Second Prize Winner Alan Catlin!

 

A Journal of the Plague Year

 

"A crowd here wearing yellow ribbons is

crying for infants to be born."

Leslie Scalapino, The Front Matter, Dead Souls

 

Inside the painted city, double locked doors,

black crosses seared into the buckled paint,

yellow flags hanging from the masts of dormant

ships quarantined well beyond the harbor,

flotsam floating amidst the rainbow stained

garbage, the bloated heads of the diseased

slipped into the water under cover of darkness,

their candy apple eyes leaving wax impressions

on the skin of sleepers walking out of doors,

gauze contagion masks sucked inward covering

jagged teeth, soiled gowns bearing the marks

of inflated skins, tumors hard as fists

blackening the stilled night, powerless streets,

stricken power lines no longer sparking

in greasy puddles, mucal like burnt skin,

leaking oils on blacktop, concrete losing

definition, dissolving along with everything

else in the burning, hazing, mustard gas.

 

Alan Catlin has been publishing since the Seventies. In addition to more than sixty books and chapbooks of prose and poetry, he has won a number of national contests and awards. He has been a finalist for the Brittingham Book Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press, the Lena Miles Wever Poetry Book Award and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, twenty times, in both fiction and poetry. Alan is one of the editors and founder of Misfit Magazine (misfitmagazine.net).

First Prize Winner Robert Milby!

 

Robert Milby of Florida, NY is a freelance writer who has been reading his poetry in the Hudson Valley, NYC, Long Island, NJ, PA, and New England since March, 1995. He’s given over 450 featured readings and has been onstage in front of poetry crowds over 1,500 times, including: featured readings, open mics, workshops, lectures, presentations, radio commentary, indoor & outdoor festivals, independent tv shows, etc. See more at https://robertmilbypoetry.com.

 

I Was Never Under Quarantine

In the haze of selling their future, several generations have forgotten

the bankers’ caste system.

I neither bowed to worship money, nor sang in corporate cages.

I was not sick, beyond disgust with modern sages;

psychic jails, and lockdowns— screwing planks in stages.

There were times that I was knocked down, but I was never under quarantine. 

 

State by state the white-out scent of cooking books,

without burning in a bonfire.

A source of bankers’ lies, on tiny screens and glowing monitors.

I never dressed in surgeon’s drag, walking through the streets,

where people clapped for nurses’ burkas or stared like dolts and preached.

There are times when I’m knocked down, but I am never under quarantine.

 

Without modesty, states stand in as teacher, mother, and father; techno gods of a new order.

I wandered field and forest; drove a city lane;

not once did cries of misery cause me bare-faced shame.

I never paid a jailer—I never bought the myths,

concocted by a dark regime, in estates of cards and sticks.

There were times when they knocked me down, but I was never under quarantine.

 

Entire countries are not hospitals, nor landscapers’ motor pools!

Fearful counties darkened churches; ignored the children, and locked their schools.

Lectured in public, by strangers, whose intents remain the same,

as past regimes’ deceptions in themes of costumed dramas.

We were never under quarantine, unless we gave consent:

Masked and gloved, cold penitents, or domestic spies, and dissidents.

2020 WILD WEST POETRY CONTEST WINNERS ANNOUNCED!!

 

 

 

 

Thanks to all for participating in what may become an annual tradition, the 2020 Wild West Poetry Contest! Following is the list of Winners and Honorable Mentions, as whimsically and with gut instinct were selected by myself, as the sole proprietor of Flying Monkey Press:

First Place: Robert Milby,  "I Was Never Under Quarantine"

    -Receives a copy of my latest book, Love's Compass, & will be published in the Flying Monkey Productions blog.

Second Place: Alan Catlin, "A Journal of the Plague Year"

    -Will be published in the Flying Monkey Productions blog.

Third Place: Patrick Connors, "The New Normal"

    -Will receive a copy of my chapbook, My Minnesota Boyhood.

Honorable Mentions:

-Jaewon Chang, "Marching in Batasam"

-Robert Milby, "Social Disgracing"

-Jaewon Chang, "Snaps in Wilmington, Delaware"

-John C. Mannon, "Watch"

-Alan Catlin, "Quarantined"

-E.P. Fisher, "The Ballad of Western Man"

-Paul Clemente, "A River Remembers 1918"

-Douglas Taylor, "The Life and Times of Stagecoach Mary"

-Paul Clemente, "About 3 PM Central on July 15, 2010

-John C. Mannone, "Life Cycle"

Again, many thanks to all who participated, and watch out next summer on both the POETS and Flying Monkey Productions Facebook pages, and this blog here, for announcements about 2021! First and Second place poems will appear here in the next few days, and prizes are being mailed out shortly.

QUARANTINE MADNESS SALE!

 

Just before the Quarantine began, I received another order of my most recent book, Love's Compass, and stocked up on Until The Words Came, as well. While going thru my files, I found a very few copies of some other chapbooks I've published. All are on sale until midnight of August 31st! Love's Compass and Until The Words Came can be had for just $10 a copy, plus $3 S&H. The others, Moses Parts The Tulips and My Minnesota Boyhood, oldies but goodies, are just $8 each, plus $3 S&H.

I'm not gonna tell ya they're going like hotcakes (aren't hotcakes awesome?). I believe the best place for a poet to sell books is at a live reading. Times being what they are, that isn't possible right now, and if anyone was jonesing for some literary diversion, I'm happy to oblige. Drop me a line at: dorothyy62 at yahoo dot com.

I hope you're all staying healthy, and doing as well as you can considering the barrage of mixed information we're getting from all sides. An hour or two in the backyard with a book of poems, and maybe a pad of paper and a pen to write your own, might be a good way to spend these late summer days. 

**Poem: "Happy Birthday, America!**

Last night, during a live streamed reading at the Green Kill Gallery here in Kingston, New York, I pulled one of my favorite tricks on myself. I left the second page of the poem I'd planned to read last at home, somewhere in the piles of creation that are my life. I promised to post it here, to prove that it really exists:

Happy Birthday, America

There is no pencil big enough to rewrite the history we have committed

these two past centuries and change.

In school, we anointed rich, white men that

mailed their demands to the rich, white King

while the first huddled masses fought the fight,

while bought-and-paid-for Africans tended crops,

cleaned their toileted mansions, suckled their young

of various races to preserve the lily-white bosoms

of their women, birds of another feather in

their gilded antebellum cages.

There are no fireworks glorious enough

to soothe the nerves of a soldier who’s endured

the real thing, or a dog who can’t distinguish

in her faithful brain the difference

between good and bad gunfire.

The Constitution never stopped a back alley beating

of a woman whose perfume didn’t match her crotch.

The Constitution never cleared things up with a cop

pulling over a black man just for driving

a car above his station.

Hot dogs and hamberders this Fourth of July,

socially distanced testimonials,

Hamilton rapping for those with the right connections,

another imperfect Father.

I saw his wife Eliza’s wedding ring in a museum,

where all matters Colonial belong.

Tenuous sliver of gold, tiny as her busy fingers were,

she wore it long after his honorable death,

rewrote and revised his history, her pencil big enough

to remember the good, make way for better