who's Hollywood now


Lisa M. Robinson, Solo, 2007


Florida Reconsidered
-- by Matt Byars

Your fiction doesn't interest me
I can see where your little stories come from and brother,
It's all quite obvious
That you lack imagination

I called you out on your falsetto
Easily traced to a current hit record
And we both laughed about it

But since we both know that
Miracles have drifted through these leaves
It seems worth pointing out the well-trod paths
Of your inspiration


Everything We Do
-- by Peter Meinke

Everything we do is for our first loves
whom we have lost irrevocably
who have married insurance salesmen
and moved to Topeka
and never think of us at all.

We fly planes & design buildings
and write poems
that all say Sally I love you
I'll never love anyone else
Why didn't you know I was going to be a poet?

The walks to school, the kisses in the snow
gather as we dream backwards, sweetness with age:
our legs are young again, our voices
strong and happy, we're not afraid.
We don't know enough to be afraid.

And now
we hold (hidden, hopeless) the hope
that some day
she may fly in our plane
enter our building read our poem

And that night, deep in her dream,
Sally, far in darkness, in Topeka,
with the salesman lying beside her,
will cry out
our unfamiliar name.


That Poet
-- by Jack Hirschman

That poet you admire so–

in my fifteen years
in the workers movement
I've never seen him
in attendance at
a demonstration against
social injustice, or at
a memorial honoring
a revolutionary hero,
or at a rally in support
of an uprising people–

is not even a fighting
surrealist
but a bibelot
dribbling over
with obsolete pus.