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Three Poems by John Findura
“Nineteen Minutes Ago”
This morning I am here
Nineteen minutes ago we might have met
But we missed each other, somehow
It is raining very hard but there is no thunder
Where there is no thunder there are few thoughts of you
Instead in their place is a stop-motion film
Of wooden hands playing the piano
Think of that – those wooden fingers on those ivory keys
Pictures of a famous actor with a bad haircut
An actress playing three roles in the same film
None of them are stop-motion like the wooden hands
I read a book about volcanoes
And the insistence of lava over everything else last night
And as you know if it didn’t happen there it doesn’t happen here
Or maybe the reverse, -
“The Tracks” by Felicity LuHill
Kim stared at her feet and silently counted her steps. One, two, three… 267 steps between lampposts. One hundred and fifty steps between mailboxes. Forty-two steps since the last time she passed a dog—a small, beige terrier, unafraid to yap at sulky teenage girls. She counted to remind herself that she was another step closer to her bedroom—to cool pillows, beef jerky, and documentaries about ships discovered on the bottom of the ocean.
She wondered what she would say to Stella, her mother, when she got home. “How can you forget to pick up your own daughter?” was an effective sentiment Kim frequently used.
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“Beavis & Butthead Do English Class: Guest Starring the Memory of John Ashbery in a Thought Bubble Floating over Instructor Bodaggit’s Fedora” by Tom Kelly
Beavis, like, bangs his head against the deskbecause the four-eyed fart-knocker by the podiumforgot to button the bottom of his shirt,so when he blabs, his exposed belly does that thingwhere it jiggles like grandma’s gelatin mold& I say his navel looks like the Sarlacc Pitbut Beavis says it looks like the hole in a Krispy Kreme donutbut I say it looks like a nook where Beavis can stick his snoutbut we agree that if we squint real hard, -
“The Spider Spins” by Sean Karns
In its foliage, the spider rides the vibratingweb. It is patient and waits Buddha-like,as if it knows something greater—that survival requires less consumption,that survival is basic— therefore its needsare minimal. When its hunger is met,it is blessed, so much so, it wraps its dead in silk.It seems simple, the spinning of the web.The spider’s world is instinctual—it ignores the chaos-order beyond its web. -
“Deep Time and Dark Spaces: Robert Macfarlane’s Underland” by S.N. Kirby
Under the earth is a world far stranger and far more mystical than our humdrum life here up top. Robert Macfarlane’s latest book, detailing these mysterious underground places, serves as part field guide and magic handbook for us surface dwellers. Underland weaves together a narrative of not just the earth and its underworld, but of the history, the present, and the future of mankind. This is not a book for the claustrophobic.
From the start, Macfarlane directly says that this was a book he intended to be less about humans and more about the mysteries below the earth;
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“The Art of Music” by David Shapiro
You were practicing the early art of memory.
You would bestow twenty per cent of your attention on me
Then shut your eyes. From time to time since the invention of print
The phrase “elephant debt” would force itself to your lips.Only one thing exists: the universe.
The others by definition cannot; how rigid out theory is.
Without the flavor of paint however force seems useless.
Needless to say the stage was set, but what followed?Together we will sing in octaves. And the hairy bushes
And bleeding hearts develop like twining vines.
