week of January 5-11, 2004
Laurie Joan Aron and Padraic Mulloy
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Laurie Joan Aron
ljaron@mindspring.com
Bio (auto)
I’ve been writing poetry for about 10 years, but only with intent to publish in the last two Up until then, I was a full-time freelance business reporter Then I burned out, took up poetry, taught one of my three children at home and started an Internet-based book selling business My poetry appears regularly in Red River Review and James River Poetry Review, and has appeared in many other publications including Eleven Bulls, Tryst, Poems Niederngasse and whimperbang I live in New York City near the Hudson River, and, more relevantly, near Riverside Park, which is where most of my poetry starts to form.
The following work is Copyright © 2004, and owned by Laurie Joan Aron and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Ancient Elms
Arthritic goddesses with a dozen kinked and crippled limbs,
These elms are a tableau tragedy
Of splintered bones and bleeding boles
Stand, they, branches twining, accommodating,
Trunks angled, moss-eaten, amid the young lean oaks
Rooted and lofty, century-old, they will fall They fall.Blood Spring
We walked through wavering curtains of rain, dog and I,
Damper with each squelch in the thawing path No other souls were abroad to breathe wet wood, to wonder
At early Aprils brown and gray winter
Today, gusts bring both snow and spring,
For the first colors of spring are scarlet and white
As the bloody kills of hungry hawks,
Red bones on a china plate.
People are PlacesPeople are the places they are from,
With that overhanging beech,
That haunted house, that overpass In Elkhart, Wolf Trap, Menlo Park,
The air is the way air is there You are the place that colors your nostalgia Greenpoint, Reno, Statesville,
At that school with that group at that dance You know how it smelled in that rec room,
That library, that cafeteria A whiff, an odd-angled site, a girls legs can
Take you back there although it is gone.
Were Naked Under Our Clothes
The mystery of a men:
Where do all those parts go that dont show unless roused?
If she hadnt told me, Id never know that under her sweater
Was a breast built by a surgeon, nipple and all Georges brown map of Ireland, arrayed on his shoulder,
A revelation in swim trunks, and Beckys unexpected curls Dawn prefers skirts, long, and tall boots “Let them assume,” she says “that I have legs “
The Trees Perform LysistrataThe locusts are muttering revolution, girdling their grooved trunks with spikes, as if those grooves were not enough To hell with the concerned public thats calling for action committees and environmental studies Theyll carve their love poems in your torso, unaware of the pain Sycamores, birches, you wear virginal white, even though you dangle seed pods that say otherwise from your outstretched arms Those were last years effort, as people ought to know Its this years fruit theyre looking for But, who will convince the elms? So scarred that they are numb, they submit like old hens recruited to warm their frivolous sisters eggs, dutifully putting out red buds.
Padraic Mulloy
padraicpinball@hotmail.com
Bio
my name is padraic mulloy i am unpublished you will find my writing in my desk, under the bed, outside beneath my window, tacked to my wall above the typer, in the pocket of women i am attracted to, and at the city dump i was born in saint marys hospital in minneapolis i attended seven different high schools in minneapolis proper and was graduated as a gift from my last schools counselor he realized i was jerking off time
“paddy, you show up, do your work and cause no trouble for the first half of the day, then you disappear either you want to stay in high school forever or your in a hurry to get home and masturbate im giving you credit for that and im graduating you “
it was 1987 seven years after my first year in high school he was right i left minneapolis that year and lived in new orleans and new york i guess i needed something new returning to minneapols in 1993 i live here today i am putting together a book of my work entitled,
PISSING ON FLOWERS
NEVER BOTHERS ME UNTIL
I SIT DOWN WITH A PEN.The following work is Copyright © 2004, and owned by Padraic Mulloy and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Obscenity Charges
the governor of new york
pardoned lenny bruce today
tuesday december 23 2003
i was kicked free
from my women today
obscenely, i will only remember her
next year because of this.
Drinking and Reading Robert Frost, I would Rather be with Robert Mitchumthere and here now
i am come and go
with the same clumsy hands
she spoke as cleansing
(each washing my body
on occasion, this then,
is no lie)
swinging freely at my side
i have held her and
i have held her tightly
my hands are like my eyes
and ears
they are unlike my feet
that stumble forward to
heartbeat.
5th and B, Lunch Counter Contemplationsall week, everyone i encounter refers to me as “boss”
ive never been fond of a boss
but, two weeks with out work
i’m ready to take the job
i could use the pay raise
here “yous” go says the waitress
the coffee is starting to burn
the pit of my stomach
its probably the nerves
running a city this size.
Looking to Hide in the Corporate Sunshineblack glasses
and black coffee
a cold winters day
on 5th and B
bring me a sports page
bring me a t.v anything to get my mind
off these dark glasses.
