<div class="line">I woke in a cold rain to the train wreck that is our country.</div>
<div class="line">How did it go so wrong: the blame-check that is our country.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">We thought love could trump hate,</div>
<div class="line">but bigotry won, this flaming deck, our country.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Red spread all over the map</div>
<div class="line">eclipsing the blue paint specks: our country,</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">too, though it doesn&#8217;t feel that way this morning:</div>
<div class="line">the Right hold a blank check to ruin our country.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Be the light you want to see in the world, Barbara.</div>
<div class="line">Don&#8217;t let the dark that&#8217;s been unleashed overtake our country.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/CrookerElection.mp3"></audio></figure>

Performance Without Notes

Poets Respond

Meursault Gets a Job as an Adjunct English Professor

Election Ghazal

<p class="epil"><i>after Dorianne Laux’s “Men”</i></p>
<div class="line">It’s tough being a woman, feeling you’re an object to be bought,</div>
<div class="line">an elusive quarry, something to be chased and caught,</div>
<div class="line">when you know you’re more than that. So pull me a draught,</div>
<div class="line">Charlie, give me something dark and frothy. Wars have been fought</div>
<div class="line">for less—I came in wondering what a girl’s got</div>
<div class="line">to do to get herself noticed? I mean, I’m so hot,</div>
<div class="line">I could melt neon. You want my number? Well, jot</div>
<div class="line">it down, big boy. I won’t call you. I have a karaoke slot</div>
<div class="line">at nine p.m.; I’m thinking a Madonna medley will do. Lots</div>
<div class="line">of water under <i>this</i> dam. I want to be a player, not a mascot.</div>
<div class="line">I want something bathed in dark chocolate, with a nougat</div>
<div class="line">center. I want a lobster in my steaming pot,</div>
<div class="line">champagne on ice, and two chairs by a wrought</div>
<div class="line">iron table on a terrace in France. Whoever sought</div>
<div class="line">the fountain of youth can forget it. The lies the movies taught?</div>
<div class="line">They’re a crock, a foolish dream, a vicious plot.</div>
<div class="line">Life isn’t fair, you’ve got to play your cards, no matter what.</div>
<div class="line">I could have been Dean of Women, a cover girl. An exot-</div>
<div class="line">ic dancer at a go-go bar. Or married to a guy with a yacht.</div>
<div class="line">But I’m not. So pour me another shot of Jack, O Great Zot.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/CrookerWomen.mp3"></audio></figure>

Jan Böhmermann the Great

From Nigeria to New Zealand

Women

<p>I’m upstairs in my teenage bedroom, lights out,<br />listening to WABC, Cousin Brucie, under the covers,<br />my hair so tightly wound around wire rollers<br />the size of juice cans that it’s impossible to sleep.<br />But how else can I get it to flow from the center part,<br />then flip at the ends in symmetrical s’s? How can I<br />go to school, if my hair’s not right? Who will I fall<br />in love with, who will take me to the prom,<em> who<br />wrote the book of love</em><em>?</em> I lean out the window, no<br />streetlights here in the country, just Orion’s cinch belt,<br />Cassiopeia’s W, the same letter I wear on my chest<br />when I cheer for the team,<em> All for you, Red and Blue.</em><br />I’m the only one who can do a flip and a cartwheel-<br />split. <em>In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight</em>…<br />I wail along in my tinny voice, unable to imagine a village<br />in Africa, children squatting in the dust, but somehow<br />I tap into the small stream of longing that floats<br />off those high thin notes. Out there, in the night sky,<br />the dusty river of the Milky Way is flowing, pulsing<br />toward the future, where s’s flip to question marks,<br />little fish hooks, that bob and dip in the current,<br />go where it takes them.</p><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/CrookerMark.mp3"></audio></figure>

The Flippant Zeitgeist

The Fifties

Question Mark and the Mysterians

<div class="line">We spent those stifling endless summer afternoons</div>
<div class="line">on hot front porches, cutting paper dolls from Sears</div>
<div class="line">catalogs, making up our own ideal families</div>
<div class="line">complete with large appliances</div>
<div class="line">and an all-occasion wardrobe with fold-down</div>
<div class="line">paper tabs.</div>
<div class="line">Sometimes we left crayons on the cement</div>
<div class="line">landing, just to watch them melt.</div>
<div class="line">We followed the shade around the house.</div>
<div class="line">Time was a jarful of pennies, too hot</div>
<div class="line">to spend, stretching long and sticky,</div>
<div class="line">a brick of Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy.</div>
<div class="line">Tomorrow’d be more of the same,</div>
<div class="line">ending with softball or kickball,</div>
<div class="line">then hide and seek in the mosquitoey dark.</div>
<div class="line">Fireflies, like connect-the-dots or find-the-hidden-</div>
<div class="line">words, rose and glowed, winked on and off,</div>
<div class="line">their cool fires coded signals</div>
<div class="line">of longing and love</div>
<div class="line">that we would one day</div>
<div class="line">learn to speak.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/CrookerFifties.mp3"></audio></figure><p></p>

THE STILL POSITION

<p><em>Review by Marjorie Maddox</em><img decoding="async" src="https://admin.rattle.com/ereviews/images/crookerradiance.jpg" alt="Radiance by Barbara Crooker" align="right" /></p>
<p><strong>RADIANCE<br />
By Barbara Crooker</strong></p>
<p><small>Word Press<br />
P.O. Box 541106<br />
Cincinnati, OH 45254-1106<br />
ISBN# 1-932339-91-4<br />
2005, 84pp., $17.00<br />
<a href="http://www.word-press.com/crooker.html">www.word-press.com</a></small></p>
<p>Seventeen-time nominee for a Pushcart Prize, recipient of numerous national awards, and author of ten chapbooks, Barbara Crooker was long overdue for a first-book award. With the publication of <em>Radiance </em>(2005 Word Press Prize), her audience can once again applaud. The collection glows with what we wake to, what we breathe in, what we sleep by. Radiance catches the joy of shadows and the shadows of joy in the rooms where we live every day. I first encountered Crooker’s work as a judge for the 2004 Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition. Her poem “Ordinary Life” broke from the rituals of the mundane into exuberance. Likewise, the poems in Radiance spotlight “blue and black graffiti shining in the rain’s / bright gaze.” They wear an “evening’s melancholy shawls.” They exhale “the glories / of breath.”</p>
<p>The book moves deftly between struggle and song. A “congregation of grackles” is “a long black scarf unwinding / in the cold west wind”; “Even dandelions glitter / in the lawn, a handful of golden change.” Crooker sees life as “a pile of sorrows, yes, but joy / enough to unbalance the equation.” In her aptly titled poem “Sometimes I Am Startled Out of Myself,” the geese “stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.”</p>
<p>In <em>Radiance</em>, we feel the pain-wrought stitches—a son with autism; an ailing parent; a friend dying of cancer; a first child, who “was born, then died, on her due date”; a hectic life that ironically leaves no time to fix a broken clock. Through Crooker’s words, nature and art work together to make us whole, even if the mending is temporary. Through the masterpieces of Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Manet, we see “a blizzard of color and light.” The “black flag / of pain” becomes “white / lilacs in a crystal vase.” The healing is artistic, physical, and spiritual.</p>
<p>Although “the sky winds its own long note, a radiant heartache blue,” as Crooker explains, she and her husband sing “loudly as we can, in our tone deaf voices / against the coming rain, the following dark.” As readers, we want to take up the song. Maybe if we do, “the suffering world” will indeed “[recede] in the background.” <em>Radiance </em>is half Blues, half Spiritual—contagious with hope. Just try not to join in.</p>


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November 10, 2016Election GhazalBarbara Crooker

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November 10, 2016Election GhazalBarbara Crooker

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