Pepper and Salt

by Brett Rutherford

and I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.
I wondered if they had become friends.
— Billy Collins, “You, Reader”

Pepper and salt
are enemies:

chessmen on the place mat,
one black, one white,
forward-left, forward-right
political knights,
or plowing angular,
dissenting bishops
each to his heaven,
his rival to hell —

spill from one, a run
of bad luck;
spill from the other,
a sneezing fit
precipitate
of a heart attack.

Salt is poison
to pepper’s ground:
no gardens grow
in Carthage, sown
with the sea’s bitters;

no papricum in Sodom
where Lot’s wife
stands petrified,
a mineral pillar.

If you are white,
all pepper is black,
a back-of-the-cupboard
kitchen mistress,
safely savored,
country of origin
unasked about,
milled, ground
to ash fineness.

If you are brown,
rainbows of spice
surround you:
cayenne, paprika,
jalapeño, chili,
hot on the tongue,
warm in the belly,
the edge of eros,
lips closing, teeth
bursting peppercorn,
sweat beads
across the forehead,
the supplicating smile,
the liquid eyes’ surrender.

A Chinese chef,
wise in the way of things,
heats Szechuan peppercorns
till aromatic smoke
stings, fries salt
in the pepper’s oil,
grinds all together
as “pepper-flavored salt.”

His yin-yang craft subdues
two rival empires.

But here and now,
on this chrome-formica
dinner table, two
pale glass cylinders
stand separate,
monogrammed,
one “S” — one “P” —
imagine the horror
if P got into the S shaker! —

forever apart,
and no, not even
remotely friends.

Disgrace With A Capitol D

 

A passionate essay written January 9th, with the facts-as-we-know-them about the right-wing lunatic attack on the U.S. Capitol. Pittsburgh writer Jonathan Aryeh Wayne sums up how we got to the catastrophe of January 6th, and profiles a number of the bizarre invaders who wreaked havoc in the Capitol. This is an urgent and angry essay. This free PDF pamphlet was produced the same day the author finished his article. This publication takes The Poet's Press back to its origins in underground newspaper publishing. Please download, read, and share this intense article -- while you still can.

This is the 293rd publication of The Poet's Press. 7 pages.

GO TO DOWNLOAD PAGE

In the Alley

by Brett Rutherford

Somewhere in Union City
on a pot-holed side street
I stumble upon a crime scene.

It is not yet seven. No one
has entered the alleyway
that fronts the auto shop.
No one has seen her, naked,
flattened, it seems, by tires
that crushed her this way
and that. Her toothless mouth
is agape in the permanent “oh”
that must have frozen there
as she knew there’d be no mercy
from the circle of attackers.

The thing her mother told her
never to show to strangers
now greets the pigeons, the clouds,
and the imminent sun-rays.
She is so torn it seems
that dogs, and not a pack of men
had been at her. Her legs
are still apart, her shoes
might be some blocks away.

Running this way at midnight
she would have found no shelter.
The chain-link fence, the ripple
of the closed and corrugated shutters
gave her no place to hide.

They had all the time in the world.
No one would hear her. One by one
they did as they wished with her,
then, lighting one another’s cigars,
they left. The moon watched
and sank, too shamed to speak.

Next week, the men will take
among themselves a collection,
a pay-day self-tax for future pleasure.
Down at the pink-lit adult arcade
they will purchase another
whose toothless mouth will never
refuse them, whose legs
are always open, whose breasts
remind them
of one another’s younger sisters.
There is a place on her back
where you pump the air in.
With luck she might last
an hour in the parking lot,
before she’s done for,

hissing out her last,
late night’s love-doll,
inflatable woman.

 

More Creepy Poems Than You Can Count

 

My huge collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems, contains all my dark and creepy work up through mid-2019. Like Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," I have expanded this work like a huge ball of string. Vampires, Golems, werewolves, mummies and ghouls abound, as well as many dark things inspired by or about H.P. Lovecraft. This is the ultimate poetic story-book for things to read aloud around the campfire, or to frighten young children into hiding under the covers. The 416-page book is now available as a PDF ebook for just $2.99. And remember, every time a copy of this book is purchased, a demon gets his wings.

Order PDF Ebook

Van Cliburn's Triumphant Rise

One of the greatest recordings of the 20th century. Van Cliburn, back from Russia after winning the Tchaikovsky competition, got a ticker tape parade in New York City. This recording, made in Carnegie Hall with a live audience, shows what all the fuss was about. This tall, imposing young Texan rips into Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto, the Mt. Everest of piano concertos.

 

My First Typewriter

 

When I was in third grade, all I wanted was a typewriter. I was given one for Christmas, but it was a toy. You had to rotate a wheel to each letter and then strike a key. It was a cruel joke.

Sometime around fifth grade, with no prospect of ever seeing a typewriter, a camera, or a bicycle (let alone new shoes or eyeglasses), I saw an ad in the back of a comic book. Shortly thereafter I was going from door to door, taking orders for Christmas cards. I am pretty sure this is how I bought a typewriter.

My Lost First Novel

 When I was in tenth grade, I completed a novel. It was a science-fiction novel, almost 100,000 words. As an avid fan of Famous Monsters Magazine, I knew that its editor, Forrest J. Ackerman, was also a literary agent for sci-fi writers. So I packed it up, calculated the outgoing and return postage and was ready to send my first work into the world.

But I did not have the postage money. I had enough money in my pocket to have a couple of after-school five cent sodas at the drug store soda fountain. That's it.

So I carefully and patiently explained to my mother how to mail the package, and that I wanted postage inside the box so that Mr. Ackerman would not have to pay for returning my ms. if he hated it. She promised to take it to the post office and mail it. I assured her that I was soon to be a famous science-fiction writer.

She told me she had mailed the package. She wouldn't say how much it cost.

Weeks passed. Two months passed. Three months passed. Finally, I mailed a letter to Mr. Ackerman asking if he had received my novel. He replied tersely that no such package had come to him.

I despaired. It was lost forever. I had a dim carbon copy, and the original had gone astray.

I didn't try again. I wrote more short stories. I wrote two plays. And then I moved on to poetry.

More than a year later, I was at the kitchen sink and leaned forward when I dropped a knife. I saw something oblong, wrapped in cardboard.

I reached down. There was the manuscript for my novel, lodged between the sink and the wall behind it.

It had never been mailed, and my mother lied to me.

I said nothing. I just carried it like a dead weight on my soul.

I even repressed the memory of this, as of other inexplicable acts of negation, but then it came back to me, crystal clear.

Designing A Poster for Poets in Protest

 

I do not remember this poetry reading, but I designed the poster for it, and read there with poets from Ireland, Poland, Cuba, Argentina and the U.S. It was organized by Boria Sax and was an Amnesty International event. I did a couple of other designs and layouts for Amnesty, but it is a rather clouded memory (1980s).

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony for Two Pianos

 Knowing that few people would get to hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Franz Liszt arranged it for two pianos. This striking performance has two pianos, plus a timpanist to put Beethoven's percussion back in.

Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet

 Shakespeare has inspired many works of music. Among the top ten would have to be Tchaikovsky's symphonic poem, "Romeo and Juliet." To show that Romanticism lives, here is a brand new piano transcription of that work, in all its gloom and stormy passion. I swooned listening to this.

Tchaikovsky Romeo & Juliet Overture Fantasy arr. Sudbin

And to hear the original for orchestra:

The Sleep of Priests

 by Brett Rutherford

The bishop’s weak lung
wheezes at night
beneath the blankets,
not gone, not even
“disappeared” like those
arrested and vanished
in the time of strict
government. As soon
as he closes one eye
the air sac expands
and it blasts one note,
one drone
like the idiot half
of a bagpipe.

Don – don – don
Donde – donde – donde
Where – where – where
the unburied dead,
the unabsolved,
the ghosts denied
the moment of unction?

Don – don – don,
Donde – donde – donde,
one note from
dusk to dawn
in thirty thousand beats
of monotonous asking

where – where – where
our blackened bones,
our dust, our skulls
a-crush beneath some
concrete stadium?

Lung-bladder ghost,
Guilt’s bagpiper,
vacuum bag inhaling
his withered prayer.
No sleep for him!

He tosses and turns.
Some black-robed brothers
have helped the Government;
others have hidden students,
professors and artists;
others have waved two hands,
ten fingers wagging, heads
shaking no, eyes firmly closed.

Nothing, I have heard nothing.
I have not read the papers.
I will of course
light candles if I am asked.

How many sleep well?
How many sleep at all?
Which of them heard
the executioner’s confession
and said nothing in turn
to his own confessor,
passing it to God only
without a further thought?

How many imsomniacs
hear lung or heart,
ribcage or ear’s cavity,
or an ever-throbbing vein
that will not let them sleep,
echoing:

Don – don – don
Donde – donde – donde,
Where are the Disappeared?

Man of the Hour

 by Brett Rutherford

Those mouse-like men
     who ousted Gorbachev
while he was up in the air,
and far from the border;
oh, how brave they were,
belling the cat’s absence;
and then they fled
to their Moscow apartments,
under the blankets in a vodka stupor.

All knew the routine.
Glasnost had played itself
as the long arachnid trap,
predictable as tide or snow,
or a lesson in dialectics.

A liberal Spring, a little thaw
to bring the poets and liberals out.
Then watch them, count them.
Make lists. Prepare the officers
for the sudden clampdown,
boxcars to the always-open Gulag.
All hail to Party chairman,
whoever that turned out to be.

But this time, it did not go
as the planners intended.
It only took one man, one
near the apex of power, to prove
that cycles are not eternal, hope
no poison beet on a string,
a false promise in a pot of borscht,

one man to say, “Not this time.”
Make no mistake: Boris Yeltsin
ended the Communist rule of Russia.
A great bear, a man without fear.
He did not need to be sober to win,
just a little more sober than
his cowering enemies.

No one knew how
it would all turn out.
That it came out differently
is what we need to learn.

The Plural Visitation

 

by Brett Rutherford

Now cut that out! I have weathered a lot

of discord in this urban arena:

the fenced-in barcarolle of neighbor dogs,

the rising and falling of conga drums,

the melodious yowl of cats in heat,

gunshots or backfires, airplanes and truck-horns,

the underground rattle-roll from tunnels,

the swell and deep shudder made manifest

by continental drift — somehow I have slept

through all of that. So now it is you:

The rag and wraith of a banshee I have spied

before (one blighted Hallow’d night I watched

one extricate itself from a tangle

of unyielding shrubbery), but that was

you in the singular, your lonesome cry

dissolving to a wisp of midnight wind.

This Brooklyn visitation is plural!

Twelve pairs of bony hands reach out to me,

from a hen-pack dozen of whirling shrouds.

Faces, if you can call them that, jut out

with insect eyes or blobs of black jelly.

Their twelve-part chorusing, from ruddy bass

to the highest squeak-screech of violins,

piles the diabolus in musica

and partners every howling note chromatic

with its half-step brother, an elephant

falling on every organ key at once.

All this, and on and on for hours, all this

from your wingbeats thrust into my window.

Who sent you? I am not even Irish!

Therefore, these whistles and yells cannot be

addressed to me, you howling telegram!

You have the wrong building entirely.

The errant Kelly, the drunken O’Brien, 

Leary with all his guns and bombs, have moved.

And why, I ask, come you in committee,

the way you dropped en masse for Spanish Flu,

or the starvelings of potato famine?

Oh, friends have died, and some died horribly,

but one by one they left me, unsummoned

by anything that tread night’s canopy.

When my time comes, I will see a raven,

a bard’s beckoning, a stately ibis.

Again, no son of Celt or Eire sleeps here.

The cat is Siamese, for goodness’ sake!

So gather up your mealy, dustmop heads

and flap on off to somebody else’s

premonition of death, you silly birds!