Kill The Old Gods

I want book recommendations. What should I put on my summer reading list?

onehundreddollars:

I’m in need of some good reads. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Tell me your favorites, or your new discoveries, or your hidden gems.

Q: Who Is Your Favorite Screen Star?

Roger Corman

Take two creatures and fuse them together and wham —
you’ve got yourself a feature. It’s the kids in the back
of Buicks that make the best monsters. They watch

in black and white as the raygun trembles in the claw
of some extraterrestrial being, but can still see his hair
under his mask. Belief is suspended as long as the Buicks

stay parked. As long as they keep buying you can shoot
another reel. Moving up in the alphabet isn’t in the budget, though
the kids petting heavy in the Buick don’t really seem to mind.

-C.N. Rife

Q: What’s Your Favorite Place You’ve Been?

A: Not so much a where
as a when: that time you
first realize no one knows anything
more than you do, before
rules and structures are formed.
How moments stung your face
with newness, how
each fresh wound was welcomed.

I want to distill that down
so I can store it up for times
like these, when fear creeps in
and makes hiding under covers
an acceptable option, when 
reciting Emily Dickinson to
the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas
only makes matters worse.

Water Child

onehundreddollars:

These days I find that definitions obscure rater than enlighten.
Facts and fiction are slopped together like a midnight sandwich.
The word made flesh is just as complicated as it is the other way around.
Memories and brain waves are white caps crashing into a dark navy coast
and navigating this ship, dodging icebergs and breakdowns, takes more effort 
than anyone let’s on. When the winds blow your sails  so they are swept off track
it’s easy to miss the message as it flutters past your ear.

                                                               Grown ups whisper: be still, be calm.
That way meaning can land safely. But I know that treading water hurts too.
I would know the whole picture by now, if only I could keep from kicking
and sending swirling mud up from the bottom of the lake.
I’m no longer sure if there’s a way to dive in and end up anything but drowned.
Poetry tells me otherwise. I filled up notebooks in cabins when I was nine.
Now I can use those stanzas as floatation devices when the slow drip of words continue to flood my head. It may take trepanation to let it all out, but for now
I’ll let them buoy me. It will give me something to hold onto when the current swells.

-C.N. Rife

Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Misses

                      If Jesus walked
upon water, would
his followers be setting
themselves down a path
toward the bottom of
a lake? That was called love?
After all

                        every Apostle
now sleeps with the fishes.
Social creationism is what
we spread as gospel.
The questions we ask
are answered with more
questions. Broken bread is
passed until we think there’s
enough, but there’s never
enough. There is no reward
for goodness, except the knowledge
that you are capable of decency.

Sometimes that is enough.

                Another great flood
should come to wipe
the songbooks clean.
Then we can say
I don’t need you
and all that jiving around*
and be kind without expectation
tremble with bravery
and find our own transportation
across the ocean inside.

-C.N. Rife

*Italicized lines from “Chelsea Hotel #2” by Leonard Cohen

I Know the Feeling

When Kris Kristofferson brought John Prine around

he told folks that Prine’s songs were so good

“we’ll have to break his fingers.”

There are poets on my bookshelf

that I want to grab by the couplets

and shake until beauty falls out

lumpy and bruised like ripe fruit.

I want to snap their pens like dry twigs,

until I find lines I can etch into my palms.

How dare they inspire me,

those gentleman thieves of language,

miners of knowledge,

inflators of hope?

How dare they set the bar higher?

How dare they steal my thoughts

better than I steal theirs?

-C. N. Rife

Poem for Billy Tipton

The same fingers that floated
across the keys in smoky clubs
stroked the hair of women who chose ignorance
and lifted children by their waists into car seats

wrapped thick strands of canvas
around the unwanted breasts
to bound down the evidence
that the story you told was less than true.

When you died and your children looked on
as the paramedics uncovered what
you had hidden from them for all those years

I hope they remembered your melodies
the warmth of your palms
the love that lined your hands.

-C.N. Rife

Becoming Bilingual

1.

I am still learning your language
the small talk of your fingers
the sayings hidden like dirt under your nails
and the diatribes deep in your spine.

The lingo you leave on my nightstand
now plays on my palette daily
slips into conversations
like notes in a solo
and I find my mouth waiting
to be filled by your words once more.

2.

I am asked to define you, which is difficult.
Most days I can’t even tell what I am.

I am a stiff umbrella.
You are my little mouse tooth

3.

There is no language of origin satisfactory
to wrap you up in.
Lips swell with stories in every tongue
and you know all the right phrases.


4.

I use you in a sentence
but the jail of parentheses could never hold you.
Each step you take is a semicolon, unfinished
down a path curved like a question.
No periods could keep you in.


The way you laugh
is like the point of the exclamation
as it is where my emotions begin
to burst like a geyser.
Old, faithful.

5.

When you are on my mind
it’s like thinking in two language at once.
I am a slow learner, so please
be patient and kind.
I will go phrase by phrase through
my dictionary, so you can know
exactly what I mean to say.