Miss Lena Raven
Title Page & Licensing Notes
Acknowledgements
Poems (1-30)
Poems (31-50)
Title Page & Licensing Notes
Miss Lena Raven
By Thomas M. McDade
Copyright 2016 Thomas M. McDade
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to the following publications that have published many of these poems: 265 Degrees of Grey, Barr’s Postcard News, Bitterzoet, Blind Horse Review, Bluepepper (AU), Catbird Seat, Catalyst, Chance Magazine, Crystal Drum, Dirigible, Experimental Forest, Freefall, Gadfly, Higginsville Reader, Jack Magazine, Mind in Motion, Nerve Cowboy, Our Wounds (Pikestaff Press), Overview, Panhandler, Paper Salad, Pawtucket Times, Poem, Poetry Fly, Potpourri, Quercus Review, Slipstream, Socet Tuum, The Moon, Tight, Unprecedented Review, Unwound, Weyfarers, Window Panes
Poems (1-30)
Miss Lena Raven
Wind Plays
Bowls
Ingredients
Outlaw Toys
Off Route 34
Short Poems – 1
Short Poems – 2
Black Shoe
Lunar Feeding
Valley Forge
At the Bus Stop
The Door
Faulkner & Dickens
Good Suburban Soil
Siren
Charlie Donn
“In The Year 2525”
Alive
Rustic Living
The Whitest Heat
Extra, 1976
Dance Lessons
Tubes
Like Magic
Snow Beat
What Sets the Sun
Sabbath Contraption
Luncheon
Litter
Poems (31-50)
Grandparents
Doorstop
Cannoball
Steel Shot Zone
Mother Fog
Wind and Sand
Mythic Alms
The Last Episode
The World
Arbor Day
Redemption
Dylan’s Last Medicine
Vinnie’s Girls
Petal Smoke
Hal Lives
Corpse Work
A Student’s Williams, Yeats…
Sarajevo Smoke Break
Among Thieves
Summit View
Miss Lena Raven
1009 North Fair Oaks Avenue
Pasadena, California
“Hello Lynx,” the 1928 post card starts,
(It’s the Victoria Bridge in Montreal.)
I’m here for a while.
Nice, lovely town.
Plenty of booze
and French girls.
Will answer your
letter soon.
Best regards,
Lenny.
He’s Drunk.
His penmanship is worse
than Dr. Perrini’s
who pined for Lena
while abroad in Rome.
(A vista of the Temple of Neptune.)
Wait for me,
will return soon.
Later from Venice (The Bridge of Sighs):
Lena, I’m coming home soon.
Not quite sure of her address,
he wrote “1009?”
Lena studied her postcards
like a Gypsy at Tarot.
Some she balled up for the cats.
Some she vowed to clutch in the grave.
She imagined others
in the hands of curious strangers
and she heard her name move their lips.
Wind Plays
No graveyard rules stop
her from giving the kid
a marker even if it’s just
for an hour like the plastic
Frankenstein she lifted
off a Halloween lawn
and edited.
Humming “Surfin’ U.S.A.”
she’s carrying a skateboard
and in her other hand
a shovel soldiers use for foxholes.
Her red beret blows off and twirls
about as if it’s alive and beating.
Wind plays with her streaked hair
and plaid skirt like men do at bars.
Boots as high and shiny
as some of the monuments,
she squats and finds the ground
too hard to even dent.
But the snow is wet enough
to build a mound to plant
the skateboard on end.
She kneels but doesn’t pray
just spins the little wheels
and talks to this kid the state
took from her at birth.
Promising a marble stone
with a skateboard carved in it
she stands and once again
masters the tricky graveyard ice
and snow as the wind plays
with her hair and skirt
the way she’s seen toddlers do.
Bowls
Sitting in a booth at Andy’s Diner
I can’t help but eye a fellow alone
so thin he’d fit though most gaps
between prison bars I speculate.
At a table set for six he’s staring
straight ahead as if a defendant
minutes away from a verdict,
hands clenched in prayer
real or disguised maybe hoping
for extradition to Maine,
Idaho or Long Island.
The outcome is a mixing bowl
of mashed potatoes and a basket
too small for the bread it holds.
Attentively dividing the butter
among thick slices and the spuds,
he dines robotically, oblivious
or indifferent to his audience.
His methods whisk me back years
to Laura’s Luncheonette
where a man, much heftier and not
as assiduous with toast
and an identical vessel
containing a wealth
of thick oatmeal.
A woman beside him, chin
on palm, smiles in amazement.
Had her friend somehow made bail
and is making up for stingy
prison portions I wondered.
Devouring, as if any second
a judge would renege, send
him to place where porridge
is instant, servings small.
A chunk flies off his spoon,
lands on his lady’s arm
and they laughed away
any early morning counter
grogginess the caffeine missed.
I do at Andy’s as at Laura’s, sentence
the newest member the brotherhood
of the mixing bowl to an evening
ice cream helping
of equal largesse—
chocolate sprinkles like the filings
off a thousand jailbreaks.
Ingredients
In a sandwich shop,
the woman in front of me
is a beauty, blonde and curvy,
holding a girl, age three
or four I’d say.
Jake the clerk is constructing
her foot-longs.
Blondie, who might be pushing
thirty, tells her daughter,
“Jake’s leaving,
going off to college.”
No ESP necessary to know
she wants or has had him.
“Have you picked a major?”
“Nope, play by ear,” he replies.
Blondie rattles off ingredients
to fill the foot-long subs:
“lettuce, tomato, olives, peppers, pickles,
cucumbers,” he smiles.
I wager myself those words have
been whispered during sex,
Blondie capping them in his ear
with her tongue.
She tells her kid, “Jake might
become an astronaut.”
Licking his lower lip
as if acknowledging
she’s rocketed him to a places
she never took her old man,
he stuffs the bread with more
ingredients than I’ll get.
As she shuffles off the kid
to the restroom,
at 12:30 on this sinfully
sunny Sunday, I figure all
his thoughts are earthbound –
what will his strategy be
when her BMW rolls through
the campus gates?
All those juicy coeds stacking
up against her mattress
astrophysics mixed
with a husband and kid
that can’t be forever skipped
as if onions and mayonnaise.
Outlaw Toys
Among the glut of wanted
posters in the P.O. Lobby
case is one with crime
details half hidden
by a burglar’s follies.
What shows beneath
is the least dangerous,
most wholesome
gentle face
in the collection.
She’s sought
for possession
and detonation
of destructive devices
not to mention
interstate flight.
Brown hair and eyes,
three sons share
the eleven aliases
serving as wings.
I’m struck with visions
of these boys—
their days
of hide and seek,
matches, lighters,
timers and fuses
handy outlaw toys plus
impromptu fireworks,
movie style chases
and narrow escapes.
What a nitwit I must
seem, face so close
to glass.
Back of hand
wiping my breath
off as if admissible
evidence, I turn
my collar up, slip
slowly away.
Off Route 34
In her poem she’s out to dinner
with a younger man,
candlelight and wine.
Slipping off a high heel, red and spiked,
she explores his crotch with her toes.
she’s wearing sneakers.
Noise from Route 34 strikes her
as a protest against her bawdiness
that her lines shout it down.
Stage right, a man
who basks in his junkie days
unfolds scraps of paper
as small as fortunes from
cookies, to find his words.
He grimaces as a big rig’s roar
beats his small voice to death.
Demonstrating his old style,
he pounds an arm with his fist.
The next poet recites from memory,
carries a walking stick.
Route 34 goes quiet with a shake of it.
“Tom, Oh Tom,” he calls out the way
Aunt Polly used to do for the Sawyer boy.
But no, he’s talking about a body found
not twenty-feet from the dock
last month -- Murdered!
Each listener spots a suspect.
Was that woman’s young lover named Tom?
Had her red shoe been at his side?
Couldn’t the ex-addict’s fist have made
a stew of Tom’s face, imagining fat veins?
Suddenly, a Harley gang’s thunder
drains audience faces, fearing all
the world’s alibis have been carried away
in silver, studded, saddle bags.
Short Poems-1
AUGUST
Tempting eyes
Sucking night
Lies of fireflies
NEW YEAR’S
Dresses dancing
Clothespin castanets
Winter snapping still
RING TIME
Fallen fir’s dusty
Mainspring failing
Early autumn
DECOYS
Mosquitoes wooing
Dandelion chutes
Curtsy of fog
FINALLY
Ashtrays overflow
Marlboro perfume
Nipple filter tips
PAYDAY
Torn drapes tossing
Breezy dice
Snake-eyed sun
Short Poems-2
BLOCK DANCE
Swirling linen
Wringer of dawn
Steam iron days
FREIGHT WALZ
Train-crushed nails
Shiny hobo tie tacks
Boxcar dancing
PET SHOP
Flute charmed
stockings molt
Fork legged fantasy
STORM ART
Candle whipped shadows
Slaves painting walls
Heritage of bees
LIDS
When you are
Sleeping
Do your eyes
Continue
Splashing
Colors
On their lids
Like neon
Signs once
Performed
On hotel
Room shades
Where you lived
With electric air
And radio?
Black Shoe
For two years plus it sat,
toad-like by a strip mall
entrance as if the grounds
keeping contract excluded
footwear removal.
Then poof, it disappeared.
It was no Florsheim, not even
leather I suspect, anyone’s guess
to right or left.
A braided band was where
you’d find the coin slot
on a Weejun penny loafer.
The sole never flipped up
and I never cared enough to check
for hole or rip.
I imagined an amputee flinging it
in a fit of limb loss rage,
a tot tantrum toss or a bad-step
slip off a thief's fleeing foot.
Once I picked up a railroad spike
not far from it that became
a paperweight and got me
thinking murder,
maiming and sabotage,
escaping on a westbound freight.
Mid-January, a snowmelt
revealed the shoe’s new home,
on a grass border in a medical
center parking lot,
forty or fifty yards away.
I figured a plow responsible.
Lately I envision it on a canvas,
just a splat would do it right
and a viewer locked
in a toad stare, puzzled
what set of toes
to wiggle.
Lunar Feeding
A plastic
milk jug
feeder
hanging off
an apple tree
is a moon
oval craters
that trill
"welcomes"
in the wind.
The perch
is a piece
of an arrow toy
Titmice
as crazy as
thirsty moths
visit most.
Ju
ncos are
skinny silo
rodents high
inhaling seeds
spilled just
for them.
A squirrel
sailing off
the feeder
like a
moon-tripped
dairy cow
scatters them
momentarily.
Valley Forge
Mouth harps, flutes, whistles,
playing cards from France
they forgot to put
undressed women on.
Pressed paper dice,
sometimes ivory.
No matter.
We owe each other
our land and savings
even the grinning teeth
we are lying through.
Marbles, pretty fired clay,
remind no one
of the colors on mother’s
calico cat.
They just click
like flintlocks that failed.
None of these is allowed
after dark but you can hear
the buzzer work.
The musket ball pounded flat,
two holes pricked for a string
to loop a finger on each hand.
Twist tightly, pull, release
spin a whirring calm.
Dream an empty ammo pouch;
the ball to save
your combat life a toy.
No nightmare.
No trade for this.
This lovely sleep.
At the Bus Stop
A woman whose
earrings are globes
like the ones that sat
on little pencil
sharpeners in
grammar school
fingers the left one.
Its diamond equator.
equator of diamonds.
If she had smiled
I would
have called her
Earth Mother.
Beside her an unlucky
man who supports
his belly that’s too
big for his buttons
with his hands.
Recall a pregnancy
or think earth:
blue rivers, pasty lakes.
A stumbler who juggled
who caught his world
before it hit the ground.
Give him a break
call him Atlas
as she might.
The Door
The adult day care
center used to be
the Canopy Club
and some recall
romances
launched there.
Still hearing
saxophones’
familiar riffs
they taste
the tension
as a bouncer’s
flashlight shines
across an ID
as fake as
they all seem now.
And with no hint
of the old
protesting, they
escort themselves
to the door
they’d love
to exit and slam.
Oh, for those nights
they prayed it would
never shut behind them!
Faulkner & Dickens
The professor expert
in how much
Dickens
Bill Faulkner
read,
slipped
an old poet
with long hair
like ours
into the class.
His Lucky
Strike fingers
as yellow
as attic paperbacks.
And whatever his high,
it did right
by his poetry.