Hollywood Party Scene(s)

During one of my better periods – okay, damn good – I made the Hollywood and Beverly Hills party circuits, the social connections better than the professional ones for me. I’d usually find myself surrounded by people who were all in “The Biz.” Word had gotten around I was the only writer in town not writing a screenplay while claiming to have no intention of doing so, something apparently never seen before and impossible for many to fathom. They liked me but I came to be viewed as The Freak Who Didn’t Care About Fame.

At an artist friend’s party high up in the Hollywood Hills, I met a certain Oscar-winning director and people stumbling around high on the juice got ticked off at me because I didn’t know who he was and I didn’t really care. Guilty of insufficient deference. Well, he didn’t know who I was either, so I thought that evened things out. Not that Oscar winners all knew me by name, but I never did feel like kissing ass just cause someone’s rich, powerful and famous. Of course, that attitude didn’t go over well with some and I got burned a few times, but it was still a hard habit to break.

The director was typical Hollywood good looking, showed little plastic work, got along famously with the ladies – although Heidi Fleiss was there so maybe it was within some context – but everyone spent the night getting loaded and paying homage to his film – except me. I mean, I hadn’t even seen it and it’s not like he was the only Oscar winner in the damn place. I’d been nominated for a Pulitzer but no one cared about that, so call it what you want. I just retreated to the back of the room and started doing shots of Patron Silver. Despite everyone being hammered and doing lines of anything within reach, I seemed to upset the host. He stalked over to the corner I’d taken refuge in and demanded to know why I wasn’t mingling, what was my problem. He knew I wasn’t big on mingling, so when I reminded him of that I seriously had to fight the urge to take a swing at him – and the director too – while somehow avoiding the Beautiful People. I swear I could hear the room muttering, Hagland can’t write anymore anyway, I liked him more when he wrote funny shit. 

Screw that! I cut out – the ultimate sin since no one arrives early; everyone arrives and stays late in Hollywood. I went home, retched at the kitchen sink while sliming the counter instead, let my bile get the best of me and wrote a lousy story before throwing the director’s film I’d been gifted into the dumpster out back. Besides, I was going over to Dennis Hopper’s pad in Venice the next day and he’d always been more my style.

Scott C. Holstad has authored 60+ books & has appeared in Minnesota Review, Exquisite Corpse, Santa Clara Review, TODAY Show, Long Shot, Chiron Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Southern Review & Poetry Ireland Review. He lives in Gettysburg with his wife & cat & his website can be found at https://hankrules2011.com.

the world is my prayer mat

this morning on bahía san carlos
fat doves strut along imagining family matters
prayer flags release into the breezy sonoran waltz
frivolous wrens flirt with little yellow flowers
as the sky greets sea with open embrace

while crisp blue sky is decorated with fluffy white sculptures
a fisherman and his tiller nestle like twins into the wind
a newborn seal pup wonders into the wind ignoring
a squabble of seagulls who continue their discussion
arguing into the fearless northwesterlies

in some distant place a frightened neighbor shelters
a youngster from the burning rath of a bomb,
broken families sob at graves of children shot in schools,
starving hearts and tummies turn toward hollow days
with dried up gardens and empty shopping bags,

but the sun rises again, i turn toward the wide world,
heart moaning with what might-have-beens
give deep gratitude for earth’s innocence
and bow low to horizon’s passionate gift of hope
with a simple prayer, may there still be time

Sharon Lopez Mooney, poet, retired Interfaith End-of-Life Chaplain, received: a ’79 California Arts Council Grant for rural poetry series; a “Best of the Net” nomination, “Peseroff Prize” finalist, & two other publisher’s honors. Mooney’s book is slated for publication in ’24, and her poems are in national and international publications.

Mittens

you know conditions are arduous and hostile when the whole liquor store parking lot is backed into their spaces, in case engines need jumping make it home barely reverse in my spot as well hoping to get this beast starting still each morning too

a goat
climbs down the mountain
grudgingly bidden

Jerome Berglund has many poems in a variety of forms, including haiku, haibun, and tanka exhibited or forthcoming online and in print, most recently in the Bottle Rockets, Frogpond, and Modern Haiku. His first full-length collection of poetry, Bathtub Poems, was just released by Setu Press.

Observing

and the parts
within

the soul
searching for
escape

the spirit
higher powers
for fair
weather
past here
to somewhere

that’s what
he saw

Dr. Roger Singer is the Poet Laureate of Old Lyme, Connecticut. He has had over 1,000 poems published on the internet, magazines, and in books and is a 2017 Pushcart Prize Award Nominee. He is also the President of the Shoreline Chapter of the Connecticut Poetry Society.

Trying

I keep bringing up the things I should have done;
you are no longer listening.
To be fair you should
close the door and lock it.
I am really lost, but
I am trying.

I have a family to remember,
an image crafted so close to perfection
it is a work of art.
I gave them what I could.
I barely see them now
but not for want of trying.

Just so things are clear,
in the light of day, I see what I have done.
I try– repeat prayers, wait for answers.
Waiting is what I do,
but the horizon is a straight and empty line,
beyond, there is no one left but me.

Richard Rubin is a retired librarian and library educator. Recently he decided to try and publish some of his current poetry, and he has been fortunate to have work published or accepted for publication in The Dunes Review, Great Lakes Review, Green Silk Journal, The Main Street Rag, I-70 Review, and others.

Eyes Open

Blood work revealed that my cancer was hiding.
Cancer is alive and feeding in a bone of my spine,
a metabolic membrane seen on a radiologist scan.

Diagnosis of stage 4 cancer, a metastasis
discovered after years of being unseen.
I am told that a radiation cyber knife
will cut into the cancer’s home.
Hormone therapy will be injected into my sunless thigh,
turning off my maleness, shouting at my efforts to sleep,
wringing out unneeded sweat throughout the day,
swallowing my softened muscles and bones,
licking away jars full of memories.

I begin an unrehearsed sobbing,
an emotional shedding of my future life.

My wife leans over and holds my tense hand.
She lovingly says, “we are planning a vacation together
with our family and grandchild. Let us think
of how memorable this holiday time together will be.”

I touch her heart-felt loving words,
looking forward to getting away.
But, I pause, feeling emotionally weak,
lost in my own vulnerable being, unable to be brave.
I feel myself becoming a forgotten name.

And, I say, “I do not want to die in my sleep.
I want to meet the last moment awake,
seeing my last breath leaving a mask of air.
I want my eyes open, to feel the last stream of light
stopped on the surface of my fading gaze,
like a narrow mountain stream
that has been blocked by a fallen tree.

I want to see who is present in my last room.
I want to see what I will be missing.”

David Lipsitz has been writing poems for over fifty years. His poems have appeared in BIG WINDOWS REVIEW, CAPE ROCK, CHAFFIN JOURNAL, FROM THE DEPTHS, MAIN STREET RAG, UPPAGUS, WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW, and other literary publications.

Gravity

It’s a surprise, every
time when I see a beetle
but it’s really a brittle, curled leaf;
a thin stick but it’s a dried worm,
a bit of bumpy rock but it’s a
tiny toad and I wonder

are the seasons simply
inhalations and exhalations,
the pupils of my eyes
black holes; am I pulled
forever in because
even gravity cannot escape?

Is it a flattened squirrel
or shred of tire in the road?
Dung or a cicada casing?
Flower petals or tiny,
furry, white aphids, of a sort?

These ambiguities
shouldn’t surprise me–
after all, the solar system
is perhaps an atom
with its massive empty space
and small, orbiting particles–
like the sky and oceans of the earth
so vast and uninterrupted.
The carbon in my body
was formed in a star over
billions of years ago.
My organs or the earth’s:
lungs or rainforests?
Isn’t it all the same?

I breathe out spring,
aware after all
that sometimes all of life is the same
to the gravity of our eyes.

Loralee Clark lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. She writes poetry and nonfiction. She has had poems published in two anthologies as well as Broadkill Review, Literary Mama, The Binnacle, Penwood Review, Cape Rock, Grasslands Review, The Iconoclast, and The Sierra Nevada College Review.

The Weight of the World

On both sides of bookstore glass,
glazed eyes contained worlds.

At that moment, you were no different
than your two children, or any child
who has ever stared into a shop window
amazed by glittering things,
or the irreplaceable things
lost so many years ago.

Mother of two, you may have seen the glare
of the aging poet’s balding head—
(maybe that’s what startled you)
or the flock of attuned onlookers
moved by his heavy breathing,
heavy words, heavy heart.

Wandering woman, you may have wondered what
occasion may have warranted
such attention from one man
stuck in the muck of time, whose verse first
dipped into a quiet stream of memory
but drowned us in whitewater.

At that moment, you may have been gripped
by fractured light, or some distant night,
when death was as common as hunger
in your country of origin, where the State
commanded allegiance, friends disappeared,
self-determination wilted in your hands.

Even if you have never seen a man
shoot all his cattle, set his barn aflame,
then hang himself from a rafter—
as the sage poet has—on the other side
of the glass, you may have parried piercing pangs
that ran as strong and coarse as his rapids.

Rising evening wind buckled you and the children.
You—we—all walked on into a world beyond glass.

The troubled aging poet waded still now,
like a heron on the edge of a dark river.

What settled in softly, though, his wake:
a prayer he unwittingly left behind:

___a surfeit of blooming flowers
___that once bowed his 90-year-old friend’s fragile fence,
___that couldn’t contain the weight
___of beauty in this world.

Mark Strohschein is a Washington state poet who lives on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in Flint Hills Review, Cosmic Double and Plants and Poetry’s anthology, Plant People, Vol. 3. His poems have also appeared in Lips Poetry Magazine, In Parentheses, Dippity, Quibble, and a poetry anthology, Dulce Poetica. 

1958 Plymouth Fury (Transfiguration)

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world.
Whoever will be born must destroy a world
– Hermann Hesse

After they were married, which was just short of a miracle because she was frail and he was literary and eccentric, a city boy to her country girl, they defied the medical odds and conceived a little girl together, although the birth nearly killed the mother; just before she passed out into haze, she saw a large dark hawk pass over two eggs in a porcelain bowl. She lost their son later on. Fertility, so precious, so elusive. They held onto each other in the summer nights, him, a humidity, wrapping himself around her sudden night chills because she was ill, and her, clinging to him like a vine. Nervous, he purchased a car for them, drove them to Iowa. Blue bonnet blue, it rose up on the highway, stole time. A four door, its front grill marked with a V, and thin chrome lines, and a round silver bumper that gripped the entire car’s face. And a set of rear fins rising up like mountain-edged peaks with red, pendulum bell taillights. And a rear bumper that rose like a set of chrome elbows. Soon, the mother would die too. And the little girl in the back seat, innocent as a small cat, cracking eggs open all over the car’s seat. Each single egg, opaque, yellow, lush, with whorls of igniting light and amniotic fluid; a spirit-glow. Osmotic, undisguised, the fluid spilled through her fingers and across the car’s interior; it was migratory, transient, prosperous. She broke open each egg, let the clear fluid liquefy and spill. Watched in wonder at just how the fertile wetness spread, it roamed. The spirit: like an aqueduct, a flume, a channel and a groove where all that’s most holy arrives by sensual, tactile openings. The gentle couple talked on, oblivious, while the classical music station, on AM radio, played S. Rachmaninoff’s, The Bells.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of eight poetry collections. He has work in Rattle, Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, Sheila-Na-Gig. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, will be published by Kelsay Books in 2023.