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The History of One Tough Motherfucker – Charles Bukowski
he came to the door one night wet thin beaten and
terrorized
a white cross-eyed tailless cat
I took him in and fed him and he stayed
grew to trust me until a friend drove up the driveway
and ran him over
I took what was left to a vet who said,”not much
chance…give him these pills…his backbone
is crushed, but is was crushed before and somehow
mended, if he lives he’ll never walk, look at
these x-rays, he’s been shot, look here, the pellets
are still there…also, he once had a tail, somebody
cut it off…”
I took the cat back, it was a hot summer, one of the
hottest in decades, I put him on the bathroom
floor, gave him water and pills, he wouldn’t eat, he
wouldn’t touch the water, I dipped my finger into it
and wet his mouth and I talked to him, I didn’t go any-
where, I put in a lot of bathroom time and talked to
him and gently touched him and he looked back at
me with those pale blue crossed eyes and as the days went
by he made his first move
dragging himself forward by his front legs
(the rear ones wouldn’t work)
he made it to the litter box
crawled over and in,
it was like the trumpet of possible victory
blowing in that bathroom and into the city, I
related to that cat-I’d had it bad, not that
bad but bad enough
one morning he got up, stood up, fell back down and
just looked at me.
“you can make it,” I said to him.
he kept trying, getting up falling down, finally
he walked a few steps, he was like a drunk, the
rear legs just didn’t want to do it and he fell again, rested,
then got up.
you know the rest: now he’s better than ever, cross-eyed
almost toothless, but the grace is back, and that look in
his eyes never left…
and now sometimes I’m interviewed, they want to hear about
life and literature and I get drunk and hold up my cross-eyed,
shot, runover de-tailed cat and I say,”look, look
at this!”
but they don’t understand, they say something like,”you
say you’ve been influenced by Celine?”
“no,” I hold the cat up,”by what happens, by
things like this, by this, by this!”
I shake the cat, hold him up in
the smoky and drunken light, he’s relaxed he knows…
it’s then that the interviews end
although I am proud sometimes when I see the pictures
later and there I am and there is the cat and we are photo-
graphed together.
he too knows it’s bullshit but that somehow it all helps.
Immigration Court – June 10, 2025
Through a new program created by local immigrant advocacy groups, Court Watch, my friend and I volunteer to be trained and be present during a court session, to aid immigrants who are summoned for possible deportation. The immigrants speak Spanish, Portuguese, Creole, no English. We speak only English.
At least 15 immigrants’ cases are to be heard. Each immigrant has received a letter from Dept. of Homeland Security ordering their presence in court to say why DHS should not deport them immediately. Some immigrants have traveled more than 2 hours to one of only 2 immigration courts in MA – accompanied by family, friends, their children. The children all are under 5, one is a newborn. Some of the immigrants arrive alone. Not one has a lawyer present to sit beside them in the courtroom.
Thanks to a Court Watch guide, we possess a few tools. We have forms in languages that these immigrants speak. If they complete this form, local immigrant advocate organizations can follow their case and perhaps assist with legal needs. We are also armed with toys and books, all of which we give away during the four hours.
We do our best. With Google Translate and forms in the languages needed, we are successful in learning about the immigrants. Many are unemployed. Most do not have a lawyer nor the money to pay for one. Some have a spouse whose own case is assigned to the other MA immigration court.
Fortunately ICE appears not to be present. But imagine driving to court wondering if ICE is hiding in the wings. Or knowing that the previous week, in the same courthouse, 10 ICE field staff in plainclothes arrested a woman in the same waiting area.
For my colleague and I, the 4-hour session flies by. (Not true for the immigrants waiting for their cases to be called.)We do our best to communicate what legal services may be available. We provide phone numbers of local organizations to contact for possible legal support. One female with a toddler, who is visibly shaking, asks my colleague to accompany her out – together they ride the elevator down and walk outside to where a friend awaits.
The good (?) news. The Court provided translation services for all cases. No one was arrested. Every case was continued for at least 11 months- May, 2026. One was continued to 2029. Couples’ cases which were in different courts were combined; and those cases closer to the other MA immigration court were transferred. The judge was patient and respectful, except when he got very angry at the DHS attorney (who appeared via Zoom).
I leave the court imaging myself in a foreign country, not speaking the language of the court, having had this experience. It’s unimaginable. Thanks to Court Watch for organizing this program.
Lynne Karsten
POLITICAL
If You Knew – Ellen Bass
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
09 – Room 814
2024 – Monument Hospital, Rapid City, South Dakota looking out in the Black Hills, surrounded by Indian Reservations, Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Standing Rock. People live here. People die here. I come in peace. Yet somewhere along the road a staphylococcus infection enters my body, attacks my skin, my organs, my life. The people in the blue uniforms attack the bacteria, bombard them with medicines, slice open flesh, drain swamp. Other people in white uniforms bring me food. I am housed, clothed, fed. Bells ring at all hours of the day and night. It is not church. Outside the grassroots wave and hint of wind. Helicopters come and go on emergency missions. It is possible to do yoga on the floor and my practice significantly improves. There are medication‘s for pain, there is meditation for brain. Beyond Room 814 armies clash, humans perish, they attack like bacteria but are crueler and more intentional. I feel safe here, cared for in ways I have never been cared for lo these long 80+ years on the planet. I accept my fate with gratitude. I needed to rest before continuing the journey.
SOUL’S JOURNEY 2023
TRAVEL
The Furry Bug
On a humid, dark, cloudy summer night,
Temperature still in the high seventies,
Streetlights not working,
I step out the door as a huge fluttering bug
Flies smack into my lips.
I do not see it.
I know it is not a moth or mosquito,
More a furry flying beetle of some sort.
And just as I do not see it, I do not hear it.
Rather I feel its flutter and the soft thud
As it crashes straight into the very center of my closed mouth,
Smack in the middle of my pressed lips.
I blow and brush it away quickly,
Feeling its dimensions only slightly.
I respond in surprise and shock,
But without fear or disgust.
I know at once that I have been sweetly touched
Not assaulted or attacked.
And though my rational mind recognizes it as probability expressed,
A happenstance of fate
A random intersection of invertebrate and human,
I am aware instantly of having been kissed by a beautiful stranger,
A princess living in the body of a bug,
The light but explicit tap tap tap of god’s finger
Calling forth my attention.
“Hey you,” the bug commands with her furry kiss,
“Wake up, we’re in this together, man.
Live life fully aware
And appreciative of me,
Fly around in the muggy dark night
Kissing strangers with me,
Let’s be in each other’s company as much as we can bear.”
Later I stand inside the rushing waters
Of a mountain stream
Spray frosting my face
Pulled along by a frightening, exciting, inexorable flow to the sea.
I am the water.
I kiss your lips.
Poetry
Homage to an Unattractive Woman
The most unattractive woman I ever made love with –
I know you think that unkind –
had a seizure disorder and took dilantin,
but had a wonderful mind.
Her teeth were rotted,
she was short and quite plump,
had stubbly hairs on her face,
wore glasses, even in bed …
and bloomers.
Her hair was a mess,
her knees were knobby,
when she opened her mouth
saliva stuck to her upper and lower palate.
She was an English teacher
in love with poetry,
romanticism,
Bharati Mukherjee
and Alan Ginsburg
She even looked like Alan Ginsburg,
laughed like him,
turned in onto herself,
aware of who she was,
and how she appeared,
and the fact that she had you in bed
and was going to enjoy it.
She had slept with my best friend Henry,
who I also adored.
She even loved him,
as did I.
He was so handsome
so beat,
and just the right mixture of
longshoreman and literary intellectual.
I was clearly her second choice,
as well it should be.
Her mind was brilliant
Her hands were a mess
Her clothes were a mess
She was brutally honest
Lovely in her way
Especially naked.
Her courage was more daunting than Henry’s
who is still in hiding,
her thighs softer,
she made nicer noises,
and never belched
or maybe she did.
I don’t remember everyone I ever slept with,
but here’s to a beautiful woman I do remember,
her name, in truth, was Linda.
POETRY
Bharati Mukherjee
Crow Blacker Than Ever – Ted Hughes
When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven.
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow . . Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing Heaven and earth together –
So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.
Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank –
A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: ‘This is my Creation,’
Flying the black flag of himself.
(This poem may seem odd to some. It is one of a few dozen
crow poems in Hughes’ entire book of crow poems, Crow.
Hughes had a very dark side. Just ask Sylvia Plath.)
The Shyness – Sharon Olds
Then, when we were joined, I became
completed, joyful, shyer.
I may have shone more, reflected
more, and from deep inside there rose
some glow passing steadily through me, but I was not
small, in a raftered church, or in
playing, now, I felt like someone
a cathedral, the vaulted spaces of the body
like a sacred woods. I was quiet when my throat was not
making those iron, orbital, earth,
rusted, noises at the hinge of matter and
whatever is not matter. He takes me
into the endings like another world at the
center of this one, and then, if he begins to
end when I am resting and I do not rejoin him yet
then I feel awe, I almost feel
fear, sometimes for a moment I feel
I should not move, or make a sound, as
if he is alone, now,
howling in the wilderness,
and yet I know we are in this place
together. I thought, now is the moment
I could become more loving, and my hands moved shyly
over him, secret as heaven
and my mouth spoke, and in my beloved’s
voice, by the bones of my head, the fields
groaned, and then I joined him again,
not shy, not bold, released, entering
the true home, where the trees bend down along the
ground and yet stand, then we lay together
panting as if saved from some disaster, and for ceaseless
instants, it came to pass what I have
heard about, it came to me
that I did not know I was separate
from this man, I did not know I was lonely.
A Quiet Life – Baron Wormser
What a person desires in life
is a properly boiled egg.
This isn’t as easy as it seems.
There must be gas and a stove,
the gas requires pipelines, mastodon drills,
banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a pot, the product of mines
and furnaces and factories,
of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
of women in kerchiefs and men with
sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the stuff of clouds and skies
and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems always too much or too little
of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a miracle of the first order,
the ace in any argument for God.
Only God could have imagined from
nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace too. It should be quiet
when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
ticked off at their scheming girlfriends and
take it out on you, no dictators
posing as tribunes.
It should be quiet, so quiet you can hear
the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a type
of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of her body.
Listen, she is there, pecking at a bit of grain
that came from nowhere.
A Wreath to the Fish – Nancy Willard
Who is this fish, still wearing its wealth,
flat on my drainboard, dead asleep,
its suit of mail proof only against the stream?
What is it to live in a stream,
to dwell forever in a tunnel of cold,
never to leave your shining birthsuit,
never to spend your inheritance of thin coins?
And who is the stream, who lolls all day
in an unmade bed, living on nothing but weather,
singing, a little mad in the head,
opening her apron to shells, carcasses, crabs,
eyeglasses, the lines of fisherman begging for
news from the interior-oh, who are these lines
that link a big sky to a small stream
that go down for great things:
the cold muscle of the trout,
the shining scrawl of the eel in a difficult passage,
hooked-but who is this hook, this cunning
and faithful fanatic who will not let go
but holds the false bait and the true worm alike
and tears the fish, yet gives it up to the basket
in which it will ride to the kitchen
of someone important, perhaps the Pope
who rejoices that his cook has found such a fish
and blesses it and eats it and rises, saying,
“Children, what is it to live in the stream,
day after day, and come at last to the table,
transfigured with spices and herbs,
a little martyr, a little miracle;
children, children, who is this fish?”