洞月亮 August 2016

FEATURED POET: CRYSTA E. CASEY(1952-2008) was born in Pasadena, California. She graduated from The State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 1976, where she was one of the founding members of The Women Writers Workshop. After college, she became the first woman hired by the City of Irvine, California, in Parks and Maintenance. In 1978, she enlisted in the all-new voluntary military, serving in the U.S. Marine Corps as a journalist, then as a self-declared “Resident Poet” until her honorable discharge under medical conditions in 1980. She moved to Seattle, Washington in the early 1980s, where she studied with the poet Nelson Bentley and collaborated with Esther Altshul Helfgott on the It’s About Time Writers Reading Series. Her first collection of poetry, Heart Clinic, was published in 1993 (Bellowing Ark Press). In 2004 she received a Hugo House Award from Richard Hugo House, and, in 2006, she was a finalist for Seattle Poet Populist. In 2010, Floating Bridge Press brought out a chapbook of her work, Green Cammie. Rules for Walking Out was the last manuscript Crysta completed and approved before her death at the Seattle VA in the spring of 2008. It was published by Cave Moon Press in June 2016. Crysta’s papers are housed in the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.

Check out her latest book @ Cave Moon Press

V.A. SMOKE SHACK

In a loosely-tied robe, the man with stump legs,
in a wheelchair, his gray hair pulled back
in a ponytail, swaps tales with another vet,
peanut butter in C-rats and M-16s
that clogged in the mud. One old man says,
“I don’t know nothin ‘bout Vietnam.”
He’s from WWII, lost on a long shot,
still betting the Kentucky Derby
that afternoon on TV. The nurse
on the night shift tells me about neighbors
who make too much noise getting drunk,
letting their kid jump on the floor.
“Shoulda never bought that place
near the airport. When planes take off
going north, the house rattles
and I wear earplugs.”
The vets in the smoke shack
stare at the sky with lost eyes
when a plane flies over. A man says,
“They’re going to remove half my face.
It was always my bad side.” Another says
he has a cowboy hat like that other vet
from Idaho, but he doesn’t wear it.
“I think I’m being punished,” says the old
man who asks for a light.

—Crysta E. Casey

MIRACLE

Last night I performed
a miracle. I poured
the bottle I had left
down the drain. I turned wine
into water.

—Crysta E. Casey

WRITE YOUR POEM!

Accoutrements:

I turned wine

into water.

The subject slaps us in the face more than the arrangement of the words.  We are hammered not by a certain meter or form.  We are hammered by a glimpse into the pain of a veteran.  So, since she set us up with that premise, the use of an ironic allegory at the end functions beautifully in this piece.

So, as you write your poem, what are you relying on to drawn in the reader?  If you lean on the accoutrements, then you have a challenge.  The reader has to be along for the ride, much like a fashionista needs to understand what is happening on the runway in Paris.  

In any case, write your poem.  Push the subject.  Accoutrements end up a dash of salt, in powerful poems.  If you are going to push the form, push it to the edge.