The Black Widow & The Brown Recluse | home
Locker Room Writers and Thinkers Workshop | Poet of the Moment | Featured Poets | Poets from the Past | Story of the Moment | Featured Stories | Stories from the Past | About the Artist | Artists from the Past | Info about Submissions | Other Events | Related Links | The Kerrville Book Festival | Contact the Magazine | Index to Issues Online
Poet of the Moment
The Poet of the Moment for this issue is:
Thomas Kellar 
Grass Valley, California
Thomas Kellar is our invited guest poet for this issue. I was delighted with the three pieces he submitted and could not resist presenting them to a wider audience. Here's hoping you see his name about in many more writing venues.
tony gallucci, 30 November 2002
Thomas was born 1955, in Ft. Worth Texas. Currently he lives in California's Sierra Nevada Foothills where he began writing poetry in 1998. He is married, has 2 sons, occasionally hears voices and has difficulty in remembering the sequence of past events. Tom enjoys discordant jazz, cheap cigars, professional basketball, and toasting the evening sunset from the sanctity of his wraparound porch.
Believer
I tell her she's superstitious,
she fires back:
"you're a poor excuse for a skeptic."
She believes in miracles,
I believe
(given a long enough period of time)
everything turns to cinder.
She waits on grace,
I wait surprise announcements
from the Emergency Broadcasting System.
Last night
she was on the phone
more than an hour
in deep discussion
with a close friend.
I was on the couch
watching Kings
lose to Knicks on ESPN,
between baskets
catching fragments
of conversation,
X-Rays...prognosis...
six months...inoperable...
Saint Francis... chemo...
complete surprise...Taxol...
Julian circle...prayer...
When she hung up
I went into the kitchen,
tried to look busy
constructing a chicken salad sandwich,
I didn't want to know.
This morning
over de-caf and english muffins
She announces:
next year
we're skipping the Honolulu trip.
She wants to spend the two weeks
hiking high desert,
experiencing what Thoreau called
The "tonic of wildness"
vast emptiness, long silence,
via negativa,
the search for illumination.
She asks me what I think,
I flog my brain for an answer,
"all I want to find is triple A's
for the channel changer."
Later she breaks it to me,
Susan's father has lung cancer.
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Yes" she says.
We sit there
watching our neighbor
Through the kitchen window
wrestle with his garbage can.
Finally she asks me,
"Do you ever think about dying?"
"As little as possible."
"I wish I could be like you" she says
but she doesn't mean it
and secretly grateful,
I'm glad as hell
she's not.
Seven-Ten Split
Beware the moment
when the game is worth two bills
and everything feels perfect,
the footwork
approaching the line,
the weight of the ball,
the arm swing,
the follow through...
The sirens sing
and fools rush forward.
You hit your arrow,
second board from the right,
precise,
on line,
halfway down the lane
the ball starting to break for the pocket,
strike written all over it.
Then the sound of hull
scraping over rock.
You've come in too high,
The sudden wish
for a Brooklyn bail out
but too much oil on the lane,
the ball doesn't bite.
Hitting the head pin flush
you curse,
pins fall,
you survey the damage.
There it is,
lit up overhead,
the seven-ten split,
most difficult of all spares
To pick up.
You'd have better chance
of scoring frigid Penny,
cocktail waitress
surrounded by male suitors
in the bar area
than salvaging the frame
and holding on to your paycheck.
Your opponent turns his head,
tries to hide a Trojan smile.
Game over
you reach for your wallet,
paying your antagonist
with rent money.
The singing has stopped,
saltwater rising
above the Lou's Body Shop
stitched across the back
of your baby blue
short-sleeved shirt.
A two toned
size eleven bowling shoe
floats by,
the sea is wine colored
and turning cold.
Forgotten Man
Tonight,
no juice coming my way,
no phone calls,
no messages,
no email,
no surprise visitors,
just me and the word processor,
downstairs light
at the end of a dark hallway.
Normally, by this time
I've heard several good stories,
youth driven dissipation,
unexpected death,
artistic enterprise,
political conspiracy,
ferocious love.
Tonight nothing.
The world is mute,
no one telling me
how dandy or inadequate I am
how I should be reading,
Chaucer or Wordsworth,
nothing but wee hour silence
and labored,
two-fingered typing.
When the muse goes AWOL
it helps to hear
others' tales of anxiety,
ambition, remorse,
as I in turn
conversationally
disembowel myself
for a colleague's
vague amusement.
Tonight is gone,
I pull life support,
turn off the computer,
throw a log on the fire,
and go to bed.
Either I've been forgotten
or worse,
exhausted my confessors.