Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

HIS BODY IN MINE

duck eye

silent wait-

ing slaughter

              not one

              word said

motorcycle

to abattoir

imperfect doors

                of perception

                better never opened

wheel spinning

ace of spades

roulette card

               sparkling on

               heaven’s door

at precisely

three one afternoon

              in wet Hanoi

              feathers resist

              this weeping weather

feet claw

yellow scales

bound for glory

              another story

              of waiting love

lost in

translation

going over Red

             River water

             without speaking

thin broken sword

swallowed swimming

bottomless throats not

               opened before

               time collapses

inside Bae Mai Hospital

mother near her last

              breath in never

              stop street

              traffic

of another place

karaoke playing

             Michael Jackson

             thrilling beat it

                            Ventriloquists

speak of being her

Lafayette Paris

             Magenta parlor

             Hotel granting

             All good wishes

(for Alice Notley)

Charles Shively (1937-2017) was born in Gobbler’s Knob, Ohio.  He enrolled in Harvard in 1955, received his master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1959 and received his PhD from Harvard in 1969. Throughout his teaching career at Boston State College and UMASS Boston, Charley was awarded three Fulbright Research and Teaching Grants sending him to Mexico, Ecuador and Vietnam.  In 1971, Charley, Michael Bronski, John Mitzel and Larry Martin formed a radical gay anarchist collective and began publishing the Boston Gay Newspaper: Fag Rag, which ran until the early 1980’s publishing 12 of Charley’s infamous radical essays. He was a founding member the Good Gay Poets Collective publishing several seminal books of poetry by queer poets outside the mainstream poetry establishment such as Freddie Greenfield’s Were You Always a Criminal? ruth weiss’s Desert Journals, Aaron Shurin’s broadside Exorcism of the straight/man/demon and John Wieners’s magnum opus, Behind the State Capitol.  Shively also published Adrian Stanford’s groundbreaking Black and Queer, the first book of poetry written by a gay black poet. Charley also published the Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (1971), A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860, his doctoral dissertation (1988), Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Camerados (1987) and Drumbeats: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Boy Lovers (1989). Charley’s only published collection of poems was in Nuestra Señora de los Dolores: the San Francisco Experience (1975), as a joint book with Salvatore Farinella’s The Orange Telephone. He died in 2017.   A new collection of his work, I Have a Poem for You, is being published this month by Bootstrap Press and is available for preorder at here

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx