by Gene Novogrodsky
From summer’s heat and exhaust fumes
To winter’s chill and the same exhaust fumes,
The grey cur takes its corner,
Sometimes on the sidewalk,
Sometimes on a lawn,
Sometimes in the street,
A living cur, thinning, wanting food and water,
Thinning, and still feinting at motion, any motion ….

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Poems by Gene Novogrodsky
Mouths
Never in light,
Never in awake.
The depth of a dream kiss.
A dream embrace,
A dream passion,
Uncomplicated,
Correct,
Together,
Before the light ….
Hands On Elbows
Guiding them
To doctors’,
To stores,

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From Gene’s Notebook
…by the mud and twisted limbs of the Red River in North Dakota, I come upon a couple with a big white dog.
I ask about the Spring flood that left the the mud and twisted limbs.
The man, in a thick East European accent, tells me that it was mighty flood.
“What did you do?” [...]

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By Gene Novogrodsky
Transition
Twilight passed,
Sliver of silver moon,
Dim outline in the south ….
Caged, Leashed and Free
She walks with a yellow bird in a dark cage,
The cage swinging, bird perched on a rod.
She walks with a white duck, leashed with clothesline,
Behind her, needing a pull, sometimes.
A white dove on the warrior’s fence,

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Road stops
…and the former West Texas high school footballer, now driving an 18-wheeler between Texas and the Pacific, rolled in around 5 a.m., 600 Christmas trees, each weighing between 80 and 90 pounds, each fresh, green and woodsy (piney, too), and crept into the back of his cab and went to sleep ….
…about three hours [...]

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from Gene’s Notebook
…the skinny woman comes from under the underpass, and I tell her that the
homeless shelter beats the underpass.
“No, it doesn’t. I don’t want anyone telling me what to do,” and she goes back
to the underpass’ damp wall.
…and the young man is walking around at dusk. I hand him a watermelon that I
carried from [...]

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by Gene Novogrodsky
For Brenda N. Riojas
Black curls.
A cousin’s granddaughter,
A little girl, identification Israeli.
And as she grows,
She will hear hate of
Arabs, Palestinians, Muslims,
Hate severe,
Hate in jokes,
Or, might she hear words of
Commonality?

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by Gene Novogrodsky
He kept a ten in his wallet,
Had for years, just in case,
And when he died, we opened
His wallet and the ten
Was still there ….

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by Ruth Wagner
Pushed Aside
We see the wizened woman
With a cigarette butt in wrinkled mouth.
She nods and pushes her grocery cart.
He, about a half block behind her,
Pushes his cart.
They travel together:
Protection?
Companionship?
A week earlier another of the
“Pushed aside,” she, older now,
With peppered hair,
Sitting on the stoop of an abandoned house
Lifts her hand

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by Gene Novogrodsky
A U-Haul passes, and I wave;
They lamely return the wave,
Away by the second,
And far from mind and space they pass ….
A U-Haul passes, and I wave;
They’re tired, but energetically return the wave.
Away by the second,
To come to mind, to be recalled ….
A U-Haul passes, and I can not wave;
They cry, and I turn [...]

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By Gene Novogrodsky
Picked in heat,
Loaded in heat,
Then, on truck to shed,
Rain and wind,
And the okra (bombo)
With its white seedy insides
Falls to the road,
Is crushed into pulp,
Green slime on asphalt,
But most gets to the shed,
For gumbo, yes, gumbo with bombo ….

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from Gene’s Notebook
…and she is counting money, and also using a Lone Star Card ….
She wants to put her chicken back, and get a cheaper one.
The cashier tell her that would be fine, but then adds: “The larger chicken, though it costs more, is tastier.”
The woman listens and says, “Don’t put it back. I’ll take [...]

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from ArtsRGV.com

The University of Texas – Pan American Library will host the second of its “Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story” presentations on Thursday, September 17, with a visit of one of the foremost scholars of Texas literature, Dr. Don Graham.  Graham will speak to an audience of students, faculty, staff, [...]

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by Gene Novogrodsky
We old men enter McDonald’s yellow
As dawn breaks and sharp Venus and faint Mars
Spend in the white dawn ….
We take separate tables, coffee, some cream,
Often sugar, open newspapers and sit and sit ….
The drive-in windows are busier than the walk-ins,
The walk-ins for us, the old,

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by Gene Novogrodsky
Leave the city green to see the drought,
To the country’s brown ….

Three goats bite for stubble.
Six hens scratch for stubble.
A funeral procession,
A hundred or more vehicles, lights on,
To the dry dirt heaped graveside.

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by Gene Novogrodsky
Why not?
Celebrate?
Newspapers scream narco violence.
Also femicide.
The economy.
The drought.
But take a break.
2010 nears, the start of Mexican Independence.
Year 200.
Failed state.
Pakistan of Latin America.
But take a break.
2010 nears, the start of Mexican Independence.

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From the Edge Tales
I walk into the North Dakota night. Below, in the American Legion, a young blues guitarist, fresh from the local blues festival, tears up the floor.
I hear on the sidewalk, Spanish, a lot. It drowns the below blues and above US-Mexican border music. Yes, border music and Spanish in North Dakota.
I start [...]

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by Gene Novogrodsky
Mid-day, and the eastern Guanajuato village shuts down
In the Sierra Oriental’s direct sun ….
A bull paces, caged in the back of a racked farm truck,
Is organs huge, and the owner takes a taco and beer break ….
Deserted streets, with lunch near, tortillas made,
Pick-ups parked; road builders dozing in shade ….
And up where the [...]

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From the edge
…and in Rensselaer, NY, a lay-over for more than an hour before The Lakeshore Limited leaves for Chicago, so an old man with his former mother-in-law’s cane – (I’m the old man) – and two young men and two young women from Detroit who had been to Boston for a [...]

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by Stan Raines
“Wow,” he said. “You’re fucked up.” He was maybe twenty, wearing the whites medical corps personnel wear in a clinical setting. The black insignia on his collar made him out to be a specialist, fourth class, as the inductee would learn later, when he began to aspire to have a set of his [...]

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by Gene Novogrodsky
The woman in jeans and a pink jacket,
Full of sleep and pop magazine reading
And some teacher-aide tasks and flat and bored
Goes into the mild night, and starts down an incline to a car in the dark ….

The woman in a tight dark skirt andv white blouse
Alert and awake, full of Neruda, Spanish-English and

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By Gene Novogrodsky
Early, before the all-you-can eat yellow eggs are placed,
The old man has coughed, bent-backed and false-stepped his way
Down the carpeted hall to the complimentary breakfast ….
Does he live in the roadside motel-hotel?
What was he?
What is he?
Why is he here?
Will he die with a next-door-neighbor’s sox on, and the neighbor will lose the
sox?
He totters [...]

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An announcement
Brownsville native Oscar Casares will launch his new novel, Amigoland, at the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art on August 6 at 5:30 p.m.
The event will feature a reception followed by a book reading and signing.
Amigoland recently received a “starred review” from Publisher’s Weekly, which called it “a winning novel.” The novel was described as [...]

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From Gene’s Notebook
…trains and more trains, the Burlington Northern and the Santa Fe (BNSF), east to west with empty coal cars, and then back, the black coal heaped; the whistle blasts shake homes, cars, stores and street, but the grain elevators, bursting with last year’s what, corn and soybeans hold firm ….
Eugene [...]

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From Gene’s Notebook
…the 83-year old soybean and wheat farmer, truck driver, too, is burning rubbish. “The doctors messed up my medication. I can’t walk without gasping. I’ve rented out my sections (640-acres per section), and this is the first year
I haven’t driven a truck or put in a crop in decades, except for [...]

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