ROSE PETALS

by Jo Schaffer

Rosepetals (Interlude) written by joJB https://soundcloud.com/jo-schaffer/rosepetals-interlude in our time (prod. DJ Simmy) (feat. Quenna Lené and the Tapest...

ROSE PETALS

Oil on my headboard..

I'mma try my hand at the future.
Oil on my headboard..
I'mma try my hand at the future

I see..
I see..
I see..

Dark matter replacing light
Dark meat being preferred
Your mac and cheese with an egg in it:
Artisanal,
Modern grocery stores would call it
Systems dismantled
Automatic ones in place
Out this beaurapitalist, capitocratic mess
No, Yes
No, I don't think we gon' do away with race but..
We may call ourselves ethnotic more specifically
There's always gon' be a place for the low end..
But it won't look how it do now.
No, they'll be free and bound.
An influx of light matter in the ghetto and the jails
Where the light lowers the property value
The loop the new bubble..
The landfill further filled out for the new projects..
The term honkey a term of respect

And the streets will be the streets
But with dinner tables lining the sidewalks
And everybody's strapped
In case a cracker venture too far off the red, the blue or the green line..
And a new line,
The black line,
It'll run you from over east to Austin..
It is our city's first bullet train..
And there's oil on my headboard

IN OUR TIME

I’ve been watching you from 3000 miles away

Fin’ly found the time to pay

Rewrote this song today

Wondering how many days

How many ways

There’ll be before we meet

Ye es es es, I I I I ca an carve a way

But there’s no need to make you stay

The distance dulled my senses butI’d lose them anyway

Tasting fa God

Discerning my own affairs

Giving you little care

To how you change

(Scat)

Dat- da-doo dat-doo dat-doo

Dat- da-doo dat-doo dat-doo

Doo- doo- doo- doo

Dat- da-doo dat-doo dat-doo

Doo- doo- doo- doo

Who lives without regret?

I don’t know

But I’ve felt bigger pain

(Mmm-mm-mmm)

And in moving on

Know there’s much to gain

(Hmm)

I’ve been watching you from 3000 miles away

I’ll get there someday

We’ll reach a common place

And i f love never calls our names

I’ll find a way to show I’m still the same

Dat- da-doo dat-doo dat-doo

Dat- da-doo dat-doo dat-doo

Doo- doo- doo- doo

"How to Act"

by Kathleen Rooney

photo from “Cursed Stock Photos” twitter account

HOW TO ACT

All the neighborhood’s a stage, an open-air space for viewing spectacles and plays.

A hearse idles outside the church—I haven’t seen one in a while. Rainwater drools from the mouth of a gargoyle.

 

Hope you like gothic flourishes and circular plots, because that’s what the script calls for!

 

Who will play my complicated Byronic hero? With only our own eroticism to keep us warm?

 

I don’t know how to play this scene, but the show goes on. Spiders are never too creatively blocked to weave their webs.

 

Is our response to any catastrophe is its own disaster? Every god a jester, every jester a god.

 

A tableau of spirit. The rays of noon illumine the city.

 

The instrument I’m hoping to master here is me.

 

No life could be more real than this. Scarlet cardinal ad-libbing in a maple.

 

Is art the human response to the shock of mortality? My character lifts her middle finger. Salutes reality.

 

In ancient Greece, you could sit in auditoria cut into hillsides with ten thousand other people.

 

The critics steeple their fingers and softly say, hmmm.

 

An actor’s heart-rate rises the instant they have an audience.

 

“My first act of free will,” wrote William James, “shall be to believe in free will.”

 

Behold! Smoke from chimneys. The blackest comedy.

 

My longing is to perform so well that in the end I’m lashed to death by flowers from the crowd.

 

I search for stage directions in the airplane contrails, but the only place they lead is back to the plane.

What do I do now? Someone tell me what to do.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches in the English Department at DePaul University, and is the author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and the World War I novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, forthcoming from Penguin in August of 2020.