Barry Graham's Blog, page 93

Walt Whitman’s haversack to go on display at Library of...

Walt Whitman’s haversack to go on display at Library of Congress.

criminalwisdom:Automobile Accident 1945 - William W. Dyviniak...

criminalwisdom:

Automobile Accident 1945 - William W. Dyviniak (Via)

Poem for Mother's Day

(from Traffic and Murder)

I think I was three years old
when my mother punched me in the face
so hard I rolled across the floor
and under a chair, and knocked
the chair over.

I don’t know
if that was the first time
she did it, or only
the first time
my memory held on to it.

She hated me, always.
She told me with her words,
her fists and her feet.

She was fat,
had a mouth full of brown teeth
and she smelled of piss,
sweat and cigarettes.

She has been dead for years,
turned to ashes
and given to the wind.

A w...

"They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered..."

“They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.”

- Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain

Poem: The Dead Outside My Window

The dead outside my window

dance in the breeze. The web

that enshrouds them catches

the sunlight. The spider is small,

thick and brown. I look at it

from the other side of the glass,

my own web, my kitchen, where

a fresh kill roasts in the oven.

My essay "Noir: The Marxist Art Form" is in the new issue of The Big Click

My essay "Noir: The Marxist Art Form" is in the new issue of The Big Click:

There are also stories by Tony Mason and Joe Clifford and an (online only) essay by Tom Piccirilli, who’s recovering from brain cancer. Go get it, and, better yet, subscribe. It’s one of the best magazines out there.

"As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way..."

“As Americans, we have this naïve assumption that people all over the world are struggling and way behind us. They’re not. Sweden and South Korea have more advanced high speed internet networks. Japan has the most advanced trains and transportation systems. Norwegians make more money. The biggest and most advanced plane in the world is flown out of Singapore. The tallest buildings in the world are now in Dubai and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world.”

-...

A Story of Rape or Something Else

It was the summer of 2004. I was living in East Tennessee, in a house on the edge of woods, at a halfway point between a mental hospital and a sewage plant.

Someone knocked on my door, and I knew it had to be trouble.

I wasn’t expecting anyone. It was after midnight, and I’m not a person you’d pay an unexpected visit to even during the day. And not many people knew where I lived.

The knocking on the front door was insistent, though not loud. A burst of urgent knocking, then a pause, then another...

Photo

I think you are extremely insensitive about the subject of Gabrielle Giffords. She is so much more than just a survivor of a bullet. She is dedicated, hard-working, and a fighter in every way. You do not know her.

There is a difference between the public and the private self, and with Giffords - whom you’re correct in saying that I don’t know personally - I comment on the public self. She may be hard-working and dedicated, but what she has worked hard at and shown herself to be dedicated to is conservative, pandering, racist politicking.

Her objection to SB 1070 was not that it was racist, but that it was impractical. She cheered the deployment of the National Guard to the border, to combata problem tha...