Sherry Chandler

Free Lunch #35

Free Lunch # 35 hit my mailbox last week. As usual, it provides a chapbook-sized collection of accessible poetry, including the Free Lunch Mentor program in which, in this issue, Denise Duhamel introduces Ysabel Fernandez-Acuna. Fernandez-Acuna gives us three mother poems that are edgy, comic, and fresh. “Unemployed,” for example, a prose poem in one long tumbling sentence begins like this:

When I tell my mother I need a job she says just don’t write obituaries because you will think a lot about death and dying and me dying and you will grow sad, wear even more black than you already do and for fun you will write your own obituary, you know you will, like you did in sixth grade…

Other poets included in this issue are Philip Dacey, Simon Perchik, Carol Hamilton, and Ron Koertge. Koertge’s “The Birth of Cool” is one of my favorites and typical of what you might call the Free Lunch mood:

The Birth of Cool

I liked it when somebody pulled a gun,
a car careened toward a precipice,
a circus train flew off the tracks.

But I loved the usherette. Her white
jacket and slacks. Her little white cap.
Her crossed arms and tapping foot.

When Charleton Heston rushed to save
the sexy aerialist, my usherette tinkered
with her flashlight.

Even after the house lights went up,
the way she strolled toward the red Impala
while her boyfriend pampered his hair,

she seemed to me like a city protected by snow.

— Ron Koertge

I love that last line. It makes the poem.

Possibly related posts:

There is a Free Lunch

Out to Lunch (not free)

Don’t Write What You Know

Ardor

Free the Goldberg 100

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