Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Here is the first of a new monthly feature from Radiator Press, GAS BILL (no charge). We're starting with four poems (previously unpublished) by the late great Jim Cory, and a poem each from Cort Day and Stephen Potter, who are editing a book of selected poems by Cory to be published next year by Radiator. We hope you enjoy. Note: Best read on desktop or with phone turned to landscape view — line breaks etc.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
cory is a faggot anonymity confers a certain daring on secret undertakers of the spirit who smile offering pleasantries at the candy machine hearty messengers w/ breath of formaldehyde & guile acquired on vacations to prepackaged gambling dens, all this betrayed in the way they chew: you may encounter their truest feelings on the walls of 6th floor lavatory stalls where they scrawl the carnal equivalent of nose pickings: what they write is (technically speaking) correct tho it’s not exactly clever nor interesting nor even News to most so...forgive them forgive their want of couth mirth style insight or decency they exist as bundles of thwarted instinct combined w/ infinities of dimly remembered soul mishaps reduced to cell-clusters afloat in the ether of what a certain Swiss physician dubbed “the unconscious”: bowing & gloved satin-tongued, w/ their eyes full of scalpels they go on living in underworld gameshow imaginations of what they can’t have or don’t have or won’t have & who cares? stray/horn to depart from the garden of Eden, obedient as shade, having bitten forbidden fruit & tasted wax wrapp’d in paisley ascot wearing the bemused half-smile of a quiet bitterness massive glasses behind which childish eyes peer from the undergrowth of a well-composed hell ears tuned to hear the river celebrate its own melancholy while the notes of a Steinway drift blithely thru afternoons of ungiven love (shirt pocket stuffed w/sapphires in his pants fate’s raincheck securely tuckt) cigarettes...gardens of gin flowering toxic & eternal solitary confinements of the spirit New York...Paris...Isfahan (carrying a caged owl a bladeless sword) * in copasetic nocturnes waving cocktails at tap dancers on the subway all the way from Penn Station up to Harlem (labyrinth w/o exit) at the far end of the bar where the clock in the mirror rears dentures of disappearing minutes or on a park bench sorting stars a last chorus of saxophones distant dim a rose unseen floating down the Hudson... Night in Tunisia the forms of approved cruelty depend on endlessly shifting variables such as time & place while the sociology of class race & gender determine who it’s safe to sneer at at the moment I remember once in the 80s Dizzy Gillespie enacting a lisping fag joke between numbers on stage at the Academy of Music he must’ve convinced himself it was still 1943 or something as he finished this mincing mimicry & grinned, awaiting the requisite burst of warm mirth but instead a run of stunned silence ensued a sound like the brain slowly drowning in formaldehyde & after a few small eternities of this he pointed his horn toward the ceiling & began playing “Night in Tunisia” In New Orleans It was in New Orleans, at the Cafe LaFitte no less that late one evening I met a swarthy pirate named Jacques, w/ whom on the 14th floor of the Sheraton I spent the tenderest night of my life. He had earthblack hair, this Jacques, ears pink as worms, amberbrown eyes where my image swam in a pool of warm regard. While the howls & cries of Bourbon Street drifted below he lifted a chapbook lying on the nightstand & leafed thru it. Oh, he said you’re a poet? Read me your poems. And of course swelling w/a poet’s vanity, I did. From outside the door a passerby might’ve heard furniture mumbling but w/in 1410 Jacques & I spoke with our hands. How quickly we pulled & peeled, unzipped & let slip away those ridiculous clothes. We were neither young nor old. Each of us had made love many times or more than many times. Still, I fell for the way he laid his head on my side & lost himself in an unwashed underarm. About his body I recall several things: that it was slender & small w/ fist-sized nipples of cranberry. These I could easily have caressed all night (gasps! goosebumps…) making my fingertips crayfish & scuttling deviant antennae except that then, in that zone of floating noise that tapwater click of relentlessness we found each other’s lips. Our mouths became portals of silent squeals & blind puppy feeling. Kisses deepened & grew while on the nightstand dots & digits blinked & ran toward morning. I don’t know when we fell asleep or what time we awoke except that we did so tangled trunk & vine. All I knew about him was his name which, he’d informed me, was mine in another language. And then, minus the perfunctory exchange of data promising some rendezvous not to be the door closed. In a minute or 2 I rose to watch that bluejeaned figure loping down Royal toward Bienville, pause before storeglass to adjust his shirt & disappear into that ragged casbah where so many such loves & nights have declared their right to exist. Jim Cory (1953-2024) was a poet, essayist, editor, and activist who studied birds, buildings, and a wide range of history. Born in Oklahoma, he moved to Philadelphia in the late 1970s and became an influential part of the poetry scene. The author of Why Is That Goddamned Radio On? (Radiator Press, 2024) and numerous chapbooks, including WIFE (1993), The Redheads (1997), Facts in the Case of E.A.P. (or) Low Road to El Dorado (2003), and No Brainer Variations (2011), Cory also edited books of poetry by James Broughton, Jonathan Williams, and Karl Tierney. Next year, a book of Jim Cory's selected poems, edited by Cort Day and Stephen Potter, will be published by Radiator Press.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Redstart Then I was a solid lyric body and you were picking berries in a blueshift cemetery, saying I’ll never fill this container. You were a mind experiment in denim shorts, and I saw you hitching: an odd behavior of eros and grief with slender green stems and pale florets, each of them a line. I’m a working hypothesis of sand. You’re a hillside of witchgrass and thought, a rhizome, everywhere growing. If I make this declaration now it's because I’m a redstart in a wheatfield, lost, and you’re some rain about to fall, and – evening clouds above the river darkened, timelapse streetlights wandered the empty park, a quicksilver touched the face of the library – and you were the transient past, and I was the irreparable future, on whose edge you quivered with a ghost creature’s weight I was the sensation of bearing. Cort Day lives in Philadelphia, where he is involved in a fortuitous collaboration with Radiator Press to publish more of the work of Jim Cory. He is the author of The Chime (Alice James Books). He is working on another book of poems.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Pasolini Elegy He was a corpse that wasn’t a corpse before they ran him over/ repeatedly/ then set him on fire. Those were the days when poets held power enough to attract cross-hairs. Or was it the movies he made that made waves, his leftist eye a flashlight penetrating the sordid reservoirs on which the social veneer floats scum-like. How thin the skin that holds together power, its cancerous bones, its putrefying organs. So don’t poke the rotting Roman bear. Don’t make it projectile vomit upon you. The beloved poor are easily bought and have no time between work and television for Marxist critiques. The powers-that-be long ago inculcated them in their catechism, defining the thimble that contains patriotism and the pinhead on which all angels dance. They have no room for faggots, not even their own, swishy pets. Backs are made for tire tracks; faces, for mud. A native Philadelphian, Stephen Potter is also fortuitously collaborating with Radiator Press to publish more of the work of Jim Cory. His work has appeared sporadically over the years in various places, including Assaracus, bedfellows magazine, and American Poetry Review.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
More Jim Cory in prose and print can be found here:
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Stay tuned for news on his collected works, out next year. All our thanks to Cort Day and Stephen Potter for their editorial and archival efforts.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.