Four Poems by Ron Androla

Whales in the Clouds
(for Megan Bell)

Whale semen circles the cream
spirals in a cup of smiling barista
coffee as fresh as sudden family
death. A sweet black cigarette
twins with pulverized beans from
Java where whales roll & growl on
sunny saltwater beds, a whole body
french-kiss, shredded by aluminum foam.

Under the ocean, whales
squeeze & deflate like fat milk
cows. Whales, full lungs behind
Ahab's rib bones, stand upright,
bent by the wind in the water.

They are spiders spitting
out handfuls of bouyant
strings. The whales & spiders
sink screaming fishing boats
with bulk, webs, & hatred.

Angular wing fins flap up & bubble,
but all hands on deck, now impregnated
by whale sperm fucked into their asses,
sink. Ahab smiles like an infant farts.
He's hooked by kelp ropes. Wrapped
in the leafy arms of a last nurse, tiny fish
snip at his purple & yellow bruises. Ahab
pisses ink like a battling octopus, yet it's his
blood rather than a defense mechanism
shading his position, smoking like a large
black flower. No love is necessary for
birth or for death. No alternative terrestrial
emotion globes Ahab nor his bloated crew.
There is no mercy for failure. Soon, the 7
seas will contract & solidify into dirty vaseline
thickened by drips of whale come. Spun
coffee: the grinning barista: sanity
is extreme. 






Logical Madness

Everybody's gone,
& I'm too old to jet
excess DNA all over

the nude backs of
sexy palm trees, to
procreate again.

Miraculous microbes
curl up, sour, & burrow
into holes filling with
blood on the tops of my
feet; gagged demons fuck
yodeling angels in midnight
alleys, in soft dumpsters of
death. A beach bonfire
evaporates like God at dawn.

I mean EVERYONE'S gone.
What do I do with their eyes
waking up in my brain? Their
faces twist like cotton ghosts
inside the complicated network
of cellular mammalian veins.

The dead unfurl skeins of time
soaked with sight & life plasma.

The face of a flag snaps in humid
space, & slaps that growing
grin off the sun.






The Fourth of July in the Early 1960's

in shadow & dew on the side of my dad's first garage, black
dirt, talcum dust, hubcap rust, bone nails, & broken wood;
oily, fingerprinted cans, plus a new olds 98 hold summer
heat warmer than afternoon inside; I have a pack of matches
& a mangled firecracker lattice in my back pocket.

I'm not allowed to do this. Never set off firecrackers alone.
It isn't safe. I push, like planting plants, gunpowder-rolled
paper sticks, blue star ones, red star ones, deep into raw soil
along the shadowy edge of the garage. Fuses show like gray
hairs of grass, but bent like thick tiny branches. They cheer as

fires touch & spark them. I'm fascinated by a whirl of smoke
like a thinning ghost in exploded dirt. My mother yells my name
from the back door, then she adds volume & my middle name
& emphasizes our same last. She's serious. I step from shadows
into sunlight, & a mean, loving, concerned face asks,

“What do you think you're doing? Don't you know that yr father
is sleeping?” He works 7-day swing-shifts in the east end steel-mill,
he's young, chews Italian dog-turd cigars. I grumble, & kick up
the backyard sidewalk. Mom widens the door. I scowl. I sulk stairs
to my hollow sun-soaked bedroom & fall across a boyhood bed.

I want to blow up everything.






Why We Matter

Shadows melt over sunlit bricks at dusk.
The shadows burn a cursive word into my
neighbor's northern wall. My neighbor's
house is full of curdled thoughts, dead
cranky cats, & 16th -century disgust.

Scripted by a soft elm tree branch, tri-
angulated by leaf & movement,
[LIFE] is spelled out, shivering, by the last
of the sun. I suggest Ann sits in my chair & sees
the etched miracle from this perspective

across our alley. “Look!” she shouts
before reading the bricks, “a lightning
bug! 2 lightning bugs!”
(Please read the shadow word, sweetheart.)
“Unbelievable, LIFE!”
​

Bio: Ron Androla is a poet living with his wife, Ann Androla, in Eerie, PA. He's the author of CONFLUENCE (Busted Dharma Books), 2015, available on Amazon, FACTORY FABLES (Pressure Press), 2016, along with many other books. He's been writing & publishing since the late 1970s.​

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