Main Street Rag – Summer 2005

The preference in Main Street Rag is for transparency, work with plain, strong language and a clear point of view — Scott C. Holstad’s “I Want It All,” for example (“Fuck the sweats, / I want the world. / No rhyming for me, / no structured / bullshit, I want / to spread out, / feel the bullets / whistle past.”); or Nicole Lynskey’s “Talker at the Café” (“The extrovert-talker / could be a pit-bull on a cell-phone / for all that her dark-haired friend / is allowed to speak, / in her ‘this-funny-anecdote’, / ‘that-divorced-couple’ conversation…”); or Glen Chestnut’s “The Pickup” (“Sometime in the 1950’s / A construction site / somewhere in the jungles of Colombia. / Work had stopped for the day. / The mountains to the west / had swallowed up the last rays of sun.”)

The preference in Main Street Rag is for transparency, work with plain, strong language and a clear point of view — Scott C. Holstad’s “I Want It All,” for example (“Fuck the sweats, / I want the world. / No rhyming for me, / no structured / bullshit, I want / to spread out, / feel the bullets / whistle past.”); or Nicole Lynskey’s “Talker at the Café” (“The extrovert-talker / could be a pit-bull on a cell-phone / for all that her dark-haired friend / is allowed to speak, / in her ‘this-funny-anecdote’, / ‘that-divorced-couple’ conversation…”); or Glen Chestnut’s “The Pickup” (“Sometime in the 1950’s / A construction site / somewhere in the jungles of Colombia. / Work had stopped for the day. / The mountains to the west / had swallowed up the last rays of sun.”) Two short stories, one by C.A. Rogers, the other by David Plumb, fit perfectly with these poems, narrated in casual, conversational voices. It’s almost as if we are listening, not reading. I can hear these voices laughing, ranting, grieving, panicking, cajoling, lamenting, and, every so often, even praising, as in “The Decency of Flowers” by Jennifer Gresham:

But every time we slip
into the cover of darkness,
the night blooming jasmine,
planted in the corner
of our lot, reminds us:
Be sweet. Be sweet.

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