Issue #34.3 Cal Freeman, Geoff Sawers, Cody Adams
Two Poems by Cal Freeman
A Helmet and a Pair of Boots
1975 Jim Beam decanter, flanged ceramic, kilned in the wake of the Fall of Saigon to honor the GIs who drank the stuff on leave and kept a market for it past LBJ’s and Nixon’s brutal follies. My mother-in-law didn’t know what it was when she found it in her father’s garage, and all the directional prepositions that bring it to our house on my mother-in-law’s 75th birthday make for bad prose and worse poetry. Jean-Guy Proulx, a poem of a name, not a marine but a Navy man who served on a PT boat in the Pacific Theater, bought it from a party store on Warren on a jingoistic whim 30 years past his active duty days. When I wake up that morning Sarah has been weeping. She’s imagining her mother gone. She can’t believe she’s turning 75. When my mother-in-law arrives with this gift for us, I become irrationally nostalgic for the Fall of Saigon and the people clinging to helicopter skids in the iconic footage, in the culmination of a disaster Sarah’s grandfather had no role in, I was not alive for. Jean-Guy shipped out after Pearl Harbor and unheroically buzzed around the little islands. Back home in Dearborn he took to gardening and nipping from pint bottles in his two-car garage where he composted coffee grounds and grapefruit peels for his heirloom tomatoes. There’s still a slug or two of 80-proof whiskey sloshing in that ceramic boot when she gives it to us and I think of how on that final trash night at her childhood home, clearing old detritus, the prolix of her parents’ lives, into a rented dumpster, my mother-in-law must’ve paused and said to Sarah’s father or herself, John and Sarah might want this for their basement bar. They appreciate this kind of thing.
Living at the Movies: A Brief Memoir With Jim Carroll and Horses
I was 16 and serious. I carried a copy of Jim Carroll’s Living at the Movies dog-eared at “The Narrows (for Carol Kane)” which I kept re-reading despite not knowing who Carol Kane was. After mucking out stalls, I’d take the book into the coffee shop above the indoor riding ring at Rushlow’s Farm, my friend Molly down there loping a chestnut mare through the cloverleaf pattern, switching leads at the corner barrels, vertices C and B of the triangle, wordless, cue-less lead changes, left foreleg to right foreleg, rider motionless, her stillness a kind of irreligious grace. I drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup and read until I didn’t care anymore about the disced dirt of the ring or the footings of a horse or the death of an historical figure. I’d seen Jim Carroll read poems at the Magic Stick in Detroit earlier that year and marveled at the tremolo of his thin nasal voice as he read lines plumbed from the marrow and the junk he plunged into his veins. He kept pulling a white bandana from his back pocket and blowing his nose between poems, scarred arms holding the pages a few feet away from his reading glasses. I watched and decided writing poetry was the most noble thing you could do. I was a city kid, but I’d get to Rushlow’s as often as I could. They were gentle, and patient with their horses, and they didn’t let on that they thought my scribbling in moleskin notebooks was strange. I didn’t have the patience to work the horses from the ground up the way Molly taught me, to let them out on the lunge rope and put them through their gaits before mounting up and riding, to slow down, to notice how an ear would twitch or a mane would tremble near the withers when the animal was scared, to turn a scared horse back into itself with the inner rein to keep it from lighting off. I fell so many times that year. I’d smoke cigarettes on my drives home listening to the Jim Carroll Band, “The People Who Died” and “I Want the Angel.” The first poets were singers, I’d soon learn. Jim Carroll couldn’t carry a tune and neither could I, but for a time he saved his own life from what he’d done with it.
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Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of several books and chapbooks, most recently The Weather of Our Names (Cornerstone Press 2025). His writing can be found in many publications, including The Glacier, Berkeley Poetry Review, Willow Springs, Oxford American, and North American Review. He teaches at Oakland University.
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A Poem by Geoff Sawers
The Night of the 20th July, 1841
John Clare escapes from the asylum at Epping Forest; sets out to walk back to Peterborough: “Night finds me on this lengthening road alone…”
The open way, the great north road is a path back into Eden. Two suns revolve, the angel sheathes her sword two moons hang low and pale in the dusk.
Night is an illusion. Only the dawn is real. He breaks his fast on clover, binds his feet the elm-sided road is hard, the corn is brown a man throws him a penny for a half of beer
complacency of the crows who can afford to wait watch him reel and catch his breath he still has breath. Imagine Byron walking the waves like this the length of the long Hellespont
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Geoff Sawers is a neurodivergent writer from Reading (UK). His most recent book is Widdershins Walk (with Peter Driver, Peculiarity Press 2025) and he edited and wrote the introduction for The Complete Short Stories of Dorothy Edwards (Blackthorn Press, 2025). Paintings on Instagram: geoff.sawers
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Two Poems by Cody Adams
Pallbearing, Poorly
He was a big man, pregnant with stale beer still sloshing around his dead gut. As we carried him, I could feel the waves of amber ale within him rock to and fro, the same way the Great Lakes get choppy and pissy when instigated by Nor’easters. As we approached the hearse he spent most of his life driving, every muscle in my caboose cramped. I dropped to one knee and clutched my convulsing butt knots. When my corner of the casket fell, the lid popped open for a brief sliver of eternity: his eyes burned through closed lids to find mine and inquire what in the hippie hell was wrong with me. Gravity snapped the lid shut before he could overcome the rigor mortis, before he could reach out his brawny paw and thump me upside the noggin one last time.
Demolition & Renovation
When our marriage counselor tossed her hands up in frustration and said “Just make it work,” I was reminded of the time Slim rhymed orange with door hinge and porridge and George by bending the words with his mouth, like forcing square blocks through round circles. Just make it work–the brute force of a stubborn decision to stay even when it requires amputations, even when we know that forcing the shapes against their natural frames will change them permanently, your circle a little sharper, my square softer. You still spill crumbs on the couch, burying trans fat fragments between cushiony coffins. But you also sprinkle your Desi dust over curry every week, the spices my forefathers killed themselves to sail to way back when I couldn’t know you.
You went home before me, and left me in a shape only you could recognize. I watch each dawn arrive, waiting to find your familiar silhouette bounce toward me against a sunrise sharp and round and never destined to set.
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Originally from Buffalo, NY, Cody Adams is a high school teacher in Toronto. His recent work has appeared in Solum Literary Press, Heart of Flesh, Defenestration, Ekstasis Magazine, Cacti Fur, among others. He received his B.A. from St. John Fisher University and his M.S. from the University of Rochester. He won the Clarence Amann award for fiction and his poetry has been nominated for ‘Best of the Net.’ He also serves as a Board Member for Forefront Festival.
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