Planning May, poem by Paul Nebenzahl (May Poetry Series)

PLANNING MAY
by Paul Nebenzahl

(Forth from pen the plan unfolds
I am mapping the light fantastic, the
End of April teasing me with cool
Nights and teary-eyed dream-pen days
Calming out air-traveling thoughts + a dew-stalking lens)

May’s start

Running to Vienna down
Streets transferred buck to sole
And into the yellow fields, a black cloth over hidden murder camps
Listening to the Gypsy wind, standing with
Fired clay in pockets, with hands outstretched

by May mid month

I’m moving east packing enchanted boxes my fingers tapping
Head laying astride up old Hudson River, water flowing south
Jimmied out Nyack across the water steady rocking
Our light travels water west to Edward Hopper’s house
Gifting ‘round our world Rex-ly miracle color-y eyes

I Hope May

To plant two gardens, to elongate splashed flair hues @ waterside Sleepy Hollow
+ Plant in Asheville, North Carolina what needs my hands, there
Where the road to nowhere
Has never been more determined
To end up somewhere

As May ends

All my dreams will come true and still where is the vanished, vanquished plane?
June will unfold we’ll be looking ‘neath ocean for that plane on the floor, then
I will be the water thundering the rocking boats under your willows
Whistling up the ever windy ‘long craggy Palisades aft fore
That comes my pretty penny way

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul Nebenzahl is a writer, musician, and painter who lives in Evanston, Illinois, and Sleepy Hollow, New York. As a performing multi-instrumentalist, and composer, Paul has created works for film and television, and has performed extensively in theater, stage, and club settings. In 2012, Paul’s poem “Gusen Station” was published in English, Italian and German by the International Committee for Mauthausen and Gusen. His poem “Charles Bukowski” appears in the Silver Birch Press Bukowski Anthology (2013) and “Here’s to the Singer of Songs” is featured in the Silver Birch Press Summer Anthology (2013). He is the author of Black Shroud with Rainbow Fringes: Poems 2010-2013 (Silver Birch Press, 2014), available at Amazon.com.

New Release: Black Shroud with Rainbow Fringes, poems by Paul Nebenzahl

Silver Birch Press is pleased to announce the May 22, 2014 release of Black Shroud with Rainbow Fringes: Poems 2010-2013 by Paul Nebenzahl.

“In this impressive gathering of fifty poems, Nebenzahl discovers long-lost relatives that were displaced from World War II and the Holocaust. In this unearthing, Nebenzahl finds himself questioning his past and present to imagine a new future in elegiac dimensions. These expressions intertwine and mediate language as a process for divinity, humor, and truth. The poetry excavates with humanity the trauma of the unexplained and the mystery of creative response as an authentic gesture from the human hand and heart that is writing.” KAREN FINLEY

“Look for the rainbow fringes. At such bright speculative mind-trip edges in these poems, one finds polka dots and moonbeams, the summer of hate, dad’s whiskey spittle on the lapel of a National Guardsman, poems written on A&P bags, Mingus, ice and madness, Freaky Jerry, red diaperism, fly-or-die panic, and people miraculously wearing love like heaven. The whole book is a dreamarium. In a world of jingles written like lead bullets, Paul Nebenzahl’s poems stand generously to oppose them.” AL FILREIS, Kelly Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, author of Wallace Stevens & the Actual World.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Paul Nebenzahl is a writer, musician, and painter who lives in Evanston, Illinois, and Sleepy Hollow, New York. As a performing multi-instrumentalist, and composer, Paul has created works for film and television, and has performed extensively in theater, stage, and club settings. In 2012, Paul’s poem “Gusen Station” was published in English, Italian and German by the International Committee for Mauthausen and Gusen. His poem “Charles Bukowski” appears in the Silver Birch Press Bukowski Anthology (2013) and “Here’s to the Singer of Songs” is featured in the Silver Birch Press Summer Anthology (2013).

Find Black Shroud with Rainbow Fringes: Poems 2010-2013 by Paul Nebenzahl at Amazon.com.

Cover art by Paul Nebenzahl