by Oleg Oprisco
The stars remember you
Love Now
by Oleg Oprisco
I leave behind the ghosts of our old selves to fall in love with you
now, immediately,
all over
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Ten Years After My Mom Dies I Dance
This poem by Patrick Rosal absolutely knocked my socks off.
The second time I learned
I could take the pain
my six-year-old niece
—with five cavities
humming in her teeth—
led me by the finger
to the foyer and told her dad
to turn up the Pretenders
—Tattooed Love Boys—
so she could shimmy with me
to the same jam
eleven times in a row
in her princess pajamas.
When she’s old enough,
I’ll tell her how
I bargained once with God
because all I knew of grief
was to lean deep
into the gas pedal
to speed down a side road
not a quarter-mile long
after scouring my gut
and fogging my retinas
with half a bottle of cheap scotch.
To those dumb enough
to take the odds against
time, the infinite always says
You lose.
Read more at Four Way Review
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Book Love: Library of Strahov
Library of Strahov, Prague, by Moyan Brenn
“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! — When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
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Poetry: Apocalypse
At the end of the world
there are no roads,
only plateaus of blue ice
and glimmers of fireworks;
if you are lucky you will
gain a free ticket to the show
and maybe an immune
companion to chat with
during intermission.
-Karen Lewis, One Sentence Poems
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Trains
“I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
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Movie Review: Cypher starring Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu
Sometimes, in my quest for action films/thrillers I have not yet seen, I dive deep into the IMDB archives. Which is how I came up with Cypher, a 2002 spy film starring Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu. Of course with that cast I had to watch it, and it obtained a not-negligible 6.9 rating on IMDB, so I thought, how bad could it be?
Alas…it was awful. I’ll spare you the details, except to say that the entire film was shot in muted sepia tones, as if attempting to give some noir-ish credence to a very silly plot that draws heavily on post-Cold-War paranoia in a story about brainwashing, double agents, and corporate espionage. Morgan Sullivan leads a very dull suburban life until he’s recruited to act as a corporate spy…and then recruited by that company’s competition. Morgan quickly adapts to his new identity, taking up smoking and switching his alcohol to “Scotch…single malt…on the rocks” like any good Bond-pretender. However, not all is as it seems…
And it wasn’t even so bad it’s good, it was just ludicrous and boring, an odd catch-all of Bond films, noir spy conventions, and Walter-Mitty surrealism. However. The cast is stunningly good-looking (I would positively kill to see them paired in some other film), so have some screenshots to please your eyes.
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Freedom
by Oleg Oprisco
freedom
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Romance Recommendation: Love Takes Wing
Belinda Simpson is still grieving the death of her husband when she arrives in a small Missouri town to take over as town doctor. An infection is rapidly spreading through town and the townfolk blame the children at the orphanage; Belinda must do all that she can to find a cure and protect the children, aided by her friend and fellow doctor Annie and the young blacksmith Lee Owens.
The Love Comes TV movies (I believe there’s six now) are based on a series of romance novels by Janette Oke, and they’re all sweet, cliched, delightful little romances with absolutely zero surprises and no particular inspiration, but plenty of frontier and midwest romance between strong-willed women and reserved, humorous men. They’re essentially one step up from Hallmark movies. The first two in the series have been the best so far – Love Comes Softly and Love’s Enduring Promise – with the others variations on the same theme and growing more and more uninspired – so I was surprised to find that this, the latest, is very strongly-written and just as good as Love Comes Softly. It’s also a cut above acting-wise – part of why Love Comes Softly worked was Katherine Heigl’s performance, and Sarah Jones in this delivers the role of extraordinarily stubborn, kind, tempestuous Belinda as if it was made for. Haylie Duff co-stars in a long line of random semi-famous stars this series has managed to pull in. For unabashed romance lovers. 
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The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
-Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems
Coffee and Irony 