Featured Works by R. Pyle

Apr 18, 2021

The Honest Ulsterman, Die Leere Mitte, The Penn Review, Cobalt Review, and Chattahoochee Review carry poetry Rebecca Pyle has recently written. Rebecca lives in the mountainous American West and she is published also by art/literary journals as an essayist, a fiction writer, and a visual artist. See rebeccapyleartist.com.

Artwork by Adriano Marinazzo from the “In The Beginning” series.

Needless

To avoid your name, since you,
I avoided the beauty of your name, even similar sounds, as if
only stepping on evasive stepping
stones, to avoid feeling forced to go forward and run into you
Face-on

Which is what will happen anyway as I am
always always brought to you at the End
You of steady shoulders who
turned out to be imitation of rancher and horseman, imitation of do-gooder

At base you were only A greediness
And I would know, as I study the trees and I know what greed is.
Continual up-search and suck-up of the marrow of gravel, and dead root,
and the pablum of dirt–

Yes, you always there, beside the buffalo,
his side sometimes heaving beneath matted hair, cocoa
dark, his dramatic devil’s
out-tilt horns, eyes almost calm, your eyes too, your handsomeness as great as a rarely-speaking
Movie star. But I am warned. You are each dangerous if crossed, or left alone, or turned away from. Who
am I? I am your plaid flayed–buffalo plaid–blood-red
woven into volcano’s black, taking turns like the checker board–I am the trampled
garment
and the garment on the rack and the factory where garment
was worried about, but not needlessly–

Time, Answered

Do you doubt there are questions and answers
which will be answered? Do you think the questions
and answers are ill, somehow, irresponsible,
wrong?
Do you find questions and answers are a waste
of All Time? Is the pen too heavy and the thought
also? Or is it mostly life will go on forever?
Are there too many answers to the questions and
answers? Are they too variable? Again
may I ask you
are they a waste of Time?
Or, may I ask you, are all of these questions void:
And the true question, best answer, is they are
Not questions which exist
at all, thus, no answers
could be made.

Je Suis Generis, the Parrot

But the bird would never think the criminal
was a criminal: no, his owner he judges
only by his good tendencies to
feed him, whatever a parrot eats, he who can
become loud and strident,
can remind an evil man of his
evil, his very angry self, his feelings of smallness
and loneliness
which parrot does ameliorate. Parrot
cannot protest.

Je Suis Generis, he, the creepy, named the parrot.
That name made him feel Ivy-league, bequeather and grantor,
like an owner of trips to Russia, to see mighty onion domes,
Je Suis Generis makes him daily feel
the good replenisher-feelings of benefactor.
Though, premium parrot food
he will not buy. Why spoil
the prisoner? The parrot, all told, one desperate prisoner.

As he the man is, this country’s, imprisoned voluminously
by his parents’ mistakes. What was it his mama said?
When she learned what he did beneath the boardwalk?
We never ever should have come to this
country. But be fractious, fractious, before
they are fractious again. To you.

From the Editor:

We hope that readers receive In Parentheses as a medium through which the evolution of human thought can be appreciated, nurtured and precipitated. It will present a dynamo of artistic expression, journalism, informal analysis of our daily world, entertainment of ideas considered lofty and criticism of today’s popular culture. The featured content does not follow any specific ideology except for that of intellectual expansion of the masses.

Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?

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