My best friend, a sweet man,
drove all the way from Mankato
when my wife left me. At the door
he stood as tall as I
and we hugged. Then he said,
“Look good you. How manage?
Can’t imagine. If my wife left
for sure gunmyheadshoot will.”
I gave him a don’t-be-silly shove.
Before he left, I could feel him looking
at me. He said that seeing me alone
made him cherish his wife. He did,
but his wife left him anyway
and—well, he did.

John Lee Clark

Bates’s thrilling debut collection begins with “The Dog.” An image of a dog stuck on a lease outside of the door as the train pulls away can’t escape my mind. Bates’s writing is dark and intimate. “Conversation with Mary” is one of my personal favorites. Quite a read.

I love trees that stay
away from me. But when a leafy finger
pokes my eye, I squint.
I’m willing to dismiss it
as an irony. A limb
that knocks my head because I didn’t duck?
That turns my heart into a chainsaw.

John Lee Clark

In his latest Netflix special, Chris Rock had many things to get off his chest. He tackled selected wokeness: people still play Michael Jackson’s music but not R. Kelly’s. He stood with the pro-choice: women can kill their kids up to four years old. Obviously, that’s satirical.

He pointed out the divisiveness in America politics: Republicans lie; Democrats leave out key parts of the truth. He complimented on female beauty: his ex-wife has as much money as he does and she isn’t even funny. If Beyoncé were to work at Burger King, she would still marry JAY-Z. In contrast, if JAY were working at Burger King, it would not have been the same.

That was Rock’s transition into the moment we were all waiting for: his response to the Oscar incident last year. He slapped back not only at Will Smith, but also his wife. He reserved the last 8 minutes of the show to eviscerate them and dropped the mic. As the master of crafting and timing his materials, Rock remains one of the best comics in America. Selective Outrage is highly entertaining.

The trails are filled with fresh snow
Let’s put on your skis and get out
Don’t just sit around and glue to your screen
Put that motherfucking phone down

The food your mom prepared is ready
Don’t make her yell your name out loud
You better get your ass off the couch
Put that motherfucking phone down

The piano is getting lonely and dusty
You have not played a single sound
You need to learn your notes and counts
Put that motherfucking phone down

The laundry is clean and ready to be folded
Straighten out your grumpy face and put on a smile
You need to do some chores around the house
Put that motherfucking phone down

The opportunities won’t last forever
Take advantage of them now
Get up, get out, and do something wild
Put that motherfucking phone down

Donny Trương

I dig the bold typographic treatment on the cover of the book. The collection is about the beauty of the ordinary. Koethe writes about poetry and use the analogy of poetry in his poems. The first poem in the collection titled “What Was Poetry?” I also love the last one titled “A Way of Putting It,” in which he ends with:

Instead of reaching a conclusion, getting old is a study in tone
That leaves you where you are—still listening to yourself
A lifetime away from where you started, and not far from home.

I want to begin this story where it ends.
He drops me at the station in the rain before dawn
and says well, should I kiss you goodbye.
His eyebrows rise into the boredom of his body
the way they’d rise in class when someone
suggested Leopold Bloom was homosexual.
All over New Jersey it’s raining. He is speeding
to the train, thinking if he can get me there on time
he will not have to wait, and I do actually mistake
a blurry streetlamp for the moon and nod yes
to the kiss as if he’d offered it. At the end
I’m a helmet of ambivalence. All transparent shield,
all bulletproof bubble, the vast yes and no of pure metal.
In the middle I can’t sleep so I suck on his cock.
It stays limp in my mouth as desire like venom
seeps into the past where I sat on the vast other side
of his desk to talk about my future and his wall
made of books cut a path through the sea back to Ithaca.
Now around us the bodies of sixteen-year-old boys
are asleep on both floors of the dorm and his cock
is a mumbled apology for whatever they did or did not
want from me in the middle of the story as the story
goes: I don’t go to that school anymore, I am as old
as Isabel Archer, Dorothea Brooke, the end
of books. It’s morning, my ticket in hand.

Taije Silverman

A weekly zine published by Dipika Kohli. She writes:

The discovery started me on a lifelong track to go and seek the new and the different, no matter how far I had to venture. I wanted to pick up pieces of everywhere, things I felt truly resonated with me. So it began. What if I could personally go and meet people in new (to me) places, see what their lives were like, befriend one or two, get to build trust and try, if not perfectly, but try, to hear and see the way they were hearing and seeing?

Become a member or pick up the issue she and I were “Talking Type.”

This guy I used to know—a friend of mine-my
ex-husband I met at nineteen on a blind

date though I could see by the time
our fried clams had arrived it wasn’t meant

to be—he said time would only
tell—I said meantime I’ll only be

wishing you well but when
the check came he was a different

man—I mean he was my student—or I
his and he was obviously an expert in early

sixth-century anonymous Gaelic poetry
that revolves around a rhyme scheme—

as he explained over the beer we shared illegally
after class—in which changing the placement

of any one word means reducing
the poem to nonsense. He was good

with his head—or hands—or at nothing
but baking bread although when all was said

and done he remained a rabid Catholic
who wanted to ban the word embryo

or he was having an emotional affair
with a pregnant woman and loved jawbreakers

and whether I ran into him at Walmart
or we went intentionally to the river is beside

the point because he was a black hole
which meant not actually on earth and therefore

could only be known as the Dark Lord (his name
was Josh) or the World’s Most Apologetic Liar

or the illustrious co-author of How to Surmise
Then Hypnotize Your Real Mr. Right and we spent

a single night together without technically
inhaling but the divorce still proved undoing

for the children. He was the father
of my dictionary. He was an irreplaceable

rhyme for baby. He was my third
love, my second chance, a trampoline’s notion

of romance. Maybe now, maybe then,
maybe if, or so the end refrains. He was one

of a number of mistakes I made
for which I don’t take blame.

Taije Silverman

In 2008, I began collecting Vietnamese songs arranged in jazzy styles for my own listening pleasure. Then I lost motivation and just stopped. As the years went on, more Vietnamese songs produced with jazz flavors. I recently picked it up where I left off.

I am curating 127 songs and I would like to share my collection with anyone who would be interested in listening to Vietjazz. I want to create a simple music app or a webpage that would stream these songs randomly. It would be great for long road trips. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to create a simple music app. I could create a webpage, but the bandwidth to host these songs will put a hole in my pocket.

I am thinking of just to create a simple page with all the songs information listed, but I don’t know if that’s useful or not. Nevertheless, I spent a couple hours this morning typing up all the song titles, songwriters, and singers. I even put in the styles for each song. I did all of this on my Apple Music App. Then I uploaded to my YouTube Music account. YouTube Music allows me to share the playlist, but listeners would need a YouTube Music account to access it. If you like to check out the playlist, sign up a free YouTube Music account.

I will continue to add more songs in the future and I will continue to think about making the free streaming music app. It would definitely be a good learning experience. If you have any suggestion about making the app, hit me up. For now, you can enjoy Donny Truong Presents Vietjazz on YouTube Music.