Adam Henry Carriere

 

Adam Henry Carriere is a poet, teacher, and broadcaster. Upcoming and recent publications include Tonopah Review, Apparatus, Lamplighter Review, The Smoking Book, The Mayo Review, Counterexample Poetics, Pushing the Envelope, Zygote in My Coffee, Juked, Tattoo Highway, and The Bicycle Review. His first chapbook, Zigeunertänze, was published earlier this year by Chippens Press; his second, Sky, is forthcoming from Differentia Press.

 

Born on the South Side of Chicago, Adam is presently domiciled in Las Vegas, where he publishes Danse Macabre, Nevada’s first online literary magazine. He serves on the Editorial Board of Popular Culture Review, and has been awarded the Literary Arts Fellowship in Poetry from the Nevada Arts Council.

 

Frightening Lightning

(From Sky, Differentia Press, 2009)

 

You'dve run first, if you had Icarus' nerve,

but you're good, your radar's on a hair trigger;

 

when you waltz through a door,

all your wet eyes look for

is the other way out

 

and the best, biggest earth

to scorch under your bare running feet.

 

Thunder harrumphs at a stepparent's distance,

but lightning strikes like God's own matches,

 

one bolt at a time,

sort of like my damaged wings do,

 

as soon as Icarus' nerve breaks

and I make up some fairy tale

to justify my latest flight.

 

---

 

Yage, and Much Learned Pornography

(From Sky, Differentia Press, 2009)

 

Billy and Al got passports

to look for a pharmaceutical

Dr. Robert, their corner quack,

didn't carry.

 

From the Andes to the Orinoco

they looked and looked,

eating every unfamiliar flower,

smoking all the strange birds,

until their addiction

emptied a jungle.

 

They would have to make do

with tangerine virgins

 

and much learned pornography

carefully archived by major universities

throughout America.

 

---

 

Father Figure

(From Zigeunertänze, Chippens Press, 2009)

 

Inside the hopelessly outdated mid-80's

technopop, a graveyard's giggling

in between inhalations of cocaine,

Kristal, and any degenerate nobody

willing to trade the skin of their body

for a well-lined whole in their soul.

 

Every snatched corpse snickers

at our tar-framed memorial;

 

every palm tree shakes its coconuts

waiting for used Chevys to return;

the rest of the campus barrio just grins,

knowing a trick when they see one.

 

You'd think a stolen childhood

and a lost adolescence would buy

a better visitor's pass than the

nanosecond 

furlough drawn.

 

You'd think every frostbitten stiff

deserved more than an hour

(or two) 

in the sun.

 

The problem is, justice depends on

basic belief in beings

any sane madman wouldn't give

a second thought to,

 

the very moment they stared at the

'Welcome to Arizona' highway sign

and found out little Virginia

is the one who should have been

locked up, once our upon the other.

 

---

 

Negre

(From Zigeunertänze, Chippens Press, 2009)

 

The hours of darkness,

the voodoo heart,

ocean without sky.

 

The white moon in black eyes

makes tears stir

like constellations.

The skin warms brown

and glides copper,

ebony as all sundown,

 

but all are negre.

 

People apart,

lady women,

boat dwellers,

boys who do with boys,

all are negre.

 

Negre freedom is the mirror,

the chicory reflection

seen by mulatto eyes,

a second-class image

murmuring, 

 

with ivory smiles

'Negre...I am negre'.

 

---

 

The Sadness of Toupees

 

Middle-age hangs, like old power lines

up on trees put to good economic use,

shorn and leafless, but a visual bother

to the aesthetics of the summer night.

 

The half-size cypresses only accentuate

the parking garage behind them, a dye job

sprucing up their remorselessly mortal carpet 

laid on wrinkly floor-boards.

 

They dug a swimming pool out of the asphalt

and ran water and duct work through the walls,

unconcerned about the implications

of the spiritual face-lift

splattered on the back-end of a truck.

 

Soon, there’ll be Italian party lights,

geysers of daddy’s milk, jiggles of flesh 

better herded into silks,

nameplates, and shrewd use of corners.

 

With the right kind of determination,

it’s remarkably easy to re-write the calendar,

the same way expensive go-karts

(or a good hat, even) fog 

up mirrors arrayed across these souls.

We pretend cool doesn’t have a shelf life.

 

There’s no refund on prior dance steps,

or warranties on the pubescent ache

writ large upon whole operas to follow.

 

In between allusive phrases there are tiny letters,

like a rainbow of justly invisible aches

arching across untold mornings yet to unfold,

the sadness of toupees pops from the cake

whose flavor had fallen from favor, to boot.