Get to Know Me
Joshua Michael Stewart is a poet and musician who has had poems published in the Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Plainsongs, Brilliant Corners, and many others. His books are, Break Every String, (Hedgerow Books, 2016) and, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, (Human Error Publishing, 2020). His albums, Three Meditations, and Ghost in the Room, can be found on Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon, and many other platforms. Visit his web site at www.joshuamichaelstewart.com, or better yet, interact with him at www.facebook.com/joshua.m.stewart.526/.
For this column Joshua will explore poetry, music, and Buddhism, and how they all intersect with each other. He will delve into assorted poetic forms and he will specifically highlight contemporary poets from the New England area, and the poets associated with classical Japanese and Chinese poetry.
Hello there!
I thought by way of introduction, I’d share a handful of my own poems that span a wide range of themes and forms. Naturally, as most poets, I let the work speak for itself.
Quills
Today a man pressed a pillow
over his 7-month-old son’s face,
then strangled the baby’s mother
(who was also his 16-year-old daughter),
called his mother, confessed,
then drove out into the woods and shot
himself in the cab of his pickup.
A porcupine waddles through a field
not far from my house. I’ve never fired
a round at anything not glass or tin,
but the summer after my mother loaded
me on a plane to go live with my father
was spent nailing earthworms to 2x4s
leaned along the backyard fence.
Hammer thwacks echoed off the shed
as morning haze ghosted
through surrounding pines. The worms
writhed as I pierced their skin,
blood and shit smeared the boards,
the crucified bodies dried and curled
under the sun my parents both shared.
The pain we receive, the little it takes
to give it tenfold. I won’t measure evil
out of units of illness and despair,
but while the porcupine munches
on clover, I’ll rest on a stone wall,
allow the sun to burn my neck red,
my hands finally at peace in my lap.
Originally published in The Massachusetts Review
November Praise
The smell of ferns and understory
after rain. The tick, tick, of stove,
flame under kettle. Bing Crosby,
and not just the Christmas records.
Cooking meat slowly off the bone,
and every kind of soup and stew.
To come this close to nostalgia,
but go no further, leaving behind
the boy who wore loneliness
like boots too big for his feet.
That time of evening,
when everything turns blue
in moonlight, when darkness
has yet to consume all for itself.
Originally published in Nine Mile Magazine
Okay, okay, okay. I know I said I’d let the poems speak for themselves, but for this next poem I need to state the following: The first section of my most recent book, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, consists of a series of poems that are sculpted poems, essentially erasure poems without the erased lines, taken from each chapter of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. I manipulate the lines, punctuation, and in some cases, the tense of a word, changing “broke” to “break,” for an example, but otherwise the words within each poem are as they fall within Kerouac’s novel. Here is one of those poems:
The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums #34
Raspberry Jell-O in the setting sun
poured through unimaginable craigs.
Rose-tint hope—brilliant and bleak.
Ice fields and snow raging mad.
I read snowy air and woodsmoke.
The wind dark, clouds forge.
The sing in my stovepipe absorbs
vaster, darker storm closing in
like a surl of silence. No starvation
turmoiling. My shadow the rainbow
I haloed. Your life a raindrop.
I stood in rose dusk, meditated
in half-moon thunder.
My mother’s love drenching rains
washed and washed.
I called Han Shan in the mountains.
I called Han Shan in morning fog.
I closed my eyes, yelled dark wild
down in my garbage pit.
My hair long in the mirror.
My skin soaking pristine light.
My fire roaring. I hear the radio
singing, She was the wind
which passes through everything.
Birds rejoicing sweet blueberries
for the last time. Sitting, I twisted
real life and cried cascades
answering the meditation bell.
I know desolation.
I owe gritty love back to this world.
These last two poems that I leave you with are from my first collection of poems, Break Every String. I hope you’ve enjoyed these poems and look forward to reading future essays, reviews, and interviews with other contemporary poets.
Snow Angels
Each night they stare into the sky
and wonder why even with wings
they can never get off the ground.
Good reason for their creator
to take three steps, cock his head
and disown his gift to the world.
Abandonment: a likely origin of anyone’s
lack of faith. And faith: precisely what’s needed
to soar in the purple abyss of winter.
We step out into our lives like sun slicing
between buildings and perform this one angelic
act that melts from our consciousness.
We return to our houses to accomplish
something important, leaving behind
the ones who don’t know any better,
who see the wings as open arms,
snow as flesh, and are willing to lie back down.
Born in the USA
We were pumping our fists with Springsteen,
chanting the chorus as Reagan galloped
the campaign trail, still pretending
to be a cowboy, and the old man who lived
in the blue house with the white fence
lined with rosebushes was handing out mints
from a bowl made out of a buffalo skull.
Uncle Bob chopped off his thumbs
in a metal press on his first day on the job.
My father returned to Khe Sahn sleepwalking
past our bedrooms, shouting out the names
of smoke and moon. He had a woman he loved
in Saigon, sang The Boss. Across the bay—
Ferris wheel lights and roller coaster screams.
Child Services found my grandmother unfit
to adopt. An ambulance in front of the blue house
with the white fence lined with rosebushes.
A white sheet. The bones and feathers
of a dead seagull—a ship wreck
on a rocky shore lapped by green waves.
On their lunch break, my father, my uncles,
and both my grandfathers, their names
embroidered on their grease-stained shirts,
stepped out of the factory and coughed up
their paychecks to their wives idling in Regals,
Novas, and Gremlins. Out by the gas fires
of the refinery. My father’s handlebar mustache
terrified me. My brother built me castles
out of blankets and chairs, larger than the house
that confined them. Taught me how to leap
off the couch like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka,
how to moonwalk and breakdance. He’d go on
to teach me that disappointment’s a carcinogen.
My father took cover behind the Lay-Z-boy
in his underwear. My grandmother offered
a pregnant runaway a place to stay in exchange
for her baby. When the plant relocated to Mexico,
my father brought home a pink slip heavier
than a Huey Hog. The rosebushes became thorny
switches. Over ham steaks and mashed potatoes,
our parents poured out their divorce.
We had to decide who we wanted to live
with before leaving the table. I’d go
wherever my brother went: that meant Mom.
My father took a job out of state.
My mother took a boyfriend, who
dragged his unemployment into a bar
called The Pit, then staggered
into our house knocking over houseplants,
and I was the one ordered to clean
the carpets with the wet/dry vac. We’d sneak
out of the house at 3AM to swim
in the neighbor’s pool, or ping rocks
off hurtling freight trains. The city condemned
the blue house with the paint-chipped fence.
My mother’s eye, blackened. We slept in parks,
better than home. She stood at the sink,
sobbed, scrubbed blood-splotches
out of her white jacket with a soapy sponge.
Wouldn’t press charges. My brother bought
a dime bag and a revolver from a guy named Kool-Aid.
My mother was crowned a welfare queen, and drove
a Cadillac assembled out of political mythology.
I smoked my first joint on the roof of a movie theater
with my brother and the stars. An after-school ritual:
stepping over the passed-out boyfriend to grab
a Coke out of the fridge. We spray-painted
gang insignias across the boarded-up windows
of the blue house with splintered teeth. The boyfriend
could whip up one hell of an omelet. We didn’t hate
him on Sunday mornings. My mother’s stiches.
We swiped a bottle of Mad Dog, drank it while eating
peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. My mother stashed
bottles of gin in the leather boots my father bought
for their last Christmas together. Twice they called
me into the principal’s office because a knife fell out
of my pocket at recess. We turned abandoned factories
into playgrounds, busted out the windows with tornadic rage.
Somebody was asking for it, and somebody was going to get it.
I overheard a teacher tell my mother, “He’s going to grow up
to kill somebody.” Thanks to the Black Panthers,
this white boy had free breakfast at school.
My brother waited until the boyfriend was drunk
on the toilet to burst in swinging a baseball bat.
Later that night while taking a bath, I fished
out a tooth biting me in the ass. Backhoes
and bulldozers devoured the blue house
with the collapsing roof. We rewound
and played back the catastrophic loss
that plumed over Cape Canaveral
on our VCRs. The boyfriend slammed
a stolen van into a tree. She’d pour me
a bowl of Cheerios, pour herself a Scotch.
The boyfriend’s dentist kept good records.
“I’m sending you to your father.”
Son don’t you understand now? Front-page news:
firefighters dousing the mangled inferno.
Got in a little hometown jam.
I stood before a judge, pled guilty to
shoplifting Christmas lights, the kind that twinkle.
Also from M the Media Project
Trenda Loftin
Chap Hop! &has Electro-swing
From Newport Jazz Festival
News Features
From Newport Jazz Festival
On Being a White Jerk
Playing, Praying & Tailgating
Wanting More than Rural Charm
Video Channels
Mental Suppository Podcast
On the Rocks Politica
SMG’s ‘Are We Here Yet’?
Hello there!
I thought by way of introduction, I’d share a handful of my own poems that span a wide range of themes and forms. Naturally, as most poets, I let the work speak for itself.
Quills
Today a man pressed a pillow
over his 7-month-old son’s face,
then strangled the baby’s mother
(who was also his 16-year-old daughter),
called his mother, confessed,
then drove out into the woods and shot
himself in the cab of his pickup.
A porcupine waddles through a field
not far from my house. I’ve never fired
a round at anything not glass or tin,
but the summer after my mother loaded
me on a plane to go live with my father
was spent nailing earthworms to 2x4s
leaned along the backyard fence.
Hammer thwacks echoed off the shed
as morning haze ghosted
through surrounding pines. The worms
writhed as I pierced their skin,
blood and shit smeared the boards,
the crucified bodies dried and curled
under the sun my parents both shared.
The pain we receive, the little it takes
to give it tenfold. I won’t measure evil
out of units of illness and despair,
but while the porcupine munches
on clover, I’ll rest on a stone wall,
allow the sun to burn my neck red,
my hands finally at peace in my lap.
Originally published in The Massachusetts Review
November Praise
The smell of ferns and understory
after rain. The tick, tick, of stove,
flame under kettle. Bing Crosby,
and not just the Christmas records.
Cooking meat slowly off the bone,
and every kind of soup and stew.
To come this close to nostalgia,
but go no further, leaving behind
the boy who wore loneliness
like boots too big for his feet.
That time of evening,
when everything turns blue
in moonlight, when darkness
has yet to consume all for itself.
Originally published in Nine Mile Magazine
Okay, okay, okay. I know I said I’d let the poems speak for themselves, but for this next poem I need to state the following: The first section of my most recent book, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, consists of a series of poems that are sculpted poems, essentially erasure poems without the erased lines, taken from each chapter of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums. I manipulate the lines, punctuation, and in some cases, the tense of a word, changing “broke” to “break,” for an example, but otherwise the words within each poem are as they fall within Kerouac’s novel. Here is one of those poems:
The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums #34
Raspberry Jell-O in the setting sun
poured through unimaginable craigs.
Rose-tint hope—brilliant and bleak.
Ice fields and snow raging mad.
I read snowy air and woodsmoke.
The wind dark, clouds forge.
The sing in my stovepipe absorbs
vaster, darker storm closing in
like a surl of silence. No starvation
turmoiling. My shadow the rainbow
I haloed. Your life a raindrop.
I stood in rose dusk, meditated
in half-moon thunder.
My mother’s love drenching rains
washed and washed.
I called Han Shan in the mountains.
I called Han Shan in morning fog.
I closed my eyes, yelled dark wild
down in my garbage pit.
My hair long in the mirror.
My skin soaking pristine light.
My fire roaring. I hear the radio
singing, She was the wind
which passes through everything.
Birds rejoicing sweet blueberries
for the last time. Sitting, I twisted
real life and cried cascades
answering the meditation bell.
I know desolation.
I owe gritty love back to this world.
These last two poems that I leave you with are from my first collection of poems, Break Every String. I hope you’ve enjoyed these poems and look forward to reading future essays, reviews, and interviews with other contemporary poets.
Snow Angels
Each night they stare into the sky
and wonder why even with wings
they can never get off the ground.
Good reason for their creator
to take three steps, cock his head
and disown his gift to the world.
Abandonment: a likely origin of anyone’s
lack of faith. And faith: precisely what’s needed
to soar in the purple abyss of winter.
We step out into our lives like sun slicing
between buildings and perform this one angelic
act that melts from our consciousness.
We return to our houses to accomplish
something important, leaving behind
the ones who don’t know any better,
who see the wings as open arms,
snow as flesh, and are willing to lie back down.
Born in the USA
We were pumping our fists with Springsteen,
chanting the chorus as Reagan galloped
the campaign trail, still pretending
to be a cowboy, and the old man who lived
in the blue house with the white fence
lined with rosebushes was handing out mints
from a bowl made out of a buffalo skull.
Uncle Bob chopped off his thumbs
in a metal press on his first day on the job.
My father returned to Khe Sahn sleepwalking
past our bedrooms, shouting out the names
of smoke and moon. He had a woman he loved
in Saigon, sang The Boss. Across the bay—
Ferris wheel lights and roller coaster screams.
Child Services found my grandmother unfit
to adopt. An ambulance in front of the blue house
with the white fence lined with rosebushes.
A white sheet. The bones and feathers
of a dead seagull—a ship wreck
on a rocky shore lapped by green waves.
On their lunch break, my father, my uncles,
and both my grandfathers, their names
embroidered on their grease-stained shirts,
stepped out of the factory and coughed up
their paychecks to their wives idling in Regals,
Novas, and Gremlins. Out by the gas fires
of the refinery. My father’s handlebar mustache
terrified me. My brother built me castles
out of blankets and chairs, larger than the house
that confined them. Taught me how to leap
off the couch like Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka,
how to moonwalk and breakdance. He’d go on
to teach me that disappointment’s a carcinogen.
My father took cover behind the Lay-Z-boy
in his underwear. My grandmother offered
a pregnant runaway a place to stay in exchange
for her baby. When the plant relocated to Mexico,
my father brought home a pink slip heavier
than a Huey Hog. The rosebushes became thorny
switches. Over ham steaks and mashed potatoes,
our parents poured out their divorce.
We had to decide who we wanted to live
with before leaving the table. I’d go
wherever my brother went: that meant Mom.
My father took a job out of state.
My mother took a boyfriend, who
dragged his unemployment into a bar
called The Pit, then staggered
into our house knocking over houseplants,
and I was the one ordered to clean
the carpets with the wet/dry vac. We’d sneak
out of the house at 3AM to swim
in the neighbor’s pool, or ping rocks
off hurtling freight trains. The city condemned
the blue house with the paint-chipped fence.
My mother’s eye, blackened. We slept in parks,
better than home. She stood at the sink,
sobbed, scrubbed blood-splotches
out of her white jacket with a soapy sponge.
Wouldn’t press charges. My brother bought
a dime bag and a revolver from a guy named Kool-Aid.
My mother was crowned a welfare queen, and drove
a Cadillac assembled out of political mythology.
I smoked my first joint on the roof of a movie theater
with my brother and the stars. An after-school ritual:
stepping over the passed-out boyfriend to grab
a Coke out of the fridge. We spray-painted
gang insignias across the boarded-up windows
of the blue house with splintered teeth. The boyfriend
could whip up one hell of an omelet. We didn’t hate
him on Sunday mornings. My mother’s stiches.
We swiped a bottle of Mad Dog, drank it while eating
peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. My mother stashed
bottles of gin in the leather boots my father bought
for their last Christmas together. Twice they called
me into the principal’s office because a knife fell out
of my pocket at recess. We turned abandoned factories
into playgrounds, busted out the windows with tornadic rage.
Somebody was asking for it, and somebody was going to get it.
I overheard a teacher tell my mother, “He’s going to grow up
to kill somebody.” Thanks to the Black Panthers,
this white boy had free breakfast at school.
My brother waited until the boyfriend was drunk
on the toilet to burst in swinging a baseball bat.
Later that night while taking a bath, I fished
out a tooth biting me in the ass. Backhoes
and bulldozers devoured the blue house
with the collapsing roof. We rewound
and played back the catastrophic loss
that plumed over Cape Canaveral
on our VCRs. The boyfriend slammed
a stolen van into a tree. She’d pour me
a bowl of Cheerios, pour herself a Scotch.
The boyfriend’s dentist kept good records.
“I’m sending you to your father.”
Son don’t you understand now? Front-page news:
firefighters dousing the mangled inferno.
Got in a little hometown jam.
I stood before a judge, pled guilty to
shoplifting Christmas lights, the kind that twinkle.
Also from M the Media Project
Trenda Loftin
Chap Hop! &has Electro-swing
From Newport Jazz Festival
News Features
From Newport Jazz Festival
On Being a White Jerk
Playing, Praying & Tailgating
Wanting More than Rural Charm
Video Channels
Mental Suppository Podcast
On the Rocks Politica
SMG’s ‘Are We Here Yet’?
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