Blue Collar Review

Summer 2009

The Blue Collar Review is a quarterly journal of poetry and prose published by Partisan Press. Our mission is to expand and promote a progressive working class vision of culture that inspires us and that moves us forward as a class. The work presented is only a sampling from the magazine. Subscriptions are $15.00 yearly, or $5.00 for a single issue.
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Poetry Samples from the Latest Issue

Hot Line
crusted with white
salt where sweat soaked
through leather.    The fire is two

thousand degrees, I'm fifteen
feet off it and ninety-eight

under Nomex.    Fourteen
days sixteen hours a day,

five thousand calories
and eight liters of lukewarm

drinking water; sometimes
I throw in pine. I've heard

of cheap bootlaces melting,
a chopper tipping in Ahorn's

drafts.   I sleep coyote,
don't think of home. At five a.m.

I'll cut trees on the line;
they throw sparks

when they fall burning
in the fire's own wind.

     Maia Rauschenberg

Resolved
And now I shall live forever
with the dusk closing in
as I try counting my change
before boarding a bus.
A day spent in the palm
of my right hand
shall leave me with memories
and yet there shall be other expenses
on my mind,
other people I have never met
who will keep walking past me
as if nothing I ever did
attracted their attention

      Jack Lindeman

Foreclosure
Along this great spine of our neighborhood,
we are redlined until
we cannot breathe without assistance.
As we fight, for our dignity
these jagged broken people,
their mortgages are sold to the highest bidder.
No breath is easy on this street --
This great drowning pool
pulls each one of us
down to darkened waters.

We welcome the new owners
two payments away from bankruptcy.
Ownership of the next abandoned house,
a broken family, so afraid, they left parts of their lives behind;
the second TV set, laundry baskets of tapes, CDs and videos,
books; torn pages packed together like cereal boxes, a wedding
picture in a bent frame, the glass broken out.

When did this become our common fate?
How can we let this, part of us, this mass
of what -- of trumped up failure?
These ribs of ours
crushed like the nests of birds.

   Bill Turley

Working Men
By the time spring rolls around
and the bank account has bottomed
out, and the desperation, like
mold has saturated the wallboard of
my daughter's smile, my spouse's
lips, and the men walking across the street
or hid at home in front of the tube
become vacant eyed: when all plans
have been swallowed like the banks
of the river after the flashing
rains and prayers quiet and patient
have worn the ears off the moon
and we are left floating in a sea
that is endless and treading water
our strength over the days diminishes
and there is nipping at our feet
as we try to send our children
swimming off smiling saying it's
o.k., but is it? That is the question
posed by the remnants of dignity
the first work of the year allows
working men too numbed to death to comprehend.

      Michael S. Morris

9 a.m. Reaming
You would've loved to tell them,
"Take this job and shove it,"
and maybe you should've.

But then you remembered
Kline.
He told them, just that!
More balls than brains.

They crucified him
like Christ,
but
he never did come back
after three days . . .

     Michael Lefanto

Religious Generalizations
"Every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer
married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators . . . the
cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer."
              -- Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell

Old Rabbis in New Jersey
are selling kidneys

Young Israeli soldiers are harvesting
the organs of young Palestinians

Catholic priests
are pederasts

Black ministers
have harems and scams

The Imams are strapping bombs to children
and making the women
wear clothes that aren't sexy

Mormons live in compounds
where the girls are toys
of old men and
the children have no toys and
the hairstyles and fashions aren't sexy

But it's the heatherns and the homosexuals and
the feminists and the fornicators and the atheists you have
to watch out for --
No morals to nail them to sins
Not of love, or the fist of god.

     Mary Franke

He Believes

He believes
   that the lone cowboy rides victorious
   and don't never need no help from nobody.

He believes
   any lie if it's big enough, if it's Texas sized,
   and comes with a beer and a racist joke.

He believes
   with all the violent love of his heart,
   and all the bloody rightness of his flag,
   and all the Free Market ka-ching! of his God,
   that we live in the bestest, most goodest
   country forever and ever amen.

He believes
   that the sky is green, that the sun riseth
   like a golden fist out of the Bible and setteth
   like a bomb on those who ain't believers.

He believes
      on his knees.

He starts to cough -- hack, hack, rattle and bark!
Out comes Haymarket, Ludlow, the Rosenbergs,
Sacco and Vanzetti. Out come legions of cops
beating the Weeping Christ of the People down
across hundreds of cities and years. Out
comes everything he didn't know he'd forgotten.

   He believes: He believes: He believes --

he pukes like Linda Blair in The Exorcist!
The lies just won't stay down.

A doctor asks him to open his mouth wide --
inside is a smiling anchorman with perfect hair
reading a script prepared by the government.

That's going to require surgery.

   Robert Edwards

Art and the Question of Revolution
"Do you think poetry will induce the revolution or is poetry the revolution?
   -- An audience member to Amiri Baraka

Poetry is not the revolution
The revolution is the revolution
Cuba is the revolution
Sandino is the revolution
Ramona is the revolution
Mothers circling the plaza
Children throwing stones
youth koitoi-ing through Soweto
They are the revolution
The revolution is chanting
between barricades
outside the WTO
The revolution is on strike
at the maquilas
on strike
in South Korea
is liberating Mindinao
The revolution is organizing
workers organizing
women organizing
queers organizing
poor folk
black folk
brown folk
yellow folk
red folk
white folk
The revolution is poetry
in the streets

   Felicia R. Martinez

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