The Montucky Review will almost never publish four pieces at once by one writer, however, in this case, we make an exception. FOUR PIECES BY HUGH FOX

                           

                          CLOUDS

                  Uterine blanking out the red sun, getting his
          B.A. in (“White Peacock”*) piano, coming back
          fifty years later to both eyes shot out, Russian-
          German-Gringo American picnics, how many
          divorces do you need before Little Orphan Annie
          turns into Coco Chanel, if only we’d filmed it
          full time as Kiddo Mozart wrote his first symphonies
          and we used to go to a British-only filmhouse in
          downtown Chicago to see what they’d done with
          Pride and Prejudice and Much Ado About Everything,
          capture, capture, capture all the final exam final
          words (Dr. Svaglic), Heidi when she was five,
          twenty, fifty, ninety, nights turning into the only
          (dream) reality that tornado floats across our
          debris-minds until we wake up to another day of
                  opening the blinds.

 
*Part I of Chales Griffes’ Roman Sketches, poem written during a B.A.
recital of Neill Campbell, May, 2011.




                           JUST DRIVING

      Just driving downtown to pick up Bernadette for
      lunch, past Rambler Mall and Jimmy’s YOU WANIT
      restaurant with its great piled high pancake breakfasts,
      almost wrote breasts because of most of the women
      there, Staples, Best Buy, Red Lobster, then into the
      older neighborhoods, right now lots of old guys out
      triming bushes, cutting grass, always an old barely-
      able-to-walk former beauty walking her dog, kids
      on the lawn beating a basketball around in the back
      of the driveway where there’s this primitivish old
      basketball court, peonies and wisteria, robin red breasts,
      blackbirds, squirrels, Japanese maples all over the
      place, then closer to downtown Larry’s Bar and
      Grill, a gun-shop, the bridge over the river, I
      call her “I’ll be there in about three minutes,”
      and she’s waiting for me by the huge garbage
      cans, 64, but with her sun-glasses on looking more
      like 24, down to Olympic Broil, great benches  out
      by the river, steak and cheese, breeze and sorry
      to see 34 years of our togetherness blowing (cancer)
              away.



                          HERE COMES

      Here comes Ms. Super-Efficiency, eyes just looking
      at the steps she’s about to take, a notebook in one hand,
      stuck under her arm, all in blue, no-heel walkathon shoes,

      two blocks down Ms. Cleopatra-Tokyo Rose-Untamed Shrew,
      oh, dem fattened-up-a-little hockey paddle legs and she notices
      me as I drive by, smiles are free, right?, blonde hair pulled back
      into tin can wrap-aroundness,

      then Great-Great-Grandma just-crawling-out-of-the grave to
      walk her just-crawling-out-of-the-grave dog, glasses, but
      she still can barely see, and the dog ain’t much help, but
      you can just hear the old guitars and horses sniffing someone’s
      ass as the tomato crop comes in,

      then downtown Dr.-Ms. On top of it all, Majestic in her
      crown royal hat and shoes and the way she walks next to
      the cameras that aren’t there,

      there’s Ms. Dumbo-Rumble squatting along, “I’m about
      to lose five hundred and sixty pounds, if I just didn’t
      love those cherry-flavored yogurt pretzels down at the
      city market.......”

      Get out your camera and mikes, who needs Hollywood in
      the middle of middle-middle western Michigan?


                          SURROUNDED BY

      Surrounded by daughters Bea (40) and Leah (32), son
      Chris (31), first wife Miranda (67) and second wife
      Rivka (63), granddaughter Rebecca (12) and grandson
      Sam (6), sons-in-law, old poet friends and Bukowski-
      Plath-Lifshin memories, looking out the window at
      my coniferous bird- and raccoon- filled backyard,
      deer once in a while, they keep talking about rain
      today but it hasn’t come yet, e-mails from Angela
      Mankiewicz and Richard Kostelanez, all the
      arthritic pain gone for a few pill-calmed hours,
      not a bad (4 hour) sleep last night, former Catholic,
      former Jew, former Chicagoan, former Bostonian,
      out in the middle of time -to -die -territory now, surrounded
      by beaks and wings, a hundred different kinds of flowers,
      Divine Presence/Activation everywhere, so why tumors
      in my bladder spreading into my bones, is there Anyone
      out there, creation design, or did it all just happen, but
      how could it have just happened, everything from nothing,
      everything has to begin, so when, how, even Designer,
      all-time, eternity, Come visit me, talk to me, You used
      to be around all the time talking to Moses and the rest
      of the gang, what about me…..NOW?


About Hugh Fox: 
Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. He is one of the founders of the Pushcart Prize, and the first writer to publish a critical study of Charles Bukowski. From 1968 to 1999 he taught writing at Michigan State University. Prior to that, he was a professor of American Literature at Loyola University in L.A. His latest books are DEPTHS AND DRAGONS, a novel published by Skylark Press in England, another novel, REUNION, published by Luminis Press, and WHO, ME?, a memoir just coming out from Sunbury Press. Hugh Fox is dying from cancer. We are proud to feature his work here.