California Welcomes You!
Everywhere
east of Nevada opens up grand, oak doorways to this country of best things.
Here you may escape cold winter with wide avenues and pepper trees, layer
after layer below hillside poppies aflame in riotous colors. Stop having
middle of the mediocre road experiences! Become a palm tree! Enjoy every
morning! Become a fish taco! Rid yourself of rickets; join the team around
a piping dish of medium rare sweetbreads. Get eaten! Now it looks like
our lady of the awkward interlude needs a good night’s sleep among
the tree dots and hill spots of a small red star between downtowns. And
here, too, the man of business, seeking new fields of endeavor and happy-trousered
weeks can heartily inhale hot meals served from east of Georgia (in dining-rooms
only west of Nebraska), where observation cars now bear names related
to the conquest’s hardy barking. These include “The Frank &
Musso,” “Last Year’s Ten Mile Poem,” (or the Early
Hollis Frampton) and the Salon Car named for Canadian “Deanna Durbin”.
Drawing room segmentations contain ten sections and rear flyaway. In this
cozy corner you shall find modish letterhead and clever books. There are
numerous ground-glass lights in both ceiling and sides. The colors, they
don’t jangle. Sleek schemes are used. The scene screams past. This
is beatitude embodied. To-day no really high-class train is considered
completely equipped without a car of this description: a skillful barber
will hair-cut you, singe you, shave and shampoo you, to be availed of
when most convenient. This is Winslow, Oklahoma passing fast and the expense
is trifling. Ferns and flowers adorn side alcoves, tables with snowy linen,
and a device in the ceiling of each kitchenette removes any odor of your
most glorious three day’s coop!
Grammatica Iowa
Hereby Iowa, a new kind of prickly fun, a new peculiar
pleasure in life (not only pleasing and fashionable)—a truly great
game. Don’t delay the pleasure of playing it. Ask your dealer, beg,
borrow or buy Iowa! But be sure to PLAY Iowa! Vanilla Malt Cousin Milt
works hard and says it plain—“It is a brilliant game of extraordinary
and unfathomable fascination.” Easily learnt and differing widely
from any other easily learnt endeavor, this battle-like game presents
innumerable combinations of fascinating problems—an original type
each time! Its real delight will come, however, when a dutiful and industrious,
eager and exaggeratedly passionate, four-handed, many-parted-player is
sufficiently advanced to use profound adroitness and sweet strategy in
ultra-combat. A violently rewarding game with only occasional yawps of
botheration from truly extreme crises skipping off the damnable leaning
lips of some marble-eyed left-tenant or posh corporal or tricked-out ensign
or such. From Joop to Waterloo halloo! Unlike nearly every other Iowa
game ever, the contesting forces are previously-arranged in the directly
dangerous, center of our Iowa field. Go to! Sally forth! Now you’re
kings in future going forward!
The Stoning of Dumbshowmen
The land-locked surfer’s fellowship of Oklahoma assured us we were
members of the tribe, that sorry set of very saddened stooges in summertime.
One of them was a box guitar player. We thought Hollywood was a place
with cows. We thought New York was lots of people wearing shoes. The winter
was a teacher. Sloppy sots: watch them sleep, hurt by the horses. Witness
parabolic curvatures from Down-east to Detroit all along the withering
riversides. Slow church ahead, slow thickly settled. Slow trampoline by
the train tracks and river beds. Slow for sale. Watch how the world weeps
when the women fall to their knees for newly-tapped epiphanies. Don’t
know what amen means? Whole Pennsylvanias of pipe! Simmer the black and
blue inks as you would a chicken, live life like a budgie on a glass of
milk. They’re beautiful, easy to train, inexpensive, clean and they
can be taught to talk (not just a word or two, either, but entire sentences)!
A moody zone, when Thursday seems like Sunday. This bruise, that noose.
Avarice passing oil (and stones). The hammer is still well-struck and
hard on the falling anvil, porous as balsa. The sweaty fist and grimy
wrist, the harmonies of unexpurgated hammer-slathered rhythms. We all
raise hell once in awhile. Watch us on our weary way, with a torsion just
as crooked (this was at Topeka) while we wonder why the young ones don’t
know where their elders were coming from now. We were upwards of the northern
line and somewhere right in the middle on route to Shakopee, Deephaven
and Independence, Minnesota respectively. And we wobbled through the train
entire. Some long hours we wobbled, no doubt. We had seven dollars left
and wanted to switch to beer anyway. Afterward and sadly we sent the young
box guitar player back to his paces. He was heard of once, abed in Wall,
not far from the pharmacy (bleach and boxcars) his ambidexterity torn
from its tendons.
HANGOVER CURE FOR MEN
Felix Liquor Rex— signing on with you with a new item from the room
service staff at Hotel Allerton Annex. Yes, the King of Happy Juice reminds
you to insure a clear head for that morning householder’s meeting
and order yourself a Hotel Allerton Annex’s Late-Night Sandwich—
the Greedy Belly Special— heaped high and seething with melted Heartland
All-American Cheese layered between electrifying slivers from our gigantic
shank of Milwaukee bologna. Make your last meal a tasty one for sure!
Supper side dish options include Uncle Glen salad, with frozen peas and
carrots in a tempting mayo-toss. All mayonnaise, all the time. Or try
our Western Omelet Sandwich with Coleslaw. Teach your stomach the ultimate
lesson. Each sandwich comes with a Kosher Dill Kenosha Pickle. Call Russ
at Reception to order now and he’ll bring your yellow paper receipt
with proof of purchase! Collect a dozen of these and win a free night’s
stay in the Secretary’s Suite. Only midnight or later on weeknights
and not available at our Las Vegas location.
Scott Zieher was born and raised in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
His poetry has recently appeared online at Eleven Bulls, Flaneur, Slurrymagazine,
and DIAGRAM. His essays on art have appeared in The Provincetown
Arts Review, NYarts Magazine, ArtReview, and online at The Emergency
Almanac. He and his partner, Andrea Smith, own ZieherSmith Inc., a
contemporary art gallery featuring artists in all media and located in
the Chelsea district of Manhattan.
He is currently at work on volume two of a projected
thirteen volume poem entitled Virga. The first volume of Virga
was published by Emergency Press in 2005.
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