“Society sees drug ballads as nice, pleasant, inconsequential and harmless, but they are the opposite.”
-Oscar Martin Arce, of Mexico’s ruling National Action Party, on a government proposal which will send the singers of narcocorridos-ballads glorifying the drug trade-to jail for up to three years.

According to a new NASA study, “January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Looking back to 1880, when modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, although there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s.” But, you know, it snowed in Copenhagen during the climate summit, so WHO KNOWS IF GLOBAL WARMING IS EVEN REAL?

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Oh yes. Here are three new pieces by poet, fiction writer and librettist Terese Svoboda.

Holofernes

Surrender does turn up.
She takes him in her arms
and crushes him to her.
How could there be such fools?

Scrabbling under
effort’s Other-love, say-
she ingredients a stew
with all that’s leftover.

He’s cute. But how long
can she hope to have a head-
in-a-basket, a heroine’s
happiness, hot for later?

The chorus wets themselves,
they cry, they wave their arms-
We’re alive.
Betrayal never fails.

Wife as Boat

Crab victuals slither and suck the undersides
-they like the paint, the wood, its age-
where he scrapes, in a suit so ragged
he could be propulsing or waving a set of
rubbery valves himself. Nevertheless,
happiness hovers with its on/off

not the least broken, the scrapes long
when he’s holding his breath, so long
his headache vanishes. I’m a crustacean,
he sings, faux gruff across the waves.
I eat little girls. He spits out salt.
The scrapees sing back, subsonic.

His chest hair moves with their wee-tailed,
their mouthed. Some foetal, some chained in sex,
none thrilled to be adrift, and so cling mightily
and writhe. Itchy? He scrapes himself, he’s glee
and jelly, he likes the alive part, its husbanding.
He dives, hands out, following the boat’s curves.

The View Finder

Drips off icicles
reshape the sand
where the driveway’s bare-

the movie coughs,
the one where you’re alive, so young.

There’s a pullback, the drive
runs into a spring-high river,
the sand is a dune of salt,

many dunes for such snow.

Walk-ons huddle beside
a period phone booth. Ring-ring!
Don’t call me at work.

But over and over:
the same call, the ice, the drip.
You take a bullet while the writer is out.
Damn

good character

. The light never
fades like that again, the car
motor stops in such silence.

Weapons Grade, Terese Svoboda’s fifth book of poetry, was published in 2009 by U. of Arkansas Press. Her sixth book of prose, Pirate Talk or Mermalade, will be published this year.

You can reach the editor at poems@theawl.com.

Everyone’s a curator: “If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look.” YEAH, ME TOO.

“When things got pretty dire for her, I had all these intense ideas in my head: we would read Rilke novels and watch Bergman films. I said: ‘Mom if you want to talk about any of this . . .’ and she said, ‘No, I want to give you a foot kiss’. So I knew this experience was going to be about foot kisses rather than Rilke.”
-Rufus Wainright discusses the passing of his mother, Kate McGarrigle. This article also includes reminiscences from Martha Wainwright and Anna McGarrigle.

Love this: “In what is being billed as ‘rationalism’s Kool-Aid moment’, a mass ‘overdose’ is being planned next week in protest at the marketing of homoeopathic medicines. More than 300 people who style themselves as ‘homoeopathy sceptics’ will each swallow an entire bottle of homoeopathic pills in protest at the continued marketing of homoeopathic medicines by Boots, the high street chemist chain.”

Frontiers of medicine: “A LEG of lamb, aerosol cans and kitchen implements — are just some of the bizarre objects one veteran medic has pulled out of his patients’ BUMS.”

What can’t the iPhone do? It can even help you figure out what you would look like after plastic surgery! Awl pal Marisa Meltzer tries them all out. (Spoiler: it turns out that America’s beauty standard means that “big” noses are “very ugly.”) “I uploaded a close-up of my profile and got to work. I noticed immediately that the sound effects seemed wildly inappropriate; the constant beeping of a heart monitor punctuated with screams, chain-saw noises, and the occasional orgasmic moan seemed more suitable to a slasher film than a woman-friendly game.”

It was twenty years ago today that James Patrick Zappalorti, “an eccentric, simple man who was loved by his neighbors,” was killed in the tiny hut he had built by the water on Staten Island by two locals who had constantly taunted him because they thought he was gay. Zappalorti, a disabled veteran who served in Vietnam and was discharged after suffering a mental breakdown, “spent much of his days by himself, his father said. His mother, bedridden for years with heart disease, was closest to him. He cooked and washed for her and vacuumed the house.” There are obviously plenty of stories like this one, but for whatever reason it has stuck with me since the day I read it twenty years ago and it still breaks my heart every time. Each detail is agonizing, and I still cannot read the final words of the Times’ coverage-a quote from Zappalorti’s father, whose refusal to accept that his son might be gay is equally tragic-without tearing up: ‘’He was my baby,’’ he said. ‘’When he was a little drunk, he’d hug me and say, ‘I love you father.’’’

Some historical perspective on where Barack Obama finds himself today: “Then as now, voters live in only the present tense, exhibiting neither collective memory nor collective foresight.”