Featured Poet: Jackie K. White

Jackie K. White has published poetry and translations in such journals as ACM,
Blackwater Review, Folio, Quarter after Eight, So to Speak, Spoon River, and 
Third Coast. She has been a fellow at Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Arts,
and the Mary Anderson. She is an editor for the literary annual, RHINO and an
associate professor at Lewis University. Her PhD in Creative Writing is from the 
University of Illinois at Chicago where she also completed concentrations
Latino/Latin American and Women’s Studies.  Two of Jackie's chapbooks will be
published in 2007, "Bestiary Charming" by Anabiosis Press and "Petal Tearing and
Variations" by Finishing Line Press.

Blues for a Hard Fall

1

Give me a miner’s hat
I’m going down
Give me a miner’s hat
I’m going down

What does it matter that
the sun is brass, leaves flecked with fowl—
dusk blears canary to a gray-white swell.

Under my song’s a braying hound
together in the well
at the bottom of this shaft
one of us will drown.

2

Night heaves and my marrow darkens;
vagus nerve-throbs send the neck blood
pulsing toward a shoe to drop, or sharpen
each last leaf, each paged prayer turns to thud.

Give me a farmer’s hoe
I’m hacking through
Give me a reaper’s scythe
I’m hacking through

Fields dried up cut down are paved,
one steps into falls gets up, is shod on loss;
each day’s colder gray blanks no clean slate,
anger nettles me with prickly frost.

3

Give me a sailor’s slicker
I’m tossed at sea
Give me a whaler’s spear
I’m crossed at sea

what does it matter that
the sky is red – it’s swarmed with geese,
and dawn breaks to shale I have to stack.

Under the moan of a beached baleen
alone in this expanse
fog-blurred field-wide well-deep
we split, hit ground and sink.

first published in Near South (Volume 5: Winter, 2005)

Under the Laws of Motion

it is like this:

the cusp of evening, a man
shows up at the door and
instinct draws the hand
forward, and you open, I
opened it. The door that
opens closes. A world

happens inside a room
when the body that entered
meets the hand that opened,
the hand moves along
the body, the body of
space between them closes.

It is the nature of bodies to
keep moving, doors open
and close as the earth goes
on spinning and you can’t
keep the moon out of
poems. Inside the room,

a lamp glows. You begin
asking, what is the moon for?
You know you can
turn off the lamp. Inside
every house doors lead
to other rooms; inside one

a man and a woman keep
an old story between them:
somebody leaving. Outside,
equal opposite motions: leaf
rustle, foot scuff, another
hand to the threshold, a body

first published in 9th Annual Juried Reading Chapbook (The Poetry Center of Chicago, 2003)

Fernando, To Fernando

Tell me the heteronym of your worst self
and I’ll let you decipher my handwritten diary.
Today, one said, I like engines much less,
but we know that’s a lie – it’s always a you
or I unliked, and it’s all over the diary
scraps gathered from the floor of a messy
but respectable tavern, homely, adjacent
to the train station. You never dared to
get on the train long scrutinized, schedules
studied, as if you were genuine
about going someday somewhere to be a new.
How unremarkable, the failure to change
the face you look out of, the fixed
others pinned in word-photos, the wheel-
longing your stare chugs along, along with
everything, says the diary, “tremulous” and “banal” –
the inert exhaustion of wanting to want
nowhere to go. You go back to your rented
room, window to the tracks and write
nothing – blank confetti later to litter
the hardwood under strangers’ feet and
suitcases on end. The head of one self
spins with the disquiet of a departing train
the other pretends to have boarded.

From Eurynome in Exile 

The First Wandering: July, ‘98                                    

“we have to make a negotiation with the places we leave behind, the places we return to”

                                                (Andre Aciman, False Papers)

(6-12)

The next mornings I crept out of
my sister’s cabin holding the rest of them
in sleep on a Medicine Bow mountain,

took a path to a cluttered clearing, a broken trunk,
and notebook on knees, pursued my old routine,
beginning one of many stories. 

In the hour’s stillness I could hear each
creaking tree that years from now will fall,
and the wind grew into hissing or shirring 

wheels across interstate 80 rose up to me
(no matter where, I hear
highways and night trains and the “what will you do) 

then something else moaned, nearer,
a voice in the branch that tomorrow
will fall beside me as I put down   

The second evening:
We piled fifteen in the Chevy suburban,
                                                drove to the summit
to watch the sun-set
               on the range beyond Elk Mountain.
                                             And back,
after the fire-side stories
outside the dark cabin,
 my sister says, you could be safe
with your words here,
               but my younger brother walks me
                                                   to the end of the road.

There he tells me the military
scrolling maneuver of his desert
war days eight years ago.
It’s called hearting the area--

How to capture an unknown place,
one by one the soldiers are
sent out, in opposite arcs from
an imagined center.

If they meet silence, the next two
spool out, one by one, and the first
set advances, and if no one is shot,
they close the heart at its end point. 

We stood together in the middle
of the gravel road, silent for minutes,
then he says, “since you’re the smart one,
tell me, what’s this line from--

‘this is the path thou hath yet not taken,’
says, “That’s all I kept thinking when
I stood there waiting, holding my ground
for another private or enemy coming--

“And I keep hearing it in places like this--
see that full moon? You think it’s pretty,
but we’re exposed.”  As we turn back
he insists, “there’s gotta be a poem in this.” 

(13-31)

Long after my return to prairie,
squeezed again into Midwest suburbia,
it comes back to me:  how to capture the land’s

                      

snow-peaks slope into hills lush falling
pines away into Nebraska flat tawny
Iowa valleys green Illinois cornfields and soy,

and despite the simplicity I want a year for,
his words and foreign words and the diverging
roads of family tell me
           there won’t be any cabin in the woods:

In this space of time
           the mind’s wide
as this country, & 

the questions spool out one by

one answers are
     animal-like, bird-skittish, head
raised at every noise—

& where do they come from, 

the lines that haunt us—
do they say,
move out
stand still
or, arc the way
home.       Is the sound
         wind      
wheels, or      
enemy

© 2007 Jackie White

Featured Poet: Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger spent half of her life in Chicago and environs before defecting to the Cuyahoga Valley, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron and NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals including ACM, American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, Harpur Palate, The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill, and her first book, Prairie Fever, is forthcoming from Steel Toe Books (Spring 2007). She is an Associate Editor of the literary magazine RHINO. Her favorite tree is the Sugar Maple. She is currently at work on a second book of poetry.

THE TWINS

I see it: no more dusk

to your days. Months ago we

stood on a porch loaded with

empty terracotta pots.

Matchbooks, snowbound

floribunda, empty rice sacks.

It occurs to me that everything

is still there without us,

creaking with temperature

swings and rainstorms. Smoke

from the three women next door,

locked out and waiting.

There were landscapes

in acrylic. Chimes from clocks

we couldn’t find. Plum tomatoes

in quart baskets. I watched

them shiver into pools

on the countertop, as if you

had rolled them in your hands

for hours. Light was gold

and inching closer, taxis

banked cheek to cheek on

the highway below. Evenings

like this I wanted kept

on ice or tucked beneath

a layer of silk. I didn’t have silk, 

only wool and nylon. There was

nothing left of the night,

only train cars and breath.

They could dust me for prints

and find just fingertip salt and rust.

You were a halo of consonants

in the dull ebb of my pulse. 

I could have hung my jacket up.

You could have told me how

they found us and took us

to our opposite corners, separate

lawns, rooms where we both slept on

twin beds, star quilts, lost in the scent

of cotton batting and blackjack gum.

ROYAL BLUE

We were two strands of thread 

snagged on a wooden barn door.

You were odd granite shrapnel

in my safety goggles. One wet

sheep standing on the driveway.

A bad stomachache after apples

and capers. If I painted the wall

ecru, you walked into it bloody

handed. Those days were less

Flemish and more Portuguese,

at least in the beginning. What

Old Master would’ve measured

from my elbow to the toaster?

If oxen crowded the interstate

we were in no way responsible

or even aware. I was not your

wife, not even close. Alpacas

always left me shivering like

a tuberculosis stick, or elevator

skipping a floor. A cartoon man

naked in a barrel can never be

unrolled. I ironed handkerchiefs

for quick cash. I let them weld

me behind some mesh. It’s mean

the way we flush right out, like

milk, and then we begin all over.

Once, we both lived underwater.

MILFOIL & AFTERTHOUGHT

There were four rooms. There were eight. You were in corners and under
furniture, near my knees, reflections of your back in stainless steel.
Suspenders, Florsheims and avocado linen. There was limestone halfway
up, and I knew I’d crash into it if I could move fast. You thought it
was a cold place. The light bulbs?  It was all like helium to me at
that point. I said someone should be taking pictures, the way we were
sprawled on the hardwood or propped up on rattan sofas. One time in the
airport we were both small and spun together in a leather chair chained
to the ceiling. You touched my leg.  Nobody was taking pictures, but
that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, or that we weren’t in Frankenmuth
five years later, at connecting tables but kept separate. A shed behind
the school, or that storm sewer at the dunes, past the grasses, left of
concession, the sand that felt like clay, like slip, how blond you had
become, I hardly recognized.  If you were here in this room you’d
remind me of the guitar, the train platform, the silver Cutlass
containing me and continuing on past it all. You said we’d go back. I
was always a good runner.  You said: the smoothest skin ever.  We’d
seen the skyline from two dozen taxis, our own legs on the bridge, from
the grass, from the grass again, in the grass on my front lawn, lit by
the cheap plastic solar lamps, from deep past the buoys of Lake
Michigan and into the waterways connecting.  We knew where we had come
from, had that in common.  In college I looked out the laundry room
window and saw you between leaves, in a corduroy jacket.  We’re here,
you said. There were blue sheets I used instead of curtains.  Later I’d
be in a hundred rooms with tin ceilings and slim wine glasses, or
rectangular tables and cinderblocks and papers.  In the subway window
I’d look nothing but tired.  I would try everything from milk to cactus
in hope of turning you to milk and cactus and dark rafters and back
again, so when I closed my eyes it was heat and every other color we
described.  The nights kept us like ants under plastic.  I kept you in
places that were cool and uncovered.  You touched my face like it was
years ago and just starting. I was busy fending off letters and
drinking green tea and lying in a cool bath.  By noon, everything was
back where it had been. We’re here and we’re living, you said. 

FOXGLOVES AT 3 PM

Ballooned on the back porch

like a bullfrog in springtime.

All full of it. The whole world

going down on its neighbor

and then sliding up bus steps

fragrant with Dial, snapping

wintergreen gum. Sunglasses,

duffel bag, nobody knows

how damp your body is.

Rooms the buttercup gold

they use for schools, seen

on desks, hushed in cotton.

What’s not a hustle? No

need for silk when you’ve 

got grease. At the opening 

reception, nobody checked

the broom closet for nudes.

There were hours pressing 

faces under the paintings,

a glass of whole milk split

between us before stained

glass grottoes. Grandparents

dressed you in lederhosen

every autumn. I was lost

as a child and felt my way

into a neighboring borough.

Why were we the only two

left at the end of the song?

It sounded like shaking, coal

dust, bells, a sitar and tabla

set loose in the wet mines.

We used to meet at the back

table, like we were corporate.

You would help me with my

buttons. I walked that room

and stepped through the blinds

into midday traffic, our haze 

a secret. Each dress I snagged

on the same broken hinges.

RED SEA

An afternoon across from you

in copper light. Smuggling

a quart of milk on the city bus

to drink between potholes.

We stood at the edge of a lot

rumbling with maple leaves.

Lie down in it. Lay it down.

An hour later under sixty watt

bulbs, albacore in pepper oil.

Where did I go when your

arm slid across my shoulder?

Even my palms turned cold.

Even gabardine went sharp.

You told a story of cloves sewn

into canvas pillows. A wife

who loved blanched leeks.

A childhood of Appaloosas

that resisted training, or girls

in distant cities wearing silk.

I remembered a chandelier

I once dissected in the basement

without permission. Your face

startled in the stairway. Blood

rides water underground

like another body. Waiting on

a bar stool in Waukegan, knowing

you are in Ashtabula, no phone.

The sound of dancing drifts through.

© 2007 Mary Biddinger

Featured Poet: Adam Fieled

Adam Fieled is a poet and Ph.D. candidate from Temple University in Philadelphia. Adam edits the blog-journal P.F.S. Post, which publishes contemporary poetry and art. He also maintains Stoning the Devil, a blog on which he publishes thoughts on literature, art, politics and other cultural bits. He recently released a spoken-word auido cd called Virtual Pinball-Madame Psychosis. He visits Chicago this week and reads at Myopic Books (1564 N. Milwaukee Ave.) on Sunday, December 17 at 7 pm.

My History

I had a life in Egypt
as a prince
my father now
was
my servant
then
in Rome
me
and my friend Chris
molested
children,
which is why
we
can’t get laid
now
then
early
in this century
I
emigrated
to New York,
where
I worked
for
the mob
who
eventually
killed me,
and
now
here
I am.

Pigs and Planes

I don’t believe in poetry.
It’s a slant that wavers
around different patches
of sky, or mud chucked
on slats of a sty. Or it
could be the pig, or the
plane, farmer or pilot,
pork-chop industrialist, air-
traffic controller. The one
thing it isn’t is itself.
To say poetry is poetry
is a rank offence, post-
misdemeanor, sub-felony,
the sort of sin credulous
people pray against. Pigs
you can believe in, & sties.
Planes you can believe in, & skies.
I don’t believe in poetry.

Window Sketch

Might trees, fore grounded
against red bricks, in March,
be expectant? Curtains,
tapered & tied. Behind,
a chair’s outlines. I’m as
settled in here as I’ll ever be.

Settled in here, I’ll never see
that chair’s insides. I’m as
tapered & tied as that blind.
Be expectant, curtains,
against red bricks in March;
mighty trees, fore grounded.

On reading Chris McCabe & then Keats

must be something in England,
makes hearts beat….stay beating,
through the daily melee…humorously..
knowing about dragons, sapphires, shit
stains, everything else….double-decker
metaphors we don’t get (as in create/
understand) in the States,
ham-fisted burger-beered belly-flopped

On Jazz

Physical beauty, Formal Rigor of God—
spiritual beauty, Economy of God—
Natural Will, Transcendent Will,
Facile Will in all its’ dismal “there-ness”—

Piano broken chords breaking down space
like watching bits of paper collect,
contained in a 12-bar blues; root
notes you tend to lean on,
or maybe a honking minor third,
a harmonic multi-colored sharp…

Follow your compulsion into flurries,
clusters of connecting phrases,
then a pause to sanctify as the progression
resolves after lingering on the fifth
for the appointed time—
pentatonics mainly w/ some suspensions,
sheets of sound, trademark leaps,
like watching a rainbow erupt
out of the placid bowels of street-lakes,
sparrows in the gutters,
Eliot-esque alienation syncopated
impossibly high & mighty…

Repeat the repetition now into major scale—
Ionian gold, major-third suspensions again,
almost midnight for tremulous trees,
also hipsters, flights of birds, rabbis
in the wilderness as blues ends; here’s a quicker
quirkier jarring bit to cut
your teeth on…

Base bottom notes natural like ferns,
ride the ride cymbal like musical fellatio,
roll w/ rolls & kick-drum ejaculations,
what Hart Crane heard in bridges,
only blues (so bridge seldom comes),
stasis achieved nicely replicates movements,
bowel, kidney, heart-beat, daring snare of lip-ness,
thickness, quickness,
get it all out for all of us into the brick-laden city,
mutter of exhausted midnight buses
as vibrato notes shiver, miniature
solos on the toms creates energy
of emptiness among the weird abundance,
concluding w/ roll on the snare, now bass
also investigates metaphysical space,
not so much implacable as inexhaustible
eruptions; spring of autumn,
autumn of spring…

Seasons of balance, compromise,
away from extremes; Middle Path exteriorized,
oh piano on a minor seventh which bespeaks
longing for a more ethereal world,
elegiac as the last apple of October, eaten
by a Halloween camp-fire, beyond blues
of Earth into cadence, dying fall of pure moon,
ravaged, torn from the throat of persistence,
mute existence destroyed completely
and on fire, a universe of fingers & mouths,
looking down the tide of Death into eternity,
square-shouldered & erect,
freezing into whims of Ultimate “there-ness”,
beyond ordinary notions of quotidian abyss
in one long sitting pow-wow peace-pipe corn-cob
wholesome dinner of Voidness,
but insinuated only to drive away singularity….

Jazz is plural,
they give you a space, show you its’ contours,
allow you to move around & drown
if you want over hilltops of remorse, created
by Love or dolorous longing & especially
Central Parks of the soul & intellectual Bordello
life cut & pasting its’ bleak outline over rooftops
& bluebirds—

©Copyright 2006 Adam Fieled.

Featured Poet: Garrett Brown

Garrett J. Brown was born in Baltimore. His poems have recently appeared in the American Poetry Journal, Urbanite Baltimore, the Ledge and has a poem forthcoming in Natural Bridge. In 2000, he won a Creative Writing Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he graduated with his MFA in Creative Writing. His book-length manuscript, Manna Sifting, was runner-up in the 2003 Maryland Emerging Voices competition and he recently won the Poetry Center of Chicago’s 2005 Juried Reading Contest (www.poetrycenter.org), judged by Jorie Graham. He is currently teaching writing at University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is pursuing his PhD. Garrett’s chapbook, Panning the Sky, was published in 2003 and is available from Pudding House Publications (www.puddinghouse.com).

Opposition

August 27, 2003

Metaphor is the frayed thread that connects what we desire with what merely exists.

Tony Rothman

Even before squinting through a telescope,

Percival Lowell revealed what he was hoping

to see: exquisite web of channels, evidence

of a vast Venice etched into the rusty disk

of Mars. Did he dream of green-skinned gondoliers

smoothly rowing from pier to alien pier,

soothing their linear canali with Martian song?

Skeptical scientists knew Lowell was wrong;

what we wish to see prevents us from seeing

what is.

Don’t we all wish to draft perfect

lines, envision a complete Cathedral

instead of quarrying the awkward

facts, imperfect stones resisting

the symmetry of the church wall?

Tonight, closer than it will ever be,

I watch the planet from my window and shed

Lowell’s imagined world for the frayed thread

of metaphor. Iron rusting on the surface, the same

element that warms the pigment in our veins: Mars,

a speck of blood in the cold, impenetrable night.

(Originally appeared on the website of the Poetry Center of Chicago; Juried Reading Winner 2005)

Constellation

Receding hairline, your rented room

in the wooded hills beyond light

pollution and suburbia, your penchant

for slender women with large eyes

and small breasts, talent for language

betrayed by a lazy palate and erratic

handwriting, your quiet disposition

that reminds the self-confident

they too have uncomfortable dreams—

all reduced to pinpricks.

The Giant washed ashore,

his lover’s arrow embedded

in his tree-trunk neck, eyes

fish-lipped into hollows,

seaweed beard. Her hands

molded his flesh, snowball-like,

into white hot spheres, fixed him

how she wanted to remember:

clothed in a lion’s skin,

chased by a scorpion.

Your waitress has small eyes, leaves salsa,

a large basket of chips. Excessive, you think,

as you eat alone, flipping through phone-sex ads

in a free weekly. Invisible points, too, hold weight,

these dark matters you refuse to acknowledge,

even in measured safety. You can’t remember

why Scorpio rises as Orion sets. The Giant

reduced to a belt. Dried mythology gives seed

to words, their stories sloughed—narcissism,

panic, aphrodisiac, pandemonium and mercury.

(Originally appeared in the American Poetry Journal, Winter/Spring 2006)

Lost Anecdote from the Pages of Vasari

Spring cleaning in Baltimore always involved

a yellow bucket sloshing with soapy water

and a rag recognized as the tattered remains

of my father’s bowling shirt, circa 1973.

I would be sent to the front of the house

on the first warm day of shorts

and no socks to wipe the marble steps.

It was also springtime, I would learn years later,

when Michelangelo would visit Carrara and lay

his head on recently quarried blocks. I wiped away

city grime, crushed berries, the dried paste

of bird mess. The stonecutters claim he listened

for cobwebbed whispers, ran his thick fingers

over mineral veins swirled within rock. I was

always amazed at how the marble would hold

the imprint of a leaf dropped in autumn and pressed

into a smudge by a winter of rain. If the tale is true

and the statues did indeed call out to be released

from their stone, imagine the Florentine

walking down East Pratt Street, hundreds of fat cherubs

trapped in the stoops, crying out to the Master as we sit

on their heads, resting cans of beer on their rumps.

(Originally appeared in Pif Magazine, May 2001)

Pyx

That smaller vessel of gold, or silver-gilt, in which the Eucharist is commonly carried to the sick.

- The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XII

At one time a cup suspended

by a chain above the alter,

pulling eyes upward as though

it could condense the dust of Christ

from a cloud of incense. I don’t

believe in saints, but keep Christopher

taped to the windshield as I drive

to the nursing home. A priest will

keep it tucked in a silk pouch hung

around his neck, the weight becoming

a sacred heart that sits against

his own.

If you had a slice

of god’s flesh – thin,

pungent with the fish

the Galileans

caught, the fish that hell

could not digest – what

jewel box would you deem

fit to contain it?

To me it resembles

the disk of tobacco my brother

kept tucked in the back pocket

of his favorite pair of blue jeans,

a circle relic imbedded

in the fabric. It’s always strange,

to see it tossed on my vinyl

passenger seat, as though the Ark

of the Covenant were strapped with

a load of beach towels to the roof

of a burgundy station wagon;

children in the backseat singing

as the sun tints red to their cheeks,

coconut lotion, the sand dunes

spilling onto the road, dust grains

on highway blacktop shimmering.

(Originally appeared in the chapbook, Panning the Sky, 2003)

On Cross Street

At this three-story restaurant the sun-

dried tomatoes are soft on the teeth,

and the windows overlook long trenches

of rowhomes where parents still spank

their children and keep opened cans

of condensed milk in the fridge. I forgot

we lived on this street, back when love was

watching seagulls pick through the garbage.

You wanted something real, my lung on the table,

unfolded like a wet towel, cork particles

in the wine. Below us, gardens furrow

the thin yards between cracked slabs

of pavement. Cucumber kidneys hang

from the fences, a plastic Blessed Mother

spreads her arms over a purple eggplant heart.

(Originally appeared in the chapbook, Panning the Sky, 2003)

Copyright 2006 Garrett Brown

Featured Poet: Andrew Lundwall

Andrew Lundwall is the managing editor of the electronic literary journal melancholia's tremulous dreadlocks. He currently lives in his home state of Wisconsin after residing for three years in the Washington D.C. metropolitan region. Recent work can be found in Ocho, Otoliths and PFS Post .

erasure of phil ochs’ song chords of fame

I found him by the stage last night

He was breathing his last breath

A bottle of wine and a cigarette

Was all that he had left

"I can see you make the music

'Cause you carry a guitar

God help the troubadour

Who tries to be a star"

        So play the chords of love, my friend

        Play the chords of pain

        If you want to keep your song,

        Don't, don't, don't, don't play the chords of fame

I seen my share of hustlers

As they try to take the world

When they find their melody

They're surrounded by the girls

But it all fade s so quickly

Like a sunny summer day

Reporters ask you questions

They write down what you say

        So play the chords of love, my friend

        Play the chords of pain

        If you want to keep your song,

        Don't, don't, don't, don't play the chords of fame

They'll rob you of your innocence

They will put you up for sale

The more that you will find success

The more that you will fail

the dyslexic ballet

the soul rumbles

under its nonsensical sheets

to go or not to to stay as scarred

and skinny fright legs burst its sockets

tangled in alchemical masturbation

to make the other thing spiritual flow

to make another massachusetts left of the dial

necking in an abandoned cadillac

like spider-veined comets

as sacred mushrooms of wanting

spray static tonight sucking

signal curtains for the dyslexic ballet

screwed-in kiss

what machine 

with screwed-in kiss 

that vulgarity’s torch

should raise a hand 

of all the static 

to you i could bring 

my caravan

erasure of merle haggard’s song the bottle let me down

Tonight the bottle let me down,

And left your memory come around;

The one true friend I thought I'd found,

Tonight the bottle let me down.

Each night I leave the bar room when it's over,

Not feeling any pain at closing time;

But tonight your memory found me much too sober,

I couldn't drink enough to keep you off my mind.

Tonight the bottle let me down,

And left your memory come around;

The one true friend I thought I'd found,

Tonight the bottle let me down.

--- Instrumental ---

I've always had a bottle I could turn to,

And lately I've been turnin' every day;

But the wine don't take effect the way it used to,

And I'm hurtin' in an old familiar ways.

Tonight the bottle let me down,

And left your memory come around;

The one true friend I thought I'd found,

Tonight the bottle let me down.

Tonight the bottle let me down...

I been around, I've had my share

And I really can't complain

But I wonder who I left behind

The other side of fame

(Raspberry beret)
Tell me
Where have all the raspberry women gone? (And if it was warm she)
(Wouldn't wear much more)
(Raspberry beret)

I thin

Copyright 2006 Andrew Lundwall