UNDERGROUND VOICES MAGAZINE/NICOLE HENARES

NICOLE HENARES

Mopey Intellectual Boy

You are the     only     one who gets it.
You      are     smarter than us.
      You with your touseled hair
           drab clothes
                carefully chosen
    for that careless look
    communicating
that you, like Vincent Gallo, like Bukowski, like Céline,
    get it;
         this,

    this boredom

         this sensitivity

to art,           to intellect.

It's all so Henry Miller
       so hyper-real:

   You aching for

    that perfect woman

to ease your pain;

thin
        and
                 wan
angel faced

with an ass smooth as two fat scoops of vanilla ice-cream.

Oh, woe, boy;
    chew on the sleeves of your black wool
sit in the back of the bar
    cry with your beer
    scorn the dumb, the pretty, the fat, the baseball capped;
write sarcastic poems.

We get you,
    you the epitome of lonely,
so tortured
         so real.

Cannery Row 21st Century

Saw Mack and Whitey last night
they told me old John
took a paint brush
to the Row recently
said Plaza and his name
just don¹t go together
especially on a building
where a game of pool costs $20.

They told me Joseph Campbell's
been pestering the lonely half naked beauties
on the pillars of the carousal
in the old Edgewater Packing Company-
asking them what their thoughts were
on the use of mermaid archetypes
on coffee cups across the street.

Hazel, they said, moved to Mendocino
around the millenium, six years ago,
the day pseudo-animal right¹s activists
took the Bird Brain game
out of the carousal¹s arcade.
They said Hazel couldn¹t stop
crying damn shame about that bird:
Beloved, well fed and with clean wiggle room,
she led a better life than most
of her shit-couped kind
and played tic tac toe like a champ.
Without her Cannery Row
really now just a faded memory
of gray hit yellow
souvenir keychains
glossy real estate
and machinated dreams
against the slop of waves
kelp stink and exhaust.

A native of the Monterey Peninsula, Nicole Henares- at the age of five-
authored her first book about the Monterey Public Library's lop-eared
mascot, Bigfoot, and moonlighted in her early twenties as the street-talk
reporter for the Coast Weekly. Henares has since penned two chapbooks of
poetry, Lush and Duende, and edited a small poet's press, Magenta. Her
poems are where the blues meets the mean reds and have appeared throughout
the small press in publications such as The Homestead Review; The Monterey
Poetry Review; Poetry Bay; Poesy; The Circle Magazine; Main Street Rag; and
Remark. Nicole lives in San Francisco with two cats and one husband.