Room 60 • Poetry Hotel
Eight Poems / Ligi
EELS
They used to sink a horse in Newtown Creek
Once it got too old for anything else
They’d wire it in a seine and sink it a few weeks
Before pulling it up stinking and full of eels
The Creek grew cluttered with horses
From Brooklyn and Queens
And even a few from Nassau
As the farmers kept moving out
The people passed an ordinance saying horses
Couldn’t be sunk anymore and no one much objected since
There weren’t many horses left
And eels could be gotten easily enough
At College Point where planes come in low for LaGuardia
I used to scoop blue-claw crabs off the pilings
When the tide was low enough to go on the catwalk
And one day as I pitched a crab to my father
A body floated up
Black and bloated with half a year
Of East River in it
It rose face up and fat and broke apart
In shimmering pieces on the surface
While the eels tore through what was left of the flesh
In their frenzy to escape this sudden encounter with air
And all the time my father yelled “Don’t move
Don’t move I’ll get you out of there”
Although I wasn’t trapped by anything
And though I didn’t move
I stood there trying to take in air
And close the eyes that fixed on the eels
And the colors and the brittle bits of flesh
Spreading out before me until I felt
My father’s arm around my neck
His thick fingers on my shoulders
To guide me back to our home near Newtown Creek
Where there were laws against these things.
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666
I tried to sell my soul to the Devil
you can't make a living writing poems
yeah sure where do I sign I said
I want the money up front
how much you asking the sales rep wanted to know
a clean 200 thou I said in 20s and 50s
that's a lot of bread the guy said
I'll settle for 15 thou a year for ten I said
two years in advance
that's still a hundred and fifty thou he said
with 30 down
twelve five a year's as low as I go
with 20 on the table
It's a deal the guy said
but I get to sign with the Devil himself
What are you talking now
for a measly eighth of a million
I get to sign with the Man himself
a baseball player gets more than that
as a signing bonus
I get to see the old geezer
I get to look him in the eye
nobody gets to see the boss the rep said
I get to see him
or the deal's off
blood or no blood
he looked at my wrist and shook his head
the deal's off he said
you fucking wimp I said
we had a deal
nobody gets to talk with the boss he said
them's the rules
then let me talk with God
-----------------
HOW WE LIVED AND LET LIVE
When I was ten around New York
Akis slammed me down with a garbage can cover
after I'd beaten him fair
over a girl
Two weeks later
when the stitches came out
I got him back
with a brick behind the neck
which cost me a beat in face
a broken nose and glass in my eyes
I hadn't figured on his brother
Akis and I got along after that
He walks with a limp
and his arms shake a little
but my eyes don't focus
and the scar in my scalp
itches me awake in the night
-----------------
BEFORE THE FLOWERS DANCED
"In Italian salma is both a large unit or weight or volume and a corpse carried on
a stretcher, which has on the average the weight of what I call a basic load."
— Livio Cattulo Stecchini, Notes of the Relation of Ancient Measures to the Great Pyramid
The swamp around Savannah is jammed
with hungry frogs. It is said
the tadpoles reach a foot to eighteen inches
in a month. Meanwhile, the bugs
are getting thin, almost transparent, but bugs
we can do without. For each disease
they carry us, someone discovers a cure.
Still, when a frog gets hungry and the bugs
run out — it's hard to imagine.
At night the merchant ships stay moored.
The captains keep mistaking their eyes
for beacons. And some have sailed
into cavernous mouths believing their ears
instead of the tales. I have heard
of Piper Cubs returning with their landing gear
"Plicked off," as a pilot put it, for getting
too close to the trees. Before the flowers danced
at Hiroshima, frogs were bait for bass, or things
a kid brought home like bottle caps and sticks.
Months went by without a word from them.
Occasionally, we heard of wars, or how
a million males competed for a single chance
to get the girl, and there were times
migrations held up traffic for miles
in cities we'd never have dreamed of
if not for the news. Those days are gone.
Now children disappear from their cribs
on the ends of the seven foot tongues.
The limits of the city recede. The water rises.
The signs along the road say Do Not Stop.
The rain is terrible to hear. I do not stop.
-----------------
PROBLEM SOLVING
for Gordon
I just wish you people would leave me the fuck alone
I don't give a shit for you people
oh sure you do liege he said
you're an asshole I said
see he said there you go
being defensive
I'm offensive I said I practice at it
because you want to be nice
he said
I don't want to be nice I said
I don't need to be nice
how else can you reach them he asked
reach who
them he said moving his arm
as if he was directing a fly
to a pile of shit
as he fell off the couch
oops he said I seem
to have fallen off the couch
whatever you say I said
and got up to get another beer
you want one I asked
better not he said
you pussy I said
well okay he said
with two or three more beers in him
maybe he'll head-on with a semi tonight
he can't stay here
-----------------
TWO THOUGHTS TWO HOMILIES
We say because our keys
Have never opened the lock
No one has a key that fits it
A man had enough time next spring
And a bucket of minners
He’d hook him a stringer full
Right here in them weeds
We hope because the lock
Remains unopened something
Horrible hides behind it.
With dim imagination flint
A stone and a little tinder
A man could make this place
Right here right cozy
-----------------
THIS MAN WAS ALSO WITH HIM
When I was hanging turkeys, trucks
Pulled into the dock as fast
As hands could empty them. All night
I dragged those heavy toms from coops
To work my debts off, thinking of
The jobs a man will take to himself,
Embrace, assimilate, and curse
For the sake of coins already spent.
I thought of ditches dug, of furniture
Unboxed, reboxed, and moved, of crops,
Of zombies made, of courses taught,
And hung those stupid birds to have
Their gullets slashed for cash, while trucks
Had hummed, machinery had hummed, and fans
Forced feathers and dust to my sweat
And shit covered skin, while toms
Tolled past, an endless line of birds
Hung upside down from truck to knife
To home. This was my job. The flesh
Tore from my hands in clumps and bled
Where blisters wore and wore again
With pain I thought I never would
Endure. I swore my hands would die,
Would crumble off, would never let
Me work an easy job again,
Until I watched that line of birds,
All white and helpless, flopping from
Their shackles, singing their insane song
From the last of their throats, moving endlessly
Toward pies and soup, toward cold cuts and
Thanksgiving, forever away from me
Where the shackles hummed and hummed all night
When I was hanging turkeys
-----------------
LIFE ON THE FARM
as george grew up he humped the bed
the oak posts holding up the roof
the water pipes
in the corner of the room
the room is grey and most of us
beat our heads against the walls
but george would hump and hump
he made the attendants laugh
and throw cold water on him
between the splinters and the burns
a new girl came to work
so george tried to hump her too
the new girl screamed real loud
and even though the attendants laughed
and laughed shhh shhh
some men came in and carried george away
they put him in another room and tied his arms up
I saw him now and then
when they brought him to the room
where pain was put in our heads
george is my friend and it hurt
to see him hurt in the head for all those years
but he kept on humping things
he couldn't talk but I could
barely stop I said
but my voice was not strong
and my ears would bleed
because they didn’t want to hear me
one day they brought george back to us
with his balls cut off poor george
he is my friend
he walked right past his bed
the oak posts the water pipes
and straight to the wall where he sits
and beats his head against it
like the rest of us
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About the Author:
Ligi (Gary Elio Emiliano Larson-Ligi) is the Director of the Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic Lounge and Laundromat. His book of
poems, Disturbances (Ahsahta Press/Boise State University, 1990), garnered critical praise from Ginsberg, Patchen, Rexroth and Mark Van Doren.
He is the co-founder of YU News Service and co-author of The One Minute President (Poor Souls Press, 1984), both with Paul Fericano.
Substack: Doctor Faustroll Writes The Wrongs
Acknowledgements: "Eels" previously appeared in Crazy Horse (1974) and in Doctor Faustroll Writes The Wrongs (2025); "Before The Flowers
Danced" previously appeared in the author's collection, Some Accident Between the Grass And My Feet, (Leatherfoot, 1977); "Problem Solving",
"Two Thoughts Two Homilies", "Life on the Farm", "This Man Was Also With Him", "666" and "How We Lived And Let Live" previously
appeared in Doctor Faustroll Writes The Wrongs (2025)
