Bluff City

By David Lohrey and Dennis Mahagin

"That was my first lesson as a male prostitute. Prostitutes don't own things. There's only a rental agreement, no contract. One needs to get serious."

America is a nation in decline; that much is obvious. At what point did America go from splitting the atom to smashing statues, from Southern hospitality to apathetic vulgarity, from conques

• Language: English
• Publisher: Terror House Press, LLC
• Release date: Aug 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951897192

David Lohrey

David Lohrey is from Memphis, Tennessee, a graduate of U.C. Berkeley. His plays have been produced in Switzerland, Canada, and Lithuania. His poems can be found at Expat Press, Cardiff Review, The Drunken Llama, and Trouvaille Review. His fiction can be seen at Dodging the Rain, Storgy Magazine, Terror House Magazine, and Literally Stories. David's first collection of poetry, Machiavelli's Backyard, was published in 2017 by Sudden Denouement Publishing (Houston). He lives in Tokyo.

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Praise for Bluff City

Lohrey's work stands singularly peer-to-peer alongside that of the great Juvenal, imperial Rome's trenchant satirist of that louche society's delirium of privilege, which so resembles our own contemporary ‘woke’ American moment. Wading through the fetishistic wreckage of our disordered gender norms, the cant and viciousness of our deranged political discourse, the emaciation of our family dynamics, and just about every other depredation of our present culture wars, Lohrey's poems and stories take surgical synecdoches and mentonymies to the weird cosmetic body of America, apply jolting electroshock-like litotes to its degenerating mindset, and administer a Huck Finn-like purgative of sane bewilderment to the constipation of its fatuous utopian innards, all in a great lament...and a great head-shaking laughter... at our slipping national greatness. Lohrey's voice is a commanding one for our time. — Professor Robert Cirasa, English Department Chair, Emeritus, Kean University, New Jersey

David Lohrey’s poetry is work dripping wet with wry humour, infused with a sense of mischief. Human nature and science take centre stage in his verse musings, which turn a lens from the micro to the macro. His is work that is not afraid to ask questions. Most of all, it tackles head-on the peculiar experience of modern America. — Trevor Conway, author of Evidence of Freewheeling and Breeding Monsters

I’ve only come across a few poets in my lifetime that are so original that their verse is both instantly recognizable and hard to forget. Charles Bukowski was one. Douglas Goodwin was another. David Lohrey joins that club, in my mind. Like Bukowski and Goodwin, Lohrey’s narrative verse projects a stolid exterior as it contextualizes current events to expose the hypocrisy and contradictions inherent in human behavior. Beneath the exterior, though, peeking out from time to time, is a heart that would prefer not to be hardened by what it has endured. That’s ultimately what makes poets like Bukowski, Goodwin, and Lohrey worth reading—and hard to forget. Lohrey’s ‘Solitary Confinement’ in this book says it best: ‘We only get one heart / it’d be foolish to break it.’ — Jay Dougherty, Open Arts Forum

"I grew up reading E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, and poetic gods of old. Today, I am bombarded by poetry that is something completely different. David’s poetry is unconventional; it defines what I call divergent literature. I crafted the slogan for Sudden Denouement, 'A Divergent Literary Collective,' never knowing that someone like David would stumble into my life. His poetry should be discussed in the same vein as the poetic heroes of my youth. Discovering the poetry of David Lohrey was an event in my life. There are a million poets in a world of social media, but there are few who possess the poetic sensibilities of Lohrey. Publishing his book will be one of my greatest accomplishments. Machiavelli’s Backyard is an inspired work, a vision that I am proud to have had the honor of putting the SD name on." — Jasper Kerkau, Sudden Denouement Publishing

"To say David Lohrey is irreverent and provocative is to criminally understate how gleefully he tosses tropes in the tumbler of his inverted absurdist Rockwell diorama, to miss the sobering melancholic notes of world-weary skepticism, the delectably weird two-tone storytelling, the madcap humor and antisocial relishing that characterizes this incomparably human poet. Bluff City is anti-twee, it is pure edge without lifting a finger to strain obscenity. David Lohrey is a lifer who has earned his spurs with no lies left to tell, telling you the bald truth, sui generis. His poetry will endure as long as there are readers hungry for something quite unlike anything they've never read, eager to bear witness to words doing what they're made to do; shock, profane the sacred, induce fits of gallows laughter, and detonate the zeitgeist. It is a vital dose of wild fun through a kaleidoscopic historical lens. David Lohrey is dangerously addictive and infectious." — Manuel Marrero, author of Thousands of Lies and Not Yet

"Lohrey’s poetics proceeds via disjunction, non-sequitur, and sublime cliche to a thorough beatdown of the dwarves who hold up the four corners of the sky. It’s either a Black Friday sale or a Black Lives Matter™ rally—tough to say which—but the main thing is that the child pornographers and tenured radicals crowding into the theatron are dutifully wearing their masks from Thalia and Melpomene’s Discount Emporium; meanwhile, Jehovah kicks back and binge-watches the umpteenth season of Cities of the Plain, his favourite reality show." — Jal Nicholl

Prepare yourself before you read David Lohrey…prepare for a depth of vision and inquiry you may not be used to. Prepare yourself to be challenged and faced with compositions of ideas you may never have considered. Prepare yourself for accomplished writing and life experiences which encompass an extraordinarily broad spectrum of thought, not all of which leave you feeling warm, cosy, and content…on the contrary, David Lohrey is a writer who will make you think, unsettle your comfort zone, disturb your urban cool. David is generous with his writing as well as precise, satirical and eviscerating...there is a thoughtful mind behind every cut and lampoon, and he fills the space with a lot of ideas. I include David Lohrey as one of my favourite narrative modern poets. — Jenn Zed

Also by David Lohrey

The Other is Oneself: Postcolonial Identity in a Century of War — 20th Century African and American Writers Respond to Survival and Genocide

Machiavelli’s Backyard

Copyright © 2020 Terror House Press, LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

ISBN 978-1-951897-18-5

EDITOR

Matt Forney (mattforney.com)

LAYOUT AND COVER DESIGN

Matt Lawrence (mattlawrence.net)

Excerpts of this book were published, in somewhat different form, by the following magazines and websites: Dodging the Rain, The Drunken Llama, Eunoia Review, Expanded Field, Impossible Archetype, Literally Stories, Modern Literature, New Orleans Review, Nine Muses, Nthanda Review, Open Arts Forum, Otoliths, Panoplyzine, Rebelle Society, Stickman Review, Storgy, Terror House Magazine, and Tuck Magazine. The author would like to thank each publication for their support.

TERROR HOUSE PRESS, LLC

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Dennis Mahagin

Poetry

Daylight Savings Time

Authentic

Camel Milk and Bedlam

Inappropriate

Spam in a Can

Thrown Together: A Memoir

Bronze Shoes on Horseback

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Imperialism

Worse for Wear

Southern Comfort

Sayonara

One, Two, Three: A Play in One Act

An Act of Exploration: An Interview with David Lohrey

Foreword by Dennis Mahagin

The poet Stephen Dobyns, referring to his own work, once said the following: Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing…

That’s apt; and anything Dobyns says about writing (his own notwithstanding) is simply golden.

In fact, it was the oeuvre of Stephen Dobyns that came immediately to my mind when I encountered David Lohrey’s poetry for the first time. It was early 2017, and Lohrey’s list poem, Confessions of a Bad Driver, arrived in the slush pile of an online literary magazine I help to edit. Within Confessions’ electric and highly original lines, a not-so-likable speaker enumerates a strange litany of personal shortcomings. To wit: I voted for Trump, I have no friends I hate the snow and, I never look at porn…etc.

Some of the confessions of this sad-sack speaker are prosaic, some disturbing, some out-and-out hilarious: I was drawn to the peculiar persona in the poem, the dark sardonic tone and exquisite vernacular of gallows humor that popped right off the page, from the get-go. I realized the Lohrey piece had straightaway evoked for me a memory of a poem (coincidentally called Confession, penned by Dobyns) which describes the Nazi in me, a Nazi who knows the world’s a mess, that people are crazy, the Nazi who wants to be boss of everything (even bananas!), a Nazi Steve who begrudges no singing, no dancing, no carrying on.

Although this Lohrey/Dobyns connection is unmistakable, if perhaps unconscious or even synchronistic (it’s possible, after all, that Lohrey has never read Dobyns, yet I’d wager hard lucre he has), it is also the case that David Lohrey commands an arresting, hard-won, deadpan syntax entirely his own. His for the wielding; there, for the reader’s taking. The talent he shares with Dobyns (and that other immortal New England bard, Thomas Lux) is a rare gift for the darkly comic, that magical-cum-conversational language that was also employed to great ends by one Charles Bukowski. Lohrey informs us, time and time again, all is not well. Then he makes us laugh out loud about it. Not rueful laughter, per se, nor hysterical. Moreover, knowing.

Yet in pursuing this place of comic knowing (which isn’t comic at all), is it possible that David Lohrey goes too far? Shattered taboos are as common as modifiers in his verses. Pieces of sacred cow litter his lines as though an armed-to-the-teeth Iraq vet lived in there, as well, some sentry with PTSD and enough high velocity ammunition for a lifetime of slaughter; hell, for a few dozen lifetimes. Initially, my fellow editors at the magazine I mentioned were split on David Lohrey, thinking, perhaps, no…no way…too over the top…a quorum of these editors, in fact, were leaning toward rejection of the work. Nah, look, I wrote in an e-mail, give it one more shot. I hear a voice here. In the end, Lohrey won. We were happy to publish his poems.

Stephen Dobyns, intoning further—once again on Craft—has said this: I write poems to find out why I write them.

Lohrey’s motives are far less metaphysical. He writes what’s on his mind. ‘Nuff said. No more, no less. Indeed, Lohrey’s incendiary comic barrages often take aim right between the veritable eyes of society. In this, his second volume of poetry, you’ll meet exhibitionists and sycophants, star-fuckers (some with obscene Obama crushes), Saul Bellow, Elvis, Batman, Mighty Mouse, LBJ—yes, LBJ! —Wallace Stevens: they’re all in there. Also, Thomas Jefferson, a big black stud Santa Claus, as well as a Sicilian hit man named Guido who gets everything coming to him, i.e.:

"Say hello, Guido.

"Why the hell not?

"Even Guido rates a greeting.

Hello, Guido. Calm the fuck down.

Unexpected, and energizing.

Indeed, with tongue rammed in cheek, or wide-eyed as a savant straddling a folding chair in a Greyhound depot, Lohrey delivers salvo after salvo of simple declarative gems, such as these:

"The country’s no dream factory, that’s for sure.

It’s no longer the Age of Aquarius…it’s becoming more and more like a trailer park brothel.

Stephen Dobyns (if you’ll indulge me now, the golden hat trick of reference quotes from the Boston master) has also said: One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

And, smack dab in the middle of all this prosodic wisdom, David Lohrey, mining another vein, asks: Do we still have a chance, or has our chance been lost?

David Lohrey is a deadly serious (and skilled) poet, who happens also to be a very funny man with a lot (I mean a helluva lot) on his mind.

This is excellent news for his fans, and for the readers who do not yet even know they are fans, for his fans who are yet unborn. I certainly plan to be on the lookout for more of his work, which should be coming right down the pike, carrying many knowing laughs, a lot of truth, and not a little bite…after all, the odds against society spontaneously healing itself anytime soon (thereby extending Lohrey the right to remain silent) are long, long indeed; they are in fact the slimmest of infinitesimal odds: one may rightly call them nonexistent. In the meantime, write on, David Lohrey. Write on.

Dennis Mahagin

2018

Poetry

The Arithmetic of War

The arithmetic of war…that’s why

Americans are poor at math. The peacekeepers

can’t be trusted. Charles de Gaulle and Thomas Mann

had it right. This is what I see and hear pa rum pum pum pum.

The arithmetic of war can’t be taught. This is how

the people live. There is nothing you can do about it.

You don’t expect death; it’s indiscriminate.

It’s the hap-happiest season of all.

We will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

He wants to make it new. Every Sunday is a picnic.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. I’m dreaming

of a white Christmas. It is time to make the journey, me and my drum.

.

New gardens must be planted—raised beds, no pesticides.

The rose is obsolete. There are no threats the ladybugs can’t

handle. The men will arrive tomorrow. They’ll be much

mistletoeing and hearts will be glowing.

The planting must continue. Cotton is wrong at many levels.

Replace the radishes with books. Melville, Faulkner and

Hemingway were the first Harlem globetrotters.

This is the recipe for a better world.

The nation has nothing to do with territory. Love’s got everything

to do with it. There will be no victory parades.

We’ll have to go into hiding.

They’ll be scary ghost stories.

The men must be told to stop crying. Women will have to

take up arms. Half the population may be annihilated.

People will once again learn to make fires.

They’ll be parties for hosting, marshmallows for toasting.

Silent night, holy night. All I want for Christmas

are my two front teeth. Do you see what I see?

I have no gift to give that is fit to give a king.

Do you hear what I hear? Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Bluff City

An idle tree wants cutting down.

If we apply the rules of thermo-

dynamics, growing radishes in one’s

back yard makes no sense. Let

it be raspberries on prickly bushes,

not dirty little roots in the ground.

This is a treatise on good sense.

Like Swift’s argument in favor of eating

children, mine is a defense of watching

too much TV. Let’s distribute footballs

to the redskins; let’s send the whites back

to Europe.

I once knew a fat chick named

Trish whose boyfriend knocked all

my teeth out. My braces held them

in place as the blood ran out of my mouth.

Even at 16, young men in the South

fight over women’s breasts; only in my

day, we called them tits.

Peaches bruise easily in the heat.

I wouldn’t leave the pool gate open

at midsummer. The neighbors might

walk in on an afternoon orgy. One

forfeits one’s right to privacy when

one makes oneself available.

I wouldn’t advise working for a company

that withholds anything, least of all

one’s lunch money.

Pecan pie is overrated, like a lot of

Southern dishes. Half of sales go

to tourists who haven’t a clue.

They’d buy a bottle of molasses

with a ribbon tied around its neck.

Hell, they’d go down on a dick painted

red. Most tourists are out-and-out liars,

like first-time home buyers and

presidential candidates.

The squealing never stops.

There’s a lot of commotion.

Our President’s been caught with his pants

down; our priests have stopped smoking.

My best friend built a yurt with a marble floor

and a padded cell for throwing tantrums.

The transformation is now complete.

The destroyers are triumphant; the victims,

silent; and the observers, transfixed. Is it

time for advancement or retreat?

I’d say, where are the people of color?

That’s always the question; or that’s the always

question.

Rose bushes will snag. They’ll catch if you don’t

watch it. It’s not just your stockings that’ll run.

Roses draw blood. I’d get to work, and while

you’re at it, prune the damned bird of paradise.

After that, you can head for the basement.

When all the work is done, you can lay your

head down in the oven.

Different strokes for different folks;

we are all part of this tale.

For reasons that cannot be easily

Explained; this author is distraught.

POTUS Interruptus

Donald J. Trump is often very good. What he is great at is being Donald—

the only one we will ever have. When he dies, any outpouring of affection

will come about because the American people feel he remains in some

indefinable way close to them, one of a kind but one of their own—a regular

guy who at heart just wants to be rich.

It’s easier to arrange an interview with the American POTUS

than it is with Tom Cruise. Is it true that he once slept with Arty Shaw?

Did he actually ghostwrite James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake?

Some believe so. In 2023, Trump just turned up grinning, almost swaggering,

at his private club. We shook hands. He declared that Melania was pregnant.

Much as I find The Art of the Deal entirely uninvolving and sometimes

close to obscene, the minute I met him, the minute I was alone in a room with

the Donald, I came unglued. All along, what we were getting wasn’t just

this or that great or perhaps even obnoxious tweet, but an idea of the President

himself: his charm, his boldness, his humor, and his desperation.

Trump has a striking talent for shaping luck or forcing chance, and for exploiting

his better half: there’s Ivana, his first wife, co-author Tony Schwartz, then VP

Pence, and his special assistant Kellyanne Conway. On one hand, he’s the nerveless

chess master; on the other, a man crippled by doubt, cocky but insecure, a man elated

by his personal rapport with foreign leaders.

The interview goes well. We start off in the penthouse at Trump Tower

but say our final goodbye at Grand Central Station where the former President’s

driver drops me. The now-empty Times Building down the street prominently

displays an enormous For Sale sign. My conclusion is this: if Trump smoked

Gauloises and drank