Open Arts Press, LLC
First Digital Edition
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Download Dan’s Book Here (Free!)

 

because once I awoke from a nap
to discover the bathroom rug on fire
I lifted it up
with smoke in my face,
threw it in the tub
and started the water
putting out the fire

– from “A Tub, A Cigarette, A Blank Stare” (46)

 

When I ran across the word “toblacko” in the poem “Negative Balance at the Flea Market Lice Market,” I knew I was reading someone I could have known back in the day. It’s not necessarily a common term. Some might mistake it for a typo. It’s not. “Toblacko” is the saved dregs of cigarette butts, cut out and saved to roll and smoke later. Understanding this is the key to understanding the poems in this digitally published collection of poems by Dan Flore III, who also earlier this year saw Jumbo Poetry published by Crying Heart Press and last year, Everything Must Go, published by Cajun Mutt. The great themes in Flore’s work are the everyday moments, the silent crushing moments, the things people don’t like to talk about, like what it’s like to live poor. There’s a way to do it and it’s one of those things that tends to get overlooked either with the usual Capitalist bootstrap bullshit or with an overly sentimental pathos. The term confessional might apply to some of the poems, but that’s only because he doesn’t shy away from any topic. When his poems address something painful, like having to choose between his parents in divorce court in “10 Year Old Judas at the Custody Battle,” his straight words and direct tone make you understand that memories aren’t just scars. Sometimes memories bleed in aeternum.

 

nobody’s niceties
could get one thing
out of my head though
that by making this decision
I was choosing one over the other (29)

 

The poetry of Dan Flore III sings differently in the world. Are they real? Yes. Do they eschew flowery language, in particular maybe words like eschew? Yes.  But the thing that truly separates Flore from the pack is the filterless way in which he approaches the world. Each of his poems is an open wound that’s reexamined, cleaned, bandaged, and opened again. As readers we’re given these moments of a child’s pain through the filter of an adult looking back at what he survived. In “If Tracy Chapman Were My Aunt,” the speaker writes about both the weight that come with having no choice but to escape and the need for verification that everything is going to be alright: 

 

and at the end of the night
Tracy Chapman would say
“so nephew Danny,
sounds like you’ve been doing a good job takin’ care of your mom.”

and lead me up the stairs
to put all of my tears
in her guitar case (30)

 

These poems ache and communicate that ache with precise, direct language; they’re lovely and sad and exist in a world in which everything is broken and some things heal, but not necessarily properly. 

-Mick Parsons