5 Poems by Catfish McDaris

Degas

Eight years after it reported stolen an

impressionist painting by Edgar Degas

was found by French customs officers


It was discovered inside a suitcase in

Marne-la-Vallee on a bus, none of the

passengers claimed it, the painting


Depicts a scene from Mozart’s opera,

Don Giovanni, called Les Choristes,

The Chorus Singers, it was shadowed


With grays, yellows, ochres, red caps

a man with an upraised sword, dancing

beautiful ladies, Paris’ Musee d’Orsay

were delighted to recover the masterpiece.



Leonardo da Vinci’s Honeymoon

The virgin

canvas lies

beneath me

in blinding

white ready

for love


It sighs

in anticipation

trembling

awaiting

my thrust


Our Mona

Lisa soon

to be

exposed

for the

curious.


The Secret to Life is Keep Sucking Air Until You Can’t


I’ve been playing the piano hard

It’s bleeding all over the floor

There are cracks in the ceiling

All the clocks in the galaxy have stopped

Your love is a giant termite

Turning my wooden leg into sawdust

Bring me a hummingbird, pretty mama

We’ll ditch all your granny panties.



The Fizz Is a Fading Bruise

I’m confiscating your

love tonight, we’ll feel

no sorrows for the to-

morrows, they may never

arrive dead or alive and

we’ll saddle our palominos

and disappear into the co-

balt lapis lazuli sunset.



Paris

Painted hyacinth and saffron with
brushstrokes of scarlet sulfur

peacocks in a raspberry sky,

green sleeping ducks by the
cattail forest and melodic stream

Rainbow cutthroat trout leaping
for the gnat hatch, fat frogs burping,
loons and cranes on stilts hunting

Vincent thought about the dancer
at the Crazy Horse and how she’d
asked him to steal a Van Gogh,
he painted her one instead.


Bionote

Catfish McDaris won the Thelonius Monk Award in 2015. He’s been active in the small press world for 25 years. He’s recently been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Polish, Swedish, Arabic, Bengali, Mandarin, Yoruba, Tagalog, Italian, and Esperanto.