Gerry LaFemina
Postcard to Tim Seibles from a Godzilla Movie Marathon
Brother Tim, Godzilla is just a man in a foam rubber suit. Those trains he steps on–just HO scale models, his left foot stomping through balsa wood buildings. Just a man. Haven’t I felt that large and bad ass? Haven’t you? Once, frustrated, my son picked up the locomotive of his train set and flung it. He was five. Just once, haven’t we felt that way: wanted wreckage and ruin, wanted to breathe out nuclear fire? Let’s face it, Tokyo’s not really burning, but we can find giant footprints off the harbor, at least how I imagine it. In the end, of course, Godzilla—Gojira as they know him in Japan—is a hero when he fights off Gigan or King Ghidorah. He bounds away all spondees toward the sea. Later he stands off camera with his co-star. I’ve seen photographs: she’s wearing a bikini, giggling. He’s still got the monster head on, like every method actor, staying in character.
Postcard to Peter Johnson from Point Pleasant, West Virginia
Peter, Everything here is about Mothman, which is to say everything here is about the prose poem. There’s a prose poem café. A prose poem festival. The prose poem, they say, has red eyes and ten-foot wing span. Witnesses place it at the TNT area. Mothman is no Big Foot, no Nessie. It’s real, the waitress insists. AC/DC low in diningroom’s speakers. I keep confusing Mothman with Mothra. Auto-correct keeps suggesting mother. My mother believes in angels̝̝̝̝—she has a collection of them. In Point Pleasant, some people suggest Mothman might be an angel, therefore the prose poem might be some lost text of the seraphim. At night, when the whole town pulls a comforter over the streetlights, you can hear bullfrogs belting out lullabies. The Mothman hunters stay silent. They see nothing. My mother has a collection of frogs, too. Angels, the waitress insists, sound a lot like frogs. Who am I to argue?
Postcard to Lynn Emanuel from the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Lynn, the light in the Steel City is a darkening indigo, and I’m sure you can see it, too, that color of dungarees in a night club. Here, they have a whole display case for Andy’s scarf and sunglasses, maybe even the ones he wore walking into Max’s Kansas City those nights you worked there. We’re equally a long way from Max’s and Kansas City, but the Warhol still celebrates the great Velvet Underground with t-shirts bearing Andy’s famous banana. Funny how we never meet for coffee when I’m in town. Funny how I’m sending this note only a few zip codes from here. By the time I was a rock n roll teenager, fake ID-ing into New York night spots, you’d quit that city, years before, and Max’s existed only in the stories told by older friends, closed for counterfeiting Ben Franklins by first bleaching dollar bills so the paper’d be correct. Mass produced copies: so Warholian in a way. Consider Elvis. Consider Mao or Marilyn. Those days, I’d move from punk rock to poetry and back again. These days I think how we’re all walking the same streets at different times—thousands of us. Ten thousands. Earlier, I ate in a diner that had butter mints by the cash register, and I took a few like so many others must have, like I used to do in diners all over the country. The candy became soft and crumbly on my tongue, the way language can succumb, the way memories fade, leaving only a subtle taste, a chalky, poem-like sweetness. Sometimes I’d stroll by that old storefront on Park Avenue South, and it’s as if the club never existed, the whole thing scrubbed from the city as if by Brillo.
Gerry LaFemina is the author of over 20 books across numerous genres, and he's edited or co-edited 10 anthologies. In 2025 Governor Wes Moore appointed him as a Councilor of the Maryland State Arts Council. He teaches at Frostburg State University and in the MFA Program at Carlow University.
