Ghoti Magazine

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Rich Furman, PhD, is an associate professor of social work at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. His poetry has been published in Hawai’i Review, The Evergreen Review, Black Bear Review, Red Rock Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Penn Review, Free Lunch, Colere, Pearl, The Journal of Poetry Therapy, Impetus, Poetry Motel and many others. He has preformed his work throughout the United States, as well as in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Guatemala. His work has been described as “neither street nor beat nor meat nor academic, but an emotionally evocative mix of styles that can be brutally imagistic or powerfully terse.” His scholarly writing is concerned with social work ethics, international social work, friendship, social work theory, social work practice and the uses of poetry in social work and research. He has published a workbook on group practice and over fifty academic articles. He currently coordinates the social work undergraduate program. He is working on a 203 bowling average, enjoys mountain biking and single malt scotch. Mostly he just likes to live as fully as possibly and mess with the poem. He welcomes feedback, comments and dialogue about his work. Snorting Dog Press published two of his chapbooks, of only average intent, 2002 and Gleaming and Faded, 2003. He also has an e-book on the Internet Poet’s Cooperative website. Legitimate Press recently released a CD of his and James L. Smith’s poetry. He is currently seeking a publisher for three full length manuscripts. RichFurmanPhD@aol.com

-Rich Furman
	The Lost Salesman After James Tate for my father, 1937-? Your face still mulches like your mother's- she is dead, a specimen sample, she is a wind chime in Omaha. You cancer gone, luck, you vaguely sniff at living, a child downwind from a candy store. Your days are more frayed than rope and your face still mulches, the features disapproving and contorted. Dad, if I could cajole you to live for even a moment cease obsessive two hundred dollar pen-shopping, I would touch you, read your face as Nat your once best friend Orthopedist, how he fitted bone into bone, those who bled into asphalt. I would touch you, as a fascinated illiterate draws on a page of newsprint. However enlightening, I would still be perplexed by you, but I wouldn't inform them dad, that you were almost human. Your legacy would remain an angry, crabby spot. You could continue abusing store clerks, teaching ethnics about their proper heritage, teaching your attorney daughter about the law, throwing millions into worthless stocks or mini malls in central nowhere. I will pretend not to be ashamed. You will be right! All I know is this: when I peer into yours eyes, as I have done in dreams every night, you dancing down a childhood hallway a small Jewish Zulu Warrior. I feel you are dead- that I should eschew you as a stranger, pray I was born to crickets. My eyes drop to the ground, I conjure spines in the sidewalk, wish to lie down, sleep, and pretend that I what? Love you? That it was a mistake, my heart a cheated baboon, an aorta chocked by all the world? _________________________________________________________________________ But I Will Freud seems to have said a cigar is not just a cigar but I will tell you this: the whirling blades of this disposal will pulverize even first-flush Gykuro, grassy and poignant on the tongue, and I read Freud myself once, he professed to have found the path to delight. Love and work. And if this were true, my father, riding minivan backseated between his adopted granddaughters, is not a happy man. His work and love are pillions on this Iowa byway, his lips are quivering tanks, self-obsessed full metal. Take my wife of three years, he knows nothing of this woman he professes to love, or these children he covets like ornaments, unwrapped from crumpled tissues each year, and hung like too-red cherries in tropical drinks. Take this space in thickened air, take this whopping cough of summer, or the fissures he cannot face. Dad, I will love you more, with the bottoms of my soles, but I will pretend pretend pretend.
		_________________________________________________________________ Rich Furman, PhD, is an associate professor of social work at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. His poetry has been published in Hawai’i Review, The Evergreen Review, Black Bear Review, Red Rock Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Penn Review, Free Lunch, Colere, Pearl, The Journal of Poetry Therapy, Impetus, Poetry Motel and many others. He has preformed his work throughout the United States, as well as in Nicaragua, Mexico, and Guatemala. His work has been described as “neither street nor beat nor meat nor academic, but an emotionally evocative mix of styles that can be brutally imagistic or powerfully terse.” His scholarly writing is concerned with social work ethics, international social work, friendship, social work theory, social work practice and the uses of poetry in social work and research. He has published a workbook on group practice and over fifty academic articles. He currently coordinates the social work undergraduate program. He is working on a 203 bowling average, enjoys mountain biking and single malt scotch. Mostly he just likes to live as fully as possibly and mess with the poem. He welcomes feedback, comments and dialogue about his work. Snorting Dog Press published two of his chapbooks, of only average intent, 2002 and Gleaming and Faded, 2003. He also has an e-book on the Internet Poet’s Cooperative website. Legitimate Press recently released a CD of his and James L. Smith’s poetry. He is currently seeking a publisher for three full length manuscripts. RichFurmanPhD@aol.com