The Yellow River a Poem By Thomas L. Vaultonburg

I appreciate the poetry of Richard Brautigan quite a bit and was probably reading it when I wrote this poem.

Poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg working the counter at Maze Books in Rockford

The Yellow River

Disoriented by Vietnamese beer,

I enter the hot zone

Approximately four inches

South of my intended

Insertion point

And am repelled

By an aggressive

Guerilla resistance.

War is hell.

Thomas L. Vaultonburg is a poet, haikuist, editor, and publisher from Rockford, Illinois. He is the founder and editor of Zombie Logic Press and Zombie Logic Review and co-founder, with artist Tré, of Wolf Twin Books. His work ranges from haiku and short-form nature poetry to absurdist, comic, and surreal poems rooted in the strange details of everyday life.

Vaultonburg is the author of numerous collections, including Vanished Roads, Small Songs for Weary Travelers, Moonscape: Haiku Phase I, Flesh Wounds, Submerged Structure, and Atrocious Poems A to Z. His recent work increasingly explores the landscapes, wildlife, streets, abandoned places, and overlooked corners of northern Illinois.

A longtime admirer of Richard Brautigan, Vaultonburg has often been drawn to poetry that can be funny without surrendering its strangeness: brief poems, unlikely metaphors, conversational language, and jokes that open onto something slightly larger than the joke. “The Yellow River” comes from that side of his work—a small comic poem in which the inflated language of warfare collides with the considerably less heroic realities of the human body.

Vaultonburg lives and works in Rockford, where his poetry has also become part of collaborative books, public art projects, exhibitions, and other experiments in taking poems off the page and putting them back into everyday life.