can we have our ball back?

2006-02-28T06:24:00.000-08:00

2006-01-26T21:20:00.000-08:00

2 Poems Evelyn Posamentier

BARCODE BLUES

snapshots have failed me

i'm forgetting what freedom means.

my medical records grind their teeth.

i fear i will never get off the train.

major acts of congress blur on the page.

more & more for sale signs appear on SUVs.

RFIDs, i love you.

i give you my brain, lesions & all.

the ending gives birth to me.

angels & ladders, ladders & angels.

RECIPE

FISA; foreign intelligence surveillance
act: in general terms my footing is tenuous.
i am asked to rebuild my credit
& this is only page 1 of 6 of the printout.
probable cause & palpable tremors
cannot stop the city, oh new garage
& jackhammer findings where the gas station
once was. what was superfund.
who will be invited to attend or ensure
that such discussion take place? minimize.
it erased every single email i had
in my box, that new program did.
the law specifies the findings
of the court must, the court must.
i keep going back to the message
as the ancients looked to the stars.

FISA deals with foreign powers & agents.
a determination as to probable cause.
i sent the premium in almost 3 weeks ago.
i had addresses but nothing else, nothing
saved. in order to issue an order
for electronic surveillance, the court
the court, the court must --
so please bear with me.
it specifies the findings the court must
should take into account
the reliability of any informant
where do you live?

2006-01-26T21:14:00.000-08:00

WILLIAM Mary Hickman

i.

Because he was so foreign, I bought a pretty boy with hooks & fists. His species sprouted pepper branches. Cities brought their split to heal.

      Spine-pointed bloom, sheath-white-William.

His cheek. A bridge. Ha, the stems of a bridge, she says. To be famous & quick I cut

it down. I cut it that morning & a tell-tale flush.

      He's god's r in pure sensation. Peeled his joints from the sand, knelt down to plant. In oil, in soil.

ii.

      Pigeon-breasted boy, I could flower

to the end of May. A foot mislaid the holes & pebbles of the beach. Birds covered over the gardens with dull red glass. We pray. I'll

flay him alive. His graceful palms embedded. My white greekly perfect. Hot webs

to touch a thing like this—wild-sweet-William buds

early. Studied prayer, hone

the gay birdsong

                   we begin to hear respired hums.

A peep of white touches the spot. William, she says.

Clean clean bloom along the head.

iii.

I grew his strap-shaped image in the tub.   Knobs—discs—cups sprung & cultivated a horn from the wreck of rib. I lashed the Sweet Bough to his head,                  Wealthy William.

He hauls a reef of skirt. William who lives, she says.

      His brain cries out in plenty. In habit. My fingers taper oval to hold

a pigeon's song of his. Drunk, what I said about the bud of ordinary god, "wood of life" & he'll wince.

iv.

Nuptial light in whitish bone: dense spikes

form the lady's crown. Hadesgreen—the shade, the toques—heron feathers for my thigh

& three fangs placed in his jaw for luck. We wed again. The calyx home, she says, & pry them off my eyelid.

v.

I could pile my stones to sprout or

graft garden junk from the stalk to the fall of William.  Devil break the red

hasp of your back, she says. All raised untidy palms to sun—white &

      blades & laid limp curled around the grass. Hand that was his. The seabirds pent into my cheeks.

Or I could pity

his buds carved

foxy on each kidney.    "Pearly everlastings."   Clap hands

& shoot inside his bulb, we pray.

WILLIAM WHO LIVES, SHE SAYS

i.

He could be big. He could be sung by rocks.

A bloody sound. His head in sun. Really a throb

from my owling throat. Hanging.

Praise from stones.

Junk he said to all them open-mouthed.

      William named my garden New York City. Then shoved me on my knees. With the suckers, the fat flowers which are

            the skirts of heavy walkers now bent

            in the garden. His women which are

            white ants which are termites which see.

ii.

Mismade him again, she says. Mislaid him. A two-celled sac borne on the stalk

his hands behind his back.  He grew profane

& big as a bottlefly. Bullfly. Covered

his left eye to wink at me.  His thousand

hands grown from his ribbed-for-my-

pleasure side. He yanked us down with a bang.

Deny the gods of the garden say. Their downy hands. Barang!

iii.

Love, tender as a beetle. It shoots down. It shoots

us down, pushing on the larynx. Pushed all our teeth back

& tongued the bark of our necks. Orchards of speech axe.

iv.

He performed a miracle is right.

Hush! Hush! Shut your goddamn mouths he said.

To plant him in the city full of prayer is to

chain him to the bar.

Tender oyster-gut of eyelids, heal us.

William     his ear to the bar     healed. His little finger

extended back

              begat (begged) wax from the crowd.

v.

Honey stop wrestling honey. I said I'd suckle for you. I said

I'd Sabbath and scatter the wafers for you. I sliced an orange root to see the kids inside. God's kids.

Weak dirt. But the rain wills trees.

WILLIAM, MY MAN

i.

A cave with arms at the mouth.

Our hero is blind: everything he hears he sees.

Hear! she says. Gold light sifts to his ear.

A roar. The seas

beaten—his duodenum, colon,

blind intestine and appendix, destined

for heat, they blush.

ii.

William's cabbage heart shook. He dragged

himself from the dirt.

If he could have rested his ears he could have seen

ginkgos in his city. The pretty boy I mean

& Will, who were both aging

with their senses curbed until they knew

New York City by root & by crack.

iii.

As if there is a fig tree rooted in heaven & each of its leaves knows all the rules.

8:45am hum: he saw the boy had fallen

into a manhole & the fig tree had fallen into a manhole

& neither could be the sound of hands splitting

gold hands landed

up the breadth of William's back.

god bleeding me a kind of blooded cry

my lady makes me a heron

or my leg for a stump

the cursed in the loam my

venomous thumbs my

His guts an a-readied muck, she says.

v.

If your hand had been dusk-

yellow not a lantern but winged

—a bridge or a dove sprung

from the dirt.

Trying to make a shape. The feathered

thumb herring-

bone. We would not fall.

vi.

I brought you in from the garden since I can't

stand the trees' visions. William you will

be there the last

stately in ribbons.

But the vision is a fattened glee.

The glee is a clubfoot.

The glee is a mutt.

The eyes sewn up the air & nothing can be seen

but visions.

You are burst sideways like a fist in water.

(Your maker staring into an apron of mud.)

Thou art

      bore a hole in the man.

Thou art

      not a bloody bit, not the man.

Then

2006-01-26T21:08:00.001-08:00

9/05
7/05
4/05
Archives
Moist Towelette

2006-01-23T21:12:00.001-08:00

2 Poems Sarah Coville

My Liver's Spoiled

dull organs in my throat becomes

irritating, acidic and making me

(dizzy- too much we consumed)

feel like someone i always spit unto

men on the streets asking us for

(no drugs, trust me)

food and something wet

between my legs like her cat

in the rain that we're stuck in

me, myself and judy; the girl i loved

How You Inspire Me

you brought a knife

to the gunfight

(clipped 'em like an alleycat, honey)

you fucking idiot

in a baggie now

(wet; please stop leaking)

above my bed

three streets from heaven

(where i should have buried my heart)

2006-01-23T21:12:00.000-08:00

2 Poems Sarah Coville

My Liver's Spoiled

dull organs in my throat becomes

irritating, acidic and making me

(dizzy- too much we consumed)

feel like someone i always spit unto

men on the streets asking us for

(no drugs, trust me)

food and something wet

between my legs like her cat

in the rain that we're stuck in

me, myself and judy; the girl i loved

How You Inspire Me

you brought a knife

to the gunfight

(clipped 'em like an alleycat, honey)

you fucking idiot

in a baggie now

(wet; please stop leaking)

above my bed

three streets from heaven

(where i should have buried my heart)

2006-01-23T21:07:00.000-08:00

2 Poems Sarah Coville

My Liver's Spoiled

dull organs in my throat becomes

irritating, acidic and making me

(dizzy- too much we consumed)

feel like someone i always spit unto

men on the streets asking us for

(no drugs, trust me)

food and something wet

between my legs like her cat

in the rain that we're stuck in

me, myself and judy; the girl i loved

How You Inspire Me

you brought a knife

to the gunfight

(clipped 'em like an alleycat, honey)

you fucking idiot

in a baggie now

(wet; please stop leaking)

above my bed

three streets from heaven

(where i should have buried my heart)

2006-01-23T21:05:00.000-08:00

6 Poems Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

Short fiction

The crucial diary
His dirty breath
All that fits into the sack
(so we stop here)
Self deflation flagellation, defection
Fragile as your happiness
The classes of society
"I don't think I'd know what to do with a girl if I fell over one"
He sees her laid out in a satin-lined coffin, in the same flowered housecoat
instead
Of her usual sluttish makeup
Perhaps because he had already lived the scene
Out in his mind
Each black half note to perfection

And upstairs on the after deck

But never mind the accident, let us turn back again to the morning

That's what the people of Mariposa saw and felt that summer evening

Tom's Gift

The time it takes
to unwrap his gift
practically dead in the ocean staying
forever a girl we
used to shower together every evening
&
fondle each other in the dark before
the rest of the family wake the
ship comes in

Tom tried
to coax the horse into freezing water twice
before he slips the barrel into her
feeling her movements not
seeing her
the pivotal surge of power nearly too much
for him
after washing the smell
from his skin with castile soap

Fly

Animal husbandry marking
starker times

*the sad crippled fly in the ointment*
caught above

the inflated earth. better not to know what
signals the sounds intend

it is better not to
know what signals

is it better not
to know what
signals the sounds

is better without intentions, sounding

since I came to this place
forgetting why i came

since this place forgot signaling

forgot what you said
it forgot you
that's what

you said it forgot you

no i never said so

*the sad crippled fly is its ornament*

In general

(1)

*. . . wilt-
ing on
buses and trains with only the hint of a
tear upon close inspection, which
may not be noticeable given loud clothes
and buzzards circling overhead
wouldn't THAT...

as i was saying...(the rest is muffled)

(2)
when i was split in 2
used illegitimately

Viewer discretion advised

(3)
all signs pointing in your direction

a folding fan fondling you

the bride price in its automaticity

pressed up against the glass

(4)
clothes the woman closed the woman
also pass
and cheap hotels

Everybody needed a top
secret or narcissist of compelling power
serving generous helpings

to pose no additional threat

space astonishing outward...

In summation
of course we have not been authorized to do that
of course the wind stretches the land
of course hanging by the thread that loggers cut
of course fear painted on our face

yet demolition time fate of birds' rainwater
yet roof caves in as flowers
yet the walls are lost where they are do you know
yet i filtrate the mob

however the trees are placed
however do not ask me again
however i sign my name
however did you not hear me the last time

alas you walk towards the door
alas the animal trapped in the tunnel
alas we ate it w/shiny faces
alas plucking up the piece that flew away in the breeze

furthermore ran away with/out thinking
furthermore took my thought and hid it a broken suitcase in the attic
furthermore tongue mistep cannot find it
furthermore bar stool upon which beer is spilt

in sum log which you split stabbed you
in sum fire that you lit saved you
in sum no time for slogans
in sum the moon the one moody or just mad

Season's greetings

"voided meaning"
"holding her breast"
"an instrument for black stars"
"when i bloodied my head"
"which cannot be settled"
"though the right moment has not yet come"
"having formless grace"
"eyebrows fetid"
"to hide the"
"must wear their own faces"
"let's turn now to the videotape"
"the bearded man took me to the rodeo"
"hip hop vocal"
"matter without edge"
"they spin their nests"
"#$%&`*?!"
"the females are screaming"
"the big animals are"
"bristling like porcupine quills..."
"touch me lightly!"
"the first one is not"
"lizard making its way across the wall over her head"
"...a close look at"

2006-01-23T20:19:00.000-08:00

3 Poems Bruce Smith

SONG OF X

Like the inmate, X, doing time in Lewisburg

A great inverted pyramid of ignorance

who wrote the pimp fictions in which he's the mack

indentured to enchantment or god

in jodhpurs and a derby moving through the streets

built brick by brick, coming into knowing

of his dominion in a blizzard of angel dust, bebe, crack

or the jolt of not knowing, but the fat chewed, the dirt

and quaaludes with a little sompin' sompin' in his waistband and

dished, the shit shot and then the point of the delta comes

a little taste for the ladies wacked up

crashing down on your heart. The end. You're better off

on a mirror, because style is all and the hustle is

for it. The question was why is time

a way to ramble, slow

afflicted for you. Why the nick in the

slower, slowest through the amber

fiction? Terrifying once upon a time

that's the press of the all, the fossil

the chagrin of leaving Eden

parables and shackles of the master/slave

that aristocracy with trickle down and don'ts

I loved the language pushed through the fangs

The story hurts. Your own story

of the needle. I hated the style

of love and sedition and shame

the made-for-TV, jailhouse, convict vainglory

tedious and self-incriminating

Where was the story of the last ten years

The beauty and the butchery

that began when my father lost an arm in Florence

that began with the deep-fried details of

South Carolina when the car fell off the jack

the fathered illness, demon possession, the spill of guts

then he packed us up in the station wagon

that was you conveyed by agents

and drove to Philadelphia to my uncle's

one pronoun after another

and got a job in a garage changing tires

like a hacked up child from the Brother's Grimm

with one arm and my mama fenced

the story of your blood and recovered

TV's and radios . . . I hustled home

guilt. Sometimes I was a changeling

in my hounds tooth sport coat having praised the authentic –

and sometimes a bird singing

pain to necessity to a handgun to a felony

in the tree branch the song of my murdering

and checked the inauthentic

Entering is ending

the spangled dream and need while doing time

Think of the Israelites, Ellis Island

One made a crime of the story

I love you, that story

The other made a story of the crime

of inordinate need and boundaries blown down

And I was a slave teaching slavery to slaves

the beauty of that

and the beauty was I was wrong

SONG OF THE RACE TRAITOR

Then the skin became our mystery

Any huckleberry or galaxy or nerve

and not just the horn, hoof, and hair

jangling, any ghost raging, a vague system

the dead surface under which

like the spectrum, the stock market, and

the new cells brood and brush up against

tort law to pull the strings of the future

and then everyone's Petrarch

which we believe, if we're white

rhyming about the wound, the man, the beloved

is a blue sky and a machine that works for us

sadly, we're such sensitive creatures

noiseless, well-oiled, well-riveted

the skin a sad machine

although given to failure like love

the skin made of elegies and airplanes

I sing this song because I have

the skin made of artificial intelligence and

a very big mouth, the chops, and the

self control and over dubbing

self like an organ. I'm loud and I get around

skin of circuitry and credit

and I'm humbled because I can be

skin of leisure I can climb into and sleep

SONG OF THE SUPPOSED PERSON

Once I was a man, then another

You and what rhymes with you

one a whip, a skinned switch, the other

a kangaroo among the beauty

a mass of slow twitch thickness

said Dickinson, nothing mimed her inside

where the itch was

or the vision and horizon outside her window

I made a sound

that rhymed, nothing rhymed

like who as I brought it down

with paradise

on myself and a man said O

everything with domain and plane

Then the glamorous, duplicitous glow

of the agony of moving

of the poem like the photographer's flash

she was my Virgil

the outrage of our faces, our desire

of the horror, of the refusal

caught, tricked, because art

she was my Beatrice

to mean something must hurt

is my Beatrice as her tenses are present

And I want to see the wound

past, future, her faces adorable

And I demand to see the wound

2006-01-23T20:16:00.000-08:00

6 Poems Julie Doxsee

BUT A FLOOD OF TOWN

arias soar the blurry bed of oil

for a mouth saying Yes over &

he mimics the spirit-turned-

fluid as in when I am your woken

body I am your woken body wilted.

WELDED FROM NARROW HEIGHT

This moving playground of corals
traps heat a hot stare curls.

All silver platter petals
etched on the window you love.

You splash my tea, hello, stillness is
how I still the surface muscles.

He says the feminine one whose hand
waved a million miles drives far.

MATCHING PILLOW TO THE BACK

Silver shadows under a jacket half-shed as shadows push your chest.
I am born with a superhero cape.
In case of shock, wean it closely like rabbits.
We use old fixtures for noticing an old box that poofs lighter granules of air.
This is enough reason to love whomever unlocks the seat, eyes on the previous air.

THE DULL PERFUME OF NOON

His fire happened two buildings down at three.
Her bone-form amasses new lung pain
underneath bluish halos because
in silver shadows there are breathing mice
to sift the yard for
leaves, browsing.
The way he almost made a mountain a death
one grandmother says: we still breathe
sky material until I live today.

A SINGLE CRACK ON THE MAP OF SLEEP

accept a crease in sing-songed ear because
these are for desire. shapeshifters listen in there
afraid when the day is cold it pollinates the shape
of the first horse they wriggled in.

SPACE A HARDNESS IN

We let silence speak into day's foot

to prove heads-tails diffuse her

little death, omni eye & oyster

the desert spiders loom around.

Hence if the breathy ends of her forget

the silk nerve relaxes

I saw it above the rib.

2006-01-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

3 Poems Bruce Smith

SONG OF X

Like the inmate, X, doing time in Lewisburg

A great inverted pyramid of ignorance

who wrote the pimp fictions in which he's the mack

indentured to enchantment or god

in jodhpurs and a derby moving through the streets

built brick by brick, coming into knowing

of his dominion in a blizzard of angel dust, bebe, crack

or the jolt of not knowing, but the fat chewed, the dirt

and quaaludes with a little sompin' sompin' in his waistband and

dished, the shit shot and then the point of the delta comes

a little taste for the ladies wacked up

crashing down on your heart. The end. You're better off

on a mirror, because style is all and the hustle is

for it. The question was why is time

a way to ramble, slow

afflicted for you. Why the nick in the

slower, slowest through the amber

fiction? Terrifying once upon a time

that's the press of the all, the fossil

the chagrin of leaving Eden

parables and shackles of the master/slave

that aristocracy with trickle down and don'ts

I loved the language pushed through the fangs

The story hurts. Your own story

of the needle. I hated the style

of love and sedition and shame

the made-for-TV, jailhouse, convict vainglory

tedious and self-incriminating

Where was the story of the last ten years

The beauty and the butchery

that began when my father lost an arm in Florence

that began with the deep-fried details of

South Carolina when the car fell off the jack

the fathered illness, demon possession, the spill of guts

then he packed us up in the station wagon

that was you conveyed by agents

and drove to Philadelphia to my uncle's

one pronoun after another

and got a job in a garage changing tires

like a hacked up child from the Brother's Grimm

with one arm and my mama fenced

the story of your blood and recovered

TV's and radios . . . I hustled home

guilt. Sometimes I was a changeling

in my hounds tooth sport coat having praised the authentic –

and sometimes a bird singing

pain to necessity to a handgun to a felony

in the tree branch the song of my murdering

and checked the inauthentic

Entering is ending

the spangled dream and need while doing time

Think of the Israelites, Ellis Island

One made a crime of the story

I love you, that story

The other made a story of the crime

of inordinate need and boundaries blown down

And I was a slave teaching slavery to slaves

the beauty of that

and the beauty was I was wrong

SONG OF THE SUPPOSED PERSON

Once I was a man, then another

You and what rhymes with you

one a whip, a skinned switch, the other

a kangaroo among the beauty

a mass of slow twitch thickness

said Dickinson, nothing mimed her inside

where the itch was

or the vision and horizon outside her window

I made a sound

that rhymed, nothing rhymed

like who as I brought it down

with paradise

on myself and a man said O

everything with domain and plane

Then the glamorous, duplicitous glow

of the agony of moving

of the poem like the photographer's flash

she was my Virgil

the outrage of our faces, our desire

of the horror, of the refusal

caught, tricked, because art

she was my Beatrice

to mean something must hurt

is my Beatrice as her tenses are present

And I want to see the wound

past, future, her faces adorable

And I demand to see the wound

SONG OF THE RACE TRAITOR

Then the skin became our mystery

Any huckleberry or galaxy or nerve

and not just the horn, hoof, and hair

jangling, any ghost raging, a vague system

the dead surface under which

like the spectrum, the stock market, and

the new cells brood and brush up against

tort law to pull the strings of the future

and then everyone's Petrarch

which we believe, if we're white

rhyming about the wound, the man, the beloved

is a blue sky and a machine that works for us

sadly, we're such sensitive creatures

noiseless, well-oiled, well-riveted

the skin a sad machine

although given to failure like love

the skin made of elegies and airplanes

I sing this song because I have

the skin made of artificial intelligence and

a very big mouth, the chops, and the

self control and over dubbing

self like an organ. I'm loud and I get around

skin of circuitry and credit

and I'm humbled because I can be

skin of leisure I can climb into and sleep

Now

2006-01-23T19:45:00.002-08:00

Julie Doxsee Bruce Smith Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
Sarah Coville Mary Hickman Evelyn Posamentier

2006-01-23T19:45:00.001-08:00

2005-09-11T22:42:00.000-07:00

Joyelle McSweeney

First Poem for the Catastrophe

Today, a woman crusted in salt. A cape, a carapace, it could be cracked away. The flesh now falling like running down a road. Dead luscious. Lemon eyes. Look of blind bike wheels. A cut out slim image on a screen of pain, eye in the palm of her hand. (Do you see another world in this word.) It’s a trick eye; blame her. She spent too much time in the mine.

Salt-carts remain an exact perfect for carting tourists through the mine. Awl punch. Blind tickets. The guide describes the view. In this chamber, an exact replica of the surface: sidewalk, workstop. This is the front of your first home, balcony. This is a view from the car. Here are hundreds of indistinguishable classrooms, parking lots. And here the flora before the people arrived, the margin of marsh ground. Marshy with time.

The handcarts hauled by women through the Peopled Wilderness. Like

after me, the foam cooler. Inside: the working body

through the tide. Suitcase rifts from one hand. Terrible angle of the baby is the angle of history, tugged towards the shelter raking its eyes over the gulf-green sky.

Does anyone know where the Mine’s gone does anyone know how long the mine’s been gone

The dead shrimp reprieved from the docks, grey veins splitting white, like the seeing fingers of the blind into the floodrush. What sights do they palpate spectacular, split pinwheel rooves of the merry-go-round, diamond hustlers, six-foot bivalves of the shell Oil signs, snaking pump-depths of our shallow signatures. dead hands and back. dead feat.

If you get in that bathhouse before me
Wait in the tub
I’ll be creeping past the watchtower
Tuh give you the rub
If you get in the tub before me
Save me some gin
I’ll be waiting in the district
For that ship to come in

We come blind up out of the mine light into lye-light. Soap white. I can’t see for the white, I can’t stomach more than a t-shirt in this heat, and now I’ll wear these plastic sandals into the afterlife and you’ll know me by my sweat feet/bloodprints.

Where is the see-with-disks. Where are the see-through-tubes. The towers and the satellites The heights and distances that permit vision. Make a pinprick on the map and draw the light. Collect the blood that runs out and mix it with rain water in the full of the moon. (The water is white with lead.). Tie a yarn to your needle and sweep it round. This represents the safezone in the sweep sweep of the tide.

Don’t go inside.

Take no action.
Take no action til the full of the moon.

Can you wait for it. Can you make a caul or a cowl for it. How wide can you cut this cloth. How high can you sweep the rug. Sweet rushes for my bodybag. Wonderbread. Goodyear tires. The throttle neck of the six cans. Glad bags. Glad. Lord it’s glad and it’s good.

And if my left hand don’t know what my right hand knows
My left hand don’t know what my right hand knows
My left hand can’t clap without my right hand, Lord

My right hand will raise up without me. The thumb and first finger in the shape of the eye, three stiff fingers, a crown of flight feathers.

Second Poem for the Catastrophe

She’s got a whorl in her hand where she grabbed for it, now she’s marked with it.
That’s how you’ll know her if you find her [out].
Whorl in her hand like: God’s eye, weather eye.
Currently piled with pink soap in the ladies
Water is no longer shuttling down the drain. The drain does not apply.
It does not apply [itself]/She does not apply [herself] [to] for
“indifferent first to school and then to her job, her person, the persons of her two minor children”
first person, second person, and then the two third persons
Scuttling of strange trees above the peaked Bible roofs
The thicket of unPeopled Wilderness this is lostness
Leave to let go into the scarf of foam (the scarf of form—time to learn it’s planless, long thing, shape of lemon on your tongue, punching the face closed)
Abed in the barracks
The scrub pine of individualism twisting on the beach
needled hand that holds nothing, at least not tonight
Marked for life, marked out for [a] life [of].
At night the stars take the shape of geese and arrows
All signs point away
billions served in a light year ten thousands applied for

All babies like a flashlight
Here’s mine with a light in her hand, she presses her fingers over it and her hand turns red.
That’s the truth of it, baby. Vessels of red.
One game day I saw a baby reach for a lighter and start to spark
‘That’s not a flashlight, baby, that’s not a flashlight.’ his daddy said.
But what was it, he didn’t say.
Some people are careless. I’m made of cares.
What do you think I want for my child.
I thought I’d take him out in onehundred degree heat and press him up against a chainlink.
I thought I’d stand for three hours in a line to buy a gun to guard our house and car against these ugly people.
I thought I’d sit him on a couch to watch the dilating flood push up more and more needy people.
I thought I’d take him to watch the President fan his white hand over the crowd
Out swimming with the silverfish all tail and no body.
Enough sardines to fill a can
When Popeye squeeze the spinach out I get the extra bite
I get to gulp the righteous sweatdrop leaping from his brow
As he prepares his sacrifice. As his brace of trumpets blares
As the President’s mother says, it’s working out quite well for [me.]
As the First Lady says, it’s just what [I’d] expect.

I don’t know what heaven will be like
But I’ve got a sense that the world undersea
Is all carefully ordered, colorful ranks of seahorses
Pulling teacup chariots in which the white king sits.
His hair spread out like a storm front.
Yes, the man got there first.
Even there, even there.
To man the coral reef and witch cave and the cool sand castles.
To hang his picture in all the frames.
His Palais de Art is really something
Small enough to fit on your dresser-top
Where are the real fish
pounded flat with both eyes on one side of their head
Can’t talk but out of the one side now
They’re blessed, they got the stroke of honesty
Lifeless on the frozen belt
Open in surprise

Third Poem for the Catastrophe

O
melting rainbow that embrace this roof
O
persistent covenant
hangs around
giving us nothing, leaves its muck in the water
expects us to be knocked out by its fine colors
weren’t you nothing too, weren’t you
sea bottom
crunched down into fuel.
and when that eggshell roof busts through
mama’s gonna buy you
a rainbow ride for free
an illumination, an inflammation
hyperion flame headdress
dream pins in the fuel
balloons of Koolaid burst down to cool
the sticky baby’s head
plus a credit card a glock a new bible
a princess dress
a mermaid princess dress
so you’ll be twice submerged
or an erased Indian princess
pajama set now go to sleep

Fourth Poem for the Catastrophe

In another place an insectoid mask of math vision split a gridded mouth piece mesh for ears a sifting in and a silting out communication a shifting of fluids from station to station to cup a drawing of power that stymies us

well that cup has certainly runneth over.
send the bulldozers in.

it travels through the air it travels through wires on the surface of the highway on the sides of boats it blossoms like cancer on the faces on billboards now chindeep and tilting a whooping crane wringing through the air with a cancer on its leg a seagull with virus colors on its shoulders everything corrodes and collapses communication exchange reciprocity help

the bureaucrat is now the most famous man in America thousands died for him
to secure a job in consulting

the walnut table is hard as a coffin
the oak sideboard is basso profundo
the sheen is thick and removable at extra cost
the dark in the room is a houndog layer
sealed into storm light like a raft on water
there’s a picture of his wife in a dog spit chair
she folds her hands on the heads of her grandchildren
if you criticize this child you’ll get an earful from me
who cares about the earful rip my whole ear off
you dogs if it’ll make this [you] all change

if you withdraw from it you have to pay into it
what you subtract from it you’ll add back into it
did the damage come from the ears or from the rain
the bodies busted at the middle to sit at the table
the winds come out one end and go right back in the other the wires
the emblem stitched onto the sportshirt breast
some mother sewed right through her thumb
and the scar’s embossed with this
emblem of state
orders are fuzzing out above the city
a manmade cloud ceiling stuck up with flame
fire at the cord bank! the fiber optic dangling chains
baked now
should be buried in the bank if we could find the edge
of the neighborhood
or the body or the city.

if there’s a silver lining to this now it’s
nothing.
if the people can see the problems in the nation now
nothing.
if starting over will mean a brand new order then
nothing.

nothing.
spread out the problem and get in lines.
what solve everything is time and tide
time and tide
leave no man behind

2005-09-11T19:45:00.000-07:00

2005-09-10T20:53:00.000-07:00

5 Poems Maureen Alsop

Spontaneous Telegram

Dear Monkey face,

I write because my mind

is too hot to speak, is crowded and awake, mourns

constantly this vivisection from heart.

I’m taking you in stranger. You, with your crotch mouth

and hangman’s lisp. Yes, my ribs knew your ribs once,

at least once, fiber

to snatch gullet and back again.

You with your bushy beard and earthy thoughts

you think you think. I’m fond

of the way my interior smiles, sees you, greets you

whole.

Oh dear monkey face,

with your second paunch annihilated,

the wrong genetic code has entered,

has too, the magpie.

If I could only speak of what your eyes said,

fragments of bone those eyes. Carousels of fire mounted

on a spindle horse riding into darkness, your eyes.

I, still dreaming, wake and am still dreaming. Dream

of soapsuds and scuffle boards. Let me see you unclothed,

just your skin and your soul.

One at a time I pluck mysterious stars

from your hide, blank in their cave of sky.

I have come to you in tenderness, fed your hump.

I have come, mid ocean

to open my victory body and grind you in. I come

undone like gray teeth, pull proctored from skull.

This year, sequestered, bland, mimics

my mouth. My mouth is a bucket of nails, each day,

like a shock against hammer, breaks

your incisors down. Slightly forward each day

moves in me. As do you.

Vernacular of Snow in Summer

Over my dinner plate’s strewn nebulae

of breadcrumbs, wild summer wrens

pick fresh the freshly picked. Then move off—aborted

somewhere between flies and cloud.

Since your death, in parts of my life, light

imitates scragging boughs of pine. The sound of a chair

pushing back from the table is the unshakable voicelessness

of snow—this, an almost tenderness. Before the sky

hatches open into a delirious dark, I am lathered

in the smell of village heat, smell of cardamom, brine, amber—

snatched by malingering bells sounding too close, sounding

like the shape of distance. And along the playa, pelicans

smash ribbed beaks into oceanic currents and waves

pulse with a seam of white.

Nightingale Habit

He never ceases his music. And for this reason

I am determined to dream and not to wake

even the single eye of a slow worm, since

my waking is a thorn pressed sharply

to his breast. He revolves all night

through abundant counties, secrets,

shy meadows. I have witnessed him

soar over a small square of light, once

at noon.

And I know of a field— radiant

with midnight stars—where his scattered notes

slip through winter grasses. I hear

his song. That reminds me.

There is a little window across my chest,

inside stands a lion. A woman nuzzles her throat

against his bristled mane

and he has shown her

his curved teeth.

Spinnaker Shift

Twice this winter I deceived myself. The doves,

hard worn by the desert saltpan had vanished. But I woke

to hear them cooing on the roof like little gurgling drums.

It was as if I’d sailed through a portrait of a storm— staggered sails

slapped backward through ink-spun shipyards—and a tremulous

flutter of feathers hung in the air. Later

darkness fell across the afternoon; the milk gray sky

swirled and wrinkled. That same winter

drops of snow wrested themselves

down into a sheet of pewter. There comes a deathtime

when the world makes strange. And love winces

before her water breaks. Now I have begun

being a parent to myself. Right now

the room is not too cold for me; I cross it

without the laden sting of ice.

Wolf in My Glass

He is staring.

He is charming.

He is posturing his improbable lure.

When I say wolf I mean the gulp that is unending,

the crime that is so friendly.

Is this death or is he howling?

I am sightless. Scowling.

I am foam and footstep through his slosh.

Yes he knew this course, even without scheming.

Yes he knew my breasts would soon be squealing in his lungs.

He is fresh and thieving.

He is tight in my sick logic,

towering his smash against my teeth.

2005-09-08T19:06:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Jessy Randall

Rich People's Umbrellas

Rich people's umbrellas
look different from my umbrellas.
They have fancier umbrellas.
They have cats and other shit on their umbrellas.
Like sometimes I see umbrellas
with little cats holding little umbrellas
on them. This makes me want to take all the umbrellas
and stick them up the rich people’s
umbrellas.

Potato Fingers

A disappointed and singed tale climbs over
potato fingers, sticky porcupine quills
(someone spilled Kool-Aid on the porcupine)
and falls into a pool of what’s so obvious:

first spring days, before I ever knew you
when the air smells like melting snow and
the kids run out of school to the buses

Fat Arms Haiku

fat arms fat arms fat
arms fat arms fat arms fat arms
fat arms fat arms fat

2005-09-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Brien James Dawson

Japan has come back to claim her style

What was once
drips of water
from a dipped sword
has become
a giant robot
made of lions

Japan has come back to claim the Haiku.

Page Seven, solipsism and Marriage

She didn't marry mere man, but a serf,
Someone to rake the bad moments in piles
And rise with the cockcrow to brew coffee.

Have you ever been blinded by butterflies,
Swarm of her eye and mouth around you
Flicking on and off, offering leaf and limb?

A country besieged in bed sheets,
Her motherland exposed-
A battle ground, convincing him
She is Stalingrad, fight for me.

What will become of me
When I can no longer
Turn her on?

2005-09-07T17:38:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Shira Dentz

Babble

Suddenly I’m let out.
Something
first: images
rinse me in their saliva
the way a cat licks itself clean,
section by section.
It’s a matter of hygiene to know who you are.
Did you notice someone pluck
a few air-dried things
off the clothesline for you, out back?
A barely noticeable line flickers past.
Morning sprouts heads and tails,
as do cut earthworms.

Ovule

A sunflower seed
hulled,
a tear

pinioned between two fingers;

the shade of barked tree,
bone.

•

You have a tip like the citron
pointed during Succoth to the four directions:
two poles, sunrise, and sunset.

A tip like a nipple, bird beak, tooth,
but I know it’s your navel,

and where an umbilical root might have rested
along the center of your underbelly

is now a crook;

if you were a boat,
passengers would sit in this scar.

Ice

How to empty:
stuff your hand as into a chicken, removing giblets.
or slip your hand as if you’re wet clay on a wheel.

Ice on windows,
wedding dress swatches, lace,
bread, rice, pasta, potato,
tear-shaped throat drops.
Bright sun on houses,
you’d think warm.
Sun moves to the right, legs.
Light a fly.
Can’t see it circle anymore,
shadows spreading.
When I finish the laundry
in the scheme of things,
how like ants we are
Light carousels round the apt.
No sex,
the white of no desire.

2005-09-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Kristin Hatch

little

remember when we found that spine
lodged behind the sun’s trachea & fenced the clouds for dibs

nature liked us like whimsy nieces,
auntie always playing dead

we were see-through then,
eager for mud
& the misadventures of the angel zoo –

how to grow thighs thick w/tender

we kept knocking on the glass of elephant grief,
anxious for a word that said like ‘cathedral’

alone at night in winter, in a sign language city

i keep taking pictures of arches.

more so, forearm

first, the hand:
a mechanism for want-digit spread,
real-live science machine
bent physics of scapegoat and claw

method feeds then to/feeds into

hypothesis, an elbow:
collateral pythagorus
a and b and c
a function of unfinished architecture

the give between bends, pause a little
linear valley of soft hairs and comma
muscle, a theory of desire and peacock

once in the park, you gave me a pinecone &
i brushed a fly from your forearm

research: tracing paper, a skinpage or maybe

flesh, in the marrow of our trochlear once-ago
i find conclusion slaving please at the structure
this alter, so coyly a creature of experiment

it leaves me still &
gluttoned for its tame

2005-09-04T23:03:00.000-07:00

Robert Fernandez

from The Poker Book

i.

Celerity. Trees are cuffed, or smoke at at their tips for the very cloud of what is permitted. Apatriates. And the blinding gun of a formality makes it easier to fix the attention on the center -- the center eye doesn’t want to close and this is where textiles, fashion, designers move to play. Trees in pavement. The hard hand, elegance eaten up and carried away by rats with iodine eyes. Sepal, she held herself on the lightening branches, curtained by need.

ii.

The light’s been an asterisk, some dusted glass to be driven upon and we have not discussed the priest's laurel / Compton. Health and irregular wreaths are the first in line. Summer draws filial lines in an obsessive preoccupation -- a differential slumber. Lumber, the chop of the peacock’s fan, excise and e-vanesce. The boy, necessarily white and dressed in cloven rose, sees his face out of his face.

iii.

Property is a volume, volute, similar to a property smokes volume if you listen. That a striated wing can be used as currency -- which was news. That the flotilla are round and infinite in number. That the washboard of omniscience has a bone to pick -- just fine, c’est la vie. Morning, round as a telephone booth in which you are assured to all that surrounds you, takes the light of your pyramidal gaze and turns it into a flag.

iv.

Little roses -- fast as children, gliding, welcome memorandum through the missile doors of an other. Welcome as settings of broken bones, as an ornithologist reaches flight. Notres of your byway, pack of lovers, afterthought of the rifle’s crack. All this is easiest, what skirts and tumbles and makes matters embarrassing is the informal hopscotch you play. Clearly, a child and always-is a child. As rose, you stand limited.

vii.

The wisteria of the club clasps the lips. The head of the spade follows up in its golden bough to insufflate -- what? Glass nanos, crumbs of the dove cartel. Pure as the driven, sleek as eucharist. Holy.

vi.

A rich translation considered by many -- Robaud via. Adonis -- to be clear as a mound builder’s aunt-hill resonance, utterly striking, neuvo, pure as the nature of temptation, wild as vineyard. The name, slow like a god, glancing up from the tile, and had a Swedish name. Its straw hat like eternity itself was alive.

v.

I knew the notes -- exactly which / who would be acted upon. The poker is wonderful, really, I do stand to correct myself but all the necessary elements are there. It is not as easily strange shoehorn, fierce as hyena, an anomic horn. When will it be time? Each, on its own, was a failure. . .

viii.

Has no fear --magesiu, shocks to make it even, your vowel -- Good! can’t say much else / respond to that. . .The rosin’s discussed. The felt of the billiard is like an organ -- the trumpet is well maintained and nothing speaks of need. These arrow heads, lucky to stand at the alter: veil, and a shotgun tree infected by wind.

ix.

The separatism of my number, which portends and expands nothing, which is a shuttle of blue glass riding the attention of a boy who’s gold earring has caught on the snow. Then it’s too soon to have a name for this, wait until the others see -- let them tell you -- thinking is ill-advised. Tromp l’oiel, a spread of the bones and sheer luck. Noted: a wisdom cornered without a mind; noted: a cartel of the sorcerer.

note:

pure as the nature of tempetation is Ashberry

Arrivant

Arrange the world so there is more singing in Shona
Less singing in Ndebele --

Which is a personal predilection
As hell is a private predilection

A bulldozer, voile, a rainbow thatch
There is silence in the exhausted theater

A macaw fed to a posse of wearwolves
And little hope of escaping the island

An angel shows its blade and Aha!
-- We’re getting somewhere, all this work

Evanescence of a dial tone,
Signal of an open scallop shell --

All of this was not in vain.

2005-09-03T19:27:00.000-07:00

4 Poems Amish Trivedi

Desire is an acid soaked wand

I need her smile because it brings burden along:
it reaches for and carries the clearing tune.
Underneath the day’s wild refuge,
we clamor for the nightly façade,
as it is to spell out doom in quicksand bursts.
I used to dream of her short-haired,
strong legged grasp,
for the shining night they wrapped me
up in their clammy embrace.
And to show the light fancy,
I stepped through the burning shadows of midnight walls
with closed eyes that volunteered.

I spot out a honey-dipped frame,
wasting on top waves of deaf foam.
The power to bring Lazarus up
carries the need to put Lazarus down,
and no matter how the translation goes,
his dreams and his rest have yet begun.
Emboldened, I was brought upon a platter
to the table of my father.
Were it cut out from under him in a massacre,
there would be hopeless, sinewy, volatile laughter.

I wept but dinner began without haste
and no longer did the mask of a suburban trash boy
fester in the lit pathways of an august tract.
The only requiem I hear is for the day,
that sank behind the rock and drew in the waters;
who held their breath waiting for the altar to be cleared;
who spilled their divine sweat for the sinner’s face down burials;
who, as he slept in hiding the sun’s charioteer,
cleared the room for the morning and flooded it with light.

I still smell the rose dew on pale skin,
but the reverse doesn’t make me a martyr.
I do not become god the fact-checker of a corrupt chimera.
I go on blending the wasted sleep of the dead
with the weary sleep of the wasteful child.
Lost in the night with his hands tied,
and lighting himself into ephemeral moksha.
Rested, he spent the day
scribbled.

To Stumble Upon A Book Of Someone's Subconscious

These visions hold me in the liminal morning:
what lives quietly at the edge
of our nails,
your universe slides into
an ephemeral wake at any
twitch of the eyes.

I become the wetness
of your neck but
am arid. The dream of
the day leaks into
sleep and any sign of you
I see recoils the threshold.

I beg to see any inch of you,
Even in an old picture:
Your back to the camera in admonition and
And me, praying at your altar.

Elegy for Junk

I never knew you, but
I wish we could have
gotten high together.
We could have twisted our
tongues on everyone like two old
hags, pumped on valium, with
nothing better to do.
We’d laugh and play
word

games, pausing for hours
between thoughts.
We could get stoned and watch
TV or lay out
and count the clouds
we’re in.
I don’t know,
I know

but I dream of
death as a penetration,
dividing intermittently,
allowing us to
puncture the night
with a flash of light
and a puff of
waxy smoke. I hope
the angels allow smoke
breaks.

Every Love Story Begins with Moonlight

She stood out among the florescent
Green, candy-shop kids,
Talking at everyone with a hand.

She stood out among the untied,
Slaughterhouse brats,
Peering selfish in the window.

She stood out beyond the morning,
Wasted in surf-riddled clothes,
Waning in the dark, childishly.

She was burned out,
Dropped through the filter
Of a famished day. She

Gasped, as if tarnished,
But laughed in rhythmic enchantment;
She stood out, anyways.

2005-09-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn Arrival 2005 Michael Donnelly

Jordan, Allen, Perez,
Gershwin, Robinson, Whitman
Basquiat, Giuliani, Guthrie.
The scene was sucked
before we could come to it. Everybody
now shops at Target. The open lawn in Prospect Park
is badly attended to, cut but not watered. I wonder
if residents will get dibs on season's tickets
when the Nets stadium finally goes up,
to house the shouting fans.

2005-09-02T21:05:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Julia Cohen

Curtains

Retrograde memories of heavy
traffic confused by light.

At the intersection, the pugilist
knocks out the stop sign.

We are 15 miles from Cobalt.

Novellas and nicotine, a kink
in the brain cog.

The mailman brings an operetta
to the borrowed housewife.

We are 15 miles from Cobalt.

Rapid divisions of vapid staples:
our pill-tangled throat.

My under-world is quicker
than your hell.

We were 15 miles from Cobalt
when the curtain fell.

WATERPROOF GOODBYE

I’VE REVIVED THE LOST ART OF THE TELEGRAM
TO SAY PAPER KEEPS FOLDING ITSELF
INTO ORIGAMI AIRPLANES STOP TO PLANT
IN YOUR HAIR LIKE THE PAPER SHEATHS
FROM STRAWS WE’VE BLOWN AT STRANGERS IN DINERS
STOP I’VE INHALED YOUR COOKIE BREATH AND NOW
I’M HOOKED STOP THE CEILING FAN SPUN YOU
LIKE A PINWHEEL WHILE I MONKEYED ON THE PAPER MOBILE
CALDER MADE STOP BUT YOU WROTE ME OUT
OF THE SCRIPT STOP TAKE A NOSEDIVE AS A GESTURE STOP

WHEN YOU LEFT I FELT THE MUFFIN TINS STOP
THEY WERE STILL WARM STOP YOU TRANSPORTED
BAKED GOODS VIA A SUBMARINE CONVERTED
FROM WATERPROOF NEWSPAPER STOP
I AIRED OUT THE HOUSE TO LOSE THE WEIGHT
OF THE RAIN FROM ONE HUNDRED SAD SCENES
IN THOSE HOLLYWOOD MOVIES STOP A TELEGRAM
DOESN’T DO JUSTICE TO YOUR LISPING
OF “THPAGHETTI WETHTERN” STOP BUT I WILL STILL RIDE
THE MECHANICAL BULL INTO THAT SUNSET STOP EVEN
WHEN, MATHEMATICALLY, THE REMAINDER IS ONE

The Coast
for A.G.

I.
You bluff a mirage
of motion: akin
to sitting more
than standing,

swinging legs
more than sitting
still. You draw

me akimbo
shifting between
parentheses.

From the wide end
of a telescope
the door is a corridor.

II.
Even a child
is not invisible.
You seek a clear

coast to peak
around the earth
back to the back

of your head. The tether
loosens with every
tug. The secret is
there is no tether.

I see a field
or a vineyard
and past that-

III.
We are too little
time to hibernate
before displacing dirt.

If I could stamp
out all the “ifs”
and twist them
into naught. If

it is wet, we
are permeable.
Left to drown
or hydrate.

But my palms
hold a paper boat.
Tug to reach
the paper boat.

The secret is
there is room
at the helm,
and past that

2005-09-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

Evan Kennedy

We bend our horizons to the parabola of Joltin’ Joe’s pop flys. From the highest point we’re hanging our laundry the laundry that weeps black muddy tears. Our hats are tri-cornered our Model-T hearts jumping in our throats. All the mousetraps we lay are found on the ends of our tails. Passing clouds fill up our shirts leap into our trousers and make their way to the movies. We would join them if we could read the marquee from here. And what of the clothes we still own the clothes that remain. We wear the shawls of the last Confederate widows stretching far past our feet our chests bare to the wind.

2005-09-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Be In It

Julia Cohen
Maureen Alsop
Shannon Tharp
Amish Trivedi
Jessy Randall
Brien James Dawson
Shira Dentz
Robert Fernandez
Evan Kennedy
Kristin Hatch
Michael Donnelly

2005-09-01T19:18:00.000-07:00

5 Poems Shannon Tharp

To make a decent field recording

It takes time
to take
apart
a sigh—

chronology is
an arrangement
of spare wings.

Beat them correctly
and the sea
will come

as a lot of
small birds
prepared
to carry rock.

Fashion

Place scaffolds
at tenuous gables.

And let toys
announce a symbol
for home.

We can only fail the farm—
put off what’s arterial.

Some day,
intersections
will plot us.

Pedestrian

Our mooring rope’s worn
and sent you from the reeds.

You’re not for hemming,
but for casting.

On the days when the water is smooth,
when lights are flashing,
or children are present,

I’ll swear
I saw you disappear
altogether.

Something of what we sense may be true

There must have been names,
hidden as they are now
in the cloud rack.

The yet of it all:
no one knows how
stitches concede.

Change
mends
that way.

for William Bronk

Mathematical

It’s enough
to know
the wind
has stopped—

that
withstanding’s
ligature
still holds.

More than
this,
there’s
nothing

but
what’s
lifeless
outside

my shadow.
Eyes. A face
to bear
me up,

bring me
back if
tomorrow
is meant.

Even Newer

2005-07-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

Joyelle McSweeney
Julia Cohen
Maureen Alsop
Shannon Tharp
Amish Trivedi
Jessy Randall
Brien James Dawson
Shira Dentz
Robert Fernandez
Evan Kennedy
Kristin Hatch
Michael Donnelly
Michelle Taransky
Sonya Posmentier
Sonya Arko
Seth Michelson
Jane Adam
Jennifer Firestone
Melissa Christine Goodrum
Jay Snodgrass
Pura López-Colomé translated by Jason Stumpf
Andrew Lux
Jennifer Pilch
Genevieve Kaplan
Alexander Dickow
Jennifer Tynes
Laura Goldstein
Evan Dashevsky
Lars Palm
Heather Aimee O'Neill
Lisa Walsh
Rachel M Simon
Erin Martin
Timothy David Orme
Cindy Savett
Dustin Williamson
Amos Tang
Eliza Bishop
John Lorenc
R.C. Daley
Jeff Taylor
Benjamin Kroh
Kyle Flak
Meghan Darakjy
Travis Jeppesen
Gareth Lee
Kim Gek Lin Short
Corey Green

2005-07-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

My Teeth In The Mirror Seth Michelson

Smog-stained, coffee-stained, burnt by digestion's
enzymes (me eating me), the rim my mouth
like a harbor's yellowed palings, stand guard
at the hideout's door. Gate-like, they open
for the edible; divide like fences
my stench from New York's. Plus how tenderly
they clasp nipples and lips in the dark!
O enameled, stalwart lovebuckles!
O speed bumps between my voice and the world!
Bear this corrosion until you're withered
and your center's deeply sore, then make me
believe in your cavities as metaphor:
That all the holes in a life
can be polished, filled with silver,
and, if rootless, dressed in layers of gold.

2005-07-15T22:52:00.000-07:00

NO MATTER THE SUITS YOU LABORED OVER Michelle Taransky

VILLAGE CLEANERS, EVERYPIECE CLEANED $1.69 EACH!
RT.70, MARLTON, NJ

you do not make a suitable story, what giving her the garments
hasty clients do not return for. Or Raymond, did you hold
plans to sew Arlene suits with terrain needles and sky silks. Show
skeins of wool meshes of the after

noons. When you woke up Arlene was already waiting already
wearing rings. Having missed lunch, she had prepared you
soup. With one broken glass she married, again, the craft and
brought her books along.

The second craftsman Raymond you are a quick study skipped first
drafts. Arlene again. Married a mender. Ever over his work
cutting away everything that is not suitable. In excess, he would
pull strings until knots and wood fall. Ray meant to give Arlene
old photographs of outhouses, a two car garage and studio with great picture

windows. Windy hustler she loved you second and rightly. With pockets
sewn closed.

2005-07-15T20:17:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Jane Adam

CRIME & PUNISHMENT

even a little is enough
vicious chestnut-colored hair
indecent
dressing gown worn completely open
end of guttering tallow candle
not high-spirited, just bloated
carriage driver gave him a solid blow
englishly, or europeanly

WILLIAM—REMEMBER HIM

old-world, gentlemanly—cirrhosis?
no—it was his head, heart—his core
down like water
empty it
remember when it was fun

I DID IT

it’s a woodgleam evening. nostalgia shines it.

driving spikes tired of purposes, of
intent that leads itself back to its own belief.
death, legs, i know, sweet hero,

i keep combing my hair.
the song of such energy invites me.

2005-07-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

6 Poems Jay Snodgrass

23.1

My ghost made an art movie through which I am moving with heavy footsteps, and a heart made of horse hair and whispers. This is canticle. I am sure you know how to make a pope. Sprinkle two shades of gray with the envy every nation has for a good, violent history. My ghost blesses me with shadows. These kill by arranging themselves across my memories so that I don’t recall the names of friends I’ve had forever. At night, if I’d been drinking, I’d sprinkle the last drops of my bottle onto the ground. There the white whisper of my childhood friend would bob up like a body under ice. Blue and grateful I’d remembered at least that he’d died and that he has thirst. If not his name.

23.2

My ghost’s art movie never ends. It never goes off the air. It’s in the living room of every house I pass when I walk the dog. Or when I drive down the expressway, the wide tongue of dark lanes swallowing cars into hillsides, blue light flickers like wildfire through every living room. And when I fly, it’s everywhere you are. She doesn’t want to miss any possibility of scaring the shit out of me. And just like a moonlight on well water, there’s no chance of outrunning her.

23.3

The tidal wave of my ghost’s art movie is determined to wipe away all life. Biblical? No. a charm of suffering I can’t go without. She films me with her eyes. I am her will. And the will of her fantasy. She wants bugs, I’m there with an oversized spoon and a bib that reads “Who’s Buggin’?” I’m there looking at you through the mirror. Or is it me looking at me? Then it’s the negative, the blacks and whites transpose to make ghosts of everything else. And upside down too. This is scary because if the surface of a thing can so easily change, why not the substance. If I am painted gray by moonlight, do I become a leaf? And if I am a waxy bobbing leaf, then my ghost is the caterpillar coming to consume it, one nod of the head at a time.

23.4

My ghost made an art movie of harsh sunlight. The leaf shade is characterized by sharp pains and an insistent machismo, the persistence of light which seeks to show, to show. The eye of her camera is everywhere, evil concave, sinister aperture. Hers is the movie of innumerable movies. She is the dark theater and the scorch of white mouth outside, the re-entry into daylight. My ghost’s art movie is a movie of weeping, of human voices running backwards as though we are slipped out of time and grasping. This is the art movie of liberation. It is a closed box.

23.5

My ghost’s art movie moves me like the desires of the tide. The will to be despite the obviousness of decay. This is the chance to groan, to be a part of the pantry, to be that which is eaten is surrender to the devour-able. My ghost has a half face of bone. In the yard, palm fronds turn brown. The yard has a half face of sand. The sun is the bright smile of decay. The world is half bleached bone, half dark wet flesh.

23.6

My ghost’s art movie gives me some time before it kills me, so I’m not sure exactly where I’ll be when I die. I think I’ll be at the beach. That’d be a nice place to die. At some point I’ll think, I haven’t seen the ocean in a while and I’ll get in the car and go. Night or day. This scene is characterized by long roads into dark interiors. This scene is the course of a river fighting against inward turning, to get back to the water. I will die at the beach where all my poems will meet me and beat me to death with pieces of drift wood and rubber truncheons. I love you loneliness, ghost, you are a hard blow to the head. I love you solitude, a sea shell on a mountain top.
A child waiting.

2005-07-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Sonya Arko

In Eight Parts

1
Unveil me—I’m ready.

2
Things have been cut away, and my face is flawed.
Look now before more is missing.
We were all born whole, with chisels.

3
I am what’s not there.
You determined me.
Hold me up to the light. Am I clearer now?
Knock me over. Am I half empty, or half full?
Turn me over, and look.

4
My shy protests were invitations, really.
I was pointing out the cracks.
I was born with cracks.
I’m a mosaic now, full of glue and glass.
You didn’t mean to carve away so much.
But the hammer slipped, and you’re an artist.

5
I’ve found my chisel.

6
I am what’s not there.

7
Can you see me now? Am I the right shape? Do I fit?

8
Can you feel where I am? The parts that are rough, and smooth?

The Civil Ceremony Comes First

I stood in a forest of branches and debris and posed for a picture.

I am wearing my black winter coat.

Underneath it I am wearing a white dress.

Outside of the Circuit Court of Cook County, I am wondering.

I am trying to predict.

*

(I am in a forest of pictures and black coats.
The prediction is white dress.
Underneath the debris there is a forest which posed for a picture.)

I am a forest of predictions, which I hang on the branches of debris.
Outside, I am underneath branches, trying to stand.
I am civil, but posed.
I am wearing the predictions, the white dress, and the coat.
I am wondering, and trying to picture the underneath.
The debris poses for a picture, and underneath, it tries to predict.
Standing in branches, the picture poses.

*

The branches pose with me.

*

Civil, but posed.

2005-07-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

4 Poems Pura López-Colomé translated by Jason Stumpf

Four Steps

1

Loveless creature,
withered plant.
Pitiless,
you dim the certainty of my life.
Next to its dying image,
I light a candle.

You made me pass through each of the stations. To find myself face to
face with dreams of forgiveness summoning those who went: I could not
forgive. I felt like the monk who could not cross the river because he
carried the weight of a woman who, in silence, he desired. And you are
like the other monk, so light he got lost between his robes.

I snuff out the flame now
and set a mirror to face it:
it has granted me,
purging soul,
its illuminated night.

2

The endless chain.
Lovers with the scent
that others left.
The immortal are in
the dampened sound,
in anticipation
of which, so many ends begin,
the infantile,
engrossed sweetness,
that ignores
that which will be.

3

All the others fall,
pass through,
like a drop
of nectar
on the mouth
of a god
that bleeds
within.

4

Pestilent smoke and exquisite aromas
from the censer.
Dreams, bodies,
words of sand.

The heart finally at rest,
burning without pain:
the dawn-song’s buds have bloomed,
opened themselves into
the divine light.

Night is not a locked house.
It is air without essences.

Be your name

I turn to you.
I do not see myself.
I keep looking for
myself in what you see
but I am lost.
I manage to distinguish
mountain ranges that do not end,
that undulate, love, unite,
are diluted.
And I don’t recognize myself.
Do you hope, perhaps,
that I will hover at your borders
labyrinth?

*

Blood is a blesséd prison,
gold of centuries,
coffer of pain.
Divine substance,
escapes,
is distilled,
becomes elixir.

When wind walked by the pool
breaking the mirage of the cell
into a thousand and one absolved drops,
the bottom rose to the surface,
a thousand and one incandescent fish.
What solar mercy.

In Memoriam Edna

You had hours of nothing more
than absolute, sealed confinement,
when the flowers hid, your face,
hands, legs, the womb:

fresh gladiolas,
fresh cut,
the aroma of your acts,
their star sap in the soul:

white chrysanthemums
bubble up upon opening the house’s doors,
inviting, offering,
caressing the bleeding
universe
of each one;

the voice of the iris
calls me from a place
both distant and near :

love me always,
don’t allow them to separate you
from this intact
mirror,
flower of the living
vision.

Forests

1

The dream floats
on the paths of this forest.
Difficult melody,
letter to the secret
of the echo:
Divine narcissus,
ubiquitous voice
The narcissuses were never so beautiful.

2

Each whiff of this air
puts one seed more
in motion,
hagia sophia,
endless forest,
eighth wonder
identical to that body
that devours other bodies,
full of grace.

2005-07-13T23:56:00.000-07:00

Nebulous Spectre Travis Jeppesen

Pieces of matter transformed into holes.
Leave the pieces at salvation’s doorstep.
A million different ways of coming apart now.
It seems like the forevers once knew my sandwich.
Not anymore. So much
Passion in those files, the poisson in our archive,
Our history of lightness.
Deepness dwells inside the running man.
So many different spheres of inactivity competing to combine the two blank factors.
Sanitize backlaunch.
We haven’t slept together yet.
My human warmth blues get me down style.
Splurge into forgiveness; the puppet trope’s battle.

When the buttock soars…

Present escapes flashes of transplanted genus. Know how
Beneficial icy snatches of paradise can be when you’re singing the praises of the whale.
Dark splotches matter deeply.

2005-07-12T23:40:00.000-07:00

4 Poems Benjamin Kroh

10% Tower

I was mailing seductions to a larger country. Dear ambassador, this is riot, this is a bridge when cars become easy. I was building any law to end the kingdom. This upended architecture is my departure is my memorial to Thursday to Saturday to August to December, a coal-candy tooth is a kiss and a curse is an empire is a door and a roof. I didn’t bother to stop rearranging. But hereafter, my castle – ten percent tower already spent.

from Matrioshka Brain Vs Jupiter Brain

O Astronauts, I apologize.
I don’t know how I missed you,
parking your trucks in my living room.
It is there, my friends, a beautiful sofa
and you, hatch-backing the phosphorous.
I would trade a world brain for a lapser proper,
but my Middle French is a witness against.
Your currency is a chemical in a crowd.
Verb me, verb thou.

Molar

Working backwards, I suspend to stranglers. The cold current provides, the therefore inspires. For us, a masked gasser we never get used to. This is one way abiding but like you said, an idle not exactly. You have one part, I have survive and sympathizers and one bad result. My mother’s mother’s official abductor begins to embellish. The universe is over. Surprised and cured completely, I sat up in bed. What happened when everyone rose to go? Re-infected, like you said. I don’t know any language but my own.

The Logicians

When he was methane and ammonia,
he could never break it

and in the hotels being arrested,
he studied touching and practiced floors.

He ruled out clarity, afflicted unmechanically,
serving his ceiling rather than the sky.

His last despair of bones and copper,
the need to use, the use in needing.

All the pressure gluts the crust
calling the mechanism to its rupture.

The needles on the face are telescopic, after his machine.

2005-07-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

we are Ayn Rand’s bitches R.C. Daley

atlas shrugged and

his spaghetti straps fell to the floor, dress n’ all

Plate o’ tectonics with meatball histrionics we thought of asteroids

and boy video gametes girl in a test tube train to London in boxers

exposé of the fittest

benign mumbles the word bond

get a dodge the hell out of the concrete

asphalt! Touché complexes surround Paris with graffiti

and stifle Eiffel while Montmartre sticks

quartz legs if the floor hasn’t dried, grief

pulled the plug, swirled Seville spin cyclists Rio Rio Grande

oh poor compound tenses of Guadalquivir

twisted nature dialogues with beards

walking around and at same time chews, sends digital

smoke signals to your god about news from Quetzalcoatl

here:

kids cornerless now, stoop less tobacco scroungers

glow stickups at dawn forked tongue ivy eyed

there now: gravestones are heavy haloed

heroes stashed in the dumpsters at rock concerts

the sun undresses the bricks redress

and makes masonry sorrow a yellow shade

over which slant lamps

night night advances

creeps like pants up legs

and swells like a fat lip

axis grease in a lipstick pillar

will tireless travel end?

the road isn’t on strike anywhere

crickets the thrum of the earth dropping

2005-07-12T22:24:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Erin Martin

planting rubber bullets

If the gift you’re seeking is a magician’s hat, if you

have memorized the word because, allow me
not to be the one to build temples on your tongue.
If you are crossing off tallies as if your ink were
marble,
I do not think I can use this chisel. I have played
my records loudly. I have sent paper boats to sea.
There are no graves but graves. If you would mistake
fear for peace, I will laugh in all the wrong places.
I have raised my fist trembling through
lipstick. I have thanked my skin. If you would
build
your camp on the tallest peak, I will take off my
boots,
my gauze, my ghost sheet. I have seen you
kick in snow angels. If you would project
filmstrips from the sky, I will open my locket again.

If you would hide clocks within books of prayers,
I will spoil the ending of this movie.

barger street at thirty watts

got no middle name
and the chandelier sways

fuck me on an old mattress
till the cows come home

want to cut out your tongue
and stick it in a hole

Page of Words

Dead bolt latched in this hotel room,
Carpet showing years of foot traffic
Bay window, no ocean view,
sunlight scattering far wall.

I will not go to Mardi Gras this year
I write, then sign my real name
in the white space,

turn the postcard over, imagine you
holding this glossy cardboard picture
of my hotel and wondering

how well I sleep without you
to stifle my yawns and wake me
with the reveille of poetry
your voice staining the lyric like coffee
bruising a page of words.

Dried flowers on the nightstand,
cereal in sealed plastic squares
You could have given me glass unicorns to ride
put the moon in Scorpio, doused my lips in champagne
foam.

I could have counted my blessings
on your fingers and toes
built you sand castles with giant moats
and crowned myself queen of your ocean.

But in a year of your summers
I would surely give myself away
cutting into your dreaming
till my human voice wakes you and I drown.

2005-07-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

4 Poems Lisa Walsh

3 sonnets

Later feelings
Like lake clouds,
fingers caressing the
neck, will you come home
early for dinner that night
will you wear a silk tie?
Then, months pass, the
smell of after shave faded,
will the passion wax and wane
will an utterly beautiful
word appear before your
eyes and you whisper "hush!"
to the children to silence them
as if in church.

Large clouds you have managed
to spare even the
deepest crevices
from extinction.
I tip my hat to your
extravagance of beauty.
Life has a way of moving
silently under you
and last night by the moon
at a water's edge,
two larks sang a
love song as your sky
erupted with the rain you
were threatening all day.

In the tanglement
of birds and arteries
the powerful noises of
motors, weedwackers.
Lawn mowers. Power washers.
It's summer.
It's elastic moon
sometimes overgrown with clouds,
the sky often littered with tall
streaks of daylight's growing -
cumulus romulus -
not removed, but powdered
and faded away, not by the saints
clippers but by the suns burning rays.

Poem

handsome, will you remember me
someday? The moon was setting
above my desk; I watched the
sky. an orange ball creep
towards me, I said "Looky here"
you came to me we waited. forever.
handsome, I cried today as is
usual when pain comes in waves and
intervals, shifts and patterns,
soft voices,
10, 2, 4, 6
it's shocking. (mocking.)
I can only take so many opiates,
starry,
I can only take so much worry fluttering
above my head
2am, 3. This is the time I tell you.
My angel.
handsome, this is a time of consternation
I did not always know you
(need you)
but once I did I swooned and walked
up a hill with you, arm and arm
I made you laugh
grabbing your arm
and never
not ever
will I let go. handsome.
no one can make me stop
loving you. or telling you.
at night. mid. when silence
fills my room with blue light
and you are far far
away, yet here.

2005-07-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Lars Palm

we are approaching a brick
it is carefully selected
it sits fitted into a house-front
the street it looks out into is near a square
the square could be centrally situated
in the city it is central, in the poem uninteresting
nor do the city, the street or the house-front capture us
it is the brick we are after
we have now come so close to it that its structure is visible
we continue approaching
now we feel its surface
no air is between us & the brick
we now merge with it
now we are inside the brick
we are surprised

because the
thing has
no name

she has never
held it in
her hand

so you saw
the lights coming
on across the

strait & decided
to attend a
conference on

nuclear swans. well
maybe what we
need here is a

little more direct
sunlight. then
maybe our

polarities would
shift & not
drift so far out

to sea. see those
lights forming
what should have

been a discarded
symbol. & the
swans light up

2005-07-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

from INTERRUPTIONS IN LATITUDE Gareth Lee

*

We were talking like that and we were
out of place, my voice
retarded by the ambience. And distance:

no yard but ships, flotillas going
blinking.
Both of us tangential, still

finding our voices. Or I should,
as you say,
speak for myself.

Now, as for my food, I say, let me finish,
let me speak. As for my food,
this sharp Mediterranean leaf
cluster and a filet from work.

I confess I’ve sucked on many tern-tits
dreaming and you flutter what
you can as if you’d rather wing past
this. Have I, eccentric, confess,

sunk the lake between us?

In this way we establish my sometimes
speechlessness,
sometimes unbounded narrative,
such symptomatic. It is clear

you are water, a lovely liquid
surge. I am opaque, I know,
irreconcilably woven. My deeds
in warp, my longing in weft.

*

I like the song when the rain starts to flop.

Our bodies love the wallow that sucks them.

Someone announced, where it sticks it
is trouble; where it is trouble

it can trespass. My nose runny

like a politician’s mouth. Your stockings

a wet primordial. We tend to slip
that way, to ruin our clothes, our

hair, our relief. And if I were to describe

to a friend this rained-out cookout

set in a once described “subdued and
monochrome” New Jersey marshland,

a friend wouldn’t believe. So much

for my gravitas, sublime and derelict.

So much for friendly relief. Wallowing we
are, I oink for a voice to be believed.

*

Enough about voices. Now about moans. The man in the video reduces
himself to himself minus the clothes. As a consequence, I see his
underthings, the extent of his influence, and most critically, the
instrument

suggesting his marketable acclaim. Pleased to assist the woman with
her elsewheres, he presents his tongue like a theme. Turn over, he
requests. As an actor, he performs clinically, referencing products

on display. And how does she react? She subverts all predictions and
refuses the man’s request. You turn over, she says. As an actor, she
may have depth, but her legs are propped up like windows. You are not

an actor. But you enter the room and, shocked, refer me to the wall.
Shamefacedly, I gather. Moments later, I find perspective. I skim our
letters. Some crisp, some emotive of that

light along you once, which was chopped up by the blinds. Remember?
Entering the hotel room then I zipped quickly over you, the traffic
outside resorting to a cacophonic suit around us. We hardly
complained. Since then

your complexion has deepened. Since then, I have received no acclaim.

2005-07-11T23:34:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Jeff Taylor

Zeno’s Paradox

500 bricks
down the path
fron this half-
brick my left
sole rests on
there's a lantern
cracked 500 milli-
meters in length.
I know cause I
counted. I got on
hands & knees
held eyes open w/
toothpicks to make
sure I maintained
an accurate count.

The 1st brick felt like a toaster -only louder-
more romantic about the way it leaves things.
I could tell by the way the edges had worn
by the way the red was pink that it had taken
the wrong shape somehow -that this brick was
meant to be a kitchen appliance.

2 - three - 4

The 5th brick was held together by mortor slapped
across the exposed wide side in a way
I could tell the work had been done just after lunch.
The 6th brick was so covered in smut I could hardly
tell it was there. A woman in a blue pants suit was standing
on the 7th wondering why my gate was a crawl. She
had a fake tatoo of a cross across her left foreman -the top
part of the yellow vertical line had flaked off in a way it looked like
a capital T. I told her my last name is Taylor -but this puzzled her
further.

eight - 9 - ten

An 11 is two 1's put together -a couple of the loneliest
numbers on a date. It rained yesterday & crusted
a worm to brick 12. I picked at it. The worm came off easily.
When I tapped on the 13th it sounded hollow -like maybe
Whitey Bulger was hiding under there. Before I got to 14
a mosquito flew in my eye & was squished to death w/
the squint of my lash. I almost skipped ahead to the 15th
while I was pulling pieces of broken toothpicks from under
my skin. I dripped blood on brick 16 -pooled & crusted
into my eye- the plasma proved to improve my vision.

50 - seventyfive - 100

Suffering from seperation anxiety 101 cracked a clean
split when I rubbed it w/ my index finger. Romance
means nothing to bricks -heartless fucks everyone of them.
102 was painted blue -it reminded me of the rubber
ducky from Bert & Ernie. Y-E-S
was written on 103 -wiping the dried blood from my right eye w/
my left forearm- I scratched T-E-R-D-A-Y into 104 w/
a piece of glass. 105 had on the suit Napolean wore at Waterloo
-I don't know how they got the blood out- but I've never
been one to romanticize the truth. 106 housed a burnt out roach.
The 107th brick smelled like a chick -but never a second time.

onefifty - 200 - threehundred

#307 was once licked by Abigail Adams during a game of truth or dare.
The 308th brick has a family history of being the 308th brick.
His father was the 308th brick in the 283rd battalion during the Korean War.
His grandfather was originally intended for the Berlin Wall
-but was accidentally redirected to a blood bank in Detroit. 309 is wanted for murder
-she switched places with 412 (who had an alibi for the evening in question).
413 used to be an extra on The Banana Splits.
414 wets the bed.
I know this kid who used to date this girl
who saw brick #415 pass out at 32 Flavors last night -it's really serious.

475 - foureightyfiive - 495

On the 1st Thursday
of every month 496 serves
food to the homeless at the soup
kitchen on Essex Street. Brick #497
-not unlike my grandmother- hides
bottles of apricot brandy all over
the house. 498 walks like an Eqyptian.
Brick #499 has been the chief
financial officer for five
bankrupt dot coms. 500
is the # of Spree one person
can eat before puking.
500 was Nelson
Reiley's SAT score.
The summer of 500
was a great year to
vacation in the Fertile Crescent.

The woman in the blue
pants suit grabbed the 500th
brick and swapped it with the 105th
-but this is Boston Common not Waterloo
& if there's 1 thing I've learned it's not to
trust anyone over the age of twelve
that has a fake tatoo.

Talk Clean To Me

We speak unseen
Listerine. Blow up
On YOUR WRISTWATCH.
I left the lights on?

Forty Years Ago
(Your Bedroom Lights). I
LEFT THEM ON?

2005-07-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

5 Poems Cindy Savett

heavy green

I am the memory
the strain
of deep grass

I am the heavy green
in the stalks

haunted
by a somber tilt

I am lilacs in the coveted air

locked

your marble lips

broken

fire
between your teeth

your
breath locked in the ruins

recommit

the white cold
the latch that insists

the unplowed earth that slides from my mouth
unspeaking earth

the waking who recommit
captive hands
and bones and famine

inside the open tent

stepped

atheist at the forgotten door
stepped into holy

the anonymous forgave reinvented their voice
in blue untitleds

their series here among hollow hands

mocks

you mock
my covered bones

flattening my shoulders with your night breath

your single vowel
unsealing
my forehead

speaking to my torn hands on the railing

I unpack my words
from your field

my unforgiven text
seaming
to the dirt

2005-07-11T20:26:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Heather Aimee O’Neill

"Nature’s Picks"

My sister looks down at her shirt,
pulls at the starchy print

of its new condition, trying to disguise
an emptiness, I promise her,

only she can see. She says:
The only part that developed

was a layer of protection – think
the clear part of an egg, without

the yellow yolk, and then takes
a hesitant sip of wine, the first since

the pregnancy’s discovery and its end.

"The Seventeenth Funeral"

I saw the way loss converted you,
the lines on your track rearranged,

the damage carried out and settled,
left for only you to countermand.

Grace doesn’t explain everything,
but I saw how you said Amen

at Mass and walked to and from
the grieving mothers with both sorrow

and guilt. It wasn’t you,
in your black suit and gold buttons,

that delivered their babies away,
or provided safekeeping for your own.

It wasn’t you who told each one
to go this way, to go that way.

"Night Blooming Cerise"

Fragrant flower penetrable only
in the dark, and only, I’d like

to think, for me. The past
wrangles, as if I asked,

as if I wanted to know all
the different ways she was moved.

She was moved.

2005-07-10T20:18:00.000-07:00

4 Poems Rachel M Simon

Improvisation

One thing about human nature is that nobody
wants to know the exact dimensions of their small talk.
I can’t imagine good advice.
If every human being has skin
how come I can see all of your veins?
Clicks and drips target my skull.
Important voices miss their target.
Some cities are ill suited for feet.
I’d never buy a door smaller than a tuba, you never know
what sort of friends you’ll make.
In the future there will be less to remember.
In the past I have only my body and shoes.
The gut and throat are two entirely different animals.
My hands don’t make good shoelaces, but I’m going to stay
in this lane, even if it’s slower.
The trick was done with saltwater and smoke
and an ingredient you can only find in an
out-of-business ethnic food store.
It all comes down to hand-eye coordination.
Once it took all my energy to get you out of the tub
we had converted from an indoor pool to a house.
I ended up on snorkeling spam lists inadvertently.
It is all inadvertent.
If you don’t believe me ask your mom.

Edibles

One must have imagination
in the kitchen, and a wooden bowl
large enough to layer every element
of pleasure. Those ingredients
are not only garlic and butter.
Some are seasonal and cannot be found
in retirement communities.
The residents remember when gluttony
was a sin. Do not ask them
to dirty their hands.

The only important etiquette guideline
is to put your napkin on your lap.
Controlling the amount of food
that actually makes it into the mouth
can be the responsibility
of your dining companions.
If there is no serviette available,
use the right shoulder portion
of your shirt. Dining shirtless
is strongly discouraged.

The impatient burn their tongues
at every hot meal as the honorable mention
ribbons are distributed for the
allergic, picky, and clean plate club.
Countertops should be kept clear of
these indulgent awards.
Formica formica. For my portion
omit all traces of onion.
For your complexion—
cucumbers over the eye.

The gratification of home cooking
ends with a bulldozer.
Unbroken dishes and
indecipherable paprakash recipes
may be passed down to youngsters
disinterested in any nostalgia
lacking a self starring role.
Do not chop them into a sauce of the ungrateful.
Nobody likes the flavor.

Autobiography

My blood is completely cheese.
If you peel back the layers
of this week’s dreams a smart
fourth-grader could tell you I feel
out of control of my life.
Cars drive themselves in opposition
of my steering instructions
until giant black bears set my car
down on the safe side of a mountain.
Plungers only make the problem wetter.
There are only four words in my
vocabulary, all adjectives.
I cannot describe the sound splash
down the wall of your childhood
bedroom. I cannot tie my shoe
by any non-bunny ear method.
I am straightforward or I sleep in.

First Aid

When submitting to peer pressure
ignore any mature inclinations
listing the burn degrees.

First: submerge in a cool river
and follow with ice. Soothing beverages
may be poured over the ice, beware the porous.

Second degree: leave the identifying information
of your internet date with someone you trust.
Screen name alone is inadequate. Set a panic time.

Third degree: a high school physics teacher might
cite factual examples of spontaneous combustion
only the rubber soles remain. Char, smoke, poof.

The Red Cross warns: the saved
will sue in a litigious culture.
Clear the airway. Clear the airway.

If you can’t spell tourniquet
don’t bother coming to class.
Your skills are better suited to the surf.

When weaving a garment out of grass blades
remember to consult the pesticide schedule.
Eye wash of the damned. Eye wash organism.

2005-07-10T17:19:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Alexander Dickow

I
Everywhere green and hum
the enjoyment groves,
vegetable and burst
interesting. Decorated
with some nicely wrinkle,
moss itches. Some days
a hilly go bump
or a mischief knee
clangs my elbow bad
and noise. Other days
the knobby sadness
and rub me with stones.

II
Not big new me
but little and old,
dim and mostly
in the dark goodbye
of things that young
and droplet smooth,
of plenty trees and
never leaves and goodness
in the lucky grass.

2005-07-09T00:07:00.000-07:00

4 Poems Kim Gek Lin Short

Wifey Pooh's Narrow Escape

Wifey Pooh did essayer.
A narrow escape she did take of Sunday dinner
sleepover, and the six o'clock morning
cab ride home in last night's clothes.

There is a breakfast hesitating on the table
with the night's most meager apology for a poem.
There is a bubble in the batter
shiny as a Los Angeles midnight pool.

A squat man, a swarthy meatloaf:
also narrow escapes. She counted three in all.
There is a basket of laundry needs something.
A gleaming tub to fill. A bite mark

silver as a shooting star, and spreading.
The kitchen timer, an enemy.
The unmade bed. Two sticky glasses
in the Dirty Bowl Hole.

But what's this? Heaven's recompense
for a belly too stretched. Ontological
sky full of black travel. Here is the skillet
from last night's supper. Here the seared stars.

Just in time for bed she is the fastest runner.
A fire lit Wyf's feet. A fire lit Pooh's smile
when meet just before the kiss goodnight,
their backs polite and stacked like shadows.

Wifey Pooh Goes Grocery Shopping

Essayer did Wyf Pooh.
Unattractive dinner, a too loose roux.
Four hours before pajamas
is all she had to do.
But fish like daggers in the oily stew.

Earlier at the market
to a sprite in pants too lewd.
I would not if you paid me,
I would not if we screwed.

Continuing in this manner,
forgetting the shallots too,
I would not if you gave me
a four-karat I-do.

In the parking lot of the market,
jealous, infernal, shrewd,
she's permitted one substitution:
lewd pants for lewd brew.

Who hath got your halo?
The tortured car seat missing too.

Wyfs, thinks Pooh, do not feel
what I do.

Wifey Pooh Gets Scared

Scared Wyf Pooh in a secret gray shake.
Which Other put her gray
she will not to It give a ring of syllabic truth.

Trying growing less gray
hearing inside how all parents
would hear the inside of Her through These

Pooh put the bad parts back and breathed.
Wfys do this all the time, Pooh reasoned,
with no way to stop her

the soft nurse gives Pooh a hard stab.
The babee! But there is no one to stop her either
from entering the shining room real and scared too.

Wyf's Daily Affirmations to Pooh

Monday

Pooh don't worry.
Wyf woke early.
Already big hurry.
Whizzed soy and bilberry.

Tuesday

Pooh don't panic.
Take time to tantric.
Dad's with his sidekick.
Mom's weepy lovesick.
Baby's bent from colic.
Husband's got his own shtick.

Wednesday

Pooh don't get mad.
Our life ain't so sad.
Vacation's two hebdomads.
He's back from Marienbad.
Mom's down a kilorad.
Baby's an Olympiad.

Thursday

Husband's pocas palabras.
Pooh's got insomnia.
Baby won't take formula.
It's Mom's fourth faux-pas.
Daddy's at the skinema.
Baby's joining Mensa.

Friday

Pooh don't postpone.
Baby's your touchstone.
It's just your hormones.
Take your progesterone.

Saturday

Pooh get sleepy.
Time for doxology.
Husband's got his fantasy.
Wyf 's got an enemy.
Baby's a commodity.
Dad's fourth cupidity.

Sunday

Pooh time for bed.
Leave these things unsaid:
Dad's a selfish pinhead.
Mom's hooked on bed-meds.
Baby's a thoroughbred.
Wyf is too limited.

2005-07-08T23:51:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Meghan Darakjy

Country Moment Ride Home

In the car you said you were hungry,
but your hands were all covered with oily shit,
so I fed you some chocolate mothballs,
fingers in your coochie mama juices and
the sweetness disappeared in your mouth
as we listened, absently, to Garrison Keillor.

I told you I love Garrison Keillor.
I said his voice almost makes me hungry,
it seems like toffee in my mouth,
thick caramel, or molasses or some shit.
My eyes were heavy then and
I evaporated like a chocolate mothball.

We used to throw snow like mothballs,
drink hot chocolate, listen to Garrison Keillor.
"He's our prairie home companion!" I said. And,
"is your stomach saying it's hungry?"
You cook food that always makes me shit,
but taunts me still, empty salivating mouth.

Remember, to make money we kissed with open mouth,
tongues licking like chocolate mothballs,
'cause boys are psyched to see that lesbian shit -
(not upstanding men like Garrison Keillor)
looking at us with stupid eyes hungry
for sex. Offering us money and

giving us more since we're sisters and
they want it so badly they can feel it in their mouth.
We'd use our dollars to fill our hunger,
tasting yummy on our tongues like mothballs.
Let's not think - just listen to Garrison Keillor,
pretend we're little girls with dolls and shit.

As we get older, and hurt, all this shit
builds up, gets behind my eyes, and
weeping I turn to the purr of Garrison Keillor.
Silences my tear ducts, evens my mouth,
in the quiet of linen closets, mothballs,
and the ever oppressing hatred of hunger.

You say, "I'm hungry, and --
shit! We're all out of mothballs." So I tell you to
savor the butter of Garrison Keillor melting in your
mouth.

Forgotten

On a beautiful afternoon,
water reminds rain.
Wind blows sweaters on,
steals words and sacred promises.
Further south a clustering of
forgotten people,
speaking to invisible friends of foes.
Windows close to the bleats of
these lambs. Dust kicks up,
swirls in a cloud.
Pull out the umbrellas,
and shiny sunglasses,
avert the eyes, disguise.
The beginning was too long
away now to worry, there is
nothing left here now,
but five cent returns,
wafting drops and changing gears.

2005-07-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Dustin Williamson

The Vincent Price is right

“is that all its been since I inherited the world—
another day to get through? better get started
& if I’m the only, the only one then I am
legend ary in a time of me & only
the heir apparent pouring gasoline in a tea kettle,
toeing the line between comedy and self
extinction living off the weak ones we leave
for a lengthy conversation flesh eaters and
a roommate letting the cat out among the flesh
eaters with someone we heard on the radio
we’re the only ones on the radio but it’s not
fair to stop trying to talk with the percentage
chance so I suppose we’re both survivors
repealed by our own reflections in the pungent year
ning uncovered the drawing of half the city
I haven’t searched how many more squeamish
moments it was raining hard, through the broken
windows we pushed shopping carts full of
imitation crab meat and a waiting darkness
into the apparent air “Morgan come out;
Morgan come out” what will they do if you’re not
inside listening to records, drunk on home
movies universal disease whistling past
a grave yard an airborne passing sound

some sort of zebra

the time the day ends/ the moment
staying awake becomes a sort
of sacrifice/ to read to you again/
and by/ mean there are lines
of deodorant down my shirt/
to divorce/ the custard/ from inside
an éclair/ you thought was
a doughnut/ the commitment of biting/
into a surprise/ of seeing a TV movie
about your life/ but Brendan would
probably still say “this is your life/
not a movie”/ fair enough/ a TV
movie then/ a title whose importance
realizes/ the sullied first appearance
as the scroll/ scrolls across/
the surface of her fingernails/ a very
tradition I’ve never heard of/
Patriot’s Day for example/ who gets
to decide the boundaries of
celebration/ perhaps the guy tipping
garbage cans over/ in my back alley
/ yeah/ that guy is off limits/ for my
celebration/ or the guy that stumbles
by/ looking to stab the next whiteboy
he sees/ which is me/ but don’t/ my
sister stepped on a tooth pick/ this
week/ & my mother couldn’t take
any more infection in her life/ or
the dogs loose in the back yard/
when the bag tips/ into his own pocket
& comes out/ with a fistful of shine
/a sort of letting go/ of my pin
number/ a realization that this is an
investment/ an identity to fall back
on/ & eat glass/ if it pays the bus
fare/ all the goods I’m giving up/
a piece of paper/ folded into
another piece of paper/ with a
piece of paper/ stuck to the corner
which allows me/ to move about
in a white truck driven by a green
man/ in a blue suit made of cotton/
revenged by a trumpet/ but I’m not
retaining the conversation/ I’m having
about the Hotel Wentley Poem/ in Boston
from my bed in Milwaukee/ tho it’s
really about the Bay/ & the man in
my garbage made of aluminum/ the
possibility of a fair conversation/
a moot point/ stirred into a bloody
mary/ that many miles/ & the spice
that makes up the grit in our bone/meal
sprinkled on some sex organs/ to either
aid contraception/ or prevent it/ on the
other side of going somewhere/ to
become an ancestor/ I hope someone
has a nice picture to show the media/
later/ when I’m submerged in/ a jello
mold/ refusing to eat/ the way out/
cuz after all/ it’s made of horse hooves/
& I don’t eat horse hooves

beginning and ending with a line by Carey Grant

“you’re smartest girl I ever
slept with on the train”
& you can’t even pick apart
the crowd from the news crawl
Who cares if it’s the train
station at noon it couldn’t be
him he’s got shaving cream
on his face A big face
& a small razor In the
spirit of the proceedings
Who’ll say the worth of
leaving the room & into
the arms of a high bidder?
That was of course the
feelings we spent to keep
the car warm & the
marginalia engorged
Who says the barbs stung?
I want to be sure you’re
alone with nothing to tell you
but the paper that I’m current-
ly reading The train original-
ly left behind The field you
ran through With the bi-
plane closing in between
the sky & your skull
“Don’t kid yourself you don’t
have any feelings to hurt”

2005-07-08T19:49:00.000-07:00

3 part wave (part 1) Laura Goldstein

transmission:

unequal parts type A
type of description
explanation very necessary regular language

as familiar as X
functions to test
plug it back in

test:

light through cloud makes cloud
no moisture, just looking
major element of seeing
especially emerging conditioned

shifting frames where the center results in person

circuit:

closed description devoid
void unit tiles types
clone project online
life inside unaware
formal parameters: half-life
convenient lens for data
look inside expanded visual plane
has potential to demonstrate
a new fact: a cross-section

2005-07-07T19:53:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Evan Dashevsky

My credit report is a clean and sexy beast.

My credit report is a clean and sexy beast.
It has no blemishes worth more than a cursory glance
and posseses no exuberant purchases
existing very far
beyond my very humble means.
All debts are paid
in a full and timely manner,
and every time I’ve applied
for an extension of credit,
it has been approved
with little in the way
of corporate hesitation.
If my penchant for good credit
could be transformed
into a scalp full of luxurious hair
sitting atop a 6 foot 5 frame,
I would be Brad Pitt
and that German girl I was talking to on Saturday
would be the world,
inebriated on my every
whim and decision.
But, of course,
a credit report is just a credit report,
not sexy,
no matter how in good standing it is,
and certainly not fodder
for even the most drunken and inane
of barroom conversation.

Planet Slut.

Every year around this time
the earth and the sun
put their political differences aside,
get wasted on star dust and moonbeams
and start to smooch and make-out
in a vain and fruitless attempt
to facilitate some kind of meaning
to their seemingly random and ordinary placement
in the greater whole of the milky way.

It takes a few weeks,
but by April,
the sun has already begun stroking gently the ozone,
waiting for his chance to spread open the sky,
so he can unabashedly fondle terraflesh—
melting all the ice cream in Brooklyn in the process,
and bringing the Jersey shore to a steady boil.

By July “meaningless” has no meaning—
full-on coitus takes place on a daily basis,
every air conditioner on earth starts to hummmmm
and the two horny celestials
are easily able to pretend
that autumn will never arrive
and “February” was just a bad dream
that need not be mentioned
ever again.

But of course,
September will come to rear its horrible face and—
as it happens every September
since the time when Septembers began—
the allure of licking mountain tops
and rummaging fingers
through lover’s moist seas and forests
starts to run bare,
and the sun will start to fade,
leaving the earth to spin inward,
taking stock and attempting to reassure herself
as she prepares for another long, cold winter,
full of introspection.

2005-07-06T17:10:00.000-07:00

5 Poems Andrew Lux

The Lighthouse

We are walking to the point tonight.
Walking on sand reminds us that our dreams
will fail us. Recently we have discovered this
in the footprints of deer. Still, we are walking
to the point tonight. The lighthouse keeper is
waiting
to play solitaire. If we are lucky the keeper will
show us
how to guide the ships to safety. For each one we
save
he will give us a diamond. When the cards are right
and the keeper falls asleep we walk back home.

The Best Laid Plans

We started to hide in the closets last night. Faces
assaulting the old coats. We were preparing for war.

The guns in the dark. The knives in our teeth.
Our leader sharpened his sword by the light of a
match.
You burned a finger. The soldier with the wooden eye
showed us the torn map he keeps in his boot. He said
he knows how to bend a tree with a glass of water.
The master’s clothes are dirty. Hearing this makes us
thirstier.
It will be a long night. When we are hungry, we will
knock
three times on the wall.

Measurements

The seamstress in the back hallway built an empire for
my body.
She hides a poker face under the rug.
When she speaks in numbers her lips become two fish.
When the time is right she will make faces on the wall
with needles.
Now she takes my measurements and pronounces synonyms
for hell.
Man, myth, moon, master.
Synonyms stitched together with doubt and hemmed for
good measure.
They looked so good swimming from her mouth
I looked forward to the afterlife.

The Lawnmower of Sadness

The shadow of an airplane casts the same shape from
all altitudes.
The same shape as the hand you hide in your sock draw.
You pushed
the lawnmower of sadness over the earth and it came
back as a net
full of talking fish. It ran out of gas in Africa.
In Africa the fish speak
the truth. You were once their water. Your hand
casts the same shape
at all sadness. In Africa the fish are eating dirt.
You are slumping your
way back home. The fish are keeping you up late. The
dirt was a hand
and you have stolen the fish.

Smoke Signal

I buried your ghost under the beech tree
because fire is not an option for memory.
In order to make rain after the clouds
composed stillness, I slid my youth in
a bottle and marked it: take and drink.
I subtracted the shadow of my longevity
and flew it again like a kite over the fields
of your body. I make camp there tonight.
I rub these words together to make
a fire for you to see me.

2005-07-06T00:16:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Corey Green

This poem hasn’t yet had an ultrasound

Sarah says the clipped film reel of the Metro window, its rush
to the next stop, stopping, and rush again and her full bladder pushes

the thousandth locked stall door. But the thousand-and-first
is not a step off the car. It’s the thousand-and-twentieth door,

the nearby bus stop, the second month, not your bladder
wetting what you’re wearing, but your breakfast, which doesn’t roll over

like “morning sickness,” but splats to concrete like, “Shit,” or “Fuck you,”
or both, depending on the gooiness of oatmeal or Katie Couric.

This morning Katie was ambivalent, balancing her bronzed legs under a lilac
quilted skirt against pictures of those who’d swallowed cinder or become

refractions, broken human mirrors when flying metal confused factories
with factory workers—lots of bad luck, centuries maybe.

The oatmeal’s revision swirled with last night’s beets.
Sarah says her family has a history of hyperactivity,

and Mozart’s too busy. Instead she sits in the sunroom at night
and listens to nocturnes and string quartets. A long cello bow

lulls the little one back to his thumb. She reads him poetry and the baby curls
to a fiddlehead. The Romantics she reads because she wants him to feel

about thinking. She’s scared he’ll be a mathematician, or anyone who uses rulers.
Pearl diver she can handle as long as he recognizes no metaphor is forever.

Reasons I’m somewhere between your doorstep and your bedroom

• By cutting off my body at the joints and sending them down
the line, I can fit neatly inside a cardboard box
alongside easy-to-read directions for reassembly.

• Others learn numerically—the buzzer that starts
the conveyer is one notch. The man who pays the rent
watches as hundreds of us notches scurry into equations.

• At each break, coworkers reported a gray cloud
forming directly on the factory roof.
It had moved over the parking lot by work’s end.

• For over an hour, traffic was stalled,
while ambulance workers
pleaded with the jaws of life
to close. They only opened.

• During the news, I lay out in a field
next to my grandfather’s pond.
The birds never landed. Although
I did not see their strings
used to wind down the sun.

• Since A cannot be B, I often lose
consciousness when I drive home.
Passing through your hall
I almost drift off.

2005-07-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

Poems Amos Tang

Lines / Origins

It is not my place

Call it fiction or fixation
Flip it over and downside up
What was to be found was never lost

Last night I dreamt of a house
Full of grey pets

Passports wet and torn on the ground
Eyes closed and locked

The final answer
And eternity

*

Up there is full of light
White light or yellow?

For variation’s sake shadows were created

Outlines could not otherwise be formed
God made himself out of him
All God's shadows
Are man-made

God's theory or yours?

Everything was created or nothing ever was
All or nothing sounds
Simple enough

But whose garden is this
Without shadows?

*

If you are sure of where you are going
You can convince yourself again
I dare you to sleep

Where werewolves were
A forest conceived in a mist
Fruits of all colours were buried
Secreting secret glue and passion
Rotten then forgotten
Rotten and forgotten

...

Some fruits disappeared for reasons
Others were found in previously unloved jungles
Those places were recently named the third
Part Africa part Asia part South America

*

A polygamist's belief in marriage(s):

As a concept
(Plant a tree and water and stare and eat the fruits)

As its singular and plural forms
(All statistical manipulations and grammars)

If I lose myself in the smoke within this glass jar
What boundary did I cross
Forgetting transparency?

Two points a curve and a straight line
A loop cradles mother and love
Death and mother

What was it that you were looking for?

*

At last
I run out of lines

My mouth opened but no image was dreamt
Wind slips phonemes between lips

In cinemas in churches in rain
Doubts seen in dotted scenes
Dubbed in faith in succession in doubles

(Silences later)

Still love grew in circles
In time
In darkness

At night
A shadow prays to its secret other
The one and only half
Tu me manques

Have you been imaging all these?
Last night
Was the last
I said

i remember the garden you ironed through to get here
and how i laughed at your attempt to dismiss the
beauty of those flowers as you wiped their dead bodies
off your shoes it was clumsy after all it's their
lives and your benefit i have no love for flowers like
i have no love for sex they are just footprints on mud
to fruit i did not mention this to you until you
stepped onto my new manolo blahnik i felt flatfooted
instantly you called the path behind you sacrifice do
you think what you have become is worth the lives of
those useless flowers you pretend so much you become
what you pretend nobody can tell the difference
between genuineness and calculated becoming if you do
it long enough but men think they are moral beings
when they attack you i don't know how to help you

<#15>

So many poems in my head, there is only one thing in
my mind. I won't tell you what. This girl in
headphone keeps on singing ‘Flower’ non-stop.
Japanese are crazy. All the past relationships I
committed cannot be locked into a white paper box.
Neither can they be framed, by anyone for that matter.
So leave, before it goes out of fire. I remember every
time love expires, my imaginations go wild like
viruses in hot blood. When I was young, some cartoon
showed fighter robots malfunctioning when their
lifespan is over. They splutter, with sparks. Then
they go out like TV sets switching off, rusted pieces
of metal collapsing on the ground, one by one. My mind
is standing tip-toe at the instant of a kiss. That
precise moment, that same spot, when you poured
fluorescent down my throat, I thought I saw you
swallowed all the darkness in me. My eyes were closed,
I could only feel. Illusions make things bigger. Your
mouth, your last words in my head. I remember I was
the last to go.

<#17>

You feel it all the time, the weight that drags your
voice down. At night the moon buttons all the notches
of your nakedness, a rock hangs on your bowing spine.
Out of a sudden you are carved out. Honest words were
spoken. A mouthful of air weights more than a bronze
bell. Look how the air rises and falls like smoke as a
glass shell is formed and sealed one more time. It is
a strange feeling to press your face onto the
transparent and look in from outside. You know how it
feels like to be in two places at the same time, to be
both in and out of your form, to be emotional about
your detachment. Some secret yearnings are dreamt, you
hold on to them like counting sheep. You use those
numbers to calculate the distance between dreaming and
praying. You wake up the next day drinking water like
drowning, your mind whirls like muddy water in a test
tube. You put your hands on a new day's paper and it
yellows as your coffee evaporates amber dreams.
Everything is about the sun at noon. Sunlight is a
metaphor for happiness. It is time to smile harder to
drag through
another day.

2005-07-05T22:31:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Timothy David Orme

Poems.

Sir
these songs are fruits
Bee and nature
invention
Rhymes
Or Elixar

some be
Loth to believe one Woman
But think two or three.
the example the name
and in some recompence
these Hymns

Ly Son

1.
at my hands
in low melancholy
Ancient of days
But not
my muses sincerity
give me
A flower
The ends our ends
zealous
heart and voice

2.
Loe yields to lie
he there
Taken from flesh
by spheares
in his mind
conceived art
in darke in little room
cloystered

3.
his welbeloved
world
stall
Starres and wisemen
Soul
Which all yet none
would have need
Kisse him
kinde mother

4.
blowing out those sparks
loe
It suddenly speaks
A shallow
manhood
mellowed
With the Sun
in his morning

5.
what weak
affections
Measuring infinity a span
an inch
yet by and by
more
art lifted

6.
Too stony hard
starved
abled
bring
thy little booke my name
in that
glorified

7.
the uprising Sun
purely washed
clouds upon
Bright Torch
thy own
Spirit my Muse
at my hands

Vine Edit

I.
my pleasures like
my eyes
cast
in
art when
I look again
sustaine
my wing
like iron

II.
as by many titles
self
decayed
bought
selfe
Image
Spirit
fight
I despair
loth to lose me

III.
sighes and teares
breast and eyes
fruit I have
mine Idol showres of rain
drankard
self proud
(poore)
the effect and cause

IV.
Oh my art summoned
like a pilgrim
fled
with blushing
red, red

V.
cunning
Elements
parts, and (oh) parts
beyond which
I might
Drown with
zeal

VI.
This is my play
my minutes
and space
in the earth

VII.
At the corners
infinities
sleep a space

VIII.
wide mouth
circumstance
Conjures
On name
in my breast

IX.
mineralls
threw us
reason
equal
stern
make a memory
remember them
if thou wilt forget

X.
rest and sleep
much pleasure
rest of bones
desperate men
can make us sleep as well

XI.
an inglorious man
let me admire
intent

XII.
the prodigal elements
bore so sillily
weaker and worse
timorous

XIII.
quench the amasing
tongue adjudge
my profane
Beauty
A sign of rigour:
This beauteous form

XV.
this meditation
which by search find
His stolen stuff
was made

XVI.
double interest
This
abridgement

XVII.
I have found thee
thirsty drop
I allow

XVIII.
the other shore
painted or robed
like knights
A mild dove
pleasing
When she is embraced

XIX.
I would not
change
to day
Tomorrow
Like a fantastique Ague
Those are my days

the picture would
fly
Frome mee
Who can blot out the instrument

2005-07-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Kyle Flak

“Giddy up”

Not even when Pittsburg had

offered us several peanut flavored

deserts did we venture out of the

blue tarpaulin that had been mailed to us

in sections after the wedding. But now the

coast was clear so we ventured inland in search

of clouds or at least dust, but instead found

ourselves immersed in film—one about a doomed

cowboy who couldn’t sell his brother’s tapestries

and personal longed for more dynamic ears. The moon solved

everything, though, at the last minute

by resembling a hay ride

that intercepted the football before mom

could warn Daniel about the dangers

of cheerleaders.

“A Glorious Picnic Outing”

18 men died trying to create

this lovely ziti pasta bake

so we’re not going to quit

now. There may be hostages

somewhere on my lawn

beside the sun tea or

above the close captioned

commentary but there

are grappling hooks

and parachutes available

at the front desk during

proper business hours. A grand

slam home run could save us

yet. And in this shirt

people say I must work

out or something. It will

all end in tears of course. But my

this recital hall has finely

equipped storage closets!

“Helping a Hamster”

The camouflage had managed to save our cookies on many occasions, but this was not one of them. A horn had blown on our banjo jubilee. A cow had brought shame to mother’s fruit salad. And all we had was one blue tarpaulin to serve and protect us. Good thing the newspaper was on time, even if it did interrupt my calisthenics.

2005-07-04T21:01:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Melissa Christine Goodrum

sound

a great grey elephant,

heavy brown and a fjord

of dirty furry monkeys

sound like something being killed

the red mahogany fiddle

is a thought, it screams

in the middle

like your stomach after

a bit of raw meat,

rapists and red fiddles,

just take the bread and go

the exhibitor

of words

undervalued and strapped

to a chair,

like a bulged blossom

and two wounds lipping.

this four-eyed spell-maker,

like musical lids open

in a window

of a closed shop

inside a cave,

he plays the pipes

he is a volcano

where a hooded wizard

plucks a chicken

and feeds

its lips to the mage

2005-07-04T20:48:00.000-07:00

From Flashes Jennifer Firestone

This manmade from a mechanical part of time we were sitting on royalty that kept being obliterated. Shuffle to the music in the blank blank store push your silver cage to dry goods. Community holes have changed and this no longer one of them. Swipe the items home.

The shark arriving rains part, it is merely aquamarine it is merely mechanical. Studio effect.

Jump inside be like whale, metamorphosing was out. Eyes touched dead holes spooling harpooning, skinning. Meal of an evening.

***

Ready for the first hot juncture. Breach. You glide slide walk on by. Insinuating image in your fashionable walk. Conceal your eyes repeat repeat.

***

Should we say terror as in who’s at my door. What noise. Wings trimming sky. Tear. Terror. As in what a terror that stage actor and his new found mop. Automobiles with weapons in glove box all drive in first.

Barbarians, thieves, uneducated, uncivil why should pact be held for such sects. Need for new thinking in the law of war.

***

If you have an electronic ticket you can leave town did I say town. You can leave designation site to future destination.

He made a dollar more than them in a store that saves us bucks. Compliant or not it is what it is. The terror not so terrible when it’s screening everyday. I took the first flight home took the flying lesson to be profound about my own operation to own, leverage.

2005-07-03T23:20:00.000-07:00

5 Poems John Lorenc

Pent up summer

Think of the dog and you,

the owner,

matching sweaters,

the floor getting wetter and wetter.

Don’t think, “do,”

says Du Fu.

Do take the dog

for a walk in the park

and do snark all you want

on the lark, the life you’re living is

really yours,

and not destined for the past lives

of Shirley McClain. Blame me

if your dog runs off and changes his name.

But do take the dog

and you off that leash,

made you restrain from trying

anything new without straining over-

heated breathes.

Companion Addition

Writing this.

Writing this, and a companion asks is

That about me?

Re-writing this.

Re-writing this to exclude the onion so this

Can include that companion. Addition:

Negative 1 onion, plus one asking, is the percentage

Of that about me.

No. Yes. Maybe we, figuring in the tip

From our tongues.

Word/Not a Word with You

Grassly, not a word with You. Yes,

Old dry cut grass makes a nice pancake.

Crassly is, yes. Prasterly, no word

With You. The past of a pastor named Larry.

Pastorally, yes. Wisterly is

Not a word with You. Wisteria like viney.

Westerly is a place.

I think pressly, like to press, is not a word unless

It is Presley, the singer. Not a word with

You. Crispery, no? good? Prissy, pricey, prosy is

Away of writing. His word with You, tressed, no,

But tresses, clearly yes. Curly, a word with You. like

Furly, like early, squirrelly is how your feeling

This morning. Moe hungry, stomach feeling

Tressed, or hungry? No, not a word with You. Nes.

First Story

Sit-ting. It is

Writ-ten.

Lis-ten.

Adam’s ap-ple is miss-in.

Eve is a lit-tle up-

set.

In the mid-dle of the gar-

den.

Snake, War-den of the Gar-

den.

Sitting in the middle of the garden,

Adam’s apple is missing. Eve is a little

Upset. Snake, the warden of the garden

Is sitting in the middle of the garden.

It is written.

Mr. P, without comment

Redemption lost after greatness

Found. Mysterious mounds of earth

Were found in Mr. P’s yard.

He looks upon them like lumps.

Marred his grass; Mr. P had words with them

Like lard, hole,

And ass. His mother, who

Still lived with him told him not to sass.

Mother, he said, these mounds ruin

My flowing green grass. Your grass would grow,

She said, you know, if you were to go to mass. Mounds

Of earth don’t come up for no reason, she said.

Mr. P let her comment pass

Without comment on the spreading metastasis.

2005-07-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Sonya Posmentier

Feeling has no windows no running water

the farmhouse you visited

when you were twelve

was in a dying orchard

snow apples fell around

you where you walked

when you were thirsty

you sat in your cellar room

and drank from them

*************************************************

Overheard

We need some leaves, to save

For the winter, Darling.

For winter, having ridden

All the way to Utica

With an angry kitten in my lap,

I will buy an automobile

With plush interior.

I will get warm by the fire

That rages in the East. I will

Try to remember the shapes

We painted on rocks

With water, when we were

Barefoot in the wet

Wood chips, the shape of what

Life—winded away by fall.

I will build a house in treetops,

I will open its door to love.

************************************************

Skin

Wouldn’t dare touch it. Instead, covered it,

forgot we had it. Under one sleeve, found

another. Our slickered arms not like

the natural hands going at it in the woods

behind the cabin, whose magic was never

to be found out, hidden as it was beneath

the leaves. Skin that was its own camouflage.

How our bodies turned on us, meant things

they couldn’t say. Stayed pale, even in

summer; dry, even in slickest rain.

Would have thought we never left the monsoons

behind with our ancestors, who wept

under banyan trees where they belonged,

all their beauty bandaged like a broken arm.

2005-07-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Jennifer Tynes

WHEN YOU SHOVEL SNOW FROM THE SIDEWALK, CAR, WHERE DOES ALL THE SNOW GO.

The carpet takes us to heart.

The oven is a grimy pumpkin.

A squash shaped blossom forms around one nipple like an aureole

or areola.

The book that was lent us is on the shelf.

Not propping up anything-

If you are not a driver it's hard to know which way to putter.

Does it contain more than one word to say a body's halo.

You have to look when a vehicle passes, it could be your cousin.

They usually cut across the yard and pull in here sideways.

***

OF AMERICAN FORESTS

Founded upon certain wild legends I have grown both teeth and the desire to flourish.

"A certain plank-walker that would rather call this reading than learning," losing face is each separate plank mouthing off.

Do you speak with your hands or learn a trade?

Along the edges of woods, whispers about whether this can be anything other than sheer material.

Forestry, I am going flatter than a mouth-piece.

From a limited possibility mindset, I may pick at holes and hide the perennials but there is always the instinct to spring.

If you meant that, when the speakers of the houses broke into their own voices and flew away in a faction.

The darkened body of the crane is always reserving a little water.

A fallen crop in a forest is admitting he is lonely, and then they have to go and talk all over him.

2005-07-02T23:01:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Eliza Bishop

Luna Cat

Nimble peach and pressed against the window screen,
shot through with fire, you see the nighttime's refracted
glistening province of silence with two green-gold eyes.
Your underbelly evidence of gravity in my one room of
watermarks: flood, alluvium,

canoe. Having touched only the water of birth and thirst
you are an unusual elemental encounter. Suckling minced
light you leave a trail of hair sweeping dust - clinging
to me like magnets. Let me leap through my loneliness
to slink as your shadow, an indiscernible dark side
tied to the body by its own devices.

I do not talk. With what velocity is left, dangle
the scent of now like so much honey, be the slow
magician. If only you could bestow truth without
hunger, un-anxious love, the ability to be
perched on a windowsill in the dark pocket of night
and have no thought swimming toward the future.

Interlude

He had come to be her counterpoint. He was everywhere she moved,
breathing hot air on her earlobe as she listened to trains passing in
the dark, straining for her as she filled the tea kettle with water,
appearing on the window pane as she closed the blinds. He was suspended
always a breath's distance from her body; she could never fully inhale,
drop ink to rest on paper without feeling two hearts' beat in her chest,
or bring a plum tomato to her lips without his kiss.

At times, when the silence seemed permanent and unforgiving, she would
write letters addressed to herself. But it wasn't until the rainstorm
on the first of May that she spoke without a spliced tongue.

Her sister was washing a blue plate and they were conversing about yoga.
The rain raced down the window in rivulets. Her chest seemed spacious
enough to encompass all the readiness for life she could imagine.
Blanketed by the beats of rain she remembered her typewriter, in the
living room corner next to her yoga mat. Every nuance of light and
color opened as she retrieved her objects. She sat down, opened the
typewriter to her hands, and a whole morning passed.

Who will you be? She posed. It's the credence of telling. Begin
again. Paint the bedroom walls a different color. Cut the curls from
your head. Sleep with someone else. Change the blinds. Face the
essence of silence where you can feel him looking at you.

2005-07-02T18:29:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Genevieve Kaplan

Why feel devoted to that object?

Trust

is not enough. As inspiration is never enough,

as bolts are not enough.

In America,

bread is enough, or planks are enough,

or driving and driving and driving.

Worry for the roof.

For the animals.

For the minds of the people who can’t help but notice.

When you were enough,

one treasure was enough, paper

was enough, two machines

were enough, amusing enough.

The leaves from the tree shake to the ground.

the motion they create makes

The fence slats rattle.

It’s hard not to see, to see, to consider

the damage in America.

Look me over here in the half light

So what’s carried is alive

we wave our arms. A fashion

after creeping through the halls,

pawning shots of cement, pausing

in front of murals which affront

our causes. The cause is weak

for the way you hold back is a way

to amuse me and that way slips

when we walk arm in arm.

Your qualities confront me

at daybreak--I get caught

in the moment when your lunge

lands on mine. Walking

in the evening it is obvious

what we leave behind. A soft

house. A frame house.

The compassion brought us

to the seat by the window

where we could wave out as we passed--

we didn’t look the second time.

We didn’t eat at all. Nothing

was expected and I held on

to nothing at all. That makes us perfect.

If the land had wandered

Clap! she said

as she raised the frame. Blam! he moaned

as the bird cowered down.

Eek! she yelled at the sight

of the crow. Pow! he tumbled

out the door past the mail box and the bent post it lived on.

We admitted it got us to this end. What’s alive

was alive. What kept pace kept

pace. Blam! he shouted

as we walked through the plaza, our hands hard with stones.

2005-07-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Jennifer Pilch

Chicago

It is difficult to plant oneself in a preconceived aesthetic
One should rather wait to be supplanted
From an emotion keen to the geometry of trace clouds moving through a jigsaw
As if the plain would reflect in skies
Scratched corneas, really, where tables and chairs were stuck

Someone was an orderly stacker
So that each leg rested squarely
On either the back or the underside of another
Until that orderly was replaced
And the tables were hurled precariously, side angles slicing

With a knock or two the tables might rest

~

Hatched rain of limbs
Hypothermic scrim
Try to avoid it looking like a haystack
Meaning: in close observation, residual factors of inclemency seem aggressively contrived
Now imagine the confusion with color

~

Invisibly the sky ties knots in the cold front of a storefront
Palette of seedy oppression in the ganglia of chance

~

If you house a bird in city limits
Green finches that sing, What are you hearing?
A walk-in closet for birds, each hole painlessly
Drilled, each tiny dowel
Details that admit the bird may be too late
In further dimension, birds evolve past cages to sit on windowsills before an obvious escape
Happy among coins or fruit or vases
And nature’s inclement null to the scene, phenomenon too raucous a form of peace

Middle Western

Within without
A caustic disposition

Without a theory first
Within the doorway out

Cruel about losing trains of thought

Instead emotional knots are working their way out

The emptier the passages the closer one gets to keep

The sound of a despondent child confirms that you will sleep

Waking shaken
Each groove felt between brick
Something coating the exigent
A body of negative light
Gray and translucent
Pearlescent at certain angles
A bird flew through
I didn’t notice because I was drawing birds from idea
Thick strokes resembling wood cuts
Black on white blinds flickering

These were the moments for roofs
Chicago brutally unsympathetic to a dream held in a blanket
Vomit on the outside of it
Something spit in it/Something to spit on it/Something spit it out
An echo crawls through the caverns of a face
Down blanket subdued by gravel

Progeny’s Plot

For months she lived on strawberries, toddling a red hopsacking bag full of bobby pins, pennies, and bolts. The goods were placed in miniature pots or lined in rows to gather dust made from sand, carried home in the ties of her shoes. When an object was removed, a shape was left. And this form was an obstruction—though a good one—as she learned was true of the shadow that mocks innocuous movement. Shadows at first were claws ripping sinister grins in construction paper skies. Fearful indeed before these features could be turned to commodities. For once Raquel Welsh nursed her on the stump of a tree among manikin parts that in a perfectly put-together world made sucking sounds from a neutral display window. The manikins had been hauled from their stands to her yard where today they gather black fungus in ruins. The yard is sandwiched between delivery roads where service trucks jump and bang in potholes. There she drags red wool drenched in an emulsion of strawberry juice, sand dust, and finger grease over a pile of paper trash. To finish, she performs swaggering telephone antics with a plastic carrot.

Issues

2005-05-01T23:01:00.000-07:00

2005-04-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

Balling Tweed Jenny Sadre-Orafai

Skeins were cheaper.

And so we helped.

Five steps down into the wood

paneled walled living room,

we sat across from each other.

One held the skein,

hands spread—a pre-clap formation—

yarn ovaled

while the other wound tightly

with no order—criss-crossing,

knuckle to knuckle

and into balls that will dance

onto needles and into sleeves

to keep warm what gets cold in the winter.

2005-04-20T15:21:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Ana Bozicevic-Bowling

Lessons in Athens

Visiting your southern hometown
in the odd season that doesn't spell snow,
but an absence of leaves, better to provoke
thoughts to fill it in.
Wounded by cars and dinner,
mind goes on unfurling like the tip of a stone tongue
paving a way over a hill as the hill grows darker,
and a dream more serious takes the dais,
the schoolmaster
who points in the depth of the moving board
a diagram of yous to memorize.
He fingers a worn chalk line
to a converted church where a sleeping bag
sinks under the brown of water,
and on the branch swimming through the rapids
a stag beetle wearing your face
nestles, carried deeper into
neighborhoods.

After the Fall

You say you met him at a Christmas party,
found him under the tree, as it were, the one
that grows taller and darker
every time you tell the story;
and those first words also
glittered like something found and lost and found
at the tree's base, in the desert
of wrapping ribbons blackening with frost.
The way he said Oh the first time was gently studied;
that, you forgave. The way
he then said Oh stung like an elastic band
snapping him from the back into a past
that didn't smell of you. The wolves
shuffled, wood-bound deeper in those leafy irises,
stamping over the crumb trail, but you were
already outside. You felt the relief
of one squeezing past the door
that opens to the wrong side,
out of the soul's toilet stall. Even the way
he didn't look over had something to do with you.
So somehow you fell into belonging
and the whole smoldering game-set complied;
the tablecloth was a gallery wall
framing the portrait-hands of seated friends, so lifelike
you couldn't disbelieve them; and the windows, too,
childishly eager to lasso you in
dimly showed through onto that open-air
prize memory, the hanging platform
where you waited on the subway, age fifteen, and smoked
leaning against the scaffold corroding into maps
of rusty continents, living up to dock soul and eyes
at this table, where the main thing could begin.

2005-04-16T23:42:00.000-07:00

news Lesley Pleasant

swallowed by salt or patina

a path that leads to Rome on a footprint

copper in the snow stuck tree in ice

look: it’s just another case of your favorite nylon fiber porous pen

penning another colorcoat in the dryer circle

colored warmth that sieves away like skin cells.

unfound along sounds and eyelashes

silted fingernail shadows in an afternoon

you pass fountains

serving photo-ops and swirling tangents flags at halfmast

rollerblades that draw and quarter worms like so many headless squirrels

voices somewhere

jogging around reservoirs or llamas

bounding in a round of carousels that smack too bright

too short

the line between one step and the next

you could eisenhower

smile paint by numbers

tango precisely watch (blimpdrifting) above tennis courts

you could also

short

recycled? Yeah. And the weather forecast’s smudged

like all those napkins on the forest floor

2005-04-14T20:27:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Andrew Peterson

American Chiaroscuro

bending matches
something melancholic in the cello
chuurrrns
bowed angst

piano or-
gan chases out space around the house
some middle A-
mer-
-ican chiaroscur-

-o the porch light
bugs, the tick flower
bursts
into bloom:
blood, that stolen blood
spills from stamen
-a
of dirt vein

opera glasses

woman with a drawn-on bow-tie / a shaky hand / grips her cane

conductor rests / the fugue fades / & over drawn-down

curtain / a sun-glass vision: / Kristina with glass of water

is this ambiguous / realism // life, with its cruel bees

growl / an approaching train / each engine to its own coal

all this mentioned / is useless / degrees in philosophy

pale words / thru the hotel wall: / such voices! / not even

a wrinkle / & such elegance: / dinner of wine / & waffles

ceilings / so low & ugly / she dreams of a kiss / on both sides

Zoologics

Enharmonics, we are other
profaned by each other's speech

With a the right quotes, remembrance
is eternal, approximated.

We wander, pleading, among
the chorus of zither-lute-piano

(everything) (moving) (a)
(metronome)

O Mother! Passers-by!
If we live forever: panic

2005-04-13T22:37:00.000-07:00

Olivia Cronk, 3 poems

(1)

To be read with a calliope, birdsong, paper crinkling & on a bus, three voices

first voice:
She had never seen such swarms,
a mess of bad bees with cartoon pink lips,
a train shaking dishes in the house.
The whole place was going to seed all along,
birds had been heading in for the ever, ever,
the father dead in the body, the brother dead in the mind,
& she & the mother just laughing,
crows & panic lumped on their backsides,
where hands go in a hip-hold,
a hive of axes humming,
& weevils at dinnertime.

second voice:
Dear Sir—
The news is a re-run, so I write you from a bark canoe in my bed, shaking a bottle of aspirin as melody. What would a coyote do here? Amuse himself with collecting old ballads, printed on half-penny sheets? Find the old song-publisher? He surely, is locked up in the basement with some wicked sherry & the so luscious musk of rain books. I miss rummy & trumperies of any sort. Play assassinations in the kitchen. Tell me: If a ghost gave you a raw sweetpiece of bear meat, would you keep it in your pocket? A vulgarity, rotting & loving its dark space? The papers in my purse pockets seem to neverend. Polly is what I would name her. The purse. I endeavor to collect & preserve these fly-leaf heroes: Water King, Crazy Dazy, Rock n’ Roll Raven, Overcourteous Knight,

I am, dear sir, & you are too.

third voice:
Askew

I leave all my fingers to my shoes,
& all bugs, hoops, teeth, pill boxes, & such
to my radio & my television—wooing unto the north.

As for my legs, give them to my coats,
Arms go to my couch, torso to bed,
whereon a redbird shines & shines.

Toes & one eye to the worn nook of my floor,
the other eye to the groceries rotting,
(maiden’s lair, raven hair).

My chairs I leave to my cabinets & windows
& the shaggy bloodhound sleeping sound,
& my ears I leave to my overstuffed panty drawer.

Go, bring me some gold for my tub,
& some dapple grey for the sea-side.
This world is too rich for salt & weed.

(2)

To be read at the train station, two voices

first voice looks like this, second voice like this

Listen, it begins like this: the terrace at the hotel of Lamalou. Someone says, “He’s dead!” Then the dead man’s clerk slips a letter into my hand. Quite the testament of complaint, licked-clean confession, map to a place of great poisons. A place, I’ve heard, where fresh-as-May wasps grow green in the sun & blood as color comes to the cheeks only after much excess of laudanum & gin. The letter! It is a most shameful orgasm of the ill hand—released wickedly into the woods. When the clerk makes time with me, I am not at all prepared. His hand touches my finger when passing the epistle, & with a bit of lightning, I smell medicine on him. Snowberry. Accidental Hook. Toxic, toxic. Toxic sleeping castle. & I am flushed & cold & rotten in the pelvis. Faustian. I am a bargain-maker. A taxicab with a hooker. I am madly embroidering the bread in the kitchen of the ailing. Faking four fingers in my glove. & I’m numb at the wrist with this letter, the bite of a spell undone sitting like all get out in my jaw. If the toes were to holler up to the ears then message, message—kiss. Then ipecac. Then snapdragon tea. Dwarf’s orange orange. So sweet cyanide. The same old song. Do nurses come in haute couture, pink willow & a canary, japanimation sky behind them? A giant wooden chair forever waits the clock into the oven. Said the first ataxic: Forget nylons with seams & your junk dress in the wind. Said the second: The wallpaper has eyes to guard you with. Mmm hmm. It is the hung hard birds of the tree that soften the crack of its back. The end, hull, to give form that is you, is this to give—

(3)

My hypnotist will send smelling salts for the pigeons,

All came hither this year,
seeking adventure & making their livings.
They win their meat on days in storm,
but of course
the squirrels, gulled of their goods ‘til spring—
are skittish & swaggering at once.

We’ve a frog on the lawn
seven years old next month,
& he’s yet to swim.
No rain soon, I worry
he will turn into a long-horned toad.

Our other one wears lunettes for earrings
& watches the frost come on, a gazelle
at the steppe’s edge.

(Really: the lip of this cup drips so.)

2005-04-11T09:49:00.000-07:00

3 Poems Rebecca Bridge

Beautiful in the Oven

Then God spoke
to say only good
things about Christmas.
It was the day, after all, that he
pulled Jesus from the udder of the
mother-lady, put him
in the oven and baked us all gingerbread.
Take and eat, take and eat,
when they are ready, but please now,
watch your fingers!
The baby is still hot!

Then God spoke
to say only good things about
beautiful women.
It is known, after all, that he
is preferential of all things white and
rubbery, he made the moon,
you know, the moon, lilies,
and beautiful ladies.
He looked at me and I heard him whisper, a shame,
a shame.
If I put her in the oven, will she sweat?

Re: Re: I Should Make Rebecca Read This Time Of Year

Rebecca Dear:

The air must be cleaner here for I have taken to remembering my dreams as little installments. In last night’s episode, my father gave me two things, wisdom and a car to drive around in. Being American, I found the streets too narrow, so I remained parked and invited over a Jewess whom I knew when she was in high school. She seemed impressed with my wisdom, and there was much going on and on about it. In the way that these things work, we suddenly seemed to have misplaced it. Hearing a noise from the dash, we stared sadly into the glove compartment. This is the precise instant that I awoke. Perhaps tonight we will act on the intense urge to reach in.

I know, dreams are boring even to the most TV-riddled minds. I can’t help but think we are six feet below the top of a mess. Did I mention Mitch? No? I’m in Hungary with David Hasselhoff. I’ve left him tied to a rock for safekeeping ever since I’ve been observing European culture and realizing that there might be some keys on Baywatch. Nobody ever dies due to all of that swimming to safety, there must be something we Americans are missing. It’s sad, really. I have only just now walked upon both Croatia and terrorism blah, blah, blah and I can’t even see a lifeguard tower here without thinking of incessant references to 9/11. Maybe it’s not all that bad. For instance, September will one day be wiped away completely and we can then give ourselves a larger Spring. That last thing strikes me as obvious and stupid, which in turn, sweet, leads me to you.

It seems to me that certain events would have taken place regardless of whether 6/2 happened or not, seeing as how my body’s sort of comparable to Shakespeare’s ridiculous asides, you know, an overdone stage whisper, if you will, and you’re so thin that you’re hardly more than a tiny, childish type of murmuring. A little screaming should have been more than expected.

It grows late and I mean, for fuck’s sake, my eyes have only just adjusted to the light in Hungary. I must sign off, but not, of course, before I bust my head once more on the door of journalism, you know, it is hard to see through these emails and editorials. Oh, I’m sure by now you have noticed the mindless manner in which dying children are inserted into my letter. It is really just to remind you that we’re both sick kids.

It occurs to me, does the world really know what your writing in parenthesis means to me?

Johnny

I’ll Love You Like Yellow Apples, Unparenthetically

We never had candles burning, we thought,
simultaneously, although it occurred to me
on a Tuesday and you came around to it many
months later. There is always the matter
of the age difference and, of course, the genders.
You have hands like hot dog skewers, and mine, pretty one,
are more of sausages, I was prone to saying, but this
is a fact I’ve been saving; not one butterfly, moth,
or katydid ever caused a typhoon across a continent,
these are primarily produced by your hands, love,
the little shaky things that they are. You spend so
much time sitting on them to save the Chinamen.

It is true, you love me like yellow apples
and I you like fudgcicles (sticky mess and all). When
we are through we will have a mulch pile and a town
built in the carrot patch for the beetles and grasshoppers.
Perhaps then it will be time to set up a
shop to sell all of these empty people as bookmarks
and beautiful words for the next couple of years.
What if we become known as the smartest business
people in the whole of the backyard! My how close
about us then all the neighbors will suddenly draw.

2005-04-09T20:17:00.000-07:00

2005-04-09T09:42:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Jose Luis Peixoto

A NEON LIGHT SAYING 'I LOVE YOU'

you will never surrender to silence
for your words scream like the strip
in las vegas.

FUNDAMENTAL THINGS

i am really sure that nobody will ever read this poem.
that is how fundamental things usually are. one may
only repeat them to the void. darkness never answers back.

i am almost certain that i haven't written this poem.
usually, fundamental things remain unsaid. then, we suffer
because there is only bitterness and regret, regret, regret.

2005-04-06T21:47:00.000-07:00

Felix the Cat Grooves with Hello Kitty Tiffany Noonan

Once
I bought
the Nile by
tiltin my head
sold it for
a coat of rainbows.
Newsprint
never revealed its
color.
How could it?
Trans-Lux
& Kinescope
didn't
geddit right &
they
had
television.
My tail knows
86 languages
more than
any old Poindexter.
See even now
it writes Egyptian
spells out
"I was worshipped
once
&
never forgot."
The rest
my Bag of Tricks
knows.
We get
ours at night.
That's why
we prowl
rule the alleys
smoke & jive
like Krazy Kat
argue
like Hobbes
groove
like Garfield &
now Nermal
that cat
he reminds me
of you
Hey-Hey Baby-Cat.
Yeah I know
that's
not your name
but
I been around
long-long-
longer
than you
so
if you want
a swell feed just
foller me
& don't
give me That
Face.
Innocence won't
catch
you fish.
Take off
that pink
bow
let your
black hair
down
open your
tiny mouth and
sing the blues.

2005-04-02T23:38:00.000-08:00

THE TIME HAS COME, THE WALRUS SAID Jessica Lerm

The time has come, the Walrus said,
To leave our homes behind.
The rooms are small. The floor - our beds;
This place is less than kind.

So off they went. They didn't go far.
They gathered sticks and stones.
They found a place, and there did start
To build themselves a home.

Oh, it was grand! One thousand rooms -
Each one of them prepared.
But then the cracks began to loom.
Their heaven was impaired.

The time has come, the Walrus said,
To leave this world behind.
Our minds are small; we are misled.
What we seek is what we find.

New

2005-04-01T23:30:00.000-08:00

Ana Bozicevic-Bowling

Be New