May 2012
1 post
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Last night a hand came out of her fish sandwich. She sat in the damp leather chair, staring down at the yellow paper, dark red bread. There were hard fries, like straw rocks, to the right, and an orange (in color, not taste) drink to the left. All the others were eating silently. It was a white man’s hand she noted with blinking eyes. The change on the napkin held down two one dollar bills. ...
April 2012
10 posts
FIRST SNOW. FIRST SOUL.
It wasn’t so much the puppets— They were dead in the sewers hung up along
The curbs— Or even a big wedge of corned beef. I picked up twenty knives before I found one heavy enough Because the heart’s gnarled meat—you know this, right? The flowers Blooming along the windows in the elementary school Blistered like soft blouses … Man looked at herself in a mirror and that was...
A DOMESTIC PRODUCTION
A lot different if you spread them side by side. Sheer mouths, see the mountains, stacked to your breast. Each bad feeling goes into the blender. Your middle pieces get hungry. That is a sing-songy memory of bed-wetting you’re torturing there. First it eats a plant, sniffs the mailbox, waits in the hallway. Wants something soft, repeatable.
David Dodd Lee
Paradox Basin
There is fire on the opposite shore.
It is the ferryman burning his oars.
There is clatter from the opposite shore.
It is the ferryman dismantling boards
to feed to the current. He knows
what suffices
in this canyon. He knows,
in all the desert far above
there is not fuel enough.
Foreshortened, half-lit,
already I claw sheer rock and rise.
Michael Rutherglen
Jésus Malverde
No one had seen him. They lifted a face from a televised lineup—statesman or actor,
cosmeticized singer—then averaged the features
and rendered an image in pastels on plaster.
Chalked hominid shapes all over the city, sidewalks impastoed with quicklime and blood.
Shriftless, the flock came in droves from the slaughter,
trafficker and homicide to his cinderblock altar,
and sought the familiar...
Galileo in Arcetri
Ephemeris left open, transfixed by his blank gaze and one
ancient ray arriving.
Inside his blindness, a remembered sky: widdershins zodiac
over the slanted campanile.
The stones he’s thrown float up again,
the vespers’ bells transpose themselves
into a higher night
now: neural carillon, signal fires across his darkening hemispheres:
brief suns just touched with light from farther years.
...
FUTURE GIRL
She can only just go there. That’s the super power. Get on a plane or train, even walk to the store and back and it’s later, the future, just like that. It’s not very feminist, but she can sleep there too, close her eyes and Shazam, the next day, tomorrow. It’s not that flashy. I’ve seen her do it standing in the kitchen, and we’ve had that conversation about secret identities and rebranding. Now...
BIRD FEET
If I had bird feet everything would be different. I’d start paying attention to where I put myself, lifting the knees like they say, going without shoes, leaving tracks. I’d become comfortable in public conversation. “No, actually. I just woke up one day and there they were looking up at me from the bottom of the bed.” My strangeness would mark the date when others learned that they were...
Spring Wildflowers for an Executed Man
For Robert Nelson Drew #755,
Texas Department of Criminal Justice
Executed August 2, 1994, Huntsville, TX
Take a star flower, Robert, and ride
its petals above the prison where they
killed you. Pick golden thread
and sew together your heart.
Pick the mayflower and let its white petals
blossom each year for what might
have been. Take the lady’s slippers and fit
them to your love—
dance...
March 2012
14 posts
The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd
Date you again? I’d rather kiss a cuttlefish, my sweet! A cuttlefish has eight long arms; you’re cursed with two left feet. You stick to Brooklyn; cuttles swim the open sea all night. When nervous, cuttles squirt black ink; your ink is pearly white.
Jenna Le
A Song Called Shudder
A kitchen match could warm me here in the gossip— Here in what I’m covering my cuts for— That an eel might not drift up through the waters & find your sleep a pleasing place to live. For what’s alive set in motion an old thought lost to a bowl of broth or to an armory at the wrist— Dreaming loud, dreaming up in the undecidable airs— & my matchbook folds its fruitfly crushed here,...
A Song Called Ranelagh
So says the dead woman in her calm ways: What won’t oppose you? What won’t actually challenge you? What won’t call your despicable behavior what it really is? Whom for for you? I was in the wet green of Ranelagh breathing beer— Breathing this briny confected air— & the islands? The nearby islands scuttled in a bit closer.
Joshua Marie Wilkinson
A Song Called Spinning
Could the living songs be heard through the transcriptions of the tape? Could the memory return with accrual? What ocean lost its cold birds of an evening to bring the flood to the stoop, the bed coils to an easement, the envelopes set open but only to the dust we might set inside them with an apprentice’s white gloves? I found only what I wanted to have made through shadows & it was...
Fabrication
I’m building in this sprawling space, knowing my lot’s full of mud, with stone to crush, mix into cement and pour into a form I’m dreaming up, a footing that supports a structure, one line coaxed and then another into angles, raise a wall to hold it in, hoist a ceiling, plastered, to a scenic elevation, post a sign in front to welcome neighbors, frame a window that can open out and let the whole...
Awakening
Awakening to the sheet,
soft and familiar, across her shoulder, to last night’s tea, cool in a cup on the table,
her glasses, the clock, the phone by the bedside,
all seem to stir, awakening
with her. She feels like she’s stepping outside after too long indoors, or coming indoors after too long outside. A pulse flutters under her skin as she wonders if she exists at all except for...
The Righting Reflex
You like to remind me of a poem I wrote for you, something about fucking in a car on a crowded street, something we did that was supposed to be amazing but was revealed to be a sham by how hollow it sounded in the poem and by the way you opened like a wound and poured into the evening instead of remaining detached. I would break your heart over and over: it seemed obvious to me. So when you...
Aurora Avenue
Today is the greenest this winter and wounds take to ripening. You hope no one will notice before the dark descends like a wave of panic over the Sound. Until then you will trace the crooked letters of handmade marquees offering up marrow.
Cars gather in humid congregation. You yearn only to be something less. Less than a mile from here, office workers watch versions of me scale the prevention...
Ismail’s Restaurant, Bitez, Turkey
The midday sun boundless as the neighbor’s
greeting. Hair on fire, I leave the lane’s narrowness
to the oncoming tractor and turn into Ismail’s yard—
gravel and palms. His wife smiles small sweat beads,
bends down to dip into a pail of well water, wipes
her brow and steps over a broom to greet me again.
She can finish when Ismail returns from the garden,
she says, or when Mustapha comes...
Dusk Takes Us for a Walk
A reach for my small, emptied hand, as though emptiness were something to give. The fact of being separated in space or time. The grasp of wily nighttime, of soft blanket, of ways to respond, whispers close to silence. A combining together or marrying. I was wondering where we were. Years of ocean, waves – black, indestructible diamonds— cut toward and away from shore. The quality of being...
While You Were Out
Voila called and said you’re passé, offering to return your lab coat and reading glasses; Azalea called and said you’re next to drop your petals to the ground, but have heart, there’s always next year as long as you keep your roots; the rain
called, said there’s no use hiding in the house, and you won’t always remember an umbrella; the ocean called, three times at least;...
Plow
it was steel sharp as hell and easy to clean and I kept it that way sharp and clean and me and elvin went out in
that field him pulling and me pushing and we cut into that black earth deep relentless we furrowed it but good
and into the fosse not the bloody bever but the seeds of food and flower
backs broke and earth opened black to green to brown...
February 2012
13 posts
When I dream of a war
by Neesa Sonoquie
What I am saying is that my mind is eucalyptus
trees on a beach while I am sleeping through
another life. When I wake up crying invisible tears
I can tell you there are children in them. I know
this sounds sentimental, but frilly pink frosting on a cake
is still part of the cake. These kinds of tears
come from an umbilical pool of silver cords,
the genesis of my gut’s...
Cur.tain
by Zachary Hamilton
i. We’ve seen armchairs yarned in factories as they take away great grandmother with cancer of the lungs, a string of long fluid woven into her assembly apt for a tapestry, a long room that is woven of her memorized thread of choice. A Volta television swamp floats until breath emerges gentleman like, heated from its length of rope nerve. Six looping pythons in one belt...
February Bloomer
It’s been raining and it hasn’t.
Rows of grasses
glow green,
glow with health so they look unnatural.
The glowing grass gives me a fright,
the only way to say
a long i of f up my spine.
I lock my bike, but
if someone really wants it
they can get it. Going inside,
two Camilla blooms,
gaudy and forlorn as Mme. Butterfly,
snag my eyes.
Camilla is a February bloomer,
the earliest bloomer, I hear...
Fourteen
After Raoul Schrott The sound of running ˙ upheaving of gravel˙
upwind he asks Where are you hiding ˙ the leaves are old˙
like winter at my feet ˙ falling ˙ though I am far away ˙
he asks˙ Where have you gone ˙ I must stay ˙ falling ˙ in
this place before he
finds me ˙ and says to me again ˙ his hand on
my head again ˙ That’s a good girl ˙ in this thorn-bush ˙
...
Aubade
After Raoul Schrott
Dark when you came ˙ sky the shade of dying
trees ˙ your voice in the forest was the color of
melting pewter ˙ heavy with impurities ˙ it tasted of
minerals ˙ and when sunrise came
it was upon us like a stream of breaking rocks
˙ or like a vein of newmade silver deep within the
planet’s iron core ˙ our lives
have been quick passages of toiling and
silence all...
The Dilemma As Established By Boltzmann
Why have meteorologists such difficulty in predicting the weather with any certainty? —Henri Poincaré He got himself fired for a dream today, or was he dream fired? Heat’s out now, anyway. And deadweight fear, and grams of hope? Scattered both from all the open doors to rust, bad breath, cold— and no sunrise behind this morning’s...
The Way Across Water Is Under River
by Shaun McGillis Three dogs barked. A field of yellow lilies trembled in a breeze. The bridge settled in silt at the bottom of the Sandy River.
There will be more, I am sure.
The way a woman in the department store ran
her fingertips over each garment hanging from the children’s clearance rack
...
January 2012
10 posts
Tonguing My Tumblr Dashboard
by Chelsea Rebekah Grimmer Kachman
Exquisite: tonguing
tongue- ing
ton-
ging
ton- gue- in- g
***
*Angels: we
have
...
from The World Encyclopedia of Ideophones
by Stacey Tran
ch’izh — (Navajo) the rustling of dry leaves
A thicket of birds frightened in the night, but then what of the wings? Tongues by day wrestle with the dry leaves each are left with to digress into verse; bustling, fussing, prattling; the skin moves about in fine linens, there is the skin beneath, much less calm than what appears; a softer crashing; a gathering of fragments of last...
Of Shells
by Stacey Tran
As scale of balance. As object hollowed, emptied of its mass.
As framework, mere externality without substance; as in the outer part.
Received unto windows as indecent allusion; as glass in its two halves.
As if edifice or fabric whose interior, removed is now merely an arc. As skeletal or concessive to such regression. Remains of a ship once carved and filled. As in building...
Engineers are close to trapping a rainbow. How do...
by Neesa Sonoquie
All of these hours and the ice sheets melting into soup,
the world now one-third plastic, beach sand like Beta and Atari,
phantom erections, phantom voices, a 2000 year-old ghost forest
uncovered by rough seas. There is an unusual swarm
of tsunamis fucking the seafloor stirring violet light
into the atmosphere, and scientists are working on a new banana.
Do we really need...
Sentence I
by Lydia Ship
Each member of my family was born as a page in a book. All of the words had to form a relevant artistic whole, so we spent the minutes of our days examining each word against others in the book. Then we discovered that the book already existed, and so we examined our pages against the pages of the existing book to make a perfect copy. We had to live as those existing...
The Other Part of Time
by Lydia Ship
My family made a bigger family to seek out the purest sighting. We tried to grow our family to as many members as possible, and we met in each other’s houses every night. We built a building and made maps. We posted the maps everywhere on the walls of the building. By then many families were our families, and we had to give them instructions they could use to...
Fortune
by Lydia Ship
Our god created a flower so that we would seek it; he sent us off in hiding; he arranged all manner of elaborate ways to visit us; he sometimes turned us into animals. He controlled the rain. We could have anything we wanted, except our lives. He could take them away or change them at any minute. We could become springs, or goats, or castaways on an island. He would strike...
Treasure Hunters
by Lydia Ship
We were looking for wisdom and saved up for wisdom detectors to use much like treasure hunters moving in the cadence of the blind on stillborn beaches. Then we had to save up for time. When we got the time, we frittered it away on petty things rather than using the wisdom detectors for wisdom. Sometimes we used the wisdom detectors to detect fancy food. Sometimes...
November 2011
8 posts
