≡ Menu

May 2014

 

PastedGraphic-1-page-0

Usage

else makeup without pretty retweeted
without personal notes
retweeted without notes without
personnel retweeting personal doubt
is else bulling me typing retweeted.
I can’t speak for myself i can’t tweet.

I cannot speak of an illness
I cannot speak a chance dogging
the title unwoken else used i make
Bully negated retweeted.

 

He slows things down, catches the vulture

Circling above our clearing in the woods. He

Focuses on lichen, close up to mimic
Coral. His body dances on the rusting can.

I built a garden in the game
And spent my labor
In that garden, to make it
dissimilar.

_________________________________
cris cheek
is a transdisciplinary poet. He is currently Director of Creative Writing at Miami University in southwest Ohio, where he was the Altman Fellow in the Humanities Center 2011-12, co-initiating and co-organizing the Network Archaeology conference with Nicole Starosielski. cris  is an affiliate both of the Armstrong Interactive Media Studies and Comparative Media Studies programs at Miami. He has a herstory of collaborative and collective practice; as co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space, in London’s east end,  he worked alongside Ghislaine Boddington, with whom he started Shinkansen and co-curated the Voice Over festival. For 17 years he worked in various text-sound combinations with Sianed Jones, including Slant (with sound artist Phillip Jeck). Following a field trip spent researching  forms of song poetry in southwest Magdagascar, he won a 1995 Sony Academy Gold Award for his radio program The Music of  Madagascar. He taught performance writing at Dartington College of Arts, during which time he made a substantive body of networked practice with Kirsten Lavers under the moniker TNWK (things not worth keeping, 1998-2007). He was research fellow in Interdisciplinary Text from 2000-02 there. Since then he has been making and showing works in spoken and projected text-sound, such as LimnImpluperfections, and the crowd-sourced piece b a c k l i t. His most recent books are the church, the school, the beer (Critical Documents, 2007), and part : short life housing (The Gig, 2009). 

butcher knife

KING JAMES SUTRA

A special transmission / from outside of scripture / pointed directly / up inside / the heart of man / I twist mine / the part most red / skyward / toward my lord / or whatever holy something / might want / even me / a teenage symphony / a pure system of spasms / wrecked with sex / I stretch what’s left / along the distance / as real as my skull / the skeleton sang / and so I pray / catch for us the foxes / I sing / catch for us / the little foxes / what fuck up the vines / my southern brain / my southern spine / gone black / but bright / laid straight / made new / next to a northern soul / she was a girl / cast as the girl / in my movie / my god / I touched her / to touch you / to allow the day / to save itself / to become a scene / in full flower / inside the city / of the dead / I escape / unlit / yet afloat / the ferry takes me / to where they wait / for me / the useless trees / of some distant shore

PINK FLAG SUTRA

Damage is not why / we come to damage / it’s the same as my stranger / is not always your stranger / an accident in nature / is an accident / in every automatic day / even here we are / an awesome silence / in the black out beauty hour / he’s a happy slaughter / the man made of anger / and light and / the angel’s slang / I am spitting on something / I love / an image / the way a ray of skin / attacks a girl / is how I am ready to go / a flesh toned surrender / the worst joke ever / is the real question / I am asking you / not to return

______________________________________

Ben Kopel is the author of VICTORY, released by H_NGM_N Books in 2012. He’s currently at work on a new collection of poems, possibly titled Sutras of Love & Hate.

 

lara glenum

 

*

Slap my meat biscuit + toss off

The day is a perverse dictionary

& Nothing spells me

 

the way u do

Everywhere I look  there are clusters of balls

 

I’m in some obscene orchard

 

So much eating

This must be a diner

 

My body must be a diner

 

*

U r dripping in2

 

my femmebot

I am eating your face

 

Peel the bad days

 

away from my

one ensorcelled eye

 

This is a dumbwich

 

made of two slices

A creamy spread

 

of legs

Some random meat

 

between

 

*

The jizz dripping out

of my eye sockets

 

catches fire

& burns down my cakeface

 

Peek-a-boo

 

fright gown + sea urchin

stilettos

 

The way I rub yr brains

against my clit

 

My gluey matter

 

Yr one good claw

gets my bubbles all gummy

 

U spit them out like tacks

 

The freakbirds gnarl up

the crummy sky

*

In my season of wilding

they said O

 

Her snout

is scaly + She has a grotty disease

 

of the gums Her junk

 

is prob rotten

Her hoofs r def fake

 

Let’s spank her

Yes let’s

 

Let’s spank her &

ride her

 

all the way out of

our fossilized love

 

4 her

_______________________________________

Lara Glenum is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Pop Corpse (Action Books, 2013) and All Hopped Up On Fleshy Dum Dums (Spork Press, 2014). She teaches in the MFA program at LSU.

Jenny-Zhang

 

THE LAST FIVE CENTURIES WERE UNEVENTFUL

The last five centuries were uneventful

the stitches that melted

from my ripped open cunt

tasted like mint and changed color

when I peed

I peed with the door open

because this is bounty

the universe has a fat lip

we put every cock from China

inside it and splash

in the slippery oriental jizz

you feel like seppukuing because your butthole is unretractable

you feel like seppukuing because your butthole is too determined

you feel like seppukuing because one time a man was rejected by a woman

she said, You’re creepy

and he got a gun

and wrote a manifesto

against bikram yoga

against women with great bodies

against women who want to have babies with other men

against women who want to have babies with men who are not allowed to be part of their lives after they have the baby

against women who know they are good looking

against women who have died for knowing they are good looking

against women who loved women and mocked men for jerking off to the idea of a woman touching a woman

I have jerked off to the idea of a man

jerking off to the idea of a woman touching a woman

and that idea bought a samurai sword from ebay

and seppukued

I wanted to have a baby

I wanted to carry my baby to term

I wanted to have milk oozing from my tits

I wanted to have bigger tits than the tits I have now

I wanted to drink my own milk and breastfeed myself

I wanted to breastfeed my mother and tell her I love her

I wanted to miscarry a baby by falling down the stairs

I wanted to toast to my own miscarriage with breast milk from my tits

I wanted to have bigger tits without having a baby

I wanted you to tell me I’m the reason why the world is going to hell

I wanted to give you the hell you said I was capable of creating

no one really cares but you do and I do

we take the relics of entire countries

and trash them in the sea

when we dive for the past

we find unearthed thoughts

the fertility of what you think could one day be

is just the honest desire to be remembered after you’re dead

so much that you focus on how to be great

so much that you focus on how to be new

so much that you forget to love your father

so much that you forget to love your mother

so much that you forget to love your children

so much that you forget to love your pets

so much that you would forsake the barren godforsaken twice

farted sea which gave rise to the queen and her queenly farts

and her princely kingdom

where she once told you and I and our children to fear everything

and we did

and we lived like that

and we still live like that

and we still know nothing

hiding our big dreams in the invisible centers of roses

where we feel big and round and ready

and ready

and ready

and ready

and ready

and ready

and ready

I’m ready

I’m ready

I’m ready

I’m ready

I’m ready

I’m ready

I’m ready

______________________________________

JENNY ZHANG is the author of the poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books, 2012) and Hags, a non-fiction chapbook forthcoming from Guillotine Press. She holds degrees from Stanford University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published or are forthcoming in Fence, Rookie Yearbook One & Two, Third Rail, The American Reader, Bomblog, HTMLGIANT, Glimmertrain, The Iowa Review, Pen American, Jezebel, The Guardian, and Vice. She writes for teenage girls at Rookie magazine.