from KING OF THE FOREST from City of Moths My friend thinks that poetry has nothing to do with words. Poetry she says, is a mountain. An actual mountain. A thing that fools climb simply “because it’s there.” Poetry is there, but why do we constantly feel the need to prove it exists? To point to it? Like a mountain appearing in the distance. “Be an uncarved block of wood” is what the Sarah Lawrence kids, who hadn’t slept in 40-some hours, still high off ecstasy and acid, sitting Indian-style on the rock, otherwise-silent, would shout at me during tennis matches. They were right. What lies in the uncarved block of wood. Whorls and grains, stories and held smoke. Surrounded by. My block of wood, another person’s mountain. The sound of a finger pointing to some unseen thing. To be reckoned with, or perhaps, reckoned by. Something to draw a [...]
Ben Pease
The People of Distress Going through a box of old ephemerae I found a tiny notebook called The People of Distress. The day I found the notebook was the day I started reading up on the gnostic gospels late at night in Vermont, stoned, the laundry rinsed by the thunderstorm, its slow musk behind our ears and inside our wrists. I’m not sure, but I suspect we have all been given the secret kingdom of God. Taking VHS into the shadowy back bedroom; Gesturing to blackflies and moths banging at the windows that we are mighty and merciless— this is how I sit, a box of old papers between my knees, a warrior beyond death. Nothing comes to us. We work with what is already here. We live at the garrison tinfoiling over half-eaten peaches while out in the world there are those who believe Jesus never kissed Mary Magdalene [...]
It’s Fair Our life is boring. The fat caterpillar makes a ring on your walking stick. I want to be consumed by wind, the smell of oyster mushrooms and red horses. When folded, things become unrecognizable like hotdog paste. Thank god for the unresolved. The corner of your mouth a heron holding lavender in its beak, headed east and west where the unripe pumpkins jump in the oven by themselves, covered in paint chips. The old house they uprooted from the stinging nettle garden in Brooklyn delivered itself like a baby, like a block of ice sure of itself. Its roof was sleeping swans laying eggs to feed the ghosts trapped there from the era of edible roses. They press the chickens when they pluck them and break the wishbone. __________________________________________________________ Margarita Delcheva is a graduate of the NYU Creative Writing Program. Her recent poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, [...]
from [Practicing Vigilance] I’m looting the altars of my former forgiveness like a cacophony of snow blowers I’m between making dinner plans and opening a can of sunshine onto the supernal room standing in a very quiet desert forcing the mean soliloquies out with their un-simulated volcanic ash hardening my exact replica. I used to put a miniature rosebush in the ground each year to counteract my squalor. Don’t tell me that definition of madness, doing the same thing over again etcetera. The definition of madness is a certain enthusiasm, then there has to be another person there to not share in it—who is oppressed by it who can only stare into it. Tell it to the bluebird rustling over my head. Tell it to a satellite orbiting in its delusion of being a moon. I’m coaxing the black bull out of my mouth with a red flag and a [...]
Federal Bureau of Investigation you give great masthead take it from me I have a microphone where my soul is supposed to go if you put your ear up to it you can hear the future ten thousand girls going crazy at a chess match and we’re not coming out of this closet for any amount of Klondike Bars a bird with a broken song is still a threat wind can commit murder and will if left unchecked my big black car breathes or bleeds a huge floating lung above the parking lot dripping privilege and something yellow what would you write in the wet cement is a test question that blanks me like snow arrested for conspiracy I need an air-craft carrier of coffee right now skin is our biggest enemy untaxable & international like the sky freeloading crowd pleasing changing at will without a pill or talk-show host [...]
from THE NOTEBOOK
REVENGE OF ALL THAT IS CAPABLE OF BEING REVENGED
After Catullus and Horace only the manners of centuries ago can teach me how to address you my lover as who you are O Sestius, how could you put up with my children thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror it doesn’t matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke I wouldn’t sleep with you or any man if you paid me and most of you poets don’t have the cash anyway so please rejoin your fraternal books forever while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn who might’ve been induced to digitalize a part of you were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness it’s good to live without a refrigerator! why bother to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter? and of the lonesome Sappho. let’s have it warm for now. [...]
VII Beneath the black jungle palms, monkeys. They remind me of me, my tools, my cartoon heart that’s shaped like a heart. Other better animals are pronounced as being heavenly, in this native island tongue. I’m not true and I’m not free, I know I should go somewhere official, somewhere right, like make my way back to the mainland, get home from my violet days of taming parrots and sunburn. If I could slather on my own tame desires instead of the monkey’s touch while I sleep, I would not want but still I would burn and for next to nothing. Some coconut milk, a better name, this is no way to get back home. There’s time. Turn black. IX Saying the word sonar is satisfying. During the Cuban Crisis, we smoked sugarcane and they dropped depth charges by our family home. I watched one soldier walk into the river [...]
Canoe How might we & the waters labor over now the new naming of the rapid by those who first travel that stretch of river named rightfully The Bronco after the tributary from the South & also after the way in which they advise it be treated as a Bronc be loose in the hips guided by The Elder look into his eyes his bluebeard braid please expect the shortest rapture as danger in those fleets that fly through the body where the past itself flees then fixates from the gulches to the minarets then from the moment to the map made from the legends told of that voyage by first the namers then the Russian trappers the bartenders the riverguides then the fieldguide sold with illustration ________________________________________ Dawn Marie Knopf is a writer-in-residence with California Poets in the Schools. Her poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Bomb, Black [...]
Extract from My Ragged Company, #19 I asked Alice to ask me to marry her. She asked if I wanted to lick the painting on the hotel wall. That’s a poster, I said. Just a paper Hopper: a sad woman in a red teddy sat on a hotel bed reading a yellow letter: He’s not coming back. I asked for a kiss. She asked for a testament. Outside, I asked a man to point me to a lake or a liquor store. In Michigan, the man said, a liquids most obvious attribute is repression. But, he said, all taverns in Michigan share one trait: inside is someone that will make you feel at home. I followed his pointer. I walked across the street. I took the ferry. I climbed a hill and a tree and sat in a deer blind for a week until two hunters found me and took [...]
Reach into the cloud
architecture, almost to the stars.
I lived where they are made
growing up as a kid.
I just wonder what people
are thinking sometimes,
or what happens to ideas
too un evil to endure.
Out there near the edge
the ferocactus has begun to bloom.
I heard once some skaters
were murdered there.
Today I would only
take advice from an angel.
She says soon you will grow
into a beautiful girl.
Soon you will become a planet,
moons and everything.
Sometimes I feel so happy
I forget I’m going to die,
then I go to the desert
with just my sticks
and wait for the shaman.
He always comes.
And raises a temple up
from the dirt, to give to my life
a gleam of delirium, that I may
accept the final results with grace.
Cardinality 1. The shotgun shines ___radiant history across the mantle. 2. The wind rips through a rolodex of the names of the dead. ___It could be a litany, almost ______like the registers of Audubon societies ___and the Who’s Who of West Virginia 1974 ______begging for a trumpet in morning, a waltz and then a nap ___in the hush of a million miraculously lit libraries. 3. And in waking, ___a waking more this time than a polite not yet to the idea of death, the atom of speech. ___Not like an old man mumbling to himself in baseball metaphor, ______but like a drop of rain in the palm, ___reminding that above there are stars in the continual ricochet of triangulation, ______bodies positioning themselves _________in relation to a reference for which ______we have no analog. But one can take comfort in the miscalculation of the heights of see-saw fulcrums, ___a child running [...]
some of Ken Chen’s poems and find links to items mentioned in the podcast.
some of the poems Colin reads in the podcast and find links to items discussed during the interview.
the poems Solmaz Sharif reads in the interview and find links to some items discussed during the interview.