Jeffrey Hecker

love on the windswept Cartesian plane — 1. Forth from the intersecting origin each number is newly born and ages as it goes this is the realm of the rich and the shallow, an empty quadrant where they think they exist but to imagine you and all you love can be positive pushes you out of the plane, into imaginary numbers. — 2 and 4. If negative multiplies with positive their creation is incomplete a kind of un-being negative numbers have empty hearts, must reach out to others alike else we are bound to fall into shadow quadrants that measure loss like childhood fears, doubts trapped in closets — 3. While hopes lie hidden in the un-space behind mirrors and old bookshelves waiting for backwards and down to see all the others are empty like them then (and only) creation is positive and all finally find balance. ___________________________________________________ Erik Richardson [...]

the birthbone’s connected to the deathbone I am setting a place for each person I love, so they will be comfortable when they set down and start to talk. The morning comes, the morning lates. The lake around which people gather claps its light applause. The people who I love are growing infections. They florally reconstitute. I am wishing their stamens. I am unconscious. What lips these flowers will vaunt. The content is set neutrally. We wonder how to marble each audible shift in tone. For instance, when addressing the child you were, I am a foreign stance; but when addressing the adult you were, I am dancing. The lake stills. Going out to take pictures of these different versions of ourselves, we shade without corollary, we color and color without any line meaning less. The things that feed us the justice of the megaphone in a tube or glass-like [...]

From Crawlspace Sonnet (3) I look through the blind slats at work. Everyone has a spiral ham fetish. What is the difference between A house and a mall really? Then there’s the classic photo Of the bride leaning down To give her attention to The young flower girl at her wedding, And there’s the door my grandma Would open and I would have To hide my chillum pipe, Lighting a stick of purple rain incense You and your family can live here Pay rent and/or mortgage Sonnet (10) I smell myself In order to start over Since everybody is so Terribly clean these days. At the baby shop The cribs have names Hampton, Worthington, & the Shenandoah, cooling in around 800 ducats. Everything is loud all the time now. They growl happily at rollerbladers Wearing “Fight the Power” cotton tees Somebody has a new idea about 21st century slum clearance [...]

On the thirteenth day of Christmas, your true love returns the partridge in a pear tree, buys cashmere, hires the Cajun she’s philandering to murder you. No two turtle doves coo alike. No two entertain you so, nightly, before dawn enters. No three French hens sleep as sensitive as you. Anyhoo, his orders are to corner you before four calling birds can dial 911, a feat they’re trained to accomplish in seconds. You see five golden rings emerge from a sink of dishwashing soap. Your marital status makes six geese a laying seem like six geese not getting laid. You try personalizing all seven swans a swimming – still can’t tell why they tread in unison. You’d file Chapter 7 if eight maids a milking didn’t churn enough product to fill every cereal bowl in town. All your nine pipers piping produce is hemoglobin and ash. The cost of replacing [...]

Blitzkreig By John Gosslee Rain Mountain Press 2013 ISBN-13: 978-0989705110 70 pages The tree lay down on the garage roof and stretched. You have your heaven, it said, go to it. –William Carlos Williams, The Hurricane Maybe World War II ends earlier if white lab-coated William Carlos Williams scrawls “The Hurricane” longhand on the back of each issued prescription drug ticket? Mrs. Myrtle, patiently waiting in queue for Penicillin, flips her note to discover what I consider the philosophical equivalent of the sentiment “All Dogs Go to Heaven”. I assert Mrs. Myrtle would feel more alive, even for a minute. She might show the pharmacist or a child behind her recovering from whooping cough. She might read it to Mr. Myrtle while he sleeps fully-dressed, pretending to listen to The Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald’s chart-topping hit I’m Making Believe on the radio. Eventually everyone in Rutherford, New Jersey might [...]

JH: Congratulations on your first book diatomhero: religious poems. I treasure how this poetry holds every religion responsible for being authentic and explores exactly what kind of turmoil/freedom of movement (of creed, language, time, space) arises in such a busy atmosphere. I’m thinking specifically of Christianity’s notion of finite resting places (blazing hot or room-temperature) teamed with Buddhist/Hindu reincarnation notions and Greek polytheistic elements. The book is a cream vichyssoise where these ingredients are available to be salted, peppered, and consumed. Could you talk a little about how the book is and is not a supplement to all religious texts? LF: I love the word ‘vichyssoise’. It’s blonde as a Gibson girl in a mint satin evening gown, as per the synesthetic-green letter ‘V’. Definitely a word with the curls of the sun. The title, diatomhero, is an anagram of the bible’s “I am the door”, a statement that comes [...]

The Mimic Sea By Erica Bernheim 42 Miles Press, 2012 ISBN 978-0983074724’ I hope the Monarch butterfly I released this spring landed in Mexico tagged with the ending line of the opening poem of Erica Bernheim’s Moonrats: I’ve got rights and I should look into them. This is the fewest of the “first books” I’ve read that feels completely self-interrogated and worked upon. It shines and it never presumes its own rescue. Dear Baby, I am held up/by anchors and antlers: one holds me down, the other/keeps me alone. There are statements all over this collection one could theoretically hear from NBC News’s Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel if he’d been released from captivity after five years instead of five days. Laid end to end, seven million hummingbird/eggs will take you to the bus stop and back. Ask the bodies I stand beside on any public transportation and they’ll tell you: [...]

I see your movement flashing like a knife, Reeling my senses, drunk upon the hues Of motion, the eternal rainbow wheel… –Claude McKay Claude was referring specifically to the hustling city of Barcelona, mostly because he’d just abandoned the Harlem Renaissance & his friends wouldn’t talk to him anymore. This is not a problem for Tim Seibles. He manages to keep both ambidextrous hands flexed upon an operating lever that activates & deactivates a bicameral fog-machine. Fast Animal—the poet’s seventh collection—is poetry that accomplishes the following laundry list (plus whatever numbered attributes you choose to affix after purchasing & camping out with the work many times over): 1. Seibles hijacks classic forms to croon Blues. I’ll let the powerful odes “Ode to My Hands”, “Ode to Sleep”, and “Ode to This for That” speak for themselves—to retain the hoodoo. There are also villanelles aplenty, one in each of four sections: [...]