As Far as Height’s Concerned There really should be more sugar maples in the valley below. I don’t know how we know, but we know they’d be perfect as far as height’s concerned. Show me more photographs of eccentric strangers on your camera phone—more earrings, more baggage, more footwear, more than I can carry with these arms too short to be viewed from the street’s perspective. In the gaudiest museum stairwell, each plate of glass reveals a doorway to a unit of music & diction—a personal funhouse. Patrons snap shots of Manets to capture the shades, from brown syrup to white ash. _______________________________________________________________ Kevin Shea is originally from Quincy, MA. He now lives in Brooklyn, NY and currently works at The New School for Social Research. He is also a recent graduate of the MFA program at The New School. His writing has previously appeared in The Alembic, Asinine Poetry, [...]
To Women Waiting at the Gynecologist -Anarcha’s Ballad Deep inside this cabin, deeper still into the darkness arising like fumes, like odor of woman, broke, harnessed in a body, by the bodies of men who believe me animal, wild, and numb because my body be black, be able, be stank after childbirth, ruined, cast out into the woods to spoil alone. My savior wears white coats bends spoons, bends me, bends spoon into my crouched hound of body. White women rest easy in clean sheets, while spoons scrape through me, give me new hollows. He will one day find, in me, how to mold the tool, the pressure, his, to relieve those precious as dew drops settled on dove’s wings will be gone. And you, innocent you, lying on cool white slabs, free legs ready, no remnants of me in you until you are pressed wide open, coffee brewing in [...]
He Who Talks With A Fist And The Voyeur How Hippothales hides How he hides behind rice stalks How he is knee deep in rice beds listening _____as bears migrate .How migration is manifold .How it starts to unfold from thigh to ass .How fingers are five migratory birds purposeful _____they move inland _____expand _____one into two __________into three fires and a dialogue How he convinces me that everything feels so much better with prayer. How he prays. How two hands steeple. _____into a pink miigis shell. __________________________________________________ b: william bearhart fell from garage rafters as child. he is a direct descendent of the St Croix Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin. he spent a couple years at a small two-year college learning how to be human. he attended Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Bread Loaf Writers Conference in an attempt to find words, friends, connection, poems. his work has appeared [...]
Secrets of the Garden of a Vacant House Seen in a Dream (translated by Hiroaki Sato) Things planted in the garden of a vacant house are _______pine trees and such loquat trees___peach trees___black pine trees___sasanquas _______cherries___and such prosperous leafy trees___branches of leafy trees that _______spread around as well under the leaves of those swarming branches _______the plants that luxuriate continuously all in all___ferns___bracken___fiddleheads___sundews___and _______such all over the ground they pile up and crawl the life of these blue things the garden of the vacant house is always in the plants’ _______shadows and dim only what faintly flows is a streak of rivulet water the sound of the running water soughing sadly and _______low day and night as well somewhere neat the soggy fence I see the uncanny muculent forms of slugs___snakes _______frogs___lizards___and such. And above this secluded world pale moonlight illuminates the night moonlight flows in mostly through the planted [...]
Three Prose Poems 1. He begins the day with very strong, black coffee. He sits in his reading chair and stares at The Iliad. He opens it, reads: “As the fighter tore out the blood came gushing forth / and his heart sank.” He puts the book down and thinks about what the world is like. He thinks it might be a Connecticut chest with a heterogenic antiparticle in the left panel and a pool of dark steaming blood in the right panel. In the center panel, behind the sunflower, there is an inactive slipperette placed catawampus on an ostrich’s brow. In the end, Hector is dragged along the ground and Troy goes up in a blaze. 2. He spent three days writing. On the fourth day he got a haircut. It was a day mixed with thinking and reading. On the fifth day he wrote some more. “For the [...]
Hook I tried to behave with my teaching assistant, with whom I was sleeping, as we laid out fresh worksheets and took positions front and back of a never-so-peaceful classroom. The kindergarteners knew before us, like a game of house, our sixteen inner-city children. Which of those lost boys or girls could be our Peter Pan that year, I mean, if I returned to the role of father Darling after a mostly unnoticed turn as the dancing pirate? Surely D—, if anyone, with whom she watched me slam my fists down in a moment of pure Hook. It should have been me, not him, the janitor helped drag down the hall while she took over, then sobbing in the office that it was me, not him, the devil made do bad things. ____________________________________ J.T. Welsch’s poems have appeared or will shortly appear in Stand, Boston Review, Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, [...]
What do animals dream? Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial? Do they struggle to catch in their slumber what is too slippery for the fingers of day? Are there subtle nocturnal intimations to illuminate their undreaming hours? Are they haunted by specters of regret do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude? Or are they revisited by their crimes transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs? Do they retrace the outline of their wounds or dream of transformation, instead? Do they tug at obstinate knots of inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings? Are there agitations, upheavals, or mutinies against their perceived selves or fate? Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion? Are they ever neither animal nor human but creature and Being? Do they have holy moments of understanding in the very essence of their entity? [...]
IN A FAMILIAR CITY where the grass and the gravel tic-tic-tic on the pavement, the morning sprinters, or on the mountain where there are no trees, or just one, grown light and thinned out of the rock: there might as well be music. There might as well be a certain resting sky, and a picnic to which we are invited. There is plenty of room. The flowerboxes are full of ice. At home, where the loss has always already happened, and the birds have only just come back, the trouble and clench of your fingers are irretrievable in the room’s studio-bright light. There are onlookers: white dress left over a door. Day-moon, hole in the sky’s blue body-armor. How small the road seems in comparison, the lean starts of redbuds spiked up the drive. _______________________________________________ Brittany Perham’s recent work may be found in TriQuarterly, Lo-Ball, Linebreak, and Drunken Boat. Her [...]
Blue Note Because there is only interval quiet, the impossibility of silence even after midnight, I am reaching for a distant tone: a single word, a sum of melody and rhythm in their absence. Clouds with glowing edges suggest extension. Inaudible dust and moths hovering around the floodlight offer suspension. If I say sound alone comprises song, which supposes location, the committee of crickets asserts intention. Great jazz only happens in hard-hitting cities, another era. Even minor sidemen knew that to build a ballad you must shape heartbreak, mimic the ostinato of heart-pump and bloodflow, know when to release a slow brushstroke across the snare drum. When to surrender a breath. Night air streams in place of daylight. A new variation of tired smells— mown grass, a neighbor’s faint cigarette, my perspiration—insists recollection. Not everyone raised here stays. X has not called in eighteen weeks. It’s perfectly fine to be [...]
Love-Busker I’ve got an ugly, but I’ll never tell, how pretty your please. I’ve got a screw tight, and wheels for wheels, and an *. I’ve got a real good thing, going, so pardon my by- your-leave. A way of opening ah and putting me under. Over and out. I’ve got muscles in there, somewhere. A tooth that won’t grow in. Spit whistle, thumper finger, tin can clang I’m your one man band. A memory of lapses. A good cold. A winterized grin. My boutique hard-sell soft-core will pink you in. It’s rolled-gold bold. If you want love in a king-size bed beware my disease: symptoms: catchall goodwill and a right knee jitter. __________________________________________ Peter Kline‘s poetry has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2010 Morton Marr Prize from the Southwest Review, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford [...]
Suleiman A simple poem would be content travelling Back from the future to transfer its burden Of knowledge about the present, but this one Stays in that present, unable to see Anything beyond the overrun square. Or mistakes seeing for having just talked, Waits there with permanent demands…. That one too is ultimately simple, As simple as having something to say About death (it’s partially total), As simple as Egypt if Egypt were To live forever on the edges of the square (Twenty years from now the square is gone). The complex poem admits all this From a counter-present the future denies All knowledge of, where talking looks Like seeing and seeing writes it down Whether or not in the order it should It comes. The peaceful transfer of Power from the past to the future Sees the end of a present, escorted By sand. It’s also the complex poem [...]
No Real Than You Are Not to know me is not to not love me. I could be anywhere near you. Lemon meringue? It’s no good unless it falls apart. It not you. Someone put a logo right over my face. Call for the opener of the mouth, Philip Morris. The words want to be alone together. It’s one way to put them through it. Ethics not aesthetics demands it. People yell, attracted by a gesture — personal, spontaneous, sincere. But jammed verbally. It’s all automatic, spooking the flowers. Are you asleep? The sleeper has two left sides. It wants no straps. Its dreams are light glowing up from under flowing water. We’ll finish the story later with the words at hand. Keep a top eye out for visions. NOTE: The art is a sketch by painter George Schneeman, who recently passed away. _____________________________________ Larry Fagin‘s books include Parade of [...]
Slip settle into found bona fides, interpretive transverse plays meeting to embrace still pretenders filling an interval – locus classicus – refurbished injury staying, a stitch in the margin, a nerve- how seen, diverse as a planet if one can re-member, one shiny token, a sparkle in the eye between thoughts, expeditious, angular de- natured curve- cupping slippage, circumference to radius point being, to or not to come to a complete stop ___________________________________________________ Christopher Stackhouse is the author of Slip (Corollary Press, 2005); and is co-author of image/text collaboration with writer/translator John Keene, Seismosis (1913 press, 2006), which features Stackhouse’s drawings in philosophical discourse with Keene’s texts. His poems have been published in several literary journals including EOAGH, Octopus, GlitterPony, Aufgabe, Hambone, nocturnes (re)view of literary arts, and The Recluse. He has a book of poems forthcoming from Counterpath Press (Denver, CO), and a collection of various texts on art, [...]
Candor Here, Lustre There In memory of Paul Violi To keep my friends is my delight so in this book I pray you’ll write quoth Miss Aurelia to her twins you who are younger than them remember the wealthy all leaving for a living our feathers! I’ve moulted only Liberace— insincere shadow not lacking boring parts but oh the many tiny weathers never played on a priceless piano thoughts which follow cigs lose places in another wobbly line messy breath toute l’âme resumée may you sit on the tack of knowledge and rise to the chair of success Several loudly splayed from a hard spin with something too pink to stay in glass preferable chair of your perpendicular dance isn’t now this evening’s entertainment you mean the Habanera what was that maiden collapsed! and when she fell you called me lady beefsteak when you’re hungry champagne when you’re dry money [...]
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 [...]