Appendix H Fig. 118: A silk scarf, painted with a map. Unrolled but not yet straightened over the table so that the rivers and mountains are shadowed in cobalt ink. Fig. 120: A question, posed by an airplane mutely scanning the landscape, Which of the lakes is mine? Appendix J Fig. 207: Cross section of a house. A series of buttons line the visible foundation. Labeled in unevenly inked typewriter letters: 1 Heater Room, 2 Living Room, 3 Dining Room, 4 Kitchen, 5 Lavatory, 6 Family Room, 7 Landing, 8 Upstairs Bathroom, 9 Cedar Closet, 10 Girls, 11 Hall Closet, 12 Grandparents, 13 Sewing Room, 14 Attic, 15 Vestibule. Pressing each causes a light to progress through the rooms. Kitchen button plays a recording. A tinny sounding man’s voice delineates the contents of the bread drawer on any given day of the week, surrendering the secret of the ironing board [...]

Certain beliefs hold that the serpent, while swallowing itself, writes its history on its intestinal walls, passing along lineage and gods, but the most vital notion for the ceremonial inscription, the sun-is-upward convention, that which opens and closes the circle. Outside Is Trouble Rooms fail because we made them. Comfort comes from lack of architectural detail the hotel-quality nowhereness. We descended the stairs. We might become bound to a carpeted purgatory, leaving behind the genitive rituals that ushered us out. They take us lower until there occurs the landing, which leads us nowhere further: Longing. And nowhere is this illustrated better than the idea of the balcony. * Low water, auxiliary dark: no rumor dies so long it keeps preserved in a deep ore or interior of the mine impressed in the mountain’s exterior stratification recorded in the very base level of the fossil record where no axing no hammers [...]

THE FOURTH WAVE KISSING PARTY Let’s not invite the whole class; let’s pretend that we are the bosses of the fourth wave. [The Fourth Wave, JoyceAnn McManus would say. In all caps, she would say] and when she is done being the boss of the way words will appear, we’ll kick JoyceAnn out of the waves. When we play pretend, we’ve got on cowboy hats and eucalyptus panties—refreshing!—and go off into the sunset every evening and to the disco every night. [That would be cowgirl hat or cowwoman hat JoyceAnn McManus would say and bucking broncos and steers and the dull-eyed cows she would say not noticing that girl and woman have been left behind for altogether new pronouns JoyceAnn McManus wrings and wrings and wrings her hands] and we wouldn’t have time for those words we’d opt out of consensus we’d just leave her behind so much on speed [...]

The Nest By Carl Dennis The omens of fall are out again. We sit in the park with our feet bedded in leaves. The wind widens, The sun grows small, Warnings that friends should band together For joint defenses before the end. Now it seems foolish for anyone To grow cold alone. You want me to turn and notice you But I look inside. There I can see bare branches With a single bird Peering out at the litter of fall. He has built his nest too high in the tree Or too small. This poem, like all Dennis poems, has a simple surface but a lurking depth. Its title, right off, tells us there is a bird involved, or at least the evidence of a bird. Birds in poetic tradition are often identified with poets because they both sing. Keats’s nightingale, Hardy and Frost’s thrushes are all simultaneously birds [...]

Point-Blank Sonnets: Jessica Piazza’s Interrobang Why did the interrobang fall out of fashion‽ The title of Jessica Piazza’s debut poetry collection is also the punctuation mark, “designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question,” according to the Merriam-Webster citation that serves as one of the book’s epigraphs. Every good book raises some questions, but Interrobang is itself a question, as well as an event: the chronicle of a speaker whose emotional awareness is matched only by a nearly incredible attention to language. Piazza deconstructs and reassembles her words as she moves—through a relationship, through the world, and through the structure of the sonnet, her vehicle of choice. This is a form that has persisted through the ages: a challenge, a teacher, and a unit of meaning that even modern curricula are obliged to include. Piazza helps us understand this sustained appeal by taking the sonnet beyond [...]

On the metropole walkside, he watched in the dimming light. She stood in the window- frame rolling down her stockings She stood rolling down her stockings She stood in the the window-frame her foot on the ledge of windowsill raised and rolling down her stockings pale against the pale light pale rolling down her stockings She stood In the window-frame she stood one arm stretched, tall, high above her head She stood rolling down her stockings in the window-frame one arm hooked around one arm stretched, tall, above high above her head and pale rolling down her stockings constellations spread along her thighs spilling down her navel down her thighs rolling down her stockings breasts in the pale light one arm stretched, taught along her taut along her belly A spill of light She stood in the window-frame nude but for her rolling down her stockings. Longing Along the Long [...]

________________________________________________________________ Jill McKenna Reed is a poet, writing instructor, and beekeeper living in Portland, Oregon. She is co-editor of “Winged: New Writing on Bees,” an anthology of modern literary writing, forthcoming in October of 2014. Jill earned her MFA in Creative Writing Poetry at Portland State University. She is a native of the Chicago area.

Allen Grossman died in June this year and it returned me to his poetry. He is the kind of poet our time needs but rarely acknowledges. Grossman received a 2009 Bollingen Prize, one of those high honors that only other poets know about. He didn’t receive the more obvious Pulitzer or National Book Award. But, then again, prophets and prophet-poets don’t open their mouths to receive accolades. When I first read “The Ether Dome and Other Poems” I found that I couldn’t read him silently and truly hear his voice. I had to read him out loud to taste the textures of his words on my tongue. Because I do much of my reading in public while in transit, I often looked like a madman walking down the street, talking, gesturing and laughing to myself. But allowing myself the freedom to do this in spite of the public display, helped [...]

The Difficult Drama of Nature How cool the air above the horizon—the sky lights up As you take your leave. And this leaving feels severe It feels the way trees look as they clutch rough edges of land All the while being shaped by a persistent wind. I can be traced by satellite. Here is my house on a virtual map But what of your soul? What of this next-phase? I might be the tree clawing to stay. Also, you might be the wind. The moon pulls these thoughts across a barren sea named Desert. You dwelled here for a time with your lens—finding the synesthesia In the mindlessness of the mesquite. What did I forget To tell you before you splintered from your body So fraught and pale—so tired of the process of breath? You should know that your intended stillness Gave way to the most difficult shifts of [...]

Apocryphal By Lisa Marie Basile Noctuary Press, 2012 ISBN 978-0988805132 Reviewed by Karl Wolff I put two bare feet up on the dash and spread myself but he is a boulder, smells of salt, has a chest that could possess me, or other nightmares Lisa Marie Basile’s Apocryphal exists in that Nabokovian twilight between childhood and adulthood. Between these realms one confronts monsters and the monolithic oppression of tradition. This is Alice in Wonderland re-imagined as a harrowing nightmare journey, a poodle-skirted damsel thrown into the jaws of a slavering beast, who may be the speaker’s father. What remains are fragments, memories, and fantasies strewn about or reconfigured. When reading the book’s sticky sensual passages, the slow realization occurs that these prurient shards point to something more sinister than adolescent sex and appeasing those base cravings. I notice: the other children do not live this way but then again they [...]

This essay will be posted in three sections. Part 2 will post on Thursday, October 16th and part 3 on Thursday October 23. Place plays a substantial role in establishing environment. Place can be used as a metaphor to define abstractions, as a backdrop that can help set tone or even as a character which can enhance movement and increase tension. Utilizing a sense of place can be an important factor in building depth in a poem and can be a significant tool for the development of characters. In the collection Skirts and Slacks, W.S. Di Piero uses place as a character as opposed to a backdrop to hang his characters upon. The characters do not merely exist where they live, place is used to give the reader additional bits of information that play out like vignettes around them. And although at times Di Piero’s characters seem to exist in [...]

In case you didn’t hate me enough already I want implants. I want Botox tips from my mother. I want to zap the spider veins right out of my long, pretty legs. I want to wear lipstick, wax my eyebrows, wax my pussy, wax my stubborn upper lip. I want to wear designer dresses, designer shoes. I want to burn every pair of jorts I ever owned. I want to submit and submit and submit. The last time a man on the street told me I was beautiful, I said thank you. I am a thief We met in a museum – your head was tilted up, face blurred. I could never see your shoes, though I tried. We followed each other up and down staircases, between beetle- gnawed taxidermy displays, met at the feet of the Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil and there is no metaphor here. There was a spoon [...]

The Magic Word: ‘Gypsy’ Witchcraft, Love, and Breaking Tradition in Luminiţa Mihai Cioabă’s Poem “The Apparition of Choxani” “Magic,” she said, “is only in words, in the naming.” - Qristina Zavačková, from “Magic and Magpies—Akhaljiben the Kakaraske” I first discovered Luminiţa Mihai Cioabă, Romanian-born Romani poet and fiction writer, when I bought Roads of the Roma: a PEN anthology of Gypsy Writers, in preparation to teach my class on Romani literature, culture, and representation at Florida State University. Cioabă, a speaker of Rromanès (Kalderash dialect), Italian, and Romanian, writes about Romani women’s lives and experiences, often drawing on Romani folktales. Her poem, “The Apparition of Choxani” (116), narrates the appearance of a witch to the speaker, the two kisses they share, and the resulting arc of desire; the piece is enchanting both as an artwork and as a critical puzzle. The version I shared with my students, translated from Italian [...]

This is an amazing week for our Infoxicated Corner. The pieces I’m blessed to share with y’all fit together by their own fortuitous kismet, in a whirling conversation about the intersection of danger and desire — the things that simultaneously attract us and threaten us.