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 / [...]

* 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 [...]

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 [...]

Swallowed Whole Recently, on vacation, I saw a blue heron catch and eat a fish. In its middle, the fish was a good deal larger than the heron’s slender neck. Looking out subway windows, sparks fly, light up graffiti tags in this dark, rat-infested tunnel I am hurtling through. Ideas leap to mind: violence, poverty, being born with very little real opportunity. I’ve been taught these ideas. The heron brought the fish on land, pecked into it repeatedly until it was good and dead, then somehow managed to swallow it whole. Can I have an original idea? It all feels collaborative, this living of life. My original ideas are the smallest of perceptions. I’ve been taught, too, the importance of graffiti as urban art, street culture expressed. I’ve rounded many corners, blown back by a mural with teeth. In a class I took, one theory-loving student asked a particularly earnest [...]

On This Side In the dream father was finished with me. He was dressed for work or moving on. Whichever it was he would soon be gone– his silence a warning, in his gaze regret: whatever it was he had wished for me hadn’t happened yet and by now probably never would. The window framed his measured stride and I understood, when he did not turn to wave, he had given all he could on this side of the glass and the grave. _________________________________________________________ Jeff Rath is the author of three collections of poetry: The Waiting Room at the End of the World (2007), In the Shooting Gallery of the Heart (2009) and Film Noir (2011), all published by Iris G. Press. His works have been published in a number of journals including Everyday Genius and Fledgling Rag. He is the 2007 R.E. Foundation Award winner and a Pushcart Prize [...]

Watching the Pelican Die On TV, I watch the pelican with its mouth wide open, its wings and body coated with oil. Is it screaming? I do not hear the sound and since this is a photograph, I don’t know if it was caught in that mouth-stretched howl when it died or if it’s howling in recognition that it cannot survive the thick coat of oil that bears it down. The ladies who take care of you when I’m gone tell me you are having trouble. “His hands,” they say, “his hands.” When I come home, I see that your hands have turned black at the tips and I see that the ends of your fingers have been eaten away. I watch the dead bird in the Gulf floating on top of the water, its legs stiff and straight in the air, its body drained of all motion, all light. [...]

Maria, thanks for agreeing to this interview. I wanted to start by discussing your book Writing Poetry to Save Your Life, particularly the idea of “personal poetry.” Could you start by explaining what your vision of that is? My vision of poetry is that it should be based on some essential truth about what it means to be human and I think narrative poetry gets at those truths more directly and effectively than many other types of poetry. I want to give people permission to tell their own stories and to look at the world unflinchingly through the their own eyes rather than worrying about what critics or literary theorists say about writing. Like Faulkner, I believe literature is about the truths of the human heart and not about intellectual analysis. I trust the old lady who lives in my belly more than I trust intellect when writing a poem, [...]

Snowing again here. Harshest winter since I moved North. In retrospect, I’ll like it except this should have happened when I was 20 or so. Come to think of it, the winter of 78 had two huge snow storms in Jersey within a month of each other. I remember shoveling Mrs. Boyle’s and Mrs Chris’ walks and then doing my own, because it had been a tradition with my father to shovel them before ourselves (they were both old) . Mrs. Boyle gave us brandy. Mrs Chris gave us a sort of royal smile, which I liked almost as much as the brany. She had a daughter named Dot, and a “ne’er-do-well” son in law named Kenny. You knew men in the neighborhood were not quite reputable if there was a Y connected to their names. It meant they had been good looking and beloved early in life but had [...]

Bliss April loves a challenge, choosing to split the slab of winter-hardened earth with the silk tongue of a crocus. She casts the stiffened brooks as her fandango dancers. At first they crack and groan, call her the cruelest of taskmasters but April persists, persuades: the streams ripple, sequined and agile. For April even forgotten roadsides can ruffle out in a froth of forsythia, waving brash wands of membranous stars that glitter like eternity, then float to the ground, a wasted galaxy melting into the land while this uterine muscle of a month bears down, rousting the fetuses each from their dark havens, thrusting them naked and mewling into the hungry light. The least of April’s exploits is lulling us: we are so eager to ignore the hollow echo of the daffodils’ blare and the lithe red tulips’ throats of snow. Bliss is included in Appetite for the Divine (2006) [...]

THE SILENCE IN AN EMPTY HOUSE BY MARIA MAZZIOTTI GILLAN NYQ BOOKS, 2013 ISBN 978-1935520-89-4 All griefs are as unprecedented, as original as the whorls in our fingerprints, and yet certain poets are able to take the specific ceremonies of grief and loss and reenact them in such a way that they are meaningful to all who read their work. This portability is something the poet Pessoa mentioned when he wrote: “The personal is not the human. To become the human it must make a bridge.” This bridge is the contrivance of the right ceremony, the necessary words that will release the energy of true feeling and allow that tentative thread to be touched and felt by the reader. Maria Mazziotti’s new collection, The Silence in An Empty House, does just that. Of course, Gillan has been sending out such threads for decades in other books, but here the threads [...]

Prayer for Topaz, 1942 Dear God, Mom said you are busy and don’t have time to listen to a little 8-year-old Negro girl from North Carolina and her foolishness, like praying for a box of candy. That would be selfish. But if it’s really important she said, then I should take it to you in prayer like the preacher says on Sundays. I’m not asking for anything for me. But I’ve been hearing the kids at school talking about some place out west called Topaz. At first I thought they were talking about a spot to get rings and flashy jewelry, but Margaret’s big brother, Ed, who’s in 5th grade, says it’s something like a jail where they put Japanese people. I didn’t believe him because he’s always trying to scare us girls. So I asked my dad, and he said it’s true. The government put them there so that [...]

Long-time resident of Miami poet Michael Hettich has been writing and publishing poetry for over three decades now. His friends and students here in South Florida have luckily benefitted from the closeness and dialy-ness of his presence and work, so too have many of his long-time readers here and abroad. As the three poems to be shared here will show, Hettich’s is a poetics of external and internal metamorphosis and regeneration, at once fed by and still feeding from elemental forces many times taken for granted because of their everyday groundedness in time and place. With a powerful impetus that has always seemed to me Ovidian, his poetry is always immediate, action-packed, vivid and engrossingly visceral, even when subjective fancies enter lyrically or narratively mid-stream. In an always trusting and refreshing manner, his poems invite all readers to dwell in them for a little. His are poems to be lived, [...]

First Thaw This morning was the first time: all the snow that buried us receding, still in drifts piled high, crusted with ice and yet receding, slowly drawing back—abandoned cars revealed, crushed grass, the shattered road ice-slicked, salt-splashed, slush running downstream, breaking up over the drains, dissolving….All this time I thought the whole world lost, but now the light glances off roofs still cracking with the weight— a little less, today. The second time is now: when I can bear to look around once more and watch this world emerge—old world from which so much is missing still, new world in which so much will, one day soon, appear. ______________________________________________ Ned Balbo’s The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press) was awarded the 2012 Poets’ Prize and the 2010 Donald Justice Prize. His two previous books are Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize and ForeWord Book [...]

ALL THAT REMAINS BY BRIAN FANELLI ISBN: 978-1936373468 OCTOBER 2013 UNBOUND CONTENT Here’s a challenge for all of you poets out there. Get a copy of Brian Fanelli’s All That Remains and try to write like him. At first blush it does not seem an insurmountable challenge. Fanelli’s work is approachable. He does not brandish his technical prowess with intimidating sestinas. There is no pandering to theory, nor does he flaunt his erudition by quoting obscure thinkers or having his characters speak in Latin. (Though there are some well-placed references to Bob Dylan and horror movies.) What we do find are rusting towns and their hard-working denizens, whose horizons are limited through no fault of their own. We also catch moments of tenderness and regret and glimpses of youth with chances seized or lost. While All that Remains is best consumed end to end, I am going to focus first [...]

FOR LACK OF DIAMOND YEARS BY CAROLINE BEASLEY-BAKER ISBN 978-1938349096 NOVEMBER 2013 PELEKINESIS As a literary person who became an art critic, the nexus of visual art and poetry has always been of interest to me. I have known Caroline Beasley-Baker as a painter; now I know her also as a poet. In Beasley-Baker’s visual art—in all of its diverse forms—I always saw a perceptually acute link between the visual and myth. In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer describes how visual feints and impressions, physiognomies (seeing faces in things), fears, animation of the inanimate, and conceptual reversals begin; how nervous ticks comprise the human fight-flight physiology. He describes how epiphanies were experienced and then clarified over time as the presence of a god (or “temporary gods”) emerged, places subsequently becoming sacred as shrines. In secular life, such huhs? are often the result of mishearing something, of making a [...]