The Delta If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet. You are not you anymore. You are a girl standing in a pool of clouds as they catch fire in the distance. There are laws of heaven and those of place and those who see the sky in the water, angels in ashes that are the delta’s now. They say if you sweep the trash from your house after dark, you sweep away your luck. If you are going by foot, bring a stick, a third leg, and honor the great disorder, the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds. Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can, knowing there is a little water in things you take for granted, a little charity and squalor for the smallest forms of life. Voodoo was always mostly charity. People forget. If you shake a tablecloth outside at night, someone in [...]

Psalm for Kingston _____If I forget thee, O Jerusalem __________~Psalm 137 City of Jack Mandora—mi nuh choose none—of Anancy _____prevailing over Mongoose, Breda Rat, Puss, and Dog, Anancy __________saved by his wits in the midst of chaos and against all odds; _____of bawdy Big Boy stories told by peacock-strutting boys, hush-hush but loud enough to be heard by anyone passing by the yard. City of market women at Half-Way-Tree with baskets _____atop their heads or planted in front of their laps, squatting or standing __________with arms akimbo, susuing with one another, clucking _____their tongues, calling in voices of pure sugar, come dou-dou: see the pretty bag I have for you, then kissing their teeth when you saunter off. City of school children in uniforms playing dandy shandy _____and brown girl in the ring—tra-la-la-la-la— __________eating bun and cheese and bulla and mangoes, _____juice sticky and running down their chins, bodies arced [...]

TOWN GREEN: SOUTH ROYALTON How long has it been since I lazed on a town green? (Wistfulness, beware.) A couple of square acres set with maple and crabapple. (Sprayed, mulched, blooming impossibly early.) Two gazebos, for bandstand and romance. (Amo, amas. Gazebo, gazebae?) Starched white church with a black clock-face. (The time is what unearthly hour?) Across the green, a train station where business begins. (End of the line) Before me, a cottage row; behind, a row of eateries. (Who cooks in a chichi town?) On its grass surface, not a weed or divot. (No sliding tackles, scraped knees?) From the highway, South Royalton seems tucked in timelessness (a steeple crucifix, a gambrel barn’s weathervane) like a storybook town one sees from a passing car, wishing (fairytales were true) fairytales were true, wondering how one gets there (from here) from here. Forty years ago, I’d have lain (“loafed and invited [...]

These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here. –James Joyce, Ulysses [2176] Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei, a translator and poetry scholar, has a beautiful essay accompanied by a selection of translations of the Belgian poet Jean Daive in . The sampling of work that Oei addresses all derive from his translation…

Crooked I wanted a crooked man. I panned for a crooked man. I tea spooned out trenches until I dug up my crooked man. Now I have a corner on a crooked man, a crooked house. I got crookider And crookider, out of whack. Nakeder than cheese, clothed with nakedness. Tilt and spin, I let in every draft. No matter. Nothing straightens any of us out. Nothing goes according to plan. Unless the plan is a crooked plan. ___________________________________________ Lee Upton’s most recent book is Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo). In 2014 a collection of her short stories, The Tao of Humiliation, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. She is a professor of English and writer-in-residence at Lafayette College. Photo credit: Cece Ziolkowski. Copyright © 2013 by Lee Upton. Used with permission of the author. Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: Lisa [...]

Butch Geography by Stacey Waite Tupelo Press ISBN: 978-1-937797-25-7 Paperback, $16.95, 72p “God made gender a plaything.”—Stacey Waite Butch Geography is the first full-length book of poetry from Stacey Waite, award-winning author of three chapbooks and assistant professor of gender studies and creative writing at the University of Nebraska. The poems of Butch Geography explore gender as a role and gender as a body. In a voice both lyrical and narrative, they attempt placement and identification, and are both the reflection and the act of locating and understanding the other in our midst. But Waite isn’t trying for the diagnostic or the definitive. We see in these poems the conundrum of the human animal: as others try to place us—figure us out—we are trying to place ourselves, too. And in our efforts are all gradations of grace, error, and exasperation. By looking at the questions of gender Waite is able [...]

Faggot As when a word lifts unexpectedly ________________________or implodes— you had meant to say maelstrom but now interposed between you and the open world, male storm (no one would think to give a sex to it, so were unready)—that was its arrival, _____________________________fire that didn’t act as one sheet but gathered separately as flames around some common matter: call it a heart, make this a Catholic scene, only the thorns are missing unless they lie, like everything else, beneath this oil-slicked water now risen, now ignited, as we are ignited—like faggots thrown at the sinner’s feet as he shakes, as he shouts It was only for love, as when all words abandon . . . __________________________________ Rickey Laurentiis was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is the recipient of several fellowships, including the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and [...]

At Dashanzi 798, also called the Dashanzi Art District, is Beijing’s premier art community. Since it formed in the early 2000s, a number of Western art dealers and corporate entities have set up shop here, and a few of its first tenants, including Ai Wei Wei, have become a powerful force in the art world. My visit to 798 in February 2013 confirmed this description. Walls and light posts are plastered with exhibition billboards and fliers. Weird public art proliferates. For example, in the first three courtyards closest to the entrance, there is: a resin statue of a scorpion, an airplane wing embedded upright in the ground (its engine looking much like an unblinking camera eye) and a 7 foot tall cement man bound in rope, BDSM style. Spray paint stencils and graffiti coat the exteriors of buildings, buses, and signs. Street sellers hock potatoes and fur pelts as fashionable [...]

CANARY I held my canary out for you when you said your canary felt a little droopy. Your canary was a ruby drop in my frosty glass of canary. The canary between us grew for many days. I wanted to fight the canary, but you held me back. The officer shot the unarmed canary on a canary I used to walk down every day. When you touched the canary underneath my knee, a balloon filled with canary in an eastern corner. The sound of unmarked canaries overhead frightened the rural hospital. The president has never commented publicly on the controversial canary program. Can you remember where that canary was that we tried so many years ago? Oh, that canary feels so good—just like that. The canaries carry electricity to our houses in even smaller canaries. When the activists passed out yellow canaries I took one and read it. A canary [...]

Gregory Orr is famous and has won major awards. John Smith is a retired high school teacher from New Jersey who is a poet, well respected locally but unknown otherwise. Orr has blurbs from such luminaries as Albert Goldbarth, Ilya Kaminsky, and Naomi Shihab Nyef. John has blurbs from poets who have won grants and are well thought of, but not exactly headliners. I was asked to review Orr. I chose to review Smith. So why am I putting them together? First, both inhabit the same generational orbit: Nam, eastern spirituality mixed with a dose of overcoming the dark spots through mindfulness, meditation, a sometimes didactic sense of wisdom that would not be out of place at a weekend retreat on Rumi. They do not draw their powers from decorative displays of language, and tend to have some of the traits inherent to the deep imagists, to Bly and James [...]

The open sound of French Even the sound of French is open And the children find me very interesting to look at It is as if I am a TV show or supper All my pretty babies who paint the winter chests With red and gold and green It was on the afternoon In the small wooden town That I was so mired in my act of jealousy I did not pay attention To the beauty of the dark church in front of me And now you ask me To meet you in a park after dark Well it is too late too late I am already flying __________________________________________________________ DOROTHEA LASKY is the author of three full-length collections of poetry: THUNDERBIRD (Wave Books, 2012), AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010). She is also the author of five chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Ducking [...]

I live in a nation that has three year olds becoming life time members of the NRA, and anti-bullying seminars that force a draconian language of the politically correct so technical and nit-picky as to be a form of bullying in its own right. Guns to the right of me! Jargon to the left of me! All volley and hold the thunder (after all, thunder may be perceived as a semiotic indicator of male patriarchy). I look at my daughter and say: “I’m so sorry, but I wanted you to exist. Into this vale of tears, I have introduced a magician giant who lifts the vale and give me moments of clarity and peace–he’s the friendly giant of old poems I can return to, the Giant who goes “presto!” and behind the vale of NRA nut jobs, and academic jargon spouters, there appears my mother’s favorite Robert Louis Stevenson, my [...]

The Food Pantry Don’t have to go to the food pantry anymore. Got a job bringing people to the food pantry. ____________________________________________ Dave Roskos is the editor of Big Hammer Magazine & Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. He lives in his home state of New Jersey where he works as a Life Skills Specialist in the mental health field. His most recent chapbook, INTENSIVE CARE, was published by Black Rabbit Press in 2010. Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: Emily Vogel Poem of the Week: Mark Wunderlich Poem of the Week: Frank Montesonti Introduction to Unlocked Poem of the Week: Lauren K. Alleyne

Today I am going to speak on a panel in front of graduate students discussing publication. I was surprised when I was asked, but found out I was third or fourth choice (I suspected that) when other professors turned it down. I will go inspite of the fact that, at the moment, I can’t speak above a whisper (should be OK with a mic) and even though most of those students are immured in careerism. I will go because they are immured in careerism, and do not care for anything except how and where to publish. Well, they do, but you’d never know it. Everything they want me to tell them is already available in dozens of books on how and where. There’s even a spot on line that gives all the ratios of publications , breaks it all down,and analyzes in almost sabermetric like detail. I will be facing [...]

I. How can we define the philosophy of pragmatism? What is the relationship between the philosophy of pragmatism and the poetics of John Ashbery? Is there one? Ken McClelland cites Cornel West’s citation of C.I. Lewis as “being one of the best characterizations of pragmatism ever formulated” (Opening Truth 12). Lewis writes, Pragmatism could be characterized as the doctrine that all problems are at bottom problems of conduct, that all judgments are, implicitly, judgments of value, and that, as there can be ultimately no valid distinction of theoretical and practical, so there can be no final separation of questions of truth of any kind from questions of the justifiable ends of action. (qtd. in McClelland 12) McClelland goes on to comment that, “with the words, ‘the justifiable ends of action’ in mind, we clearly see that pragmatism’s philosophical impulse is inextricably tied to temporal consequences, with the idea that the [...]