There are certain (uncertain) propositions that every poet must eventually encounter, if only to embrace or abandon. They are not propositions so much as ways of being, lifestyles; and, like the way one walks, or talks, or just stands in the rain, they are ineluctably intimate parts of ourselves, hence not propositions so much as self-images. What kind of poet do you want to be (I imagine a Bellovian unctuous trickster asking)? What kind of poet are you? “Oh, she’s an angry poet,” they say, or, “The woman is far too sentimental for my tastes.” These are cursory judgments, but some kind of truths are lodged in even the most mawkish and unhelpful of sentiments. So let’s begin at the beginning. A poem is a stance, a temperament, a philosophy, an ontologically practical, (if impractical), modus operandi. A vision – not necessarily metaphysical, but a way of looking at things [...]

You sit down to write a report entitled, “How is it possible for one person to kill another?” An hour later you wander off into the streets, leaving a blank page pocked with dark nothings. You see people cover coughs, remove glasses, wave goodbyes, adjust headsets, thumb mobiles, stub out cigarettes and arrange hair in ways that suggest intimate worlds and private moments. Almost every action unaware, an unnoticed use of the hands. You wonder how many more steps in the direction of unconsciousness would be required for one of those pairs of hands to be raised against another. You fall into the hole between the hand and the heart and stay there because it is easier than answering such questions. Australian born Richard James Allen has published nine books as a poet, fiction, performance writer and editor, most recently The Kamikaze Mind (Brandl & Schlesinger). His writing has appeared [...]

Massachusetts writers hold a great position of influence in American writing. Some of this is just a matter of timing: Massachusetts had a kind of head start in fostering talent, and such advantages inevitably become influence (“whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance”). But perhaps it’s better not to speak of “influence”; instead, I would claim that Bradstreet divined in the landscape images and structures of being that other American writers would discover and explore. After pondering the act of contemplation, Bradstreet retells the first murder. Cain is depicted as the definitively anti-Christ figure, a cursed newborn enthroned in the lap of Eve (contra images of the theotokos): Here sits our grandame in retired place, And in her lap her bloody Cain new-born; The weeping imp oft looks her in the face, Bewails his unknown hap and fate forlorn; Stanza 15 tells the story [...]

Ghosts bristle from the grimy grout of cobbles and tiles. Foot -paths, the Ouija board. Feet pulled by forces to trace, decrypt names. Whispers just audible to haunted ears. Pedestrians strollers and filth, endless streets. My mind an accomplice a terrified toddler, curious climbs the steps toward the attic a house planted on dead memories. Eyes catch shadows, shoes read the Braille of faces. Shades surface beneath my boots, blacken the soles on the sullen trail, a ghost-infested city. Ali Alizadeh’s latest book is Ashes in the Air (UQP, 2011), shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Poetry. His next novel will be published by UQP in 2013. He is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Monash University. He has a website:

AND THEN WE SAW THE DAUGHTER OF THE MINOTAUR Poet, comma. It is thus the delay, which is also a beginning. That we can link eyes across her time-space continuum is another hyena. The female elongates, bares fangs, and a trash compactor recycles. Hyena gives in the recycling fashion. Phoenix, no more false flight from holes; now balloons eat at decay. Hunger denuded us, too. But will you give up your death for me? With surgery, I outright hollow the monster to breathe across windows. I don her hollow whole. She writes back in the pauses of haze. Her and her tragic magic. We are all cross-dressing in tiny wings with the machines of bones to go on. ___________________________________________ Of her most recent book from Litmus Press, I Want to Make You Safe, John Ashbery described Amy King‘s poems as bringing “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than [...]

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: [...]

The assertion that “Contemplations” is primarily concerned with the ascension of the soul may bump against prevailing notions. Some critics have said Bradstreet was more in love with the earth than heaven since the lines that directly address the idea of heaven often fall short: “too often merely traditionally rendered passages pale before some of the more deeply felt lyrical passages in praise of Phoebus and the things of earth”. Indeed, the poem begins with the rapture of the poet as she views nature: her gaze begins with the autumn leaves, then moves upward toward the sun: Thou as a bridegroom from thy chamber rushes, And as a strong man, joys to run a race; The morn doth usher thee with smiles and blushes; The Earth reflects her glances in thy face. Birds, insects, animals with vegative, Thy heat from death and dullness doth revive, And in the darksome womb [...]

Because the river is never still enough to reflect the sky, I want to stay. I want to say to strangers, who say I love you, it’s untrue. The mirrors of their eyes only blind me. There’ll be no ovation. There’s hardly a road. Home is a distant thought, hovering on a squall. I spot a chapel in the shade covered in lichen’s dull brocade. No-one’s looking at me, kid. Take a flake of rock, scratch the word Ingrid into bark, letter by letter. By the force of my hand, I might earn permanency. Let that plane leave without me. is the author of Mortal (Washington, DC: Red Morning Press, 2006). She held both the MacDowell Fellowship (USA) and the Hawthornden Fellowship (UK) in 2005. Her poetry appears in journals and anthologies worldwide and online, including Cordite Poetry Review, Famous Reporter, Poetrix, Hecate and Moorilla Mosaic: Contemporary Tasmanian Writing. Ivy [...]

To the Night Shark Past dusk I dived Fled without flashlight Went against the current I knew Would bring me to you Tooth-skinned from nose to fin Mortal and counter Clockwise across you Skin I gave up to touch Streamed against the current One moment still mortal I was without struggle without air instinct speech Skin dissolving between each Snaggle-toothed stroke Touch babbling bled Only then With the current Immortal ___________________________________________________ Rosebud Ben-Oni is a playwright at New Perspective Theater, where she is currently at work on a new play. Educated at New York University, the University of Michigan and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ms. Ben-Oni was a Rackham Merit Fellow and a Horace Goldsmith Fellow. She is also co-editor for “HER KIND,” the official blog of “VIDA: Women in Literary Arts”. Her works have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Arts & Letters, and The Texas Poetry Review. Her [...]

When I was 4 or 5, my grandmother loved to ask me where I was from: “Pittsfield, Massachewits” I’d say. Like a sneeze. She took a special delight in my inability to grasp and order all the necessary phonemes. We moved from Massachusetts before I turned 10, before I really appreciated the important literary contributions that state had made to American literature. I do remember visiting Herman Melville’s estate and finding, appropriately enough, an arrowhead half-buried in the ground. Presumably another child lost it after buying it from the gift shop, but that object must’ve buried itself deeply in my psyche because I’ve felt compelled to recover my heritage. There’s Frost and Dickinson, of course; Moby-Dick is becoming a psychic and artistic anchor for me. And more recently, I am growing into deeper relationship with the “small triumphs” of Robert Francis. It’s part of this Massachusetts ressourcement, I suppose, that [...]

floats down river worries about mud lice and loss of power stops in no parking zones will recall a brief encounter with a Gospel piano enters the playground of roofs yields nothing to hungry dogs or startled onlookers no longer holds blood orange and old sausage bumps into bridges asks nothing of river bank mourns broken seals steals past ships notes other white goods on top of cars at the bottom of swimming pools cannot avoid direct sunlight releases carbon slowly into surging brown water born to beer once dated an esky hovers over houses is alarmed by outboard motor drifts past factories plays dodgem with bus stops glides through the drive through carries no change does not order a fudge sundae bears more than it’s own weight ferries the last of the sea gulls wishes for a raincoat finds a broken umbrella asks a drowned cat how many lives? [...]

FIRST SNOW Split peas simmer to a chalky paste when held long enough over fire. Suspended over heat I’ve been known to change properties: I said I would never forgive. Beside my pot the silver knife blade longer than my hand smells like onion & crushed garlic; I have held this same blade out toward his chest. A year ago I knew cold, but now I marvel at how winter brings wanderers inside: the scurrying mice through the walls. The quilt collected at the foot of the bed like old receipts. Last night I slept on the higher side of the mattress, let him back into open spaces. Outside the first snow falls; we might have melted. __________________________________________________ DéLana R.A. Dameron is the author of How God Ends Us, a collection of poems selected by Elizabeth Alexander for the 2008 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize. Dameron’s poetry, non-fiction and fiction [...]

Abendessen The statues of Berlin spent decades underwater- during the final days all of them were tossed, all those iron men were tossed into the canals for safekeeping. Picture the face of Geothe caressed by weeds, at home beneath a sheet of solid ice unmovable through the darkest months. There are no ghosts: only statues. Haunting is a notion too obscene, there are no ghosts: this house is clean. tourists, students of human atrocity swarm and sip from glass phials her ashen residues as verigated diverse and seductive as any French wine, or Belgian chocolate. The water itself remembers, though its course is fixed: the tour begins at Zoo station and will conclude at the Jewish Memorial. But where do they sleep these innumerable children of trauma? do they make their graves in the air, the famous curative Berlinerluft? or in the swamp which is the mother of this place, [...]

Dear Uncle Sam He’s not your type. He kisses men with eyes open, talks with them shaded or averted to acquiescent asses. When cordoned & questioned, he laughs. Beware. His laughter beguiles. Beware. He never shoots straight. Always curls fetal in the arms of any one who can still him. Never sleeps alone. Give him a gun, & he may turn it into a prop for a plié. Give him a gun, & he may turn it on himself & every fool who believes you. He’s claimed bodies in every major city east of Chicago, saw mine heaving among strobe-lit throng & marked me: his sweat clinging to my nape, our silhouettes on bedroom walls, now a mirage blurred by desert dunes, now only the caress of lines hardened hands scrawl: I’ll be home next month … I’ll be home next year … I’ll be … I’ll … _____________________________________________ L. [...]

Download a PDF of the strip here. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Kevin Simmonds Eric Kocher’s Equals Tiger Poem of the Week: Kevin Shea The Melody Ascends Stepwise Continues