Some thoughts on time and acceptance of time, by your faithful editor, Arielle Guy
May 7, 2012
]]>First, I just want to say, thank you for everyone’s patience in waiting for this issue. And, other than that, Hallelujah! that it’s finally published! Absolutely gorgeous and moving work in this issue, I am so grateful to all of the contributors. Thank you!
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This weekend, I finally wrapped up the current issue of Turntable. It didn’t even require more than the usual one cup of coffee per day. My schedule had just finally cleared enough so I had a good part of two full days to devote to posting and editing. This span of luxurious time to devote to one task was a revelation. In the past several months, I’ve fit in uploads between work deadlines and proofreading jobs and coaching appointments. I thought of time and space and downtime and uptime and whatever else kind of time and how schedules and urgencies and deadlines make up a life. It doesn’t matter how busy we are, how many hours a week we work, busy is busy. Comparing hours logged doesn’t matter. What is busy to us is busy to us and we can tune in and listen to what our own personal thresholds are. And, what I’ve found is that, even in the midst of this busiest of times I have just gone through, a breath in the middle of it all, letting myself rest even a little bit, with eyes closed and computer off, expands time in an almost miraculous way. I say “almost” because there must be some law of physics that addresses what happens when taking a pause to be aware of the present moment. Quantum dharma.
Measuring Stillness and Deep Acceptance
The beginning months of this year have been a lesson in acceptance. Acceptance isn’t partial or occluded. It is the essence of unconditional view and attitude, bearing carried through in every situation, with every person, with every thought and feeling. This kind of dedication to truth, to the underlying reality of each experience, is a skill. In some ways, it comes naturally to be where we are, to experience life in a raw and immediate way. But life teaches us to shut down, protect ourselves, place barriers between ourselves and our experience, our own thoughts and emotions. Seeing through these constructions of rules and expectations and busyness, of entanglements and denial, is a lifelong pursuit. In the pursuit, there is revelation and a constancy that can only be found in the shifting of the very ground beneath us. The paradox of acceptance and constantly shifting reality is that it cuts through to the core of experience itself—a conflagration of quantum and four-dimensional reality. The reality beyond reality, in reality, existing parallel and intertwined like DNA strands in our daily lives. The very inaccessibility and uncertainty of subatomic particles is what builds the ground under us. We are made of illuminated substance that isn’t substance at all, yet it’s tangible on levels we can’t even fathom, can’t see. The measuring and acceptance of these two seemingly conflicting states of reality is reality itself.
We deal with an ever-changing world that we try to hold steady with toothpicks, we try to keep warm with flames from small matches. It’s like trying to hold the planets in a colander. The orbits and gravity and attachment of the universe to itself is transcended by the speed of light and dying stars and black holes and dark matter, elements of reality we can’t explain fully, elements that exist and we know of their existence only by their effect on other elements. The universe is, for the most part, unknown. Our lives are, for the most part, unknown. Yet we try to build structures and schedules and goals and even dreams that sustain on the tightrope of time, emotion, flesh, and thought.
Since January, time has not gone the way I expected. Schedules have been disrupted to such a degree that whatever original plan there was dissipated into ether. I spent a lot of the last few months being angry and frustrated and worried. What I found, to my surprise, was these disturbances were only on the surface. When I went deeper, there was a beautiful silence, a steady peace, the cradle of acceptance that felt like birth itself, death itself, where all things merged into one whole piece of sustained reality. All of the science in the world, all of the psychology, coping mechanisms, clotheslines, dish strainers, family albums, house walls, pay checks, are no match for this world beyond time and space, this connection to a divine peace, a mystery that will never be solved, and in which we sit like babies on a mother’s breast. The truth of this mystery is comforting, once we get beyond the sheer terror of everything we think we know expiring into nothingness, emptiness.
How does this all relate to daily life? It has had an astounding effect on my mind and how it works, and how I think about things, and how I maneuver through my day. Stress, fear, tension, sadness, anger, joy, desire, longing all still arise, frequently, and every moment, I turn to them and, instead of interpreting or craving or distancing, I look toward them, and inquire into their nature, their feel, texture, bodily sensation, accompanying thoughts and beliefs. This inquiry was first done so I could find peace, be at peace, cultivate acceptance and comfort and relax into my life. The stage that came after this wrangling with, again, trying to pin down peace and comfort, was the deepest lesson I have ever learned in my life. I learned to be with the experience, without looking even one second ahead, with full immersion in the emotion or bodily sensation, full presence. This is a constant vigilance, one that requires awareness each moment, and a willingness to not define, predict, tell stories about, or repel or drown in any particular experience.
Our stories are powerful, seductive, compelling, melodramatic, fascinating. They make our lives into epics. The thing that is so heartbreaking is that, without these stories, we are even more heroic, more epic. Being with what is without effort, without trying to frame it, is the deepest, most powerful experience there is. We can want so desperately that our hearts feel like they will break out of our chests, feel grief so intense that it weighs our bodies down like lead, feel love so overwhelming, we shy away from it with our beliefs about relationships and intimacy, and we can train ourselves to stay. To stay with all of it, intense and overpowering as it is. This is true intimacy.
So during these first months of the year, when I have been unable to do everything I wanted, everything I set out to do on January 1st, I have been learning, slowly, achingly, how to accept this. To accept that I can’t run three businesses, see my friends, edit my arts magazine, work out, do yoga, do my dishes, breathe, walk, make coffee, cook healthy meals, open the windows, be there for my family, feel everything I am feeling, pay attention to my thoughts, meditate, look up at the stars, attend events, sleep, watch TV and have downtime, all at the same time. I have not learned how to not sleep. I have not learned how to multitask to such an efficient degree that I can get everything done faster. I have learned that I can’t do everything.
Balance is a trick of the mind. In the middle of everything, I have learned how to balance. When nothing is getting done and I am ridiculously behind on everything, I have learned how to balance. What are my priorities, what are the real quality activities I want to do, where is my energy highest, deepest, most rooted?
I think about those little atoms dancing and the beautiful, unpredictable electrons, neutrons, and protons, quarks and unknown subatomic particles dancing, and moving, never knowing where they will move toward, never even knowing where they are, and there is amazing and awe-inspiring hope and openness there. The very nature of physical reality is built on a movement so unknown, it becomes a stable ground for us to understand and feel and live toward. We live on this earth and can feel physical earth beneath our feet, air in our lungs, our heartbeats and senses and the experience of light and darkness, fear and pain, ecstasy and faith, and it is all of apiece. It is a whole, the cradle of which is deep reality, immediate presence, and constant shifting, movement that is so constant, it holds stillness within it. In this, there is peace and we can develop skill to stay there. Stay there and work with accepting each experience exactly as it is. This is being true to ourselves, to our lives, to our experience. This discipline leaves no room for denial or interpretation or prediction. This loyalty to our experience, every moment, obliterates any lie, any protective mechanism, survival skill, learned resistance and distancing from ourselves and others and life and death. This is divine and wondrous. In each new moment, there is each new moment. Balancing this out with getting chores done, striving for goals, forming relationships is the essence of truth—in all of these pursuits lies the very nature of reality itself. It’s about how we approach our lives. We can stand open and vulnerable to our lives, letting our thoughts pass, working with our resistance and compulsion, and holding steady, heart engaged, releasing our stories, letting ourselves fully experience our lives, without trying to change them.
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Molly McIntyre is a Brooklyn-based artist, illustrator and educator. Her work deals with tenderness, vulnerability and the desire to be a better person. She employs motifs and materials familiar to her own life, in the belief that the specific connects us as much as the universal. Her work has been shown in Philadelphia, New York, Maine, Washington, California, and Mito City, Japan.
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rob mclennan’s Glengarry and C, and Jennifer H. Fortin’s Mined Muzzle Velocity
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rob mclennan’s Glengarry
rob mclennan’s new book Glengarry (Talonbooks) is both visceral and concrete. Glengarry appears as a three section wonder that in my reading of it, I experienced as a triptych. Not just three-fold but held together by hinges. The two hinges that held the triplicate together for me were place and body, and they allowed the whole of Glengarry to be a sort of art for me. I will speak about both place and body in a blended way throughout this review. My intent is to reveal how these two hinges work together (enacting Glengarry) in a communal way in order to hold the book together from the inside out.
Part of the triptych feeling certainly came from the aesthetics of the poems. Dripping from themselves--but in a clear and calculated way. Like rain dripping from an aerial gutter that has just reached its max. Addition of drips making drips leak. It is raining right now as I write this. Rain that makes the sky look like a shadow. I think about apparatuses that can fill to a max. That have an end point. I think about what it is to extrude beyond an end point. Is Glengarry just such type of apparatus? Does it have an end point? Or is it the extrusion beyond an end point? What is it for an it to spill over from within itself? Is it possible that spilling over can be an activism? Oh “many-splendoured” wake!
To spill over as an activism.
In this book there is something that emerges from what feels to me like a gestural admixing (on the part of mclennan) of the details considered to be history. Prior to reading this book I thought of history as something fixed--as frustration. As site that would always indelibly remain past tense. However while reading through Glengarry’s sections (glengarry: open field, “whiskey jack” and avalanche”) I was struck by the way that through continual threading of the materialities of mclennan’s history (“beyond the darkening side of trees/ beyond the county line”) into other aspects of that history’s materiality (“the junkyard alive”) what emerged was a different (torqued?) site (not necessarily past tense “push of seasons; on,/ unending”) from which to proceed in the considerations and meditations. For perhaps “if you know where the history, happened” you can begin to unravel how to hone that history into home.
Perhaps it is engagement or method (threading) that turns history into home. By way of a process of honing? What generally are the differences between history and home? Does one or the other emancipate us more? Destroy us more? Make us more mute to ourselves? Add to our vividity?
Glengarry often made me wonder about how to be a conduit for transductions of (or conflations of) place. How to be part of an obsession regarding history and home but to do so by way of an awareness of the unavoidability of fractured frames? I see Glengarry’s poems themselves as fractured frames. I see some of the lines in the book as fractured frames (“to become one/ a hardened break” or “think you/ in my standing stall/ a testament/ to all the weather we lived”)—fractured in that they do not enact any singular image—fractured in the way that they move rhythmically. With hard jolts of consonants against smoother mouth and ear shapes (the smoothness of “to become one” against the hard “k” in “a hardened beak”) or how the inner workings work with slanted rhyming (“in my standing stall” to “a testament/ to all”).
“I sometimes talk about my home, my point of origin, as though it isn’t there anymore.” Perhaps this is what we must do if we want to galvanize any given (birth or context) origin for a more animate and current version of origin. This current version--no doubtedly one that we would have to have our hands in. Hence the gestural admixture I see mclennan enacting (mentioned earlier in this review) as one of this book’s main strengths.
I feel that in this book home is “a resolve marked by passion.” A commitment. A shifting and a staying. A site where mclennan and his characters (“partner”, “children”, “her”, “our grandma”, “ex-wife” “the very taste of iron you”, etc.) can interact and interject. Can deepen the myriad landscapes for the sake of a reversal of “can you ever go home again?”--for some sort of guarantee that we are in fact in a home that is our own.
In the multiple times I read Glengarry, I kept thinking of calculated leakage becoming solid flow. I felt Glengarry materialize itself in the ways that “a river is always certain.” A river that is actually capable of never stopping. This river mixes. It reconfigures. It flows over cracks, crags, boulders--borders.
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Creative Engagement with rob mclennan’s C. (LRL, 2011)
mclennan’s new LRL chap “C.” is a masterful blend of mysterious motion and non-normative meta-narratives of the quotidian (“the lights in human form”). With subtle repetition of objects of human sentiment (“figs […] artichoke hearts”) which roots us in the physicalities of planar existence on Earth) as well as with a sort of slipping in of philosophically and compositionally profound phrases (“I wanted change/ to not break; narrative,/ thick and strange” / “titled; sad/ phonetics”), we are taken by this book’s gentle whirling.
It is as if, for a time, we are enacting dervish-spins around unforeseeable derivatives (“a spherical notion/ sometimes a great theory/ of untuned strings”) and that act, motion and location is how we find our relation or home here.
What could be more inductive of connection between the quotidian and mystery, than a “constant renovation”? mclennan takes us into “combined reflection”—a place where there do not seem to be ultimates but instead, so much upturning (“threadbare/ caked in ash”). Here I feel like we are digging up “symbols [] to turn [] angles/ to action” finding ways to “live/ beyond each limit.”
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Jennifer H. Fortin’s Mined Muzzle Velocity
In Jennifer H. Fortin’s Mined Muzzle Velocity, we learn firsthand how “impairment / can alter how we increase.” Fortin has compiled a book of fragments and connections in postcard form. The postcard as base for both the analytical and the intimate information included in the book is felt as a stricture. A beneficial impairment. A tightness that holds us in and to it until we leak. We burst forth. We emanate beyond stricture. Is that not what postcards are for? To bleed on or to weep on or to leave our very individual fingerprints on as we read them while we are cutting meat?
This work is not a memoir. I am not even sure if it is memory anymore. Fortin explains (in an interview with Nate Pritts (also at Lowbrow Press, http://www.lowbrowpress.com/prittsfortininterview.html) that “it felt natural and necessary to cannibalize my written memories, to feed them air again.” Are memories that have been fed air (toward new livelihoods) even memories anymore? Or are they unforeseen autonomies?
I felt a very strong awareness while reading Fortin’s book, that if these postcards came to me in the mail and not in book form it would be difficult to ensure that they ever stay as a collective. Fortin tells us “subsets can be beautiful” and I agree—therefore I find that as I encounter this book, I am somehow pleasantly caught between wanting the postcards to remain collective (ensured by their remaining in book form), and needing them to be able to be separated. Lost. Made somehow disparate to one another—to become subsets. This means I am going to print the PDF copy of the book that Fortin sent me so I can separate and regroup the postcards. Perhaps even a need to tear the pages out of the paperbound copy of the book when it arrives in my mailbox.
“I think of a postcard as a sideways / call to action.” Yes. Mined Muzzle Velocity is “a sideways / call to”. An echo resounding powerfully in a glass of milk. A wrist bleeding gray. A collection of Technicolor graphs superimposed over black and white photographs of unnamed fields. I see “a sideways call” as always somehow bent. Tilted. Strange. But all the while provoking.
Now, regarding “action” (as in “a postcard as a sideways call to action”) this book is wild with various actions. Actions of interactive mind between the speaker and its “yous,” locational/geographical action: “What do you think of the statue?” and ephemeral or dream-like action: “the non-trees between other trees.” When WE are engagements of such “sideways call to action” we must “Resort to / the eyes on the sides of [our] head.” I see the method of engagement (the commitment when reading this book) as a swerve being met by a swerve. This is how we must give. By filling in the blanks. By trusting the gaps. I am saying that as we read the postcards (which are enacting by way of and within us) we are changed. We are charged. Heated.
How to share when the aspects of one’s action are inherently disparate? Fortin speaks about the creation of the “Dear” in these postcards as act toward touch—“leaning particularly hard on the consistency of the addressed ‘Dear. (And when one is anywhere but home—hey, but also when one IS at home—isn’t there inevitably a missing Dear you want to share some things with?)” What is most intriguing to me re the composition of said “Dear” is the way that what must be relayed (because it is what of text is included in the postcards) is not necessarily erotic intimacy—is instead a motley of quotidian details, praxis, sensation, chatter, species feeling, yearning, proposition, etc. It is as if what is created in the “Dear” is a closeness, but one that could be a kinship or an emotio-spiritual proximity as much as it could be a lover. And all the while the speaker says “I’ll show you / everything or as much as I can.” There is a sort of admittance here between the speaker and the “Dear” that implies that there are limits (“as much as I can”) to what can be shared. I as a reader am curious about where the limits come from. Are they translation (of emotional extant into linear articulations) limits? Are they limits based on keeping others’ secrets? “To encase but not to enumerate”?
Fortin goes on to say “I’ve shied away from trying to imagine real places if I can’t see them myself—I don’t like constructing fuzzy versions of things.” It is important to note that in the articulation of this real version of things (articulate of Fortin’s experiences while in Bulgaria) we do in fact (by duration of taking in the postcards) get a “fuzzy version of things.” The way information is given and information is left out. The way that we “witness grazing wild” both partially belonging and partially not belonging. Dizzy with details and with disparateness. I see in this book a subtle energy toward helping to be “separate from the outside while inside” and while Mined Muzzle Velocitydoes divulge itself with honesty and formal precisions, it also in my opinion allows us as readers to be unable to complete it. “Have I shown you the real skeleton key / I have? It is filed but opens no real locks.”
j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with xir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous cross-genre works previously published and forthcoming (a few of which are): prurient anarchic omnibus (Spuyten Duyvil), long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones), a womb-shaped wormhole (BlazeVox), treOOA(with Eileen Tabios/ Marsh Hawk Press). j/j’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including Trickhouse, Vlak, Big Bridge, The Offending Adam, Dear Sir, Eccolinguistics, EOAGH, Aufgabe, Queerocracy Art, Masculine Femininities, Caketrain, Plath Profiles, Bombay Gin and PANK The Queer Issue. j/j is currently in the process of curating an Anthology of Queer Nudes (Knives Spoons and Forks Press, 2013) and has helped curate (and participated in) two major Trans anthologies. j/j is an Elective Affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv, writes for Lit Pub and is a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j currently writes creative reviews for Big Other, Jacket2 and Emprise Review. j/j’s work has was appeared in a Queer-focused show at the Leslie-Lohman Annex in New York. j/j’s books have been finalists in the Kelsey Street, Grey Book Press, Grace Notes Books, Switchback, Omnidawn, DIAGRAM and Ahsahta book and essay competitions. j/j’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Publishers Triangle. j/j’s manuscript extant shamanisms won the Pavement Saw poetry award. j/j’s manuscript dear secondary umbilical, won second place in the Mad Hatter’s Wild and Wyrd Poetry Contest. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award and j/j’s book prurient anarchic omnibus was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.
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Jamie Townsend's MATRYOSHKA, Edward Smallfield's Equinox
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MATRYOSHKA
Jamie Townsend
8$ US
Houston TX: little red leaves, 2011
reviewed by rob mclennan
1. must mean something
for words
a lateral prop a
shunt –
rather to watch streaming
video delay
in evenings
East Kensington, Philadelphia poet Jamie Townsend's second chapbook, MATRYOSHKA (Houston TX: little red leaves, 2011), on the heels of his STRIP/HALO, is part of Dawn Pendergast's little red leaves textile series, “lovingly sewn using recycled curtains and other textile remnants.” Townsend's small, graceful and enviable chapbook is a binary poem, each page with two pieces, an “I” and an “O,” with a weave of punctuated paper swirls, tiny needle holes, swirling between.
O. fiber art pictorial
cross rooftops
nonesuch remnant
weather projections
overlaid strands
satellite updates
bold formulations
A sequence of meditative bursts, patters and patterns slowly emerge in these small pieces, weaving their sharp way across a subtle scope. Townsend seems capable of quite a lot in such a small space, a small canvas, packing much into his wonderments. As Michael Cross writes in a recent blog posting, quoting poet/critic Brenda Iijima, on Townsend's chapbook (June 9, 2011, disinhibitor.blogspot.com):
The poems are totally elemental (down to the binary "1" and "0" headings) in that the language seems to register phenomena in the body while processing it ("rendering" it?) on the page (as if the chapbook were a sense organ). Townsend uses tons of nouns in these short bursts, which contribute, I think, to the haptic weight of each page. And Dawn Pendergast's INCREDIBLE design work (including some super delicate sewing on every page) further adds to the language's material presence. Little Red Leaves co-editor Ash Smith writes of MATRYOSHKA: "The title...denotes famous Russian nesting dolls, and yet the subtle physics and physicality of such poems which attend to "sub-dermal termites scattering" reveal that such momentary nesting is in fact a station in orbit." Indeed.
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Equinox
Edward Smallfield
US $15.95, 92 pages
Berkeley, CA: Apogee Press, 2011
reviewed by rob mclennan
ciao, Marcello
On a bridge
in a country of cars
on the radio from afar
an edge
you had crossed over a wedge
Life is a lure
& through the half-open doors
in hotel hallways the black & white almost measures
Something is always beginning or ending The water
in all the fountains in Rome has stopped
The flashbulbs & balloons have popped
Life is a feather
who On the radio
, ciao
When I first saw some of the pieces that make up appear in American ex-pat Edward Smallfield's Equinox (2011) in an issue of New American Writing, I was immediately taken with his cadence, the edge and the flow of how each short poem stretches across the page, reminiscent of Canadian poet Jay Millar's brilliant chapbook-sequence Sporadic Growth: being a third season of 26 fungal threads (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006).. In three sections—Memoir, Solstice and Elegy—Smallfield's Equinoxis constructed out of lively, single-page meditations that dance across the stretches of family, history, travel, music, painting and literature, including small poems-as-essays on (and sometimes from/after) Catullus, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams, Billie Holiday, New York City, Vivaldi, Archilochos and Jorge Luis Borges. A number of these names even return a few times, in subsequent pieces. As the notes at the back of the collection suggest, the pieces exist not only as small essays, but plunder the language of other writers and other works, weaving into the poems to stretch his language even further, with a listing of many of the poems with names and/or titles following, perhaps even suggesting further directions to add breadth to the reading. There is something of the “day book” to Smallfield's pieces, writing poems-as-daily-practice, a quality of daily contemplation through poems, and Denise Newman, in her back cover blurb, refers to these as “floating notes,” which I quite like.
The publisher/editor of Berkeley's impressive Apogee Press, Barcelona-based Smallfield's publishing history has but only a few titles over the past seventeen years, from The Pleasures of C (Apogee Press, 2001), Trio (Specter Press, 1995) and the collaborative One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (with Doug MacPherson; Battery Press, 2003), to the collaborative chapbook locate(with Miriam Pirone; dancing girl press, 2008), but if any of those are even close to the thoughtful quality of Equinox, they might all be required.
Bilbao
cool
along the river the morning hulls
rust in the water shells
abandoned after the tools:
erosion years caracoles
logarithm arithmetic the null
set oxidizes the hills
cling to the road time's fool
cows & sheep
a few horses
the discourse
= silence = sleep
the show is always about to start
oh, now furniture is a work of art
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011) and 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
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Decoration Day
going, and sounding, how, gathering
and again
a putting into place, a following
or similar. A
turning back, to an end. In arrival
or disposition
in measure, in picture
are several, having one, and, role
according, as, is an end.
As high is far or near, or, save to say
in such a case, are all, are, similar
Are all, are, an end
and so on. And ever so, to
part or like.
Blue Glass
or, the less, how less. the hand can see.
certain prejudices or disturbances,
in theme and in rehearsal. the hand can see.
in kind and in degree,
certain tools and purposes, in pairs or in threes
hidden, and in kind. And visited, the one.
out of number, or rub, or band or bese
the tendency.
enough, or, inasmuch. And visited, the one.
and how, the hand can see, to spare and to return
the color
to rise, or, proper to. to rise or to surpass
and how,
in demonstration, the point is to the line
Rummy
by fiat, or consent
a, redemption, or, liberation
the, goings and comings of locations
the, knowing of a kind
both resident and remote.
or, that of two, one should arrive.
in silence, in ceremony
both resident and remote.
the figure of a wheel.
or,
one’s intended. destination.
falls.
parade.
the exile, in hospital
the exile, in studio
the exile, in shepherd
Canteen
of one to one, is said
or
epic letters
are come to rescue said assertions
one above and one below
to the left, or
face to face
but do not be, a pair, a
parallel and unexpected giving, to
or
in belief
as late as, so, to, merits an assertion, runs
in unexpected pairs, in relations
or,
as in relations.
Say,
in relation, or alike.
And so to cease, or parry.
so, to, cease or closet or border a routine
or
length, but do not be, a pair
a parallel and unexpected giving, to
or,
in belief
Boat
in hand, or, to receive
any person, at all
and so,
sufficiently able. Day
or
wishing to take on, himself
of others,
with affection, and the future.
Or,
in a prosperity
those, who are at variance
and partly to befall
an invective
whatever lies, we can from those who know
is not concealed
but as it is, and it is, from anywhere
it will be
that it is. Mannahatta
admit the bearer
to understand, each thing, is
we know nothing
but according to, and of, but according to
and of, those, upon
of that upon, those, or, how
and in one’s own, book
sounding, again, impossible book
A rod or hook or sleeve
for, it is, how, to doubling, and halving
such as arises, after
or, such as setting out, by lot
are given
or by lot, by toss, and sleeve. And so
sufficiently able
and virtue can, or cannot, serve as dicast
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino writes at his blog, The Postmodern Romantic, and edits the online poetry journal, E·ratio.
Poems
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Approbations 351
—after Bill Evans’ Peace Piece
Watch.
Dusk
unfolds her graying locks,
finding home on branch,
leaning grass,
shadows forgotten
by the steps of travelers
aiming west.
Glowing breath
of fireflies’ ignition:
this
is the pivoting culture
inviting ghosts
into the psyche of neoteric
revelations.
Approbations 489
—after Marilyn Crispell’s Gathering Light
Hand’s alone
light
sifts through fingers’ finger-width
departure
from ascertaining hold, grip
performing renewed holding, a brand of touch
not
yet
fashionable: embracing between two lovers
combining flesh and braided voice, happily. In hands of
soil’s presumed dirty region, light
befriends
with holy connotations, thus
delineating realism’s corporeal
experience
from hypothesis’ rendition of scientific
hokum.
Approbations 490
—after John Surman’s Wayfarers All
We meander.
Fall, alone. Together, too, fall
past love, beyond notions
the self resumes
following acrobatic tributes
to the awakened state of dawn’s
presentational
collage.
Approbations 491
—after Marc Johnson’s In A Quiet Place
Sounds rise
twirling praise, resisting contravention’s changes
ascending
from the lake’s orchestrated lumbar
allowing
feed and birthing bathers
to
conceal obligatory blur
hiding within the beneath symphony of
wave, space conceptual understanding.
Approbations 492
—after Joshua Redman’s Wish
Or, planted verbs
skating
distant mouth open geography
windowed, personal
diameter of sound
relevant upon cultural procession, deliberate
mention of hankering’s
subliminal
value.
Felino A. Soriano is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. Recent poetry collections include Intentions of Aligned Demarcations (Desperanto, 2011), Pathos etched, recalled: (white sky books, 2011), and Divaricated, Spatial Aggregates (limit cycle press, 2011). He edits and publishes the online journal, Counterexample Poetics. For information regarding his published works, editorships, and interviews, please visit: www.felinoasoriano.info.
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CLOSE YOUR EYES
1
The world is brown and green—and orange. An orange quilt. The gray shadow of a large turtle in the bright red. Black specks—seeds—
weeping in the bright red. Sunspots. Fruit punch
. A golden bed floats high in the flames. The green stuff inside a lobster. Black puzzle pieces
. The sun, in the upper left, turns the world to fruit punch. Pure sun shining into a space, drenching a space. Orange vanquishes all
. An upside-down man, a seated little man, floats out of the picture. Is that part of his tophat?
There are triangles—three black dots with threads connecting them. Triangles falling in
space. Two black dots, a line, falling. Falling repeatedly. A barbell falling. A yellow beach
. A gray seated woman, a pietá without Jesus .
Black stars drift down the orange. The shadow of something makes an incursion. Rowers in the orange, pointing toward me, but not going anywhere. A troop in the yellow . A gray triangle dissolves in the orange, and a few black dots drift down. Three gray bodies (or shadows) in the orange, perhaps a landscape. The orange
puts me to sleep. An orange rash in the red. Chinese. Two black dots dancing at the top, unwilling to come down, unwilling to leave
. Close-packed yellow stars against the maroon sky.
A maroon shadow projects into the pea green. A black profile—of a man, a man like me— backs away from the maroon . Little bubbles roll down to the bottom of a most cotton-candy-colored world.
A cat falls through the orange. A white sun shines into the red from the upper left.
An orange I pulsates. Lime dots flash , make a diamond in the orange. Lime blobs flash in the orange—a real crisis— the shape of a horse. Lime blobs—epaulettes. Lime blobs—moose antlers.
2
Close your eyes. A yellow object won’t come down into view. Yellow rains down on black. Starry night. Flickering stars at the top. An orange ball spins in the lower left.
A milky cloud. Milky blue. Milky blue clusters. The inevitable stirring up and settling of sediment.
A miniature white town at the bottom. A plane zooms across from right to left, leaving a white wake. The incredibly shrinking destination.
Bright stars along the top. Rays of light slant down to the left. Light curving down . A white triangle pulsates in the middle . From the whiteness, black gradually emerges, takes over the center in a broad vertical band. A golden wing trembles . White mist. A head pushing up, never getting far. A flashing dotted line . Orange mist . The black dunce’s cap. The black witch’s hat lovingly fills the center, out of focus, softened. An island of light in the blackness— the shape of Japan. Silver ammunition belts. Conveyor belts from right to left. A white mound melts away. White soap. White blob, white glob, white gob. The black silhouette of an evergreen against a faintly lit sky. One of those huge-hipped 19th century skirts. Bursts of silver bubbles floating up. A ghostly
plateau in the middle. Three dancing kids? Monkeys? Tubas?
World after world of fur and flannel falls in front of my eyes. A green mist. So much tiny unreadable graffiti on the black wall. The horizontal sunset through the vertical trees. The small bright light in the middle .
3
Close your eyes. The world is a silver mist. A silver spruce fades in and out in the muddy black . Upside-down white mountain ranges. Reflected in a mountain lake? A white rainbow partly swallowed by black. A white peony blooms in the black water.
A black silhouette, a profile without details. Now my prayer is for a starry night. Fur around the circular horizon.
Yes, the world is a silver mist, with a white flame in the middle , a white flame growing larger, brighter. Orange—and blue—and green. One light at the top of the top window. The top of a pointed hat. The crescent of light rises out of sight. A glob of mercury. Three globs of mercury. In the center. A slow drop. A white O, pulsating. Soon, it will take things inside . Or perhaps cough up things inside . It is a store. Everything. The sun catches a piece of chrome. The only light in the black. A glow, that’s all, a glow. A glow of what? A glow. That’s all. A glow. (That’s the end, right? ) A glow, a small glow, like when one of the witches in “The Wizard of Oz” appears, or after she leaves. It gets dimmer, it disappears. Into the black .
Michael Ruby is the author of three recent poetry collections from BlazeVOX [books], and the forthcoming trilogy Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill Press) and American Songbook (Ugly Duckling Presse). He lives in Brooklyn and works as a newspaper editor.
Photographs
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SHOTS: ABSINTHE PHOTOGRAPHY
BLUE MOSQUE, Istanbul, TR
LEANING TOWER and DUOMO, Pisa, IT
ST MICHAELS, Kiev, UKR
ST VITUS, Moscow, RU
TEMPLE OF HEAVEN, Beijing, CHN
NEXT YEAR IN UMAN: A JOURNEY TO THE UKRAINE
BRIDGE: 9/21/06, 12:59 PM
TOMB: 9/18/09, 12:20 PM
DANCERS: 9/21/09, 9:23 PM
MEMORIAL: 9/21/09, 11:12 AM
Ahron D. Weiner creates photography, advertising decollage, newspaper collage and found object sculpture. Having lived for several years in Prague, he traveled Eastern Europe extensively, documenting both the remnants of a disappearing Jewish heritage, and a modern-day pilgrimage of Jews returning to rural Ukraine. Ahron has used photography as medium to manifest the hallucinogenic effects of Absinthe; and as a means of exploring the artistic value of advertising once its commercial purposes have been exhausted. Ahron’s work has been featured in museums, galleries, books and magazines in the US and Europe. His first solo museum show–for his documentary project titled “Next Year in Uman: A Journey to the Ukraine”–recently completed a three-month run at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art. Ahron is an itinerant traveler, passionate chef, obsessed angler, lapsed falconer, and dedicated husband and father to his wife Pamela and three sons–Moshe (13), Amiel (10), and Max (3).
]]>Poems
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from Hark, a journal: 1032-1863
for Christine,
It follows that if one speaks of literality, one is talking about a position alreadyformulated, orally or in writing, whatever be the truth of the phrase.
Emmanuel Hocquard, Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France
San Francisco, 1848
Assisi, the foot of the Golden Gate. Suite, an anonymous task. Thankless. Love, are you listening. Compositions in crisis. I am finally now warm enough. A forest of missions, flood gold in the conifers. The drilling of blood, dissatisfaction. Wonderful scraps. Spanish port in a storm. Your tiniest hands. I was returning to welcome. My stay doesn't take me.
Petersburg, 1712
Baltic Sea, a czar, a saint. Sees only self, messages of city death. Call back Peter, Paul. Arrange, a language without walking. Prisoners of a solvent war. Do stratified, we double, mute in prose? Sex in the distinguished dark, text ages. According to plan. Canals a grid, exemplified. Would evident. I would disarm this plan. Checkerboard, he kings me.
Washington, 1814
James Madison's dinner. Books, handmade copies. A fiction of characters. This neutral room, without speech. Slight of hand torch, sweeping whitewash. Six letters of sky. We were simultaneously, starved. This window-clear sun. Through strict discipline, captured. Branded him as a ruffian. Troops had gathered great wealth. It was not my mother's job. In a panic. We'd come here to live.
Mexico City, 1521
Cortes, the kilter. An elegy, worthy of figuring. Appointment to rifle. Imagine a passion-flower. Trapezoids, drawn. Recording, I am in pain. Some grey lines, gold. Introduction of letters, lined chocolate. To a certain degree, feminine. I am having an atom bomb. The contours of poetry. North, sentence mountains. Knows only, inferiority. Finger-marking the causeway. I heart you, premeditate.
Budapest, 1848
Someone asks, distance or near, a national insurrection. I would like to run wild. The dynamic Pest. Philosophic, one with words. There is no such death, all your life. Became a thing with others. Remember: the dry grass, the ruins. This smiling Buda. A young woman, drawing. The two banks of remarkable. Danube. Defense is difficult, plains. In fact, quite unusual. Privately, book.
Edinburgh, 1124
A small question unwinds, porcelain. This beautiful fortress. In what country this means. Extremities admit to the wound. Such glorious gulf. Scorned, from Germanic. I would like to prolong. A forest line north of. The impossible sea. Determined, your stupid heart, currency. A tribal that binds. Celtic prosody, undertow. Let me drink all of it, name we now call.
Lancaster, 1820
Calamity schema. Highlanders. He informs us in fragments. Loyalist subdivide. Available fields, and intoxicating vigor. Slippery slow, concentrated. The brink of suffocating paralysis. White thread of cheese, perch. Sleek, from paper scraps. Unclouded. Dear Mrs. Thompson, wife of late David. Opened veins of the river. Cairn at the screaming mouth. Stood once where you now. A native impossibility.
Bytown, 1832
This watershed moment. Indexing. Her name, not in cards. First raft of squared timber, sweet. Spent evenings in character. Head stuck in asphyxia. Claimed territorial. Leave deposits in shadow, aureole. Lot deformations, discoloured. Stood their ground by the stream. Imagine, canal. Thirteen crops to sustain. Tributaries, a molten shape. Suddenly, naked. Will the path never rosy. I will not be barren.
Copenhagen, 1167
One may reach by water, furtive. Volume is determined. Inlet to a Viking. Dislocated. Lattice, to a large estate. Propositions, songbirds. Proclaim an inner life. Who is that, crying? Classically trained, essentially ludic. Half a question to answer. Thinking, sleek with morning mists. Except that in the sense to copy. I would hide no castles. Borders, torn from several headlines.
Norwich, 1422
I walked, since. The borders overtake, this fortune. A letter, translated. Transparency, an unknown place. Singularity contracts. Feminine abstraction. Lament, unwinds. It whitens. Pen nor pencil, shipwreck. Prays for wider audience. What fate impunes, a throne. Once drew, a perfect rectangle. An anonymous slowness. Cultivating black thread, a studied rose. Am no longer walking.
Future Bakery: Interim Report
1.
Tumble awake, this morning. Start from fragments. A gauntlet. Urge others, speak slowly, more. Unity precedes. A cranial. Decline to leave names.
2.
Regular harbour, weave. Brunswick House, girlfriend. Ease down like an astronaut. What brief integrity, dialed. Composure governs. I pull my soldiered hands, small fortunes.
3.
Children, the frame. Agency of water, fresh and unremarkable, rare. Brace, with low chairs. The sun strikes everything, rattling plastic clouds. Who is this, really? Table this, divide.
4.
Windspeck, taste of rain. Illusions in this distance, blue. Compulsive fingernails. Battered, cleared and crawled. Hotel concordance, congress. In passing, spark tongues. Suppress. These rooms are legion.
5.
Mechanical lineage. By the way, no longer. Sorry flightless birds. Submit is not the word. The right lane ends. All these coloured pencils. A shelf-life. Blueprint grit. She worries: where we cease to be.
6.
A corkscrew, distance. Impatient, leaf. Sweet fragrance. Hotel, sustains. Time changes colour. Coffee cools, and something moves. Synopsis: boundaries. Hips and dashed integrity. Relieved, we plummet.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011), grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2011), Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), kate street (Moira, 2011) and 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) (Obvious Epiphanies, 2010), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
]]>Cell Poems
]]>There are full sets of chromosomes in each cell in a body. Chromosomes are inherent coils of DNA and they are responsible for animation of cells. There are many genes, sequences and governing structures within cells. Some cells (gametes) are sexually procreant. The amass of information that I include here regarding cells is directly related to my composition process. My compositions are certainly gamete. They function by way of reproductive adrenalines. Impetuses toward constituting new aggregates. The gametes (meta components within my compositions) mingle (by magnetism and synchronicity) together and deep, recombinant fusions take place. The result? Uncanny collages. Cell poems.
"sewn stone" has also appeared at esque
"unequivocal moats into" has also appeared at Certain Circuits
j/j hastain lives in Colorado, USA with xir beloved. j/j is the author of numerous cross-genre works previously published and forthcoming (a few of which are): prurient anarchic omnibus (Spuyten Duyvil), long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones), a womb-shaped wormhole (BlazeVox), treOOA(with Eileen Tabios/ Marsh Hawk Press). j/j’s writing has appeared in numerous journals including Trickhouse, Vlak, Big Bridge, The Offending Adam, Dear Sir, Eccolinguistics, EOAGH, Aufgabe, Queerocracy Art, Masculine Femininities, Caketrain, Plath Profiles, Bombay Gin and PANK The Queer Issue. j/j is currently in the process of curating an Anthology of Queer Nudes (Knives Spoons and Forks Press, 2013) and has helped curate (and participated in) two major Trans anthologies. j/j is an Elective Affinities participant, a member of Dusie kollektiv, writes for Lit Pub and is a regular contributor to Sous Les Paves. j/j currently writes creative reviews for Big Other, Jacket2 and Emprise Review. j/j’s work has was appeared in a Queer-focused show at the Leslie-Lohman Annex in New York. j/j’s books have been finalists in the Kelsey Street, Grey Book Press, Grace Notes Books, Switchback, Omnidawn, DIAGRAM and Ahsahta book and essay competitions. j/j’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Publishers Triangle. j/j’s manuscript extant shamanisms won the Pavement Saw poetry award. j/j’s manuscript dear secondary umbilical, won second place in the Mad Hatter’s Wild and Wyrd Poetry Contest. In 2011 j/j’s book we in my Trans was nominated for the Stonewall Book Award and j/j’s book prurient anarchic omnibus was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award.
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The Hornet
for Tyler Flynn Dorholt
Nervous pennant
bodega shade
hornets don’t bite
too alive still
notched by today’s caustic
sun’s slop-glutted face
and tearing pieces of crown
to forge taste and jewel
night into an endless prolepsis
I think I want too alive
like a surge of hornets
cloud to form nuptial flight
these are scientific terms
and we are ethologists
and all that
we lust after
will animate
in curve
from one pheromone
to entire syntax
garish pockets of light
in someone else’s pollen
so in frenzy we’d know
just how ancient we’ve grown
seething with the light of friends
who did never stop for law
I read all the directions
backwards to stave off logic
and claw each sunny
curl as it breaks
against the beachhead
of my face
to breathe
new pollen
on the telephone
everyone loves cancer
we should talk hornet
if by talking hornet
you mean dance it off
The Trash
for Zachary Wollard
Learning too
hard really
claw broken open
I sniff fringes
as they happen here
a little forest breathing
over the neighbors’ new trash
as it crinkle crinkle shines
like I’m saying to the children
you have to feel the shadow
of this plane’s loaded escape
like you were its planet
nose folding tomorrow’s weather
into a candy wrapper-
like eye patch
to block hubris
can I
I can’t
believe the sun
just fucking disappeared
into that flaky building
new tenant no keys
driving toward the other’s language
or just humming trash again
I got down on my knees
which crinkled slightly forest breathing out
like that haunting Zombies chorus
I can’t stop shaaaaa-kiiiiing
and instead just up
and disappear into finance
trash breathing in
the tremor’s double
at night
in July
like that Larry
Rivers’ painting on
the fourth floor of
the Brooklyn Museum where
the eyes of the picnic
cross and blur to bring forth
more family and then more family
The Opening
for Erica Svec
Roses seep
a beach
black paper elbows
and keep John
on ceiling little smirk
for curly detergent readiness
he wants us to break
open heart cookie cloud day
to simply crowd out lack
until it rides tireless and bare
and a quaint Bud sprouts
in the deep plastic black
where our hands meet
our forever suffering nightlife
to charge victorious
in blue char
so summer
subnormally wrecked
as many petals
sleeping over as
we can find beaches
to write our names
mine is trash and forest
full of alias rich trees
but the only reason I came
here tonight is that you’re here
like an aura that’s stuck
in the blue-green position
we’re already so stoned
on the faces’ architecture
so look dangerous
for a moment
look sexy
for peace
The Face
for Will Edmiston
Will you
still hear
me can’t you?
waking wet eucalyptus
in a crumpled horn
the interface is sacred
can the interface be sacred?
is it still a séance
if you can’t say it stopped?
the rain is in the mail
my face is on call
there’s interference to think of
and it’s all just
a kind of cursive
that keeps belongingness
swept in abeyance
of holy
honeysuckle but
can honeysuckle holy?
I can helicopter
mosquito from the office
so that all hymns
are a form of expectation
I can loss block fever
on the verge of going white
if that will feed the eucalyptus
it’s like one coffee and
my face is on call
ready to mask out
on a drowsy coworker
or beam honey
into daybreak’s latent
blood crust
swallowing face
under street’s amber
dial tone I
can see the end
beg the beginning’s return
can see the face’s ghost
tread past in traffic’s grin
Chris Martin is the author of Becoming Weather (Coffee House 2011) and American Music (Copper Canyon 2007). He is also the author of several chapbooks, including How to Write a Mistake-ist Poem (Brave Men 2011) and the forthcoming enough (Ugly Duckling 2012). After editing the online journal Puppy Flowers for its entire 11-year run, he is now an editor at Futurepoem books, where he curates the response blog Futurepost.
]]>Because The Shell Half-Swallowed Her
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Because The Shell Half-Swallowed Her
SEA
SEA
Namesake driven, now divine.
Because The Shell Half-Swallowed Her
She was left half-whole—
Half-mollusk as it were
and half-Her!
SEA
SEA
Half-her and half complicit—her legs!
IMMER running
running running
from the OTHER
Because the Shell Half-Swallowed Her
Her Porcelain Legs, O!
Her Lower Half!
Her awkward skirts!
SEA
SEA
Her mouth amuck —Crustacean
Voice amniotic
Circuitous abalone
strands about her hair
Because the Shell Half-Swallowed Her
She is now half-there
She is NOW half THERE!
YES! She is now HOUSED there!
SEA
SEA
Because the Shell Half-Swallowed Her
Her Shoulders Cower So!
Her back bends alternately
in the arch of forever
O! ASTERN!
Seahouse Encasement Subjective
SEA
SEA
Isolated anew.
Try her on for size!
All men do!
Snailed and spiraled blue her shell
her sea, her sea her NOW.
SEA
SEA
But she may wreckon you!
Yes, she may wreckon you.
LOVE!
Oh?
Love, you tried her on for size?
SEA
SEA
HMMMM! How silly this sounds to Her!
O, she hears your wild drone.
But Sea! forever harbours her
Her ear Aft—Abaft—Aback!
SEA
SEA
Hell! Closest to the Seanow, enow!
She will tell you whatever you hope to hear.
What do you hope to hear?
SEA
SEA
Her hair a wild tangle,
her note not of your range—
Her Siren folds
elongating—her
treble beat precise
She sends you off now unrequited—
Mainmast far-flung from her reach
SEA
SEA
O, Prodigious Son take care.
Because The Shell Half-Swallowed Her
THE SEA HALF-SWALLOWED HER!
And she will swallow you too.
She may have already swallowed you.
Yes, as she is there, she is through.
SEA
SEA
Susana Gardner is the author of the full-length poetry collections HERSO (Black Radish Books, 2011) and [ LAPSED INSEL WEARY ] (The Tangent Press, 2008). Her third book, Cuntstruck Lithe Guttersnipes is forthcoming from Xexoxial Editions. She has published several chapbooks, including Hyper-Phantasie Constructs (Dusie Kollektiv, 2010) and Herso (University of Theory and Memorabilia Press, 2009). Her poetry has appeared in many online and print publications including Jacket, How2, Puerto Del Sol, and Cambridge Literary Review among others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies, including 131.839 slög með bilum (131,839 keystrokes with spaces) (Ntamo, Finland, 2007) and NOT FOR MOTHERS ONLY: CONTEMPORARY POEMS ON CHILD-GETTING AND CHILD-REARING (Fence Books, United States, 2007) and the forthcoming KINDERGARDE, Black Radish, 2012. She lives in Zürich, Switzerland, where she also edits and curates the online poetics journal and experimental kollektiv press, Dusie .
Poems
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Last Lines
1
Escucho somnolienta los metales
oxidados de su inolvidable reír.
Los restos de la tarde lo navegan
al encuentro de su caricia pleamar.
En el cielo una costra de zoofílica
humanidad amenazaba clarear.
Algó pasó en este pueblo de mierda,
donde ni los pájaros se atreven a cantar.
Selló para siempre el letargo
de mi inútil despertar.
Todavía percibo en el rosal del aire
la huella herida de su bamboleante caminar.
Tuve un sueño de embriagado trapecista
sin red…porque tú eras el mar.
2
Is cut you somnolent lost metals
oxide dad Oh! Stay so in old biddable rear.
Lo, sures toast a tardy lone avenge an
all in queen trot a souk car easy a play Omar.
An else yell or a accost ready so Philly car
a man and dad a men as everclear are.
Al, go pass onus tepid blowed them year the,
dont any lost pi hurrahs say two riven a can’t are.
Say your pad awesome prayer let her go
day me in beauty desperate are.
Toad ab eon perceive own all dosa delay ray
law hey airy daddy subway rambo lay ante cam in are.
To be you sway neo-them brie argh ah dont trap ease tie
seen red…fork a two her as elm are.
3
Somnolent I listen as the metals rust, enjoying the unforgettable laughter of their degradation. The remains of the evening have become a starmap to navigate to hightide, its caress. In the sky, a scab of animal-loving humanity threatens to dawn. Something finally happened in this ghastly town, where not even the birds dare to sing, and it sealed away the lethargy of morning’s useless awakening. In the rosebush air, I still smell the footwound of his swaying walk. My dream: I was a drunk flying on the high wires with no net below, because you, you were the sea.
4
Somnoliento ay liso canasta metales ras, en llueven de un ver yegua valva o de degradación. De remo en sorda niña bebé cama estafa tuna vega tatú jato, es caro es. En descalza bovina mal lubina juman hidratado en estado. Sandía final y jabón ende es gaste donde te ve en deber es derrotismo anisete wey déle tarde amor niños ilesa guacala en. Andar o sea buche ir ay estilo esmalte fút undécima esguince alcoba tarima guasa de nunca flán anda jáguar vino neta velo, bi caso u, u lo cuerda sí.
Note: The first text in Spanish is constructed out of the last lines of several crónicas from the book Adios, mariquita linda by Chilean drag rebel, writer and activist Pedro Lemebel. All are translations of an emotion.
John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, educator and translator. His work is informed by experimental poetics, radical aesthetics and cross-border cultural production and has appeared in journals and magazines in the U.S. and Mexico, including the Rio Grande Review, Picnic, Third Text, Animal Shelter, HTMLGiant and Literal. He has published more than five books in translation from the Spanish, including essays by a leading Mexican feminist, short stories from Ciudad Juárez and a police detective novel. There are two chapbooks of his work, Routes into Texas (DIY, 2010) and Undone (Dusie Kollektiv, 2011).
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Alison Moyet
Warm sweet
autumn in
the throat I am
eating the hell out of
memory and fears
of having, not
having, never knowing
memory, desire
one last big
warm moon
before things
get normal & the year
ends
again
and again I’m thinking
of a sound
tracking a mood
sensing a field
of friends without end
notes like leaves
fall must end let
the cold come,
empty bed
feels better than
empty body
empathy
being seen by
the strangest eyes
Maybe another face
with a heart in its eye
the slipstream between
engaged & escape
when the snoring stops
keep moving on
through grey coda day
seeing heart, feeling eye
what does it take to say
maybe another face
in the seam between
what is and is
unseen to seeing eye but nakedly
engaged
a cage
of tinder sticks deep
heart head eye
another place
another time
February/March
Long belt of Venus over long view from bridge
long frozen river w/long
thin spots
Long day of work & long wait ahead
long weekend long time coming
Snow is warm
before dark fall in
two slices red
bull jittery
& annoyed
but snow is pretty
getting laid
Hawkwind
we were born to go
drunk & cold on Thursday night
thinking of you & when you’ll text next
this is definitely the future in some ways
Snot frozen nose
remember
favorite shades, eminence
front drums under
cold sun all
skies are blue
an underture
tiny ice shavings turn
speed metal in
the ears
Shining
in the sun absence
is not deficiency
reading up on Mars
where it is also cold
where it all comes from
a line two steps a line words
like harmolodics the more
I put in the more
I get
shadows on sidewalk
not coming for me
Fuck me if it isn’t the moon
pale blue w/sky over
Porter Square under dirty
pink cloud over last sun
dirty windows
“Rain Song” and waitress
everywhere, a hundred poems between
me and it
I know the answer but the question shifts
with shafts of sun across the floor
Woke as though still
drunk nagging elsewhere
in the dungeon mind
California poets
in the backseat or the trunk
streams of suitcase beer
Cold Aries & Cambridge closed
but at red lights savoring X
organ frenzy & open air
repurposing & moving
under violet skies
Pink light, liquid silk
some tower in the distance
pale midnight clouds, wind
slows rain to drip through screen
city still across the river lit
the universe at your core
in your room I am still
in my own skin
October
Cool again, getting late
rain light now as piano keys
streetlight pinks the blinds.
Some things are forever.
The idea of music is better.
You called with the best you had
and it was just enough.
Thinking about The Deal.
Riding the Megabus with Emily Spiegelman
Rainy morning, old shoes
empty streets, fast T.
South Station rain
front of bus, top deck, rain
Mass Pike, wifi, Hemingway:
“he got his nose flattened
it was an improvement.”
Bent nib, Wellesley/
W. Newton
Thinking about Boston
heading to New York,
weather report from Brian
via text
Last night w/the Knitter
first tattoo nerves in the Hen
Turkish Delight & soda
“black cherry is a strain of weed.”
This morning, news about Japan
waiting in Hawaii
everything everywhere seems bleak.
Steaming snow off the Pike
sitting higher than that Mack
Reading The Whalen Poem
letting it get in my head
“And who can square
I want nothing at all
with I want it all?”
What’s the name of that book?
We can look it up
on my phone.
Raining less
reading less
telling story again
of shitty reading
w/Jess, hot summer
inappropriate hosts
the weekend of my divorce:
Hendricks with cucumber
in sweaty Baltimore.
84 to 20
Hartford
New York.
Steam rising from roadside bog,
Chris to me in high school:
“You’re like me, you get on a note
and you stay there.”
Connecticut welcomes you.
Great. Sick
of baseball
in poetry.
There. I said it. Also:
I don’t get August.
Homework from shrink:
think about Mom,
“see what comes up.”
Writing is not thinking
but feeling kind of is.
“Atlantis is the best option,
don’t forget your passport
that would be the dumbest
thing you could do.”
Dainty Rubbish Service
Luv Boutique across from Sleepy’s
Sun comes
thinking about peeing
it could be a disaster.
Duchess: Grilled to Thrill.
Wasabi Lobby
Nancy Lee’s Pig Heaven
Pick-a-bagel
Szechuan Chalet
Hot and Tasty Bagel Café
China Fun
The Health Nuts
Hot & Crusty
Chicken Kitchen
Litter & Leashes
Hot Jumbo Bagels
The Irish Exit
“style is not
a display
of wealth.
But an
expression
of
imagination”
Seeing double w/hunger I thought the whole day was ahead of me
Relearning old songs holding
loss in my hand & heart
we all die & at a point
we all leave a thing or place
behind in pictures
or on earth we go
around like songs
Forever
changes the way
time changes throw
back into daylight
or straight into darkness I
can never remember now
that you’re not there to call
one blind bright
w/shadows
& light
other blind
leaf red
blue sky & wires
breathing breeze & loath
to leave who knows
where I could go
without care
taking flight I watch ten
thousand bats in Zambia
online and ten
thousand tiny plankton flutter
through the lit wet dark
of a certain sea
I don’t want to see
these
shores again recede
call it psychic tide
regrettably
there’s no other word
or way
to put words to it
is the only way
Aaron Tieger’s books include February (Fewer & Further), Secret Donut (Pressed Wafer), The Collected Typos of Aaron Tieger (Editions Louis Wain), and Chaos Flowers (Skysill). He is also the editor of the first American edition of Richard Caddel’s Uncertain Time (Pressed Wafer). His poems have appeared in 6x6, Fulcrum, Litter, Drill, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals (Bootstrap Productions), string of small machines, Hassle, BPM, and elsewhere. He lives in Cambridge, MA, where he is studying to be a licensed mental health counselor.
WOOING WITH
loves
of
spirits
do
better
is
spirit
a
win
my
better
my
&
my
wooing
with
that
be
yet
tell
being
from
one
another’s
yet
know
my
one
EVER SWEET
love’s
make
sound
said
me
for
when
my
heart
come
ever
sweet
used
gentle
taught
anew
altered
end
followed
day
night
a
heaven
away
from
away
my
saying
THOU MANSION
soul
my
earth
powers
within
&
painting
outward
large
so
thou
mansion
shall
of
up
end
soul
servant’s
&
store
divine
of
within
without
shall
thou
once
more
MY LONGING
my
longing
for
longer
on
the
uncertain
to
reason
my
are
not
me
I
desire
did
past
reason
&
evermore
thoughts
discourse
random
truth
thought
bright
art
dark
MARVEL MISTAKE
eyes
love
no
sight
have
my
that
see
fair
false
means
world
not
love
love’s
true
O
be
with
with
marvel
mistake
sun
heaven
love
thou
thy
faults
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