Great Poetry For The People! Cosmoetica Links
Kate Benedict Adrian Boas George Dickerson Clayton Eshleman Marissa Fox Dylan Garcia-Wahl Everett Goldner Harvey Goldner Cindra Halm Neil Hester Dan Masterson Whinza Ndoro Peter Nicholson Maurice Oliver Gilbert Wesley Purdy Iain James Robb Alex Sheremet Anthony Zanetti
MIA Poets: Richard Dana Carlson Greg Clark Leah Cutter Shawn Durrett Angela Haug April Lott Steve Perkins Maggie Sullivan
Kate Benedict is a New York poet (a Bronxer) who has published since 1980, & lives with her husband on New York City’s ritzy Upper West Side; they surround themselves with totemic objects and thrift-store treasures. She has worked in book publishing and finance, hating every minute. Visit her website, from which these poems are reprinted: http://home.att.net/~leahyshaw/katebenedict.html. Also her online zine is at http://www.umbrellajournal.com/.
Atlantic City Idyll Beneath Bronx Singular EL: The Litters Glimpses of the Body.... In The Key.... Into His Hand Itchy Scar
Atlantic City IdyllCome bet with me and be my luck
and bring me gimlets tart with lime.
We’ll chase the wily holy buck
and toss the dice and sneer at time.
And we will dazzle in our clothes
and neon dazzle us as well.
We’ll strike a sleek and moneyed pose,
we’ll yell a blithe, ecstatic yell
until at last we’ve squandered all,
shot the wad and maxed the cards,
until we’ve quaffed till dawns appall
and hoarse are velvet-throated bards.
Come stroll with me and be my muse
of feckless hope and vain desire.
On the boardwalk the huckster woos
and Armless Annie tongues her lyre.
Where it sank exactly no expert knows,
the British frigate with a Hessian name.
Most likely, it foundered in the narrows
off the Bronx in a nor’easter. It came
with a freight of gold to pay the redcoats.
The coins are still unclaimed, or so some dream.
They glint in murk beneath our pleasure boats,
the scattered coins with unremitting beam.
But there are those who do not trawl so low,
who put all latent treasure out of mind.
My family never spoke of a lost ship
when we took those waters at a nimble clip
on summer Saturdays. Were we sun blind,
to notice nothing luminous below?
In the confinement of my solitary childhood
I did a little wandering.
So many things to see and ponder—
bars next to bake shops,
whining expressways,
shrines to the Virgin Mother
set up on people’s lawns.
Some days I’d straggle very far,
past weedy lots and car lots,
through the labyrinth of the projects
to the spot where avenues ended
or else where they began.
There was a beach down there,
I swear it,
a tiny inlet strewn with bottle tops
and sludgy rubbers,
mussels too,
and once a horseshoe crab.
There’s where I did my best thinking
as oily water slapped into my sneakers
and jets descended,
low and lower,
to LaGuardia across the way.
Here is not where I belong
is what I’d say out loud to no one.
My real neighborhood is elsewhere.
I’m from there.
I’m going there, someday.
Rouge, the tabby who matched my mother's hair,
had kittens in the crook beneath the stair.
Mink Max had hers on the porch, on a perch of dried
cloth. My mother didn't let her come inside.
I was four when Rouge brought forth her litter.
I named each kitten: Puffy, Winky, Glitter.
I was eight when Max grew swollen-large.
She'd purr and preen and queenly strut, garage
to snowy gutter, stoop to alley to back-
yard. And Rouge? Daddy put her kittens in a sack
and drowned them in the toilet. The sack throbbed,
the sack mewed. I held my ears and sobbed
though he said to let them die was just humane.
Max glared at me one day beyond the windowpane.
She seemed untamed, she snarled and hissed and rolled
her arching back. Her kittens: dead of the cold.
I had to see. I let one chill my palm.
I weighed the awful event with icy calm
and coldly cursed my mother for allowing the kittens' fate.
Thus it was I learned terror and hate.
Glimpses of the Body at a City Window
Mine is not a building with a river view.
No park outside my window changes hue
with the successive seasons. If I crane,
I see chaotic traffic, and a fire lane.
Shades shield me from the urban mess.
If now and then I raise them, it’s to guess
the weather, not to linger at the sill.
Still, one day I lingered against my will.
Across the street, I saw a man, a very
old man, naked in his room. A terry
towe—gray, perhaps once white—glided past
his hips. He bent, and his momentous ass
hovered above the avenue. Vast, pink—
he bore his great weight gently to the brink
of that too public sill. His wife helped him dress.
He put up with each capable caress.
Were they not mindful of the spectacle
they made, he in his enormous shackle
of slack skin, she in her intimate act
of wifely duty? Their street-show lacked
self-consciousness or shame. Uninhibited
as infants, pure, free, they exhibited
his frail exquisite body and were proud.
It wouldn’t have surprised me, had they bowed.
Nor did it surprise me when the scene would play
again on other days, or that I’d stay
by the window, riveted to the floor,
or that in time their figures came no more.
In Central Park, you lost our keys,
you dropped them in a drift of snow.
The plows
had not yet cleared the road.
Our boots dipped deep with every step,
hip-
high sometimes, kneecap high
and in the snow you lost our keys.
A haze
suffused the tops of trees,
a shush of sleds was on the air.
A pair
of cardinals did not cheep.
Quiet city, muffled, furred.
No one heard
the house keys fall. No one
heard them clink or ring.
How long
it’s been since last it snowed,
how long since we were that transfixed,
so lax
that we let go of keys,
lost them in capacious snow.
Awe
is a deep, distracting thing.
We even took a mazy turn,
down
a path that seemed so strange,
it was made over by the snow.
How
long until it snows again
and snow mist caps the winter trees
and we lose
ourselves, or keys?
...cupped in sleep, you’d tuck a nickel. Such
gentle stealth: not wrist or finger stirred.
His O-mouth gaped, his snoring chuffed and whirred.
That numb deposit: all you knew of touch.
Double shifts of duty on the subways
conducting a shrill orchestra of doors.
After, rotgut with Clancy’s dull-eyed boors.
Back home he’d drop right off: you’d foray
into father’s room, bearing your bright coin.
You loved imagining that wealthy waking—
but did he like the joke? It wasn’t spoken.
Today that quiet man lies dead. I join
you, husband, in a rite of our own making:
tucking in his hand this subway token.
A faded scar of mine turns garnet red.
I’ve dusted powder on and slathered rich
ointment. Nothing assuages the sharp itch.
Untidy wheals have broken out and bled.
Hadn’t I forgotten that childhood gash,
forgotten it like a freckle upon the back?
Forgotten too: the masked faces, the black
coma, the body part removed like trash.
The scar was numb. It gave no sensation—
though I recall, dimly, how it prickled
when newly etched. For a while it tickled,
then all feeling ebbed. Complete cessation?
Unheal me, resurrect me, the wound wails.
Have at me, prize me open with your nails.
Adrian Boas was born and grew up in Australia but has lived for the past 35 years in Jerusalem. He was born in 1952. He started writing poetry only recently. He is an archaeologist and university lecturer in the field of medieval archaeology (a field he has published 2 books, & is completing a 3rd in).
Down shopping mall or narrow covered suk
In sun-warmed streets the happy people pass,
A Friday morning's shopping to be done.
And laughing faces, children at their play,
Young girls and lovers walking hand in hand,
And somewhere near a baby's laughter heard.
Then, for a moment pure silence reigns.
But only for a moment, then a rush
Of heat and noise and dust filling the air.
An immense din, too great to be described
And putrid smell that is best not recalled.
The frightful ringing matrix behind all
Is broken by the sound of falling glass.
But sound and smell are only part of this
And sight is now far the most awful sense.
Shattered limbs, burned faces, wild eyes
And empty husks of bodies on the street.
The anguished cries of injured and distraught
Are buried now beneath the sirens' wails.
As fear and comprehension take a grip.
And those who still live settle in their pain,
Begin to grasp their new reality.
But some are dead, some will not walk again,
Some will never more see their loved ones.
Some who before were children now are old,
Some wish that death had taken them instead.
Some candles and a wreath, a curious crowd,
Perhaps and angry voice or two that shout:
"How could this happen? Who will take revenge?"
But come again, say in another week
To pleasant covered suk or shopping mall,
Or sun-warmed streets where happy people pass,
A Friday morning's shopping to be done.
George Dickerson is a poet ("The New Yorker," "Mademoiselle," "Pivot," "Rattapallax," "Medicinal Purposes"), fiction writer ("The Best American Short Stories of 1963" and "1966") and actor ("Blue Velvet," "After Dark, My Sweet," etc.). His "Selected Poems 1959-1999" was published by Rattapallax Press, 2000. He is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
A Mist Of White Horses Badinage For "Pepper" Dentistry In War Relativity The Coming On Of Night The Integument Of Dust
A Mist of White Horses
Tell me you have not forgotten the rain,
Close by the Mediterranean Sea,
Promise a mist of white horses again!
In the marshy sedge of the delta’s plain
Where the white horses of Camargue run free,
Tell me you have not forgotten the rain!
Why we should meet I could never explain,
Except for a squall’s serendipity;
Promise a mist of white horses again!
Huddled together like two sheaves of grain,
Strangers sheltered under a wind-whipped tree;
Tell me you have not forgotten the rain!
Well, this led to that and that led to pain,
But what severed us was not surgery;
Promise a mist of white horses again!
I’ve stumbled into an arid domain
And counted the days to infinity;
Tell me you have not forgotten the rain;
Promise a mist of white horses again!
Badinage for "Pepper"
(for Thomas M. Catterson, in memoriam)
So you've finally gone to seek your severed leg
And end your body's antic quarrel with time.
Terrific! What's left behind? Here. At the still point.
Where the mirthless clowns of midnight
Snicker: "Hoo ha! Hoo ha! Sweet Pepper's dead,
With Eastern metrics dancing in his head."
This is not so fine, my friend...this hapless end.
You know how absence aches....
You knew before you quit
Your walker's intricate pirouette
The recklessness of wish and want...
The cost...the haunt... ("Jig! Jig!" the jongleur said.
From his busted bed.) But to stop short
The syllables of your heart's fierce muttering
So soon is beyond my knack to grieve.
Hey! Let's take a jaunty, jocular leave
And screw the wizard of finality.
We'll have another cigarette. You bet!
And watch the lovely ladies' last late pass,
Then listen for God's gruff guffaw
As you humpety-bump your raggedy ass
Up the steps of heaven. "Hoo haw!"
Dentistry in War
Leaning in, his drill a weapon in his hand,
Hachem sortied into the molar’s core.
I could read the braille of sweat
On his oily face, acned like downtown
Souks pocked with bullet scars.
“Your mouth’s corrupt,” Hachem said.
I thought of Martyr’s Square
And the bomb-blasted stumps
Of the center’s rotten teeth.
“Root out the cause,” Hachem said.
His hairy finger probed
Like the snout of a foraging pig
Or the blunt nose of a Kalashnikov.
“The nerve must die,” he grinned,
Imagining himself the perfect
Executioner, imagining himself
On barricades, firing away,
Committing murder in the name
Of hygiene, without anesthetic,
Smirking while the city screamed.
“I hate the killing,” Hachem said,
“It’s such a waste of dental work,”
Digging deeper still, as if to excavate
The ruined Roman stones beneath
The crumbled, bankers’ vaults,
The war-wrought jaws of East Beirut,
As if in my poor slobbering mouth,
He could wipe out recent history,
Eradicate the offending caries
Of civilization gone awry.
I thought of flesh falling away,
Of teeth like gravestones
Marking the cemetery of the skull--
All laughter gone--incised
With Hachem’s demonic skill.
He was a man of sensibility:
Leaving in my sinus a pool
Of formaldehyde to combat
The germs that might yet try to live--
Embalming sentinel of his domain.
I protested the coming hurt;
He cursed and shouted, “Screw your pain!
What matters is my artistry.”
Oral butcher of West Beirut,
How many of the mounting dead
Smile the rictus of your dexterity?
Outside,
I can hear a siren
Speeding
towards someone waiting--
Someone
who may not know
He
is waiting.
On
my kitchen table I reach
For
a crust of bread
And
crumbs I have not yet eaten.
Between
the reach
And
the waiting
Is
the cave of a parabola
Where I can hear
Einstein
laughing.
Light scatters from the trees
Flutters
momentarily,
And
seems to die on air.
Night
picks up his walking stick.
Jackhammers
machine-gunning the streets
Have
stopped their persistent yammer.
Only
a fragment of an echo
Brought
by the restless wind
Chatters
the Venetian blind.
In
my room a girl trembles
To
an emotion as far away
And
indecipherable
As
the shudder of subways
Through
the belly of a building.
It
is too late for summer,
But
she makes fireflies
In
the darkness
With
her cigarette,
Insisting
on her presence.
In
the first night, in the Garden,
Did
terror strike our hearts
With the quickness of the tiger?
Or
was there a sign
To
ease the uncertainty--
A surprise of stars
Assuring
the upturned eyes?
Over
the city now,
The
stars open bloodshot eyes
In
a heavy, sullen neon glow.
The
girl snuffs out her light,
Makes
a stirring like leaves,
Like
grass disturbed by frightened birds,
Then
empties out my room
With
the closing of the door.
The
heart crumples black
As
a burned letter
From the half-forgotten past.
The Integument of Dust
I’ve been cautioned by the cognoscenti
Much of the dust in my unkempt rooms--
The dust that soups my kitchen air,
Stirred by a ladle of sunlight--
The motes that silt the rivers
That grain my oakwood table--
These are flakes of my own dead skin
Hanging around to haunt me--
Sometimes cohabiting
With the sloughed-off flesh of others:
The man who reads the meter,
The plumber who plugged up the leak,
And all the transient lovers
Who’ve left hints of themselves behind
With these miniature calling cards,
Just to remind me what I’ve squandered.
This is unsettling news, to learn
I’m dying piecemeal day by day,
That when I scratch or if I shrug,
Particles of me fritter away,
And to discover I’m never alone,
Even in my most private acts--
For which I can hardly atone.
(“Ashes. Ashes. All fall down!”)
If I draw the blinds, I cannot escape
Hannibal’s elephants marching on Rome--
Their dunglike feet pluming the air--
Or the ghosts of the Ganges dead
From ghat-burnt pyres that smudge the clouds.
Coterminous with the cosmic dust,
I am commingled with all that’s passed--
Nudged in a sneeze of memory--
Composed from our common quick pool of quarks
At the yawn and stretch of awakening time.
When the great storms rose on the Kansas plain,
My grandmother taped all the windows tight--
The cracks of doors and all the chinks
Where the laden wind could insinuate--
Sealed fast the cedar chest under her bed.
Covered with blankets, we hid in the closet
While the banshee wailed through her widowing house
And the buzz of bees filled our dust-bit heads.
Before he died, my grandfather ripped
The tape from the chest, felt deep to the center
For the yellowing linen of her wedding dress,
Unfolded it with arthritic care
To find another’s dust sheltering there.
(And the centipede crawled on their mohair couch.)
I have been to distant desert places
Where toppled columns crumble and flake--
Our civilizations blow away in the wind
And dust devils dishevel the mind;
I’ve knelt and wept for all our sins;
And I’ve come back home to trace
The calligraphy of your spectral face
Writ in the grit of my windowpane.
Clayton Eshleman is a poet, translator & editor of Sulfur magazine. He has had many books published by Black Sparrow Press since 1968. Upcoming books include Companion Spider [essays] & a revised translation of Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land [both by Wesleyan University Press]. Check out his websites: http://www.webdelsol.com/Sulfur/ & http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/eshleman/
Crematorial sensation in a department store, thousands of suits and dresses without bodies, as if it is always Book 11 of The Odyssey, we are surrounded by speechless souls
Souls trying on souls, the hippo-assed white, the mantis-waisted black, caramel shoulders of a teenager, a pink ankle-length soul for Xmas day
Caryl found some fabulous pants, gold green alligator quills, loose in the crotch, baggy in knee, she put them back, fearful no tailor she could find could fashion them perfectly
(In eternity, Henry Miller is a tailor--
lustfully he entered the Cave of the Nymphs,
soon became more concerned with the gates of ivory and horn,
souls arriving, souls departing, all needing
a cutting here, an addition there--
a drowned soul slithered in, needing resurrectional attention,
old Blake hobbled through, Henry dusted him off,
perked up his lapel)
We sashay over to the Santa Center, the old sot in red crumples each wish, sending a beam of hope into the child heart, I can feel the soot already in the childrens' mouths as wishes like elves congregate on their lips, they sit for a moment on the stony gingerbread knee, this realm of sweet deception
Dorothea Tanning's female cloth-like forms blow through, crumpling knots of outwinding femininity
Department
depart meant
Beckmann's Departure
clothes awaiting casting off
Redesign yourself, step into this angelic armor
Cuddly music, emptiness made cosy
"'Exquisite work, madame, exquisite pleats'
vanish into a bloated face, ordering more dresses,
gouging the wages down,
dissolve into maria, ambrosa, catalina,
stitching these dresses from dawn to night,
in blood, in wasting flesh."
Old man in a pea coat searching for something among womens' suits
Recalls my father searching for my mother after she had died, he'd steal his car keys the Rest Home people had hidden, then drive and drive, 200 miles away one afternoon a housewife found him parked in her driveway--when she asked him what he was doing there he told her he was looking for Gladys
--emptiness keeps coming in,
the unfillable sleeves and slacks of life
The terrible animal imprint in perfume departure, the civet cat and the musk deer, crushed like grapes, displayed in tiny gold vases
I help Caryl shop, holding her coat and scarf, pick out clothes, color schemes, purples, lavenders, auburns and deep browns, things for her new silhouette.
Copyright Ó by Clayton Eshleman
Marissa Fox is a recent graduate of Barnard College, where she studied Art History. She currently lives in Brooklyn, where she spends her days working on a floating chamber music hall, and her nights contemplating Frank O'Hara. This is her first online publication.
A Short Confession Border Town Blues Jamaica Transfer The Excuse The Graduates
Kaikki is hello in Finnish.
I found this in your English-Finnish dictionary
when you were downstairs using the bathroom.
I was going to surprise you with my language skills,
but I put down the book quickly (like a thief!)
when you returned, so I never got the chance
to figure out the correct pronunciation.
I have been meaning to say it to you:
kaikki when I ring your doorbell,
kaikki when we meet by accident in town.
In my mind kaikki also means goodbye
and I say that, too, though slower,
lingering on the ka-i-kki until it means hello again.
Listen, I know you have trouble understanding me
(save for the instance when we locked eyes,
when we held hands furtively in a crowded pub),
I just want to tell you that I am working
on other words - pussata, suudella, suukko –
that I will mention one by one when language
means less, and the spelling looks right.
Copyright Ó by Marissa Fox
The heat down south is killing us:
we, the disarranged,
the leftover, the jughandled,
even our stories are stale –
We feel a prick on our tongue
that doesn’t disappear for weeks
I fell for you in a border town,
near a tent city
from my vaudeville days
in a bar that was all corners
When the shots went off,
I followed you half-way across the country
in a long tuxedo coat
and one application of mascara
My eyes were bluer then,
before the cataracts;
there was nothing innocent
about the way I looked you
up and down
Copyright Ó by Marissa Fox
The train lights collapse
Across the platform is Olga
Her dress immaculate
Her thoughts strewn
Like old leaves
She presses her spare keys
Into a stranger’s hands
As if by habit
There are traps
In the architecture of unfamiliar faces
Jiri calls with the excuse:
we can no longer meet
at the flea market at lunchtime.
It will be too hot –
Haven’t you seen the way the sun
descends on the plaza?
Hitting the rims of old spectacles,
reddening the necks of those digging
through the remains of forfeited fiction,
the stubborn reminders of chance.
We cannot meet here midday,
he says over the phone,
only later, when the shadows
spread across this tired square,
when the market shuts down
and Marolles becomes a burial ground:
Meet me where the vans
gather the unsold goods
in the wave of exhaust fumes,
where pieces of cloth, chains,
a shard of glass lie –
there you will find me,
scavenging.
The Graduates Present Their Theses
Concretized, Krauss-esque
In both ways, in multiples
An appendix or an index: a sign
Hold on, hold fast
Less didactic, more romantic
There is a seamlessness to your discussion
There is a seamlessness to your dress
Bad graphics, how Benjaminian
Adorn[o]ed, their best blouses
The blondes always discuss Turner
A pause, applause, 3 missed calls
Some misread article in Artforum
A re-appropriation of “the icon”
Their lecterns were invaded,
Or worse –
Poorly articulated.
Copyright Ó by Marissa Fox
Dylan Garcia-Wahl Dylan came to the UPG a number of times. He has written novels, as well chapbooks of poetry. In addition he has hosted reading series, cable access shows, and is an avid jazz enthusiast. He is married, with two children from a previous marriage. One of his long-term goals is to live in Europe. I have known Dylan since 1993 and we have collaborated on a number of arts projects. His website: http://dgarciawahl.com/
As In Benediction Baptism Filmatic Gates Of Rodin Manikarnika Ghat Quiver For.... Somnolent Verse Song To Whom Is Forbidden Voices Welled
You, Madonn’ of my desires,
each dream is coiled to your caress
as is the solstice of my needs.
My love, when the world covets flesh
mine very words shall covet love.
For answers come before questions.
And now only thy flesh is the
lasting want of antiquity
come immaculate. Soft, I scream
my past and my sins into you.
Palm to my chest, these delicate
flushings of wish are beyond me.
The dark refracts as a single
wonder passes from you to me.
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Baptism
'Tis only by humble cherish
that I make my way to your fount
The writhing of my essence in the hands that I clasp
make into this hollow of mine, a performance of grace.
The words of my confession, the trial of my days
lent to your forgiveness.
For you,
I shed myself of my flesh,
of my calling, of my sins
before your waters darkened by candlelight
to seek redemption
to ignite a purity
to deepen my bow
and fall to the within you.
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Filmatic
for Jerry Tomlinson
“Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm happy to state, I finally won out over it.”
-Elwood P. Dowd, “Harvey”
Life (?)…
an archipelago of breaths
Reels –
movement
(or years)
purposed and propelled by memory
The theatric boast of life the eyes parade
a silent camera, ever behind, focusing.
In patchwork scenes childhood, middle years, old age,
death – then birth -
edited
played out
critiqued
Nothing known at the fade in
will be felt in the fade out
Leaving nothing to predictability,
except pardon,
the film is christened - ages
in sensitivity and texture
The stir of the heart
scripts the direction of purity,
cleaving to what we cast off,
never playing tomorrow as the strains
of another day
What of the actor?
His lines are his to forget
-his audience to recall
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Whereas Ghirberti had bronzed paradise
The unfathomable can be found more explicit
By the doorwell as much mirror as it is plaster,
A question posed: By what sins is there a rising in Hell?
As declension must have a counter balance
Avarice is brought in holy quantities
The expulsion of shades that have drowned in spirit are still
The Biblical myths pray in their falling
And incomplete as is all sin
In vignettes of lamentation
Never has the human form been more naked
Never have beliefs passed by so rapidly
Even if discord is not visible to you
Face your sorrow and it is sculpted in portal.
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Manikarnika Ghat
The Ganges moans unlike any ocean can
But, come tumult, the voices are similar
Death is this sound of dying
Dead, all is the reap of prayer
A shade made of life
owing veneration
to what waves can bring to memory
In the renunciation of the river
wisdom is given repose and
passions are washed away to become sediment
The water, itself, is but a mask of the senses cleansed
A diseased breeze feeds
the sinless fires
in turn sooting the air with ancestry
making way for the eternal river
-which is Heaven
Chanting at the steps
Doms of outcast wearied
Bodies burned of their stories
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Is his life the tune of his human hands
as they play out rhythms at his shoulders
in a refrain that comes to nothing more
than drumming of nervous architecture
to the straight on stare of strangers and friends
which mixes the past with what now comes myth
in a man that is buried from within
by the loss decreed sanctimonious?
The very tremble of his hands excused
in order to show his capacity
to feel beyond the blur of his present.
For continuum weighs sympathy. There
is not sin in the baring of these days
that calm this man to strains of humanfold.
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Somnolent Verse
‘neath bare your feet the grasses sing
as springtime yields the world its heart
In timely tongue my language will pattern
a supple course of desire
There’s a prayer I’ve chanted made up of your motions
in a day that needs you closer to tomorrow
So, until I can approach you
having you see me as naked
without seeing me as weak
I will not call again upon your rest
Sleep
Sleep
for a moment in the hold of God
Oh, sad intangible one,
to die impossible by your side
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Song
Singing something
to walk through the walls marketing the world
Singing to imbue a horizon
Singing a prayer of spirit
It is within our flesh that God comes to ponder
showing the makings of illusion
For it is not the ribs enclosed in flesh
that give definition to man
It is by the singing we are defined
Judgment comes by how the songs of midnight
meet the songs of daybreak
Sculpting an innocence
is easier in the blindness of the womb
than in the world
with its mint of the unfamiliar
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
To Whom Is Forbidden
There was the night I dreamt you drowned
Baptized to me an anguish found
No breath to rise, lips part no more
As horror wished to be adored
I pardoned our unwedded bed
I practiced saying your name dead
At Midnight’s lunch the grave was served
When I rose to unleash my nerves
And tipped the shelter of my fears
In the house that believed you here
The corners where your shadow weeps
Displays the dust thought buried deep
What comes of you is chord and note
With weight to sink but wave to float
My eyes to lift and tremble when
I woke to find my broken pen
Its ink in flood across your throat
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Voices Welled
Emparadis’d in your reaching spirit, delicate
there is a sky that does not pass above you,
a second that is not made a moment without you,
and a beauty etched to carols of the heart.
For there is something naked in your voice.
Innocent not - sometimes a weakness
when the heartened flesh trembles pale
brightened by a moon of continuum Spring
who’s breath does birth the belief of ecstasy
kept to union in nestled bodies
weeping for immortality.
For in each whisper, a catharsis.
An echo for to surround
with the sigh of your quiver.
All senses toward you.
And always
you
moving alone within invited crowds.
Always you
stopping breaths
forever
and dressing desire.
Always you
haunting the hours of man
with an image of beauty
that justifies their loneliness.
And always you,
only you,
hearing my voice
falling silent
in hesitation
of your soliloquy
in fear of its touching
Copyright Ó by Dylan Garcia-Wahl
Everett GoldnerEverett Goldner is a poet and actor living in New York.
Heat Sonata Leather, Sketch, Score, Mist
Heat Sonata
Now motion is postmarked, sealed and shipped.
I recognize the propriety of stagnation
and await, with my brilliant reasonableness
the next hundred easels.
I await that old classic: the end of invisibility.
I await the confluence of light and need.
I await a microcosm of dogma...
In Lyle, perspiration's index sits on its stool
and thumbs its tail at a schizoid menu.
Fringe elements wail in the heat. Thermonuclear
with the Jewish 'u' on...
Leaf and chrysalis bent like a blank dogear...
Tasteless things. Placards and shrugs.
Old anthems placated down through the pipes
Into one small --
Wash 'n wear kaleidoscopes.
Steel-belted harpsichords.
Thrill-seeking stonehowls.
The last impulse of speech is always fluted.
Elastic gong rings in a shivering space:
bent beams cross on a leafless cluster;
Unraveling a batch of glass-blown bake.
roily dodges wandering, opaque;
momentum, rivaling, lacks a pout to muster.
Elastic bound rings in a searing space.
Out in grace, waiting curious, all origami cascade:
illuminate this stillminded play concave maze –
unraveling spiral, of nonesuch make
while star-felt reelings la deedle de game
reaping, into verse, pelt static through flame.
Elastic bound rings in a salted space –
and moves impatiently, like an unsigned wave
palms up and soundless in any given enclave,
unraveling spiral, horn and wake.
at limbo, o scarlet harlequin, bow a sheer A;
a long-muted mobile sees its calmed outline fade.
elastic bound rings in a salted space
unraveling spiral, horn and wake.
Harvey Goldner Harvey Goldner (newpacificboomerang@hotmail.com) lives in Seattle. His three chapbooks—Her Bright Bottom, Memphis Jack, and American Flyer—are available from Spankstra Press (Seattle). To purchase, contact Chris Dusterhoff at spankstra@hotmail.com or write Chris Dusterhoff, Spankstra Press, PO Box 224, Seattle WA 98111.
19 sonnets from an apple basket
#1
Prominent cheek bones, on the deck of her pastel condo,
high up, Claire runs a red comb through her hair, black
with just a minor encroachment of gray. From far out,
a Pacific breeze ruffles white the Sound water and stirs
some business papers beside her chair. Down there she sees a few
trivial gulls and sailboats and—vibrant capitalism, three huge ships:
a freighter from China stuffed with mattresses for the massive
Americans, a ferryboat, passengers bound for Bainbridge and TV,
and the wedding cake Princess, top-heavy, her pleasure sponges
no doubt drowsy from a big dose of rigatoni and red wine or
something. She dozes and dreams a rustle of rats in the attic, the
several stations of the crass, a basket full of death wishes & red
delicious apples, a priest—the beast who scooped her up—dead
in a dim room, a bullet wound in his forehead, oozing blood, red.
#2
She awakens and her trigger finger itches. Claire Black,
recently widowed at fifty, leans over the railing of her deck,
cold now and in the dark. Should I inject my face with
bo-tox? Should I jump? But what if death is—even lonelier?
Maybe I will inject my face with bo-tox and buy a small dog,
a Maltese, maybe two Malteses, male and female. I'll call
them Tess & D'Urberville, Derby for short. Yes, bo-tox and
two Malteses, but both male—Laurel & Hardy. O fuck, all
I need's a stiff drink. From a cabinet above the kitchen sink—
a tumbler, a fresh fifth of Bombay gin and two tiny bottles of
tonic water, Schweppes. Claire struggles unscrewing the Bombay.
Hot Christ! I don't need a man to screw: I need a man to unscrew
bottle caps. After a blast of gin, a TV dinner and a hot shower,
Claire, in a pink silk kimono, settles down for a family album hour.
#3
Two more gin & tonics and Claire feels like a blathering mother so
she first phones her daughter Phoebe's friendly answering machine
in Omaha, and Phoebe's friendly answering machine (Claire sees
corn stalk or parrot green) cheerfully announces that Phoebe
has gone to church to eat corn on the cob, to sing some hymns and
to play a little bingo. Claire informs Phoebe's answering machine
the if she should ever return to church she'll be packing a pistol in
her Louis Vuitton, to drill a filthy raven between his twisted eyes.
Another blast from the bottle and baby daughter Annie's answering
machine (pantie pink) in Miami sings, breathlessly. Seems Annie's
fanny's on the back of her photographer fiancé's Harley, and they're
touring Gulf Katrina states on assignment for National Geographic.
Claire, now somewhat slurry, sings to Annie's pink machine that she
is torn between skydiving in Peru & scuba diving in the Caspian Sea.
#4
Nuclear family business complete, Claire decides to connect
with her larger tribe: she flips on the TV. It will take a village
to polish off this bottle of gin, she thinks, as she riffles her deck
of channels, finally fixing on the Seattle Sonics versus the Phoenix
Suns. All those stunning men in silky shorts, so tall and nimble!
But what a waste. If only...if only they could break free, free at
last—God Almighty!—from that retarded basketball. She trembles
weeping while splashing a tumbler half full—or half empty?—
of gin and tonic, then wraps an Indian blanket around her tightly
and stumbles out onto the deck—those lights, those harbor lights!
Claire's eyes open at dawn. She crawls inside, drinks her last drink.
She dumps what remains of the Bombay gin into the kitchen sink
and mumbles: "Time to sell my eagle's nest high above the Sound
and live somewhere closer to the ground, maybe even under ground."
#5
In a peachy Hawaiian surfer shirt, Red Feather—long black hair,
blue cotton headband—shuffles his homemade cards. He gazes
into, and through, Claire Black's eyes, places a card on each
of the nine points of an enneagram crudely sketched with a red
magic marker on old cotton, and speaks, amused, hamming it up:
"Madam Black, I see shoes, shoes moving back and forth. I see
a man in black…but not Johnny Cash…I see a flash…not from
a camera…I see blood…from a head…not yours…I see your
"photo… a theater poster?…a postal wanted poster? Now cross
my palm with silver. Twenty bucks. I'm in serious need of fresh
buffalo meat. Would you like some advice?" Claire swoons and
nods. "Record your dreams in this specially blesséd journal.
"A mere twenty bucks. I'm in serious need of a dog for my sled.
Mark your place with this red feather. It's free: I like your head."
#6
Claire stands up, dizzy. With a grand theatrical gesture, Red Feather
hands her his business card—Have 3 Eyes; Will Travel—& a rather
filthy paperback copy of Steve LaBerge's Lucid Dreaming. "Brother
Steve's a shaman—campus tribe, Stanford clan. Sacred smoke of cedar
"fire has purified this copy—twenty bucks. My squa needs a new bra."
"Where'd you get your red feathers?" Claire stammers. "From a
cardinal, but not at Rome—in Missoula." Claire's fingers now smell
like a Cascade Mountain campfire. She exits Red Feather's closet—
Red Feather, Registered Psychic on the door—in the back of the
Fremont New Age Bookstore (just below the Troll) and browses a bit,
buying a hunk of rose quartz and a fresh copy of Lucid Dreaming.
Claire wanders Fremont, and before sundown she rents a basement
studio apartment in an old building. Her windows—sidewalk level.
She sees shoes, shoes moving back & forth. Red Feather—you devil!
#7
Saturday night and neon swirls in a Fremont tavern, The Cars
on the jukebox churn cream into butter, the bartenders—Lars
and Laura—draw multiple beers for the boys and girls, Dusty
throws a dart that misses the board, Nicole Rococo swats him
on the ass and everybody laughs. Out front, under lights, under
summer stars, Leona and the smokers gesture & smoke & pose
for the traffic. In back of the tavern, in the dark, Angelo parks
his Harley in the weedy lot, and with a big silver key, opens the
back door. Claire Black follows him down dark stairs, and
together they light a dozen candles on the long table that stands
surrounded by cases of wine and beer. Slowly more ghosts
file in and fill up the chairs. It's Claire's first AA meeting: The
Saturday Midnight Fremont Free Monsters. Hanging on the wall—
their motto: The way up is the way down. Claire feels quite small.
#8
Shadows and candlelight play on his face. "My name is Angelo, ex-
con, gypsy, joker, and I….We were out in the yard shooting hoops…
hard words…push & shove. I got stuck in the gut. As I lay dying,
blood pooling in the dirt, I saw—it's all a big joke. The world, the
"Earth—comedy central. God the father mother joker. I also saw,
not that we're all in the same boat, but that we're all parts of one
sailor. You, me, everybody, really just one sailor. Sounds corny,
I know, like a Beatles song." The meeting over, the ghosts drift up
and out like smoke. Claire declines a ride on Angelo's bike. "Angelo,
you're beautiful, and you and your beautiful bike make me feel like
seventeen. But I don't want to feel like seventeen. I want to feel
seventy, or a hundred & seventy. See you next Saturday." Rarely
have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.
Most evenings, Claire reads: Kafka, Sam Beckett and Sylvia Plath.
#9
Claire wakes at dawn, goes to the stove and boils water—Am I
dreaming?—for a pot of green tea loaded with honey. She records,
with words and small sketches, her dream: On a sinking ladder, she
tries to climb out of a sunken flower garden. Out her window she
sees shoes moving. Am I dreaming? She puts on her walking shoes
and begins her long day's walk towards night. Widdershins, she
circles Green Lake, observing the joggers: Some joggers are demons,
some are being chased by demons, while others—the unawakened
dead. Am I dreaming? Claire stops at a Greenlake Starbucks, sits at
a sidewalk table. Coming up the sidewalk—a pair of men, both bald.
They are taping posters to poles. One is very old and tall and slow
and white; the other, very young and short and quick and black.
A few feet from Claire's table, they stop and tape. The poster reads:
WANTED! The Amateur Avant Fremont Freakstar Theater Needs…
#10
…Actors And Actresses Any Age Or Size, Experience Useful But
Not Essential…Also, Anyone Willing To Help Backstage With
Props, Costumes, Sets, Lighting And Sound Or As Stage Hands,
Prompt And So On. Contact…. Claire remembers her college
thespian career. Her senior year, she starred as Irene, in Ibsen's
When We Dead Awaken. That freshman Gina stole the show
as Maja—bigger tits, bigger hips, bigger lips—that bitch! May
she freeze in Hell or Norway! Sundown, the following Thursday—
just a hint of Autumn quince in the air—Claire strolls down hill
to an old weathered barn—the Fremont Freakstar Theater—near
the canal. Waiting to ham for the director, she chats with Troy—
seventeen, short, genius, black—who has put down his hammer.
"No, Claire, I didn't drop out: School interfered with my education.
I didn't run away: I kissed Mom goodbye at the Greyhound Station."
#11
"It was my 16th birthday, Cinco de Mayo. I tell you, Claire, I was
ecstatic to be exiting rust-belt Buffalo. My first day in Seattle,
Ocho de Mayo, I explored on Metro, and Fremont felt—just right.
I sat under the Troll awhile, then strolled on down to the canal.
"Something drew me to this barn, where I met Stan, that old man
over there, hammering. Forget the director, Peter Pan: Stan's the
heart and brains of this enterprise. He was a hotshot New York
director in the '70s, a rising star, fast. Thought he deserved a little
"Holiday in Poland, big mistake. In Warsaw he looked up mad Jerzy
Grotowski, bigger mistake, and joined one of Jerzy's theatrical, uh,
experiments. Stan and some other seeker suckers were driven deep
into the countryside, and dumped. Stan, distracted by some strange
"Polish flora, became separated from the group—lost, alone. Clear
night awhile—then rain, lightning & thunder. I felt like King Lear
#12
"(Act IV, scene 4) at first, and that was theatrically charming, but
soon I felt like shit. A Polish farmer out shooting squirrels found me
the next morning, shivering under a Polish oak, in shock. I returned
to New York and attempted suicide, failed, & then attempted drugs,
"without success. So I moved to Seattle. It seemed like a nice place
to sleep. Stan's taught me everything about this monkey business—
backstage and front—and he gave me a valuable piece of advice:
Shun actors. Their brains are like vacant barns in which grotesque
"birds and creeping things come to nest. And I've managed to teach
Stan a little about computers. Mom got me a PC when I was six,
a gift from a rich lady whose house she was cleaning. At 14, I was
considered a prodigy hacker: I could see the cracks in the seams."
When her name is called, Claire tells the director, Mr. Peter Pan:
"Cancel my audition. Could I work backstage with Troy & Stan?"
#13
Sunday night, night of the autumn equinox, Claire Black takes a
long bubble bath (total immersion) followed by a quick hot shower.
Her body covered with a clean cotton sheet, Claire curls up in bed,
rehearsing her lucid dreaming script. Sleep. Am I dreaming? Yes!
Claire, small as a sparrow, stretches her wings and ascends to the
sun, to the top of the Christ Tower, rose quartz pulsing with light.
Standing on the deck of his penthouse condo—Christ! He wears
Mexican sandals, 501s, a green cotton shirt with pearl buttons and
a dusty gold pinstripe fedora. He smiles and says: "Claire, I know
what you're thinking: Christ looks like Crazy Horse. Who'd you
expect—Jim Caviezel? Now about that so-called priest. Go ahead,
off the son of a bitch. You've got my green light." His shirt turns
from green to yellow to red, then back to green again, but brighter.
Claire wakes at dawn, humming Ave Maria. She feels much lighter.
#14
Claire gives Angelo 500 bucks and a kiss, and he gives her the cold
piece. "Yes, Angelo, I know the drill: point and squeeze. When we
first got married, my late husband Rusty, afraid of rapists, bought me
a .38 and taught me how to shoot it. After we got to know each other
"a little bit better, the pistol disappeared. Rusty wasn't the brightest
bulb on the Christmas tree, but he was no fool." Later, at the barn,
Claire says to old Stan: "Say, Pops, I'm going to be an old crone at a
Halloween party. Can you give me some tips?" Stan, master of
props, gives her a cane from a Noh drama, bits of a crone costume
and a ragged wig from a Yeats' play; and, touching her face, says:
"A little paint here, Claire, and you'll look like a hundred." Then
Claire asks Troy: "Troy, can you find a man? You might have to
"hack the Vatican. Can you hack the Vatican?" "Of course I can.
I can hack the Vatican. Tell me his name and I'll find the man."
#15
Thursday, clear and sunny, Claire meets Troy for lunch, Kentucky
Fried, crispy, a picnic at the Troll. "I found your Father Yago. He
really gets around, to & fro, up & down, slums & jungles, jungles
and slums. It's like something's been chasing him for forty years,
"but, surprise, he's back in Seattle; and, next week, Allhallows Eve,
he'll be at Blesséd Bingo & the Beatles at his church in Rat City."
"Troy, you hacked the Vatican?" "Didn't have to. Yago plays
bloggo, has pages at MySpace. Yago likes to keep in touch."
Feeling foxy from the chicken and the rare, crisp autumn weather,
Claire strolls from the Troll to the Fremont New Age Bookstore,
thinking: I'm coming to get you, Red Feather. But Red Feather
isn't there. There's a basket of red delicious apples on a chair, and
on his door, a note: Eat one, in remembrance of me. Don't worry:
be happy. Have gone to pick apples with my tribe in Wenatchee.
#16
The bingo basket whirls. Beatles blare. Bending low, poking
with her cane, her appearance an amalgam of an ancient Mother
Superior & an old Irish-Japanese witch from Macbeth, Claire
enters the raucous bingo hall &, with mincing steps, heads straight
for Father Yago, who sits at the children's table slurping a hot
fudge sundae, a Notre Dame varsity sweater over his shirt & collar.
She croaks in his ear: "Father Yago, I have a bequest for the Holy
Church, gold and precious stones." With Claire on his arm, Father
Yago waddles down a dim hallway to an even dimmer room.
They sit at opposing desks. Claire looks in his eyes—nobody home.
Claire thinks: Father, you have sinned. Say half a Hail Mary,
quickly, & kiss your ass goodbye, you freak. Claire reaches in her
purse and feels the cold piece. She looks out her exit, the window—
crescent moon. A flash coincides with Sergeant Pepper's crescendo.
#17
Next day, Mysterious Murder on the evening news. Bud, 300 pound
cabdriver, towers over ace reporter, Molly Chen. Scratching his butt,
Bud explains: "She was so old. I picked her up at Swedish and she
seemed Irish yet oddly Japanese and when we got to the church in
"Rat City she tipped me a quarter, barked, took it back and tipped
me a dime and then when I wasn't quick enough getting out to open
her door she called me a goddamn fool and poked me with her cane.
She must have been a hundred. You see, Molly, to live that long,
"one must be exceptionally mean. That's my theory." Claire, feeling
finally even after forty years, returns to the Church and, following
a date with jolly Bishop Tucker at Ray's Boat House (Friday, fish),
Claire makes arrangements to enter a retreat on the eastside of Lake
Washington (nine months official mourning), a convent for rich lay
ladies—flowers, ducks. Without delay, Claire begins writing a play.
#18
Working title: Irene Contra Maja: a Tragedy. After subtracting
Ibsen's superfluous male characters from When We Dead Awaken,
Claire takes Irene and Maja and sets them in a ski lodge on Mt.
Shasta, where they battle for supremacy, day & night, on the slopes
and in the bars. Feverishly, far into the night, Claire Black sits in her
cell at her PC, collaborating via e-mail with her co-conspirators, Troy
& Stan. They opt for a minimalist approach, but fast—Sam Beckett
fused with Kabuki. The frequent howls of laughter exploding from
Claire's cell disturb the nosy nuns & other inmates, and there is talk
of importing a specialist priest from Boston to perform an exorcism.
Fortunately, the final curtain drops (Irene, triumphant in a duel
fought with ski poles, plants Maja's body in a lodge pot, and sings
a concluding aria, crowing) before the exorcist arrives on the tarmac
at Sea-Tac. Claire Black splits the convent and she never looks back.
#19
After an earthquake Fremont Freakstar run, the play's performed on
Broadway. Stan, now awakened, declines to return to New York in
triumph, saying only: "Ah, fuck New York." Soon, Hollywood buys
the title. The movie, now a comedy, ends, not with a duel, but a duet
and a wedding. Jennifer Aniston, gradually looking more and more
like Humphrey Bogart, plays Irene with considerable flair. Angelina
Jolie as her bo-tox bride, Maja, is sultry enough, but a bit lazy. As
bride's maids, Brad Pitt & Tom Cruise star in hooker wigs & skirts.
Jack Black, in Papal drag, performs the Vatican wedding. Critics
predict Oscars. Meanwhile, far from the maddening Hollywood
hullabaloo, Troy, Stan and Claire are directing Bill Gates and
a bunch of jaded Microsoft executives in a Grotowskian theatrical
happening involving skydiving and mountain climbing in Peru.
Newsweek headlines it: The Ascension Towards Machu Picchu.
Copyright Ó by Harvey Goldner
Cindra Halm I met Cindra teaching a poetry class in '93 at a Barnes & Noble. She teaches classes at bookstores, S.A.S.E.- The Write Place, and The Loft. But don't hold that against her! Cindra is an excellent poet who explores connections in sundry ways, and a critic, fiction writer, dancer, and active participant in the local art scene- as well a local grocery co-operative. Had she been a regular attendee of the UPG she might have been described as the yin to Art Durkee's yang.
Asking The Kitchen It's August.... Said The Chef The Grove.... When I Walk
for work is like bartering with any
lover: cut and be cut; warm
to be warm. Whisper, toil; tables will
breathe, fill, sharpening the palate,
your style.
Copyright Ó by Cindra Halm
(poem 1st published in FOOD & OTHER STUFF)
It's August. You'll Be Passing Through Town Soon.
I love the twin guardian angels (not for sale)
on either side of the porch, their oxidized wings
collecting the world's poses curved between them.
And fountains, everywhere, for birds or for show: See, I'm
never alone, on my balcony, scrutinizing postures. Have you heard?
I live in the house next door to the place that sells statues,
25th and Hennepin, third floor. Down in the yard
shape takes its weight: busts, columns, life-sized gods,
obelisks, an array of hound, reindeer, and scroll.
There's enough swaying and straying as shadows
inch at the pointed gate and beyond yet I still find
the bronze soldier who has borrowed your backpack and conceit.
With your curly hair you may look
like my brother but you are not.
The swell of commerce cools as light cools to leave
garden empty of guests and Zeus in stone, riding
chariot urn as figure then figure turns to its nightly
orbit. Gestures make meager, conversations solidify, the far
sky slips between me and these cluttered, familiar heads
like a blue-haze barroom tunnel. I've agreed to stay
in the house next door to the place that sells statues,
forever. This is my beautiful view, a vista certain,
craved. So when you come, come in the morning, full of flesh
and footfall up the stairs to the third floor
where I can watch you move. Wanderer, wind, I
remember you, and there are times when I desire
the sun and your hands in my hair.
Copyright Ó by Cindra Halm
(poem 1st published in SIDEWALKS)
Smell, first, to locate, to tease. Release of food's
When I breathe deeply, widely, I am able to find
In the kitchen where it is hot and my body
Copyright Ó by Cindra Halm
The Grove Which Lives Between Matter and Wander: the Heart
Whether this weather abates is not the point,
My bicycle shifts beneath me on ice-rain slipping
A toddler unwinds from her mother; the mother,
Which nesting doll am I, rain above, rain below?
Back to ground, the found child and her mother
From my debate about the weather, on my bicycle
Copyright Ó by Cindra Halm
The Devil talks to me, too. I shake just like anybody
Copyright Ó by Cindra Halm Neil Hester is a Texas
poet currently attending high school. His blog can be
found at http://laevanesce.blogspot.com Advice
To The Stout A
Reflection On.... A
Difficulty In Parenting Every
Pop Quiz Half
Tragedy Loosely
Laced Ou La
Mort The
Last Visit Village
Children To those of a fearsome, Goliath
descent For power is broader than muscles
alone; A
Difficulty In Parenting A
Refl Intangible glass in tangible glass.
They stand In between, the doppelgangers I dreamt last night Our pleasant chatter falls away; She
cut the tension with a knife, a
gun, and a smile. What’s life in
a place like this? He’d miss her, but
half-dead love only copes with hell so
well,
so long,
he
thought, same knife, same
gun, no smile. What’s life alone?
In a place like this, with
an all-dead love (still smiling), and
all the winds beguiling her
hair into an almost-lively flight, a
sight he could only bear so well,
so long.
Copyright Ó by
Neil Hester
Glassless watching: this and that Even the slums are beautiful I was told to, bar what they sing, God of the civil razor, he laughs My name is on a program. All
the petals are in the pond. He’s
loved me four times, loved me not three. The
fairy tale count is very forgiving; Never
and always are very cruel. At
times, we would join, if only to be– Just
for the sake of feeling, of living. Well,
for him, anyhow. I’m a fool. To
only touch is such a weak bond. I
used to respond to every misgiving That
threatened to part me from my jewel. My
jewel– sure, just a thing to be donned. For
awhile, anyhow. Now I numbly let him flee. Enough
with petals. A toad and its stool, For
half-love and lust–– into the pond!
Copyright Ó by
Neil Hester
Village
Children
Copyright Ó by Neil Hester
entered into with abandon or not at all."
--Harriet Van Horne
perfumes, sprays of oil or sweat fresh from whatever pod
or skin has shed them. Asparagus bursting through steam,
garlic and cayenne escaping the skillet. A knife
or flame carefully played elicits the aromatic truth
for the most gnarled of noses: if you breathe here
you will soon feel the need to eat.
that region near the back of my tongue where
the unwritten menus reside. I am a choreographer
wild with vision, daring culinary music, coaxing
bodies to blend or collide. One day--from where?--licorice
seized me and declared a theme: fennel salad, tarragon
pate’, Pernod in the ratatouille, anise for shortbread.
On another, a Greek appetite engulfed the table: dolmades
mousaka, spanakopita, baklava ah, ah, ah to sup
in the lap of the Aegean Sea! Which came first,
my passion for flavor or an errant breeze
delivering a neighbor's feast? So, I am
is heavy. Saliva insists on primal skills,
reduces me to an animal of constant possibility.
Composition sparks anonymous fires. I ask myself,
what does the air taste like today?
Then I work, inhaling, spreading my hands to all
corners of the room, bringing the food
before me, away from me, then out the door.
(poem 1st published in NORTH COAST REVIEW)
but rather, how I matter in the weather.
streets adrift on the nature of plates further under
that could wake a shaky geological matter and flood
bicycle from me, me from mass of earth, me
from myself in health. Everything could separate:
losing ground, grasps madder at whatever weather
has twistered the child away. For moments
or years, I wander, dream about an earthquake's crevice
calling me until I fall through eons of air, granite,
my own body's dense matter. At bottom, small as one
cell, one time's flick, I perceive my amoeba
self, wonder whether weather or I moved me, shifting, here.
Soaked between cloud and puddle, wet seat and dripping
hair, precipitation, evaporation, I might as well
middle inside a teardrop, a stopwatch, a toy boat in
a full bottle, a pond drip under glass under eye of God's
microscope. Seen. I didn't ask to swim but since
I'm swimming in someone's sight I find I'd like to make
my strokes as beautiful as that eye. One atom this time,
or many, next; it doesn't matter.
hover within the grove which lives between matter
and wander: the heart, a mass of clover sending scent
to one, another. This place, here or not, is how
they matter to the weather, is the brother between the eye
and the slide, the seat and the seam, a sudden
spring of water and drowning in a sleeping
earthquake's quiver. It's better that I'm back
shifting seasons in a cold pelt slipping on the streets.
Now, exposed: ticking tires, slick shoulder, water danger
pressing my pulse to the lover called weather and how I
home or not here, heart. Am I mad to want to be seen,
floral in the midst of inclement, wheeling further into each
drop, feeling? I yield to what happens, to matter. Sleet.
(poem 1st published in THE BELLINGHAM REVIEW)
else. His voice is low and he laughs a lot. But not
the kind of laugh you'd think is funny. It's more like
a hot laugh, one that follows me down the street
when I'm wearing high heels. I am wise so I save
ice. When I hear that low laugh at my skirt I fill the
tub with cubes soon as I get home. If I lie there for
about 20 minutes there starts a ringing in my ears
so loud there's not room for 40 devils. Then the freezer's
empty so I put on my jeans and go across the street
to the 7-11. I never heard any voice at the 7-11
except the one asking me for my money.
(poem 1st published in PARAGRAPH)
That retain a Davidian mind:
Do not ever venture to represent
A hunk of the dim-witted kind,
Be large in your culture and wit.
With both is strength; it’s not unknown
Athena made Hercules knit.
A wrinkled lump of faithful skin
Lay curled at my daughter's door.
The dog was tired; I took her kin
And tucked him in; he didn't snore.
When she awoke, "Oh, where is Spot?"
I said he pulled a Peter Pan.
For after all, a dirty cot
Cannot compete with Neverland.
A foolish hoax, I must admit,
An act that kindles no applause.
My daughter beamed; and I regret
I've yet another Santa Claus.
Copyright Ó by Neil Hester
And talk of love which we only touch
The beginning of, and of such
We cannot hope to see the end.
Grace their crystal-set creators,
Each as real as next, each
Farther off, smaller
Than that before,
Until there is
none.
I almost touched
The end,
but
I
Rattles run from eager pens
And fingertips. Eyeballs writhe
Like witches at high stakes. Red and black
Roulette: my ballpoint pen lands black,
Bound for red. We’re the smartest group
Of gambling minors that I know.
Are almost one. Blended room
That says: “You shouldn’t scat
With me!”: I differ when I say,
“You are with a better tune
Without your huffy face!”
Like this. They almost mock
The other side, with its cruel-
Set corsets and urbane ways;
The ladies find it hard to walk.
You look better without the lace.
Squeeze my longings to a point
That pins the edge. Of nothing
I speak of; of nothing I take
Everything that is left to behold.
Such is taken by eyes that cease
To shun the dead horizon,
The curve that mocks sanity
In its (im)purest form:
Before the dawn, his daily draw
Of red stench, common and quick,
Laced with the cheers of men
And children, dying to see
Life pass a terrific door and flee.
Everything exploded: my longings,
My lungs against the zeal of men
Who urged me (in a sense) to be
With and one of theirs. They cry,
Liberté, égalité, fraternité!, and I
Bellow out of mind, but sane,
Ou la mort!, and die.
~John
Singer Sargent
The drear of the day settles far
Into her black and lovely gaze,
Deeper than the running streets around her
That almost walk still in their constant march.
Lost next to her, a little drifter
Is somewhere else, wonderful
And stars away. She cannot blink, in fear
Of consuming her grand and dear escape.
Silent and warm, the village is next
To their plain and precious charm.
Dan Masterson's 4th book of poetry All Things, Seen And Unseen, was published by the University of Arkansas Press (1997). He's a member of PEN & contributing editor to the annual Pushcart Prize Anthology. He teaches at SUNY/Rockland, as well an online graduate poetry course for Manhattanville College, via his Poetry Master website www.poetrymaster.com . His poems have been published in magazines diverse as the New Yorker, Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, among others.
A Visit Home Clouds Undisturbed by Human Things Missing in Action
The bottom sweater button
is in the next to bottom hole,
and his mother's fingers almost
find it out, but climb instead
to the polished head of a brooch:
a maiden blushing to the left, hair
falling across a shoulder
bared in sunlight.
she should know him, perhaps
the young man who brings her groceries
or Father Sullivan
dressed for a day off.
But no. The voice is more comfortable
than that; it fits the neighborhood.
His hair is going grey; tanned,
he must spend time along the lake.
The eyes react
as her father's would: cut glass
catching light
Shed by a flowered bulb in the ceiling
where they stand stopped
in the upstairs hall, she
at her bedroom door; her married son
nearer the guest room, a step away,
dressed from the shower
hardly used since he lived at home.
She'd like to have a towel
from the linen closet, one of the long
fluffy ones they used to save for company,
and wrap it 'round his head, the way
his mother must have done
before he grew so tall.
He seems familiar,
but she can't believe the name
he used for her.
She takes his arm
and turns his face up
toward the light, as mothers do,
and finally asks the question:
Whose boy are you?
Copyright Ó by Dan Masterson
Clouds Undisturbed by Human Things
Two geese joined at the neckrefuse to go the other's way
and become themselves
and then doorkeys
in search of locks across the lake.
An arrowhead has missed
the dog's spine
blown sky high
and scattered among fish
and one prehistoric bird,
thick-winged and silent,
owning the sun.
The long-limbed fox is opening
a kangaroo's pouch drifting
ever closer to a turkey,
one leg kicking
at a possum in pursuit.
Off to the west, far from fox
and dog, fish and geese,
the crab with transparent pincers
floats after the wingless sparrow.
Copyright Ó by Dan Masterson
The thud always awakens herwhere she sits at the living room window
gathering a shawl tight at her neck,
her fist a pale brooch,
its veins hard and swollen.
She has heard it every night
since he went overseas:
the muddy jeep backfiring at the curb,
his flag-wrapped body bumping to the ground,
stars flicking light on the hedges
as he rolls toward the house.
Her cane finds the corner of things
and she makes her way to the veranda door,
its screen speckled with bugs
lured by the pantry light.
At the top step
she shakes her stick at the darkness
and mutters a private curse;
she leans on the railing and takes
each step as it comes, swallowing
quick gulps of air and straining
to see the lawn.
On down the walk she goes
to the far side of the hedge
where the streetlamp lumps its shadows
on the leaves.
She pokes at the bushes and calls him
in the voice she used above his crib
three wars ago, pleading for her bambino,
expecting to see him young and warm
in his bunting, longing
to feed at her breast.
She unbuttons herself to the waist
and probes among the brush,
disturbing nothing but a squirrel,
stiff in the leaves, the mouth
dried open in its fur.
Copyright Ó by Dan Masterson
A Lady In Her Power Good Enough To Eat, Boss Pills In Your Book I Took The Einsteins Of Earthworms
I admire the queen-like power
Some flowers have over a bee,
Though no coveted tenure
A display by which all decree.
For a bee that sets sight on her
Plumage of a cultured pedigree;
The bee as if in honor,
Dances to her majesty.
Copyright Ó by Whinza Ndoro
Every time, we again meet
After my weekend away
And it’s barely seconds
Into engaging you on Monday.
As you look at playful me
And I, somewhat, ogle back,
Then you half-smile softly
So, in turn, I smile Black.
With kinky tender regards
I think to my demur self—
‘Wow, it’s kind of neat
How she’s quite a treat!’
Now had my soul-weekend
Soared between two peaks,
Setting off cliffs sensual to
Snuggle at those erotic.
To that compliment
Of you being a treat
Jocularly, I add—
‘Good enough to eat!’
But now if I tried to
Explicate what I meant
It’d make for a sexy or
Sexual harassment moment?
Just be mindful my gay
Tongue-in-cheek display
Makes me as quiet poet
Quite a cunning linguist.
Copyright Ó by Whinza Ndoro
Eventually, my (un)dying hope, my wishful loop is a getting together,
shoulder to shoulder, in one big festive room,
with you, my esteemed grave-clothed heroes,
who as far as enlightenment goes—
I missed meeting in person.
If time prolonged, then I'll thank you
when first off even God wasn’t enough
nor family, friend, or lover too;
as life tried boomeranging me—
above it, you held me aloof as a roof.
Randomly, picking up a dog-eared book,
turning the wise pages,
there it was in potent hook—
an understanding of yours, O sages,
when with what ailed me then,
fittingly— (I got the chills)
you prescribed medication
of wordy worldly pills.
Copyright Ó by Whinza Ndoro
To you, a sir or a m’am—how to die?
Is the first question we must frame
In each generation’s itch how to live?
How to live begets answer in how to love?
The latter massaging relief in how to give?
Which in turn, as pattern, is in how to be?
How to be in pure Mobius strip fashion
Fastens a return in how to die?...
Hence within a life’s encircling mysteries—
Answer-questions enwomb question-answers,
Except one: where did All This coil from?
I’d presume by men’s theorized forms—
Our internet is as easily understood
By those Einsteins of earthworms—
Copyright Ó by Whinza Ndoro
The Australian poet Peter Nicholson was born in Sydney, New South Wales. He has published three books of poetry, A Temporary Grace 1991, Such Sweet Thunder 1994 and A Dwelling Place 1997. http://peternicholson.com.au/
Kursk
Nice to be sure of life and life's long leavings,
To wrap the world in meaning,
Seal our hope in exponential form
And putty out blood's fissure with just law.
That would be good, to be one with the other,
But not, so sudden, have the chance to gather
In at one end all the ordered ranks
Or at the other loved one's dolphin shanks.
I see the sailor from the submarine
Buried back on earth beneath a polar gleam
And think - there, but for the grace of God,
Go I, still vertical, still with the wish for good.
I feel the terror rise up in my chest,
Spreading violence through the golden vest
Of beauty that is crumpling to the shore
History's slate warning of despair.
Beneath the Barents Sea the sailors sleep
Far from time and our remorseless need
While, in troubled prayer, remembrance is kind
As floating hands reach noiselessly back at pouring time.
Copyright © by Peter Nicholson
In 1995 Maurice traveled around the world for eight months, recording his experiences in a journal instead of photos. His poetry has appeared in The Potomac Journal, The MAG, The Surface, Word Riot, Taj Mahal Review (India), Stride (UK), and Retort (Australia). He lives in Portland, Oregon where he is a private tutor. www.bloxster.net/mauriceoliver.
Acknowledgements.... And Anything.... Blazing Panache.... I Mean.... Verbs, Lost.... Whispers, Waving....
Copyright © by Maurice Oliver
And Anything Else Is A Letdown
Then what you're really saying is that it all comes down to this:
Everybody ends up here,
in a theme park wearing merely a flimsy Pisces throughout the human kingdom by propelling the sun to move
towards a frictional Hollywood square pattern with Mars bound to fail
or maybe brusque with friends does the harsh scent
so love ones will boomerang until every nasty consequence
(made more significant by red planet envy)
tarzans pass the limp silk strap of desperation
and on into the spring-loaded harness of a bottomless abyss
hoping against hope
but still never waking up in the cold motel room
to find the him-or-herself in us cuddled up with Don Rickles.
Blazing Panache.White-Hot Courage.
"I've spent the whole day as noir as night", she repeats, as if the audience didn't hear her the first time. We're acting out the stage version of beat up & grown up. In this adaptation I become a short poem about her father who is a traveling salesman of articulate jealousy & desire. He never wears the same pair of socks twice. He eats dinner with his chair facing away from the table. He is near enough to the cardboard props to feel their rage. Elegance is our model. A book our national treasury or maybe our customs studiously sleep in the footnotes. What's important is every mysterious adulthood is but a jagged piece of glass murdered in bed. Nothing is luminous enough to shine at heart and even I something want to be nothing too but the moral of the story is to never forget that even Joe DiMaggio had an Adam's Apple that thought it was too cool to go to school. Oh yeah, and don't worry, the applause will drown out any sounds the curtains make as its being lowered.
OK. I've had it up to here with the notion that an Air France flight could seriously blow through Lily Marlene strong enough to cause anything but a version of life where things happen in reverse. Mask. Ghost. Footprints from a welded impostor. So change the channel already. Find a show where the angel-butch double-agent loses the key to her safety deposit box & turns like a Venetian blind. Or better yet, let's tune-in to an episode of dying for faith where the ever impossible request torches explicitly on the piano top. I want to hear a severe melody try holding its breath under water while life comes and goes in a red dress split up one side. I want to be skull-hung just before the gargoyle in its late-forties with jet black hair & a five o'clock shadow surveys the filth from above then decides to put the whole bar under house arrest just to make a point.
Verbs, Lost In Their Transitive Cases
As I remember it, the whole thing begins after a palm branch scars the horizon deep enough to bruise its skin. In turn, that causes a crescendo of lavender scent to leak all along the naked limbs of an apricot wind with its passport at hand. Next, the mirror of white pearls pluses on the way to Lourdes and then takes the wrong turn in dense fog pressed against the hip. Coffee table leather jacket. Golden gate lazy earthquake. Cloak and dagger hillside town. Or a stale box of animal crackers falling out of the vast spree of redemption. Either way, it all adds up to a raspberry beret of colored fingernail polish much too flesh to bread or thoroughly soaked in a railroad crossing where a horseshoe on a dashboard has access to any dusk coupling riddle and can activate it by repeating this narrative in a foreign language as written on a red enamel bedside table or by tenth grade students who say, "Wow, that was an awesome lecture".
Whispers, Waving To An April Dawn
It all begins with a scream of wind through the wet hair of willows & then continues to:
-One dusty pickup on a highway partial of suspense novels.
-A pristine Blue Grotto slightly gold framed & naked in the rain.
-All of Costa Rica playing a caprice on a red violin.
-A feral garden that eats out of a complete stranger's hand.
-Bales of freshly-mowed hay with legs that scissor the air.
-A slice of burnt toast with a scab already forming.
-Voices used for the audio portion of a soccer match.
-Two streetlights watching re-runs of an episode on lunar ellipses.
-A hillside terrace that slopes into a cross-dresser's closet.
-The blazing gaze and stonewall demeanor of a field of sunflowers.
-Life darkened at the edges to make the heart seem more luminous.Copyright © by Maurice Oliver
Gilbert Wesley PurdyMark Hanna Under Starry Skies Poetry 2000 TM
The vague stars loom above Mark Hanna’s head.
His cigar smoke wafts a Milky Way.
He stands between two potted palms,
beside Lake Erie, an autumn night.
A darkie porter holds his coat.
Another gathers dinner plates.
The leavings of a modest meal
betray a man of modest tastes.
In Lowell, maidens, full of grace,
trail textiles as they float through aisles.
He sees the yarn-guides in those stars:
the light-beams weaving taffeta.
In San Francisco, Chinamen
press the fabrics made of them.
Their grandfolks sit in state upstairs
and quote Confusions with their tea.
In Pennsylvania coal-mines miners dig;
and, as they do, they sing pure tenor strains.
Up those mountains wind the notes
through woodlands cleared to frame the shafts.
They wind past children safe abed
on linens those bright yarn-guides weave.
The patchwork quilts which keep them warm
show farmyards rich with artlessness.
The miners’ wives each light a lamp
to keep their husbands safe from harm.
They dot the hills just like those stars
and touch his heart with their ascent.
He recalls a song his mother sang
as she rocked her babies on her lap.
Before he knows its over him,
the notes rise up to join that choir.
It’s an old song of a simple life,
of simple people, simple loves.
A simple beauty fills the words.
His quavering voice is choked with it.
He clears his throat and looks askance.
A single tear runs down his face.
Mark Hanna looking vaguely toward the stars
holds out his hand to have his coat.
Within he holds a brand new dime
as if he reached and pulled it down.
His hirelings track the Bryan train.
They tear the posters down and spit.
His buyers place their orders with
the proviso: Should McKinley win.
The porter thanks him kindly, sir.
‘Someone must protect the currency,’ he sighs.
In particular, it is a language designed expressly for streamlining the writing of novels (or poetry).
-Metamagical Themas, Douglas R. Hofstadter
Hello and welcome to Poetry 2000TM,
the finest in poetry programs today. Please read
the End User’s License Agreement, sign and send
the pre-addressed reply card, then proceed.
The System 2000 is simple to use. Just point
the tiny quill and click. The pull-down menus
will lead the way to self expression choice
by choice. Then click the icon of the Muse.
In seconds your first-draft appears, correct
in style, grammar, spelling, length and theme:
A wistful moment that you recollect,
perhaps, or snap-shot of someplace you’ve seen.
Next simply click the Shakespeare icon. Note
that an eraser has replaced your pen.
You simply rub out each word or phrase that’s not
just right. Just click the little visor, then.
Now watch 2000 really show its stuff.
It's searching through the Anthology Data Base,
and, while the Bard of Avon chews his nub,
the changes you selected are being made.
Revision is the key to writing well
and now those boring late-night hours are done.
Erase as many times as you wish and still
have time to mix at our virtual Cafe Dôme.
So then, (1) click on File. (2) Click on New. Note
the little scroll unfurl. (3) Click on Edit.
(4) Click Special next. (Note: Never double-click Rose
without Expanded Tautology Gertrude-Stein-Set.)
The Special Editing Scroll has unfurled now
and all the choices are yours to make --
each a pretested adjective, each a pretested noun.
(For pretested neurosis click Emotional State.)
Perhaps you’ll pick Poetic Nouns. Your menu
will display a list of over twenty choices
selected by the hundred most successful
contemporary American poetic voices.
Choose ice, perhaps, or mirror, salt or moon.
Wing, bed-slash-bedroom, breast, bone, heart or blood --
just click the ones you want. (Note: You must Undo
or the system will assume mouth, tongue and love.)
Or Botanicals, perhaps: just click the flower
and poetical gardens blossom before your eye.
Plant camomile or crocus in your bower.
Pick baby’s-breath, viburnum, gorse, or thyme.
And Colors are a poet’s special tools.
With a single choice a poem may be made.
Too many poems fail for simple blues
which indigo or cobalt might have saved.
Just click the little palette icon. There
before your very eyes appears a rainbow
of mauve, pop-sickle pink and lavender,
the spectrum of turquoise, silver, jade and rose.
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Kuala Lumpur dot our market-tested maps.
In all, twenty poetic places are there for you.
Before you close, consult the Style screen
to choose your poem’s type-face, shape and size,
including Hen-Scratch, Random, and Prestige,
and, the present standard, Under Thirty Lines.
Now click the Muse (see figure 1, above),
And watch your favorite sitcom while you wait,
Or prepare a meal, perhaps, with Gourmet StoveTM.
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Warning: product is only meant to be used
in the manner prescribed. For injuries which may
result should the product be altered or abused
Poetry7 will be harmless in every way.
For damages which may result (either
direct or indirect) to leather, tweed,
berets, careers, relationships, or other,
it excludes all legal liability.
The Poetry 2000TM is designed
for exciting years of personal expression.
When used as directed no group may be maligned
or suffer insufferable fascist oppression.
It respects all rights of property, the laws
of all the 48 contiguous States.
The little Walt Whitman pixel even applauds
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Copyright © by Gilbert Wesley Purdy
Beneath The Rise.... City Station, Under Arches of Sky Musings On A Lighthouse Near An Eastern Isle Sapphics The Serial Cheat.... With The Stars....
Copyright © by Iain James Robb
City Station, Under Arches of Sky
In the shallows of the silences I hear your voice,
In the gaps between the shadows of the city station-
Copyright © by Iain James Robb
Musings On A Lighthouse Near An Eastern Isle
It
is bright tonight; this plain, displaced from place
In Time's broad flight, wields nothing to the strains
Of air, no marbled hand unstrafed by rains
Or gales retraced through past days' shaded waste.
Great things may fall; through all life's vagrant seas
Drift things so small we pass them as they fly-
Yet a man may have no memories of these:
Things carved against doom's deep shall last yet die.
What listless whispers from the winds are these,
That lead thoughts prior to pass of fortune's page?
All death's a dream that fades upon the stage
That raised strayed sails, to strange eternities.
Beneath the wreaths of green and Eastern skies
That wheeled through fields of liquid emerald,
Your range of years, white watcher of the world,
Perennial as the fires that marked your rise,
Had outfaced an age. Your pale palladium
To those who'd tamed the treason of the seas
Awaits no voice of time's now but the thrum
Of waves, cast far from strands and galaxies.
In lampless lands where sunlight never glides,
Your eye gone out, what man may mourn you now,
No guiding height by weightless Wain or Plough,
No land-bound star and temptress to the tides?
Now hushed beneath the breezes and the bays,
Now shut from all the seasons touched by sun,
Your plinth's height through its Hepastadion
Could not forestall your fall; your starboard rays
Had reached at length your fatal yield of years;
The spells that stars cast pass but won't reverse.
Had a shape been traced in space that sigiled tears,
That had passed across the looming universe
For prophets' tongues? They seem to live where press
The currents that succumb or beat their breasts,
Past lightless realms where suns are rocked to rest-
That rise to leave your shipless wilderness.
Faint Pharos, shall men ring your name once more,
Or praise the safeguard of light's beaten breath?
Some things, it seems, are only born for death:
You seemed as ageless as your salt-lipped shore.
What bronze-thewed youth or white-haired wanderer,
From lands unguided now through floodlit seas,
Rides by raftered strands to Alexandria,
Over windless ways no steep sun seeks or sees?
Detained past hope and range of loss and rage,
Corrode to pumiced stone, and turn from sight:
O voiceless watcher once through lanes of light
On night-bound paths: to narrowed straits of age.
Copyright © by Iain James Robb
Copyright © by Iain James Robb
What matters it, this June, if you or I
Redeem ourselves in other’s eyes, as trust,
To each our images inside which vaunt to sky?
We are our selves: Spring gilds to Autumn’s rust.
You are my pawn; myself, if I should veer
Against the captious minion of my sight,
Our distances once more will make us near:
Our distance now will make us benedight.
What matters this if my dull words inspire
Your will to lose; my loss will be the same
If passion wants, its wontedness to tire
In febrile haunts; what innocence to blame?
It was just me, but you are also I:
Her cunt can not estrange your majesty.
Copyright © by Iain James Robb
Copyright © by Iain James Robb
Alex Sheremet Alex Sheremet was born in Belarus and moved to Brooklyn, NYC when he was six. He is an undergraduate studying English Lit and Classics.
Cities In Decline: A History Drama: At The Station For Graffiti
Cities
In Decline: A History
"I must match its weird refrain..."
- Countee Cullen
Again they
left, the old Italians, a gutted, late-fenced lawn,
the soil’s
inadvertent feed still reaching from the tenured dole
—
the
hand-delivered, chink-stitched pumice,
an
unconvincing, pickled blast
of louder
days:
In a hardbound, gull-drawn renaissance,
August
torched, and cities swung, and Brooklyn raked
the
branching skyline down to sour stumps,
castled back
to barking towers, the earth thick
with the
floured bits of carbon clutter: wild fruit
once
censured in a less sophisticated mouth,
the softer,
dangling midparts cored and seeded,
his teeth
strung for a pilgrim’s pious neck, a jeweled
leash,
tugging dustward.
"...our last winter, which now tires
against pumice-strewn shores..."
- Horace
That spring,
a Roman slavegirl — hair bunched,
or nervously
unbraiding to the whip’s indenting
whims, he
rests his throbbing thumb
against the
faux-imperial embroidery,
a
maladjusted lion dunked in the swimming center,
its nose
wrinkling with the master’s lungs —
smells the
hanging crater with her mouth,
a spewing
sore, still-miles from the town,
from bed,
from the unawakened, golden floor
of bottled
minds, soon tipped
by a
solitary finger:
this, I think, is how it ends,
long before
the earth can prune its bloated bottom
with a
priest’s exacting fork, or jar its grisly store
in ashy
shades of unconventional disaster,
and clump
the pumice in a hand still trembling
to a
specious breeze from the Atlantic.
Copyright © by Alex Sheremet
Drama:
At The Station For Graffiti
Timothy "Spek" Falzone, 1982 - 2001
I.
Tim, to Officer
Grip's crooked. I should have been a carpenter:
hangnails, caked Krylon, abraded palms
on colored hammers, mocking bone.
Alright, imagine: I'd still rot some day,
firm-legged, right -- dirt-grown splinters
worming through these hands. And I'd still burn
glass, refit the speckled subway windows,
name (and co.) on bottom. (The crew sticks,
the fines don't -- fat caps for fat tickets,
unless you smack the third rail, face-down.)
Thick pen, Officer. You scribble knotty names
that straddle an imagined line, palms
inking through the lettered hoops,
but I'd rather cake 'em -- grip's crooked, see --
high above that record shop, 'cause walls stretch
blankly -- inarticulate stares just burning
to be read. And think: across the borough,
such pangs are the staple of the soul,
a strange, rudimentary rehearsal
in case the last paint spills, the button-down
is finally ironed, the silk bandanas trashed
as spiders, walled by the new or the slightly
unusual, might casually abandon
an old web.
[Stares.]
You listening? Yeah,
niggas aren't meant to be understood.
II.
Officer, to Tim
And I plucked the job a changed man! Sure,
sure -- I couldn't curb this pompous belly,
and Night still drapes the day from lamp to lamp,
hiccups blunts, bad guys, and other artifacts
we stretch-still and fossilize into a page,
a paragraph, this stuffed police report.
It's hard to blink those ingrained hues -- you scent
stiff traces, blowing bubbles at the wall:
you see the dumb-brief, separating rock,
your ringed initials worn to dust
on
unborn, bookish hands. They'll chase
your rock-bound annals from the soil. Belly-
out, that pussyfoot might even look like me:
she'd piece the unmanned, prim-cut specks,
and jot your blue-built ingenuity.
I've thumbed your name in each report,
each letter compassed horizontally;
smudged the crude-cast pencil figures,
laminating favorites; taped your files, as twine
would pepper-down my manicure to dust.
Still, as I tied your blunt enigma,
as I pat your papers busily --
in short, as I buckled to that old routine,
I never thought that trust of men,
that banded ring of awful stares
would find you in its crooked center
high above that record shop, tonight.
You snickered, sharpened the enigma
with a flint budge --
[He moves sparingly.]
and affirmed it all: the imagined fine, palms
pinking through the colored hoops,
and there -- your knotted name, just burning
to be read. And in case that last paint spills,
in case my waning grip -- like star-rent brass,
approximately shelved -- docs and draws
your rail-smacked figure, evaporates,
aborts, and tosses you mid-sentence
like an unexpected, grainy cough
across those rough iambic freight-lines,
in case you're bled into that button-down --
[Points
somewhat.]
you're a star-sown actor,
dumped and potted into this flawed,
sublunary drama.
Copyright © by Alex Sheremet
Dynamite 25 Facade Of A Montreal God I Give Betty Smith.... The Red Desert The Whirlpool
The birthday candle unravels its wax—
unfurling the curve that shatters its graph,
it rockets to Blonde—as man shimmers back.
A core, immortal, wills past—to its pax;
as grain culminates and unwraps from its chaff,
the birthday candle unravels its wax.
Unpinned from the wick, it bolts and unpacks,
as motion unsnaps from a still photograph.
It rockets to Blonde—as man shimmers back.
No breath from a wish can cool its attack;
when each note of song
sparks from the staff—
the birthday candle unravels its wax.
Lethal: the drop from the sweat on its back,
its shock vaults through octaves and Richters a laugh;
it rockets to Blonde—as man shimmers back.
A sizzling blue vine writhes through cold blacks;
ecstatic—as ecdysis jettisons half,
the birthday candle unravels its wax;
it rockets to Blonde—as man shimmers back
Copyright © by Anthony Zanetti
Façade of a
Montreal God
photograph
of Fascist HQ, Rome
I’ve stabbed a flag into the Fascist
March eye. You make the bullet
cry, you make the nation
sing. A sovereigned head on a coin,
the shallow inks of wings—align
to remind me: I’ve chosen again. In the city,
at the rally, they shout: he is strong,
il est fort. I find myself chanting along;
I can’t abort. Gods trapped
in a head—we are everything except free:
the azurite Italian, the glittering Mussolini—
orating and exhorting—mathematically
operatic—your head suspended
against the word repeating: si si si si
Copyright © by Anthony Zanetti
I Give Betty Smith—And Live In, But Not With
Coffee stirs me out of you. Tired
Of shyness: I type to my vox.
Boxed in an office—lust must wander
Past—to last, as literature
Manifests immortality. Many leave me
Flat—as a thumbtacked Alanis,
Or the glass panorama the train tries to pass.
But your visage enriches;
Into poverty—reaches
And travels a song—
A Brooklyn: bygone.
Through me, she writes you—
As cities soak streets;
As pines sew their green.
My gift
knows you better; it knows what to do.
Artifice excites—writing
Of me: in you.
Copyright © by Anthony Zanetti
*after Antonioni
There is a mind inside an island. By the brim
Of her shore, a boy culls from the sand; a ship,
Unmanned, scores the gulled coast
While cormorants repose on the glittering rose.
From
the ocean, Poseidon is goading the shore.
Drops spray the boy’s back. He is shelled
To attack; his searching turns in; becomes
An internal thing. Friulian lyrics
Smooth crests from within. Who sings
Dialectic, in dialect unseen?
It is the island; it is everything.
Copyright © by Anthony Zanetti
You
stare from the wire that cuts sky from brine.
Effeminate desert, you thought it benign;
But inside—I collect corals & spines.
Currents twist as flesh curls to a fist.
Feel the form of my force:
In the core of the vortex, concussion
Is pure—the pressure of poetry
Waves into lines—
Breaks. On the bottom: funnelled
To
finish,
Lies
your mind.
Copyright © by Anthony Zanetti
MIA Poets: The following are poets of excellent ability whom I have unfortunately lost contact with.
RICHARD DANA CARLSON I first met Richard at the old Irish Well Poetry Readings in St. Paul in the early 1990s. In '95 he self-published his ms. POEMS FOR THE PUBLIC, AND SOME NOT. I shall, in time, be posting some of those poems here, however I would much like to know his whereabouts. The last he was heard from he was in San Diego, CA.
GREG CLARK Greg is, next to me, the best poet I have ever personally known. I 1st met him at the Garden Crow Poetry Group, but he is wont to losing touch with people. He still has relatives, I believe, in the Coon Rapids, MN area. If I can find some of his older poems- some excellent lyrics- I shall post them.
LEAH CUTTER Leah was a UPG regular from late '95 to late '97 when she moved to San Francisco to be with her fiance. She is mainly, however, a sci fi writer (as is her now-husband). They then moved to Arizona where both letters & emails came back empty. FOUND!- Click here for INFO!
SHAWN DURRETT Shawn's a multi-talented artist I first met in 1993. She was an intern for The Loft & ran a reading series at the old Susan's Coffeehouse in St. Paul. She had an excellent poetic future ahead of her when she left in 1997 for the University of Michigan. She was planning on going into Social Services. Anyone who can locate her and/or put her in touch with Cosmoetica would get appreciation, as I would love to post some of her poems- old & new!
ANGELA HAUG Another multi-talented young woman- poet, dancer, photographer- who was a UPG semi-regular from mid '98-late '99. She may have left the Twin Cities for college but any way to contact her would be appreciated. Her poems deserve notice.
APRIL LOTT A young woman who was a UPG semi-regular back in '97 & who had alot of talent. She is still in the Twin Cities area- as of late 2000- & I would like to post some of her poems.
STEVE PERKINS I only met him twice- at a reading & once at the UPG. He wrote spare little lyrics that were just charming. He never returned because he got a 2nd shift job- this was about 1996. Anyone who knows his whereabouts please let me know.
MAGGIE SULLIVAN I once wrote a Le Bestiaré poem (1st ms.) on her called The Enigma & anyone who met her knows why. I first met her at the old Ophelia's Pale Lilies group & subsequent readings in 1993. She left Minnesota around late '96-early '97 & headed to California- I believe San Francisco. I lost touch with her a year or so later. Her works would find a place here. Calling the Enigmatic One....