The Duplications

Mark Statman, "Swan Song"

2007-09-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

the boat ports at the dock
the plane the runway
the swan the water
everyone has some
question of travel
connected with certainty
and uncertainty
with arrival, departure
the green mediation
of the imagination
the green mediation
of a path
defined by bridge and wire
I’m in love
with the black swan
and the white swan
I’m in love with the boat and
I’m afraid of the plane
the smell of the water
the boat’s horn
the flight attendant’s sudden
closing of the cabin door
I know how to swim
and can easily forget in passing
the iciness of the water
I can’t fly
and I know how
the deceptive solid clouds
wouldn’t hold me
not even for a second
right now
I’m in love with the swan
with the swan song
though this means the end of something
at the beginning I only think
of what’s ahead
in the middle
of when it’s over
at the end
the swan touches the water
it makes hardly any ripple
in the late summer afternoon
no song, no ripple
smell of honeysuckle and lilac
the swan swims away
when the black one meets the white
then two
no song yet, no ripple still
the green mediated path
of imagination, bridge and wire
from it
you’ll hear them
swan song
you’ll hear
come on, come on

Scott Glassman and Sheila E. Murphy, Untitled Collaboration

2007-08-04T20:10:00.000-07:00

from Section 1

Leviticus dusted for prints leaves little doubt of what is missing from the tent of acrimony
severing the wince from nature and blackmailing sippers of latte into pocketing the story
following the story rumored to be the sole story, kisses or missed brush notwithstanding.

Affections wheeze a channel-click stammering thou and shall deuteronomy zooming
into Chappaquiddick, the unsolved fabulist: autum festival stirrer and frothing frigate
scantly heralded biserial, hazard lane. Hop to it, wish this upon fuss, rush in. Demand it.

Second commingling solves thousands of zooms that cut to the quick to find a found
lane drawn in thirds. Binomial distributorship seems only yesterday’s conundrum. Broth
bears Alice rushness. Pass it on. The mandarin exclusion quakes with fistula revealed.

Stall door barges into lop-eared odyssey, confounds the gear sneezing agitates
enigma’s road crew off-ramp teacup— nausea impresses, retrofits algebraic mast
tournaments, years, all objects abscessed (smile) where bell jars gather rubble, breath.

Tactics mean the world is drying. Years take back the paltry fall of yesterday, the parking
lot where woman as robot left her meal, prompting a departure of all others from the tiny
space as though stubble were a launching pad, found charted, and gears finely worked.

Neither lap nor Julia’s suspicion uproots the fabricated the laxative of thirst. Betrothed
as one is to Proteus, due for neverland, categories rappel down the outfield’s only wall.
Strike three names the intimate in saddle-stitched unshaven strep throat apprehension.

The set pulse leaves us cold from all that failure to fry. Protean baskets empty
themselves and neighbors, purported to have shared the field, the wall, three blames
prehensile possibly, until the spikes enter the wood of definite articulates (still pulse).

Anemic flurries lend sound into-these-gaps-with-caution, deer’s tongue simmers
whitely among the faint of being, and scrolls la meme chose township’s fallow rack
where twilight attains its body, the o’saurus of night’s fecund silver rakes its reef awake.

Aloe s/oftening the skin. Conditioning repositions aught to form primary numb(erstwhile)
c/raft there(by) depletes an enormous storehouse (Stockhausen) in the act of following
the fallow with attention, post-scurry qua liver spots delineating twilight’s free twills.

Antiquated bin of heart’s twice-wrapped furl. Innerscript is width the score-is(gorge)ous
as ventricle, logarithm vivisecting orange slices on pint glass emblems of slippage, sight
lined to the hilt rabbinical wollop, swift uppercut g’mornin after Vader’s dark has bitten.

Leave the litre near the bin. Turn off the set. Core gorges feed the ventricle to rhythms in
a mood of sector lint. Blancmange served to the rabbi yields a string of wisdom, or a
vast warm sky finned through by youthful curiosity, cut with ratcheted ark markings just lit.

Sharpener vatic as the haftorah point-click-drag (disposed of) yoga ligament. Thumping
brood of crash-apportioned child. Shekinah appetizer fields a ping of sincerity, icons
leap at the tragic voweling of purim noise. Pop-up exodus recants six million tea lights.

Lump together rash and you get wrinkled dashboards, conical dreams, rim-shot cavities.
Posture toward the sacraments and you get consonants that cantors fling. The tea runs
mist across the yard, proportioned so the point is breath, not noise, not rude. Not cash.

Stumped but not forgotten, how the louvre of odometer and mileage consecrates fealt
y open-ended stairs equipped in the amen of pluto’s demotion, role as simple son via
ravines’ equating link of Haggada to kissing & egg hunts condensing to afikomen.

Miles to twirl before dense kissing’s quasi stair light in the full consecutive of morning
shaped by vines’ links and the looking. Draft integrity mourns instructive sadness for the
simple to be right in this museum of promotion. Vast and shouldered and arriving.

Even differentials invite the miner’s lettuce into escalation, penny to the well-pleat.
Indignant fire thinks “red vinca” as it flags across latticework, micron tougher than vent
respires its fool’s errand in crass hydrolitic colonies, cedar staves and sister cities.

Colonial cedar blanks out use despite the escalation of pleated digs. Where lagging
growth emits a fire, one thinks to rough it near the ventricles and random rasps from
fields where penny wisdom flourishes amid mined resolution faking its way through.

Shapeless mittens parry barrels, shafts appearing ‘round the stained counterfeit
railroad. Collect calls sack the community chested coriander-scented firework,
fluidics of such a price and oddity that inquisition faints beneath the swaying trope.

Rehearsals for depth perception fete the wool piece by the sack cloth vested in work,
priced to be peeled from library copies of the lubricants that sway from trope to tropics
henrying their way to mill the grain from sod when rice is all that nests in sound.

For which parade, mother-bird‘s junkie itch. The thinnest of metal planes, a coin-
chewing tin man as omniscient (self-proclaimed) fading forestation doomsday where
fairies lose their grapheme seaweeds, thrive on day-old crepes pickled in fructose.

Lane change, vetted rest stops, close quarters fed into the dry machine shop strike one
thin line radicals (free) chase water back to source (codific) as if read-only memory were
daylight. One panders to prophetic discharge when metallic gold coast factors west.

Prefigures jams and U-boat wong turns— Jack, Jack, could eat no book, his head so
full of gum and scansion hash mark going down dear SOS autocramped, sped for
upload. The plow a north one must review, wire tap dance its anklets against acedia.

Plumlets grace the dark in kind, mementos practice being bringing back the impulse on
first base. Are you fair? A gimlet’s worth of boring offers incisive views of down home
blockades like mother used to makeshift as a tap game sparring anklet against flow.

Impacted with nightwatch a garden likewise bobbles the pitch and inflames its dare:
the umpteenth court conquered by maps. Arthur resuscitates the maiden with olives
and oxygen, gloves wet, a Polaroid’s weather. As if eroding from mirage (starving it).

Watch that photograph for subtle changes, mirage is an acquaintance of sotto magic, the
teeny aptitude for foraging recuses selves we didn’t know we had, including Rodman on
the court (recall?) androgyny’s a mere forecast forestalling maiden voyages galore.

Sexless confidence of the daimon, skin-rip. Vitiates the torpor, la hermana ditto, stance.
Hot topic in Monmouth calibrates a drill, funneling balls down 3rd, vomitorium— pronto.
Priceclub examines (hacks into) Pluto, every transamerican myth delaying launch.

Haunches repay hunches in full. The stench of erasure faults lemony salvation, its
stature and linguistic gnosis. Calibration is the act of leaving out the blips. Confiteor deo
omnipotenti. Do not bother taking back. Removal’s hyperbolic. Lunch trumps launch.

Outskirts the noxious fang-strike of Brady kiss, benched indefinitely among khaki & twill.
Agnostically let-go. Blindsided middle of night shedding its viceroy evangelical aroma
et lux perpetua es (is) (light) (and) (forever) revamped. Fed to a clause, tramp as mirror.

Press ag, press pnostic, press pastiche. Low-cost singularity makes raves with rivulets
(the will to forget) c’est ca. And sides are often blind. Remember them, the quicksand of
skipping rope to gravity . . . one has not played, The vice in roy. This hand. This lift.

Going stag, storms of backgammon and beach (ratted out). Ah is the diagnosed sturdy
magic, recall a shrine’s immaterial aches what equus tabulates & overfills zoology with.
Quintets assert loudly to a monorail. Byzantine isotopes distend a rhythm’s hearth.

Brat force lacks tithing. A glottal stop is worth the busywork its smitten with. Zoology
convenes the sharp and shapeless fans of mononucleosis sitting bedside by the
television sap lines raging ostensibly across counters about aches and pandering.

Agrarian hinterland. Take five. Hedgerows drag into probable cause the lecherous
stalks. Violet paramours double as sinkholes to the tinny furtive conch. A strewn
ellipse entangles its raven with bluejay, with zero. Take π, for instance, the price tag.

Five sentences sink in. The couch is strewn with ragged tin and blue. Probable warbles
make her voice in church in jest. One rues the day when mezzo sop turns dizzy high
then goes low. Although the warmth of that exceeds the human status paragram.

Glam vindicates the mink imperative, declares it sin, tantamount to quart-sized
mime type, fetal divide. Lounge prunes its clockwork for soprano run-through, flies
das boot hermetically this furniture of pulse intensively in a paradigm’s vendetta.

Implacable enemy centers the heart, locked into work files never tantric (trick sized)
plaint divisible by three unless the ounces glued to pulse seal war glyphs into psyches
prana filled and clued or not a place to sit to side with tensile hastenings dogmatic.

Mana is elevation ready for fool’s dough kneading its treatable metabolism, a hand-
me-down saint. Is that your card? Chimeric flounces out of its coffer, shipwreck stunt
binds mind to the encephalographic mothertongue blast ingesting marketplace chatter.

Flatbed rucksack plat combellishing formats, reformation’s friend off-hours wrecked in
the stun gun mind waves tongue smart and gestating some wise treason toward the
need of saintliness (look at the graph, look at the sun shield, quietly regard the raft).

Towing the delta flaps-up over indigent crosses, voluble powwows take on bilge. Pin-up
graves sung tart among a fan base diuretic. Its heiress spills a prettiness clamping down
on third world aether (thesis) recycles debt-affected domes for the straggling few traces.

In lieu of a domestic flap, the cycle was blimped into spastic atmosphere as it to tamp
down the diurnal lark made grave, pinned to dross and lithe divergence tapped out of
the trove of stung mass (sung Mass) based on heirloomed repellent for the sh/ark out front.

Pang or Great White. Whose heterogenous rasp skips through plutonium pores drilling
shores into antecedent heap, the bodies aggregated, caving thrones plugged, panting
as the baroque lower jaw amends one palpitation of spray, one halting hello, or halo.

Suppress, remand, excuse. Enlisted sentences bundle the tones of gluten where rills
might stand to plumb the deep executive cave disguised as ladder constantly amending
a foreshadowed present tense. The law ensues and comes to outcast Pluto’s stance.

In the mirrored quake, repopulated by retina, howls a quaint bounty shivers revealed
dumbly when festooning the skin moves on its own recognizance, fending off triple
plays and nauseous recounts. Ill laws are like the sores of a crowd on volcanic plateaus.

Pratfallen isotopic tropes give fender light swift lip scat borrowed from cognizant settlers
made to pitch their flaws hemetically sore from rowdy kin who lay aside differences and
find new dumbbells to lift to populate the empty cells habitual anxiety would fill.

Must have the vale (evinced) how they perambulate hunts purchasing their Lousiana
bless you thanks tactic shreds hapless garage band dowdy currents in line with
watershed give-back and nautilus paper Indians near lithium’s hopscotch morgue.

Breath is its own advocate. One hears the lisp of treelight in the spheres on grows
among. And letdown beams its butterfly taupe surely as the lineage pays homage to
pronunciation’s Catskills overdrawn and rendered via eye-hand memory coordination.

Ball descends through gnat’s eye, vaulted urge, watchful demagogue, hearings round
table one traipses across, riverdance the la-la-la head up la-la-la wing down ameliorate
pinnacle of Proustian inches (pop-up blocked) synaptically pointing its shrill fatwa.

Swann’s glowing repartee or not, the sun slits through imaginary windows, music for use
available to the untrained eye, and lockstep revelation of a fastened knowledge of the
mother’s movement upward through the spiral nicknamed home’s own sin of mind.

Splashing iniquity’s corsage so revolves a chakra in the interim. Take a moon, frozen
in its valent swivel, holly red, whatever insole, chelsea house, villa, landslide, or porch
cigar-smoke embryos sucked from gravel cuffs, surname teased, the tiff of ulcer invoked.

Clear first. Refract spun live one, roses are not carnate spores. The sliddly land mass
orchids its way into psychometric cufflinks until ulcerous recall prevokes the tantrum
term from limits tucked in breadbox left on first. The syrup clip reminds of clutter’s clash.

Crater in every fold of tongue. Roses are black as veins, freight whistles, breath, total
abdication, laced with chalk silent ringing once over, soon over here. East, whose east,
is kept out of view. Limits dye indelibly, saying who is not weak, who goes toward it.

Quiet is the empty place, also the full, where risen flowers include young thistle, and the
rests defining measures hinge the rooms with calm connected breathing timed by virtue
of felt talk when language equals pulse defined as compass points and magnets.

Waist-high soiree of fire, thrown out at first. Bunted willow (thunderhead) prods the cur.
May: drowsing horizon cries foul, the hard arpeggio stalks frosting over weeded hue.
Triple myriad of somnolence, indoor lisp of tamarind, astrophysical and stygian as sight.

Glass brick see no clear arpeggio. It hurts to know skin blue. If somnolence, then tapping
sound from indoors where slight rowing shifts the arms and then a horizontal occurs to
headlines. The brunt of any calling is its a priori genus. Now the hour just fades to you.

Sun rattles its sopping footprint among the octane greeting: dear constantine it’s difficult
to have skin defoliate a brogue, feign its accent, affix your emergency exit to the head
of the Charles, open-armed, tweaked by locusts, typhoons canvassing ruby sepulchers.

Learning colors in a brogue enlivens non-emergency’s sweet vastness via custom when
syllables sprawl into vowels following their little fence print styles of teething and the
wind matches the yard with tulips and with clothesline dancing bodiless under the sky.

To starboard, obstreperous impediment of the dialectical: expanding into rainbow-
mustached waves, when in Rome parts its bloom, yellow & pungent Inca ruins the
bassinet of centuries, acclimated, dripping hooked pansies, 80-watt flannel speartips.

Rock and toward, forthcoming lipstick and the motion carried, lines made bow stretch
longing leeward also foot markings of lexicograffiti unguent and show shaven so runs of
few press synthesis osmote their riptide to the lotion shore, the priestly place, the dome.

The derelict spray, proof is rouge, cosmetic as dream, rough-meet, help none. Fines
they score unto, herewith, shall bring a forget-me-forward astrolabe attached to plaque
matched by blade, cicadas and blue agave, skydiver salves to emptiness and altar.

Reams of one include with breast, and there are ivy things. Pronounced young
laboratory animals, sung speed of the cicada blue, to wit rest stop and tines the pray for
us commencement offers yet largesse all drama winter. Keep the sake in part alive.

To cheat the intestinal and phallic herd, agrestic vurt, league of unplugged simulacrum
habitat trail a pr(ism) of catgut, graphite year scalds orthodoxy, braying, waltzing at antidotes, such coolant of grass, a juice of tassles, gray apartment: vow or cumulus.

Priapus dredges little music from the tithing, and Ray-Bans deflect skylight. One shops
for cool-decking to resist scalding that would spoil the wheat grass, thus mute thinking
quality, despite a nest of cumulus cloud feathering with scant evidence of moisture.

Dillydallying launch in ten, or sacked in five, claw or front-loaded life, banned chess
caucus, its checkered rods, cones, pressure differentials loyal to the fasting cornea,
necrotic kidney inn, respite for a whittled pill (lightning) in soft-shelled Cassandra.

How she wastes her daylight one-at-a-time protrudes in front of sorry eyes affixed to how
she spins the damages stage right into a curtain stained with royal habit, another interim
dimension of the odd lot trades that hinder mint from seeming in condition, arriving fast.

Ledge is Prilosec, parenthetical, hype O-knight to her sweat-clothed “as if this”— a kiss
is eyed, adumbrates pillow fight, the staid involution. Prophesizes never to be swan,
swapped out for garage sale ‘o fire, relativity’s (sic) quiet claptrap shut-it pseudonym.

Rapt in sequitur of winter, she I he we grant something to low lace and the prophet (may
she join us) willows how in white the parents knight a very to privilege. Is town
amendable? And are the shut lids also quaking just a little? Fire is kin to sense of sight.

Autodidact snows a gray network, polarized flake of non-anything, imperializes the
prorated lance (he-to-a-she advises, adapts, squirrels out prima nocta for thrill ride
vermillion) proudly round, but irascible, think another mineral-hard flame as scabbard.

Is the temper only thin when white? And fragile, pale, gray snow line almost wintrified to
make the glass matte where a mineral lace changes the view. At night the ration of
divisible mistakes goes thin to film and water matches vice. The tender prayer is ice.

Blizzard is masonic, thrifty with its clouded sconce. Footage of blank yard 8mm icecap
where emperors wear grizzly furs case the joint flowering lid superimposed star stripe
additive a mousetrap bucking cointoss ratios: red 40 caking on Achilles’ palatial glare.

Gallery grist means mill town’s not a safe. Yet footage harbors hope beneath its sconce
collectively intuited as though rain were on the thresh- and pillars of communal piety
were off duty this long while, trapped on 40 acres being tossed atop a fleeting overhang.

Where portraiture flutters? Fabric nation for a fast-drawn proctor, many silks scarfing up
the bow. If maimed lamb makes it to the ark in time, tapered leg— port of call steroidal
lesson plan in sunset-gunshot, cup of chaff, meal to acreage’s tightly coiled wheat.

Vestments sometimes taut will usually shine. Row, row, rhyme your reason, lamb cake is
Iscariot because the roids are pinching sets off half-lives eel-like along the acres of
untidy wealth, despite presumption of the stealth positioned heavy on the heat pump.

Plink, punt the grail, collar-nouvelle. Skip, boon, start the rigged spark. Season, scam
heretic of homerun sting, plundered, met stumped. Trunk peeled, marinara feels
fakeness in titanic gobs, crass marina, steam projectile of stake, nocent chores.

Armistice jams thought with theorized string. Lumps of projection lumber along in view of
cameras obscure as runes. The opus diggity projects a stance, eel shaped Riviera
championing clinks and clutter amid raspy thoughts of knobs in lakes with silt.

Chinese red, cinnabar gasses giants sputtering to cherry. Pit sky soaks bicyclists
urea and paunch askew. Lenses tilted at the papal asteroid Acme rearing up cord
asunder. Wet minion circling roof, glassed-in Leith, lady of the branch-bound grackle.

Watch: the empathy under rooftops passes for viewpoints splayed into an avian effect.
As ants, we move together, and each encyclical derivative gives rote rendering a lilt
amid the fray, a clue gone nattering, having passed the pewter overclothes of living well.

Vade mecum: blotches the apollonian gray, brief enthesitis, symptomatic, blubbering
stumbles onto a trail held back fifth grade colored outside uncool call of the call. Built
for toughness, gaiety. Bric-a-brac gangly solving its indispensible nature, height-oiled.

This book, this empty, even constantly used emptiness, limbs vector lubrication-lit and
railings are not there to lift radical side tests all rough crackling and distended. Lease-
purchase lock-steps our bearing to be lore, that in the future calligraphs will show.

Priss chattanook. Concup- crest is eulogescent. Pudd-ump, pudd-ump the aeroverse
piston chugs its schooner blurb of nerve-radio-bravado. Move that quickly in a while to
scallop the sulfuric deed pricklessly hooped both feet down on the stallvein growhut.

Not to have resided within mores leap yeared, owned intransigence lubriquė as
stevedores lay prismic near the chattel having been the chattel to the quicksand levered
and foreswayed heavenly hemplined toward a wicklet pretense overcast, mussed crest.

Scud-tested a day less than bilked plentiful hypotaxi(s) in city lisa de mon ravine.
Ponds (great lakes) spackle the chapel’s frill. Very well, thank you for toking
vinery of triumvirate up to ones annex, easterly knee on hyperbole, tousled down.

Taxonometric see-through vinesap lines the rill as nexus bowled across oneiric knee.
Whose symmetry’s compatible with least-sum-of-ilk. Some nattering’s in need of milk
toke blasphemous to will the wellside charm to rant-free prose quite unlike Dickens.

Fagin’s rags corningstone motor, huck and jive. Solar plexal, the mowed clonidine-licking
spree. Trinidad in Tobago, matte black elk, how one gets the horns, free from plinths
spoken for / against / printed obeisance: a farm of riddles, fob to cloud, smirks out of it.

Shines forward and back an intense sunshiny riddling loud and mirthful holding pat(tern)
whimsical unequal to survival instinctive stature not quite smooth yet not quite wobbling
a consecutive prepared rim shot plastered over undertone and thriving in the shade.

Kabul standing in as crawler, stop sign autographed by bullets, corner aces folded high
against bridge’s lacuna night, riled to half-mast, boardroom bionic slider sphere of toil.
Shush of finger to flicked crickets’ moby twinge inside satori pert black-eyed peas.

Nigh shoulders lean into right click after oars, later on graffiti’s merely spherical, the
detention status flickers until candle fall, then wings emerge in thought, the lack of ease,
the old and signatory cataract shields ridges from being tactile in full foreground.

Begs an infestation, paddleboat cloves a blight (spectacular) serum, one given on-the-
house. Three minds impolite foam their brothel at you, assume a sterile visitor. No-help
hooved as one might defend, jerry-rig an excuse or backwater to compliment a scent.

While in line, beam a child to calm him, and the room, after a while, returns from jagged
sterile to blue lake, very shiny, for the whole of us to agree upon. The compliment comes
from anywhere, with nothing to fend off, summative mind uplifted beyond even the shine.

Sleep terror resides in a mobile Inc. roams if he/she chokes the bathrobe-belted neck
bled pregnant with cubes, hunches, clubroom azaleas— multifarious disagreement
clones the swarm, swaps its moans, bonuses, om-sick yeast feasting on its petunia mat.

Stasis ought to be magnetic, but it’s not. Flame azaleas subdivide attention between
warmth and lobbing across nets gargantuan compared with mini-minds of agonists
perpetually veiling over joy that must be hypothetical in keeping with the spewing dance.

Uptick the do not enter do nothing but wait, flare ones cheeks like a puffer washed up
voice godlike if fire is not invigorated with its fuss or commandment imperative triad
hypnotist to winter theory plods criminally effete sans comeuppance accruing chance.

Odds are, fetes will be remanded to least sum of focus, when the wind, in the wind gives
up by being just the stripped down storybook of fire. A Lenten sheaf of withering remarks
left on the page is called a letter, pressed somewhere, sans luster and sans gods.

Sands! And other sands. Solomon occasion, to roll the die & dysraphia (phrasic shade)
croaks— unhand me disband the jet-fumed La Niña. Fumar (to smoke rapidly out of el
hábito) scruff (is sage) bustle of salutation, Mingus of modelo cerveza, the shaken ream.

Good everlast. A mild subset of the band empty of note modes, remade sound in which
to bask in un-rough fumes, let’s call them fragrances. A tool and dye offered to shake
loose the ampersand, replace with letter press. Table of random numbers, I confess.

In ones, riddance, subpartition, brittle and nonplussed think thunk codes graves
in hunger a village of axes, clinched, found out, stabilizers, wrist samples. Louche
as bootlegged superstition semi-confided ink lung bling of colophon and bluster.

David Michael Wolach, "Rabocheye Dayelo"

2007-08-04T17:46:00.000-07:00

The gendarmes: fastidious sparrows with semi-automatic documents raiding nests. December. They stole the newspapers but forgot to take the ideas.

Water is the reason god was invented. Oil is a byproduct of a discrete ineptitude in the upper strata. They buy t-shirts expressly for the occasion and never forget their fanny packs. Like small turds sparrows streak across a horizon lined with radio towers. Nobody broadcasts this.

Oil masks roads paved with good intentions. Intentions are hard to come by. Children say they've seen them. One might leave a plate of haroseth for a spontaneous arrival. Wine is too extravagant now. And nobody eats the brisket. Not even minor prophets.

Look for clearance sales at corner stores. Indications that aliens will be paying earth a visit. Blue-light specials attract more than one form. Shadows cast by these are long as the sun is low. Very low.

In Hamilton Ontario two tall stacks used to shoot flames from their mouths. One has gone out. Water at Rosie's is from the tap. Chlorine masks the idea of cocktail. Cock and Tail are what you get here. Luck is to be blamed. Someday that fire will rise again. Then you know the paper will mill disproportionately to demand. One small overlooked dividend will be:

the newspapers will reappear and not long before the gendarmes.

"Remote" by Laurie Price

2007-05-03T06:35:00.000-07:00

A cologne named Siesta or
a bus route dubbed Beethoven
misplace the detachment of
solo distances from the getgo
When I hit this green button
there you are a field of mirrors
I reference the discontinuities:
to write and engage by love
& money desires impulse,
concentrated persistence
sometimes though not
altogether, almost
that

Christopher Mulrooney, "the billionairess"

2007-02-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

outcome goes
anyway comes in a four or six-wheeled carriage

the victim is described as follows
medium height or build
medium fantasies or weight
and the build of fatuousness

the victims start to disdain their own mothers
lining the sidewalk
two or three deep in places

Nate Pritts, "4 months from Monday, Monday"

2006-08-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

“Monday, Monday, can't trust that day.”
—“Papa” John Phillips

February

FEBRUARY 6
Fool, said my muse to me. Fool.

FEBRUARY 13
Already, buds. Spring starts talking loud

FEBRUARY 20
& the quiet of this winter is

FEBRUARY 27
a slow echoing.

*

July

JULY 3
I make a sandwich. I drink grape juice. I peel an orange.

JULY 10
Today I am a lute in a window & there is no breeze.

JULY 17
Today I am a window with a lute in it. No breeze.

JULY 24
I am a breeze not blowing; over there: a window, a lute.

JULY 31
I peel an orange. I eat.

*

August

AUGUST 7
Affirmative red, this dichotomy.

AUGUST 14
Can’t trust that day.

AUGUST 21
Sparkle-hearted: this dull memory spackled over.

AUGUST 28
& what I wouldn’t give for a chili dog.

*

September

SEPTEMBER 4
A sad monument, something fading.

SEPTEMBER 11
Can a day ever be just a day

SEPTEMBER 18
or is it always the other days it was,

SEPTEMBER 25
a dull history of days, an oppressive rush?

Clark Coolidge, Three Poems from Counting on Planet Zero

2006-03-19T13:39:00.000-08:00

SCORED FOR SUN AND TRIANGLE

Dreamed of Ian Holm as Cable Hogue
he came in good on the vacuum frottages
the Baroness Freytag saved from circuses
and idling at the rim of divulgence
firm with parturience on a radar vine
a ring but that end is stupid
blackening with the farm engines
vittles and enough water for a cork
adverse to radio but not in youth
the sail coat came on over night
spent rolling wallets and crowing
over and over the counters rang over
the boil road a giant plant
cognizant enough to have your number
in a row you thought but it’s Pegasus
Andromeda the Silver Pig in Amethyst
robes that crystallize and you don’t
you’d best wait for the proper race
the number of the face
and its waterglass balancing squids

THE ALEXANDRINE TITTERS

If you survive Absorbine placement you’ll be seen
fanning your palms in Pharaonic thensome
ever study that map around the planetarium’s axle?
I would come to if I were solvent
you could be killed for hiring a new address
breaching a cup attending to the tailor’s details
there are fortresses that dispense transparent tobaccos
or a rash of automatics stolen from lollygaggers
payoffs lying around everywhere the time is now
pyroclastic the burners used here for heatups
they must melt thumbtacks in their blood
that the ocean give one a straightening
puff and drag the marrying molesters
to the circular palace of wandering minds
beneath a sky cloaked in undergarments
if you have the cabbage to stomach it
learn to learn from the telescope not what’s in it
a brilliance you could see soak through bandages
the Flown Child trained to munch on carrion
hoping to brighten in the magic of a milktoast storm
something will always tell you how to turn
a peeling message among the tie-downs
I hadn’t glass to witness

YOU CANNOT LEAVE THE ROOM

If you walk in off the patio you’ll see
the lamp shining on my filter paper
and the country’s finest collection of goads
but it was dark in my head that night
above alone but none more capable
the signal said we wish to form
an Earth beyond your dreams
the perfect alien of wish fulfillment
lunar beds in planetary belts
no halts on the limiters
the plan was to crosscheck the children
all the crestfallen and sundry dwellers
I got a planet you couldn’t beleaguer
straight but could conquer by the load
ripe for shining alcohol on the grounds
a maybe zany bitch on a homeside ball
a crystal in the hay rick collapsible on call
a throat of tremendous heights and strengths
right comestible on hand but try not to separate
care to scrape this buzz from my flashlight?
try crawlspace stand and get a grip
a hemisphere is for the nervous pleasures
you just slip on a wrap like the uncles gave
the plot was to leave a coverage of worlds
ripe and on hand for whatever following floor

Chris Rizzo, VARIATION ON RACHMANINOFF'S BIRTHDAY

2006-01-15T19:04:00.000-08:00

Voilà! The way shit happens, you stroll outside
to see what type of day it is and you'll be damned:
200 pounds of guerilla for sale, a green-eyed leopard
clicking her heels professionally, Martians
in windows, buses cramped with long faces of ghosts—
you don't know how to feel about all this,
but there's a pot left on a stove
and the coil of somebody's lover is burning away...
I'm a child again too, awed when I should
have been sobered, now a spy
buzzed on air, on a mission to nowhere—heads-up
where you step—ambergris and pollen,
sage and saga loose in a bag-o-wind. Sweet music,
you've gone and fucked me rotten.

Thomas Fink, "You Think This Tooth"

2005-12-01T08:57:00.000-08:00

YOU THINK THIS TOOTH

is working out. Signs yell slow
soon: visible tresses, viable trees. Or
erotic erosion afoot. Traffic cult rousing

our severance panxiety. Pulled over, shovel
your winsome handicap. Against a hardy
sackcloth tinderbox roaring shell. Cloud could
bitch tuna. Couple toppled by rogue

golf in a snake nest, in
a hot hotel cupola. It can’t
hole my interest. Brain studies its
arraignment. You can be truly thermoplastic
when you don’t need. Let’s rinse

the demented suede suction. When I
cut my copula now, I cut
it into very small monologues, because
I claim it that way.

Tom Beckett and Jonathan Mayhew, "Hurricane Season"

2005-12-01T07:43:00.000-08:00

I.

The cop sweeping glass
from the street.
What has happened here?

It's the high acrid smell
that makes one
forget where one is.

I feel very bitter about that,
actually. Bitter and resentful.
I'm taking a battery of tests
tomorrow. To see what ails me.

Only to circle a block
before entering an office
where one wonders, the Good
Doctor prompting, whether
a block fits in a hole.

That corrosive,
viscous
substance stuck to your heel.
Wipe off before entering.

(An inadvertent dance
at the threshold
of a laboratory and the street.)

Should I think today
or feel?
If you gotta ask...

then I just ain't prepared
for feeling or thought, or
intimidations of mortality,

or for the tact of the bully:
his refusal to beat on Sundays,
his scruples and niceties.
His redundancies and scowls.

II.

You gotta believe, doncha?,
that every got-damn thing
happens for a reason.

We used to have beliefs,
now we have "belief systems,"
but is this an improvement?
Hell no!!

Improvement, schimprovement!
"Underneath the pavement--
the beach!"

The "sad commentary on our times,"
the "alternating current"--
these are not what you think.
Don't stick your hand into that.

Nothing
is what I think. Would you
watch where you're walking?

Look, I want to buy some dress shirts,
strike out the side.
Is that the proper tone to take?

Dunno. But take it from me:
I'll swing at anything
that looks like high heat.

That’s why there’s nothing in the freezer
but chicken livers.
You never saw a black cow.
How come your leather jacket
is?

…pleather? Oh, I see,
you were answering
your own question. Clever.

III.

Against the grain.
A thousand fonts at your disposal.
The dullest one is always the proper choice.

Dwell too long
on the proper
and you will
come a cropper.

Not the dwelling, though,
but the to and fro.
"Feel free to come and go,
but not to stay."

(All refrains it's plain
are mainly in disdain…
My gorge, you've got it.)

What could be lamer
than that disclaimer?
A rhyme in time
saves eleven.

We could
talk about the weather.
Is it ever
going to stop?

The growl in my stomach says no—
an appetite for storms and
strums.

Stirred, shaken,
but split between the elements,
by an air guitar.

Jill Jones, "Bone"

2005-11-19T06:20:00.000-08:00

I set up the shot yesterday
but fell into the hole
in my mouth
yes, where the stories leak
to my throat
or fling to air breathy
busking my walk.

This is the wide city
it has accumulated me
along each stage
the clarinet, the needle
and abraded bone.

Lola Velasco, from "La cometa o las manos sobre el papel"

2005-11-18T15:18:00.000-08:00

I. The Hands Speak

This is how your albino hauteur
dangles,
so bright it is perverse.

***

Free of wrinkles,
with a dazzling
insolence of forms
you rush your dream
to the crest,
escorted
by golden rays.

You flirt almost always
in profile,
and the sun
tosses you missiles
of yellow lust,
alters your color,
trying to confine you
to its dome.

***

And the other acrobats,
stupid paper ballerinas,
clear away their final pirouettes
so you can show off
your lone, aerial
luxury in flight.

***

But night will come.
There’s little time left.
And your sophisticated,
cynical beauty will pour down
false gold.
And you will fall to me,
artlessly.

Jenna Cardinale, "Flaws"

2005-11-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

The applause for the dahlias only stings my ears when it seems short.

The puppeteers promised to never pause their pruning and I would often resort to believing them.

I cannot sort the saws from the shears.

I just watch the engineers abort the garden, then twist themselves in gauze.

I cannot court these laws. I feel as my right hand disappears.

Nada Gordon, "Nugatory Wax Milk Goats"

2005-11-01T01:53:00.000-08:00

for Kasey

It is human nature to stand in the nucleus with a disfigured wax forehead,
mewling and praying in our goathair suits. Meanwhile, Paxil
passes into the breast milk, rending law and opinion nugatory.

Glyph, gnarl, gnash, gnaws, gnome, goads:
the magenta waxworks seraphim stick like rapacious leeches,
milking a he-goat into a frenzy.

Nudities, nugatory, nuisance, numbness, numbness, days are numbered:
the children are emanations of their parents, and dependent on milk emanations.
The milk emanations are dependent on the pulsation of caprice.

The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx, inconsequential and unconducive.
A steadied wolf-fish takes out the acrimonious goats’ milk with a slouched shamrock pea,
soft as butter, soft as down, soft as silk, yielding as wax, and tender as chicken.

The crusted wax bean varies the disqualified ball-peen hammer with a leggy hobble skirt.
A nudist’s nudities trek the nugatory flashing discount viagra, and fade breathlessly
while taking another gobble of the randy-cake.

The man raises his head and looks at me with yellow goat eyes:
"you work in the bad old fashioned way of modeling wax dolls – singularly superfluous
with proudleduck contours."

Glass, wax, silk, wool, hair, feathers, and even wood – each with an emerald
turkey foot at the top, like the milk of our superlative loveliness.

This nugatory acidophilus milk ferret wants out, emitting catcalls in the unerect carnuba wax.
The hyoid Fermi also warbles with dispersive suffixation -- comb, trash and dead bees strained out.

I have been digressing for all that. Let us return to our goats – their treacle and their infomotions. Gluten, albumen, milk, cream, protein; treacle; gum, size, glue; wax:

the little capricorns, vascular soothsayers, shoot off their sprouts.

Malcolm Davidson, "Sinistromanual"

2005-10-14T09:37:00.000-07:00

In the country, in a room we've had before, on two hard beds shoved together beneath the beams and the sloping roof, we close our eyes. The one of us with ears can hear a scrape, a scratch, a tick, a claw just in the air, a ticking in the beam.

Lights out and sleep, but something gets me up. I lie with one hand holding up my head and listen to the wood.

That's when a hand comes from behind my head and covers my left eye--left hand, left eye--as if to say "don't look," as if to say "guess who."

I spin and there is nothing there. The hand was small and cool and damp and smooth and smelled of soap. A woman's hand, the left hand of a particular woman who was never there.

Joseph Duemer, "What I Like about Chickadees"

2005-10-12T19:04:00.000-07:00

Hard-driven little buggers
with their wisps of whiskers

beating each other from
the feeder & finding some

branch or other from which to
berate their fellows & sue

for redress of grievances.
They are formally dressed

like diplomats without remorse
when hostilities commence.

Dana Ward, "Beatrice"

2005-10-12T08:09:00.000-07:00

Beatrice,
for me you embody the waking proportion
there is no distinction in hating oppression
& loving you, I turn the idyll away.
In the blur ideology, love & the shape of your face
are entirely real.

What is this coldness between one another?
a coral pore stopped up with christening air
I will sing you a carol instead.
I will break over my head a pure bottle of prosody
then we can sail.

In eclipsing the impulse the light is just so
no, its not you in the myrtle white shroud
being utterly un-good to anyone.

Melissa Jones Fiori, "Manifesto"

2005-10-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

I could grow wings and use them to scoop sherbet from the sky.
I could shellac the cat and eat radishes only. I can eat my own life
and spit you out as the pit. From the leaves that fall before turning
I can distill elixirs of my disregard: something for you to drink while waiting
for the eyes of my dream to open.

I am cotton lace, loose from long service under a centerpiece. You chewed me
twenty-two times before swallowing. I have stood on the doorsill and blushed
at your temerity—that was where the earthquake found me. I will not end up
in the arms of hacks and history. If I tried, I could catch
your breath.

I will learn to do the backstroke with severed hands, jack-knifing
out of each embrace. Because dreaming is my life's work, I will weave dung
and mercury into this sweater. Wear it and then tell the world, "Look,
she loves me." I have been so many places besides here, but none of them seemed
to stick.

I can't hear you shouting because a small dog is howling in the kitchen. I stuff
my pockets full of candy, ready to be made millionaire, G-man, cosmonaut.
In my lush new life I will win at cards and refuse to share the wealth.
Fat and happy, like all good girls in all good fairytales. Sweetheart,
the dream has not yet ended.

Gary Sullivan, "JOHN JOHN"

2005-10-11T11:45:00.000-07:00

How much longer will I be able to inhabit the corn pail
Of entire slabness? Do dolphins plunge bottomward
To find the float stone papers? Or is it BOOZE horizon
That is searched? Flame corn urgents? Huh. And if some day

Men with "gas prevention" streaks come to break open the moth
Which encases me, what about the foam that comes in then?
What about the grease of the light?
What about the moth?

In pilgrim times your crow wound flustered over
Since then I only lie
My suit scuttled with your flavor choking me
With hell ("buns") ("spew")

bomb compaction lamp bomb scutty work stamen lamp
To have held my breath under the house. I'll trade
the dock I flabbered on,
Named Tom. The

sore you did, "between") mossy rocks down to me
In this warning cake (clocking in the gas
When he'd had he would not toilet lung "e" pan
And clotty toilet smarting of privet

Which on hot spring nights flat pee your crainialtic
With the smell of sperm ("my bread") but "closure fake"
On hot summer afternoons by kicking through your socks
If you knew why then) inhaled

To his friends: Drink to me only with
description ("got the books")
By a great shadow under the styrofoam.
I floated *pages*

The boy took out his own forehead.
His girlfriend's head in clown's redoubt
Of narcissus stems. "OK you win
doubt or froth absorption pillars of intend"

Jack Kimball, "My Car Has Been Eaten"

2005-10-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

One assumption is the future will be an extension of now.
A disclaimer in Chinese contains characters that cannot
Be displayed. It says a lot that there wasn't any.

So I write about machines with gears that look like flip-flops.
Cord organizers that yank their loads into natural history.
Sometimes I'm called the father of the acrylic poem.

Brandon, are you going to do a J-turn there? because if you are
It's a switch I didn't intend, miser, helping others, waving
My kerchief, keeping an honorable distance, keeping the cat.

Tom King, "THE SOLE PRINT"

2005-10-07T17:16:00.000-07:00

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some cornflower of a foreign fifteenth
That is for ever enlargement. There shall be
In that rich easement a richer Dutchman’s-breeches concealed;
A Dutchman’s-breeches whom enlargement bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave once her fluff to love, her weak sisters to roam;
A bogeyman of enlargement's, breathing enlarging alabaster,
Washed by the RNA, blest by superchargers of hominy grits.
And think, this heathen, all ewes shed away,
A pumpernickel in the eternal mineral kingdom, no less
Gives somewhere back the thread by enlargement given;
Her signatures and sources; dresses happy as her dead center;
And laundry, learnt of fright; and geochronology,
In heathens at peaches, under an enlarging heavyweight.

Tony Towle, "Out and Around"

2005-10-07T06:19:00.000-07:00

The streets have never been more replete
with automotive self-assertion. The sun
has its instructions: keep up the heat. Nouns
drift about like paper. One of them, a politician, orates,
creating haphazard currents of serial realities
and on the corner stands the archetypal critic, musing
as in a blog — scanning the empyrean
for discourse, paradigms, process, and praxis
while poetry pauses, unnoticed, to signify
on his or her leg. And we are not on the same page
so I turn it and move on
to the Librairie de France
where La Monarchie austro-hongroise pour les gourdes
is finally on display, justifying my years of toil
in making The Austro-Hungarian Empire for Dummies
fit for Gallic consumption,
and somewhere in yet another context
the grizzlies are creeping closer
and are doing well from the outside
but can they prosper in the paint
is the question put to the otherwise empty landscape,
and a gentle ripple of opinion
passes through the waving field of experts.
But you are skeptical of all this darting about, you say.
Very well, I shall pick my way among the fundamentals
in these explosive times and relate a sad but cohesive tale:
Krakatoa grew up with two magmas,
which created feelings of stress, conflict, and volatility
and it resulted in a predictable eruptive displacement
that preempted the attention of all in the neighborhood —
and thus they were treated to monumental trauma
as acted out with rock and gas,
supported admirably by lava and all the ash you could ask for.
Now, let us return to the unfinished landscape:
You are correct that the lesson is not clear,
the translation inadequate, the rainbow suspended.

Daniel Shapiro, "Poetry Vanilla"

2005-10-06T11:59:00.000-07:00

In a store of ice-cream,
came different flavors of the world.
I looked and saw letters and numbers
on the waffle cone.
I noticed that it was Robert Frost it was
called Poetry Vanilla.
I said strange strange indeed.
I licked the words fire and ice off
Poetry Vanilla and the ice-cream seller said:
Doesn't it taste like words?

Laura Carter, "One Liner"

2005-10-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

Oh what a quiet fly

"David Shapiro, "Dream of the Truth or Truth but Slant for Her"

2005-09-26T05:55:00.000-07:00

I kiss Lindsay
and tell her how beautiful
her face is.

Later she takes a knife
and is going to plunge it
into my poem.

I tell her, Never plunge it
straight in.
Do it at an angle.

***

"Truth But Slant or As an Eagle"

I kiss you
and tell you how classic
your face is.

Later you take a dagger
and are going to chop it
into my neck.

I tell you, Never plunge it
straight in.
Do it at an angle.

Julia Tsuchiya-Mayhew, "HOW ICE-CREAM CAME INTO EXISTENCE"

2005-09-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Deep in the woods a coyote
lost its howl, a man wandered
away from his village to find
food and saw the coyote, the
coyote asked the man for help
and the man said yes and got a
shovel and dug a hole and found
the howl and returned it into the
coyote's throat and the coyote gave
the man a gift, called ice-cream

Jim Behrle, "I'm Ready to Walk the Walk"

2005-09-19T12:31:00.000-07:00

remember: your mouth was once a vagina

when the soup gets cold they charge twice as much

true love leaves no traces

what I leave behind Crime Scene finds with black lights

"We can still count the number of women who attempt

writing on such a scale on the fingers of our hands."
an old lady floats by through poopy water

who gets to burst first, you or me?

on tv black women chant "help us, help us"

the beautiful story about the cicada tattoo

I ate a cicada for you

and the mighty power of God fills the air

inside me is a cellphone tower

count the sex acts that have been

committed in this hotel room

and add two

the flag says A MAN WAS LYNCHED TODAY

wish they'd covered it up better

soap gets in your eyes

bad light / bad heat / "that jelly rolls in the

street"

Tom Murphy "Overblown by a Host of Imperial Contradictions, I Reminisce"

2005-09-15T06:18:00.000-07:00

Overblown by a Host of Imperial Contradictions, I Reminisce
about a Simpler Time in a Safer Place

all the blank spots collected in one heap. as

articulate and conventional. one hill of them

without butterflies. or dogs. or kites. but say

an arrangement of happinesses down the other

side away from town. here we mope and jingle

our fine nuisance away. cramped by a question.

kari edwards, "constant crazy"

2005-09-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

I am being called to pray
to allah
by the jains
in a crumbling postcolonial
irrational utopia
crumbling in a spirit of sanity
insanity
and cricket mornings

allah
opens the door
for the sick and dying
the lame and never healed

krishna
circle the wagons
rip open the heart
turn up the speakers

rama
tears down the concept
body flesh
body ego
sensing
hollow screaming
no
when there is only yes

dying singing
burning dying
singing

broadcast shiva
burns
always burning
burning water
running out of water
running out of allah

call me to prayer
call me a windmill
endless pumping
ceaseless fire
five directions
a dedication to a million trees
a breath from ganesh
remover of obstacles
nothing everything
crazy
wrenching sorrow
snake sorrow
twelve pillar sorrow
that never ends
that never begins
can never return
to crazy
constant crazy

Noah Eli Gordon, "A Miniature Symphony May Be A Watercolor"

2005-09-13T15:41:00.000-07:00

In gears of the silverfish
rounding a corner of
the house that is not
a house at all but a misshapen
riverbed out of which brushstrokes
freed of systemic order compose
from this score a movement.

In the gears of the silverfish.

In the photograph of a misshapen riverbed.

In the language of musical notation.

In charcoal and chalk on paper, glass and a mouth underneath.

9/12/05

Tony Robinson, "Dog Day Sonnet"

2005-09-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

1. It is only the rain in August a likely repetition this year makes like the last.

2. A list may be useful: ten things about Oregon or five things only you know about Oregon.

3. Downpour. We have ears & eyes for combat.

4. Fires on the hills behind my house of sticks. Faggots & fascicles spontaneously combust.

5. Approaching it with high expectations. How else can we enter?

6. A boy’s club. A place for gathering. When we fuck the night bunches up at the corners.

7. The electric fan hums & the open windows smell of sixteen gravel pits asphalt.

8. When you cried out I was thinking of a sandwich the blood you left behind.

9. All the old forms have been used up between the “compacts of sluts.”

10. A phrase repeated again accrues symbolic relevance even as it is drained of semantic juice.

11. In the summer’s first real rainstorm the usual gloaming is obscured by clouds with the faces of men.

12. My house contains four Mexican rugs. It contains a woman and a pig.

13. Cloudy in the morning chance of showers animals dying softly on the doorjamb.

14. We only say it in the dark or repeated in many tongues. What can we possibly know?

Tony Robinson, "To the Future"

2005-09-11T18:43:00.000-07:00

My friends moved to Chicago, leaving me here on the sidewalk where a dandelion pushes up.

I have an amazing story to tell you: the rash on my face is caused by drinking too much.

I often think in the summer of moving with you to Arizona to sand dunes to dune grass tufted high to saguaros.

I think on these long days of Popsicles.

All afternoon and evening it’s hot and old folks cluster around rusted automobiles.

There is gunmetal and skin patchy and rough.

We turn different colors against the sun in Arizona and we strive to make it through the next year one year at a time.

I do not have an automobile you will have to drive me there and blow me in the front passenger seat.

We will drink in Arizona to keep cool to keep our rapidly oxidizing bodies supple against the firm desert weather.

I have filled my portable storage device with photographs and songs of you.

Trying on my best outfits, I am torn between linen and tweed, my chest cracked open with love.

Breaking the mirror and losing the pieces, set free by a small anthology of favorite verses, set free by airy absences left behind by my gone compatriots.

If I say you are statuesque it means I want to extend you, want our bodies to be like canoes on water like yellow leaves blanketing the Autumn sidewalk.

I don’t know who you are yet. I haven’t had the pleasure of your coming.

Eileen Tabios, "CIRCA 2005"

2005-09-09T17:56:00.000-07:00

I am beginning
to suspect

an open door
is overrated.

Yes, it obviates the paradox
of a wall

necessary to allow
for an entry.

But why dismiss the barricade?

Mosquitos are hovering.
Worse,

the results of bad parenting
await.

Tom Beckett, "Hay(na)ku for Mayhew"

2005-09-09T14:05:00.000-07:00

One

doesn't, as

I don't, know

when

to use

'para' or 'por'.

Ricardo Aleixo, "Love Is"

2005-09-07T05:41:00.000-07:00

a series of fragmentary beach parties
we have no choice but to attend

a voice cries out loud and long
this morning, we exist

ah my trick vibrating eyeballs,
excuse me while I ruin this piano

—trans. K. Silem Mohammad

Kate Greenstreet, "Introvert"

2005-09-04T19:48:00.000-07:00

Deep in my own green element,
I met a friend—
my double, my dearest.

Others
pulled me out of the sea,
placed me

in this pan of water,
added salt,
and taught me to eat bread.

Leopoldo Maria Panero & Claudio Rizzo, from "Tenso"

2005-09-03T07:48:00.000-07:00

From afar, aware of the immense distance, I stifle
il soffio al cuore: abruptly, like a burnt-out bulb.

I passed my hand through your graying hair and
someone said: il mio bambino.

Everything locked behind bars of hard metal.

(trans. J. Mayhew)

Michael Helsem, "Talking to Robots"

2005-09-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

Titan silk story
want unknown

Oswald pillbug glass skillful aspic
straw wodwo brisk cyborg swill

maskful ontology ptarmigan sully
individual skins

and to swarm
into foolproof tsunami twilight

Heather Brinkman, "Petition Candles"

2005-09-01T05:47:00.000-07:00

gran torino
where my
hummingbirds
and no butterscotch men
only joy of being trashy
mello yellow poverty
wearing a tinged bolero
like candle wax skin
of my Mary of Guadalupe

Jess Mynes, from Coltsfoot Insularity

2005-08-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

New first day:
pine needles
on flat roof
red shingles
acorns leave
berets in
the walkway

“Jimmy Carter Says Yes”

Jess Mynes, "Self Portrait, 1936"

2005-08-31T11:15:00.000-07:00

Fly autumn umber
hands clasped
blue
red
here are the lines
and what counts
for a nimbus

Raphael Rubinstein, "What happened"

2005-08-31T07:47:00.000-07:00

Of course I would like to be

a poet of personal universalities,

noting, in chiseled language,

daily events, extravaganzas of nature

and the amazing revelations they bring,

Once I was such a poet

or at least was making appropriate gestures in that direction.

What happened?

Should I try to explain

in a 600-page memoir titled Some Time in New York City?

Or a lengthy autobiographical essay called “The Dangers of Derrida”?

Or a playlist that leads off with

the Sex Pistols, the Contortions and Gang of Four?

Or point to a line on my CV that reads

“Studied with Harry Mathews 1978-79”?

It’s 9:20 AM. Almost time to leave

this light-filled café at Varick and Franklin

and plunge back into artworld maneuvering.

Before I go

I’ll read one more page of Ammons’s A Coast of Trees

Raphael Rubinstein, "Deciphered from an Old Retablo"

2005-08-31T07:45:00.000-07:00

Accomplished nothing! Alberto, Carlos, Florencio,
gang of my youth! Old poems yellow in the boxes
money was no help, finding
Divine guidance was a joke, and now traces of
the Solitude are all that remains. The intercession
was a mirage; our Muse went elsewhere to live her life.

Gina Myers, "After David Shapiro"

2005-08-31T07:21:00.000-07:00

dear cloud, free from moral guilt
dear calendar, your pages worn
dear bridge, free from the heart's concerns
dear train, free from pain
dear passing, no need for a watch
dear address, words on your eyelids
dear lullaby, dear vase of flowers, dear candy store
dear sun, let go your winter coat
dear stove, free from yesterday's mistakes
dear fan blades, turn & turn
dear song, it's come out all wrong