On July 1^st I invited a number of poets whose work I admire to contribute one of their poems to what would be a one-off online publication to go "live" on August 1^st. I also asked them to pass on the same invitation to a poet or poets they knew and admired. My plan was for the resulting collection of poems to be entirely chosen by the poets themselves, and for there to be threads of friendship and mutual admiration linking the work. I've done no editing or selecting. Poems arrived, and they are here to read.

It was also my (probably futile) intention to kind of take poetry publishing back to recapture something of the spirit of the mimeo age, which is where I began some 35 years ago: quick and simple publications that concentrated on the poem because the means of production gave you almost no alternative. Sometimes it's a relief to leave the flashy sophistications of state of the art websites behind, isn’t it? (Please feel free to disagree and/or to point out the paradox of saying all this here online.)

Anyway, what you have before you is the result. No frills, just the poetry - not even notes on the contributors. (You can Google them if you're desperate.)

I'd like to thank all the contributors for their support, and I hope you enjoy the poems.

Martin Stannard

Zhuhai, China

August 1, 2013

___________________________________________________

Sonnet exercise # 5: The Devotional Poem

There are airs and graces, graces, airs and lines

that dance, or at least seem to, until they fall.

There is music and that which music can’t mitigate.

There is shattered capitalism gradually undressing

to expose the ruins of its crumbling nudity,

while the poet, bent on refining defined experience,

writes repeatedly how it was the bird alit,

with fluttery poise, like an inkling, invisibly cradled

by under-scorings of sky and so on. Now

for the crux: though you pour libations to the gods

who keep outrageous hours and behave

like animals, teenagers, the sundry dissolute,

still you will lift up your eyes to the skinny guy

suspended uncomfortably there in fickle daylight.

C. J. Allen

___________________________________________________

poem from “A New Geography of Romanticism’

Inviting an embarrassing compassion

According to this you’re on your back in long grasses

Prayer roots deep in the soaking lungs

Not all coastal plants are made of communion wafer

Insular yet enormous plus conceptually hissing

Dust obstinate guest absurd and/or bored

Wheelie bin reeking of dance in mono

Pass Go then return to Basic Principals Square

On automatic pilot judging from your face

Post resurrection he was cranky and irritable

Sponge limbic Ponge rib-poke provocation

This says you resigned from a strong position

Tim Allen

___________________________________________________

The Air Scatters

the initial question is place

but also position

within that place

is it safe

can we speak

but then

events intervene

the air scatters

you gather a few remnants

you renounce those

who have opposed you

some of them

still around

the air is muddied

you no longer listen

into separate places

you have closed your mind

there is nothing else

I can say to you

so much air

Clark Allison

___________________________________________________

Breezeway

Someone said we needed a breezeway

to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.

Alas it wasn't my call.

I didn't have a call or anything resembling one.

You see I have always been a rather dull-spirited winch.

The days go by and I go with them.

A breeze falls from a nearby tower

finds no breezeway, goes away

along a mission to supersize red shutters.

Alas if that were only all.

There's the children's belongings to be looked to

if only one can find the direction needed

and stuff like that.

I said we were all homers not homos

but my voice dwindled in the roar of Hurricane Edsel.

We have to live out our precise experimentation.

Otherwise there's no dying for anybody,

no crisp rewards.

Batman came out and clubbed me.

He never did get along with my view of the universe

except you know existential threads

from the time of the peace beaters and more.

He patted his dog Pastor Fido.

There was still so much to be learned

and even more to be researched.

It was like a goodbye. Why not accept it,

anyhow? The mission girls came through the woods

in their special suitings. It was all whipped cream and baklava.

Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us

and promptly looks away, at a new catalog, say,

or another racing car expletive

coming back at Him?

John Ashbery

___________________________________________________

Joseph Wright

A lamp in a darkened room

picks out a folk memory

I know where the the mills were,

and the ironworks, the union banners,

a river that runs underground now,

the labour of children

Tax concessions and flexible labour

open up this town. The world is waiting,

crowded into Cromford Mills:

building workers from Poland and Croatia,

maids from the Philippines, competitive rates of pay.

Open up this town.

Arkwright, trailing smoke and sparks,

steps into Arcadia with engines and workers,

mills and ironworks, incidental light

Mechanics of perception,

a white canvas, ghosts

stalking the geographical wonders,

the great coaching inns fetching trade

along the routes of industry,

a Grand National Trades Union

a layered perception flowing underground,

science of hope, mechanics

of a new society.

Somewhere, the notion of a better life,

a river, a town, its ghosts,

a geography of common wealth,

if we could only find it.

I had a notion that

layered experience lay in this town,

lamp in a darkened room.

A notion of light

and mechanics of perception,

layered geography, ghosts

of past masters, open up a route

through the Derwent valley,

past the mills and forges

to landscapes of feeling,

alchemy of craft and enlightened views.

Under a dark outcrop an earthstopper

works by lamplight.

In the library of a great house

a philosopher is giving "that Lecture on the Orrery

in which a lamp is put in place of the Sun"

to work the motion

of light, swaying

through the minds of the people,

and gravity, in perfect balance,

energy, to pump the mills,

coal, smoke, sparks

strange machines in the lit air

of Derby's workshops, in place

of handwork “these cotton mills, seven

stories high and filled

with inhabitants, remind me

of a first-rate man of war,

and when they are lighted up

on a dark night look

most luminously beautiful”

Cars cross St. Mary's Bridge, office workers

lie in the sun at lunchtime, the mill

inhabits a silence, two girls

are dazzled by an ingot's glow

The crags of Derbyshire darken,

landowners pose for portraits, and the friends

of a young artist, his writers and poets,

are young still, in perfect balance,

with gravity, mechanics, the construction

of strange machines

out of canvas and painted light,

most luminously beautiful,

first-rate, and filled with inhabitants.

(Note: Joseph Wright of Derby lived 1737-1797. The best collection of his paintings is in Derby Art Gallery)

Alan Baker

___________________________________________________

(from Song of Chin , 1972)

poem for pauline

chin

turned to me

in her eyes

turned

in her naked

arms

楽 lè

music

into her

I came

without hesitation

thunder

settled over the lake

tonight this winter-moon

is behind a cloud

animals went with certainty

went to the water's edge

& over

without the light

whose shadow will

the lake reflect

Ed Baker

___________________________________________________

Some Regrets That Will Attend You When You May
Have Kicked the Seat of The Patron In Front of You
at the Movie Theater Too Often

A sad milkman drops the milk

And enters a strange basement

To use the restroom. A repentant fox runs past,

Looking transparent like a slide of fire.

“A hell of an out,” they say

In these parts, referring to the green caterpillar

With brown spikes found exploring the chef’s salad

On two separate occasions, despite

The guardianship of saltines, and referring, too,

to the Galaxy that fell off its wheels

Inconveniently.

At the movies

You are disappointed at your failure

To stop kicking the seat

Of the person in front of you,

And take your leg outside, where it continues

Its protest. The bath mat in your backpack

Is a lamentable gift

For your true love, a contrite ghost who has gotten

Lost in the dark, a guilty river that

Follows the concrete, a dejected sneeze

Gone free.

The man who breaks dirty dishes

And buys new ones is as mournful

As were bewailed the happy campers

Who threw their smug song up our penitent noses.

But when Brenda Lee’s record falls,

When Brenda Lee’s record falls,

She is commissar of sorry.

Angela Ball

___________________________________________________

Portrait of Edith Murtone, fiction writer

Scarlet nail polish and lipstick.

Plastic surgery on her once-prominent nose.

Edith summers in Cornwall,

winters in Athens.

Her latest novel is selling well.

The cook and the gardener

will each receive a Christmas bonus,

compensation for enduring

Edith’s moods and temper

when she finds living

harder than writing.

Characters like Clarissa and Harold

appear to her

as she drives,

as she walks along the river.

Clarissa,

eldest of two daughters,

an amateur botanist and watercolourist,

infatuated with her piano tutor.

Harold,

a neighbour’s only son,

asthmatic, excused from sport.

Interested in astronomy

and the treasure underneath Clarissa’s skirt.

Desire,

the primary emotion that moves plot and pen,

stirs the serpents in the garden,

coiled in the shade of the family tree.

Images crafted into words,

words crafted into images.

Truth and fiction,

lying down in the same bed,

entwined,

no longer strangers

to each other.

The white heat of writing—

thoughts, visions

becoming words,

lifting the writer and the reader

beyond the page,

to where the self is seen,

an ant

struggling with crumbs,

one day to be crushed

beneath a wind-blown twig.

On a good day, five thousand words.

On a bad day, the snapping in half of pencils—

the study mirror reflecting

Edith asleep on the sofa,

one shoe missing,

an empty brandy bottle

in her lap.

Edith waking

with hangover—

legs of straw on which

to inch and tilt

towards the horizon

of the kitchen sink,

a much-needed glass of water.

Edith

straightening cushions on the sofa,

lighting the day’s first cigarette,

asking the walls

what post-war England could be

if Nigel’s plane hadn’t been

shot down over Berlin.

The roulette wheels spins,

the white ball

comes to rest on zero.

Not every player

will risk as much again.

Edith alone

with her characters.

Maybe in the next book,

Harold, through his telescope

will view the flare and fall of a comet,

an arc of light that once scarred the heavens,

now reduced to a photo, data in a journal.

Clarissa will disturb his ordered world

by becoming pregnant.

The characters’ world changed by

a birth,

a wavering allegiance,

an affair revealed.

All that threatens and excites,

asks us to consider again

human nature

as it slithers away

from definition,

Edith will examine

in her next book.

Already she knows its title,

writes it out neatly

on a fresh sheet of paper.

Tomorrow will be a good writing day.

Peter Bakowski

___________________________________________________

Highlands Blowback

The you recedes

And now I’m not sure who the you is

But as far as poetry goes

Who cares about that

Maybe even makes the work better

Carried away

Yes, me I eat miles like air

With a Super-Saver advance return or

Two singles

It depends on which is cheaper

Though that can’t be right surely?

No, it was the highest road we took

Remember, we rolled in the heather stoned

By a loch / Or at least

By some other large expanse of water

This can’t have been forgotten

I got such bad sun-burn

Richard Barrett

___________________________________________________

The Long Time

It was a long

time. What day

was it? I

didn’t know.

O little while, while

you last,

as somebody

who doesn’t know meets

somebody who does,

and the rooms’

crack of wind

tinted glass

across from the

stone-piled well into

the church’s field:

to grip the telephone

with my neck,

over a light

I loved you

Don Berger

___________________________________________________

Professor Dobrowski

Professor Dobrowski's fingers

made no mistakes upon the keys,

not in June, July or December.

Michael Blackburn

___________________________________________________

Lines on a Luggage Label

punter

leaning on the bus

in the supermarket

makes it laugh

sunned

crocuses daffodils

viburnum

unfurl

bisecting

shaven campus grass

return hay

meadow

perfect egg

lightly poised

in the middle

of the carriageway

untouched

by traffic

petrified

the pastels of

winter

just so

a line suggests

itself

entwined in

one’s own

rhetoric

universe

and fiscal sense

conjecture

we need

nine mice that are

broken

music

is all prime

numbers

jounce

the poem pops

reminders

unstrings

Tilla Brading

___________________________________________________

Tomatoes

So here I am

some morning in the future

buying tomatoes

& picking each one up

to examine it

to see if this one is for me

as meanwhile people die

in terrible car crashes on the M6

& the people who run the world

rub their hands

while I'm buying tomatoes

wishing you'd come up behind me

or if I went down the escalator

you'd be on the way up

Brendan Cleary

___________________________________________________

Glow-worm

After your mother died

I shuffled around the kitchen in her slippers

boiling water

for sips of instant coffee cactus tongue.

You told me that when you were 12 you sucked ice cubes

so your tongue would feel

like someone else’s.

I keep thinking your mother is in the bathroom mirror

or has organised

the cutlery drawer and the spice cupboard –

I can’t find anything.

Meredith Collins

___________________________________________________

Feast

That evening, a gull stepped up to my table

on the roof terrace of Riyad el Medina,

as if to speak, but bent its neck instead

and began to peck from a bowl of green olives

set beside a bottle of wine from Meknes

before stepping off again and taking to air

as if it was its emperor, millennia

turning in the clock of its wings

wheeling high in jet stream winds

peeling back the surface of the Atlantic

and where those stones fell lies karma,

a dark stain spreading through a single

sheet of paper folded into the book of life,

the one that has your name running through

it like a well-dressed fugitive, and me

waking late with my face in the fountain

and head full of music, gut strings

occupied by touch and vibration,

costume jewellery that sticks to the skin,

our spirits disputed like the weight

of our luggage and the limits of knowledge,

the clicks and knocks that live inside doors

and the wings of seabirds swinging like padlocks

in a universe without keys, or universal laws.

I attend to the wind intoxicating itself

in stairwells and windows and the wings

of sea birds spreading themselves around

the world as we do to hide and seek each other

Tim Cumming

___________________________________________________

On The Road Ode

In the Ocala Red Roof Inn,

next to the ‘free Continental breakfast bar,’

a TV makes of the disparate, One.

“And now, on Wall Street yesterday, the Dow—”

Mouths spit bits of bacon, calling

for seconds, “with coffee”; & a biker

in chaps & a Hawaiian shirt recites

some sort of mantra over his eggs.

“At Fenway, the Yanks rally in the ninth—”

Near a rack of real estate pamphlets,

a mother in a flowered pajama top

spreads cream cheese on a bagel,

while some tourists from Syracuse

stack their trays at the same time,

& an Appalachian man—

smoker, long hair short at his ears—

gazes shyly at a wife made

weary by all his good times;

their burr-headed son, ten, chews

his corn flakes with a thoughtful look …

“The recall of tainted fish sticks has spread—”

Jim Cummins

___________________________________________________

Downsides

--for Samantha Brick

Seems I can’t go anywhere without some dude

trying to get inside my frontal lobe. Just once

I’d like to go to a hotel bar without hearing,

“Nice brain stem! Can I buy it a drink?”

Or “Did anyone ever tell your cerebellum

it could be a model?” Whenever I pass

a construction site, the hardhats

whistle at my bouncy left and right hemispheres.

As I scurry away, I get, “Stuck up, neocortex!”

At work, Mr. Smith ogles my limbic system

and the administrative assistants with small brains

ignore me in the lunch room. I guess it’s true—

I flaunt my high IQ. I can be a tease

when it comes to anagrams and spatial reasoning.

But, hey, don’t we all use whatever we have?

Unlike most women, I’m actually looking forward

to senility, so everyone will stop seeing

only my brain and except me for who I truly am.

Denise Duhamel

___________________________________________________

Does this poem pay its way?

The UK Government's Culture Secretary Maria Miller said the arts world must make the case for public funding by focusing on its economic, not artistic, value (BBC News 24/4/13)

While reading or listening to this poem you should decide

if it gives you value for money.

Please tick or indicate all that apply.

Does it:

a) reap the reward of your reading investment time?

b) merit further reading investment?

b) make you want to read the poet's new collection?

c) persuade you to investigate the poet's back catalogue?

d) stimulate the wider literary economy through purchase of:

· tickets for readings

· CD recordings

· poetry apps

· library memberships (only available to purchase)

· works of criticism

· stationery items

· visits to writers' houses

· computer hardware

· office furniture or back supports

· magazine subscriptions

· competition entry fees

· a shed to write in

· a writing retreat/holiday

· editorial support

· copying, printing or binding facilities

· the services of an amanuensis

· a waste paper bin?

Sue Dymoke

___________________________________________________

Wild Dog

My dog was wild – not quite the wolf

chained up under Uncle Clyde’s porch in that town

where you had to collect water from a pump and

shit in an outhouse the local boys would push

over whilst you were performing – but it was

obvious the day I got home and found my tamed

red squirrel torn to pieces. So it was time to let

the dog go, doing unto another like that unacceptable

even in my childlike take on the rights and wrongs

of things [and a double tragedy in such a concurrent

loss] but it was around a week later when the farmer

returning its lead said his dog now was chasing sheep

and running free and living a life that eviscerating my

other pet was just the manifestation of what should be.

Mike Ferguson

___________________________________________________

Under the Lime Trees

All that glitters

is not glass, but lots and lots

of it is, mused

the helmeted cyclist … o you fast-

spinning tyres, so delicately ridged, so like the scales

of a young crocodile – avoid

whatever sparkles, and that

straggle-haired woman weaving

her way briskly against the traffic, her hands

a jiving blur as she belts

out snatches of We’re just

two little girls from Little Rock … the one who broke

my heart …

in Little Rock … Are these

I spy the deserving

poor, fully adrift, or breast-fed bohemians (weird

thought of the day!) jostling on a street corner beside

an all but emptied rack

of Boris bikes? Wolves

living on wind, sur le Noël, morte

saison …

we do not feel

the speck of dust that alights

on our shoulder, nor

its fatal cousin, the germ we inhale, unknowing,

and cannot spit out. It slides

through the unmapped city

within. Responsive

cells divide or move, suddenly

restless, alert, driving, dragging

from the abyss an image

of myself cowboy-hatted, aged three, proudly astride

an East African zebra. The spongy marrow

buried in our bones

enriches the blood that unites, as it flows, nerve

and muscle, tissue and tendon, propelling

all smoothly forward like a river swirling

over its unseen bed; while every

active capillary, if challenged, or opposed, or howsoever

aroused, dilates

in bold defiance, in outright

scorn of the cold footsteps creeping like mist …

blink,

and click your heels one-two-three, and the yellow

brick road is thigh-

deep in nettles and willowherb. Even

when it’s invisible the sun

flings into space its gassy flames, each day

enthrones itself, and we, too, must purge our minds of the inert

and confining, dwell

in thoughts that breathe, and words that burn, or shine

brightly as a falling

guillotine … blink

again and the fantastical

flow of money

and data bursts like a blood vessel, scattering

the crowds gathered beneath the weeping

limes. It happened

I fell in with one kicking wildly

at piles of sticky, heart-shaped leaves – his cheeks were furrowed

with scars, and his left ear seemed torn: ‘Follow,’

he confided, ‘the scent to the vixens’ lair … take up

your broken bicycle, and with both hands hurl it as far … as far …’

Mark Ford

___________________________________________________

Talking to Patrick Heron

At a random gathering

you throw amusing quotes, ‘roughly, sea from the balcony

window’ to yourself even when things wrong stare back

like ‘Japanese moons kept in mind’

shuffling up a Cornish field

waiting to paint late

as you said in the Tate that day

with your tiny camera

snapping away at your own work baffled by my careless

observations.

Your toy-box of colours, floating arms, hands and wrists

in front of an audience you’re an expressionist

showing erudition, important when

embraced by just about everyone, so

I want to follow

in your footsteps

charge at my canvas

be fresh,

spontaneous, dreamlike

make

tremolo shapes from old poems

shaded

as wind

wall-like in themselves

mapped

never to wear thin

as lines of a railway bridge, as three hallways on

three floors of any St. Ives hotel.

Rhythmic patterns of carpets

against the glare

of over-used doors.

Back-to-back

everyone wants a blend of history and art,

a montage in at least seven colour ways

your sporadic insomnia must be an end-life crisis, not forcing

the talk

not a colour out of place

but

arriving at final words

for the day, still with the ability to laugh …

‘do you have the capacity to break out of your routine?’

back at the beach where they’re all sitting down

your reach is sugar minus salt plus flesh,

rounded gestures live, feet let go.

Freed out of blankness, your sea is purple-black,

your ground is green-black, a page

is dropped into air.

Peter Gillies

___________________________________________________

All Said

All said. Knowny known.
Ovvious, so ovvious, it’s all so ovvious:

mutabilitude, mortalitude –

houses of ash
towers of toothpicks and paste
manuscrip-manuscrude-manuscraps in your closet
Pulitzer puff pastries staled in the bragbox
spotty sunken oldsters once very presentable
now wobble toward dementia or a busted hip
dozens of lemonade trucks from decades back
now entoiled with ferns beside the airport garage
um hum mutabilitude mortalitude ovvious
all said all knowny known

so then – so now – now what –
humiliated silence?

Somehow that won’t do;
the day
replete with Beckettish crazed persistence
grief memoriousness fantasy
beauty in tight jeans
email from someone stirringly wishful
earnestness of Chris Hayes
disguised outrage of Stephen Colbert
Republican greed in bald or sly forms
injustice in New Orleans Thailand Syria Chicago
Florida Bangladesh the next town over
brave optimism of strollers in Washington Square
a quietly serious Korean movie
the comic-desperate yowling of Kim Shattuck
all the flick-fly-fine stuff you care about
memory of dancing with Marcia to “Party Doll”

demands reply . . .
So I will confect new-ish ways to say
yesterday’s gone and we’re all going to die!

Better trite than self-surrenderedly stifled –
though that’s not quite the credo
I ran up my secret flagpole
in my decades of Keats-n-me castle hunger.

Mark Halliday

___________________________________________________

The Answers To The Questions

For that rainy day reading at

the bookstore in the mall

Where do you get your ideas?

From a guy named Howie in Philadelphia.

They’re $19.95 a dozen, less if they’ve been used.

I used to get some from my family’s horrible holiday

dinners, but they won’t let me in the house anymore

Who are your influences?

Any number of colorful obscurities whose

names you feel bad about not knowing

and this is because

I am inventing them as I speak.

And Frank O’Hara.

You always have to say Frank O’Hara.

When do you put in the hidden meaning?

I usually write that first, then cover it up

with mud and leaves so that it’s totally

obscured, then I forget where I put it so

your guess is as good as mine. You can

bring your own meaning and just slather it on.

Can you stay for the open reading?

I’d like to stay, I really want to stay

I’d do anything in the world to stay

I’ve dreamed of staying,

I would have definitely stayed but

now I’ve fallen into past tense so

I’m afraid it’s impossible to climb out.

And I think there’s a terrible storm coming.

What is that buzzing sound?

I wonder if I’ll get home faster if

I get on Route 80 and take the bridge.

I see myself speeding down a deserted highway

What is that annoying sound? Oh.

It’s me. I seem to be reading.

I wondered why they turned the music off.

Robert Hershon

___________________________________________________

Joe’s Barber Shop

after a photograph by George Tice

There’s a Christmas Santa Claus holding a holiday reef in the center of Joe’s Barber Shop window in Paterson and the light outside slants to the Linoleum from a smaller side window and the shadows of the words “Joe’s Barber Shop” can be seen spelled out instead of reversed on the glass. It is a cold sunlight and the shadow of the smaller window frame makes a cross on the floor above his name. What can be seen outside through the window is a truck and a couple of stores and a car. It could be winter, but there is no snow and no people. Joe’s is empty, a newspaper lies folded on the table next to the waiting chair in front of the window by the porcelain sink. An apron hangs from a hook by the smaller window. I can’t make out the month or year on the wall calendar or the date on the newspaper, but I know it is decades ago, and the floor is free of hair and a barber towel drapes over the arm of the old porcelain base swivel barber chair with a cracked leather seat and porcelain arms. A few bottles of after shave and tonic line the counter in front of the chair in front of the mirror.

I wonder where Joe the barber is? Is he standing somewhere inside, or did he leave? It looks deserted. It looks as if he left and never came back, as if he just got in his car and started driving one day to escape having to stand all day cutting men’s hair. And like the rest of us who wake not wanting to go to in because we can’t stand going back to what we do, wouldn’t it be nice to say “fuck it” and leave forever. I know what it feels like to have my hair cut by an old barber. I’ve been getting my hair cut this way all my life and the barbers were always old men, mostly Italian from the old country who would whip the apron and snap it in the air like a matador snaps a cape and twist tie it tight like a noose around my neck, and I would listen to them talk because what else was there to do. And you can learn a lot from listening to people and I imagine Joe had a lot to say and talked to every customer about his life, his son who left home and joined the army and never returned and the wife who got sick and died and how hard it was to make a living cutting hair. And I wish I could ask him what was the strangest thing that ever happened to him with the customers that walked in and asked to get their hair cut. The odd exchanges, the boring ones, the sad, the funny. And did he ever give a bad hair cut and did a customer ever refuse to pay or walk out? I know I got some bad hair cuts when my mother took me to the barber to get crew cuts and the barber put me in the toy car and I cried when I was six because I hated my naked head and now at sixty not really caring about hair seeing how bald I am and trying not to care anymore because the scariest thing in the world is seeing yourself from behind the way someone else sees you as if you could be a stranger to yourself and step outside of who you are for a moment as if you could give yourself a hair cut which I do now anyway standing at the mirror with an electric buzz cutter and wonder who that old man is in the mirror who is always standing there in front of me and I try to push him out of the way.

Mark Hillringhouse

___________________________________________________

Petrarch Sonnet 188

S'una fede amorosa, un cor non finto

if I can keep my head while all around

lovers lunge at each other’s attributes

queue up for more Q8 chrysanthemums

& gift wrap inventive new vibrators

& if a face can launch a thousand ships

then why does she insist on sinking mine

not to mention her habit of snipping

through the strings of my acrobatic kite

if I were a carpenter I’d knock up

a wooden horse to park in your garden

& if I can’t have you I don’t want no

if I were a boy I’d do it again

I swear I wouldn’t be a better man

if you’re happy & you know it fuck off

Peter Hughes

___________________________________________________

Third Ear

after Stelarc

I’m an unborn mouse

curled on the side of your face

suckling on sound waves

Father pinned his ear

to my dress like a corsage

when my boyfriend called

strange listening fold

lift me: I drop from your cheek –

soft pink telephone

Sarah Jackson

___________________________________________________

The Stone Of Destiny

I. Conor

The Stone of Destiny,

y’ know? My granddad

smashed the portraits of

his enemy’s ancestors

& burned them in the ol’

Faerie Ring.

Blasphemy of a level you

cannot understand. We’ll go

to the Hill of Tara, you’ll see

yourself. You’re my first Jewess.

Okay to call you that?

A Jewess—

that’s what my granddad

called them, a man

who never met one,

was from a small town

& married his cousin.

In return,

you’ll cook me some

chicken soup, so.

II. Alisha

Unsurprisingly, it’s a rainy

night when I walk home on

Merrion Row, not knowing

Conor will never take me

to the Hill of Tara. As I pass

an old man, he sets his eyes

upon me & he warns,

Beware of the Jew!

Excuse me? I say.

The dew, he says,

Beware of the dew.

Alisha Kaplan

___________________________________________________

MAGNIFY, O MY SOUL

I am part of the governing body which consults with the professional regulator on the closure of your advisory panel, but in its official role your advisory panel counsels my governing body on the burgeoning malpractice of the professional regulator and I haven’t slept in forty days. There is something I have done which I feel guilty about, completely unrelated and in a different time-zone; the recollection bounces from conscience to storage with a dull report. My self-disgust in an ember.

I am part of the Krispy Kreme doughnut which accompanies the strong black coffee on your closed laptop, but in your eagerness to counter her claims of malpractice you spring open your laptop like a jack in the box and Jennifer is too scalded to accept your apology and a tiny cliff-face-shaped fragment of white chocolate falls down your suit, bouncing twice against your leg and landing in your oversized shoe, reduced almost immediately to a liquid. Here he comes with his dull report. The health inspector doesn’t remember.

I am Zart of the Intergalactic Munitions Association and we regret to inform you that your Star Glider X3-20 has been towed by an inter-planetary advisory committee to counsel the League of Species on the rampant corruption in communications between the reporting structures established under 7.2 (b). But you cannot support your family without it and our new policy cannot locate your savings account. Your life is a wing-nut fumbled by a distracted mechanic suspended above a strip-mined cavern, currently bouncing from girder to rock, and escaping into genre fiction offers little-to-no comfort. Your first instalment is due in December.

I am a barely a fart in a windsock to the west of an abandoned runway. I am playing back the notes I made on my Dictaphone: self-deprecation … dyspepsia … easy enemies … despair. I mean saxophone. Something has been lost in transubstantiation, or an erratum slip flying from the pages of the completist’s terrible joke book, I mean who cares? Jargon, syrup and fly. I’m sorry I’m like this.

I am Stuart, vocalist for a post-punk band called Trip Hazard. This is a name we thought would be funny, we explain to the tech support as he gaffer tapes the mic lead to the dusty floor. I hate oppositional art because I have too much empathy. In a horror film I am the victim, in a game of chess I am the piece which rolls off the stone table and gets picked up by an off-the-leash jack russell. Therefore in oppositional art I am that which is opposed. But, says the drummer, have you considered that oppositional art such as the punk movement was and is actually opposing the bullies in the equation you posit? But punks used to spit in old lady’s faces, I tell him. In this equation I will always be an old lady’s face.

My date has lost her wallet, her phone and her keys and is still bravely trying to enjoy the evening. This is pretty funny because the slogan on my t-shirt is YOU’VE LOST YOUR WALLET, YOUR PHONE AND YOUR KEYS! – the title of Trip Hazard’s post-reunion album. How sweet to escape from the duties and responsibilities of work, domestic maintenance and family via a costly and distracting legal battle. The established pattern has fallen apart and only the typos were deliberate and/or I only respect monks and they don’t want it. Preferred it when I thought it was that. The jack-lead was accidentally plugged into your speech-centre, now I can remember, now I can remember. May you never lose you timbre.

Luke Kennard

___________________________________________________

Becoming double sonnet

The Jealousy Box says, “I am jealous of humans with both

Dicks and twots.” I say, I am jealous of humans

With neither dicks nor twots. I am jealous

Of ghosts, shadows, clouds. There is a without me

Within me. It is immaterial (Buddhist joke).

Sonny Berman was a hell of a trumpet player.

Just listen to “Woodchopper’s Holiday.”

Neither dicks nor jokes. Hey, I’m just a dude, devalued.

I am jealous of this and that and them and those, ghosts,

Shadows, clouds. Now it is Les Brown & His Band of Renown,

“I Got the Sun in the Morning,” vocal by Doris Day.

It gives me the Milky Way. I am jealous of the Milky Way, and

The Multiwavelength Milky Way, Sampsonia Way, and Niobe Way.

Who has been studying the social and emotional development of

Girls and boys for over two decades, hashtag dicks and twots.

And I remember John Davies and Brian Way, English professors,

Blind as bats, so drunk at the Royal St David’s hotel in Harlech,

Planning the scholarly article competition they would manufacture

Between themselves regarding Moby Dick, published in

The Critical Quarterly, just for the hell of it.

And I remember Channing Way in Berkeley where Andrea and I

Lived for four months in 1974 at the Rapa Nui apartment building,
Almost getting evicted for swimming naked in the pool at night,

Before we moved up to Jane Saunders’ house in Kensington, with

Tom Fogerty living next door and the miracle of cable TV in the bedroom.

Yes, sometimes there are miracles in the bedroom, but

No, not when I am around. When I am around there are reverse sexual

Epiphanies and Dadaist jokes…

Doug Lang

___________________________________________________

The Laffer Curve

On the back of a restaurant napkin he composed

the definitive exposition of the theory

that the economy is driven or decisively

restrained by the federal income tax rate,

and a lot of people went along with that, because
it was in their interest to do so but also because

he made the argument so casually and lent his apt name
to the diagram describing a direct ratio

between tax rates and the rate of unemployment.

That was an economist named Laffer, Arthur Laffer.

But I heard the news on the radio and in my mind

there was a curve that a mathematician had devised

to measure the success or failure of a comic endeavor

with highest honors awarded to practical jokes

that turn out to have a major influence on history

despite their intent to be just funny, a harmless
diversion, demonstrating that the last laugh,
whether bitter or hollow or even downright mirthless,

is always at the expense of the losers.

David Lehman

___________________________________________________

Magicians

We are walking through windows,

we are playing with air. We are

heating it up, but learning

to cool it all down. We are practicing wisdom

on a ten inch screen in a bolted room,

and sending a message to God

and his heavens: we can no longer believe.

We are herding millions of other magicians

into the schoolrooms to learn to be better.

And giving them tests, and carefully

making our judgments. We are passing by

the graveyard gardens, where every year more

stones appear. But we’re inscribing the morals:

A meaningful life, a life of adventure.

We are eating our ice creams, examining our bellies,

and wearing contraptions to hide all that flesh.

We are disappearing—but oh very slowly—until one day

we are hurtling through windows: Please

hold my hand, it is all I have left.

We are moments. Then we’re not.—Was that

blood on those pages? Never mind—we

are scattered.

Kathryn Levy

___________________________________________________

The Museum Of Drowning

It’s difficult keeping
your head above water,
harder to not use cliché.

I surface occasionally
from paperwork and marking
at the end of another year.

Orange rooms above
purple and blue water;
a pineapple island

with boats on the lake:
the first time for
several centuries.

Two inches of water
are enough to drown in
if you lie face down;

a hundred essays
can trigger anxiety
and problems breathing.

Rupert Loydell

___________________________________________________

Six Windows Of Waste

We meet

eye to eye

many years after

our ripe lives turned to tomato soup –

the colour of your finger nails,

the veins in my feet -

for what forensic evidence in our neurology

remains of then?

What can we recoup

from a sandbagged cerebral cortex,

save the twitch

from holding onto an opening too long?

And what of you?

All hair and heels

to hats and Kipling bags;

from skinny dips to varicose;

from seaside one-liners

to frowns ploughed deep?

I want to sleep.

We meet

for a meal

a lifetime later,

cold plaice and a cold potato.

I talk of my Mediterranean stomach,

you, your new tropical hips.

I long for chips.

My faecal smear is in the post.

You twist your head

And forty years evaporate

For a nano-second of testosterone

To just before Nan’s corset broke

Against a reversing milk float.

But hey, six little windows of waste are in the post.

Rupert Mallin

___________________________________________________

Assemblage, Moeity, Propinquity

A boy and a girl, both violet-eyed, insouciant, with incipient wings, sitting by a chimney.

The girl with violet eyes and incipient wings, in love with a beleaguered, brooding boy with carved-rock cheekbones.

The brooding boy with carved-rock cheekbones — lissome, sweet, summery — in love with a girl penumbral in color, mellow and super happy in a bungalow.

The mellow girl penumbral in color, in love with a bucolic boy who lithely jumped off a bus after a young gazelle and got hit with a tranq bullet.

The bucolic boy who, after recovering from getting hit with the tranq bullet, fell in love with a fetching ingenue — umbrella haircut, eyes chatoyant — who strode unhindered in opulence toward a perfect good.

The fetching ingenue who strode in opulence toward a perfect good because she was in reality moving in unison with a furtive, comely boy twerking it to the future between two moonlit lagoons.

The comely boy who, while twerking it to the future between the two lagoons, became inured to an imbroglio involving alien cyborgs in the offing and his life-long nemesis: a boy sporting a gossamer ‘fro of mysterious abilities and cheeks efflorescent with joy — his secret cynosure.

The boy whose cheeks are efflorescent with joy because he is beside his beloved girl-cousin Dalliance as she chooses, with forbearance, from a plethora of magical tools and talismans, one of which — The Shield of Desuetude — she must use to dissemble an evil, ineffable destiny.

The girl named Dalliance who experiences an epiphany and chooses correctly The Shield of Desuetude and so produces a boon for humanity, and then, as part of the panacea, asks a demure boy named Halcyon (his burlap-y dreadlocks wafting an evocative petrichor and swinging like rope around his shoulders), “What is the felicity of this harbinger Earth, this redolent green seraglio moored in the stars, and of the Moon which lilts the air like a sussurous evanescence, so soon to unravel, and with what stars has God imbued this night, and why?”

The demure boy with dreadlocks who trails a length of diaphanous petunias tucked into his underpants, at the end of which sits his pet fungal onion Susquehanna, in love with a tiny pony with a vestigial head hanging languorously from its neck, a head that is, in reality the woebegone ghost of some erstwhile Surrealist.

And the woebegone ghost of this erstwhile Surrealist, in a previous life one ingredient in a bitter elixir but in this one nothing more than a fugacious mote, the least scintilla of a long-lost palimpsest, but whose mote-love is the emollient ripple in the ether that suspires a wish in the heart of all things to bring the violet-eyed boy and a girl, insouciant, with incipient wings, to configure in miraculous imbrication by a chimney.

* * *

A note about the poem: I was recently accused of writing "ugly" poetry. This poem contains a selection of the "fifty most beautiful words in the English language" (according to, you know ... someone).

Sharon Mesmer

___________________________________________________

Snow Rescuers in Their Own Words

"It seems strange in the 21st century that we're still at this type of game."

– Red Cross volunteer, quoted by BBC NI news, March 2013

Belshaw came to the rescue of a couple who had been snowed in for five days.

‘The wind's blowing and it's burying lambs and ewes.

It's just putting the tin hat on it.’

It's just putting the tin hat on it. ‘We’ve also used helicopters.

Nothing works. It's hard to even walk in it.’

The weight of the snow.

‘The weight of the snow took the trees down

and the trees came down over the lines and that took the lines down.’

We put snow in buckets.

‘We put snow in buckets and let them lick it.’

Belshaw came to the rescue,

and McCullough opened the road to a dairy farm in Carnalbanagh.

Martin Mooney

___________________________________________________

Crooked Spire

Are you giving me the come on?

you, beckoning like that –

misplaced apostrophe

above the town –

and leaning,

leaning over everything:

the Smirnoff-Ice sky,

weather in slow motion,

trees like children’s drawings

of themselves

and all the girls I used to be

queuing at Riley’s

for the night ahead,

the snowflakes falling

through them.

Helen Mort

___________________________________________________

(Com)modify with Me

Tree house splinters seam heaven-and-hell

within in the infant

psyche, trebled by incessant

lack of rest.

One leg of the restitution

journey segues into

marginal relief, unless
“you, too, can perform like

Helen Bitters, the renown

acrobat who (y)earned

(st)ripe old (st)age

fright in her (c)lean

way living in tan

dem with one’s own

(s)mall mown freshness

again(st) the (g)rain of daylight.

Sheila E. Murphy

___________________________________________________

Ladybird

UP!

the loft, detritus

I used to be so small

as a boy I used to be

so like a boy

Ladybird Learnabout the world

technology was pre-science fiction

except the Doctor Reverend Dobbs

his simple electronics

flip-flop

flop-flip

M.E.S bulb holder, capacitor mounting

in worlds of science

we have the electronic organ

mountable on three pieces of wood

mountable on loft beams

hanging pendant fittings

amateur hour in the house Jack built

the house Jack re-wired

Ladybird, Ladybird

fly fast

your children Ladybird

they’re calling you

Martin Myers

___________________________________________________

The Pounding Rabbit

After a clock design by Neya Churyoku (1897-1987)

If you know the Japanese folk tale

about the rabbit that ended up

on the moon, you will not be puzzled

by a table clock depicting a rabbit

pounding rice cakes on the moon,

but if you do not know this story

you will look at the clock and pound

your own head in disbelief,

as if to knock from it the spirit

you wish to offer to the gods

who munch the rice cakes

and never turn to say thank you

except by sending down the genius

to create such a clock, such a rabbit.

Ron Padgett

___________________________________________________

Stay There So You Remember

Stay there so you remember

Blinded on the roof

Caught in the accretion

Stay calm and wild

And hot and blind

Haunting in your lover

Haunted on the roof

Stay there so you remember

The night we nearly came

A night caught in a bottle

All ether hazed protruding

Availing an existence

Of two relating dues

Where-when the lovers love

The claim is always two

It’s summer

Here again

The wind shakes

Up the path

It goes so

You’ll remember

The night we

Nearly came

It stays and

It remembers

It’s shaking up the path

And it is caught

And wild and

It stays warm

And blind

He says summer without Julia

I say summer without Mark

Two names approximate the other

Like in two mirrors of two sides

I say Mark and it is through my edge

Not with but through the mouth

I do not want to sleep

Until we are together Friday

It’s summer here again

In the summer without Julia

And in the summer without Mark

Julia Pello

___________________________________________________

Valentine

This morning I could taste blood
in my mouth. Toothpaste,
I thought, or the flavour
of the freshly risen.

But when I spat
my spit was valentine red,
landing on the ground like a surprise,
throwing me off guard.

I spat again
and once more the watery
warning sign slap-landed
on the pavement.

Of course I instantly thought of Keats,
coming home late that night with curdling lungs.
Then the image of bed-sheets
drenched in claret,

soaking in the kitchen sink.
I spat again and again,
and each time the spit
became more and more orange,

like the sunrise, I thought, strangely.
Though I could feel no sickness
in my body, I only just stilled
the butterflies, and it made me wonder

how young John Keats
must have felt,
first feeling the saliva rise
in his mouth,

raising a hand up to signal
pardon to a friend,
spitting love's colour
on to lush green blades.

Matthew Rice

___________________________________________________

Lounge Ghazal

I miss the excess of youth. So deep I used to drink of it—

Love till dawn, all night long, the double-cream stink of it.

The blues is just a skin too small for our flesh

But lately there are days when I’m past the brink of it.

Love also has its anthems and its flag:

The sepia and red and the pink of it.

More than the kick of liquor, more than the wiry taste,

I like the toast and the clink of it.

Did you do something so human you can’t even tell a friend?

Well, you can always tell your shrink of it.

Don’t get trapped in your past, Zack,

Not for a second, don’t you even think of it.

Zack Rogow

___________________________________________________

Creatures

There was a mottled snake which made its home under our kitchen sink. If it was venomous, I would have to kill it. Otherwise, we could keep it as a pet.

There was a woman upstairs with smoothest skin who lay naked in her bed at nights, but I wasn’t sure it was me she was waiting for.

Around the corner was a small store no one went to anymore. I felt I must go there soon. I would buy a bottle of wine and chat to the Indian owner the way I used to. But first I had to decide upon the snake and the woman.

Ian Seed

___________________________________________________

Something That Was Not Fragmented

I contemplate a part of
your beauty that is
like having a new key, or
like holding a snake that
has had its venom emasculated.

The battle with that serpent is
almost over, and the
joys of the fruit will soon
be settled.

You are the designer of
my limitations. You are the
root of my fervour, and
I am caught in your days.

I spent too much time on
the reckoning and not
enough on the shoreline—or
so it was mentioned to me.

You knew the sea would
cure me, though, but not
for how long.

Jeffrey Side

___________________________________________________

Iliad

Old age, Tolstoy wrote, is the biggest surprise
In a man's life. So true! Childhood hours
In the ancient car I now recall, the hot months,
Sox game on the radio, soporific Bob Elson
Mumbling in the microphone, "Um, strike one,"
And at bat Sherman Lollar, sloth-like catcher,

Elson droning, "Ball four. It's a base on balls,"

Henri Bergson called this perceived duration,
The sense of time as elastic phenomenon
Stretched or compressed by stoic's fortitude
Or child's impatience: "Are we there yet?"

And this is where the surprise comes in.

Yes, my good man, you have arrived there.

Yes, you are there all right, ya big dummy.

In fact, you've already been there for a while

Except "there" is not "where" or even "what"
You would have imagined. "There" is "here,"
Wherever you happen to be at the time.
As the snail everywhere bears its shell,

You and the destination are one now,
Not where you're going but what you are.

But we will grieve not, as Wordsworth wrote.

Or perhaps we will grieve. Shall we? No matter,
It doesn't really amount to a hill of beans.

That's just how the cookie crumbles,

That was the funeral of Hector.

Mitch Sisskind

___________________________________________________

Rendezvous

At the bus stop in front of the mall

but there might be too many people there

it's not a very good place to meet we might miss each other

but it's easy to find the 69 bus runs every 13 minutes

the first one being at 06.36 or 06.41 on Sundays

and the 10A is every 16 minutes the first one is 06.25

seven days a week but it goes the long way round.

Outside the library if it's not raining I'll be

holding The Consolation of Philosophy I've read it four times

now I'm on my fifth Boethius was in prison when he wrote it

in AD 524 mine is the Penguin edition it cost 30 yuan.

In Starbucks I'll try and get a couch

but it's not always possible if I don't get

a couch I'll be I don't know where I'll be how could I

know Starbucks now has more than 750 stores

in the People's Republic of China two years ago there

were none in this city now we have three.

The lobby of the White House Hotel you don't need to

be a guest to go inside a room there costs

from around 800 yuan and up but it's cheaper

if you book online there's a site I use all the time it's good

although I don't trust the hotel reviews unless

I write them myself which sometimes I have done.

Round the back of the Zhu Ying supermarket

where they stack used cardboard from boxes

stuff comes in nobody goes round there in the evening

it's dark the girls especially steer clear but it's too near the bins

I saw a family of rats there last time it was a family of five

one rat for each bin they were very well organized.

At the entrance to the cemetery a resting place for

at the last count 972 souls partaking of glory.

Martin Stannard

___________________________________________________

kiss

emu park, qld.

tonight, within this slab of sauna heat we

sprawl like flattened toads on grass as warm

as breath & eat. we feed each other wide-hipped

prawns from bowls hand-crafted by the children

of xi’an. our fingers taste of brine & lime, the syrup

cloy of over-ripe mangoes. we hungrily kiss,

devour our feast & then each other’s burning

skin. the beer we drink will cool our lips. we have

grown adept in silences, in naming constellations,

have learnt humility from the weight of their light. we

have conjured sunrise in far-off darkness; launched

prayers into this dome of sky & sung; each fragile note

or lyric swarm like billiard balls they kiss the glow of the

southern cross, careful trajectories guiding them home.

Paul Summers

___________________________________________________

Targets and systems, for morality

Where is the breeding end of all this talk,
by a flickering, long dead monitor,
crammed with insane systems, to plan and splurge
tainted glories onto a savage class,
which grasps and sleeps and stuffs and is not me.

People become targets, assigned at night,
when the emails arrive unasked between
two waves, flint water hard as failure.

Always he is punctual. The sound
of his shoes, his showergel aroma.
All the world to his child. Held,
towel-warm and safe, under his chin.

At work, one man crying, to another -
shameful such decline. Blame is important,
I spent a year in Moscow, the basements
of pain, ledgers with targets for slave camps.

Alice Threadlee Brown, wrapped in her deadsheets,
can garner evidence for damnation -
she tiptoes into rooms as the air leaves,
her accurate judgements based on nonsense.

When I questioned the socialist zeal
for measurement, I was canned with corn beef,
reminded of centuries of turnips,
matchgirls leaving their jaws at the altar.

Often when I drive through these endless towns
I hear a lonely family pray and sing,
bird voices raised above the roar,
just half understood, tears in the dawn;
as I slept I had cried about something
but forgot it all when I awoke.

Though much is stolen, bits of it are left.
But the place is unrecognizable -
still and whatever, it is what it is:
wrecked by targets and sadistic systems,
the pure intellect abides in its cave,
to think and know and see and hope to write.

Paul Sutton, 3rd July 2013

___________________________________________________

images become aspects of the real

which burns the streets treats of itself white hot in love

lined avenues beating red eyes downcast cigarette butts

cluttering drains the head of purpose

explains the system

works by pressing levers into sockets till they hurt

no-one except bare-back riders of bad news

or when it stops

music wrung out

for every split second changing course

you are weeping which seems irrelevant but

sentiment’s stuck at the heart of it

(all the fun of the fair)

and like you say stumps bleeding off the wheel

relax who knows how fast we’re moving really

Nathan Thompson

___________________________________________________

The Indian mystic

Once in a dream an Indian swamiji

came to the bad daughter, arms outstretched.

In actual fact the swamiji was dead

he’d had a heart attack

three weeks before she arrived at the ashram,

she couldn’t help but think

his death had something to do with her,

the way her mere presence in the family home

would cause her father’s horses

to come fourth or fall at the final hurdle.

In the dream the Indian mystic

wore an orange robe and smelled

the way Sundays should smell,

without the looming dread of Monday morning,

like I say he approached with arms outstretched

while she took hesitant steps towards him

wondering what she’d have to give up

this time but when he folded his arms around her

she lost nothing, nothing was sucked from her,

it was all give on the part of the swamiji

and the bad daughter let out such a breath of relief

she was afraid she’d blow him clean away.

But he held fast, not in a clingy or desperate way,

no, he held on and he kept giving, it was a miracle,

it was as if she actually deserved all this love,

and she drank it all in although she kept glancing

over her shoulder, waiting for the catch,

waiting for the waiter to sidle up to her table

and hand her the bill she’d never be able to pay.

Lorna Thorpe

___________________________________________________

Colloquium

you thought that the

argument could have got

out the pattern edged

through the gut punched

on both fronts wanting

reconciliation at the price

of supplication took its

toll to bespoke overtures

and retrievals troubled

inequities across a costed

bound to flip a tense

bird macho man

thought to bury thought

to contest whilst dis-

avowing ego ignominy

attention unfolded full

mediocrity in the median

mode is not a judgement

that manipulated your

ambitions the exact

opposite of what you de-

clare to tamp turned

out and over ashes of

survival in a crumb of

burned out porcelain

simple sonnet something

beyond the pale could

not advance your artificial

objectives to have your

art and eat it out

Scott Thurston

___________________________________________________

Eel

“Can’t / you believe she’s your sister?”

“The Eel,” Eugenio Montale, trans. David Young

A belt from the sea,

pure long appetite.

Its kind clusters in pits,

darkened glass,

scale-less,

all snout

but filled with riches:

Cleopatra unrolled from a rug

or lowered in a stocking.

Or this one is

slippery as galoshes,

slub skinned, slick affidavit-bearing

absolute lawyer of pliability,

a lawyer’s lawyer’s lawyer,

a slippery bait,

a river shriven and twisted,

and recently more likely found in ditches--

a tongue on its own

that does not

respond to us

with sympathy

never will be

my sister.

Lee Upton

___________________________________________________

Free Ache

fools pull

incomparable

pure hearts from bridesmaids’

warm breasts

trying to break relations

and weak and magnificent

bleak adventurers ramble

demonically

owners of hearts remember

the indifference of

jeering doves

who bring peace

plain echoes

harshly shatter silence

and the rain hides chasms

in every verse

and stamps on love letters

austere and deafly red

the earth grows

while singing trees

in clear profane dreams

meekly embrace swaggering vipers

sobbing

defiant the hostage’s soul rises

in a free ache

Daniela Voicu

___________________________________________________

American Coffee

Dare I open my mouth to sing

wake to the sound of taxi cabs

something about weather about

the smell of jazz art and and

you’re looking pretty tasty tonight

like bagels and lox hold the mayo

always what’s not said opportunity

no not that it’s like everywhere

goes out the window you’re sharp

in those jeans as the Empire State

holy as new penny your smile

may be a dream of New York

knock me down with a one day

I’ll be amased feather in Manhatten

and probably not appropriate like you

Times Square shines in the movies

I’m always criminally shy Harlem

jitterbugs head all musical affect

you’re probably not interested but

Batman climbs the side of a building

I’m really not that kind of guy

in the rain this will be swept away

but I can’t help notice and avert

(when the storm comes I wake up)

my eyes from your chest which is

let’s face it lovely I’ve never been

to New York something appropriate

American coffee hot dogs stands

Steven Waling

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Clay Feet

Yesterday, when I was walking

as exiled humans do, in clay feet,

outside the garden of the knowledge

of good and evil in the cool of the evening,

God slipped into a pair of clay feet too.

We walked foot to foot for some time

and being that close, I noticed that

God is:

More earth than air.

More of here than of there.

And all of now.

Bounding in and out of ifs.

Abiding boundless

inside is.

Transcendent most

in immanence hiding

in nooks of creation.

He’s as much of a she as a he

and She is also we, and God

forgive me, also me.

Creeds cannot catch Him

Nor churches house Him.

He keeps no throne in Rome.

He has no test for us to pass.

No will for us to bow to.

He burns no hell.

He yawns when He hears “O God” intoned

by preachers over the pews, but He

cups His ear when

someone alone in the pews whispers

“O God, help me

make it through the night.”

Listen then and you may hear His hum of

Nothing to do but

be, dear.

Nowhere to go but

here, dear.

Michael Whelan

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Corset-Maker

What do you want girl

between your breasts

and jutting hips – a ravine, a cutting,

or a valley’s slopes?

Soft stays that work like muscle

or a harness made of steel, bone?

Jackie Wills

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Drunkonomics

The oceans drink the rivers.

The smoke replaces the sky.

Then the gospels tell of the origin

of the birds and how the birds flew

too close to the cockpits and how

the planes then crashed. And that

is how man came to know about

the split between nature and artifice.

The dietary laws are strict up here.

They call for men to dress in gigantic

black overcoats when they are killing

something to eat. Everyone lives

in a settlement where the beautiful

maidens are kept out of sight.

Whenever there is violence, the precepts

recommend that you riff on your horn.

Down below, there are tinkers

hiding in the forest. There are runaways

cooking dope in the alleyways. It’s cool.

It’s very fucking cool, yo. The banks

are open for business, burning your

credit rating in a rusty oil drum. You could

fry a chicken over that hot flame.

Terence Winch

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On Death Condoms

after Jean Genet

You would look divine in a cape on a divan.

(Just maybe drool or purr or coo anon.)

We’re songs on a gorge on a samsara veranda.

Oh no. You can see where this is going.

A baby a professional a gulag Cassandra.

Souvenirs can claim oh no & pathos & veni vidi vici.

Let’s now soothe lemurs—or let lemurs soothe Lionel Richie.

The point shaking up the front the up shaking point the.

Hello—is it me, the man too bizarre in the sun

or him looking four-eyed from my tourist binoculars?

Save these eyes, unruly piggies.

A musk escapes with you.

Cold watering holes vs. solar holes,

Mouth vs. anus, gauche vamp of ages.

Brrrrrrrrrrrr, Heads of Unctuous Gauze,

said a post-it put on every big bank casket.

Any dropped visage claims l’aissez-passer

any leap a lop-eared earthquake.

Ugh the frisson of the crude mother without clothes

of taboo scents in the mall, pantyhose a tone of baggage.

What a grand plunge she has sung—

what muff, what loofah, what flotilla

A person can kiss anywhere any time of the day.

A song can pass the evening in a balloon.

Yo, matador. Yo, Pluto. For real please stop this. Ok.

The dreams of Monopoly cannot keep looking

& claiming love anymore. Much more real: a moose

convincing leaves of his majestic knife pontoon.

Elisabeth Workman

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In The Cloak Room

Except to hang up our coats in the morning

or to retrieve them when school was over,

the only time we went into the cloak room

during Sister Maria Rita’s sixth grade

was by her express permission. “Cloak room”

even back then was a strange phrase, since

none of us wore cloaks, and because the “room”

wasn’t really a room at all, but a huge closet

filled with hooks and darkness. Perhaps

there was a ceiling fixture there, but I

never remember seeing light. One day

I raised my hand and asked to get something

that I had left in my jacket, or maybe

it was simply an excuse to remove myself

for a couple of minutes from the tirades

of the nun who was nicknamed “Monkey.”

Her sallow skin was horribly shriveled, and she

jerked her body about as if strings were pulled

that made her move. There I was in the cloak room

when some kind of freaky feeling seized me,

and I, always the Good Boy, found myself

standing in the dark among the coats and jackets

that hung like so many disembodied children,

all slightly hunchbacked. I clawed the air,

making my most horrible monster face,

my gestures timed to parody the shrieking of the nun.

I must have thought that if I could make physical

the ripped-up feeling inside me, the feeling

of being shredded by the hatchet of her voice,

I might wipe it out—the screech like the sound

chalk sometimes made on the blackboard.

Sister’s other nickname was Captain Tiptoes:

up she’d go on the balls of her feet, unheard

by her next victim, only to slam him unawares

into the top of a desk or the side of a wall,

or to smack him with her pointer. And now,

as I clawed and gnashed at the black cloak room air,

I turned to see Monkey heading for me, her spectacles

catching glints of light as she moved in to grab me.

I don’t know what she thought I was doing. I

didn’t know what I thought I was doing. I don’t

even remember what she did—maybe she shook me

to bring me to my senses. But the thought

crosses my mind that maybe, at that moment,

I was beginning to come to my senses, to protest

in my crazy way the daily insanity that all of us

were made to live with—the rule of fear

and physical punishment that hovered

like the statue

of the crucified Christ

in every room of the school,

as if from his own cosmic hook

on the classroom walls.

Bill Zavatsky

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Inexorable

The tide goes out

Revealing mud

And amorphous shapes

Half-covered in mud.

A gull swings by

With a shell in its mouth—

Clam or mussel—

Then drops it from on high.

It splats

and doesn't break.

The gull picks it up

and drops it again.

And again.

Indefatigable.

The fine line between stubbornness

And stupidity.

Little air bubbles

Signs of life

At your feet.

Your ankles, actually.

Larry Zirlin

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