Poet Dilemma

 Do I want seconds

I want to write a great poem

                Here just falling asleep

Thinking of animal names    inventing

        A new way to do adjectives

    Sustain the regard, all corrupted parts

Of the diction

 

    Can I enlist you?

What's true for the snail

        Is splendor

 

 

 

 

                                            Bananas        crescent moons

        there is rain and a virus outside            they are falling

in a strange occasion the morning will be

            "all mine"

 

 

 

 

    Golden hills against the greyish truth       cemetery appearing in

the old romances        proximal, notational        sketchy

 

    A teenager on main street, it can't be

simply impressions        yet impressive how the stars

                                                                        arranged

 

    Turmoils    the turgid passages

        Luscious rash

 

                            I have learned to say

from a long list of murders        such ecstatic personal austerities

            this great ensample

presumption and arrogant visions

                                                    make up Art's heart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you think words are made of poems

I mean poems are made of words

As we're taught

 

I know plenty of words

Though I come from the provinces

Where the earth is filled with violence

 

Agentic, essential

To what a human calls the world

In high sun

 

 A dark corner

Odd fog

In vital personality

 

Standing at the fair

I know dismay has some relation to lyric

Through repetition

 

And measure

Is a breathing castle

Stacking lines together

 

Science won't destroy our enigma

But does something to the glare

The peaks of these

 

Nodding grasses

Remind me of paradise

Where sentiment is hard and clear

 

 

- Hannah Brooks-Motl 

October

 

1.

 

Is it winter again, is it cold again,

didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,

didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

 

didn’t the night end,

didn’t the melting ice

flood the narrow gutters

 

wasn’t my body

rescued, wasn’t it safe

 

didn’t the scar form, invisible

above the injury

 

terror and cold,

didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden

harrowed and planted—

 

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,

in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,

didn’t vines climb the south wall

 

I can’t hear your voice

for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

 

I no longer care

what sound it makes

 

when I was silenced, when did it first seem

pointless to describe that sound

 

what it sounds like can’t change what it is—

 

didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth

safe when it was planted

 

didn’t we plant the seeds,

weren’t we necessary to the earth,

 

the vines, were they harvested?

 

2.

 

Summer after summer has ended,

balm after violence:

it does me no good

to be good to me now;

violence has changed me.

 

Daybreak. The low hills shine

ochre and fire, even the fields shine.

I know what I see; sun that could be

the August sun, returning

everything that was taken away—

 

You hear this voice? This is my mind’s voice;

you can’t touch my body now.

It has changed once, it has hardened,

don’t ask it to respond again.

 

A day like a day in summer.

Exceptionally still. The long shadows of the maples

nearly mauve on the gravel paths.

And in the evening, warmth. Night like a night in summer.

 

It does me no good; violence has changed me.

My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;

now there is only my mind, cautious and wary,

with the sense it is being tested.

 

Once more, the sun rises as it rose in summer;

bounty, balm after violence.

Balm after the leaves have changed, after the fields

have been harvested and turned.

 

Tell me this is the future,

I won’t believe you.

Tell me I’m living,

I won’t believe you.

 

3.

 

Snow had fallen. I remember

music from an open window.

 

Come to me, said the world.

This is not to say

it spoke in exact sentences

but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

 

Sunrise. A film of moisture

on each living thing. Pools of cold light

formed in the gutters.

 

I stood

at the doorway,

ridiculous as it now seems.

 

What others found in art,

I found in nature. What others found

in human love, I found in nature.

Very simple. But there was no voice there.

 

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt,

bits of green were showing.

 

Come to me, said the world. I was standing

in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—

I can finally say

long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty

the healer, the teacher—

 

death cannot harm me

more than you have harmed me,

my beloved life.

 

4.

 

The light has changed;

middle C is tuned darker now.

And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.

 

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.

The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

 

The songs have changed; the unspeakable

has entered them.

 

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says

I am reborn.

 

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.

This is the present, an allegory of waste.

 

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate:

the ideal burns in you like a fever.

Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

 

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.

They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.

They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

 

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly

in anticipation of silence.

The ear gets used to them.

They eye gets used to disappearances.

 

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

 

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;

it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

 

How privileged you are, to be passionately

clinging to what you love;

the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

 

Maestoso, doloroso:

 

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.

Surely it is a privilege to approach the end

still believing in something.

 

5.

 

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.

It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.

Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.

 

I am

at work, though I am silent.

 

The bland

 

misery of the world

bounds us on either side, an alley

 

lined with trees; we are

 

companions here, not speaking,

each with his own thoughts;

 

behind the trees, iron

gates of the private houses,

the shuttered rooms

 

somehow deserted, abandoned,

 

as though it were the artist’s

duty to create

hope, but out of what? what?

 

the word itself

false, a device to refute

perception—At the intersection,

 

ornamental lights of the season.

 

I was young here. Riding

the subway with my small book

as though to defend myself against

 

the same world:

 

you are not alone,

the poem said,

in the dark tunnel.

 

6.

 

The brightness of the day becomes

the brightness of the night;

the fire becomes the mirror.

 

My friend the earth is bitter; I think

sunlight has failed her.

Bitter or weary, it is hard to say.

 

Between herself and the sun,

something has ended.

She wants, now, to be left alone;

I think we must give up

turning to her for affirmation.

 

Above the fields,

above the roofs of the village houses,

the brilliance that made all life possible

becomes the cold stars.

 

Lie still and watch:

they give nothing but ask nothing.

 

From within the earth’s

bitter disgrace, coldness and barrenness

 

my friend the moon rises:

she is beautiful tonight, but when is she not beautiful?

 

 

--Louise Gluck

The Wild Iris

 

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

 

Hear my out: that which you call death

I remember.

 

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing. The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

 

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

 

Then it was over: that which you fear, being

a soul and unable

to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth

bending a little. And what I took to be

birds darting in low shrubs.

 

You who do not remember

passage from the other world

I tell you I could speak again: whatever

returns from oblivion returns

to find a voice:

 

from the center of my life came

a great fountain, deep blue

shadows on azure seawater.

 

- Louise Glück

Hymn to Iris

 

quick moving goddess of the rainbow

you whose being is only an afterglow of a passing-through

put your hands

put your heaven-taken shape down

on the ground. now. anywhere

like a bent down bough of nothing

a bridge built out of the linked cells of thin air

and let there be instantly in its underlight -

at street corners, on swings, out of car windows -

a three-moment blessing for all bridges

may impossible rifts be often delicately crossed

by bridges of two thrown ropes or one dropped plank

may the unfixed forms of water be warily leaned over

on flexible high bridges, huge iron sketches of the mathematics of strain

and bridges of see-through stone, the living-space of drips and echoes

may two fields be bridged by a stile

and two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance

and may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,

like in the wind the trace of a web, tethered to nothing

 

- Alice Oswald

from Sixty Stories

 Attitude Toward His Work

"Sometimes I can't seem to do anything. The work is there, piled up, it seems to me an insurmountable obstacle, really out of reach. I sit and look at it, wondering where to begin, how to take hold of it. Perhaps I pick up a piece of paper, try to read it but my mind is elsewhere, I am thinking of something else, I can't seem to get the gist of it, it seems meaningless, devoid of interest, not having to do with human affairs, drained of life. Then, in an hour, or even a moment, everything changes suddenly: I realize I only have to do it, hurl myself into the midst of it, proceed mechanically, the first thing and then the second thing, that it is simply a matter of moving from one step to the next, plowing through it. I become interested, I become excited, I work very fast, things fall into place, I am exhilarated, amazed that these things could ever have seemed dead to me."

- Donald Barthelme

from Conversations With Friends

     The next day I started to write a story. It was a Thursday, I didn't have class until three, and I was sitting up in bed with a cup of black coffee on my bedside cabinet. I didn't plan to write a story, I just noticed after some time that I wasn't hitting the return key and that the lines were forming full sentences and attaching to each other like prose. When I stopped, I had written over three thousand words. It was past three o'clock and I hadn't eaten. I lifted my hands from the keyboard and in the light from the window they looked emaciated. When I did get out of bed, a wave of dizziness came over me, breaking everything into a shower of visual noise. I made myself four slices of toast and ate them without butter. I saved the file as "b." It was the first story I ever wrote.

- Sally Rooney

I'll Say It Again

 

Shame gets out of bed for

no one in particular and there's 

nothing wrong with that. We say things

until we don't want to anymore.

That is called broken, it's

called desire. If the room

were another half itself more, if

the trees were quieter when they

grouped together talking and if a city

was in my house and you were in that

city. Well anything just about ends

when we fall down at night. Having

moved toward victory, I was ready to

lie on the floor until it was all over.

Waiting the forest out, we spoke

I think you kissed my arm. Darkness

finds a meticulous hole and falls asleep

inside; my mouth has little corners.

See, return is just another word for

shame--no, virtue, molecule? Blight.

The ghosted things we used to do as

beggars for the waves still make good

stories but stories come with graph paper,

graph paper with song. I could show you

something but I don't want to, I have to

keep my coat on, I have to

take us home. The pin light at

the end of my mind flashes off

like it just had to. Color as your new

best friend, I asked you what you're 

still doing here, you said you wanted fire.

- Amanda Nadelberg

Prophecy Spots

 

Deer appear at the edges.

Our dog is burning, so you cut off

her legs.

She dances madly in the field

while I am alone with her murderer. I nod

and nod. The ice complains all night.

You say everyone is apart

from at least one child. One that we were

or one that we want. And the day

gives in and gives in.

Falling twin stars open their hands,

stumble into some building.

Perhaps, Night, 

you didn't need them anymore?

Or let me put it this way:

the moon awakens with empty hands,

her legs rattle.

- Sarah Vap

We're Standing on the Sun

 

you say when I break the aloe leaf
and smear its sweet, clear gel over your body.

On the nude beach, you get hard

and stretch skyward like an unfurling touch-me-not.

You dive into froth, nearly impenetrable,

maybe the shadows

of a few darting fish. I mirror you above,

twin planets, untouched and indivisible,

borne along by our bodies toward a farther shore.

- Derrick Austin

INVERSE HEAVEN DIVISION TWO

 

The family was uncertain--wind with sand,

within the staid breath, shuddering

a flame flares then falls like a shield before a cup of spirits.

A complex comes up to a desert; a fine c.

Add water from an amphora.

Someone summoned as by ship. Division Two

up for the ashes. The ashes had their time

by the flame. I cannot speak of pure carbon

only what is bound here to be burned again. A cup

of spirits convinces one to sell their dearest treasure

for sight then for gold then for wine then for more time.

What fox, this soul thief, shifting fur

and see the dough creep. 

Guile in a hard landscape.

What family remains composed the jar,

a Lot. A cock with hens. A Lot.

If the father is uncertain,

possibly cuckoo, do you

blame the daughter who turned into water

to summon a ship?

Separation: takes these creatures from their storage,

takes these girls from being creatures.

There is no one who can say, you are mine.

For me you were made.

He turns into a millstone who says that is so.

He loses his treasure, his anchor and his soul.

- Ish Klein

AMPLIFIER TO DEFENDER

 Just back from running--it seems I am always writing you
when I'm just back from running, but that's what happens:
My mind in motion works better in motion, or maybe it only works
more furiously. Or happily, clearly, seriously. My plan is to make a few notes

on who we are/what we might be. What it's like

to pay a particular kind of attention, have faith, get reckless. To unravel

in our pockets and in sadness, fall or drift or tear apart. Last night

I cut my finger on an artichoke. I reached into the refrigerator,

and it was thorny and sharp. Today it hurts. That's not a diversion,

but a reminder to stay focused. Now looking up at the clouds

from my porch, I am thinking how nice it is to be entangled in all the ways

we are: what we think, who we love, and the grand scheme of things.

There's always a grand scheme of things even if we can't articulate it.

I think one can see it in the fact that anything exists at all. Cities

and locusts. Speed metal and snow. But if one doesn't,

that's okay, too. I'm not really invested in providing some fleeting thesis.

My assumption is only that we all have assumptions

and these have a great deal to do with our perceptions. The world

as I find it is similar to and different from the world as you find it,

so it becomes necessary for both of us to find the common ground,

the plateaus and sore-spots where our hearts and our language

and our dreams overlap in a bridge that we can walk together.

As Lyn Hejinian notes, language, unlike other artistic materials,

doesn't only exist "in multitudes of contexts, it is multitudes of contexts,"

and given that there are multitudes of languages, you can see

how reality doth spiral out of control. Depending on your perspective

I suppose this could be thrilling or terrifying or both. One can't be

out-of-control-in-control--that is, both reckless and careful all at once--

and yet, in a significant way with words we always are. We employ

and deploy language simultaneously--it is, by its very nature, both

a thing that we use to mean other things and a thing that means out beyond us

in spite of our best efforts to keep the portrait in focus, e.g. "I cut my finger

on an artichoke. I reached into the refrigerator and it was

thorny and sharp." The artichoke or the refrigerator? Both.

And I love that. I don't want to fix the ambiguity. I want meaning

to radiate. I want to make sense, but I also want sense to be made of me

(both by myself and other people) and regardless. As Matthew Rohrer put it,

"I must learn to say the things I never intended to say," and then

I want to add: I also want to learn to say all the things I intended to say--

intended and unintended in the very same breath. This seems to me a power,

inherent in language itself, to make and re-make, to vision and re-vision,

to act and re-act to the world as it throbs, or culture as thesis-antithesis-

synthesis, fear and some trembling necessary and full. Barbaric yawps!

Walking home drunk the other night, I said a bunch of weird, good things

and you did, too and while it's hard to remember exactly what,

the shadows of what and the feelings still linger--even now,

even sober--we were so fired up, because

the night was so ridiculously in flower, so and so and me and you

electrified and shocking, terrific and true, and we were laughing together,

leaving our strung-out presences like presents around the city,

me an amplifier and you a defender. One thing I definitely remember

is talking earlier--earlier when?--earlier ever

about how you convince everyone that you're talking directly to them,

and I convince everyone I'm dangerous with speed--it's true

I like being worn out, even when I read, and sometimes, too, overwhelmed

and even panicked (though mostly after the fact). When experience kicks me

and everything turns black, or polka-dot, or mechanical bull, or post-avant,

my teeth in the trees my blood on the windshield, it's just an indication

that I need to act decisively--to do something for myself with myself

and keep living. It's the best I can do for the people who'd miss me,

but more importantly for the ones who I would miss terribly. Life is overwhelming

for good and for ill. But what isn't overwhelming? Beauty is overwhelming.

Data is overwhelming. Text and the devil and the heavens overwhelming...

How to live and what to do? To make sense all the time (or maybe ever)

in this life/of this life is a sham. Nothing is perfectly nailed to the wall.

I want as much as possible for the carnival of what is. Better worn out

and wary, than a mannequin pretending. "The slightest loss of attention

leads to death," said Frank O'Hara. I say: Be prepared for the darkness

when it takes you, but stay alive and stay light

for as long as you can.

- Matt Hart

from A Small Place

    In a small place, people cultivate small events. The small event is isolated, blown up, turned over and over, and then absorbed into the everyday, so that at any moment it can and will roll off the inhabitants of the small place's tongues. For the people in a small place, every event is a domestic event; the people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture, they cannot see that they might be part of a chain of something, anything. The people in a small place see the event in the distance heading directly towards them and they say, "I see the thing and it is heading towards me." The people in a small place then experience the event as if it were sitting on top of their heads, their shoulders, and it weighs them down, this enormous burden that is the event, so that they cannot breathe properly and they say, "This thing that was only coming towards me is now on top of me," and they live like that, until eventually they absorb the event and it becomes a part of them, a part of who and what they really are, and they are complete in that way until another event comes along and the process begins again.

    The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account, of themselves. The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete account of events (small though they may be). This cannot be held against them; an exact account, a complete account, of anything, anywhere, is not possible. (The hour in the day, the day of the year some ships set sail is a small, small detail in any picture, any story; but the picture itself, the story itself depend on things that can never, ever be pinned down.) The people in a small place can have no interest in the exact, or in completeness, for that would demand a careful weighing, careful consideration, careful judging, careful questioning. It would demand the invention of a silence, inside of which these things could be done. It would demand a reconsideration, an adjustment, in the way they understand the existence of Time.  To the people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist. An event that occurred one hundred years ago might be as vivid to them as if it were happening at this very moment. And then, an event that is occurring at this very moment might pass before them with such dimness that it is as if it had happened one hundred years ago. No action in the present is an action planned with a view of its effect on the future. When the future, bearing its own events, arrives, its ancestry is then traced in a trancelike retrospect, at the end of which, their mouths and eyes wide with their astonishment, the people in a small place reveal themselves to be like children being shown the secrets of a magic trick. 

- Jamaica Kincaid

4 a.m. Bombardment

 

My body runs in Arlemovsk Street, my clothes in a pillowcase:

I look for a man who looks

exactly like me, to give him my Sonya, my name, my shirt--

It has begun: neighbors climb the trolleys

at the fish market, breaking all

their moments in half. Trolleys burst like intestines in the sun--

Pavel shouts, I am so fucking beautiful I cannot stand it!

Two boys still holding tomato sandwiches 

hop in the trolley's light, soldiers aim at their faces. Their ears.

I can't find my wife, where is my pregnant wife?

I, a body, adult male, awaits to

explode like a hand grenade.

It has begun: I see the blue canary of my country

pick breadcrumbs from each citizen's eyes--

pick breadcrumbs from my neighbors' hair--

the snow leaves the earth and falls straight up as it should--

to have a country, so important--

to run into walls, into streetlights, into loved ones, as one should--

The blue canary of my country

runs into walls, into streetlights, into loved ones--

The blue canary of my country

watches their legs as they run and fall.

- Ilya Kaminsky

Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night

 

I've always liked the view from my mother-in-law's house at night,

Oil rigs off Long Beach

Like floating lanterns out in the smog-dark Pacific,

Stars in the eucalyptus,

Lights of airplanes arriving from Asia, and town lights

Littered like broken glass around the bay and back up the hill.

In summer, dance music is borne up

On the sea winds from the hotel's beach deck far below,

"Twist and Shout," or "Begin the Beguine."

It's nice to think that somewhere someone is having a good time,

And pleasant to picture them down there

Turned out, tipsy and flushed, in their white shorts and their turquoise shirts.

Later, I like to sit and look up

At the mythic history of Western civilization,

Pinpricked and clued through the zodiac.

I'd like to be able to name them, say what's what an dhow who got where,

Curry the physics of metamorphosis and its endgame,

But I've spent my life knowing nothing.

- Charles Wright

A Race

 

In the lap of the guest so fast,

in the burlap sack of heaping sugars

a crow tied to a fox.

The tusks of dusk snapped

in pepper and a flash of hay.

A hill rolled to the door and knelled, Here, on green knees!

Each mirrored in its spoons of moons, over a shoulder

what it sought:

Thoughts that bind when I run, said the fox,

with pearls for balls; that blind

when a familiar comes, wending from sides

for hitching and nurturing like a fast

friend, with only glows for eyes, like the wicks of crows.

Tendons couple

in a crimson stream and the popped collar moon hums

everything what a morning

will read aloud: too loud, too clear!

I'm on sour breath stilts, said the crow,

to read waters with fury.

Everything that means a happy pauper's emptying or being

driven in such a fashion

as the Great Pollution created by masters to bring

a more certain nature out of its beloved hiding

though it rises only in hairs and moves with friction for a crown

and stands to know so little of what is left

even as day clarifies these white crows the deaf

with dreaming stuff.

- Farnoosh Fathi

Snail

 

Tracks laid down with dawn,

Pace at one with the bride, the runs

Train as long as the aisles of the garden

(One, two, opal grip is milked;

Foot sells galavanter's silk)--

Only every other pause is a swing out black,

Black like rubber curls of the awaited telephone.

When it rains again, you don't answer.

In your modesty, there is a castle--the apex of which

Is the door to your youth. And though

It rains like a beggar at that door,

You've sealed the letter with your foot

For the door it has a slot--and still, your eyes

Bloom each penny trip into the sun

You smooth out. You move in slow ripples, a wave that

Left the sea and from the shore took

A heavy shell as echo and memento.

In circles you go, as if writing a poem

About the sun, or considering what you could

Become. "It was no one," you insist, then curl

To sleep like a fist. Then your eyes

Become microscopes for stars which seem each

A pin in understanding--gold, in a grenade--

- Farnoosh Fathi

Shadow of Doubt

 

Link the i to the n and get nothing.

Because I've left a path which knows you.

An indigenous form of blemish, a fatal lend.

Would a postcard in the shape of 2 kisses still get through?

Ice-storms in Spokane left not a tree standing.

Take off the good shoes, put on your boots.

Put your socks on. Take a shower. Comb your hair.

I'm writing to you from a far-off country.

I'm buying blueberries for breakfast, milk for tea.

A nuisance met a notion a begat a noun.

Will you be singing this evening to my green eyes?

Will the mist-mad birches tarnish and perish?

A good day to beat a heart out, to buy a hat.

A good day to fold blue blankets and forget.

- Karen Volkman

Pets

 

Since I have known the plains, I have seen revelation.

Not mine, my brother's revelation--

a solid beat behind the sky, something bloated with blue light

staggering against evening's velvet curtain.

More terrible because it is not mine, and better, because

legendary spots should remain legendary.

I hope mine never arrives. No one should tell me

that my isosceles dream of knifing the other woman

is less urgent than the molten gold of his love.

Gold and knives are no longer relevant. Nor is the ravished brother

or the chosen one who saw the rabid squirrel of my true self.

Though it is true  that a mad squirrel lives inside my trunk. 

I am a mouth without an ear, wasting glamorously away in a cage.

My chinchilla mate is gone, the one who listened

to the spot behind the sky. The chinchilla believed that the sky

was a thing like frosted glass. Perhaps he will return.

I'm sorry things degenerate. I have a room for thoughts depraved.

I can't turn anything away. It's a farm in here.

Everything that waiting breeds.

Acorns upon acorns of poisonous raptures

fill up and stopper the faults in the doorway.

As for the other room, it is a room so bright

I cannot enter. I can't give it a name.

- Feng Sun Chen 

more you never get to know

 

the most interior;

entered into

another person's hand,

too intimate--

black sheets of water

below a naked light

and the ammonia of the semen

unlearned by learning

someone else's sounds

and that's all.

warming and calming

and talk talk talk.

- Sarah Vap

Telemachus' Detachment

 

When I was a child looking

at my parents' lives, you know

what I thought? I thought

heartbreaking. Now I think

heartbreaking, but also

insane. Also 

very funny.

- Louise Glueck

Aloha Cum Yakuza

 

Faze the field that fellates their messiah

Phrase the frets that foment jambalaya

Force the fiends to leave off penetralia--

Having no form to feign to fuck, Arnaut,

Is swimming gainst the heels.

Do they find some math in it?

Some face, some fondling with tailgates

Gunning lordily? No wrought iron bed

Upsets the tum, nothing misleads the wrists:

Nothing fails in the proportion.

Fight for fags to fuck the sleek regalia

Flummox the fleet that fondles our Gaspara

Flout the furs that feed off la stile nuova

That there's no form to feign to fuck, Arnaut,

Is filching us for meals.

The bruised topoi are arranging

The furniture again. Lost in the shoals

Of a notion, she could no longer be called

Anytime Annie. Check it out,

An attestation of penetralia!

Flout the fakes that feed off marginalia

Fjord the few that figment automania

Feud with fevers fawning on aphasia--

To feign--not to fuck a form, Arnaut,

Is making shoddy deals.

Popularity is naught but mathematical

Persuasion, midst lashings

Bout the ankle--Aloha cum yakuza.

Metrists use the poet

To go about their math.

Is it a murmmurring of that hell

Causes me to sleep causes me to wake?

Ornamentalia: a burnout mummery,

A plume of somnambulist plastic,

Before, during, and after the tortures.

- Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Vast & Lonesomely

 

It comforts me to know the pharaohs yearned

to be young forever and arranged for boats

to carry them to the afterworld.

The only boat I have is the bed it takes me

too long to rise from, too long to return to.

The pomegranates in my house have softened,

the oranges go soft, the flowers

from Ilya darken and soften the water

that pulls through the pipes into

the clear vase of today,

a good day for sleeping,

a fascinating day.

- Catherine Barnett

The End of a Nation

 

---------------Marfa, Texas

30.3095 north

On July 2, 2018, my flight took me to Marfa, Texas--not my usual

migratory route. Nevertheless, during my brief stay, I was able to

meet swallows and sparrows, and I observed other exceptional

migratory wings from Mexico. Some small-winged children were

captured and separated from their parents and placed in

internment camps along the border of Texas, US and Mexico.

Who will translate their wings? Whenever my ears would let me,

I looked up at the night skies in order to track Planet Nine. Being

the compulsive translator that I am, I traced and traced the

planet's orbitary routes, its rotations of capture, torture, and

massacre. The universe is such a dizzying place that my ears were

spinning out of control. Planet Nine! Come in, Planet Nine!

The language of capture, torture, and massacre is difficult to

decipher. It's practically a foreign language. What a nightmare!

But as a foreigner myself, I am able to detect the slightest flicker

of palpitations and pain. Difficult syntax! It may show up as faint

dots and lines, but they're often blood, snow, and even dandruff.

How do I know? Foreigners know. Ahn-Kim calmly narrated as

she continued to circle and circle Planet Nine with her pen. Her

circles were extraordinary.

- Don Mee Choi

Among Spruce

 

Before glimpsing outlines of whorled branches,

you smell spruce needles, know gophers lie

in tunnels below ground and sense their tracks.

You can't measure the background tracks

of the big bang but believe in finding what

is needed when you must. A sea captain

brewed spruce beer during a voyage and rescued

his crew from scurvy; a famished hiker

consumed spruce needles and emerged out

of the forest. In the darkest minutes before dawn,

you won't ever live to experience pure silence

but were never a composer yearning

for that nirvana. Standing in the cusp of cold,

you hunger for a hummingbird darting from scarlet

penstemon to penstemon in midsummer

for a shearwater skimming over ocean waves;

now, in this dissolving darkness, you strike

a match and cup this second of warmth, this flame.

- Arthur Sze

Poem

 

Then I choose the bad part, regularly

misinterpret exchanged glances. Crawling

under the hedge home, I sit and wait

for the orange tint declaring the approach

of the avenging angel. I know peace.

You're below the overhang in the rain,

getting wet. A little herbal for me,

unaccustomed, Wax Monument, what can

a comforter protect us from? Then I tumble

down the elevator shaft, heroic, ungainly.

Then they look like three talons

from an enormous bird. Ignore it till it's

too late is not working out as I planned. 

I'm afraid to disappoint this stranger

in the wine store, why? Honestly. Twelve more

things depart while I'm in the secret room

above the office, looking for clues in the

nervous side of your elbow, little spit machine.

How does anyone else do it? I'll wake up

when we hit land, not sure yet if I've felt

employable. You better look out for love.

- Laura Henriksen

Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

- Muriel Rukeyser 

S Apostrophe S

 

The pelican cocks higher her wing

for good get at. Nibbling the blister

and siphoning the mud by bill to the brood.

Hey, how did the consecration go?

Aristophanes and Judas, but not

Johns. Memphis' (emphasis mine)

on the Mississippi, but not on the Nile.

Hey, how was the peroration?

The bronzer devises a rapprochement,

the mulcher, the parents, the host. She

plans to rephotograph the memorial bench.

So, what was the beseechment like?

Bluing was a way to whiten, the bottle of

bluing agent reads. It takes its place

beside the finish. Or should I have said solution?

Hey, where will you be for Thanksgiving?

Or else I were alone in thinking something

had been in the air, a frost phenomenon,

a pestilence, the AM station's affiliate switch.

But, then, who gave the benediction?

With a tail as big as a kite, for something that

by itself repeats. The windsock on the helipad

and blame enough to go around.

So, what was the turnout in the end?

Two in a pew, one stressed,

the turn down in the thread of her halo

screwy. And whose little boy is he?

- Brian Blanchfield

English

 

A row of trees.

A crackhead asleep at the library.

Air conditioning.

The ill.

An equilateral triangle.

A woman barking.

A poster, a painting, liquid, bread.

A hand through a wall.

Another parabola.

Rain.

Regard all that occurs as

a few shallow stairs.

A horse lying in a forest.

A dark tale on the Western frontier.

A teenager in Ohio.

An unbelievable amount of bats, in streams of hundreds.

A second, secret anyone.

A weapon / sleep

"what are we going to do with the rest of our lives"

"what is left of us"

A performing leopard

Curls of bark

The lamps

A famous man, a singer you feel for

A wet computer in a bag of rice

A candle a flame a face on a banner

A parking garage, a heavy round tree

The feathers on the breasts of certain parrots are strictly yellow

In ravens, only the exposed portion exhibits iridescence

A plastic bottle

A perfect piece of toast, he died

The cat returning through a hole in the bedroom screen, he did die

Groceries, dark metals and wine, he died collecting gold

The written world without an eye to move it, he's dead and such

A toaster sound / the phone his face is gone

He bought it with the cash he made raking leaves and filling black bags

Settled into an endless lush slope of ivy overlooking a parking lot, he's just dead

A black suit, a coin in the dirt

You were in this town in the rain, but he's dead it's a city

What you said made me picture the earth, dying

A circle of women shifted to let in two men, one was dead I think

A room of velvet that collapse when you find it, there's a dead person in it

I went into the dark square and turned on the light

HD he's dead

New York he's crossing the water

He's carrying me

A train in the rain on the plain and all that scenery

Brain of the morning say you're frightened, not afraid

Nature, he crosses you, he's through

Thrill of the plain

deer and their mother

walking on a mirror

in the meadow unavoidable

showing against many hours

he had been more

it was like Lucy, John

a form on the wall

I can't imagine, Irene said

and she wasn't him

he died at me, unclassically

;

painted body inches over a blossoming elm

sewagey puddle

mosquito on bus cloth

ticket in the pocket

Civic, Galant, Hyundai, Accord

;

it was kind of one way for a while

for a long time it had been like that

;

no one could stop him

none of us

The thought of him occurs

it's a liberty

a slap in the face

A mark to the senses

Unsymmetrical, death verges on life

it's a liberty

it's passionate until it is silent

that's when it stops, enticingly

death throws itself at anything, in all of the words

he wasn't alive

A little glow worm, a little kid

Zazie in the metro, zombie on the light rail

walking along I pull a tree from the earth

no one sees me

(It's a feeling, like death)

Now it's lying in front of me

and the yellow lines of the crosswalk are lying under it

and the heavens are below

the twilight zone and all that

and all those people crossing made it fast to keep going

so I'm with them shopping

I turn my head underground and sense and see the concrete go by

there are holes in it where the air sits and then drifts, tinyish

It's like sand like that

But cold

they don't feel it, I feel death

motioning at my kidself

I visited Ocean Beach

There were kids his age looking at the Sea

;

not that

beauty a black stripe

long hair, come back, not even that

but now I had

a key in hand

sunny day, purple highway

both are true, believing in the end

he is waters, snow, went to hell came back blank

saw the fire, saw the ash

let it down, fell out

for the soil

weeds the world of pines

pines in their place / places

blue flags in the shrubbery, like blue flags in the woods

a wet computer in a bag of rice, and the dead one came through the door

;

the video was

an almost lifeless seed

and then bulbs, roots, shoots,

what tends to be shut out

from the top half of the world

;

man with zinc on his mask shape

sitting on a white Rambler in the new world

baby foot against my thigh on the J

White glasses in winter

White shades in winter, warm December

Black pieces with white / black shades underground

Lifted blue

Blue shirts on the lap

Folding smalls with words on them, folding large ones, turning the sleeves back

;

hands grimed in customer cash

the sky floats

like air conditioning

the dead live

the dead breathe

the sun sets

the filth I had traversed

the dirt the clan weighed down

with thought, which stuck

delivered

trampled

sank along

blank curtain to the floor, sand at the neck, he was a thing so long ago was more than that he slept, far  apart

stairs carved out of dirt

camera obscura, the waves so cloudy

a pewter plate, coated with a layer of asphalt, it was something I read

middle of the country, my ghost cloud around

buoy hanging in the bathroom, he's in the flower, 

there is no substitute

The areas of the asphalt exposed to light hardened.

The unexposed parts were washed out with lavender oil and turpentine.

Many knights have left their lives here, I shall soon have made an end of you too,

Many knights have left their lives here, I shall soon have made an end of you too,

my ghost cloud around 

dances by the train

my death game

I waver

and fade

if you close

The door

The night could last forever

Leave the sun

Shine out

and drink a toast

To never

;

Fortune

;

fortunate

;

I took a walk with the palm trees

As the daylight fell

Ta a a a allk in to myself

Ohhhhhhhhh.

death runs clear

like blood like of that ghost

who lives

it's not an error

a dangerous fourth page

a bright slope of yellow

over a good face

a dancer dragging

a partner flat

her sweat is real

across it slowly but she wont get through

the people's furniture

;

my ghost cloud around

the union office downtown

brown hair black leather chair rose in a cup ice breakers gum rainbows on the shirts pinned to the wall, a tack at the neck,

tacks at each corner and shoulder

D

E

Fishermen sorting skeletal crabs, they're alive, no haunted eyes

They have no soul his death is spreading the photo

Mexico, Namibia, a molded carcass of a ship named Eduard, wrecked at Conception Bay in 1907, it's moving along

An isolated rural community, it's alive

An ox carved out of soft wood, it's so beautiful it only looks like an animal

A chest of drawers, there is life-alivliving

A chest with legs and flowers, a dark green chest

Sand in a bedroom,

Double doors, a table and its matching bench

Mud / snow in them, blood

A relief with lions and pomegranates, a dark natural finish

Three women looking down, heavy gathered cloths hanging behind them like animals

FASCINATE YOUR EMOTIONS!

it says in the same language

where my brother is dead

and my sister is walking

over a row of strange all-color rings in New York

- Emily Hunt