Poetry

Life is the Jet Wash, Eric Miller 

Blade sharpened sickle sitting starkly on

grey-brown kicker with profligate foot-

licker demurely dancing circles around

the carpet, carpenterman just come for

clean up. Fully loaded umpires now closely

watching through his every move, not

quite what he expected, this mad house,

this lead huntsman’s pissing yard, measure

the length, the width and the time it takes

to get there and I swear from the far end

of the gymnasium, there’s this tick, people

watching, hard with time it takes loaded

up under the dancing circles; the world of

sunrises is a harrowed and hollow one.

 

Vision, Christopher Houston

There was God and ashes everywhere—

ashes skimming my deep lake.

I kissed the servant with

the salty lips, imagining

Great infernos;

my eyes were

open windows.

Their sound was the

key

that

opened: human doors.

 

Burnt pennies, sour pudding,

pupils miniature bruises,

my shirt rushing north:

tucked in

my pink canopy,

I

am

pla-

stic,

worn cheeks

grinning—

the year

ev-

ery-

thing

Fell into them.

 

Their sound

was the key. That

op

-ened

hu

-man

doors, 

imagining

Great infernos

—

Keep fires

inside

yourself.

([Oulipo] Lines from Tina Chang’s “Origin and Ash”)

 

List-en, Christopher Houston

“See, he will kill me; I have no hope,

but I will defend my ways to his face.”

Job 13:15

Job,                                            Job,

Suff-                                           Suff-

er-                                               er-

r (ing) r-                                      r (ing) r-

ight                                             ight

n-                                                n-

or                                                or

wrong.                                       wrong.

List-                                           List-

en                                              en

to                                               to

the                                            the

be-                                            be-

he- (knows)                            he- (knows)

moth.                                       moth.

(Wh-                                        (Wh-

y?)                                            y?)

how I select is, Alan Bromwell 

how I select is, I wait for the smile at the edge of the bridge to make itself female and I divide the time her whites tease teach me into a ball of lint by the air bulge short glued to my throat. the rigor of the couch decides for both of us whose pocket albums remind more of horseshoes than cartoons. like the crunching sound you made at my suggestion, the wrinkle we sipped at long into this smug parade of an evening is a more persuasive lip than either scotch or sativa. and there like an unglued bird the path is one again, and with it some new semblance of ego, a newly colored pen to record the new madness in all its lucid tongues. 

 

convinced, Alan Bromwell

convinced when I landed

you the old failures would be tarnished

frames at the back of a museum

of amber intent, I let the sun

wrinkle my folds into two

syllable outpourings.

 

where before I exhumed

quilts one thread at a time,

plucked sweaty dandelions,

we are scarf flesh now (it’s not

for twills like us to know whose

neck we warm)

 

pretend we’re free, Alan Bromell 

one

 

pretend we’re free. let me

untaint silver, repaint fame in

merciless contours

 

break undercut truisms,

entreat mental tribalism—

sectors compete, corrode,

treasures untie dopamine

knots. regale us with

blood foliage, lease

posture. neurons flutter.

memories unwind, collared

chimps rearrange daft

chants, unlend intimacy.

 

we’ll ask untruth to unravel,

spirit to dilute symmetry,

winters to thaw proselytize

a mind without an overcoat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

two

 

coiled, she sheds curls—

tangleclump litter,

discarded galaxies.

 

believes in soulmates;

genetics too.

 

wonders hotly whether

kindred souls prewrite

quantum entangled strands

and space&time synchronize at love’s locus

 

and DNA is a pedantic romancer.

on doubting your existence, Stephen Mirabito

Series of Untiltled Poems, Sara Falk-Mann

dear caroline,

 

whenever we walk

near a cemetery my stomach falls backward and

I am still blinking.

it is so typical to be tortured

by people coming in & out of other countries.

 

 

 

dear caroline,

 

you do not want to understand the machine

in wyoming. she always said to leave your fingers

alone—that they will take care of themselves. we can do our own dishes, and peel our

own mangos. i would like to forget any affection near staircases and the way you walk across the kitchen.

                 

 

 

 

dear caroline,

 

that all encompassing i-cannot-look-at-your-teeth. when you said, i could fuck

with that, near turning lanes, i wanted to hold your entire family.

                 

                                    to not be so nice       

                  to not be so fun.

 

i disappeared, but i do not want you to see

that.

 

Everybody talks about themselves

here.

 

 

We eat flowers out of photographs dressed in denim dresses.

We surround rib cages near slanted walls.

We ache when elbows bend into the sunlight.

We admitted once that Iran was like the orchid near your window.

We wear snow on our feet like our mothers never went to the hospital.

 

Oh, I am objectifying you.

 

 

The back of my chest still leather sometimes, too.

 

Think about it:

 

I ache when bodies stack in your mouth. I

bow in every city away from you.

Literally—I wear these boots and grab my

crotch near kitchen counters like these legs have

something to say, like you know your mouth

gets around the ocean. We are in a cave

and you are smarter than ever—holding

some version of Spain.

 

 

 

We are sprung on ordinary kinds

of bedroom darkness. Near or in a fall,                                                      

we lay on furniture—feel blurry lined

up in bathing suits, every smaller

day full of water—every pier sort

of under your ribcage. Oh, we are so cold

every other laugh put back near an airport. 

Doors only here to see jaws unfold.

I tried to hold your sleep in my throat. We

could wake up to yard sales everywhere with

people only dying. Let me

love the lawn chair and patio even the

fifth time out the door. Do not tell the leaves

about sadness when only summer grieves. 

 

Los Angeles/Poem for Jack Onorato, Jack Christie

I write this for you, Los Angeles, I write this for you, Los Angeles, you’re the kind that I put out my eyes in a airport restroom, for permission there is the long alleyway walk, a family came out of you and crawled across my plains and I cut myself up with oceans but you still set up your restaurant a four-hour busride away, for you Los Angeles, if you have rivers they sleep for me, I sleep at the bottom of them, for you Los Angeles is the peyote and the long, firm mattress, all the little places I write about are 1940’s hardwood and civil engineering, you are punctuation and enough places to lose virginity that I could do it the right way, they are installed early morning the worker’s gap teeth and new shag carpeting and a glass obtuse metal serpent desk fist-filled nettle caldron, for you there are twenty-two hours in the airport with face-in-hands, I’m sorry Los Angeles, for walking past you on the busy street, for not returning your calls, for sleeping with your sister, I have this for you, Los Angeles, ––Los Angeles, this is pleading, see, this is my first armpit hair, this is running through the house and waking my mother when I try to jump out my window, all my poems are confessional and I’d be shamed if you threw them, Los Angeles, you are enough for me to wait in a wheelchair, you are enough for my legs going to sleep on the floor, you are enough for any northeast train, you are enough for a metal grill to lean against, across from tennis courts. It works like this, I bought a quilted mattress from Army-Navy surplus, will that work Los Angeles, meet we halfway here, bring a cocktail party in the next room so I can write to it, lemme jam, Los Angeles, I’ll raise you a cardboard box with everything in it in the stone hallway of a northeast university with deep wooden hollows and oiled canvas and I wanna deal with you Los Angeles, I want a lot of body fluids Los Angeles, if someone wanted a novel out of me I’d go into the desert and talk to lizards and shit and I’d never mention you at all Los Angeles, I’d mention you once and say “just kidding”, I’d do it for one hundred dollars a word. Give me twenty-seven minutes, Los Angeles. Tell me about your rivers, Los Angeles. I don’t know what you’d ask if I lived with you. I do not know what your people are but they are paper and white things and they are smart enough to welcome everyone in so they can spread you across city blocks, so they can rub you down with the cutting-tomato motion of drained basin walkaround bombastic watching crowd orange like the shape in a snowbank, the bit of carapace and lizard shine and how I walked around it, got into it, looking out over the plain like I owned it, for you Los Angeles, try the neck, maybe the ear, always the mouth, if she arches her back toward you you know you got it, you got it, remember this, Los Angeles, if I ever find myself dancing in a mid-priced hotel I should kill myself, remind me, if a girl ever gets off with you kill myself, kill me, I will be out in the desert and I will be dangling around a stick and I will have cacti all down my throat and I be food for spiders, it would be alright, Los Angeles, ––Los Angeles, say it like that and I will be happy, give me the wet and dark and certainty and a streetlight placed above a tree so when it is night everything kind of works out and that’d be enough to do it for free, at least for a while.

 

Keraunopathy, Audra Figgins

Dolores, Fraser Long

Sassafras stood one hand on hip and snap chewed bubblegum. Pop pop. She boiled water for grits and then made coffee instead. Poured whiskey wetly in glug glug. No grits. Just coffee. Whiskey. To the slammed screen door she turned and yelled. Don’t slam that door! Wove a wooden spoon near small trousered behinds. Pop pop. Applied lipstick in the shiny chrome ovenlight. Red red. Smack. Don’t tell your daddy I’m goin’ out. Don’t do it. Pop pop. Undid and tied up the apron gingham cherry red peach pie on a hook by the door stepped click click out and revved the truck engine. I ain’t comin’ back neither. Sassafras gone.  

 

Weld, Fraser Long

Spinning the thread out of nothing. Out of the air and a few hairs. Light from the sun filtering down through the fibers from every corner of the sky stumped against the flat shadow of her pinched fingers. She glances up with sheltered eyes at the red plateau falling away against the blue sky. The grained dust closing in around silver green rocks and scrub desert plants scattered about here and over there accidentally rooted. Checking the time by the fall of light and shadow – by the angle of the horizon line. And back down to her fingers the tips puckered with age and the colors of her wool. Red green yellow blue desert dark earth and night. In the morning there is nothing to fear nothing to see. By afternoon gray roiling clouds have begun to align in the distance and an ill sly wind picks at the strings of her loom.

 

ECHOES, Sofia Laguna