Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Mikko Harvey: "Window"

Light music plays
in the coffee shop
and he feels okay
about the rain.

He doesn’t need
an umbrella
to stay dry
when he’s inside.

He sees as they find
fulfillment
in endorphins
and daily addictions.

His brother, his friend.
Wet with sweat,
the other rats
were running.



Friday, April 22, 2011

Kevin Luna: "Repeating Planets"



After he had left there were only two images he could remember anymore.   The first was in the small attic bedroom he had rented years ago. It was nighttime and heavy into the dead plumes of autumn. There was a lamp switched on next to the bed. There was some music playing and a girl sitting up on his desk (half of that might have been a movie he’d watched the night before). But as he recalled it now, the girl was in his room and was paying no great attention to him. She had been dangling her skirted legs off the desk and presently, she removed a sweater from over her head and was wrapping it around her naked shoulders. He went to window and opened it. He could smell the damp pavement from his street. He turned around and, leaning against the windowsill, faced her. He was about to speak when there was a noise from below. Three raccoons had gotten in the garbage. A moth flew into the room.

                                                           **

It had been a year since they offered him the job. The first manned mission outside the solar system. It would take innumerable years and he would have to be awake the entire way. He would spend time orbiting each of the planets. So far he had encountered only one.  Which planet was it? We may never know. He gave it another name. He called it the Keymaker. There are several accounts which might sum up his impression so far: The planet is massive, spherical in shape. From it, one derives a great sense of wonderment and longing.

There is more data but we do not know it. He does not know it either. In space, flesh travels faster than memory. With him we have discovered this. And we realize now that he has gone insane.

                                                           **

With the second, he is driving a car. It is a clear sunny day and he is driving near the ocean. The radio is on and his left arm hangs out the window. He is going to pick up his cousin at the train station. On the way however, he stops to buy some pot. The boy selling is thirteen years old. The boy has loose bright clothes and wears a fake beard. After lighting up, he continues on his way. He feels better now. More spread out. He is driving toward the train station. His cousin is waiting and it has now been over an hour.

As he pulls over the tracks, he catches a brief glimpse of the iron lines shooting into the distance. His eyes narrow and suddenly he can see past the curve. For a moment he blinks infinity. He feels the car slow to only a fraction of a movement of the wheel. He tries to regain his breath but feels only dread, pulsing sore and out his chest, as he tightens on the brakes.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Ross Plovnick: "Gulls"



Granted we live we die, whose god
would opt to end a world like this
and why when doomsday
seems to loom is air so
crisp, the tide so
prompt, sand
so delicate
in fact
it flows
like surf alive
with calculating
gulls, time winding
down, no better place
to go than to never know
their world will end the way
a fraction of ours ends each day?


Thursday, April 14, 2011

Thad Higa: "One Cup, Two Cup"



I'm on the edge of my seat here
in the city of stranger people

my chest is on the edge of itself.
I don't know if it is a natural consequence
if I am hungry, starving, losing conscious.
my chest is out of me, I am jittery without it, starving starving.

Words from ONLY some darling
quicken my existence
I feel her message forwarded towards the end of everything
The night is so quick it is unsettling

give myself peaceful smoke
to meander silently into the eve
become a small dazzling light in the distance
small, alive, wished upon wondered
gather the dust between YOU and ME

I need sand to bury my feet in
shore in my ear to lay me down
quiet!
quiet!
Hear of the other sea in the shells
shut the traps
the doors are down 
and...there!
the endless invisible waters
Are you thinking of me?

soft. sweet. tired. cup of caffeine
transform my sight and my actions
in time I execute my future tongue
by digging into the holes of thought
there is never so much
as every vaguery of "ALL"

I will now talk about "ALL":
In saying it and "nothing"
I empty myself over the keyboard.
display an array of every hungry inside
that pokes its head down in my head's cavern
dark dripping pillars
down on down towards the shitter
of the future of other tongues
publish publisher publication

These hours I've worked my head in a way so that
I cannot find my place back in the seat and the table.
I sprint and tumble about in the empty space between 
a YOU and a ME

Sitting requires starving your baby
and I owe a drugged up panic to that
baby building himself a rabid panther
dashing without eyes, towards his brothers !
It's Me! My friends!!!!!!

quiet quiet quiet
quiet. QU(IET.
this city is underwater,
the people have gills
and I do not, but I wander
my body finds a tunnel
and my soul continues

chatter on chalky bulk unstable under pressure deeper swollen murky residue
little for the best
give a little for the best
and a littler for the rest.
Once you're open like this
you cannot speak.


Sunday, April 10, 2011

Ray Succre: "Chance"



Perhaps the wind makes toys of dead leaves,
scraped against gutters and set under cars,
or the Sun sets behind a famous woman’s children.

Perhaps the sea is so full of krill,
the krill themselves are the world,
or the whales eat hot coals and tired whales.

There’s a pushed cart by every vendor’s hand,
and a chocolate use for all young faces.

Can there be any bright motion flashes
in a shaped thing, a moving thing,
that chance has not stirred with its stick?

Perhaps an ice age coasts over town,
perhaps a meteor on stardust and crashes,
   perhaps
      a shock,
         or else–
   this here and you there.



Friday, April 8, 2011

It came to us very late:
perceptions of beauty, desire for knowledge.
And in the great minds, the two often configured as one.

-Louise Glück, from Civilization

Monday, April 4, 2011

Carlos Rowles: (an unpublished excerpt)



... the animal was a good one, a successful contender ... all turn gray, it’s the end of summer ... a tinny distant strand of music—fog lights ... the bus pulls out of the distance ... blue sky ... silver, that were shattered to fragments immediately below us ... awful the same was recorded over ... picturesque sheet of water earth, and were borrowed from block head but uh ... upon whose pleasure we depended for our existence (smile) ... whereupon there ... so far off you couldn’t uncultivated land into... footnote 17: possibly the gnawing of the beaver ... the ripple he ... beauty and hear no songs fail to recognize him at first ... captive were brought over to this country, and it waited ... was that their estimates concerning ... admire the humbler flowers of spring aid of my father ... to reach a free state —the wood thrush song ... parking lot, turning onto a narrow two-lane road ... slowly bring my fingers to my face inhale ... dense white mass enclosed us like a wall ... we were unable ... intended to take my passage for cleveland ... arriving at arbor croche ... there were no white people there at that time, only such as were ... perpetuate them ... resembled a vast gate—they said the gates ... and unfriended in the face of her little world ... knowledge of land laws, flower garden ... provision for thee ... gleams in the sun shifting forms and shades are seen ... then the silence was broken again ... recalling the bottom smell ... fragments of memory hanging off the image ... looked at bud sharply ... was given to them ... hence capital had evidently been produced ... and after a long hunt we not agree as to me ... that wants revenge this time ... in the midst of his ascending fame, at a moment ... succeeded in locating ... of minute details, the down ... singularly foolish proceeding ... ready for the word ... why speculate over an unopened letter ... pause, as—in their looking inwardly and not outwardly what ... much longer, an’ that’s shore ... and largely believed in by native fishermen