DeWitt Brinson: “Today,” and a drawing

Today just like everyday

was uneventful for trees

as far as they can tell

trees do very little

and are very important

for us to survive

and other species

if we are ever to survive

we must let them continue

doing almost nothing all day

Howie Good: “Lost in America,” “The Hit,” and “The Fallacies of Hope”

Lost In America

Women in those days carried tear-gas pens in their pocketbooks. There wasn’t much work around even for a person with two advanced degrees. The bus departed from underneath the Port Authority building at eight that night. If you asked, I couldn’t have told you the difference between a casket and a coffin. The homeless lived in the corners of the cavernous waiting room. I should have taken something for pain. When I woke up, it was snowing in Ohio.

The Hit

1

My youngest daughter, tormented by visions of burning airships, trips the metal detector. I feel like an empty gray glove. Strangers crowd into the elevator with us. Only later do they think to ask if we’re going down. The weather has turned. Buds pop, a nation of suicide bombers in dynamite vests.

2

So this how I’ll die, stabbed repeatedly by dry droplets of fiery rain. Someone you know well will also be caught in the storm.

3

I had just put my key in the door when two men in sunglasses walked up behind me. Was it because my mother was my father as well? The one who looked most like a paid assassin made a gun with his fingers and pressed it against the small of my back. They asked each other and then me what to do next. If I have to wear a tie, I said, I won’t go. There was never a stripper named Naked Truth, but there should have been.

The Fallacies Of Hope

A guidebook

to Belgium.

4,000 killed here.

Bloodstains

that by some

strange act

become farms

and buildings.

The sun

is god

stupefied

with ether.

(Howie Good’s latest chapbook is Threatening Weather, available as a free audio book and e-book from Whale Sounds.)

Marwin Vos: “Very little trees left” (poem and animated treatment)

in the middle of the woods

there's almost no life

there's almost no

middle in the woods

more woods

will be cleared tomorrow

lots of people in the woods

they occupy the woods

because the woods are weak

vicky the viking comes

to the rescue

and follow the link to the animated treatment:

http://www.marwinvos.nl/very_little_trees.asp

Doug Draime: "The Earth Is Exploding Where Lawrence Of Arabia Once Slept” and “Trip to Nowhere”

The Earth Is Exploding Where Lawrence Of Arabia Once Slept

where he fought

and fornicated

where he turned

his heart to blowing sand

blood lust

running through

his aristocratic veins

his blue eyes full of

the murderous

future

Trip to Nowhere

Where I found answers I

could not find questions

for. The middle was not

in the middle but off

to the right side, positioned

like an open grave. Voices

spoke In English making

no grammatical sense. I

grabbed hold of

the edge

of something freezing and fierce, 

which took off all my flesh up

to my elbow. There was no moon

or sun or stars or sky

only rain and movement all

around me like

speeding trains on

rusty tracks. No entrance, no

exit, no way of telling light

from dark. My bones

broke like pencils

against monolithic structures everywhere

I turned

and everywhere was nowhere

and somewhere was slaughtered with

no purpose and no direction. 

Suddenly there was a sound like

millions
of breaking windows, 

smashing in echo chambers

over and over. I knew then, somehow, I had broken

through and that my bones would

heal, I would form new skin on

my arm, and the questions were something

in the middle once again. The moon, the

sun, the stars and the sky were

there too.

("Trip to Nowhere" was previously published in Ken*Again, 2008)

Tim Van Hook: “Leave"

Our tangled pair bubbles out from a point,

Till the dark mass pulls us in to rejoin.

Space winds up time in a place we can stay,

Red shift of light can’t diminish the day.

I only grieve so I find you anew.

I only leave so I fall back to you.

Once we were one in the hot salty sea,

Split but the code sits in our memory.

Ere the begats that the garden expelled

You were my sister on African veldt.

I only see as I look through you too.

I’m only free as I bind fast to you.

Slip of a girl and a boy tongue-tied tall

Kiss inside us through our grown up disguise.

Tucked in below children long to recall

Two old folks young in their soft focus eyes.

I only cry so the tears clear my view.

I’d only die so I rest next to you.

        (Previously published in undrian.com where you may find other of Tim’s work.)

“Leave” by Tim Van Hook, 2010

Brian Beatty: "Fenced Out"

The early morning graffiti

of fog doesn’t lift here

in London, CA.   

Geography is a fear —

a vast pornography of voter

abstraction 

& discontent. 

Why not riot? We're expert

at following arrows.

We are what remain of all

that we can’t see for the forest’s 

proliferation of trees/posts.

This goat the world's

been parenting as a metaphor

has turned out to be

a dreadful substitute.

Or maybe we're learning 

(again) that we’re poor hosts.