Saturday, September 24, 2011

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







Wednesday, September 21, 2011

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.)

Sunday, September 18, 2011

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:

Thursday, September 15, 2011

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)

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

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

Saturday, September 3, 2011

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.