The Planet Formerly Known As Earth

November 30, 2011

2011-11-30T15:15:00.000-08:00

The world always ends when you least expect it. Good luck, everyone! Thanks for living on this planet!

Jennifer Tomaloff: three images

2011-10-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

Ray Gonzalez: “The Destroyer of Compasses” (after Julio Cortazar)

2011-10-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

The destroyer of compasses is my brother. He lies in the wet fields of war and dies young, his spirit rising above the soil to be trapped in the great books that tell a different story because magnetic north has been demolished, the master of compasses witnessing the coffin and flag draped with the glory of the weeping mothers and the lying generals that perform without the four directions turning their sweat to blood. The destroyer of compasses is my brother. He eats the same meal as I, though the bird of migration is set in its cage and cannot flee, its shriek waking the young and resolving the old. When the bird is eaten, the boy takes its compass apart, hiding the magnetic needle in his left ear, leaving the blazing feathers behind. He follows the vibration to the south where his family emerges wrapped in robes the savage priest left behind. The destroyer of compasses wants to be my brother, but I am too old to give advice, the glass on the compass touched by our father who doubted its magic—the devices of love and death hidden in the shoes of the stone men who refuse to be shown direction and drink the mud of their angry sons, the loyal followers, and the boys who insist they must defend the earth from its barren kind. The destroyer of compasses is my brother. He flies, lifting the sorrow of lies beyond the broken fields of rock where the compass refuses to point, its frenzy the dance in the engine of the heart, the compass the last circle spinning wildly before the young man finds out where he is bound.

Nathaniel Tower: "The Arrival"

2011-10-08T09:15:00.001-07:00

Everybody knew it would happen. It didn’t happen exactly when or how they thought it would, but nonetheless it happened.

“I told you it would happen,” a bearded man told his wife.

“Of course you did. Everyone knew it would happen,” the wife responded while thinking he could use a nice shave. He would be a lot more handsome with a shave.

“Well, I knew how it would happen, too,” he said through the massive piles of wiry brown hair that surrounded his mouth.

“No you didn’t. No one did. If someone had, then it could have been delayed,” she said, trying to picture his face hairless.

“Well, at least I knew when it would happen,” the beard said.

“No you didn’t. No one did. If someone had, then we would have been prepared.” All she could see now was a giant mound of hair talking to her.

On a certain level, everyone was relieved when it finally did happen. They had been waiting a long time for it. Finally, they could relax. There was no reason for anxiety anymore.

Some had doubted at first, but the source of their doubt was likely rooted in denial. Everyone came around eventually. Luckily, by the time it did happen, no one seemed to doubt it anymore.

“What should we wear?” the wife asked the beard.

“It doesn’t matter,” the beard responded.

“But it might be the last thing we get to wear.” She was genuinely concerned, both about her outfit and her husband’s raggedy appearance.

“Then wear something you like,” spewed out the parted patches of brown hair.

There was a lot of variety in dress that day. Some chose to look their finest. Others sought clothing that they found comfortable. Still others tried to make one final fashion statement that set themselves apart. Regardless, everyone changed clothes when they found out it had happened. The bearded man had been right though. It didn’t really matter as long as you didn’t show up naked.

“Should we eat before we go?” the worried wife wondered.

“The impression I get is that the food shall be plentiful. We shan’t ever hunger again,” the beard spoke as the stomach below rumbled.

“Should we have a snack just in case?”

“Perhaps we had better.”

She hoped that no crumbs would stick in the mess of mouth hair.

Most people ate a snack before they left. It happened halfway between lunch and dinner, and people were starting to get a little hungry. The snack would tide them over until dinner. Most assumed dinner would be served a little late. With all those people, it would be difficult to serve everyone efficiently. No one considered that dinner might not be served. Everyone just expected it. Just the event itself, they weren’t sure when or how, but they knew it would happen.

“Should we bring anything with us?” the beard parted to ask.

“I’m not sure. I don’t think we need anything, but perhaps we should bring a few essentials just in case,” the wife said, adding Perhaps you should bring a razor to herself.

“What are the essentials?” the beard wondered, hoping a razor wasn’t among them.

“Well, we need toothpaste, deodorant, soap, clean underwear, makeup, and…” she paused. “Maybe a razor and some toilet paper. You know, the things we can’t live without.”

“Can we really bring all that?” he wondered.

The wife didn’t respond. She was too busy putting all the essentials in a bag.

No one was really sure whether or not they should bring something. It seemed likely they should. They would likely never return to their homes. Some people brought practical things. Some brought sentimental things. Some, those who were very confident about their fate, brought nothing but themselves.

“What time should we arrive?” the woman asked frantically as she ran around the house filling the bag.

“I think we should try to arrive early,” the beard flapped.

“When should we leave?” The bag was overflowing.

“Probably now,” he said before she had had time to pack the razor.

Everyone arrived early. None of them knew what exactly to expect other than huge crowds and hopefully eternal happiness. They stood in throngs, barely room between each other to distinguish where one life form ended and a new one began. They talked among themselves, but the conversations were mostly meaningless and found themselves lost in other conversations.

They waited for a long time before the man they could hear but not see spoke to them. “All who are presentable but not magnificent, hungry but not empty, prepared but not equipped, early but not premature may enter.”

The crowd looked amongst itself, each member wondering if he or she met these requirements. No one spoke with their mouths, instead just offering each other puzzled looks. The silence of death hung over the crowd.

They were still looking at each other two hours later when the gates closed.

(previously appeared in This Zine Will Change Your Life)

Michael Brandonisio: “it’s always the end of the world”

2011-10-03T11:05:00.000-07:00

it’s always the end of the world

ever since the world began it’s been ending

prelude for it’s always the end of the world

always the world ending every so often

and so no more oceans no more monkeys

no more murder no more love songs

no more world to kick around anymore

because it’s always the end of the world

goodbye world I hate to see you go

auf wiedersehn world sayonara ciao-ciao

all this paranoia about the end of the world

for goodness sake hurry up and end already

always the world ending always finis finis

goodbye world it’s been nice knowing you

everybody keeps on waiting for the ending

always waiting for end times in extremis

encore for it’s always the end of the world

one day the world will end for sure for sure

and so no more world to bitch about anymore

but for auld lang syne hold on to your top hats

try and stick around just a little while longer

you never know what might happen next

DeWitt Brinson: “Today,” and a drawing

2011-09-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

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”

2011-09-21T19:38:00.000-07:00

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

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.

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.

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)

2011-09-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

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”

2011-09-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

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"

2011-09-07T11:22:00.000-07:00

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"

2011-09-03T11:56:00.000-07:00

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.

Peter William Stein: “The End”

2011-08-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

The end is near

The end of the world

No.

The end of us

Or maybe just me

Armageddon

Mass destruction of society

The death of an ego that thinks it is the world

She will be fine

Nothing she hasn’t endured before

She has boiled with fiery skin

She has hibernated under mountains of ice

Her seed is still at the bottom of the sea

And we are a dead branch of Darwin

That will someday fall

And decay into fuel for the roots

That will build another limb

What we call Nuclear Holocaust

She calls chemotherapy

This greenhouse we are building

Will lead to little green fingers

Cracking and pulling pavement apart

Ivy entwining skyscrapers

And the emergence of a new metropolis

With canopy trees and prehensile tailed tenants

Organic beast ripping the urban machine to shreds

This process is not evil

She does not hate us

It is only survival

And we are to be recycled into samsara

It is no surprise that I will die

And so will the WE,

And someday she too will break through

This mortal plane as fuel for a sun

Expanding too rapidly for its own good

Jordan Kapono Nakamura: “Slow Sun Exile”

2011-08-24T07:56:00.000-07:00

a year can now be measured in weathered candles

five o’clock tea has been a bad friend

i’ve never had

for months they’ve been quiet in the frat houses

cupping hands around the fire, squinting at the chessboard

“Trade for my Queen, please,”

the pawn is replaced which is not a pawn

but a bottlecap no one bothers to find the pieces

that slip below the table making no sound as if the floor was the

bottom of a yucatan cave 200 feet deep

fallen leaves scrape the door

with the noise of tiny claws

the scent the promise of wax

wanders by like holy men

before the good Samaritan

Before Derrida, Pollock,

before the pirate bay was closed down

my mother would sing hymns to make me dream

and i would try to feel small

then later

i had mountains make me feel small

but we can no longer see any mountains

i found a page ripped from an old story

there were just nine sentences.

but it was enough.

Kyle Hemmings: “The Problem with Watching TV Reruns When You're Too Sober on Cold Pizza”

2011-08-20T21:06:00.000-07:00

I kept my mother's TV, one that I'd never throw out, black and white, equipped with old cathode and vacuum tubes. Only occasionally did something smoke. Maybe it was me. So I was sitting there, watching The Last Pony Express Rider, a close up of both man and horse, one desperate to leave St. Louis, the other so needy of sugar cube and water. Both horse and rider jumped out of the screen and into my room of clutter, paper designs of failed rockets, my old love letters written when I still believed in the future of science.

The rider, dusty from the trip, handed me the letter. His horse was still panting.

My dearest Harold. Forgive me my poor judgment. It was not meant to be that I would become the fair headed and lisping stage actress of Sacramento, the rage of failed gold miners. Alas, I am stranded here without money or promise of sustenance. Shall I sell myself to the angry moon and die hungry? If you could but come to my rescue one last time, I will never leave your side. Already, the dirt streets of St. Louis ring in my ears sweet as a choir. In my own unfathomable way, I have always been loyal to you. We are both creatures of what rustles through our brains at night--A Love So Unworthy--Wanda Tarrington-Cates.

The last name belonged to my mother's side. My mother, who in her precociously shut-off days in a hospital that resembled a resort, painted Impressionistic paintings of sunsets in crashing colors. Over time, those paintings, with an acquired cult following, commanded exorbitant prices on ebay.

I made out a check to Wanda Tarrington-Cates and proceeded to hand it to The Last Pony Express Rider. But his horse had turned to glass. His show being cancelled, he was nowhere to be found. From then on, I vowed to live on a diet of cold pizza, black coffee without sugar. The old TV set no longer worked, but its black rectangular eye kept watching me, as if someone far away, perhaps behind that screen, still needed me.

Stephanie Matson: “Suicide Bomb at a Volleyball Match in North Western Pakistan”

2011-08-16T07:21:00.000-07:00

The pearl slips through

Wrinkled finger pads.

Water flowers over the bedrock

Which contours limbs

To mold my pearl

Melting away.

The coal I had saved for you.

A reversed Vandenbergh effect

Set up in my mind;

Saying hello to Eddie Haskell

As I drive down Cornell.

When your medication decreased

I prayed for an eddy.

For Riff Raff and Magenta

As our lips sat peeled back

Like the skin of a fruit.

Prayed for an abyss which would take me away

From the hallucinations which made you cry

From the stickers of your faded emblem

When I needed you most.

Well, it's the fractions in our heads—

The analogous mental disorders—

That I thought would lead to our fusion.

But I fed off of your suffering,

And deteriorated to spite your recovery.

Holding to you as a leach

Looking for warm blood

From a lizard.

These were the days when I was better off dead

Air pressure not strong enough to offer suction

To swallow the last bit of liquid

Needed to satisfy my thirst to obtain,

For my catalyst had long since evaporated

bl pawelek: "snake and peyote" and "swallowed"

2011-08-12T07:11:00.000-07:00

he rolls himself

constructs tight against the six stalks

grinding encompassing consuming

diamonds roll the back

and shape head strong

the snake and peyote

await the divine light

the signal of pilgrim luck

move west

over the mountains

to the water of final ends

push the dirt

push the sand

accept the prayers for rain

Jeff Grunthaner: "Dead Fish in a Lithograph"

2011-08-08T08:56:00.001-07:00

The fat lady is singing because her heart

has broken both its legs. Bloody murder

rains out in a brassy chorus, where the

radio is useless machinery you can cry.

The chiming of old-timey music is really

the chimera of an idiot’s derision, like

a call to conscience from before when radio

was invented. It surges into awareness

without any message, & translates the staccato

of experience into ice, numbed by musical

phrases woven with the strings of violins.

The discordance of life-styles is projected

like the several notes in a single chord,

where living is a technique like television,

an approximate profession, wholly digital,

& experience more or less an encumbrance,

like the passive thrills found in watching

a bad movie. Personally, I’m wedded to

my sorrows, which brought with them some

momentary surprise, tainted by laudations

promised when the bars had closed, & text

messages that reply: “Sort of fun. Ur cool."

Ray Gonzalez, "The Mark"

2011-08-04T08:46:00.001-07:00

The Mayas believed we all have a face and a mark. They believed the invisible mark is more of a face than our own face. They said all humans will be known by their mark. My mark is not invisible, but hidden somewhere in the territory of the mind, a place of markings where I have never gone. Last night, I dreamed I was eating fried lizard meat out of a McDonald’s container. It was not a nightmare, but a quiet dream of ritual where I ate the lizard meat and felt stronger. When I woke, I told my wife about this and she said it was a sign I am getting well. It is my mark, the sign of the creature leaving marks on the sand, that distance that has nothing to do with my face or the way I look because I am looking older and the mark trumps my face, the lizard meat prepared by an unseen face and served in a fast-food carton to warn me many people are searching for their marks. I also told my wife the next brief dream last night had me listening to her play her violin. She is taking lessons and getting better at it—the soothing air of the instrument leaving its mark on me as I slept and got the closest I have ever been to recognizing my face with my eyes closed.

Laura LeHew: “Should We Vanish”

2011-08-01T09:14:00.000-07:00

“you may drive nature out with a pitchfork but she will always return”

~Horace

To Whom It May Concern:

By an unfortunate error we’ve

misidentified civilization. It was,

in fact, not created by the deity or

deities known sometimes as God

but by Mrs. Charles [Anne] Hobart of Kansas City,

Missouri head of the Abstinence For You-All Coalition.

We sincerely regret this error

and offer our apologies.

~Jesus Tran-Rodriguez

Transitions Director

New Directions in the Great Urban Outdoors

Building Bigger and Better Prisons

maybe she wanted him

the impossible dialog

Something Imagined

Write your name

in a veiled raven.

the sun detonated

it made a lot of noise

it was over

5.

An error has occurred.

The feed is probably down.

Try again later.

flick off the light switch

The ghosts are laughing

I still have hope

2011-07-31T11:42:00.000-07:00

One more skilled adventure—whatever

it is that fuels the stalled machine

and sends the pilot on his starry quest;

whatever it is they hope to find

out there—an emptiness, a stillborn

terror, but it is not love.

-John Haines, from NEAR Travels Far to Find Eros

2011-07-04T16:30:00.001-07:00

The phoenix mourns by shaping, weighing, testing, hollowing, plugging and carrying towards the light. He seems to take a clear view of necessity. And…maybe he comes to see the immensity of the mechanism in which he is caught, the immense fragility of his own flying—composed as it is of these ceaselessly passing shadows carried backward by the very motion that devours them, his motion, his asking.

-Anne Carson, from Nox

Joyce Lautens O'Brien: "September 27, 2001"

2011-06-30T15:58:00.000-07:00

Everything will be all right I tell myself

At first I couldn’t sleep it hurt couldn’t

believe

everything was changed nothing

the same ever again men weeping

on television in full public view too

awful for words lives buildings peace

everything normal gone forever ground

to gritty dust and ash but sixteen days after

flags flying a resurgence of hope I laugh

with friends take Giuliani’s advice and

spend I buy a watch I had my eye on

before

a luxury item gold plated with Roman numerals

to mark the hours I check my portfolio down

but not too much not too much to bear

and the economy improving by the second

by the second quarter no doubt back up

to speed people flying through the air just

like they used to no cares in the world

everything the way it was what lies

we tell ourselves

what lies ahead

(this piece first appeared in Connecticut River Review)

Howie Good: "Mal de Mer"

2011-06-26T14:04:00.001-07:00

What’s the weather there? he asked. Some people prefer the sea. The taxi had dropped me off and then climbed the sharp hill that led to all the years ahead. The man put a finger to his lips. We had worked out a scheme – a woman like the girly pink rose machine-embroidered on the back of her backpack.

He invoked the rule of thirds, but couldn’t explain it. All I knew was that it had something to do with pictures. I had gotten a price from him. Bullets were extra.

I met a woman you never met. She talked about the jellyfish incident and removing fragments from her flesh. She said what she most missed was the strangeness of every day. All of France mourned her.

Brad Liening: "Desperado"

2011-06-22T08:30:00.001-07:00

I rode my horse over the hill,

there was a sound like

invisible language alighting in trees,

like a thousand bees

with a thousand microphones,

I knew I had a job to do,

I was needed in an important way

though I myself was unimportant

like a snowman falling

into an icy crevasse,

a cemetery full of

mostly forgotten, grassy graves,

that was all I knew but

just then the sun looked beautiful

like a beautiful woman

stepping out of a limousine

into a field of scorpions,

my horse was frightened

and in the deepening dusk

I whispered wild promises to us both.

Eliezra Schaffzin: "All the Comforts of Home"

2011-06-16T10:04:00.000-07:00

Annie counted the napkins, rolling them up and stacking them like scrolls. She counted the napkin rings. She counted the forks, knives, and spoons. She counted the chairs and she counted the table, though it was quite clear there was only one. She counted it again, shaking her finger at it each time: one, one, one. She counted every piece in the china set, and counted the wine and water glasses after that. She plucked a reluctant crab off the soup tureen and counted it with the ladle and the salad bowl and the tongs. The waves ushered in a gust of sun-warmed wind. The sand shifted. By the time she was ready to count the finger bowls, they were gone.

Brian Beatty: "Wigs and Hymnals"

2011-06-14T15:20:00.000-07:00

Whatever river takes you,

it’s going to make you, too.

Locals soaked to the bone

swear that’s the only baptism

the seriously righteous need.

Who am I to disbelieve them?

Small, smooth pebbles fall out

of their teeth as they pry, pray

and preach themselves hoarse.

And I’m not here for trouble.

That doesn’t matter, of course.

To mollify shouting onlookers

with convictions much deeper

and mightier, I’m quite certain,

than any I'm ever likely to hold

(doubters from the next ghost

town over have surrounded me)

my faithful hosts begin running

around lighting each other’s hair

on fire — using book pages

lit with wet matches.

2011-06-11T09:57:00.001-07:00

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they

That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea

Where down the blind are driven.”

- Edwin Arlington Robinson, from Eros Turannos

[According to some sources, there are 558 days, 18 hours and some minutes remaining.]

Doug Draime: "Now That You Are Gone"

2011-06-09T16:26:00.000-07:00

for Beth

The fact that we can receive

and transmit

music and voices through the air

amazes me. Everything amazes me!

That life goes on amazes me. Your body

is under the

earth now. Molecules still expand

and contract. People are still at

war: the couple up front are still

trying to

kill each other. Children born innocent

still have a chance, if they don’t

accept it all. You are gone. Wall

Street goes on. Flowers grow.

They still pick up the garbage. Evil

people who should have died

long ago still suck blood.

It all amazes me! My love

for you and your love

for me always amazed me.

And I pray your spirit

finds rest from

the world that killed

you.

What I want to know is where can I offer

myself up? What mountain do I climb?

(This piece appeared earlier in Northwest Magazine)

Chris Moran: "Eyes of Iblis"

2011-06-06T08:24:00.001-07:00

Spires of the sun pulsate and ache throughout the continuity of the void,

Through collapsed, weaning light. A limbic light whose fulminating aura is felt

Though never touched. I can never feel empathy for anything except for a failing thing.

Crossroads dim in this contingent vacuity. A devil touched me. Birthed me, brandished me.

Though my target eyes smile breath varnished. A tragic nudity, a stillborn. Palatial saturation.

Channels of decay. A fuming tension puts a barrier between my life-stream and other currents

Which flow parallel. The flow of days onward is a collapsible echo. Morph into an annihilated

Dream. The burning sensation of moon rain flitting the planet. To master our capacities

Fuller and fuller on command. To put my dream on this planet.

Cecilia Chapman: "Let Me Sleep In Your Crystal Kitchen"

2011-06-02T09:37:00.000-07:00

Please view at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbWrWqKGlxU

Music by Jeff Crouch, cell images by Steve Johnson; from Danger Archive, part of the Surreal Suspicion series currently in production.

Kate Schapira: "Like Sails"

2011-05-29T11:47:00.000-07:00

The difference between girders and beams

floods

the difference with lavender and yellow light

The differences between lavender and yellow light

deepen into the deep blue of blueprints

Streets and buildings empty of people but full of stone, garbage, animals, asphalt, cars, rats, pigeons, squirrels, cockroaches, souvenirs, fleas, mice, lice, people, mites, lights, silverfish, Sleep.

When J was a girl he was already forming architectures, investigating homes. We go from room to room not thinking our path is also something made. How many resources a single-family home reserves. How much a family makes—not just in the money sense. Should homes be more or less like factories. It’s difficult to place the cadence now that it’s faded; this room can’t mean what a larger room would mean. Recharged, a vision of building rubbing against his sky.

How high

How far

The plume of steam

Of bats

Of smoke

Like sails

The flight that harbors

Blueprints are blue because someone coated the paper with a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferrocyanide. Strong light converts exposed areas to insoluble blue ferric ferrocyanide—Prussian Blue. Someone else washes the soluble chemicals off with water, leaving a light-stable print. Or, blueprints are blue because for almost a century blueprint was the only low-cost process for copying drawings. J understands transformations that do nothing to change what’s essential. Buildings—elevations—fill and lift. Hinges, paper feathers, reveal the turbulent peaceful truth about what’s essential and there, like the present, billowing.

Take notice of the windows.

Take more. Not empty.

Empty of value.

Thrilling with fear of passionate arson.

A rag-musty assemblage.

A busy, temporary kitchen.

A declaration of grandeur.

Plaster dust settles in the shape of A) a permit / B) permission.

It’s when he tries to uncramp, to louver, he feels just how down his arms have been.

Say, “Vibrant,” say, “Eviction,” say, “Future.” All of these stray straw men-dogs, easy to blame or believe; say, “Commerce,” say, “Profit,” “Profit from,” “Nonprofit,” eat sauerkraut in “Punk houses.” Bacterial abundance, conjunction and fermentation. Say, “Vibrant,” again, say, “Thriving.” Jars glow and cool. Worms wriggle red in dark

newspaper. Changing weather balloons, silvery copy of Sleep who will float down and cover all of us, however vigorously we change, it can’t be the reason; say, “Thermal,” “Solar,” “Intestinal flora,” “Graywater,” campfires in our delicate structures, our giant catastrophic heaps.

Enormously expensive public sculpture made of

tongue-clickings and head-shakings

Plaster saints of money-luck in the windows of

botanicas (“Plants and Religious Goods”)

A man reposed under the giant abstraction of

whatever that thing is called in a still

because it offers shade to him, his chair and book

in use that’s living and resolute

Now the building, black on black, dark gray on dark brown, flat disuse on iron echoes and shadows, high and wrought and die-cut, shrinking his presence. He got a late start. He follows a trail of instructions and short candles up past the old dynamos and vaults, cavernous, massive, flickering, looming, to where his surprise lover sits, to scale, in the lighted center of the floor. Overhead, vastness, equally welcome.

Hugh Fox: two pieces from "The Yearbook"

2011-05-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

IX.

Wanting to zen into Spring like the swollen river outside my

back door, the gigantic crow top-heavy in the tree outside

my bedroom window, everything beginning

to unwrap and unwrinkle itself, and here I am with

my Skull Cap and Passion Flower, Melatonin, Valarian,

horniness, or is it horniness, or is it just angst, melancholia,

paranoia, discontent, bitchiness, ticks and lice, Lime Disease,

cancer of the lower bowel, flow, you are already dead, this

is all just extra time, flow with the clouds and the moon,

you've been dead a hundred thousand years, Siva dances

and Kali chomps on bowels, til death us do part a thousand

times, the perfect house on the perfect river, the perfect

porch, perfect hair and face, legs...and still you've been dead

a hundred thousand years.

Then suddenly one Sunday it turns and the undulating

forested, farmed, rivered landscape begins to talk, "We're

back, out here it's not the enemy any more, the enemy is in

there away from us," under the canopies of the resurrecting

trees, the river my love again, "I knew you'd wait for me to

come back," out, out, further into the duck and crow, deer,

squirrel world, the tree-god voices fingering around my legs

and face, as I'm swallowed by the shadowgods, home.

Tree Riesener: "End Times"

2011-05-23T09:09:00.001-07:00

the end times

started right after breakfast

fire remembered vapor

and rock the void

the wind was inconsolable

moaning and howling

in air’s new molecules

a thorazine world gone mad

now water’s gone

but there’s good news

you can live without water only a week

we’ll be gone before love goes

David Tomaloff: "-k ing { -escent opposite"

2011-05-21T07:42:00.000-07:00

David Tomaloff: "SPLiNTER"

2011-05-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

how does one put

one’s arms

around a tide?

ii.

the radio has been dreaming

for days—

about a day after days

, when it no longer lives to sing

the songs

of madmen &fools

iii.

about a day

when the oceans will rise up

&dance

with the moon—

present company excluded

, of course

2011-05-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

Rapture? What rapture?

According to some sources, there are 580 days, 23 hours and some minutes remaining.

Kim Parko: "Fortunate One'

2011-05-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

Astrological means to the end times. Ripe fruit. A séance drifts into Auto Park. Dark interior stratums. Tree rings. If we lose our will…will we recover from traumatic collisions colluded by too coolness? To the left to the left to the left right left. My left hand with its knobby fingers and fisted fatigue. My buttocks with their slow ache massage. Trip the light to land sprawled in shadow. Pull a blind eye from the tightening sun. Another dusk with pockmarked sanctuary. Airy surmises. Enterprising youth on the edge of curbs. Curbing inward we maintain adherence to the centerline. Nothing precipitated the drought that has landed us so thoroughly in hoarse whispers. Parchment from past decries all man-made articles of filth. Factory farming for the feint heart. Proclamation from future extols virtuous flora fanning into overzealous canopy. What better way to free tongue from barricade of scripture. Talk of the roundabout town. Down the chute to claim our loot.

Trains in the main stay. A hot bed of mortal coils. We search high and low for the mid-station. In a festive light there are fastidious shadows. Such is the sanctimonious singsong. Lovers of all things bright and bristled. A blip on the rotunda omens unseen pockets emptying their lint and receipts. The effervescent voices “like a glass of champagne” and a whirlpool will-o-the-wisp in the winged annexes of nave. Willfully, stringently, bitterly, they tightened their caps in the balmy air. Over in the next field the animals form pods, bunched souls, an amalgamation of fluids and fleece. The endless drought ended in a mass blow off. Herbal tinctures and poultices to bekcon meandered grace. Riverbed without fresh linens. Birds in mass descent forsake aerodynamic displays of uplift. In another lifetime. Plum wine drunk in the cup with the moon.

Oh, beast. Oh fortunate one. The intermittent leaves give way to vast expenses. Circle circle dot dot dot. In the mean time is the end time, is the time opening to embrace static estuaries. Coming down the track in rhythmic foreplay. Happenstance. Standing at alert. Muscles go to the place where they are most likely to harden. Spasms. Massage the knots from the over-tied hammock. We fall through the cracks. Winged Nike. In long forgotten deserts prescription to dry-lung. Coughing up thick, ashy globs of re-breathed debris. Mortals circle in immortality. Breastplates, skulls, wide berths for navigation through narrow channels. Open this letter. Body’s garbled voice writes with an unsteady hand. Glyphs and hatch marks knowing not if they are accidents of erosion.

Caitlin Thomson: "Summoned"

2011-05-14T08:51:00.000-07:00

People speak now of the

texture of absence,

the yellow nubbed air

in the street car replacing a stranger

with blue eyes and sideburns.

The small hovering

of cadmium in a lovers

spot on the couch.

Smear of ochre

above a swing.

Initially the fear of madness,

fingers being pointed

and rooms locked, kept lips

pressed together. Pursed

until whole nursing homes remained

full of beds, bleach, respirators

connected only to the walls.

Leaving people to grieve

with, not to.

2011-05-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

2011-05-11T18:14:00.000-07:00

Along Leninova, soot pines and state trucks,

a world emptying of human belief.

-Carolyn Forche, from The Notebook of Uprising

[According to some sources, there are 589 days, 14 hours and some minutes remaining.]

2011-05-11T10:08:00.000-07:00

Our forms are fearful of the fires that burn away
Self and identity, but in the dark of the heart
The candle of the soul still for the bridegroom burns,
And in the hidden electrons of the water
Consumes the zeal of burning for the last day.

-Kathleen Raine, from Fire

Tim Lantz: "Exeunt Omnes"

2011-05-10T16:05:00.001-07:00

blue-pinned almost-to-be-businessmen boys please allow this ground

to remain messy biologists cannot draw enough diagrams pinned-down

showcases contain only the practiced arrangement of swallows

become another way of marking time before we discover our kissing

heads where we persist in the directory restraining the names

we'd made for ourselves reparations in boxes our vascular systems

incriminate us for bruising whoever knows whether these fingers fumble

through any locks that still exist and foster one limb that pleases and please

share my latest-caught reserve of water if I accidentally remember

you in my writings don't think I owe you an apology for the inclusion

AE Reiff: "Pony"

2011-05-06T08:03:00.000-07:00

Pit pony

blind in Britain,

got rights in Europe

with Ape,

registered to vote

in condos,

places were pending

in Spain.

When Kafka's animals

understood,

the citizen

of giant mole

obsessed about it

like a dog,

the thing that’s not,

the mole that’s not,

the mine that’s not,

the ice foe's not.

Dots comphrending

to the end

of Pit ponies,

deep in their belief,

showed Kafka’s

animals were men.

When red tail

fomentin' lemurs

clung the wall

of Solzhenitsyn’s

cell,

pit gerbils

down on the floor

below were shocked

to octopeds.

To break

the boundaries

of all that’s not,

these monsters,

deep at traffic stops,

ate Borges

under coats of fur,

because the eagle spaniel

Solzhenitsyn men,

were animals.

Down in "The Burrow"

electric lights

detached pulsed

from their heads.

To give those animals

rights we sought

we give up

the ones we did.

we brought

the black carp up

the Mississippi Derrida,

and borrowed safe mine

ponies like snails,

to pull empires

big as whales.

AE Reiff: "Global Cure"

2011-05-01T08:58:00.001-07:00

To launch a bomb with one hand clap

I strike this meat hook to the cellar floor.

Insecticides in cans are going up

As farmers here below must shoot their stock,

and bees turn mean to leave the ants behind.

A first cure asks decay to make new art,

bug virus or a tree off landfill trash.

Billions of cars must southward go,

but computer parts are slow,

now there’s polluting on the moon

this tragic species dies too soon.

For a second cure we seek another buyer.

Tree rings burned from the years fire

make earth imperfect

as heavenly metal in hell,

or hot gas Venus-Jupiter,

but not enough on Mars,

and Pluto’s worse.

It brings down the galaxy’s net worth.

Failing that the human gene will have to stop it,

Simple nature no longer profits,

we release a cure for all our wit,

flip the poles and make a sudden leap,

which makes the ages fall asleep.

The natural law is just, it just

takes long to rule the human meek.

Mikko Harvey: "Window"

2011-04-26T08:59:00.000-07:00

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.

Kevin Luna: "Repeating Planets"

2011-04-22T11:54:00.001-07:00

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.

Ross Plovnick: "Gulls"

2011-04-18T09:59:00.001-07:00

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?

Thad Higa: "One Cup, Two Cup"

2011-04-14T09:43:00.000-07:00

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!

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.

Ray Succre: "Chance"

2011-04-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-04-08T15:44:00.001-07:00

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

Carlos Rowles: (an unpublished excerpt)

2011-04-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

... 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

Aaron Belz: "To the Front"

2011-03-30T08:27:00.001-07:00

I must no longer ask

the kinds of questions

one asks in poems

or provide the kinds of

answers one inevitably

provides: I am at war

now and must produce

steel, rubber, and rations.

I am at war and must

ship all my questions

and answers to the front.

At the front people

are dying because they

have not enough steel,

rubber, rations, questions,

and answers to beat

the enemy. They are dying

because I am hording

everything for myself

and my family and not

giving it to them.

I will fly this poem,

loaded with supplies, to

the front. I will step into it

as one steps into a cargo

helicopter and inevitably lifts

amid gusts, amid clouds

of dust, and fly until I reach

the front and land

and emerge the hero

with a load of new

rubber, hard steel, fresh

rations, and questions,

many questions, and new

answers, complex answers,

and I will be decorated.

They will whisper

that I did the right thing.

They will smile and be proud.

They must not die.

[Read more Aaron at [belz.net]

2011-03-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

In the dream of approaching forty I saw myself as about to die and realized that I was no longer myself, but a creature inhabited entirely by parasites, as a caterpillar is occupied by the grubs of the icheneumon fly. Gin, whisky, sloth, fear, guilt, tobacco, had made themselves my inquilines; alcohol sloshed about within, while tendrils of melon and vine grew out of ears and nostrils; my mind was a worn gramophone record, my true self was such a ruin as to seem non-existent, and all this had happened in the last three years.

- Cyril Connolly, from The Unquiet Grave

Ben Nardolilli: "The Other Side"

2011-03-25T10:17:00.001-07:00

Flat horizon only the solitude

not the mountains or the sea,

the cold blast I wheel,

And responded gaily,

when there is the damp ground

sweet Thames, run

so intelligent

Heard one person starve

a young man carrying thunder,

his eyes open, I saw

the Elysian Fields,

a poet and a world traveler,

the heyday, my friends,

heard the roar of a graveyard,

and not without reason.

2011-03-21T22:16:00.000-07:00

Knife in hand, the totem maker

Carves the final ancestor

In the animal valley

- Duane McGinnis, from The Valley of the Gods

from the saucers

2011-03-21T22:09:00.000-07:00

2011-03-19T22:01:00.000-07:00

from On Gertrude Stein About 9:30

How curious. I had no idea! Today has ended.

from Canicula di Anna
52

Black for the pines,
black for the cypresses,
black for the thinking Christ.
But
silver rubbed
white for the bones
when we found her for
they stood
in the wounds like metaphysicians
quiet,
bloodless,
glancing
out.

-from Anne Carson

2011-03-19T11:22:00.001-07:00

Every day, a little apocalypse

Lay down, lay down next to his

-David Byrne

2011-03-19T11:19:00.000-07:00

The gale, it plies the saplings double,

It blows so hard, ‘twill soon be gone:

To-day the Roman and his trouble

Are ashes under Uricon.

- A.E. Housman, from “A Shropshire Lad, XXXI”

2011-03-19T11:12:00.003-07:00

2011-03-19T11:03:00.001-07:00

Ah, past the plunge of plummet,

In seas I cannot sound,

My heart and soul and senses,

World without end, are drowned.

- A.E. Housman, from “A Shropshire Lad, XIV"

Kate Schapira: "Choose your own (II)"

2011-03-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

If you make it past the checkpoint, you enter a stadium lit with green and yellow lights—you’re already pulling the gray clay brick out of your bag, people are pulling gray clay bricks out of purses, fannypacks, satchels, briefcases, messenger backs, people are laying their own bricks—the bricks they brought with them—on top of seats, walkways, and below, the sweepers hired to sweep away the flowers look up in late alarm—

The sky is a blue shell you wouldn’t believe even if this story came true. Whose idea could it have been? Forming the low houses framing a courtyard just as they used to, or would if they could, forming hot blank corners and places to tuck bicycles, and the guards are shooting now but their bullets get lost in narrow passages and unexpected gardens.

To begin with if. The rags of our wounds never quite close, but clean clothes become part of the economy. Everybody knows each other by name and smell. Grim is not clean or general or easy; events always seem to lead, but in effect what it comes is back to this, food scarce, scabs, a guest at the fire. Actual relationships to a central governing body have not changed much but presumptive relationships have melted, colored oils soaked from them into already fairly poisonous ground. If slowly bad news became human-sized, come not back but around, if you are one of many, but not very many.

2011-03-17T16:39:00.001-07:00

Kate Schapira: "Choose your own (I)"

2011-03-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

2011-03-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

What if I lost all the detail, and could only tell you about things in a general sense? All the edges had turned a little metallic—or was it just ashy?—slightly silvery, a kind of ghostly powder, hard but not exactly bright. There was still something there, lumped into sacklike nouns, a little adjectival sprinkle sifting out of the open seams. It was like a skeleton, like a burned forest filled still with the uprightness of the former trees, their spacing maintained by their crusted stumps, leafiness and liveliness now only inferred from the gray material so consistently covering the charcoaled ground.

-Angela Woodward, from End of the Fire Cult

Lee Stern: "Either Way"

2011-03-12T08:56:00.001-08:00

I want you to be proud of me for the way that I’ve turned out.

I want you to say to yourself, “It could have gone either way

but he did pretty good.”

I want you to say that, when I fell into the pit hole,

I didn’t waste any time at all in pulling myself out of it.

And that when I got back up to the level ground,

instead of wasting my time sniveling about my experience,

I loaded some pears into my basket.

And took off for the new world that was finally waiting in front of me

not like a supplicant. But like the bringer of additional advice,

who, when the melting begins, throws leaves in a bowl full of grain.

Bruce Boston: "Ghost People"

2011-03-09T21:47:00.000-08:00

If ghost people

were the world

we would roam

the empty highways

in search of life.

We would migrate

through the walls

of deserted homes

and become manifest

in abandoned bedrooms

and kitchens to briefly

touch the objects of

the real world in a

way less than human.

We would watch the

fine artifice of man

stealing into ruin

as the centuries

unraveled: highways

cracked to broken slabs

soon lost in wilderness,

cities collapsing stone

by stone into rubble.

We would learn to think

of the changing climate

we were unable to feel

not in months or years

but passing millennia.

We would track strange

species as they appeared

and flourished and evolved

to stranger incarnations.

We would see the earth

turn flat in its crumbling

and watch the seas recede.

With our memories intact

as the sun burned red,

we would howl louder

than the dying wind.

*

[According to some sources there are about 652 days and some ten hours remaining of the world as we know it.]

Duane Ackerson: "Praising Little"

2011-03-06T10:06:00.001-08:00

Let us praise little:

dust, pilgrims resting on plateaus,
the world inside the wind
of a vacuum cleaner,
the mouth of the navel
rehearsing small speeches
of lint, pockets full of replies;

things moving under stones:
bugs, small black flames
licking through woodpiles,
worms stretching their tendons
when you try to pull earth free from itself

parachutists, blossoms falling and
folding back into two-stemmed flowers,
walking away

dogs performing under the grandstands
while the elephants attempt
to climb up on each other

the mist, no larger than a gray caterpiller
as it climbs hills
to reach your eyes;

the past, becoming a small small ball
as it richochets off one thought
then another,

bouncing further and further
back into the brain.

[from the chapbook, "The Bird at the End of the Universe"]

Cooper Renner: "Lear"

2011-03-03T08:06:00.000-08:00

and from Shakespeare's text:

Lear:
Nature’s above art in that respect. There’s your
press-money. That fellow handles his bow like a
crow-keeper: draw me a clothier’s yard. Look,
look, a mouse! Peace, peace; this piece of toasted
cheer will do ‘t. There’s my gauntlet; I’ll prove
it on a giant. Bring up the brown bills. O, well
flown, bird! i’ the clout, i’ the clout: hewgh!
Give the word.

Edgar:
Sweet marjoram.

Lear:
Pass.

2011-03-03T08:00:00.001-08:00

The ovenbird is in the warbler family. It has olive-colored wings and tail and upper body, but its belly is heavily streaked in black. You often saw ovenbirds walking on the ground, as I had that week behind the sawmill, though sometimes they perched on low branches. I thought it was easy to detect a human word in their call, teacher, teacher, teacher, each repetition louder than the one before.

- Howard Norman, from The Bird Artist

Therese Becker: "Lunch With the Dalai Lama"

2011-02-26T08:42:00.000-08:00

In a dream he is standing in line

in a busy high school cafeteria

blending in, (even with his shaved head,

prayer beads, red robe and sandals)

waiting as if he were just another student.

When he asks me to have lunch with him,

I begin to excitedly invite everyone else to join us,

but we are invisible inside the hungry crowd

rushing to their place in the food line,

and so we sit alone at a long wooden table

where he proposes no mantra, no meditation or prayer;

instead, he reaches inside his robe and brings out

an old radio which he places on the table

as if it were the cafeteria's main selection of the day.

He begins to show me how to work the dials

and I feel like a child just beginning to walk

or a bird about to sing its first song.

As he works the dials, he looks toward me

to be sure I'm paying attention.

His hands appear brilliant as the sun,

his eyes like water in a still pond

that holds an endless wave of being

transmitted and received.

He reaches out, holds

my trembling hand, places it

so gently on the radio's dials

where I begin to feel the song inside

of everyone awakening, a song of hope

I've always known, but yet forgotten,

that is now right here as I awake

inside the middle of the night singing.

(previous credit to Oberon Magazine)

Sheila Ryan: "Crossroads"

2011-02-23T21:17:00.000-08:00

2011-02-23T21:16:00.001-08:00

The night was gone for good. Then he heard a door open upstairs. Someone came down the stairs, and Elizabeth stood before him. She touched his arm, she moved her lips, but he heard nothing.

In a moment, she said, “You’ll never come back. I know it. Don’t say you will. You’ll never come back.”

“No, I never will,” he said.

She dropped her hand and said nothing more. She was standing, motionless, at the very same spot as before, looking at him through lifeless eyes. He took one step toward her, opened his arms, and then, wrenching himself violently, he thrust himself outside. The world was alight with morning; the dew entangled in the spider webs gleamed in the first sunlight. He never looked back. Behind him the peaceful farm slowly dissolved; and in front of him rose the great, wide world.”

- Theodor Storm, from Immensee

Brad Liening: "Beyond the Sea"

2011-02-20T18:52:00.000-08:00

In this landscape of flowering skulls

You turn to me to tell me of

Great octopi forming letters

Beneath the sea,

A desperate message for whom

And who taught octopi how to spell?

Spells cast and broken daily.

That’s the last I see of you!

In the back of the hearse, a smaller hearse,

One million unique snowflakes

Edging closer to the flame,

One phase moving into another.

Transmogrifications abound:

I’m a French millipede

Understanding the underside

To French shoes and stiletto boots,

Everything else Greek to me

Except for the ruins, universal language

That makes a lot of money.

2011-02-19T10:18:00.000-08:00

Dead leaves, coffee grounds, grenadine, tabac Maryland, mental expectation,--perfumes of the Nord-Sud; autumn arrivals at Pigalle, or sorties from Notre-Dame-des-Champs into the lights of Montparnasse, where the chestnuts, glowing red by the metro entrance, live in a warmer climate than other trees....
Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whome we do not control.

-Cyril Connolly, from The Unquiet Grave

(photo: "Mushroom" by contributor Eric Burke)

Marge Simon: "When the Moon Explodes"

2011-02-17T10:57:00.001-08:00

They’d planned to tour Greece this summer, but now that’s out.
They put the last of their pot in the Ford pickup, take I-95 to Daytona. 
It’s Vera’s idea.  She says she wants watch the moon explode.

“Do you remember when we got this high?” Vera says.
“Crazy times, the seventies,” her friend agrees. 
She wipes the hair from her eyes.
.
Tonight they walk along the sand. Moonlight makes divinity of the fog. 
There is a sudden rush of wind and colors that are not colors
but multiples of blue and silver. The sea is on their lips 
and the whole white night sings aloud.

Vera laughs and steps into the waves, extends her hand. 
"You’ve not enough strength. Take mine.”

2011-02-14T21:41:00.000-08:00

He seemed to be quite unexpectedly (for human despair seldom leads to great truth) on the verge of a simple solution to the universe but was interrupted by an urgent request. A squirrel under a tree had seen Pnin on the path. In one sinuous tendril-like movement, the intelligent animal climbed up to the brim of a drinking fountain and, as Pnin approached, thrust its oval face toward him with a rather coarse spluttering sound, its cheeks puffed out. Pnin understood and after some fumbling he found what had to be pressed for the necessary results…

The water father continued upon his way, came to the end of the path, then turned into a side street where there was a small bar of log-cabin design with garnet glass in its casement windows.

-Vladimir Nabokov, from Pnin

2011-02-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

Janet Brennan: from "New Colors"

2011-02-13T12:22:00.000-08:00

....Only the green haze that engulfed the city permeated my consciousness on that dreary day in September. The leaves should have been standing out against a turquoise sky as gold and red-rust. Rather, they were hidden among the thick haze that threatened to choke all of humanity. Most sane people were huddled together in the basements of their homes after diligently, albeit a bit late, boarding the windows and cracks of their homes. Quick streaks of electricity sparked and crackled across the sky, snapping branches of dead trees as a thunder storm threatened to purge the decaying city. It would either rain or set it on fire again....

2011-02-13T10:38:00.000-08:00

Homage a Hokusai

2011-02-11T13:17:00.000-08:00

When he stepped out into the street, the afternoon was ailing; a plague of light was blighting the radiance of the sun; an epidemic of boils and rashes spread and erupted across the sky, infecting the clouds, which wilted and sagged in their faltering progress....
....And there in the distance, along the scabby skyline, Suk's spent days shone blue, small, and healthy, devoid of calendar names in the happily vanishing herd, free of him and his worries, leaving dust in their wake....

-Milorad Pavic, from Dictionary of the Khazars

2011-02-11T08:05:00.000-08:00

2011-02-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

All at first was the fremitus of things, the jigger of gnats, drum of the blood, fidget of leaves, shiver of light, boom of the wind. The tremor of my cry may have had something to do with choosing this threshold. There are other sills, empty places with intolerable glare, presences, noon quiet, lonely desperate desert wastes. I have died again in them. Those who go to the inhuman to place their hopes upon its alien rhythms, its bitter familiarity with nothing, its constant retreat from all that we can love, are hostages to vastation.

-Guy Davenport, from C. Musonius Rufus

Doug Draime: "War Mall"

2011-02-09T12:30:00.000-08:00

There could be time

enough, and even

energy enough,

but the will stumbles back

into unrepairable

memories.

The lungs have inhaled

marijuana, and the

day is dark, moving like

a snail uphill in fog.

Everywhere there is

preparation for war ...

where the big countries

bomb the little countries.

The mall is full

of robots called American Consumers,

blind and dull

as door jams.

I forget where I parked my car,

and almost desperately

search one row at a time.

And I find my beat-up, ‘92 Ford Tempo

at the end of the 5th row.

Some days I can’t walk into a mall

without being overwhelmed by the

mentality of war.

There is something blatantly

ostentatious, something

bellowing greed and arrogance,

that disgusts me!

On other days I am better.

I can come with my wife shopping for family

and friends, and be a regular guy.

Yeah, it must be the ganga, or the gloomy

dark Oregon day,

as I speed down the freeway for

home, like an army deserter

running from the front lines,

and more than happy to be one.

(this poem first appeared in The American Dissident)

Anssi Seppänen: “to do”

2011-02-05T09:30:00.000-08:00

what to do in life,

spiders & flies.

what to do,

in life,

comics,

cartoon strips,

wives.

something to do,

Chagall, Modigliani,

Kandinsky.

sleep in life,

follow the tide.

Howie Good: “Art of This Century”

2011-02-02T07:01:00.000-08:00

Black lines of paint veil

the troubled queen.

A dagger-tongued horse peeks in.

The man in overalls has begun

to drink heavily again.

With the arrival of summer,

a flower is a fox in a hole.

Such winds!

Sounds in the grass disturb

the neighborhood’s grief.

2011-02-01T16:07:00.001-08:00

…and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take if off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will…

-Robert Bolano, from By Night In Chile

Peter Max Lawrence: "figure"

2011-01-31T09:56:00.000-08:00

[According to popular sources, there are 689 days, 12 hours and several minutes remaining.]