Sunday, May 29, 2011

Kate Schapira: "Like Sails"

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.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Hugh Fox: two pieces from "The Yearbook"


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.


X.

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.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Tree Riesener: "End Times"



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

Saturday, May 21, 2011

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


David Tomaloff: "SPLiNTER"



i.
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

Friday, May 20, 2011

Rapture?  What rapture?

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

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Kim Parko: "Fortunate One'



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.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Caitlin Thomson: "Summoned"


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.


Wednesday, May 11, 2011

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.]

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

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Tim Lantz: "Exeunt Omnes"



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

Friday, May 6, 2011

AE Reiff: "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
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.

2.

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.

3.

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.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

AE Reiff: "Global Cure"

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.