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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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)

... 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"

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]

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"

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.

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

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

Every day, a little apocalypse

Lay down, lay down next to his

-David Byrne

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”

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)"

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.

Kate Schapira: "Choose your own (I)"

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.

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"

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"

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"

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"

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.

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"

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"

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