DeWitt Brinson: “Today,” and a drawing

Today just like everyday

was uneventful for trees

as far as they can tell

trees do very little

and are very important

for us to survive

and other species

if we are ever to survive

we must let them continue

doing almost nothing all day

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

Lost In America

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

The Hit

1

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

2

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

3

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

The Fallacies Of Hope

A guidebook

to Belgium.

4,000 killed here.

Bloodstains

that by some

strange act

become farms

and buildings.

The sun

is god

stupefied

with ether.

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

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

in the middle of the woods

there's almost no life

there's almost no

middle in the woods

more woods

will be cleared tomorrow

lots of people in the woods

they occupy the woods

because the woods are weak

vicky the viking comes

to the rescue

and follow the link to the animated treatment:

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

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

The Earth Is Exploding Where Lawrence Of Arabia Once Slept

where he fought

and fornicated

where he turned

his heart to blowing sand

blood lust

running through

his aristocratic veins

his blue eyes full of

the murderous

future

Trip to Nowhere

Where I found answers I

could not find questions

for. The middle was not

in the middle but off

to the right side, positioned

like an open grave. Voices

spoke In English making

no grammatical sense. I

grabbed hold of

the edge

of something freezing and fierce, 

which took off all my flesh up

to my elbow. There was no moon

or sun or stars or sky

only rain and movement all

around me like

speeding trains on

rusty tracks. No entrance, no

exit, no way of telling light

from dark. My bones

broke like pencils

against monolithic structures everywhere

I turned

and everywhere was nowhere

and somewhere was slaughtered with

no purpose and no direction. 

Suddenly there was a sound like

millions
of breaking windows, 

smashing in echo chambers

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

through and that my bones would

heal, I would form new skin on

my arm, and the questions were something

in the middle once again. The moon, the

sun, the stars and the sky were

there too.

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

Tim Van Hook: “Leave"

Our tangled pair bubbles out from a point,

Till the dark mass pulls us in to rejoin.

Space winds up time in a place we can stay,

Red shift of light can’t diminish the day.

I only grieve so I find you anew.

I only leave so I fall back to you.

Once we were one in the hot salty sea,

Split but the code sits in our memory.

Ere the begats that the garden expelled

You were my sister on African veldt.

I only see as I look through you too.

I’m only free as I bind fast to you.

Slip of a girl and a boy tongue-tied tall

Kiss inside us through our grown up disguise.

Tucked in below children long to recall

Two old folks young in their soft focus eyes.

I only cry so the tears clear my view.

I’d only die so I rest next to you.

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

“Leave” by Tim Van Hook, 2010

Brian Beatty: "Fenced Out"

The early morning graffiti

of fog doesn’t lift here

in London, CA.   

Geography is a fear —

a vast pornography of voter

abstraction 

& discontent. 

Why not riot? We're expert

at following arrows.

We are what remain of all

that we can’t see for the forest’s 

proliferation of trees/posts.

This goat the world's

been parenting as a metaphor

has turned out to be

a dreadful substitute.

Or maybe we're learning 

(again) that we’re poor hosts.

Peter William Stein: “The End”

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”

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”

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”

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"

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"

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"

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”

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

            ~Horace

1.

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

2.

maybe she wanted him

the impossible dialog

Something Imagined

3.

Write your name

in a veiled raven.

4.

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.

6.

flick off the light switch

7.

The ghosts are laughing

I still have hope

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

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"

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"

1

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.

2

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.

3

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"

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"

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"

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.

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"

                  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"

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"

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"

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.