NO INFINITE: a journal of poetry, art and protest by Mitch Manning

E T I N I F N NO I a journal of poetry, art & protest

Volume 1, Winter 2014

NO INFINITE

Insides Here, Now, Ephemera, the Poem, and Other Pieces Examined by Me

Joseph Torra

self, a hanged man methusela tree

Thera Webb

Lives of a Parrot / Lou Reed RIP

John Wesley Coleman III

Untitled

James Stotts

Dwelltime

Annie Gardner

To Furnish a Broken Glass

Carl Mehrmann

Bruno Looks For Pansexuality / Sneak Peeks His Aunt’s Sympathy

Charles McGregor

James Cook

Translation Feature

Victor Valera Mora translated by Anne Boyer

Feed Your Demons

Brandon Dean Lamson

Prayer For My Father

Tamer Mostafa

i’ve left the studio door open,

Lewis Feuer

Gravity Plums

Peter Picetti

Ode to the Automobile for my Car Designer Friend

Lance Langdon

Audrey Mardavich

Cormorant Somatic

CA Conrad

3 Poems

Martin Corless Smith

Notes on Martin Corless-Smith

Boyd Nielson

Contributors

3 Poems

Late Capitalism Cover Art: “One Peak” by Francesca Caruso Editors: Mitch Manning, Stephanie, Correa, Ginger Tripp, Grant Bonnier & Tom Johnston Layout and Design: Mitch Manning & Ginger Tripp Visit Us: noinfinitejournal@tumblr.com Contact Us / Send Work: noinfinitejournal@gmail.com © 2014 NO INFINITE - All rights retained by the authors

Artwork “Chromium Swell”

Bryan Olson

“Perception”

Sammy Slabbinck

Editor’s Note

Here, Now, Ephemera, the Poem, and Other Pieces Examined by Me Joseph Torra

NO INFINITE emerges from the continuum of essential, but often neglected, Boston-area literary magazines. We consider Ralph Emerson’s Gyre, John Wiener’s Measure, Gerrit Lansing’s Set, Joe Torra’s lift, Cid Corman’s Origin, Alan Davies 100 Posters, Bill Corbett’s Pressed Wafer, Dan Bouchard’s The Poker, Margaret Bezucha and Kevin Gallagher’s compost, Boyd Nielson’s Property Press, James Cook’s Polis among many other journals and mags to be our local literary predecessors. NO INFINITE is another spoke in the spinning wheel of anti-establishment Boston poetics, gyrating on the energies of those before us, those among us, and those we’ll soon meet. NO INFINITE provides a venue for writers and artists whose words and visions speak to our world, far worlds, and infinite worlds. NO INFINITE is born out of the lost illusions of the 21st century, the failure of infinite growth on a finite planet and numbed to near death by economists and indolent politicos.

Hiss at night ask why it strikes its mark in talk moves in lines in dark in bright dyes grooves stretch your leg exposing a modest-sized camel-toe boring everyone except yourself Today has to do with your tomorrow blue brings me by again thinskinned stories and carriers of song along the fence finches flutter all avenues die at a dumpster You’re some collapsible blood cell painted toes tattoos ooh cool hey farmer farmer put away the DDT you saw the sixties now a graduate of the world swirling in a pond of steamy liquors Beat the life out folks with little luck die and that’s it climb a long line of sound into the picturesque beneath the antenna above the porch a crystal craze be to purebred watch stored in space and time my muse wants out walks away on sexy heels

We are the praxis of Charles Olson’s message in “Letter 6”: “There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only eyes in all heads, to be looked out of ” Enjoy the dithyrambic chorus of NO INFINITE, a world placed down on the map of ordinary time, in art, verse, and protest. — The Editors

A species of exotic birds floods markets bodies float in tropical fable twice bitten once forbidden hidden underneath I imagined a light left on but your hair’s a mess dress stale boho Buildings with wallpaper from decades gone by in subtitles entitled little urchin itching for yesterday an apple a day is alluring eat the starfish bubble up in murky water they oughtta spray you over with a sleeping spray cover the penciled misery

A little dick goes a long way Texas becomes part of the landscape a handshake I figured you born prairie dust and sagebrush wood floors in numbers one two three four five and five is ten then you start over wee one car after another until until gas spills and there again thumbing rides hills slide into human orifices Dreams on the patio a great day in anyone’s life smell flowers unexpected hours where I would have you but you refuse it on the stairs Black paint on white wafer a man with holier-than-thou looks plays tricks you into a kiss in a small town where poem died the child’s ear hears suddenly a born winged creature between air and not air Edges where we became animals then cannibals then material for a story I find you wildly childlike beneath a wooden bridge mouse in a hawk’s beak hidden in a huge tree trunk you harbor your freshly cut pain I’ve no stomach for an against-the-wall angst-ridden doll like you I want a dot on a map a farewell widely spaced drops of rain to be reborn on the ground I can no longer free myself from Womb mistaken for tomb roots a hole that needs me to tell letters from syllables the value of one number to the umpteenth power neat little rows of plays no one reads yellow walk signals click-clack of tap shoes Ado or adieu you paint-by-number palette billboard return history to an all-purpose serum and tortoise-shelled willy-nillies I’m weak you’re not-so-urban neon so c’mon gee wiz poem’s an orb in the palm of a hand

self, a hanged man Thera Webb

in the hierarchy of meaning the sun is behind her behind the fog of waterfall the sheep’s head grazing glass blood stratifies in rock. air stratifies in stratographic measure. if you were a shadow left on paper a wasp would nest it a measure of millet, of working hands per mile the plants are always moving pixilation runs across the field towards her eye what do you say on a day like today? your body breathes above the clouds masking the moon, your hung heels and the airplane waving what good is a knife that won’t close? all the time heals with a jump, force out the present through a steel loop. x out the eyes. gouge. island lungs, air pressure I breathe out a tree can be scraped of its entirety chipped cool marble off the statue’s face one time I spent the every day an ice chip on the ocean tear away my eyes from your skin deflesh me

methusela tree Thera Webb

pinprick of alphabet on roots, bark mark the age of the age you are today. today you eye in the cloud swims you rhythm of the ocean pounding grate the land today your pinky tears apart from hand tar bubbles sand your roots are too far from the sky to ease the burning of the sun down your body is an archive of staying here cyanide breathes. the tips of the grass move. into burning lungs. the touch of scorched water. breathe into the mouth of a needle floating on water

Lives of a Parrot

Lou Reed RIP

John Wesley Coleman III

Red sullen roped broken jesus save the parrot stare on burning cross made of pink feathers bush glowing urine woman eating flies bars of sun brighten songs of pain hello future past parrot Blues 6

lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou what can i say about lou? lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou lou

Prayer For My Father Tamer Mostafa

There’s all this talk about Abdel Nasser and the glory he brought to the country, that even in the ’67 Six-Day War, a loss was a loss, but it was a loss because of a lack of numbers, not a lack of action. You were glad I left in time. Glad I wasn’t there for the first wave of violence, that I’m a first generation American who was spared the sight of golf ball-sized bullet holes in heads, the missing limbs, the police vans that have overlapping human body outlines on the front and back under the Arabic lettering.

Today, you are back in your country without another president. You’ve seen four in your lifetime, each one worse than their predecessor and the streets deteriorated into enemy territories and fragments that ricochet off disposed political boards. Until now, I’ve kept quiet and listened to so-called revolutionaries in academia call for numbers in debating issues they deem to be inhumane, but they don’t have your stress, the physical wounds, the proof, the cause, or your action.

One of our first lessons as children is that Egyptians don’t think with rationale. It’s all emotion and about the terms of honor and nobility that only a revolution can turn into attributes. You hung off a tank’s nozzle in Tahrir and used your other arm to flash the red, white, and black flag with so much force, it was the most turbulence the affixed golden eagle in the middle has ever felt. We never played catch, but thinking of you throwing heavy cement chunks and steaming tear gas cartridges with ease makes me glad we skipped that father-son moment of bonding, and I know you are still amazed at how little blood can be soaked up with the gauze bandages that were always low in supply. We said this would cost you, but you stayed for the remembrance of the older generations who recited their tales of colonial independence from experience. This has cost you. It’s cost you in stress, in escalating diabetes numbers, pulled teeth, bullet grazed skin marks, near fatal stab wounds. All in a cramped square for weeks with millions of Egyptians whose collective blood pressure is unimaginable. After the revolution, it cost you America, the recurring symptoms led to homeless shelters, park benches, and hospital waiting rooms until security removed you because they knew you were only there to sleep.

Dwelltime Annie Gardner I’ve been thinking about dwellings of recent. As I thought about the spaces in which I have dwelled, I thought about the connotation of “dwell,” and not just the connotation but in fact the literal definition. Webster’s College Dictionary calls it, “to live or stay as a permanent resident,” but I’ve never actually taken up any permanent residency anywhere. And, in fact, I have this little tic wherein as soon as I remark upon my intention to stay in a place permanently, I immediately begin to secretly plan my escape. I immediately begin to plan to dwell elsewhere.

Interviewed in Der Spiegel, a drone pilot operating out of Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada says, “We watch people for months. We see them playing with their dogs or doing their laundry. We know their patterns like we know our neighbors’ patterns. We even go to their funerals.”

A thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately has been the US government’s drone program in Pakistan, which has been ongoing for nearly nine years but which, admittedly, I only started thinking about when I started thinking about the ethics of voting Barack Obama in for a second term. It occurred to me that while I had been frantically covering the Arab Spring and marking the disquiet leading up to it, chalking all this up to the loyalty that only an Egyptian childhood could have sparked, I had forgotten entirely about another childhood home. When you don’t dwell in any place for long enough your loyalty wires get crossed.

You are trained, as a certain type of transient global cosmopolitan kid, to hyper-pigment your imagination. What you don’t actually remember, you make up. All kids do this (“I remember, when I was a baby...” Kid, no you don’t!) but the transient global cosmopolitan kid does it more. My younger brothers and sister can remember things that happened before they were born, remember them in vivid detail. I can remember the time I asked my conservative Southern belle grandma if she had a penis, even though what I actually remember is the way that my mom tells the story (It is never not funny).

An MQ-1 Predator, a long-dwell unmanned aerial vehicle produced by General Atomics (private industry: nuclear physics, defense contracts, founded “for the purpose of harnessing the power of nuclear technologies for the benefit of mankind,” emphasis mine) is a multi-faceted creature; so multi-faceted, in fact, that the “M” in its name is new. It stands for multi-role. The MQ-1 Predator, and such close relatives as the MQ1C Grey Eagle or the MQ-9 Reaper, used to be initialed RQ, but aficionados discovered quickly that reconnaissance was just one of its myriad talents. MQ-1 Predators, when outfitted rightly, can attack, too. They can hover quietly (older models were described as “lawnmowers in the sky,” nowadays they’re engineered to be more quiet.) for up to 24 hours at a time, as low as 15,000 feet. Predator drones have a long dwell-time, and as they dwell the pilots holding the joysticks can wait and watch, and watch, and watch. There’s an existential anxiety that is triggered by choosing to write about 10

drones. Considering surveillance, considering quiet, hovering shadows that see you and your pets and your family dinners and calculate, quantify your life and whether it’s worth taking.

In an informational video on Predators, a chipper pilot says, “When you get out you can go home to your family just like anybody else.”

The machinations of this world, this transient global cosmopolitan kid world, so frequently broken by movement and migrancy, is made accessible through a fourth wall; you were there but you’re not there now; it happened but now it’s over. Our memory bleeds. The terrazzo floors I remember from Islamabad might actually be the terrazzo floors from Cairo with a different brain-light-filter, my favorite doll might be somebody else’s doll entirely. When I look at the pictures I realize I might not really remember very much at all. At a family dinner my granny asks me what my first memories are. We’re eating daal but it’s not spicy enough. Our family legacy belongs to Pakistan but Pakistan does not belong to us. Here is what I do remember of my first three years of life: beautiful mountain vistas. Maybe the Himalayas, maybe the Hindu Kush, probably a little bit of both, my parents travelled a lot because I was an easygoing child and they were easygoing young folks. Hail storms: this 11

was probably in the mountains too, if I know anything about Pakistan’s climate. A garden with a high wall in F-8 in Islamabad. Rosebushes, getting bitten by red ants. We went to Swat at least twice. Swat Valley was quiet. It was the retreat. It was where everyone went when summers in the city got to be too much, three hours or so from Islamabad on the Peshawar motorway--a very winding 3 hour motorway, my dad reminds me. My first visual memories, excluding the walled garden in F-8 in Islamabad, are rocks, bellowing rivers. Taking a bath in a bucket. The one piece of furniture that my parents have carried with them across three continents is a Swati chair. In Swat my dad goes on a trout-fishing trip with between 8-10 of his Pathan students. They catch no fish, they roast a goat instead. Swat is rural. It’s undeveloped. We eat kabobs at roadside stands, we’re not supposed to drink the water. 25 years later the same population is the target of a drone war. “The military drone is a transnational and telepresent kill system, a disembodied destroyer of bodies.” That’s artist Alex Rivera. He says that drones are “the most extreme expression of who we are and what we’ve become generally.” Are we drones now?: hovering, surveilling, shooting, barely touching ground. Urban Dictionary’s most popular definition for dwell reads thusly: “dwelling means to think about past things that could have been good or bad to someone this is usually brought upon by alcohol or drugs and sometimes leads to depression and drug-use [example:] guy 1: hey man, i have been dwelling bout the night my home past away, i could have saved him guy 2: don’t blame yourself bro it aint your fault, no-one could have stopped the bullet.”

To Furnish a Broken Glass Carl Mehrmann

for Joanna Oh There is no dust on the furniture of neglect, although it’s kept alone and still, like dreams of fruit in barren countries, or hours spent on less foreboding shores than their domestic scene—defining, as one must, routine against routine as accidents of dust. This invitation to the falling glass is like a flash of lust behind my eye, whereby its shattering inaugurates a foliage of contemplation, a flush of so much sitting water on the floor, each shard of glass articulating the moment to itself, and you, now turning from the cutting board, our breakfast apples sliced and stacked beneath your palm, assign to the room its hue— so gentle, so startled, so radiant, so undressed.

When you are a certain type of transient global cosmopolitan kid, you become hyper-aware of your own privilege and your sense of empathy gets skewed, and you start to feel responsible for things you have no business feeling responsible for. You think about the 176 Pakistani kids who someone in Indian Springs, Nevada pushed a button to kill and you begin to dwell on it. You begin to think that maybe you are less like a kid and more like a drone. Maybe you hover and surveil and watch other people and then maybe you shoot a thing and then you leave your command pod and go back to your family just like anybody else. 12

Bruno Looks For Pansexuality

Bruno Sneak Peeks His Aunt’s Sympathy

Charles McGregor

Reflections come too easy on a dripping porch where everything falls in patterns. A plastic bottle clatters down the road and Bruno would like to go with it so he can feel the mist and do the right thing. She used to ask questions without answers. She is a why do people even recycle if they stack them on top of the bins? He wonders if there is an in-between for him—a lust for hairy armed women. How many bins can Bruno stuff and what would be left for the others? He can’t decide— the tidy rain, the rancorous bottle? Does everybody fit into a priori patterns?

She generously talks to him about titan swings, ballerina curveballs and the next hologram hero— a tragic Gehrig. They pick the motion picture with the heaving breasts and Bruno wonders if she saw him stare at her paunch. He is angry because she calls the popcorn kid sir and laughs when he says her ten looks old. Bruno nods at his just the soda, fella? She calls the kid entertaining—probably a queer— but deserves forgiveness. Coming attractions deceive Bruno—revelations of the best possible moments.

The Arguments Eschew the Source at Their Own Peril

A Recovery-Gap Task-Force Petition James Cook

James Cook Dear Wallie, A gaping hole in the sky speaks silences to the dumbstruck legions below, our heads tilting up, our mouths open. Tune out interference static, sorry ones & zeroes & what-not from the gadget boxes & chrome tabernacle of circuitry dispensing digital Eucharist to awestruck consumerbots. Whatever temple is good enough – more matter of no matter, as in, who cares? A question I want answered before another atmospheric airwave episode strikes you zombie. Hey, quench your fist, knucklehead, & watch the returns. The small hours are stealing the votes. Burgeoning hangover despite expanded sobriety stations. So many channels. Watch the intake, baby girl, first or last grail. Jesus, the air’s heavy under this regime. Belly up to the New American Century. As the saying goes, what’s good for your goose is cooked. No do over this time, Sisyphus: On yeh go. On ye’go. On y’go.

The tearful woes of capital (and its frozen logic) put workers on the boil. This was sometime a paradox, but now it’s productivity’s boon. I did love you once, Wallie. Uncle Walton, your Mart wants ma(n)chines (not emplodees or ashociates) in the output gap cranking the family billions. Workers man the falls, as wage yawning persists, and donate plasma-bills, which, father economists insist, are payday loans. The country rallies its scraps in a series of shock-capacity food drives. I mean, $12,000 per annum grows close to hungry. Do I bite the hand that fails to feed? Thanks giving isn’t right when the beauty of power will sooner reform hostility from what it is to a company Christmas ball than the frost of dissent can seize its powerful assets. I should not have belied me. Not when government assistance gapes publicly and spits on the gobless rate. Not when a decent wage withers with a right threat to unteach undeployment. I was the more deceived. The Bains of my existence, your Freeoneers and Marketistas, parlayed donor appointments into charter collateral, right-to-stand-your-work legislation, free-market Koch-front, collective bargain whack-a-mole, voucher merit, tax-credit, and the death of “gilded” benefits. Venture capital cannot so inoculate our publicly traded stocks but you shall garnish wages. I loved you not. I am, however, forever in your debt. Biliously yours, Weep Willie Winking

Poetry, Xtianity, War

(an argument concerning marketing) James Cook

Poems are cheerleaders out of my mind

for the visitors

into the fame they deserve

& want to pass on

to their children Goodwill

boxes the poems climb out

of the blue for a reason

St. Vincent de Paul save us

from our excess &

love of security

to perdition films for with a vanishing

horizon & the road the soul ending

point inside your television

tags squirting ink

on our innocence

by the seat of our power

sing love songs in a high

onward Christian shoulder on his bicycle with sincerity for not just anyone into unlike a pit

no doubt youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll stand in

how gloriously uncommon

are your consumption habits

proud of your difference

of one for fulfilling

its promise to the tune

of $87 billion & many

magazine subscriptions guarantee immorality drink to your many

you left lying around

of despair but nearby

line for a beta version

I salute your army

the blame for the missionary

to walk away with or fall

wearing garments of faith

on the axis of an event

pornography & ballistics for the men inside you

lives all begin

Translation Feature Victor Valera Mora (Venezuela, 1935-1981) translated by Anne Boyer

THE BEGINNING The class struggle. The great imperialist monopolies. The bloody stumps of the generation of ‘28 how much damage has been done. The park police. The lovers reborn in the possibility of terrorists. This sad question: what it means to carry a guitar under your arm. The freedom to starve twice. A royal Achilles tenderness. Lately it has been very hard for us. We are forced to speak in the most furious languages. Make poetry an angry rifle, be unforgiving to beauty. There is no other way: the fall of one fighter for the people hurts more than the collapse of all imagery. When the people take power, we will know what to do as long as the world is ours.

WHY THE HELL MOURN ONE I was late to the distribution of the loaves, I arrived a little after I was invited, today with my weight and my height, and a fierce desire to sit down to eat and now no way to do it. There’s a reason I can’t collapse on the sidewalks to mourn with my head in my hands that Thursday at exactly one in Los Núñez stood Mr. President with his already full belly, the Cardinal in his palace with his full belly, too, Christians gorging on penniless human flesh, Bankers entrepreneurs managers debt collectors with bursting full bellies, too, proudly stroking their cigarettes and singing all praises to heaven: “Oh what a beautiful life.” “How much we have left to live.” But it is not only among the poets the hungry voices quiver. Not only me. We are the jobless thousands of thousands, millions of landless peasants, workers receive their wages of misery and the end of each payday is death. So I say here: Why the hell mourn one o’clock if we are not alone at quarter past it?

ALL THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES

FOREVER WAR

Victor Valera Mora

This is a black sad river, El Loco, and I want your rage like a hawk Feed my hatred against imperialism and damn the domestic lackeys Give me the truth of your armor Give me your unwavering faith Give me the glow of your knife Give me a mouthful of flame I want a tremendous explosion I want a terrible fire Let the earth swallow me up and return me No new poems I swear for the struggle I won’t look through any but the tormented’s eyes I will have no fury that glorifies anything but the hearts of the rebels who will die

All is far from being drowned the ark and the new prophets superior to sea level live and continue to fight Happiness is hard to catch What will take an olive branch in its beak is not to be announced before the flames It is to rejoice From the mountain as the bearded hawks swoop down Incorruptible and releasing We’ve come far I’ll suffer alone this pamphlet and its immediate consequences I’ll celebrate in poetry like a guest celebrates a wedding with a knife I am the most faithful witness of my country at war One day I will solve my life’s burning purpose as the golden rat will leap into the void.

EVEN IN THE MIDST OF TERRIBLE STORMS

OUR TASK

Victor Valera Mora

Even in the midst of terrible storms I have always chosen to defend the dignity of poetry Return it to its origins Its dazzling many-edged blade I accept that I mock everything and everyone because I am clearly in love with this most nefarious fate So the next shot belongs to me If the earth dreams to return to the innocence of the poet before she jumps rope I am now more than ever the Prodigy Valera Mora who encodes fire in the rain

For our stubborn hearts and how we have stayed horizons we who have lived in the history we helped build say a lot about it but with a little sadness and we save our radiant joy for what the people who come after us will build. We can fall, slaughtered by terrible bullets, but always our reinforcements rise: the hungry child, fierce, shaking with her first verse as the either/or of any dilemma the difference between a radical of clouds and a militant of wind. This song never has an ending and always leaves an opening, a gap from which emerges a slight suggestion which the poet grasps, and grasps, and grasping finally, pulls up to bring each next day in. We, the poets of the people, sing a thousand years, and againâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; â&#x20AC;&#x192;

Feed Your Demons Brandon Dean Lamson If I feed them whiskey, pouring oak stung blossoms down their throats, a wave of rash would plume my face, feathered like the Egyptian god Horus, his hawkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head streaked with gold. If I feed them lotus droppings, pollen culled from Afghani fields, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll pass out again in the cab of my black Chevy truck and sink into a tar pit in nineteen thirties California. If I feed them flesh, pastel rubbings of nudes, chalk lines vanishing inside rouged interiors, they will not be satiated by masterpieces but hunger for more. If I feed them fists, blades, bullets, a vest of explosives, if I feed them promises, reflection, regiment, they will not surrender but entrench, blend into the jungle, recruit from legions of unseen insect life. If I feed them songs, arias smoking through unscreened windows, they will flame and grow larger. I can only open a door to the vestibule where oily saints absorb street fumes and let them with their slow needles devour me.

so far

namesake

James Stotts

here i am the hill looking over the pond i want to come down like the dawn like a goodlooking man in a pair of obscenely comfortable shoes with an easy way of walking or like a swan and fuck every pretty little thing that passes by but i have no mouth no shoes to speak of no breast or wing or bone or car nothing but a handful of sweetsmelling dust to toss at the wind no earthly idea how iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m supposed to drown

you told me if bushmillâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s was good enough for the i.r.a. it was raining on your old classroom earlier today, and mild mold and bike weather afterwards rest in peace, with manna in your jacket pockets in no time the stones will sprout white wings from your grave play their game of mocking stars and with a hundred brothers arm in arm erect a roadblock, a barricade unmovable all across the public space for anything less than proper whiskey while you take the low road my james, my joe

“mid april”

“seeing the elgin pelicans”

James Stotts

mid april passing manchester the cherries have no stones washing their wings in the river wind not nearly as material as those bald merrimack pylons i am the maculate receipt of bestial capital and care barely thirty but i can already feel the worms between my legs the black mold fastened to my bones and in my memory it was the same hour as the cherries the finish line burst into flower

seeing the elgin pelicans on their ungodly wings with their welloiled hearts humming their guts churning fish bones sulphur oxide cigarette butts their golden heads stained grey by clouds flying low over hellas and chicago toward these harbor islands i race dawn’s gradual reversal of grief before the day’s blue maintenance pitchblack hazel lavender life is hard loud labor even the made bodies of machines long to die crumple to their knees with the selfless ferity of dreams

32 33

Lewis Feuer

iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve left the studio door open,

Gravity Plums Peter Picetti

Ode to the Automobile for my Car Designer Friend Lance Langdon

At the top of the hour the news cast tells us

2005, France. Thousands of vehicles were burned and at least one person was killed by the rioters.

that tomatoes don’t need to be in season, apples don’t need gravity, that there’s no more plucking. Now plums, pears, mangoes fall far from the tree, ethane gas fills cargo planes to ripen green tomatoes from ‘produce distributors’— Adam wouldn’t have gone along with this. Eve was deceived by a ripe apple; she knew satisfaction’s in the pluck.

To move through necrophilic freeways his six-figure Mercedes is prime. Blinkered, passionate, he whose pen draws iron to cage apocalypse pistons scans the wrecks of France, disgusted. Arabs abroad before the spring upended parked cars. It must have taken seven or eight men each—every muscle and bone to leverage the steely flesh and lay it waste. A tsunami has nothing on this, brother. Fukushima? We’ve seen the cattle, wide-eyed sailing. But these Opels, Peugeots, and Citroëns flame holy in enraged praise of metal’s democratic dictatorship—toppled, flare-fendered hoodscooped, we gasp and press the gas. Fuel injected, we find ourselves flooded muttering the keys of revolution.

Late Capitalism Audrey Mardavich

I’m making music in my mind. The 66 pound dog in my heart is doing hydrotherapy. My friends are falling in love with their exes and novelists are asking, “Do you not like spaghetti?” It’s 2014, man. The dog’s name is man. It’s important for me to make sure that my own great deeds get the recognition they deserve a deep seeded need to control.

writing is something we can win at and is it possible for me to crawl into some cold war era home and remove my skin and come out better? This is the one world we live on top of where the porpoises occupy the beaches and the great whites are now eating us, the humans, and our tiny blue hearts.

But no, Annie wants to be the dictator! Everybody is making their characters limited and I’ve found it impossible to converse without some red, red wine stay close to me don’t let me be alone. The view from my desk is bad just the Atlantic printed on a post card. I wish that heterosexual love could achieve more. It’s important for me to make sure that I’m getting torn up sufficiently. Nothing matters except love and I want to imagine all of our fists pumping the air but I also want to imagine

CORMORANT STAGECRAFT A (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual and Poem CA Conrad --for Caitlin LaCourse Ryan and Kepler-22b “Venturing into the sun to smoke  I am proof of nature and all its declarations.” --Ariana Reines Kitten is my principal spirit animal, a totem to conquer my various forgivable, discordant planes of constriction. But it is the cormorant I surrender to for my most morbid of human needs. A cormorant DIVES into subconscious water-worlds to resurface somewhere new, and agitates my soul into happiness. When I was a boy I yearned for webbed fingers and toes, and was grateful to Benjamin Franklin for inventing swim flippers. Telling Ryan Eckes about this new (Soma)tic exercise he said, “That’s what I try to do with every poem, I try not to drown.” What animal will you require yourself to meet for this exercise? I wore nylon stockings on my hands, then DOVE into the morning ocean off Virginia Beach, American fighter jets howling across the coastal trails, deafening the gulls, frightening the dolphins, and me. Eggs in the sand, nest in the dunes, a wind where all instruction flattens my eager crest. Love in a cormorant call compels a vibratory trance throughout a feral heart, lungs, liver. Draw eight pictures of your spirit animal in different phases of your enactment of their lives. On the back of each write a message. Write a bit of confession from the bird, hippo, or unicorn you choose to be. Create an email account for this exercise to include at the end of the message. Leave the pictures on the subway, in the bathroom at a museum, or the coffee shop counter. Anyone who writes you must receive your animal’s reply. Your animal correspondence is YOUR TRUE correspondence! All your notes from the exercise become the poem.

WHAT IS BRIBERY IN POETRY GOING TO PROVE CA Conrad

I claim a hundred feet of air above my head making use of tiny instruments needing their music absorbed rollercoasters are my favorite form of transportation elevating harmed avionics of the brain climbING tracks ROARing downhill reborn through the S-curve love came breathing against me I did not mind the captivity pluck me out of my gown throw me against your song a murmur of sparrows flew in flew out keeping me nauseous with love OH if I could take the rollercoaster across town everyday instead of the bus I love being a statistic involving spun sugar on a stick and instability a thousand stories in a thousand drops of saliva we can read ANYTHING go out and read the engineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cold throttle left over night in one position

my endless attempts to care about happiness the extortion of poetry an opera mounting the bed sheets we wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stop it when we know we must my critical review of your little daisy staring staring staring staring STARING until it grows

Holding a Herring to the Sun Martin Corless Smith

I am stronger than a whole army of foxes That rip me into shreds Shred me into a whole Piece me piece by bit. Hark how it begins—a dollop of affection Played into atmosphere—a herring pointed at the Sun All glittery—as if a talisman. The herring now a symbol of outfished oceans or The herring now a name ill-known What shall I hold up to the Sun that might reflect Ironic glory—it is vain to think of cures To suprahuman tragedy—vain to think as well Of carpet bombs and fasts. I who have brought into my den the smirking fox Disabused of charm and status in an urban realm Now too like the poorer humans to elicit aught but fear A loathing—entering the house obedient to need. Where in the hierarchicals shall we place poetry A residue of culture when a story held us rapt— Or when a culture wrapped a farthing of anxiety With prudent hope and anticipated ordin’ry resolve

Darling it’s William Morris at the door Is he dancing or hawking another car No darling he’s attempting to deflect The catastrophes of Empire with his little press—Oh bless! Tell him to fuck off I’m on the phone The sickness unto Death, The evils of Revolution In consolation to his wife—Decline and Fall Lord how shall we gather at the river Without texting all our friends Once in the enemy of time I rinsed my hate With sadness made of Love and for a ______ Found I could manage to exist without the burden Of anticipation answered by desire I could uphold the instances of being As if by aspect they resolved all matter Into incidents that coincide—hold a herring to the Sun Its eye a perfect mirror to the glory Of the frozen present in a future memory.

Seeing him perform’s alright but I can’t be bothered to read it To put down my phone who can put down the possibility of union Even when the gift of union is ultimately lost deferred to symptoms Of anticipated salve.

Vaughan Impromptus Martin Corless Smith

The incarnation saffron rose Lamp black about Flares through the dark air To the dark world sent Eyes met—fires or fears arrest

But being here echoes a life Untouched by any living soul And if the poet wills The glory of the willing reed Plays living to his death.

Their warm drops reach + creep We spend every breath dissolved Upon one tear—the measure Of our full supply and endless fear A lake birth from her As if love were a mistake A docile melt we had no choice A warming bound by sun and rain All songs contained in voice And love our bodies’ accident. The light I had not thought The world when coffined in Too long the scarlet bloomed For me to settle dim A flare confuse the night Where commerce burns away Those idols shade belief And I allow language to bow To a knowledge far below my grief A pointless happenstance as if Neglecting death offered relief

“The poem is an atemporal sacrament to being—” Martin Corless Smith

The poem is an atemporal sacrament to being— ignorance may well precede and survive conversion and knowledge (the poet and reader remain) but the event of conversion is atemporal. The verticality of the lyric is not depth—it is A folding of surface (book technology). Because the poet survives the experience of Sacrament another ritual is written— It might be that the “truth” of the poem Resides in the experience of coming to write The sacrament anew. The lyric can be said to exist in The space between self and other Or self and landscape or past and present— But in its middle spot it exists in a sea of Mediation—the instance of which points not Only to the specific instance of description but To its necessary part in an infinite realm of Similar instances of being. Being, if housed, is The two aspects—the determined instant and The infinite backdrop. I might choose to despair of mediation or revel in it Or both—but the resolution of the lyric is Neither conclusion to being—nor solution to mediation— It is over only in so far as it is left. The poem that escaped from silence knew of its history Before it was finished—knew its nature and its forgetting In the short breath of its making—in the long absence

That stretches out before and after its mutter— As though the history of love were borne in one short kiss And a glimpse of love a begetting—a memory Of otherness. As if flat.—the moment at least allowed Past and future to embrace—almost to move to a globe Blooming from the instant of the poem. The arrangement itself was the fate of its soul—and The life of the instant the glory of a death foretold. God was lonely for the fact of our mortality— Existence itself bore no relation to absence without us. Fate played the tune upon our accidental birth And even the clumsiest of speech held truth. It was the god-inhabited to hear itself aloud. There was no reason to call it self—compelled As we were by an unfathomable urge. Always and forever the blue sky surrounding the Renaissance portraits was a void—and a halo of Blue but the absence of being—the blue void at The very centre of man—the vanishing point—the Star. Insensible chamber of being—inscrutable I hidden behind Its shadow. The flattened curse of the leech beetle—the leech Moth—hand-sized against the wall and window—the Hand-sized leech moth against the light shade and then Wardrobe door— The beetle in the wood of the bed knocking knock Knocking—the glee beetle and the leech moth— And the floor unstable on the eaten rafters beneath.

Notes on Martin Corless-Smith Boyd Nielson

I want to write some notes on Martin Corless-Smith’s recent poetry, and to do that I want to insist that, inevitably, I will also have to write some notes on love. Although I often think about it and although I have read about it and even written about it, I do not pretend to know anything remarkable about love. What I write will have something in common with a guess. The title of Martin Corless-Smith’s recent collection English Fragment/Brief History of the Soul inevitably recalls the historical period of modernization in which unchanging attributes were stripped of their timelessness and made subject, as Locke says of ideas, to “Sensation or Reflection,” and thereby, of course, to bourgeois history. But what in fact does it mean to be subject to sensation or reflection? “We die,” CorlessSmith writes, “by the facts of our existence. The terrible thing about being a writer is that it is what I wanted.” Can we, in fact, historicize that seemingly incidental phrase, “in fact”? What is its relation to the facts? Especially the facts of our existence? I will resist my first temptation by succumbing to it. “Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise,” Milton tells us, and “Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil.” Let us rephrase the questions above. Or, rather, let us transform them. I want to ask whether the purpose of love is to tear us from everything we know. English Fragments/Brief History of the Soul is Corless-Smith’s finest and most significant work to date. And perhaps his most personal: it is almost discomfortingly personal. Corless-Smith’s productions in the last few years have tended to build upon by destroying one another; or, to put it differently, they have swerved from and, in the act of swerving, have deepened one another. They have been not just leaps but also falls. One cannot help but miss (and perhaps long for) the language that runs from beginning to end of Of Piscator (1997), the remarkable and insouciant re-vivification of Middle English and Renaissance language, the intrusion of, say, Claire and Lawrence, all in the poetic wake of, most obviously, Alan Halsey and Susan Howe. Who would not have welcomed (and who did not expect) at the time, three or four more collections like 48

it? Instead, in Complete Travels (2000), a shadow begins to fall, and those voices are distanced and estranged into a set of heteronyms in Nota (2004) and Swallows (2006). In English Fragments/A Brief History of the Soul (2010), a massive book of quotations, lyrics, commentaries, this process becomes refracted, reconstituted, and, quite literally at some points, interrogated. Corless-Smith’s poetry is, in toto, inconsolable in precisely the stoic sense. Is love the destruction of the world? Is it self-destruction? If so, Corless-Smith offers us as consolation only love, and that love is the inversion of consolation as such; it is consolation as inconsolability. “My Angel has abandoned me / and I must take her part in this.” In “Lycidas,” the weeping voices are quieted by ever greater instantiations of authority and, as it turns out, by ever greater threats of violence, even as these figures are mere substitutes. St. Peter holds the keys to the church, but St. Peter is obviously only acting on the authorization of God. God never appears in the poem. The violence of the poem, the “two-handed engine” that “Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more” holds back a greater violence. But what if this violence erupts in the form of love? (quite literally at some points) almost as though this book were, at the very least, an ambitious twenty-first century version of Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue Between Soul and Body.” Like Marvell, this is two books….At the heart of English Fragments/A Brief History of the Soul is a simultaneous recognition of and distance from violence that is both personal and anonymous. The tension here emerges and reemerges through a bewildering range of extremes: old age, the burning of libraries, mythic failures, and so on. They are sounded out with a musical ear that is astonishingly well attuned:

I close my eyes against the world Against my own heartbrokenness But rain is sure to dampen me And where she lives I cannot see

Should I recover of myself Sometime emerge into the light It will not be because of sun But as my bones are washed so white

My Angel has abandoned me And I must take her part in this

Just as remarkable is a voice that seems not so much a register of catastrophe as a negation of it. In our modern age of faux interviews, here is a real instance of interrogation. Here we encounter this marvelous exchange of Q and A:

Q: Can you will your presence in the universe? A: You may allow that it has happened[.]

Q: How do you cease hatred? A: By seeing it.

Q: What if you are personally attacked? A: Where is it that you are vulnerable?

Q: How can I calm my restless mind? A: By waiting. Q: How can I achieve my desires? A: Would you be without them? Those last two lines are fascinating. Elaine Scarry, in her astonishing On Beauty, suggests that in face desire for beauty is structurally linked with the recognition of error. Or to put it another way, soul, we are told in English Fragments/A Brief History of the Soul, “is focused energy.” And there is real black humor here. If one of the recurring anxieties of contemporary poets (if not punk rock musicians) is that their most radical maneuvers have already been co-opted by a culture that marginalizes opposition, that is, that these poets must divest themselves of their desires for change by achieving their competitive desires for poetry, you might say Corless-Smith in this book exposes and exacerbates these anxieties beyond recognition. Note the humor here: Be vigilant—The same room in five years is not the same room. You are shorter—your eyes dimmer. Throughout the book, categories of time and space are introduced only in 50

turn to be displaced. The trajectory of narrative, for instance, skews into the trajectory of age. More surprising than the implications is the soul’s irreducibility to a physical location. “its form is everywhere in the house / and nowhere in particular.’ Location fails because the soul is not reducible to it; soul isn’t contained in the body so much as the body acts as the condensation or thickening of the soul’s energy. One way to look at the book is as a celebration of the postmodern aspect of contingency. But the lines quoted so far precisely the opposite had been seen. And it also radically calls into question the possibility of politics that are predicated on waiting. If in f Perhaps not all readers will be attracted to the book’s play. CorlessSmith’s recent work has gone beyond early work’s introduction of syntactical and grammatical play within a recognizable traditional structure; recently it has engaged in more radical disjunction (and simplified articulation??????) at the phrasal level even as it has reached farther and deeper into the substrata of poetic history. English fragments/A Brief History of the Soul is a veritable symphony of these tensions, and this tension can be seen most prominently in the two fonts that are used to separate the (two?) books that mark, again and again, the slash separating English fragments from A Brief History of the Soul. It would be hard to miss the more salient examples of heteronyms such as Thomas Swann and William Williamson (from two exalted periods of modernist and post-modernist history, the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries) who recur along with ever more numerous quotations and homophonic translation. Thomas Swann and his brother William remind one something of Henry and William Vaughn. These representational distortions of what may be called spatial duration or temporal depth simultaneously extend and critique the desire for more stable (because more alienated) contexts of critique. Here is Williamson: The surface isn’t so much dimensionless as it is the field of multi dimensional interaction. Depth is the apperception of the multiplicity of surface—We imagine depth as the store of surface interaction. If surface relates to the present then depth is its temporal distortion into past and future.

Surface does not disclose itself.

This critique centers not so much on mimesis as method. In exposing the formalization of our own relationship to what can be lost and found, painting takes on a special, one might say consecrated, role here: I was always writing until I could return to painting. I had gone out to achieve and lost myself in other people’s eyes. The notebooks were with me—the paintings had been waiting for the return of my duty to happiness.

Corless-Smith’s book will likely be read as something other than a confrontation with this contemporary world, but, if so, perhaps American and English readers will not just miss themselves in “a glass contrived / Artfully placed to show the world its face. They will miss also a faith that is truer than license or disgust. If reviews are to do anything more than repeat a serious of praises or reach beyond the obligatory critique of reviews (where praise is followed by critique or vice versa, ad nauseum) then…

It’s not just, then, that “the soul wants to do without the body/ but it can’t”; it’s also that “Another example would be the sun / try all you will to separate the light from it / forever the light is / in the sun.” I for one want to follow these poems because they instruct us, and what they instruct us most about is how we can believe in something like “having energy” or “doing work” or “painting” are/is made possible by the downright disintegration of our own resources and of ourselves. Aging is a diminution of our willingness to live. Fear and containment replace the wandering excess. We die by the facts of our existence. The terrible thing about being a writer is that it is what I wanted. At their best, in their strange negotiation of poetry and prose, these poems reveal to us that our ground for present practices is what we already stand upon…a more firm trust in the seemingly insufficient means available to us. “The moral grounding of your work will be more lasting. Your intentions / are most obvious (moreso to others than to yourself ).” It should strike us as curious that a poet with such attention who has lived in the United States for over a decade (even at times for part of each year) should have written so little about contemporary American life. But when so much of American moral and intellectual life has been demolished in the last few years, we can perhaps be forgiven for hearing something else in one of the first images that confront the reader of the book “a head puffed up by parasites / I am become a monster to myself.” In this culture of excess, Lutzian discourse can endlessly parade glittering alternatives to truth that encourage only in order to trivialize contestation. 52

Syria Daniel Sarver

Contributors

sun bright and glowing you are all mountains to me from this rock vista dried up riverbeds entwine nations reaching fighting yearning for water

Anne Boyer is a poet whose works include My Common Heart, The Romance of Happy Workers, Anne Boyer’s Good Apocalypse, and Selected Dreams with a Note on Phrenology. She is an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute.

i’m urged to read the cartographer’s lines like god’s own caligraphy spiderweb strands that meet somewhere beyond this ridge

Francesca Caruso’s current body of work is a series of small-scale, handmade collages with found materials around the concept of portals and black holes. Her live/work studio at AS220 in Providence, RI has become a vitally important part of her work. AS220’s residency program is invite-only but open to artists of any medium, writers, musicians, performers etc. If you are interested in this residency, please contact Francesca at francesca.amadee@gmail.com.

damascus is only a passport stamp and a desert width away but i feel like i know you already from inside the movie mind of a dream obsidian eyes that see with no resistance pigment powders heaped and spilling streak dirt roads lustrous red pounded deep this desert is too much to be taken wide open rocks moving up and down no place to return to but a bus to take me home and dust that stays in my eyes

CA Conrad is the author of six books including ECODEVIANCE: (Soma) tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), A BEAUTIFUL MARSUPIAL AFTERNOON (WAVE Books, 2012) and The Book of Frank (WAVE Books, 2010). A 2014 Lannan Fellow, a 2013 MacDowell Fellow, and a 2011 Pew Fellow, he also conducts workshops on (Soma)tic poetry and Ecopoetics. Visit him online at CAConrad.blogspot.com. James Cook lives, writes, teaches, and rabble-rouses in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He co-edits the journal Polis (polismag.wordpres.com) with Zachary Martin. John Wesley Coleman Lewis Feuer is a second-year MFA candidate at UMass Boston and graduated from Lewis & Clark College with a BA in Studio Art. Lewis co-founded Portland’s 12128, an alternative gallery and workspace constructed aboard the Labrador, a retired Bering Sea crab-fishing boat. He currently teaches at UMB, and serves on the organizing committee for the Graduate Employee Organization, UAW Local 1596. Annie Rebekah Gardner was born in Chicago, grew up in Cairo, and presently resides in Cambridge, MA. She has an interest in im/migrancy, liminal spaces, and female friendship(s). Right now she is working on a novel and some chapbooks and is co-editrix of forthcoming CAMP: A Journal of Radical Possibilities.

Brandon Dean Lamson’s collection of poems entitled Starship Tahiti won the 2012 Juniper Prize and was recently published by the University of Massachusetts Press. He’s published a chapbook entitled Houston Gothic, and his poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Brilliant Corners, Nano Fiction, Pebble Lake Review, and Hunger. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Bethany College. Lance Langdon is a perennial student, teacher, and sometimes poet. Lance will finally finish his dissertation on literacy networks in 2014. His poems on the University of California budget “crisis” and poverty in Nicaragua are forthcoming in Struggle: A Magazine of Proletarian Revolutionary Literature. Audrey Mardavich lives in Dorchester, MA by the bay. She works at PRX, produces a monthly storytelling event for The Moth, and curates the 2x2 Reading Series at Lorem Ipsum Books. She was the 2013 Fifty-Two Sundays poet, a project with Desire books in Sydney, Australia. More at audroma.tumblr.com. Charles McGregor is a twenty-five year old Florida native. After writing, teaching is his second passion and he taught ESL for the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan. Currently he is teaching at the University of Texas-Pan American while working on his MFA in Creative Writing. His poems can also be found in Xenith and Enhance. Carl Mehrmann is a poet who was born and raised on the South Shore of Massachusetts. Currently, he is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the University of Vermont.

Peter Picetti is an MFA candidate at The University of Massachusetts, Boston. His favorite pastime is making goose jerky. Daniel Sarver is an Sammy Slabbinck (°1977 Belgium ) renders dynamic surreal collage prints and original collages on paper, combining vintage photographs with contemporary compositional styles. Martin Corless Smith was born in Worcestershire, England. He is a painter a poet and a sometime essayist. He teaches at Boise State Univiersity. James Stotts is a poet and translator. He lives in Boston with his wife and son. Work has appeared in Little Star, Action Yes!, AGNI, Critical Flame, and 1913. Joseph Torra is a poet, novelist and editor. His most recent books are My Ground Trilogy (fiction) and Time Being (poetry). Currently editing Let the Bucket Down, a Magazine of Boston Area Writing. Thera Webb has a silent H and lives in Boston in a warehouse full of old punks. She has an MFA from UNC Greensboro and a chapbook, On The Shoulders of the Bear, available through Fractious Press. Her poems can be found in Forklift, Ohio, Fiction (JP), The 22, The New Poet, and Handsome, as well as on the tumblrs of teenyboppers across the internet.

Víctor Valera Mora (Valera, 1935 - Caracas, 1984) is Venezuela’s most important and popular political poet. He joined the communist party as a teenager and was jailed during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez in the 1950s. At the Universidad Central de Venezuela, he became part of the literary group La Pandilla de Lautréamont [The Lautréamont Gang]. His first book was published in 1961 and his poems throughout the sixties expressed solidarity with the leftist guerrilla groups that emerged during that decade in Venezuela. He lived in Italy during the seventies and in 1979 published his final book, 79 poemas stalinistas. Tamer Mostafa is a Stockton, California native who is currently finishing his Master’s Degree in Creative Writing at UC Davis. His works have appeared in California Quarterly, The Rag, and Poet’s Espresso Review. He can be contacted at tamer_s_mostafa@hotmail.com. Boyd Nielson is a poet, translator and activist. He is the author, most recently, of the chapbook Beautiful Enemy (2012). He holds a PhD in American Literature from Tufts University, and he currently lives in Dorchester.

“We are a part of this force that has no final answers or absolute truths, for our mission is to question. There are architects of apollonian statics and there are (punk) singers of dynamics and transformation. One is not better than the other. But it is only together that we can ensure the world functions in the way Heraclitus defined it: “This world has been and will eternally be living on the rhythm of fire, inflaming according to the measure, and dying away according to the measure. This is the functioning of the eternal world breath.” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Pussy Riot, letter to Slavoj Zizek from a Siberian jail

NO INFINITE is a journal of poetry, art & protest

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Write to us: noinfinitejournal@gma

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Featuring work by eph Torra Thera Webb Jos es Stotts CA Conrad Jam Victor Valera Mora John Wesley Coleman translated by Anne Boyer Audrey Mardavich Boyd Nielson Martin Corless Smith