NAP 2.3

GUEST EDITOR: GREGORY SHERL Gregory Sherl’s first full-length poetry collection, Heavy Petting, was released last September. His new collection, The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail, is out now. He blogs at http://gregorysherlisgregorysherl.com/.

COVER: SEYMOUR BLAKE Seymour Blake crumples up his demons like newspaper and dispenses them around New York City. He writes, draws, and has a tendency to get caught in circles of various sizes. His Tumblr is: scrappaperart.tumblr.com.

His twitter is: @AhaBartleby.

NAP 2.3 YEAR 2 ISSUE 3 EDITOR: GREGORY SHERL NAP MAGAZINE & BOOKS INDIANAPOLIS, IN naplitmag.com

ALLERGEN WARNING: THIS ISSUE WAS FORMATTED ON EQUIPMENT THAT PROCESSED POETRY FROM THE FOLLOWING: HUGH BEHM-STEINBERG MELISSA BRODER ANDREW COX CAROLINE CREW & CYRUS PARLIN CHRIS EMSLIE TYLER GOBBLE DAVID GREENSPAN ROSE HUNTER KRISTIN KIMBLE THOMAS PATRICK LEVY ROB MACDONALD M.G. MARTIN ROBERTO MONTES DIANA SALIER NICK STURM K.M.A. SULLIVAN PARKER TETTLETON BRYCE THORNBURG DANIEL J WALSH

HUGH BEHM-STEINBERG

DATING DEVIL

The devil goes out on a date. He is outwardly suave, but she knows better. Do you want to kiss? Do you want to come down to my apartment? Can I show you my etchings? Let me comb the feathers in your wings. Let me wax your halo.

The devil stutters. All the things he wants to say. So much time and so little he needs to do. Clip coupons. The dead come in heaps. He doesn’t have to twitch a finger. I’m up to my horns in souls. It’s a buyer’s market. What’s God up to these days? Mostly he sleeps, she says. The good become fileclerks. God serves them tea. Hands them gold watches.

I’d give you my number but the phones haven’t worked in years.

BUSINESS DEVELOPER DEVIL It’s not as disciplined. More alive. A plane tree rising above a yard. Where’s my bulldozer, the devil yells. He has the last word. It is blond and flutters. Like a finch or a heart held between your hands as you lift it from a chest. A rough cleft-cut wall is not good enough. I want to see the screws, the devil says. Put the steel trellis over there. No, a little to the right. Now swallow it. Every scrap of it. Then cut your hair. That is how a bank should look. Like you as you are.

The way you are meant to be. I love you, the devil whispers, like a debt. But the people around here won’t appreciate you.

Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and two Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery and Good Morning! His poems have appeared in such places as Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Spork, Cue, Slope, Aught, Fence, Swerve, dirt, ditch, Zeek and Sweet, as well as a few places with more than one syllable. He teaches writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

MELISSA BRODER

DARK POEM

Today I sorted all-beef knockwurst in bags of sauerkraut.

They were ancient knocks too old for our humanity.

One small girl ate a fat knock until she vomited light.

I watched her vomit in the dark and felt I was owed a dark poem.

I kept saying daughter daughter though I could never be a mother.

Light is every rainbow color.

I offered her my dark arm.

A poem kept us company.

It was dark as evidence.

Poetry is not evidence, it is and it is not not not.

Somebody is lying about the moon disappearing.

I offered her a cherry cola to help her vomit darker.

GOD, GOD AND GOD

I had the boys in graphics do a little Photoshop because I wanted my god to become a popular myth.

They blew that god up big, lord, big!

I really saw a difference.

Now my god was everywhere.

No human could resist.

I started a bible study and Moby Dick was the bible.

We read Moby Dick every night for a year.

We ate zuppe di pesce.

One night the students wanted to be left alone.

I said: You without me?

That is a very lonely god.

The students said: No. You in pursuit of us.

That is a very busy satan.

Now I want a personal god.

I want a god so personal I can put it in my fanny pack.

I want to measure my god in ounces: the ultimate thirst-quenching god.

When I do not even know I am thirsty I want god in my throat.

This is what they call grace.

I am waiting.

Melissa Broder is the author of two poetry collections, Meat Heart (March 2012) and When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother. Recent poems appear, or are forthcoming, in Guernica, Redivider, The Missouri Review online, Court Green and Drunken Boat. She edits the online journal La Petite Zine.

ANDREW COX

LAST TIME

Once upon a time ended days after the lights went up ___ Because a dog scratched himself wings were needed for everyone ___ The things people say shouldn’t surprise anyone ___ I promise I won’t do it again ___ A witch’s hat and glasses with a fake nose say hello how are

you ___ Once upon a time ended days after the lights went up ___ Time to take the long flight back home and get married ___ What are you I’m a princess I should have known ___ I promise I won’t do it again ___ No kids on Halloween came to the house where the birds

once sang ___ The things people say shouldn’t surprise anyone ___ The last time I felt this way I didn’t take it to heart

___ Learn to sew Learn to make something Learn to whisper

when you talk ___ The girl on the balcony will die in the last scene ___ Once upon a time ended days after the lights went up ___ What he remembered was not what he remembered ___ The things people say shouldn’t surprise anyone ___ The day to day wins again ___ The last time I felt this way I didn’t take it to heart ___ Once upon a time ended days after the lights went up ___ The things people say shouldn’t surprise anyone ___ I promise I won’t do it again

Andrew Cox is the author of THE EQUATION THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING, (BlazeVOX [Books] 2010), the chapbook, FORTUNE COOKIES (2RiverView,2009) and the hypertext chapbook,COMPANY X (Word Virtual). He lives in University City, MO, the Brooklyn of St. Louis, where he edits UCity Review (www.ucityreview.com)

CAROLINE CREW & CYRUS PARLIN

ESCAPE[B]

Harpoon the shivering trees They are only trouble just waiting to serenade you in all kinds of weather Their leaves are dirty as Kentucky coal mines they’ll sing for alibis or a good story it’s raining where you grew up These pines are not honest They laugh about tramps they don’t give a fuck for your little favours The weather’s getting warmer Let’s pick dogwood flowers drive away and set a cyclone down in the grass

ESCAPE[C]

Baby, we were machines— gold and golden and wrong.

I wish we were two bodies full of things to set on fire.

My engine / your engine is getting busted in the grass.

Luck may have died but the bus is still running.

ESCAPE[D]

How we will crawl to the city

is how we will pack it up

and walk this town to Baton Rouge

It can’t stay here

This city like the moon

is southbound

It’s going to California on to Mexico always out of state

It follows the pretty rags

looking for the same name

its children prayed to when they were born

Caroline Crew is a poet. Cyrus Parlin collects music.

Once they lived in Atlanta, GA.

CHRIS EMSLIE

THIS IS NOT THE TONIGHT IT USED TO BE I have said enough about my old lives to make the concept redundant. It is a different kind of now and in it I am full of words. Not the kind we unravel into three a.m. audition pieces to make us feel better about us. I mean that I feel buoyant. There remains so much that the world wants silenced in me. These lungs could give you seven waves of hurricanes before you uttered a word.

Chris Emslie lives in Scotland but writes other places. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in > kill author, Aesthetix and Sixth Finch.

He is assistant editor at ILK and is building several secret identities.

TYLER GOBBLE

WHO/WHAT/WHEN/WHERE/WHY

I read somewhere TINY HUMAN CAUGHT IN A TUBE which could mean any number of things like kids with their Chicken McNugget bellies stuck sideways in one of those red fun tubes or maybe it’s an article about reproduction about the nine months it takes the time everyone spends worrying how it’ll come out two-headed or dead or full of life ready for processed chicken at the edge of an indoor playground.

I’m throwing myself in a ball pit here, but I think it was probably a picture of faces lots of them twisted into shapes like that chart the doctor holds under the light: How Much Does It Hurt?

The answer is usually A LOT Why else ask?

ABORTION PROTESTERS ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD Again Patrick Swayze and how he just won’t die and that pretty blonde he schmoozed as Jennifer Grey stumbled in with watermelons that blonde with the lovely feet bouncing her lovely head even in pregnancy the first person I remember looking at and going WOW THAT’S A WOMAN. Also, my first masturbation experience followed by the only time I looked at my mom and said EXPLAIN ABORTION. I squinted to picture two legs pinching a knife but only saw Johnny Castle solving problems with just his hips-another way the body can be beautiful.

My car flicks rocks at the woman with the ABORTIN KILLS sign.

How we can be angry and careless at once!

The reverse driveby is a better approach than shouting DONE or DOOM or DUMB at teenagers hobbling out of clinics better than heaving fake blood out of pails meant for feeding pigs.

A sign referencing God reflects off my hood and Patrick Swayze again and how these people must have forgotten what it’s like to dance and to masturbate and to love because surely someone in that whole row figured out it takes more than a sign to save anyone’s life.

Tyler Gobble is lead editor of Stoked Journal and a contributor with Vouched Books. His poems have recently appeared with or are forthcoming from PANK, Country Music, Used Furniture Review, and Forklift, Ohio, among other places. His chapbooks are, Please Tell Me You Have Good News (H_NGM_N Books) and Stale Champagne (Artistically Declined Press). Later this year, Goodness is a Fine Thing to Chase, will be released as part of the anthology, The Fullness of Everything, along with work by Christopher Newgent and Brian Oliu (Tiny Hardcore Press, April 2012). Find more at www.tylergobble.com.

DAVID GREENSPAN

BEFORE THE SUN GROWS CLAWS place your hard earned thoughts into my earlobes. not my ears that would be too much, i’m not ready for that responsibility. just let your syllables droop, dance strangely in the atmosphere. like an airplane doing the moonwalk. there is no gravity in my stretched earlobes, how do you even do the moonwalk? i write a manuscript about how a plane can do the moonwalk on the side of my head. my eyelids grow heavy at the mere thought of physics, there is so much math in life. why can’t we all just practice our cursive: loop after loop after loop. after each disappointing third grade kiss. after anxiety and more anxiety. after years of ketamine and heroin. after, after, after. after i am just a neon sign with no recollection of walking through the red light district. imagine my earlobes on a slab of marble, stuffed with chocolate chips dressed like birthday cake.

WITH SINCERITY, XOXO.

i give my lover a pot of water and boil all her forks in the scalding froth for no other reason than to watch her mumble revelries in her sleep: fireworks growing from the juniper bush, a green and purple august. i give my lover every pine tree in alaska. when she steps from the shower, i want to climb her bangs. my lover gives me fingernail clippings explaining that during an elastic rain these will blossom into her fingers. i give my lover a stalk of corn because if the knots become too painful we can run through a cornfield. she sews a merit badge on my favorite sweater whispering how good i am at untying knots. i give my lover a baby hedgehog. his hair reminds me of hers when we used to take acid and fuck like pianos. somewhere we find a vintage radio and sing about the breath pushed out of every church organ.

i give my lover a textbook thinking she can meet me in the attic where the floorboards creak like locked hands. my lover gives me fishing line and a stern warning to thread this wire through my cornea. i give my lover a gold star above her headboard so she can paint children with the consistency of molasses. she believes in a callous way that sand is firmer than children and will put out the oil fires. i give my lover a t-shirt accented with spray-paint. she is seven views of brick turned graffiti monument. my lover gives me a polaroid of herself naked. she says: when a teakettle yells come wake me from under the blackbird sky.

David Greenspan is the author of the chapbook i tried to bear the elephants and lost (NAP 2012). His writing has previously appeared in NAP, Mud Luscious, Dogzplot and others. He has work forthcoming from Kill Author and Camroc Press Review. Find David online at davidgreenspan. blogspot.com.

ROSE HUNTER

YOU AS YELLOW & BLUE

like your kitchen, talavera: my perch your boat and I am sweating, ice, I tell you here it rushes from the fridge in cubes (not like you, hacked from a block) as the fifteen-year-old who comes to help me into the bath: scraggly, mottled fucked - like the tiles I am, skittering, & who says, this isn’t what thirty-six looks like the tumblers with yellow rim (yours: blue) just as much difference between the sky & the sea.

YOU AS LEAVES

As in fall red as in pale as in buckets. As in a beach theme remember as in molasses as in imagine the top layer of gravel, sliding over the ground below taking you, and hell no you are not going to a doctor and if I hadn’t gone to Manzanillo you wouldn’t have been on that hill and when they say let’s pause to consider the suffering in and out do you know, if I turn I see you hauling over a chair, aiming as I do, for the safety of the corner but it’s times like these we are trains leaping to another track we do not know anything of the other route but that doesn’t mean it never happened.

Links to Rose Hunter’s writing can be found at “Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home” (roseh400.wordpress.com). Her book of poetry, to the river, was published in 2010 by Artistically Declined Press. Poems of hers have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Diagram, PANK, kill author, The Nervous Breakdown, anderbo, Juked, The Toronto Quarterly, Bluestem, and others. She lives in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

KRISTIN KIMBLE

BEING DIAGNOSED WITH CLINICAL DEPRESSION IS NOT THE WORST THING that has happened to me in my twenty- one years of living but I suppose it does come close to other things that have happened like: going to the hospital in the third grade for dehydration I am always thirsty for life like: my dad having cancer when I was eight years old I have always had lots of hair like: getting locked in the bathroom at Boston Market apparently I can’t scream loud enough

I MISS YOU

only during two-thirds of everyday. Fuck fractions, you say. then I fall in love with you a little bit more tomorrow.

Kristin Kimble is majoring in Creative Writing at USF. Usually she writes sad poems, but occasionally writes poems referencing Full House, Zack Morris, or cupcakes. Sometimes there is a boy named Michael. She is pro: Oxford comma.

THOMAS PATRICK LEVY

A LARGE OVEN

The test results say YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON. The test results are never wrong, the tester says WE WEREN’T EVEN TESTING FOR THIS, the tester says this with a voice made of strings of llama hide, the strings are drawn into a cord, the cord is wrapped around each of my fingers, each of my fingers are made of pieces of my heart. I’ve already told you that my heart is contained within two pages near the center of the Los Angeles Review. You know, the misprinted pages, the pages torn and ruffled by the press. I press the pages together and hold my heart close to your heart. The test results are never wrong and you say YOU ARE NOT A TERRIBLE PIECE OF CLOTH, AT LEAST. You say THERE ARE THINGS IN THE WORLD THAT ARE SMALLER THAN YOUR TINY TINY HEART. The heat trapped between my legs, the heat trapped in the density of our small house, our small house like a large oven, a large oven that bakes so many tasty breads, sweet breads and sour breads, all breads we can never eat, again. All breads we can never taste to make us happy. You are also a terrible person. By association, your heart is also in the Los Angeles Review, your heart is my favorite broken toy.

HOLES IN THE WALL

The test results say SMILE THE FUCK UP. I am not a cheery bastard. The sunshine does not wake me in the morning but instead the sunshine comes through the wood blinds like dull bandage wrappers. My skin still aching, my skin a bit yellow, my fingers rough on your back in the night and the tester still whispering like a bottle of cold medicine. I don’t know how to shut the bedroom door, I don’t know how to open the bedroom door. I don’t know how many times I will contradict you. Myself. You know I don’t know. The secret rooms are no longer secrets. The secret rooms have no windows and to get out of the secret rooms we have to make blue holes in the wall. I don’t know what I’m saying. I am still full of shit after all this time. I am still lying to you every time I speak. You know when my lips are making noise, you know when the windows have been open in the dry night because my lips fall apart in little flakes.

Thomas Patrick Levy is author of I Don’t Mind If You’re Feeling Alone (YesYes Books, 2012) and Please Don’t Leave Me Scarlett Johansson (Vinyl 45s Chapbook Series, 2011). Find him online at thomaspatricklevy.com.

ROB MACDONALD

TIME AND PLACE

The Chinese girls hate that song.

They kill a spider.

They text Neal: the normal smile, not the slutty one.

They want a tea ceremony.

They want rad babies.

JUVENILIA

Tonight, I’m intent on raiding the hen house.

The moon makes me stupid, and once I’ve lost my head, it’s chicken or nothing.

Studying the stars for hints about my pre-existence would be a better habit, but I want to paint my name in eggs on the broad side of that fucking barn.

I want a comet named in my honor, and then I want that comet to drape me in flames.

Take that, hen house.

Take that, barn.

Rob MacDonald lives in Boston and is the editor of Sixth Finch. His poems can be found in Octopus, notnostrums, H_NGM_N and other journals.

M.G. MARTIN

ALL OF OUR TEETH HAVE FALLEN OUT & WE ARE STILL YOUNG we’ve run out of gentle vitamins & we’re gambling our health on asteroids & loaves of candy. dear, we’ve run out of gentle vitamins & are tired of quarreling with inertia. our taste buds are sleeping beds for splendid needles & we’ve already tried to swallow the piano. we’ve run out of gentle vitamins. in garages, we plan emotional picnics & smack false meat with camelhair whips. we are hiding behind a filthy hiccup. dear, we’ve run out of gentle vitamins. we are trying to crumble. we are becoming surgery. we are slowing until broken. our time is spent sauntering behind bootlegged grandfathers.

THIS IS WHY PEOPLE MOVE TO FOREIGN COUNTRIES FULL OF BAD WEATHER sometimes people die. so: first, leave the sink running & travel to a country you have never been to & will never leave. forget the facts & amnesia everyone from yourself. then, find the biggest city in this new country. you will know this city by the smell of hard boiled eggs. it is best to sit in a park in the middle of the busy city, just watching people. imagining. you can imagine the people friends, family, lovers or just acquaintances. it is easier this way. this way, there is no pain &, so, death becomes an abstraction because you won’t know anyone. you will only know fictions of people that could be, the passersby. sometimes people die. when you love them before they die, even if you don’t think you do, or don’t remember that you do; you can’t really tell until after the person is dead. this is the point of death & the reason that love exists. this morning a man is caught in a difficult place. he is between the subway & the subway tracks. it is rush hour, which makes this even more sad. many of the people are angry at the man.

he might have jumped, he might have slipped or been pushed. nobody in the subway station cares, they are just angry to be late for work. sometimes people die. he will, you hope not today. imagine the man is family & sit in the park. never go to work. sit there not doing anything, try to heal the man with imaginary pain. sometimes people die.

TOUCHING EXHIBITION

we put on our startled jackets & go to the touching exhibition. it is a place of professional despair, where gold is turned into punished clocks & unlucky bicycles. we find seats beside garbage & feel lucky for unbiased bathrooms. we sit in the touching exhibition admiring the etymology of catsup until the function of blood flow is vocabulary. & now the touching exhibition has begun, we watch it like an uneasy tooth. there is a fascinating stupidity to it all, all of the touching looking like some iridescent stereotype. as the exhibition closes, we are transfixed by the sound of throbbing, we hear the vibrations of hands & become two walking hormones, confused by our own enormity.

M.G. Martin is the author of One For None (Ink 2010.) His work has appeared in PANK, >kill author, elimae & ZYZZYVA, among others. M.G. lives in Brooklyn with the poet, Tess Patalano & the dog, Ihu. Find him at http://www.mgmartin.tumblr.com & @themgmartin.

ROBERTO MONTES

LOVE POEM FOR RELENTLESS DEMOCRATIC ACTION My politics is sitting quietly at the kitchen table thinking of nothing not even you.

You are so impressed with my politics and also my beliefs. I believe in many things, for instance, the ocean–– it is way more wily than it looks.

It will kill you dead. We run naked into it. We come back distinctly wetter, our collar bones delicious with salt. I tell you this in our secret fort. I kiss you about the freckled neck and shoulders.

I have a spirited debate with your legs. They are so sure of themselves. They are all over everyone spilling their drinks.

What we need now is a return to our roots, I make out with a mouthful of grass. You make out with the crosswalk, a real capitalist.

A sexy, auditorium capitalist.

A capitalist bending over the sink

washing your hair. When you wash your hair like that I just want to buy you five hundred glistening things.

I build a secret fort inside it. You take me in with a pelican affection. Deliver me, I chant, to main street please. You go exactly the wrong way. It is so beautiful that you know how.

THE GYPSIES

In the game you had to shoot paper ducks with little silver pellets. Those were the rules. Seito, the Game Master, was trying to explain all of this to the child at his stand. The ducks quacked tissue paper that floated into the sky and was eaten by the sky. Like this, Seito instructed, miming a rifle. The child just stood there. Tulips somersaulted sadly in the child’s eyes. No. Like this, Seito motioned again. You have to shoot the ducks. Seito’s father was a Game Master and his father before him and so on for as long as he could remember. The game was his birthright. Sometimes seagulls hovered above the stand and tried to catch the tissue paper quacks in their beaks. If one caught the tissue paper it was a winner. But that was a different game than the one Seito knew. Seito’s game was cleaner and quieter and of the earth. The only light for miles came from the rifle, which the child aimed directly at Seito’s forehead. The child took the shot. Wait, Seito wanted to say, that’s not right. But his tongue thickened in his mouth.

It seemed to him that they were playing a different game all along. The child shot the rifle over and over into Seito’s face. Wait, Seito said, bloodying the air. What game is this? Am I winning? The child said that Seito was winning a lot. That’s good, Seito said, But what prizes can I get?

LOVE POEM FOR THAT TIME WITH PERENNIALS I hold September by the lip like an angler.

It is cool and underwater.

Its belly is a coral reef.

People snorkel in and out of it.

Sometimes the only thing left is to caress the hell out of some anemone.

It hurts I know. They are kissing the sea life faces and crying. They are on their sides thinking intensely with their eyebrows.

They are napping at the hotel while room service waits furiously by the phone to take care of everything.

I AM ACTUALLY VERY LONELY is what I want to tell room service but I am millions of miles away boiling pasta in my underwear.

Actually we are at the lake roasting September over a little fire.

Actually the lake is in our mouths and the trout leap out daring each other to test our smoldering faces.

Roberto Montes is a tulip-faced rascal. Other work of his is currently at or forthcoming from Sixth Finch; Forklift, Ohio; & Vinyl Poetry.

DIANA SALIER

HOLY SHIT I HAVE BEEN SO LONELY remember when we spent saturday drinking tea downloading porn on the free wifi at the café below your apartment holy shit i have been so lonely i want to drink tea and download porn with you on the free wifi at the café below your apartment

Diana Salier wrote WIKIPEDIA SAYS IT WILL PASS (Deadly Chaps Press, 2011) and the forthcoming collection LETTERS FROM ROBOTS (Night Bomb Press, 2012). Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Housefire, kill author, Aesthetix, Stoked, Short Fast & Deadly, and other places. She is wearing striped pajamas.

NICK STURM from WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! (iO Books, 2012)

WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! I have an intelligence community & it is called a beard It is called a world where the opposite of the legislature is grass but what does that say about grass Inside my thinking there is an Iceland where I stay up all night gluing traffic lights to a bunch of horses Oh my Iceland Oh my agape manhole clogged with spectacular wallpaper My dinghy can catch some wicked air Let’s go to the carwash & chew on the sun Let’s go to the capital & use our hands Our hands which are a chance for music My last act in this world will be to spray paint the lawnmower gold & evolve into a field of rosemary

WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! Some noise gilded me funny Gave me grammar & fur I had a yacht lodged in my hysteric socket It was everybody’s birthday & I bought everybody a milkshake I drove a limousine gauzed with feathers It had a horn that sounded like a child when it is laughing because flowers are sticking out of its amazing ears My guidance system got all emotional as I lavished our meat luggage with irregular commotion We did delicious things wearing mittens Then heaven crashed into my face & my face went straight to voicemail

Nick Sturm is the author of the chapbook WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! (iO Books, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aesthetix, Catch Up, Dark Sky, Forklift, Ohio, Jellyfish, Ilk, Red Lightbulbs, Sixth Finch,TYPO, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews can be found widely in places like Coldfront, HTMLGIANT, and Bookslut. He is associate editor of YesYes Books and curator of THE BIG BIG MESS READING SERIES.

K.M.A. SULLIVAN

EDUCATION OF THE VIRGIN

to the French, the complement of yellow is lavender to others it is ultra-marine fuck fundamental forms mastery of plastic elements hub & spoke even when my face is dissolved into the blue of the tree breasts & cunt remain following green I’ve been told I am ambitious toes grip air but who decides my limits? the boundaries they don’t want pushed beyond some days I am pieces of cotton pasted paper an illusion of space embodiment of infinite compassion pubis at center as it always is even an orange on a plate can provide structure when is death timely?

PROCESSIONAL OF THE MOON

along this arcaded walkway I think of ancient things Cleopatra, Elgin Marbles, my body like an Egyptian priest you bleed, gut and bind me liver, lungs, intestines packed comfortably in canopic jars I thought conjugal bliss meant cloisonnĂŠ and jade rings latticed doors twelve cypress posts to support the roof there would be evanescent joys shades of fawn and umber among Persian tile I, your pillared temple you, my recumbent knight instead I think about statues of the dead seek the Second Book of Breathing long for a sandstone cocoon

K.M.A Sullivan’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in PANK, Potomac Review, Cream City Review, Gargoyle, >kill author, diode and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in creative non-fiction and from Vermont Studio Center in poetry. She is the editor of Vinyl Poetry and the owner/publisher of YesYes Books.

PARKER TETTLETON

KISSING

I remember where I haven’t been. You home reminds me no one is a record. Every day performs imperative as give a shit.

DARK’S

I’m inches from veiny midnight, relip your kissed pm. This is not Is this not? Advertise fucking up. I don’t mean you should buy a Mac.

ARROW

When we bleach hearts we peel an index finger, aim ownchest-high, pull back a thumb, fumble out It’s pointed. We don’t mean They’re because we’re friends, alone. On one or the other’s animal-licked, menthol-whispered porch. Drying up summer’s second (last?)-choice-smudged mason jars.

Under the generational sink on the latest dead-awake day of the week. We say pointed & flicker quietly: we’re thinking of a time when it was raised.

Parker Tettleton’s work is featured in &/or forthcoming from Gargoyle, elimae, Mud Luscious, The Catalonian Review, & FRiGG, among others.

His chapbook SAME OPPOSITE is available from Thunderclap! Press.

Find more work & information here: http://parker-augustlight.blogspot.com/.

BRYCE THORNBURG

RECALL

Advantage had me By all kinds of collar I mean the light’s out In what were called houses Fragility struck me As you had a hand in this Beat me to the bed Undone thought The cold about over

PRESCRIPTION

Bandied about A sore Sporting too much Painted in By the way I moved On Sunday You’d think I’d taken to what You gave me Thought this Awful tasty

Bryce Thornburg was born in Modesto, California. He has studied English and linguistics at UC Berkeley. His work has appeared in Quercus Review, elimae, and is forthcoming in Euphony. He is an editor for The Berkeley Poetry Review.

DANIEL J WALSH

NEW BLUES1

Mars doesn’t have two moons it has two rocks but don’t tell it that or you’ll fallow its ugly heart.

Without the sweetness of moons Mars won’t remedy the drag of downtown where something is burning & nobody knows what. No one goes there for soup or sleep but love is always almost happening. A woman crumples her face at her husband’s posture & groaning vertebrae & American money & she believes its infidelity is his infidelity, his pleated self tracking bareback between hands & hands & hands & hands— in this sense he is an accordion with a hole in it— a busted body & gone good sound.

1

The first line originally appeared on scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Twitter page.

SUMMER WITH TALK RADIO

Find some elemental place, a cave alive with lightning, and learn silence as you learned shelter: game, then fire, then need. Make mutely the usual observations: that your chest is a dark machine, that the moon has massive legs. Did all voice vanish with you, the accomplice to only uncommitted crimes. Wonder if yours is the body being hid here and haunted by wanting. Miss speech and resort to talk radio for contact.

Mistake stars for bullets. Notice the cobwebs on the zen garden, how they tell of the nothing you’ve said in three months and the nothing there’s been in even longer.

Daniel J Walsh is an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.