issue 2
psychic meatloaf journal of contemporary poetry
psychic meatloaf journal of contemporary poetry
issue 2
1
psychic meatloaf - journal of contemporary poetry
I would like to thank all poets and artists who contributed their brilliant poetry and artwork to Issue 2 of Psychic Meatloaf.
All authors within this journal reserve all rights to their respective works. Published with permission of the authors. No material from this publication may be reused in any way without the written consent of the author or artist.
Cover Painting: "Home Alone" by Ron Campbell Editor: George McKim Graphic Design: George McKim Cover Design: George McKim
Please visit our website http://psychicmeatloaf.com for more information, or for guidelines for submitting your own work.
Copyright Š 2010 Psychic Meatloaf.
2
Table of Contents
arkava das - you can change, The Question of Spaceman Spiff's Bath .................. Ashley Vajgrt - My portside Portland ....................................................................... Ben Nardolilli - O Bright and Beauty, Manhattan Morning ...................................... Aaron Angello - yes birds......................................................................................... Andrew Taylor - Digital Home Communications Terminal, Route Recalculation, She looks like Television ............................................................... Corey Mesler - Night like a Thief‚s Pocket, Remaking ............................................ Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé - as with prosopopoeia an old haiku, Vignette 014, Vignette 016 .............................. Piper Ivasheva - Above Rule (for a painter who was mine), Freedom .................... Elle Pryor - The Inability of Attraction ....................................................................... Jason Bradford - Cassiopeia Nose ......................................................................... John Lambremont, Sr. - HETEROCLITE, AMERICAN DREAM, CARGO .............. John Sibley Williams - Portrait(s), Invitation(s), Flight ............................................ Kanev Peycho - Big as the Sun, Interval ................................................................ Kristin Joi Lockridge - Birthing ............................................................................... Kenneth Pobo - UP FROM THE GRAVE ................................................................. ira joel haber - collage 594 ...................................................................................... L. Ward Abel - Water, Paris, White Dog ................................................................... Laura LeHew - With No Apparent Lapse in Consciousness, Suggestive Short Phrases .................................................................................. M. A. Schaffner - Q12 Engagement Score .............................................................. Matthew Dexter - A Child’s Intuition ......................................................................... ira joel haber - Head of a Boy .................................................................................. Michael McAloran - Sharpening- ............................................................................. michael rattigan - Thanatos (After Alan Mills) ......................................................... Nicholas Michael Ravnikar - BEACH VACATION .................................................. Orchid Tierney - Hollow Shaft ................................................................................. Pat Hauser - My sunsets are always victims or devices .......................................... Rosalee Thompson - You Will Have All the Tools You Need ................................... Julie Dru - Her Ghost ............................................................................................... Ron Campbell - Tin Cup, Speak Now ...................................................................... Ryan Quinn Flanagan - Madness is as Easy as Changing Your Socks .................. Sara Fitzpatrick Comito - Dark Island Landing ....................................................... satnrose - THE SUPERSTRING THEORY OF EVERYTHING (a troped poem) ..... Sergio A. Ortiz - Flat Voices, Dear God ................................................................... Ted Jean - Love at the townhouse window 1977...................................................... Biographies .............................................................................................................
3
4-5 6 7 8 9 - 12 13 14 - 15 16 - 17 18 19 20 - 21 22 23 - 24 25 26 27 28 29 - 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 - 39 40 41 42 - 44 45 46 47 - 48 49 50 51 - 56
arkava das
you can change event-related hunting in foul weather trapped elevator (in a pitch) & concrete patch X and Y both realize variants of a single property or two subsequently differing bellwethers rain low-angle fading then a variable beam incidence near actuation stiffness siding a new catch drift if only the topic-comment (now peevish half space) saw things much before implanted gaps signed off therapeutic opportunity to leave the window to itself
4
arkava das
The Question of Spaceman Spiff's Bath Center–surround inhibition quickly heeds a density-morphed commonplace coughed-up enzymes issued chloral plastids between sharp safe inter prates we have to keep duct X lips actuator gripper side takers for foraging need needle needle scent snot trail NOOS sphere dilemma
5
Ashley Vajgrt
My portside Portland Up and down Burnside, Lives proof of a simple symbolic territory, Saturday Market where Elvis and Jimi Hendrix have risen to take pictures with tourists, This place a rip-zipping, button-popping kiss of color sweetly slammed into your cheek the towering city of books recommends poetry, photography that doesn’t fade so I will sit and wait for the number 20 bus, my favorite number working for my favorite city... under the Bradford pear trees, listening to the glass canaries tattle on the sun, slipping down the clouds I pull the yellow cords at Hawthorne, not giving a further thought to things like feet, the Red Light glows summer, and I keep mine around my neck, a jellyfish encased in glass
6
Ben-Nardolilli
O Bright and Beauty Away! Eastward now, avoid the hours of its decline, before this power, that pole. We make land fast, the saint's vision presses for the ambrosial, in tin, things are flowing. Lightning glazes the sky, the gods shop for men in the Christian market place, we must walk and be profane
Manhattan Morning The sky is stuffed with lavender, So the buildings are rose, With a slab of chocolate Here and there along the street. Mosquito motorcycles are gone, All is quiet, no drunks congress, Streets are empty And the lamps are off. The clock in the dome glows, As the breakfast man, Drags his aluminum store Down the avenue to prepare For another business day. Stoplights switch from gem, To gem, Emerald to amber, amber to ruby.
7
Aaron Angello
yes birds yes birds but wiring cornerstones
infrastructure
in the crowd is a red sweatshirt a few tall hats a presumed pathway through the apparatus code exquisitely mottled mechanisms deliciously navigated in the middle of the machine a little girl bouquets dried twigs a woman with headphones roller-skates chirping yes birds but sewage pipes wireless pedicures
8
Andrew Taylor
Digital Home Communications Terminal Too much voltage too much buzzing light is in strips weak blood in veins forces insomnia to call at 3.00 a.m. like the North Atlantic Drift linked souls in time zonal shift language bites lights switch on automatically in grey corridors so are you here to haunt me? so here we are four months on five years on clothes change faces burn like retinas into the brain past slow active ? diseases pass slow active disease at night the hotel corridor shuts down returns to dark while dreams get littered with women and disaster so what is divine? Can I get to you through prayer? can I rewind the tape and find you there? watching the video shot on May 6th 1989 is like having a knife slowly scratch initials into the forearm oh fellow explorer of gardens and gaps I miss you
9
Andrew Taylor
dreams of invasion and seeking family to move away from danger and to take shelter to watch from a distance when the heart explodes it causes severe damage that lasts a lifetime I'm scarred all over Travel fatigue escape in service stations refuel seek shooting stars and the sound metronome of red lights versus white a balance Junction 13 and I'm near enough to appear in her dreams when I call she refuses to speak to me and who can blame her? when Millie Pig is in the washing machine It's about priorities Andrew and inspiration and poetics love and lies and throw poverty into the mix The mist makes the road shrink on trains heading north I feel the pull I can't exist without you The smell of hyacinths announces the passing of winter into spring
10
Andrew Taylor
The light across the bay brings with it warmth and August brings the sweetest music September with its dappled green and parks of change offers winter cusp of sanctuary and security it is time to end this madness You make my heart melt
Route Recalculation England's motorways run river like coast to coast All roads lead north where the heart remains unappreciated Occasionally we meander like a tributary Through dark mist shrouded lanes and for an instant like granules in a jar I settle
11
Andrew Taylor
She looks like Television Cathedral at dusk all souls congregate They've built public toilets near centuries old resting places In reception reading The Independent and Wallpaper* she looks like television arm cast a hundred messages in a hundred colours She can dance in nightclubs in the city Taking air amongst the trees the eaves house swallow nests the lake is reclaiming the land
12
Corey Mesler
Night like a Thief‚s Pocket
Light-headed as if turned on I stumble back into your arms pitying the darkness which used to hold for me such dense pleasures.
Remaking
My daughter takes a few polychromatic pipe cleaners and makes for my heart a small safe room. Outside the demolition continues, reconfiguring the makeshift neighborhood. I watch the colors rise and fade. I watch my daughter dance with the suncats to the music of umbrellas.
13
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-MingdĂŠ
as with prosopopoeia an old haiku beyond baron’s cove kirrin island a blue dot life buoy in a book the more pulled the sun the more pulled the waves sliver, silver moon and ideas, cloistered – by whom? take the shortest route take the line, triangulate wide eyes, cold palms the mainsail goes on and on eggs and cartons on the floor cracked and yellowing and our shouts adrift, downwind
14
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-MingdĂŠ
Vignette 014 This was possibly the impending apocalypse everyone had heard about, which had become a seer’s bad word among the Hedoskeptics and Vicoccupians, their eight hundred theories of how time changes light and its movement never once explaining whether time could stop, completely stop the way you could close in on its behavior, fold your fingers into a fist like Hyperion and make light disappear. Or would the stopping of time be another illusion, the little things merely wispy and phantasmagoric, stashed away for a while.
Vignette 016 ----- I just have to see your numbing spectacle and exposition, Resident 97 thought, gingerly lifting the flyaway fire from its cube and then, in one bold stroke, painting his immediate sky with it, so he looked right through the sponging as if it were a glass window. In it, he saw the other side, of the northern district growing old, its dilapidation more severe and the salt lakes now solidifying into a muddy, unworkable state. Over the hardening magma, a heavy rainfall of snow. Water crystallizing in mid-air, now trifoliate flakes. Maybe someone would know how to pray for the rolling plains. For the entire landform and its safe return.
15
Piper Ivasheva
Above Rule (for a painter who was mine) Like the pines and paint thrashed together and illuminated in your skull, your body reposing I superimpose over the country in which you live: blackberry bushes and your blushed mouth, the river and your rib. Did you know that Gertrude Stein was always burning? Hot to the touch, in fact – white light in her cheeks, and ruddy, jagged flame scraped the landscape. She always walked above ground: in the claw of a tree; in gossamer blue extending like a spilled glass. Smudge her out in oil pastel! I am clicking her in my mouth like perfect stones. In your absence my heart falls to jabbering. I’ve heard the stones tumbling since you left. Come to me, my love, for a truth like God’s. Come to me. Please fall at my feet now.
16
Piper Ivasheva
Freedom I want to remember hashed and harried houses with charcoal shadows and yellow illnesses. At this hour the streets know quiet has dropped like a cold hand to a fevered head. I am inside the frizz of colored lights. My brain – frying with the neon sizzle, becoming food. Let my poetry flop on the concrete like an organ beating – like a fish on a hook, exiled - breathing. Bathe me in winter – lock my mind in the freezer, it is too rich, there is too much – it wants excision, preservation. It is wanting porcelain, and the constricting confines of cellophane. It will be there in spring for you when again there is hunger. Lock me up in the gridwork of lace posed by the shadows on concrete. Unleash the houses.
17
Elle Pryor
The Inability of Attraction Lovely enters and so tolls my bending strength weakness runs through my body stealing my legs we are at parallel, two beings who never intersect Euclid says to lean, then we will indefinitely meet for I am rooted, a captive of able forces unknown you must lean to me, follow only a crooked arrow diverge from this line to merge with my long sigh for in its airy lair I stay confined, then move close curse my scourging blood with tricks of clumsy dropped head unsteadiness and fluttering fragility like the slender flower stems that you didn’t send. Refrain from tracing the grainy details of this face for I am doubtful you will skim about here easily rain will caress my skin before you notice me umbrellas will protect and deflect your downfall while I am drenched in a lynch of sly storm water to see you once more, then again once more after so on looking infinitely, the only known medicine.
18
Jason Bradford
Cassiopeia Nose This is about neither the constellation, nor the facial feature but rather the sketch on the wall I’m not supposed to like with lead-shot eyes you scratched out on torn paper a concept a blind man’s expression experience of a train’s troubled track going outside the lines
19
John Lambremont, Sr.
HETEROCLITE Snow storm in Sugar Land, tree blanches, verdant rock hosts ice lichens' negative color snaps, park shivers in reverse, white crow caws for still life, Monkey Man smokes with both fish sauce hands.
AMERICAN DREAM Just a random chalk-soaked Thursday, fax me over opium, a slow ride through the house d'accord on the back of a gambling gibbon. Mornings are all getting smaller, afternoons just seem prolonged, vox musica is broken, and I turn to the blinded windows in search of sustaining rain.
20
John Lambremont, Sr.
CARGO I am a ship of the Palace, adrift between chaste and six. I am the serviceable abuser hidden in the life jackets. I am a lantern with limbs, whiskers jutting, port-side grin. I rub twines across pine, orchestrate debris, one drum beach. I was born in my hold a pressurized insert, do not tamper with it, even when I’m empty.
21
John Sibley Williams
Portrait(s) So long validating in cloud-shapes a more intimate portrait that within this promise of second heaven absorbed what glass once sung.
Invitation(s) Slipped beneath my wiper an invitation to festivities held in the empty factory I just left where once mirrors were assembled.
Flight We swiftly took to the road. But there was no road. Nor lines upon the road. But we followed the lines. One of us turned up the radio to kill off any song. And we hummed silently together to the end. But there was no end.
22
Kanev Peycho
Big as the Sun
The light penetrate our bones as butter and we stand tilting blank faces up in the bitter sky. We saw the past and the present, we saw the cows laying in the fields, with their udders foaming under the sun, looking calm and happy as Buddhists. I remember standing on the ridge stretching our hands beneath the light and softly whispering our names to the sunbeams, watching them go back to the far end of the galaxy where the first thing uttered in the eternal darkness will be Eve.
23
Kanev Peycho
Interval
Silence falls down on the ground Sad and slow song dies right away The wheat leans slowly forward and its sunshine explode with it Oblivion is just another name for the Cycle The whiteness of the children’s smile Copulation within the core of the violet Tiny bricks of Buddhist’s happiness Mole trapped in the lamp-shade The dome of the church is completely tenantless Nameless sanctuaries in the obscurity Frozen desire sucking the dust of the dream Rock rolls unrolls The needle on the vinyl like leprosy Beads of tears dance in the fairy-tale.
24
Kristin Joi Lockridge
Birthing Used to be I sat down And it came Didn’t ask for I breathed it. And he knew They all knew. I felt something. I feel no more. Now he asks Why shudder and stumble Close my eyes Bury my head Why hide Underneath skin Like a child In the womb Waiting for rebirth For simple solution To recondite answer.
25
Kenneth Pobo
UP FROM THE GRAVE He arose we sang many a Sunday. Jesus had a triumph. My own barely registered— getting up for school, swishing peas down with milk. I wondered how would Jesus look freshly risen? Shiny and fresh, as if he had gotten a perm and a manicure, not tacked up on some cross, speared, thorn-skulled. We didn’t want to picture his close-up without him looking his best. He had to be Fred Astaire dancing to glory, not one more done-in corpse freshly animated. The organ pumped and we walked out into suburbia, ready for baseball, Parchisi, and fried chicken.
26
ira joel haber
Collage 594
27
L. Ward Abel
Water Water is everything. A glass of oxygen on a balcony. O, movement, space is time is vision itself the sound the effort the energy is water.
Paris Thirty years ago in Paris I was young sun going down loaf of bread ham cheese two--count them--two bottles of red the river how I carried my guitar I don’t recall but I was happy without knowing it No I think I knew.
White Dog I saw a dog get run over. She was full and white. She chased a Tahoe tire got in front and bought it. She shat. I cried. It rained.
28
Laura LeHew
With No Apparent Lapse in Consciousness sleep is hard a sort of torture by accumulation spidery symbols fluctuate to a splintery heart a Green Knight, harts, ravens, a dark man in repose cloaked in feathers a shawl of raw umber glacial fragments signs sprout tiny bat wings fly away in a hymnal the dark man glows white and he is illuminated
29
Laura LeHew
Suggestive Short Phrases afterlife bad beneath you bring crush doomed end family forever gift grave Hell intervention hush lessons listen never normal packs primeval replacement same sleeper spiral touched villains when wicked
amends bargaining bewildered choices dark Doppelganger enemies fear foul go harsh help I into the woods lie living new older pangs prophecy reptile seeing smashed superstar tough weight where wish
angel beauty blood consequences dead ear entrpy first gentleman gone hallow help initiative killed lies lock nightmare once passion puppet restless selfless some assembly surprise triangle welcome who you are witch
30
As becoming body conversations dirty empty faith flooded get goodbye harvest him innocence killer life lovers no out potential real revelations serial something teach two what's wild yield
M.A. Schaffner
Q12 Engagement Score Not the person you had planned, or shadow, but the image of a root vegetable grown PC-ponically in cubicles all day between calls, forbidden downloads, and trips to purchase or pee out coffee. Most definitely a life form; office parks providing the underground reservoir from which they express after every rain of release times, the absence of sunlight relieved by the bioluminescence of websites reflected in irises. After four, hydrocarbon-based spores disseminate over suburban pods certainly life, lived fully as it can.
31
Matthew Dexter
A Child’s Intuition
Tooth fairy dancing Into bedroom Smells a lot like Dad And because he paid with dollar bills, I have feelings that he came from the strip club.
32
ira joel haber
Head of a Boy
33
Michael McAloran
Sharpening-
Atrophic sun we lick the lie With dead teeth shadows Drained fluid We are the dead children Ague of emptiness Sky shattered listless laughter Noose of gilded breath We shadow self’s corridors Sharpening the blood .
34
michael rattigan
Thanatos After Alan Mills Everything contains dark. Who closed the door? I see without feeling through eye-sockets lighter than nests. Nothing has weight within. One day earth won't be. Water will have its way and air will breathe through bones. .
35
Nicholas Michael Ravnikar
BEACH VACATION On the drum, the dead air wears her mass of tiny voice, reflections collect in the runoff pool, her face melts until the nose resembles for one instant a guitar, acoustic Each window its very own sad woman, inserting fingers into morning's declarative breath, she tries to call herself a pacifist She lies Her hand searches the coast for any ordinary it can find Instead, the color of every stain ripens Ashore and then on the porch The furnace nuances its fumes. Who could trace reason from the game in this box of toys Wednesday night's always hard times She wants to blame herself with slices The inconsistency of the ocean proves it Epiphanies always feel so melodramatic
36
Orchid Tierney
Hollow Shaft
cars pass the bird's plume lifts lightly in a moment
it will fly,
maybe.
.
37
Pat Hauser
My sunsets are always victims or devices Sound the collision bell: The leaves unhinged like bottles, dripping from the roof, heat lightning, you're my ticking disease, psychosis splashing in the bricks, foaming like sawdust in the air. The background is all contrails and an easy grasp on your training Hints of ice cream, fading: After the tournament, He said "Easy Roger, everybody gets one scoop. Everyone has one turn." We sit, they extend, razoring thin white lines followed by a trace line with chalk followed by erasers contaminated with jetwash, hands propped up now safely {& Securely} decomposing these promises, they're just substitutes and only substitutes, and I just lay them anywhere. I won't remember to exclude them tomorrow.
38
Pat Hauser
So, Radiates into the stage lower all manner of dissipating pink & vermilion, I use the blackness like poison, to melt their skin away, earmark them for safety presentations, Our inflections, buried with their flowers west, in one of the parking islands.
39
Rosalee Thompson
You Will Have All the Tools You Need I zip up my husband's green spacesuit then kiss him a radiant good bye Titanium trees sapphire sun oh orange ocean his nothing dreams dust a small suffering for our l00th flag on the moon I am a ghost in the moonlight Our failed experiments are part of the process Moonflowers scatter the glass floor We onced loved each other like children
40
Julie Dru
her ghost
41
Ron Campbell
Tin Cup Please. Let me curl in the shadow of your scapula. Let me nestle along the trestle of your spine. Let me burrow in the marrow of your collarbone. Let me hide under the eve of your jaw line. And when you laugh Let me camp in the thatch of your oyster And let me leak into the open spaces that you keep Between the vertebrae. And when you cry Let me drink the tears from the hollow of your clavicle And rattle the tin cup of my longing Along the bars of your ribcage. Please.
.
42
Ron Campbell
Speak Now “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” -Unidentified customer of a gas station in Seattle, Washington in the midst of an altercation with another customer. Speak now or forever hold your piece Of the pie And hold it between your thighs And take those razorblade eyes And your slice of life And all that bad advice And hold it By the tail By the tongue By the throat By all that’s wholly Not yours and not mine Either. Speak now or forever hold your piece Of the rock Your stock Your verbal hemlock Your chalk outlined Hip cock Back talk And stuff it inside That sad propensity of yours to gawk. Speak now or forever hold Your nose And sniff the whiff Of all the white lies And the black truths You use to keep That smooth roof Over your eye tooth.
43
Ron Campbell
Speak now or forever hold your piece Of tail Your “holy grail” That deep exhale Of everything you’ve ever truly known You will never ever Truly truly Know. Speak now or forever hold That piece of your mind That’s impervious to the sidewind And the bottom line And the riptide That you use to hide The signs That everything is “fine”. Speak now or forever Close your eyes To the size of it all. To the expanded tear The inflated pause The lost cause And the escape clause That says: Speak now or forever hold your Peace.
44
Ryan Quinn Flanagan
Madness is as Easy as Changing Your Socks
Tickled ivory of Chopin over the varicose veins of Polish Radio; nocturne in B flat minor. While I sit in the dark making shadow puppets on the wall and an old mouse trap under the sink snaps with no time left.
.
45
Sara Fitzpatrick Comito
Dark Island Landing In forest edge dark the god screeches, the frogs, the night lilies, the open throated children to the suckling sky are my dreams of being broken of being backwards on a boat over the wake, the huff of an incessant horse that smells like earnestness and it is fear or trust that is his food. He grazes indifferently for he forgets the taste of grass. .
46
satnrose
THE SUPERSTRING THEORY OF EVERYTHING a troped poem
between a flow theory main string (which precludes physics) the truth can be found in a single particle except that there is no such thing as the number one to thought to describing a candidate becomes simply an attitude still it can be something magnificent the being really of [gravity] strings the string reconciled is a theory Einstein approaches through the opening that your theory standard has in the manifold achievement the motive and has related quickest to the group mathematically but perhaps in supersymmetricity the description is more direct but the point well taken nevertheless there is still the viewpoint of the unaffected observer who can describe the theory to an objective outsider [if such a thing is possible] (the String which suppose, [bozon] and it’s resonance growth) so we all sit around and inspected it but other that we have to expect that it exists as compactified of as in theory as the principal somewhat thought explanatory dimension is a no-go meanwhile knit is five model with separate constructivisms because the particle energy membrane standardization insists on being shared who was involved from the dimensional in which it a Feynman superstring M to the time the criticized remarkable during (like all theory) with and/or without the dimensional which by example the space type was required of CERN and of the actual strings themselves [if such thing can be conceptualated] for you to see it in plural means you have to rely on the manufacture of the related leptons of which the interaction is like the addition connected with which and qualities M by the research and made-up “facts” which if and when which thing the whole becomes subject to the method closed and what is achieved is the order basically mathematical (with a middle an end and no beginning) but this is just another looney-tune space theory the fullnes of the feature was the test of the surface with the laser and which differs from the thing that the theoreticians have claimed all along where the basis for the addition is inside and therefore fundamentally like the vibrations imagined Bohr said quantum is scary and the theory is suspect which perhaps offered the best out and he’s dead anyway and doesn’t have to worry about it like we do the was was not the is the is is not the was in physics and which therefore this phenomenon creates a belief that somehow
47
satnrose
character can affect space-time and it of the word is so made as is to discover it seems however it turns the of existence of what was described Glashow mechanics creates a source but string theory requires a structure strong enough to be understandable but the invention of the idea of the quark supposes the differences that eleven dimensions indicate another hidden theory which somebody proposed in secret it grew with what was supposed to be the first Witten and the development of assoc-iative space differed from what physicists demanded [even though that didn’t make any difference] and the best of them established string theory because they could make some real money at it so they proposed it and the result was Calabi-Yau dimensionality the research of which seems of to create excessive dimensions [which requires a feat of mental juggling not unlike the chainsaw act] mainly a system is enacted and those who were where the is is are in high-energy and very Veneziano with the general first and the specific after (part and logical 11bosonic strong principle the beam string the graviton dimensions desc-ribes the theory) this superstring point electron (gravitation string theory that is) seems like a readable text but an examination of the celestial mechanics provides an example of supersymmetry the fermion particle (the be of which is the high of However) the particle just sits there and part permeation the theory of stringed together superstrings has proved that theories correct of everything are possible only if you spend your whole life trying to understand them but even with these in principle the coherent gravity is predicated upon indirect experimentation and if there is not another dimension the what is considered logic breaks down completely completely and is observed respectively and all that splendid theory becomes the same x as dividing by zero unless it’s only a theory .
48
Sergio A. Ortiz
Flat Voices prayers parade through the flat voices, the crumpled chalk, on window. stop the sounds and their flatness dissolves into answers. i follow one last time and almost repent.
Dear God I feel you in the leanest spaces of a line of skin that recalls the humidity of a love harvest. Let's play lick the snakes, dissect respiration. Two exhausted centuries fray in their daily routines. Street urchins lose their fear and on spit you.
49
Ted Jean
Love at the townhouse window 1977 When I lay down by her it was a while before of course we heard the creek beyond the window, and the berserker bush tits in the locust bloom. Not drowned did I, but drank deep, and inhaled the incense of her answering gaze; the commentary of crows was comfort at the wire on the creosoted post. Without a word, she crossed her calf on mine and turned her narrowed eyes apart, as all the while the sun spied through its flickering eucalyptic lens, and a mockingbird sang something bluesy to the churning motor mowing of the Mexicans next-door.
.
50
Biographies
Arkava Das lives in Kolkata, India. His work has recently appeared in Blackbox Manifold, BlazeVOX 2kX, ditch, Moria, Otoliths, The Delinquent etc. Ben Nardolilli is a twenty four year old writer currently living in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared in Houston Literary Review, Perigee Magazine, Canopic Jar, One Ghana One Voice, Baker’s Dozen, Thieves Jargon, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, Poems Niederngasse, Gold Dust, Scythe, Anemone Sidecar, The Delmarva Review, Contemporary American Voices, SoMa Literary Review, Gloom Cupboard, Shakespeare’s Monkey Revue, Black Words on White Paper, Cantaraville, and Mad Swirl. In addition he was the poetry editor for West 10th Magazine at NYU and maintains a blog at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com. Aaron Angello is wrapping up his MFA at the University of Colorado. He's been published in Pacific Review, Springgun Press, TitMouse, Two Hawks Quarterly, and a few other places. Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. His latest collection of poems 'The Sound of Light Aircraft' comes from Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. Poems have recently appeared in Heavy Hands Ink, Durable Goods, MUST and The Journal of Heroin Love Songs. He has a PhD in poetry and poetics. Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are BillionYear-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) and Following Richard Brautigan (2010), a full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), and a book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor‚s Writer‚s Almanac. He also claims to have written, „The Martian Hop.‰ With his wife, he runs Burke‚s Book Store, one of the country‚s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.
51
Biographies
Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé has edited more than 10 books and coproduced 3 audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. Trained in book publishing at Stanford, with a theology masters in world religions from Harvard and fine arts masters in creative writing from Notre Dame, Desmond is a recipient of the Singapore Internationale Grant and Dr Hiew Siew Nam Academic Award. He has recent or forthcoming work in Copper Nickel, Dark Sky, Fence, Grey Sparrow, JOTAC, Nano Fiction, Sixers Review, and Spork Press. Desmond also works in clay, his commemorative pieces housed in museums and private collections in India, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. Elle Pryor is based in Florida and is a graduate of the University of Wales. She is published or will be published in South Jersey Underground, Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal, Black Lantern Publishing, (A Brilliant) Record Magazine, Crows Nest, Pens on Fire and Kerouac’s Dog. Two of her short stories are included in the anthologies ‘Dusted’ and ‘Caught by Darkness’. Jason Bradford's chapbook Remembering the Future won the Edna Meudt Memorial Award from the NFSPS. His poems have appeared in The Coe Review, Colere, and The Pearl. John Lambremont, Sr. is a poet living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He has a B.A. in Creative Writing and a J.D. from L.S.U. John's poems have appeared in more than twenty literary reviews and journals, including Red River Review, A Hudson View (2009 Pushcart Prize nomination), Boston Literary Magazine, Taj Mahal Review, and Lilliput Review. John Sibley Williams is a poet and book publicist residing in Portland, OR. He has a previous MA in Writing and presently studies Book Publishing at Portland State University, where he serves as Acquisitions Manager of Ooligan Press and publicist for Three Muses Press. His poetry was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize, and his debut chapbook, A Pure River, is forthcoming from The Last Automat Press. Some of his over 100 previous or upcoming publications include: The Evansville Review, Ellipsis, Flint Hills Review, Euphony, Open Letters, Cadillac Cicatrix, Juked, The Journal, Hawaii Review, Cutthroat, The Furnace Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Aries, and River Oak Review.
52
Biographies
Peycho Kanev’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Poetry Quarterly, Welter, Ann Arbor Review, The Shine Journal, The 13th Warrior Review, Mascara Literary Review, The Arava Review, The Mayo Review, Windmills, The Aroostook Review, Chiron Review, Tonopah Review, Mad Swirl, In Posse Review, 322 Review, Naugatuck River Review, The Houston Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for the Pushcart Award and lives in Chicago. His collaborative collection "r", containing poetry by him and Felino Soriano, as well as photography from Duane Locke and Edward Wells II is available at Amazon.com. His new poetry collection “Bone Silence” will be published in September 2010 by Desperanto, New York. Kristin Joi Lockridge is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago with a BA in Fiction Writing and a current MFA student at UNC Wilmington with a concentration in Fiction. She has previously been published in the SN Review and You Must Be This Tall To Ride. Kenneth Pobo won the Main Street Rag poetry chapbook contest in 2009. His poems appear in Windsor Review, Naugatuck River Review, Forpoetry.com, Mad Poets Review, and elsewhere. Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, drawings and collages have been published in many on line and print magazines including Rock Heals, Otoliths, Winamop, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Barfing Frog, The Raving Dove, DeComp, Foliate Oak, Siren, Prose Toad, Triplopia, Thieves Jargon, Opium, Dirt, The Centrifugal Eye, The DMQ Review, Broadsided, Hotmetalpress, Double Dare Press, Events Quarterly, Unlikely Stories, Coupremine, Cerebration,Chick, Flicks, Softblow, Eclectica Magazine, Backwards City Review, Right Hand Pointing, Ascent Aspirations Magazine, Brew City Magazine, Fiction Attic, Mastodon Dentist, Blue Print Review, Ellipsis,The Indelible Kitchen, Crickret, Entelechy, So To Speak, Taj Mahal Review, The Fifteen Project, The Externalist, Why Vandalism, Mungbeing Magazine, Lamination Colony, Paradigm, Lily, Literary Fever, Glassfire Magaine,The Houston Literary Review, Lilies and Cannonballs, Wheelhouse Magazine, Terra Incognita, Qarrtsiluni, The Tusculum Review, Multidementional, 34th Parallel, Wood Coin, Sacramento Poetry, Art & Music, Anti-Poetry, Divine Dirt Quarterly, The Mom Egg, Disenthralled, etcetera, & sea stories. Over the years he has received three National Endowments For The Arts Fellowship, two Pollock-Krasner grants and most recently in 2004 received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.
53
Biographies
L. Ward Abel is a poet, composer of music, lawyer, aspiring teacher and spoken-word performer and lives in rural Georgia. He has been published at The Reader, The Yale Anglers’ Journal, Versal, The Pedestal, Pale House, Kritya, Ditch, Open Wide, Moloch, Legal Studies Forum, and hundreds of others. Abel has recently been nominated for “Best of the Web” by Dead Mule and The Northville Review (2009). He is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), and the forthcoming American Bruise (Parallel Press). Laura LeHew is an award winning poet with 250 poems appearing over 100 national and international journals and anthologies such as Alehouse, Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems from Ragged Sky Press, Filling Station, Gargoyle Magazine, Pank, Perceptions, and the 2010 edition of the Syracuse Cultural Workers’ Women Artists Datebook. Her chapbook, Beauty, was published by Tiger’s Eye Press in 2009 is in its 3rd printing. Laura received her MFA in writing from the California College of the Arts, writing residencies from Soapstone and the Montana Artists Refuge, interned for CALYX Journal and was nominated for a Pushcart prize. She edits Uttered Chaos www.utteredchaos.org and is currently guest editor for The Medulla Review. Laura has one husband, eight cats [Nikita (la Femme), Tessa, Mr. Socks, Baby, Dorian (yes he is grey), and the Army of Darkness (Raven, Shadow and Smoke)] and never sleeps. M. A. Schaffner has poetry recently published or forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, Magma (UK), Stand (UK), Dalhousie Review (CA), and Markings (Scotland). Other work includes the collection, The Good Opinion of Squirrels (Word Works, 1997), the novel, War Boys (Welcome Rain, 2002), and the memoir, Good-Bye to All This (PBGC, 2009). The Swinging Urinal, a novel in which real fighting closes in on the bureaucrats of civil war Washington, has begun making the rounds. Matthew Dexter lives and breathes in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. An expatriate author and poet best known for eating shrimp tacos and drinking enough Pacifico to kill six blue marlins, he's the Lil Wayne of literature. Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, (1976). His work has appeared/ is forthcoming in various print and online zines, including Carcinogenic Poetry, Sex & Murder Magazine, Horror, Sleaze & Trash, The Medulla Review, The Plebian Rag, Media Virus, In Between Altered States, Graffiti Kolkata, Tehlia, Pratishedhak, Negative Suck, Danse Macabre, The Stray Branch, Counterexample Poetics, Heavy Bear, etc. In the past year he has authored seven chapbooks, including 'The Gathered Bones', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'The Black Vault', (Calliope Nerve Media), 'Debris', (Erbacce-Press), 'Final Fragments', (Calliope Nerve Media), & 'The Death-Streaked Air' (Virgogray Pressforthcoming). http://mcaloranmichael.blogspot.com
54
Biographies
Michael Lee Rattigan's work has been published on the internet, in magazines (most recently in OtherPoetry and Phati'tude) as well as in book form: a chapbook of poems, "Nature Notes" and a bi-lingual translation of Fernando Pessoa's Caeiro poems. Both published by Rufus Books. Nicholas Michael Ravnikar lives and teaches in Southeast Wisconsin. He received his MFA from Naropa University in 2008. Prior to that, he studied at Columbia College Chicago and Malcolm X College before graduating with a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin. He edits an irregular little zine/chapbook series called The Bathroom, and he really needs to go to the gym. Orchid Tierney is a New Zealand writer, art director and the editor of Rem Magazine. Her most recent work has appeared in Otoliths, Potroast and Streetcake. Pat Hauser lives in Columbus, Ohio. His poetry will also appear in the forthcoming issue of Milk Money. Rosalee Thompson is a poet, visit her blog at fragrantsnow@netzero.net. Julie Drew is a freelance illustrator, living in France. Her website is http://julied.jimdo.com. Ron Campbell is a poet, playwright and artist who also happens to be a Cirque du Soleil clown. His website: Soar Feat Unlimited at http://soarfeat.org/ and his writers blog is Scrutinies & Tangentia at http://roncampbell.posterous.com/. Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a wheezing asthmatic. As such, he prefers short walks on the beach and the company of inhalers. He has recently been published in Quills, Vallum, The New York Quarterly, and The Antigonish Review. He also has pieces appearing in the anthology Lake Effect and has a full length poetry book in print entitled Pigeon Theatre. Sara Fitzpatrick Comito lives in Fort Myers with her son and husband and more animals than is reasonable per square foot of her little Florida house. Originally from Massachusetts, Sara's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in places like nthposition; The Camel Saloon; Short, Fast, and Deadly; Radioactive Moat; Negative Suck; Barrier Islands Review and Right Hand Pointing. She is editor of the online journal Orion headless.
55
Biographies
satnrose is a well-known antiquarian bookseller, and formerly a not-so-secret messenger in the innermost depths of Capitol Hill and K Street. He has been published in a number of literary magazines, but since his reincarnation as 'satnrose' last year, he has been published in EVERGREEN REVIEW, ICONOCLAST, DANSE MACABRE, COUNTEREXAMPLE POETICS, wtf.pwm, OYSTERS & CHOCOLATE, APPARATUS, GLOOM CUPBOARD, ESCAPE INTO LIFE, MAD SWIRL, METAZEN, THE NOVEMBER 3RD CLUB, STRAY BRANCH, THE CITRON REVIEW, MASTODON DENTIST, FULL OF CROW, NEFARIOUS BALLERINA, COUNTERPUNCH, deadpaper, theviewfromhere, MAVERICK, CALLIOPE NERVE, THE BATTERED SUITCASE, etc., etc." Sergio A. Ortiz is a retired educator, poet, and photographer. He has a B.A. in English literature, and a M.A. in philosophy. Flutter Press released his debut chapbook, At the Tail End of Dusk, October 2009. Ronin Press released his second chapbook, topography of a desire, May 2010. Avantacular Press released his first photographic chapbook: The Sugarcane Harvest, May 2010. His third chapbook: Wet Stones and Bedbugs in My Mattress, will be released by Flutter Press, November 2010. He was recently published, or is forthcoming in: Carcinogenic Poetry, Perceptions Magazine of the Arts 2010, BorderSenses, Offcourse Literary Journal, Cavalier Literary Couture, and Touch: The Journal of Healing. Ted Jean is a recently retired AIG executive. He writes, paints, plays lots of tennis. In the past year, his work has appeared in Poetry Quarterly, Blue Earth Review, Cirque, The Delinquent, The Centrifugal Eye, Turbulence, Apparatus Magazine, and several other publications.
56
www.psychicmeatloaf.com