POeP!

RATTAPALLAX PRESS 532 La Guardia Place Suite 353 New York, NY 10012 www.rattapallax.com Ram Devineni, Publisher Copy r ig ht (c) 2001 by Rattapallax Press ISBN: 1-892494-51-5 All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reprinted or reproduced by any means,including electronic, without ex pr essed permission of the authors, editors and publisher except for quotations used by reviewers.

Some of the proceeds made from this publication will be donated to UNICEF. Please make checks payable to the U.S. Fund for UNICEF U.S. Fund for UNICEF P.O. Box 96093, Was h i ng ton, D.C. 20090-6093 http://www.supportunicef.org/ ---------------------------------------------------------------

Editor: Edwin Torres Issue One Guest Editor: Anselm Berrigan cover image: Oh Bunny! by Matthew Rose 1998, Collage on Wood, Private Collection visual artists contact: Elizabeth Castagna—ecastagna99@yahoo.com Pete Kel ly — pe tekelly@hvc.rr.com Tracy Mc Gu i n ness—tmcguiness@hvc.rr.com Linda Obuchos ka — obuchoska@yahoo.com Karen J. Revis—kjrevis@netscape.net Matthew Rose—mistahcoughdrop @ ho t ma i l. com ------------------------------------------------------------I’d like to thank everyone who contributed their unique vision of the world to this first issue, you are all POePs now! Thanks to Anselm for sharing his wisdom. And to Ram Devineni for giving me the chance and for publishing this work. -e torres ------------------------------------------------------------POeP! is published twice yearly, submissions are by solicitation only.

WRITERS: Rosa Alcala 4, 5, 6

Alice Notley 101

Elena Alexander 7, 8

Lori Quillen 103, 104

Kostas Anagnopoulos 10, 13

Matthew Rose 105

Bruce Andrews 17, 19

Mariana Ruiz-Firmat 110, 112

Anselm Berrigan 21

Andrew Schelling 113

Gina Bonati 24

Lytle Shaw 117, 118

Andrea Brady 28, 29

Ron Silliman 121

David Cameron 30, 31

Sally Silvers 129

Elizabeth Castagna 33, 35, 186

Paul Skiff 132,

Todd Colby 36, 37, 38, 39, 40

Juliana Spahr 138, 139

John Coletti 41, 42

Erik Sweet 141

CA Conrad 43

Edwin Torres 143

Robert Creeley 46

David Trinidad 147

James Shubinski Davids 53, 54

Mike Tyler 153

Tom Devaney 55, 56, 57

Dana Ward 157, 158, 159

Marcella Durand 60

Karen Weiser 160

Betsy Fagin 62

Yolanda Wisher 162

Tonya Foster 63, 64, 115

Emanuel Xavier 165, 166

Alan Gilbert 65, 67

Emily XYZ 168, 169, 170, 171

Bob Holman 70

John Yau 172, 174

Bill Kushner 75, 76

Lila Zemborain 178

Denise LaCongo 77, 78 Rachel Levitsky 79 Michael Magee 81 Pattie McCarthy 86, 87, 88 Sharon Mesmer 89 Carol Mirakove 91, 92, 93 Fred Moten 94, 96, 97 Hoa Nguyen 99, 100

ARTISTS: Elizabeth Castagna 59, 61, 176, 177 Pete Kelly 12, 69, 98, 120 Tracy McGuinness 32, 34, 85 Linda Obuchoska 116, 146, 152 Karen J. Revis 16, 131 Matthew Rose Cover, 45, 137

SPANISH ARMADA

Three cats defend La Alhambra Three cats, one blinded in a duel Three cats revealing a crow’s path to the garden Three cats dreaming of Egypt, suggesting the Nile with their backs Three cats their tongues erasing my palm Three cats, sisters at weddings Smiling and malcontent Three cats weaving fur into the wasp’s nest Three cats contemplating irrigation, yawning at fountains Three cats thinking milk absurd Three cats unveiling stars, trees of cool hibiscus Three cats stretching towards Africa, their bellies firmly South

ROSA ALCALA

A GENERAL SONNET FOR THE UNRESOLVED

Had I known you for the fuss of it Unguarded to reveal an act’s shining treason Or determine the body’s miscellany as variants of Truth of what we are momentarily

ROSA ALCALA

THE POETICS OF HUSH after E. Glissant Silence as a certain husbandry of self-interest or as an effacement of the account Something in transition, a forced poetics or necessarily a natural one As a starting point or as an end The mouth holds all its weight like hands: the record of such limitations the abeyance of song This elision or this gathering A waiting room where the body will be produced as a remediable thing, or in ashes as a reducible thing

ROSA ALCALA

WHAT CAN CRY?

What can do?

Cry Waves what rocked us before foolspor washbrained Fana tick meltdown Knelt. Flew up smartly stand up sit down standing upsitting-automata-Atta pilot Maybe. Yells Rah-Rah! Raze it to the ground.

Always sounds oxymoronic.

Din bell’s rung down the curtin Raise up the dead Change game. Rewind (“Let’s go to the video...” the hop, the past) tape.

ELENA ALEXANDER

LET’S PLAY “LET’S SAY”

Let’s say I told you I met him on the plains Wide winds Feathering clouds white as unstained sheets.

That would be a lie.

It was a bar Dark Smokey Free dope Wine and more wine Let’s say I told you he was single at the time Unclung as veined ivy yanked out at its root from between tight bricks.

Lies. All of it lies.

He was married. I was too just not as much If I implied, “I put my spine against his, He turned talked We walked out into moonless drizzle where his jacket fell to my hips as he placed it around me,” perhaps––like the child’s game–– we would all be getting warmer Let’s say I were to say I recognized him feature by feature the way you do someone you don’t really know at all.

A famous movie star A famous killer Knew the soft-steel feel of him.

Maybe yes Maybe no

ELENA ALEXANDER

>

If I dropped a clue small as a stitch Picked it up and gave you to believe we saw sun pinking the windows that next morning you might do well to begin to place faith in my telling Let’s say I told you that before a year had passed we covered great distances through icy clouds Landed in green meadows where “Dogs caught worrying the sheep will be shot” and his parents, shocked or not, met me Sustain your faith Believe firmly in coursing love Let’s scream together those early punk songs Earthy prayers of fair is fair to some if not to all Like a wife left without much explanation Let’s say I told you pleasure and punishment are bedmates over the long haul Would you recognize your own lusty sorrows?

Let’s say I told you “I love him.”

That would be so

ALEXANDER

~

THE WORLD OF BOXES

or we were taken by the place or we were taken by a place we didn’t want to necessarily be. A place we went to twice meaning never and this time took a new way there. A different way of being at such a place or when we got there it was plain to see a place on an isolated stretch, one we’ve located before, with or without walls a place with some distance from such a place we needed to get away from even more so since we were in and out of places all night long which were only in themselves placed like so many because it was time we saw the place we knew but since we saw it before in such a light and since it remained the same as before but different than remembered why didn’t we see it then. Why didn’t we place ourselves smack in the middle of the farthest corner of the place and why didn’t we place ourselves there instead or why we didn’t we leave when we wanted to. Why didn’t we go in the first place since we found it as we expected only to lose such a place only to find such a place or when we saw again the place we lost if for good we didn’t know it was theirs. So what did we expect from a place or why didn’t we see it for what it was or did we see the place out of fear or when we saw it for what it was we fell behind even more or what we thought we were before was really now since we were replaced

K O S TA S ANGNAPOLOUS

>

in places we regretted or so the pamphlet said or we knew nothing and everything of the place and knew once and for all no place such as this is ours and this was wrong and we knew it so we needed to leave it to understand it or when we saw something else indoors we wanted nothing of the sort

ANGNAPOLOUS

~

P E T E K E L LY — C O B R A

BY A HAIR

the heart of the city, still at the expense of the city, guarded us by being further disfigured by the streets. Clearly, it was the family with us absorbed with the sense of the scene and their unreliable sources about our certain scene have it be the night life or the morning walk, parallel to how we find things at the corner no matter what they tell us have it be the gang around the outer door or simply that the inner had other means to get where we were

K O S TA S A N G N A P O L O U S

>

each structure blocked each from each other and we sank into what we thought because we were all about them no matter what their case was once about if they really knew, we could have been expected as we were driven repeatedly in our day. We lived check to check. Signs ahead didn’t mean we were isolated by all the taken spaces. On the contrary, I was taken by some flowers, occasionally, on the same corner, selling their bodies seeing that every display in actuality takes us by storm, has us in isolation is a set of blocks set in an obvious spot, considering I thought about it on my break and at the end of my shift, I shifted

ANGNAPOLOUS

>

if I am on the correct street as though the street is the answer are you going to steal the words from my mouth if the street is wrong are you going to give me directions to where I shouldn’t be or let me rephrase my question so I get the answer I want. If so should I tell you that I live on your block or that I’ll end up eventually in this line as though this is telling. Then again, I tell myself it’s not too late to take your paws off and leave me in bed to think otherwise streets are expensive. They cost us in the back of the cab. They are hairy while something different and same happens to make transsexuals in transit

ANGNAPOLOUS

~

K A R E N J. REVIS — W H I T E L I N E S O N INDIGO, 2000 ENCAUSTICS, ACRYLIC, AND PAINT MARKER ON PLEXIGLAS

DIZZYISTICS 5.doc

Cranial jolt the sequence playground razzle-dazzle the decomp shutterbug isotherm the secret of our mind That’s right, me what do you mean never-mind nothing automatic, too psychobabbly about it A > B & B > C & C >A No defibrillators on my hump head sneaks up to a neural fallguy point You’re not as not dumb as you think you are the coincidental incidental torn-up hypnosis eggs I’m between ideas NO, function as memory BLOCKAGE to want language to become ooze Cortextual etch-a-sketch psy-chunk gaga ganglia Synapse cogito plump à go-go I can’t get enough buzz Baby Steps post nonnarrative thin ice —————————————— don’t think make it up —————————————— pill-size success What if a dreamlike large white animal suddenly appeared (to YOU) in your living room? — to treat reality as special effects pindown — easier Synapse jittery normals

B R U C E ANDREWS

>

Don’t listen to me.

Don’t read this.

Beyond that fence [in your cortex] is a restricted area M K Ultra nickname quizshow neurologically mutagenic inactive junk DNA a baby in paragraphs Ditch the passive what did you yearn from that

ANDREWS

~

DIZZYISTICS 7.doc

Laa-Laa hope-mongering pretzel cursive syllables kick it lettershapes — calligraphic letdown caught up in a dayglo pathet lao — give it the smash test as emotional target practice we’re the problem & that’s the socialist the hope extends love the sorry s c a re c row kicker Nonsense peasants’ bazooka glow surrey with the skin on top In a clique, I can lose my inhibitions & be myself insect morality — truth so toxic no, we want to see it on TV kitkat PICK YOUR FRIENDS BUT NOT TO DEATH choked back tears — I’m a refugee camp yip yip yank baby bird eat up headlines cheer us up — what mucks up a legend most

study the enemy The only diaries you know are incendiaries, the only art you know is artillery choppety-chop — carpet bomb the looking good killing is inappropriate ————————————

delusion defeat ———————————— champagne all around an ambulance with an overbite cramp down on your bondage

B R U C E ANDREWS

>

on the bite toto bodybag ‘freedom fighter’ means C.I.A. beat up the landmasses us & them, S & M Should fascists be killed? — or has nonviolence become too fashionable?

humpty dumpty plié napalm you don’t have the right to hit me licking the kitchen socialist Anti-Pop Good Riddance, spank you very much Omnilingus turkeyshoot divebombed taffypull for peace

ANDREWS

~

ZERO STAR HOTEL (excerpt) I’ve never met any Mysterious musicians Sorry. I wish They stopped saying Lord, and ended This Pope business My relative Clapp Died at the Alamo Let's give Texas Back to Mexico

the original of this poem is available for $5,000. When I sell it I plan to buy a debris slide. I’m broke but I make more money than my parents did when they were my age

Solid boundless freefall My connective tissue My fine citizen centering Circles this frame Upside down flying Back first into Woods, flipped Over handlebars Brake cord detached Leaf imprint on back

what is interesting about him is also what is wrong with him rendering him electable he’s the guy who poses for trophies, biologically but he is turning into bio-seitan, to be eaten by a despicably healthy human extending a lifespan

I can get a sparrow With a bow and arrow I can buy anything Cheaper than you Who wasted the miracle On the dove?

The subject is SAME NAME. There's nothing To cross out. $5000!

Have a happy warning

if you don't understand don't be ashamed to ask three times the answer is TIGHT-LIPPED you have won $30, 300 can I have a glass of water? the Americans had Judy Garland & we had Edie Piaf he was set to do another season of Superman, then he was shot

A N S E L M BERRIGAN

>

Using the money I borrowed for rent I’ll lend you half Of your rent until Your check from The job you just Quit comes in And by then one Or the other of us Will have another job

crossed out four lines just to get right here a briss came by today took me to Pie Land said I’m a thigh man I stole money, books stamps, addresses and phone numbers in exchange indirectly for a sucked out soul

In the pitched past Pitch of grief, not Withholding oddity Functioning is easy Practice is easy Just lay drunk down Feed brain, feed stomach Recognize ease of that Make truce with reason Make friends, don’t call

just because I’m writing this doesn’t mean I feel bad I feel terrible and we like that we derive momentum from it, and evacuate no one, to enable the emphasis to fall on a Sabrett hot dog stand mustard and ketchup please

Bye Doug. Bye Thought about calling From the airport At a time that Turned out to be The time.

In preservation Cubicles, our Opinions are being Formed and represented

without consent. you looked like you were still there in your body but a blackbird in the tenth arrondissement sang near our window the next morning to prove you were not

BERRIGAN

>

Glad I didn’t have brain Surgery, or all my Relatives slaughtered By a guy trained in France to be a lefty Intellect while I Escaped to drive A western taxi Glad I left Buffalo And San Francisco

the demented classics pouch the revelator being a marsupial pouch was warm kind and unlike my twenties. John reinformed this one about the life reading mail slot mace and cab colored cop cars

One of them, a few Argument, what, every Every time. And that No, Drew said slaps Like broken municipalities The gosh raptor And the organizing Apparitions imagine Interiors while Falling through chairs

when I was a cell inside an orgasm after too consciously speaking to broccoli headed aliens who introduced me to the notion of reality as wallpaper ‘twas as though I’d swallowed a burning tire

Not necessarily owned But dutiful, to the Couch, the stove The filing cabinet The space where The icebox used To be now occupied By a toolbox next To a can of paint over Which a fist trembles

level sea below sinks land, to free in half hand the hold its non-fictitious base Buddy Lee is right for me said the case of explosive materials up in the ochre light sorted as an individual pursuit to lose the thread

BERRIGAN

~

5 POEMS: 1) I lifted up colors of small fish out of the fish bowl they had been into colder ocean water so they would live I lifted in handfuls, palm at a time scooped within my palm bright colors of small fish came out of my palm in color groupings for a time I scooped turquoise then pale gold they looked like small eyes I said "eyes" and the eye fish spun swimming circles round my head.

2)

my sweet love I haven't anywhere to go but further in this vast world a disappearing thing when I am with you only your body my body knows your soul behind the ocean of your eyes

GINA BONATI

>

3)

It doesn't matter how severe the anguish (during mourning, a sudden rain).

I have slipped yellow petals into my back pockets as a young girl - and as I. It's a funny thing: how plants continue to grow.

Who cares about your feelings? I am alive and striving toward my death. ...that is what the yellow lily is screaming, and the amaranth: who cares, who cares.

Once the end of me is floating, a fruit tree out my nose......no!

I want to be a berry patch, listening.

With two good eyes I could have preserved a million, labeled and shelved in sequence. Instead ...I am a yellow petal in the dirt no, a grape arbor, no, a grape.

In the belly of a bird.

In the belly of a song bird.

Maybe I'm the song.

I am.

Am I here?

I am who cares. ...who cares.

BONATI

>

4)

It was a cloud A painted mouth It was a sleeping face It was moist around the edges I held it speaking Something about a heart Something about fire The careful brewing of summer Time amazes She was so simple In layers of cake Like a dead child Ephemerally roasting.

BONATI

>

5)

Today, a cloud settled; covering the memory of you.

Until this darkening, I floated on hope.

Your cruel departure sings to me like ghosts haunt empty houses.

It seems for you it was a gesture; your graceful turn in air requiring not even a meeting of our eyes.

The swallows are in mud.

The water fell.

The girls began to bleed.

I am still bleeding I am thirteen pounds lighter than when you held me; when I was a woman.

Now, I am a skeleton: bones of a white dog, Hungry eyed on a frozen lake.

Watching the glass shadow flight of two swans.

BONATI

~

INAUGURAL WEEKEND

I poison the species when I laugh, even barking at a cupful I finish that temporary dream. Which got us here, under the sign of the Coffin. Turning the pages for a pest. What upper part of a queen held in our arms and kissed dug up under Westminster could ask for any less than soup of iron embrace of millions.

Would she speak up for progress with her green tongue rotted from her mouth? And augur their deaths in the depravity of a walking tour around the Capitol, crushed in a dustbowl of laziness, self-love. Hey it’s the electoral season jamming the subways with thin lines.

I believe in change, I offer the account manager my details over my bacon bap.

This is because yesterday’s vacant line drawing of the girl covered in 180 wounds, back to front, ruined yesterday’s appetite, that I walk around half-corked waiting to settle the scores.

I breathe deeper; the telephone rings, America calling my loved ones names they hardly know.

ANDREA BRADY

THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

With the transport pencilled in all shades between red and green, no wonder distracts us better than the tangible. It contracts me, through the desks and columns, airs trampolining overhead, the italic bulk of the sea and every swarming character denying by the laws of physic and plastic televised ethics your own presence, to you.

On you a terrible facetious spotlight, risk of injury is small besides the comestibles would absorb your detailed bulk in a fortnight anyway. I call it in the air a field of tenderness, liquids loosed to caress you may call it envy hiding among a lost tribe. But don’t feel the hazard breathing on the corners, made to seem like destiny where it has us over a barrel; don’t call anything by less than its own name.

I love you through the chevrons of hazard and hurt, warning to keep a distance, for what is not the next question when we are penetrated by capitals we exhale loudly and take each other up.

We found that a dark time; obscure external links bound us into volumes, and we lie closer here to the boundaries of good than anywhere. If you can reach to pull your presents toward you, I am there at the breaking point, floodlit with you and different as the world is now: I found for you a brighter hemisphere.

ANDREA BRADY

LETHE The Lee The/The The The/The The Tea

Come on, (my heart works for donuts and sourdough) I love monsters. (tigers fallen asleep in low-oxygen air) I’ve always wanted to plunge (my fingers tremble) Into their crinolines (the lay preacher pays the hospital bill) And refill my perfume bottle. (a hellish trombone crushes) Low calorie (release my neck and wrists from the stockade) Breathing apparatuses filter out (brings in a flower) The soft relenting voice of my lover. (defunct) I want to sleep (sleep beneath a living plum tree and sew) On a quiet sea trip. (the Mafioso’s son cuts love in half) I’ll tally by candlelight (this song is for the eels) Until the police come with a carving knife and cut open (asserting the weight of your beauty) The glutton’s fat throat. (it rains appraisals) On the couch (no one visits me in Labrador) A forgetful cat burglar (lives in her bush) Pours out kisses, (and Lethe dances in) Delicate (a man who fell asleep in a dustbin, awoke and found himself on the moon) Predictions (commentary on the job market goes) And a virgin’s change purse. (the martyr closes the deer’s mouth) In the attic the supplicant (don’t last forever) Sucks on a raccoon (pouring taffy, mother) With no pants on. Cigar smoke (L. ate his bun) Sails in by the valley-full (until the charming sneeze) And the jailer loses his keys. (it didn’t occur to me)

DAVID CAMERON

XLII

Poa traim driver, qut uor lesses, eu ice a ai An oi quat re-rore. If ue mut scere it of cours uul Ren ento a leerer. Alls sabt leerer ac a baths, A girl and vater. I don’t lof eu driver, i sand Mie asrections to sorn one elns. So get lath. Uur er gun Ut soncet, a oud treen uvire a ruden oil, a Distam gursin, a call if a paper arese. Sheul Cout bideonse on dae lihn ever ule tratst, Saict Lodis es entelit ul stean and a quoad Is id a tree. Tame dullet, as u quntelu cosdan Ur fantomn sbacealoses un endam im dafe an olm.

Son times i jalp op ed i jear ule or id telt er bedles I pale de bloor. Zie iln ur queem, am ole quuem.

Om ule galsian angel, seatem jere in da dus.

DAVID CAMERON

T R A C Y MCGUINNESS — L I T T L E T I N Y B U G

after is a body after is a body not after is not a body is no no not is after is a body no not no not after is is body, no no after is a body is no is no is no it is a highlight after #1 ec/01

after is not fallen and if it is it is supposed to be that way after all after all after all it is a blah blah blah after all is after all is after is after is all after is all after it is is all is all is all after it it it is after all we can ask for no more after #3 ec/01

ELIZABETH CASTAGNA

T R A C Y MCGUINNESS — T E E N Y

after is a body after it is a body. not time not time lost lost, a body is not a body is no time lost. a body is no time lost. lost in a body in no time. in no time lost in a body is no loss, and after is a body in no time. no body lost. no body lost in after body loss. no after body loss after a body is no. no. no. no. no.

I can understand what the crashing of waves on your shins, legs, feet can do, but to bring an elevation down is more than I thought was possible after #5 ec/01

there is no after or before there is only on the way on the way suggests no point no point in time there is no point in time to time no arrival after #8 ec/01

ELIZABETH CASTAGNA

FROSTY SABLE BROWN #520

Do not fuck my last nerve Frosty Sable Brown.

Do not bring the red racing car Into the blazing blue room.

Do not leave colorful skid marks On major territories.

Do not ride the highway liquid cab Into the great blue translucent.

Do not remove the bandages Or you will see a commotion in the seat of your pants.

Do not let the little shits tell you that you are Smaller in your own head than in the world.

Do not pile into the car all at once Or you will have to backhand me.

Do not take a walk and come back upset If you believe this isn’t love you’ll believe anything.

TODD COLBY

JUST WONDERING

Here’s what puzzles me about your claim for the thermal mass of a silken ass: If the bone or digit is completely inside the insulating ass foam, how does it act as a thermal mass? My old Balcomb Ass Manual hammered on the need to have thermal mass in the same space as the solar anus, preferably illuminated directly while throbbing and lubed. It had not factored in the reduced effectiveness of an ass that was not in the same space as the prong, connected by wires alone, so the numbers were a little short.

My question is this: What is the effectiveness of an ass that’s buried inside the insulation? Laceration? Or for that matter, what about the manipulation of dream content by the thumb inserted in the ass so as to soothe “The Kid?” How does it absorb or release any heat from the digit, i.e. how deep and twirling, or how much spitting and grinning for there to be gritting of teeth punctuated by low deep moans? Who gets to relax in a dream like that? Scratching my head, Todd

TODD COLBY

THE ARISTOCRAT

Blue, cracked in-half with brilliant ideas like “You gotta be a bit of a hippie to quit smoking cigarettes.”

My body is clogged with passion.

The real question tonight is “What is my effect on others?”

How difficult it is to behave responsibly during a war.

If the synopsis of last night’s production was: “A man and a woman stay up all night in a hotel room,” We wouldn’t have watched long , we’d have fast forwarded to “And then he shoots a white puddle on her stomach, while she humps a pillow.”

(Impossible!)

I took a nap and had a dream that I walked by the hotel in mustard-colored slacks, a powder pink shirt, white patent leather shoes, and a white belt with a silver buckle that formed the word “HONCHO.” Maybe our nervousness is a byproduct of our brilliance or maybe we’re both insane.

If you think about it too much everything hurts.

One thing is certain: my nipples burn.

I feel absolutely dull wearing my sissy pants in candyland.

I want to keep the river on my right and my left and I can only do that in Manhattan.

Listen to me, Brooklyn is shrouded in smoke tonight.

TODD COLBY

THE TONGUE STUN

Brilliant orange into neon red I doze off, switch places with the sun Return to and go and then come again I am this small creature pulverized Yet still shifty by my own design Throat scab, big bread Crusty tongue stacks money in tight piles Light green to dark olive and underwear lips kiss Deeper still in this brown house Old railroad tracks half covered in tar The sound is deep blue radio in a car Bass thud and prickly fingers down my girly Spine--goofy, inconsistent, yet able to read The future in a burned out Dodge Dart I am the lemon, the orange, and the lime Come and get me mister get mad Mister misty growl at me all day long And in the morning come and get me again.

TODD COLBY

RUBBERY ON ME

She goes all rubbery on me Grooming as she goes blue Protein holds what’s under your skin I say bubbles of blue ammonia Form an icepack of frozen peas We split in-half to sleep while oceans Ooze their way in our hearts with germs Having a convulsion on a boat A thin membrane is all around us Like the thought of a friend on fire In the boat he goes blue As a rack of frozen lamb In a bubbling ocean full of germs Blue ammonia holds what’s under your skin Like powder from a kettle

TODD COLBY

ADAPTITUDE

Days after Autumn. You’ll dance….

Like you used to. Like you still do.

Like you are just now.

Less environment will keep us ironed Aligned to paranoiac wolves in the mainstream Sleazy, armless imagination of an unrobed piety It’s as dangerous as it ever was This nudging to clam up is The most fearful Side-effect of living On Television’s Friction That made this grub inch a little faster Than it ever had before Complicity has no meaning In a corrupt existence Bird remains. Completely practical Ideas remain. irrational scored funnels Gripped by the few An elite commodity the toughed-out can’t have PhD’s forking compliant Indoctrinate and useless In a time like this keeping a language intact.

JOHN COLETTI

DIFFERENTLY SENSITIVE

“She lost her son down there!” and “You can’t even tie your shoes!” red face, glasses need space to mour n more than ever a woman in a cardigan taps me on the shoulder, asking “How are you?” and makes her way down the bar asking each the same question,

rattled, displaced

only waiting for some answer then moving towards the next “...NY City mayor Rudolph Giuliani urges Nyers to go shopping.”

“The US needs no evidence. for The will of the people is one!” here where a fireman’s photographer will be missed the Fireman’s Chaplain who remarried my grandparents passed in this horrible clinic

JOHN COLETTI

THE DISTANCE

all the death has a way of getting us the love it's always what's m i ss i ng from anything that's m i ss i ng one tries to extend love by trying to distend for love salutes you back it's not philosophy it's a kiss moving down your spine it holds one day you can't believe how much it holds

CA CONRAD

>

nobody cares because you're not in the movies a roof allows a house underneath the can calls out for the can opener as much as the peas tragically i ns ide I'm talking about love still you were wild for someone in the distance but it was a mirror

CONRAD

~

M A T T H E W ROSE — ROAD SIGN 1999, COLLAGE ON WOOD, COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

THE MORE SO ALL HAVE IT Notes toward a Recognition of Art

FIRST, I WOULD LIKE TO THANK ALL WHO HAD A PART IN BRINGING ME HERE --but that says it all too quickly and too simply. Because, whatever the circumstances, it's here, in fact, literally to the preoccupations and company of this moment, that I have been headed now for years and years. Perhaps the loss of my left eye all those same years ago made me preternaturally aware of seeing things, of that outside so insistently present in looking. "Seeing is believing," as one says -- and not seeing, not getting the point, not being one of Plato's preferred "spectators," not being able to witness, would seem the loss of all that humanness might otherwise finally recognize. Before his death, when I was four, my father had been a consulting doctor at the Perkins Institute for the Blind. When still young, I would go with my mother and sister to Christmas performances of the Institute's chorus at their invitation, and so watch and listen to these remarkable people as they, sightless, made such extraordinary music, often with hands on the accompanying grand piano in order, I was told, to feel its resonances and vibrations. Clearly their music was a transforming art, both of their own persons and the great resources of music from which it came. But to a one-eyed child, it was their sightlessness that compelled attention, made me endlessly wonder whether what they "saw" was inside or out, a something apart, call it, or a something inextricably the fact of their own bodies. What does Blake say? "And leads you to Believe a Lie/When you see with not thro the Eye/That was born in a night to perish in a night" Perhaps seeing was not the kind of believing I'd presumed.

Even so, it was the art of music, of dance, of painting and sculpture, of film, of all that now came to be a seeming means -- of poetry, in my own case -- that most confounded me.

What was art, to begin with?

In college I remember

taking a course on the philosophy of art -- innocent as I was! -- in which the principle text was R.G. Collingwood's Outlines of a Philosophy of Art. (He died the year I went to college, 1943.) Here, briefly, is a generalizing summary of this work: "One of Collingwoodís earliest attempts to define the aesthetic essence of art.

His aim, he writes in the preface, is to state a general conception of art and develop its consequences. His conception is one already familiar through the writings of others “that art is at bottom neither more nor less than imagination" but from his

R O B E RT CREELEY — Mellon Lecture at Skowhegan School 1/7 for the Arts, Wa l d o b o ro, Maine — July 23, 2001

observation he goes on to outline the various distinctions between subordinate conceptions of art, and to attempt to demonstrate their place in the general conception, and the place of both in life. He urges that the meaningfulness of art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded, and that we must attempt to explain the process by which an artist reaches a particular point of view on reality."

"Only the imagination is real," was the battle cry of my great elder, the poet William Carlos Williams. He also proposed the converse, "No ideas but in things."

Apart (or truly beyond) the discussions of the possible meanings of an art, its philosophical or psychological grounding, is the daily business, call it, of any art, what it does in that day and who does it. Fellow poet Charles Olson spoke of this aspect of how it is a poem comes to be written as, "He [or she] will have some several causations." How true! But it continues my own interest to know whether or not it is the art that leads, rather than ourselves who make it. I know that in poetry that would seem to be persistently the case -- that one writes, again as Williams says, "Because it's there to be written."

Poets and poetry, despite the root of the word, poesis (to make), make something, of words, which is peculiarly transparent in that momently it exists, it disperses, disappears in the myriad responses and recognitions it encounters. As any writer will tell you, there is no such thing as a stable text. In fact, there is no thing of such "thingness" at all. Again Williams in age writes in a poem, "But the words which came to me, made solely of air, I regret most that there has come an end to them." Or Allen Ginsberg: "Some of my time now given to nothingness."

This is the place and condition of poetry and insofar as we remember it, it is because we have made it our own.

NO DOUBT THIS CURIOUS FACT -- THAT WHAT I MIGHT MANAGE TO do as a poet could only be real insofar as others found means to take it from me -- this has all my life bemused and, in a sense, delighted me. Whatever I did, it had to be taken from me by another to be for real. "Go, lovely rose," Like the tree in the forest, if no one heard it fall, just possibly it didn't. But even more difficult to resolve was the sense that this particular art, despite its great echoing tradition and its regal powers such as Robert Graves recollects in The White Goddess, had become a kind of filler or squib in the public magazines or papers in which it found place. For example, I was told recently by an editor that a poem of mine would be used when its physical shape conformed to a like physical opening among the various articles that constituted that magazine's real occasion. Of course, there has

CREELEY

2 / 7

been and continues a tradition in poetry of making such visual forms -- vases, wreathes, pillars. But the magazine did not so warn me in this case. "Poetry? I too dislike it," Marianne Moore could very easily begin a poem with that line when I was young.

"Poets," as another remarked, "were boys who couldn't play

baseball." However, there is little need to argue these points in this present company. Put simply, poetry, an art that is extraordinarily difficult to define to begin with, that has no evident public engagement or demand to give it authority, that has not even a singular physical existence, is what kind of art? John Chamberlain once remarked to me wryly, "Poets and harmonica players are just alike -- terrific, but not much use for them." Should poets therefore leave the room?

If the artist is presumed to be in some sense "creative," that is, if he or she is thought to make, invent, or otherwise cause to be in the world some "it," which had not been there otherwise, then the sense of art takes on a somewhat daunting significance. It is no longer the art of repairing shoes, for example, or of shuffling cards or of balancing a phonebook on one's nose. It has come a long and curious distance from simplifying abilities or from the practical knowledge of how something, anything, might be done. One suspects, in fact, that the "fine arts" (for so art now becomes) were a classically human proposal for some resolving sense of what was insistently without apparent purpose in itself and had no locating social applicability or need. "What good is it? Well, it's art," I cannot myself believe that all the complex activity and effect of the arts can be put in such a reductive box. If the dictionary says such "art [is] that is concerned primarily with the creation of beautiful objects," then what is "beautiful," and how and why is something so called? If the dictionary says it is "art for which aesthetic purposes are primary or uppermost," again one needs to know just what "aesthetic" is taken to mean. So there is a lovely echoing resonance to the final stanza of John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn": Oh Attic shape! Fair attitude! With brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought.

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shall remain in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

CREELEY

3 / 7

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

"TRUTH," BE IT SAID, IS CONSENSUS FAR MORE THAN IT IS EVER SOME objective resolution of the facts. Just so, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" -and becomes, as truth, a common denominator as and when a sufficient number so believe it to be the case in a given instance. Both are a response to the given world and have only that condition to sustain them.

So what brings things together, how be an artist or propose and practice an art in a world so empty of securing premise? Traditions might well be considered as factors of inertia, of what hasnĂ­t stopped yet -- like cars on the Maine turnpike -- rather than humanly defined values so kept determinedly against change. Artists themselves are a curious group within the body politic as any statistical reference will insist: Even as a liberal profession, the artistic enterprise remains professionalized to a lesser extent than other recognized professions. Estimates made at the beginning of the 1970s suggest that no more than one-half of 1 percent of the professional painters and sculptors in Paris and in Germany receive a regular and sufficient income from the sale of their works. Some arts have retained, even in the self-perceptions of the artists, the character of vocations rather than professions: it is still awkward to describe someone as a professional poet.

When there's no work, so to speak, when the society finds no place or use for the function of its artists, then something's gone very awry. Why is that so?

Because, as Charles Olson aptly puts it, "Art is the only true twin life has." It's that human activity which both projects and reflects the condition of being human within a wider field of activity and reference -- of not being a stone, for example, or a machine. It is both 'what do you see' and 'what does it feel like to see' -- not simply, "Do you need glasses?"

Someone once asked the poet Ed Dorn if he ever wrote poems for sale.

His answer was that all his poems were for sale, but no one wanted to buy them.

A like story of John Chamberlain's comes to mind. He told me once that his first wife said she wanted to be a singer but what she really wanted to be was famous.

If the market is the only connection one has to the common world, if that's the only means by which one can find either audience or validation, then I suggest we all run for the exits. When people are selling things, that's just what they are doing,

CREELEY

4 / 7

neither more nor less. If art is at times immensely profitable -- and it has surely been so for particular artists of my generation -- it's not because it's great art or an extraordinary manifest of human imagination. It's a successfully quantified product, dependable, distributable, and determined. No funny stuff here! No one wants anything to go off unexpectedly if it can be avoided.

AND YET, HOWEVER SENTIMENTALLY I EMPHASIZE IT HERE, ART'S what can't be avoided, what one has to do, like it or not. As elder poet Carl Rakosi said, "The last thing poets need is encouragement." I'm not sure just how it is with you visual artists, but I am sure you'd paint in the dark if necessary. Philip Guston told me once years ago that even were his building on fire and his family at risk, he could not stop work to go do something about it. "When I am in my painting," as Pollock said. But then one can be finally anything one chooses to be, is what they say here in America. What a relief! Maybe we can be successful after all.

Being old, my head is flooded with tags and echoes of reading, of seeing things, fading voices, great smells at times, whiffs of wet woods, dogs, birds, all that stuff out there. I'll end with where I began, recalling the words of Parmenides I put as motto on the title page of the only novel I ever managed to write: "It is all one to me where I begin; for I shall come back again there." So be it. Having one eye both then and now, there was need to see both out and in at one and the same time. There was one chance to see, one means -- monocular. It was always the first and only way possible. God knows what I either wanted to be or thought to be otherwise. I never did plan nor was able to. I followed impulse with whatever consequence. But that's not the point here either. If an art constrains its imagination to limits it does not itself constitute, if it objectifies its "reality" by making it convenient to interests which are not participant, I think it puts itself in great jeopardy as well as all who would use its information for their instruction and delight. "A new world is only a new mind, and the mind and the poem are all apiece..." Art must find a place more intimate, more familiar, more at home, simply more local. Global art like "globalization" seems to arrive at no one's specific door and those "doors" are crucial, now more than ever before. We are in no world we know securely, in no place we feel finally at home. Yet as a friend said, "In New York nature is other people." It's our common home as well. If "The way out is via the door," then art's all we have now to open that door -- either to go out, or, finally, at long last to come in. *** CREELEY

5 / 7

["IF I WERE WRITING THIS"]

If I were writing this with prospect of encouragement or had I begun some work intended to be what it was or even then and there it was what had been started, even now I no longer thought to wait, had begun, had found myself in the time and place writing words which I knew, could say ring, dog, hat, car, was rushing, it felt, to keep up with the trembling impulse, the connivance the words contrived even themselves to be though I wrote them, thought they were me. .

Once in, once out Turn's a roundabout Seeing eyes get the nod Or dog's a mistaken god?

God's a mistaken dog?

Gets you home on time Rhymes with time on time In time for two a "t" begins and ends it. .

CREELEY

6 / 7

A blue grey edge.

Trees line it.

Green field finds it.

Eyes look.

Let the aching heart take over.

Cry till eyes blur.

Be as big as you were.

Stir the pot. .

Whenever its sense, look for what else is meant in the underthought of language.

Words are apparent.

Seen light turns off to be ambient luminescence, there and sufficient.

No electricians. .

Same sight, shadows at edge of light, green field again where hedgerow finds it.

Read these words then and see the far trees, hear the chittering of the birds, share my ease and dependence.

CREELEY

7 / 7

THE MISSION HOUSE

It was after they left Muheconnituck, broken, only twenty-four families left from a nation of twenty-five thousand people, that they stood outside the mission house, waiting to speak to him, not being allowed inside.

That was nearly three hundred years ago, and many times I’v wondered if they would have chosen to do it if they could have seen what would be lost.

Maybe you didn't know how you would forsake the ways, even the words of your grandmothers Maybe you didn't know how your children’s children would take their own lives from the despair of not knowing who they were Maybe you couldn’t see how your choice would haunt your people, caught between the ancient song in their blood and the hymns that gave you comfort when your hope was torn away.

The mission house still stands in Stockbridge, a quaint museum for tourists and a thousand miles away, on Muheconuck Road, on the reservation we now call home, stands a church which my grandfather helped to build. It has a red neon cross over the door that burns all through the night, like an ember from a fire I was baptized there, though I haven't been inside in years.

I prefer to wander the creek and the powwow grounds just beyond, thinking of an honor song. I am remembering the words.

JAMES SHUBINSKI DAVIDS

HUDSON

I was walking slowly, no energy to bother with much and I fell asleep somewhere on Jane street left my head on the ground and kept on going (my mouth was snoring and it was annoying me) but I couldn't see where I was going and I ended up in the river halfway to Jersey before I realized that there was something wrong-I had all this river shit, this silt, in my shoes and then a piece of rock and then some broken glass from a beer bottle and I wanted to stop but I thought I might drown so I said to myself I'll wait until I'm in Jersey then I'll stop and clean out my shoes so I can keep on walking, even though I don't know why i'm bothering but as long as i am I might as well try to keep my shoes clean (except for my own feetdirt) so there I was in the middle of Hudson river you know it used to be called muhhekanittuck and since i couldn't see (my head was back on jane street) i had to imagine the statue of liberty smiling at me in this river and saying hey! why dincha use the bridge? or the tunnel. so i waved back to her and said hey liberty, your torch has gone out and why don't you just lay down for a while and rest; your arm must be tired and no ones paying any attention anyway so theres no point in bothering what with the book and the torch and all your weight on that one foot for so long so long wo heya heya ya heya heya ho

JAMES SHUBINSKI DAVIDS

ONLY THE AMOEBAS ARE HAPPY on guarding Ernesto Neto’s installation of the same name It's difficult to walk right into the amoebae.

A surprising lack of give.

Wading through two feet in to this biomorpic pillow-Not what you expect.

Not for kids.

Gallery floor discard: Shoes, boots, head phones, bracelets, leather purses.

Body displaces the place you land--Beads, white spandex habitat.

Tiny buttons.

Some thing does and doesn't hold its shape.

The Big Bang Bean-bags-A lot of sewing going on.

Barra-bola, styrofoam leaking its escape patterns over the poured concert.

TOM DEVANEY

THE THREADS THAT CONNECT THE STARS

Not a story all the way through, but a partial sentence we have.

A dedication to future Octobers, ringing true and false--truer and falser.

The story wasn't bad, it was how the threads that connect the stars reveal a sense of space between night and the day.

There was little time to write a short letter so you wrote a long one.

You said you "Knew what you were doing," said, it was "A stop gap measure"; The idea planted in a permanent grammar, corrupted pronouns. Your daily pillowings visible in the seams of the atmospheric scatter.

TOM DEVANEY

TRYING TO LIVE AS IF IT WERE MORNING

Every character in Dostoevsky is going to be in the hospital after this poem.

The underground man with a baseball bat, clearing house “Philly-Style,” and from what I’ve seen it would be true.

I put the Brothers K and their endless array of calamities out with my pinky.

I don’t go in for the ping-pong of rational-irrational, possible-impossible— The sad, lucid, mad, attractive, murky and yes, horrible overcoat of Paradox, Pennsylvania.

I don’t need that.

The Bros. K are gone.

The problem of fake hamburger or even real hamburger remains.

The Past is at my back, back in the past, I agree with John Coltrane when he says, “War begets war.”

I drive all around my neighborhood with “the Idiot” in the front basket of my bike.

When he falls out we pick him up and keep going.

He’s clever in a way that any other person might be killed for.

Of course, people don’t fuck with us.

It’s the old game of imposing order where there isn’t any then calling yourself on it.

The Ancients called it gravity; The Modernist job security.

The people after lost a lot of weight and went home pissed off

TOM DEVANEY

>

not believing they were home when they actually were— so they never really slept.

It’s the kind of trouble a fleet of blips ‘up in flames’ might cause flying over an Olympic stadium as seen on video cassette— but really real anyway, like on fire.

People point out the violence I do to my own words, how I’m uncareful I can be—I duck under their commentary.

My copy of Crime and Punishment is under the aloe plant all buckled and stained from water A man I respect said there hasn’t been any “breakthrough work” since sometime in the 1930’s.

Sometimes for me it would just be breaking things; Like my uncle’s a “good guy,” but the Precinct Captain pulled his back up; He shouldn’t be here; we don’t talk about it.

Take out a piece of paper and write down: Man the builder, Man the destroyer, Man the eater of donuts, butter cake and pork buns.

The experimenter says He, or a recombinant He and She “unsettling all things.”

Even though that’s a cool, I don’t unsettle “all things.”

I don’t have enough time.

There’s enough nonsense without that nonsense.

I’m not here to settle that.

I’m here to write a poem because I’m a morning person and it’s morning.

This is a morning poem.

DEVANEY

~

ELIZABETH CASTAGNA

Scale shift from bright blue-green through time to yellow-green as travel through yellow green as farther in scale leaves inside other leaves as travel through from bluish tinge spreading to yellow green through time as going through observe coding red gold from yellow green and darker green codes observe viburnum vivid across range optical spectrum as travel through geography and observe viburnum and pine dark green evergreen as spot in white, color against gray shifting through time from start of season bluish green small and transparent unfurling going down scale through heat expansion bluish green to darker green unfurling observe pine dark green fuller and wilted grows larger as travel through geography in full of season fuller wilted and yellowish tinge as observing through tinting yellowish tinge in preparing for red gold gold and oaks brown as water in limits change as travel through geography or time as season changes red gold or brown yellow tinge scale spectrum visible across range as travel through season changes red, brown, oak from blue-green unfurling travel through wilting season red-gold coding and on ground almost purple violet tinged dark bluish season coming geography sap changes sap changes from full on to wilting summer heated and sap slows down wooden rings expand & wooden circulatory system red-gold coding sap slows down as travel through geography as we would travel through yellow tinges changing unfurling into gold, green, against white, gray as geography season changes as optical spectrum observe through travel geography time brown as water limits as yellow surrounds and like water yellow in directions gold coded and water slows in season as season slows water and yellow-gold surrounding and observe as we are surrounded as we are submerged in coding yellow-gold, red-gold, browns and dark green against white, gray as travel through spectrum in directions gold oak viburnum pine dark green against white, gray and black indicating travel observation delination travel observing on black against color spectrum red gold coded, bluish light green unfurling through spectrum time travel on black coded red-gold oak viburnum vivid as travel through bluish light green unfurling into red-gold, browns, oak, pines as vivid against white, gray we are submerged in spectrum travel observing gold, green through season changes vivid geography time we are submerged in spectrum surrounded coded red-gold in such colors, vivid against black, white, gray, we submerge observing as we would travel

MARCELLA DURAND

ELIZABETH CASTAGNA

AS A BARGAIN

rumors that the older, their estates at least an island up for grabs an island with a castle with multiple pools and beautiful architecture. and as they out their lands I on some list, but just the old boys and I they, me, off in a pool of my own– that they my name. their years more vital

around drinks nothing. the gist of it in association with

but I an elderly man too my own king, kingdom. the rumors that the princess of the beautiful island all maybe she just, the heathens. but more likely something wrong with the castle at such a good price. and out before it into the ocean. islands into the ocean everyday. when I her she me, me away in this cell they under the gate at us us at bay across from the throne room. everyone the king long since and the throne bare. this my eyes. the other royal children as emissary, missionary to the captives. we together in our cells she kind. the throne I it. all the pretty colors all the sweet sweet sounds when we the state, the tv we back where we among the blind seers up across from the throne in rags where a king or a queen

B E T S Y FA G I N

1. as always there is the black robe, the platt-platt of a robust gavel.

2. as always, there is is/was. What will be is just peripheral

3. this is how grief will enter a body\water into water goes

4. this is how grief will be corrupted- loud talk of its middle hour.

5.

Bodies of black men site specific installation America

6.

Bodies of black men turn the mouths into the mouths of guns to dare us

TONYA FOSTER

7.

Urban widows wear your habits well, your mourning is just pudding-proof

8.

Urban widows wear your mourning secrets, like a tongue in a closed mouth

9.

Suddenly, in black we are. moments. Who knows who, what, or how many

10.

Suddenly, in blackland-defined nation with lines drawn in space and time

11.

What is an urban widow? asks the chatty Bush.

A disappeared wife.

TONYA FOSTER

ECHELON

I can’t seem (static) to get (static) the channel (static) to tune in (static) very well (static).

Who owns that image, anyway? Share the love is what I say.

Live to see another day.

Container ships glide past Bayonne where perfumes sprayed into the night air mask pollutants released during chemical processing.

A busted radiator leaks green coolant in puddles.

I may not work in this office again, but I’ll definitely work in this city.

Where they boiled in oil the inventor of toil.

My brother hoists beer from the cellar to the bar.

Leaving the scarred valley behind.

Squirrel guns and deer rifles.

At home, a dog waits expectantly by the front door and stares forlornly out onto the street.

A student sits quietly in the front of a classroom.

Circumnavigating the latest fashion, like a garden left off its hinges.

All sizes up to 3x.

A crumpled pack of cigarettes rests

A L A N G I L B E RT

>

on its cellophaned side.

A nation’s waste washes back up on a California shore.

The fog’s burned off somewhat, though I can’t see the ocean from here, so we’ll just have to drive down to the beach in a slow snarl of traffic and feed the meters while idling cars fill the parking lot with exhaust.

Wearing ruts into I-95, I-25, I-5, I-80, I-70, I-20, etc.

Deaths in the family.

Keys in the left front pocket. How does one keep from getting lost again?

Information wants to be free.

So here’s to no more stasis, though I hope the future doesn’t turn into a long, lame groove, ’cause if I have to bite my tongue one more time, there won’t even be a stump left.

What happened to the barley the wind used to shake?

I moved at least a dozen times while growing up.

And here at the end of the 20th century, it feels as if there couldn’t possibly be anything left to greet with disgust.

Air sirens. Represent.

Know what I’m sayin’?

Slowly surveying the scene.

It’s still not right yet.

(But I’ll keep on trying.)

G I L B E RT

~

DISINFORMATION SOCIETY

I. A shadow slowly moves across the apartment during the course of the afternoon.

The new’s not always very shocking.

A wrinkled pair of nylons with holes in the toes dangles from the showerhead.

It’s not somewhere but right here.

Learning from Atlantic City: waste washing up under the boardwalk, burnt-out and browned fluorescent signs, spinning sevens and lemons, and scraping taffy off the back molars.

In other words, we’re waiting to be entertained, though you may find it more difficult than you imagined. Using poker chips to buy basic provisions, and playing the chorus on kazoos. Power is a specific set of relations, like placing bombs in the beds of civilians.

A chicken pecks at scattered corn.

What’s the nourishment in this?

Tin panels flap on the side of a shack.

And it’s all good— except for that and that and that . . .

Sticking my bony finger into my squishy heart.

I can’t be your mirror right now, you say as you briefly glance up from a pulpy mash of potatoes and corn.

A L A N G I L B E RT

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II. A severed brake cable further endangered the life of the action hero.

What are you most famous for?

There’s a reason why poor people composed songs about the sinking of the Titanic.

Alternative economies proliferate, just as you can always find a good use for chickpeas. Carrying objects around in the mouth, and collecting cologne samples from a men’s magazine for Saturday night’s big date.

Don’t think that when the time comes I’ll still be shambling around in my dressing gown and tattered slippers with hairy ankles exposed.

Instead, watch me try to hold this soul pose, even on the roughest of roads.

Steaaaady. Hold it.

Because it comes to a head again and again, and it’s clear this isn’t working out.

Tupperware® dreams of making cheap caskets, though we couldn’t find a use for that fresh corpse.

Petrochemicals come in a variety of forms that can be enjoyed by the whole family, so let’s water the plastic plants just to be safe.

You must be joking.

And grab that Miracle-Gro®, too.

It’s like bedspin semantics, and I’m feeling mispelled in a genre called the kiss-and-tell-all.

G I L B E RT

~

P E T E K E L LY — T O D D L I N G

ISOTOPE 217 reasons lectric dreams agrarian vagrant varmints boojie fragments banjokeydokey boommeans goat the cheering saturnian rembering ev’rything blue huh windshielded

pop bingo

freedom breaks loose from the chains of freedom breaks loose from the chains of freedom sit down on the Universal Chair * night pusher dabbling pop-upper hept keen with dense democracy schemes never held a childhood no never had no -no-

*

Whoop It Up! (Jupiter) planet rockin rocksteady

B O B HOLMAN

>

pergola premeth elemental the thinking light for numerous years the symbol for idea is the light bulb -ah! now the bulb itself perhaps wearing the psychedelic mortar board of evolutionary consciousness is a thinking entity dynamic intensity Ah! Light Thought!

(light thought) THOUGHT LITE!

Perfect for squintoid dullit quasintellectaleur DUH Caldor caldoric column flubbed flutie brattle glassy nullentity O sweet flared Buddha Nature (in a hat) Lost battalion microphone sock stock Keep the piece of pie Rolled into the Love Burrito the

just “the�

the

*

HOLMAN

>

shoulda aughta hadda woulda shoulda aughta hadda woulda wanta didda musta beena wanta didda musta beena multifloriated bilungular drop the DNA track off at the time locutionalarian buy bubriv of fram

Hybrider svamm’s O! please ‰ = W

HOLMAN

>

*

In the passive mystery that is your eye I see blue smoke congeal into portraits of catawauler A pink shipper of poetry Dashed against the African shores (or, shovels) The mighty mighty canoe The heliopeter of fragrant epiphanies Kick up cadaver dust, my Trusty Wuss!

Blind with lovey dove Copernicus Make that CD skip power into thy ducky groove Zero zipper potash potato All manner of inequities blow blow blow

Beribboned Stuck Of

like just another

sweet so nuclear

mother’s in holocaust

comb afterflow aplomb

*

keep keen clean sheen of if magazine blaze maze craze stays days and days sure pure fiery moiré mutant bible truths proof enough roof goof booth No joke, Oak “The Condors wander the Corridors” That’s what I woulda told em! *

HOLMAN

>

down spiral suit moved closer snap tarpoa cocka noodle soup?

jaja, mein hair und alvays rember: Keep the frills

trimmed

* lose the empanadas cross boarder guards patrol the past someone else’s A rabbit building a trap will wait years just for you to walk by

*

non-end arose like phoenix cave-in planting an idea forcibly in the neck of the world

HOLMAN

~

FRIENDS

Everyone says he’s depressed but what does that mean? Dean always waits & waits but he waits what for? isn’t life too short?

Lewis is cautious at first, but quick to love. Ruth fell down & broke her crown, but now, in a sling she’s home. Richard just got back from the world & what he says it’s from awful to okay. Too soon, school begins, & too soon the autumn. Why I always get so sad when I see the leaves turning falling, in a flame. Lillian, she goes on buses that goes to see them but I never can. Charlotte? she remains unheard from, is that Piaf singing? she who regrets nothing, oh Don, dear Don, out walking, when last seen, in the rain. A call from Karin, Bob’s birthday, & a week or so later, it’s Paul’s, & he’s turning thirty, of all peoples, turning thirty come weep, let’s dance. Paul & Justin went down to the site to help dig day after it happened, good boys good men. Faye? still painting away still searching for beauty where whereever it’s hiding, come out, let’s play.

Lilla’s still back & forth, the house New York, the house. I think she’s still grieving, you can grieve a long time, every thing takes a long time no? Rose? is forever aglow, no matter the what, but that’s her, that’s our Rose.

BILL KUSHNER

MUSIC

If I jump at the slightest noise near the Pleasure Chest, my nose to the window & you for a moment in the pale reflection that is New York in the haze of a summer, naked & shimmering, dazed & confused, was I dreaming as one of you or you of me? you ask for a light, then tilt your head just a bit to receive it, what I tres gaily give. Sometimes, & at these moments we hear a music of cocks & rings & our hands bound shivering toward our destiny, for it is to simply dance to whatever the piper, his pipe commands.

Like the moon follows sun, I gaze, you inhale of a smoke I’d deeply swallow, love’s very own fool. Hello, as the shops close early, we stand & stare at how pretty those shoes are glistening in the darkness to their very tips where our hearts do beat so, & wait for lips

BILL KUSHNER

ESCAPISM.COM

Lest the silence to speed up your heart turn on the light Listen to a familiar voice, long distance.

When neurosis strikes the last stalwart friend left glad mine hit at 19.

It’s all ok eventually, I told her, The panic attacks never as bad as you thought the cause- an identity flop.

Pot.

Cocaine.

DENISE LACONGO

Passivity.

Tofu.

IGGY POP

August came on a Wednesday, a passing fetish, the purples, the golds and the velvets on the radio.

Definitely the first time the Fall came so early.

Summer salts, epsom salts for digestion, trumpet of God makes you a new creature. Windstruck and willful, windstruck and alone. Starfucker, starfucker playing at sacrifice. Everything you had rolling around in the glass with him, and now mother is placing you in school.

DENISE LACONGO

ETCHTRACTHION* (excerpt) for Renee

I. Diaspora I visited distant ancestors who like me Gave away words until they gave up words And fell into dreams and daydreams of old-fashioned Fancy flat footsteps entertainment halls wellDressed big round tables black and white checkered Floors pantomimes droopy dying machinations Well-worn complaints who loudly claimed a righteous Self-mutilation reformed and renamed selfPreservation. The self should not give up so much Of itself once the built-up disgust of long-term Under-use articulates the shows and hides of Affection seek identical parades.

--But for my father they did not speak. They dropped Feathers like hawks poked by screaming pursuers in Black garb. Plucked and silent they continue from above; They maintain a sense of what’s funny and what isn’t And will eye you suspiciously when you think you are But you’re not when you say things like Over there that Pine tree’s astoundingly bright green color only Exists for us because of its reaction with the mid-day ray Of light. Though they know you speak the truth they Prefer you to know when they would know a thing and When they would need to be reminded or warned With time to bolt the door and leave a generous note of thanks.

--I miss them their identical noses and gravel Voices the looks of worry in their faces unExpected tender caresses rumour that nights Once filled with loving didn’t actually cease.

I’m not afraid anymore of what a lover Can do to me but what they don’t—I wear the mark

RACHEL LEVITSKY

>

Of antecedent. There have been many upon This boardwalk now they are gone replaced by ones with Fur hats & breath stench like seagull. He goes around and Around. He can’t help it the manipulator is Rotating a shiny spot below. I want to walk Into the surface. It’s an ocean. It is cold.

--Survival implies a degree of luck prosperity Merely pluck and perseverance. In the chain Each ridicules the ridiculousness of the Beggar before. The movie star is advertisement For this game which is an investment a bank. They Didn’t walk into the Capital. It was their Day job. They died exactly as they’d begun. On the Way to work some got distracted and were dipped in To the Muddy river. Nor did it matter. It’s true For a while they lost count, the tracks from where their Desire had sprung. They also died in mystery Like they began—of conditions marked by caveat.

--The secrets of a tribe are hung prominently Framed embossed dedicated to resist the Tracking and measuring machines obsessively Invented by carnival crowds driven by visual Distortions they are eager to see but not belie ve Like giant rats the size of dachshunds or playing cards.

They twist & turn to find the trick quick movement From a too long sleeve that too is a thr eatening Sign so justifiably bomb heads with flashes Metallic beeping devices designed for detecting Vacated fortunes but charged in this case to decode Whatever it is they hold so cunningly close.

---

*This spelling is derived from a spelling of the word found in a late nineteenth century British cartoon call Punch, or the London Charivari. The exact spelling was ecthtracthion.

LEVITSKY

~

PRACTICE TESTS

Mars comes in like a ballbuster and out like a fucking dogass, right? That piece of shit can't get his facts the fuck straight. He She found her his voice fucking the neighbor's wife. It was as if she were the woman and he were the man.

Merry Christmas John Brown! Hark your hairy a-hole and part your pear tree in the middle!

In the above paragraph, is "sink the pink": a) a reference to intercourse b) an anti-communist epithet c) an anti-homosexual epithet d) some of the above Whose "huevos" are left? a) John Brown's b) The neighbor's wife's c) Mars's d) That piece of shit The author of this: a) novel b) poem c) memoir d) document is: a) facts b) like c) voice d) was

M I C H A E L MAGEE

>

Weather permitting the vast specie will leave at 5:30 on the bus marked E-norm.

Permission slips should be swallowed by polar fleece. Fleece suckers on your own time, out of ear shot, in your own way. Report all tumors. That is all.

Pack consciousness, hack conscience. That is all. Vend horizon. That is all.

Smoke tech, buy bio. That is all.

The above paragraph represents: a) the politics of the left b) the politics of the right c) the "poll-itics of the middle" d) the poultice of the masses e) l'art pour l'art

Who is E.? a) energy b) Ernest c) Norm d) Ezra e) Mark How does the vast specie finally get home? a) on the bus b) by following the horizon line c) tornado d) deus ex machina e) secret password This excerpt is a: a) parody of b) allusion to c) apology for d) defense of : MAGEE

>

a) The Declaration of Independence b) poetry c) The Communist Manifesto d) The Origin of Species e) l'art pour l'art Villainy nueva In nuestra palabra Beber from the goblet Of habit's prueba De capacitaci贸n.

Your decapitation Of capital letras Arrived via carta Which arrived via Cart, before your horse's Boca replic贸 Your vaca loca Que vuelve a casa To roost como ave In flight from NASA's Maria Abece

This poem is written in: a) Spanish b) English c) Spanglish d) Greek e) Your mother's tongue

MAGEE

>

The villain is: a) habit b) horse c) ave d) your vaca loca e) Maria Abece The goblet contains: a) milk b) language c) Maria Abece's blood d) horse piss e) All of the above When do the cows come home: a) at the end b) after the letters c) never d) never to the moon (la luna) e) never to the poem

MAGEE

~

T R A C Y M C G U I N N E S S — S PA R K L E

nequaquam vacuum, 7

11 October 1582 Let the new wine be tasted along with the old. there is the matter of her reputation as a prisoner that she should be married off three times that she should take many lovers In the “Portrait of a Woman” thought to be Lucrezia Borgia she has one breast exposed crimped hair & suspect flora in her right hand.

Pythagoras, aside from reading the moon, apparently was reincarnated variously as wheeling flocks & piscatory lyrics. drowned.

Drowned ?

Drowned.

An unlucky day to move house as birds.

See how she regards us from the corners of her eyes.

See how she is crowned in what I suppose are laurels – (I am reminded of bay leaves) Lucrezia the prophet was thought a bit prodigious.

Excessive sleep was thought to reinforce natural heat.

The widow’s hands have been cut off.

“Why have you been arrested?”

The back of her skirt has been cut off. woe unto you, poor bella— your hair will become the shoes of your father’s enemies

PATTIE MCCARTHY

nequaquam vacuum, 8

12 October 1582 In old georgian manuscripts the good thief is commemorated & odds shall be calculated He is a pillar. Look : math!

Lucrezia de León dreamt in the third person but her translators have transported them into the first. Her troubles had nothing to do with bellybuttons. However, there was a drawing in a certain kindergarten that implied the presence of Eve’s umbilicus that won someone a trip to the headmistress.

If you fast on a Friday, your dream will be prophetic.

There is a wonderful sentence in Augustine. I wish I could remember the Latin. It is even finer in Latin than in English.

When she enters a room, she moves towards a shape that pleases her.

The shape may be a table or a shoe or a sculpture, no matter.

It is the shape that matters.

Below, a tendril from the initial becomes the tail of a dog that bites its own leg (his tail was dragging along a third part of the stars).

I recuse myself scrupulously & specifically.

Excuses are useless—the alibi unconfirmed, unprovable—the shirk out of the question.

Isn’t ‘shirk’ curious?

This is the real color of my mouth arguing facts not in evidence.

Elaborate upon the threshold & follow the genetic lottery from infancy through adultery.

PATTIE MCCARTHY

nequaquam vacuum, 9

13 October 1582 That which lies beyond twelve, such as unreason.

I never could find anything wonderful in Augustine.

At the fall of Babylon, a sky darkened by a cloud of birds of many kinds, so says the so-called Cloisters Apocalypse.

(Friday’s dream should never be told on a Saturday.)

QEI, savvy skeptic that she was, impressed with her indifference to the comet of fifteenseventy-seven & looked at it from the window—quoting Caesar, no less. However, in fifteen-eighty-one it became a felony to cast her horoscope.

Certain occasions call for suitable superstitions, one supposes.

Garlands are tossed into springs & wells & we are working on a better understanding of our bodies in water.

I said for fuck’s sake but you’re a fabulous beast— even in this big book of fabulous beasts, you are peculiar & most fabulous. your fault, my fault, no-fault : term-of-art out of cigarettes— O what a wretched creature is this.

I, the undersigned, having been duly sworn, having examined the errata, having signed my name in my own hand.

Days when you are a dualist, you are so terribly quarrelsome.

You are cunningly a little Copernican and this is an introduction to mollycoddling.

PATTIE MCCARTHY

LONELY TYLENOL

It always falls most heavily on the person least able to deal with it falling heavily on.

In fact, it falls cats and dogs.

Like the night you walked toward me on Eighth Street out of fog and said you were getting married.

Life could be so pleasant, I decided as we parted, if each of us fucked according to our abilities.

Two weeks later I discovered Nature loses interest after sixty-five gingersnaps up your ass, and then your uterus falls, followed by the broken bottleneck, to the linoleum floor.

After they put me back together I had scars on my tongue and my pants were unbuttoned, and I was nostalgic for something as simple as your final rejection on the bench in the square fashioned to resemble old Andalusia in summer.

Remember me at midnight screaming at you from the prairie?

Because of you I got a bluejay tatoo. It got infected. Twice.

I know I told you you had a beautiful cock, but that was because I was drunk, and we were fucking on the floor of an empty office diamond-high above Manhattan.

Above us loomed platters of untouched seafood, and you said, "I'm gonna make you scream."

Nipples did not stand at attention. No one spurted to kingdom come.

Rather, in the fine cracklings of plaster that fell from the couvade, you spread my thighs with your knees and whispered, "The elephant is in the diamond, and the diamond is in the lotus."

It was your winsome view of the universe.

But I was neither famous nor popular, neither pretty nor influential.

All I could promise was to acquiese, like Boris Yeltsin in the Lincoln bedroom.

I had been waiting for you for so long, waiting in the car, waiting to lick & kiss & love you, but when you're alone like that in your car the car itself can make you feel that way.

If women bought cars for sex, like they want to, men might start cooperating.

Anyway, my breasts were resting in your hands like small dogs, and my irrational desires pinnacled globally, from the loftiest spreading tree to the humblest agnes cactus.

SHARON MESMER

>

I was like the giver of life in the temple of the four seasons, a nocturnal lagoon oozing voluptuous nectars from every diameter.

You were like a team of puppet lovers and midgets, safe houses and teacups, all rolled into one.

Bugs and fluids were gathering, forming a Calgon bath in negative space.

Then came the fisting, the clubbing, and the flaying.

Finally, the mute twirling and the sputtering.

"Corn?" you said, "when did I eat corn?"

What my circumstances were you knew, you to whom the gods had given ample appetites.

I had a humbler station in life; I still had a lot to earn.

"If you're lucky," you said, "your solitary fantasies might one day transform one million realities."

"Anything heretofore neglected," I said looking out at a blurry view of Jersey, "only needs that mad housewife edge."

You called me your cross Dolores; you were my youthless Andalusian.

I knew someday we'd be in Paris for the lighting of the lamps.

But after that night, no more. Nothing more.

Only long days on a mossy stained mattress with a bee sting lingering, and red shoes tumbling through space in a dream.

I dread seeing you again, on the avenue.

Every blurry view of Jersey reminds me of you.

Is this what it means to walk naked through the world?

MESMER

~

BRIDGE STREET

kicks barnes & chernobyl to the corner of 30th & M as increasingly we flex high noon rooted & dusty, solar trillion knee socks balcony a 25th hour in the cycle fermata world works too many drug tests & the wrong ones on TV. woman shall kiss, break sweat in a timecompressed, carbonated mango sabbath — attuned & not necessarily useful

CAROL MIRAKOVE

BARDO RODEO

hunched back & boothed in impromptu banjo serenades trashy as a virtue — snuffalufagus we crave your mammoth kindness the bathroom walls the depths of sticky is a buffalo firing he remembers boredom & blackouts & puppets pull harder in the earcrash a jukebox rambles many openended nights & skips home from an alcoholic library

CAROL MIRAKOVE

ZINC BAR

the present thinned out & brassy surprise of the introbricks, perfectly good shape the tapestry omissions brought to music stand & velvet baseball off-the-cuff orations haul bourbon & cat pills to the masses & people breed despite this so bitter but implicitly sweet horseshoes the trot of delinquency in reality does not leave the ground & groundless does not leave

CAROL MIRAKOVE

JAMES BALDWIN

hey somebody, some jewels lined up like hard flowers. pull that one jump the hidden balcony the air, get pierced and snared and soft down to the street and roll to Fanelli’s. the booming walk of goods all over the buckled street like Fred Hopkins. towers peeking over the corner of temples. somebody’s window is covered by a book with pictures. hollow circle and round edge scream and shatter the material. a whole buncha ribbons like a choir. you can walk through the bookshelf to a bloody corner: pull Foner and that late wagon squeal to the next dockery. a little dug out cave out there in the Broughton settlement. the bow of a fiddle and broke tea cup. quilt made of grass and big ol’ legs sleep in the other room. they shot her twenty-three times and hit her twelve. woke up when her back collapsed but that’s all over now. the white on black like glare ride the chute the old-new city: mama and Ms. Key an ‘nem whispering if the phone ring somebody’s plan and stall that cut pause distended horn and recall. on my machine like lomax standing right next to the passage. anniversary riverside bronx. this is the end of the open passage: sullivan, arouca, that late night pan and worker’s party, the logical jam of their future

FRED MOTEN

>

in my present of not only his bridge but these other bridges too, the band spread out into the audience, the cook sittin at your table, hard beauty with swallowing eyes, home through the sharp rapidness of her notes

MOTEN

~

ALICE KEY

enter some people walking and talking. a hand touch somebody’s event, somebody’s coat. step down rise behind that yellow sweater fadelike song. this a gallery of octagons and the band’s a train of steps up open windows frames wide matting and low running maybe the edge of the water. the half grand up ahead, in the street I started, before your used to be, open door, unclean corners, lab labyrinth of manchester, andy kirk, andy cole, chanting, canton, noon to noon afterparty the framed-up trip of her name the after party. I gotta make a call this ain’t my edge this inside edge.

I’m on the massed-up rack of these sound events like a cave painting, one fold, auburn rough mobile and object unwellformed: a moon

FRED MOTEN

CECIL TAYLOR

klang (and cut: drive through burning slow lean not about perspective: texture and kept us all alive thu burning slow smokeless long long cut and long standing water flows outstretched address hi. I love you. hey mama. this song scream bird on rock ove sea. lions nightbird. bye mama. bye baby till the bridge fly

FRED MOTEN

P E T E K E L LY — Y E W T R E E S

[A NIGHT AT THE BEACH WHAT IS LEFT]

A night at the beach what is left conch shell shimmer marks where feet trail across sand dense as stars Humans like me can’t hear beneath the trillionth day of DNA sung meaning of sea waves Sting nettle having waves to paddle

HOA NGUYEN

[FLYING COLORS LAND

DIVIDE A PLACE YOU]

Flying colors land divide a place You have this I’ll take it swirl like a target radar eye I am a crowned bird on a pointy nest the monster next door crowned bird on a pointed nest where we’re from two colors two maps dividing land ugly lots garden variety ones

HOA NGUYEN

AM AN INCORPORATED DEAD WOMEN MATERIAL

I am not material. they wrote us a letter out of sky. a drunken door...I just wanted how many to me. to want how many, dead to speak to me, but if they are a women it isn't a drunken chore. choros, reasonable forms I've forgotten the shores are fores, the golden shores are fronts, affronts, of how I am not sex or race. how I am not a white woman, how, freely, I am not.

A woman form walks into a white stucco pyramid house with wide windows that is it opens to receive her, its walls open to, then the building lights up in the night, lights up and lights up. I fall asleep, into the theatre of the play of loss, because it's all about pornography isn't it, the loss of the pornography of the stated structure of life, the perceived reasonable forms, I was interviewed on the subject, I'm transcribing it by line, I'm waiting on line for the pornographic performance of the letter out of sky from the women born to love a drunken!door door to the river desert factory family shore door to the door. shoot me up again with your lose my place in line I'm transcribing the interview by hand, with me, on the subject of pornography, me and the junky by name, she's part of it by fame a nd woma n hood in the fac tory of struc tu r es of hoa xes, of hexes on your visua l penetrations, into the vocalise of the black-leaved trees or pressed purple dew a drunken door, to more. I'm in bed with my dead true love in a rather public corridor, because this is later so he leaves, and the pornography is the depiction of the veritable trees whispering love is the floor sex is more the fore the arrow of plenty in political power all of our poetry is the whore of pornography's bastard bestial obeisance to the forms of the given rites unrelinquish Ć’ed, I wanted to love him longer, even despising the forms for money we assume in the unpleasantry of employment, the bestial city no animals cry out to or love. he has to leave, what is the pornography it's where you think with your historical givens as ever with the genitals of power love in the grasping basketry pledge to the

A L I C E NOTLEY

>

shrunken doll the any old idol handed down food race sex family race sex race sex house food the intelligence of creeping in shit, I have an important ticket, to the pornographic performance, to which he will come no more, she shows me how to re-enter it, the great dark theater where starts singing, fat in glasses, greek woman, with her chorus onstage, Hang me up by the old stonewall/ hang me up by the old stone wall/ and I'll never go home again/ and I'll never go home again. oh isn't this sentiment my friend, oh my friend sentiment, pornography, productivity, sociability, I'm leaving the performance exactly, with one cleaned garment on a hanger, a cup of coffee in a container, the crumpled ticket to the performance, it starts to rain my friend and I start to cry, should I take a cab. what is pornography? a destruction of reasonable forms, by their presentation, through the vision of others, imposed on dead women, and dead men, going to work in the performance, coupling, bodies, over and over, proclaiming your names, and I loved him, and loved him in this world.

NOTLEY

~

THOSE MEN/AVOID

Inside the three code army, raids were common and my movement went virtually undetected.

Symmetry hugging chivalry- he bested the show dogs and glistened in a winners coat/arms.

Tunneling through vision, filling up the foxholes with rubber cement and SKITTLES, I created: "the rainbow entombed", absent from memory the space/time continuum forgot to whistle: She, "intruder" of vision, of night blindness & flat feet, of "dismissed on entry" ~ you file back.

Into misery, into stolen grief, a slot car runs off the track and I drown in the sparks like awe.

LORI QUILLEN

HIS CONFETTI [MY TEETH]

Shellacking the wild coconut or trembling with vacation we entered the asylum courtside and marvelous, Wondering for fireflies the balance is unnerving amongst patrons & providers my source light dimmed.

ENTER she said through my slack mouth or idiots stare ~ "But miss I am missing all logical explanation of air" Faking a tremble, the last wine taster exited stage right tilting my chest up "hire" to gain hindsight/company (he) wanting my white, or is it bones? Persistence is the same as permission when festivals dry up into last gasp.

LORI QUILLEN

FOURTEEN WAYS TO RUN OUT OF REASONS

Je fais souvent ce rêve étrange et pénétrant D’une femme inconnue, et que j’aime, et qui m’aime, Et qui n’est, chaque fois, ni tout à fait la même Ni tout à fait une autre, et m’aime et me comprend.

Paul Verlaine, Poe`mes Saturniens

1. You have got a problem but the problem seems to be only air, that is, you can’t exactly hold it, but you can feel it and so it exists only in the air. You don’t understand the reasons: They don’t, as they say, hold water. You continue breathing.

Your best friend tells you don’t have a problem, his girlfriend tells you “your problem is you can’t let go of your problem.” You consider these things and then go home and drink a beer. Before you light a second cigarette, you wonder what sorts of problems these people had that they solved, got over, dealt with, pushed away.

You remember you used to have amazing powers of recovery, that is, an ability to resolve a problem, whatever it was and put it on the shelf, move on. Wipe it up, throw away the towel. Or rinse it out. You wonder what it was...and then you remember the child voice that is so faint and so brittle that it squeaks to you now. You hear yourself saying your name as a 5 year old. You know that this is your true voice, the one that said you would be President of the United States one day, the one that swore revenge on your evil brothers, the one that said you would find the window and go out because you knew you had a gift, you knew, in effect that God was with you (yes! God!) and would enable you to fly, the proof being that this is exactly what you did at night when everyone else was asleep and you slept with an open window so you would be able to just slip out of bed and float up, rise above the trees and see everything that ever caused you pain way far below. And because you could fly and because God was there keeping you aloft, why what sorts of problems could you ever really have? What sorts of reasons could you ever really hope for? And sleep was deep and your death that night was sweet.

2. You have listed all the reasons why this love you kindled and held has not worked out as planned. There it is on a piece of paper. Fourteen items scratched out in pencil. One was erased (she is/was too young) and then rewritten on top of the

M A T T H E W ROSE

1/5

palimpsest making it the smudgiest). She is not too young, you know. She was never innocent. She once peed on an ex-lover. You run through the entire list. You re-live the first moment you saw her, the first time you kissed her. What she said after.

Then the music lesson, and the painting lesson and then her washing off the red paint from her bare feet in your shower and your heart racing. And then another one of your reasons: Putting your heart on hold. Pushing it back into your chest. And that is the only reason, isn’t it? That is the reason that kills you now as she climbs into bed with some man you do not know and her cunt moistens and she slips off her panties and reaches for the evil dick of this man who you do not know and then she sucks it and has no thoughts whatsoever about you.

3. You are trying to remember the time when you actually beat him. When he was coming at you with his full force on the front lawn and you stepped aside and stuck out your leg and he went flying, awkwardly, calling for your help suddenly (and what a surprise that was!) as he hit face first into a tree. Yes, your older brother taught you quite a few things. This is a successful memory.

4. It is late and you are alone and you are wondering who you might call on the phone to keep you company. Someone you could call who would listen to you and not go on into problems of their own. You want to be connected like you once were. You think about calling Jim, because at one time Jim didn’t seem to have any problems, but then again he did, and one of them was not understanding he had a problem, which was principally that he was lying to himself all the time. So you decide not to call Jim. There is another old friend, Karl, but every time you spoke to him he kept on apologizing for not calling you. This went on for the length of the phone call and finally you had to hang up, feeling no better. No; in fact you want to speak to someone intimately but not exactly someone you know very well. A priest or a rabbi perhaps. Maybe just the operator. Are there still operators? Maybe just dial a telephone number randomly and see what you get. Then you realize all you really want to do is talk to yourself, but you are so caught up in yourself that you can’t pull yourself away (or apart) from yourself long enough to answer. So you hang up, having called no one except the network itself which responded with a monotone buzz. Not very comforting in the end. So you try to go to sleep. Maybe you will have a dream where you talk to someone--yourself certainly--who will understand what it is you are trying to say. But as often happens in your dreams, your tongue suddenly petrifies into a clod of cement. But maybe not tonight. And then, perhaps you will remember what you said to yourself the next morning. Maybe you won’t have to

ROSE

2/5

remember. In the morning the phone will ring: Someone has been trying to reach you for days, or weeks, or months. Or their entire life.

5. You walk outside and get yourself a coffee. You stand at the coffee bar and smoke a cigarette. You order another coffee, light another cigarette. This is not the first time you’ve done this, in fact you’ve done it so often you can’t remember how many times you’ve done it, but you try anyway, standing there, multiplying by 2.5 (the per day rate) the number of days you’ve probably done this--say for at least 20 years, since you’ve been smoking and drinking coffee. You come up with a pretty large number. You ask the counter guy for a pen and paper. You write that number down.

You stare at it and wonder if your life has become nothing more than a number on a piece of paper. You know it is much more than a number on a piece of paper, but you stare and stare and stare at that number. It sums you up now. You leave it on the counter and leave, but as you cross through the doorway you see the counter guy looking at the piece of paper with the number on it. You want to tell him that it is a self-portrait, but you know there is much more to you than that. Don’t you? Yes, at least that.

6. The landlord calls you on the phone when one of the prettiest girls you’ve been with since your break up is sitting in your house alone with you. She just got there and the phone rings and because it is the first time the landlord has called you don’t want to be rude and the landlord keeps you on the phone for a half hour and so you decide that you will entertain her with your conversation with the landlord. She seems to listen and smiles at some things you are saying and you don’t feel you are being rude to anyone but you’d rather hang up the phone, stop being polite, strip her clothes off and hold her naked in your arms.

7. After six months your shrink tells you “you are holding back your feelings.” You can hardly believe it as you’ve been crying all day long. When you get to his office you’ve stopped crying. He would rather see you crying, you think. You ask him: Do I actually have a problem?

8. You think you’ve fallen in love with a girl you met. She has a child you discover, and you really like her little boy. Then you discover that she is with someone. Then she tells you that she’s in love with someone else besides the boyfriend she’s talked about, “but that can’t go anywhere,” she declares. “It’s an impossible love.” You spend more time with her and you fall more and more in love with her. You learn her

ROSE

3/5

smells and see the color of her hair in different light. At the same time, you get to know the boyfriend. You don’t dislike him, you just wish you’d met her when she was without him, that is to say, when she was on her own, with just her little boy. You’d be able to teach the boy baseball. And then you’d be free to make sexier proposals to her. Now every time you are with her, the boyfriend is there whether he is actually there or not, sort of hanging over everything. You begin to understand reasons that come from nowhere, that are answers to questions never posed.

9. A year and a half ago you thought about killing yourself all the time. You imagined all sorts of deaths and even joked about it. You wished more than anything else to have a nice quiet little heart attack in your bed. You thought God would take care of it. You’d just help Him along with cigarettes. You even said: “Take me!” when you felt a pain in your chest. You even imagined that just as you were expiring, the phone would ring or there would be a knock at the door and she would be there. And in a sense she was: Every time you began to expire, the silent knock on the door would bring you back to life. You think God has a plan for you. You don’t know the whole plan, but you know part of it.

10. Part of your problem is that you think you are immortal and can never die. Or that you are a genius and you are never wrong. Or that you are alone, which you are now, except that what is stabbing you with pain right now is the neighbor fucking his wife or girlfriend or whatever. You can hear it through the wall. You think about the neighbors who heard you in your once eternal state fucking your girlfriend. It’s all quite a strange thing: Being on both sides of the wall at once. You decide this is your newest talent, yet where is the bird to eat my liver?

11. You consider an old photograph of yourself: Standing along a log rail fence in the dappled sunlight, wearing a blue t-shirt. You can smell your own sweat, a by-product of your embarrassment of having your picture taken. A picture not for you but for your parents. But now, 30 years later, it is really on a picture for you mostly because coiled in that picture are your feelings as an 8 year old. You remember when a guy first walked on the moon and when you lost your virginity seven years later. You remember the smell of that woman. Her cunt that smelled a smell of rot, mingled with some kind of perfume. Sweet and sour.

You remember everything you’ve ever known, said and experienced and yet, none of that is really relevant to how you feel now. Except that you were always alone with

ROSE

4/5

your thoughts and now you smell your fingers. All you can smell is nicotine oozing out of them.

12. It is nearly three in the morning and you are trying to fix a leaky faucet. Why? The faucet has been leaky for a long time. What makes you think you can fix it? The dripping, which used to make you crazy, is now part of the noises of the house.

Fixing it is now making you crazy. You are caught up in it. It is now three in the morning and you think you’ve fixed the drip. You have fixed a drip no one who has ever lived in this house has succeeded in fixing. You are a kind of hero.

13. It is four in the morning and you’ve been asleep for fifteen minutes. The phone rings. You get up to answer it but then decide not to and let the answering machine pick up. You stare at the machine with its blinking lights. You know who it is, or you want to believe you know who it is: You want this whole thing to be over. You run out a fantasy conversation in which the whole thing comes to a brilliant conclusion. You see yourself happy again and tears fill your eyes. You are not pissed off that it is four in the morning. You understand that most of the most important things in life happen at four in the morning. You understand too, that there will be no message, that the caller will hang up, that the mystery will keep you in life for another day. You are in fact relieved that you can now believe it was anyone who called you. You begin to feel good and go back to bed and have a flying dream.

14. You realize that you are living your life, regardless of what it looks like on the inside, regardless of how slow time seems to pass sometimes and how fast it speeds by at other times. You have little idea how to put your arms around your life, but you remember once when you were about five years old and you stood facing the toilet and said to yourself: “This is my life.” Then you believed you could put your arms around it. Now you grasp at nothing. You heard your own voice say “This is my life,” and you vomited your guts out, filling the porcelain bowl with your insides. What was left allowed you to flush the toilet and move towards the mirror to look at your face.

“This is me,” you said to yourself.

You wanted to run and tell your mother and your father that you discovered something really unique, but when you found them in the kitchen drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes you told them something quite different. You told them you felt sick and that maybe it was better you stayed home from school.

ROSE

5/5

NOT GIVEN TO BROTHERLY ADVICE 1.

The mouth of one just dead succulent push up from the of his letters spill milk 4.

Back to desert, bedroom Paris My friend has blue paint subChaste it does this weird thing with my antennae 5.

We're in the studio it takes up prisoners time, Do Not let the antennae fall heal industry 7.

Anxious just ping sunlight egg shell Palomino strange weather systems in here oh fall!

9.

Your death conundrum for roses and still frames jump to Xanex to memory and move me rapid MARIANA RUIZ-FIRMAT

>

11.

Winter I'm not funny at all I take simple things seriously ah women women 12.

Your name so exotic I'd like to fuck it or what I know of it, thank you Love Me 13.

Pig lady softer dandruff How can progress eat itself?

Oat is not just for sleep lay down 14.

Anxious Sunday night has birds and worms fighting the walls of iron clots stick um bending

RUIZ-FIRMAT

~

PLACEBO

31 days of blood/works Remove silver shellac This disease Eats away at me Renewable economics Thirty-one pink tinted canvases candy-spell Warms another victim Of invisibility Into the foil wrap Caught on remainder one sold wing Phoenix In this Bulbed row When once you Were a boy And that hope Strings ten bulbs Illuminatta had Anomolous heart But well You loved found objects Blue evokes the artists memory All interference May generate freely

MARIANA RUIZ-FIRMAT

THIN AIR ON MT. AUDUBON for Tom Morgan

Don’t slip on the spruce brachiopod wracks or hidden ice breaks. At this altitude a mica of volume cuts the Russian tundra into consonants. Filled with dwarf trees, never too late, the year’s squall exposed on a barometric edge. At final ridge lift, some went melodic, some danced, some went into sculpture, most drew close with a shrinkage of hide. When the glacier returns the rock scrapes copper.

Food chain stuff food utility sacks— sun going hard west.

Today the juniper glitter tomorrow the scree. A bare push south would drop you through that precipitous col. Get back or get bleached, like the photo of Mallory on Chumolungma, fallen and frosting the yellowish lichen patch with skin gone porcelain under the wind. Was that when your thumbs went funny? Metal trouser buttons more icy than a snow goddess glance, a frosted nipple, a shock of water. The wind strings you like jerky. High on Audubon, low on oxygen, there among singing weathered peaks, the primal taste came into your mouth as a few times on mushrooms. First that inward darkness. Bitter, salt, meat, hormonal. Distinction flavored with rock.

What rock? With granite sediment. With chimney. What chimney?

Born with a shock, one blink and it’s gone.

Hand me that boulder.

A N D R E W SCHILLING

>

To study the wind unobserved, to write snow banners, summits of where. Fox color hogback’s a tectonic ripple below. Pine’s absent, fir a kerosene tint. And green?

Nowhere green. Taste was always more basic than touch, you discovered the flavor in marsupial time. Sentient, feeding on, loving nerved flesh. Mostly love. The first taste of a woman was shocking—that recognition—ingestion—left you cuntstruck?

Back so far you were bent on the northward slope, splitting the outer husk. Thin air is where you learnt the uncertain answer. The riddle is what did you cast at birth.

Taste of her inward self? Vouchsafed? Salt meat taste of your own. You never got over it.

Dear dark mammal, clutching at life ever since— who amid ice, stone?

SCHILLING

~

12.

What is an urban tomato? asks the focused Rice. Cause for concern.

13. inconsolable griefs are common happenings in some parts of town.

14. inconsolable places our peninsular regrets just fingers

15.

I want to be like Mike, says we, want to wear his skilled skin on my feet

16.

I want to be like Mike, says we, just as long as I can take him off

17.

Thought can make a man make a monument, make a man a monument

TONYA FOSTER

L I N D A OBUCHOSKA — COMMONPLACE 2001 — 40 “ X 30” C PRINT

AH ... HOUSTON

Increasing our static levels the world fogged out: tiny server lung swells padded the incident with stars and gulfs and provisional gulags: all of the 2001 modules retained plug-ins, which led to our scoring ambient muses while circling the globe in our special racing suits, asymmetrical hair cuts emphasizing our bangs.

You could swear at your maker-boss over small loudspeakers and not risk a run-in.

Other lot was Earl’s, driven by crude on his West Texas plain.

Somewhere there must be a measure for this cube’s final resting point, gleam out under the risers and perfect set.

Taco Hell would be getting his at dawn.

LYTLE SHAW

“THE HERDER”

Thought Herder as he thought back on the first who heard a sheep: “White, soft, woolly— the soul seeks distinguishing.

The sheep bleats!

The inner sense at work.

This bleating, which makes on man’s soul the strongest impression, which broke away from all other qualities of vision and of touch, which sprang out and penetrated him most deeply— The soul retains it.

The sheep comes again: White, soft, woolly— the soul sees, touches, remembers, seeks distinguishing: The sheep bleats!

And the soul recognizes, feels inside— ‘Yes, you are that which bleats.’

LYTLE SHAW

>

The soul has recognized it humanly when it has named the sheep with a mark.”

Thus thought Herder on his bleating flock, the flock he herded as Herder, their pastor, in his Weimar pasture.

Would that great Goethe, too, had heard Herder as Herder thought he should be heard, thought Herder.

Would that Goethe let himself be herded— “Yes, you are that which herds!

I have heard you before, and now I recognize you with all my senses as Herder! the Herder.”

SHAW

~

P E T E K E L LY — T R E E B L U R

BOPTIVITY From VOG 1.

Shklovsky in my kitchen, pacing wildly, waving a sheaf of papers – “not enough chairs!”

She gazes distractedly out the window.

A dusting of snow lay on the ground, barely enough to cover even the smaller stones.

The bones of the bird’s wings are, in reality, elongated fingers.

Scouting locations for the next paragraph.

A simple sentence.

Balloons swelling, one after another, from the nozzle of the helium tank.

Wittgenstein’s evil twin, like a four year old, always with the questions.

Hours are as flowers.

There can be only one geostationary earth orbit, over the equator at 22,300 miles.

What if you called this page a browser?

Thrashing in the end game.

Follow the data.

My kingdom for a force.

You stand naked in the walk-in closet, contemplating.

It’s the new buds that push the leaves from the trees.

RON SILLIMAN

1/8

Can-do theme of four-wheel-drive commercial.

A light in the woods.

2.

Phlegm balancing act.

The logic of rope thrice twisted.

Can an invisible gap exist?

What sounds at first like a skateboard through the night woods turns out to be a train rolling electrically over tracks.

A word effaced is a word erased.

An org chart with your name missing.

Protein Design Labs: fulfilling the promise of monoclonal antibodies.

Passengers must remain with their baggage at all times.

Hay wrapped in canvas.

Roy Cohn State Park.

Often I am permitted to return to the Moika.

The layers of onion curl.

She learns of some old photos posted onto the Web.

SILLIMAN

2/8

Raccoon stares into the headlights.

Problem of diphthongs in the syllable count.

Register your domain name now.

Hear rain, see mist.

Eye surgery in a sitting position.

Count the drops.

3.

A song to digress of the world in degrees pitting love against the magnet’s twin gravity so to rhyme shamus with Camus I must persuade you to invoke a broader range of engagement engorging gouging purging an arrangement of scripture tipped in blue ink to imply the sky this guy is writing high above the evil king who staggers now beneath his general’s blow

SILLIMAN

3/8

no loyalty against advantage who are the rooks pawns enough for all intrigue invisible to feral cats in the woods in the walls rats mice roaches mites all having established a balance fall into order denied by the human mind so-called, appalled, appellate bleating in the barn before lamb stew steaming centerpiece upon the table around which mashed yams blanched broccoli and a salad spinach tomato avocado dressed in cilantro hot rolls interspersed with green glass towers and a vase whose long-stemmed flowers you almost recall the name music in the background right at the point of recognition (in one corner the television on with the sound off a sort of lamp)

SILLIMAN

4/8

rain & then more rain raven poised atop trash bin in the mall lot looks up at geese loud in the sky the upscale deli – “parking lot rules� shouts a dad to two small children who reach immediately for his gloved hands small dog in a large van spine as a variable ends in the neck above which flowering rises a single complete thought which, however, like pointillism upon closer examination dissolves a building that implodes almost peaceful billowing cloud I yam what I aim to have been most modified by implausibles even now not foreseen

SILLIMAN

5/8

4.

Translucent yoyo.

From this room what I hear of the rain is the water spilling down the drainpipes.

No wick for the rested.

The wind in the wallows.

So they called it Amnesty International when what’s needed isn’t amnesty but justice.

More junk mail from John-John.

So light a snow that it doesn’t cover the top of the grass, but a cold spell so that it remains, until after three days it has a crystalline chemical look.

It is not that his speech is slower or slurred six months after the accident, but that it’s an octave higher.

The difference between a 10-Q and a 10-K. He looks at you out of the corner of his eye to see if you’ve noticed that he’s made a joke.

Outside in the hallway someone sighs and by that act alone I can tell who it is.

“I can still taste you.”

The defroster’s impact on the side windows is negligible, making it impossible for me to see where in the dark to start the turn left.

“What is it that you do?” we holler (impossible to be heard over the sound of the machinery).

We need shelf-stable products.

SILLIMAN

6/8

A man’s abdomen – electronic handshake.

Gradually the dozens of antique clocks wind down.

At the base of the false tree a small train moves slowly in circles.

My hand motionless against your breast.

Then lower.

Sunlight through the blue glass of the bottles.

From an upstairs bedroom the boys are laughing, talking, laughing again.

Even war is governed by rules.

We offer to care for your daughter should you be called into action.

Doily atop the lampshade (to dampen the light).

Framed photos of dead mothers in a line upon the wall.

Calories in the glass alas.

Asked what he thinks of Toy Story, the old main merely grunts.

Full moon follows us from city to city.

Tenure is to intellectuals what pregnancy was once to women, the “special condition” around which all else becomes excused.

They stand around the living room like a pair of scarecrows (later I wonder if maybe they’d argued and were merely suppressing the show of anger).

SILLIMAN

7/8

The goks will die if you don’t come.

We can still see signs of the original script in the mishmash of details in the final cut.

No “B” side to a CD. Old layer of leaf mash dissolves slowly in the grass.

The tragedy of theory in the tool-and-die maker’s bent shoulders.

Day in which I can barely lift this pen.

Knot at a spot right in the middle of my spine.

So that when the wall fell nothing remained but tenure.

When, in the “advanced nations,” capital dreams it can do without the state.

Over the tops of the trees of Valley Forge, two plumes of white steam rise into the dull sky from Limerick. .

SILLIMAN

8/8

AKA THE UGLY POEM

Yolks & Bark – Flossophy: go spit in France The vain ugly with tattooed acne There’s a reason we have a skin—that (inside) stuff is ugly It could have legs coming out of its nose; it could have nosehair legs Pool length channel chainer eating the spermy fat of bees Quit pap smearing your dental floss itchy sinuses caused attack of positivism cavity-filling length thistle legs open like your scrotum is going to be teabagging not instant—instances her groomed bush led me to ask—is your husband a dentist? you can’t will your body to dog food? fist my fifth noggin or martyr Potter’s Field if you haven’t had your 15 minutes of fame I’m nervous about my aspect pining for fiords a gun with a hypodermic

SALLY SILVERS

>

I don’t care how many mosquitoes bite me after I’m dead. attention dickafist disorder I take it that toilet seat’s taken the masturbation of death is suicide Mr. Clean, the autopsy.

Stake through the heart—boning a shad—even Kavorkian won’t do that How thick is the toupee on its a-hole? chocolate covered ashes Throw me some more rat hearts on the fire, baby I think I’m not as big a dope being dead is goal-oriented as I am Hock forth (with the wad)

SILVERS

~

KAREN J. REVIS — GREEN/BLUE DOT LIGHT,2001 SILKSCREEN MONOPRINT

(untitled)

.on an oreo bellyflop .make cops comprehend hunger’s empty hand .unbreak the leg .prove the existence of heaven .get younger .from Saks beg a fur coat .name which lump of coal charred in the powerplant on 14th street brightens the light in the firehouse garage .improve the world with jokes .next to a jackhammer dream .make money vanish from earth .for fifteen minutes hold your breath .drive a bus backward up Broadway .live forever

my dear diseased grandfather, cancerous cousins, my father exterminated by his own blood vessels; I sing lies to your gravediggers. hot wind, smoke upon the tongue, blisterous wrists and fingers. I am running, pushed like a needle

.dying into the mother between yes and no what we can do is understand water was remedy for disintegration when five thirsts used the same tongue like teevee channel watched by wrong guesses looking for pivot-spells of paranoia

PAUL SKIFF

>

,each bodily presence cage with eyes that disembowel my breath. bleeding dogs search my brain for confession with time of light so gray I can not breathe fast enough. I am being born beneath a snowplow. I can not see who opens me up to hang head of an ax above my tongue. the hands that tear contentment from me smell like gasoline. the door handle on my stillness is a clitoris. where was this minute manufactured. who is the rain

.locate Jimmy Hoffa .believe smoke .put out an apartment fire with a dance .get high off nothing .steer time .hear what cat thinks .make the president to answer the white house phone .backwards, five times, in sanskrit, with a mouthful of ballbearings, spell transcendence .possess emotion .become rich emotion .grasp thought .breathe underwater

dump more infernal, flaming, spastic pictures on my voice so the barks spurt to stain huge sexualized distances pierced by generous cinematic puppets, the eyes gorged with mouth of gift horse more empty than moral prohibitions that pounce upon

SKIFF

>

each anybody to spill the human streetcorner loitered on only by bureaucratic doctrines who are late for their magazine covers and boyfriends, odorless, tasteless, slowly bruised; accidental patience, recuperation not found in things

.surrender, confess, run out on cold street to fling love .who are you, who are you, the first ring of saturn .what do you do, what do you do, concoct bombs from truth, make each audience millionaires of comedy? oh yes, i’m sorry, i’d forgotten that mattered. I ate your leisure time. you take this as hip, cutting-edge decadent fun-but I am not a middle class romantic. you regard my offensive refusal as maniacal but this is not a clinic. what have I become by loving you this way

.with your hands read the stars .become wise on broadway .pretend to be alive .bribe a judge with a can of catfood .into a ballerina transform the champion linebacker .never pee again .have love not confined to a feeling .philosophize superstition .join the alphabetical order .make the city a safe place to live .record the voice of buddah .with your toes masturbate .juice a credit card .run between raindrops .explain existentialism to the crowd at yankee stadium .turn inside out

SKIFF

>

all my breath glove for light that drinks air. red moon high on corner of my normality human shadow deep pool of spine two walls meet in triangular rumor; - puzzle-house where change and solution grow ghosts ,clarity apparitional hole in world talk excruciates. I do not trust loudspeakers of obedient personality you would wire into me, one-third slave who lives under floorboards with blood made from falling stone and vacuum tubes

instead I yelled yes at myself

so my miseries have bled from memory, coagulate upon tiny bones deep in my ear, there color my contemplative tremor with descendants of the first hand clap.

my cock has penetrated my happiness which now stands to spit salt.

my heart has run up my neck into mouth where my lips defecate smiles.

everyone phones in clarities as medicine to correct eligibility for painless life SKIFF

>

that tripped into mercury vat on purpose but wrong numbers fill circuit bank prayed to by applicants for eyes that dream a world balanced on innocent mistakes. I am

contagious with gravity spewing fevers that run in heavy veins all the way to earth’s first revolution.

I do not know everything.

I stood in the deep beneath train tracks for one thousand nights drowning sparks with my hand. I hid in February wind whose blast taught my tongue to conceal its fuse. I have hung

on to life so hard trying just to be okay

.drink stone .flatten a wave .free the uncaptured .remove sharpness for sorrow from planecrash .burn history .swim to the moon .shit gold .cancel winter .cure me

SKIFF

~

M A T T H E W ROSE — LOVE/VELO, 1994, MIXED MEDIA/BOTTLES, PRIVATE COLLECTION

NATURE POETRY: TWO

the view from the sea the introduction of plants and animals, others, exotically the opinion of the sea the occidental concepts of the government, the commerce, the money and imposing the sight from the sea the introduction of koa haole and axis deer the sight of the sea the great and extremely fast modifications of a series the sight of the sea the introduction of the factories and the animals, foreign, exotic the vision from the sea as well as western concepts of government, trade, money, and imposition the sight of the sea the introduction of tree of heaven and cow the sight of the sea a series of great and extremely fast changes the sight of the sea the introduction of exotic, alien plants and animals the sea of the way as well as western concepts of government, trade, money, and taxation the sight of the sight the introduction of mongoose and apple snail the sight of the sight of the sea of the stroke the series of large and extremely rapid changes the view of the view the introduction of the factories and the animals, other, exotically the sight of the track western concepts of the government, the trade, the cash and the imposing the vision from the track the introduction of ant and coconut heart rot the sight of the trace the series of large and extremely fast modifications the sight of the land

JULIANA SPAHR

>

the introduction of the plants and the animals, others, exotic the sight from the earth the concepts western of the government, the commerce, the money and the great modifications the opinion from the country the introduction of the greenhouse frog and the myna the sight of the track the extremely fast shutdowns of a series the view from the land

NATURE POETRY: THREE

the condition in the cause of the session the sea expands and is modified by considerations to this calmness there is the breath and the green of the land then the coolness and the things in constant motion the input of information that this is someplace differently and then the conditions in the cause of meeting the sea is modified and urges considerations from this calmness is the breath and the ventilator and the green of the track the coolness of things in constant movement the input of information that this is someplace differently the requirements of this meeting and the sea is modified considering from calmness and from ventilation and from the green of the earth which it magnifies for coolness things in constant movement the entrance with this someplace differently

JULIANA SPAHR

>

the requirement in the meeting the cause, the modifies, and the sea stops considering the calmness and the sail the green of the ground that magnifies the coolness of the things the constant movement the inbound of this someplace differently the requirement on meeting to modify and to regard then calmness and the sail the green of the soil which increases the freshness of things constant motion the arrival to someplace differently the constant movement to claim, to gather, to change, and to consider sea the calmness of the compartments the greenness of the ground the freshness of the things increasing the arrival to someplace differently the arrival to someplace else the calmness of bays and the greenness of land caused by the freshness of things growing into the constant motion of claiming, collecting, changing, and taking the view from the sea

SPAHR

~

GALAGA BY MOONLIGHT (Shelley in the darkness)

Starting from the sunset out, clear Jungle-gym weather Sassoon milk water Jordache playing my heartstrings Bees out on leisure! Promenade on and several dignitaries in and around a balcony overlooking little Reykjavik.

On the evening of the 1980s Winter trapped inside an argument and I say Go! no nuclear attack!

A Communist 64 dawn arrives to the morning bus as I lift my head just to lift my head and go back to sleep.

And a trumpet plays And Gabriel is at the gate making pancakes next to the glacier.

Alas the day— as Shelley’s heart is still pumping and he said: “The everlasting universe of things/ Flows through the mind

the heart is still pumping in my left hand— my right hand controlling their video game universe goodbye long-ago luggage summers The wind-up Winter has arrived As Ovid would say in his video game: “to not look in the mirror Narcissus “or look behind you you freak Orpheus and his boom-box going “Smartass angel angelcito Ocean is miles away in my small childhood room”

ERIK SWEET

>

As David Berman once said: “I am not a Cub Scout seduced by Iron Maiden’s mirror worlds”

I am not either or ether or not even a bit of absence lost on a highway wearing a Descartes patch on my jeans jacket next to my iron-on world in a mirror of what is not right.

I will dream; and you will not stop me my hand even on a hot stove to wake me pugilist speaking under supreme negotiations, to an underworld just a vacant lot in a heartbeat lost in the flow of all things; I am not mixing metals, but it is all in focus now:

hold my hand and heal me as I mix watercolors above H2O with the dust on my windowsill— with the late night world a changing within forced occurrences of hate and HBO ink on your brow as you realize the trumpet sounds an alarm to stop the arrogance of post-Moscow letter-writing campaigns and let heal in that everlasting impressionistic moment

I am like the bleep and you are blipping forcing a quarter down my throat and my oh my oh my the verse is here tonight!

SWEET

~

CATALAN BONANZA TRANSLATION (or What I Think They’re Saying From What Sounds Like What I Know) ----------------------Scene 1: Late after noon, Catalan Ben Cartwright’s home office, facing a moral dilemna, he sits at a table discussing strategy with Catalan Bonanza Guy Dressed In Black: -Well, I hate to eat your farina...but...

-It’s okay, I don’t have secrets!

-The world BITES me?

-NO! -Very well, EAT the blue dress! (pause) I’m thinking about our days...I was sure I was...pushing you!

-How have you changed?

-YES? -hmmm...first time for blue hair.

-To die and to know?

-I’m sorry, it’s easier to pray...(stands and puts cowboy hat on)...later!

-My dress... (Ben hands him a box) -The shaw?...(Ben sheepishly grins) -Okay. (music builds, cut to outside shot of Catalan Ben on a horse, riding off) ----------------------Scene 2: Late after noon town saloon, Catalan Mary is flirting with this episode’s handsome rascal: -Will you kiss on my rats, Mary?

-Astrologically?

-You’re a special deal...natural...Mary?

-There is a fever on your opinion!

-I can’t...Mary...but don’t tell us! (music builds as they kiss, cut to closeup of bartender’s jaw) ------------------------

EDWIN TORRES

>

Scene 3: Saloon at night, Catalan Bonanza Guy Dressed In Black playing cards with this episode’s villain: -Why, these are cards of love! Show me your...itinerary!!!!! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha (endless demonic laughter...cut to commercial) -----------------------IF YOU’D LIKE TO ORDER PLEASE DO ...AND NOW BACK TO OUR PROGRAM ----------------------Scene 4: Kitchen at night, Catalan Ben Cartwright’s house, Catalan Mary is dressing a wound on Catalan Little Joe’s forehead as Catalan Hoss looks on: -You live here?

-People have women!

-Thank you!

-Space & time have altered your fly...

-Your trap!

-Pushy aren’t you?

-You rabbit!

-How stringy and Maus-y you are...

(Catalan Little Joe whimpers in pain) -Suck the goat, brave!

-You...I don’t know why...have a misfit nose! Hmmm...Child of No No? -Don’t tell me...I’M SMALL? (they both nod) -GET OUT OF HERE! -BUT, MEN ARE BOYS IN MARCH! -Push me...you, you... (there is a struggle) -WHERE IS THE RAFFLE WHEN YOU SLEEP? (Catalan Little Joe leaves) -(Catalan Mary yelling) DON’T MENTION THE CRUSHED DRESS! (turning to Catalan Hoss) ...Hello...

(Catalan Hoss surprised but sheepishly, returns her stare, fade to commercial)

TORRES

>

----------------------UBU’S RECTORIUM WHERE THE BEST RECTUM’S...ARE FREE (hold up 3 fingers) TIRED OF WAITING FOR THAT RECTUM YOU ORDERED...

FREE WEEKS AGO (hold up 3 fingers) THEN...WHEN IT ARRIVES THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU WANTED...

HERE AT UBU’S RECTORIUM THE BEST RECTUM’S ARE FREE! (hold up 3 fingers) ...AND NOW BACK TO OUR SHOW ---------------------Scene 5-epilogue: Sunset, outside, Catalan Mary and Catalan Hoss face each other, a horse between them -Hello...

-I breathe deeply to imply that I miss you.

-Yes, I feel it. (they both mount the horse) -Crush me, and I’m happy! (end theme as they run into sunset roll credits)

TORRES

~

L I N D A OBUCHOSKA — P E RVERSION 2001 — 40 “ X 30” C PRINT

[ F rom “PHOEBE 2002: AN ESSAY, ” a continuing collaboration with Jeffery Conway and Lynn Crosbie.

“Phoebe 2002” is a mock-epic based on the 1950 movie All About Eve, starring Bette Davis as Broadway star Margo Channing. The following excerpt is from the Stork Club powder room scene. Karen Richards (Celeste Holm), M a rgo’s best friend, is being blackmailed by Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), a young actress who wishes to usurp Margo’s career.]

In the powder room the women come and go Talking of Marilyn Monroe.

JOAN CRAWFORD Look—there’s nothing wrong with my tits, but I don’t go around throwing them in people’s faces.

BETTE DAVIS That little blonde slut can’t act her way out of a paper bag!

She thinks if she wiggles her ass and coos, she can carry her scene. Well, she can’t.

JOAN CRAWFORD Too many actresses today are little more than tramps and tarts.

(Before slamming MM in print, Crawford had made friendly overtures

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toward the young star. She invited Marilyn to her Brentwood home, where, after serving her a drink [and replenishing her own], Joan took MM upstairs “to see what a real star’s wardrobe looked like”: Marilyn reportedly “gasped” when she saw Joan’s dressing room, “which was bigger than most people’s living room.” The walls were stacked with shelves and plastic color-coded boxes containing shoes, gloves, hats, and handbags, while underneath hundreds of dresses, coats, and evening gowns were hanging on multiple racks. A special room nearby held her furs, including minks and sables, some seventy in number. “Try one on,” Crawford told the impressed starlet, who reached for a skimpy white-fox stole.

In her bedroom, Crawford presented Marilyn with a box. Inside was an expensive brand-new black cocktail dress, in Monroe’s size. “Take off your things and try it on,” said Joan. “If it’s not OK, I’ll send it back tomorrow.”

“Oh!” the breathily excited Marilyn whispered, then slipping out of her clothes, the nubile young beauty sent the semi-intoxicated Joan into a state of cold sobriety.

Underneath her street dress, Marilyn wasn’t wearing a stitch of underwear.

“Oh!” said Joan, her eyes widening and her temperature rising, as she began to experience the full impact of seeing the naked, exquisitely formed body of America’s future sex symbol.

It has been said that what transpired between Crawford and Monroe that night was more than a mere fashion show. Some also believed that Joan’s intentions were strictly philanthropic. “Joan was very generous to newcomers,” said [director] Vincent Sherman, “although I remember when we were at Columbia there was a girl who was always hanging around her. We often wondered about her.”

Mother had “lesbian proclivities,” said daughter Christina, revealing how, when Joan was drinking, she sometimes wanted to sleep with the children’s nurse.

Actress Louise Brooks also decreed that Crawford was “one of those girls who went back and forth”; while director Joe Mankiewicz said he thought that Monroe was attracted to her own sex.

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“I often wondered about Marilyn,” said publicist Harry Mines. “But Joan? We were very close friends. I never saw it, and I doubt it seriously.

She liked men too much.”

A similar “fashion show” [the older, more glamorous woman inviting the younger to try on one of her dresses; the latter presumably agape at the frocks] was urged upon Sylvia Herscher, friend of Greta Morrison, a live-in nurse employed by another MGM movie queen, Norma Shearer, in the mid-30s: “Once she said, ‘I want you to have a good time trying on my clothes.’

She took me up to her bedroom, showed me her enormous collection of gowns.

Many of them she’d worn in her movies and she seemed very proud of them. She insisted I try something on and left me alone there. I wasn’t much interested in clothes at the time, but I did try on a magnificent white gown with red fox fur trimming.”)

Terrified of La Davis, MM reportedly vomited in the powder room before and after her scenes with the older actress, just as her character, Miss Caswell, is “violently ill to her tummy”

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in the “ladies’—shall we say—lounge” after her audition.

At the London premiere of Cleopatra, Elizabeth Taylor, appalled by the film, dashes to the powder room to puke.

Actress Jean Howard witnesses Alice Faye emerge from a powder room stall wearing long white gloves.

“She pissed in her gloves!”

Howard was sure there were urine stains on the tips of Faye’s fingers.

Viciousness in the powder room!

Women disappear there to dish friends (Phyllis Povah and Rosalind Russell in The Women); to discuss and haggle over men (Katharine Hepburn and Jayne Meadows in Undercurrent; Carmen Miranda and Betty Grable in Springtime in the Rockies; Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall, and Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire; Greta Garbo and Constance Bennett in Two-Faced Woman); to flush wigs down toilets (Patty Duke in Valley of the Dolls);

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to deceive and outwit other women (Norma Shearer et al in The Women); and to blackmail “friends” (Anne Baxter in All About Eve).

“I’m so happy I can do something for you—at long last.”

Eve at her most vicious, her most evil— incapable of true friendship or gratitude, only covetousness, resentment.

Karen is white as a corpse.

Like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, she has come face to face with her Kurtz— “The horror! The horror!”

Lady Bountiful reduced to a cornucopia of rotting fruit or Paula Prentiss’s robotic double in The Stepford Wives, stabbed in the stomach by Katharine Ross, gyrating about her kitchen in a frenzy of short-circuited devastation: I thought we were friends . . .

I thought we were friends . . .

Works Cited Bob Thomas, Joan Crawford: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978).

Sam Staggs, All About All About Eve (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000).

Shaun Considine, Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud (New York: Dutton, 1989).

Gavin Lambert, Norma Shearer: A Life (New York: Knopf, 1990).

TRINIDAD

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L I N D A OBUCHOSKA — V I R TUE 2001 — 40 “ X 30” C PRINT

FRAGMENT OF THE TUMBLER

Once in a puny time The Tumbler tumbled into a hurricaine's hurricaine drats the rat's fat daboss tossed the stinkin' manilla shaking all the way there's a whole lotta going on she was the whiskers on the dog the bright and the bestest the tamer witout a timeclok crocko sh she nu hegel as a kinda host she logged into the dialetic with remarkable screed nothing lousy try hard care mazing how da nut loss ends at the beginning of her rope slide from first to home keep your eyes emma peeled black in the nu forest of color smokey was asleep as the wheeler dealers ding the nasty and the grunts go marchin' with a two-by-four hurrah, hurrah the last forests burn in teenage speed drift wood no longer drifting planted nomoreness colorline hopscotch chalk deftly stepped over ubreakable glass ceiling

M I K E TYLER

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only a square in a sky of orange oranges the juggler drops and the bruises mount pain swum thru the hero's bananna slippin' up to skate on the ceiling cut it to shedding the past has a way 'bout it of being over at least should nasties are it she said evildoers doing E males, dere hormes poring oavery da prog gnostics believe dicks can't do funerals (the program's end) but dese here lines are good conveys the conveyer belt daboss occured trouble bruting up is the only place ta go in a broken elevator down is too scary goto who's the guy? gal oh she can tumble it no ? don't think anybod can tumble it hurricaine hurricaine's hurricaine just flip in den come weeds won't tumble it maybe stopit

TYLER

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diva not an asshole thinks divas are dicks she'll paint a rogue make the nasties tumble it sure is nasties nasties are it she said better not be tagged last you're tellin' me dere's nobod else here gnostics meeting gender programs doreen da funeral end 'o self too soft for da priviledge mules so dey pump fake quick in and out dis is where you got 'em don't hit 'em low hit 'em lower go back to front begin's pretty beguylingo can even learn doreen, gotta nasty to tumble def male E da funeral is procession perfect emotion pitching fast chick with dick need 'nother way in food stomach greed sometimes center is fat da way to a dick's heart grabbing da marbles middle it

TYLER

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middle it hercules parrot middle it chop off legs and head torso ho middle's big longer flab gettin' it by not gettin' it all of that that make's it it time is of the jet so just say yes stopit me and nobod's army

TYLER

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FLAGRANT DISSOLVE

harry has no art to temper the flagrant dissolve to tamper, copped w/ out temperance darnning the real in his socks when there’s no on to turn to, horny in the parched dark fragrant as Billy the Kid’s nomad gun, gathered in a wreath & hung mounted, stuffed & living, on the mantle pantomimed by a spastic shadow-puppet mom your sleepwalking muppet-palsy & inciting my friends to rot like sharks in Ohio. art to resolve the missing dissonance in harm’s way, the real donned, it has no fragrance, exuding it’s usual honeysuckle fits abounds now in the spring beyond this ballpark.

DANA WARD

HARRY’S INDETERMINACY CRISIS

sense is ending me. in a robot Lockheed-Martin that fires pallid lightning into thought balloons rusted, & thrust against autumn, I can’t discern this dreamy talk from leaves. treed, all termite rage bottled up in formica, withered in kite rags wrecked against an aging artillery. the breath in my mouth is searing, faintly, & in this vague torment it is odd to be everything littering & turbulent, formed in the news of any living, then dispersed inside nerves that race & heave & house this excess, wavering. where the birds speak, look for me, I’ll be peeing sideways in terror, fair hair rushed into a spiderweb for shelter, examining miserly semaphores & beating semiotics till sanctimony shu ff les out in a wet mop in the ruins of a Martian cemetery, sense in the blue & fecund sky above us, shit.

DANA WARD

2ND TO LAST POEM

after Ted Berrigan

in one unintelligible story language conditioned softly the monochromatic hush of my transphonetic Louvre. in a former life, a syllable, I stood eliding mawkish verbosity although it interrupted a glamorous biography gave contour to a melody, spare each breath of pure clairalience, a trauma of untenable lucidity , they lazily remained aggrieved in some proximity farther from the mind than heart & stayed there, ponderous before being added to English rather late in a ceremony loaded w/ kissing impossible quantities, but w/ words I had wanted to measure the pressure of each opposite giving way. several doses of operatic torpor gave the sun a broken neck which restored the plagiaristic pleasure of sleeping that itself dissolved or ran ragged apace w/ the ‘freaking out’ of books, I was allowed to go under & come to, simultaneously once but delay is unabated, every simile erased what I though I knew, & what was loved remained: a very plain poltergeist commingled w/ pleasure, daily life & aria collapsed a synapse artery, & singing untangled from them DANA WARD

TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD Everything in the world has a heart.

The world itself has one very large heart.

—— S. Ansky 1.

For the love of a brazen mill-plant We are heavy with turbulent birds And a humid frontier haze Is settling on sea-fauna hills The number of plankton Nitrogend and fainting in this Tropic, like pigments in fertilizer Is luxurious and mile-long

2.

For the love of a knock-kneed egret We lose this upper-deck battle Alighting on barges of explosive house-parts Moving through oceans of lots of oceans The actual doorways are blessed Lining up in parade formations of Arms, unidirectional and opening out The ribcage of the house in swift strokes

3.

For the love of a splintered patriot We crack the heart vessel like fireworks Comport themselves in timely manners Or symphonies of breakfasting crows The darkness consumes this section of merman Blushing inside water’s mass, Like such ruses will ripple the hovering Texture of skin, the cracking derma of scales

K A R E N WEISER

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4.

For the love of a ghostly duo I am monotheistic and often faint In dreams of houses in houses of sea plants I am floating and crookedly placed Exploding me is a gray matter Hanging the sky in orderly fashion As clotheslines of cul-de-sac suspense Flash in my nightmare air

5.

For the love of a weightless gesture You are dissolved in tempered solutions Your heart matter suspends itself As a pattern of light, as a positive space The sound of your body under green water Against a backdrop of chlorine and motion Is a pattern of light, is a positive space The air is loud and suddenly breathing

6.

For the love of a pond-like surface We are exploring simultaneous lighting In fields of fireflies and night heat We are generating dusk-like proportions The number of ghosts and white dreams An average subplot encounters Changes with each mass is the tub Changes with each passing barge

WEISER

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JO SERAPH F(IEND)EIGN

( laf ladee lavenda unda courts moon tin stars beet out pewta peel yo bananas half mercy den confess dont fret de haters stockins gat runs n em demon wit voice operetta is dat mammy n yo trane ? jemima loungin n yo tea air uh ? dame pare yo seek wins re veil some thin pretty warm yella cornbred bake bed strut marks butt u had nuts & u didnt knead balls ) ( huh wuz x optic too de hu man eye pick ass o fan seed huh best chi aw funk bow leg hem way found huh tec key la tonged e-z era gerdy crude sigh cut huh out lak pay pa dolls huh stressed n fan tassles ear rings stud wit rude bards danglin penal lashes day sea huh e turn awl lee n rags slave n ovah stove camera flog n lacy apron & jag ged linger ree drawl Y O L A N D A WISHER

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omen sent wit fair moan null fear heroin seams busted make dem wanton too water dare pants ) ( womb man o x travel gent tail lint fear de rope o lick rich round huh neck foe darin ta speak huh dig de boogie woogie butt win de wagon cum huh bee throne off cuz huh gat de diss ease o awl de pee ola de word den seen why chant huh bee uh ore gaunt tit fruit dat nebber fall n too iron basks full o starvin eyes huh pray fo blak reign two strip diss white lite butt hit nebber come wiles huh livid ) ( peel peel pile bananas cut green maid yellow dark end bye white lite peel peel pile plan taint rice skin st louie stew yo trash can full wit diss point meant

WISHER

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eat out de make up loose bones fluid menstruate minstrelsy dont look strait n de eye turn ta gel turn de key n knees flop out o frame uh plastic glove peel peel paul colin callin fame peel paul out blood bananas chant bee men sting yet n vent eroticism rotted out tree o life )

WISHER

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IT RAINED THE DAY THEY BURIED TITO PUENTE

It rained the day they buried Tito Puente The eyes of drug dealers following me as I walked through the streets past shivering prostitutes women of every sex young boys full of piss and lampposts like ghosts in the night past Jimmy the hustler boy with the really big dick cracked out on the sidewalk wrapped in a blanket donated by the trick that also gave him genital herpes and Fruit Loops for breakfast past the hospital where Tio Cesar got his intestines taken out in exchange for a plastic bag where he now shits and pisses the 40's he consumed for 50 years past 3 of the thugs who sexually assaulted those women at Central Park during the Puerto Rican Day parade lost in their machismo, marijuana and Mira mami's 'cause boricuas do it better Tito's rambunctious and unruly rhythms never touched them never inspired them to rise above the ghetto and, like La Bruja said, "Ghet Over It!" his timbales never echoed in the salsa of their souls though they had probably danced to his cha-cha-cha they never listened to the message between the beats urging them to follow their hearts On a train back to Brooklyn feeling dispossessed and dreamless I look up to read one of those Poetry In Motion ads sharing a car with somebody sleeping realizing that inspiration is everywhere these days & though the Mambo King's body may be six-feet under his laughter and legend will live forever

EMANUEL XAVIER

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The next morning I heard the crow crowing, "Oye Como Va" his song was the sunlight in my universe & I could feel Tito's smile shining down on me

LATIN GIRL

You are the ones with the brown cocoa skin, the milky white flesh, la piel de morenita the Spanish eyes and the wicked smiles With hands on your cinturas featuring finely polished nails Amongst yourselves, the loud exaggerated laughter echoing defiantly from the back of the bus You enjoy the sweet taste of lollipops and the rebellious look that chewing fantastical pieces of bubblegum leaves imprinted on your quince単era face popping and snapping until the teacher finishes talking about whatever he or she is talking about You are the ones with overcrowded closets jewels glistening brightly like lip gloss against your innocence with secret diaries and heart-stamped journals hidden underneath pillowed beds jotting down memories of your youth which will ignite your passion somewhere down the road inspire the humble words of poets and the songs you croon to on the radio

EMANUEL XAVIER

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Boy fr iends- entertaining yet unnecessary like your vast collection of mu単ecas and stu ff ed animals which decorate your poster-wallpapered rooms a trail of broken hearts held tight until you meet the right one, the one who respects and truly loves you the one who doesn't treat you like his property offering you his hand in marriage to wipe away abuela's lagrimas after a long struggle for independence from the oppression of old-fashioned machismo When I see one of you with a baby carriage my heart breaks f lo o ded by the memories of my once teenage mom and the hell I've put her through You will grow up to fuss even more about your make up fidgeting over pints of ice cream and pastries which will leave you with Mami's or Titi's legendary hips, hips that are hip to the Latin culture on women who age gracefully if unknowingly while religiously watching favorite telenovelas Mira nena...

Never lose the beauty of your spirit never forget your freedom to pursue your dreams for that freedom no longer belongs to men alone Sigue so単ando...

XAVIER

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(THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT FAIRWAY)

The last move, about a month ago, I threw out as many notebooks as I could stand to see go— I am so tired I am so tired I am so tired of my own past I am so tired of all those things that are so important to me— I’d like to invite you to a Boston Tea Party of the mind in which we toss into the bay not just junk, but things of suppposed value— like mentors ideas of success and people we never shoulda fallen in love w/ in the first place

EMILY XYZ

(BARNES & NOBLE, 3535 US ROUTE 1)

We go to see Paul Lansky, delivering a box dissertation 2 years in the making the sky outside his house is strangely clear / somehow darker, and the stars a little more like scattered jewelry than elsewhere— His place smells like lime velvet, there are candles and glasses of water on the floor / Do you really wanna know? We were exorcising the craziness out of my mother’s furniture—it was his wife’s idea. He offers us some candy / a box of skulls and bones / a treat for Hallowe’en— and of his trip to Iceland says Good music, but alas, the Museum of Phallology was closed.

EMILY XYZ

(CVS, 1716 G ST NW)

On the pay phone in the art museum right across the street from the White House I called the psychic.

It was quiet echoing marble, wide stairs, rooms full of color.

He gave me a message from my mother who died in 1986 Outside the lever of sunlight was pulled to the horizon and blue evening closed behind us. A panel of choices, art experts, uniformed guards talking in low voices, slate of heaven fickle w/ stars forming no pattern discernible at this time

EMILY XYZ

(PUTNAM MARKET 587-FOOD)

now comes spring bigger than winter the narrow cold halls of winter the frozen cloisters of winter the dark windows of winter the stone passageways that lead to the crypt of winter all have to be widened and the clock of winter has now to be expanded by one hour to accomodate the breadth of spring

EMILY XYZ

ONE HUNDRED VIEWS OF THE OUTSKIRTS OF MANHATTAN

An immense copper moth enters the new firehouse The sole refurbisher of car upholstery clutches his throat Alone on East Nightingale Road just past Knot of Hope Circle Inn The worms are unable to abandon the municipal golf course two days before the edict is delivered on their behalf I like to retch in hardware stores near the shelves of plumbing supplies Night blooming cereus baloney on rye toast Horses don’t get up and make speeches the way they used to Another bowlegged champion circles his prize Among the various rungs of lower perfection that are easily available, I favor shiny liquids sold in shopping malls My particular specialty small leaks in the veneer I am paid to make them seem like they are necessary

JOHN YAU

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to the latest rise of fragrant decay Have you ever stopped and noticed the residue of vaporized memorandums collecting on the duck pond Recently, I decided it would be wise to postpone my efforts to verify the oracular veracity of fortune cookies stuffed with three or more fortunes I studied philosophy until I fell asleep Pineapple clouds stored above the empty kindergarten I don’t believe walking to work is a legitimate way of losing weight A policeman carrying a shield approaches a bulldozer parked on the wrong side of a ditch I am not one to count sheep for fear this hideous beast might mistake my sleeplessness as a sign that I want to interrupt his pilgrimmage to have him tell me a beautifully sordid tale beneath a rinsed junk dog sky

YAU

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ONE HUNDRED VIEWS OF THE PORT OF BALTIMORE

An air-brushed statue of Edgar Allan Poe blows snot at an obstinate seagull Two ex-firemen argue over embroidered biscuits The kind you keep in the crevices of your pocket The kind you bury on rainy summer evenings when overweight coyotes quaff hummingbird wine beneath a rotted oculus The kind you float on an artificial lake when the swans become signs of the swans themselves The one who resembles me scours book bins for traces of transparent horoscopes insect pornography pages stored inside jars of invisible ink He says he has proof Egypt vanished during a civil uprising

JOHN YAU

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only to reappear thirty-three feet to the left of the Nile I knew it was time to quit the factory and join my ancestors I moved into a thrift store I began shopping every day Nothing I did changed what I did When I burned the toast or misplaced the roast dolls winked and stuffed animals cried titilated as burning twigs looking up a marshmallow’s skirt A hooded woman reputedly blessed with the gift of prophecy enters a public bathroom never to be seen again His first reaction was normal Gold threads lead a dragon into a crayon chimney Two mirrors – empty as teardrops – emerge from beneath tomorrow’s ruined sky

YAU

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ELIZABETH CASTAGNA

ELIZABETH CASTAGNA

USTED (1998)

Once, I grabbed a little bottle that my mother had on a desk One of those bottles that could contain poison I pretended to drink from the bottle and slumped to the ground as if I were dead I fell so softly to the floor so instantly What is wrong? What is wrong? my father yelled I got up and said Nothing is wrong This chick's nuts My sisters kept saying And father But why? But why?

L I L A ZEMBOARAIN

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They do not know the magnitude of the tempest getting closer It never obfuscates us It never imitates us only when day becomes night and night, day A wind rises From the skies, partridges fall dead in the materiality of fields They stone us from heaven Day has become night and night is cruel nature unrestrained

ZEMBOARAIN

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The horizontal infinite does not exist The only infinite is above where beyond the black and the stars there is more black and more stars

ZEMBOARAIN

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From a thousandth of his tangible body a drop with a million particles fell out that could have been not me And one of those was me And one of those is me

ZEMBOARAIN

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I

Oh splendorous night you loved every last bit of his body surrendered to life's pleasures How many nights we stood in the light of your shadow to look enraptured at satellites Oh night how I look and look at you with the bright hope of finding him in some vestige of my intermittent sleep

II. Oh night!

Empty is the light of your concrete words You arrive in the afternoon like a sure stain and take shelter in the heat of boundless moon You were there, it was day but you were there in the tremor of my writing You were there, while my body opened the breaches of untethered sleep I wrote this poem in that infinite night with my voice in memory and my dreams in your clutches It was a voice that spoke of the night and the stars and of his splendorous death

ZEMBOARAIN

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It was a voice that spoke of his splendorous death And I understood something unsaid It was speaking of the moon and of a soft glow

III We walk hand in hand that moonlit afternoon and together we look at the sea Together we look at the sea Oh splendorous father

ZEMBOARAIN

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I While in my house they dismantle the rooms leaving only a shadow of what they once were And they rip from my skin the paintings that saw him live How many afternoons he will no longer look, only in my memory and his verses, at that quiet and gentle plaza listening to Debussy's "Jardin sous la pluie" His steps echo in the full house and it is night that brings him enveloped in sounds We, your daughters, look dazed They take everything They take everything His presence vanishes in the dissolution of space enclosing his daily things It is a scent that we will no longer sense That fragrance that became absorbed in the bottom of a draw or in the handle of a window

ZEMBOARAIN

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II Father, my dear father My life is no longer yours My life is this arid city that extends upwards For a women accustomed to the horizon vertical strategy is always incomprehensible Parallel streets flee from me and voices are strange to my ears glowing with your breath Oh father I do not recognize what I am being or the furniture that surrounds me It is only your word that assures your presence And also mine Alfredo Zemborain, my father who they take away today in his most elemental state They take away your scent, father of mine saturating every corner of the house that saw your birth and your death

ZEMBOARAIN

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It is night and the disquieting voice of the written word slips through your body Graphics are seen as insane forms of aesthetic material Inertia of the insatiable that submits to word's voracity Until night's depth has the clarity of a dream to be forgotten

ZEMBOARAIN

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after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after after is here, is after is still is still is still is still is still is still is still is still is still is still is still. after #11 ec/01

ELIZABETH CASTAGNA