TIssue ARPAULIN SKY / Print Issue
Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal Issue #13 / Print Issue #1 Fall / Winter 2007 Š 2007 Tarpaulin Sky Press Printed and bound in the USA. ISBN: 9780977901968 Cover and book design by Christian Peet. Tarpaulin Sky Press PO Box 189 Grafton, VT 05146 For more information on Tarpaulin Sky Press and Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal, including subscriptions, submission guidelines, reading periods, previous issues, distribution, personal and institutional orders, and catalog requests, please visit our website: www.tarpaulinsky.com
The text/image collages on the front and back covers, the title page image, and other images include fragments and details from the following sources: two puzzles made for children—one a colorful stegosaurus, the other stone figures on Chile’s “Easter Island” (aka “Rapa Nui,” or “Isla de Pascua”); a children’s book, I Wonder Why the Sun Rises, and Other Questions About Time and Seasons (Southwestern, 1996); a photograph of the Aztec calendar stone in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, Mexico; a photograph of stones and leaves outside Tarpaulin Sky Press’s new office in Grafton, Vermont, USA; and two paintings from the collections of Persian miniatures in the Teheran Imperial Library, Iran, as reproduced in Persian Fables (Spring Books, 1960).
Christian Peet Publisher Editor Julianna Spallholz Managing Editor Elena Georgiou Advisory Editor Caroline Ashby Assistant Editor Web Manager Lizzie Harris Eireene Nealand Sarah Brown Alexis M. Smith Assistant Editors Dimon Hunter Editorial Assistant Noah Saterstrom Selah Saterstrom Wonders
Contents Spencer Selby
1
Scout Assembly Before Dawn
Jon Christensen
2
These Explosions Should Be Happy
Sandy Florian
3
The Time is Near
Mathias Svalina
9
Creation Myths
Anna Maria Hong
13
The Empress
Julie Carr
14
A New Idolatry
Karla Kelsey
17
from Iteration Nets
Lucy Anderton
22
fall #1
Nadia Nurhussein
24
Two Pieces
Prabhakar Vasan
26
The Violation Thereof
F. Daniel Rzicznek
28
Two Pieces
Kristen Yawitz
30
from Sixteen
Brandon Shimoda
34
from O Bon
Hillary Gravendyk
37
Boneyard
Cara Benson
38
Saved
John Deming
39
The Divisible Line
Annie Guthrie
41
Two Pieces
Elizabeth Robinson
43
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Caryl Pagel
51
Upright
Laura Carter
53
from Close Space
Theodore Worozbyt
59
Mars
Bethany Wright
61
from Un-Sea, the Ebbs
Teresa K. Miller
65
from Basic Skills
Justin Marks
71
from Best Practices
Julie Carr
74
Tolle Lege: Creative Criticism in the Academy
Sampson Starkweather
86
Two Pieces
John Hyland
88
from Song Notions
Thomas O’Connell
90
The Goldfish
Lily Brown
91
Dead Animal Machine
Daniel Brenner
93
The Machine is Correct
Claire Becker
95
Moat
Danielle Dutton
98
from S P R A W L
Lucy Ives
103
Poem
Rosa Alcalá
104
Child Interpreters
Jen Tynes
106
Two Pieces
Sarah Mangold
108
from Cupcake Royale
Heather Christle
111
Four Pieces
Ilya Bernstein
115
Ode to the Open Wound
Patrick Culliton
118
My Want is not to Bronze but to Pause
Steve Langan
119
Stone (Where the Heart Is)
Bryson Newhart
120
from Taken O Air
Popahna Brandes
123
Between a Palace and a Theater
Brent Hendricks
133
from I Am Audubon
John Cotter & Shafer Hall
134
A Bug is Sad that Autumn is Coming
Barbara Maloutas
135
Trap
Sean Thomas Dougherty
136
What Unfelt Thing
Jeerson Navicky
138
Teeth
Joseph Bradshaw
139
Two Pieces
Samuel Amadon
141
Branches
Della Watson
142
from limb by limb: the collected letters of dk
Nate Pritts
144
from Spring Psalter
Lytton Smith
145
Annuls the Space-Time Experience
Contributors
149
Notes
Tarpaulin Sky
Spencer Selby Scout Assembly Before Dawn Set about memory that doesn’t belong. Wrong age offered role currently serving life. I’m tempted but can’t reach the clearing in extremis. The forest is both theater and audience. My immune system for about 35 cents on the open market. My best friend bursting with animal protein says I must apologize. Two kids appear to mimic the dance of an ancient tribe. The rest go their separate way when flames die out. Without thinking they are reunited doing a search by sealed envelope. Continuity obscures movement at a crucial moment. It’s intentional, I’m told, and then the fun begins.
1
Tarpaulin Sky
Jon Christensen These Explosions Should Be Happy: Poem for Multiple Voices Voice I
Voice II
These explosions should be happy But god is on the radio The doors are closed And the dogwood blooms
On God’s radio the dog Closes all the doors And the blooms explode But no one’s ever happy
These explosions should be happy But god is on the radio The doors are closed And the dogwood blooms Voice
On God’s radio the dog Closes all the doors And the blooms explode But no one’s ever happy
God is on the radio
God is on the radio
Voice III
The dogs are happy No one’s God explodes. The blooms close and The Doors are on the radio
Radio god explodes The happy blooms Behind the closed woods no one’s dog is at the door
The dogs are happy No one’s god explodes The blooms close and The Doors are on the radio
God’s closed the doors The happy dogwoods bloom And no one is on The exploding radio
Radio god explodes The happy blooms Behind the closed woods no one’s dog is at the door
God is on the radio
God’s closed the doors The happy dogwoods bloom And no one is on The exploding radio
God is on the radio
2
IV
Voice V
God is on the radio
Tarpaulin Sky
Sandy Florian The Time is Near We are revealed to ourselves by the stick-like-wick. Familiar symbols we pass as shadows as we wait in expectation for our endless bliss. Last night I had a dream. I was sitting on an island and I heard a voice trumpeting to me, Write it down. When I turned around to see who it was, I saw seven illuminated street-lamps and, in the middle, a long man in a golden robe. His head and hair were white with whiteness, his feet like burnished bronze, and out of his mouth came a double-edged sword. He said, Write a letter to man and tell him I have a complaint. Tell him this. You have less love for me now. Think of where you were before you went to where you are now and return to where you were. Tell him this. Only I will open the door that I will open and only I will shut the door that I will shut. Write it well. You are reputed to be alive, but I know that you are dead. Wake up and put a little resolve into what vinegar you have left, or I will come and rob you like a robber. Write it well and write it nakedly or I will spit you out because I am the itch, wretchedly wanton and knuckling the door. When I woke up, the wicked and sickly Montgomery paused from his procession, ďŹ xed me with his underscored eyes, and asked me a question with a voice like stone. Are you afraid? he asked. Afraid? I asked. Afraid of what? Then last night I had a dream that I was sitting on an island
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Tarpaulin Sky Sandy Florian
and I heard someone trumpet, Come here, come here, and when I awoke, there were millions of us, crowding around a great new darkness. A bowl emptied over the sun and the sky rolled up like a scroll and all of our cities vanished in a blink. I heard again, Come here, and I thought to myself, my sins have reached the edge of the clouds and my dear god has my crimes on my mind. Twice ten thousand times ten thousand mounted men in sapphire and sulfur, in hyacinth and cholera. Two great olive trees and two great lamps and my big city began to collapse. Twelve hundred and sixty days, and then I locked my look upon the sea. There stood the best of all the beasts, like a tiger with a bear’s paws and a lion’s open mouth, for forty two continuous months because my statue will speak to anyone who will listen. I will now give the schematic history of the beast, that beast of the dumb abbey and that dragon little locust. It seems unnecessary to discuss the precise relation of different codes. Some of the revelators insinuate distinctly enough that the great chancellor is no more mistaken than the father. They tell me that the best beast comes out of the sea, but I know that truly the best beast, the beast above and beyond all other beasts, comes out of the sea yawning.
4
On the evening of the sixth, god creates all of those animals of the chase, of the four-footed game, like venison of the forest, like those that are fed at Mr. Polito’s menagerie, like those who feed amongst the beasts of chance, and those who feed on fat bison in the space of three short days. The beasts of the chase
Tarpaulin Sky Sandy Florian
in our statute-books are five in number, one-by-one. But the beasts of the forest have our hearts on sticks, while the fowls of the warren are the hare, the coney, the pheasant, and the partridge. I grow horns on my head by the power of my imagination. In my dreams, I yap and twitch and whinny and writhe. By regarding the sore eyes of midnight, my eyes themselves become sore. So I open myself inside myself to give birth to a bouncing boy. Out of my son, I make another lesser beast and instruct him to bear my sins upon his back. I wind him up with sticks and wounds, soil him with oil and wine. Then I send him out on the town to exhibit his best behavior. The very trees seem to grow lower to the ground. A bullet is torn from between my bones. My savior, I let hang and strangle. I demand the release of Gog and Magog in the battle of Armageddon with the resurrection of all the dead. Then, amid the weeping and the wailing, I demand the beheading of all my previous demands. I vow to myself to bind myself for a million years, then I dismiss the idea of the million as being ridiculous, in my fat city that flows with oil. In my fat city where I look for a somber place to lay my head, somewhere else where the Sabbath can lay its eggs upon me. Here and now, in the smallest stem of the tallest tree whose topmost boughs reach to the highest clouds. Here and now, on the tail of the ostrich, where I lay myself open to my more animalistic propinquities. For today I feel lit. Today I feel lucid to supernatural disclosers. Today I have it upon myself to request a showing of a god with greater bones than fishes’ bones. And on this polemical poetry,
5
Tarpaulin Sky Sandy Florian
I’ll roll my dice. See, the plot of our big city is perfectly cubed. We build our city of diamonds of gold. The foundation we face with lapis lazuli, turquoise, crystal, agate, rubies, gold quarts, malachite, topaz, emeralds, sapphires, and amethysts. Twelve gates we make with twelve perfect pearls and our secret streets we pave with gold. On the banks of the river, we plant twelve new trees of life which bear a new fruit every month and the leaves of which are the cure for palsy. We hire revelators to show before what is said and what is done, what will be said, what will be done, for ours is the kingdom to speak in visions. And when we have a knowledge of our own undying death, we begin to understand that, on the supposition of eternity, science antagonizes all our revelations. We hire merchants who sell us scads of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, linen, silk, and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, bronze, iron, marble, cinnamon, spice, incense and myrrh, wine and olive oil, flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, human slaves and human lives to toil over our human affairs.
6
A jigger of salt, a London limited, green merchants from the greenest basement. Because we have only veritable revelation in the greenest science, the exquisite revelation of tree systems which stripped boughs give, until there’s no more sea, until there’s no more land. Grains of rice fall in celebration of my revelations, and when I open to the book, I become the keeper of the cloisters and the detour doors. When I open the book,
Tarpaulin Sky Sandy Florian
the battered and mislabeled jigsaw stands well packed to profess. That we are alone. That we are lonely. And so I awaken in a way to put on my strength, in the way of that wilderness, in the way of that howling desert and that blackened sun that we deem useless. It is true that the prophecy of the devil may be known from his revelations of our god. After all, he too is his servant and so has the highest of visions. So if I have a dream that my body is perched on a hill, my nighttime magic is not a revelation from hell. After all, six different legislators announce six different revelations that run into discord. If anything human lies without the scope of man, no revelation can be final. At that moment, I receive nine letters from the abbot. I feed the dragon yarns of hair mixed with tar and fat, a semiconductive concoction which demonstrates the dragon’s immortality. Everyone falls ill, but because the oncoming plague is a mere prelude to the pending apocalypse, I pretend to kill the serpent with my mimic fang. And lest I show awkwardly at the supper of the lamb, I make my sorrows suddenly end. Prospero ushers a new era with an apocalyptic dinner of skyparades and firecrackers. Because this is a holiday. This is a fat horse of a home when the nearing end can be shown. I’ve had my teachings. I’ve held my tongue. I’ve crouched Job-like couched on dung and crazed with blains to find that. History is a meaningless enigma. The sooner it is stopped, the better off we are.
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Tarpaulin Sky Sandy Florian
8
Seven heads upon seven hills upon which one lone woman sits like a metropolis. I heard, Write this. Blessed are those who are invited to the supper. All of heaven opens to a new and brighter heaven, all of earth to new soil. When the oceans disappears, I hear, Tell him this. I am making all things new.
Tarpaulin Sky
Mathias Svalina Creation Myth There was a big puddle of honey & millions of ants surrounded the puddle & after the ants came the mice whose faces grew sticky with honey, honey dripping from their long whiskers & after the mice came the dogs who lapped at the honey until their fur was matted & coated with honey & after the dogs came the bears who spooned up big handfuls of honey with their stony paws & after the bears came the humans but by then all the honey had been eaten. The humans stood in the spot where the honey puddle had been & looked at each other & cried. One of them invented speaking & they all complained about how much they were looking forward to the honey & one of them invented the plough & they built a farm on the spot where the honey puddle had been & one of them invented guns & they went out into the world & shot all the mice, dogs & bears. The ants watched all of this from their anthill. They patted their swollen bellies. They laughed at the humans & their complicated objects. They passed bowls of honey around the crowd & drank deep of the honey & passed out from too much honey. So they did not see the humans inventing a new kind of ant that feeds on honey-eating ants. Once the ant-eating ants ate all the ants they turned on the humans & ate all the humans. Once the ant-eating ants ate all the humans they turned on each other & ate each other.
9
Tarpaulin Sky Mathias Svalina
10
Eventually there was only one ant-eating ant alive, the only creature alive in the world. He returned to the spot where the honey puddle had been, sat down & watched the sunset over the foothills & then ate his own thorax.
Tarpaulin Sky Mathias Svalina
Creation Myth In the beginning there was a map of the east coast that didn’t have any of the highways on it. The doctors came & checked it out. The diagnosis was melancholy, so they hooked the map up to an IV & pumped it full of Demerol. One of the nurses noticed that the map was printed with a strange ink, so she had it sent down to the lab. The lab technicians ascertained that the ink was dyed milk, which made the detectives suspect that the map was involved in the crime. Three detectives approached the map & accused it of being in on the crime. When it wouldn’t talk the doctors pumped it full of sodium pentathol. Delegates from the UN watched all of this through a peephole. The delegates returned to the UN to tell them that the secret was out; the map had been discovered. They rented some Chris Farley movies & ordered pizzas & had a brainstorming session about what to do. The UN guy from Russia suggested that they build an infinite number of nesting dolls. One for every potential person there could be on earth. Because there were no better ideas & they were out of pizza the other UN delegates agreed to this & they allocated some money & started construction. The first nesting doll was infinitely big, the subsequent dolls incrementally smaller. After they had constructed an infinite
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Tarpaulin Sky Mathias Svalina
number of dolls they folded the map up until it was the size of an electron & placed it inside the smallest nesting doll. They built a rocket to shoot the dolls out into space but when they fired it they realized their error. The biggest doll was infinitely big so it had nowhere to go. Trying to make the best of the situation they created a new religion based on the dolls. The central tenet of this religion is that there is a tiny map inside of each of us, but only when every person is nested inside of each other will anyone be able to read where the highways are on the map. The eternal search is for the people who are one increment bigger & one increment smaller than you. People walked around wielding slide rules, calculating logarithms, establishing the correct hierarchy of nesting. When someone found one that they were supposed to be next to they followed them around. Soon there were long chains of people that followed each other around. They tattooed maps on their foreheads, they bought increasingly flashy slide rules of ivory & mahogany.
12
The only ones who didn’t believe the religion were the truckers. They rode the highways every day. The highways were filled with ghosts of maps that fluttered by night in the wakes. The ghosts howled at the passing trucks. New legends, they howled, we need new legends.
Tarpaulin Sky
Anna Maria Hong The Empress I built an enormous happiness from babyhearts and sand. Then feeling whorish, I left the palace of the Heavenly Emperor, out the cloud gate, sword in hand. Some would say I fled. I think of it as rolling over a very great abyss. Asparagi root, clover, Japonici (mai men dong), and some other ingredients I can’t remember mothered me along. It’s true. I realized it too upon erecting and fleeing. There never was a man. I had swallowed his temper like the formula he was. Then feeling blue, I left the palace of the Heavenly Emperor, out the cloud gate, clutching a mirror and a will.
13
Tarpaulin Sky
Julie Carr A New Idolatry
suck
14
faith
Today the new museum got slammed in The Times. Tortured, however, may not be entirely a bad word. Lots of things are tortured and we mean that complimentarily. Yesterday I heard that dogs are used in prisons in Connecticut and Indiana, used to discipline prisoners, to bite them until they agree to be disciplined, for instance, to get out of their cells. This didn’t surprise me though it should have. As earth is wormed is warmed with wrath. Connecticut is an awful state. (I without a my in that.) Forgive me, but there I’ve found only shame—like dancing on a temporary stage at a street fair. This wasn’t Connecticut’s fault, but reminded me of sucking my thumb in public as a child— not even realizing I was doing it, but suddenly the thumb in my mouth and no way to pretend I wasn’t sucking. Or a party of drunken pre-teens. Spit-slick and reddened. Cowed by my naiveté about architecture, shamed by my jadedness about torture. My friend is not jaded and it is for this that I love her. But she is also afraid of losing her necessary hold on optimism, the optimism that mothering demands. (Know any venture made can be day.) She says she must stay on top of things, must not let things go, but that by doing this she is risking faith. This is what happened to Wordsworth when England went to war with France. He was more than disappointed: “Thus strangely did I war against myself; / A bigot to a new idolatry / Did like a monk who hath foresworn the world / Zealously labour to cut off my heart / From all the sources of her former strength; / And as, by simple waving of a wand, / The wizard
Tarpaulin Sky Julie Carr
instantaneously dissolves / Palace or grove, even so did I unsoul.” He is talking about not writing, about losing faith in his imagination as he loses faith in the logic of the world. As the world becomes a place of ongoing violence, of illogic, he responds, not by going further into the illogic and magic of poetry, but by withdrawing, like a monk. But to withdraw is to enter into a place that is neither imagination nor reason—and what is that? That is to be unsouled. The school of unsoul. (I judge I, I, what good.) Maybe this is the problem with the reviewer. The museum, he said, was dated. This because to be ironic is now to be naïve. The snowboarder does not know that. He is taken with Beckett because Beckett wanted to reduce all language to sound. This, according to him, is delightful; though he does not use the word, his apple-cheeked face expresses delight. It is no doubt much darker than that. (I interpolated, made, had, an I.) He thought perhaps Hopkins wrote plays like Beckett did?
delight
foreswear
strip
No, Hopkins would have as soon written a play as performed a strip-tease—which is to say, he might have wanted to do both of these things and enjoyed exactly the self-torture, the grinding and groaning of thoughts, that would have sprung from such desires. But that is something else. The point is that Hopkins did not want to strip language of meaning—did not want to strip anything of anything because there was, for Hopkins, never a reason to strip. What others might think of as clothing, he saw as more body. Christ plays on faces. (That true to as high-minded a one.)
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Tarpaulin Sky Julie Carr
Faces in rows, ears tuned to dities of no-tone. I sat also in a row of desks, delighted in watching my teacher, on whom I had an irrational crush (all crushes are so), sing “adieu adieu” and “happy happy!” To laugh, to see if he would also laugh. And he did which is why now I continue to think of him, to worry that he, like Keats, might have suffered death’s advances in Italy, where he, like Keats, went to attempt to heal. Sorrow keeps breaking in
16
—says Winnie
fled is that
Tarpaulin Sky
Karla Kelsey from Iteration Nets 9.1 Sin bent, eyes retracted to the ground, I melting and thinned as from a dark blue wave, dim. Sent, I subtracted truth to found eyes welted, sand-wind. A sum. A lark rued day. Pelting fanned skin past some brayed marks you say the tympanum is worn thin./ The iris is become transparent: wellspring, sand. Sin-clad, run a stark hued slave, a tin can sun kissed warm skin./ We eye risk. Tryst be done trans-errant, the thing I am is born sinned./ See, tiredness we run—lands, air spent, and peace proclaims olives of endless age. Land’s feast re-famed: all is love, lend-less days, the rimmed land done. ‘Tis formed. Kin,/ the eyes risked bliss undone. Bands are rent. A thing I sought with wail can drown precious friends: strayed. Sing my thought: whipped sail-spans found restless ends.
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Tarpaulin Sky Karla Kelsey
9.2 Sin bent and eyes retracted to the question: what is ground now that foundations have blown away and I am as melting and thinned as from a dark blue wave? Giving off dim impressions of light, the siren-wind’s been sent out, for it was I who subtracted truth to found eyes, the stories rendered out in prose, out in histories welted, sand-wind. So what is ground but a sum given to the tree and her blind bird burgeoning with symbology, a lark rued day? This was my ready made, my heartbeat asking in the color, the gold, the day pelting fanned skin until we came to the point where the river stops. Not flowing past some brayed marks into a grander body of water, ocean, reservoir, or lesser stream. Not gone underground to fertile chambers, you say, but stopping, inexplicably, here, though this does not seem possible, for the tympanum is worn thin, the iris is become transparent, and I’ve tried to raise myself to the level of this valley, the fronds coming down wellspring and the rain. And we talk of ground to adhere to as if sand. As if, sin-clad, we were part gold and had never led our brothers to the field to be torn at by wolves, over-run as in the image of a stark-hued slave. As if we didn’t live under a tin can sun lusting after kissed warm skin, we eye risk for tryst to be done and relinquish us to breath. Followed by the flooding of these lands I’ve learned to be trans-errant, the thing I am
18
is gashed forth and inside the fabric born sinned. See, I am pinned and marked with the tiredness we have run as in a wing, as in the geese on our walk numbered for study, for stability of lands, air spent, and the message of peace proclaims under the awning of olives, pollen shaken
Tarpaulin Sky Karla Kelsey
o in wind. Of endless age, land’s feast is done into little patches of wet ground re-famed, wormed and worried over as salvation, yet the mantra persists: all is love, lend-less days spent out until the rimmed land is done. And ground, ‘tis formed by kin and all the eyes that have risked bliss to come undone. Before the closing of day bands are rent and the violent sunset reminds me of a thing I sought with wail, for this question can drown precious friends. The tympanum has worn thin: some will have strayed through this day and some will be told it will be their last, sing my thought, and some will be told that it will be their least and make it last. Through the night whipped sail-spans found, for tomorrow the birds will be gone, pennies shining in these shallows of restless ends.
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Tarpaulin Sky Karla Kelsey
9.3 Sin bent and eyes retracted to the question: what is ground now that foundations have blown away and I am as melting and thinned as from a dark blue wave? Giving off dim impressions of light, the siren-wind’s been sent out, for it was I who subtracted truth to found eyes, the stories rendered out in prose, out in histories welted, sand-wind. So what is ground but a sum given to the tree and her blind bird burgeoning with symbology, a lark rued day? This was my ready made, my heartbeat asking in the color, the gold, the day pelting fanned skin until we came to the point where the river stops. Not flowing past some brayed marks into a grander body of water, ocean, reservoir, or lesser stream. Not gone underground to fertile chambers, you say, but stopping, inexplicably, here, though this does not seem possible, for the tympanum is worn thin, the iris is become transparent, and I’ve tried to raise myself to the level of this valley, the fronds coming down wellspring and the rain. And we talk of ground to adhere to as if sand. As if, sin-clad, we were part gold and had never led our brothers to the field to be torn at by wolves, over-run as in the image of a stark-hued slave. As if we didn’t live under a tin can sun lusting after kissed warm skin, we eye risk for tryst to be done and relinquish us to breath. Followed by the flooding of these lands I’ve learned to be trans-errant, the thing I am
20
is gashed forth and inside the fabric born sinned. See, I am pinned and marked with the tiredness we have run as in a wing, as in the geese on our walk numbered for study, for stability of lands, air spent, and the message of peace proclaims under the awning of olives, pollen
Tarpaulin Sky Karla Kelsey
o in wind. Of endless age, land’s feast is done into little patches of wet ground re-famed, wormed and worried over as salvation, yet the mantra persists: all is love, lend-less days spent out until the rimmed land is done. And ground, ‘tis formed by kin and all the eyes that have risked bliss to come undone. Before the closing of day bands are rent and the violent sunset reminds me of a thing I sought with wail, for this question can drown precious friends. The tympanum has worn thin: some will have strayed through this day and some will be told it will be their last, sing my thought, and some will be told that it will be their least and make it last. Through the night whipped sail-spans found, for tomorrow the birds will be gone, pennies shining in these shallows of
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Tarpaulin Sky
Lucy Anderton fall #1 It must start again through the slaughter through the dark pond of demerits. Daughter finds her fingers ringing with ice, with snow, with the lilt: the fixed droplets—tend the bending plant neck. Stay spare from the earth. We turn to the earth. The spin of her obstinate skirts rush up the axel of shred. When do the W’s stop. Lamp. Cradle. Dot. Sypher. Crucifix. Bottle. Enter the spoon. The bowl is filled. Save the spit for the ticket stubs and after effects. When the window
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wears a woman away is where
Tarpaulin Sky Lucy Anderton
I will walk. Taxed and without a real soul— shoeless through the rain. Ah yes—my surface is breaking with stain.
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Tarpaulin Sky
Nadia Nurhussein Skein Head underneath, under the encroaching water where the green grass grew all around, and see that there is so much cold fury stored in that brackishness. It’s waving greenery you should stay away from. The break-through came no sooner than any were believed to have thought, had they thought. This is a gesture that scratches the surface, of course, but what can be provided now after all is all that is. The roads remind us of nothing so much as a lattice of caul fat, so allow yourself to be nourished. (Blood vessels break, plum-bruise all over her face. Tested too much? Dove too far down? She is spoiled?) She is ravages best seen from above, a swan skein to which I was disbelieving witness—
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It draped over some of us, warp and woof.
Tarpaulin Sky Nadia Nurhussein
Flowering Identifications of paperwhites, white-moth orchids with lipstick red lips: bride’s-month. In the glasses which illumine and make earth-shattering bounds, marks making loved ones and shared goods, a world gone loony lapidary. Lucy’s shin: weed grown wild. (Encircle it madly.) Coal-Christmas blooming paper-white. Under sun-ray bursts, this bone is blanching, blandishing, appalling.
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Or, to be precise, solely the violation thereof.
But if a grin spreads too wide, it starts to bare its teeth. Just so, the deadbolt grew far too friendly, wouldn’t simply imply only safety. Whispered through its gold molars innuendos of threat, that something wanted in.
As shown by even a cursory study of the historical record, the fundamental measures of integrity have always concerned the body, the family unit, one’s home, one’s native land. Or the violation thereof.
The light once meant to ground. The key, to put at ease. So, too, the window (two panes) did mean (mesh) to clothe (and screen.) Winter, anchor. And the wall meant even more.
The Violation Thereof
Prabhakar Vasan
And so on, through each successive layer.
And the cold has left a tongue of itself burning in the ear; so that the body, each pore and bone of which had gripped a hardback lexicon, now means a paper cup.
For the body, (to take the simplest instance), to the extent that it is left undisturbed and intact, is of no concern. We can say it recedes into the given, that portion of the field upon which no vigilance need be expended.
And the wind found the crack in the frame, so that glass (at its very edge) came to mean its utter lack, an indiscretion which can leave one feeling exposed and gawked at, perennial receiver of Q (without the U), X, and Z at strip Scrabble (which February has come to mean.)
Tarpaulin Sky
But then one crosses over. Presses on it with a hand (which can mean stethoscope.) To verify. And it buckles to powder like a snowman. For there is a beating against, movement from within another space. And here means adjoin. This, through. Out, insistence of his faithful heart
But let the body suffer extremities of deprivation, the family undergo rupture, one’s home intrusion, one’s country infiltration,…
And most egregious was the wall. We built it up with so much fanfare, wore all our finery for the occasion. Betrothed ourselves to its hairless torso, its ribs and hollows. Squealed when it settled, once and for all, what here means, what this, what out. Laid down the law the way a husband should. And so much floats in the light. Dust. A hair. An eyelash. Which can (only) mean the earth is coming apart.
…let the integrity of any fundamental structure be threatened, and it roars out of the ambient sphere. Becomes suddenly vital, a matter of survival, well worth dying for.
belied by crimson lip gloss gashing his jugular.
Tarpaulin Sky Prabu Vasan
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Tarpaulin Sky
F. Daniel Rzicznek These Doors Will Lock Behind You [Franco-Flemish: Pendant to a Rosary or Chaplet, 1500/1525, Detroit Institute of Art] Hewn from ivory, the living face faces one direction: downward eyes casting thin boats, and the mouth a slit of storm drain, and the wet hint of a reptilian tail behind the ear. And the sad rotundity of engraved Latin . . . ~ [Our Lady of the Pines, Horse Shoe Run, West Virginia] Once I visited the smallest church in the world. It was a mistake: we were driving to find a national forest, and the small, fading sign (“SMALLEST CHURCH IN THE WORLD!”) arrowed right, past some firs. The church was very small. Big enough to hold maybe twenty parishioners. Very small. ~ [Franco-Flemish: Pendant to a Rosary or Chaplet, 1500/1525, Detroit Institute of Art]
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The head turns over to show a skull, bare and reminding—sockets staring out everywhere at once—and decked with centipedes, toads, and salamanders, the longest of which complicates the mouth’s hollow chamber with its seeking: slender petal-like hands planted on top and bottom of jaw, as if moving the mouth toward speech . . .
Tarpaulin Sky F. Daniel Rzicznek
Lodestars All We lost our tempers in McConnellsburg, Pennsylvania, only to reacquire them from a gravestone marked UNKNOWN. The above words now coincide for us with memory. But what are the words for that: that collision and aftermath of synapse. And the words for that? Nine in the morning and four sleek crows hunt the turnpike’s brim for anything but grass. Here there is no grass. “Disavow” you said. The little fiber of the mind, the toy that teases shape and smell and diction into believability. The bloom that calls down whatever water it needs to grow. I saw a young boy keeping watch at a window. I saw a man who would grow up knowing how an hour meant. Mountain after mountain. What did Frost say about that? The valleys work themselves outward, rivulets of green wrapping the road. They might be giant hawks asleep. We donate this idea. We underwrite this blessing. We take the role of rose and rise.
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Tarpaulin Sky
Kristen Yawitz from Sixteen i.
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The Archives rose off a broad cement base. A blind building. No windows. A big beige thumb. Our tour guide directed us to a glass display case in the basement. Inside were two tea-brown, flaking books and a dead bird. The books demonstrated how much damage exposure can do. And the bird? Our guide smiled: no one knew how it got trapped Inside. The bird’s body was black and shiny, a suit that needed Dry cleaning, draped on its side over the edge of a book, it Offered its neck to us the way animals sometimes will When confronting more powerful creatures. A taxidermist had manipulated tiny bones into this beseeching Pose half-off a crumbling bank of words sealed inside A Goldilocks state of “just right” that was also A state of blindness.
Tarpaulin Sky Kristen Yawitz
iii. That spring a girl’s body had been found Naked and penetrated by a tree stump On church grounds in the northeast suburbs. I didn’t know how to hear that: Could a tree fit into a vagina? No mention of that Crime in the local papers that spring I remember Adults saying one mercy was That the men (presumed plural and black) Might not have entered themselves.
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Tarpaulin Sky Kristen Yawitz
vi.
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My mother’s Tuesday Bible study circle always concluded God never gives a person more than he can handle. Across town, poor black children were disappearing From bikes and errands and swimming pools. Reappearing as a tarp on the ground in some woods. A skull on a table. Gap-toothed and bony Ten year olds haloed our local newscasters, nights. You should be able to handle this is a bully like Don’t worry your pretty little head about Yusef Bell strangled and stuffed into a crawlspace. In our living room, God was telling Israel For a mere moment I have forsaken… with a little wrath I hid Clifford Jones by a dumpster Behind the Hollywood Plaza Shopping Center.
Tarpaulin Sky Kristen Yawitz
ix. Blistered blacktop crusts under Hairs springing off of bare Skin as it dried Mulch gave off mildew smells Hot dregs of school bus pitched Red clouds rattling boys lightly balanced on Gooseflesh under the fishing line you Stretched while he reeled Mr. Bluebird on my dinner Table manners shifting Your eyes eased gingerly out of Monkey grass bordering Earl Lee Terrell, age eleven, Last seen
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Tarpaulin Sky
Brandon Shimoda from O Bon Bon Odori you throw your middle child to the red clay press your sandal to his larynx and the red clay goes a bog elongates beneath his back kidneys breasting bog asphodel leaves streamering rotor clouds bulbs suspend their naked glass from the scaffold secretions of wax on the heads of the elderly dancing in the flame-out widows with their shadows on the trodden stage and the stage goes flutes dismembering notes the wind riddles and the bodies go
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into dusk
Tarpaulin Sky Brandon Shimoda
Bon Odori camphor trees swaying with children and birds I shake the branches the birds fly off to other trees children tumble to the ground white performance lights reflecting off a tattersall of shattered eggs you are in back of all this working the heat of the evening in back of the trees, the shells in back of me, a lady fern fanning your yolk-lacquered feet
o I stroke the dancer’s curves from dancing clockwise embalmed with cream from the border tree cuneiform heart, a fungus makes the welkin ring knit with stomach yarn, false berries crushed the littoral germ we love
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Tarpaulin Sky Brandon Shimoda
o nine wagtails rise in the anabatic wisp of nine maidens chained in the wood beaking lice from black hair
and y on— nine maidens crumbled owers, white in the spinneret falls disappear
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the danceless burial grounds
Tarpaulin Sky
Hillary Gravendyk Boneyard Stitches in the dirt make a suggestion, legible, piled on one side. Little pebblefist path, whiskertree, stun, little sunclot. The fullness of the account. Teaspoon spade to take measure. Ours. A largesse of ritual. An archeology of remainders. Clay, cedarhair, rock, rock, peat. Whose shard arranged into hours. Into festal sacrifice. Little spinning sodwheel, little start and stop. With clues. Little foot-pedal of ground. We made a packet of crushed cement, ghost orchard & firepit. Little buried stairway. Little burial. Clock of clean bones, burned white.
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Tarpaulin Sky
Cara Benson Saved
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Burned earth, the ďŹ re can travel through dry underground roots and spring up hundreds of feet from its source. Garden beseeched. Prayer gods kneeling over the victims. Evisceration of locals. The perimeter is secured by the usual means, though it is evident the event is so unusual. The ringing in the ears fades for some, in others, remains. What they hear is projection of what they have heard with constancy to date. This may be solely the function of their aural mechanisms; likely it is the mind registering its vote in the process. A collaborator. These survivors will re-experience the screaming at night. Florence will hear casino bells. Henry, the washing machine.
Tarpaulin Sky
John Deming The Divisible Line That all lines are divisible, that they provide further lines, divisible themselves. How then consider the lines between city and forest— cities and forests are thickly the same—height, business, and the living. Frost heaves forcing breaks in sidewalk, sometimes several inches tall. Smacked then smashing a toe on a root thick in gummous dirt, torpid sucking earth— from dense woods to broad fields spotted with painted houses, then more houses; they match better and pull closer together. Populated and unnerving—various densities and places to hide. I’m safe living for now, someplace sipping whiskey, though it may be warping and curdling the organs in my ventral bag as it is three cubes of ice. Horizon might be a divided line, to remember one sunset’s
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Tarpaulin Sky John Deming
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to remember them all, each fallen city evidence that to peel two things apart is to effectuate a line: so, a line can’t be: that’s closer. It’d just become a circle anyway. The seam of a tree, the slip of human skin, the needletip of a skyscraper don’t fake they’re lines, ineffably pressing air. What’s left: there is division and everyone’s spiraling or dead. A time in which the entire sky was enmeshed, a single gray, white cloud. Clouds. I outlived both.
Tarpaulin Sky
Annie Guthrie *Decline As an American I wasn’t happy not making progress. One time though, in the vineyards | the moon | an escape hatch, etc. A man’s body. A moment drop skipped itself. (whimper/seam.)
-attempts at equivalence a sputtering engine. A moon on the lean. A mind | the mind | kept as a standard like guilt by which the self will measure Up.
In the morning I flew into town A shade of green gone yellow the children had grown into hysterical builders and the sky had a highness no one could put down.
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Tarpaulin Sky Annie Guthrie
*Weather’d The world unwound shut down. Thunder, and a newly reckoned darkness. The light out made birds sound otherwise.
I feared the place inside I never visited. Was out now, a flushed out dark wound up in sky crossed by lightning— I recognize myself out there in those pockets of darkness between flashes: I can hold the reigns of the visible. The visible: a tyrant over taste & smells and bird calls and other calls. The thunder unseams a silent sky, and my wonder, How a mind makes shapes of gathering clouds
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(I feel,) I say, I feel designed.
Tarpaulin Sky
Elizabeth Robinson Rock, Paper, Scissors Two eyes astraddle a nose suggest a woman. Or—perhaps—two eyes suspended over a mouth suggest poetry ends, and prose begins. All faces are recombinatory. Two eyes on two women: two women make up a face. They speak in prose, its interchangeable parts. Rock, paper, scissors. Eyes, nose, mouth. Two women cease to speak so that they can make their own equations. The eyes of them look up, concentrating, while the tongue of them is introduced at the corner of the mouth, concentrating. Eyes, paper, rock. If an argument is a form of prose, how does one look it in the eye —or is it the face?— and ask it to be so irrevokably
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Tarpaulin Sky Elizabeth Robinson
absent from itself as poetry is?
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Two women have two eyes between them, two eyes astraddle the argument of the poem.
Tarpaulin Sky Elizabeth Robinson
Rock What is an idea, and what is a grasp? The hand reaches out and grasps the streak, the streak in the sky, whereas the sky is a streak in the mind of god. This idea hardens underneath the esh as tumor or bone— it clenches itself or walks under itself like a streak across the sky. An idea bleeds out, fading, in the sky, while the hand is actually a rock whose invisible muscles
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Tarpaulin Sky Elizabeth Robinson
squeeze. Its patent bones.
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Rock crushes idea, and remainders its pigment. Rock does. Rock makes out, distant, the smear of muscle.
Tarpaulin Sky Elizabeth Robinson
Paper Two women play a shell game. One secrets a rock within one of her four hands. Quick, she whips hand over hand in a parody of sequence. Where is the second woman to judge the location of the rock? One of four hands takes notes; two of four hands cut a garland of paper dolls from an accordianed sheet hidden below a last hand, behind the folds of a face. Hands astraddle the face—whose face?— elaborate peekaboo, the poetry
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Tarpaulin Sky Elizabeth Robinson
of covering. Elaborate as origami, a blanket on the witness makes her mute, these alternating narratives while
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four faces cover four hands.
Tarpaulin Sky Elizabeth Robinson
Scissors Because it is their birthday, the scissors are entitled to stall for time. Their hollow eyes look identical, but in truth one is discursive and the other metrical. Because it is their birthday, they wish to have their cake and eat it too, as so often they have. Ah, their homey domestic prison. All its beauty cuts through—to what?— a finer form of air. Only air, on which wafts the aroma of something indefinable, baking. All beauty is hermaphroditic, they believe, as they lick frosting from their fingerholes. The time has come. They tell the guards to summon rock and paper, and then they fall back on themselves. A plural against
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Tarpaulin Sky Elizabeth Robinson
two singulars: they know. Jailed in themselves, they know that the victors are those who linger longest in the warm
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smell of indecision.
Tarpaulin Sky
Caryl Pagel Upright Crawling through the hallways of my home I stoop low—allow the crop to stand straight, tall. In wake of Mister—lost— I take to fierce task: form makeshift rows through monster growth. Alone now knowing not where to plant, or how, I think to regret such little skill. Raising, I hoped, would earn my keep, keep me fed with excess work— but the few seeds found found home in walls, the floor and windowpane. Scattered off the desk, they burrowed deep into instruction: pictures of last autumn, proof
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Tarpaulin Sky Caryl Pagel
that labor can turn out. With horror the plants spring close—suffocate—wind wildly past control. My home I see now lies at stake in destruction yet un-done. Even the animals note an absence in command. They peek in through the windows—see huddled in the wildness,
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me—senseless how to raze, no sense how to rise back upright.
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Laura Carter from Close Space 19 After the hutch where the light got in: the little chest, autonomy of more light and chess playing. I tighten up my files. A Christmas carol rings out and rings in. Debenture to the little drawers—obscurity files away the white ash left in the hallway, a suture of meridial axioms. I classify sea sand with sea salt (though the latter is more haptically pleasing); I make the files for space and phenomenology. The drawer exists. There’s a film of skim milk over the top, a radius of procreative energy, the force of the light that opened the chest. In both senses it is left bleeding—one’s for speech, two’s for the late late show, a frame within a frame, fire marshal singing his song like bricks over tangents. Intelligence of the chest: the brights are thrown in the wash separately, the darks sulking in the tub of readymade silt out by the pools. A center of order hangs the readymade lavender dress. Degrees of freedom: from stonework to a soft rose-patterned cosmology the ideas drawn over as a florist would draw them—a botanist—handiwork at rest. Yes, it rests. The key is not on the door and the chest will work off its mellifluous sentencing. Scripted: what this is being kept in reserve—the linen, the moonbeams, color of the seen sun hitting the comforting flanks of russet and almond.
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Tarpaulin Sky Laura Carter
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After the hutch the key, the gentle closing. Multiple uses for the environs—hydrated limes, a pair of dolphins, the almond lit like new sky.
Tarpaulin Sky Laura Carter
21 There is a sequence of historical causes; there was a late flowering of portraiture. The files are extensive; imagine reproductions of the people you know. Modes of being change modes of seeing. There’s no drawer for the linen, there’s one for the documentarian’s systemics. Oh! Dynamics of the little chest—the surgeon’s hands gone in like basalt for stone and what center will remain should the movie be shown? “A unit of pressure” the fin’s emblematic enclosure cut: what knows it is an eidetic who, the blood rerouted, lungs breathing out.
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Tarpaulin Sky Laura Carter
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Shut in by mountains in the first house. The taste of vinegar lingers. The house is swathed in the blankets of its protective center. “Everything comes alive when dis-contradictions disperse” and the house is the color of helix, curtains pulled as Baudelaire would pull them. The stars know not to shut themselves in with the open eye, the hibiscus over the fearful sky, the shook tree a hospice for the (reduced) dialectic of snow and plush. What’s plush? It’s bleach; it’s dramatic (c. 1000) calligraphy. Negative of an image: the trees unleashed in mothlike corridors, false love that breathes only in nodding obsidian sky. I want only transience, a nomadic lack of numerals. Oh counsel of linked tissue! What’s in the dialectic of bounty and hunted, what’s in it.
Tarpaulin Sky Laura Carter
23 The first house: geometrical (bell) space, paradigm of hard-touse, civil service. On the roof I did not fear the striation of iron hooves—apophatics cannot remain russet when taken up for the sake of phenomenal reduction. The house is a secret of simple woodcuts after fire. It is not infinitely extensible. It breathes. It is not undiscoverable. It does not wear talons or sharp CIA tongues. It is not predicated on glass. It is sportive, a London of existential octane, a utilitarian embedded mountain cove. I remember the first house as a cowgirl remembers to pull on her boots and click them together at the end of the poem. The first house was folded lengthwise in dialectical security, its linear topos a triptych deployed. It knew not love of dolphins. It knew neither Torah nor biblical peaches. Its intimate intensity knew only a muss of feathers, the birds long since flown from their perches, runway redacted (a red movie makes a poor companion). I am thankful for that marocain dress, that things-to-do-in-Providence dress. The camera foregrounds a soft sleepiness, historical gestures of dolphins with doors on their shining filigreed fins.
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Tarpaulin Sky Laura Carter
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I turn on the lights. The river is a universe, a rooter. Time wears its existential silence, a crown of ivory. The house shakes. The town shakes down; each empowerment is a tension. Poetry, come out from behind your treatise, your airy curtains. Poetry, veer out from the tunnel of existentialism; come out from the yarrow of the 20th century. I turn o the lights. The seeding is drawn into a cavernous cosmology (visually no sure footing).
Tarpaulin Sky
Theodore Worozbyt Mars My knees ache. I loved too much or not enough. My brain is mostly empty space. Thought must bind itself to some image of a regulated garden. Fifty years after Belsen, Elliot Lippman tried last night to give me his address. The imagophone flickered, my hands clumsy on buttoned numbers. The addresses of the dead are like these flowers, numerous and identical. I was coming over for a J&B, maybe a Hebrew National dog on the grill, brown mustard, watch football, lose thousands, eat the juice. Shirley drank Tanqueray. Kisses taste like spiders, red lilies lighting lawns with delicate flame. Frank Sinatra phrased it best. Clouds thresh and ravel under thin sun, the Cadillac apartments. Cold new winds darken the blue heaven skinned bright after a rain. Rhino chased a rabbit shadow and was gone. The results were naturally positive and flawed. Susan was on the test, her dark hair the water of my sleep. At dawn by the river in the woods, the silk
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Tarpaulin Sky Theodore Worozbyt
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catches on my lips. Mars, glowing like a drop of pigeon’s blood, turned out to be the top of a radio tower. Wireworms wind round the turnips bulled into the trained loam. Someone stole Elliot’s collards. Good boiled beef is never boiled. A pair of dove chicks fell from the tree. The interesting house was blocks away, its windows undraped and lamps clothed, ideograms stickered to truck hatches. Their nest clung to the grass, the chicks blooming down on the sidewalk under the hunched dove I startled away. The next day a latex glove lay beside the spot where I’d placed those dandelions in the nest. Someone started watching over them, someone nearer, like you are near to me. Space heaters smell like army blankets. The best French onions grew beside the sea.
Only gruesome deaths are devastated as expectorant while plainly
Bethany stood guard over the bodies until they said they did not know their neighbors and authorities declined to give their names. But they did not say who they cared for.
Surreptitious: after barfing when she was queened at the beginning Bethany inspected the damage on Saturday afternoon. The roof was blown off. “We are alive” though the crystal death was more of a presence than Bethany. A sickly elderly couple and their grown son. The couple’s shapes found impressed in the depths -- their son was hurled, their father passing through. Bethany speaks to another home as if she were breathing and embedding face-first in the back wall of a closet. “He was taken alive,” they said.
returns, its consuming. A single cell escapes no worse shame than the suppression of laughter as awake as it was in whispering. From the rail yard, it’s heard with or without its trebbled surroundings.
from Un-Sea, the Ebbs
Bethany Wright
Tarpaulin Sky
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The stairs were spiral so on my way around, I could see she was curled with her head rested on her knees. I was actually washing the blood off a steak knife in her mother’s bidet— not just any blood, it was clumpy in spots and very viscous. Before some other
so I retorted, “Well you’re a little too significant! .............. for me....” and left her there, tromping.
the covers off, I saw that she had the word “VICINITY” tattooed largely across her classic tattoo-lettered chest with little flags. She is telling me that I have stammered just too long “for [her]”. She said, as she would have told anyone, she told
“Bikini” she said, matter-of-factly. So I fished under the covers to flee for her underwear, making my way through her pubic hair like a broken record. She was getting impatient. I finally found her vagina as she sighed exasperation and rested my mouth on her waist, just above her right hip. To retract my head and pull
(curtains)
“House of Hassles was sitting up in bed with Jenny Pao and asked her what kind of underwear she was wearing...,” the monologuist begins.
we must learn to familiarize ourselves w/ fear.
Tarpaulin Sky Bethany Wright
Oh, setting my buckets right in the center of the chatting circle strummers, I lifted one rubber-booted leg and then the other, to plunge them, the grapefruit juice and walking with them, buckets knee-high of grapefruit juice, as my shoes. My garments dripping off the last lewdness to exude. I am
guardians, I grabbed pieces I wanted -- silk scarves, loin cloths – and grabbed 2 large, red plastic oval buckets, and filled them with grapefruit juice. As I was doing this, I noticed the pet in a plastic bag had belonged to one of girls and which, I suddenly sang with some satisfaction, I had killed on occasion the night before.
girls plowed in and started to flood. All 3 of the bathrooms conjoined and flooding -- they were all going to take showers & baths; they were going to take them together. But I had just been killing time washing my knife while I was really waiting to take a shower. See, they chided me, saying long very long showers. My partially soaked (pee? amniotic fluid?) garments I gathered from the bathroom I fled from and marched. Where at once in the coatroom,
Tarpaulin Sky Bethany Wright
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say devastating. A wispy cloud of fragile blood is normally blocked, but not this so first her head began to pound. What she learned was devastating: a puff of smoke swelling up the trees, her blackened teeth, a brain hemorrhage, the end, the end, a textbook chapter on it.
(lights)
trekking up the hill, I had to bend my knees like a wrestler to walk this way. I plopped down over them to stop them w/ hyphens, exalts. A doctor might say, “yesterday I was backing out of my driveway,” and I would overcome her story gruesomely compelling to continue from her starting point and ending with the phrase. So please,
Tarpaulin Sky Bethany Wright
Tarpaulin Sky
Teresa K. Miller from Basic Skills and Expectations Work begun, problem patterns emerge the student to approach fixing must be familiarized phonemes. Long vowel sounds, homophones, suffixes diacritic e. (silence) Each week, the skin off the tree recirculate the heart would the first thought, worse thought made worst, worster, worse test.
Continent sound hums the background
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Tarpaulin Sky Teresa K. Miller
Starting small, discrete sounds mapped as the number of vowels per word tautology the number of syllables, ways to pronounce t other than the English voiceless oral alveolar stop, the Spanish interdental, the Hindi palatal.
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there where the sweatstains through shirts indecipherable Rorschach the frequency spilled on a surface the shape twice/week/17.5 weeks
Tarpaulin Sky Teresa K. Miller
From the assumption that any of these boxes of letters matter, rustling around, waiting to form the words we really want to say.
looping back to the pronunciation of the position the dynamic skewed/power in truth, retroex plosive. the teachers’ teacher looking for categorical economy
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Tarpaulin Sky Teresa K. Miller
The solitude soundstarts a heartbeat soundages a drone unassumscaping. Pried slits openovered the dirgewalk from beneath a cold boundary prepositions—things one can do to a person, on, over, within, beyond, as righted, left.
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white narcoleptic black judge Vietnamese refuge in the table ringed by Russian future nurses the Burmese auto emission technician [certiďŹ cation pending] the mouth chalk in hand ears wishing to catch up
Tarpaulin Sky Teresa K. Miller
She should be ashamed. Introduction of modals, social obligation and logical possibility. One becoming another without much prompting, with practice, an everdiminishing ego to mediate the conict.
techniques acculturate technical reader, beneath text words thoughts damp shivering self waiting to lodge blue/black right eye/trachea
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Tarpaulin Sky Teresa K. Miller
Point of Articulation Well is a reading a seeing is an unhinged from knowing, the long sequence of shapes for air to push through.
Vibration feeds a wanting, all the seams where the rips start and the clicks keys in locks beneath ďŹ ngers.
Tap the crumbling, the symbol simple cymbal.
junior: community, remedial: basic, second: foreign, red ink: blue/black, lecture: skills
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autonomous thought: process
Tarpaulin Sky
Justin Marks from Best Practices Competitive Analysis Profiles demonstrate how your targets think. Psychographics explore identity through patterns of behavior to reveal what is relevant and important. Tactics can be offered, competitive weaknesses determined, offensive and defensive strategies devised. We can even reveal potential first move and counterattack advantages in key competitive segments. But it’s up to you to leverage these insights. Let us show you how.
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Tarpaulin Sky Justin Marks
Expanding National Footprint Our team represents authority. Everything we do is based on established reverse principles: wherever, whenever, however. Stay ahead with our pioneering thought leadership. Your offerings are just the beginning of our collective insight—
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targeted, profitable.
Tarpaulin Sky Justin Marks
Linguistic Profile Words represent people’s immediate needs and interests, and create a view of how your audience thinks when it speaks. Insights of this nature can help you recognize and close the gap between how you speak and the way people express themselves. It also reveals thought patterns. We’ll provide answers by determining your word universe and its concepts. We’ll also classify your words, analyze patterns and usage and detail rankings for words analyzed. These are the first steps to informing you of your decisions and driving your actions accordingly. Take them now.
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Tarpaulin Sky
Julie Carr Tolle Lege: Creative Criticism in the Academy I conclude with what I said at the beginning: to have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it . . . . And at some epochs no other creation is possible. —Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” Ernest: You are quite incorrigible. But, seriously speaking, what is the use of art-criticism? Why cannot the artist be left alone, to create a new world if he wishes it, or, if not, to shadow forth the world which we already know, and of which, I fancy, we would each one of us be wearied if Art, with her fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection, did not, as it were, purify it for us, and give to it a momentary perfection. It seems to me that the imagination spreads, or should spread, a solitude around it, and works best in silence and in isolation. Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism? Why should those who cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value of creative work? What can they know about it? If a man’s work is easy to understand, an explanation is unnecessary. . . . Gilbert: And if his work is incomprehensible, an explanation is wicked. Ernest: I did not say that. Gilbert: Ah! but you should have. Nowadays, we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.
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—Oscar Wilde “The Critic as Artist”
Tarpaulin Sky Julie Carr
What should we do when encountering a literary work? Should we assume the authority of judgment, the privileged insight of analysis? If skirting this assumption and its attendant conflicts, should we instead respond by assessing, not quite the work at hand, but the cultural moment for which it can be made to stand? But what if the work’s historicity is not the thing we most want to notice about it? What if, as in the longgone days of the New Critics, we remain curious about how it works—how it works on us? Are we then pushed into the reversals of “reader-response criticism,” turning our attention to our own subject-position, our own culturally determined or intricately trained reading practices? Across an ocean and a century: Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” Matthew Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”: All of these works argue, in one way or another, that criticism engages a poesis of its own. That to encounter the strangeness of a work of art is to be spurred to another kind of making—a making Arnold called “the proof of being alive” and Pater described as a flaming gem. The critic who encounters the work with the intention, or willingness, to be moved into creative action is, we should assume, no longer, or not only, engaged in mastering the unruly object before her. Instead, this critic submits to a kind of awed wonder, allows the thing to maintain its sublimity, its capacity to provoke. As Pater put it, theories and ideas—the “instruments of criticism”—can only guide us to objects we might not otherwise regard, they cannot supply us with the “quickened, multiplied consciousness” that only our “poetic passion” can invent.
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But who, today, wants to admit to “poetic passion”? Who measures success by counting ecstatic pulses? This kind of talk sounds squarely, or roundly, nineteenth century. And yet, the available paths of critical response are beginning to look like grooves. And would we prefer to be caught blindly trotting along, knowing too well the way back home? As always, much is at stake in these questions for American critics because these critics are generally (though not exclusively) tied to academia, and therefore write with a number of goals in mind: promotion, tenure, and continued participation in the “community” of scholars. And, as Lindsay Waters eloquently argues in his pamphlet Enemies of Promise (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004), cuts in humanities lists of prominent university presses, when combined with the internal pressure universities exert on their departments to produce a requisite number of publications per year—and thus to become “accountable” (as the elementary schools are now “accountable”)—have lead us, in recent years, into a culture of increasing compliance. The problem, argues Waters, may be less that brilliant books are not finding publishers than that academics are being measured by their ability to produce numbers for their institutions in order that these institutions adhere to “standards.” As one humanities chair put it to me recently, the administration will always be asking, “What have you done for me lately?” A strong and indeed economically motivated need to fit in—to make work adhere to a set of already established norms in order to be most readily recognizable and therefore publishable—threatens to make whip-dogs out of young scholars and lap-dogs out of older ones. Waters’s polemic is that there is “a causal connection between [academia’s] corporatist demand for increased produc-
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tivity and the draining of all publications of any significance other than as a number.” He claims that The humanities are in crisis now because many of the presuppositions about what counts—which is, not to be too cute about it, counting—are absolutely inimical to the humanities. When books cease being complex media and become rather objects to quantify, then it follows that all the other media that the humanities study lose value. (Waters 6)
This is putting it in dire terms—disrespect for criticism leads to disrespect for books in general—and Waters maintains his tonal gloom by tracing the problem to a particularly dire moment in US history. He argues that the situation in which scholarly and creative work in the academy is assessed by administrators concerned more with counting than content began with a dark transaction occurring around 1941: The American university underwent dramatic changes during World War II, because of the way the university was enlisted in the wartime exploration of the mysteries of the atom for the sake of developing weapons of mass destruction. First Columbia University, then Princeton, then Chicago, and then the University of California became drafted, or enlisted, for the war effort under the Office of Scientific Research and Development, formed in 1941. University budgets increased tremendously. And so have university bureaucracies. (10)
The warring of the University is the bureaucratization of the University. Big guns are big business, as we all know, and when the University becomes corporatized in this way productivity becomes the measure of success. Whether or not we buy Waters’ analysis, it seems that some literary critics are (perhaps as always) searching out new modes
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of response. Perhaps we can note a shift, not necessarily initiated by academic administrations (Water’s true targets), but rather by individual critics themselves. It seems that not only editors of university presses (and Waters is such an editor), but also some of the authors these presses support, find themselves tiring of the available approaches toward the monograph. The dual desire to recognize the otherness of the work at hand, while respecting the activity of subjective response, has lead some critics to reanimate the passionate stance of “aestheticism,” and has allowed “creative” criticism, criticism of strong emotion (as Steve Goldsmith puts it, of “heart felt freedom”) to find its way to the fore. Wearied by the excavations of New Historicism and (warily) energized by the interactive possibilities of readerresponse theories, critics placing a new or rather renewed value on the emotions and cognitions we locate in ourselves when we read have at times gone a step further. In works by some critics—Jerome McGann spinning into Socratic dialogue in his Black Riders, Lyn Hejinian’s poem, “Happily,” which completes The Language of Inquiry—these responses are employed as genre shifters. The writer of scholarly prose, as if spurred by pure enthusiasm, plays poet or dramatist, and the reader understands, in these moments, that they are to read the burst of creativity as an ecstatic extension of the more pedantic writing that has preceeded.1 This critic/artist, rooted in Baudelaire’s salon, in Wilde’s dialogue, in Dante Rossetti’s prose, in the literary-historical
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1 Of course, in the case of Hejinian, she is a poet first and critic later. The Language of Inquiry can be read as supplement to her many volumes of poetry, rather than the other way around. But in the context of that work, the poem that concludes the volume comes as something of a surprise, as if all that had been said about Stein, Flaubert, William James, Oppen, Charles Bernstein, Leslie Scalapino, etc., simply could not be contained in the logic of prose.
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period we call aestheticism, comes to the work of art in order to be moved to action. Jeffrey Robinson, in his Wordsworth Day by Day (Station Hill, 2005) provides one example of just such movement. “The principle behind this book as well as much of my other writing is: the poems I like stimulate me to write—usually to write about them, but fundamentally, to write” (91), says Robinson. And from this experience of stimulation, Robinson reanimates the relationship between the critic and his subject in order to make, from the encounter, something new. Robinson’s book-length poem/essay traces the interaction, the intersubjective dialogue, that reading demands. Because it is bolstered by this faith in reading as creative encounter, Robinson’s book is only ostensibly about William Wordsworth’s poetry. Indeed, Wordsworth Day by Day is about William Wordsworth in about as much as The Prelude is about William Wordsworth—which is to say, the proper noun supplies the work with its initiation, but the work subsequently moves into territory not anticipated by its subject: the classroom, the Iraq war, Pessoa, the Objectivists. The book is composed of a series of diaristic essays on reading and teaching Wordsworth interspersed with poems constructed out of Wordsworth’s canonical lyrics. Robinson calls these poems “deformations,” a term compellingly, and accurately, Frankensteinian. Like the monster in that tale, these poems bring back to life bits and pieces of poems some readers have long put to rest. It is not quite right, however, to describe this work bi-generically, as if it were half criticism, half poetry. For some of the moments that are most poetic—which is to say, compelling, surprising, playful—are moments of prose in which Robinson is discussing, for example, the oddity that is blank verse, or the role of simile in Homer:
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The mind of the reader…occupies multiple realities, both in literature and in social, global, life. Typically these realities are not compatible but are there nonetheless. Visionary poetry has long acknowledged that simultaneity, beginning in the West perhaps with the massive similes of the Iliad which, even though the Agamemnons on the field before Troy try to keep the values of war primary, enforce the proximity in mind as well as in the cosmos, of war and peace: in the poem readers are not allowed to forget the fact and the values of one domain while the other appears momentarily more compelling. (9)
Likewise, some of the “deformations” function as distilled bits of criticism, for as we recognize patterns in Robinson’s choices of source material, we begin to understand just what he values so highly about Wordsworth. Here is his deformation of “She Dealt Among the Untrodden Ways”: Love shining in The difference (60)
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That this act of deformation could be a tribute, rather than an attempt to overtake and master, is asserted by Robinson throughout the book. But the point he is making seems as much about poetry’s placidity—that the poem is always a malleable, transformable object—than about the relative value of his critical/creative act. And yet, Robinson’s objectification of Wordsworth’s poems serves another polemical purpose in his book, for throughout he argues for Wordsworth as a kind of proto-objectivist. Wordsworth’s celebration of the “life of things,” is, according to Robinson, not so distant from the embrace of the object in Williams, Oppen, Zukofsky, or Niedecker. Thus, to treat the
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words of the poems as moveable, in some cases expendable, is to draw attention to their status as “things” themselves. Under Robinson’s watch, the Wordsworthian poem is no more stable or “closed” than the collage-like pages of Patterson. The familiar division between Modernism’s treatment of language as object and Romanticism’s faith in language as revelation begins, here, to break down. What we have to ask is whether history can really work in this way—retroactively? Would we, without Oppen and Niedecker, be able to read Wordsworth’s river—with its capacity to love, speak, and teach—as just a river, revered for its existence as matter, as innocuous and therefore necessary as a wheelbarrow? Wordsworth unadulterated: Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, And, from the alder shade and rocky falls, And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou, O Derwent! (Prelude I, 269-275)
Is this personified and pedagogic nature really analogous to the silence of the “twig-strewn streets / Of rain” in which Oppen’s poet “Walks homeward // Unteachable” (“West”)? The question is intriguing, and perhaps not meant to be answered. Instead, Wordsworth Day by Day allows us to approach Wordsworth with this thought now in mind. And Wordsworth will therefore never be quite as he was. The motivation behind Robinson’s deformations is, however, not only an attempt to find the Zukofsky lurking within Wordsworth. It is also to rediscover the strangeness of the Wordsworth lyric, a strangeness that has been dulled by time,
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but which was, for Wordsworth, at the center of his poetics. There is no doubt that Wordsworth thought his own poems would induce feelings of “strangeness and awkwardness” in his readers—that the experience of reading would be one, not of familiarity and comfort, but of alienation. This feeling of estrangement was a positive value for Wordsworth for many of the same reasons it is a positive value for contemporary defenders of poetic difficulty. The estranging poem wakes us up, forces us out of complacency, alerts us to the complexities of the actual world we inhabit. “For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor” (436), Wordsworth complained in 1802. The new poem was, then, an antidote to this torpor. Thus, it appears that these deformations are meant to reveal things that were going on in the poems all along—love of the object, celebration of the strange—if only the familiarity of blank verse or ballad form were not so numbingly in our way. “At its most ‘perfect’ (Adorno: ‘the more perfect the artwork, the more it forsakes intentions’) the formalism in Wordsworth’s lyrics creates their beautiful, stimulating surprises. But typically, his form induces in us complacent forgetting. So let’s open the form” (39), invites Robinson. Admitting that Wordsworth “never greets me strange,” Robinson feels called upon to therefore make him new. To his credit, he questions this impulse, asking, “Do I like a poem because it startles me? Or does my response to its strangeness gratify because I know I’m confirming, entering my idolatry? Do I call something strange to mask a stimulating familiarity” (50)? And this self-critical moment, perhaps one of the most charming in the book, moves the en-
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tire project into the realm of experiment. Again, the interest is in what happens when we read, not in whether our reading practices should be taken, by others, as authoritative. However, Robinson does have a pedagogic desire: “In this book I attempt to locate resonances between the idioms of Wordsworth’s Romanticism and the poetry of experimental modernism and post-modernism” (7). Indeed, this desire is being worked out elsewhere, on a larger scale. For Robinson is the co-editor, with Jerome Rothenberg, of the third volume of the crucial anthology Poems for the Millennium (UC Press), due out in 2008. This third volume keeps its gaze on the experimental, indeed radical, works of the nineteenth century, in order, one assumes, to draw new lines of comparison and influence between these now near-ancient works and the modern and postmodern innovations so enthusiastically and thoroughly documented in the previous volumes. Wordsworth Day by Day offers up an example of just what these new lines of comparison and influence might do for us. Not only do we get to rethink the impulses and desires that moved one poet to new forms and new subjects, we also get to glimpse what an informed interaction with such material might mean for us, as we continue to make things called poems. Let me, in the manner, then, of a Wordsworthian poem, return to from where I began. Robinson is quite aware that his book, quiet as it may seem, is pressing against the norms and requirements of his position. “(From the vantage-point of academic scholarship, a diary about a poet smacks of ‘waste’ rather than ‘use’)” (17), he admits. (Full disclosure: Robinson is a professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder, also, now, my place of employment.) And he goes farther:
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Scholarship and criticism in the Academy today seem committed to both intention and information, as if anything less would admit to a loss of control, internal and external. Certainly other issues count at least as much…Sometimes I think that academic writing about literature and its world has itself become a principle of regulation rather than one of exploration, delight, uncertainty, intellectual risk-taking. (91)
This is Robinson, sounding very much like Waters. And Waters, like Robinson, offers up an alternative to such regulation: I believe that books can change us, that they have in them, the best of them, the ability to interact with us in ways that bring new things to life. But we have to let them affect us…Against our pragmatists with their conviction that nothing new can or will arise within university research, I call up the ancient Christian humanist, Augustine, whose mantra was Tolle, lege: take up and read the book. Augustine counters our contemporaries who hollow out the book of any significance or content, because Augustine believes an object, a book or a movie or a song, some artifact outside my body, could draw me into an interaction that would change my soul. (74)
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As Steve Goldsmith has argued, “even the least sentimental criticism harbors this minor enthusiasm, working to defamiliarize the conditioned self, testing constraints in order to alter the inherited practices that constitute the subject in the first place” (unpublished manuscript). Indeed, Robinson’s book revels in its own enthusiasms, in particular in the concept that the beloved poem can and does alter the self ’s construction. This love, however, alters where
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alteration finds. As in Waters’ depiction of Augustine’s faith, the project hinges on the concept of interaction—the malleable poem and the malleable reader, prepared equally for de-formation. * Ernest: There is something in what you say, but there is not everything in what you say. In many points you are unjust. Gilbert: It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.
Works Cited Jeffrey C. Robinson, Wordsworth Day by Day: Reading His Work into Poetry Now. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 2005. Lindsay Waters, Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship. Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004.
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Sampson Starkweather Review of Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw
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When sentenced to death, Saddam said, “Hit yourself on the head with that gavel!” unaware that gavels are now made of rubber. Information is everything. Crops are important, not the images they make from the air! Matchbox gods. All of us. What happens to a halo underwater? We found one floating in our pool like a bat. I think it was my uncle’s. He taught me that bats are blind and live underground. The difference between being dead and alive is a matter of information. If read upside down the book becomes perfect. What the world needs Ben, is to know what we look like from below.
Tarpaulin Sky Sampson Starkweather
Review of the First Two Pages of a Six-Page Review of Two New Books of Charles Darwin Darwin was a narrative writer. His dad was fat. Darwin never had a day job. He never curated a museum, but concluded that “people like looking at dead things in jars.” His words defy bullets or power points. He bred pigeons, and compared chicken carcasses with the facial expressions of his own children. Upon holding the first hard copy of On the Origin of Species, he ceased to look at the faces of his actual children. Life is one long argument. Adam and Eve were what the engineering world would call a “prototype,” the military prefers, “service test.” Prototypes have many superb features which are not included in their mass production models (us) because their high performance is proportional to their high cost. Evolutionary dogma. In high school, a popular t-shirt said, the one who dies with the most toys wins. Darwin predicted we will end where the Internet ends. Enviorment is everything. Some chipmonk-thing is staring at me through the window. It’s serioulsy creeping me out.
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John Hyland from Song Notions The Explicator
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If words then also what. Night slips into itself, into its drawn warp. Or wary, stars reveal. Other stars though not night, not words as then. As also, as if to say, now: A describable fabric, a depiction. A despicable ďŹ ction, say. Or, what if, then also words. In other words, the impossibility of re-presenting what is ever slipping however away to conceal its arrival.
Tarpaulin Sky John Hyland
A Report Discourse arrived early this evening, leaning slightly to the left; to the right, a small eye spoke mildly of places spoken too often. A quagmire strayed. While learning persisted other spatial tendencies were nowhere to be found. To be heard is still under investigation. All initial queries indicate a small protuberance in all western areas of course.
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Thomas O’Connell The Goldfish
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We won them on a carnival midway tossing ping-pong balls into clear globes. They were introduced inside a plastic bag. We put them in a bowl together where gravel was a luxury. At the five and ten cent store, we bought them food flakes and a plastic plant. We gave them simple names. They watched us eat breakfast, watched the futility of trying to strike a match, watched as we made love like dice, always gaping. I suppose we taught them how to tell time. One day, we placed their bowl on the windowsill, believing that the view was a gift to them. The sun boiled the water until it poached them. We sent them on a tour of the city pipes. We would have disappointed them. We always appeared much larger than we were.
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Lily Brown Dead Animal Machine Speech fathers the weak. Paper floor. Plaits of paper in my hair. Hand parleys the peltladen pavement.
(We install pelts under streets and leave a window for transparency’s sake.
And for the children. All new zoos are underground).
Hands in hysterics. We clack together so.
We ride out on volcanic fields. Steam rises orange from black pastures. I’m not for antagonizing the gods and we worry
for the gods. Loose rocks and leaf tearing. Boats scare dolphins and what a view the gods enjoy, buried in the moon-
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basin hills. Boats in the shapes of circles, dusk loving sharks. I choose a thing for its surface,
its dark reflections. I wake messy. I wake lacking eyes. Then I’m animate again.
The trees’ tresses blow into the sun, shards of speech
revolutions, of tonal informants.
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I want social, want ears.
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Daniel Brenner The Machine is Correct When something forces it to I need to understand why it Does this to me when I am out Of the water and make myself Hurt through 5 buildings & reach The island by swimming & through it all I scramble This is my song to the life I grappled The cord reaches a dangerous speed Knocking over the footstool It is a horse do you understand You stunt for my heart ies into Into the blue or when you play Your mouth it goes like A road that sinks in the night All orange and blue
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The Hangar I wasn’t the one who spilled The entire world My hallucination double They were The dolphin No one followed me It’s the same thing every day BCE It’s the same green on the ceiling One day her hair changed The lion did whatever it wanted Despite the fact that the water was great I was sick It’s temporary time again Time for a butcher
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There is a carbon copy of my Seahorse somewhere That waits for a reactor In the water garden At sunset
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Claire Becker Moat Has fish. Is a water-filled ditch. What is called a language library and next to that sincerity forming unfamily in the moat. A throat is a moat. We’re talking its darkness. Adult students of your darkness poetry. Darkness because you turned the words and we saw that they were gestures and we looked back on the page and they were words and they were turning into gestures. A kid calls this romantic and worthless like a dream. Great uselessness: the words, worthless as gestures ‘til we airbrush them into two round breasts, at least one per page, and they deserve our ogles. We will pay billions to ogle these breasts. These breasts are darkness turning into gesture. “Do you sense how all the parts of a good picture are involved with each other, not just placed side by side?” I read on the Baldessari.
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Doubt is best right next to genius. There’s a cat and if I wasn’t intent I’d hate it, but the cat outside my west-facing window has swallowed a baby whole, and the baby is crying. The cat was Kansas—boredom, madness. Our clouds—sheet metal. Our walls—sheet rock. Our teeth: things between them disturb us. We want to see the way we think we’ll see, the way the thing we see erases. I have pasted seven poems into the body of this email. I have omitted a cover letter, per your request. I push “Send” on the seven thousandth email. Seven hundred poems I destroyed through abandon. No junkyard, no farewell for them. Let’s have a barbecue and send off these poems. August first we drive anywhere for one month exactly. We’ll see all the earth we already saw, the earth we fly across. The clouds above it might obscure it, but I don’t notice because the clouds are it. The way the thing I say creases.
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The lit bridges are our bracelets,
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adorn the rivers’ wristlets. Is a moat if it looks like a moat, acts as a moat. I go through the learning process in order to know less, to know the poems in slow process of themselves. They will; there is the apex, and we don’t know. A sliding down low. Welcome to our language. If I added a drawing to each page, traced the passage of the word, I might finally learn about the flatness of the earth, the universe’s donut shape, the seam, the rubble seam of time. I don’t answer the visual ringing; I keep something to watch. And I begin my twenty-sixth year. My breasts and I are supposed to like it here.
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Danielle Dutton from S P R A W L
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I am sitting naked on a wooden chair. On the television is a movie about a dream house that awakens unusual longings in a young man with a simple hairstyle, while the book in my hands says: “Our dinner table is a shark tank.” A plastic blue bowl, two slices of pizza, and two paper napkins are arranged on the kitchen counter. The next day, Haywood and I go to the mall and watch an old man eat bright yellow popcorn. The man wears red suspenders and a letterman’s jacket. For lunch we have Aloha Burgers in the food court. Then we sit in traffic and watch sunlight reflect off mirrored sides of office buildings. On the car radio a state representative apologizes for recent behavior. Carbon monoxide and ozone are no longer subjects of debate. We are destined to destroy a world characterized by the unrefined. It makes an uneasy, ironic consumption. In turn, I prepare an honest dinner, reassuring in all its surfaces. I run my toe up the side of Haywood’s socks. I lay my hand on the butter dish. The sugar bowl with blue lace patterns sits at the edge of the table. It might even hover centimeters above the linen tablecloth. A saucer has pink, yellow, and blue flowers, a gold rim. Two blue candlesticks, half melted, stand at odd angles in mismatched brass candlesticks—it is the one family heirloom in this picture of private spaces. The bedroom is a whole other question of a public kind of dreaming, with a different set of buttons, different catalogues, etc. At night I imagine every person in town reading letters in carpeted bedrooms, letters that offer glimpses of other bedrooms, of country-music bedrooms, or sado-masochistic bedrooms, movie-star bedrooms, the bed-
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rooms of enemies or neighbors, of wealthy Americans, serious or well-designed bedrooms, bedrooms in blue houses or beige ones. I myself admire passionately and with fetishistic interest the bedrooms in high-value land sites. Our own bedroom boasts silky smooth sheets and creamy colors. It started with embroidered pillowcases and thread counts of 250 or higher, to which I added goose-down-and-feather-fill, an inner-spring mattress, and hues that harmonize with my eyes and skin. I stand in the bedroom and I am the thing peculiar in it. I watch myself in the mirrored closet doors. I can’t take my eyes off myself. I wear high-heeled pumps and a pin-striped bra. I have a glass in my hand and a satin ribbon in my hair. I am off-balance and show signs of recent handling. Then I invigorate it all with a dash of white and lots of chartreuse and a plush throw in velvet. There is a massive stain on a white cloth. I say “Put the photos in an album,” and “R.S.V.P.” But all this is very disproportionate. There have been complaints. Dear Mrs. Millet, This may seem a bit extreme. It may take more of your time than was previously calculated. No doubt it means different things to different people, different things to people in frontand backyards, people with good lawns and bad, people in danger and people in swimming pools. It deals almost exclusively with barbaric self-indulgence. I have only the best intentions. Mrs. Millet, it’s time you adopt a practical approach to native plants, to the aesthetic and financial requirements of residential land use, to cutting down that spruce tree and considering the greater public good. I mean to be frank, Mrs. Millet. There is danger of complete degeneration. Aren’t you concerned? Don’t you want to know the answer? Don’t you want to feel it warming your skin and hands? Mrs. Millet, you
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must give notice to things used and owned. This is not a “natural” state of affairs. Kill your pests and weeds. Sincerely, etc. In the morning, on the countertop, there’s a plate smeared with yolk, evidence of cheese, an olive pit, two butcher knives, a wooden cutting board, a metal strainer, a wooden spoon, a Tupperware lid, a piece of bread, and a small Chinese bowl filled with lemons. I see a dead dog on the side of the road and get home to consider a life bare of creature comforts, or a life filled with oral ballads, or the marked patterns of quilts. Gathered together on one small section of the kitchen table is a stack of bills, a plate with the shell of a hard-boiled egg, orange peels, two glasses, one linen napkin, one spoon, and near the edge is an empty box of chocolates (gold foil). In the evening I go for a walk through proposed developments that mean different things to different people and I remember late one night I genuinely desired to talk with Lisle. I got out of bed in my flannel nightgown and walked down the street to her house and up the path and knocked on the large front door. Someone must have had to get up in the dark and slip down the stairs to open it for me. On the door was a Christmas wreath with fake evergreen, real pinecones, plastic berries, and plastic eucalyptus leaves painted silver and sprinkled with red and green glitter. I think about my own home as an auspicious site for an increase in population and economy. When my doorbell rings I open it and step onto the welcome mat, but no one’s there. I’m confronted with a kind of information overload—the constant noise, the doorbells, lawn mowers, leaf blowers, car horns, screaming babies, grocery-carts, electric dog collars, electric gates, mouse traps, garage doors, television aerials squeaking in the breeze, decorative weather vanes squeaking in the breeze,
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car doors, doors slamming, satellites, airplanes, bouncing balls, and the electric guitar of the teenage boy next door. I sit in an upstairs bedroom and comfort myself with boredom. In the afternoon, there’s a picnic beneath the water tower. Carnal motives are signaled by the position of articles of clothing, hats, flowers, the way the interplay of floral patterns, polka-dots, and silk scarves hide wifely sorrows. Next to the Olde Red Barn, where we sell fudge to tourists, teenagers push against each other. It is not a vague scene. The unfolding friction of their lives draws attention to itself like a movie camera. I can’t take my eyes from it. Compared to this, daytime television fails me. These are warm scenes, in the presence of neighbors. The summer is upon us as a kind of kidnapping. Afterwards, I hear they wonder if they were ill, walking with carnations in their hair, with sheer lips, that kind of talk. I stand in the Richardson’s swimming pool up to my middle. Mrs. Richardson drinks a glass of gin. Mr. Richardson grills burgers on the lawn. Haywood flirts with Mrs. Bonn and Mrs. Odol under a fruit tree. Small birds twitter around a piece of cheese under a plastic chair, and I catch the eye of the strange newcomer who eats guacamole with Mrs. Robin and her daughter and who looks attractive with his legs stretched out on the grass. Alone in the pool I touch my bent elbows to the surface of the water; I break the surface with them. I survey the yard on all sides. Then I do girlish things in the pool, such as laughing, splashing, and enjoying a glass of sparkling wine. I sit on the warm concrete and leave a wet mark and bits of bean pods, tomatoes, and plums. Finally, I make haste to escape the rain, which is suddenly, steadily falling. Wearing only my bathing suit and my glistening orange hat I stalk through neighbors’ lawns, picking flowers and know-
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ing it. One man and one wife and several children probably observe this strange phenomenon. I hear doors and windows slamming as I go. I hear the evening news through screened-in porches. When I get home Haywood isn’t there. I say, “Stick a fork in it.” I hang my wet swimsuit on the back door and crawl into bed. I have a terrible dream when the thunder begins during the night. It’s terrible enough to base a whole superstition on it. Then in the morning Haywood and I shop for brandname labeling and other wrappings and packages. On the way home we see a double rainbow stretching over the wet streets and houses (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). I listen, but there’s no sound at all. The dark clouds, how they hang against the sky! For dinner we have hot dogs and beer. It’s a cool night. The neighbor’s dog keeps barking in the hedge. I say, “Are you ready?” But he just keeps snuffling in the leaves like an old instinct. “Keep it up,” I reply, very specifically. Then Haywood beguiles me with something like eternal freshness (a glass of water and orange wedges on a green glass plate); he pursues me in this manner. He smiles broadly and stands in a clean white shirt. He says, “Slow down,” and “Right there.” Roughly twenty minutes later, my elegant mess, my smell of powder and skin, one might not think it, but the difference in the images, the hue, the pace from one end of the room to the other reverberates in my feet, down into my half-sleep, dancing before me in the name of “what is out there” and other dramatic things. I never tire of them. I mess it up for its own sake to watch it rotting, in peculiar positions, asleep on a high mountaintop or mildewing in the sink. Afterwards, it’s easy to recognize. Just look at the way he picks me up and puts me back down.
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Lucy Ives Poem You just end up talking about yourself, what looks from here like a wide wide puy skirt, you end up not wanting more than what could have done harder yes I recognize this
Disturbed me a jack at my ankle, does that: turning and rolling like a shooter over my front door
I hurried back to the house which had been provided Thankfully, I thought: doing up the knots along my cupboard no one will see what I have within
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Rosa Alcalá Child Interpreters Experts say children lack the vocabulary and the emotional maturity to serve as effective interpreters. And two of every three mistranslations have clinical consequences. —The New York Times, 30 Oct 2005
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The ability to convey hairless —as all good messengers—the gestural roughness of things, to talk to the oddly shaped head of the martian, this is a boy’s navigational mastery. This a training for the day a girl transcribes him, tissue by tissue, to make breathing count. When she lowers him into the bathtub and presses his mouth to what is (suddenly familiar). Have you ever lowered someone into a bathtub? A sick mother, a small thing? An injured bird until he’s no longer injured, but dead. Two bodies, one lowering and one lowered, a multiple nakedness sucked into slots that swallow the overflow? You grow weak with distraction: if porn is a cancer, is cancer a porn? Is sex a form? And sickness? A girl fills the water with imperfect relations; what a boy says a quiet metastasis.
Tarpaulin Sky Rosa Alcalá
The same’s true of a girl’s wildly populated bedside. When here come the warnings against gargantuan gossip, said to distract from the erection of columns, the laying of marble. Have you ever seen the common nude? Nude taxi drivers? Nude subway strikers and strikees? The bagel guy nude in his ambulant deli? Or the uncommon: someone riding out their dying year—nude? We think beauty a rabble, so we organize clubs against and for it. The shirtless bang tensions from the skin of a drum, a suffragist lesions a remarkable ass or a portrait of Henry James. A girl’s trying to get somewhere and a boy’s trying to make the building taller, and still, the hospitals keep reporting the dead. What a girl says is a fuel, when she is still a girl, to make a book that drives like a book. But hospitals are exemplary architecture, if corridors are your thing, if you like to be led, that is. She’s blind-sided in one eye, her heart unfashionable, and the lungs? What are we to say about the lungs? A girl and a boy mate air to clinical consequence, offering vocabulary in such wrongly portions.
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Jen Tynes Woof at the Door Look at these girls! Every one is my cousin! I changed their diapers into dumpheaps and look at them now! They have bosoms and blonde hair the color of steel! As babies, their blonde hair
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and bare chests were the color of corn and mercury! They were tobacco princesses, husk queens then!
Tarpaulin Sky Jen Tynes
Darkness Creeps Upon Us Everything, even our family’s speech, has a hole in it that must be tamped with absolute electricity. Primitivism is a loaded, gum-filled mouth in my eyes. I see mechanisms coming to each other. There are only windows to the soul and windows looking out of it, into other windows lighted because it is dark outside. What kind of friend recognizes their enemies. Another kind of saying will take you out of aphorism’s hand, another kind leads all sounds back into the forest, nicking the ground’s small lantern. Absolute statements are uneconomical, make us sorry in the eyes of the law—for every glowing latitude a city, a citizen. Let any other animal feed this homily.
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Sarah Mangold from Cupcake Royale Behind the music
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In Mexico you can have cat whiskers implanted working on ears and tail they didn’t tell me to roll my eyes the stylist can dress you but nobody told me to roll my eyes George Michael in the world secretly we sit and his house in Dallas and the theory of can’t be all smiles fat deposits around the hips don’t necessarily have the disease other publishing economies I’m somewhere in the middle injectable drugs vanilla buttercream
Tarpaulin Sky Sarah Mangold
we love your house the garage is really important winter time I’d propose wisteria orange chocolate his compost pile water and sipping straw keep the lid on gun loaded
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Tarpaulin Sky Sarah Mangold
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slow sugar infiltration wandering congested she knew her girl wasn’t sparky manufacture normally spray it with varnish and instant angel a couple hours of family needs to be identified wrist corsages plastic animals
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Heather Christle Catastrophic Water String attaches me to everything. String sprouts from my head. I am a maypole. I am in Walpole and no less enthused. I am an IT man and you are an IT woman. Out there is the giant ballet. We are trying to learn very slowly. One way is to dignify food or wood, as though we found it very beautiful. I find money on the ground, in the field. You find the damaged circuit. I work all the time. You notice the heron, but the heron does not notice us. Our two desk chairs resemble an iceberg, if we stand at the door and lean in.
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Tarpaulin Sky Heather Christle
Themselves Performing Small Brave Acts
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I will not renounce anything for more than eighteen minutes. I don’t want to; I want to get changed in my bedroom behind a Japanese screen. I will not renounce the decorative. So many lamps have made me visible to strangers and where are they now? The strangers. I miss them on the side. There are a million places I would like to insert my head. I easily embarrass. I fear the discovery of our wrongs. Things melt, then we mop them is the kindlier form of admission. I won’t renounce the planet over which a family’s scattered. Relatives are small green dots. Like other things they are glowing. Sometimes they move around. I will sit in the furniture showroom and watch a hollow phone. I will sit there and watch it forever. I will not renounce the sea.
Tarpaulin Sky Heather Christle
Man in Bonnet I am tied to the lamppost because I want not to get lost in the large handsome city. I have corrected myself in many embarrassing matters. I repair myself every night. When I arrived in the capitol I demanded pants and even now I wear them. When I love something I want to smash my head against it. I do not love the lamppost. To be clear, I predict a New Tulip. This next year will prove if I’m right.
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Tarpaulin Sky Heather Christle
It Doesn’t Feel Like A Sunday
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Anyway, you said, it was only a mild everyday catastrophe. I nodded, but couldn’t say if I agreed. I was becoming less and less certain of everything. Was the word I meant “distance” or “difference?” The cigarette smoke was a distance, but the sky? And if we were here, sitting on lawn chairs, then whose had we left at the dump? I had to shake it all off. You were looking off into the word that I could not determine. I thought if I were to paint a new portrait I might as well start with your scalp.
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Ilya Bernstein Ode to the Open Wound Now we can simply close our eyes for a moment, Lean our heads against the wall, And fix our thoughts on the wound that is not closed. There comes a time when even the skin Becomes confused and cannot figure out how To heal itself. Its edges do not meet, The wound does not close, and in its openness the flesh Is at a crossroads. Who rang my bell at four a.m.? It was Ellen and she was drunk. Did I mind? The first time it happened, I didn’t mind. But the second time it happened I said to myself: If this happens a third time I won’t open the door. The wound does not close. Its edges do not meet. And in its openness the flesh Is at a crossroads. For a second The police siren sounded like a woman Faking distress: “Oh no! Oh no! I can’t pay the rent!” It was raining and my mind Was filled with all kinds of garbage. Now we can simply Close our eyes for a moment
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Tarpaulin Sky Ilya Bernstein
And lean our heads back against the wall. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita” — There comes a time When even the skin Becomes confused — “Nel mezzo del cammin of nostra vita I found myself in una selva scura.” The swerve of Broadway Carried me downtown. I leaned on Broadway And it helped me walk. I walked down Broadway Kicking around the same handful of memories. And the sea, Coming through the rail, Left a pool of water On the pavement. And the rain Whipped all six of my Windowsills simultaneously. And a police car drove around The neighborhood in the downpour Playing sinusoidal melodies. And in its openness the flesh Is at a crossroads.
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I picked up a lemon, Peeled it in little pieces And left them on the table to dry. They dried and hardened, like dark yellow petals, Curled up or down and Rigidified.
Tarpaulin Sky Ilya Bernstein
A time when even the skin Becomes confused and cannot figure out how To heal itself. I was hit hard by the free will. It was my love, it was my everything. They dried and hardened, Like dark yellow petals, And the sea, Coming through the rail, Left a pool of water On the pavement. The edges do not meet And out of the mud of my daily life — All that blinking and breathing — Rises an individual Whose eyes are fixed on The open road.
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Patrick Culliton My Want is not to Bronze but to Pause An hour of nothing to, nowhere to in the pressed park. Cold hands and a phone tumbling in my pocket. A fountain full of pigeons, a head full of crease. Bananas greased and strewn, this is no cartoon, this is Friday afternoon, Chicago, winter. I’m cold, sure. I’m lost, mostly. I walk and warm only to think of my leg vibrating, the phone saying, “Home, come home. Come home, come.” Days are enormous, trees are enormous, pigeons are enormous, phones are enormous, blood blisters are enormous, I am enormous, you are enormous, not talking is enormous, air is enormous, Lincoln is enormous and Biblical in his stone seat. He’s shaken the stoic and weeps birdshit. He cries because he’s frozen and he’s not even a pond.
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I want to vibrate, not tremble. I want to climb onto Lincoln’s great lap and float down his leg in an inner tube, drunk, as I’m prone, on cheap beer and visions of you nearing with a basket of towels and meat: an enormous comma beneath the shade trees.
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Steve Langan Stone (Where the Heart Is) This city is perfect for us. Every event is metamorphosis in reverse. The buildings are glued to the earth, the foreman whispers into his bullhorn. I won’t ask you to remember this place. Who am I, anyway? Call me whatever you want. And should the photos shock you, look away. I lost one once. She was sitting right in that chair where you’re sitting, Miss Jones. Whoever said “Welcome” first was hailed “Master.” Whoever said, “There’s no place like home”… I simply cannot smile when I’m wearing the wrong clothes so pardon my misery. Any horse with Love in its name gets my money across the board. My little pot o’ gold. Next time you see me, I’ll be behind the crosseyed dice in the big silver car. Stone where the heart is, that kind of agreement seals a friendship. Hurts, don’t it? is a punching game. At night he put away his two mad dogs, our one-armed neighbor but he was fierce. You just had to respect him. Then an hour later the houselights went out. That’s when we knew we could relax, drink some wine and watch TV.
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Bryson Newhart from Taken Off Air Taken Off Air, Channel 2726 “Beneath the Astroturf Lawn”
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A man opens his flashlight and drinks all the pineapple juice, depleting fuel from its singular projection. He pokes his head from behind the sun, losing his medicine cabinet in fields of narcissus while calculating the blueness of his hair. He checks his watch. He and his wife stalk the gray animals on display, netting photos of albinos from a world that flipped axis last week. Denying all symptoms of the small pox, believing inverted weather to be made of grease, they close shop to take advantage of a morning that might rise into the sawdust. Later, at home, he observes his wife in the courtyard, cutting a circle in the astroturf lawn, poking the black soil beneath. He and his son toast with barbed-wire tumblers, the son with a bloody mouth.
Tarpaulin Sky Bryson Newhart
Taken Off Air, Channel 365 “Evasive Fortune” Bleeding from the gums or maybe the neck, a woman breaks open a fortune cookie and searches for the band-aid inside. A strip of paper falls out, swishing in orbit around an invisible planet, prompting her to follow its descent. She crouches in the light shining through the roots above, waving her claw to try to catch the strip, swiping with her hook and both her crutches. She strains through space around an imaginary planet with a grabber in her teeth to grab stars. Finally, she dives to the ground, where she will later be outlined in chalk, but still the paper gets away, disappearing through a hole in time. Luckily it is only her fortune and not the band-aid contained inside the cookie. “Shit,” she says. “I almost forgot about the bleeding.”
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Tarpaulin Sky Bryson Newhart
Taken Off Air, Channel 896 “Curious Creationism”
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On Ash Wednesday, a chair is forced to kneel in the rain wearing knee pads. A man’s lips are squashed while closing an apocalyptic book. Microscopes connected to the nearest central vacuum inspect a virus later swallowed by the priest, whose spewing chocolate eyes can’t wait for their gasket patch. The virus merchant bends soft metal around the holy man’s neck, attempting to tune his expressions, asking the priest if this is what he does in his spare time. “Only when having an epiphany,” states the holy man. “And I’m not really sure what you’re selling in this store.” In the evening, a ham is stitched to a blasphemous child, his body mitigated by vegetable organs. The Eucharist explodes into a memory of surgery performed with wooden tools. Aired backward, and in slow motion, this program is more easily enjoyed by recording it, then pressing rewind.
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Popahna Brandes Between a Palace and a Theater The bears continue to arrive at the house next door, a dirty stream, knocking day and night, though mostly in the morning, early and wayward. They shout: “Hand over the clothes or I’ll slam your window in.” They growl. They throw things at one another. I repeat: they throw things at one another; an empty cup, an asthma inhaler, a silver sobriety chip, whatever’s on hand. They speak to one another in humorless clauses: “If I would of said, then maybe I could of seen her but she’s makin’ it up, right?” And: “I never did, did I? I never did.” Without the wits to kick in a plexiglass window, they hop around, puffing, circling, relentless. “D’you think the clothes’ll still be here when we get back? Richie, I’m talking’a you. What’re you gonna do with the clothes? They’ll still be here, right?” The same bears return, over and over again. Every once in a while, one will appear, notice the apparent inactivity, and never show its hide again. I watch them from my central vantage point. I can’t see anything else, even when I wish I could. All my windows face onto their scenes. Sometimes they look in my direction, sensing observation, but this only seems to stop them from first-degree offenses. The clothes piled in the basement attract them. The crack upstairs, hid between the sofa cushions, this attracts them too. Meanwhile, I am tied, in a sitting position, to my dining room table. My love does this to me. My love is not a person but a gigantic eyeball. A sleepy, often absent eyeball. When it’s around, it winks slowly and constantly, indicating its desire to lie down and have nothing more to do for the day.
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I watch a brindle bear out on the street, talking to another bear that pulls up in a maroon Cutlass. There’s some sort of an exchange, which involves the brindle bear looking away and then grabbing a standing lamp from the garbage pile next to him and beating at the car door. He stands in front of the revving Cutlass and with a key slowly engraves: “u R ded meat” on the hood. Another bear appears from the next-door driveway walking a warthog. The warthog is not on a leash but in a trance, zigzagging gently, in order to snuffle. The bear kicks at it, kicks it in the head while it’s shitting on the front step of the house next to the lamp. A limousine arrives. When the doors open, a gaggle of children are shoved out—maybe fifteen, maybe more—and they fall all over one another, busting fingers and leaving teeth marks accidentally on one another’s heads. The fragile skin of the children on the bottom of the pile is ground into the tarmac. The limousine pulls away while they squirm. This I can see clearly from my roost on the table. I have a hot spot.
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The phone rings—another wrong number. This has been going on for quite some time. Because I am trussed and my hands are only free from the elbow down, the phone has been placed in my lap and I can make the simple gesture of picking up the receiver and putting it back down. The voice on the other end always asks for Lucy. I used to say, I know no Lucy. And while that’s true, it’s also true that I have known Lucys, one too many, in fact. There was the Lucy that owed me money and the Lucy that owed me a brother and, indeed, a whole lot of time, so I don’t speak to them anymore, and they are certainly not at this number. If I do answer the phone now, (which I often do as I believe that it will be someone else, giving me something
Tarpaulin Sky Popahna Brandes
else to think about) and Lucy is requested, I say: “Haven’t we been through this before? Give me some information so that I can help you.” There is never any reply. The number shows up on a screen next to my phone, but a number is just that, one among many, unless it shows up as my own, which is what happened today. My telephone number is calling me. I’m curious, of course, excited by the idea that there may be someone else in this forsaken, empty abode. Now the bears are frantic on the street. They pace back forth, swinging their arms, most of them walking upright, some sporting puffy sneakers or unlaced construction boots. A beige bear in an oversized t-shirt yells: “Downtown? Yeah? And you think I don’t know that?” He turns on another bear sauntering along, minding his own business, and with a left upper cut, takes the wind right out of the sucker. I might have worried about that punched bear as he fell to his knees. I lied when I said the place was empty—my abode—but I don’t really appreciate the housemate, or whatever you want to call him. Most of the day he’s not around, and it’s just me and nothing else in a lot of space, a big house full of nothing. And then, every evening he comes in; he pays me to do that, and to have a bed, to use the bathroom, to cook meals for himself. That’s the basic agreement. He’s very friendly, or so it seems. I mean, he smiles a lot, and he leans against doorways or sits on the floor when you talk to him. And it was entirely my idea to have someone else about. I had imagined that it would warm things up; that we’d find ourselves on the front stoop, smoking a cigarette and exchanging anecdotes. Instead, he helps himself to my carrots, a muffin, the duck paté. Because he showed up
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with a guitar, I had imagined that he’d be in the bard category, that there would be some sort of enchantment. But his guitar case turned out to be stuffed with socks. So, even when I was a free agent, he wasn’t exactly my mate. I can’t forgive him the way he picks at anything I own when I’m not looking or passed out. He uses my body lotion on his bum, and if I begin a conversation with him about our arrangement, his chapped lips become slack. When I think of the gummy fish, I get heated. There was a hole in the kitchen wall, there always had been. Without mentioning it to me, he began plying around—a little more each day—pushing with a fork, curious. His excavation finally proved fruitful. I was watching from my desk when he inserted the pliers and pulled out a bag of Swedish fish gummies, packed between the original lathe and the plaster. That night I observed him eating the candy after his dinner, slowly and deliberately, one fish at a time. He never said a word to me and soon the hole had been taped over. The bears are brandishing their baseball bats and tennis racquets; they’re blowing the horns they have hanging at their sides. Why can’t they laugh? They stand on the weakly supported porch amid the scattered, dusty, ragged plushies. There’s a laconic dog that barks once in a while, one bark at a time, not a bow wowing, but a single woof, silence, then woof.
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On Tuesdays I teach, and since I can’t move, my classroom comes to me. The dullards shuffle in, reeking of deodorant and aftershave, their spiral notebooks shedding. I ask them to make a sentence and draw a line through the air to the appositive. Why can’t I be teaching those ruffians roaming around in a
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limo? Where’d they go anyway? But no, no such luck for the likes of me. I get stuck with the ones glazed over. I gave them an essay on morality in a valley and now I want some feedback. “Come on; unearth some effort to respond,” I say. They stand around me, staring at my cords, at my proneness. “Well, do I have to call names? All right then, you, with the long blonde hair.” Half of the group looks up, startled; worried they’ll have to voice an opinion. “I mean you, with the blue eyes and the baseball cap,” I shout, pointing at one. She looks at me with reproach and resentment. “I found it depressing,” she says. I turn my head, stiffly. The bears are now walking out of the neighbor’s house with armloads of clothes. The side door is fully kicked in. Most of the students are vacantly regarding the scene. “The people—or, I guess it was some lady, right?—that wrote this story, or essay, whatever you call it, seems pretty down and out. Like she doesn’t care what happens, and she’s just bitter; maybe because she doesn’t have any friends,” one of the idiot boys finally says. There are a couple of nods here and there from other students. I stare up at the ceiling. They stare at me. I’m aware of my smell but it’s better than theirs. “Has no one got anything else to say?” I finally roar. If my love could only roll in right now, a glaring eyeball to scare the shit out of them. “All right you fuckers, you poor souls,” I say calmly, “Class dismissed.” And they are gone, like magic. The house mate comes in. “I heard a lot of galloping,” he says. “It’s the students,” I explain. “They love to leave and they do it well.” Things are awkward since I’ve been tied up. It’s unclear how long the situation will last, how long we’ll endure.
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“Hey, those bears have got a bonfire going,” the house mate says. I close my eyes and think of the last time I was walking around: two Tuesday ago I was stuck in the stairwell of the college library, my bag caught on the banister. I heard voices descending, echoing, discussing ways to deal with the heretics. The men shut up as soon as they saw me, like they were closing a bank box, and they hid their hands in the folds of their white gowns. I stood still, not sure whether to pretend I was going up or down. In the meantime, as that is what my life is like now—the meantime—I’m jacked up by the fact that my own phone number is calling me. My pleasures are becoming more select: voyeurism, wrong numbers, antipathy toward students and house mates, an ever increasing fear that I’ll start eating myself or simply disintegrate, and an active memory of banal moments. “Hello?” I say, then pause, like the dog: “Hey-lo?” There’s nothing, a little click on the line. Something malfunctioned. No more wishful thinking, no more ideas of psychotic breakage, no more leaps of faith. I hold the receiver, disappointed. Then a voice, soft like a sand dune, says, “Is Lucy there?” Eyeball, come on! Come get me. Take me away from here. Eyeball!
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The bears are acting chummy. It’s that time of the night, just before dark, and just after they’ve had their vice. They appear smug and on top of it all. There’s always another shirt, another pair of trousers in the basement, and more supply upstairs. One grizzly runs to 3Gs, the bodega on the corner. He comes back
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with popsicles for ten and I’ve only counted to ninety-seven. How time passes. The eyeball is obsessed with sleep. Our interactions are restricted by and in the interest of sleep or the lack thereof. If the eyeball is awake, it concerns itself with its sleep; at first, examining the quality of it, then deciding that there hasn’t been enough, and probably never will be enough, indicating all the time that it needs more! The eyeball claims a new ambition: being ambitious. “I am changing,” it announces. “And I cannot, for the life of me, get enough sleep. The dreams beckon with giant gloved fingers. Nurses . . .” I would lie next to it, frozen, afraid that I would breathe too loudly. I worried about the noises of the neighborhood and things I couldn’t control. I worried about the moonlight piercing through the window like an x-acto knife. I was sick with worry. The housemate calls from the other room: “Do you smell that? What the hell are they grilling?” I hear him unpackaging something, carefully, so as not to make a sound. Clearly he feels free to appropriate all my provisions, even the ones tucked away. And why not? I’m bound. “That’d be swan,” I say. “They trap them down under the bridge, with breadcrumbs and big, black garbage bags.” “Stinks like burning mattress,” he shouts, his mouth full of food. Smoke billows, black and thick, twisting into the neighborhood atmosphere, separating and dissolving like dazed birds. The bears gather various barbecue items to make up for whatever
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harm they’ve done. They stamp around the fire like they stamp around the porch, acting too hungry to do anything else. One of the regular nighttime bears gets a delivery from a friend who apparently robs liquor stores. The thief bear shows up in a red Taurus and from his trunk lugs cases of cheap beer and bottles of mixers. The good bears chug that—a sugary, acidic, neon green beverage—while the bad bears put away beer. Tonight a spotted bear is going on and on. He shouts. Why can’t he speak at regular decibel levels? “I thought it wasn’t’ gonna never stop,” he hollers. “Every day, the same freakin’ thing, over and over again. I was goin’ berserk. I was like, doesn’t nobody want it to change around here? That chick’d open the door and—” A much larger bear hits spotted bear on the head with frying pan and he shuts up and they keep drinking. When the meat is done it’s mostly charred and they’ve all lost interest, except for the one bear in oversized, dark sunglasses, reflecting the setting sun—a mystery bear, indiscriminate in his eating habits.
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I put the phone into its cradle. I contemplate throwing it off the table. Wrapping the cord round the housemate’s neck when he next leans over me. It rings again, almost immediately. “Hello?” I say, quickly, eagerly. “Hi, this is Kristy Dick from your three o’clock class.” I’m silent. “I was wondering if it would be possible for me to change paper topics? I’d like to write about cows and slaughterhouses. I’ve already done a lot of research on it. . . I hope you don’t mind.” I’m imagining asses, trying to remember which one Kristy is. I say: “In fact, I could care less.” Now she’s quiet, like me, and then: “Okay, well, thanks.”
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The acrid smell of burnt swan disappears with the night and a domestic brawl from the house across the street picks up. The familiarity lulls me like a children’s song. I try counting the reasons I’m attached to the eyeball. There aren’t very many. The limitations, the expense, the increasingly rare moments of being seen like never before . . . And love is a broad term. Nine on one floor. They pummel with arrested brains and brawn until the young curl up, like pill bugs. My sleep is pitch black and empty, a hole. Nowhere to go; nowhere to be; nowhere to get here. My love does me. My love sleeps me. I feel heat. I am awake, rigid, alert. In the lot kitty-corner, behind the Chinese restaurant, flames shoot from the maroon Cutlass. Flames reaching high, a shimmering wall of heat, of red and green, licking up near the tree branches; the car emitting random snapping noises. I pick up the phone to call the trucks but I can’t find a dial tone. The housemate says from his bedroom: “I wouldn’t worry about it. Things have a tendency to sort themselves out.” Meaning what? That within fifteen yards of his bedroom there’s a fire involving gasoline? That the eyeball will feel a magnetic pull? I say: “Right-y-ho, ranger.” The housemate’s quiet for a while, then says: “Cling on, habiteer.” Surfeit. The world is a small place. I’m in a cloud of my own vapors and I need a lot of room to refuse this surface of a table. To make this surface refuse. To surface in the refuse. The world’s a small place. Or, “Not so fast, my friend.” A spit of land rises from an ice clogged, tidal inlet. As in, “You go right ahead, Kristy. Cast far into the waters.” Watch which way the current goes. And, “Call your shots, bear boy,” the shelter’s just around
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the corner. They got clothes, don’t they? As in, “Drive on by, spotty, lend your hand. Carnage is always on someone else’s doorstep.” Or, “Engrave on me, you hog, eye, mate. Engrave my demise on me.”
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Brent Hendricks from I Am Audubon Plate 13 Because I love you I’m willing to make some changes. This includes thinking and doing things I’ve never done. My main idea is to paint a picture for you, probably something abstract but maybe just the background will be abstract and then there’ll be a white pony standing by a river. That’s what I mean by changes—the kind of gesture containing the pony. This particular pony I’m thinking of now will be kneeling and not standing by the river taking a drink, the kneeling being something most ponies don’t normally do, and the river will have a magical quality as suggested by its translucence, a type of eternal radiance. But to balance all this out I’ll have to have something darker, possibly some vague resonance welling in the water. Actually—now I’m thinking there won’t be anything abstract at all and the glazed background will include a sun and mostly blue sky. In the middle and at the top a few clouds will part and I’ll be floating there holding a pony, just regular me basking in my unadorned humanity, and there’ll be some ambiguity about the pony and the lurking shadow, I mean about what happens to the pony in the end, but I’ll just be floating there in the blue sky waiting for you.
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John Cotter & Shafer Hall A Bug is Sad that Autumn is Coming The days are accordions, folding on themselves with creepy ease. The nights are lights that bring me home. In the winter snow falls like South African sugar mines exploding; the low hills are stones I pass over. Alone for awhile, I tell myself stories, keep my six legs on a door screen until some child rips me off. I can’t read the rhythm map of stars or wind direction. June has passed. I don’t know where I am
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or why but the days go peacefully enough. And nights! Take me home! The trees bend one way these days.
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Barbara Maloutas Trap At the end of their vacation and before they left for home, a couple purchased a mousetrap. They shopped around to find something their friend would like—an imported device that was artful while designed for catching mice. Some mousetraps were more like folk art than mousetraps. Some looked flimsy and obviously handmade. In the store where they found their purchase, they asked the lady to give them a demonstration. She climbed right in to show them how well it worked although it was handmade. They thought about purchasing the trap with the sales lady inside, but decided against it, since their friend had been having problems with his wife and he would not have appreciated an already occupied mousetrap. To their surprise the sales lady refused to climb out and held the door firmly closed. She had dreamed of immigrating to another country, especially to theirs. They on the other hand thought, “Nothing stays where it belongs,” revealing their point of view. Then again they thought, “Her intention to break with her homeland is almost heroic.” First came their vacation, then excitement over a purchase, then distraction again as they watched her extract herself from the mechanical device. Finally they were not sure what they really felt.
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Sean Thomas Dougherty What Unfelt Thing
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The black swarm of the refinery smoke, buzzing of the electrical lines, and the coal cars uncoupling as I headed off, the third shift siren hauling up the dock doors. Bars of gut-grieven, fistgripped shots, the lines worn down to the bone. Blessed Be-Jesus we’re broken Harry the Irish-Kraut laughed one night, standing on top of a stool between the dart boards at Daileys. The burning river and the dark lake, freighters hauling their anchors with muscle and grit. The waiting and the war—the doorbell rang—our son dead—hands on my shoulder at work without a word. These two lips pressed shut at supper. This unspoken spit. These boots. The dark wedding of this grief. At night the boozy walks peering at the windows of neighbors, the curtains of strangers, block after block, fingers trying to turn the wrong key to the wrong house. Aunt Theresa and the veil, the wailing and the weeping. Which hurt? This filthy work shirt, the piano we hauled from the dump that was never in tune. What lesson was taught? Bar-driven, breakneck picnics between the gum colored vines. Mashed grapes in winter tossed on the side of the road. Sunlight across the aluminum siding in October, the lawn brilliant with yellow, red, half-green, wind-blown, blousy you ran, he falling, then rising earth scuffed him. I drove to the plant, the black swarm, the buzzards in their white shirts and clip-boards. Was it as simple as the pen marks, the checks. The good word, the up. Mr. Pachetti with no one, the few fellas at his funeral, head-bowed with their hats in hands. Malashevski weeping in the restroom for what we knew. What not the good I say, then I say what not the bad? Is this train, coal-coupled,
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the clotheslines along the ditch. The long drives. Granpaps who claimed her blue robe. To cling to cloth. How this, not that. What sharp hooked catch of late summer, laughter unheard, numbed. The cold caught by caulking. What unfelt thing. Is this humming, thumb-paged heart?
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Jefferson Navicky Teeth
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My grandfather, the one I think of as the color yellow, took me for a ride in his Lincoln after dinner when I was ďŹ ve. We drove down to the lake and he told me the lump of land on the other side of the water was Canada. That’s another country, he said. I nodded as if I understood. I wanted to eat that country, all of it. The sun began to set, turning the lake crimson and burnt orange. We drank the colors from the shallow bowls of our hands. I tasted everything that was North.
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Joseph Bradshaw “In Idaho,” by George Oppen In Idaho, that soiled green, Was the green of tree, the was Of paradise and everything. When you entered your feet Were a sign among the roaming Waves pounding ashore in Idaho. In that sea Birds culled a word called Idaho from their wings. Such confusion expanding As froth, you confused Gulls scattering with the sea’s Flung spray. In Idaho you were Anything, but everything, but Idaho.
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Tarpaulin Sky Joseph Bradshaw
Idaho Hello. A corpse, washed up in running scales, but all fucked up, a sharp where flat should be: a wave hits H, falls. A drop or crash of water. Spherical, each crash or fish flops flayed. Here flesh enters water humming as ghosts who tussle the hair, as winds that wake a west-pushed shore to “Idaho far.” Here Whitman skips
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over grasses wet, and greener grasses—more human than salt is green.
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Samuel Amadon Branches When he took that kind of light everywhere and none here or another like hair you think you finished sweeping. When he took that kind of light with ice cubes or paneling. When he took that kind of road is white. When he took that Nebraska. When he took that kind of light everywhere and boatyard. When he took that feel of during the emergency or just after. When he took that bloodshot. After he took that bloodshot. After, bloodshot, how was he to take that. Take that was what made for now close the door, now ice cubes or paneling. Now that kind of light everywhere and none here or another like hair you think now Nebraska, now that kind of road is white. And couldn’t even tell the picture was blurring, was nothing, was books for that kind of light everywhere and none that took Nebraska during the emergency or just after boatyard. Just after boatyard is white and ice cubes or paneling is that kind of road is white, is now close the door, is like hair you think he took that kind of road is bloodshot, after bloodshot, after that kind of road is bloodshot. When he took that kind of light everywhere. When he took that kind of light everywhere or during the emergency or just after. Just after he took that. Just after he took that kind of road is white, is ice cubes or paneling, is that kind of light everywhere and none here or another like hair you think you finished sweeping.
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dk
blood on the moon, the leaves turn. that drifter boy had david’s young face, his black walnut eyes. the spirit rises then seeks a home; catherine in the doorway, passing an apple, palm to palm. she used to hold breath till the skin went blue. mother said they cannot take the heavy ones.
e,
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dk
grey-spooled days, her strays—eve on understanding. c turns, dug in by the hindlegs; sound and home. a thread of her lock is dangling; flick and fall, a mark on the floorboard. like dust it settles and incorporates. her toe tapping, each quiver a word.
hare,
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from limb by limb: the collected letters of dk
della watson
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dk
morning, blueplate backcloth, crow sewn lines. that last gift--moon traced nightstorm--iced pines--the old cold coat, the glass gloves. --how crisp my joy has become. with blackpowder pop, a limb breaks. catherine stirs from her chair.
e,
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as i wrote, in field, the kingfisher dove, caught your gnat he’d from sky seen. grass knee high; when we cut by foot these beings flee, thought free, and yet the sharp eyed will feast. on your name am_bushed by the season, d
fly,
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Tarpaulin Sky della watson
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Nate Pritts from Spring Psalter It was the spring of getting-by, of starting-up, purged bodies pinched & broken & pulled & emptied, the summer of travel, excursion & incursion, such brilliant velocity, seasons of travail, happy seasons of agony, the look of pain & anguish, that same transience, the seasons transient, changing, always holding on & then the fall, the arc of light, the leaf-glow, the pattern of ragged sunlight through branch-bone, the cool of night & pink sun of morning, heat gathered like a commodity then shelved, &, oh, it was the winter of disconnect, discord, the cordate tally of causes & reasons dispersed, refuted, rank & ďŹ le unďŹ led, scattered, gone, kaput. But like a song, compelling, compulsive:
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one more time, please, with feeling.
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Lytton Smith Annuls the Space-Time Experience And Kate is gone—some climate tension—flown the kind of coop we thought we’d built hereto and how the world’s less blond than once, and no, no key’s been left for locking the lean-to so vagrant’s grown the inners, kind of nest we called a bird’s hereto, with moss ado about the walls, their lichen gray, then next the barn then next the miniature hamlet so what’s to do but build our balsa wrecks of ships from kits (no point in paint, forget ideas of paint, of colour), let the rest unravel jacob’s ladder-like and let achromatic roses, coals, red lettrist days be the days we think of Trevor, where we left him teaching plastic soldiers whist and gin in suits of cards too similar, war of spade on spade. That’s where this leaves more than us: science has machines for finding lairs behind the mazes of fancy French jardins’ obscure designs, though the -ometer’s cracked gauge or-would-we-call-it-face reveals less than
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predicted once, though Prudence sailed the Cape of Charm. Is this the dream of language: a trap with rusted hasp (suggests escape but offers teeth); the way we shear the hedge, hedge our bets and, better, the tethered way we set our teeth to task? The string that led toward the centre becomes knotted, great hindrance for minotaurs, and Fred has left a written note as if to say the lair is love of lair, the lyre a stringed bereft of am, the lure just that, another dream of language much as fluid as adrift within this sea of goings from the scene we thought we’d held to, here. But isn’t to hold the thing, and not the thing that’s held, the feel of having found ourselves paused in the field of water caught in the fountain, and slipped to patterns? Logic won’t let us withhold, we’d take up welding could we, learn the ship of draughtsmen or the work of thieves, we’d have ourselves the skills of craftsmen widely, flinch
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the candlesticks but end the same way, trapped in the mantrap and left to think from sense to sound, to loiter out the time and grab
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what’s tragic, goat: we’ve fallen for our absents and this is then the dream of language, of those who’ve left, and left us with their absence.
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Contributors Born and raised in Paterson, NJ, ROSA ALCALÁ is the author of Some Maritime Disasters This Century (Belladonna, 2003). Forthcoming are translations for the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry. Alcalá’s poems and translations can also be found in a variety of publications, including Barrow Street, Brooklyn Rail, and Mandorla. She is currently Assistant Professor in the University of Texas at El Paso’s Department of Creative Writing and Bilingual MFA Program. SAMUEL AMADON has published poems recently in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Modern Review, New Review of Literature, VOLT and elsewhere. LUCY ANDERTON lives in the south of France where she was the writer-inresidence for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2005 and 2006. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary, Rattapallax Magazine, AGNI Online, and Forklift, Ohio, amongst others, and are forthcoming in Born Magazine and Poem, Revised. She is finishing her first book of poems, entitled Check the Number on My Collar. CLAIRE BECKER lives in Oakland and teaches at the California School for the Blind. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Octopus Magazine, Typo, H_NGM_N, 580 Split, the tiny, and The Alembic. She holds an MFA from Saint Mary’s College and is the author of the chapbook Untoward, forthcoming from Lame House Press. CARA BENSON currently believes in the vagaries of boundary. Her work appears in 88, pom2, HOW2, EOAGH, Sentence, and BoogCity. Her wee-e-chapbook Bound is forthcoming from Dusie. She is editing a collection of writing for Chain, and her “Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation” is available from BookThug (www. bookthug.ca). In addition to teaching for Skidmore College, Benson makes poems every Tuesday with male inmates at Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility in upstate NY. ILYA BERNSTEIN’S poems and translations have appeared in Ars Interpres, Best American Poetry 2006, Circumference, and elsewhere. He is the author of one book of poems, Attention and Man (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), and the editor of Osip Mandelstam: New Translations (UDP, 2006). JOSEPH BRADSHAW is the author of the chapbooks The Way Birds Become (Weather Press, 2007), and This Ocean (Cannibal Press, forthcoming in 2008). His poetry and reviews have recently appeared in Cannibal, Cultural Society, Denver Quarterly, Jacket, and The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel—2nd Floor. He currently lives in Iowa City. POPAHNA BRANDES lives in Providence and New York. She teaches lyrical fiction at Pratt Institute. Recent work in fiction and translation can be found in Encyclopedia Vol. 1, A-E. DANIEL BRENNER currently lives and writes in NJ. His first book of poetry, The Stupefying Flashbulbs, is available from FenceBooks/UPNE. LILY BROWN holds an MFA from Saint Mary’s College and currently lives in San Francisco. She has poems appearing or forthcoming in Octopus, Typo, Coconut, Cannibal, Fence, and Handsome. Octopus Books published her chapbook, The Renaissance Sheet, in early 2007. JULIE
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CARR’S books of poetry are Mead: An Epithalamion (UGA Press) and Equivocal (Alice
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James Books). She is working on a critical book about Victorian Poetry titled “Surface Tension: Desire and Time in Late-Victorian Poetry.” Her poems have appeared recently in journals and anthologies such as Verse, Volt, New American Writing, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review and Best American Poetry 2007. She is the co-editor, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press and teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder. LAURA CARTER is a PhD student in Atlanta, GA. JON CHRISTENSEN is a life-long Brooklyn resident and a graduate of Brooklyn College. He teaches high school English in NYC. He thanks his wife (Tanya) and daughter (Felicidad) for their love and patience through all his endeavors. HEATHER CHRISTLE lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. Some of her poems appear in Boston Review , LIT, Octopus and Third Coast. She occasionally writes for the Kenyon Review blog, and frequently she is the assistant editor at jubilat. JOHN COTTER is the poetry editor for Open Letters Monthly. His poems appear or are forthcoming from Volt, Goodfoot, Hanging Loose, Coconut, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and others. His collaborations with Shafer Hall have been published in MiPOesias, Shampoo, and Failbetter. PATRICK CULLITON lives in Chicago. His work has appeared, or will soon, in Backwards City Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Cranky, jubilat, The Journal, and elsewhere. He has slain many beasts. JOHN DEMING is a native of New Hampshire but currently lives in New York City where he teaches English at Baruch College, works for Plum TV, and serves as an Editor-in-Chief for the poetry review journal coldfront (coldfrontmag.com). He holds an MFA from The New School and a BA from the University of New Hampshire. SEAN THOMAS DOUGHERTY is the author of ten books including The Blue City (2007 Marick Press) and Broken Hallelujahs (2007 BOA Editions). He is currently traveling the world in search of the White City. DANIELLE DUTTON is the author of Attempts at a Life (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007) and SPRAWL (Clear Cut Press, forthcoming 2008). From California, she lives in Illinois. SANDY FLORIAN is the author of Telescope (Action Books) and 32 Pedals & 47 Stops (Tarpaulin Sky Press). “The Time is Near” is an excerpt from The Tree of No (forthcoming with Action Books). Other excerpts appear in /nor, bird dog, and how2. HILLARY GRAVENDYK’S poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Colorado Review, 1913: A journal of forms, The Eleventh Muse, Fourteen Hills, The Bellingham Review, and other publications. Her manuscript, The Sensible Horizon, was awarded the 2006 Eisner Prize in Poetry. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also the co-curator of The Holloway Series in Poetry and Poems Against War. Originally from the Northwest, she and her husband now live in Oakland. ANNIE GUTHRIE is a writer and jeweler living in Tucson. She is currently working on her third manuscript. She lived between Tucson and Italy for many years and continues to pursue her love of language and translation. She is co-owner of “The Jewel Smithery” on South Park in the Lost Barrio and works for the University of Arizona Poetry Center. SHAFER HALL’S first full-length collection of po-
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ems, Never Cry Woof, has just been published by No Tell Books. Originally from Texas, he’s a senior poetry editor for Painted Bride Quarterly. His collaborations with John Cotter have been published in Absent, Can We Have Our Ball Back? and Snow Monkey. BRENT HENDRICKS’ Thaumatrope is forthcoming from Action Books this fall. A two-time National Poetry Series finalist, ANNA MARIA HONG has published poems in many journals including Black Clock, Fairy Tale Review, Cue, Painted Bride Quarterly, ARCADE, Puerto del Sol, Fence, and Quarterly West. Her non-fiction appears in publications such as American Book Review, Poets & Writers, poetryfoundation.org, Seattle Magazine, The Stranger, and The International Examiner. She teaches creative writing and literature at UCLA’s Writers’ Program and at DigiPen Institute of Technology where she is an Assistant Professor. A graduate of the English Department at the University of Maine (Orono), JOHN HYLAND is currently doing work in Cultural Production at Brandeis University. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Modern Review, horse less review, Dusie, Puppy Flowers, and H_NGM_N. LUCY IVES lives in New York. KARLA KELSEY is author of two chapbooks, Little Dividing Doors in the Mind (Noemi Press) and Iterations (Pilot Press, forthcoming) and two full-length books, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (Ahsahta Press) and Iteration Nets (Ahsahta Press, forthcoming) from which poems in this issue are drawn. 9.1 pulls lines from Laura (Riding) Jackson, William Shakespeare, Aaron Shurin, and Charlotte Smith and mutates them via loose homophonic translation, drawing them into prose in 9.2 and erasing them to leave the fragments of 9.3. STEVE LANGAN is the author of a collection of poems, Freezing, and a chapbook, Notes on Exile & Other Poems. His poems are in recent issues of Zoland Poetry, Drunken Boat and Beloit Poetry Journal. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and teaches in the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing Program. BARBARA MALOUTAS won the New Issues first book in poetry competition for In a Combination of Practices (2004). She was the winner of New Michigan Press/Diagram Chapbook Contest for Practices (2003). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Aufgabe, FreeVerse, Segue, Tarpaulin Sky, Good Foot, The New Review of Literature, bird dog, dusie, JAB and Greatcoat. Her work is anthologized in Intersections: Innovative Poets of Southern California (Green Integer, 2005), and the 5th Anniversary Issue of Segue (2006), the online journal from Miami University-Middletown. Beard of Bees will publish a chapbook, Coffee Hazily, in 2007. She teaches book structures in Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. SARAH MANGOLD is the author of Household Mechanics (New Issues), Blood Substitutes (Potes & Poets), Boxer Rebellion (g o n g), Picture of the Basket (Dusie e/chap) and Parlor (Dusie e/chap). She lives in Seattle where she publishes Bird Dog, a journal of innovative writing and art and co-edits a small chapbook press with Maryrose Larkin, Flash+Card. JUSTIN MARKS’ latest chapbook is [Summer insular] (Horse Less Press , 2007). His poems and reviews appear in recent issues of Octopus, Soft Targets, and Word for/ Word, and are forthcoming from Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel—Second Floor, Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, and Cannibal.
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He is the founder and Editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks, and lives in New York City. TERESA K. MILLER received her MFA from Mills College and has taught English in the Peralta Community College District of the East Bay and at Columbia College Chicago. She currently runs a tutoring center for at-risk youth living in a south Seattle public housing community. Her work has appeared in MiPOesias, ZYZZYVA, Shampoo, and others. Basic Skills is an unpublished full-length manuscript dealing with the discourse issues that arise in open-enrollment classrooms, the im/possibilities of communication across “academic” and “nonacademic” dialects. JEFFERSON NAVICKY teaches writing at Southern Maine Community College and curates the Vermillion Performance & Reading Series in Portland, Maine. Map of the Second Person was published by Black Lodge Press in 2006. His interests range from his grandfather’s opthamology tools to barns in Vermont. BRYSON NEWHART’S writing has recently appeared or will soon appear in elimae, The Dream People, Caketrain, and 5_trope. NADIA NURHUSSEIN is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her poetry has appeared in the Harvard Review, 580 Split, and elsewhere. THOMAS O’CONNELL is a librarian living in the mountains of southwestern Virginia with his wife and a couple of swell daughters. His prose poems have appeared previously in Tarpaulin Sky and in Cranky, Sleepingfish, and Mad Hatters’ Review, as well as other print and online journals. CARYL PAGEL, originally from Chicago, is currently a Provost Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa. She works for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and her poems have recently appeared in Coconut, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, and Parcel. NATE PRITTS is the author of Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX); his new collection, Honorary Astronaut, will be published by Ghost Roads Press, fall 2008. “Spring Psalter” is an eponymous part of a longer piece that will be published as a chapbook insert in Cannibal #3 (Spring 2008). The editor of the online journal H_NGM_N, Nate lives in Natchitoches, LA, with his family. He works in advertising. ELIZABETH ROBINSON is recently the author of Apostrophe (Apogee Press), Under That Silky Roof (Burning Deck Press), and The Golem (a chapbook published by Phylum Press). She is a co-editor of Instance Press and EtherDome Chapbooks. F. DANIEL RZICZNEK’S first book of poems is Neck of the World, winner the 2007 May Swenson Poetry Award, published by Utah State University Press. He is also the author of the chapbook Cloud Tablets (Kent State University Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, AGNI, and Mississippi Review. He currently teaches English composition at Bowling Green State University. SPENCER SELBY’S most recent book is Twist of Address (Shearsman, 2007). Forthcoming is a new compilation of visual work titled Flush Contour, from Otoliths Press, Australia. Also in the works is a new book on film noir. BRANDON SHIMODA was born suddenly in California. Poems from O Bon—some of which are appearing here—can be seen in Colorado Review, Free Verse, Handsome, Play No/Play, Alice Blue Review, TYPO and elsewhere, as well as in book projects forthcoming from Corollary
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Press and Flim Forum Press. He has lived and worked most recently in Mexico, New York and North Carolina, though he currently lives in Montana. LYTTON SMITH is a poet and Anglo-Saxonist living in New York City. His chapbook, Monster Theory, will be published by the Poetry Society of America in February 2008. SAMPSON STARKWEATHER was born in Pittsboro, NC. He edits your children’s science textbooks. His poems and essays are recently published or forthcoming from Octopus, jubilat, LIT, RealPoetik, Absent, Open Letters Monthly, Sink Review and other places. His chapbook,The Photograph, is available from Horse Less Press. He lives in the woods alone. MATHIAS SVALINA is the co-editor of Octopus Magazine & Octopus Books. He is the co-author, with Julia Cohen, of the collaboratively written chapbook When We Broke the Microscope from Small Fires Press & the author of the chapbooks Creation Myths from New Michigan Press & Why I Am White from Kitchen Press. JEN TYNES lives in Denver, Colorado and edits horse less press. She is the author of the following books, chapbooks, and collaborations: Found in Nature (horse less press 2004), The End Of Rude Handles (Red Morning Press 2005), The Ohio System with Erika Howsare (Octopus Books 2006), See Also Electric Light (Dancing Girl Press 2007), and Heron/Girlfriend (Coconut Books, forthcoming 2008). PRABHAKAR VASAN’S work is forthcoming in 6x6 by Ugly Duckling Presse. He is currently working on a small manuscript of erasure and collage work entitled Sutures are Sweeter. He lives in New York City. DELLA WATSON’S work has appeared in Limestone, Make, Free Verse, Denver Quarterly, Parcel, nanomajority, eye~rhyme, alice blue, elimae, and word for/word. THEODORE WOROZBYT’S first book is The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006). His second, Letters of Transit, won the 2007 Juniper Prize (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). Recent work appears in Poetry, Po&sie, and The Best American Poetry 2007. BETHANY WRIGHT—poet, performance-installation artist, independent curator, teacher—is author of 4 chapbooks, including Indeed, Insist (a mystery) (Ugly Duckling Presse) and the forthcoming From Whence Undone (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008); has work also presently/soon appearing in Fascicle, 580 Split, Octopus, Mirage #4 Period(ical); has mounted solo performance works at several venues in New York and Portland, OR; currently (temporarily) lives in Iowa City with Joseph Bradshaw; teaches comp and film theory, especially Hitchcock; was a founding editor of FO (A) RM magazine, journal of arts & research; is gesticulating a groping spectrum soon to be a piece for theater. KRISTEN YAWITZ’S work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Xantippe, Five Fingers Review and other publications and has been featured on KQED’s program “The Writers’ Block.” She has worked with theatres and performance art groups on both coasts.
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