TA R PAU LIN SKY PRESS G R A F TO N, VT 2008
Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal Issue #15 / Print Issue #2 Winter 2008-09 Š 2008 Tarpaulin Sky Press ISBN: 9780977901982 Printed and bound in the USA. 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 Tarpaulin Sky Press and Tarpaulin Sky Literary Journal are grateful members of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
Publisher & Editor Christian Peet Editor Elena Georgiou Assistant Editors Caroline Ashby Sarah Brown Eireene Nealand Julianna Spallholz Guides Noah Saterstrom Selah Saterstrom Past Editors Rebecca Brown Bhanu Kapil Selah Saterstrom
Ta r p a u l i n S k y L i t e r a r y J o u r n a l Issue #15 / Print Issue #2 Winter 2008-09
CONTENTS Brandon Downing
Cover
The Women Pirates
Erin Lyndal Martin
1
Patty Hearst in Reverse
Michael Rerick
2
from How to Fight the Middle Class
Peter Davis
19
Poem Addressing Potential Publishers . . .
Dan Thomas-Glass
20
World Trade Organization
Patrick Morrissey
21
Insurgency
Tim Roberts
22
from Endlessness: A Lyric
Peter Davis
32
Poem That Suggests Ways . . .
Sara Veglahn
33
from The Mayflies
Kristi Maxwell
41
Satchel from Which is Pulled
Jess Neiweem
42
Songs From A Summer
Brian Henry
44
from Lessness
Rauan Klassnik
50
from Heaven
Kim Gek Lin Short
53
from Toland’s Datebook
Blake Butler
60
Comb Room
Peter Davis
71
Poem That Speculates . . .
Joanna Ruocco
72
Three Fictions
Laynie Browne
86
from Scorpyn Odes
George Kalamaras
90
The Problem with Missionaries
Brigitte Byrd
91
from Between Worlds
Bernard Noël
95
from The Rest of the Voyage
Rob Cook
96
Stone Snow After You Wandered
Jill Magi
98
from Cadastral Map / The Meander
Aidan Thompson
108
from A Little Bit Called Tremble
Heather Green
112
The Come Back
Megan Martin
113
Sparrow, Final Eulogy
Peter Davis
115
Poem That Reveals . . .
Corey Mesler
116
This Poem Is A Prayer
Richard Froude
117
from [Marjorie and Alfred (or) The Dashes]
Michael Clearwater
127
from Elegy Venues
Rae Gouirand
131
Sky Page
Peter Davis
133
Poem Making Assumptions . . .
Jonah Winter
134
from Bestiary
Jamey Dunham
137
Three Poems
Andrew Michael Roberts 140
chehalis
Mark Cunningham
141
[specimen]
Amber Nelson
142
from Horoscope
Cal Freeman
143
from A Key for Shapes and Kites
Gregory Howard
147
My Brother
Kristen E. Nelson
154
from The Hole Family
Peter Davis
158
Poem That Indicates Something . . .
Contributors
159
Notes
Various Presses
159
Ads
Tarpaulin Sky
Erin Lyndal Martin Patty Hearst in Reverse I’m Tania! Up against the wall, motherfuckers! And then the gun disappears into the air. Where has she gone? She tells a strange man she will stay and fight. He sends crappy food to poor people. She is rich and happy!
Tarpaulin Sky
Michael Rerick
How to Fight the Middle Class seen language Though a neurotic may feverously attach himself to a domesticated animal, this has little to do with family romance or the Wolfman. The neurotic feels a semiotic disruption and the blurred line between felt and projected emotion seems to communicate over an actual bridge of language.1 you’re a couch, flop they stay with friends. she is curious to watch this part of him. she says there is a stranger sleeping on the couch on the porch. he says he knows who it is. how to fight the middle class The philosophy and film departments at Loyola University apply Adorno’s theory of simulacra to film and film a worldwide revolution. Because of their modernist lens, modeling the showing on H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the film is considered a comedy. The philosophy department issues an apology, citing their failure to recognize the meta-subjective nature of the viewer. _________________________ 1
This neurotic form of empathetic transference occurs most severely in highly industrialized societies. A new branch of Marxist psychology should be introduced to address domestication.
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
take up the recycling and garbage he likes electronics. he takes the transistor radio with him at night to put the garbage on the curb. the dj announces that Tucson has the highest crime rate in the country. turning to the house, it’s dark. going in his step-father jumps from behind the door. this goes on. don’t slip s ip\ s|ip on l A graduate student in mathematics attempts to calculate Derrida’s chain of signifiers. It is a hobby and he soon gives it up. No one has found any value in continuing the calculations.2 the sheen language he says I’ve seen enough. she says you don’t know the glow. they preen and coo. she’s not the mean she remembers. he’s not seen the family in a long time. they sift the conversation onto the floor. Mary and Joseph found it ironic Though vigorous attempts and proofs3 conclude the contrary, notions of encoded binaries and Hegel’s dialectic persist. Case studies show a 78% resistance to synchronic notions of time, deconstructive notions of subjecthood, a knotted universe, etc. _________________________ 2 3
For further study, see fractal theory. Published last year in Nature.
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
I beseech snow and he dreams of Antarctic snowboarding and a brown dome of trees. a voice repeats arbor. sewing pin grown to a push pin There is a clear link between Ponge and Barthes in that they examine the thingness of things. Another clear link is aesthetic and associative. They are both French and wrote during the same historical period. The kind of author4 each produced shows their difference: Ponge attempts to construct one out of soap, and Barthes lets go. I’m following the rules to get back at you, to you the space between her window and the parking lot fence serves as a bum hotel. they sleep and, she guesses, buy drugs, but never bother her. she walks quietly at night and they don’t snore. she wants sometimes to open the window and touch them. she wants sometimes to move. have you seen language Following Wittgensteinian precepts for linguistic structures, a Mississippi governor works with the city council to formulate a fluid design for urban planning. A compromise with a small sect of rural Kierkegaardians preserves a concentric traffic of commerce. The residents sleep so soundly at night the city is cloaked from the highway. _________________________
4
Which, since, has been reconstituted with new notions.
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
they said, around the whole yard we had all kinds of fires. there was a bonfire that singed the eucalyptus tree, the barbeque pit, the flares ‌ have you ever stepped on the hot sulfur drippings of a flare with bare feet? no? well, it makes running around with a flaming branch seem like a peace offering. see (sea) turn (turtle) The current debate of whether the U.S. is a colonial or empirical entity fails to take into consideration the radical thesis of totalitarianism. This is meant in the human, animal, and environmental sense. There is a giant whisk at the ready to beat together everything on land and in the sea. Whatever we label the hands, they are beginning to move.5 please speak in complete thoughts she did not speak for the first 5 years of her life. there was no apparent reason why. though, she was often seen staring seriously. this graph projects her cost and benefit during speech therapy and penmanship training. pool as cold Though Fanon’s theory of selfhood absent a dichotomous relationship with an oppressor works toward a positive autonomy, the lingering sexism disturbers some theorists. This could be a residual of, on the one hand, a certain resistance to closure, and on the other, a positive but bound predilection to closure. _________________________
Unfortunately, the extent to which a study of the hands, whisk, and batter would take is beyond this current study and should be approached through cross cultural anthropology. 5
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
3 inch skin at the wrist it just sits there on the table. shhh. I mean, along the arm. it’s no use talking about it. do you want to go outside? and smoke? yes. jump in jump in jump An anonymous source remarked that when Adorno received the first copies of his first book he stood looking at a copy a long time and remarked, what have I done? deadly alive seen how many people do you know who have done it? only one. I knew a couple. but a lot more that have just gone. yeah. then you’re just gone. the book about it a movie The pop culture, or postmodern, approach to teaching6 has often introduced Hollywood films7 and bestsellers8 into the classroom. One week of Anne Rice’s book Interview with a Vampire coupled with another week of the movie Interview with a Vampire disorientates students, which is the Jamesonian point of the endeavor.9 _________________________
See the journal English. A google search cannot produce a satisfying result for this genre. 8 A bestseller is probably best chosen by the concurrent year. Though, the chosen movie should correspond to the chosen bestseller of that year. 9 If the movie and bestseller chosen are not of the current year of classroom application, one should attempt to puzzle through nostalgia theory and openly show puzzlement to students. 6
7
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
lounge music languaging around as the bread cube touches the hot cheese in the fondue pot he remembers the drink he spilt on M last week and asking P over to watch a movie. ghost curtain shower Theoretically, Agambenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desire for a collapse of zoe and polis can be postulated within Shaolin society. Here utility and social organization is unified yet specialized, diachronic yet outside history.10 The major flaw in such a theory, as with most social critique, is the chaos of personal interaction. ___ | +=+ *(*))* #>+/+=* ____ &% $$$ <*> ^&^ += @! & <(*)> &^ did you hear that A small band of young scholars publish the anthology The Mythic Reader, a collection of myth and folklore theory. The anthology is occasionally taught to undergraduates and only a handful of times to graduate students. Out of print, the book is a footnote in the archive of a labor of love. _________________________ 10
Outside history in the Nietzscheian sense.
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
what haughty love make we lived together through 4 states, 5 cities, and 9 apartments. I understood that cat more than most people. I petted her as she went down. when I was alone bouncing a rubber ball through all those years, she was there. we learned each other’s language. sound after a collision Lacan smiled into every mirror, just a little. This included pools, metal, and other reflective surfaces. He stopped smiling when non-reflective objects began mirroring. This included dirt, whitewash, and insects. deadly alive language unable to escape time, he sits. he sits until there is nothing. he sits until there is a sudden shift inside. he sits slumped and straight. he sits through the ache. he sits for only ten minuets. he is about to say. this is a word, it’s important | and Pre-Marxist economic fractals11 traced in the Iliad, specifically the exchange of gender, reveals that not Achilles’ shield, but Hector’s wife represents the proletariat struggle for liberation in the face of the tyranny of eros. pris _________________________
11
this is a word, it’s important | and
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
how to fight the middle class seen language I know this one. All forms of love, visa-vise the other, appear to be some form of narcissism, editorialism, masochism. The question is, is the disruption necessary?12 you’re a couch, flop Fanon’s theory of selfhood (“winterism”), I read, was inspired by a Michael Chrichton novel. Lacan smiled. The unconvention of embrace in the bay ruins The March of the Penguins and enlivens the Bride of Chucky college for hundreds. we had all kinds of fires. how to fight the middle class the space between [the] window and parking lot attempts to calculate Derrida’s chain of signifiers (::::::::::) into every mirror, [and], well, they haven’t heard it, listening to Bob Marley, every little thing’s gonna be alright. +=+,13 like gadgets, [a] neurotic form of transference. take up the recycling and garbage Though a neurotic may feverously attach himself to [the] domestic, he dreams of Antarctic snowboarding and a brown dome of trees. the insidious nature of power. but it’s hotter here, Thus, not only a synchronic notion of time and space, but also disruptions in linear notions of subject relations. _________________________
12 they knew each other when they were younger, dressed like push pins. in New York, they stand and look the same way. 13 gadgets.
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
don’t slip s ip\ s|ip on l animal, this has little to do with family, with friends, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, a collection of myth and folklore theory: the U.S. is a colonial or empirical entity absent a dichotomous relationship with an oppressor. she says you don’t know the glow. they stay. the sheen language an actual bridge of language,14 a clear link fence, hotel, drug, sleep. she is curious to watch her mother, her cousin in Mexico, a small band of young scholars preen, coo, and smoke. she snorkels15 among the legs and snorkels.16 she wonders.17 Mary and Joseph found it ironic an absence of twittering I heard at so-and-so’s party in a retracted statement, Benjamin arguing Jameson, Saturday night. drunk and slipped, you know, the song was still playing Wittgenstein. they say, hu. it was difficult to be in the house after the philosophy dj announced the neurotic and semiotic disruption blur. I beseech snow and there is a stranger sleeping on the couch, he takes the transistor radio with him. turning to the house, it’s dark. (A google search cannot produce a satisfying result.) he sits until there is a sudden shift inside. _________________________
Domestication. and watches turtles loll in the slow undulations of tide 16 of other tourists 17 if the turtles ever snap 14
10
15
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
sewing pin grown to a push pin a meta-awareness or syntactical ambiguity: deny any such purposeful construction.18 Yet, also somehow a necessary horrible wreck. This can take the form of fascism, though the alarm goes off and she considers the word again, theory.19 I’m following the rules to get back at you, to you Wolfman. *(*))*. A graduate student works toward a positive autonomy, breath. are you going, you have to go and at least see the film part of him. she says, he knows who it is. you want the conversation onto the floor. yes. have you seen language a worldwide simulacra Adorno says, Barthes says, Zizek says. an aesthetic thingness of things in Pre-Marxist economic fractals runs dreamy, defying power from within power with a knotted universe, soap. a positive Kierkegaardian film revolution jumps from behind mathematics. they said, around the whole yard at Loyola a voice repeats, arbor. she walks quietly at night Following precepts for linguistic structures, notions of encoded binaries and Hegel’s dialectic. a handful of zoe and polis archives a labor of love in the face of the tyranny of eros. the river asks, but she won’t go. _________________________ 18 she had gone. 19 to formulate a fluid urban design.
11
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
see (sea) turn (turtle) romance20 occurs at night, a compromise to sleep soundly at night, on land and in the sea. the chaos of personal interaction (#>+/+=*) puzzles through nostalgia (+++++=(.)), a just little twittering, their disfigured weather subject. please speak in complete thoughts Though vigorously. examine the clear and associative link,21 a bonfire to the giant human and animal comedy. pool as cold as the department showing modernist crime rates, a hobby in continuing calculations, synchronic case studies in proofs he wants sometimes to consider a radical thesis of totalitarianism. he does not speak through the lingering sexism but it sits there, a hot sulfur dripping flare. 3 inch skin at the wrist couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t translate what happened to that girl out back by the dumpsters. then,22 the hidden cost of reformulation believes in a contradiction that is not a contradiction but an application clearly defined and split between a unified diachronic. jump in jump in jump Generally speaking I can imagine her in the library shuffling little noises on the table â&#x20AC;Ś shhh â&#x20AC;Ś including whitewashed objects mirroring flaming things like a peace offering. _________________________
12
20 The philosophy film. 21 The most severely highly industrialized society. 22 all day I was inspired by labor
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
deadly alive seen between the French bum Barthes and the garbage Adorno occasionally taught, The Mythic Reader is just gone. The Iliad, the proletariat Hector’s wife, just gone. a major flaw outside history includes an ache to escape time traced in a particular puzzling in lesser poets. the book about it a movie I’ve seen enough. An anonymous source remarked. a citation from sleeping a few minutes. when I was alone and fell and broke the small and easy. What have I done? a certain resistance, I mean, <(*)> to other forms of drives. lounge music languaging around he says, a 78% resistance to family, (drink), through an ambiguous aesthetic relationship with meaning, exposes the result, (drunk), of The current debate of environmental pop culture and bestsellers. ghost curtain shower how many people receive no model at all. time that is still emotion recognizes value in touch. hands beginning to move in concentric guesses, running around, fail to take failure seriously. do you know who has done outside angels in a perfect juxtaposition? ___ | @! [(+=5}. <*> “-)]”____. 4 &^ & $$$, += #. &% ^&^. 5 = +. <//>, %*23? (). _________________________ 23
9
13
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
did you hear that theory of lens modeling between the lines projected over the country. she felt put on the highest notions of the historical time period, cloaked in everything Hollywood.24 she wants to step to that graphic life staring only the smiling. what haughty love make or seems an apology for a new branch often projected along the arm bound for a footnote.25 viewer, communicate and identify the great concrete on the closed hand on the door. sound after a collision show Ponge deconstructive notions in the meta-subjective nature of the highway curb. city residents preserve a traffic anthropology, but not the mean. remember, they soon give it up. Ponge, they persist subjecthood constantly to The construct of Nature. but don’t open the window. deadly alive language because of their film issues, he is about to say, Achilles’ struggle for gender liberation. she rises to find a translatable reference. they’re making a movie about it, he feels. unfortunately she doesn’t go to her theoretical Castle anymore. they introduce an address a long time, talking about it in every language they are learning to evade closure Theoretically understood as bouncing straight for ten minutes. _________________________
a Mississippi Interview with a Vampire, the movie and bestseller, films Anne Rice’s book Interview with a Vampire. produced to show A bestseller and movie correspond, that the first year serves her attempt at Marxist psychology. 25 on a porch.
14
24
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
this is a word, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s important | and It is in she, he â&#x20AC;Ś not seen a long time. No one has found any kind of work, planned commerce for their Plato-Bob-Dostoyevsky today. This is meant in the Whatever we label it sense.26 another week disorientates their last week specialized in social critique, training therapy. each she, he language went down rubber. pris
_________________________ 26
Romantic, Modern, Postmodern, Post-Postmodern.
15
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
how to fight the middle class an acre of drawn ledges, seen pressured by language, is a flat silver mountain with blue sanding dust a weekend team works through a grid of discarded couches. each adventure for the good, final flop I never learned how to say the street name, locally. didn’t learn to fight in a karate school. never felt what we, the middle class, were traffic patterns take up signals from stop lights, predicated on recycling routes and regardless of garbage roofs in a row don’t show what’s inside, though the roof state lets slip some s ip\ of the pockets and faces s|ipped on before leaving l the dirty abandoned window sheens at night. a language of maps avoids the safest lines home they superstitiously name the airlock Mary, and the dock Joseph. tight quarters find the crew naming each un-ironic object I tumble like a ball, beseech snow, and avoid the open patches he tracks a trail of sewing pins strewn along a curb. the collection, grown too large for his hands, leads to a cache of push pins
16
I am never following you, never abiding by the rules, never here to get back to the beginning, never veering at you, never getting to you
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
seen forward up an incline the exertion language they make it went around, they say. I ask if they mean around the whole yard. yes, the whole yard, and all the places in between. I am amazed away from the city she sees the long distance of winter trees and feels her body adjust to the damp. a sea of needley mulch is overturned by her boots, she unzips her coat so the swimming Florida turtle can peer out of her yellow shirt pleased rows of pansy blooms speak, as yet, incomplete for the daffodils. thought signs solicit aerially, a southern California pool cartography displays a pleasing array of irregularities. the periplus experience is a pool as cold as the air, or painted blue and empty auspicious 3 inch wrinkle, skin an omen underneath, bent at the wrist they notice a sudden jump. they think shift in time to the space in the alley and jump a little in their clothes but the jump of time they never mention graffitied on the deadly pilings: la. on the shipping trucks, the warehouses, the corner store: les, les, la. the vandalâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trail, la to la, stenciled in palatino linotype alive from the overpass he teaches the book spin-off of a movie, and it is not about the movie, but how it makes a book more like a movie. a student asks the moral. he says, like cigarettes leading to alcohol
17
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Rerick
the dim lounge is everything that could be imagined, but the pool table music and Christmas lights languaging around the bar are staggeringly disappointing you are not the ghost. settling the curtain against the sill when I enter the room. you shower branches onto the roof in a perpetual ice storm. you peripheral dot squiggling off ___ | ?: (m). ^, ###o###; --- &. O they lay still. the ufo hums off. they sit still. the hag rambles through the bare winter thicket. they stand still. the murderous plot mists away. they look down. the emasculated haint stays. they want to speak. did you hear that she says, what an awful mess. a haughty distinction of desire, the love of its merry-go-round. swerving to make the stomach sick sound fails to travel. stuck in the momentarily. just after. bright as a collision the deadly weight of wonder after wonder blooming in architecture, deep in a canyon, alive above treetops. inscriptions speak a language impossible to read. wonder, wonder any point in the abstract is moveable. say, a word, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slide put silently on | a corner where and a kitten sits. not erasure, but receptacles
18
nous ne pris que cette
Tarpaulin Sky
Peter Davis
Poem Addressing Potential Publishers of This Poem, Thanks! Perhaps you are considering this poem as part of a larger manuscript, or possibly you are considering it as a single poem or in a small group of poems for possible publication in some type of poetry-related journal. I hope you like this poem enough to publish it, obviously, that’s why I’ve sent it to you. I’m trying to imagine how I might make it better, but I don’t know what to do. Hopefully, you are thinking something like “This shit kicks serious ass!” or “This sentence is especially good. This quoting of me is terrific. Really, really good.” I think it’s pretty good or I wouldn’t be sending it to you. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. Looking forward to hearing from you.
19
Tarpaulin Sky
Dan Thomas-Glass
World Trade Organization
20
World Trade Organization as such… & the marriage of how might have happened & did in actuarial dawn – tripping heathens, forms of history, depletions – & K among us would we barter? Would we give up shoes for paintings, Adorno for antelope, once-times, nevers? The systempoem wishes on words to cull spaces & lull collections from dust or dusk of reason – no. A-9 long corridors of examples fourteen-song recombinant exchange beneath glass templates parlayed between windows for end products – face powders – kaddosh kaddosh below iron in our time of times & webs when the making-makers eat wholly wholly teeth grind at grist sifting flowers to string new lates. Un-leafed from gold infinity spectacles our seeing, majestic impossibles gather breath, gut-punched & awestruck.
Tarpaulin Sky
Patrick Morrissey Insurgency
When the insurgency arrived, the door burst. He waited on the threshold and wondered if. Names clattered past; the street filled with stones. They tore down the signs and staved all the windows. He did not know and almost burst with unfamiliar urgency. A hole in the imagination the shape of a body. They gathered around to watch it die. For each thing, at least two names; for all things, one. They made a law to streamline understanding. They gathered around to hear things said. It took time to clear the streets; at first they were patient but they couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t eat stones. He stared out through a hole in understanding. He imagined a house and began with the door.
21
Tarpaulin Sky
Tim Roberts
from Endlessness: A Lyric
22
I wouldn’t know what you were doing. I wouldn’t be able to take those tests, to take those tests with rue. Then it would start all over. These were different walls. These were white moving inward, windowed, chimnied, folding, vertical. We communicated across the folds, every test pointing to now. On board ship, they collaborated. They shared what had come up the night before. The circumstantial lamplight. Take out your wallet. Take out a 10 x 3. Then, as if you were complete in the allotted space, the partial room with those other people hiding somewhere (isn’t every word precise?), the offerings wilted like consequences of the past. The world hits with a face blowing its rhyme, soil against a blue sea. If what you’ve seen is like what we already have, then keep doing it, no matter what the water looks like. If what you said is like a bullet piercing through, then we’ll dig until our eyes glint. A metal sheen is thrown around my upper home, the things that have to happen now. Like seasonal green that drowns a living tree. Like elephants pressed against a retaining wall, their notions are but three. I’m sorry about the poorest shards, which at night barely number three. They don’t escape us, or remark us, unless we test them and we see, on the north side snowing. On the south side melting, I’m not sure we included thee. Strings to earth. Constant description attaching. In a box. Nothing to do. Until we notice an amount from “out there,” which becomes a story, of later days, on the front porch,
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
no longer in a hurry, not caring whether the world sang or succumbed. Our formal attire, this pustule or your own body. Give thanks. This rest of the body, for safety. Let’s sing about it—the rest of the body, the rest of the body. If I were counting these within variant degrees of space there would be different measures, depending on the primeval, depending on a sheet of something firm, that finally became spiral, and therefore that unvarying song, which is simply a way to shift outward, the face of disease. Now, here’s what’s contained in nothing: bright neighborhood, no one very long said to be lain low. And if I were. Asking you, that is. Asking you by the fact of what I am. Still he has nothing to do. Still my interlocutor reaches out. What does a feeling person make? The sun will be a soul again, one soul. The sun will have its components justified, it will have land in the same fractions as labor. Happy then, like a wassail or a shimmer. Looking then, over the countless nothing doorways. Having forgotten touch, labor returns. It downplays and belittles its ostensible pattern. It says, not this way comes anything. How old do you have to be? Since I have been asking that question, the spoiled spot has grown. You would not be able to fathom a mountain, you would run into trouble from day one. You would freeze, even against the face of your father, of her father, running naked (until this year). Seasons have shed your life for you, the very service we’ve come to rely on. Interesting maturations happened in those decades, but now it’s up to us, to look squarely into the whirlpool, naturally occurring. When we are old, charity is outside of us, tension is disturbed. If right comes from such capable hands, it must be a great craft to extinguish it. The
23
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
24
rating’s gone. The nude escapes. It was impossible to know the full count of ballets or mistakes. Don’t give me money, it will only drag me down. Here, let me impart what my mother imparted to me. Make sense of things. Make the golden shaft rushing overland toward your soft center into the payoff, not the paydown. Like a symphony we gather every year, chanting. What light would you make, if there was light? What face would be in front of you if you had any face at all? I forget who the patron was, surely a member of the tribe, surely a dancer nearby. I forget what shapes were left unsaid, but at night we weren’t supposed to speak shapes anyway. To break from those requirements. Even if you could stay with one poem invisibly counting a continuous song, just right against an oracular opening, oval lung. I wrap my shoes around a safe reply, I am nowhere to be found. I have fled the relationship. I am nowhere in this round hall, or this restaurant/bar. I have a wardrobe. There are mixed results, there are mixed greens, jack cheese, what’s around me. Music creeping from our pores, each layer infiltrated, one atop another, for such tithe as self is made of. My whole eye is a tread the earth makes, my “Hey wait, now we’re being told.” Now we’re locked in an embrace. 3-year facial. Why so much awesome sadness? If you don’t have a vision, there are ways around that. If you’re in a cubicle we can help you. We can get you to where you won’t need a great body of unified ways of looking. It was the moment when a neutral body arose. Translating nothing was disgusting. Everyone was the same height. Each labored jonquil was a Gerry curl. Each sequence looked the same but only today, with its porches and platforms of the tongue. To adjust to the new wave,
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
were the tiny bodies too old for that? Were they fortunate to “succeed”? What else would happen before the whole disconnected communicative apparatus shrunk to a pea? That frozen afternoon voices connected across questionnaires, backward comprehension of birth tension. Make no remark about my intelligence. As if it were a poem. As if it knew what to say or what it was about. My heat arises from other sources, other sources talked about. The long conversation with my father. The delectation of waking up one morning, perhaps alone, perhaps against a wall. Intelligence, place before a feeling came. Emboldened to watch the body breamed. Nothing grows around the body except this. We have special gloves, we hear special notes. We cable to the spheres what won’t fit in a message we could cable. If only to repeat it. Three women walk contemplatively along an empty road near a warehouse, early sunny morning. They thought of no poem. I moved along, I believed something else entirely. Since what I am: heat, urgency. Far away. What did the women think? Would the world be going to hell? What forest would you yourself provide? How many angels looked for you across the room? The orgasm is a way to recover from the walking we have done. I serenade like the jostle of machinery, I resemble the heavenly matrix, which is etched across a dome. In the place outside of here the violent animals roam. Is that where we should go? First voices, gravelly, experienced, must be heard. First the world’s intelligence takes hold and there’s no question of my interference. First a wave of being every day. First to know what you know, to know what you do not know. How was it that clean, when you were thrown
25
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
26
out of your house? Who else was in the room with you—nothing genuine, legs, feet in place to withstand a precise attacking? We’ll always grieve our round numbers together, think of it, think of what time allows. Particles even now settling sideways into the hush. I don’t know what continuation is. At 40, we start to wish for not only more ice cream but for the kids to eat it with. By that time we’ll have been out of touch for twenty years. The neighbors are heard wandering near each other, in the nick of time. The gendarmes have soul—something to turn to and the lions feed on Wednesday nights. Thin devotion, for the rest of the week, thinking the hunt, what visitors mostly observe. With the right chemicals, nutrients, that is, we leave off sparing these new souls. Like marbles they slavishly follow cost-effective inclines. They result, which allows them to be monitored. Then when finally books are published about the timing metrics, we holler from the kitchen porch. Constitutions—look, let’s just say that our tears inculcate their own magnitudes. And if you laced a canyon with a freight train, why didn’t you peek at the final descending acknowledgments, the white centered text scrolling slowly but surely? Lowly but purely. Hmm. Static seems to forbid us to leave. If not for the announcements there would be no knowing (a) when the tickets were checked, or (b) the valence of the oppressive technologies. Now, back to Living. Back to what part of your body you heard lies in. The green knight. Something appeared when I was not there. Some shy official put up boards everywhere. And to know an expense report is to be one. Look, what we really wanted, to indicate the washboard syndrome. I personally trace the troop movements back to the invention of
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
gloss. None of the other nasty habits could stand that kind of test, shaking at the root. The period of waiting seems to interrupt the functioning but holds sand and syllable of its proper cause. Two sides of a river have divorced each other and there’s no telling what the new plans are. Each of the faces turns inland. When it’s time for the last breath, we survey the last round then peer through that. I don’t care what kind of shelter is current, just that certain derogations take place. The whole neighborhood was impacted, but in a good way. Not necessarily by our policies, though it’s possible to look to the studies that were done and talk some more. Nowadays no one is left, from back then, and we’re concerned with present disturbances. We mostly accost them with our daily thing but it’s nice to put a nice face on it later, right before bed. Still couched in the appeasement, this is when our real love of the agreement comes into play. Its terms function as organs, the word for heart, the word for head, the word for when and where. Deeply grateful we notice in the morning that the entry is clean. The mud falls from the clean faces of the officials who imagined this for us. Not until much later in the day does the abstraction of junk become a blue factor. By the time of the nuptial we’re torn by the old linkages. Lust like blushed potatoes stuck to a skillet, smell of old oil, taste hidden behind mouthwash. There are a few more dreams than I would have said. I’ll leave off counting and calculation. Ropes are manufactured instantly and everything between our hands looks like the middle of a plot assigned by a disappearing office. Ordinary gentlemen must have been watching. They placed bets in this windlessness and general fixation. Then operatives operate
27
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
28
on operation, nonstop resurrection, a perfectly erect election, an indication that grimly led to the end. Each prelate was a particle of reality, any given pope succeeding in office. None of the popes lacked calm, prelates and constables crowding around. But it’s more than I could meander into this morning, these general affinities. Let’s not climb too far together, I mean alone, once we’ve separated and the cable cars are whisking away party members. Too many functions of my value look like reservoirs spreading fever. And that flock compensates, anytime really, for the lost flock of last week. If it’s not too much, tell me what you’re thinking. The bullet stops because we turn to the mundane fixes. We turn to the shapelessness of custard. Sex tags our libido for who we are. Any excuse will do. A haggard shape, every word lopsided. Different things have been bought for me. Released from thinking, each history is a little horny. I’ve never been with you, either. I never caught sight of what you were thinking. We’ve agreed to believe. What if she never told the truth? How many cycles do we go through? Does anyone have the time? My organic metaphor, my shoe size. I have passed into the solidity of my own head. Now that you’ve met yourself, say you’re sorry, say what might happen. The hammers and saws are the noises of morning, as if definitions above the sky were like orbiting flowers. This constitution, that constitution. I’m not sure who is looking. I’m under the traffic in a tunnel of crimes. Any tube would have done but our sudden riches purchased transitional comforts, like syrup and honey. To believe that she’s there because the markers are, because in holly bush and frock the instruments rust. If seeds on air then feet on metal heart-ground. Eyes on paranormal
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
ordinary melt. I could be any one of these machine-made objects, since I built the machines. If paperwork then roll up your sleeves. Content yourself, divagate, but coffee your spittle and wash your eye. Building maintenance, candy sales, bus routes. Philosophy is crazy. Her parents were dead but they left her the Mercedes. The new models were already shipping. I guess entanglements don’t pay off, but put the ringing phone in your pocket. I would shake until the cow’s arrived. I would be a harbor caught within a margin never trying to touch you. In multitudes of exits the savage lines appeared, and as we were leaving I wanted to “show up.” In multitudes of texts different natures crawled, with none of us to trace them. They shook as they faded. Then suddenly the voice of intimacy. He held the door for us and said it was time to go. We had our doubts. Then present company consisted purely of the well-adjusted. Suppose these voices were not following a pathway, that they had been stretched across the temporary partitions. And who was to question this caliber of instruction, if it could mount such a resurgence in the aspect confronting it? None of the men have lipstick. How unpleasant they’ve become, their combativeness, their sexual racing forward. That presence, someone simply sitting there, retracing habits and collecting leaves. Have you in your stupid cape been able to be yourself in front of yourself? What is supposed to feed the cohesion? At your own expense, with all your might, you uttered “might.” But what awful gradations have you now found enpalmed. If everything is grey and dandelions are hiding. That means it’s time to reconsume the favor. And what to do, as expressions & wounds are licked, as counterpoise is analyzed and fragrance is
29
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
30
abolished like the luster on the docks, for removal all over again? The fantasy is a questioning fantasy, of being able to question. Then recursive personal imagination before the bell rings and the door closes. Harmony is nothing if not hard, music the world makes. The nasty looks, reduplicated staring, clean but for the dust of exhaust. I was clean, too, I want to say. Instead I throw a rock, go home, look up. Instead, as things happen, a paroxysm derives its outline against a burning from within, from without. If we show each other to each other’s communities. Toil loops its ladders past the mundane avenues. It’s never funny. Had he meant something to her, had he fallen in the ruin, had the blast meant the falseness of dimness of a pageant of ruin? Shapes of self-pity renumber in the stockyard. Existence has little pulp, but appears to shadow what becomes of native folk. Please remember, if a small name replaces you then it comes forward pronouncing its own wish. There’s one thing my mind adores. It is the typical compliments. It’s what we’ll put our money toward. A believing bubble. A tragic spate of concurrent trouble. Then what happens, the altarpiece, the ray that woke somehow. Even if I were to hurt myself. This is only a drawing, with cap, nose, mouth, on a structure that prevents the intrusion of hard objects. You didn’t. I mean you yourself said it. You yourself did it then said then woke up early and went out, to a place. I was anxious, but my teeth knew what to do, parachutes were cheap in those days, dogs were awful, handbooks got us started, state fair letdown, whatever else on the list that was named at the meeting. In the field the lions cry. They carried lanterns, they offered madrigals when our eyes longed for salt. I’m sorry but that chain, between
Tarpaulin Sky Tim Roberts
us or any other oddity, is gone. In fact, there’s less to do than you think. The polarities and pachyderms having really the same skin tone as what of ourselves we see, result in concupiscent shelves & airways. And the luster’s where I want to be and am, if you have followed. In fact it’s nearly nighttime but I’m sure I’ll choose to stay. Grandstand your congratulations, ration food and blood. Ration the r’s, the a’s, the tides. This morning in any case the beaches are gone. The gloss in our galoshes shines with fire. The nit’s solved and you’re welcome to leave. We have to stride, in thought, to a birdhouse or beachhead. Once achieved, the shade of our still hinging topic steps into an untimely repetition. Once retrieved, we struggle to look at the top results. It will catch us, I’m sure it will, though not before I finish writing. There are two entities to keep watch over, a shield and a sword. They suggest completely foreign stories but nonetheless the same one, the lackluster, polluting, overdone one.
31
Tarpaulin Sky
Peter Davis
Poem That Suggests Ways That You Can Use This Poem To Enrich Your Community
32
I hope you will understand that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m only trying to write a good poem. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not trying to show off or do anything other than entertain you in such a way that leaves you feeling enlightened and impressed. Depending on how you feel about all of this, you may want to consider writing a reflective essay which will give you the opportunity to think more deeply about this poem. You might at least consider talking about this poem with a number of your friends, or on your blog. If you are a teacher, or involved in academia, you may want to mention it to your students or friends in the department. I know it might seem strange, but you could suggest forming a reading club devoted to this poem and the complex and simple issues it illuminates.
Tarpaulin Sky
Sara Veglahn from The Mayflies
A day of sun. There were swallows on the power lines. A
kind of warning. Or a good omen. Later, the sky turned green in a sweep of wind. The tornado sirens sounded. Terrible wind. She thought she heard the roof crack open and fly off. She thought she should gather herself and her things, but where to go? Everyone walked out to the streets to see what had been strewn. The roof remained intact but every shingle had been torn off and thrown to the swampy grass. So many people with hands on their heads, so many with hands over their mouths. After walking through her neighborhood and finding all of the felled trees, she went back to where she lived. There were things to be raked from the lawn. There were things to put away. The sun shone through the muddy windows making strange shadows on the walls. She gathered herself up slowly, she walked the floor the way a farmer walks his fields. Everything was out of place, as if a smaller wind had come inside. It replaced one thing with another. The plates were where the cups should be. The shoes were in the bathtub and the soap was on the floor near the door. Her books had been double-shelved, a row behind a row. Now the back row lay on the floor, leaving the front row intact. Nothing was missing.
33
Tarpaulin Sky Sara Veglahn
Before everything,
34
there are first things. Small high window views. Her little prison when she was small and waiting. She saw everything that she saw. A mistake in wanting. Everyone waving where she could monster. Throw this mean over the fence. The green was actually shining. And now flung or thinking so. She was waked.
Tarpaulin Sky Sara Veglahn
It came from far away, as scheduled, and then left
in a stream of debris and ice. Most of her life was spent looking forward to when she would see its dark and frozen body. It was the 76th year. The year it would come again. She was ready. She was impatient with the loudness of living among a very quiet family. The comet came when she was impatient to leave. Before, she was content with small tasks. School assignments or treks to the meadow. She would eat lunch there. Vienna sausages, packets of Saltines, hard-boiled eggs with paper squares filled with salt and pepper. She ate with small methodical bites. After, she would sit and pretend she was a pioneer. She did not have anything to wait for but now there was a comet. It was an event she felt she had been preparing herself for her whole life. She knew about the astronomer, how he first discovered the orbital period of the comet in the early 1700â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, and that soon she would see the same thing that he saw. She knew that comets had been feared. One appeared shortly after the death of Julius Caesar. One was thought to signify the fall of Jerusalem. One appeared around the time Mt. Vesuvius erupted signaling the last days of Pompeii. One appeared when the Black Plague struck London. One was blamed for starting the American Civil War. She did not fear them. The day came. The forecast was clear. She went to the meadow. She had her binoculars. She waited.
35
Tarpaulin Sky Sara Veglahn
36
The sky was clear and there were hundreds of stars. She stared at them until they blended together making an illuminated swirl that made her so dizzy she had to look away. She felt it, then. The comet, the streak of light across the sky, the trail of dust and ice, had passed. She looked up and saw the remnants of its arc or she saw the blur of stars she had seen before or she saw the stars or the comet or she saw the comet or the stars or she was dizzy with looking or she was waiting, or she looked again to see the comet or she looked again to the stars, or she saw something out there that night, or she would have to wait many years to be sure.
Tarpaulin Sky Sara Veglahn
One woman saw a horse in human flesh, descending on
a hammock through the air, and as it neared her house it was metamorphized into a man, and this man approached her door and threw something at her which seemed to be rubber but turned into great bees. Another was lost in a vast swimming pool where she found she could breathe the water, that it was better than breathing air. Once she finally was able to emerge from the pool, she was transported to a large room filled with sugar and salt. Everything was made from it: the furniture, the light fixtures, the paintings on the wall. The room seemed to be prepared for a great banquet and there was a long table filled with food. The food was made from sugar or salt molded into the shapes of fruits and meats. It seemed she was sent there to figure out which was which. She found she couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell the difference.
37
Tarpaulin Sky Sara Veglahn
(her ladies inquire) “So you thought you were drowning?” “I couldn’t be sure. It was unclear which way was up, how to move, where to go. It was a strange perambulation. I heard some sort of water bird, I saw many gliding along the periphery, watching me. There were mayflies, an undertow, I knew this from what everyone said about moving bodies of water, and there were currents that could swiftly carry you across state lines if you caught them. The currents seemed to me like a train or bus you would wait for and get onto. But of course it wasn’t like that. I was seeing all kinds of blue, I was trying to emerge.” “How did you get away?” Her ladies were all leaning forward. They held their chins in their hands, they sat cross-legged on the floor in dresses made from pale chiffon.
38
“To leave a place is difficult. I understand motion, but am unclear about how to ignite it. Most places are like others. I often feel as if I were somewhere else. As if one city grid were placed on top of another, inserting its atmosphere as well as its architecture. I’m not sure how else to explain it. It’s not me that is displaced, but the landscape.”
Tarpaulin Sky Sara Veglahn
A dream: She is sitting next to someoneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sickbed. A lantern lamp twirls pastel light around the room. She cannot see who is lying in the bed. There are too many blankets, all white. The only clue that there is someone there is one hand resting on top of all the whiteness.
A steady hum persists as she sits. It is almost too loud to bear. It is like metal on metal crossed with electricity and speaker feedback. It is like being in a horror movie except there is no blood, no demon, no evil. Everything is white and pure and calm except for the horrible noise. She tries to move the sheets to see who is lying sick in the bed, to see who is going to die soon, but something, the hum maybe, prevents her from doing so. She wakes knowing the person she could not see in the bed was her. She thinks this is a prophecy of her own death, and that she will probably be dead in the next day or two. This does not happen. It was no prophecy.
39
Tarpaulin Sky Sara Veglahn
I could tell you that it is possible to understand loss
40
and to cease feeling haunted by it, but this is not a ghost story. There are no apparitions, no cold spots on the stairs. All of my photographs are free from mysterious smoke. But the landscape bears down on me. All the words Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve meant to form have dissipated. Are you still here? Are you? If you could send me a sign, or give notice that you have not forgotten. Something small. Something I can see in the atmosphere.
Tarpaulin Sky
Kristi Maxwell
Satchel from Which is Pulled Swaddled spark jotted onto the atmosphere— How do we with surety tangle the appropriate vine? We’ve tired of resisting charm at the fairgrounds of our most favored accusations. And so step, and so skip, and so slip our skipping into sprint. Here is beauty to raise with fingertips crammed under all sides. What illusory carton would will us be milk or pus, a substantial filling? We cartographers confined to a solitary inch for culling. Slimmed to fit these shared accommodations, how we share. Scent confined to the closure of petals—who leads the rapture chorus on the banks? Who feigns rafters to our praise will trap us there.
41
Tarpaulin Sky
Jess Neiweem
Songs From A Summer i. The heat traps us. There is no shade Beneath this tree, Within this lake No water. The Graveyard closes Like a fist at Dusk, in morning Opens like a Revolving door.
ii.
42
New foundations Mock us. We long To erase proof That we have been, To let our roots Consume us.
Tarpaulin Sky Jess Neiweem
iii. Under the ruins Moss; under moss, Ruins. What was once Shelter is now Fodder for rot. What kills us loves Us, what blinds us Builds nests above Our scalded homes.
iv. Here in the war Between wars, fool World biting flesh From stripped fingers, We make our stand, Determined to Love even this, Our undoing.
43
Tarpaulin Sky
Brian Henry from Lessness
Elegies for Failure She turned from the soapy dishes bent to unzip and take me in her mouth —I had been pushing
There I am in the movie on the blanket on a lawn her tongue in for the movie the razorburn soothed for a second by her spit she spits twice for the movie the first dribbled in the second deadcenter easing the tongue’s passage up.
One wouldn’t go down on me and one (built from the same chassis as the other) wouldn’t let me go down on her
44
—in both cases I felt cheated, destroyed.
Tarpaulin Sky Brian Henry
One would let me touch the edge but not go in, and one would not let me anywhere near. Neither wanted to fuck, but one did.
*
Dust mites dig into me
flare my skin.
There’s a difference between dig and bite. These dig as they bite. There’s a difference between knowing what you’re talking about and caring. Sing pollywollydoo all day.
*
All I remember of Nebraska is the vomit as it whipped back toward the car dappling the passenger side finished all the coke in Boulder the night before woke on some guy’s floor the photo on the porch
45
Tarpaulin Sky Brian Henry
* To set a bone that’s been popped. A shoulder untied to a center.
An embolism, and you’re down. A muscle tears in your back and you’re down. A ligament in your ankle, pop, and you’re down. A kick in the groin and you’re down. Aeschylus done in by a tortoise shell. Montaigne’s brother killed by a tennis ball. You think you’re strong but cannot lift yourself by yourself. Hence the importance of community. Pack your bags, I’m moving in.
46
On the way to my apartment I never moved into everyone was evicted before I arrived he was driving my car and the headlights made a cat appear he braked and pulled so hard the car spun until it was facing the way we’d come next time kill the cat I said but maybe it was a deer.
Tarpaulin Sky Brian Henry
*
split in half down to the root itself snapped from its anchor in but not before weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re numb from ear to chin hugely open toothsmoke jawwrench bloodroot gumclot split in half down to the root
47
Tarpaulin Sky Brian Henry
*
The pressure drops migraines me I cough and one side of my head a gunshot wound warm front and rain left temple between vise ends remove it please remove me from me
The summer before the coke nosebleeds the nosebleeds were from something else foreign matter in my head three teeth pulled and no headache the girl nothing happened you took to a baseball game that night nothing happened a week later you drove her in your Spider with the top down into a thunderstorm on I-64 and though both wet and laughing nothing happened.
*
48
With nothing to say except through wine we drank and smoked until the edges smoothed and she turned on a side to invite me in and my body obliged though so unclear about what it was I was trying to do
Tarpaulin Sky Brian Henry
* Every dog deserves an elegy when it comes home from the oven and is placed with sadness and pride on the mantle or some other shelf to be dusted weekly for a while then monthly then not at all and when the man who was the boy who loved the dog so much he walked through snow to a phone to hear how she died and stood in the snow at the cornerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only phone to cry and remember and return returns home a decade after and thinks to look for the tin with the bag with the ashes inside he finds it on a shelf in a closet where nothing else from his childhood is.
49
Tarpaulin Sky
Rauan Klassnik from Heaven
A Long Night (8)
50
I took this man in, she said. My children were afraid. He bit his tongue in half, and he would not stop shaking. Please, you know what he did. He is a hero. A national hero. We all looked down. Tears hooked through my skin. But we hated him: shaking, defiant, destroyed. And nothing stopped us.
Tarpaulin Sky Rauan Klassnik
A Long Night (11) He sees himself walk up into a clearing, wiping his foreheadâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; and, here it is, dead. He wants to cry. He wants to punch the air. He is sweating. He is sweating like a pig. He is sweating like a fucking pig. The Lord giveth. And the Lord taketh away. He is standing over it. The heat is tremendous. His mind is glistening. His eyes and fingers shake.
51
Tarpaulin Sky Rauan Klassnik
The River (9)
52
Wild ducks call out. The lights have all turned yellow. I am shaking. I am strong. Men strip down. I am tired. Under the trees, in shadow and in light, a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s playing a violin.
Tarpaulin Sky
Kim Gek Lin Short from Tolandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Datebook My Feeling for Fame I was early felt for fame. A wet but serious actress who did not know I was a liquid. Who talked to the pneumatica who was a dramatic chorus. Who inside a teenage alchemist lived (his name was Harlan) who was my only maker ever since I splashed thereupon. My name, I was not sure, but the pneumatica made me famous, in a play I enacted continuously, in the shiny language of spilling. But Harlan called me Toland, a body I could not dissolve, for there was ages ago a girl (or so I hunched) who whirred about the wingparts of Harlanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heart, her ever fuzzy shape a storm by that name.
53
Tarpaulin Sky Kim Gek Lin Short
Villian
54
When they find me, they concoct a magnificent story. I am the heroine, and from the first time he sees me, Harlan sees nothing else. Many would, they say, but Harlan has â&#x20AC;&#x153;problems.â&#x20AC;? He finds a poof of curtain on an old rod, and he sees me. He runs to catch a bus, and the sidewalk is a rugged cliff falling into a flickering sea that is me. They smash the windows in his house, and under the dusty gables the grainy glass is me. I am too scared to look. I sit under my bandages and hallucinate several more examples. They choose the least literary, and I emerge like a boiled root vegetable from the scalding basement, soft and shining. Overall, it is an amusing story, they decide, like that comedy where things are dark at first and then they cry but less in the gut like laughter.
Tarpaulin Sky Kim Gek Lin Short
The Romance The summer I am ten I star in a romance. My romance is the fountain pen that blots my naval in black ink I cast as my inner bug a bug called Harlan. I offer does anyone want to enact it? No one wants to enact it. Before I draw that bug on my naval everyone especially boys want to enact it. After it is there every morning mother there to wash it, it wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t wash away. Long tops from now on, mother scolds, no more dolling-up. You shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have given her that pen, curses at father, father stares. Soon the ink is gone, mother did it. I try milk it does not work. Sister wonders does Harlan kiss you where does he kiss? I try soda very sticky my costume sticks to my naval. I take the costume off it is hot anyway. The tape of sugar attracts bugs the bugs taped to my naval. Sister wonders should I swat them she slugs me I fall hard. On the grass I stare: the smurfblue sky the clouds moldy raisins. Over time my naval changes the blue black blue of dead dried bugs, the bugs one plastic smear of hair like a Superman figure. Everyone especially girls want to comb it, how romantic, they pretend, they enact it.
55
Tarpaulin Sky Kim Gek Lin Short
The Crime
56
He was surprised how much water I swallowed before I squirmed. I had practice. I slept in a tub most summers it was the coolest place in that house. No matter how tight father turned the tap all night water trickled candlestick slow. “In or out,” he would ask, dangling the plug, in those days I had a choice. “In.” Down it went in the hole he kissed me goodnight. I dreamt of oars, April rain, dotted plastic curtains. I woke infused with fluid an intravenous drip. Once, without him knowing, I removed the stopper. It only took a moment and bugs came from the drain, lined the porcelain a hot velvet blanket. I’ve never been scared of bugs since.
Tarpaulin Sky Kim Gek Lin Short
Bug Soup Sister doesn’t look when mother picks with latex gloves the leaves crawling with bugs she does not see. She drops the leaves in boiling water until they are as her eyes less green, the bugs blisters on top. But she does not see. Mother asks, anything to eat? This soup is almost cool, the answer. Sister doesn’t look when mother eats the soup and the bugs on top of it all waxy buck of crayon. Nine months later mother names me “To-land” and when I am old enough I try not to look at the soup too, but it is no use, I am a door always ajar. Every summer is the soup shot-up with bugs she does not see (wings perforated like toilet paper). I won’t eat this soup this soup is bits of bugs, I pout. What’s the matter, mother asks, in love with bugs? To-land loves bugs, the answer. I eat the soup.
57
Tarpaulin Sky Kim Gek Lin Short
Circus
58
Whenever Harlan asks me to tell him about the circus as in â&#x20AC;&#x153;the children we are fated if a circusâ&#x20AC;? I do not answer but elaborately knot like wings the tube in my back and under the sheet push down my balloons and clowns pajama bottoms until both pantlegs are rolled around one of my ankles. Harlan slides under the steamy tent of sheet draped over my two bent knees and directs the circus of miracles he tries to therein cast. Sometimes Harlan doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ask again for a few days, and sometimes in a few hours. Sometimes from that soggy tent shapes of bodies trampoline into the wet sheet that I index into stage names, like a trick playbill, hopeful the spell will take.
Tarpaulin Sky Kim Gek Lin Short
Search Warrant They were polite but needed evidence. They had proof and shook a visionary book of posthumous poetry at us. We were flattered. We signed. They followed our corpse like deducing a beautiful Miltonic trick. They pulled everything they could understand out of Harlan’s sewing kit, and glossed the small margins with names of identifiable objects. Next to the passage about guilt, they write “wheelbarrow.” In a poem about love, they place “bug” next to “her.” Things might have been different had Harlan sewn instead of glasses, leather. Instead of pesticide, cologne. They never explain how the wheelbarrow fit in there, and sometimes, even now, I hear wood warping when I read that rare book.
59
Tarpaulin Sky
Blake Butler Comb Room
1. This certain room was filled with liquid. In this liquid there was light—shone from the stubbled ceiling wrought with scratching—illegible, duressed. 1.1 Deeper down the liquid’s thickness ate the glow and scrunched the space to gone. Perhaps still somewhere in there, drowned: my bed, my bedside table, my sleeping gown, my sleep itself, my head etched in the dresser mirror. 1.2 Sometimes, in night, this room would boil. 1.3 Sometimes the wet would flood with fungus, stuffed so tight you couldn’t see—fungus like what’d grown over the forest—fungus like our sea—fungus like that covering my mother in her fragments and my father gone wherever. 1.31 The fungus grew in several colors. Inside the fungus nits would burrow. Their paths would cause a pattern in which one might decipher incantation.
60
1.4 In this room for years I hid a cat named like mine until I woke to find how she’d combusted.
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
2. This certain room sat flush in fat. Chunks I’d known once. Shedded pounds—made of the shit I ate and carried with me, never needing. Dead energy. Hid light. 3. This certain room held certain people. Folks I might have one time known. I mean there was always someone in it. At least one, but much as hundreds, maybe. Listen—it was impossible to count. They formed a throng, these people, became each other. Mashing. There wasn’t anywhere to go. Their eyes would toddle, sloshing. Their foreheads seemed distended. They did not flinch when the house caught fire, nor for my shouting, nor when their air became a gong. 4. Upwards in my room of windows, I held my breath to stop the fog. In my lap the tape recorder buzzed, the speech spurred from its speaker. My voice did not sound mine, quite—more like a man I’d met one night, I think. My voice—my voice—mine. I turned to try to see my face reflected in the room of windows’ glass, but no matter how I turned, the surface curved obscure. I could not make the light behave around me. I could not find my eyes reflected—though I felt them with my fingers—my eyes right there in my head—eyes all wet and kind of greenish—green from my mother, whose glassy eyes were somewhere else. I had a picture of her somewhere. Can you see it? Can you see the picture? 4.1 Try again.
61
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
5. This certain room was wide as nighttime, wide as all of where I’d been. This room could hold a house within this house already. This room would warm towards its center. Inside this certain room I’d sweat and sweat and sweat. 6. In this room of windows I’d somehow gotten stuck. I’d come into it through some long hall—not like birth or death or dying—though I’d heard my mother’s voice. The hall branched to halls and halls again—halls sunk slick with bubbling from where the light had made the house melt—from where the house mashed against itself, like clockwork. I’d gotten crud all on skirt—black thick crud as from a motor, clogged in my fingers, in my hair. I’d felt it want to flex around me. I’d felt it slither up my thigh. By rolling in the light and holding my eyes shut and fists clasped and shouting out, I kept the crud out of my inside at least a while. 6.1 This room of windows did not have a door. As if I’d been inside it there forever. As if I’d—if I’d—if I’d—if— 6.11 However more I fought to remember, the more I buckled—deeper white.
62
6.2 In my lap, one small forgiveness, my tape recorder hummed. My voice, a tremored version, blabbing. I’d always hated my own sounds. I only recognized myself in the certain phrasings, rasps and inflections, flicks of tongue taught by disease. The language chopped in and out a little where the tape warped.
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
6.21 I spoke a language I don’t know. 6.22 I said: YUNYI-DEEKLETOTISH EISBEN BEELVIT NOIKKID DISHDOR. LER MANNIFIFS. PEEB BEWEREROIT CHACHERRERUM NOIVAT BEERY, BELVEIT SMART. SMART TOIFFINTZIT, QER-QA WATTLE WETTED WINTZ-CHOLD CHAH. 6.23 I did not know why I was saying that. 6.3 The tape went on in that same fashion for several hours. When it reached the end of one side, it flipped over to the other and went on. My voice began to make me feel transfixed a little. I played the tape again. 6.4 I played the tape again. 6.41 I played the tape again. 7. From inside the room of windows, there were things that I could see, such as the rooms. The things I saw out through the windows, unlike most windows, would often shift. 7.1 For certain lengths, through certain windows, when there were not rooms, there would be color—sheaths of long flat blue or white, like televisions. Other times the glass showed water: oceans, streams; condensation budding on the outside—someone breathing?—torrents, sideways rain.
63
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
Sometimes the water shot so strong it looked like nothing. Sometimes the path of the dripping traced out names. 7.11 Through other windows at other hours I saw whole long yards of crumpled trees. I saw the dirt upturned and goring, blasted black around the edges—holes where old buildings had once stood—now uplifted or sunk in or crumbling. I saw gobs of gush like milking candles pour in gobs against the coast, burbling at the mushy sandlots where as children we’d dug and buried, where we’d traced our names and watch them wash. 7.12 At other times there might be hours where disease would grease the sun. A pocky black blob which made the light skitch in and out. At certain angles the ruined lighting caused the room of windows to seem deeper than itself. During these conditions I would lay flat, flat as ever, if I could, and press my hands against my stomach and let my voice go on in wait. At times I’d find myself repeating what the tape said, the way it said it. Sometimes I chimed in right along. 7.13 In one window, for a minute, I saw the pasty bump of my mother’s womb.
64
7.14 Another time, a blinking iris, wide as awnings, green as mine.
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
7.2 One thing I could not see through the windows was the outside of the house—at least any walls or roofs or grass or driveways or the yard, or any of those other things one might find when looking outward, even now. 7.3 Through the windows also there was sound. It didn’t come clear from one direction, but more seemed to move of and by its will. It was sometimes difficult to determine what of the sound was elsewhere and what was in my head. As a small child I’d been burned once standing close to an explosion—my father’s chemist visions in the closet, mixing crap of several sorts together—trying, he claimed, to make medication that’d take the fungus off his skin—off the backyard—off the sky—even since then, in all those wormed years, I’d never learned the way of the vibration. In the night I’d hear men coughing, hear them whisper to me; I’d hear livestock stuck up in my bonnet; rodents singing in the pipes while drowning. There were often long low bowed tones. Muted trumpets. Baby goggle. Mewing of a horse. 7.31 Now, by sure, I knew, though—the house had learned a song. 7.32 The song could slither in one ear and out the other, or it could hover in my back, or it could fill my entire stomach with ballooning, or it could hush me into a tent of awful silence where I knew nothing but my gut. Whichever way it came it came on and on. It flossed me like a dentist.
65
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
7.321 It was there. 8. This certain room was made of me. Parts, at least, of my expulsions, my teeming refuse—all my ruin. The floor was packed and polished, made of all the stuff I’d sneezed, the years of sick, the tissued gumming. The walls were made of teeth. Teeth I’d lost as a child, helped by my father’s long forefingers toddling each canine and molar back and forth. Teeth I’d had in my skin once from when attacked by dogs. Teeth I’d swallowed in my sleep. Down from the ceiling—made of marrow) hung light fixtures strung up with splayed end braids of my cut hair, bulbs sat in little crowns made with my nail growths, curved weird and yellow, gummy stunk. The air hung wet with spit. The furniture stuck together with my eyelashes, with my urine, my dandruff, my booboos, sheets of blood, with crusty sleep brushed from my eyelids in the morning in no sun.
66
8.1 Around the room in glossy bone-made frames hung a long array of pictures made of me at many ages. There were the glossy segments of my ultrasound, from nubby up to fist-sized. There were close-clipped renditions of me in grade school, one for each year, a little longer in the neck as time went longer, the minor rash creeping up and out from my school dress. That same dress I wore for years and years, loosening the hemline as I stretched, the moth-holes patched with bits of bedclothes, old newspaper, puppy hair, or whatever other crap that I could muster when my mother would not sew.
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
8.2 Where the timeline of my short schooling ended, the photographs went on. There, me while shouting, squatting, climbing trees, using a wrench to pull the sink apart and clear the bugs out from the pipes, wading through the muck in our front yard ever-higher, cleaning the mirror with my tongue. The most recent photos had been taken, as far as I could tell, on this cold day. Of me curled inside the room of windows, looking outward, withered down. 8.21 I did not remember these photos being taken. I could not recall a camera’s proximity in years—people’d begun to seethe against them in close quarters, smash their lenses, as if it were the film’s fault our world had warped. Each night turning on the news you’d see the shots framed among the cracked conditions, often ending in abrupt blackout, big men’s fists, as if by rendering these old spaces in our memory so clearly in the midst of so much ruin, the cameras in their silence devised a well of guilt and wishing so deep we’d never breathe. 8.22 The room had collected my image without my knowing, flash unseen, as if perhaps the sun’s on-off blinking was a shutter of surveillance over everyone and every all. 8.23 Through the floor the room made of my excess would hum and rumble, harmonizing in the house’s song.
67
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
8.24 Through the floor I waited that I’d wake up reassembled in the gown of who I’d been. 9. My breath became a curtain. In the curtain there was fear. I could feel it pulse around me with each outtake and the quickening, the thicken. It made my hair stand up on end, curl in the wet of me, my dew. The room of windows was small and hot now, growing smaller. I felt my innards swelling back. Pressed from both sides, I sat sweating. There was a part of me still me. 9.1 From my lap my voice sponged endless. The voice was torn and tattered, full of leak. It didn’t sound so much like who I’d been once even. The gears of the cassette deck caught a little in their looping, the language crimped, becoming drone. I felt a stretch, a stinging tired. I felt some plastic in my mouth. My present voice hung in my throat all wadded and wayward pulsing, wanting out. I swallowed inward. Swallowed harder. Swallowed. 10. I was grown. Grown as a woman, yes, but also, grown into the backbone of this room—this house. My head was huge. My lips. My stomach. That or the windows were moving towards me. Either way, I felt my size. Felt my ears burning as I fumbled, slid in my sweat that greased the walls.
68
11. Against the glass I pressed and pummeled, looking for some small way out or in. I scratched my fingers on the surface, felt it
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
scratch back. The glass began to gleam. I beat it with my knuckles, elbows, forehead. It would not give. It made no sound. The room for certain had shrunk smaller—making room for other rooms around. The room was going—it was—going—it had me—had me good. I felt the glass panel I had my back on—through which I’d seen the skin of horses, a blub of butter, a woman waddling, gash of tree—it became suddenly more vertical. Its pane edge shrieked in friction with another. It vibrated through my neck. The glass panel I’d had my knees on—through which another window wardrobes, peanut butter—stuttered forward, pressing my legs straight, hard enough to make my sockets junk a little, squeam. I heard the sound of stretching muscle. My tape-recorder yarbled on—TIKKA LO WENT SHOBBITZ DEET—EYEROID BELDRUM NEENOD PEEPINT CARDKEN SEESUM OIF LIT SHRUM. My voice—my voice—my which one? A pane folded forward for my forehead. It pressed my skull one side here, one side the glass. I felt compressed. My brain scrunching in the glimmer. I found a thought of my father—the days that summer, too hot to toddle in the backyard chasing up handfuls of dead bugs, he would lead me through the forest to his shed, where we’d take turns smashing eggs and rattles and glass eyes in his vices—this thought I’d found, though, was of his knee—the way the wrinkles there would make a face. He’d have me speak into it and it spoke back—that ruined knee’s weird voice—oh fucker—the voice like mine now in the tape deck screwed and slow—my mutter slurred into molasses—the deck itself caught on the glass—the plastic splintered in the scrunching—the short shards scratching my small hand—one puzzle lodged in my thumb knuckle, squeaking—and again I began to bleed.
69
Tarpaulin Sky Blake Butler
Bled like those mornings with my head soaked on the pillow all teenaged, my nostrils slickened, my vision white. Bled like those days when I was twenty and my whole womb’s payload would splot at once. Bled like when even younger I cut my finger there in father’s shed and he’d take it in his mouth and suck and suck. Bleeding on the glass now, slid in slow strokes, all bubbling in pools. Pooled in my teeth and belly button. Pooled in the room the size of me—the room from which now though the windows, through the minute, I could not see anything at all.
70
11.1 No, heavens, listen—I could see a—I could— Listen—I had—um— This certain window— Through the room now— Heavens listen— See now— See
Tarpaulin Sky
Peter Davis
Poem That Speculates As To Who You Are And Imagines My Death Reaffirming My Life So you like reading I imagine. And youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re interested in poetry. You are probably a college undergraduate or an MFA candidate or someone interested in poems about birds or somehow you just have this fondness for poetry. You might be a college professor. Maybe you find yourself here the same way I find myself here. Maybe you are me. If you are me, I hope you are okay with this poem today. I hope you are okay. You are likely a friend or acquaintance of mine. You may have known me in elementary school, high school, college, or grad school. You might be one of my family members. You might be my student or colleague. You might know me in some other professional/poet/artist capacity. The odds that you know me are pretty good, I think. On the other hand, by the time you read this, this poem could be slightly or barely famous. I could be eighty years old and you could be a member of a government that uses this poem as a type of manual. Or you could have found these words in 2074 on a sheet of paper that is wrapped around your birthday gift. I hope you do. Knowing me personally, to you, might seem strange and distant. If you know me, knowing me personally probably doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem very strange or distant. I am 34 years old. I will turn 35 in about 6 weeks. This poem could be done by then or just getting started.
71
Tarpaulin Sky
Joanna Ruocco Ugly Ducks
72
In the waiting room, I look at the door. There is a little window cut in the door for no reason. The reasonless window is very small and a lack of color comes though, the non-descript color of the corridor combined with the non-descript color of distance, which is just a general dimming, or blurriness, applied to other colors. I find the window irritating. Most doors donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have small windows. Classroom doors have small windows and doors in mental hospitals have small windows and these small windows exist for observation purposes. Administrators need to see the children reading at their desks and the mental patients sitting calming on their beds so that they can assess the quality of education or mental health services received by the children and patients. Similarly, representatives from the American Dental Association may need to observe various waiting rooms across the country to decide whether or not the dentists who maintain these waiting rooms should be granted ADA approval. There is nothing I dislike more than being observed through a small window. In this instance, however, I am inclined to believe that the window is a mistake, that the door with the window came at a discounted price, and the window has no meaning in and of itself. The window is just part of a bargain. I have been wasting my time with thoughts about observation. I would like to think that waiting is not the same as wasting, but here I am given no choice.
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
I pick up a magazine that the dentist has supplied for my entertainment. In the magazine, I read about the secret technologies celebrities use to make themselves more attractive. I look at the computer-generated images of what the celebrities would look like without the use of these technologies. Hump noses. Skinny lips. Sties. Pits. Veins. Boils. Birthmarks. In-grown hairs. Warts. Keloids. Dermoid Cysts. Some weird dog-bite looking thing. I flip to find the “Top Ten Undercover Uglies” on page 94. The receptionist walks over and pauses by my chair, tugging at her bra strap. She’s wearing a tiny green sundress and her purse is hanging off her elbow. I can smell her watermelon chewing gum. “I’m leaving right now, ” she says. “Okay,” I say. “Meet you in five,” she says, and looks down at me with a crease in her forehead. I realize she’s talking into a headset. “Hold a sec,” she says. She moves the mouthpiece down by her chin. “It’s my lunch break,” she says. “I’ll be back in a hour. Reggie? You there?” She kicks my foot as she walks past. “Damn,” she says. The door bangs shut. I drop the magazine on my lap and look at the door. I see a face in the window and the door opens. A woman enters. I immediately notice her great skin. She smiles and her teeth are white and perfect. She has the Arc de Triomphe of teeth. I do not smile back at her. I am almost certain that this woman uses the technologies listed in the magazine. Of course, there is the possibility that she does not. The possibility that she does not use technology makes me feel worse about myself. I think about the biological shortcomings and poor personal habits that have negatively impacted the
73
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
74
quality of my own smile. What if the woman does not use technology? What if she is the responsible custodian of a genetic endowment, which includes, among other not inconsiderable assets, evenly surfaced teeth with coloration naturally inclined towards the white? I know from conversations with my dentist that tooth enamel tends towards one of three colors: white, yellow, or blue. My own tooth enamel is strongly predisposed for a yellowish appearance and stains easily due to my chronic mouth breathing and also due to my failure to abstain from coffee, strong black teas, cigarettes, and carbonated beverages. The carbonated beverages, I have been told, not by my dentist, leach phosphorous from my bones, contributing, not only to dental caries but to osteoporosis, arthritis, and a host of other debilitating and unattractive skeletal conditions. If the woman does not use technologies then I am not more attractive in comparison to the woman than I might appear to be. If she does, then I am more attractive in comparison, though how much more attractive I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t say for sure. My best guess is that the womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s smile is entirely engineered, that her teeth have been polished, painfully, and at high cost, by an oral surgeon using a laser-based experimental whitening technique. This is how the technique works: lasers sculpt the surface of each tooth, microscopically aligning the tooth particles so that their positions and newly honed angles of refraction maximize their reflective capacity, thereby giving the smile that dazzling, full spectrum effect. In electing for this treatment, the woman revealed not only her vain, immoderate character, but also her financial imprudence, because cosmetic procedures are not covered by any insurance
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
plans. Furthermore, I think there is something slightly sick, unpoetic, and wrong, about extracting an oral property from light beams. Someone should tell her that. A man in whom she has a romantic interest. “You’re shallow, Jenna,” says the man. “I don’t care if your teeth are made of ivory piano keys. Even if I could play Ode to Joy on your teeth with my tongue, I still wouldn’t date you for a million dollars. Not in a million years. Not ever.” The reception area is clearly empty, but the woman walks to the reception area, her stiff pantsuit emitting insistent, rasping noises, which are unpleasant to hear. If I entered a waiting room, and the waiting room was completely empty, except for one woman, a woman sitting quietly with a magazine, minding her own business, I would take care not to cause a scene with my pantsuit, in the case that I was wearing a pantsuit, which I have never done except on one occasion in court. The woman’s pantsuit is salmon or coral colored. Some people try to make themselves visible, and some people try to make themselves invisible. In the animal kingdom, females are usually invisible, dirt-colored, speckled things that resemble bogs, leaves, or scrubby bushes, background components. When you attract attention, this signals that you are expendable. You don’t have a uterus. You don’t have eggs to warm, or mouths to feed.
75
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
Flying Monkeys
76
I get on the airplane and right there, 22B: Margaret. She looks like Margaret except for her skin, which she has tanned very orange, the color of a fresh basketball. “Ciao?” says Margaret. I sit down beside her. “Prego?” I say. I cross my legs. I take off my sunglasses and Margaret mists me with her little silver bottle. My eyes start stinging and my nipples get hard. “Pheromones,” says Margaret. “It’s French?” The stewardess locks the cabin doors and the air starts recycling. The air is warm. The air is warm and crotchlike, with pheromones. Margaret wiggles, she rubs her thighs together and then we’re both pressed back. We’re pressed back in our seats. Our breasts sort of flatten. Momentum does weird things, to breast shape. We are in the sky. “I want the aisle,” says Margaret, so I stand up and she moves over. I crawl across her lap. “The window is better?” says Margaret. She stands up and I move over. She crawls across my lap. “It’s not better,” says Margaret. The captain says, “There’s a rough patch,” or it’s the co-captain who says it, in the loudspeaker. He sounds too young to be the captain. He is definitely not married. He does not have a mustache. He is big and blonde, smooth pecs, no mustache. Maybe waxes? I imagine him like a lifeguard but in a pilot suit. We hit the rough patch. Margaret jerks violently. She yanks the tray and the tray covers her lap. I say, “Is it snack time for Margaret?” A long time ago Margaret was a fatty and then Margaret got skinny. Now Margaret’s face
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
seems slightly rounder, but it could be the orange, and the fact that orange things are round, like basketballs. Margaret wiggles. “I am down to my last frayed nerve,” says Margaret. “It’s youknow-where. It’s in my you-know-what.” “Your fanny flower?” I say. “Your fifi? That’s what happened to your French tips? You’re like, clam-digging?” Margaret cannot impress me. “I date Europeans?” I say. “I boffed this leathered Hollander? On stage? In Holland?” I’m thirty-one. Nothing surprises me. Like with guys anymore. Hypertrophy of the perineum? Semi-circumcision? “Remember Nathan?” I say. “You can’t imagine the botchjob? We had to prestidigitate his prostate. Every time?” “We have them too,” says Margaret. “What?” I say. “Prostates,” says Margaret. “Testicles. Tucked up. Very small.” “Like pearls?” I say. “Yeah,” says Margaret. “Coated kind of?” “Yeah,” says Margaret. “They don’t, like, do anything?” “Yeah,” says Margaret. “Inert? Sugar pills? Placebo?” “What?” says Margaret, “God, I’m in a state.” “I dated a plastic surgeon,” I say. “He kept the bedroom really cold?” “I don’t date,” says Margaret darkly. “I don’t have time.” “Good for you?” I say. I sip my soda water. I think, you are not better than me, Margaret. You are in no ways better.
77
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
78
“This is flat,” I say. “She just opened the can?” “I love the light over the Pacific,” says Margaret. “That soft pink beam.” Margaret leans on the tray. We have one of those greasy windows so everything outside seems thicker. Maybe what’s inside seems thicker too, but you can’t look inside from outside unless you’re one of those flying monkeys, those weird guys, from Oz. It’s all kind of sexual. I didn’t get it then, the witch, the group thing, randy animals. Rubies. It was like, a sex dream? Big hands of some farm worker? Ding-dong, ding-dong, up her dirty gingham in a windstorm, goat lips, little hooves. I don’t have sex dreams. Alright, this is not a dream. I like the word “ramrod.” I say it in my head, during sex. I wait; I hold it; it’s almost there, but I forget, like what is it, I want, it, like God what again, what is it? I kind of hold my breath, what, what, what, I say, out-loud, but wah-wah-wah, gaspy-hot, in his ear or neck or something, and then I say it, an explosion, inside, in my brain, like it’s all tight, all the way through me, jammed in my head, yeah! Ramrod! I did it in my twenties but the timing is what I got right in my thirties. The thirties are about timing. “What about more than one guy?” I say. “Like at the same time?” “It doesn’t last any longer,” says Margaret. “Like at the same time same time?” “Not at the same same time,” I say. “Obviously.” “Yeah, it’s alright,” says Margaret. “I went to a therapist,” I say. “I kept stealing? It wasn’t a money thing. Like for excitement? Stealing is expensive, said my therapist. Like in another way? Like how I was paying her for
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
therapy? $100 for three-quarters of an hour? But it’s not about money, I said. And excuse me, this seems to me like reverse psychology, I said. Like from grade school? Reverse psychology is a real thing, she said. Like in Vienna?” “You’re boring,” says Margaret. “Oh. Oh God. I’m having an orgasm. Because of the altitude?” “You’re right over the engine,” says the stewardess. “This is not a new aircraft. That shaking? That’s old.” “I don’t feel it,” I say. “Listen,” says the stewardess. “Now?” “Does the papaya have added sugar?” I say. “Because it’s bad. My skin?” “You’ve got great skin,” says the stewardess. “Sometimes I get splotchy,” I say. “From B vitamins? Niacin flush?” “Does sugar have B vitamins?” says the stewardess. “Date sugar, yes,” I say. “Beet sugar, yes. Cane sugar, no. Equal, no. Splenda, yes. Sweet and Low, no. Root beer, yes. Diet Coke, no. Diet Coke with Splenda, yes.” I look at Margaret. “You’re really up on sweeteners,” says the stewardess. “Are you sisters?” “No,” I say. “You look like sisters?” says the stewardess. “So do you, with the other stewardess,” says Margaret. “They have the same clothes,” I say. “Our clothes match,” says the stewardess. “There’s that.” “Is it true about special chewing gum for flight attendants?” I say. “With more flavor? For longer? Because it’s medical? For your eardrums?”
79
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
80
“I think so,” says the stewardess. “Don’t tell anyone, but this is a shitty airline. I mean to work for. No extras.” “What about pilot meth?” I say. “Have you heard of that? It’s legal? No jitters. Better than for truckers because it’s more prestigious? You have to go to special school? Flight school?” “I’ve thought about it,” says the stewardess. “Flight school.” She has a shiny auburn ponytail and green eyes. One of her eyes is a little off-kilter. It’s angled towards her ear. “I got shot in the head, though” says the stewardess. “Outside the Hammerstein Ballroom. As a teenager. I’m okay, but I get mini-seizures.” “What about auto-pilot?” I say. “Like how mini?” “A few seconds,” says the stewardess. “I’m also bad with depth. 3-D. Distance and objects.” “Did they have to shave your head?” I say. “Yeah,” says the stewardess. “You know what’s weird? When my hair grew back, my hairline was a half-inch lower. And I think a slightly different color.” “That happens when you’re pregnant,” I tell her. “Which one of us would you say is more successful,” asks Margaret. I’m wearing travel clothes, no harsh seams or bunching, this really breathable, cute pink tracksuit. Margaret is wearing a white sports jacket and skin-tight trouser shorts. She sits up straighter and sticks out her chest. “Are you leading with your breasts?” I say, politely. “Because we are going the same speed? Do you think your breasts will get somewhere faster?” “I used to think that if I were in an elevator at the top floor of a skyscraper and the elevator cable snapped so the elevator went
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
plummeting down the elevator shaft I would just wait until we got to the first floor and then I’d jump into the air and it would be like starting over again from that jumping point and I’d be the only survivor.” I look at Margaret. I look at the stewardess. I feel strange about it, but I can’t remember which one of them just finished talking. “Everyone thinks that,” I say. “I never thought that,” says Margaret. “I’m against the grain. Frictive.” “In movies when the elevator starts falling everyone is looking at the numbers over the door and the numbers go flashing backwards so fast and everyone is screaming, but do you think the numbers really go backwards? Like if the elevator is broken?” “Give this to 26C,” says Margaret. She hands the stewardess a folded Memo note. “In the hotel pool,” I say. “Do you swim with the co-captain? Or does he stay somewhere different?” The stewardess holds the note. Her hand veins are huge and she has chapped skin on her knuckles. “Is that from cabin pressure?” I say, but it could be that her skin is burned chemically, from hotel pools. They have chlorine but aren’t hygienic. You get staphylococci? The stewardess is a vector? Sent by terrorists? The stewardess is looking at Margaret, unpleasantly for a stewardess, because stewardesses get paid to be friendly. It’s their industry. The stewardess is rolling her good eye and sneering. I would be certain that this stewardess is not a stewardess, except Margaret could make a hospice worker look like a terrorist. She is that obnoxious. Like strident? Her tan is
81
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
clearly fake? I would probably kill Margaret, if I had a boyfriend in IT, or engineering. I would have him make a bomb to blow up Margaret, but not right now, on the same plane. Another time. Margaret is extremely rich. To be fair, there are other things to blame than Margaret. There is family history?
82
Years and years ago, Margaret’s mother started the whole fashion thing, against panty lines. This was way before it mattered, about panty lines, because panty lines didn’t exist yet, in America. Women had stockings and slips and, puffy things, poodle-skirts, but Margaret’s mother knew, somehow, someday, slacks and sheath dresses and low-riding light-weight capris would be wildly popular, and women would have all kinds of aesthetic problems, because of panty lines. Women would look terrible in a way we hadn’t even imagined yet. Margaret’s mother decided to fight, so women wouldn’t look terrible, in the future. Margaret’s mother was a visionary? She invented thongs? Or marketed them? I hate family histories. Whenever a guy tells me his family history I eat croutons. I eat the croutons from my salad and then I can’t hear anything. Nathan’s father fixed the knees of famous athletes? Or he was a theater director? Nathan had a brother? Margaret’s mother looked like Margaret, but bigger, with a paralyzed vocal chord. She always carried fifty-pound bales of hand-made Andorran garters on her shoulders, no problem. When I met her, she was maybe eighty, but with a powerful upper body, and big boobs, and her cleavage brown-spotted and finely wrinkled, like natural-fiber Japanese paper.
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
“If a man has an ulcerated sperm duct,” said Margaret’s mother. “The seminal vesicle secretion becomes acidic. If you feel a burning sensation, in your throat, gargle immediately with salt water.” “I think your voice is sexy,” I said to Margaret’s mother, but what I meant was more specific. I meant that there’s this precedent in our country for finding sex appeal in husky, deep, half-strangled voices, but only for small, delicate-boned women, not for Margaret’s mother. One time, Margaret’s mother showed me her thong. Her thong could have been a hammock, a filmy pink hammock for a half-dozen sexy small, delicate-boned women, on an island. You sleep on the beach, lots of girls like on Lesbos, but you meet rich men and get filmed for TV. “Swallowing is sexy,” said Margaret’s mother. “I try not to say anything.” Then Margaret made martinis. That was many years ago. We were best friends? Me and Margaret? “What do you do?” says the stewardess. “I’m in intimate apparel,” says Margaret and then there’s this pause so I can say what I do. The stewardess is waiting, but so is Margaret. I look at Margaret. The thing to say is “I heard about your mother. Sorry?” Margaret is a businesswoman. I imagine her smiling. “I don’t have time to be sorry?” The stewardess slips Margaret’s note under her blouse. I say, “Most women are wearing the wrong-size bras.” “Oh, I’m not,” says the stewardess. “I requested my FBI file. I know all of my personal statistics.”
83
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
Small Sharks
84
My husband is reading to me from a novel that he hates. He reads the sentence from the novel a second time and looks at me with his reading glasses pushed down to the tip of his nose. I don’t know what to say. The sentence seems fine even though my husband read it using a silly, exaggerated voice, emphasizing the adjectives as though the adjectives are really to blame for my husband’s disgust with the sentence. The adjectives are “thick,” “fumbling,” and “nylon.” To my mind these adjectives are acceptable. What adjectives could be better? I like the adjective “radiant” a great deal, but there is more to constructing a sentence than just pasting in whatever adjective you happen to like. I realize that I do not have any criteria for determining the quality of a sentence. I look for subject-verb agreement in a sentence and would notice glaring spelling errors but that is about it. Over the course of my life I have inadvertently memorized thousands of sentences but these sentences are not necessarily good sentences. They were just said by famous people or in famous circumstances or else they are the nearly meaningless components of ritual speech. What are examples of such sentences? Walk softly and carry a big stick. Diamonds are a girl’s best-friend. Rest in peace. I don’t know how to think about those sentences. Would they impress my husband if he read them in a novel? “There is one part so far I like,” says my husband. “It’s a small part. Dr. Idjadi miscalculates the ratio of gases vented into the sleeping quarters and there is too much helium. Janice and Lars start talking in squeaky voices.”
Tarpaulin Sky Joanna Ruocco
Because I read a small blurb in a magazine describing the novel I am not bewildered. I know that Dr. Idjadi is the progenitor of the humans who are to repopulate Earth but for the time being live in an underwater colony off the Jersey Shore. I take the novel from my husband’s hands. The spine is creased and flaps open to the section my husband is currently reading. The sentence he read out loud is right at the top of the page. Flipping backwards through the pages, I notice paragraphs that are printed in italics. The paragraphs are dialogue between Janice and Lars. “Do the italics mean helium voice?” I ask. I read a sentence of dialogue out loud. “That part isn’t as bad because you can imagine the way they sound after inhaling helium,” says my husband. “It’s accessible and amusing. The rest of the book just focuses on the trials of living underwater.” “I can imagine living underwater,” I say and it’s true that I have imagined the very thing. There would be round windows with a million tons of pitch-black water pressing against them and occasionally small sharks with light-producing organelles in their skin would pass back and forth, leaving milky streamers. “I can’t imagine it all,” says my husband. “That is mostly what is wrong with this book.”
85
Tarpaulin Sky
Laynie Browne from Scorpyn Odes Scorpyn Ode
86
at the edge of night like a miniature lobster with no ocean
Tarpaulin Sky Laynie Browne
Departure We havenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t begun really. Even to admit this to ourselves. That arrival is the death of dysfunctional caricature. A chiaroscuro you can beckon. Like the garden which needs tending but still borrows itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own dignity. You can look to the fallen unpainted fence and fix upon the sounds of traffic and decide it is only a resident prison of green within imperfect urban flux. Or you can walk right up and inhale whose very scent. How often do we look into each other upturned? There is so much exquisitely untended, rancorous, disorderly mulch and tangles. And somewhere above, the sun.
87
Tarpaulin Sky Laynie Browne
Scorpyn Ode What is your scorpion name? Home amid long grass, piles of unkempt wood creeping along walls Convulsive memory of four-hundred million years Your home once the sea Is that why this landscape within radius of inhospitable blame appears strange to such a coniferous onlooker? Remember carboniferous remember, at the edge of submersion like a miniature vessel of time
88
Please hand me that scorpion glass
Tarpaulin Sky Laynie Browne
Departure How I feel about it today, fucked up hideous to own anything. Everything will be clean and uncluttered. Even speech. In the next incarnation of enough bookshelves, possibly a desk. Possibly no school shootings, possibly funding for National Science Foundation funneled from the war is over. Possibly sleep and not underwritten. More flow unto you and less treacherous waters becoming migrant not at all workers but the word client was changed to person. The word weapon was changed to mediation. Youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d say meadow was a stretch. Go ahead say meadow. Say minimum wage. Say possibly nothing is forgotten. The street across the street and the globe across from that with dental care, insurance. Go ahead, say youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll wait in the meadow for all of it, streaming. Everything will be clean and uncluttered. In the next incarnation of enough green thinking, possibly unlimited memory.
89
Tarpaulin Sky
George Kalamaras
The Problem with Missionaries Now we take up the ground of a new incarnation. We favor Dakar, arguing about the French, though speaking in French and feeling shame. One of us did not have a name. Another went simply by hen neck across my chest. I hope you understand when I say it was not grotesque. No matter what you feel, it can never compare to exchanging bouts of malaria with black water fever. Was it your friend from Somalia who relinquished the greed of introducing prefabricated grain? Was it I who actually slept through three courses of soap?
90
Someone ordered strong coffee to wash out my mouth with starlight. I stood below where the stars should have been and stared at what I knew I was about to become.
Tarpaulin Sky
Brigitte Byrd
from Between Worlds (prelude) What binds me to a voice when it is silenced by the vanishing of a breath the depth of an empty room the distance between her nothingness and the click clacking of broken wings. At the beginning there was a woman opening a story with her body. At the beginning there was a withered country resting against a Polish corridor. Words woven into peace. Words torn into pieces. What was he thinking when he said Ne tâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; inquiètes pas, je reviens bientĂ´t. At the beginning there was already the end.
91
Tarpaulin Sky Brigitte Byrd
(different interpretations)
92
It was not easy to follow a bag across a train corridor across blue smoke across other men across the country. She kept her eyes on his hand. Eyes on her back. Bag on its shelf. There is more to imagine. The way he slid the glass pane down to recollect the scent of night the way she pat her hat with her finger tips to adjust a loose pin the way they swayed ceaselessly with each turn of the wheels the way they knew to keep silent. What was the time of year and does it matter that he bought her ticket in the rain. There was always a word to carry. Always a word to keep when they did not see the cross-bearing eagle soaring over their yawning youth. There was only radiance in the car as they slept.
Tarpaulin Sky Brigitte Byrd
(different applications) She said Tu peux pas savoir comme j’ai été heureuse cette année là. I know the meaning of the clock the lines in the skin days shortened by the burden of time. I don’t know that year near le Parc Montsouris notes left in her books whispers on wooden benches. Did she walk past the afternoon past the reservoir past the avenues past the gates. Heels knocking against cobblestones. Eyes on the window. Key in her hand. Did his hand brush aside the curtain to catch her lips. Il avait un air très doux, des yeux rêveurs un peu fous.1 There. Her happiness under my skin.
________________________ Il avait un air très doux, des yeux rêveurs un peu fous is from “L’étranger,” a song created by Annette Lajon in 1935 and for which she received Le Grand Prix du Disque in 1936. Both her rivals Edith Piaf and Damia immediately added “l’étranger” to their song repertoires. 1
93
Tarpaulin Sky Brigitte Byrd
(in a conciliatory light)
94
There was another picture and she was the same. But of course she did not swim. Did not smile. Did not look at the camera. At the grey water. The cliffs beyond the water. White sky beyond the cliffs. She walked past changing cabins striped against sand past two women whispering against the breeze past shadows squared against the boardwalk. Évidemment, là c’ était Deauville dans les années trente. White raincoat flapping against her thighs. Folded newspaper beating against one hand to keep a steady pace. Heels knocking against wood planks. Did she say Pourrais-tu vivre sans moi? She almost drowned in his world after the rain after the train and he pushed the button.
Tarpaulin Sky
Bernard NoĂŤl
from The Rest of the Voyage translated by ElĂŠna Rivera
Marseille a touch of rose at the level of rooftops old water buried under little white boats thousand masts scrape an ominous open sky to the left the galleys to the right Pouillon the weather snaps between the two you would want to gather the hidden debris and see the present play the same game that images play in the head climbing back up the black pit while a bit of rain seeks to moisten eyelids that turn the gaze and roll it into the sea whose waves beat beside the pile of vertebrae
95
Tarpaulin Sky
Rob Cook
Stone Snow After You Wandered Wind mauling your body for bread, deer made of bread and not blood, the sun a drop of someone elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brain trembling on a bare branch, the branchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shadow made of endlessness, not bread, not blood stalking the stone snow. * Who is that, speaking in crooked mouths behind the book of bricks and famine developments. Who is that, speaking in church bulletins. Who is that, spider-quiet since the beginning of the world, speaking in snakes at the snake ovens. *
96
Unemployed, you have to live where an eyelash lived.
Tarpaulin Sky Rob Cook
Unemployed, an eyelash’s bed blown miles from the face, miles from the eye’s cold and twitching city. * Take zyprexa, say the geese. Take zyprexa, say the zebras. Zyprexa to make you more like your colleague the asparagus, more like your maker the asparagus. * An amateur, I paint the shreds of a horse into an afternoon with no water. Each shred trying to reach where it’s been shorn from the blood maps. Each shred trying to leave Bangladesh. Bangladesh after Bangladesh in the searchlight of a broken mosquito.
97
Tarpaulin Sky
Jill Magi
from Cadastral Map / The Meander * Pictures should be painted with trees and shrubs and flowers and ferns whereas other states have a mega-attraction, MADAM IT IS YOUR MUD! MY CREED OF THE OUT OF DOORS: 1. all good Vermonters should leave home 2. the pastoral vacation outdistanced all other kinds of tourism 5. one sixth federal parkway land or choose 6. money for flood control because 7. at that point you will lose the brand and 8. the whole matrix will collapse
98
landscape progress publicity (A CURRICULUM FOR BOYS)
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
* Prickly Mountain Total Loss Farm drunken tipsy fence posts Trouble at Earth People’s Park RECREATIONAL SHOPPING CULTURAL HERITAGE TOURISM (they may say they want to stay on a farm but I bet they’d rather stay next to one) * To touch the serenity of a clear blue laminated map. Scooping leaves away from runnels, designed and ablaze. Shadow of a star and of a song about the soft shadow felt.
99
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
* The battle of the wilderness is still on unproductive hill farms all pitted, not against each other, but against time and space AGENDA FOR THE COMMITTEE ON TOPOGRAPHY AND CLIMATE: (Vermont is the west of New England) DESIGNED BY THE CREATOR FOR THE PLAYGROUND OF THE CONTINENT * (Graphs 1-10) seek your summer home keep Vermont a secret historic scenic shrines a state of mind and mountains cohesive downtowns Long Trail Ale THE DORRILITES THE PERFECTIONISTS
100
crafty come hither pamphlets
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
* COMMITTEE ON SUMMER RESIDENTS AND TOURISTS: A) taking the waters B) we have room to grow certainly midweek C) (MIGRATION FROM VERMONT) D) vs. hippies or the voluntary poor E) NINETEEN HUNDRED AND FROZE TO DEATH * Sugar maple. Red maple. Mossycup oak. Driving toward her farm found in a field. Hummingbirds drawn to anything red. Last seen means wedge-shaped is fine with teeth twigs hairless or nearly so. No. Yes. Yes.
No. 101
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
* NO BARE FEET the problem of bad sign placement to retire submarginal lands and VALLEY-MINDEDNESS
away
with dead trees and lifeless branches (CONCERNING CHARTS 1-10) he pushed his boat out onto the lake and there died debating indigenous attractions vs. artificial all cities cemented so * (SEVEN ROADSIDE SINS) Vermont sieves slowly anyway WAS PERHAPS SUICIDE as the she-bear rears her cub
102
in the depths of virgin forests
these
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
* Coarse-toothed. Stubby spur, contour interval shallow grave. Spreading evergreen fruits red bare trees are not such a desolate sight tracing her last movements
Prickly
brambles at the bottom of winter. * The social history seen along the way may be somewhat thickened. Separating into papery thin sheets that sometimes discomforting history of penetration. I could not wait to fill in the gaps of the series.
103
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
* A popular wooded tourist site may be compound or simple in arrangement. Crack willow carefully pressed downplaying the threat red rose still tries to flower body therein found. Awake downy sleeper! for we are where we are not and end buds are false in plums.
Leave your porch light on.
* Cutting in a sugar house, spudding ice, gathering sap to sweeten the lips of work or vacation. Aspens shimmer the valleys and apple blossoms all
104
stalk your eye. Trees turn
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
golden, smell the moist green of here not there, smell balsam up trail after you have been in the same woods you first saw all stalking your eye. * The last asters. Mid-ribs not winged scar-crowded spur, hand lens a very careful person. Twigs dark round ridged. I look outside myself and the tree inside me grows, trunk swollen at base. to inform the family Bitter kernels tiny.
105
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
* his journals marginalia
grab-bag
of PROGRESSIVE ideas 2. so that he who runs the ridge may read the topography of the region without undue distortion: Barren and Rough Rivers Treaty of Hard Labor Compromise
A point called COMMISSION ON COUNTRY LIFE
106
5. (these Vermont hills happier and easier to live with)
Tarpaulin Sky Jill Magi
* Smooth modern highways beckon you onward as thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s when the warblers are going through our vertical distances are of necessity exaggerated A CONTINUOUS NATURAL PARK! or the personal impact of a failed plan and lost vote: take my boat, take my boat, take my boat
***
These poems are based, in part, on the journals of James Paddock Taylor, 19th century progressive who advocated for the beautification of Vermont, solidifying its tourist industry. While he was successful in establishing the Long Trail, his proposal for a Green Mountain Parkway failed, resulting, some say, in his suicide. Thanks to the Vermont Historical Society librarians for their assistance. The last line of the last poem is from a work by Victor Hernandez Cruz.
107
Tarpaulin Sky
Aidan Thompson
from A Little Bit Called Tremble 5.
108
I thought I was drowning but it turned out to be water between the ears, filtering through the sluice of unsolved musings. With two shots from the 45, the detective killed inspiration, persuading the tentacles of language to lose their grip and straighten into encyclopedic clarity. A jury swallowed the argument and agreed to pour the concrete into conclusive forms. Consensus is a way of determining truth, although “cat” is a furry creature, a malicious person, a knotted whip, an American, a horizontal beam for raising a ship’s anchor, a tractor for driving in snow, a six-legged tripod, and a short tapered stick. Please, hold still for the camera and quit tangling yourself with your signifier. You were determined to be a feat of condensation, but went too far, evaporating as you entered time with its archival and contemporary memory. “Prisons,” says William Blake, “are built with the stones of law.” There is no one giving orders anymore, each woman in the surf plucks a harp tuned to the present, refusing the tyranny of the familiar. Where do we go from here? The sleepy hand curls under the chin. Open me carefully. I am sitting on precise perceptions in this weird corporeal world with sharp objects. “Subjectivity is legit,” says the musician. Hearing bright colors depicts the ephemeral state of beauty, encouraging
Tarpaulin Sky Aidan Thompson
the sensitive soul to observe the rigors of the ear. The broken vase listens for its time to transcend. That was enough to make her water the plants, sharpen a pencil, and clean off the dark. We discuss what she might do instead of putting new roofs on old houses because headers and rafters are predicated on stable ground. Cycling through labyrinths of narrow thoughts she turns, snatches spontaneity, and throws it into the wind. â&#x20AC;&#x153;This is not as bad as it seems,â&#x20AC;? says the octopus with a vast imagination. A mermaid looks skyward in bemusement, still for a moment, basking in her mystery. Words are as complicated and essential as the tympanic cavity. Of course, there are other gems that will help you through the world. We heard that if everyone grew fins there would be more room on land. She wanted to smile but before she knew it, she was in the narrows distributing conundrums.
109
Tarpaulin Sky Aidan Thompson
6.
110
A hand dipping into my reflection in a pond skewers perspective, while bare feet in the mud form a direct interplay between an impression on the senses and an imprint on the ground. It is often easier to explore things than to assign them proper names. This is impossible to grasp all at once, but blinking, whimpering, and absentmindedness are acceptable especially when reference wavers. The effect is temporary insanity and we summon an anecdote as an antidote, giving some medium of control, even though boundlessness thrills us no end. The best thing to do is to fumble for your satchel and run down one hundred and fifty-six steps to the road. How did labeling become an obsession in this long hallway with no lights? Blocking the mind can make one fold the legs and cover the face with both hands because things need multiple associations. Could this be why “arbor” is shaded by a dense notion? My eyes moisten at the sight of a cloud perched above a tree. “I’m losing my identity,” said the eye of a storm, racking against cobalt blue. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we uneventfully exploded into the twentieth-first century, where fragments from elaborate ceremonies shot forth on well-laid Astroturf. There was nothing we could do about a staid beginning, and drawing a blank, I inhaled deeply, hoping my lungs might carry me to lush meadows, but the moon hiccupped and the snow continued to muffle the road. Weather can foster generations of connections like rain and sun venturing into color. Although heat waves spread pale pink afterglows,
Tarpaulin Sky Aidan Thompson
limiting the earth’s response to the odor of cut grass and car fumes. Anticipation quivers through a chicken. “You mean you want me to fly south with the rest of them?” Even those who initially appear settled secretly revel in variation and change. What can the alchemist do but gently call out to the nasturtium bud while the phoenix explodes into flame?
111
Tarpaulin Sky
Heather Green The Come Back
112
Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m so busy my hand in the bird box. We could become a house where porch light breaks on moths June to October. Afterward, months of snow. Still, I have never been so busy, crushing deep down, do I? in my fist. I fear the cold eye, the snow shine, the denuded tree against an empty sky. Cheep cheep the love goes, & it returns like cawww.
Tarpaulin Sky
Megan Martin
Sparrow, Final Eulogy I took the leap, the prescription as directed. I made love to your insomniac parakeets, and did not neglect to feed the fish, either. I made good, paid my dues, did unto others. I did not come to understand, make new, or settle the phone sex bill. I ate all the potato chips that had staled in the cupboard because I was too lazy to throw them out. And left my crumbs all over the countertops for you to clean with a sponge that would make your hand smell like mold later when you tried to masturbate, preventing you from doing so with pleasure. Though I tried thrice, I could not reorganize my safaris into a kinder, gentler nature. It is true that I hijacked the Red Sea with Uruguay one last time, but it was only momentarily good and never fascinating.
113
Tarpaulin Sky Megan Martin
Had you been here, you would have known Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d brought a souvenir of deepest delicacies which I unknotted, drenched in hot butter, and lay open on the white tablecloth: for you, dear, for you.
114
How I fastened the strawberries so carefully, so they gleamed wet through the fishnet pouch.
Tarpaulin Sky
Peter Davis
Poem That Reveals The Selfish Nature Of My Thought Process What you are looking for in this poem baffles me. I am interested because I am interested in myself. I would like to see you thinking deeply about me and what I have to say. I feel that by understanding your thoughts about me, I might be able to better understand myself, which is what I’m most interested in. It would be very good if you were to review the book this poem appears in for a reputable journal. That would be good for me both professionally, and personally. Personally, I would be flattered to be taken seriously by someone who takes things seriously. Professionally, I could put your review on my vita. The more I can add to my vita the better chance I have of getting a good job. I’m already a college teacher, but I’m not tenure-line. I would like to be tenure-line. I would like a good job. I would like the money and the prestige. I would also like the freedom and my summers off. I actually am taking the summer off now. My wife is working more. If you want to review the book that this poem is in, I’m sure you could contact the publisher and they would send you a review copy. This poem might not be in a book yet. Thanks for reading the journal that this is in. It’s cool of you to be so interested in poetry. I am also available for interviews and other solicitations.
115
Tarpaulin Sky
Corey Mesler
This Poem Is A Prayer
116
This poem is a prayer. It wears that hat lightly. You may be forgiven if you cannot perceive the devotion with which it was crafted. But words are goo. Ideas are balloons. The desire to craft a hopeful design fails at the outset. And still for Chloe these things are built and built again because we wish to emend the world for her, something honorable and foolish. Something dishonorable and brave. And when it breaks down, as it must, the prayer, one hopes, will still be there like residue.
Tarpaulin Sky
Richard Froude
from [Marjorie and Alfred (or) The Dashes] -
-
-
My prayer book is bound in red leather. All good wishes to Marjorie from E.M., Christmas 1915. By January the walk is covered with packed snow. -
-
-
The first eighty pages consist of three short plays. It is my mandate to distinguish between cherubim and seraphim. Unable to furnish you with data pertaining to snowfall in Pasadena between the years of 1913 and 1916, I will instead report the names of three months: February, April and July. July was the month in which Alfred was killed. -
-
-
By Christmas 1915, those in the trenches had long abandoned the singing of Silent Night and returned to the less savory business of war. There is nothing of this in my prayer book but there are several illustrations. A cavalier sits atop a white stallion. Enter The Dashes. If consciousness is transparent then white is the color of death. Alfred stands on the balcony and spits at passing cars. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your name, little bird? The cat balled at his feet.
117
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
-
-
-
By January the walk is covered with packed snow. It is singing in the garden. My little bird is singing. The ideal illustration acts as a reflection of the reader. This is Marjorie. Marjorie, Alfred. To say the reader expects narrative is to say she expects logic. Movement is accomplished through sequenced proposition. The ideal prayer imbues a direct relation between the speaker and God. Who is leading who? Dog bites man. Man bites dog. All of a sudden I am wearing a leash. These are images of a different war. This isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t dynamite, it is a needle. Run your dynamite across my skin and my little bird will sing. It is a nostalgic allusion, a paper chase through Pasadena. On every page a prayer. We gathered the leaves and burnt them. -
-
-
Her silence is white. Cut with a dash or needle. Dear Marjorie, these are my wishes of the season. By the end of the first day, the British alone had lost more than 20,000 men. The identity of E.M. remains unclear. To my knowledge, no sĂŠance took place.
118
-
-
-
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
Throughout the war, Alfred dreamt of a bridge in Pasadena. The city of Pasadena was incorporated in March 1886. The bridge was built in 1913. By July of 1916 it was covered with packed snow. My prayer book lists the names of the dead. Man on a balcony, cat balled at his feet. My name is Alfred and I carry a gun. I cannot tell you these things directly. Marjorie waits in an easy chair by the window. She has pondered a walk through the briars and honeysuckle. The cat is sneezing, and besides, it is January outside. Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d rather spit at passing cars. -
-
-
What have you brought for me? The book of Leviticus and two slices of unleavened bread. For pudding? A smile. In this instance, speaker becomes reader. Her name is Marjorie. God is a little bird. -
-
-
I have written your prayers. Now I invite you to stroll through the gloaming. Put that bread to one side, dear. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve brought
119
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
saffron from the orient and petals for your hair. The distance from January to July becomes a parenthetical statement of loss. This is the song of 1916. Carry me down to the river, my dear. Carry me down to the sea. If it wasn’t for Marjorie’s patience. If it wasn’t for Marjorie at all. Who are The Dashes if my little bird is God? Enter Alfred atop a white stallion. Perhaps this represents an afterlife. The offensive was ordered by Sir Douglas Haig, most notable of the old boys: his bronze, craven image atop the parapet balustrade. We spoke of consciousness? How it dips toward the object. It is charming to die in the summertime. It is meet and right so to do. -
-
-
Such prayers are not founded in the death of God or any among the company of heaven. Insistence on a decisive battle will be retained into the twenty first century. I can offer no illustration but this mirror. Am I to play Alfred? I think so, for now. I have settled with The Dashes. They would remove their hands from their pockets, some would even salute. In place of logic, may I offer you these trinkets? Here are my medals. Here is my gun.
120
-
-
-
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
Come, come, little bird. Let me share in your blood. Christmas is coming and I have been a very good boy this year. Let me follow the walk to its conclusion: weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll kill a few Germans and be home in time for supper. The first car passed the balcony at 8:44pm. A bullet grazed the rear fender, at which point the parade was halted and Haig ushered onto a Learjet bound for Pasadena. Nobody suspected Marjorie, the cat balled at her feet. -
-
-
My prayer book is lilting. It patrols the walk with diligence and a fixed bayonet. -
-
-
My dear Marjorie, it is possible for the end of a story to occur in the midst of the text. Alfred was killed on the first day of July. I mean, it is possible to die and continue breathing. My dear little bird, I waited for days at the Cenotaph. My dear Dashes, will you melt with the snow? I have been looking at photographs this morning. The headstones were white and spaced at regular intervals across the field. The City of Pasadena has commissioned a new memorial and we are to write the prayers. Though we are many, we are one body, because we all share in one bread.
121
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
-
-
-
In 1961, Khrushchev uses Yuri Gagarin to disprove the existence of God. Alfred notes the importance of vocabulary: words like skirmish and velocipede. This disrupts the logic of prayer. The text becomes deranged, split into its constituent parts (though these parts are themselves deranged: one molecule strontium, one molecule zinc). These are weak bonds, the likes of: Dash #1 Dash #2 Dash #3
Sticks. Straw. An old brick shithouse.
After he was born it took Yuri Gagarin 34 years to die. It took Alfred only 40. -
-
-
In the corresponding illustration, a garden. Alfred leads me down a path lined with pink rhododendron. He has led me this way before. Beneath a yew tree we stop at the bust of a gorilla. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name is Alfred. We stare at it for days. Such a prayer is conceived without discernible truth value. I chew these terms until they turn to powder.
122
-
-
-
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
Oh Marjorie, it’s a beautiful morning! The Dashes (in unison)
His discovery of the truth will be frightful.
Here in the archway? That’s the joke. -
-
-
There was a rumor that ‘all’ meant ‘everything.’ There was even a rumor that to breathe was forbidden. Don’t you have a machine that puts food in the mouth and pushes it down? Instead we would improvise plays and perform them wherever we could: in the trenches, on the balcony, once (and only once) aboard the Vostok. Gagarin would whistle a tune by Shostakovich. All would respond, “Amen. Lord have mercy.” Such was out habit: to chant the name of God. -
-
-
Little bird, little bird. Let me in. I have abandoned my stallion in favor of this early bicycle. -
-
-
123
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
From a bunker in Pasadena, Haig follows the progress of 1961. We were talking about 1916. We still are. It’s Khrushchev on the telephone. Good morning, Mr. Khrushchev. Good morning to you. I will offer you many things only to take them away. The cat is restless. My name is Douglas Haig. I attended boarding school in the south of England where they have erected a bronze statue of me beside the memorial arch. As the boys walk by, they remove their hands from their pockets. Some may even salute. (Alfred cowers before his history) My previous work includes the Book of Leviticus and the Selected Poems of Robert Browning. I assure you I’m the right man for the job. -
-
-
All good wishes to Marjorie from E.M., Christmas 1915 – written in a flowing script, Christmas abbreviated to Xmas to avoid the name of God.
124
Through localized recruitment drives, battalions are formed with the promise that friends would fight alongside friends. As a result, whole towns of young men are wiped out in minutes. This July, the 700-strong Accrington Pals suffer 585 casualties in less than half an hour.
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
-
-
-
How are these prayers composed? It is generally assumed that the process is deciduous. That is, it entertains both recession and succession. We are held in place by momentum, in check by a leash. What determines division? As perforation, enter The Dashes. Dash #1 Dash #2
Who is Marjorie? Who are you?
On the level of proposition, truth is discarded. Exeunt. Who are The Dashes? As if there could be no alternative reading. Who are The Dashes? They are names. And names are numbers. Who are numbers? Alfred’s was seven. Some of the boys pronounced it ‘sevarn.’ Fourteen had such trouble, he pronounced it ‘twelve.’ In this way, at age eleven, Alfred was seven but referred to as twelve. The sum of these numbers is thirty. The war was to be over in thirty days.
125
Tarpaulin Sky Richard Froude
Is this the argument? Marjorie is my argument. Dash #3 (offstage)
Marjorie is a prayer.
126
Marjorie is a screen of transparent whiteness. A logical impossibility? A little bird. A prayer.
Tarpaulin Sky
Michael Clearwater from Elegy Venues
Autobiography: Families driving through the desert at night with snow at either end. What is the meaning of this? The windows and the radio. The last half of the 20th century: my father and my mother. Lives keep spanning more and more. But acronyms can kill me without even looking. Our songs have been the apocrypha to a very long document on war.
127
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Clearwater
Cinema: On the hill above the city while we slept they broke into our chests and stole our pace makers. They sold them to a chop shop. Our hearts beat illicitly and everywhere. In the life version of the movie about our lives I want to play you and you want to play me. We will lose out on these parts but we’ll advise on the music that plays while we look out the windows of moving cars, which will become the most important part. In the real-life version of the opera of our lives I want one aria that lasts the duration. I’ve got to be going. I’ve got to be going. I am going, going, going. Back at the movies the part of my father will be played by my father as a small child; the part of this page will be played by a piano—it is only a cameo but it keeps coming back.
128
I will be the picture you take of me. If you do or don’t close your eyes, the thing is about to start.
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Clearwater
The Amphitheater: In the dark your voice pokes little holes in the around us. Light, you little lapse in syntax. Light makes the milk in the dish milk in the dish and not your skin in a sentence. Light is what keeps coming back to us looking just a little different than the last time it ran off. You, stabbing through with bits of what we mean to say. What we mean to say is that until we’re not, we’re alone. And then we’re here, in the middle of this crowd we are. Remember when you forgot me alongside my name? We hold our hands in our little hands and we make the shape of trembling. This is how it started. This is how it ended. This is how it was all along. Applause.
129
Tarpaulin Sky Michael Clearwater
The Mathematics: Our innocence went out for ice cream in the rain and came back ruddy and cold and soaked all the way through. We wander inside hypotheses. We go to the mall. Our lives will be proofs of their endings. Inquiries are continually being made into the nature of inquiries. There is God equals there isn’t. God equals God plus our thoughts about him divided by the number of children we’re willing to surrender. We equals the green hills divided into the steps from my house to yours. The river is called forgetfulness and we can’t remember ever falling in. [The word is a box in which you keep] [things/ the box is a construct/ the box] [is around us/ we fit ourselves into] [each action again and again/ I am] [throwing the ball/ I am bleeding from] [the mouth/ I am waking up inside my] [weeping/ I am thinking you are] [watching/ you are asleep/ your word] [wakes up inside me/ we know/ when] [we’re in] [a dream]
130
The conclusive argument against God’s existence is that we’ve seen his home movies. What a gawky kid we were.
Tarpaulin Sky
Rae Gouirand Sky Page
Saint Lucy had her eyes about her. The eyes of the martyr. The eyes of the body & the eyes of the world blinking. Everything I see returns the eyes. In every fence that marks a place. Every fence makes a place in it â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in its water, in its stance. The eyes move over this & take it. Seen it is changed and made a breathing thing. A thing with wings held near a sky page. The eyes of the saint wait on the body. The eyes of the saint mark the attempt & the course. I would take her arms & pin them back to ask the dark part, the pupil. Eyes in it sing mine & mine & mine. Never come back into two points. Lenses spill and bounce. Water
131
Tarpaulin Sky Rae Gouirand
sinks the eye further. I would look for water in her. I would start looking
132
harder. I would look to her at my return, look up again to near the word.
Tarpaulin Sky
Peter Davis
Poem Making Assumptions And Entertaining Various Possibilities, Including Very Pleasant Ones, As Well As The Possibility That You’re Not Reading This For Pleasure Since you are reading this poem, I’m assuming you’re enjoying yourself. Or you feel obligated to read it. Perhaps, as a friend or student or something, you feel you must really see what this is about. You want to be fair to me as a person (for some reason) and so you keep plowing through it, even through this clause, intent on living up to your end of the friend-or-student-of-the-artist-bargain. It would be cool for me if this poem were assigned to you in one of your college level English classes. Thank you for your dedication to the poem, or to me, or to your studies. It shows something about your character as a person and thus you should, at this moment, feel good about yourself. I do hope you’ll project some of those good feelings onto this poem and me. It’s possible you might be reading this poem because you were prodded on by your government, mom, or doctor. But I hope you’re reading this because you like it so much. Because you’re, like, “Dude, this poem is fucking terrific!” And, “This quoting of me rocks!”
133
Tarpaulin Sky
Jonah Winter from Bestiary
The Ant (Opus Nopus)
134
The Ant is called “The Ant” because of his tendency to walk backwards up and down certain designated stretches of remote coastal highways. A worker, The Ant can carry up to 23 pounds of office supplies on his back, indefinitely, while making his arduous journey. The leader, or Lieutenant Ant, stands on a very small platform and communicates vaguely intelligible philosophic thoughts through a system of tiny colored flags. When day is done, these creatures return to a mobile glass jar about the size of an airport. Jesus Christ, our Savior, is like unto the bold Lieutenant Ant, standing there in our midst delivering proclamations which, though not exactly useful or practical, are nonetheless somewhat interesting. Mankind, be ye more like Joyce Carol Oates, pushing a peanut across the floor all day with your nose while all the others are outside having fun. The path to salvation involves the act of shouldering 4,000 pounds of garbage between two points for no particular reason. The Ant teaches us futility—and diligence.
Tarpaulin Sky Jonah Winter
The Wolverine (Escrivus Maritalaidus) The Wolverine’s chief physical characteristic is his pointed head, shaped thusly from having spent a short amount of time in a giant electric pencil sharpener. At birth, these overgrown weasels are plunged nose-first into the machine, a rite of passage originally intended as a clumsy hygienic procedure. Wolverines spend most of their days hidden away in small underground rooms equipped with writing desks and miniature flashlights. The Wolverine will sometimes bark like a dog. This usually occurs around the Vernal Equinox and serves as a warning to sailors. The Wolverine’s mating habits are rather sophisticated—at least, for a small woodland animal. These creatures rely heavily on electronic vibrators with multiple attachments and fittings. Fantasy and role-playing also figure largely into this randy fellow’s fanciful downtime. Hopelessly romantic, The Wolverine feeds on animals almost twice his size, such as The Grizzly Bear and The North American Art Colony Leech. No one, as of yet, has ever actually seen this animal. Satan, unlike the gentle Wolverine, is visible in every single corner of The Universe, ever-present, plying his trade with the fierce determination of an executive sales rep from Xerox Corporation. A copycat, Satan hath not the ingenuity to fantasize or strap on interesting sex toys, instead removing his own head and stomping on it, over and over and over again in a fit of
135
Tarpaulin Sky Jonah Winter
136
literally â&#x20AC;&#x153;blindâ&#x20AC;? rage. Be ye then, gentle Man, more like our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who is the ultimate Wolverine, pencilsharpened into a state of divine pointedness, ready to transcribe the final days and hours of sinfulness into The Book of Life, which hath a Beginning, Middle, and an End.
Tarpaulin Sky
Jamey Dunham Gabby
He was writing The Great American Novel and booked a flight to Canada to do some research. It had started out as an action/ adventure/romance but now was more of a self-help manual. It was tentatively titled “How to Make Love to an Angry Wolverine” and he hoped his childhood on a farm and years in the pornography industry would be of some service. As it was, he had never really been good with animals or sex and would end up drawing primarily from his experiences as a boy scout. And so on that fateful day when he rounded the bend of the scenic mountain pass and found himself staring eye to eye with the fierce creature, there was a moment of self doubt; as if he were suddenly surprised to find himself there and the many days of hiking and scavenging about the caribou carcasses had somehow been meant for another purpose. Then the boy scout in him returned and the “can do” spirit took over. He slipped calmly behind the creature, lifted its bushy tail as if looking under a rug and went about his business. Afterward he returned to his cabin to put the encounter to paper but no words would come. The experience had ruined him for all others. He fell into a deep depression and spent the rest of his days in his cabin alone. On clear nights, the wolves would come down from the mountains and sing for him.
137
Tarpaulin Sky Jamey Dunham
Trickster on Hajj
138
Dust clouds and Mountain Dew empties. Coyote on the pilgrim trail. Coyote making the journey to Benton, Arkansas, holy city and birthplace of Walmart. Coyote in ihram, his slender frame adorned with the same plastic bags used in Walmarts today, the same plastic bags used to bury the dead. Coyote reverent but also reflective. Coyote remembers how it all started with just a pair of cut-offs and some pocket change. And now? Millions of pairs of cut-offs, thousands of dollars in change. Coyote but one in a sea of true believers making the spiritual journey from Raleigh, to Nashville, to Little Rock. They will find refuge along the way. The white man in the Nascar hat who hands out sticks of gum in Greensboro. The black woman in Memphis who makes her own beef jerky. Coyote knows we are all the same in the electric eye of Walmart, peering down from above the parking lot. One people united by a desire for dollar gallons of milk and three dollar patriotic t-shirts. Coyote the pious adjusts the plastic bag of moon pies slung over his shoulder and hunkers down for the long road ahead.
Tarpaulin Sky Jamey Dunham
Trickster at the Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Colony Coyote out of his element, taking in his surroundings. Hills wear trees like film on the tongue. A coffee concealing what? Harsh landscape? Undesired geological features? Coyote the bird caught in a religion of migratory patterns. He stumbles back to this place summer after summer like the B-movie character returns to the sequel. The only surprise is the lack of surprise. And now what? Coyote stands at the easel and waits. The sound is the slap of weathered oilcloth. The sound is a stain. How to capture that on canvas? How to write a weather, a past? Paint and technique fail here. Urine and sweat would be too deliberate and awfully hard work. Coyote waits for talent as if for a postcard from home. He wears down; eyes sinking, flesh hardening to leather. He has found his way back to the bronze-age. And now what? Coyote has recreated an entire history but still failed to conjure one, small art. But that is something, isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t it? Yes. Congratulations. That is something. Congratulations.
139
Tarpaulin Sky
Andrew Michael Roberts chehalis
140
this is the part where you wander drunk into the darkening woods and they don’t find you face-down in the river for three days because you drift six miles downstream. your limbs are bone-white and split with bloat. the fish have made a mess of you. the boys who snagged and fished you up never dreamed of you. now you’re with them every night. you sit at their beds’ dark feet, emptying your boots of it, the riverwater, the sand, your soul. ‘it’s worth it,’ you tell them, ‘becoming the river.’ you feel benevolent, returning to them, making them part of something infinite. you can’t imagine their loathing. ‘to taste the language of fish,’ you whisper. ‘to know it means you are part of something, not just some thing.’ they don’t answer, but you know they hear. under their lids, their eyes dart like trapped things. out beyond the trees a beaver strikes the river with its tail, clear and loud as a gun shot.
Tarpaulin Sky
Mark Cunningham [specimen]
Originally, people believed Van Gogh shot himself while he painted Wheatfield with Crows; then Artaud claimed Van Gogh painted the canvas almost “at the precise moment he rid himself of existence,” then he noted Van Gogh painted it two days before he shot himself; now, scholars hold that Van Gogh painted the picture twenty days before he died. Looking again, Artaud noted something “prenatal” about the suffering in the painting. She told me she had two words for my idea, “bor ring.” I wish this thing had a 48-hour battery: I’m looking at a long night.
141
Tarpaulin Sky
Amber Nelson from Horoscope April 6 About the sanity of physics. We are all such small Hello Mom. I have missed
142
vibrating points. your resonant frequency. I am teaching myself to paint anything. Even sound. There is so little science. I mean silence. Canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you see it? Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll need a large, large microscope. But this little string will have to do.
Tarpaulin Sky
Cal Freeman
from A Key for Shapes and Kites Proposition 17 Mother’s Third Attempt In her coma mother didn’t dream of angles. I asked what those in comas dream. Those, I remember saying. She explained that she could still hear the doctors mutter pejorative, those words that hurt. I proposed that the sum of any two angles is less than two right angles, and the gaunt cat in my father’s voice raised a paw. We could all gather (I told my sister, I told my uncle) and insist that father take legal custody of her. Uncle and that line AB, Uncle the line AB, his phone call to me equal line BC, and my subsequent phone call to my sister line CA, all forming the triangle ABC. Let Mother then be D, that tail pendant from the cat in father’s voice. Cat in Father’s voice, is that what we are? We could all gather to spit wooden nickels, but we tend to forget where they land. We gather as the cat in Father’s voice, but is it what we are? The tanager in mother’s sallow face says, No Straight Lines. I am relieved to hear No Straight Lines. I was afraid I might be blamed.
143
Tarpaulin Sky Cal Freeman
Father Calls Upon Shroedinger to Defend His Orange Cat There is a version where there are two versions Of the cat: in the one we live and broom Feathers from the birds, in the other We are dead as your mother Wished to be when she swallowed pills And slept on the basement floor and was dragged In her sleeping bag like a highway deer.
Those, I Remember Saying
144
A tanager sings sweetly, the custody of which the cat in Fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s voice, its tail stopped, cannot gain. I have proposed the shape of what we see here, regurgitations of live birds, the tail done with swinging, pouncing crippled by gravity, against a better intuition. I heard the rill of wings before I went to speak, or someone shuffling a marked deck, or the shucking of tissue paper in an ever-dimming room.
Tarpaulin Sky Cal Freeman
Postulate 1 To draw a straight line from any point To any point. When the tissue paper was shucked In the ever-dimming room, I thought I heard sobbing. When the doctors Brought her in, Mother was compliant as a cow. I am the mother of my own suspicion, The line that draws itself from Mother To the disorder of a craggy shore. I am the simple postulate that excludes The order of the shore. Euclid didn’t specify That the line from A to B must be Of a particular character. It isn’t as though The line could be extracted from its shape. The shape keeps bringing more to itself Until it’s tempting to isolate the line From other lines. Given line MO, We will find a line with M and O as endpoints. Ontology of the graph paper used, affinity For the thin blue line from which Mother is drawn holding a lily With a broken head, or fill in any flower. Nothing in Euclid allows the flower peculiarity. None of it is really allowed for. The parabola rises briefly from the ground At dusk. It retreats before noted on most nights. The accumulation of tissue paper In a dim room, the disembodied voice Crying for what, it cannot know.
145
Tarpaulin Sky Cal Freeman
Axioms 3 and 4 Mother’s friend came to town, stole a bottle of perfume, and gave away her son. This was what sister and I were able to deduce from the orange cat that teased the infant boy in the living room, pawing rattles hanging from his car seat. Mother shooed the cat, then fed the boy from a bottle, waiting for a phone call from her sister, word from the lawyer on how our aunt could adopt. The orange cat in father’s voice taught us Axiom 3 at the breakfast table. Mother’s snow angels skated atop the china cabinet, unaware of the orphaned boy. Now his mother smelled like mother, but had no child. Father read, “If equals are subtracted from equals, then the remainders are equal.” We watched the boy spit milk on mother’s shoulder, his cry like father’s snow blower starting up or the orange cat in spring heat. Walks were cleared, kittens born on father’s overcoat, a baby screamed, all near the noon hour.
146
Our aunt had no ovaries. It appeared the little boy would be hers, his name not yet determined. Father continued on with the lesson: “According to Axiom 4, things which coincide with one another, equal one another.” Perfume, one less bottle, my cousin was the walkway cleared of snow. “Coincide,” father emphasized. Much remained. The walk recanted and kept its snow. When she arrived, our aunt trekked slush across the carpet, held the baby high and spoke in gutturals. Mother’s birds slept quietly in their cages. The cat perched on the baby seat. We passed the boy around.
Tarpaulin Sky
Gregory Howard My Brother
My brother, who for years has suffered the suspicion that something mysterious and untoward happened to him in his youth, has decided to build a scale replica of our childhood home. In this place of familiarity and dread he intends to recapture those illusive events and in doing so, surmount them. This does not surprise me. He has always been prone to excessive gesture. My job is to verify and amend. He sends me photos and I look at them and together we reconstruct the house. For example, we look a photo of the living room. The room is fairly dark and comes across as musty on account of deep red and ornately decorated rug in the center of the room, the dark brown tables and chairs, and the fact that our mother always kept the drapes closed in order to protect the furniture from sun damage. He is kneeling on the floor, his face close to a book, while I am asleep on the couch. My body looks lifeless. He wants to remember those things not in the picture. Was there a small darkly polished table behind the couch? he asks. There was, I say. And did it at times, depending on the day of the week or the quality of light, resemble a small and frightened animal, he says. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s debatable, I say.
147
Tarpaulin Sky Gregory Howard
We do this deliberately and once a week. We talk only by telephone. This became the plan after I revealed to him that I had no photosâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;that I did not take any when I left. To build a house in this way is no mean feat, but we are resigned. At first, it was only he that was resigned, while I continued to wear oversized dresses and think of myself in silhouette, but that has changed. Now, I no longer perform my accustomed activities. I do not look for objects on the street. I do not lie on the floor of my apartment and look at the ceiling. I make bitter coffee and look at the phone. I think only of the house. I readily admit our situation is peculiar. I have not seen my brother in years. Even though we live in the same city. I came here first and he arrived later. I was apprised his arrival by means of a postcard. This is to inform you that your brother has, at last, taken up residence in your city, the card said. It was decorated with cut out illustrations of antiquated but happy children playing with a dog. Months later I received another card. Why not decide for yourself? it said.
148
Sometimes, when I walk the streets of my neighborhood, I think I see my brother. There is my brother, I think, as I begin my approach. I watch as he does interesting, anomalous things such as write graffiti on the side of a building, curse softly at dogs and parked cars, or collect old shoes that are everywhere distributed on my street. As I do this my thoughts turn toward possible outcomes. Will he embrace me and call me by my name? Will we talk about older times or discuss purely the proper ratio of
Tarpaulin Sky Gregory Howard
wall to ceiling? Will there be an offer of cake with pink icing. Anything seems possible. But of course in the end it is not my brother. I intend to grab him lightly by the shoulder and whisper a greeting in his ear. But the person that turns around and looks affronted and sometimes threatens violence. Watch where you are going!, these people who are not my brother inexplicably say. It is hard to imagine that I ever thought these people were my brother. In the end they look nothing like him. I do not go with the purpose of looking for him. I do not go with a purpose at all. This is something of which I think my brother would approve. When we were young we played a game of his devising in which we would tell stories to each other about the things we found on the ground. These things were not obvious. They were gloves or doll heads or playing cards. He would always start and I would continue, though my tendency towards fancy irked him. Not everything is evidence of another world, he always said. Eventually he gave up. But I kept playing. In truth, I like thinking about the house. It has been so long since I thought of it, that when I do it feels like I am remembering a dream. I remember, for example, the time my brother wrote, directed, and then observed a rendition of his own funeral. He was ten. He watched us in the tastefully lighted living room as we solemnly attended his casket in our best mourning clothes. He watched from the stairs, and I watched him watch, though he didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t acknowledge it. Later I found him alone in our parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;
149
Tarpaulin Sky Gregory Howard
bedroom. He was despondent. The whole enterprise had gone badly, he felt. Still, I told him, it must have been edifying on some level. Everyone wants to know what thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s like, I said. Maybe we should do it again? he wondered. I imagine our house in a clearing in the heart of a forest. The clearing is quiet and the sun shines through the trees casting dappled shadows. A short walk in one direction will take you to a lake with a slight sandy shore. Of course, this was not the location of the original house. That house was torn down a long time to make way for newer houses and newer people. For a while we go on like this. He continues to call and send photographs and postcards. The cards depict edifices built years ago and abandoned. One is an old house of the future. It is white with soft rounded corners and round windows and has been overgrown with trees and shrubbery. The sky behind it is blue. Another is a rectangular metal sculpture in a field. It is rusted. The sky behind this one is also blue. I find these postcards curious yet soothing. I know I am expected to understand their import but I am so easily distracted. They bear no notes now. They are each their own message. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel a great sense of satisfaction in our progress.
150
But suddenly there are problems. My brother has decided that perhaps instead of building a replica of the house, we should be building a replacement house. He hands the phone to a woman who explains the difference. Her voice is low and reedy and sounds of lakes and overcast skies. I imagine her in flowing
Tarpaulin Sky Gregory Howard
white dress, standing confidently on sturdy legs, while my brother kneels beside her. I must admit this image is displeasing. In a replacement house, she says, my brother would create new memories rather than uncovering traumatic ones. Who are you?, I ask. These new memories, she says, will allow him the regeneration he so desires. But itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the same house, I say. Not exactly, she says. Now when I walk in my neighborhood instead of the people and the shoes and the animals I watch houses. What kind of houses are these? The people in them give nothing away. Through their windows they appear studied in their movements and postures. They sit without touching upon colored couches while looking at the television, or they argue in a variety of seated and standing tableaus, or they are not at home and their rooms filled with silence and furniture and dust. One night I see a factory catch fire. The flames are orange and purple. They shoot up into the night sky. I can feel the heat on my face and hands from my considerable distance. Though it feels as if the fire is just for me, I am only one of many spectators. We do not talk to each other. We watch as people run into the factory to salvage what they can. What they bring out doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seem to belong in a factory: mannequins, circular metal canisters, glass orbs. Part of the roof collapses sending sparks into the sky. Some people sob. We stand around late into the night. The next day I walk to the site. The building is hollowed out and smells damp and burned at the same time. The walls that have
151
Tarpaulin Sky Gregory Howard
not crumbled display silhouette patterns from the fire. I let the wet ash run through my hands. A replacement house, I tell my brother decisively, when he calls, will allow for greater freedom in dramatic recreation. Accordingly, I have been writing out scenarios. This is true. In one I am my brother and he is me and I am the one that gets to hide in the woods for several days and have adventures and pretend I have been abandoned while everyone looks frantically for me. In another we own a small ugly dog, the lack of which seems important to our respective developments. Let me tell you about the small ugly dog, I say, and the importance of its ugliness. Instead of a replacement house, my brother says,I have decided to build an entirely new house. Possibly one with turrets and glass and secret passageways. He hands the phone to a woman. It is a different one than before. This womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s voice is high pitched and melodious. I cannot imagine what she looks like. In a new house, she says, behavior is contingent only upon oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s imagination. I hang up the phone. My apartment is small. It is mostly one room, but there are separate rooms for the kitchen and bathroom. In it I have placed the many things I have collected. But when I look at this room and these things, I think only of the house. I lie on the floor and look at them. I sit in a chair and look at them. I try different angles. I know now that it is my responsibility.
152
I look at the photos again. I have kept them in the refrigerator in Ziploc sandwich bags, labeled according to room. I empty each
Tarpaulin Sky Gregory Howard
bag onto the floor. Because the house is a mixture of all things, I think. By chance a picture of my brother and I falls upon the top of the pile. In it we are standing next to a log in a small forest clearing. We are not in the center of this image, but to the far right, as if the log were the subject and my brother and I merely ancillary. He looks into the camera. I look away. We both look serious and melancholic. I do not remember this photograph or the excursion its meant to commemorate. In fact, it is only with difficulty that I recognize my brother and I. There is something foreign about this boy and this girl, something discordant. They do not look like the people they are supposed to look like. They do not look like us. But when I look at the photos I find this to be true of them all. In every single one, we could be someone else. We could be anyone.
153
Tarpaulin Sky
Kristen E. Nelson from The Hole Family Princess When the Hole Family took a trip to Club Med, Princess became the star of the Club Med Circus School by mastering the trapeze in one short week. Her instructor said things to her like, “If only you were a few years older.” Princess practiced a new gaze on him: innocent and longing. She felt a man’s hands on her body for the first time, knowing that his hands on her hips adjusting her halter were not quite where they wanted to be. She practiced and practiced for only one short week, but he was a very good teacher. On the last night of the Club Med vacation, the trapeze instructor painted Princess’s face with blue eye shadow and red lipstick and swung her through the air above a very large net. On the walk to the shuttle bus that would carry her away to the airplane that would carry the Hole Family across the ocean home, Princess with her perfect gaze of longing, looked over her shoulder at her instructor and said, “If I could I would stay here forever and swing through the air every day until you taught me how to fly.”
154
All grown up, Princess takes a job at the United Nations and is flown to a poor country to help monitor voting in an unsettled area. This job makes Martyr worried and proud at the same time. Princess winds up staying at the only five-star hotel in the
Tarpaulin Sky Kristen Nelson
capitol and dines with the mayor. The messages sent home say, “It’s difficult to stay impartial when the incumbent mayor gives you an honorary membership to his club and offers you martinis and lobster. Talks about taking you on hot air balloon rides.” All of Princess’s martinis are shaken, not stirred, served with a twist. She never orders them herself. There is an army of Egyptian princes—poor scarred Italian peasants who worked their way to knighthoods—and more recently a mayor in a poor country, at her bidding. They have memorized her drink order. They wait, ready to order that shaken martini with a twist, thinking clean thoughts about Princess, who dresses in white in a dusty, dusty city.
155
Tarpaulin Sky Kristen Nelson
Lagrimas Lagrimas is always either way down farther than the rest of the Hole Family or way, way up farther than the rest of the Hole Family. She wasn’t home to save Button the day of the kitchen knife because she was working. She thinks that she should have been the one to save him. She is the only one to stand directly in front of Button and use Capoeira to avoid his crows while listening carefully to his words. She has a list. A list of things to remember to be angry about. Most of the writings on this list are about Princess. Lagrimas writes things like, “Princess was poured a large glass of juice at breakfast and I was poured a small glass. . . . Princess dropped out of high school, while I am working two jobs to get through college. . . . Princess bought me an expensive Coach bag for Christmas this year that I wanted very badly. I unwrapped it in front of the rest of the family, while she unwrapped the acne face soap I bought her.” Lagrimas keeps this list of things to remember to be angry about in her very expensive Coach bag at the bottom of her closet next to the stack of degrees from good schools that she earned without help. The closet is in her small house that she purchased without help.
156
The list of things to remember to be angry about is written on a scroll of cotton paper that she weaves herself. She learned how to weave cotton from a book when she was a small child and her
Tarpaulin Sky Kristen Nelson
mother was pregnant with Princess. She weaves more whenever she is way way down. She regrets the weaving and the list at times. Lagrimas forgets to be angry while she is way way up. She doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sleep. She puts on tight black dresses that complement her breasts and strappy shoes and dances Salsa and Meringue with brown men who fall deeply in love with her. This usually lasts for several nights. Then she says goodbye to the men who love her. She kicks her shoes into her closet. She sits in a chair that she purchased without help and picks up her loom.
157
Tarpaulin Sky
Peter Davis
Poem That Indicates Something You Could Do For Me That Would Be A Great Surprise, Though Less Surprising Now That I’ve Written This Poem You could nominate this poem for a Pushcart Prize or something else that’s
158
prestigious.
Tarpaulin Sky
CONTRIBUTORS Laynie Browne is the author of seven collections of poetry and one novel. Her most recent publications include The Scented Fox, recipient of the 2007 National Poetry Series Award, selected by Alice Notley (Wave Books), Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Books, 2007). Currently she lives in Tucson, AZ. Blake Butler is the author of EVER (forthcoming Calamari Press) and Scorch Atlas (forthcoming, Featherproof Books 09/09). His work has also appeared in Unsaid, Willow Springs, Fence, Sir!, and etc. He lives in Atlanta and inside the internet at blakebutler.blogspot.com. A native of France where she was trained as a dancer, Brigitte Byrd is the author of Fence above the Sea (Ahsahta, 2005) and The Dazzling Land (Black Zinnias, 2008). Her third poetry collection Song of a Living Room will be released fall 2009 (Ahsahta Press). Brigitte is a board member editor for Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies. She lives in Atlanta, GA, and teaches Creative Writing at Clayton State University. Michael Clearwater lives in Salinas, California. He works as a researcher. He has work forthcoming in Jubilat. Rob Cook lives in a shoebox in NYC. Edits Skidrow Penthouse with Stephanie Dickinson. Work has appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, The Bitter Oleander, Mudfish, etc. His book, Songs For The Extinction Of Winter is available from Rain Mountain Press. Mark Cunningham lives in central Missouri. He is the author of Body Language (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2008) 80 Beetles (Otoliths, 2008) and two chapbooks from Right Hand Pointing, Second Story and nightlightnight. Peter Davis’ book of poems is Hitler’s Mustache. He’s had poems published in journals, and he probably has some poems forthcoming in journals, but he’s really just stoked about being in Tarpaulin Sky. Since bio notes are ideally fifty words, he’ll just add this sentence and be done with it. Brandon Downing is a photographer, collagist and filmmaker and poet. His books include The
159
Tarpaulin Sky
160
Shirt Weapon (Germ Monographs, 2002) and Dark Brandon (Faux Press, 2005), while a monograph of his visual work from 1996-2006, Lake Antiquity, is forthcoming from Fence Books in 2009. He’s just released a new feature-length DVD collection, Dark Brandon: Eternal Classics; more of his work can be seen at www.brandondowning.org. He lives in New York City. Jamey Dunham’s prose poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including: Great American Prose Poems and The Best American Poetry 2005. He Co-Edited the upcoming anthology, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, with poet Brian Clements. Jamey teaches English at Sinclair Community College and lives with his family in Cincinnati. Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit. He received his MFA in 2004 from Bowling Green State University. His poems have appeared in The Journal, Comstock Review, The Minnesota Review, Ninth Letter, and Nimrod among other journals. He currently teaches creative writing at University of Detroit Mercy. Richard Froude was born in London and raised in the Westcountry. He moved to the US in 2002 and is most recently the author of The History of Zero (Candle Aria Press, 2008). He lives in Colorado where the sky is often blue. Rae Gouirand’s poems have appeared most recently in American Poetry Review, jubilat, Spinning Jenny, Bellingham Review, Forklift, Ohio, and Bateau. The winner of the Meijer Fellowship, the Hopwood Award, and a summer 2008 fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, she lives in Davis, California. Heather Green was born in Laguna Beach and recently relocated from Lincoln, Nebraska to Boston. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, The Hat, Octopus, Pebble Lake Review, Sixth Finch, and other journals. Her chapbook, The Match Array, will soon be published by Dancing Girl Press. Brian Henry is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Stripping Point (Counterpath). His translation of the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices (Harcourt) appeared in 2008. He lives in Richmond, Virginia. Gregory Howard has published work in Elimae, Hobart, The Cafe Review
Tarpaulin Sky
and Square One. He lives in Denver. George Kalamaras is the author of four books of poetry and three chapbooks, the most recent of which are The Scathering Sound (Anchorite Press, 2008) and Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008). He is Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990. Rauan Klassnik was born in the mountains down by the sea. Rauan Klassnik likes to keep moving and enjoy the flowers. Etc, Etc. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and his first book, Holy Land, released from Black Ocean in the Spring of 2008. Jill Magi is the author of Threads (Futurepoem), Torchwood (Shearsman), and Cadastral Map (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). Two text/image works, Poetry Barn Barn! and From the Body Project, are forthcoming as chapbooks from 2nd Avenue and Felt Press this year. Jill teaches at Eugene Lang and Goddard Colleges and runs Sona Books. Erin Lyndal Martin lives and writes in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Cannibal, H_ngm_n, and Coconut. Her first book, Hive Mind, was a finalist in the 2008 Tupelo Press First Book Contest and is currently unpublished. Megan Martin lives and teaches in Chicago, where she is a founding member of the literary collective Venom Literati. Her first collection, Sparrow and Other Eulogies, was a finalist for the 2008 Slope Editions Book Prize and other pieces of her short prose have appeared in WebConjunctions, Denver Quarterly, elimae, and BlazeVOX. Kristi Maxwell currently lives and writes in Cincinnati. She’s the author of Realm Sixty-Four (Ahsahta, 2008), Elsewhere & Wise (Dancing Girl, 2008), and Hush Sessions (Saturnalia, forthcoming 2009). Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He is the author of two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue, and We Are BillionYear-Old Carbon, as well as numerous chapbooks and one full-length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems. His collection of dialogue narratives, Listen, is due out in March 2009. He and his wife own Burke’s Book Store in Memphis, TN. Patrick Morrissey’s
161
Tarpaulin Sky
162
poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Typo, and Harp & Altar. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Jess Neiweem received her B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is currently pursuing an M.S. in Library and Information Science. Her work has appeared in 27 rue de fleures and Hayden’s Ferry Review. When not writing poetry, she writes and records wizard rock. Amber Nelson is the cofounder and poetry editor of alice blue. She likes blueberries and almonds and reducing her carbon footprint. Her work can be found or is forthcoming online with Word for/Word and Coconut, and in print with Taiga and I Can’t Be Your Girlfriend. Kristen Nelson writes short fiction and poetry. Her pieces here are from The Hole Family, a chapbook nearing completion. You can read more of her work in Trickhouse, Cranky, and In Posse Review. She is a founder and the director of Casa Libre, a non-profit writing center in Tucson, Arizona. Bernard Noël is a poet, novelist, essayist, historian and art critic. He received the Prix National de Poésie in 1992 and was given the poet laureateship as well as the Grand Prix International Guillevic-Ville de Saint-Malo for his oeuvre in 2005. He is the author of numerous books, including La Chute des temps and Extraits du corps from Poésie/Gallimard, and Le Reste du voyage : Et Autres Poèmes from Points/poésie Seuil. Michael Rerick is the author of the fulllength collection In Ways Impossible to Fold forthcoming from Marsh Hawk Press as well as the chapbook X-Ray out with Flying Guillotine Press. He is currently working towards his Ph D at the University of Cincinnati. Eléna Rivera’s translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Secret of Breath is forthcoming from Burning Deck Press. Other translations have appeared in the Chicago Review, Circumference: Poetry in Translation and are forthcoming in Tuesday: An Art Project. She was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Institute for the Arts. Her latest book of poetry is Mistakes, Accidents and a Want of Liberty published by Barque Press (2006). Andrew Michael Roberts is the author of
Tarpaulin Sky
something has to happen next, winner of the 2008 Iowa Prize for Poetry, Dear Wild Abandon, winner of a 2007 PSA national chapbook award, and Give Up, a chapbook from Tarpaulin Sky Press (2006). His work can be found in journals such as Tin House, Iowa Review, Colorado Review, and Cincinnatti Review. Tim Roberts is a freelance editor for Stanford University Press and managing editor of the American Literatures Initiative. With his wife Julie Carr he copublishes Counterpath Press. He lives with Julie and their three children in Denver, Colorado. Joanna Ruocco lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she recently completed her MFA in Literary Arts at Brown University. She is co-editor of Birkensnake, a fiction journal. Her stories can be found online in Pindeldyboz, elimae, and Fringe Magazine. Kim Gek Lin Short’s chapbook, The Residents, is part of the dancing girl press 2008 series. Work related to this project appears in this issue of Tarpaulin Sky and in journals such as Caketrain, No Tell Motel, 42opus, Soma Lit, and Drunken Boat, and was selected by Kate Northrop among the Mad Poet’s Review 2007 prize winners. Visit Kim online at kimgeklinshort.com. Dan Thomas-Glass is the editor and publisher of the systems-poetics journal With + Stand. His poems have appeared in BLACKBOX, Caffeine Destiny, Digital Artifact, Shampoo, Kitchen Sink, and elsewhere; reviews of Mlinko and Bernstein in Jacket. His dissertation on rap and langpo is titled The Dialectic of the Collective. Aidan Thompson’s work has appeared in journals such as Five Fingers Review, The East Village, Poethia, Sidereality, 26, Poetry Flash, Paragraph, and the Faux Bay Book. She is the author of Particle and Probability (Potes & Poets Press, 2002) and a chapbook, So Earnest to Have a Green Point (Palimpsest Press, 2006). Sara Veglahn’s most recent chapbook, Closed Histories, was published by Noemi Press in January 2008. Currently, she is the Associate Editor for Denver Quarterly and teaches literature and creative writing at Naropa University and the University of Denver.
163
5BSQBVMJO 4LZ 1SFTT $VSSFOU 'PSUIDPNJOH 5JUMFT
+FOOZ #PVMMZ <POF MPWF BÄ&#x2026;BJS> 5SBDJ 0 $POOPS 3FDJQFT GPS &OEBOHFSFE 4QFDJFT .BSL $VOOJOHIBN #PEZ -BOHVBHF %BOJFMMF %VUUPO "UUFNQUT BU B -JGF 4BOEZ 'MPSJBO 1FEBMT BOE 4UPQT /PBI &MJ (PSEPO +PTIVB .BSJF 8JMLJOTPO 'JHVSFT GPS B %BSLSPPN 7PJDF "ESJBO -VSTTFO "OHPMB (PSEPO .BTTNBO DzF &TTFOUJBM /VNCFST 1BVM .D$PSNJDL DzF &YPUJD .PPET PG -FT #BYUFS +PZFMMF .D4XFFOFZ /ZMVOE DzF 4BSDPHSBQIFS 5FSFTB , .JMMFS 'PSFWFS /P -P +FBOOF .PSFM DzBU $SPTTJOH *T /PU "VUPNBUJD "OESFX .JDIBFM 3PCFSUT (JWF 6Q (JWF 6Q #SBOEPO 4IJNPEB DzF *OMBOE 4FB $IBE 4XFFOFZ " .JSSPS UP 4IBUUFS UIF )BNNFS ( $ 8BMESFQ 0OF 8BZ /P &YJU .BY 8JOUFS DzF 1JDUVSFT "OESFX ;PSOP[B 8IFSF * 4UBZ
XXX UBSQBVMJOTLZ DPN
ASSUMING THE FORM OF POSTCARDS AUTHORED
BY AN “ALIEN” OF UNKNOWN NATIONALITY, ETHNICITY, AND GENDER, ADDRESSING A VARIETY OF
INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANIZATIONS (POLITICAL FIG-
URES, MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS, HIGHWAY
WORKERS, PEOPLE IN CONVENIENCE STORES AND PUBLIC TOILETS, ET AL), BIG AMERICAN TRIP IS
A STARTLING DOCUMENT OF FEAR AND LONE-
LINESS IN THE 21ST CENTURY U.S. WHETHER
Big American Trip
by Christian Peet Shearsman Books March 2009 ISBN 9781848610156 $15 / £8.95 www.shearsman.com
DECONSTRUCTING ROAD SIGNS, A FAILED RELATIONSHIP, OR THE STATE OF CONTEMPO-
RARY POETRY, THE VOICE BEHIND THESE TEXTS IS AT ONCE FAMILIAR AND
STRANGE, DETERMINED TO BE FREE, AND DESPERATE TO COMMUNICATE WITH ANYONE WHO HAS EVER FELT AT ODDS WITH THE LANGUAGE OF A NATION.
New from Shearsman Books
Kent Johnson Homage to the Last Avant-Garde $16 / paperback / ISBN 978-1-905700-95-0 Anne Gorrick Kyotologic $15 / paperback / ISBN 978-1-84861-004-0 Nathaniel Tarn Avia $2 / paperback / ISBN 978-1-84861-002-6 Kristy Odelius Strange Trades $15 / paperback / 978-1-905700-84-4 Brandi Homan Hard Reds $15 / paperback / 978-1-905700-81-3 Anna Glazova Twice Under the Sun $15 / pâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;back / 978-1-905700-92-9
Trade orders in North America via Ingrams, Baker & Taylor or SPD
see rangers for hours
SUBSCRIBE 1 Year — $17 / 2 Years — $30
www.fenceportal.org
counterpathpress.org
K?<I<ËJ K?< ?8E; 8E; K?<I<ËJ K?< 8I@; :?8@I# KfdX XcXdle IFJ< 8CC<P# A\i\dp ;Xm`\j K?< 9I@KKC< 8>< Xe[ I<KLIE@E> LGC8E;# I\e :_Xi# kiXej% >ljkX] JfY`e GC8:<;1 B8I<J8EJL@ GF<DJ# :Xifc Jefn ALC@FCF>P# E`ZfcXj G\jhl j# kiXej% :fc\ Jn\ej\e 8LI81 C8JK <JJ8PJ# >ljkX] JfY`e
Little Johnnyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Christmas List: Cap Gun Cowboy Boots Bull Riding Lessons Case Fbdy.* Belt Buckle City of Moths* Holster Batwing Chaps The Jungle* and a complete set of The Manila Broadsides*
Open Submissions 2009 Rope-a-Dope Press will read chapbook manuscripts during our first open submissions period, February - March 2009. Please mail one copy of your manuscript*, postmarked between January 25 and March 31st, to: Golden Gloves Chapbook Series Rope-a-Dope Press 516 East 2nd Street, #42 South Boston, MA 02127 * Only manuscripts between 15-35 pages will be considered. * More info and Johnnyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s extended wish list available at: rope-a-dope-press.blogspot.com
NO COLONY DOT COM
a quarterly on-line curatorial project
Take a peek here:
www.trickhouse.org