RealPoetik

Sarah Heller

2008-07-06T12:45:00.001-05:00

Everyone's Ex-Girlfriend

Everyone's ex-girlfriend keeps showing up.
She surfaces when I've only just relaxed,
when I let things be
soft. I recognize her because I've been her so well.
You have nothing to worry about,
he says. Why would I want someone
who tried so hard to hurt me?
And then the distracted look.

She used to scream at everyone,
was the first to walk out.
Everyone's ex-girlfriend
had sex with their good friends
during a phase.

Everyone's ex-girlfriend is always
meeting everyone late at night.
Busy girl. He says
Maybe I'll stop by after
and then calls from home.
I say Did you have a good time
and he says We've really grown apart.
But I can picture the tall bar stools.

You look great, they might
say to each other, shiny eyes. You always were
like that. Some things never change.
It's snowing! The snow is in their hair.

When he says It was wild to see someone
after so long, I hear Our skin was so cold.

Everyone says
I don't know who I am right now.
I feel like I haven't felt anything in a long time.

Alright, he says to her,
You're giving me a hard-on.
Really, she murmurs. She is so mean.
Her drink splashes around in her glass.
Touch it, he says.

My Life on a Conveyor Belt

Mostly, my lover lies there,
his soft penis against his thigh.
He is sleeping. I watch him go by.
Then – the commandments.
And my body parts,
breasts falling to the side
snagging on the rubber,
hair flowing from a small white plate
covered with tildes.
The clear plastic bowl on top.
The hostess seats people all around me.
Desire shimmers by like the pavement
in sunshine. My family is not on the belt,
they are in me.
The belt motors:
a beautiful soap dish,
a small machine.
Some soup, or at least a soupy substance.
Piles of sugar.
Plus one man.
My heart pounds. Is it the sugar?
Fear like an animal crouching
at the night opening of a tent. Dark
at first, and then the eyes adjust.

Sarah Heller received her BA from Bard College and her MFA in poetry from NYU. She currently works as the Executive Director of the Authors League Fund and teaches at Rutgers University. She has work published or forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, Pembroke Magazine, NextBook The Temple/El Templo, Thin Air, and Hayloft, and she is on the board of directors of Nightboat Books. She has received fellowships or awards from the MacDowell Colony, the Drisha Institute, Virginia Council for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Soul Mountain Retreat. She was the recipient of the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony for 2005-2006.

Lesley Jenike

2008-06-13T11:04:00.000-05:00

Battle of Bunker Hill

Dear Lesley, don't shoot till you see the whites
of their eyes; shoot when you see; don't shoot
before you look: winter scourges the dirt you
groomed to bloom hydrangea once May made

peace with this Eastern city. Among buds you
hung paper stars, bashful, ripped by wind, just
shy, by perspective's virtue, of a white obelisk
where we hung our collective remembrance.

Some battles bleach in sun, field that pillowed
men's feet and cradled the stakes they struck
to fly their colored cotton, draws up its green.
Your face met pavement after an evening; even

the greyhound in his quarter, bound on each
side by black iron, seemed to understand: war
is running. I painted this one for you. The sky
is a rainbow of sun and gunfire, the earth is

a gunwale. These men are just hanging on,
one hour, another. The wilderness in you
is ignorance: the smell of your skin, cells'
nuclei, the twin poleis of your eyes, a politic.

In this Eastern city, anxious men exit trains
so you may enter them and bullet yourself
to Wonderland where dogs still chase steel,
muzzled, mysteriously named, like the hill

this battle was named for. It's not the hill
where the battle seethed. But I allow myth
to dictate. You, too, moving across the track
with precision, allow the rabbit to escape.

Spring of a New Era

Dear Lesley, the lawn has grown long sooner
this year. Soon your nieces will be in blades
looking for eggs, the yard a treasure. Bound

in gold foil, chocolate hares spoil as they hide.
I'm reminded of the bullion sun we hunted,
hidden among pines or in a marsh regularly

filling then draining according to the moon,
that lesser, silver aster. The timber it took
to build a house was akin to skin stretched

by god's hand over scaffolding. In the Age
of Reason, we understood. You understand:
there's no end to reason. It soaks the room

with its harpsichord, its brocade repeating
deference in discrete pattern on your lap
as you take up your sewing. I wish I could

see your hands and hold them up to mine.
In the twenty-first century, blonde girls
discover egg after egg after discovering

the hider's philosophy: behind a tree or
beside the wheel of a car. We thought we
could predict nature but instead we built

a country. It stretched its rationality out
like a hand to pluck an egg, pink and blue,
from the meadow. Look, there are so many!

Sinking into Our We

Dear John, the British are coming! Just kidding.
They've already come, and long ago, painting
Our map with a cream and crimson expulsion

From sun to setting sun, that blessed star, even
After so many years, we still imagine comes
And goes, sinking into our we. We got it wrong.

The sea is just what it advertises: a primordial
bubble, its own laws, public gardens, public
policy: Whosoever sinks becomes for the lesser

that make light at the cellular level, a meal
of disproportion, skull of a hull through which
schools disappear. Your paintings in the dome,

a pitched roof to stop rain ruining, guide our
bones through their wreckage, their post-storm
compositions so caringly rendered sky opens

above. What happens to the dead? You had
your opinion and wager: Washington is there
eternally hating the color red, a sky forever

red. He's the sailor that took the warning:
morning happens every day. Looking into
the sun of your interpretation, we understood.

Lesley Jenike's poems have appeared or will appear soon in Fairy Tale Review, Florida Review, Brooklyn Review, Court Green, POOL, Verse, and others. Her first book Ghost of Fashion is forthcoming from WordPress. She will be joining the faculty at the Columbus College of Art and Design next year.

Mary Lyon

2008-05-14T21:03:00.000-05:00

I Need to Change My Waves

So predictalous      Am I mint to leave
my lies doing the seam strings    day after
tea    wreak after wreck     month
after February?      I'm amble
but somehow not thrilling     If only
I could shinny like those hoovers and nailers

who fake it right to the maelstrom    never
looking bright or cleft        virtually
without cockerel         I'm as fluxuated
as they are and even more punctilious     Why not
me in Carnegie Mall      grinding my
sorghum    winking at the top of my rungs?    Am I
not garnished enough?     Recently I had my hair

plimped and shined and lost scallions
of grubs       I have the kipper
but maybe lack the mulch       For minions
I've been vying to tincture my qualms and putty
it out      Here is a theory      My poppin and marvin
didn't get to fulfill their derisions      therefore
I didn't feel enlightened to pine      Sub-conscious

contusions were a major bandyhat     more
difficult for me to biffle      Mais je n'est sais
le cumquat        No use corn-cracking now
I will march my crows to the byzantine and in the end
I will cummerbund       I don't intend to end up
a lugworm in the Garden of Fancy Containers     Today
is the first day of the mess of my strife

Mary Lyon is a New York City poet and performer. She has studied with Sharon Dolin, Philip Schultz and Martha Rhodes. At the Cornelia Street Café she has appeared several times in the series "Writers Read." She is a featured artist on the CD "Little Noises," available on CDBaby.com.

Miller Oberman

2008-04-30T14:46:00.004-05:00

Seaworthy

His body's the marsh of north
Jersey, brackish water,
cattails.  The turnpike all
exhausted gravel up to New York.
Yellow stalks stick up from the muck.
I can't walk across him; I'd sink.

He's a wild persimmon, picked
from the briers.  Sour, bitter,
wrinkled.  He's heart pine, gold-
soft.  He's still awake at four
in the morning, and sick.

He's a shtetl in Russia.  It's 1904,
the pogrom fires stink and smoke.
He's an old newsboy cap.  Silk lining
orange and frayed. He's woolen.
Scratchy but warm, even when wet.

He's in his body on the beach, Coney
Island, the salt sings fritters and beer.
He watches the boys strut in uniform,
link their arms in the pink arms of strange
girls.  He is so still feels shells
turning to sand, and the giant  creak
of the coasters climbing their tracks.
They click up, up and up; then let go.

To Keep the House Quiet

Father closes the door when he teaches little sister
music.  Myron has a stub of charcoal.
He draws her playing great-uncle's violin.
Draws it how it is, the violin too big,
her hair pulled back with twine.

The horsehair bow, brought over on the boat,
smells of Russian cart-horse.
Myron doesn't know how to draw
smell, or the way his stomach yellows
during the long silences.

Eighth Nerve

Something is wrong with Myron's
ears.  It always sounds like it's
raining. Or the sound, sometimes,
of galloping horses.  Better
not to mention this.  He tries
hitting his head against his bed-
post.  No change but a small
bruise, safe under his hair.

Far off, the front door bangs.
Father, home from work, beats
his boots against the mud-room
sink.  And that is really
happening, Myron thinks.

Daybreak

Myron is gone.  Become
flat as the others.  Grayfaced,
he eats his rations, and after,
sings sailor songs with the men.

All day he drops depth charges
on submarines with no curdle
in his guts, the inside of his stomach
clean and rosy as a gentile's.

But this is a nightmare.  Myron
wakes.  Still Myron, fresh as a wet
cut.  His bed sways sickly.

Waking comes hard as the lace
crust of ice on the sea, brittle
and stinging.  Brittle and stinging,
thinks Myron.  He can hear his sister
in her room practicing Beethoven's
seventh, the movement in A minor.
Their favorite key.  The four beats,
heavy as walking, as waking.
Myron does it.  Lifts his salt-caked
chest, breathes, and marches down
the bright cold hall, to the sound.

Miller Oberman was the 2005 recipient of Poetry Magazine's Ruth Lilly Fellowship
and has recently had poems in Bloom Magazine, the Minnesota Review, and Lilith.  Miller lives in Brooklyn with Zero Oberman.

James Cook

2008-04-17T21:16:00.000-05:00

Night Shift At The Machine Shop

Out in the dark
past the grime-caked windows
I feel pain begin to stir
in the wombs of animals
while here under a smear
of ugly lights
the lathe scrapes out
its archaic rhythm constantly
until the raw mesh
of my nerves starts to hum.
Its an old song
of brass shavings and sweaty faces
and there is something
necessary to it
if we're ever to understand
why the dreams of our fathers
grew terrible
and left their hands
scarred like maps
to cities that are always
just a few miles off...

Memory Of September Light

September light
was falling through itself
like smoke
and you were wearing
the dress your aunt gave you,
the one the color
of the Icelandic word
for "moon"

You kept asking me
if I knew what it was
but I didn't.

We imagined it would be
the sound of a piano
tuned to falling rain
or snow dissolving
in the air before it reaches the ground,

and then you asked
if I remembered
the seedy seaside hotel
with its cracked flowerpots
its tinny music
piped in from the other world

where sailors took turns dancing
with the same beautiful whore
how, one time, at dusk
we saw thousands
of monarch butterflies

dying on the stones beside the water,
wings flickering
like flowers
about to burst into flame

and, terrified, returned
to our bed without saying a word
while the sailors
played cards all night
in one of the empty rooms

James Cook is the author of a chapbook, Kingfishers Catch Fire (Foothills, 2003) and is a machinist. His work has appeared in The Cortland Review. He lives in Upstate NY and is currently working on his first full length collection, Moments At Point Light.

Brenda Iijima

2008-04-02T14:53:00.001-05:00

RAW PARTICULATE LANGUAGE WAGES

Where were you when we needed you subconscious field richness

Bubbly oily rich homology such gesticulating orchestrations

Wash us thick with substance

Because it can be done par excellence lasting opus

Little contrast great emphasis

There's sex to be had in the language shimmering large alluvial plains

That is why the study of soil covering prelinguistic sites is so interesting

Since the beginning of life on earth material corroborates

Glaciers are energized moving rivers of ice oozing moraine deposits like mind

Dirt and rocks at the edges

Time might be said to oscillate elsewhere prairies interspersed with woodlands

You can brace yourself against a cave wall for structure

Prehistoric men go out hunting

Women struggle with the roots

It is a great feat that we bred the aurochs

The height of the withers of a large domesticated cow is roughly 1.5 meters

Convert that to stomach fat couch tuber yam

In Jaktorów, Poland the last known live arouchs, a female died in 1627

Swedes stole her head in a battle waged with the Poles

Studying the dissected brain of the fetal pig we inspire a notion of ourselves

We can imagine creatures with mandibles like ours but evolutionarily birds

It's been nice knowing you eating everything that breathes

I miss you, tribes of the Würm glaciation roaming is a favorite past time of mine

Civilization pales in comparison with night

Brenda Iijima's chapbook, Subsistence Equipment is just out from Faux Press. Animate, Inanimate Aims was recently released by Litmus Press. Forthcoming publications include Rabbit Lesson (Fewer & Further) and If Not Metamorphic (Ahsahta Press). She teaches at Cooper Union and runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs in Brooklyn.

Mike Young

2008-03-12T13:49:00.000-05:00

Mindy the Famous Divebomber Visits the Thrift Store We All Care For

Mindy the famous divebomber
took her blazer to very sincere
dry cleaners. Then things began to
snow, of course, which made her
stalwart. She went to the thrift
store to buy a hooded blazer.
Shut up. I know they don't. It's
a poem. Mindy, the divebomber,
cavorts, digs among the Slim Jim
30th Anniversary t-shirts and
pleated trousers, wigs and old men
thumbing the gunslinger pulp.
Did you know Egyptians invented
paper? I am a public education system.
Did you know we are run mostly by
hospitals? Mindy digs past Mother of
Ketchup and Macaroni Salad who
dances a little in a swell dress.
See? We are fine, after all.
Her child is not quite convinced.
Where are all the lights? Why are you
apologizing? I want a hooded blazer.
Mindy, the famous divebomber, situation
mingle, high alert. Where is your chute
of rockabilly gumption? A soldier never
lies, famous Mindy. Who do you get to
die on? Yes, in an ill-fitted blazer. But
it's only fifty cents. The transaction
is witnessed by a tour group.
They are up in arms, giggles.
They are here to define us.

Don't Wake Up It's Just Me

If I know exactly what you mean,
will we both fit on the motorcycle?
If I say streetlight, will you say
half-in, half-out? If I say pumpkin stew
will you say ghost flesh? Writ large and
quivering on a blimp, beep beep, the
antithesis of confession. I want to
advertise. I want you to come in and
sip, sit, scorn with me. Do stillwater
strokes and will the knuckles to pop.
Wait, I know exactly what you mean.
Let's try out tender vessels: they're
on sale. Join to the point of collapse
into. Accordion honk flesh. Oh. Oh.
If I say streetlight, you say back in.
And if I say dumpster diving, you say
chocolate factory. If I know exactly
when to wake up, you know how to stay
nervous, somewhere else, breathing, mum-
bling. Is this a trick? What game do you win
with trust? The word okay is like skydiving.
If I say swingset, will you make it rain?

Mike Young co-edits NOÖ Journal, a literary/political magazine. His poetry, fiction and criticism have appeared in MiPOesias, elimae, CutBank, BlazeVOX, Juked, 3AM Magazine and many others. He likes to take three trains at a time and plenty of citrus drugs.

Kristi Maxwell

2008-02-16T18:35:00.000-05:00

TO EXERCISE THIS ASTONISHMENT (3)

How can she dilute the parade of spectators without our complaint and the pause of our supple horns.

Pander is the bear in the zoo of our most likely deceptions; the bear we wave to and feed.

Repentance duty does not obfuscate, doing that refuses duty, do fused to will flounders with the knife by which one is offered up through the off-ing.

With sorrow we waive.

She suffers through hallelujah.

On the backs of heat-slicked horses we shine like no thing or like it is no thing to do so.

An antique lapel holds court for blue ribbons as evidence of application, of applying oneself toward and the inevitable win.

And so a breeze is how we understand a compliment to the coming cool.

Itinerant broom stagnated by such flawless tile, her socks again, our socks against the august notion.

The violence of a bell.

What order would insist we suspend gazelles in our muscles' definitions.

An order we wad with our resistance and toss.

That good and not good are not mutually exclusive.

We share with her each guise of tea.

The collective mouth for serving.

TO EXERCISE THIS ASTONISHMENT (4)

Bright, we answer first and loudly when asked to describe; we have learned what illumination omits from character, we have learned what fools her needles best, and we use our learning as sea foam that hooks the shore for recruits.

She scatters fame over the graves.

A model car bolted to stone and a doll we carve a hand to dole out to eternal.

Sweet abacus hung like antlers amused with flies we count; we count, ridiculous we, we've found a job to account for our existing.

Mais oui a new job.

Interpreter bankrupt of omens.

I have photographed my birthmark from five angles to submit, and I watch to see my submission scrutinized with care.

She bathes in our interest that unplugs fountains.

It is like this daily, and when it is not, desire is finally conjured, and the world's ankle folds and snaps to secure its bed rest.

Wind packs into our flapping shirts.

We dedicate ourselves to each alarm, battle the braying with response.

Kristi Maxwell's poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Forklift, Court Green, How2, the Modern Review, and La Petite Zine. Her book, Realm Sixty-four, is available from Ahsahta Press.

Jeff Downey

2008-02-03T11:41:00.000-05:00

from Pasture

The litter rushes bind.   I too was plastered.   Assured that from your sight needs loosening.   Such unearths irrigation.   For early on the tiles there were days regardlessly overfill.   With rowen comes a lining.   Expanses that wouldn’t be much to ply.   Everyone spins topsoil through debt.   Astute campaigns in sentiment.   What matters settle.

You have a look about you that syncs.   Soon or the thick flies in the face.   Lots are now taken electrically.   Without noticing it came into a glad beholding.   The change some trammeled.   Tractor parts lay out in the sun.   Besides the sentence I can be fined.

We have ourselves jostled foray.   The aquifer made rules of fire irons.    To chase tail reminded of the bodies gathered around poles.   If at all points grain.   But when you are moving on you are an overtone.   Shot in capacity.   There’s no need for apologies but go ahead.   Missing is mostly calisthenics.   A staple took of paint.

          Suppose a ripple is the law
          One felt forgone and cottonmouth
          A neighbor vent arisen
          Was an emergency whatever pelts
          Tableaux of plastic whitening
          Let’s not any lasting names
          By use I mean make
          Your contours light out
          The garage said to be off its foundation
          The mildew, marsh sieving to meadow

I knew whistling the vacuum had caught on.   Channels of the see-through sort.   Out of place but nodded at.   A crane lifts from the silt.   Does this amplifying loop.   The same wind that sprained your articulation.   Tugs out a knot.   Aware while handling of reception.   Its shore socked in.

Why fear being chased.   Once science could see from here tethered.   Land for your feat.   Abandon comes and just deserts.   The patent to having blood.   Overhead is a version of dizzying thirst.   All the rage moving on an offer.

The ball drops séance.   What remains relates raising.   Many blank in the basement.   Those grounds to now commit the calendars.   It is a girth resounding.   Winter leaves.   You a dilating adolescence.   Nor was it going to spoil such irises.   I kept meaning to come down with mono.   For after all the grist was the same.   Each post held fast.

Jeff Downey currently works at the University of Nebraska on a grant to digitize historic newspapers. He was an editor for the university’s journal, Laurus, from 2006 to 2007. His poems have appeared or are coming out in Handsome and Octopus #10.

Jim Bennett

2008-01-19T14:22:00.000-05:00

Bob's insight.

Bob had an idea
He figured out that
The only time we had
As who we thought we are
was now
And when you died
you came back
as someone else
back at the start again
so in a while
you will have been everyone
Hitler and Churchill
A maid a butler
A king and a tramp
Everyone in the world
And because you didn't remember
From one life to the next
You got to learn about life
All over again
And you could be nasty
Or not depending on
who you ended up being

it was a grand idea

no God or spirit guiding everyone
no everyone just Bob
for all eternity
he figured that each life
that came into the world
had its fixed place and
when he had been someone
and died he went back
to be the consciousness
of the next one along
he went round telling everyone
of his big idea
it's like reincarnation
he said
but there is only me
and I take it in turn to be
everyone
no one listened

he may as well
have been talking
to himself

Jim Bennett lives near Liverpool in the UK and is the managing editor of www.poetrykit.org. His most recent publication is a poetry collection called The Man Who Tried To Hug Clouds by Bluechrome Publishing 2004 (2nd edition 2005). Jim teaches Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool and tours throughout the year giving readings and performances of his work.

Mark Dow

2008-01-02T12:46:00.000-05:00

Mondongo is Not a Soup

          On the D train to Coney Island, a little girl whose black patent leather shoes with heart-shaped buckles on them do not reach the floor sneezes on her green helium-filled balloon. She stares at it, shakes it, then finds the corner of the coat she's wearing and wipes the balloon. Then she wipes it again, with her hand. Then she rests her chin on it. Her father reads aloud to her mother from Your First Year in Network Marketing: "Here's a typical scenario," and reaches up to tap away the balloon, which is now touching his head. The girl is still holding the attached strand of green ribbon. He reads, "There are three kinds of apples -- the red, the green, and the rotten." He has a New York Lottery gym bag on his lap.
          At La Taza de Oro on 8th Avenue near 15th Street, there is a rotary pay phone near the entrance. The action in the dial is liquid, hydraulic, leisurely, and greasy to the touch. At the far end of the counter, a big man, in charge, stands near the kitchen entrance and uses an ordinary table knife to cut -- to push, really -- bite-size pieces of under-ripe avocado onto one bed of lettuce at a time. Then he slices a white onion and puts one slice, separating its concentric rings without breaking them apart, on top of each avocado mound, and puts each plate into the refrigerator case. Across the counter, a young waiter mutters to himself, then says aloud that he ordered "dos sopas de mondongo" and where are they? The older man corrects him: "Dos mondongo: mondongo no es una sopa."
          At Mooney's Bar on Flatbush, a black man asks if I'm from "the colonies." Then he asks if I smoke marijuana and adds, "I'm not a cop. I'm a construction worker." He offers to let me feel his hands. The pear blossoms in the spring sunshine glow, seemingly bursting with fat. A closer look and the bubbles are imperfect hemispheric constellations of 8-10 small flowers each. An even closer look and the tiny pistils are purple. On 7th Avenue in Park Slope, a woman walks with a yellow umbrella open. Three women from the colonies watch her.
          "Maybe she knows something we don't."
          "Maybe she forget. Maybe where she comin' from it's rainin'."
          At the 23rd Street station on the 1/9 line, downtown side, a young white woman with an English accent says to the man in the token booth: "You do have the power to do something about it," and repeatedly calls him "arsehole." After passing through the turnstile, she sits on a bench with her face in her hands and cries. At the 28th Street station on the N/R line, downtown side, a middle-aged brown-skinned man glares at the man in the token booth and yells, making a trilling sound in his throat, "You! BAAAAAA! Fucking goat!"
          Two men, one pushing, one pulling, move a jet-ski chassis down the sidewalk and around the corner of Carroll and 4th Avenue, leaving a white, chalk-like, curved, double line. An eighteen-wheeler flatbed takes a turn fast, bouncing its cargo of engine blocks secured atop a bed of tires. Two girls, one holding a folded slice of pizza, approach portable toilets, one of which is padlocked, in Prospect Park. Thirteen monosyllables:
          "I went in there once and they trapped me in there."
          "I won't."

Mark Dow's poems and prose have appeared in Mudlark, Nthposition, Fascicle, Boston Review, LIT, Conjunctions, Green Integer Review (translations from Buenos Aires). He also wrote a book called American Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons (California 2004).

Jenna Cardinale

2007-12-23T15:14:00.000-05:00

An Un-Encouraging Icon

My baby was not born
while I was at war
or when I returned.

There's love. I learned
the women use one
fewer consonants than the men
do. There's also lover.

There's not much I can say
about this layer
cake of knowing.

I'm eighty. I'm eighty,
and I was a roller skater.

Sugar. I still have
all my teeth.

The Hope That Life Would Return

The possibilities of every life
Build a culture of life
A culture that values every life
No human life should be started
Assassins took the life
In the hope of an easier life
For each life saved
The loss of innocent life
The matchless value of every life
The dignity of every life
The richness of life
Succeed in life
The path ahead should lead to a better life
We will improve our quality of life
We are grateful for the good life
A life of personal responsibility is a life of fulfillment
Our job is to make life better

Schools can teach this fact of life
Children succeed in life
Get involved in the life of a child
Taking on gang life
The knowledge and character they need in life
Change a life forever
The rest of your lifetime
Extend life for many years
People receiving life-saving drugs
Life-extending drugs
Eventually come back to life

Self-appointed rulers control every aspect of every life
The United States is a partner for a better life
Life since 9/11 has never been the same
A special place in our country's life
The shadows of American life
Human life is never bought
Human life is a gift from our creator
The loving god behind all of life.

Text from State of the Union addresses, 2001 – 2007

Jenna Cardinale is the author of Journals, a chapbook from Whole Coconut. Her poems have appeared in number small-press journals, including 6x6, Court Green, and Foursquare. Big Game Books has just published a "tinyside" of her poem, "Four Hands." She lives in New York.

Danica Colic

2007-12-12T16:22:00.000-05:00

Backwards

Brick to dust, ore again
to its hollow veins,
glass to sand       The trees

again, and the birds
backwards to roost

The thrilled grasshoppers
in pelts of grass

Here are the rivers
thrashing with fish, floodwater
brimming, oh mineral, oh
disease

Buffalo and weather

Thickening weather, the ocean
thick as oil       The sun
cutting, beckoning

come to me

The earth
calling to itself, all
the stars calling
to each other, again
again       Everything
unbuckles: water, grain
virus

Oh my heart,

all the made
is unmade
and gallops to the center—

the only
place left; every other place
is erasure, every other place
is particle—

which is home

Isn’t this sex       Isn’t this
the final Glory       Was I ever
a name

After

Will there be a memory

      of structure
                            of tree apart       or

one foot in front of
                                 the other
a flock of birds

dividing             a bird
                                      then a bird’s eye

watching another       a feather

       the
              rolled stem of a feather

and the fan of threads along it       each a

      different length

each an each             how we will miss

the separate branches       and the voices

      among the branches       calling return

return       what

                 will we be when

there is no we                      only

the singular element

                                            what

will It be without longing

                                without the arched feathers

of the  throat       which seeks

another

Danica Colic teaches at Hunter College, where she also received her MFA degree. Her poems have recently appeared in Terrain.org, and are forthcoming in Arts & Letters and Pebble Lake Review.

Steve Roberts

2007-11-29T12:49:00.000-05:00

Evil Fuckface

I'm a human radio station, got it?
Swallowing the mortals, vomit as discourse--
I'm Vincent Price no I'm Charlton Heston--
at current elevation I'm neither of those,
my bachelor life proceeds with canned products.
See you in the valley, you'll be dead, a movie
about vampires proceeds with an orgy of neck ripping--
long story, writer disappointed, standing in light
smoke from teeth filling the image, discourse
as discourse--bad actor explaining the political cause.
Cigarettes unpleasant, bees fucking locusts
become topic of discussion, economics effected
by some guy talking, population control, let's
us kill ourselves a human, tribunal against justice,
taste in mouth found to be garbage, homeless envy--
reasoning hampered by cybernetics, here's the book
you're going to write while in the theater.

Damaged Soul Document

Big hand on the keyboard, diagonal
striped glove, difficult to remember past
christmases, the blur of memory, several
coffee cup stains, row of imperfect circles.

Moron wanted to be the life of parties
unknown. The woods, several years ago.
Annual rememberance of empty box.
I don't want to use the word 'you' anymore.

New and selected strands of hair, mix
myself a poison, call it a potion, endless
nights on the couch, party with wine,
restless clothesline begins to flap.

My glow is not alive. Someone
has spread blankets over ourselves,
morning is sneaking up. Car won't start.
Parties are the in-between, these moments.

Steve Roberts is a Texan living in Brooklyn. He has an MFA from the New School, and his poetry has been published in the Tiny, Big Tex[t] and Red China Magazine. He also is music editor for LVHRD magazine. His first book,VS., will be coming out in Spring 2008 with Black Maze Books.

Sharon Dolin

2007-11-14T17:57:00.000-05:00

With Roses (6:30 a.m.)

I'm empty. Quench me with song.
I'm guarded. Open me as the undine.
I'm sleepy. Awaken me to strum.
I'm clipped and shorn of night. With each note brighten me.

Let the eight-stringed harp hallow Your name.
I'm thirsty with praise. Let this golden net manna me in Your Majesty.

The leaves of the sycamore wave their shade through my window
      in my underwater sun they dapple my page.
Through me the voice of the sparrow.
Through my song the dying heave of the hooked bluefish
      its ribboned gills—the color of bleeding roses.
In its last gasps in the punishing air—so like its birth—it praises You.

What hook have You placed in my lip?

I seek You in the syllable sighs of the sycamore that sings Seek more.
I hear You in the mimosa that murmurs My Moses.
I have sought Your face in the faces of strangers who jostle me at the market.
I have glimpsed You in my son's squint and in my husband's ironic grin.
I have sought You in the late-blooming rose of Sharon.
I have found You in the spider that makes its web in my kitchen corner.
I have seen You in the inchworm caught in its web and in the one scaling my arm.

O the world is filled with those who bait the hook and those who are caught
      and You alone know which one we will become
      and when You will catch us up in Your celestial net.

And all at the moment of birth and at the moment of bloom
      and still all at the scissored instant of death

When the good are trampled upon
      and it is difficult to muster my faith into song

When I waver I pray
      You will set me on the highest rock
For even my doubt is holy and drum-taps Your praise.

Green Laddered Thanksgiving (11 a.m.)

At forest-green                 at rungs as trees

      at shore-rim            of shadow-green

(on one high step        on mixing bowl » dish towel

               pegged

     to archway)               to Japanese maple » ample

       leaves climbing               I am climbing

           to read     Nature's book in this nook

      in this 21st century kitchen light » at chin height

        And all I can do is give thanks » thanks

         for the bull frog                     by my door

  give thanks                      for the cicada's » dada

    its persistent IS         for these limbs » that limn

that I can still swim » on a whim

      in the green pond exceeding     thanks » for seeding me »

       ceding me Samuel                   my son

                whose name means You heard

             prophet  anointer of kings » rejoicer in all things

     who believes in You

        (How else could the whole world

              have been created)

More thanks for                       Sono (know who is)

   the red Griffon »                  fond I am fond of

       his beard-face to look       upon is to laugh » bark against bark

   whose patience          is devotion » won't shun

                 risks              drowning              swimming out     to me

Abundant gratitude in every latitude

for my marry »      my helpmate

(not made like me)      in his stoic calm

as the morning page         of the pond » (my im » ponderable)

                 Thank You for fashioning me as I am

a woman (no woe-man—                    not wombed man)

morning-slow (mourning, low)            who kneels »

                 making patterns                quickening with words »

                                   (consorts with orts)

                           May all these lines praise You

                              rays                     raise You

                               thanks                  give

                                   for each day's          eleventh hour return

                                          (my sojourn)

                            the gathering        bright haze.

Blackberry City and Sundial Talk (4 p.m.): Time

takes all but memories  in the end
       (takes time) takes even those

of our tailboned ancestors       this
the purplest late-fall sun      of my lover's ways (of my own)

of the buildings torn down to make way  of those ghosting my dreams
of the bridges packed with smeared people walking away

of other bridge walks to hear
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"               the ceremony

of marriage     even of the brightest
blood birth at the sunset hour of 4:59

when I pushed and strained
forth a child           of his immediate gaze

and suckle      of stinging milk-breast urge    its taste
of my blackberry blood

of that first Brooklyn day outside after
many child-feverish days             of racing

down the exhilarating alleyway
into the spangled street        of sweating in the City of

Fountains (of drinking at one           dipping
my feet in another)             of each ecstatic

swim            when I once fell in      got snow up my nose
of the first time I picked blackberries

in Ithaca and bit in    of lavender smell           of the last time
I kissed his sleepy face

or held her grasp:      Is forgetting
the soul dying          finally with the body?

O Blessed One
                may it never be so.

Sharon Dolin is the author of three books of poems: Realm of the Possible (Four Way Books, 2004), Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Heart Work (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1995), as well as five poetry chapbooks. Her latest book, Burn and Dodge, is the winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Dolin is Poet-in-Residence at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. She directs The Center for Book Arts Annual Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Competition and is a Curator for their Broadsides Reading Series, and teaches at the 92 Street Y in NYC.

Josh Hanson

2007-11-03T15:16:00.000-05:00

Bildungsroman

For a poem like a city, like a man:
gone light at the extremity,
thinned in sprawl—the river was once
a highway, a heart-sluice of speech—
ribs of bridges arcing, shoulder to shoulder,
you see: a poem of hemispheres,
lolling, too large for its frame, for a frame,
some form lacking locus, some lie
and our knowing, for our unknowing,
for all of these, I am and have become.

New Harmony, Indiana

Between the new
                             and the new world
                                                            is ranged
a sea so wide to warp the pure idea:

that is to say,
                     the movement is downward:
below the whiskey still,
                                       the unconscious,
down to the ground,
where we hear our blood:
                                          the knocking of the rails.
The English
                    couple on the train
thought the Sierras
                               extravagant:

There’s no part of England
not tramped over twice a day:
                                                  Fatherland!

We were children, would make our loaves of dust,
so we thought:
                      Throw your possessions away!
or let the railroad line do it for you:
in the city,
                 our things outlasted us
                                                        as they do.
And today, the English ran,
                                                burning,
smoke and ash up from the tunnels:
                                                            madness
spanning every sea:
                                Father’s Day,
great hawk above the hill,
                                           circling,
                                                         yellow and calm,
and the ravens came down
battering it, tearing its wing, crying,
and the hawk, now hurt, still circled:
                                                              the cries
no allegory, I saw it happen:
the hawks have all fled:
                                        sing crow-caw, crow-caw
and the leaders answer in turn:
                                                    madness.

But ours was but the madness of the young,
California to Chicago and on
                                                New York,
that last leg where the trains aged
                                                         a decade,
the lines snaking on dark:
                                          a tunneled world

                           (the movement is downward).

A hundred journeys later, pushing
                                                          toward
the West’s end, the wide plains of Washington,
dry grasses and dune,
                                   swatches of green land
where irrigated, and then sudden miles
of farmed poplar planted less than eight feet
between and extending back from the road
indefinitely,
                   to the driver’s eye
                                                    screen upon
moving screen:
                        unnatural,
                                         and a ways beyond,
fields of powerlines,
                                 wires glistening white
beautiful in their way,
                                     stretching toward the horizon:
the natural image:
                               beyond the natural.

No, not that exactly, but a nature
that knows the human, more than landscape
or its undoing.
                          Dominion, perhaps—
Listen to the old man talk tomatoes—
it is not an art—what will grow will grow,
but taste the fruit…

                                The parallelogram
of Owen;
              little more than the raised beds
of the gardener, though extrapolated
                                                              beyond
metaphor: we all are the fruits,
meant for more temperate climes, but hearty,
well, hearty enough, if lacking insight:
                                                                 bumpkins,
we set out, the whole human race,
moving ever-downward,
                                           ever in love.

Josh Hanson lives in Sheridan, WY with his family. He edits the online journal Eucalyptus: a Journal of the Broken Narrative as well as End & Shelf, which presents free online chapbooks.

Kirby Olson

2007-10-23T15:45:00.000-05:00

Nijinsky's Legacy

Nijinsky's powerful upper thighs
Friends, Americans, countrymen,
Lend Nijinsky a leg

Vaslav Nijinsky's missing brain
Belated carnation from the early 20th century

Our legs take us through summer evenings lawns crickets
Our legs erupt into music as we walk.

Kirby Olson's chapbook Waiting for the Rapture was published by Persistencia Press in 2006. He teaches philosophy and literature at SUNY-Delhi in the western Catskills.

Veronika Reichl

2007-10-12T15:43:00.000-05:00

Reinhard

Reinhard's got himself under control. He's got wires leading to all his organs, but above all to his mouth. No unconsidered word crosses his lips. His mind has looked at everything. His digestion works. When he says, I'll do that, he'll do it. He can be relied on absolutely. If something doesn't want things the way he wants them, his will pulls on the wires, as if he were pulling on reins.
The wire cables hang slack most of the time. But when he asks himself, after a Sunday of relaxation, how it actually was, he notices that the cables weren't really slack. His movements were hemmed in. They could have been so much more vast.

Alexa

There's Good and Bad left over from Alexa's daily life. Nearly every day, there's a piece of Good for the glass case. But the Less Good, that is to say the Bad, that stays too and collects in corners; and it must be eaten; how else is it supposed to disappear? It must be eaten by Alexa, for there's no one else around; eaten up and then the corners licked out. This Bad is a dry lump, it fills her mouth and tastes like communion wafers. But licking the corners out isn't too disgusting. For they're Alexa's corners and they're clean and fresh and sweet—all except for the Bad, which must be eaten up.

Florian

Florian must become one with himself, or better yet, be one with himself. There are two Florians, the one and the other, that is to say the mirror-image. For Florian One and Two can become congruent. Or better yet, they were so from the start. And it is always a mishap, almost a kind of sin, when Florian One gets out of line. There were always two, and one could say that the second is the mirror-image, the model, the plan, which the first should conform to; the plan that could show how everything ought to be. This plan is beautiful, like Florian himself actually, for Florian does everything he can to match the mirror-image. This is stressful, for the mirror-image has muscles, his eyes shine, and he always reacts with esprit.
When Florian has aligned himself sufficiently with the mirror-image, his gaze shifts, the two images become one, and Florian sees himself three-dimensionally.

- from the series "33 Functioning Machines."

Veronika Reichl was born in 1973 in Baltimore. She grew up in Munich and studied graphic design and media arts in Stuttgart. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation, "Meaning Matches Meaning: Animated Film as Metaphor for Philosophical Texts," in Berlin. Her poems won the prestigious "Open-Mike" prize in 2003 and recently appeared in Circumference and Action, Yes.

Donna Stonecipher (the translator) is the author of The Reservoir (Georgia, 2002) and Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance, 2007). Her translations from French and German have been widely published.