otoliths

2009-08-24T20:17:00.001+10:00

issue thirteen
southern autumn, 2009

defiant lethargy
Mark Young

CONTENTS

about archives books submissions links

2009-07-20T14:09:00.005+10:00

issue fourteen
southern winter, 2009

Destiny
Bobbi Lurie

CONTENTS

about archives books submissions links

2009-07-18T23:19:00.002+10:00

Randall Brock

Four Untitled Poems

Winter

in tears

of dream

in soft

fire

blue

     *

edge

in dance

of soft

fire

blue

in tears

of love

     *

Winter

in season

of mad

flow

in soft

fire

     *

dance

in motion

of fire

in dream

of rhythm

blue

A bionote for Randall Brock can be found here. He lives in Spokane.

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2009-07-17T14:54:00.011+10:00

sean burn

aka ad re degrade process hag

aka get up and walk in rhyme-poor target languages spiderman

aka ig n & v colloq

aka kill son hard all thats affected

aka planting carrots without leaders

aka type of ode thorised ligature

sean burn is a writer, performer & outsider artist whose fifteen poetry films have received many screenings worldwide, as well as at tate modern and national film theatre studios, london. his latest performance bastilles englan concerned with 'escaping all our asylums' is currently touring internationally. a third full collection of his writing – wings are giving out – is out imminently from skrev press. he is a regular contributor to http://nosobrasotros.blogspot.com/.

the first four pieces from this series appeared in issue thirteen of Otoliths.

he had a new soundscape / performance text launched at last months carlisle arts festival - buds have spoken black. it's also available for free download as an mp3 file (5'38'' / 6mb) from www.sendspace.com/file/ti3uuo.

more on sean at www.gobscure.info.

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2009-07-17T14:26:00.003+10:00

Reed Altemus

Reed Altemus's work has appeared in the following magazines since 2002: Rampike (Canada), Offerta Speciale (Italy), Unarmed(USA), Open World (Serbia), Otoliths (Australia), Lost & Found Times (USA), Boxon (France), SCORE (USA), Signal (Serbia), Blackbox (USA), Moria (USA), Gestalten (USA), Blackbird (USA), Xtant (USA), fhole (Canada), Voce Piena (USA), Generator (USA), Letter Founder (USA), Communicarte (Brazil), Miniature Forest (USA), Arnyekkotok (Hungary) , Big Ode (Portugal), Wohnzimmer (Germany). In his spare time he enjoys ice cream and the Mekons.

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2009-07-17T14:08:00.006+10:00

David-Baptiste Chirot

from Death From This Window (cont'd)

David Baptiste Chirot "Essays, reviews, prose poetry, sound and visual poetry, performance scores, Mail Art have appeared in print and web 60+ different journals in over a dozen countries. Participated in 350+ Visual Poetry and Mail Art exhibitions, Calls. 3 books, 3 chapbooks and in many print and e-anthologies. My work is with the found, everywhere to be found, hidden in plain site/sight/cite. http://davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com". Also: Cronaca Sovversiva Feneon—Faits Divers & Fate's Divers.

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2009-07-17T13:56:00.006+10:00

David-Baptiste Chirot

from Death From This Window (cont'd)

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2009-07-17T13:30:00.008+10:00

David-Baptiste Chirot

from Death From This Window

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2009-07-17T11:09:00.004+10:00

David-Baptiste Chirot

EL OJO DE DIOS

Part the Second: Parrot and Owl

For Eireene
Until upside down we meet

El Colonel smiles. Having arranged himself as though “setting up for an august display a stuffed likeness of himself, having carefully arranged the limbs and facial expression as though he were a funeral home director in charge of a painted and preserved, mounted and stuffed El Colonel whose taxidermist he himself was, he had come to a decision. For, seeing that this representation might be not only a form of mummy but also a kind of dummy, he found himself taking note of a changing role in his ongoing process of narration—from out of a mummified writing to find itself emerging as an activity of ventriloquism . . . ”

El Colonel gave a brief staccato and sotto voce laugh, “made almost harsh not only by its brevity and force, but by the cut off, raspy sound of its half whispered and conspiratorial tone.”

El Colonel sat for some moments, feeling himself in all his limbs and nerves becoming indeed a mummified dummy, expectant, alert, for those moments when the drama would commence and his ventriloquist would begin to supply him with the lines of his character, which was after al but a variation on an imitation of a stand in-representation of himself in his role as El Colonel.

El Colonel smiles. Considered from this perspective in which drama and the saying of lines provided by another converged in an enactment of that writing which he himself produced in the action also known as thinking, he realized that he could “indeed begin to speak of himself in the third person, and so alter the enactments and lines of the drama to be played out by himself on the stage of his high ceilinged white washed stone walled room; that indeed not only might he adopt the role of a third person narrator, but also begin to treat the movements and spoken lines, and indeed the presentation of inner thoughts also, as evidenced in the gestures and facial expressions of the mummified dummies being ventriloquized and playing their parts, with al this leading to the realization that indeed he could begin to treat this all not only in the third person but as a form of theater, in which he would also be providing the stage directions for the movements of characters, for the tones of lighting and the acoustical arrangements made for the amplification or softening of vocal tones . . . ”

El Colonel smiles. Seated now in the full and resplendent realization of this multiplicity of actions known as thoughts which are simultaneously writings, he saw that he also could be a spectator of the production of the plays carried out by means of ventriloquism, third person narrations, and a setting forth of inner thoughts via the dummy of a mummy who played the part of a representation of a Colonel decked out in funeral home splendor, at once alive and stuffed, a taxidermist’s dream come to life in the dimness of a cool and closed for the evening display room now realized as a Night at the Theater. Joyfully, he now found himself observing himself in the process of observing this play which was about to begin, following the directions given by himself to these beings enacted by himself for the benefit of that spectator who was himself. . . .”

El Colonel smiles. Having reached a conclusion, come to a decision, he is now ready for the play to begin, and for himself to take charge as the director of all that happens among spectators, actors, prompters, stage hands, musicians, technicians and as the writer of the text which is but the brief sketchy outline of that which must be made flesh as well as that mummified dummy to be made eloquent by a ventriloquising stand- in for a stuffed taxidermist representation of a funeral home directors art, not so very different from that of the kind of dramatist he himself now undertook to be, as in itself but a part of the overall production, much grander and more circus like by the moment . . .”

El Colonel smiles. And now let the play begin! —-—Let the Circus open its tent to the incoming night airs and crowds . . .

El Colonel smiles. Previously so precisely unfolding, the events of the day have started to run behind time. 10.00 hours has ticked away and the minute hand on El Colonel’s watch continues moving, widening the angle of triangulation which it shares with the near-stationary hour hand. Footsteps are heard on the stone floor of the hallway outside El Colonel’s door. His adjutant appears.

El Colonel smiles, and with a brief hand gesture signals his readiness for a report. “Mi Colonel, El Ojo has not arrived.” El Colonel’s sharp ear had caught the distant sounds of some one entering the foyer at the other end of the long hallway. “Has another man entered, Adjutant?” The adjutant nodded a slight assent, his impassive face glistening slightly with sweat as the day warmed, and his anxiety rose. El Colonel took keen note of “this slight defect yet to be corrected in the demeanor and decorum of the recruit... Though who could fault him perspiring in this heat? Still, it did not mask his distinct lack of a requisite and resolute composure . . .” (But then, in the slight somnolence of the gathering heart, did not El Colonel enjoy a certain “relaxation of rigor, letting sentences trail off, drift off, to float among the hazy vagaries of an alluringly veiled suggestiveness . . . “)

El Colonel smiles. A very slight lift in his lips indicates a suppressed sense of mirth. “And does this man have a signature, a name put down in writing, Adjutant?” “Si Colonel. He signs himself Senor Greene.” “Ah. And what does he look like, this Sr. Greene?” “Forgive me Colonel; it is very hard to say. I—”

El Colonel with a brisk movement of his feet beneath the desk, signals an order coming. The Adjutant straightens stiffly. “Adjutant, a man named Greene whom one has trouble in describing is none other than El Ojo. Conduct him here immediately.”

El Colonel smiles. As some do in adjusting a tie, so El Colonel does in arranging certain of his smiles. This one requires a few extra knots and flourishes, for it is from his Special Reserve, among the most prized of his chefs d’ouevres of the art. “The Butterfly Effect: to create the sensation of the unfolding of vast and brilliant wings, and then, having let the viewer behold for some suspended moments their outstretched beauty, to have them begin to flutter, as do the petals of a flower in a slight and refreshing breeze, before the acceleration of the effect and its launching into flight. And, air borne, there to dazzle the spectator with its agility of the great aviators and the consciousness of its poise, even in flight, of a great and noble woman, a classical and exotic tropical beauty, a true Regent of the Air.” And the Butterfly is perfectly poised as the Adjutant arrives with a shadow not his own moving behind him in the cool dimness of the stony hall.

El Colonel’s Butterfly Smile opens, parting its wings like lips, and then slowly unfolding them into the full display of their glory, there to remain beautifully balanced and poised as the Adjutant announces the entrance of a figure made even more vague by the gorgeous beauty greeting him.

El Colonel rises slightly in his chair, and with one arm indicates the chair prepared for the visitor. With the other hand he indicates to the Adjutant that the coffee should be poured now, the cigarette packet left untouched, and his departure made gracefully.

El Colonel smiles. Once the coffee is served and the Adjutant has retired, he addresses his guest in a firm but friendly tone. “Signor Greene, it is very good to see you weekly again. And how have you been? Are your travels still pleasant even in this heat?”

El Colonel smiles. One must give El Ojo a few moments. He has to have a few sips of coffee and unravel the plastic off the cigarette pack wrappers, break the seal and fold back the foil, folding it neatly at an angle across one corner. Then he must shake the pack up and down before tapping it several times on the palm of his left hand. Then one single cigarette, shaken loose, is slowly transferred to the waiting lips, an old battered Zippo comes out, the cigarette is lit, and El Ojo, sitting back exhaling with a satisfied sigh, says—“Ah! Now I am open for business Mi Colonel. Yes, now I am open for business.”

El Colonel smiles. While the young men of the Heroic Patrol “evince a carefully contained yet none the less discernable degree of a childlike affection for El Ojo,” he, on the other hand, “senses deep within himself a Baudelairean ‘Correspondance’ with the man, prompting him to murmur sotto voice, ‘mon semblable, mon frère,’ at times when listening to the detailed accounts of El Ojo’s ‘Voyages,’ among the scenes of their ceaselessly astonishing native land.”

El Colonel smiles, not a Butterfly Smile, but a much simpler one, more informal, more reassuringly confidential and “open to listening, like an ear that has bloomed forth from the lips of a flower.”

El Colonel suspected that El Ojo possessed a literary ability which he greatly respected and found most fascinating—that is, he suspected El Ojo of being illiterate, or at least selectively illiterate.

The clue to this illiteracy El Colonel found in the incredibly detailed presentations that El Ojo was capable of making, so detailed that they must proceed from the kind of photographic and aural memory that, in his experience, only illiterates and near-illiterates possessed.

These prodigious feats of memorization, which had enabled the Heroic Patrol to make such detailed maps for their lightning hit and run attacks, had prompted the young soldiers to dub this personage “El Ojo de Dios” or simply El Ojo. The All Seeing Eye a—and Ear—a Being of mythical stature and one deeply revered in their youthful and invented Cosmos.

The exactitude of El Ojo’s prodigious feats of detailed memorization of existence was coupled with what in effect was their opposite as far as the appearance of El Ojo himself was concerned.

That is, while his memory was exact and detailed, the memory of he himself was not at all exact nor even certain. Where El Ojo presented exact details to the listener, to the observer he presented only an invisibility, a gap, as the memory of his appearance vanished with him when he departed, leaving behind not even a trace in the vacated site of his no longer present presence.

As many times as he had come to “do business” with El Colonel, the young men of the Heroic Patrol could never recognize him from one visit to the next. Each time he showed up, he was seen as a stranger. And once they had accepted that this was indeed El Ojo, that legendary figure alive before their very eyes, it was only to recognize him for the duration of the visit, and then, immediately after, in discussing amongst themselves the popular visitor, none of them could agree on whether El Ojo was short or tall, whether he wore a suit or a peasant’s clothes or even if he had or not a scar on his face, or an arm in a sling, or wore sunglasses or plain glasses or perhaps contact lenses or had nothing at all in the eyes but a bright glassiness or a hardness as of obsidian.

There were times; too, that El Colonel enjoyed day dreaming “that some untoward event, unnoticed and lost amidst the rubble of so many others, had caused a lesion which produced alexia in El Ojo.” Alexia fascinated El Colonel even more than illiteracy—an illiteracy, however, in El Ojo’s case, which could be translated by way of having El Ojo write out the letterings he had memorized with such distinctness, as though he were stopping for a moment the flow of time and narration, halting it to take a snapshot, which he could then write out for his listeners, so that seeing the images, they produced the meaningful sounds which he could not read himself.

Except, of course, El Colonel hastened to add to himself, that often El Ojo knew words because he had been told what they meant, so that recognizing a particular combination of letterings he could utter something of what they spelled out, as though he were indeed reading, after all. Thus his direct transcriptions of signs seen along the way might not be images which he could read at the time, but in the act of writing them out, they became ones he could suddenly recognize and “read”. This sleight of hand method of appearing to read would dissuade the observer and listener less patient than El Colonel from “divining his illiteracy.” Or, if not totally dispelling the idea of said illiteracy, at least making of it an arena of ambiguity.

It was to this arena of ambiguity that El Colonel found himself returning again and again, not only in the presence of El Ojo, but also in the aftermath of their encounters; for El Colonel thought that among these ambiguities, these drifting shadows of forms at the peripheries of presence, among these there must exist further mysteries, enigmas, whose dim outlines slowly became more clearly perceptible to his persistent inquires and speculations.

Like a moth drawn to even the dullest of flames, El Colonel felt himself irresistibly attracted by these mere sketches of an opening in the flickering shadows of enigmas without name. Passing through this sketchy and obscure portal, he felt a distinct sensation of walking backwards, “into the past darkly” as he said aloud to no one but the echoing of his own voice in the cavernous silence. Using the echoes as a form of sonar, El Colonel followed them along the sinuous paths of a labyrinth which now and then flashed with sudden illuminations of moments in time uncannily familiar, and at other moments merely revealed an inky swirling, like that left by a departed squid.

As El Ojo spoke in his monotonous, detailed way, presenting an incredible amount and array of informations which would later be gone over again and again, El Colonel observed him carefully, during those moments when he forcibly tore himself away from the labyrinths of the past darkly.

Then, thanks to patience and attentiveness, El Colonel had found that El Ojo had another peculiarity besides his formidable memory and his equally impressive unmemorable presence. This was that his eyes oscillated between two forms of expression. At times they were suddenly a dark glass, which stared blankly at the observer, “like the eyes of a parrot, which appear to absorb all light into them while staring outwards at the observer with the steadiness of a stuffed bird. And just as these glassy eyes, through a glass darkly again,” muttered El Colonel beneath the ongoing monotone of El Ojo, “just as these eyes stared back, so did a parrot’s memorization of language, words, phrases, syllables, morphemes, phonemes speak back. And for al the world this ‘parroting’ and these ‘eyes of a parrot’ seemed completely in concert with the suspected possible illiteracy or yearned for alexia of El Ojo.”

Thus, a part of El Ojo was indeed his being as a Parrot, a Parroter of language both written and spoken, memorized visually and sonically, and retransmitted to the world from photographic and sound recorded memory as the projections outward of images and sounds, a reproduction of the copy of the reified spectacle it had registered so completely.

The Parrot however, was only one half of the dual nature of the eyes of El Ojo. The other was their prolonged periods of blinking, punctuated here and there by a closing of the eyes for short periods of time. This shift from an unblinking eye to a blinking one El Colonel thought of as a movement from a Parrot to an Owl. For in this blinking and eye shutting, El Ojo seemed to be not only “the spitting image” of an owl, but seemed also to have acquired that aura of “wisdom” associated with owls.

Blinking and shutting the eyes, sometimes with a slight drooping of the head downwards so that the chin came near to touching the chest, this Owl seemed as impenetrable as the unblinking and mimicking Parrot. Two impenetrable appearances which gave to El Ojo’s eyes an alternating glassiness as of black ice, and the flickering of an old movie being shown in a dim and obscure room wherein the screen was nothing but an old and dirty sheet brought down from an attic whose roof allowed in the dust and rains of the universe.

As El Ojo alternated between Parrot and Owl and droned on in his monotonous recounting of incredibly precise and at times completely superfluous detail, El Colonel’s seeing through the past darkly began to take him back to times he had long ago abandoned, like old and worn out mines left to create chemical interactions with the waters which found their ways into them.

Spread over a series of El Ojo’s visits, El Colonel had been following this labyrinthine passage among the abandoned mine shafts and catching ever more glimpses of not only times but beings from out of the past.

Among these he had realized with an immense start during El Ojo’s last visit, was that of a small boy with whom he had sat in the ill lit mud floored room of a schoolhouse, trying to follow the lessons taught by a small and energetic young woman, whose voice and gestures seemed to weave an hypnotic spell over her students. El Ojo remembered that he had sat at the very far back corner of the room, on the East side, where now and then a ray of light would manage to make its way through the water swollen slats of the wooden wall. The play of these rays of light would pick out the muddiest and most polluted puddles which had formed in the dirt floor and make them shine like lakes of fire and gold. It was these lakes and light rays which had first “set his mind on fire,” El Colonel recalled, and given him the raging desire to learn, to study and somehow find a way out of this disaster struck existence clinging to the sides of a mountain, among the rubble which was all that was left after the bombings and raids by the government forces under the supervision of their American and Israeli advisors and contractors, those true signs of The Power of Will behind the True Force desperately called upon by a Dictatorship of Devils.

El Ojo was droning on, his eyes closed now in the Wise Owl Meditating Inwardly under the Guise of Napping mode, a mode he had developed under the direction of that Goddess whom he was a representative of, Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, Calm and Clear Headed presence in the midst of the Chaos that exists as the “background noise” broadcast playing the sounds continuing to emanate from the first moments of the Creation of the universe.

El Colonel smiles. Among the seemingly mundane static drone modalities of El Ojo’s endless stream of precise and vividly detailed descriptions there are always those sudden pockets of revelation, in which the bright light of an illumination shines forth and reveals a landscape previously hidden, one that is littered with those bits and pieces of information so necessary to the operations and life-sustaining missions of the Heroic Patrol.

Among these bits and pieces, El Colonel knew from experience, were those shards and fragments, those bobbing heads clinging to shattered spars floating in the flame-dotted ocean of wrecked and burning ships, which were companion texts to those he found in the rubble of burned libraries and private collections; to those tomes captured at gun point or saved from the drenching downpours and harsh exposures of the elements. It was from these texts, such as they were in their burnt, torn, time and light stained fragmentary and dampness-warped conditions, that El Colonel had been able to piece together those elements which he used to exercise those thoughts simultaneously writings which provided him with the action of an accompaniment to his existence, so that he could create this Theater which doubled at times as the Cinema of Catharsis, and on whose stages and settings he found himself giving life to a world of death, in which the peppery smells of slowly roasting corpses floated in the air among the sensualities of thick and bright heavy flowers while in the distance droned the music of insects accompanied by the last gun shots marking the end of a confrontation as its participants melted back into the forests . . .

El Colonel’s own head seemed to be dropping slowly towards his chest, as El Ojo’s droning spread a nodding somnolence of half-awake dreams throughout the bright and light air of the high ceiling room with its windows flung wide to the green and vibrant world, to the high and blue skies . . .

El Colonel let himself begin to drift into these eddies and undercurrents of waking dreams, into the shoals and small tree-draped riverside inlets not much larger than the floating boat of one’s somnolence . . . .drift into these areas where memories begin to rise from the muddy and rich alluvial soils deposited through time and making buried worlds indicated by the heaped up piles of sand, like those immense ant hills glimpsed in old children’s books or in some long forgotten documentary shown once to some children whose teeth chattered in the auditorium whose roof was barely a strainer for the thick rains pouring down . . .

Among these dreams floating in the puddles and muddy rivulets El Colonel slowly made out scenes leaking from the long closed vaults of memory . . . memories of himself and a small enigmatic boy seated in the back corners of the cramped and rain filled shack that was a school on the side of a mountain . . . and thinking then in watching him how this small boy always seemed capable of knowing what the words on the blackboard were when the teacher called on him, yet when it came time for he himself to write them down, he had but a sketchy idea at all of how to proceed and had to depend on El Colonel’s boy self for aid with the tiniest of words, the simplest of sentences and even with the occasional refresher course in signing his own name.

El Colonel gave a start in the midst of his rivulets of dreams, and found himself staring at what appeared to be a reflection in the dirty water of the mud puddles of the floor, a reflection of a man who looked uncannily like the boy seated beside him, a man who now sat facing him . . . startled into a semi-consciousness, just alert enough to turn over and over in his mind’s observing eyes the facets of a rough diamond dragged out of the suddenly light struck mud. Startled into a slowly expanding alertness, El Colonel found himself rediscovering a once long entertained suspicion which later he had abandoned as no more than a passing fantastic glimmer of fool’s gold. . . a suspicion at the base of his spine where the nerves shot signals straight up into the brain and blinded him with their Light, the Light of a Truth that he at once knew to be true and felt himself wary of—for it takes time he muttered, to be able to simply trust one’s intuitions . . . especially in a business such as this existence here at the edges of the world . . .

El Colonel, jolted now by a much stronger and more powerful shock of realization saw that El Ojo might indeed be the adult into which the half remembered ambiguously literate child of his early school days had grown . . .

El Colonel turned his eyes on El Ojo, who sat placidly in his chair, now the Parrot, brightly chirping away in his strangely high voice the listing of another long stream of sites and their signs in such a jerky speed that it was impossible to say at any given moment which in particular his Parrot eyes were registering. El Colonel looked and looked at El Ojo watching every tiny bob and weave of his Owl Head, his Parrot Head, and seeing if in these might remain yet a tracing of those movements now coming back to his recollection made in the small shack by the small and grimy boy at his side, asking for help at times and at others confidently “reading’ what the teacher had written on the old battered and fading blackboard as it turned into a mixture which combined its own decompositions with those almost impossible to erase layers and layers, those thickening palimpsests of chalk and erasings, which had been piling atop the crumbling base of the ancient and disintegrating blackboard.

El Colonel watched in wonder as this figure before him, Parrot and Owl both, began to devolve as it were back through time, reverse engineering these dual manifestations of his “Ojos de Dios”

Alternating with great rapidity before his very eyes, El Colonel observed the swiveling nature of these two forms of eyes—Parrot and Owl, Owl and Parrot, like the sweeping arcs of a Lighthouse whose projector itself shifts lightings, angles, movements in quick succession as it revolves. El Ojo one moment was before him, a small figure neatly poised in a chair too large for him, the next moment a small boy at the back of the dim, unlit dirt-floored classroom, listening to the sounds of the rain carom and ricochet off the corrugated tin roof.

El Ojo droned on in his hypnotic way, mesmerizing the shadows growing steadily as the day wore on. El Colonel sat very still, watching the eyes in this face in which the lips moved on and on, like those of a dummy or marionette, a puppet, manipulated by some unseen hand. “La Mano de Dios!” El Colonel thought with a start of the great and wildly strange footballer Maradona. La Mano de Dios, l'Ojo de Dios, all of them summed up as it were in the alternating appearances of Parrot and Owl on a small human producing a recitation of things never before seen nor heard, as Lazarillo de Tormes puts it.

As the afternoon wore on, El Colonel’s tension relaxed and he simply tilted back in the old chair and let the stream of words flow over him. El Ojo, he knew, would not stop until he had come to the end of his detailed presentation of al that he had seen, heard and “read” during his journeys since last visiting El Colonel. That El Ojo stored up such a profusion of facts and scenes for him suddenly astonished El Colonel. Perhaps concealed in this outwardly impersonal recitation was, after all, recognition of some closeness between them.

El Ojo finally came to the end of his long journey of words and sat back a bit in his chair, shaking a cigarette from the slightly opened tin foil of the pack’s top, and placing it firmly between his lips, lighting it and letting out a thick stream of smoke that slowly dissipated in the late afternoon shadows.

El Colonel also lit a cigarette, observing how is own habitual way of holding so closely resembled that of El Ojo’s. Another sign of our secret friendship, our Baudelairean correspondence in the forest of symbols and stones, El Colonel murmured to himself.

El Ojo sat there before him, resplendent in his through enjoyment of the top shelf quality coffee, the special cigarettes and the attentive and patient ear of El Colonel. (It was only at the moment of his departure that the payment for his services was produced and handed to him wrapped in a small handmade pouch like al the others used for the same purpose in the region.)

The two men sat smoking as the shadows gathered about them, cloaking them in the rapidly cooling air. With a small gesture El Colonel declined the offer of bringing in a candle or turning on the lights from one of the young soldiers of the heroic Patrol.

Finally El Colonel bent very near to El Ojo and began to murmur to him in evermore urgent and coaxing tons, trying to tease out a flash of recognition, in which the two boyhood friends would find themselves both seeing themselves as now grown men and still good friends, their friendship enduring though al the long bloody years of upheaval and displacements.

The closer he leaned to El Ojo, the more he stared intently as he poured out his longing for this friendship to really be here, and not simply a figment of his lonely imagination, a creation of his writings and a method of trying to find some connection with a bombed out past he knew must be somewhere among the wreckage strewn al around them in every part of the land.

As El Colonel crooned and cajoled, El Ojo began to rock quietly in his chair, and his expressions continued to alternate between Parrot and Owl.

Suddenly, in a burst of enthusiasm and dread, El Colonel seized El Ojo by the shoulders and drew his face very close to his own, and said in a voice filled with the power of storms and wild horses—“Bepe, Bepe, don’t you remember me? The school house? The tin roof? The copying papers and blackboard’s words? The rain he mud, the tin roofs and blood?”

El Ojo simply stared back, though is face had been violently drawn straight before the very eyeballs of El Colonel and his having felt the hot breath of the heaving breast of El Colonel.

El Ojo continued to blink, now a Parrot, now an Owl.

Suddenly El Colonel understood. This was El Ojo’s way of remembering their shared past their childhood and friendship. None of it was lost to him, none of it forgotten. While he repeated the long memorizations signs he couldn’t actually read and traveled far gathering sights, sounds and symbols t be borne to his old friend, he had at the same time long ago learned to conceal any such signs from being outwardly recognizable.

El Ojo had concealed everything, and hidden it so well, that al that one saw now were these surface appearances, these impersonal recitations, these mechanical performances with cigarettes and coffee.

With a start, El Colonel recognized himself in these words—that it was he as well as El Ojo who had learned to conceal everything beneath an outwardly mechanical and impassive presentation of a being going through a series of rituals in order to gain a foothold still among the living. .

The past in order to endure had had to be “buried alive” as it were, hidden within this cloaking of obscurity that presented only appearances to the eyes and ears of a continual and extremely dangerous surveillance. Meanwhile this outwardly seemingly unfeeling being, this seeming Parrot and Owl, carried on courageously hidden in the heart of the enemy and brought from out of there his news to his friend.

In the darkening shadows, in the cooling air, in the fragrance of the last flowers’ closings, El Colonel leaned forward and embraced El Ojo.

“Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère,” El Colonel said aloud in the resonating high-ceilinged room.

And laughing, he began to rearrange himself to again assume the role of El Colenl, thanking and saying goodnight to this trusted source of information, and finishing the scene with a snappy salute from himself and al his men.

But tonight as he did so, for some moments El Colonel felt himself adopting the alternating gazes of Parrot and Owl, to be seen in and by the Parrot and Owl that looked back at him.

Mummies, dummies, Parrots, Owls, Colonels, soldiers, all of it a performance beneath the watching eye of the large and seemingly light producing reflector, the moon.

In the sun’s reflected “moon light,” the two pairs of eyes met in a seeming production of non recognition in which lay concealed a secret resemblance, a secret sharer.

In their mutual recognition, and of it, neither gave a sign.

*****

Afterword—A Supplement—Written “Ahead of Time”

This is from a letter (to the buffalo poetics e-list) written some months ago re Appropriation; I stumbled upon it today by chance while looking for something else. It seemed “appropriate" then to appropriate it, and present here as a kind of Appendix or Supplement to the text of Parrot and Owl.

I noted before that there is a relationship—as there is in Moby Dick—between the uses of appropriation and translations, mimicry and copying, which make of writing potentially a form of acting, even of acting in a theater constructed by the writer and in which the writer becomes both the director and the leading character or characters. It is possible also for the writer to become the audience as well and in turn the critics, who provide reviews, commentaries, blurbs, hatchet jobs and fawning notes of introduction for some favorite of theirs whom they wish to promote in the role of a kind of "private agent." This dispersal of the "writer" through so many roles in turn begins to generate ever more series of meta-writers, meta-dramas, meta-commentaries until one has what is basically the long glorious history of the productions of Shakespeare's Richard the Third and their myriad spinoffs, including Johnny Rotten copying Laurence Olivier's Richard in the film version for his creation of the character and existence as a performer on stage of—Johnny Rotten, who in his turn is ranting and attacking the Queen.

This theatricality of a writing which makes use of appropriations and translations (including invented ones) means that the "author" does not "die" but instead becomes an actor, in which the presence of other voices begins to issue through the throat and the writing of "some one else" to come from the hands. The actor whom is the role that the writer has become, speaks lines which are—whose?—The writer's? the actor's? the role's? And out of these emerges a writing which is a fiction which is at the same time real, or a reality which is fictional, and al the while is performing an activity which is a writing, a gestural, visceral, sonic and visual action writing which may in fact exist "nowhere at all" but as the non-writings of a non-writer who regards thinking and writing as the same, just as imagined writing may exist in a sphere in which it has no need of being "written down," as it enjoys in fact the freedom of it's not existing on the page, but in the "else wheres.".

When Bartleby says "I would prefer not to" and instead stands staring at the blank view through his window of a very close pressed wall of the building opposite—is it into these elsewheres that his writing now is being done?

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2009-07-17T10:25:00.002+10:00

harry k stammer

“I think”

not (where)

stubbed to (toe)

bullet

casement (dinosaur)

“I’m brooding”

walking 7th

street (Bixel)

left licking (rolled)

fingers chicken

(less) clear

track’d

“it’s visible from here”

‘fenseless

daylight ridge

square (outline)

“thinking no, not”

solitude (here)

box brown

flaps up

(infinite)

head over shirt

(pulling) delta

arm (pit)

hand down resting

finger rubbing

thumb (thumb) rub

“nobody, not”

light hand bulb

(swing) mute

note (chain of)

“even this thing”

(I)

“myself reached,

a look”

step (ing) back

“Ophelia, disappear in’t”

bird leg

wrapping ‘round (again)

set (disturb)

“place’d, arrange’d”

(caught) “is set”

‘jaculat’d sever’d

separate (piece)

fossil

(done) open

“the trunk is full”

bones (shells)

scraps

place’d

“this like note’d”

set angular distance

(objects)

“I’m half asleep”

covered lower

position light

(ly) “no, sweetly”

meager

shine’d away

wall

solid (mix)

bricks (head)

plaster’d (duck) pant

cut long

(falls)

“treble pitched, strike”

(ing) flash

pass’d attached

drag’d light

across (it) “then

pull up”

singing

(ing) off

clothes (shirt

and pants) letters

formed ‘rascible

“shake you

at someone”

another hand

(up) drop’t

(complex) up

side (invert) pick

(ing) grasp

“false short”

awake position (bring)

“there that” effect

stimulant

(relax’d) urine drip

(plays) pattern a

(fixed) past

composure

“as adapted, up”

overturn’d spread (less)

circle

trace’t (noun)

washing

“and put, wrongly insert’d”

wade “asleep,”

neck blanket up

(times) through’t

temperature (hunger)

position lower

(cover) “yes, sir!”

stiff hand over

(wait) arm

needle (still)

move

“so, if it’s another”

pull shoe (purpose)

bent toe back

(boot)

“tonight, fast”

blood

raw heel

shin foot

(effect) scraping (ing)

wipe (ing)

every (thing) done

clean’d process’d

scar-like

“maybe it’s another reason to leave”

here ‘ctic

(hiding) another

heel (s) chang’d

limit’d (first)

corner present out

“roughly, four

feet”

branching over’t walking

(involving)

to curb step

available

“blocked by a curb”

under (once)

set shows’t head

up/out effort

paper over

cover’d

“getting cooler”

(thirst) pregnant

(not) once

two sheets

“getting cooler, cooler”

heel up (out)

oxygen

(mask) leg

stretch (id) fits

heel

shoe (since Jesus)

“not constant, don’t say’t”

smother (one)

load up

plaster’d over’

sense

end one

more street

over (play) dreadful

turn

harry k stammer

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2009-07-17T10:13:00.002+10:00

Charles Freeland

Tactfully Keeping a Blank Expression

They turn on the radio, then refuse to be coaxed from their silence. To emerge from that element costs more than can be explained by the rate of inflation. It keeps some people from even recognizing their reflections in the pond water. By the reeds. When they are passing on bicycles and just happen to glance in that direction. They reject it as being somehow shameful. Not to be advertised. It’s the same thing that makes us pack up the camper and head for the desert. Hoping to find something to fill up the hours. Images of mythic creatures scratched into the sides of a cave. Even our microscopes seem hard-pressed to determine where something begins and another thing ends. It’s like we were told a story that means different things to different people. But when you look closely at the elements, particularly the denouement, you realize it’s too quirky to have any meaning whatsoever. That we have simply deposited our own needs and well-being on it like an insect laying her eggs.

Among a Cluster of Bawdy Postcards

Eulalie knocks the ashes from Squid’s coat sleeves, looks at him suspiciously because there are no active volcanoes in the vicinity. Even those that have gone dormant require one to pronounce their names carefully. As if too much haste will lead to mistakes. Will make us realize we don’t know why there are that many syllables to be hacked through like jungle vines. Squid feels sometimes as if Eulalie’s skin is the same skin he has been touching since the day he was sixteen and decided to move beyond the world of imagination. When he was coaxed away from his own mind by the girl with a chipped tooth. Sometimes there are satisfactions that don’t become such until well after we’ve launched them on their way like paper boats. We go hunting for them again much too late. Calling them by name. Even if that name isn’t entirely accurate. Eulalie attempts instead to emulate the earth that lies beneath our feet. Tells those who might be interested that it is composed of particles that themselves consist of particles much too numerous to count. And this is what should serve as a model for those who come from this substance. But who wish to escape those origins by wearing frilly things. By conjuring the sky and its rapt, ephemeral whole.

As the Fates of His Heroes Show

We ask the stars to align themselves according to patterns. And they oblige us, for a time. But some day, when our attention has been turned toward the napkins in their holders and the statements made by fools about the work of Pushkin, they will undermine their past achievements the way we routinely undermine our own best interests. By chasing women who are distantly related to us. Who have no qualm describing the contents of our letters to anyone who will listen. I think it’s time, then, we stop asking ourselves difficult questions. And concentrate instead on pre-packaging our difficult answers. Start throwing them together in bundles and shipping them off to the highest bidder. I know, says Eulalie, her arms wrapped almost completely around herself like snakes, her upper lip quivering with an emotion I have yet to classify. Something with ardor in it. A trace of derision. The days follow so closely upon one another, she says, we won’t be able to remember a single one. Won’t be able to differentiate between them the way you can differentiate sometimes between separate members of a single species of ape. If you look closely enough at their heads. Some of them have knots and ridges. Others scars owing to physical conflicts that affect more than just those directly involved. And ask yourself: Would I consider this a task worth pursuing? Or would I just walk away because I have been down that boulevard previously? Either way, we haven’t exactly emerged with what you might call concessions. At least none in the neighborhood of those given the latter kings of Calicut — who were spared the ritual of cutting their own throats at the end of the traditional twelve year reign.

If His Behavior is Not Mechanical

Strange how we desire things in opposite proportion as they are available to us. This is why a book about the surface of the planet Venus, say, is almost always more compelling than one that treats of families just like our own. The pairing-off reminds one of the time when there were no large carnivores on the planet. Only miniature ones angry at their plight. How do you justify consuming others? How do you keep from feeling ostracized and overwhelmed? Something is definitely causing a fissure. Something is pulling at the atmosphere with its claws. We love the way words come out of one another as if they were being born. We even have a name for the phenomenon, but it isn’t dignified and to utter it in mixed company often results in accusations that sound vaguely like compliments. Why not just admit that what we want is the same thing as what others want? It just goes by different names. And its surface appearance changes itself according to who is looking at it. The membranes reacting to the presence of light. To the presence of an observer, much like sub-atomic particles according to the Copenhagen Interpretation. Or those adults who never quite manage to outgrow their social phobias. Generated perhaps by trying too early to escape their surroundings. The wallpaper their parents thought charming. With waterfowl on it. The hues approximating those to be found on the skin of a grape.

Accents that Form the Diagonal

Some marks start at the top and move downward, sustaining themselves through gravity, I suppose, or the will of the mark itself. Others begin in the middle and radiate outward from there, but in varying degrees of intensity and length, so that those oriented north and south, for instance, tend to extend beyond what would otherwise seem logical limits. They explore the boundaries of their own genesis and completion, following a desire that is as old as the Sumerians, or maybe a few years older. Whenever we strain to see that far into the past, our eyes begin to feel as though they have been damaged by something chemical. Something administered by one of those villains usually depicted as slinking around in a long black cape. His head obscured by shadow. Or a mask that covers only a certain percentage of the face. The higher the percentage, the less menacing the apparition.

In the Days of the Plagiarist

The impossible must re-assert itself as something ferocious, to be held in great awe as it was in the days of the plagiarist. When everyone was keen to demonstrate his impeccable taste. And then fashion (after, of course, the fashion of others) a response to the pervasive malaise. To whip it up into such a frenzy, the riverboats swung wide to avoid it. And ran aground. They tore enormous holes in their keels and forced the occupants to run around on deck as if they expected at any moment to witness an allegory without actually knowing what an allegory was.
               Squid won’t look in that direction no matter what the temptation. Won’t raise his eyes from the ground for fear of looking in precisely the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. And spoiling everything the way the refrigerator does when you leave the door open. This is something cunning, a trick on his part that we ought not to pass over in silence. Or the near silence that indicates we have no idea what the proper response should be.
               I find myself haunting this neighborhood almost daily. Nodding and looking over people’s shoulders even when I long to connect with them in some more meaningful way. Say by inviting them to Lake Erie. By showing them where the walleye hang motionless in the murky water. They wait for something to flash by. To stir their instincts in a primal fashion that we can document but no longer truly take the measure of. We have lost that ability in trade for others more circumspect and ultimately unnecessary. Fine glossy adornments that cost a great deal. But don’t fetch much uptown, where people are busy selling their cucumbers and their squash. And relating tales of things that seem to have happened directly to them. Marvelous, uncanny adventures that almost always conclude with someone mistaking one person for another. Becoming confused about who is in the room. And who has only recently left it so as to train their telescopes on the Pleiades.
               And where do they come from, exactly? How is it they intrude so consistently, we can’t imagine our narratives finding their completion without them? Perhaps this is what it means to be searching for solace in places where none is permitted. Where it has been banished by edict of someone who ought really to be more lenient. The grand executioner. The purveyor of wanton phantasmagoria. Who nevertheless spends his weekends relaxing by the sea.

Charles Freeland lives in Dayton, Ohio. The recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, he is the author of a full-length collection, Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro (Otoliths), and the chapbooks Furiant, Not Polka (Moria) and The Case of the Danish King Halfdene (Mudlark). His website is The Fossil Record.

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2009-07-15T12:16:00.005+10:00

Marcia Arrieta

Four Collage/Poems

Marcia Arrieta's recent work appears in A capella Zoo, Eratio, Moria, Karamu, Jack, & Counterexample Poetics. She edits and publishes Indefinite Space.

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2009-07-15T11:36:00.003+10:00

Mara Patricia Hernandez

in (your) hands

load

dismissus

Mara Patricia Hernandez was born and raised in Guadalajara. She is a visual poet, graphic designer, photographer, and digital artist who is currently living between 4 white walls in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her blog can be found here.

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2009-07-15T10:56:00.004+10:00

Matt Hetherington

Name Poem

HETHERINGTON
HE THE RING TO
HE THE RING O
HE THE RON
HE THEN ON
HE THE RIG
HE THE NO
HE THE IT
HE THEN
HE HERO
HETERO
HE HER
HE HIT
THING
ETHER
HE HE
HE
ER
HI
I
i

My Flat

(For Jennifer Allen)

i don’t go crazy
these days yet a dog barks a lot
sometimes at night & it’s new
but birds can often be heard also

the big doors close
quite easily though the window’s a little stiff
all flooring is now almost free of waterlogging
& the walls nearly gone of upmarket pet-marks

natural southern light abounds
in winter while transport & shopping is close
the neighbours keep their distance
& the garbage goes where it should

if you want to
you can nearly touch my ceilings
on odd occasions fallen crumbs may be left
the ants express interest also the rats

Matt Hetherington is a musician and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. His first poetry collection was Surface (PRECIOUS PRESS, 2004), and the latest is I Think We Have (Small Change Press, 2007). He is also on the board of the Australian Haiku Society.

Recent work has appeared in Masthead, Thylazine and Cordite.

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2009-07-15T10:14:00.004+10:00

Felino Soriano

Painters' Exhalations

383
—after Yuriy Shevchuk’s Jazz Miles Davis 2

The running water of
                                              esoteric solos
distinguished
different formulations,
intimate emotions—
embracing altered
                               grace
gone in the windy breath of afternoon’s
                                                                                  cleanings.
A caressing care
con
                toured toward
                               relaying physical
                                         grandiloquence
                              garbing
reliant listeners with ornate baths of the barely visible
                striations. Distant, near the faint interpretation of nearly
lost to absence, the heard finalizes human contact, musical
bodies lying down in meadow calm
                                                             sheltered within the human
tone tongued from the reaching forth
tantara.

384
—after Eric Aho’s Long Yellow

The yellow S
                               curved
elongated etch on
tiger leech’s shimmering physique                   analogous
to the field of smiling suns
born up from the soil’s embracing threads,
gesturing.
                               Avenue of landscape
where the crawling dangle slowly
                                                             below
acrobatic avifauna
                                              launching
into saluting
formations
                               higher than the thought of cease can
ascertain
                                              thus, infinite or simile of
echoed ensuing
brandishes
                itself over into repetitive showcases
day’s author refuses to erase.

385
—after Matt Brackett’s Threshold

Door’s grand attire. Obese
opening, occasion to gander
a
specialized fortune, anti-cookie broken
fashion.
                               Couple, man and mate,
their lives a distance complicating
mathematical understanding.
                                                             Their
wants, a gnarl wishing return
of sporadic rainfall, too dry to design
clothing to clothe a moment meant of
happy alterations. Forward
                                                             step
                                                                            become.

Next,
an intertwining will befall, life
together until the door of allegorical
death
swings its breath of unraveling
exit.

386
—after Michael (Corinne) West’s Poetic Structure

Silvered
                               s
                                 l
                                   i
                                     d
                                        i
                                          ng
                an aerial convert
                                                             once startled an uneven show                balanced
on the scale
-rise with dawn’s pet rooster:                                                             trembling

a leaf circumference (here, circumference, data of circular come backs
                                                       bound to routine the mind ceases to release)
Xeroxed
                               demonstrated same in conceptual name is revolution

                                              language returns across spectrum
totaling artistic

                                                                            landing.

387
—after Ruth Durland Horton’s Untitled Abstract

We watch the wanted blend
a created creature form itself
interpretational grace,

freed jazz assembly of birds of the congregate
arrowhead forth hitherto realized
a distant locality.

388
—after Francis Butterfield’s The Embrace

Lovers embrace tongues, body
lingo form                               of verbalizing hands, absent
revelations. Assembled, a store bought
model careful to showcase                               unaltered, true to
directions human minds define
among dissipating Eros.

Felino Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He is the editor of Counterexample Poetics, an online journal of experimental artistry. As a poet, he has authored seven collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008) Feeling Through Mirages (Shadow Archer Press, 2008) Calling Toward Clarity (Chippens Press, 2009), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), and r (please press, 2009). A mini-chapbook of poems is forthcoming from Wheelhouse Magazine, 2009, as well as a full-length collection from Calliope Nerve, 2009. The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website.

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2009-07-10T12:24:00.006+10:00

Paul Siegell

Paul Siegell grew up a New York Mets fan and had no right being along the thirdbase line at Citizens Bank Park on October 29, 2008 when the Philadelphia Phillies won the World Series, but the ticket to the final innings made it his way in a miracle, and there he was. Thanks, Mr. Pucci! Two days later the city took to the streets, officially this time, and celebrated their heroes. Woo-hoo! Paul Siegell is the author of jambandbootleg (A-Head, 2009), Poemergency Room (Otoliths Books, 2008) and the e-chap J∆M> (ungovernable press, 2008). Hit him up at ReVeLeR @ eYeLeVeL.

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2009-07-10T12:08:00.003+10:00

Martin Edmond

diptych: the future in the past

I
excursus

We were out late dancing the night before, in a gay bar on K Road that didn't seem to have a name. It wasn't until some time the next day that M found she had torn the hem of her dress while genuflecting to the gods of sexual excess on that boy-haunted floor. In the taxi back to the hotel delirium rode with us. And in the lift. And ... in the breakfast room we talked with authors of young adult fiction as if we are ourselves young adults; as perhaps we were. In the rain washed morning, under the heavy concrete of the portico, we stood beside the coach's throbbing engine waiting for some New Yorker to join our party; much later we found he had been sitting on the bus all along. No matter. The festival director would not meet my eye, I had asked for money the day before, she had not given it to me. The former archbishop of a Scottish diocese was gracious and attentive as he bent his long body and lowered his head in conversation about the eccentricities of those who discuss philosophy on such inadvertent occasions. On the way to the former psychiatric hospital, as the bus filleted rush hour traffic a pony-tailed man briefed us, with gravitas, on the visit we were about to make to a house of learning. And told some well-worn jokes. I knew and did not know what he was saying; have been on buses like this before, on excursions such as this one was. Neither native nor foreign, not at home but not a stranger either. Weary of my ambivalence yet willing to assert it too. So it was (not) a surprise when the karanga caused tears to start from my eyes. We took our shoes off and went in to that house of learning. The learning was the house, the house as encyclopaedia and dictionary, as compendium of knowledge. A lifetime is not enough, we know that already, what could an hour or two add? I felt again the affliction of memory, the affliction of forgetting: how will you? Not? Actually I remember everything but most I cannot recall now. That's both nonsensical and true. After the speeches and the songs, the explanations and the looking, the reverential jokes and the joking reverence, we were slow to leave to go across the lawn to where the tea and coffee, the pastries, cakes and fruit were served. A chap we had not seen before was talking, he had built the house although he had not designed it. The thought of that man ... ! he said of the one who had. Let me show you ... There were subtleties I never would have noticed: the house arrowed towards the past but if you went and stood with the ancestors and looked back you would see the future. The double helix figured as a tiki, rongo rongo script found in a cave on Hawai'i, 5000 years old, on the tiki next to that. Binary numbers on the barge boards, some inscrutable code, all the 0’s blacked out because the future is unwritten; the 1's resplendent in their multiple singularity. As we walked across the round green a young black-backed gull swooped and the three pukeko there stood up in warrior poses; and then again. Those vast ancient logs, the branches not the trunks of trees, burnt in a fire, waiting to make a bridge; the hidden water; the surveyors on the other slope, practising. On the way back I fell to talking about sheep with a joker from the Rangitikei; and offended another fellow, from Jamaica, who wanted to hear the rest of the explanation of what it was we had seen. M was sleeping, her head against the window of the bus. I could feel the arrow of the past, contracting away from us; and the future opening the way a river does when it meets the sea.

II
long life light

In the kitchen the dim light of the future discloses a practical infinity of meals: fish pies, legs of lamb, Mexican sausages, chicken curries, pasta sauces, potato bakes, rump steak with garlic and mushrooms, pork chops served with broccolini or sugar snap peas, tuna salads, satay sticks, omelettes plus all those uncountable sandwiches, cups of coffee and tea, glasses of wine and whatever else will pass through here. It is of course the same looking in the other direction, towards the past that was more brightly lit but otherwise unattainable now, its food and drink having performed their casual alchemy. Cooking is perhaps what made us human after all, fire unlocking the extra nutrition so that our brains could grow. On the high shelves, a putti, a glass jug with a deep crack in it, the base of a kerosene lamp with swallows flying around on it, a bowl made out of the wood of the jackfruit tree, two disused telephones, an empty packet of Gudang Garam, paints and brushes, methylated spirits, a folded Chinese lantern, a jar of 1 and 2 cent coins, a sandwich maker, a bottle of Ant Rid, a coffee pot and who knows what else? Laughing Buddha attended by wishbones, ginger jar with broken lid, that little pottery ball-in-bowl toy that Toon Borren's sister Anika made four decades ago now, two handleless cups from Malacca and a spiral shell lined up along the white tiles of the sill above the sink. And on the wall, kid's pictures below the big painting Lexie did of my sister, the photos she took it from yellow-tacked up next to that. The calendar in the shape of Australia stopped at the date of her death, 28.06.75, thirty-four years ago now. The tape machine and the box of Irish tapes. Little Feat's Sailin' Shoes. My authority card and a pad of the forms a taxi driver must fill out every time s/he begins a shift. I'll be using them again come Monday. Unpaid bills stuck with magnets to the fridge, a scatter of words, likewise magnetised, they all have something to do with psychotherapy: Stuck With Fear In Deep Past, one sentence reads. I Lash The Manic Animal says another. Will Her Fast Love Gut Me? is a third. They sound good but mean nothing much. Just chance arrangements of the available words. Like this. A bowl of stones and a ceramic cat. Tennis rackets, flippers, a soccer ball and another that looks like it's for playing gridiron. That walking robot that doesn't walk any more. The ironing board and the iron, the brush and pan, a bag of rubber bands, where does all this stuff come from? (I know.) And that's not the half of it. A Rubik's cube with some of the coloured panels gone. The dry pod of a jacaranda tree that still, sometimes, lets a papery seed capsule fall. Candle holders in the shape of stars. One day I'll wash the floor, make those black patterned yellow linoleum squares shine again. One day I'll remove the patina of grease that covers everything with sticky. I'll clean out the fridge. One day ... but not this day, which is given over to contemplation of that bright and empty past, this cluttered present and the dim future, illumined only by the thin glow of an ecologically sound long life light bulb in which I will cook the meals I have cooked before and eat them elsewhere, out there, in company, at the table in the sitting room where the facetted windows give onto the west and secret air that will be even more luminous then than it is now, replete, I’m sure, not just with more than we know, but more than we can know.

Martin Edmond's new book, Zone of the Marvellous, is being published by Auckland University Press in September.

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2009-07-10T11:27:00.004+10:00

Nicholas Michael Ravnikar

from A THEORY OF AUTOMATA

MY MIDDLE NAME

How we gorge ourselves (by carved women)
for everything (is mustard) as loud as parking lot Ensues
(where we pee, where we find ourselves walking) to call the harpist
and (who came alive in High School) tracing erratic loops
Always preaching the definite curve (twice in one night at least)
remembering (sort of) the Exposition (that came that same
fateful night) All evening you were calling for

(Unleash yourself. Defile me.) but I could never ask
(you about the prison tour because) I didn't know (all the simple
tests required bloodshed) virtual greed and (golden ashtrays, too)
so hidden from that point (where curiosity replaces tact)
                                                             It felt like (a plantation)

DANGEROUSLY PRECIOUS RETREATS

of a notion to equal s
present moist and cock

empire's categorical lingua
Response time thus

Design can check miniature
homogeneity, but only

as door-ritual
and only once.

TEST KITS

                                              more short term skit sites kiss court tits in prison before or since

AMERICAN FLAG DENIM TEE-SHIRT

yesterday's X-ray will always be true on some possible world

where Antediluvian Cerebellum and Pointy go out for brunch

That window are bare, austere and elegant What

a mess! Because what are "Real Breasts" anyway? Because,

alarmists, what do you call it? the next machine with investments

and enemas and ruins device, cuz when we interfere

the Uzi looks like mine, & I don't see how you can ask

if there's a problem with that The details' worm compulsive as

a priest's chances are you already forgot about that Cig pucker,

see, the trouble in front of both of us is making it work

THE CAULK

maybe you'd
like to take
crack and

run down
numbers like
this its

vulgar such
line item
views from

the veto
to bridge
desk and

rear-end
summarily
cultish liberals.

Nicholas Michael Ravnikar pays his bills by producing industrial video in Racine, Wisconsin and teaching writing and video workshops in after-school programs, summer camps and prisons. He completed his MFA at Naropa University's Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in 2008. In the works are also two feature film scripts and a documentary about small presses. He edits a webzine, The Bathroom, available free at http://bathroommagazine.wordpress.com.

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2009-07-10T11:04:00.005+10:00

Stu Hatton

Night of the Living Dead

(after the 1968 George A Romero film)

Boarding up all windows and doors, using whatever we can find. Breaking up furniture. Lock ourselves inside the house. An excuse to break taboos. The sick little girl turns into a zombie, consumes her dead father’s flesh, then stabs her mother repeatedly with a cement trowel, killing her. The moral to the story: don’t make fun of the dead, especially in a cemetery. They have us outnumbered. Tom & Judy burn to death when a gasoline spillage causes their car to catch fire. Zombies feast on their barbecued flesh. Recall a fast food advertisement, the glowing family trying to out-excite each other across the table. If you’re waiting for the real enemy to show up, damn it, you’ll be waiting all night. If we lock ourselves in the cellar there’ll be no way out. What, you think it’s sexual? The deep, glossy black of blood in black & white films. Reflective liquid. You won’t find a better man than a black man. Trust you to mistake him for a zombie… Disaster in the middle of nowhere; a haunting lack of sirens. There’s always a token naked zombie whenever we see them marauding as a group. Not even thinly veiled. The radio & TV emergency announcements are so, so camp: “Thousands of office and factory workers are being urged to stay at their places of employment, not to make any attempt to get to their homes.” Shoot on sight. A situation where ‘anything’ can be justified, or where justification is moot. We see a slap across the face on screen; does it matter that it’s simulated? She’s hysterical & therefore of no use to us. You have to laugh: it’s a horror flick. The zombies seeking to devour the woman, leaning in, stretching their hands through holes in the wall. We know a ghoulish hand when we see one – but how? The zombies are hideously slow. They’re strong enough to overturn a car. Thankfully we can fend them off with fire. Walking political allegories. The men have an argument about the best options for staying alive until help arrives. You call these survival instincts? An abject failure of the system.

want

will not be pinned or nailed unless we choose a name in the margin ~ sanctify a saint who can be edgecutter too ~ a rat on rat patrol radar on ~ i’m a business cannot assist i feel so oh no master of none milky tea on my fingers ~ think i’ve found the real stuff needs doing hired a hand but it couldn’t hold ~ the use? ~ slob readerships for mediated ~ taped mouths ~ taped mouths ~ theft can be pretty? they’re your words not mine what’s to write home? ~ don’t interfere with mating plants ~ guns stick to your easily think i’ve figured how to read these secured the bridge flee the inward we shit so much repressed breath ~ pocketed another face for later quit sleep take up night fled the junk party room with its pinked haze ~ you want her nametag though & so many buildings your table not content

the masculine

poor sad masculinity. spend the whole day jerking off. would opt out if you could. what awaits discovery here? no black gold. what's a man without it? downing a slab of mid-strength. what’re a few uncried tears? while diving in ink. don’t bother looking down there. it's nothing, always nothing. who’s alpha? is this what you have left to offer? even your pen refuses to write. the bastard. what you will resort to. you shop around. in hell's name. for endgames. is speed chess the game for you? they queue for your time. ‘not for sale’ sticker attracts attention. you’d love to crack. somewhere bright & crowded. with family units. michael douglas in falling down. a good career move. tear their smiles off. c’mon you’re far too meek. take it out on an ornament. assault by proxy. hurl down a galaxy of glass.

porn

i.e. where sex is a form of greeting begins with the basics tits
blowjobs etc you stalk the elusive chase-thrill until chore of
the addict quest to out-gross you underperform no wonder
                                                                                                         you
wonder why not bring the drugs in front of the camera the
post-shoot bloods cramps visits to quacks gynos & cashola
cut on desks in shoebox low-rent offices strewn with adult
store novelties stockpiled microwave dinners actress
ephemera industry awards
                                             matter of fact that’s been done
seek & ye shall seek what you want’s a free pass cultivating
mind dirtier than mysterious mid-rock-festival portaloo
discovered by timetravellers allegedly researching lives of
beggars & toms in 17th century london squalor
                                                                                      oops this was
unplanned uh whatever your day off home alone an
exercise in deletion clear cached history clear private
data now the afterfade you mindless gutless pointless

Stu Hatton spends most of his time messing with text. He teaches writing and editing at Deakin University, and blogs at http://wordyness.blogspot.com.

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2009-07-10T10:19:00.004+10:00

Jill Jones

When The Green Starts

You dangle in sweet wreckage
escaping the doubt of the world,
a small stone at the heart of the matter,
or a shadowy self in dusty clothes,
such a one who praises
a god of inversions.

Or you wander about purified
despite carbon, to breathe among
flowers bearing colour into the place
where dailiness stretches, grain by grain,
or where it parallels your unstable night’s
sudden chrome intersect, of silence,
when the green starts
being brave, atomic,

everything which is sung.

A Humming World
(Synchronous Optical Network)

A day writes its names in the wire,
but the waves did cancel it: Agayne
the day wrote but here comes the tyde
and it makes rivers in the mind and payne
demanding , until I gave away my Vayne
analysis of useless things, of mortall
worries, thickets, my forests of dis-lykeness
indeed, within a humming world, cars, bees, all lykewize
with the dying, and the dust, but alive
to the most fundamental things, to devize
without reputation but with rarer vertues
not eternal, surely, but to wryte of hevens
around streets and houses, splendour full and of,
whenas the world fills even an hour of its love.

(The poem contains the ghost of Spenser’s sonnet ‘One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand’. Synchronous Optical Network, or SONET, is a standard for connecting fibre optic transmission systems.)

My Reading

The eye’s as much a part of this
searching a sign through the weathering
wrecked at surface, worn tapestries
junk and styrofoam, as a thermo rig
drives thru today’s orgy, noisy talismans
shaking you, piercèd at the root
the worm-eaten leaf, misplaced stones.
But let’s see, how I try to read clouds
or bend to zeph’ring air that passes
along curling sounds, flicked, uncaught.
I’d rather feel my way along the phrases
each as it places on the sign, the wall.

To kiss each sound, to be in the blood
nerve the dancing lid, cochlea, lens, the throat.

They Are About Love

Today begins colder, amongst magpie scurf, bird mind.
A man looks like the past to me, memory fools memory.
There’s effort, people holding themselves, ready in the silent rage.
Three phones thumbed for news, engineering creaks.
Conversations describe conversations.

Wing lines argue with extinction as survival changes tack.
The guano of ages can be stepped over. What confusions!
It’s hard to balance words, they fall off clouds.
Among sponsorship deals, arguments become belated.
In the issue of union, don’t suggest celibacy as an awakening.
You get what you pay for. That old lie.

Seven anxious angels sleep in the folds of newspapers.
I don’t know all my languages but they are about love.
Cleavage is a kind of engagement, every t-shirt a sign.

14 Particulars

     Wing
clouds make sky
into other spaces
glad for clearness?
Remember the birds
particulars

     Fleshed
the material gathers
flocks premises degrees
of flux plastic
and vibrant bruised
easily

     Great
temperatures
like emails continued
heat in the hard drive
a love song
businesslike

     Days
I earn, you
earn, we sometimes
stand and watch
minutes without labour
gathering

     Allow
a little breathe
in the sexualized
the conditioned and
the happy sad
air

     Breezy
undermined
by service delivery
do you get it? Leaves
tenuous in late
autumn

     Old
hill, road, river
the moisture wish tangle
rusts in the old wall
resistance

     Organism
a salty pull
expiration forecasts time
that carelessly hangs
habit is greedy
tasted

     Song
noise moves through
rooms, cars, fences
huge chords reporting
the lost sun
music

     Bloom
a walking breath
from a map
pinging the stratosphere
that invisible blue
trellis

     Arisen
chlorophyll wind beat
vegetable sprung growth
wages of distance
to the crumbling
ground

     Current
somehow drops through
air the silvereyes
work of birds
where money never
lands

     Walking
eclipse early heat
this red in
sky talk love
brief filled with
time

     Let
great days allow
old organism song
wing fleshed current
breezy, arisen bloom
walking

Clouding Sound

river plays at bridge
coasts
brilliant floods
lagoon deep-met
afloat in delays
of sound, stone, loss
eye down, down
the river
feathers sink

water clouding birds
spirit flirts
ascending bridge and way

the caught collects time, becomes
spark flickering each cell

Jill Jones Jill Jones has published poetry in print and on-line journals in Australia, UK, USA, New Zealand, Canada, France, the Czech Republic and India. Her most recent books are Broken/Open (Salt, 2005) and a handwritten "tiny" book, Speak Which (Meritage Press, 2007). In 2009, she took part in the Micro-Festival Poetry Series held in Prague and Brno. She keeps a blog at http://rubystreet.blogspot.com/.

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2009-06-30T12:09:00.003+10:00

Jay Snodgrass

Hello Dark One

Under intense interrogation,
the diagonal line of my childhood

became unmoored
as a source of light, as a source

of making good on future constructions,

and the short colors, molecule dreams
became the other sources for

green and purple shadow, ultraviolet
pressed away by my inner light, frightened of evil.

And the bomb inside me, fondled
by such strict panic, enlarged.

Sign the book of Red

I’m a pork diner and a mistaken police beating.
Thank god I caught the regurgitation on tape
or doom would have befallen the street scene,

her testicles of yellow lamp light on the crimes.
My hands are bound to the rail tickets I carry,
and, look again, now they are just bloody stumps

backlit by sparks from the train pulling in
to the station. Or look now, they are investment
stubs gummy with my drying blood.

Remember everyone, save your ticket-ends
for the raffle, all proceeds go in to the vat to be
mixed up and re-fed to the dinner guests.

Remember to have your identification cards out
if you want to get your meal, open up, slide the card
down the row housing, down her mouth.

Jay Snodgrass has poems in Versal, Big Bridge, Oranges and Sardines, The Iowa Review, and so on. He lives in Florida, works in Georgia. A little like Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit.

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2009-06-30T11:54:00.002+10:00

Mariana Isara

from Latent news sonnets

3.

Flirtation and mild
wind defined as comfort. A
room recites the roots
of trees, rotten stairs,
everything’s suspected of
damage, the waiters
burned bread and quille
blades shattered lizards. Plastic
mated a saucer of love,
and oil. Effects speed
temperature, weeds die on
the page, willows are
toxic. Do not stop until
meat, I said and it made sense.

4.

Hot weather islands,
brought a ticket that wouldn’t
blow away. The sea
rose thick retardants.
It damages the windshield
wheeled and coursed for things we wished
for recycling.
Blunt careless Love is wrung from
polychlorinated
biphenyls unravel the
nervous system. Old
women assemble heavy
metals in their fists,
lonesome for magnetic fields.

5.

Glow worm sheet in the
stratosphere. We talked about
the war, all night an ozone
of grief suspended
my body, familiar places glistening.
When the winter wind
wept like rats, washing print &
lucid pictures of
malignant melanomas
years peeled apart.
Whales packed their bags – outpatients.
Go back to a clear atlas.
The shy lead damages
your eyes.

Mariana Isara is a poet who subsists in Otautahi/Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Trout, Sport, NZ Listener, and Blackmail Press.

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2009-06-30T11:08:00.002+10:00

Márton Koppány

Still Life

Márton Koppány

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2009-06-30T10:13:00.003+10:00

Joel Chace

Cell

nearly a reprise                               shorter          even                previous

darkness                        darkness                               several beats       as

dim as possible                                              /                          narrow

cot                                              tiny cell                          chemical                motionless

toilet         table              folding chair                                                 /                hands

to forehead         hand to                               eye                /                          this scene

this effort                                                                            considerable                 rendered

/                                                                                                                         coming to             /

and this time                                                                                                    the weeping

***************

weeping                  still                /                     on a hanging

ceiling cord                          light bulb           /           small

table and tray of food                          /        hands along

the doorless walls                     /             a note                   best

interests at heart             what your life             who you

are                      the fact             the release                      folded

fear             confusion                                     face to face

/             despite the still doorless                 the weeping still

Joel Chace

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2009-06-26T12:20:00.002+10:00

Kristina Marie Darling

The New Conductor

The old opera house had been turned into a discotheque, but no one bothered to remove the red velvet curtains, the gilt cornices, or the great plaster cherubs above each doorway. When the musicians arrived, dressed in sleek tuxedos and red bow-ties, only the building's smallest embellishments seemed familiar. Apparently a new conductor has taken the podium, one of the violinists mused. Then as the dancing began, and a cold white light shone above them, they all sensed a coup d'etat had taken effect since they'd last performed. And that only the concierge, with her long white hair, knew when the old conductor would return.

The Forest, or, The Musician Dreams a Change of Seasons

He begins by playing the saddest song he knows, an elegy for each dark red leaf rustling on the trees. And out of it drifts a woman's voice, ringing like an iron bell into the cold blue night. Crooning as if to postpone a change of seasons with her low madrigal, its muted crescendos, the instrument's stuttering fugue. Yet when the frost sets in, every note becomes an ode, echoing through parched foliage. Within that music, a wilderness. The forest's dried canopy heaves and sways.

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in American Culture Studies. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in such journals as The Mid-America Poetry Review, Pear Noir, Illya's Honey, Big City Lit, and Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies. Reviews and other criticism have also been published in issues of The Boston Review, Shenandoah, The Colorado Review, New Letters, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, and other periodicals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Centrum Foundation, and the Prairie Center of the Arts, as well as scholarships to attend the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and the Ropewalk Writers Retreat.

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