What You Said ‘Then’ ‘I’ll begin, and then became aware’ ‘naked streets’ | ‘beautiful men in florals’ ‘shapes as cast-offs’ | ‘petals blown apart’ ‘in the power of smokes and powders’ ‘plague is the colour of pale blossom’ ‘distant cars’ | ‘her long shiny thoughts’ ‘I lunge at my anger with all my commas’ ‘boys don’t cry’ | ‘yeah, not half’ ‘the scraps, scales, fur’ | ‘ghost flames, feathers’ ‘a wall is not a wall when it’s not a cage’ ‘still miming life’ | ‘a suitcase is an exit’ ‘a cup is an instance of heaven’
Andrew K. Peterson
HEAD SOUP after Alfred Jarry Orchestrated madness demands countermelodic mendacity : Re-collective Orchestra & Debbie Allen Dance Academy perform Starburst live from the Hollywood Bowl Interruptions, new continuities to slaughter the charmless indiscreet oligarchic bourgeoisie : Pere Ubu serves Putin head soup made of radioactive wind blown thru Ukrainian wheat The banquet years — an empty plate : Seven Keys for Seven Doors To Seek a New Home by Brother Jack McDuff
Sarah Sarai
A Vegas Vegan I never promised you a statistician, although I fantasize on becoming a poet of actuarial tables, a poet of the odds, a true Vegas vegan with an eye keen for a sun longing for love and, like a Greek god who mis- understands the penalties, melting into the imperishable west of the sunken and the found.
Diana Magallón and Jeff Crouch
Don Narkevic
Charles J. March III
Pillaged Den Nothing’s ever finished Everything just gets done Never cease fighting Recursion & futility Consume silently Alone in your room One bite at a time Mindful of someone else’s big screen TV Nobody in regret A prisoner in your own home Move to Stockholm Sweet
Thomas Hibbard
UNOBSTRUCTED KISS O fragrant and pure sweet petals! - Tibor Tollas strange Napoleonic gentle borderlands each night the gypsies along the river flickering in front of Mount Hoverla lately, a starving child appears or a dark-haired man with his concertina retreating into the remains of a shattered airport all those cars parked in the forgotten parking lot mundane disproportion of a father’s smashed mouth kneeling on an alpine cliff, praying in this dejected Sabbath slaughterhouse— where everyone anticipates living forever or is this planetary cauldron the beginning with the “little cities” and their Cossack Frankenstein tumbling, walking amongst the willows and doctors treating the tender carcasses reality is possibility, the dreams of true experience where the hours pass slowly and indecisively in front of the connubial half-brother from KGB: the incredible song of nightingale’s sorrows
Mark DuCharme
from Complicated Grief Conjunctive Batman Thrills I looked at the set & was spilled By its startled eyes Elk rhythm blunders Economies of bird-in-cage Rattled sentences blossoming Once upon a shadow Or anything else you’d likely spoil Like a cage of lost children Here is one: think meager When the scrawl of night sits down in wonder Or blunder. It doesn’t matter which. If intrigued Please complicate noontime shadows Scrawl penitent as a rook in lamb’s clothing Vindicate corruption with corruption in a letter of 3,000 words Find new ways to say goodbye Or wander off in shadows, ’til the heat of night bleeds
Jeff Harrison
Poem quickly glad, the tiny here sickness in wind out ripple many years eye real in green to breaking too twofold and challenged to disappear
Charles A. Perrone
Mark Young
from 100 Titles From Tom Beckett #76: The Sedimentation of Sentimentality Armageddon arrives; & the messages glide off every Hall- mark greeting card, merging as they meet. Then, collectively, this mess of mangled messages slides toward the nearest water, silts up the rivers. Continues to move, further downstream, has learnt from lava. Blocks the deltas. Water no longer / reaches the sea.
#10: Poem Beginning with a Line from Charlie McCarthy When I get smitten, I stay smut. It blasts the wheat in the ear, makes everyone I come in contact with seem less wooden than I am. Perhaps that's why it took me several days to get used to our very limited accommodation. Forget spending a few minutes in a relaxed state — I had to buy my own tung oil since none was provided. Then water started dripping from the apart- ment above. That meant the light wouldn't work. Now the dark place I was in be- came darker. I felt a hand, an arm, reach up my back. My mouth fell open. I couldn't speak; but still a voice spoke out. "i've got a good mind inside me to…" it started out. "Then why don't you use it," I interjected.
Michael H. Brownstein.
THEN if radiant energy if the prism with well-lit blossoms if a tambourine sparks the scent of orange-blue walk with me through the forest of log cabins near the path of the river of gold into the cave where diamonds echo vibrations of taste this could be a maybe this could be a possibility this could be the silent laughter in the end what if if could be anything else but the if it allows itself to be
Vernon Frazer
No Room at the In fretting pineal the flume hotel transit disposed its torpor militia breaking a somnolent rumor from its disport habitat a worn boomerang vocalist caught the horned legions reversing the bearskin to ghost their venom pageants declines frontage under the madwoman habitat the next dreamer temples a sentient breath precision simmer elicits a resuscitator tonic replication lowered its climb ladder its stain fin sentenced to bromide
Cameron Morse
The Vision In the vision of myself as electricity encased in a black rubber sheath, there are wires in the walls of my body. Lightning bolts drop from my fingertips and the jerky squirrels in my yard are seized by lightning, the epileptic squirrels. How this energy is in hell is this fireball harnessed how it could be held if needed. Power lines lasso my horizon. Transformers on the march across Kansas drag their heavy lines and for once I am lacey light. My lines are sails that lift in the tender morning air. My webs invisible in this light.
Mike Sikkema
Diana Magallon
Butterflies To add more fractions. Do you know why you are doing this? Tricks like the butterflies should be avoided. There are several reasons 2/5 + 1/5 is simply 3/5 this is your new denominator that becomes your new numerator. Tricks like the butterflies should be avoided. There are several reasons I like my trick and it works, tricks like butterflies should be avoided. Have you seen similar behavior? Tricks like the butterflies should be avoided. There are several reasons Russian translation by Gleb Kolomiets Бабочки Сложить больше дробей. Ты знаешь, зачем делаешь это? Следует избегать трюков мойр. На это есть несколько причин. 2/5 + 1/5 просто 3/5 это твой новый знаменатель, таким стал твой новый числитель. Следует избегать трюков мойр. На это есть несколько причин. Мне нравится мой трюк, он работает. Следует избегать трюков мойр. Тебе уже встречалось такое поведение? Следует избегать трюков мойр. На это есть несколько причин.
J. D. Nelson
the cherry coke brain waves alone with the nothing of the old world I’m stuffing my skull with new brains in the glove of forgiveness the new world is a clean hand the machine of the head the eye of the rainbow the bible of the broken clock the berry named for an apple milk mulch is some serious ammo I have the power to be the soft ape what does the skull say? o nocturnal earth!
Randy Prunty
Nico Vassilakis
Glen Armstrong
Among the Forgetters #57 This is a city that never unzips its pants. A sad city in need of a good scrub down. A repressed city. Everyone owns a copy. A statue. A war hero whose pirouette in the thick of battle hardens and cracks off into history. I love the idea of juxtaposing colorful flowers with gun barrels, but they say I am a little too loving, too trusting. I love the juxtaposition of dancing and snakes, of public art and rigor mortis in theory, in theory
Nathan Anderson
Oh this monkey (paw) poinsettias on the bridge of your (nose!) a break from the hopeful fuel achoo achoo achoooooooooooooo not these not these steps again pearl coloured against the (glass) a tile and a chrome flute aakkkkkkk aakkkkkkk aakkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk bbbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzttttttttttttttttttttttt bbbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzttttttttttttttttttttttt bbbzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzttttttttttttttttttttttttt (tttttttt) plu plu pluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu ba ba baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa hu hu huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa you've got the itch so (scratch) it go on go (on) (go) on (go on) good
Charles A. Perrone
Fashionable Words 11-13-20 I was almost fifty years old when I added the word sartorial to my supposedly-superior vocabulary. If I am not mistaken, I was wearing on that occasion the legendary T-shirt and jeans, or something of that sort or of those means. Nicely-tailored lexical item that I was fortunate to befriend, for it even provoked rumblings in the well-worn memory banks. So, like, I was truly a motley teen, in myriad ways. I even had a sartrian phase, though I would've spelled it Sartrean. I'd barely begun to shave on a daily basis, yet I was reading, what was the title? ... The Transcendental Ego I do believe. Uh, no, sorry, that should be The Transcendence of the Ego. Get beyond it and for that matter your self while you're at it. There's a difference, a coated voice says, you dressed-down dope. Next, little hope for you, averred a former college roommate upon our unplanned reunion, you still take the prize for worst-dressed person in the room and in the class. And on did he babble about some disheveled playwright from Spain named Alfonso Sastre who sewed together versions of Irish plays and came to publish dramas in New York even though in Spanish plus a few scissored translations with such endearing titles as "Death Thrust" and "Tragic Prelude". Morbid stage mood indeed. At least you've avoided that level, mumbled, decades later, my exquisitely-clothed physical therapist while he tried to sort out my real sore maybe torn tendons, as I lay in my grey jump suit, adding that I was lucky, sort of, not to have aggravated the sartorius, a connective upper-leg muscle about which I learned absolutely nothing in my philosophy, drama, and anatomy courses.
Maggie Sullivan
Julia Rose Lewis
All those Barn Swallows Guttereal leaves the nickel lavender sky lies down to let to rent to make loose and lax. Some jello family: a fox and a horse with navicular and tardive dyskinesia see parking lots. I am mud and he is lavender resulting in lemonade to be held a good deal tapering all the way down. The lens can be Indiana if first electronic toll collection system or super moon or prime. The silken negatives say so fifty meters is fair play in the seal land waxing artifice and rock calls: there there reason. It is only a lepisma saccharinum moon I learn even in a nocturnal light. Sardine is no synonym for navy fleet I fear I have I left the sunflower test too soon do you know how your drinking water feels if it is the nearest I have ever found myself to meditation. II Not another archive a sponge and a spy and a nickel lyric calls purgatory a parking lot. They were silver platters even if there were a grey sieve let me be an anchovy for the shark knows there is a better fish under the door. She is certain as the ocean looks on the iphone. Let me be asbestos beside the ficus sacred and wood finish and food glaze as if willowing to shell layers. So the lobster residual says to star the varnished days all that lay like shellac because in the morning they were expensive computers; my mind to your mind and mica flaked compositions. If silver wishes safety pins paperclips and mint torpor a nickel lyric calls it tough-skinned wishes all the way down a shell lacking a hotel if skinny funnel then it is not a mint tornado let me be asbestos. III A fried egg riding pegasus with a dished face verifies that andalusite is not a recognized breed. The theater recalls itself to itself it is related to sillimanite as sugareal released itself into the wild hollow is not a horse that color of water rice. Some jello family is some jello family I can find a lifetime if performative then fall limnology is silken lies all the way down then put the first shirt over your head then the second then the giraffe is given a third feral love then do you know how your drinking water feels? If you will believe pyrite mica is glittereal mucus sells itself music calls as for being allergic to gold naturally it is not magic. Once upon a time there was a singing mint and a hotel leading to being gulped down; do not wait for the poet voice. In the sense sudden high bid dead battery and time hammering the grey jumper. Icing the state of Washington into horse trading before green does not grace the steeplechase: it feels like fucking barn swallows fucking.