#59: It’s a Lot to Swallow
You can probably understand
a significant number of people
adhering to the belief that that
vision of man landing on the
Moon was shot in a Hollywood
studio. After all, it was an in-
credible technical feat, & just
the thing to push the Soviets
headfirst back into their Sputnik —
whose launching was, in itself,
almost as incredible. Other
beliefs feed off earlier beliefs —
Area 51, or the deaths for those
who pilfered parts from the car
James Dean died in. But to be-
lieve that Donald Trump is truly
the white knight who will once
more ride into town & cast out
the unbelievers, ensure that every-
one who follows him will have a
job, will become rich, will bask
eternally in the pentecostal glow
of their orange-faced Messiah
is, to be blunt, a lot to swallow.
John Grey
WHERE ARE THE HOMELESS?
out of shabby day,
evening has brought
near annihilation
out of no probability,
no possibility
from near-invisible
to preferring that
nobody come and watch –
so what’s it be?
the sun’s caustic shadow
or the moon
gazing down on their habitat
minimal light,
eyes closed
Stephen Bett
Jan Wiezorek
Keep a Poem Alive
This is not my poem
to breathe life into;
I poked into that which
I should not--like a bottom
dresser drawer, w/ yellow
paper clippings, plastic-wrapped,
by accident, too many boys--
too small a boat, too heavy
a motor, a lone survivor swimming
ashore like my brother blessing
the Mississippi River inside
souls of their poems--one mother
who strokes the head of a body
of a poem--& a drawer & plastic
keep a poem alive. I want to climb
a river bluff to read the words
out loud into space, a depth
flowing to the mouth of the living.
Eve Young
Dispatch From the Eye of a Storm
Looks betray me, words betray me.
The sea is a stone road; critters glow
in the mist from a series of questions
of one kind or another. These pots
glisten in the rotting dirt. I know not
what slips through my fingers, but the
stones are covered with mud. By sunset,
it already has the feel of flesh and blood.
I go down and the scale passes over his
fingers, wood through my fingers, vine-
yards in the rain. Grass and gold come
to me. Milk and buckets cover me. The
wind picks up. Algae whistles through her.
The waves break on the country beach,
during the solar cycle before death. I
looked, afraid of the sound. Here come
the birds, the noise, the storm, the danger,
the danger. White grass, white waves, the
broken staircase disappeared into the light—
I am clean.
AG Davis
AWAYWARD
herringbone basquetism
itten with yone winded grating,
sapplingh-ire bluing to
sow me the olden car is texas,
vending machinations
turnstile against miliwary
tar armsfacials,
theyme and timely bursting
gutturalterity jubisleep;
possibly interrosnaked
or begotten elsewhere,
the swarthy, drugged
fumigations
aghast chemforests
and bemoaned,
reddened burnt as
lambently smoking against
an encasement of diesel
fuel,
the tanks intertwine
my forgetemptiness,
and won now my hurting
as the spinning tops work
their waste inslide
and outerealms with force:
the foxes are forgedgotten
in bronze-simile filligrees,
yet all we see are
chasms and
pockmarked holes
between
vacant palms
and a broken star
Nathan Anderson
John Grey
ELUCI-DATING
All this once more would have to be.
And it was the tender bent above you as your eyebrows were.
Burdened by a hundred slaving years,
But truth is hidden from me a long life to the last
But beneath this rose meanwhile a green
by the clench of her jaw by this landscape,
Hurry, hurry, come quickly now the sun has set:
fed by melting fields of terror.
Fugitive, the thief of girls' despair,
Has listened, that now withers and knows all.
have sucked her red cheeks your thought was, tender
Here to lay it, strewn before our eyes
I wonder at the lovers if man through
in a bucket in weary irony,
Into the tumult of his blood's wild sea:
is dug deeper Is it not as it we'd gathered it
Like a tree upon the cliff gleaming shrilly
Time past and saved it for our own,
Mingled still with dark from introspection,
of her life, of burning bone.
Or do they rather yield it up blind
Out of feeling now and memory,
Out of new dreams, half-forgotten pleasure,
out of her feral face.
See the foggy green of twilight on the grass.
Attending, full of patience, finding ways
One more thing to let go, to release,
Still we think of it. It is as if
Still, the utmost measurement surpassed,
Sweet and glowing, as, to catch the overflow
swell to accommodate, too huge for the eyes
Take the weight the comfort's full-swollen song,
—that god sunning, that have couched her temperament,
That it may never hear of its own disgrace?
the salvo of betrayals
The dimple of her chin Their waters these lakes
the deaths that, These sobs stumble on
the once green lawns of this soul,
this teary body rampant, we've trampled over
Stirs the one and keeps his peace
You urged your fire and brittle breasts to soar
Mark Young
from 100 Titles From Tom Beckett
#45: Individual White Noise Machine Envelope
I suppose I should consider myself lucky, getting a non-custodial sentence for a second offense of sending out a screed of hate mail. But there were mitigating circumstances. None of the messages were racist or deeply hateful: more along the lines of ‘stop parking in my space or I’ll key your car’ or ‘stop your dog pooping on the pavement in front of my house or I’ll pick the poop & the pooch up & push them into your letter box’ or ‘stop mowing your lawn in the middle of the night or I’ll send my armadillo round to dig it up.’ The recipients were picked randomly from the telephone book & so I had no knowledge if they possessed cars, lawns, or pets. Plus I lived in a trailer park & had next to no possessions anyway so my threats were somewhat empty. &, as further mitigation, I had written my address on the back of every envelope so I couldn’t exactly be accused of trying to hide my identity.
Therefore, instead of bars & cages, another form of bondage. Six months of weekly visits to a psychiatrist, twenty-six hours of my life I’d never get back &, I was certain, get nothing from. At first adversarial: ‘Why do you dislike people?’ ‘You spend so much time writing, so why don’t you try to write a play, or poems, or a novel?’ ‘Where do you get the money for postage from?’ Back & forth, back & forth, hour after hour. But about halfway through we starting identifying the reasons for the likes & dislikes.
So, a word to the whys. We determined that I really did like writing, but became frustrated when I couldn’t seem to get beyond an opening sentence or two & reverted to that single angry phrase that had nothing to do with what I really wanted to say. That I was upset about my lot in life but had no one I knew personally who I could take it out on or talk to about it, hence the use of the phone book. That I included my name & address on the envelope in a hope that my random addressee may turn out to be a literary agent or academic who saw something in my writing & would reach out to see more.
That much established; but how to proceed? My psychiatrist said she would think about it over the coming week, would try to come up with something that might sate my anger but in a way that didn’t offend others, that would satisfy my need for creative endeavors, that wouldn’t consume as much of my fortnightly unemployment benefit.
A week later she had a list of suggestions for me. I didn’t look at it ar first, rather listened to her exposition of the points she’d made. ‘Keep sending the mail out but ration how you do it. Individual pieces. Say what you like but write only to yourself. Post-it notes will keep the message short. By all means use the postal service but a more economical option is to put it in your own letter box when you go out, & open & read it when you get home. It’ll save on the postage, plus you can reuse the envelope.
‘After you read the message, write it down in a notebook. That may seem like a redundancy since you were the one who wrote it in the first place, but it adds some distance so that you can see it in a new light. Plus, you might be able to move past that opening sentence paralysis we discussed earlier when you see several lines together. & don’t for a minute think that you have to have a hundred of them before you do something with them.
‘Finally, buy yourself a white noise gizmo — some of them are reasonably cheap — stick the post-it note to it, & send them together by whatever means of transfer you’ve decided on, just in case you’d lost your temper when you wrote it & that prompts a second angry burst when you read it. The white noise will quickly promote calm within & out with you, a sensory envelope that will work quickly.
‘Oh, & see if you can get one in a neutral color. Works even better.’
Vincent A. Cellucci
a masterpiece of nothing botch this unfinished rhinoplasty planet when risks submit to disappointments disguised in drag and the monotony merely the exotic butt-dialed to death I dare you time fingerpick the instant we meet conversant in a stockyard of complaints carefully laundered and set out with the chance for showers we cello today property count the names that we refuse to let run away when even observation becomes violent and omniscience a loss a masterpiece of nothing this creation amounts to destruction and the mowing down of civilians to prove our wisdom only official opinions without room for renovation criteria’s not a source of jubilation a paradise of crimes and counterfeiting missions encouraging the execution of sporadic planning that folds our calendar into origami automatic weapon expiration dates getting scalded alive the original quotidian orphanage one must assure the fetal conflict to carry out this deference to counting the commission for this tragedy stuck on repeat forced to dig a hole to place ourselves in and get squat over as ritual abrupt recession of the years weeks days hours seconds a round of applause for the impossible second encore for our illusions
Louis Bardales
I've Waited For English And Cried For Spanish Never arriving at any direction, I had no other choice for I'd try to hear a voice and I'd lose a voice and mine So instead I asked a vine for guidance and it gave me a theater though, not entirely, only the air of a stage exiting my hieroglyph with enough violence to offend an empty hall Extending this immediacy of plague a mistranslation punches the eye of my storm's heart and triggers a screeching asylum by jumping off an imminent bridge and landing upward at the top of a fury where the freight's darkness is nourished by extinction and hello, I'm the mind pouring weaknesses into the void that begs to be unaligned A cry reads it's own adonis and weddings occur in the forest's doldrums In cold dais our sentences govern a space in the cigarette The flowering bulbs of harsh sighs warn of daisies pushing deaths from underquilt hideouts to foregrounds of tongues lost Believe in a century's fall then rise, tarantula at the end of the doldrum's day
Darrell Petska
Vitruvian Man Enters a Bar
Where in this impious world is your symmetry, man,
with asteroids skimming our rooftops and the oceans hungry for land?
Godly tresses no longer become you.
If you open your legs enough and raise your hands enough,
know that your center is a bullseye and the region between your legs
a map of hyperspace with a spiderweb of coordinates roughed out
by Han Solo in a valiant attempt to avoid the Great Black Hole.
And haven’t you heard about the two-headed man who orders a drink
and the bartender asks which one of you is paying? Or maybe it was
a two-headed bartender so the man asks which one of you do I pay.
Nature is as relative as Einstein. Consider outlier man, unlike you,
whose measure from his knee to the root of his penis
is more than a quarter of his height—your tired assumptions
leading him to build his “right-proportioned” bar different from yours,
which relates to your woman problem:
if man is 24 palms and his bar reflects his measurements,
is there a bar that reflects woman’s? Undepicted and undeified,
could thirsty woman enter man’s bar? Could she even be seen?
I don’t know, man, but somewhere must sing the body virtual,
with duckweb feet or flippers and gills and worlds to match.
So a hologram man orders a drink at a hologram bar.
The hologram bartender says what’s the point, you’re not real.
James Croal Jackson
Cashing Out White plate spinning on the head of summer god: boredom in the breath of grass illusion, green in brain, in wiles, wet- rag fingertips pressed against nose, sanitation breath, crater of spirit, the less mortal, the mightier morals, if what you have is less than you entered.
Texas Fontanella
A Line From Jimmy Dore We build, and get billed for, our own coffin fits. It’s not unusual to do in paris, walking as a tourist by the louvre in stead of entering. The evidence is nestled deep in a psychosis, which would be next in line to the impossible to ascertain without the assistance of a thorough online learning pro gram whose ethics are unquestion ably superior to those offered by any known government depart ment, or indeed, any department store known for selling strawberry blonde bucket hats at reasonable prices, all without compromising the quality of material used in order to influence parliamentary processes. & it is in just this get up that I will turn and cough. The open casket is not, is never enough; I’ll have my mind wide open, thanks, throughout death, and glasses I don’t need on. My voting rights will shrivell, but i’ll remain contended. At the low, low price of $600 a day, death remains the most affordable rental op tion currently available on the market.
Mark DeCarteret
after effect simultaneously not & a lot they start in on themselves then surge outward as if they got to tugged to & fro before being rushed back into place but this time at-that- lingering where they’re back-lit illuminated by the sun’s after- thoughts or re- assurances & then still lingering & realigning a- gain while w/ standing my guess work & milling around before segueing into these in- scapes & something more or less out there & here
Stephen Bett
Everly’d Out I want you to tell me why you WALKed out on mE (right this minute!) Done a flyer thru the city them big yakkers & don’ let that swingin’ blue jeans door smack yr cheeky lil’ smartass the way out (either!) Oh no, he said, what else could he say That walker … that dumb talker * * Everly Bro’s, “Walk Right Back”; & self-refs to Those Godawful Streets of Man (pp. 26 & 52) & Track This (p. 108)
Mark Young
Anna / Karenina is / back in town Absolute targets have been shelved. The perception of independence is now seen as less vital than the ambiguous 'gray zone' of subversive statecraft. Whatever apologies are forthcoming resemble pre-shot videos, & stand as testament to the outrage of an influential section of the media who wanted charges brought against the clergy as well as the military. Any evidence offered has been so heavily redacted it looks like a blacked out War & Peace. All we need now is Frank O'Hara to stand up at the U.N., bang his shoe on the bench in front of him, & cry out “Napoleon is coming on the right day.” Meanwhile, at the local gun shop Even though the website has not worked as well as it could, please use its displays as a guideline to the goods & services that are at our physical marketplace. We have persuaded dignitaries to come along, in the hope their presence might bring some semblance of order, perhaps quell those angry crowds who claim very little pro- mised is available, & those things that are have prices far above what were advertized. A grief counselor is on hand for urgent consultations. who plays in Loss Angeles The Angels' bullpen finished the team's 10-game road trip by blowing up yet another of the city's cultural institutions. Such are the shortcomings of a streetcar system being completely dis- mantled & later sold.
AG Davis
Nathan Anderson
Nicholas Ravnikar
The Book of Preposition Studies You can’t be sure what truth will look like but I want to think I’ll die with tasteless roses and no company to keep in an efficiency apartment the windows open to summer just as the stalks bend their dry green scales toward my shade and the fresh glitter fragrance across my eyelids says to me hang on to your heart and get ready for the playback
Rowan Beckett
*** x vs y warfare * water into wine another sip of koolaid * of clay and moss these tendons stillborn * carnations holding this body to ashes * posthuman I stack my ribs accordingly
Dylan Loring
We were going to make a blood oath but instead of a needle you used a dagger and started gushing, and I vomited on your mostly severed finger, and you told me I needed to take you to the hospital, but I told you I needed a less smelly shirt because not all of the vomit landed on the finger, and you said if we have to wait anyway we might as well do the blood oath while you were already bleeding, and so you handed me the dagger, and I intentionally dropped it because at least one of us needed enough blood to drive, and you told me to watch it because the dagger cost $500, so I asked why I paid for your lunch, and you said because it was sweet to do it up until I made that crack, and so I decided to change the subject back to the hospital, but you insisted on doing the blood oath immediately in case you didn’t make it because even as you passed out from a vampiric wet dream-level of blood loss, you were able to argue that it made a better obituary if the blood oath was successful, but I totally disagreed and so could no longer take the blood oath in good conscience.
Mark Young
from 100 Titles From Tom Beckett #100: Lust and Listlessness He once kept secret lists, on a regular basis, of the emotional states he passed through. Would collate them monthly. Lust, it turned out, was the prime recurring state; embarrassingly so, especially when his husband discovered his notations & saw that the lust was pointed in other dire- ctions. A number of harsh words were exchanged, many ultimatums. He has now begun a forced course of listlessness.
Cecilia Stelzer
the wilting fist make a recording of air or suede on grass french kiss the video cut velvet the lock 500 egrets for eyes
Nicholas Ravnikar
The Book of Money I shook the tree twice — once on top and once on bottom. We saw the children, then, arguing for their right to anger in an old language we forgot to teach them. They hid a part of me away and never showed me where. We count all the new money twice as it falls on us. That’s the way of these worn facets. rolling over and rolling over — past time. After it. Still, they call me a liar. God knows where my grave is, but it’s filled with your best advice. If I read it aloud, nobody would believe me.