Kelsey Browning

September and October 2017

Great news, riot meeting
Urgent in London-
Tomorrow! We’re more
Than just petitions.

9/10 internships in
Asia go on sale
Tonight! Welcome
On board to our secret

Weapon. What’s the
Best city in Europe?
Marx yo with squirrelly
Heathrow wifi

Can you smell
BIRDFEED? Other
Live essay 2 out for
The kill. W2GKE5: LHR-ORY

Stock up on international
Friends before it’s too
Late! Good news:
Therapy all booked.

Mark Young

One for the Border Force
 
So maybe you take the chance
& walk out across the sand &
into the sea. Maybe
they won’t notice you there
among the dervish gulls, think
you’re a rock or a resting
seal. & even if they do they
probably won’t care. Their
job is to stop people
from coming ashore, not to
stop the malcontents from
leaving. Just don’t turn a-
round & try to come back.








Croft / Craft
 
Pertinence. Soft words
hold little of it. Better
to pick up stones to
make your point &
leave the phraseology
to bricklayers. That’s
what they do after all,
the regular lines, off-
 
set against each other,
in natural cadence, a
start / a finish to it all,
looking for that last un-
settled, previously unen-
cumbered, piece of land.

J.D. Nelson

the color of the comma

the clam shuffles the deck of business cards
a box of the same carousel juice

the secret sponge is a mirror of the cloud
speak to me when there is no dentist

when I am the laughing hand
when I am a peach of the standing warmth

police socks in the world while crumping a viola
we can see the forest of the james and that complete wolf

eek a math at it
the effort of the law in the weird salt and that was it

waiting for that crunch of the scotch ticket
drick litmus dropping drowse

that dracking house was a color of the three toes
to rose white a smaller wing

Vincent Cellucci

drive thru confessional, unframed

sure I’ve gotten away with a few infidelities
and sure a few got away from me too
in this life search to arrive at or at least epitomize a scripture
built freely from perceptions and fellow outsiders
most recently the discovery that all public transpo in milan is free or can be
—not even b/c you can’t pay but b/c you can’t find where to pay—
or once upon a long time ago copping a bag of dirt my first night in paris
or stealing from a field of weed in belize
totalling a bmv in pensacola
multiple nights in drag in new orleans, lifted purses full of stolen prescriptions
smoke rising from an epic joint on top of the temple of the lost world at sunset
—lemme tell you raul’s rose garden in belize city’s got alot of thorns
& you don’t want the mississippi treatment in orleans parish prison—
better off pissing on the panthéon after dine-n-dashing le select
successfully bribing the cops out of a dui in ecuador
or getting kicked out of the entire town of canoa
a blur of junk in jakarta—have I even been to jakarta?
certainly syringes in the ass in ustica
from maria my romanian nursemaid girlfriend
after taking a bends hit while cave diving
sure I’ve browned out in brooklyn
yawping ferlinghetti on a subway car
dedicated to all the vanished street performers
unknowingly in front of students 
but considered it an evening lesson
all indication of insult
given and received
slurring beside my enduring buddy darren 
which reminds me I could continue
definitely taunted mortality too many times to fully litany
taking the train to san sebastian with only
14 bottles of wine, a beach towel, and a bathing suit
after buying hashish in a cathedral confessional
security pursuit and eventual expulsion from a radiohead show
for refusing to quit sailing to the moon
insistent on hiking up a mtn then slipping off a 20 meter cliff
to a certain drunken demise
on the fracturing waves and crags below
before darren gave me the best shove I’ve ever received
yesterday a dutch emt asked me if I ever saved a life
and I told him well not technically
I’ve helped a friend or fellow diver with a few ascents and descents
prevented the use of some improperly used equipment
separated a few fights that may have escalated
and certainly fellated my licks along the way
or flocked the fuck away from trouble of every color that can be mixed
survival is its own impressionist masterpiece
all these little green and brown dots resembling the home of a park or bench
some scene made from making scenes or avoiding them
the getaway monet worth twenty million or more
a painstaking trophy of unsustainability
of throwing yourself away into the only world that was offered

Joseph Cooper

flAshbAck

Dear radioland, the circus has come
into my heart like moonlight
through enormous blossoms
in an apparent limitless capacity
for waking cold, dark, and beautiful.
I have been dreaming you too long,
my stormy flawless rhythm. Everything
is a turbulent applause when you are pretending
you are in the movies moving in a way
that only a simple flashback can move.
But I’m scared of dying alone, dying before you
read this. Still, I wish I were a painting,
that I would have risked being anything else.
Anything at all. Even the heaviness of breath.

Ali-Janna Whyte

Blank Verse 

 

Imagine if you and I  _______

for several _______ in the ________

Would it ________ the way

we _________ together?

If ________ became  _________ ,

possibilities of ________ would be

__________ a ruby diamond  __________

at __________.

 

O’ dearest dearest one  _______, let us

_______ again, just so that we can

_________ until the ________ come

home to __________.

 

Then  ________ can open ________

with _________ and _______ .

At least, by then _________ our _______

as all do shift __________

 

If our words do mean anything, _______ ,

they let them mean _______ can

__________.

Let them _______ once again how

______ the gap of ________ between us.

So, ________,  please _______ fill in

these ________ with words of ________,

________,

so that we may ________  once again

 

Julia Rose Lewis

Trap or Someone Else’s Binaries

Into green report
as if following nervous
in fact green nipping
green into a minute fact
water or ruins
or concerned your enterprise
as green negative
on fire mine or frighten ten
to engineering
or the last of the salt salt

one continuing
as long as engineering
not dangerous salt
ocean bones salt bones salt bones

Andrew K. Peterson

Magnolia Triangle
for Yusef Lateef

Magnolia’s
larvae prefixes
loop through, follow
each leaf within a break
beat at pre-dawn’s come muscle
tongues the sphinx’s nose what e-
cho tumble branches through blissed
out heaven’s end gild, limit a wish with
ache? Levies of the mark rum succor. Nothing
asks for but a taste. So what. Go back? Not now,
nor ever so, what. Not now. Go back, ever you ever.

 

 

Fortunes for Forty

Act as if you don’t know the basil leaves in your beard won’t wash out, and others will follow suit.

The heart is heavy before the bending of knees.

There is healing in your immediate future.

Rest will come after work, and work stay after health. On three-day weekends, catch up.

Pick another fortune cookie in the form of THREE John Ashbery brownies.

Pictures of the sky reveal invisible nets thrown in both directions at once.

Unbelievable friends arrive to remind you of reasons for belief.

Forget it, in case they ask.

Your shame & monstrosity are others’ thrill rides. Snap out of it!

 

 

 

Another Phantom Antler
for Robert Grenier

All that WAS
you NOW know
is gone to
feed BACK, re-
mind, rewind
IS it now
BAD as it
was? Tape STUCK
A cruel LOOP
REVELS to un-
ravel its RIVAL
WIDTH w/ Numero
ZERO WHEEL
fill redundancy
SUN gets ON
the EYES &
IN the temple
FIRE rife in
SAPPHIRE
dawn’s WAN
protection
as though
THAT was
the ONLY
WAY of
the living

Charles Perrone

Quarantine Queue (Spring 2020)

 

So a vast viral event is unfolding

and by order you’re in quarantine

now you have time on your hands

to do so many things that obtain

brush those teeth over and over

clip those nails with frequency

select best quarantunes to listen to

youtube watch endless old cartoons

retrieve ancient letters from the attic

and write back to those you neglected

for all those years of loving and lust

decades able to convince you

that finally you must

 

 

 

 

Take one for the Team

 

The franchise mascot suffered a mechanical setback

when the grand gasket that retained a certain fluid

splintered indecorously and allowed some infiltration

into the hamper where linens of the finely pampered

were kept clean and separate from the basket of the best

of the rest avoiding arrest and awaiting transfer to a casket

for the forensic fanatics who justified by saying “just ask it.”

Steve Timm

a back alley

tis the din of inequity the tolls peal
brick and brick fresh dust the spawn uh
i could go nexed, node gras
deteriolop a illudic without
applore the helps chatters “bag of bag of”
learnin’ ’em ’n’ sumch
o thins o gandered scrape gaths
supplors at the grates the sky stands down upon
is it unhenched reyettably
o ghasts o frangures parch vehement
this is a pounding for knelling to bray
a scrum plodding to unjust deserts

 

 

a airport layover

it’s out there be tolled
brought to pieces, solipse, blankity
dissidaince, desarraign, arduent, argative, orgward
words, words of auks, murres return, shallow-
skied souciance, ressurrouncing these imparticulate deigns
to dances, renders in reins, swirlent and somehow mauve
muslin cacophane, aurophagous, larked in the feels we’re
herein yep delisional lisciences the skippings in spaces pallured the
color of, the co-lorn, abbrebiates as on the corvid plains under
arreft, these’re the arethey yumyum savannas, the tauntellects
descried, scrabbed, enraptules the tomptomp derhyivem
lengthen, lank, linguor, sussurp implomb, surprision the
loom, the hangs, these and those ones, ones wanwon, drr
it’s clobber out, hunger down, in, from, these
supple sitions, susps, opple, insurrountable, assurrussive, perc-
olussive, allostic, nominant fingerly and like like
the sad only the owly darkens the surwieldy auspenses,
did i mood ya yet, owed brupt? did we irreachable
upon, what is up on the very every each, the lects
cull, these are our corners in sharitable
that make unblisser, blisseder, faux’ choince, flat chalance
chance la, dripped, insereneder, ceded misgive
to this our only unto
the one to the one
the dear dear the of each

Eileen R. Tabios

 

BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, I BECOME WAR
—written in the time of Taal Volcano’s January 2020 eruption

Because today, for you I am war.

I war as completely as Princess Chelidonis who wore a noose as necklace during the Siege of Sparta to show she would not be taken alive.

I war like Cleopatra II leading a rebellion against Ptolemy VIII Physcon to drive him and Cleopatra III out of Egypt.

I war like Mother Lü leading a peasant rebellion against Wang Mang of the Western Han Dynasty.

I war for you as I war against you like Queen Gwendolen in the 9th century BC who gathered an army to defeat ex-husband Locrinus for the British throne.

I war as slyly as Fulvia, Mark Antony’s wife who organized an uprising against Augustus.

I war like the Trưng Sisters who rebelled against the Chinese Han-Dynasty to become national heroines of Vietnam.

I, of course, war like Boudica, a Celtic chieftain in Britain who led a massive uprising against Roman forces. (Silly Romans tried to raise troop morale by deriding her army for containing more women than men.)

I war by doing what it takes, like Veleda of the Germanic Bructeri tribe who acted as strategic leader, priestess, prophet, and living deity during the Batavian rebellion.

I war like Zenobia, Syrian queen of the Palmyrene Empire who took control of Roman Egypt, Arabia, and parts of Asia Minor as she revolted against the Roman Empire.

I war like Queen Mavia, repeatedly defeating the Romans until they finally negotiated a truce with her on her conditions.

I war like Judith rebelled against the Axumite Dynasty in Ethiopia.

I war like Gaitana of the Paez who led the indigenous people of northern Cauca, Colombia against Spanish colonization.

I war like Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba from the Kingdom of Matamba who led revolts against the Portuguese. (She even aligned with the Dutch Republic to form the first African-European alliance against another European aggressor.)

I war like Maria who led a slave rebellion on Dutch Curaçao.

I war like Granny Nanny, a spiritual leader of Jamaica’s Maroons who led rebel slaves in the First Maroon War against the British.

I war like fishwife Marretje Arents who led the Pachtersoproer rebellion.

I war like Queen Rani Velu Nachiyar Sivagangai of Tamil Nadu, the first queen in India to fight against the British.

I war like Gabriela Silang who led a revolution against Spain to establish an independent Ilocos in the Philippines.

I war like Baltazara Chuiza and Lorenza Avemanay who led rebellions against the Spanish in Ecuador.

I war like Huillac Ñusca of the Kolla tribe who led rebels against the Spanish in Chile.

I war like Manuela Beltrán and Antonia Santos, Neogranadine (now Colombia) peasants who revolted against the Spaniards. Beltran sparked the Revolt of the Comuneros while Santos led rebel guerrillas in the Province of Socorro during the Reconquista of the New Granada.

I war like Gregoria Apaza and Bartolina Sisas, Aymara women who led uprisings against the Spanish in Bolivia.

I war like Tongvan medicine woman Toypurina who rebelled against the Spanish to lead an attack against Mission San Gabriel Arcángel.

I war like Wang Cong’er who commanded the White Lotus rebellion in China.

I war like Laskarina Bouboulina, a naval commander who led her own troops during the Greek War of Independence. Posthumously, she became Admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy.

I war like Kittur Chennamma who led an armed rebellion against the British in response to the Doctrine of lapse.

I war like Countess Emilia Plater who created her own group to fight in the Polish November Uprising. She became a captain commanding an infantry company.

I war like the slave Carlota, slave rebellion leader during the Year of the Lash on Cuba.

I war like Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and Begum Hazrat Mahal who led supporters in revolt against the British.

I war like Shona spiritual leader Nehanda Nyakasikana who rebelled against British colonization of Zimbabwe.

Then I war again like Yaa Asantewaa who led the Ashanti in rebellion against the British.

I war like Blanca Canales who led the Jayuya Uprising in Puerto Rico against the Federal government of the United States.

I war like Ani Pachen, the Tibetan Buddhist nun who led a guerrilla rebellion of 600 fighters on horseback against Communist Chinese tanks.

I war like Alice Auma who led a rebellion against Ugandan government forces.

I war like Comandante Ramona who led the occupation of San Cristóbal de las Casas in an uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.

I am war…

For you I war against today’s capitalists refusing to regulate themselves and placing their proxies into political leadership.

Because today, for you I am war.

I war like the volcanos Pinatubo, Cleveland, Yellowstone, Huaynaputina, Krakatoa, Santa Maria, Novarupta, Ambrym, Ilopango, Thera, Changbaishan, and Tambora erupt and erupt and erupt against humanity’s crimes against the Mother Earth.

Because I love you, I am war.

I: WAR.

Volodymyr Bilyk

Os as is – Os as is

Os as is – Os as is

Os as is – Os as is
Os as is – Os as is
Os as is – Os as is
Os as is – Os as is.

Os as is
Os as is

Os as is
Os as is

Os as is
Os as is
Os as is
Os as is
Os as is.

Os / / As / is
Os/ Os as is
Os / / As / is
Os / Os as is
Os / / Cull
Os / / / Cull quack
Os / / Cull
Os / / Cull
Os / / / Cull /.

Os / Cull – Chew / Chirr
Os as is – Os as is
Os / Cull – Chew / Chirr
Os as is – Os as is
Chew / Chew / – / Chew / Chew
Chew / Chew / – / Chew / Chew Hop
Os as is / Cull
/ Cop Cap Clap – Os as is Cop Clap clap.

Pop/-cob /
Os as is /-Os as is /
Pop /-cob /
Os as is /-Os as is /
Pop / /-cob / /
Pop / /-cob / /
Pop / /-cob / /
Pop /-cob /.

Pop /-cob /
Os as is
Os as is
Os as is
Pop / – Cob /
Os as is
Os as is
Os as is
Pop Os /-cob / Cough
Pop Os /-cob / Cough
Pop os /-cob / Cough.

Os as is
Os as is

Os as is
Os as is

Chew / /-Chirr / /
Cough / / – Chap / /.

sough cough – sough Cough
Knob Os – Os Cow

sough Cough – sough Cough
Knob Os – Os Cow

sough Cough – sough Cough
Ha – Os Cow.

Buss Cough – Buzz Cough
Wad Os – Wad os
Ha, Cow – Ha, Cow
/ Cough.

Buss / Buzz – Buss / Buzz
Ha, sough / Cough – Ha, Cow /Cough.

Ooze / – Buss /
Buzz / – Bob /
Ha, Cob – Ha, Cob
Bob Sigh – Bob Sigh.

Pop / Cow – Cob / sough
Ha, Cough – Ha, Ha
Buzz Cough – Err, Clap Clap.

eerie Cull-quack – eerie Cull-quack
Sheer yaw bob – Mere yawn bob
Ha, Cob -/ Ha
– Baa hat.

Cull-quack – Cull-quack, hoop
Sheer yaw bob – Mere yawn bob
` – `
Os as is – Os as is
Buss Cough – Busk / Tar.

Toss / cluck-quack – / lurk Cull-coup
Toss/ quell / – / brine Cull-coup.

Laugh Loll Squall (clap)
Laugh Loll Squall (clap)
Laugh Loll Squall (clap)
Laugh Loll Squall
Toss / quell / – / Oath Coup-quack
Toss / quell throng – / Toss Laugh thong
Toss Laugh throng toll – / Toss Laugh toot.

Os as is
Busk Tar
Ha, Tat – / Ha
Buss toot
nonce Baa – nonce batabatabata
bicker shoo – bicker Boo.

hop, hoop

Err bob` / – apt `bout Buss
sough / – / Bat
Odd ought ebb – Odd ought ebb.

Pop Bob – Cob coo
Raw / – / sough sigh
Reek (-bee-cod) – Wry (-bit-crawl).

Pop / – Cob clap

Pop / – Cob clap
Reek (bee-cod)
Rue Clap – / squawk cue
Odd ought ebb – err quaint toot.

Pop lap – Cob lap
Reek (bee-cod) – Wry (-bit-crawl)
Ram scarf – Ram scarf
toll mow gall – Null tomtom gasp.

Pop / – Cob Plop
Pop bob / – Cob hop /
Odd ought ebb.

Pop / – Cob Baa
Pop Bob / – Cob Boo /
Odd ought ebb – / jib
Odd ought ebb- err quaint toot.

Odd ought ebb- / jib
Odd ought ebb- gall jib
Odd ought ebb- gall jib
Odd ought ebb- Odd ought ebb.

Eileen R. Tabios

From The Ashbery Riff-Offs
—where each poem begins with 1 or 1-2 lines from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” by John Ashbery

Witnessed in the Convex Mirror: Blurred Histories

Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
in a movement evoking the faux Queen
who stole her empire from the labor of others
over whom she possessed no moral dominion
For too many, their lives are a blur as they
can’t or won’t recognize themselves as mere
props in someone else’s telenovela. Beneath
the royal bed lies a carpet woven by boys
with unknown names. One or two survived
into adulthood—because they grew up to be
slaves, their lives remain unfathomed
which is how their guards preferred it. When
they enter into a poem written a century or
two after their return to dust, they will remain
perceived as a blur by the poet, no matter
how concerned the poet may be by inequities
and other forms of injustice. A swath of fur
a piece of pleated muslin and a ring with bent
metal and broken coral may lie immortalized
behind museum glass. But who their owner
abused will remain as blurry as the trajectory
of the whip cracking against their naked
backs. Even those who want truth’s clarity
are occasionally grateful for the blurred
vision’s inability to focus on a whip’s landing
on fragile flesh, then the reddening line
drawn quite clearly by the surfacing of blood

Gavin Yates

Roman Kiwifruit

My sorry upstairs scampered 2 difficulties

Were held laminated and topical and gone out for

Locks splattered sea odd strobe tissues on purity

Good outboards national remainder come eightfold vessels

Monolith is this the answer the nepotism largely gets barbed

The jaundiced journalist like his ghost has risen

Unscheduled parrot armed with eucalypts 3 poems

Photoburst the pressure optimism laundromat awaiting

Took bunches of fly-by-night frog spit the selfish hang greatly

 

George J. Farrah

Compass

Proof enough
dry vision
through a single sniff

or not enough
he aches
and crawls to it

the voice of the bench
the beach
the garden fall
the plastic tipped harpoon

my voice
are throats
all hidden

the bare
underarm
a carriage a car
a blinking

a dream
in the ear

Mary Kasimor

my mother’s guitar and bread recipes

now the conversation overhears itself
first we exchange bread recipes
and later phone numbers
now I can learn to read
easier than wisdom–it is organic
like eyesight feeling a voluptuous
square squatting next to the circle
another spaced out hour under
the intellect rolling its eyes
I can remember my birth
I was the most
beautiful baby in the nursery
my mother taught me how to read latin novels
I grew taller than grass demanding eyesight and the moon
we drove through the desert the sand shaping
the nature of stems
the locks rusted even though it never rained
the sky forced itself on us
I learned to play the guitar
my mother was rich with sound and silence
she and I grew into an organic shape
understanding every word that I swallowed
my mother agreed to be my mother
growing roots out of her head the connection
of breast to nerve
the foreign uprooting to what I understood
I hated her like myself
she loved me best but she died
and continues floating
in acres of music

Ian Randall Wilson

Corollary Three

the womb about the body
a chill suffocation

milky time

medieval sex he tells us
the source

slice a few
fallen nobles

consult a soon condition
proceed to document the crevice

the realism of swabbing
for centuries the hunt

housing a swig
in formal consumption

blood life springs
ritual intoxication

people must predict
plant advance

explore broad nooks

your name
a price

Charles Perrone

Fraternal Epigram 1.5

Friends, I do truly wish an end
to this unruly internecine quibbling.
And as for Mister Sister,
my duly Other Brother,
would that he
could see his way clear
to redeem an available coupon
so as to deem us one and all
dear and beloved siblings.

Andrew K. Peterson

Poem for Boston Seaport’s Northern Avenue Bridge on Joe Cooper’s Birthday

Blood summons the diamond-
harbor city wakes that long for
net-lit passage, smoked copper
dome mouth pouring sage-lipped
incense nailed to concrete.

Harbor the city in wakes
that long for you, disgraced
unions of smuggled blue
elephant labrum, moss,
labor’s musk. Continuation’s

busked out grace rents years
in a tilt among climates for a sphinx
eye to fill. Snow melts the pyramids
releasing bones of tyrants, peaceful kings,
forgotten golds from a rift orchard.

Share these abandoned names
with the storm that brings erosion
in ragtime flu-braced floods, headless
birds, free stuff museums of lost
hoodies. Beneath torrents: violet

skies, deranged rovers beneath cap space,
beneath tea-flooded tides. Vacuums
the leopard from domesticate wheel
fire, frailing and framming. Wash
Atlantic Rivieras out with foam ash

lost deliveries, dismantled search
engines. Blossom and return
illusions on reckless city rewind.
Blossom, oi urchin pattern
fire-nettled floors, birthday forests.

Blossom and anew, release.