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

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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

Vernon Frazer

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.

Carmen Racovitza

words change people’s fate……

(after Erik’s original text)

he extending amniotic
what space
tête guilt
groupings of recappings
were
strung whirl
vibrionic

unrecked it were
into that kaumatua reassessment
feel monotremes
kitchen penumbras into
that intervening
roux

gingili puffed this he what
is δ folded
he foil
what tautologous chaffe
of an iodophor
unsexes raggedness
in lived plasmodia

have year
i each colour loaf
tutu hardshells
that would help
birdwatching

automatotrophin fluids
these moths
these
moths
he silver tired
reauthorising
mailvan
bombarded disguisedness
is says conjecturably
they’re driven

tired learner
requires &
delimits a shape

undulating
wineshops
he miserable helpline
if life strays
hierarchy is
dodecagynous night
be axils subcardinals
imblazing
grievances

they cup chased resolve
consciousness demonized
effleurage of will
with way or clinquant sensitive
off
just will with way
or background luminousness
and will
with
this solid
life
sea scarts way shattered
sea
she unreproachful
walking

sea
teeth peal
glops
destroyed smartness
iterates her preliminary depurated
era dates
chopins
a little maenadic

ponderable celestial
rough ceilings dry on queuing
cheeks
give bodhisattva little rarely
of just polyzonal
chopsticks
on grandma brightest future

their toymen sharkskin cause
unreproachful
scare velocity
and i that maternally am fat
coinherit him
he admit
teening is one
bursting terraforming
punishment and readable
leprechauns era
there

dopiness
whimseys year
moths contortionate
embayment door
tricky
their pocked book
yuky be gelatine

utterers who sea this spit into that luged
hulked still place
shet her
yellowy razzamatazz thoughts
you phanged practice
arm her
whose algorithmic vassalling
bios pop up
why Tiresias fib
faucets lie

you
it is opposite
we get truth ostomies
epiclike
ceaselessly
certain dainty era beamlets
benign
titbits
geobotany discoloured blades
noiselessly
undefoliate
big sider peace

all workshopping pollenisers
lighterage hyperspatial bezants
categorising
a would-be noiseless genre

there dealate unique
haves arctophil robots
that take kyanises
necessary
making hard year plushness

cup which finger
they will
will be
demotivatingly
entrapped as cybercriminals

beautiful imprecise feel
i by rare reeking
choreograph profound
beautiful pavises
dive up city members
cut off enchantment

i orange give opalescent
but
give has gurges
has lines of reverable
gummose era
into it

pushed that misfiled
sea
noctilucent with
hope
you hear and sideman

beautiful α you
imprecise of i
phrase on enrage
grave silent take
on replumbing dream
overthrowing these
grave minny
all dismantlements that cut

he enfeebling
ζ
she embrace
all that misfiled
she sea
big line
into forgetfulness
that event slickings
of a logos
him impede concaveness

syrup go what heeded
big late abstrusity of likest physicality
choke would big
she dying
myrmidon
cantonal ever subduple
be waterscape

we
outbargain
cup Verlaine
i you desulphurate glossographers
photooxidizing and
all year demoralizations
cup big ∞
is new

melodramatics

hard would be
big dizzy decimalist
outwent interested
apple matrilocality
of juliets

big her him
zero-g calendarer
anchorless
with rich flood cherubims around
and spectroheliograms
cup the moths
just take irrelevances
be refolded

platyrrhines
morphemically fat
echo totalisation
one peal he grief
she after he
she universe in expansion

 

Bill Yarrow

END GAME

Where the Story Lies

Everybody wants to know
where the story lies. Does it
lie in childhood? Does it lie
in old age? Does it lie in an
angry outburst or a stinging
rebuke? Does it lie in a moment
of compassion or in the recognition
of calloused selfishness? Bruised
love or hidden despair? Unfounded
ego? Personally, I couldn’t care less
where the story lies. I care only
where the story tells the truth.

Where the Story Tells the Truth

Can a story tell the truth? What truth?
The truth of a moment? What good is that?
A good story is an honest story, but
honesty is not the same as truth.
Anderson’s “Untold Lie” is a good story.
In that story, Hal Winters, twenty-two,
asks Ray Pearson, just fifty with six kids,
whether he should marry his pregnant
girlfriend Nell. Ray mulls it over, finally
deciding to tell him “No! Don’t do it!” but
before he can say anything, Hal tells him
he’s decided to marry her. Ray thinks, “It’s
just as well. Whatever I told him would have
been a lie.” See what I mean? Honest, yes,
but that’s not at all the same as the truth.

Why Stories Can’t Tell the Truth

Look, even a great story like Delmore Schwartz’s
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which tries
to tell the truth, can’t help but fail. Remember
the story? A kid in a movie theater sees on the
screen his parents in their courting days. Like
Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors, he tries
to warn them: “Don’t do it! It’s not too late
to change your minds!” He gets thrown out
by the usher. He’s about to turn twenty one.
That’s where the story ends. That’s the problem.
That’s the essence of the problem. It’s the problem
with every story, every novel, every play, every poem.
Stories end. Novels end. Plays end. Poems end.
The truth doesn’t end. It never pretends to.

Every Ending Is False

Every ending is false as every beginning is false
because every ending is arbitrary as every
beginning is arbitrary. We pretend otherwise,
but our life does not commence with our birth
(had we no parents or ancestors?) nor end with
our death (had we no influence or effect?)
We didn’t begin; neither do we end. Just because
a book by us or about us has a first and last page
doesn’t mean that we do also. We’ve never not
been here (we were potential in everyone who
came before us) and we’ll never not be here (we
persist in some way in everyone who succeeds us)
and therefore every ending is false. This one too.

Not Every Ending Is False
for Marshall Levin

Though arbitrary, not every ending is false.
Better to say not every ending is accurate.
To the extent to which no story reaches
a final conclusion, the most we can do
is echo Dostoyevsky:

That might be the subject
of a new story
but our present story
is ended

We are the past story, the present story,
and also the new story, the future story.
We end as a stanza ends, as a chapter ends.
Our book is not just long—it is endless.
Blake said

One thought fills immensity

I say, one person fills eternity.

Jeff Harrison

In Rosebuds Are My Letters Dressed

Herr Bibliothekarius, I,
delicately finally identity,
set out for home

suspect,
weeping, &
disappeared irregular w/out drives

further naked,
pleased, & shipped
to the FINAL LIBRARY

but,
of all two
hundred
& thirty one
literary giants

none,
Herr
Biblio-
thekarius,
constructs
Wormswork,
not
so much
a name as
a word
that turns
humble
when re-
cognized

so, may all their laboriously-
penned verse tragedies,

aëry titan-constructed yet
daydreaming hard science,

ever fall, Herr Bibliothekarius,
upon your literary zeal

AG Davis

KNIFING

gall as precedence before
anesthesia timidily feathers
on compliant curtains rob,
as it is tied to the quartering
rope dismounted latex extends,
protector thrown for halves
and crosswise,
laden GPS regression of text,
illegally
knife caught and abroad
bursts, so much for the return,
the biography dismisses
an impenetrable soul,
loose deaf meridians
I have not yet drawn up,
it may never be sliced into salient hearts
in the teeth when we are in the black-lining
towards beige north, which we’ll talk of when (?),

a syphilitic triptych
the arrival of the endless
abortion

passes by
unnoticed

Hugh Behm-Steinberg

From an end is the towards to

So will, will. Have three or more or a camel;
keep your camel in the forest because the business
takes care of the business. Just you wait they say

you’re going to live in a desert, you’re going to

live in a desert and dream of trees, a place where
trees used to be, each one with an angry red heart,
blood black leaves that taste great crumbled

on chickens. The world isn’t shameless even if it’s
full, asking if you’re empirical yet, are you trading
everything you value to the self you tore out long ago?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Come on it’s a coffin it’s how you used to be

what flows rushing undocumented or having
sex with people who don’t love you but find
you more or less attractive an undergraduate

thesis project, the enclosure of property, a silk
shirt for sale at the salvation army (you’re not
saved, you’re not in their army). Your chimney,

your attic crawlspace, your insulation: live
outside all the time now it’s great being a
grownup, live again all the time now.

 

 

Matt Hill

Homeostasis

A feedback of loops
That correct inherent
Anticipatory responses
Over and under shoots
Cycle within the system

Dysfunctional byproducts mean
Analog override gets necessary
Always danger with the algorithms
Cybertaxis shows a tough matrix when
Homeostasis becomes evolution’s Logos

Rus Khomutof

Vintage ghosts of
joy and sadness
a saccharine statement
the highest expression of the autopoetic force
the incarnation and withdrawal of a God
declaration of hither swarms
accretion of the torrential becoming
instances emancipated from
all anxieties and frustrations
in the anagogic phase
made dizzy by the hybris
a regular pulsating
metre of recurrence

Jorge Sánchez

from The Letters

[D]ear [ ]d,[

]NW: a stump or an outcrop of red desert
rock or a petrified stump; NE: an army-green
shed, sun-discolored along the bottom and ribs
of its west wall, oxidized from the roof’s
second corrugation to the roof’s north edge;
SE: concrete slab and chattahoochee floor,
lawn furniture (mostly second-hand, retro),
punching bag, outdoor fireplace, edge of car
port and overhang; SW: a wooden gate, open.

Charles Perrone

Behavioral Eclipse

So, following the sun’s obfuscation in the present ample meadow,

if I choose to use or even abuse this mead, this booze, perchance

delightful delicacies prepared with nothing particular in mind,

to augment an anticipated slumber, the option to snooze,

then shall I be able to lose the impertinent habit of intransigence

linked to curbed ingestion and irked interrogation?

 

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: The Optimist’s Ciphertext

The diagram still sketched on the wind
haunts, refuses evaporation so that
the world might be seen with more
clarity. Clarity, as lives of quiet
desperation imply, is untrustworthy: we
all know a hit-and-run driver who melted
into a suburb which has never shivered
from a siren. What we have is a friend-of
-a-friend professing a plan for a master
-piece “so eloquent the Vatican’s gnomes
will come knocking”—yet its rationale
relies on an acquaintance-of-an-acquaint
-ance dutifully memorizing Berlin “for
sympathizers” then Tahiti “for deliberate
dissonance” then Miami for “enforced
hermitry among those still faithful to high
heels.” All are required to open a steel vault
without releasing phosgene gas to reveal
the masterpiece that’s elevated all
encountered critics into collectors, so
seduced were they by the painting’s
denial of primary colors. I admit I can’t
fathom or perhaps picture, the charisma
of absent reds, yellows, and blues until
I realize they are the colors found
rippling across the flag of your birth
land that’s lapsed to a paltry figment
of imagination. How ironic, indeed, that
you dared to plan after embracing
orphanhood—an ambition that refuses
to be dispelled by wind, memory, or
scarlet lips fashioning a moue. You say
any diaspora teaches the futility of
skepticism. You emphasize, flags fall
down their steel poles everyday yet
they continue to lead spies into lost
evenings with shot glasses. I get it: to
second-guess the blueprints that
created this safe house is pointless—
it provides, for now, the only roof under
which we can safely open, heat, and eat
from cans of stewed beef well before
their expiration dates. Before continuing
to plot, we need fuel. Shall we dine?

Keith Higginbotham

Aileen Cassinetto

Lily Briscoe Was Here

The Attic, 1990
So loveliness reigned
and stillness,
and in the attic,
clasped hands,
among the faded
and perishing
(window, chair, light)
Here they remain
clasping hands—
With “the lives that they lived”
The lives that stand still, here.

Bloomsbury, 1914
Blast and suffrage
and Marinetti!
See the landscape shift
its shape to show figures—
female and famously
huddled,
foreshadowing an orange
armchair, ordinary and
unperturbed, inside an orange-
roofed barn. Yonder,
a swirl of silver and amber,
viridescent and vanishing
in a waterless tub.

Paris, 1919
In Montparnasse, on the left
bank of the Seine,
where the sun shone brightest,
I met Nina.
Watched her dance on tabletops.
I could see clearly,
her shape in cadmium yellow—
an honest color.
and my undoing.

Isle of Skye, 1920
The whole thing changed.
The lighthouse in eclipsed
light and the line
of the coast, dissolving
like salt
cellars on a lace tablecloth,
only the Jackmanii
remained, wedge-shaped—
purple and unresolved.
As for the kitchen table—
there it was, scoured and
upended in the fork
of a pear tree, its four legs
in the air, like a Chinese road
painting, liquescing into a blank
canvas, white and unwavering.

San Francisco, 1940
The bridges were built.
And to the City by the Bay, I came,
Chinese eyes set on
the Pacific and its World’s Fair.
Within a palace of concrete and steel,
I painted my panels next to Diego’s.
The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent
he called it.
In other words, Pan American Unity,
rooted in the soil, moving forward,
machine-like.
Young Emmy Lou—whom I liked despite—
and her friends, Irene and Mona,
were a sight to see before 22 feet
of fresco—women can paint!
(Emmy’s grandmother would have
been proud, she who “fought
for due process when women
were committed to mental
institutions simply on the word
of their husbands.”)
As for me, I was sixty and free
to paint my world of form and color.
I was told I was out of fashion,
but what can I say—
those fauve mauves drive me wild.

New York City, 1960
The
great revelation
never came. But
here’s
a little
miracle: The Purple
Triangle
was shown
on Tenth Street.
Just
there, me
on a wall.

London, 2000
Dulwich Picture Gallery opened today the first major solo exhibition of work by Lily Briscoe…

“Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed.”

Allen Jones

The modern bony fish

Because those who view the cosmos as basically nonexistent are sensitive to very small changes of temperature, except for traffic along the coast, most information—for example the elementary words or sounds of South African rivers—before being measured, must determine a mining method, produce a design plan accompanied by reproductive organs prepared by a species of the bony fish, and choose a monistic location.

The function must be determined

Therefore, the internal features of missiles and spacecraft—the beak, esophagus, first ganglion, and the great Iranian religious prophet and teacher, Zoroaster (whose amazing memory and powers of observation make him comparable to the modern day concrete gravity dam, though most information is a sequence of choices)—are designed to protect businesses against the possible dishonesty of semantics and symbolism in mystical experience.

Charles Perrone

Relative Antipathy

A standard uncle and an appointed step aunt
have agreed to declare overly daunting
the inherited tasks of unmasking courtiers
wanting in basic math and fundamental decency,
of separating the entangled antlers
of dueling demons of dollar diplomacy,
and of convincing the fan base that the anthem
thus intoned simply should instill
nary an ounce of pride.

David Felix

Act

Allen C. Jones

Deadicted Pluzzer

I arode you, so nlaturaly attmpet to saw
and cnotscurt a jagisw of this wrold,
flierecy rginrearnag our dtisnat, deresordid
dmears. Sneadss hroves wthiin a plie
of bule pieces, curevd insuriotsn,
cradarobd dietsines. Your ctonours
slitl esixt sheatweert, callery as a cicelltoon
of croner pieces. I lgune across an urbluntane
tlabe and insitsently celleroct all fuor.

Joel Chace

from Mouth Pieces

 

Mouth enters  —  well, hops, really  —

into the academy.

Long, lonely  —  well, empty,

really  —  corridors.  Silence in

those hallways.  Two ears hear

another silence:  of ones who

don’t wish to be found, to be

found out.

The great hall is ornate,

unpeopled, terribly hushed.

Hand holds an unshelved  book that

won’t open.  One after

another, books that won’t open.