Monthly Archives: May 2020

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