HOMAGE TO UKRAINE Is this the earth unlocked—Gog and Magog The smashed logos of buried time The coded universe’s familiar death pattern Advancing furtively inflated metaphors The ones about democratic Ukraine needing “de-Nazification” As fuel depots explode from Russian missiles Spewing oily plumes formed like Cyrillic script With misspellings and war crimes As arctic cold and snow linger in late March And grocery shoppers return across mine-fields of words Are those rock stars patrolling Kyiv’s outskirts on Tik Tok? The sun without warmth. A people erased. Could a virgin-spring be bubbling up in Blue-and-Yellow Grave-markers stooped from undaunted chants of freedom Dreams attacked continuously day and night Dreams of terminologies and cyber-security The coveted dimensionality of infinite children Odessa—accountable violins playing the national anthem In the face of pure destruction and random tyrannical storms Is this the moment unreality becomes reality With the Black Sea pounding the grand piano of world-wide globalism An eternal NATO museum of artistic red rubble Versus charred autos piled high in materialist forests And obsolete myths of incontestable forevers
Monthly Archives: April 2022
Ben Nardolilli
Satellites The boys are back, bad for life, It’s a new year for them, new contests to submit to Hairstyle bans? They transcend them, They know the stories everyone needs to know Events are picked just for them to enjoy, Our revolution has to be theirs, we all deserve better Get on aboard if you believe them, It’s the last chance to get a ticket to party on the subway
Michael H. Brownstein
DO NOT IGNORE THE SUN to not wake up to not see the mansions made of skin the root of bone the splashes of gum disease across graffiti littered lawns a flux of heat blisters and blistered lips tongues swollen into heavy shipyard knots scurvy and bacteria laden lemonade a sudden loss of oxygen felt paper and cellophane sweat and spit an inability to scream muscular turbulence tendonitis a loss of self confidence brain waves thin as spider venom and the hollowing of a fly
John Grey
POEM FOR CAMEL AND PIG For my final act, I played the camel on the pig’s back. I clung to that sow like a web without a spider. All politics, the crowd said. Progressive, reactionary, we can’t tell the difference. Please, I silently begged. Don’t judge me by what you can’t understand. I’m just trying to make a living as a camel. The pig is fine with carrying its weight and mine. It’s a pig. And a cashier in real life. Too abstract, cried the back row. Too obvious, sang the center. A man up front spat in my camel fur. He wasn’t here for realism apparently. It’s always like this when I’m four-legged, hoofed, and goofy-looking. The audience is stuck with being human. Their costume doesn’t always suit them. They boo at the camel. They’ve kind words for the pig. But the pig wrote this skit. His script said, “Camel on top, the heavier the better.”
Morley Cacoethes
Pebbles Upon the Narrow Road IV The twenty-seventh boat, part of the twenty-seven cherry blossoms of the night accompany me with emotion. I set out on the boughs at dawn. The sky was misty. The early morning moon had lost its light to see the long journey ahead. My dearest friends had all come to my disciple’s houseboat the night before, so that when I set out on them, my dearest friends had lost their third month light.
Sheila Murphy
2 Sections from “October Sequence” 119/ Behold revanchist urgency reptilian Cold along the lifeless streets The eyes erasing what eyes know A spiral delving into wanted earth Now fallow land broken as claimed And charred and ruined aftermath Of smallness unimaginable the lust To self-broker into coveted history As if what mattered was destruction As a way of hiding impotence No one is interested no one glances At the metric meant to pierce and shame Those forced to flee The horror of deformed psychology Of the eternal infant squawking To fill emptiness embedded in the DNA That bespeaks the shallow end Of the bell curve shunned by norms And normalcy and people wanting peace 120/ Low light template rids attractive nuisance From the row of homes still orderly Yet stained by personality One and another see through whole note Opening and owning a soprano reach To match the bass tone audible To the young steepling purported worship As if feedlines were palpable To wild caught communities of thought Still feeling warp and woof Of canines defining family categories As real as these uneven steps Someone ought to smooth to artificial evenness As short planes descend To levels that mean something As dictionaries spill into the street Where muffler delete deceives Inhabitants arguing the merits Apart from factual considerations And the weeds play through The yards of growth versus development