What You Said ‘Then’ ‘I’ll begin, and then became aware’ ‘naked streets’ | ‘beautiful men in florals’ ‘shapes as cast-offs’ | ‘petals blown apart’ ‘in the power of smokes and powders’ ‘plague is the colour of pale blossom’ ‘distant cars’ | ‘her long shiny thoughts’ ‘I lunge at my anger with all my commas’ ‘boys don’t cry’ | ‘yeah, not half’ ‘the scraps, scales, fur’ | ‘ghost flames, feathers’ ‘a wall is not a wall when it’s not a cage’ ‘still miming life’ | ‘a suitcase is an exit’ ‘a cup is an instance of heaven’
Monthly Archives: August 2022
Andrew K. Peterson
HEAD SOUP after Alfred Jarry Orchestrated madness demands countermelodic mendacity : Re-collective Orchestra & Debbie Allen Dance Academy perform Starburst live from the Hollywood Bowl Interruptions, new continuities to slaughter the charmless indiscreet oligarchic bourgeoisie : Pere Ubu serves Putin head soup made of radioactive wind blown thru Ukrainian wheat The banquet years — an empty plate : Seven Keys for Seven Doors To Seek a New Home by Brother Jack McDuff
Sarah Sarai
A Vegas Vegan I never promised you a statistician, although I fantasize on becoming a poet of actuarial tables, a poet of the odds, a true Vegas vegan with an eye keen for a sun longing for love and, like a Greek god who mis- understands the penalties, melting into the imperishable west of the sunken and the found.
Diana Magallón and Jeff Crouch
Don Narkevic
Charles J. March III
Pillaged Den Nothing’s ever finished Everything just gets done Never cease fighting Recursion & futility Consume silently Alone in your room One bite at a time Mindful of someone else’s big screen TV Nobody in regret A prisoner in your own home Move to Stockholm Sweet
Thomas Hibbard
UNOBSTRUCTED KISS
O fragrant and pure sweet petals!
- Tibor Tollas
strange Napoleonic gentle borderlands
each night the gypsies along the river
flickering in front of Mount Hoverla
lately, a starving child appears
or a dark-haired man with his concertina
retreating into the remains of a shattered airport
all those cars parked in the forgotten parking lot
mundane disproportion of a father’s smashed mouth
kneeling on an alpine cliff, praying
in this dejected Sabbath slaughterhouse—
where everyone anticipates living forever
or is this planetary cauldron the beginning
with the “little cities” and their Cossack
Frankenstein tumbling, walking amongst the willows
and doctors treating the tender carcasses
reality is possibility, the dreams of true experience
where the hours pass slowly and indecisively
in front of the connubial half-brother from KGB:
the incredible song of nightingale’s sorrows
Mark DuCharme
from Complicated Grief Conjunctive Batman Thrills I looked at the set & was spilled By its startled eyes Elk rhythm blunders Economies of bird-in-cage Rattled sentences blossoming Once upon a shadow Or anything else you’d likely spoil Like a cage of lost children Here is one: think meager When the scrawl of night sits down in wonder Or blunder. It doesn’t matter which. If intrigued Please complicate noontime shadows Scrawl penitent as a rook in lamb’s clothing Vindicate corruption with corruption in a letter of 3,000 words Find new ways to say goodbye Or wander off in shadows, ’til the heat of night bleeds
Jeff Harrison
Poem
quickly glad,
the tiny here sickness
in wind out ripple many years
eye real in
green to breaking too
twofold and challenged to disappear
Charles A. Perrone
Moss Trill 