Counterexample Poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry

2025-04-21T20:30:00.000-07:00

2012-05-28T14:29:00.002-07:00

Virga

the worm quickens clay

worries her heart

she ears

stone moons rolling in heaven

but gray gates the sky

hair

before landing

evaporates

the furrow hides her seed

crushing the naked walk stumps toe

a smaller soil—the globe on all sides

falls to stars

day a shinbone

cracks—night the worm

snaps

yellow jags pound the earth

along dead eye cobble streets

her numbers: one

box of plastic fingerprints

two keyhole whispers

and the moons roll round

atoms boiling from the weave

unravel reason's self-reviewing

knots—becoming

naked

wan a body

turns

eyes

in concrete frost

no footprint

croaks

from its mouth

what signs? perennial fingers

clutching clothes, she

smiles

to no one, nothing

says, it's nothing

her words wing

as calm winds through her innards

the flameless fever breaks

only when a thing

when a thing has become

has become whole

whole it can only

can it shatter shatter

Happiness

stone

peaks

plow

wet clouds

pine

roots

peasants'

knotted

fingers

cling

to s

headless spires on the green plain

isolate skulls in a sea of cloud

Swap plural training

The plural plays which ridicule the hole which is called to the group of sadists the hole and are trained.

In the woman of the beginner making training start from soft imono abnormal play is enjoyed with the normal costume and micromini become opportunity of SM training. At first glance, it is the play where the abnormal feeling is weak but the effect is tremendous. The actuality that "it is different usual by your you point to the appearance which changes", changes the feeling of the woman from basis, being to be paralysed, does. To take such mental fence, after paying, if it advances to training, the first step of training probably is success. Gradually following to the order of the sadist, when going, it drastically changes the expression of the woman, being at a stroke to drive recklessly the desire to pleasure, it does. With the metamorphosis club net the eye line it does not become you can enjoy "the collapse" of change ego "of change" inside of this "expression" with the non correction picture.

2012-05-27T06:52:00.001-07:00

2nd Law

(if undisturbed)

Foresight

in its saga

of debilitating

heat to heap-o'

lying blistered

the customary parry-against

what's done is

how do you reckon the rest

lying blistered

tolerate coming separated

as two pod-beens

the summer mark-up

retching out OUF!

lets us drown our borrows

in bartered what's called done

goes over the fence

and has lead us to fleece

trying fleeing

Abscond/Fecund

Some polycoidal crunch 'n breaks a noun supérber

clippers a trowel's at which (or better) stills neon

yet yet could it? implifying stoop down counter ip-

sum lying stout a blister slimmer slit it to be that

fiend-dream puckering coy calls stamps you saving late

(for instance) bickering a total wham! and stop here

You preem it sees a bright sliding twixt thumbs who

was that crashing pitiful got to bottom the

fully late-lit "Ex-Hale!" 'til you bet its get-up

After Quarter Two

Said's windy

Louds me tee how

Setting up the rose blessèd

scrimps this little pouf

long past Aberdeen

and anonymous fee cheeping

such is to lie

so she did

told [bracket] apace in gramsci

Annie got it loud pre-lorn absent

the whole Rubicon rearing the mist

candied less and lesser

than here's an occasion the word found suitable

"was-ering"

elongated by twins

punctuating in digest on a soft

softer softly

small h'rrrrrrr

Ante---

What is top-sisal?

a brush tip?

one hair?

pale as the dark stork

who is un-leggèd

No quitter

he-who lands where a crumb-grain

less than he can

stands as a crutch

on none-leg

or otherwise

abstinence

not even

absence there

was before

now non-here

maybe cork

re:nodding

Oh---

why not pork?

Fat floats

Birds

Rehearse how comes pitter in gross revenue

some saying but numbs the weird slavish

jivey monsoon that spies him coughing

breezily skitters lengthwise to

an astrolobes' nightingale rehearsing

"tilly tilly tilly" in the shade plum

Whithering goose flees (you could ascertain)

a mode o' day its twin flavors reversed

so running sorely roaring the left out saying

"Heep-heep" up in the bush we wondering

"Who?" blands atop metering should rehunker

now time's item now grows ídem

2012-05-20T09:47:00.000-07:00

wolves in chernobyl

today is nothing. the future won’t come

Vasyl Stus

April 26^th 1986

but even apart from our wood

I do not know how one should say

things in the dark have colour

will the wise do things,

things that are forbidden,

knowing it won’t be found out?

a simple answer isn’t easy to find

but freedom from trouble in the thing

and from pain in the thing

are still in the pleasure,

but joy in the thing, and exultation,

are considered, involving motion.

all the day

life in the town goes on as normal

families shop and walk their dogs

fisherman lug their tackle off to the Prypyat river

couples sunbath around the cooling ponds

football matches go ahead

as do sixteen outdoor weddings

sponsored by the communist youth league

how can an object be good if it withdraws the pleasures of taste,

(retreat for the cowardly)

and withdraws the pleasures of love…

and withdraws the pleasures of hearing…

the call of the button

and withdraws the pleasurable emotions caused to sight by beautiful form?

yet it can be, good,

giving, living in the goodness of our wood.

by stable condition, by well-being,

by the sure hope of its continuance,

Kyiv, it was good, rightly calculated

do not eat green vegetables

or milk.

the nature of the universe is things and void.

the nature of all existing things is body and space.

the nature of all space is things and colour.

if you wish to make me wealthy,

wish me not to make me glow,

but diminish my desire.

yet do not extinguish my desire,

allow me just enough left that I may not preach of being one,

or without desire, and above my peers,

but happy in the clutching of a ball

or an artist’s postcard.

or a parents plot of land.

I hold in my hand my most precious object

– one’s own pickled, cancerous appendix.

I am thrilled with pleasure in the thing’s body.

I spit black spit

on clear glass that is not somehow opaque

- or how we say ‘frosted’ – not for its own sake,

ancient armour, a gift from the basalt,

that blocks waves

because of the inconveniences that follow them.

With protection we may have a feast.

the schools debated whether or not to go ahead

with a planned ‘Health run’

and settled on outdoor gymnastics instead

this is not anxious to please the mob.

for what pleases them, it does not know,

and what it does know is far removed from their comprehension.

it knows that when flesh cries aloud,

not possessing flesh,

it is unnatural that the mind should cry aloud too.

a silent stomach communicates in sweeping thoughts

it is better to be a thing of wool

and rag

that provokes freedom from fear

than a golden couch that brings trouble and woe.

sweet is the simple memory of a dead thing,

a friend,

a flag

and how one would not mind so much the joining of you both.

more firemen came up

complaining of vomiting and acute headaches

if this wooden thing listened

to the prayers of all men,

all men would quickly have perished;

for they are forever praying death

against one another.

if the prayers of women were to come true…

of this i cannot speak, knowing not.

a foal had been born with eight legs

piglets without eyes

calves without heads or ribs.

deformities due to in breeding

vain is the thing that does not heal suffering in man

for there is nothing new happening in the universe,

the warp closes like a mouth,

always readied for opening.

If we consider the infinite time passed,

and thus there is no excuse for distractions.

dumb things are for drowning,

thus the sea is deep.

helped us understand we are a colony

SJ Fowler has published three collections of poetry - Red Museum (Knives forks & spoons press), Fights (Veer books) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (Anything Anymore Anywhere press). He has received poetry commissions from the London Sinfonietta's Blue Touch Paper project, the Voiceworks project, Mercy, It's Nice That and the Tate online. He is the UK editor of Lyrikline.org and the poetry editor for 3am magazine. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck college. He is also an employee of the British Museum.

2012-05-14T17:41:00.002-07:00

Hypnos

Linger be the tune of wood that leads cicada song

in flight from fields pipe soft and charm these steps

on ways not lost but loss itself where the air turns air to silver

and shy a thrown hinge opens fornever with nothing below

the first undoing of stars

–– lie down still lie down while wheeling breathe

suspended on the wings of swifts lighting

where remainders and the cast off symmetry of circles descend in hymns

Speculum

Mirror the thresh that holds a world expel these lungs swelling

a double’s rise –– grips on anamnesis

over ends beginnings at listless duration of want once wanted

when sense slips back to its old safe place

there comes an intrusion of the same uneven even as before

these easeful halves lunged dumb

into the little but pitch that flickers with currents

and currents pass

at pace to assemble resemblance as only catch can

Nebuchadnezzar

Seven years seven

times of dream that dreams itself and means

when it was said that with these nails I dig thee pits

not I another assumed but myself

I spoke to no one was not my own

felt limps creep into each limb until I crawled again

crawled and I sank under the weight–

less heft of a serous sky

where near madmen go to pay their debts to thunder

ringing hesitant hover compressive ring

around the stump of the terebinth tree

fastened with bands of iron and bronze

2012-05-12T07:32:00.002-07:00

To the Man with the Umbrella, Thinking of Sunflowers

After the painting Snakes and Ladders by William H. Rutherfoord

All
these
patterns
in the sky
of the birds and pies
soaring through the air with great speed;
could it be a warning or could it be a mirror?

It
twists
around
a needle
and is pulled out from
under the skin in a helix
to treat the sin, and cure the unholy infection.

Stained
glass
values
of the church
reflect the bull’s eye
staring at our souls through sermons
with music of the world beyond the ears of mortals.

You
and
I are
enshrouded
by our own shadows.
It’s an innocence that every
desire wants to destroy as much as admire.

Snakes
wrap
themselves
through the rungs
of ladders and climb
into the arms of Ophiuchus.
DNA escapes the church and returns our birthplace.

Though
it
is all
visible
a twisted ladder
through the sky and into the stars
is ignored by trusting the spiral tower of dreams.

You
looked
surprised
when the dice
landed on snake-eyes.
You want to look for Satan to
blame him for the roll, and punish our gambling fingers.

Don’t
make
mistakes.
This is no
garden or pasture.
The bells will only make a sound
to the people who have learned to hear them ring each day.

Lines,
dots,
mantras
in your mind
are not deducted
with any glory, promise, or
with the logic of all of the stars, seen and unseen.

Where
are
you now?
Lost between
entrance and exit,
heart shaking with indecision,
before invading forces of feathers and saucers.

M.N. O’Brien received is B.A. from Roanoke College, where he was published in On Concept’sEdge, and was honored with the Charles C. Wise Award in Poetry. M.N. O’Brien currently lives inLexington, Kentucky, and hates talking about himself in the third person.

2012-05-02T17:28:00.000-07:00

into water my heart is thick with it

my heart - thick thing + fishlike our basement is a basin of carpet of hot water pipes

crashed like branches weathered an ache toward ruined the city rains itself clean

on this old building ivy covered underwater we grow

alone crisper than chirping on this coast it’s weighty the scaffolding outside is blue while i sit below the window think it’s safer cloaked in scaffolding than not try not to wake you fish don’t have footsteps have any steps before

you leave for work i take this loneliness to the couch where how is it that i hear the rain when we are at the bottom of this intricate New England coated building which could just as easily be ocean

then it hits me

+ rain, the windows

sideways like my ivy-covered underwater heart next to your bare body rain is gentler less wild than bayou water where it flooded the lake which resembled a river it was that

long it was a lie

+ now that I think of it i never saw where it ended if it ended

at the end of everything else you

asleep warm not sure about today me

weathered on not sleeping there are too many books on our shelves spilling over an Andrew Wyeth painting hangs above the fireplace

we are the only renters in this old this scaffolded this damp building the nearest river is actually a river i don’t have to force myself to cry

on False River Rd. i thought how strange i haven’t cried in a month maybe this means happy on the concrete driveway which slanted far into lake

add my body to the driveway + look into the lake

if you don’t cry something is wrong oh this morning

on a coast much heavier with people with cars think i

might break with northern spring all double yellow lines

Volvos all scaffolded metal painted blue you’ll wake up

soon + our basement windows crowded with sleep with how

heavied + stoned this building is a liar thicker than muscle

but somehow more fragile than a trailer in a tornado

False River basements toward itself it’s a lake

a first flood Andrew Wyeth painted a girl crawling

toward her house tilted like our slanted driveway

beige insect covered at the bottom of the country

of the building where it all slides into water my heart

is thick with it

there is a window we are supposed to sleep under it

abrupt + august i let the tarot decide how much light

to follow in which part of town i’d settle to decide whether i’d

stay + which whether meant mine it’s a good faux-pas: to use

a pack of tarot cards that were not given to you as a gift shuffled

frantic like when moths know autumn circles under bay windows

+ vine st.

was one way i moved in while someone slowly destroyed the field next door

with a parking garage each day saw less + less of the distance (this time of

year meant insects) which was a mountain thick with weeds hiked it at night

from the south had a word for it: lurk + one morning thin like hill-grown

milkweed i began pastel drawing that time you picked up one of my sketches

+ said well what are you doing with writing? this pleased me abrupt + september: stopped writing because of how happy your face looked so i pastel’d + taped each

page overgrew

the room this pleased you kept it up like making love how i’d continue because i’d begun from this kind of work the hands get oiled dirty tired multi-colored like summer light through our

unscreened windows

never worried about bats moths burglars only how to heat the place once

winter came but it wasn’t winter yet the curtains were semi-transparent blew in when the wind did knew they were the curtains that i’d look at past your face as they blew + rippled like fish i shuffled my sadness + picked the top card you said:

i feel like there is a window we are supposed to sleep under it you will always make sure the curtains are opened even if they swing shut you’ll get up in the middle of the night for a glass of water + open them you would never

deprive me

i did this kept safe your dreams like children by now the parking garage was done i thought of the field existing under it without sun our bodies beat against summer the way moths beat against a light bulb as if electricity doesn’t exist

you came home after we finished the curtains shut where is the window what does it frame what does it

keep out

the day he threw my car keys into a field

inside a California field what is another

word for field I meadow’d it was May

inside of me after I scaled the field what

is another word for field I pastured up

and down in rows the surface parting grasses

like one thousand mouths my skin green from

damp land where is the skin of the field what

is another word for skin I peeled back the field un

covered the car keys he watched + I thought run

but stayed

2012-04-02T17:33:00.000-07:00

Prosopagnosia

There is a shade of felicity
in your happy farces
your façades of fine-pinched faces
but it will fade out
indeed as the cyan walls
in the slate gray flat
assuredly dilute
in the malevolent chromatography
of alchemic days.

Our hedonistic hemoglobins
are immiscible
our gallows-oriented hilarities
are dissonant distortions
of decadence.
Throw away your aspirations
pollute the choked river
leave me to my valley
my steppes
my somnambulant solitude.

The face I see
is not the face
I want to see
There is no face.
Only fingerprinted glass
and yellow light
in clear crystal ponds
in asphalt puddles by lightning rods.
There are no faces
that know the silt
of sanguine waters
coarse and rusted with the
hopeful bile of cordial palpitations,
the malapportioned mascara
of your runny racist retinas
castigates those unadorned that do.

Concupiscence only solicits ice-cream
miscegenation beckons uncertainty
fraternity is the harbinger of only
a descending umbra on reality
an encompassing shadow
that adumbrates our hollow
Kurtz of an egocentric soul

there is no god
in a tetragrammaton
there is no life
in a social automaton

the unique perish unless alone

2012-04-02T17:27:00.002-07:00

The Male Torso

on Constantin Brancusi’s “Male Torso”

The male torso will not budge an inch

unless it’s toward the light and it’s a light

that plays well upon the male torso.

Are you seeing this? asks the male torso.

Yes, I say, trying to sound annoyed

as I sneak a peek, the light playing up

the bronze of the male torso. A firm

and glistening pest, the male torso.

These Waves are Mine

on Paul Gauguin’s “In the Waves”

Leaving a breathing body

of clothing waiting for me

on the shore, I had never

before let outdoor air greet

my spine. Whispering currents

ushered in a nipple. Icy

thighs, throat open, roaming

forward. Wading through

a buzzing green orchestra.

No Code

We are pre-code Hollywood,

sweating bourbon and champagne.

We are black and white pixel

ladies, holding a kiss behind

big hats. We will not keep one foot

on the floor as we tumble to the bed.

Our fingerprints reveal multiple

unnecessary undressing scenes.

We are strong female leads,

our expiration date pinned

in our hair with diamond

barrettes. Blaring trumpets sound

like thigh high stockings as we lean

against jail bars. We stand behind

our matching podiums blindfolded.

We’re gentlemen in tuxedos waltzing

in a boxing ring.

Ding.

One Working Headlight

One working headlight won’t look you in the face. One working headlight shines on your shoulders and thighs. One working headlight writes the ransom note after the murder. There is no broken headlight says the one working headlight. One working headlight has cinnamon and pliers, rubies and cowboy hats. One working headlight says to meet it at the train station at 5 am. It doesn’t show up. You drag your duffel bag along the sidewalk as you walk home.

My Boyfriend at Fourteen

places a comic book open

to a page of a voluptuous

woman under a see-through

clipboard. He sits in his

desk chair, his desk lamp

turned on and burning, a stump

on the floor. How gently did he

lay the piece of tracing paper

on the clipboard? What color

pencil did he use to outline

the breasts? I didn’t know him

then. Now, when we visit

his boyhood comic book store,

his face weeps without tears.

I stand there and do nothing.

Meg Johnson's poems have appeared in Slipstream Magazine, Word Riot, SOFTBLOW, Blood Lotus, Camroc Press Review, and others. Her poem "Free Samples" was nominated for Best of the Net. She is currently a poetry student in the NEOMFA Program, a teaching assistant at the University of Akron, and the poetry editor for Rubbertop Review. Prior to this, Meg worked for many years as a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, and actress. She blogs at: http://megjohnsonmegjohnson.blogspot.com

2012-04-02T17:20:00.000-07:00

Wall Secret

Road Block

Vauxhall Corner

2012-04-01T19:31:00.001-07:00

A Garden’s G[l]aze

Pink elephants puddle in the beat
of the rain. What’s the rush?
The [dis]illusionment has not changed.
Only the angle of our eyes. Funny.
What choices[? The] colors like
to play.

A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida. She has previously published three collections of poetry: The Difference Between Shadows and Stars, Carrying Yesterday, and Cognitive Distortion. She has also published her work in national and international literary journals such as Avon Literary Intelligencer, Writer's Gazette, and The Penwood Review. Find more about A.J. Huffman, including additional information and links to her work at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000191382454and https://twitter.com/#!/poetess222.

2012-03-17T07:42:00.001-07:00

Reliquary Hands

excerpts VII. – XXII.

VIII.

The harbinger, Mike Spike’s

negative

numbers,

among them with sidekick—

one more unforgiven

shift to an over-written

pause.

VIX.

Claude Wyle,

must throng

every rift

to be fit, camouflaged

tight

between tiers and not be lit

or dim

or a polyglot,

to flash

a quick wit by dint

of answers

for voids.

As a master of mix,

Igor More,

comes before

the word of himself,

which is to say, beyond

the below,

living into death

to tally what

dissolves in a blank

of lids.

XI.

Call him Max Zip, Incubi

of Cenobites,

gone awry with acid

reflux, reaching cores

of possession,

as a figurine,

with black coat

and miniature Bible

in a vitrine of smoked glass.

XII.

To travel through a disc-skinny

crack of redux,

Leet Brig

bites his brain, playing a green

violin in a red shirt.

XIII.

Genetic error, Liev Ikor,

sports a bovine coccyx,

bonobo limbs,

his libido-cuticles,

autoaffected

finger-shards

of devolution—in the morning,

a thin, black tie: retro.

XIV.

Calyx, sepal and eucalyptus

buds in gauze-fog—Brad Mogue’s

eyes are in backwards,

to eye the climate

of a final salvo—nihilism’s

halo of night,

perched above his swagger.

XV.

Maké Admin, forensic data miner,

can be queried via argot

and analytics, to unlock code

and purge dross

of probity—last

defense in the social

network.

XVI.

Zack Mack

lives in hollows

of the Tule fog, eyeing

bulrushand black ice in a wash

of smoky gray.

The rite is clitic: almonds,

rice

and prunes meld into native

Nisenan.

XVII.

Irenic schlub, Roe Spart, ditched

his ax for a nostrum

and landed east of rapture,

downing a shot

of taurine. Tell him his gospel

is unctuous—to keep

a tryst—that ire

wrinkles the eyes

of a squint.

XVIII.

Eschaton, Lew Curs, sulks

on this side

of emanation—queer

dread. Baroque

contrapposto, less sinuous

than the S Curve.

Resurrects

in the combed

curl.

XIX.

Syd Neil struts

like one of The Four Zoas,

a Urizen in spikes

and fishnet,

decreeing on high with whip

and bolts.

A scheme to revive?

The hackneyed dread

of limp, lies back—spanked.

XX.

Reprieve—mother of invention,

Ixxim Mills,

is late to her laudatio

(step 1 in canonization)—in the park,

pigeons

peck on scraps

of foie gras.

This gavage

is not the fat hands of applause

in the pleated room.

XXI.

Rain dripping on clematis vines.

A rumor of alchemy

in Pentecost.

Mea culpa. A cappella choirs of sewer

rats. Fires in Les Halles.

Brittany’s redhead,

Bella Galette,

reads Baudelaire during

Les Filets Bleus,

denies

the autodidact.

XXII.

Axon anarchist,

Niv Nu,

drives a pickup

in militia shrub, his tibia

the axel of sinewy gears,

floored to hatred.

Disjecta Membra

is tattooed on his neck,

which sports a bald head and goatee,

accompanied

by the Lydian-mode

of a slow

meth-lab hum.

Daniel Y. Harris is the author of Hyperlinks of Anxiety (Cervena Barva Press, 2012), Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue (with Adam Shechter, Cervena Barva Press, 2010; picked by The Jewish Forward as one of the 5 most important Jewish poetry books of 2010) and Unio Mystica (Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009). He is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Some of his poetry, experimental writing, art, and essays have been published in BlazeVOX, Denver Quarterly, European Judaism, Exquisite Corpse, The New York Quarterly, In Posse Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Poetry Magazine.com and Poetry Salzburg Review. His website is www.danielyharris.com

2012-03-11T16:44:00.002-07:00

ORANGE ALDERS

To the inner belly: ear-flowers listen to the pulse of the family afar, we hear sorrow, in our
kitchen peeling silver cabbage with Johnny Cash. He sat wired and prayed hot death, singing of
God’s merciful currents. I plead mercy, too. For, transmissions tear skin, tear-rivers on the red
marriage quilt. Dry, I tell them, melt, so those wires become mouthing tubes, orange alders in
the morning dew. Hello, worry: your womb is a shield where only the softest light and music
passes in resonant love through birth. Breathe, I tell her, breathe invisible.

SHINJUKU

I stood bow-tied, stiff to the microphone
and spoke English in the feast chamber as
dawn gaped. Hot fingers, my American arm
reached around the wet ring of her hole, waist:
conversant, night hair of shuddering liqueur.
Until someone put my hand in the actress: escort
through Japanese rain. Her drenched glare tugged loins
soaked white and wife on water; Tokyo Bay, rose
to haunt sleep. Shinjuku, stained sheets, soaked red,
charitable like blood petals in the cherry pond.

A NEW WAY OF BRUSHING TEETH

Spread open the gush, horizon of your blossoming sport, makes rivers
drip face-wise and lip-slurp the life force. Fluid possession. Rina’s jerk,
aching hate, a passage for hands to reach, pluck wet fish from the
ocean of togethering tongues. Gathered in the afternoon, slip soap in
waves. Moaned kiss, hotel television: a lens like ours, skin like your spine
pressed in white, face to cotton. And this misery manifests as a jolt. The
underbelly of the male is, in the end, nothing but a spasmodic explosion
of chemical planets. But up here, mouth to heart, hole to hole, it’s a
collaborative art: a new way of brushing teeth.

Jamie Grefe currently sleeps and breathes in Beijing, China. His work appears in numerous journals and literary magazines of the utmost prestige and quality. Please, give him three cups of black Italian coffee and read his work: http://shreddedmaps.tumblr.com

2012-03-11T16:33:00.002-07:00

from Ignore The Wires

5

drill wish emaciate robust fevor of

hllicopter shadow mall brace enfranchised couple land bet on
eye fringe

car entrenshed colors some diffrent parydime indfrences
waite waite waite waite waite

world neuron through stolid bell flow urinate pavemnt shudder frequnecies
untunned

ant leg lost angualr cellcarton towering greese hound evenriver

granuilar trust windowtounge doge dosed feelfingers

cantileaver hedge improper insight leaves borders unasked

crawl mirror taped gullitene of imperfect will
ed

wood welt washed woozy overture vectors simaltaneous saught undanced
limit

boxed wave stoned stand airmove palmed up

George J. Farrah received an MFA from Bard College, NY.
His work has appeared in The Washington Review, Open 24 Hrs., Ribot, BUGHOUSE,
Fourteen Hills, Disturbed Guillotine, Tight, Aileron, Fish Drum, The Columbia Poetry
Review; Caldron And Net, Moria , CROWD, Xstream, MORIA, Ampersand, Elimae, Blaze
VOX, BHOuse vol.2, Blue and Yellow Dog, Experiential-Experimental Literature, Los
Magazine, Anemone Sidecar and others.

2012-03-03T11:38:00.000-08:00

Andrew K. Petersonwrote Museum of Thrown Objects (BlazeVox books, 2010), and bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (a chapbook, Fact-Simile Press, 2011). Other recent writings online at: Buddhist Poetry Review, Dinosaur Bees, Dusie #8, Elective Affinities, Golden Lantern, The Offending Adam, The Medulla Review, and more. He edits summer stock, an online literary journal published by Livestock Editions.

2012-03-03T11:10:00.000-08:00

2012-02-26T10:08:00.000-08:00

Click image to view Calvin's work

Calvin Pennix holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University and lives with his wife and daughter in Mission Viejo, CA. He is currently an instructor at Everest College, where he teaches Composition, American Literature, Critical Thinking and Algebra. Calvin’s first book of poetry, Grounds, was published by Argotist Books and his second collection, Around/About is being published by Differentia Press. Calvin has had his poetry appear in UCity Review, A Few Lines Magazine, Unlikely 2.0, Counterexample Poetics, Ishaan Literary Review, Truck, Peacock Online Review, Mad Hatters Review Blog, On Barcelona and Otoliths. He is also the founding editor of quarter after, a new journal that will be publishing its first issue in March 2012.

2012-02-10T17:04:00.000-08:00

Everyone’s Enlightened but Me (Amber Fact-sheet)

’cause I’m the bug and they’re the resin —

whose frenzy identifies them better than mine? Who’s

the meanest in the wall?

Why’s the better judgment reserved for prestige

positions?

Which of them are the blasphemous, the

righteous, the chosen

few? Who amongst everyone can pulpit, preach, teach,

exorcise and exercise?

All the stories in the world could bug me less than this metaphor —

my interpretations spin out from the fables, yes; my

inadequate

education and blindspot excluded

McRunnels

Way beneath the upper crust there once grew a mick-runnel in a bucket of muck. A franchise-minded muck-rucker found the mick-runnel, sold it to McDonald’s corp, which cloned and reproduced and sold the crumpet on their breakfast menu, dubbed it a McRunnel. One day the McRunnel could take it no more: Why am I so alone, why do I not have a mate, on this menu called Micky Dee’s? Why do I feel like a specimen with friends all looking and acting and tasting just like me? The McRunnel-with-cheese appeared, giving the McRunnels something else to romance besides themselves for a change. After the McRunnel was stripped from the menu (like the McRib, it rarely sells) the few frozen McRunnels remaining in the deep freeze were held onto until they expired, at which time they were thrown out, thawing slowly with deep ponderous thoughts over the meaning of never getting fried.

Just the Barcode on a Lemon Segment

An apparition, an anomaly, the stark black stripes a numeric reiteration against its white sticker background; the latest lemon added to my beer (no lime left) floats in the glass, baring its bar-code, black and white adherence to the money-matrix; with a lift of the rind the lemon-code sticker (bee-bunny orange) claims or appears to claim doubt about its own validity; the codes paint death-via-ignorance---.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

A sticker on the fridge behind the counter at a bar in Santa Fe has the Jolly Rodger emblem and the slogan: Beatings will continue until morale improves. With a sick, warped, inhumane sense of humor, you can laugh at, even derive guilty pleasure over that sentence. You bring it up and chuckle with the barkeep every time unless it’s a busy night. The barkeep, whoever he or she is, chuckles or smiles, or grins appreciatively, as though clever writing is your bag, not theirs. Reminds me of another sticker now attached to Santa Fe: If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much room. Hohoho. So much wisdom in a sentence, if properly wrought.

Knock on Wood

E-notes jumble work and play with everyday paradoxes and riddles, jokes. Like the rhetorical one about the lack of dizzy we feel on a spinning planet. “We are dizzy, we just don’t know it” will parlay, then, into a game of esoteric body-orientation: organism developing with>/

James Beach's credits include Antique Children, Celebrity Misfortune, Danse Macabre, Jivin' Ladybug, Mad Hatters', Medulla, Paraphilia. His online project "Wood Coin: a magazine of 18 issues" can be found at woodcoin.net.

2012-01-21T09:37:00.001-08:00

Review of Petra Whiteley’s chapbook ‘The Liquid Metropolis’ by Dom Gabrielli

Petra Whiteley's defiant latest tome, The Liquid Metropolis, published by Erbacce Press, sets about a ferocious dismantling of the persistently flourishing Social-Christian tenets. Frame by frame, poem by poem, stone by stone, look by look, in a challenging long-metrage between diary and diatribe, poetic epiphany and novelistic dystopia, Whiteley walks the amazed reader through the post-apocalypse metropolis of misguided affects. The gaze of leering masculine eagles, the seething anaesthetic of cowardly hatred, did not waylay her from her task. No stone is left un-turned. This is a work of unabashed pride. To walk with these words is to understand the meaning of standing out in the rain, resolutely outside, where the rains do not feel the same, where something ripped from ugly becomes beautiful. From within the tree, poetry never abandons the reader throughout a thrilling conversation with the myths of cherished lies. Poetry emerges victorious as mind and body, as the seconds which exceed Time, as the bare statement which kicks and shouts as it is, in silence, as the nothing that lived and breathed, even these words, even the sun, even its fire, even the unattainable, which crawls 'as a syllable on a promised tongue/ forever no/thing.'

I imagine this enterprise was not without risks and that therefore first it is our role as readers to salute the bravery of this author, who has paid no heed to fashion nor to commodity, but to has listened to her deepest sentiment and revealed with such harsh and beautiful invective, the bare bones of the post-capitalist predicament. 'The clock hands/ of my practical suicide turn/the light backwards, no outer/limits…' Since Artaud, the necessity to un-live and un-think the colonial powers of Christian absurdities has been paramount. Here the manual to exist outside continues, in the rain and without lying. '(God's) endless fingers of words claw suicide/into the everyday smell of my flesh and its throbbing/is the only life left.' Or better still:

'I was there, playing dead for them, the oak of silence growing
into my lungs. Was noise a bruise that spread whitely into me?
Yes. In that poisoned room within the tree, I left traces of death,

lived backwards, the slow drip of birthday butchery.

So long to language and its pain!

Breathe to break the hush of words into music,
unconstrained and unshattering.'.

Hope is for the misguided but love entertains the brave, a love you build between the slow suicides of souls whose de-mystified sexualities can start to sing a song of muscle and beauteous, poetic bone. Disillusions many ripped from the misfortunes of previous identities can be stripped in a kind of ritual post-mortem of manners and realities. Can one say, following such adventurers in the domains of the Spirit such as Artaud that another body is possible:

'I wanted you to watch
Me die, to watch the trees growing from my hands
Into the stark digits of night and be the monument
Of my liquid sex. To
Witness the opiate orgasms
In my resurrection.'

What for convenience sake we still call man or woman suffers here a keen and rigorous un-thinking. 'I am the void, the pain and the whiskey lie, a sucked bone, a flute,/and as I,/you will/(desc)end softly as a barren rattle sound.' The Liquid Metropolis is a book-machine in the great tradition of radical thinking, a book for new lover-thinkers, into the hope-less beyond of the naked end of the world. For those who, dare I say, have never bent their knees to kneel nor sheltered their eyes from the glaring truth of society's founding lies. This is a resistance song, a remarkable bottle hurled into the ocean of nought. To collect its messages is to accept that a book requires the reader to work, to pause for moments to collect one's whole intellectual history, to agree to be challenged, to be hurt, to be attacked by the anger of the author, to travel with her to the trees and the colours which sing on the other side: 'our laughter will echo like hard rain when we finally slip away.'

We have become accustomed to Whiteley's unstinting intellectual rigour, to the beauty of many of her poems, but never has her true instinct been able to express itself with such uncompromising clarity and fire. The Liquid Metropolis is what the burning libraries of 2012 will need, an at times brutal poetic pamphlet whose language prepares the audacious for the trees which will grow from their hands, for a new laughter for the living who do not wish to postpone their desires and abdicate their enjoyments. 'I dream of Thames at midnight, where at least a rabbit can choose/ the softness of one's own never ever after and push hard towards/the dawn in the city.'

-------------------

Dom Gabrielli studied literature at Edinburgh and New York Universities and prepared for his doctorate in Paris and New York. Gabrielli’s passion for French literature and thought led him to begin writing, translating, and teaching. He translated widely including published works by Bataille, Leiris and Jabes. In the early 1990’s, he left the academic world to travel and devote himself to writing. He has published two books to date. The Eyes of a Man (2009), his first book of poetry, and The Parallel Body (2010), which earned considerable praise. Several new books are on their way. Gabrielli has also published several individual poems and interviews, notably at Leaf Garden Press, The Poetry Bay, Vox Poetica and Real Stories Gallery.

2012-01-21T09:32:00.001-08:00

In/dem/ni/fy

Ev’ry

artist

work

Scaf-

fold

for

Dis-

cus-

sion

Absence, newly angled at disturbance

Full of obscenities are these parks filled with children

You ask if I speak another language

Steam rises from your rice and there is mist

I am curious about your origins

But don’t want to hear them

I don’t want to see your photos either

Remember me, though: cursing every light

Amplified by water, I am thirsty

)))((( *

For Hakuin

Gaze at something

)))((( *

See how you cannot

keep

attention

)))((( *

thought

Insubstantial

)))((( *

Love is solid immovable silence

)))((( *

Bobbi Lurie is the author of three poetry collections: Grief Suite, The Book I Never Read, and Letter from the Lawn. Her work has appeared in numerous print and on-line journals, including New American Writing, E-Ratio, Big Bridge, Otoliths and The American Poetry Review. Dancing Girl Press will be publishing her chapbook, “to be let in the back porch,” in 2012.

2012-01-21T09:28:00.001-08:00

Meniere’s

The shell in my ear

the conch that sings distraction,

distrust

reminds me I don’t know what’s out there

where’s up, where’s down

only what’s thinking,

I’m thinking, that’s how I perceive,

apperceive that sinking

into language, truth, logic is best avoided

by climbing the tree

that sprouted in the corner of my mind

when I first believed.

Phillip Barron is author of The Outspokin' Cyclist and editor of the new journal, OccuPoetry. A southerner — of the American South and South America — he stays in northern California, where he works in the digital humanities. He previously taught philosophy at the Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina.

2012-01-21T09:22:00.000-08:00

www.leonardkogan.com

2012-01-21T09:16:00.001-08:00

Pluck you

You tutor yourself in

confessionary logic of

St. Augustine

& revelation of

temptation w/

limitless promises of

comprehension

Here I am! Hear me

& hear yourself

You study nighttime logic of

dreams where spirit navigates w/

faith alone

Look here! I see best w/

eyes closed

You love according to

earthly logic of arousal w/

beauty’s antenna conjuring yet more beauty

Suck this! My flavor is the flavor of

love

You are unsatisfied w/

any spectrum of

choices that falls short of

all the colors

… w/

anything shy of

life’s full arc from

seed to

womb

& beyond

… w/

unequal openness

… w/

something that’s just sort of

love

No February flower are you w/

fear of

her own bloom

You unfurl your vastness under

heaven above

& before

the level gaze of

a man who sees you

I reach across

the garden gate to pluck you

but you slap my hand

& tell me that wasting time is a sin

Compost

I am the old revolutionary going town to

town @

night past dozing guards who pretend the sounds of

my flip-flops are simply the cheerful clucking of

chickens

last I find your bedroll

& lay beside you

& sew steamy dreams of

radical visions that tap into

the root of

your desire

Please hoose:

freedom from ___________

freedom to ___________

You awake

& together we steal away

& travel the land wrecking foundations

& pushing down walls

& crushing pipes

& gnawing wires

& ruining roads

& diverting power

& halting traffic

& blowing away entire ecosystems of well-tended accommodation

& bleached belief

the wake of

this tempest of

liberation the bodies of

occupiers

& martyrs

& lost lovers alike

will merge w/

dead hope to fertilize the land for

generations to come

Fickle

& freckled

Breathing

& dreaming

& always becoming human you upset my apple cart

& out spill oranges under

o r

t a

i f

n a

n d

g o

i n

o a too-narrow bathtub where you

& I stand toe 2

toe/

chest 2

breasts

Strokes of

mischief scrubbing/revealing what/who is to come

Pearlsome lovemate fresh

& pink

& new

I peel you back

& bury my smile

2012-01-21T09:12:00.001-08:00

Of Complications

When we pause for a picture there are multiple

takes. Her hand cups

into my waist,

twitching

along my hip. It feels

most like clutching

for what can't be

reached, knucklebones jutting

out like broken

pylons. Her hair is cordgrass

quivering in rip

-tides. I rest my palm

on her back and wish

hers could

hush

to touch the beauty, the arch

of vertebrae bent

over an age she drinks

like wine. I instead

brush circles there, hoping to create

calm

for her—for when the world

stood on her toes

to fall in step with the

dancing.

The photograph will be false. She will be

Parkinson's in my arms,

shriveling. The truth will be

hidden in digital pigments:

I am the one being embraced.

This hip has formed bone,

has hardened against years and lost

its soft

wobbles across the yard.

She is an old mother.

I am supposed to be,

now,

the neighbor's baby I used to be.

She holds me still,

still—

still.

Three Conversations I've Actually Had

1. CONVERSATION WITH DISEASE

The idea is to dissect west into peaks I can't see but know are there, into the vast altitudes until they gulp down the last bit of gas I have. To uncoil into the truth.

What does the truth look like?

These walls are all psychology books. Bricked lists of questions with right answers. These walls have always been here. He draws out of me like a siphon the coffin of moss he wants, the half-hearted lacerations, scabs and big secrets: the blue-green of dreams.

What does the truth look like?

Like returning to the womb. Like red columbine rotting into the river from which it drinks. I am loosening from form.

2. CONVERSATION WITH HOPE

When

gravity snaps

I will cut

loose like a thread,

tilted

out

of the cords of the earth.

When

gravity snaps

I will loosen

out of my

self and be

wreaths of

mist into mist.

When

gravity snaps

I will find

what I've

lost

in the

weight, somewhere,

somewhere

in there where I know it to exist.

3. CONVERSATION WITH TRUTH

I am gone west, I am the empty

tank, ponderosa seal peeling

back like a broken ribcage. I climb

down into the stone

throat of the waterfall. I am the hinge

between horizon and sky. The air

is particulate, sound

pouring agape into the crash

basin. I have rotted

to this place, come to what I've imagined:

rock edge, vastness.

There will be an end, finally, to the gravity

in my heels. An end on the underside

of the river. I lean into the mist—

as into casket padding, as into a lover—

but feel it keep me on the cliff, swelling

like inhaling, untangling

me. I uncoil

into truth: I am not where life

breaks. This is not where I fold

into the earth. There is a bottom to everything.

This is where scars, becoming smooth, sink.

Family Dream

We are three shades hip

-deep in azaleas, rhododendrons

lipped around pine forest like

kisses at the shift

of mountains. We shoulder the sun, rise with honey

-bees. We form the rim of heaven.

Father is three sizes smaller, wilted in what I wish

could go back and be just a dream. Tubes into holes, holes

where eyes have sunken back, unhinged

jaw frozen open like a gate. Blood

backs up in stale puddles behind his ribs.

Three decades before

we smoked and thought nothing

of it, pulled

triggers for quail, pushed our pulses

into our throats.

Here we carry fistfuls of bloodroot

blossoms—glue to hold

together the opening

folds of dream.

The stiff, cold steel warms against the breastbone,

grain in the stock mirroring the creases

and calluses—mountains, valleys in his palm.

Brother's thumb is on the trigger, the scythe blade.

I can feel the pillow case clinging to my cheeks,

tears

the adhesive to keep it

together. I can feel laughter

in the valley, dipping

our fingers into outer

space.

Smoke is the old language I identify.

My lungs have been described as raisins

unraveling into the half-breaths I stuff them with.

I have been fated to fill like the gaps in a dream:

only with things we think could have been.

Dream is healing: my brother’s chest

cavity still

closed, father’s arteries open

wide, my lungs at

capacity.

We smoke, pull

triggers for quail, laugh our

hearts out

of our chests. I bend

to a dandelion, uproot

the stemmed cloud and it scatters

white. We fade

into the halo of honeybees,

stroke sky with black fingertips.

P. J. Williamsteaches high school English in Apex, North Carolina. He hopes to pursue an MFA in the Fall of 2012. He hopes the world doesn't end in the midst of his studies.

2012-01-21T09:07:00.000-08:00

Sublivian Crockagators

with squinkulous winks to Lewis Carroll and James Joyce

Sublivian crockagators spliverously purling

Aslish and aslash into the floaming pream,

Besmirched and besnook with crustiferous knurling

Maliferous whackers on scabulous skirling.

Pronunciapation awrack and awrecking

Cohorting and snorting my deathwording flaggers,

Their hooksharp harpoonage and doomful deathclutchings

Splayed bestial blather tweenst pointiful taggers.

Methought with methinker, “How toothsome and dapple!”

While pinkskinned and blushing myselfdom did paddle

Away from those bumpassly gnashful reptilians,

“This pream seems askliver, though frumptious and flapple.”

So I froglegged my rumpass acrost and askunder

With quickshoving waves of Neptunic Splunder

But like a turtle in glueygunk stuckered and muckered

My delicate pinkskin felt gashingly plundered.

The fierce crockagators swaived lumptiously loppin’,

When hand over jowl I ran glop to the stoppom,

My crapulous flabules proved snackerly vista,

And my snufferly thumper thrummed “bunktummy-bunkem.”

Then the snidger-snadge sneer of my spoilyboned brother

Came thrashedly clear through my rumpled-up cover,

Behated beskated we'd slung and bumpchumpered,

Though most of our fisticuffed bloodwagon lumpered.

My dreamdreaded crocks croaked agog and vermoosened.

Besides, the crustiferous knurling was loosened.

But long by, our sniffley and quiffley big sister,

Sublivian crockagators n'ere splivered farsooken.

The Painting

The painting’s deft brush strokes sculpt

Textures of late-day gold on green panels

Two dimensions of a kaleidoscopic prism,

A false facade that takes me off this wood floor

To drift from meaning and time and find

Another way to stand within my mortal frame.

Leaving the fragmentation of my calamity

On a music quieted by its waves of light,

The rendering of a simple yellow wall

Nestled among the faceted cityscape

Draws me out of my crowded seclusion,

Calls me from behind its pigmented surface,

And like the dimming of late orange sunlight

Deflected from the roof-tips into the blue horizon,

Descends into a coal-grey sea of knowing fish

To ponder the coast and its lapping lover,

The sublime light still fusing its children in glass—

The painting drinks the space inside my eyes,

Light of unformed image not yet corrupted

By the gaunt and failing spinner of the known,

And evaporates, as its empty stillness interrupts

This relentless falling for just one more moment.

Threshold

Like two golden birds perched on the selfsame tree,

intimate friends, the ego and the self dwell in the same body.

The former eats the sweet and sour fruits of the tree of life,

while the latter looks on in detachment.

—The Upanishads

It begins, tiny hot seed of the burgeoning flower,

The morning glory of my hemorrhage blossoms like fingers

Peeling back layers of life's pain misperceived

Blanketing my vision with stars, velvet black birth.

I never thought it would feel like this,

Sitting in the back row at my own funeral gathering,

My old friend Jim sputtering over imagined sharing,

Telling my story to these stiff, nodding heads.

"And then there was the time we drove around

In my father’s Chevy stealing flowers from gardens,” said Jim.

Wasn’t he going to tell them about the darkness and disgrace

We unearthed in the casket-plush interior of that big Caprice?

Or when we, with three friends and my birthday cake

Ate it all with our bare hands, gooey, chocolate-smudged, laughing

Like our heads were on fire, until we cried in drunken reverie

Because we were each secretly lonely and afraid?

And how we talked about death’s big doorway, whether it would be

Blackness, or blinding light in the fast funnel of racing retreat,

Or tickly tendrils of miniature scampering naked angels?

Would he tell them what we said about our dreams?

The golden bird that had been silent for a lifetime

Now flutters forward to share the branch with the impostor.

They pause on the threshold, one eye forward and one back,

Leaving the branch, the two birds one.

Robert Parrott may have been mistakenly transmuted into this culture. Placed on the wrong planet in error? Parked diagonally in a parallel universe? He is a Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert has dedicated his energies to collecting experiences beyond even his wildest imaginings. Touched deeply by art of various genres, amazed constantly by the creative spark, daily experiences convince him that the universe is anything but 'random'. One thing he knows: There is absolutely nothing to fear. Ever.