Twin

Palsy                                                                                       Bob Hicok

Ignoring the obvious is most of manners.
Better to turn from the man
with a nose shaped like the boot
of Italy, the bad dancing
of Siamese twins, to the lillies,
white & flecked red, and praise
their novel arrangement
in the green vase. Now that her hands
shake, music lives in her martini,
the bright collisions of ice and glass.
I didn't see this coming in the way
I didn't see the universe coming
or my loss of hair, the limp
that's set up shop in my left hip.
It's not rude but descriptive to say
her head bobs as those tigers
in the backs of cars do or
plastic dolls dressed in the uniform
of a favorite ball club that nod
their agreement in the rear view
all the way to Miami. An earthquake
lives in her signature on the bill
she snags at the bistro and insists
is hers, the pen moves
as the stylus in Ouija does,
giving a dark answer from a realm
without blood. When she lays
the tremor of her hand on my arm,
I'm reminded we all vibrate
more or less from womb to death.
Years back I'd have asked what
it's like, to be a stranger
in your body, but my greater pride
at forty's what I don't say. Anyway
truth encumbers. She might
contradict what I've decided,
might say all hopes and memories
are beaten about, that it's
like living in a tornado and not
proof of a soul so happy
to still be around it shivers.

*******************

Flemish                                Caroline Knox

My sister said,
“All the elements in this painting,
Still Life with Strawberries,
appear to levitate”
(by Isaak Soreau [1604–after
1638],
Flemish, early 1630’s
Gift of Mrs. Robert McKay
Cincinnati Art Museum)
DO NOT WRITE BELOW THIS LINE
__________________________________
it said on the postcard of the painting.

“I’ll tell you how to levitate
strawberries,” said my daughter.
“Hull a quart. Sprinkle them
with half a teaspoon of balsamic
vinegar and a teaspoon of
confectioner’s sugar; let them sit.”

Still Life with Strawberries, though,
isn’t a patch on his Carnations, Tulips, and Other Flowers in a Glass Vase with
       Peaches, Grapes, and Plums in a Basket on a Ledge with Cherries, a Butter–
       fly, and a Beetle.
Isaak Soreau was a twin, moreover,
and in 1652 his twin, Peter Soreau, painted Still Life of Apples, Black and
       White Grapes and a Walnut in a Porcelain Bowl, Together with Chestnuts,
       a Pear, Figs, Turnips, and a Melon, All on a Table with a Bunch of Snipes
       Hanging on a Nail
(SLABWGWPBTCPFTMATBSHN). Oh Flanders! A Benelux country, a

       Low Country. 

*******************************

Two Sisters Swim in a Small Locked Box 

By Malinda Markham
© 2005Portland Review Literary Journal

Sleepers dream of bandaged mouths and bright petals,
a static of bones and inelegant snow.

The night sparrow finally inhaled its own sound. What else
Could have happened? The vessel

was cardboard and twine. They should have strengthened
the moorings, should have cast

their own limbs of matter more promising
than flesh. One sleeper

mistakes a splinter for morning. The other curls
around a small jar of fear.

When the bough revoked its breaking,
the descent became nothing at all.

Two girls stood back to back, entwined.

The initial failure was a rocket-sound of wind.

****************************

Quilts                                                                              Jane Springer

Six siblings and two parents
divided by one man's wage
equals two rooms and three beds.
My father slept between his
brothers and his father's razor
strap. Some summers he slept
in his uncle's bathtub where
his eighteen-year-old aunt asked
where he would like to touch.
My mother slept in a field when
the boards of her house swelled;
there were no electric fans
on tobacco farms in Kentucky
then. Her sheets lilted over
her body with each June wind.
After they married, our parents
slept under quilts their own
mothers patched from discarded
clothes, and so their families never
left them alone: But here,
a brother's sleeve would reach
across their twin-breathed chests
as though to pass salt over a
crowded table. The dead never
do keep their hands to themselves—
and even stillborns'

empty hems cradled their toes.

********************************

Geography Lesson     Chris Abani

To the Igbo everyone is family, everything

is connected, Grandmother explained.

Like the weave of this raffia mat, we intertwine,

see? This is the world to the Igbo.

Nodding, the German anthropologist licked

her pencil in concentration and wrote:

To the Igbo, the world is flat like a mat.

Long Live Long Poems!

In case my post on where to submit long poems didn't give you enough options, Linebreak's blog The Line Break has a list of 32 (and counting) places accepting long poems. While there's considerable overlap, each list has a few that the other doesn't, so check them both out.

SoCal Reading

If you'll be in Southern California on Sunday, August 10th, please consider joining William Trowbridge, Taylor Supplee, and me for an evening of the Rattle Reading Series. It's at the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffeehouse in La Cañada-Flintridge. Followed by an open mic!

Would love to see you there!

Stranger

“we make strangers of ourselves by loving others”  Carol Moldaw (in a reading at Skylight Books)

*******************

Lazy Eye                                                         Lesley Wheeler

The stranger unplugs her bogus teeth
with a damp pop, tossing discarded parts
across my room, where she bunks this summer.
She brings Cadbury bars and Oxo cubes.

I am ten and not Cassandra. The gods
broke me, didn’t send a gift or a note—
Sorry, Second Sight is out of stock.
So one eye glares at tomorrow, the other watches

the visitor. Off with the belt that cinches her fine
figure. She tucks her dress, as green as envy,
into the pastel sweetness of my closet.
A bra’s silky cones protrude from her case.

I peel a scrap of plastic from one iris,
drop it in the shag, kneel to stroke
the rug, sit up to scrape the ball again:
could the lens still be drifting there? Have I lost

something, or not? Contacts improve me for other
lookers, but do not change what I see,
the double vision, partial views, the way
she’s my grandmother, the way she’s

a foreign country. Oh, hyphenated you,
the chorus mocks. I am a lucky girl, I have
souvenirs, I have plans, I can gaze along two
paths at once. Some kind of recompense. 

********************************************8

“The man who is detached in this way is the friend of God, as ‘a stranger is a friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth’”. Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem

*************************

The Possibilities for Wings                        Gary Fincke

How often have the customs of strangers
Silenced me into dreaming their beliefs.
In Java, for example, some people
Insist the souls of suicides return
In the bodies of crows, while in Scotland,
Souls of the lonely flee to butterflies.

In Pennsylvania? In this town where death
Belongs to those with names I've said, the souls
Of the ordinary are cries called out
And gone into an afternoon of rain,
Leaving me to wish winged things for the friend
Whose heart has failed, the friend who killed himself
In his meticulously sealed garage.

In my back yard? I'm talking to the friend
Who, like me, has sidestepped the terrible,
And even, from time to time, laughs aloud,
Neither of us, not yet, fluttering off
In moths or whatever we might predict
For our futures, the possible wings for
Depression, jealousy, the waste of hours.

Choose one? he asks, and I say the poorwill,
The only bird that hibernates, waking,
After months, to flight. Yes, he answers, good.
Overhead, just now, a small plane pierces
The air, and I imagine both of us
On board, becoming birds that seem to fly
Without love of anything but ourselves,
Shaping our fear against the summoned sky. 

****************************

Palsy                                                                                       Bob Hicok

Ignoring the obvious is most of manners.
Better to turn from the man
with a nose shaped like the boot
of Italy, the bad dancing
of Siamese twins, to the lillies,
white & flecked red, and praise
their novel arrangement
in the green vase. Now that her hands
shake, music lives in her martini,
the bright collisions of ice and glass.
I didn't see this coming in the way
I didn't see the universe coming
or my loss of hair, the limp
that's set up shop in my left hip.
It's not rude but descriptive to say
her head bobs as those tigers
in the backs of cars do or
plastic dolls dressed in the uniform
of a favorite ball club that nod
their agreement in the rear view
all the way to Miami. An earthquake
lives in her signature on the bill
she snags at the bistro and insists
is hers, the pen moves
as the stylus in Ouija does,
giving a dark answer from a realm
without blood. When she lays
the tremor of her hand on my arm,
I'm reminded we all vibrate
more or less from womb to death.
Years back I'd have asked what
it's like, to be a stranger
in your body, but my greater pride
at forty's what I don't say. Anyway
truth encumbers. She might
contradict what I've decided,
might say all hopes and memories
are beaten about, that it's
like living in a tornado and not
proof of a soul so happy
to still be around it shivers. 

***********************

From the Plane                         Anne Marie Macari

It is a soft thing, it has been sifted
from the sieve of space and seems
asleep there under the moths of light.

Cluster of dust and fire, from up here
you are a stranger and I am dropping
through the funnel of air to meet you. 

****************

Questions for Silence                                                  Paul Guest

In its first thin tide. In the place
to which it's come like a stranger.
Where the day is a map
you cannot read, crickets begin
in the warm night to whirr
green songs they could not unlearn
had they minds to grow bored.
The willow tree shudders
as though it were sewn up
with twitching nerves, with wire
bright as new-minted pennies. Where
do you go to gain the ear
of the moon, its ravaged face
lamented by no one? And
what do you tell something so old
it cannot remember
being once part of the world and not the sky?
What would your shadow care
to hear, to come close, to touch
hand to wall the tremor
of a passing train? If it had bones inside it,
you know it would flee.
So what are your words worth
to the hurried traffic,
to everything blurred,
to the ice cream truck
and its sweet patrol,
its song spilling out like a toy,
even in the dark? For all the sunlight
passing from the world
like a thought, who might you sing
to timid sleep? However long
you waited for rain
to rinse you of light's molten color,
for the elbow of the river
to bend back
to your life, the grass whispers,
you waited too long—
and all the while it speaks
it grows. 

The Insomniac: Maybe So

A really thoughtful, generous review of The Insomniac's Weather Report is up at Christina Veladota's reviewing blog maybespoetry.

Please check it out: it's a review that makes me blush (to have been so well understood)!

Color II

Questions for Silence                                                  Paul Guest

In its first thin tide. In the place
to which it's come like a stranger.
Where the day is a map
you cannot read, crickets begin
in the warm night to whirr
green songs they could not unlearn
had they minds to grow bored.
The willow tree shudders
as though it were sewn up
with twitching nerves, with wire
bright as new-minted pennies. Where
do you go to gain the ear
of the moon, its ravaged face
lamented by no one? And
what do you tell something so old
it cannot remember
being once part of the world and not the sky?
What would your shadow care
to hear, to come close, to touch
hand to wall the tremor
of a passing train? If it had bones inside it,
you know it would flee.
So what are your words worth
to the hurried traffic,
to everything blurred,
to the ice cream truck
and its sweet patrol,
its song spilling out like a toy,
even in the dark? For all the sunlight
passing from the world
like a thought, who might you sing
to timid sleep? However long
you waited for rain
to rinse you of light's molten color,
for the elbow of the river
to bend back
to your life, the grass whispers,
you waited too long—
and all the while it speaks
it grows. 

*************************************

Time and Materials                      Robert Hass

Gerhard Richter:  Abstrakt Bilden

I.

To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk;
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.

On this day a blur of color moving at the gym
Where the heat from bodies
Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.

2.

The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,
   In progress, of everything
That is not these words
   And their disposition on the page.

The object o    f this poem is to report a theft,
   In progre    ss of everything that exists
That is not th    ese words
   And their d    isposition on the page.

The object    of    his poe    is t    epro    a theft
   In   rogres    f  ever    hing    at    xists
Th    is no    ese    w rds
   And their disp sit on o     the pag

3·

To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,
To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.

"Action painting," i.e.,
The painter gets to behave like time.

4·

The typo would be "paining."

(To abrade.)

5·

Or to render time and stand outside
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment
To have the sensation of standing outside
The greenish rush of it.

6.

Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
Or desire can rip a life apart,

Some wound of color.

**************************

Landscape                                                            Chad Sweeney

I subtract one color at a time

to arrive at green.

Green cardinal.

Green snow.

This green is excavated rather than built.

Looking you begin to feel

disappearance

what culture feels when exposed

to time---

a pit

in the air, a climbing up to

no altar.

The clover,

the teeth of the horses,

shine.

Green burns in the green cloud.

**********************************

Did We Betray the River                                                      Dionisio D. Martínez

Did we betray the river or did the river betray us? You've noticed, I'm
sure, how, under certain conditions, a ladder leaning on a wall is a draw-

bridge waiting for a sailboat that keeps delaying its journey, calling
the man who operates the bridge, layering elaborate excuses so neatly

that the man only hears one excuse: the boat's coming, just not yet, not
while the water's in control of the situation. The man waits—drawbridge

up, traffic on hold. Sometimes the world is all patience and silence
and there is nothing you can do to stir up trouble. The driver who keeps

a knife beneath the seat is tapping on the dashboard a song coming from
another car. This is an exception. Others are praying to their private

rivers, as if the one just ahead were not there: seeing is too easy: one
acquires increasingly complex needs, like the taste of earth just

turned by oxen who know the plow as well as a man knows his river. We
know this blue's an illusion: the things that shelter us are colorless and

hover just so, not quite halos and not quite hats, and they can all be named
even if the names are arbitrary, even if they're not quite words. Our boat

waits for the water to go from blue to brown to ocher, as in a Turner
vision—a realism so crude it borders on beauty, the way beauty

was meant to touch us: with its repulsive allure, its unwashed mirrors of
heavy morning fog. We have to look head-on, and learn to forget again. 

**********************************

Nasturtium                         Gigi Marks

is a ring of simple petals
in a single o of surprise as if saying,
this is not what I expected.
is color in one shade that doesn't flinch
but meets what fate hands out,
the slender stem broken and placed
in clear water in clear glass,
so that there are no more days outside
near round-faced green petals, and
there are no bees and no seeds to
form, and the earth that seemed
so certain always right below is gone,
and all it seems to say is I see with my
one way of seeing that I will live what life
I have left in someone else's house.

**********************************

Hummingbird                                                            Barbara Crooker

He comes every day, in his crushed-emerald cape, flashing in front
of the kitchen window, quick as a thought, and just as elusive;
one blink, and he's gone. Try to show him to your mother,
who's come by for tea; she doesn't turn quickly enough,
doesn't see his throat, red as a stoplight, doesn't see him
dart in and out of the bee balm, honeysuckle, trumpet
vine. Her skin is thin as a folded roadmap; she's setting
off on a new journey. The tea trembles in its porcelain boat.
She is getting ready to board a great white ship
whose sails are already luffing in the wind;
the hawsers creak and groan, the crew
is ready to cast off. But she is still casting on,
yarn the color of spring grass, yarn the color
of heart's blood, knitting afghan squares
for the homeless. She sips her tea. He flickers
back into view, takes a long sweet drink.
He signals stop, then go; stop, then go,
both directions at once, confusing semaphores
that spark and crackle in the brilliant, merciless sun. 

The Insomniac Goes Wild!

Thanks to Amie Longmire and Wild: A Quarterly for this generous review of The Insomniac's Weather Report.

Wild: A Quarterly was a dream to work with; other poets looking for review opportunities should contact them. And of course, send them your best work for their journal!

Woodstock: Free Public Readings

Attached to the Woodstock Mayapple Writers' Retreat is a series of public readings, and they are free. Details below:

Schedule of Public Readings – 2014 (free admission)

Wednesday, July 23, 7:30 pm at the Villetta Inn at Byrdcliffe (next to the Byrdcliffe Theater on Upper Byrdcliffe Road).
Readers: Judith Kerman, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Rachel Coonce, Vincent Cooper

Thursday, July 24, at 7:30 p.m, at the Villetta Inn at Byrdcliffe.
Readers: Leslie Gerber, Jessica de Koninck, Nola Garrett, Patricia McMillen, Joyce Kessel

Friday, July 25, at 7:30 p.m., New World Home Cooking on Rt. 212, in the back room.
Readers: Roberta Gould, Shannon Frystak, Gary Leising, Diane Lockward

Saturday, July 26, at 7:30 p.m., at the Villetta Inn at Byrdcliffe.
Readers: Judith Lechner, Robert McDonough, Maril Nowak, Zara Raab, Helen Ruggieri

Enjoy!

Color

Sincerely, the Sky                           David Hernandez

Yes, I see you down there
looking up into my vastness.

What are you hoping
to find on my vacant face,

there between the crisscross
of telephone wires?

You should know I am only
bright blue now because of physics:

molecules break and scatter
my light from the sun

more than any other color.
You know my variations—

azure at noon, navy by midnight.
How often I find you

then on your patio, pajamaed
and distressed, head thrown

back so your eyes can pick apart
not the darker version of myself

but the carousel of stars.
To you I am merely background.

You barely hear my voice.
Remember I am most vibrant

when air breaks my light.
Do something with your brokenness.

************************************

Color Theory             Eric Leigh
       
"I envy your yard," an old woman once said,
leaning over the fence we shared, pointing out
a cardinal and a jay. "They seldom coexist,"

she told me in the quiet voice of the lonely.
"If you have cardinals, you can get robins.
Just nail a half an orange to the side of a tree."

And though I was young enough to want everything
I did not have, I never sliced that orange,
never nailed it to a tree. They stay with me still,

the things I did not do, the birds I did not call
with that proud color which refuses rhyme.
I've held sorrow closer than I had back then,

joy too. I know now how rare it is to see
those colors come to rest side-by-side—
the red breast, the blue.

************************************

Self-Portrait as a Child’s Stick Figure Drawing on a Refrigerator  Tom C. Hunley

        “You are not what you think you are. You are something to be imagined.” Clayton Eshleman

Often I’m a musical instrument
that’s afraid of the sounds inside.
My days consist of arrayed efforts
not to hear or hum.
I’m like a baby who screams
at first seeing his arms swinging,
unaware those whips flung
straight at his head are attached to his body.
Why are you doing this to me?
a man asks his body as it fights sleep
and the crucial appendage droops after a woman
says Okay, why not, after steak and lobster
and Hugh Grant’s latest formulaic schlock.
So spent, his body mocks him; he can’t
fathom how he ever lifted the long-stemmed rose
he gave her, now drooping a little, too.
In my son’s latest drawing labeled “Daddy,”
my hairs are stray spaghetti strands,
my head an oversized triangle crushing my stick-thin frame,
and a briefcase weights my three-fingered hand.
Often I feel sketchy like that, as if all the wrong colors

spill over my faint lines and anyone could cross me out
just like that. I haven’t always felt like a stick figure.
I haven’t always been an instrument
left forgotten in its case. I remember a time
in junior high when Doug Dickerson passed me
a pornographic flip book, the male stick figure’s stick penis
getting bigger and bigger and the female stick figure’s
stick legs getting farther and farther apart
until the stick figure bed broke and something hidden
deep inside me broke through, broke my body wide open,
a strange inchoate music that wanted to come out. 

*************************************

I Provide for You, Boy Child, Like God,                    Beth Ann Fennelly

and like God, I will cast you out.

Your eyes blue as a drowned thing.

The harshest lesson:

you are no part of me.

Learning that

will cost you ages in which

your eyes will take on the human color: grief.

Coming to words won’t even help you

name your suffering.

You will embrace

false idols.

Yet those women can let you

back in that primal crawl space

no more than I can.

************************************

Approaching Thunder                Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Let's assume about the body
that after applying enough pressure
it could, same as the cottonwood,
or the limbs of that damn box elder,
the one our neighbors kept calling
a weed; how that night, the worst
of the summer storms spread its fingers
across the little piece of earth and air
we thought we owned, how it took
each tree by the throat and turned.
Yes, I remember the first night
I guilted you into making love,
how the color of the stone changed
in your eye each time I touched;
how silence rose from your skin,

began to accumulate above our heads.
And for hours we laid still, listening
to the wind opening and closing
its purple fists. And come morning,
we took an inventory of all we'd lost. 

************************************

The Red Coat                         Idris Anderson

It's sleeting when we walk from the white church,
the ground frozen, the brown grass brittle.
I am somewhat back in the long black line of mourners,

behind my sisters, their husbands and children. I see it
all as it's happening as though it's not happening.
The roses on the polished oak of my father's coffin

are sheeting with ice and I know the red coat
is too thin to keep my mother warm. She's not shivering.
She walks across the breaking grass behind the coffin

slowly and with great dignity—without her oxygen tank,
her mouth open, a rose filled with snow.
She's walking toward something silver and mechanical,

like a fence around the grave. There's a canopy imprinted
with the logo of the funeral home, Herndon and Sons,
and four rows of white plastic chairs and the artificial grass.

A blue tarp covers a red clay pile of earth. We aren't supposed
to notice these things. Bits of color in wool hats and scarves
and the red coat. My mother was determined to wear the red coat

which I'd bought for myself but gave to her because she loved it,
because it is the color that he loved on her,
because I could not bear her not having anything she loved. 

B O D Y

I'm grateful to Joshua Mensch, and Chris and all the staff at B O D Y Literature for publishing my poem "Not Seeing" today. Check it out.

When the Light Turns Green: Kenneth Pobo

for sale here 

Living in Japan, far from the suburbs of Philadelphia where I grew up, I easily welcome contact with the old neighborhood. So when James Esch, founder of Spruce Alley Press and former high school classmate of mine, asked me to have a look at one of the first books published by his press, Kenneth Pobo's When the Light Turns Green, I was happy to do it. For old time's sake.

Still, thoughts of old time's sake notwithstanding, I was unprepared to be immediately submerged into my American suburban childhood in the collection's first poem, with the lines:

At ten I hoped to live
on North Carolina Avenue,
any green property.
We were more of a Tennessee
or St. James Place family . . .

Likewise, mentions of the Acme (always the Acme) and Commonwealth Edison, of street hockey and Clearasil, had me immediately spiraling into memories of my younger years. Like Pobo, I find while reading his poems that:

A blue butterfly,
time flexes
on the stop sign.

The nostalgia rising in me as I read When the Light Turns Green had me obsessing about a childhood that didn't exist the way I now remember it, in the same way that the voice in Pobo's "The Last" frets about asters dying in late fall to the point that:

Back inside, I curse
winter, miss a painting made of frost
just hung on the window.

Plants feature heavily in the second half of Pobo's collection, with mention of petunias, maple, pine, crocus and daffodils, maple and ferns, dahlias and marigolds. All this talk of flowering and greenery is surprising given Pobo's preoccupation with the winter months, with hail "a Geiger counter’s / click on the roof" and with "sleet’s dirty socks."  It's true, as he asserts, that "Winter yawns, hardly ever refunds unused tickets."

And yet, when summer finally does come, it brings little of the  respite and verdancy Pobo has been longing for:

A June drought—sky
doesn’t open her purse
of rain for weeks.

And this is the overwhelming emotion of the collection, longing for and waiting for what will never be, for the light that will someday turn green. Someday, but never now, an emotion echoed in the accompanying ephemeral artwork of Stacy Esch (James's wife), with its dreamy childlike figures and faces embedded in richly-colored intricacies that to my eye echo the repeated forms and recurring shapes seen on a molecular level, in organic matter under a microscope. In tapestries that witness the human trying to make sense of life at every level, right down to the microscopic, Esch's artwork echoes Pobo's examination of the past and the longing for it to have been otherwise, confirming what Pobo has asserted, that  there is "no way to stop / August from coming." August, the end of childhood, and the gateway to "winter's hangnail," an apt description of the scale of an individual human's suffering on the timeline of the earth.

Logic

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” — Franz Kafka

****************************************

Anagrammer    by Peter Pereira

If you believe in the magic of language,

then Elvis really Lives

and Princess Diana foretold I end as car spin.

If you believe the letters themselves

contain a power within them,

then you understand

what makes outside tedious,

how desperation becomes a rope ends it.

The circular logic that allows senator to become treason,

and treason to become atoners.

That eleven plus two is twelve plus one,

and an admirer is also married.

That if you could just rearrange things the right way

you’d find your true life,

the right path, the answer to your questions:

you’d understand how the Titanic

turns into that ice tin,

and debit card becomes bad credit.

How listen is the same as silent,

and not one letter separates stained from sainted.

****************************************

A poem is special because its logic is emotional and aesthetic and resists the traditional ways logic seeks to jail itself. Dorothea Lasky, in "What Is Color in Poetry Or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word" 

****************************************

Girder                                                 Nan Cohen

The simplest of bridges, a promise
that you will go forward,

that you can come back.
So you cross over.

It says you can come back.
So you go forward,

But even if you come back
then you must go forward.

I am always either going back
or coming forward. There is always

something I have to carry,
something I leave behind.

I am a figure in a logic problem,
standing on one shore

with the things I cannot leave,
looking across at what I cannot have.

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The poet's emotional signature is retained in the poem. Aristotle, in his bipartite model of the soul, places the emotions under the obedient, illogical part, reason with command and logic. Yet both parts are cognitive and partake in the logos. Thought is the efficient cause of emotion. This is why a poem's intelligence is more moving than its heart.  from Jennifer Moxley's Fragments of a Broken Poetics, Chicago Review, Spring 2010

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Vanitas Mundi                   Robin Ekiss

To make perfume from an iris,
      you have to mash the roots
but leave the petals intact,

as in vanitas mundi, skeletons
      are made of fruit and flowers,
not the dour bones.

It's this way with any form
      of pleading: please begins
with plea — linguistic insurgency

driven by a sense of urgency,
      not the sort of error in logic
a "war on terror" implies.

Hidden inside: the ornamental
      edge of understanding,
returned to us through language—

moving, but rootless,
      like spent blood
circling the veins.

The consolation of physics
      is art: scoliotic curve
of the earth, cello

that was Adam's
      first knowledge
of women's pinched waists,

gland of a mussel that dyes
      the emperor's robes
imperial purple. Like hell

or hello, homonym
      or homophone, who prey
on each other's predicate,

what can we know
      of the world
but every measure of regret

carried in a word
      with the gravity of air:
begot, beget, begin

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A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

-- Sir Rabindranath "Tagore" Thakur

****************************************

Three's Brainchild Is                                         Lesley Jenike

Made from hope's detritus, the stuff of wisdom but wider,
wide enough for a hand to slide through. There's a cut,
after-all, in this baby's skull. I can reach in and pulse
the mind manually: No thought except the one I give you.

Made from the mechanics of a subway train or dormer;
the fever that once flushed your cheeks I held like chicks
at some farm I can't remember, where rills in the land ran
down to woods rumored to transform the ringlet to risk.

Made from a river. I nearly drowned and so had a near-
death experience in which you reached from the future
a hand down to extract me like a tooth from the mouth
of my own loneliness. I like you. Likewise, you replied.

Made from a chessboard's warp and woof. I can't play
but I adorn the bishops, the queens. They are history but
sometimes marble, sometimes plastic, so easy to move
over the hoard that's your body where war is good.

Made from cheval glass so I may tilt myself to look in
at you behind my face. This fact remains: chiaroscuro
is also called claire-obscure and so night's imprecision
casts its shade across me to make someone new: you.

Made from the city's clarion call that is a clasp knife,
spring-loaded, released in my pocket as I stride beside
danger. Fear can put a mother's mind at ease and power
can transfer, like money, from one account to another.

Made from the click beetle or the skipjack depending
on the lexicon I give you. You did Dada back when
Dada was only a scatological dream. With your honest
palms you made love to sculpture. I chose the medium.

Made of megillah. You're an Old Testament heroine,
depression never stopping you from doing god's will
and I'm your god, though young and sadly subject to
Imagination's singing mesmerism: look deep into-

Made of my womb's long-playing record. Listen to
its big black forest. Even the crickets are desperate.
So rest instead in my brain's bower. Crown yourself
with blossoms growing according to size and color.

Made of the Lord of Misrule's mantle, seersucker
and so impossible to wrinkle. My logic is many-
valued. True or false is negotiable. Over dinner we'll
discuss nuance, then after, much later, I'll cradle you.

Made Of maraschino cherry, with only a tongue I can
put a knot in your stem and that's sexy, very un-
motherly. But his is a world in which the marcel may
appear on any head anywhere though it's not 1920.

Made of thanatos. That's why I bore you initially,
so I'd recognize, on-screen, me in you, performing
the original sin which is the manipulation of time
and space. Incase you're reading this after I'm dead:

we're made of the enzootic. We're all best left
in our exact jungle or specific neighborhood
stumbling erratum stuck in the revolving door
of this life. Script doctor daughter, make it better.

Made of scullion or scupper, whatever is dreck or
close to the water, you're the kid I hoped for: quiet
till I say go. Then you row our golden barge across
the Nile. On Cleopatra's Needle I prick my finger.

************************

No Encores. No Autographs.                         J. Gallagher

When I was little, and could float,
I made up my mind to touch everything
on the way. Here I go and

Yes into the red leaves, the winter logic.
Waving seemed so sad
when I was mild, and could hear

the sounds of the house
growing into the hill. The eternal workings
of the going to be,

while out to the left
there's a hole in the overcast. A little hole.
It may be growing,

it may be shrinking. Hard to tell.
Either way, it comes back now
without meaning.

It comes back as people I knew once,
fading in and out of buildings and trees
in a north wind,

while, full of spider webs, the porch
glistens in dew and first light.
A foggy translucence covers the world.

You can go out and read the argument
in the grass.
Just take off your shoes.


You can call yourself a pilgrim,
noting the texture of matter.
You can go from here to here. 

August Poetry Postcard Fest 2014

THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM PAUL E. NELSON, THIS YEAR'S ORGANIZER OF THE AUGUST POETRY POSTCARD FEST. HE ENCOURAGED RECIPIENTS OF THIS YEAR'S ANNOUNCEMENT TO FORWARD IT TO ANYONE WHO MIGHT WANT TO PARTICIPATE, SO I'M SHARING IT HERE. 

This'll be my 3rd or 4th year participating, and it's so much fun! Join in, if it sounds up your alley. 

It is almost August once again and this means POSTCARDS!

Mississippi River Postcard

The August Poetry Postcard Fest is an exercise in responding to other poets. You write a poem a day for the month of August, write it directly onto a postcard and send it to the next name on your list. When you receive a postcard poem from someone, the idea is that the next poem you send out will be a response to the poem you just received, even though it will be sent to a different person. Ideally you will write 31 new poems and receive 31 postcard poems from all over the place.

To participate, send your name, mailing address, and email to splabman@gmail.com. Use the word "postcard" in the subject line.

Again, one long list will go out this year this year instead of individual lists of 32 names. You can send postcard poems to the 31 names below your name, please do not use this list for advertising or for any other purpose than postcard poems. DO NOT SPAM THE LIST. 

I will send out the list twice. Our international participants often require an earlier start due to longer delivery times, so I will send the incomplete list out on July 16th and the final version around July 26th. The 26th is the cut off date, I will not be adding any more names to the list after that, the list sent out on the 26th will be the final list for this year. Really. I'll be out of the U.S. myself. Please be sure to send in your information before that. I will email the list to the participants in a google document as well as in the body of the email.

If you know anyone who would like to participate, feel free to forward them this message! Hope you enjoy the Poetry Postcard Fest!

Swimming in the Subliminal Soup

I've read that when you have a successfully creative day, you should stop and take note of the circumstances that allowed it, so that you can try to recreate them in the future. So, here it goes.

This morning I woke up at 3:50 am with thoughts of a solution for a poem that had been going wrong for me. I've woken up with fully formed solutions in my head before (see this post and this one) thus I am a big believer in using the liminal space between waking and sleep for creativity (see here, and here), but this time I woke up without the answer but with the conviction that I could solve the answer, if I thought about it hard right then and there. And so I drifted in and out of sleep.musing and making illogical connections that the sleep state is so good for, and the answer did come. Then came answers to another poem that had been stalled, and then some new ideas for two new poems, and then some more revision ideas.

So you can imagine that I'm interested in recreating this kind of amazing flow that I encountered between sleep and wakefulness for about an hour and a half this morning. How did this extremely productive time come to be?

First, I went to bed after reading poetry (Charles Wright, in case you are interested) and I fell asleep thinking about a poem that was stuck. These pre-sleep inputs gave my unconscious mind the suggestion to work on the creative problem I was having.

Second, this week I have been trying to go to bed 30 minutes earlier than usual to combat the exhaustion I've been feeling of late. I think that getting more rest over several days made it possible for me to be able to stay in the liminal space this morning rather than falling back to a deep sleep (or even a fitful unsatisfying sleep). I think if I had been as tired as I usually am, I would not have had access to the liminal space and to my subconscious work on the problem.

Third, this week I received some feedback from a poet whose work I admire, some very specific feeback, and it gave me a starting point for thinking about a trend in what goes wrong with my work. Having access to his observations pointed my thinking in a way that was more fruitful than my own floundering around usually is.

All this came together this morning in a perfect storm of creativity in my mind. Here's hoping I can instigate another frenzied storm in the near future.

Rhythm

Dylan Thomas: “[A poem] is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement from an over-
     clothed blindness to a naked vision.”

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The Plan is the Body               Robert Creeley

The plan is the body.

There is each moment a pattern.

There is each time something

for everyone.

The plan is the body.

The mind is in the head.

It’s a moment in time,

an instant, second.

The rhythm of one

and one, and one, and one.

The two, the three.

The plan is in the body.

Hold it an instant,

in the mind—hold it.

What was say you

said. The two, the three,

times in the body,

hands, feet, you remember—

I, I remember, I

speak it, speak it.

The plan is the body.

Times you didn’t want to,

times you can’t think

you want to, you.

Me, me, remember, me

here, me wants to, me

am thinking of you.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The sky is the sky.

The mother, the father—

The plan is the body.

Who can read it.

Plan is the body. The mind

is the plan. I—

speaking. The memory

gathers like memory, plan,

I thought to remember,

thinking again, thinking.

The mind is the plan of the mind.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

The plan is the body.

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Two is the rhythm of the body; three is the rhythm of the mind. Leonard Bernstein

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The Elementary Structures of Kinship      from The Making of the Mother: Portraits        Marcia Aldrich

The rhythm of the mother's chopping onions hurts her daughter's soul. Chop. Chop. Chop. Pause.
      Hurt.
      The top of this mother's lip curls before the difficulty of the onion. What is the difficulty of this onion, the daughter thinks, and why are her eyes tearing up. Is it from the milky sap of the onion or the skin of the mother? Chop. Chop. Chop. Pause.
            Hurt.
      The mother looks up from her onion to her daughter and wipes her eyes. She, too, has tears. The daughter thinks—are my mother's tears caused by the onion or has she read my mind? Does my mother know that she irritates my soul?
      The mother holds out the knife to her daughter: “Will you chop awhile? My eyes,” she says.
      The daughter takes the knife silently from her mother and begins chopping. Chop. Chop. Chop. Pause.
      Hurt.

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Desert Ant                               Sawako Nakayasu

Says “and” with every step, so that it sounds like this: “and and and and and and and and  and and and and and,” and so on. By the time I make my way to the same desert, I have been collecting and carrying an accumulation of nouns over the past, oh I don’t know how many days, and so I insert them in between the steps of the ant. Cilantro, tennis, phone, hand. Needle, rock, hair. Mingus. Monk. Mouth. I have been ignoring the dirty looks the ant keeps giving me, but finally I cave in, which means I stop to listen carefully. I am informed that I have thrown off the rhythm of “and and and and and.” I am informed that this shall not continue. I am given several options. I choose Monk, so for a while we do “monk and monk and monk and monk and monk and monk and monk.” I thought we were doing okay, but before I know it the ant is out of sight, and then before I know it, the ant has made a decision, and then before I know it, the ant is in my mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth, and mouth , and mouth.

*************************************

Perhaps the first songs were lullabies. Perhaps mothers were the first singers. Perhaps they learned to soothe their squirming simian babes by imitating the sounds of moving water, the gurgles, cascades, plashes, puddlings, flows, floods, spurts, spills, gushes, laps, and sucks. Perhaps they knew their babies were born from water. And rhythm was the gentle rock of the water hammock slung between the pelvic trees. And melody was the sound the water made when the baby stirred its limbs.

There is the endless delight we taken in new beings . . . and there is the antediluvian rage they evoke by their blind, screaming, shitting, and pissing helplessness. So the songs for them are two-faced, lulling in the gentle maternal voice but viciously surrealistic in the words. Rock a bye, baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradles will rock, when the bough breaks the cradle will fall, down will come baby, cradle and all . . . . Imagine falling through a tree, your legs locked and your arms tightly bound to your sides. Imagine falling down into the world with your little head bongoing against the boughs and the twigs, and the branches whipping across your ears as if you were a xylophone. Imagine being born. Lullabies urge us to go to sleep at the same time they enact for us the terror of waking. In this way we learn for our own sake the immanence in all feelings of their opposite. The Bible, too, speaks of this as the Fall.

E. L. Doctorow, in The City of God, p. 139

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