Idea Vilariño

18 August 1920 - 28 April 2009

Craig Arnold

16 November 1967 - 27 April 2009

Three Poems From George Moore

Survivor Gene

The islands we create are enemies

we reach
breech perhaps

our mitochondrial rate
mutations of mutations

in what we hate
then love

then hate again

sub-Saharan beauty rests
in its place

the tip of the extreme
inflection, reflection

but language morphs
or mutates

depending
even as a gene survives

we live in polymorphisms
so does speech

breeched by the child developing
fewer ways of seeing

what islands mean by separation


Running

Not always the same
universe, the same spacetime
continuum, some

warp in the way bodies
regenerate, or refuse to,
and ankles knees

bones of the brain
constantly fight
the seasons, for they are not

the same, not the same
spring in the step uphill
at heaven, nor in

the long distance miles
along trails that seem
rockier, more

personal, and weather
harsher than
forever.

Not the same but sweeter
maybe, legs like
Kau Cim sticks

tossed out
on landscapes,
bones picking up speed,

grown strong by simply
being out, thrust & parry
in air & earth,

singing against the end,
runner’s mantra,
next hill,

the next curve,
life strung out
a tensile thread

between coming and going,
and into the next
whatever

it can be,
long as it
moves this fast.


Tattoo for God

I got the boy on the right arm
out of the army, about the time I met

my wife, who wanted to know if
this was permanent, or just a passing

faith fancy, something she did not
herself believe in, either way,

and I said it was a drunken night
in Bangkok when the moon was full,

an eye on the Asian continent
and I felt like the Buddha in love

with all the cosmos. She said
get it removed. It’s my turn.

It took the skin right off, one
god less, one goddess more.

George Moore's poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, North American Review, Orion, Colorado Review, Nimrod, Meridian, Chelsea, Southern Poetry Review, Southwest Review, Chariton Review, and have been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Moore was a finalist for the 2007 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, from Ashland Poetry Press, and earlier for The National Poetry Series, The Brittingham Poetry Award, and the Anhinga Poetry Prize. His recent collections are Headhunting (Edwin Mellen, 2002), poems exploring the ritual practices of love and possession, and an e-Books, All Night Card Game in the Back Room of Time (Pulpbits, 2007).

The poems appearing in Zone are part of a collaborative installation with award-winning Scandinavian textile artist, Hrafnhildur Sigurðardóttir, scheduled to appear at an exhibition in Iceland later this year. The installation will be cite specific to Nes galleries, in Skagaströnd, on the northern coast. A previous collaborative work, with French-Canadian visual artist Mireille Perron, appeared in Can Serrat, Spain in 2007. Titled Complicatio/Explicatio (Folding and Unfolding): A Collaborative Artist Project on The Materiality of Textual Experimentation, the installation featured Moore's poetry and Perron's conceptualizations of the "book." Several shape poems from the Can Serrat installation have been published in Bathhouse.

JG Ballard

15 November 1930 - 19 April 2009