Z O N E

Gil Scott-Heron

2011-06-09T16:17:00.001-03:00

1 April 1949 - 27 May 2011

Ernesto Sabato

2011-05-01T19:46:00.000-03:00

24 June 1911 – 30 April 2011

Gonzalo Rojas

2011-04-25T21:44:00.000-03:00

20 December 1917 – 25 April 2011

Five Poems From Andrea Kato

2011-01-18T19:12:00.006-03:00

Mexico Is Underwater

We told you we'd make you brown rice
toast with a single green olive while you
sat outside a Burger King, on those

disgusting plastic chairs. You also
asked for hot sake. We forgot
both, I'm sorry. You played a game

with pomegranate seeds because
you had no dimes. They looked
like rubies before they broke.

Half underwater, I began
reading a green folder
with a secret message from

Mexico. He wrote that when
his enemy entered the room,
his particles blended with

those of his bed, and then the
floorboards, and then hell.
The tree in the picture

frame above the bed turned
orange, and caught fire.
I am always so jealous. I

knock at your door a bunch
of times, and no one answers.
I open the door and see half-

empty yellow beer bottles on
the table, and a broken wine
glass in the sink. The television

is on. I think it's Jeopardy! or
the nightly news. I assume you
are not home, but then I find you

in the back room on the computer,
and I notice a bowl full of chewed
gum stuck back in the wrappers,

making little balls. I had no idea
you chewed so much gum! and
wondered if there was something

worrying you. In horror, I watch
my mother tumble down the stairs.
You try to tell me about an under

water city that is slowly being forgot
ten, and how tragic it all is and I say
the preservation of history is like

wine, and I wish you would shut up.

And Anathema

1
You call me a 'Capitalist'
and I say -

What do you mean, you
beautiful, beautiful thing?

I say -

I want to see you
bleeding & broken
in my bathtub again

like the last time I loved you.

I want to knock on your locked door
again
and ask you if you are still alive.

I say -

Do you want me to leave.

You blow bubbles underwater
and cut your perfect wrists.

I ask god if he can look through
the walls for me and tell me what
color the water is. Please,

I need to know this.
She is already an angel,
he tells me.

I wonder about the asbestos
under your sink, and if you
will ever see me standing
naked on your green rug and
if we will ever wake up to
the light coming through
your cloud curtains.

But mostly I wonder if you
will need to stop loving me.

2
My head throbs
and I dream.

My temples pound
like church bells
and I dream.

You tell me you are glad that
they did not pull out your teeth.

I am feeling it all over again.
When they stuck needles in my gums
and pulled them out. Afterwards,
I would sit in the grass in the sun,
and leave my mouth open to let the
sunlight
into my throat because I refused to
take antibiotics. I would administer
drops of green rotting meat to my
swollen mouth
and refuse to take even one tylenol.

I gave you a bottle of painkillers.
I gave you a bottle of painkillers.

3
I hear you in the mornings.
I hear you eating plastic.
I hear you eating cranberries and watermelon.
I hear you eating white & yellow
eggs &
green apples.

I groan and tell you to shut up.

4
I drink from a bottle of
your mother's gin from your
pajama drawer
and hate it.

I start crying uncontrollably
in your tree-branch arms
and tell you how lonely I am.

I never-ever wanted to leave your arms.

But you are rooted because you are a tree,
and I am not.

The Starbucks Poem

I am at a Starbucks. This Starbucks is downtown. This Starbucks is downtown and is located on Third and Santa Clara. This Starbucks is full of fat Mexicans, businessmen, and a few crazy fucks.

This Starbucks is where I live. This Starbucks has a good selection of tea. This Starbucks is a little cold.

This Starbucks has a code to its bathrooms. The code is 191415. This Starbucks has only one cute guy working here, and he is never working.

This Starbucks is a busy one, and there is a woman who might be pre-menstrual at the table in front of me. She is shopping for clothes online. I would be too embarrassed to shop for clothes online in public. In fact, I would be too embarrassed to shop for clothes online in front of myself. I would have to get myself drunk to do it probably.

I am watching a young white man and a young black woman on what appears to be a first date. I feel like I am watching some cheesy eHarmony commercial. Their names are Natalia and Lawrence. Natalia and Lawrence are fairly attractive, but boring people. I think Natalia and Lawrence will be very happy together. I think Natalia and Lawrence will have great sex. I think Natalia and Lawrence will eventually have one half-black daughter who has an inexplicable amount of self-esteem, probably just because she is half-black.

I am avoiding looking up from “Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” by Weston A. Price, who was a dentist, because there is a crazy fat guy who keeps talking to the customers, including himself. I am watching him apparently think he is a really funny guy. I am watching him jiggle in his striped polo t-shirt eating two opened bags of caramel-covered popcorn and drinking just ice-water.

I am avoiding him and putting on my mean Asian face,
in case I mess up in avoiding him.

I am glad that the fat black man left, and also glad that the Nigerian man, who looks more like an Egyptian or Moroccan man, and who made an almost inappropriate comment about my physical attractiveness did not make any further attempt to “get to know me”.

The Nigerian man comes inside, introduces himself, sits down across from me, and further attempts to “get to know me”. I am unwillingly smelling his armpits. I am unwillingly noticing that he probably has not brushed his teeth in a few weeks. They are caked in gunk. I am grossed out. I am trying to turn him off by telling him about the exciting dietary studies and adventures of Weston Price, the super dentist.

I am watching myself watching him ramble and ramble the fuck on about life and positivity and the mind and negativity and living in the now and how to be happy, which is stuff I already know about. I am watching myself realize he is crazy. I am watching myself stop smiling. I am watching myself not respond. I am watching myself subtly say: I am not interested, now please get out of my face so I can read my book.

I am having a competition with the man with the paperwork, and the old Asian man with the cell phone that rings too loudly probably because he is going deaf, and the woman on the laptop, and all the employees. I am beating their asses at who can stay at Starbucks the longest. I am beating their asses at who can write the best Starbucks poem. I am beating their asses at life.

Death

You are talking to me
like I am a dead person.
It makes me feel strange,
and inoperable.

When you pull apart
my incised skin
pluck out my ribs
like fruit
you get too close
to my heart.

I get scared
and bleed on you.

The wind is blowing
dust and exhaust
straight through me.
I sit here wondering
what you would discuss
with someone on
their death bed.

I want to blow smoke
in your drunk face.
I want to pull on your hair
and get closer to your brain.
I want no one else
to have your love.
It is too special to share.

She has a devastating mouth.
A light shines through your teeth.
Your lace fingers weave over me
at night, but I can't find your hands
in the daylight. I feel dead and wasted
like bloody flowers in a trash can.

Mixing Chemicals

I am writing right here and there
is a lightning bolt
that I want to make
into so many other shapes
I want to take your arms
and make them into a heart
that wraps around my body as the sun
crawls out of my stomach, drool falls onto
your pillow.

Andrea Jane Kato was born in the great state of California and was raised Buddhist by a gypsy-like artist mother (deceased) and a Japanese farmer who currently grows pineapples in Hawaii. She is a Capricorn, Dragon, INTJ, HSP, Atheist, singer/songwriter, abstract painter/artist, iPhone photographer who likes yoga, fasting, and smoking. She has been published in magazines such as The Blue Jew Yorker, My Favorite Bullet, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Beat, Ditch, Pomegranate, ReadThis Magazine, and Alternativereel.

Four Poems From Lâle Müldür

2010-09-29T19:32:00.002-03:00

From The Cyclamen (Mary-Incense)

IV

“the apricot blossoms are blowing
from east to west,
i’ve tried to keep them from falling.”

summer’s passed quickly with its tanbur lutes
a raspberry rain is falling now
grandfather’s sleeping inside
in that wet raspberry land
the elegy of the Virgins of Jerusalem begins.

summer’s passed quickly with its downpours
the woman’s still sleeping on her prayer rug
she is a raspberry land now
in her heart an angry and frightening
song begins.

did i want to return
did i want to return
to no you,
to that pagan land

to return with rock and roll records
to return in Venetian outfits
sassy and decadent
to return to a bunch of boys who had waited for me
CONTRA NATURA

and to say “I, Lazarus
                have come from the land of the Dead
                Forgive me”

forgive me for the terrible things I’ve seen
                among you
because i walked away from you with violets in my hand
                forgive me

i want to join the Virgins of Jerusalem
in that wet raspberry land
i want to give birth to a son and
                and forget you.
…

VI

Apprehensio-Melancholia!
Memorabilia! …

“the Angel wanted to remain a while longer …
But the storm breaking out from Heaven
catches his wings with such violence
that he cannot close them again.”

the angel of History,
his face turned to the past,
helpless in the storm,
is dragged toward the future …

Like Eurydice
attaining an identical new maidenhood,
untouchable.

“And suddenly,
taking the god’s hand, uttering
with a painful scream these words: ‘Looked back!’—
not understanding something, softly said, ‘Who?’

VII

irhâç: the light on the brows of the grandfathers (the blush)

a watchword written
on the brows of Mary’s grandfathers: MHMD

They are a race that come from one another!

Mary’s pearl birth
The oyster, it is said, at times rises to the surface
to draw the rain into itself like a heavenly seed
Pearl, it is said, is good for melancholy
Unperforated, virgin pearls …

VIII

Maryam al-Basri
was in the service of Rabia al-Adawiyya:
Whenever she heard knowledge of the love of God
she would faint

In a session of dhikr (the remembrance of God)
she died suddenly of love …

God has servants who are like rain,
Falling on earth they become corn, falling on the sea, pearls.

IX

the universe is a compound of four elements.
whichever you choose you’re nipped in the bud.

Rose:   burns in fire
        withers without water
        suffocates in airlessness
        freezes in marble.

From “The Divan of the Dictionarie of the Turk”

Shaman! “your secrets, who will ex-

pound them to the crowds?” a message

goes out from your head, that you stay

in your forest place. who could you

love? even for just a while, who will

you love? the Shaman spirit waits for

the founding of “our own city,” open

to dangerous winds. among the Turks

at the entrance of the year of the croc-

odile, much rain falls and in the cycle

of years remains an unforgettable

memento. a pearl there caught in a

spider’s web, your secret, who will

expound it to the crowds?

the woman was trying to be nothing. names

they shouted her. the woman became a

sensitive flower. she made her escape. her

housepole she set up herself. she became a

sensitive flower.

                   “My foot was caught in the snare, not seeing
                   the secret snare, I suffered thus
                   long sickness. Be the remedy my beloved.”

waterjug was chilled under the star Bakırsokum
(copperbite). skin of wild rabbit could be made
into raincoat and the Sword Xan observed it.
he made himself secret, from everyone. they said
“This man drives his horse, always to the fore”
but like that very Woman he was trying to be
nothing. “thirst-making sun was overcast;
hoped-for friend made jealousy.” he pulled down
his tentpole. observing nothing he made his
exit.

among the Turks the highest jumper becomes

king. he has two wives, one the daughter of the

summer, the other of the winter god. the first of

the children changes into a white stork. and

there are Turkish forefathers who have slept

with a sea goddess, ones sprung from wolves as

well. to spring from she-deer and he-wolf is also

seen among the Mongols. the Genghis line

springs from the marriage of Börte Chino

(göksel heavenly wolf) and Qo Maral (she-

deer). the wolf is blue, the deer is dark. on the

barren steppe the legends are counted true.

prince of hearth and fire …

in the Book of Dede Korkut to say “annihilate

your clan and kin” they say “extinguish

your hearth.” while in the north of Mongolia

fire is deemed female and its priest

is a woman, in the south fire is male

and its priest is a man.

“The thirteenth tribe” … the Khazars

… double kingship … religions are

debated. jews come from Baghdad and

Byzantium to Khazar. Khanate is

established. Gabriel becomes first

khan. shamanist before, the reason the

Khazar khan accepts judaism is this:

because all religions to come after

judaism accept it. German jewish

traveler Petachia, Rabbi of Ratisbon,

who in 12th century passed through

Khazar land, finds jewish Khazars

primitive and says his ears heard

always “wailing of woman and howl-

ing of dog” in his journey of eight days

in Khazar land … wailing of woman

… howling of dog …

The Melodies of Forest and Light

to Ömer

For it is written of them, they will not believe
even a voice from out of the grave
“I, Lazarus, have come from the dead.”

Transfiguration!

The Holy Prophets Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Jesus

As a race that comes from one another!

Those who did not see Elijah in John the Baptist

How could they ever see Muhammed, Moses, Jesus, each Holy Prophet,

A wretch whose every journey begins from the desert

One who suffers, one who is always about to be killed!

Pitiful human being!

Who does not hear the melodies of forest and light

Whose eyes are veiled by arrogance

Who mutters delusions of infinity

Who builds castles and houses,

as though to dwell there to infinity

Even the disciples

Wanting to build a tabernacle of leaves

For Moses, Elijah, and Jesus

meeting on the mountaintop

They were nothing but uncomprehending servants

O those who take themselves seriously!
Integrals of arrogance!
For it is written, they will not
believe even a voice from out of the grave

“I, Lazarus, have come from the dead”
And the disciples saw
Jesus turn to light
His garments transfigure in a weird whiteness.

Jezebel’s hatred and Elijah

Herodias’ hatred and John

The Jews’ hatred and Jesus

Prophets!

Rough drafts of one another!

Melodies of forest and light!

Behold a swan,

For you,

Splitting into particles of light!

From A Solar Regression

II

because melancholy should just breathe in and out in silence
and i should be dressed in white like a tree of ice

now get out,
hope, suggestive whore

NOLI ME TANGERE

i made a tree of my body
no one can touch me again

mimosa pudica

wound that remains beautiful

dark and hopeless the trees are demigods
where countless voices and dark green death take shelter

you killed the living things
like a light emitted by pansies
i only broke the branch of a mourning plant
and made a tree of my body
a tree that takes breath in Silurian seas

       NOLI ME TANGERE

i forget my body
       and a tree forgets its motion
i forget that i have lived
       and the sea forgets its anemones

Translated by Donny Smith

Widely considered one of the most important contemporary Turkish poets writing today, Lâle Müldür is the author of ten books of poetry, including Ultra-zone'da Ultrason (2006), which was awarded the Altın Portakal Poetry Award. Two collections of English translations of her poems have been published: Water Music (Dublin 1998) and I Too Went to the Hunt of the Deer (Istanbul 2008). A volume of Müldür’s poems in French translations Ainsi parle la fille de pluie (Istanbul 2002) has also appeared.

Donny Smith teaches at a high school in Istanbul. His collection of Lâle Müldür translations, I Too Went to the Hunt of a Deer, was published in 2008. His own collection of poetry, Was Gone and Has Gone and Was Gone, also appeared in 2008. His translations of Wenceslao Maldonado’s Si cortarle la cabeza a la Gorgona and Cemal Süreya's Üvercinka are to be published soon.

Four Poems From Dawn Corrigan

2010-09-23T18:33:00.001-03:00

Sailing from Troy

The next morning Cassandra was brought to the ship.
She’d told our people not to take the horse—
though it was futile, she could not stop
herself from trying to warn them. Of course
she was ignored. She turned away to miss
what she had already spoken out loud:
the serpent wrapping Laocoön like a shroud,

its barnacled skin the fluid bark
of a tree. It moved relentlessly
to the prophet and his sons, the way a shark
finds a shipwreck, and ate them with glee.
The dumbstruck Trojans suffered loss of memory
as they always did when one of Cassandra’s
prophecies, before their eyes, came to pass.

But I’m surprised she left. I would have wanted
to see the monster, though not the slaughter
that followed, everyone killed but a few painted
boys and girls, and the king’s daughter,
who would have been raped by a soldier
but he was stopped by Agamemnon,
the triumphant chief, who claimed her as his own.

On the voyage Cassandra assured me
she would not live one day in Greece:
Iphigenia’s avengers will not spare me.
I didn't believe her, as perhaps you might guess,
teasing her, even: Death shouldn’t scare a priestess.
I thought no one would harm Agamemnon.
But I was wrong. The fleet was scattered by Poseidon,

and envoys have just brought word on Cassandra.
Diomedes thinks war is threatening
against the murderous Clytemnestra,
but Cassandra’s words as we were sailing
away from Troy, as she clutched the ship’s railing,
were No revenge, pointing toward the cabin
where Helen lay with Menelaus again.

Naked and Playing the Harp

They are unknown to me, tears and laughter,
as the history of man is, strewn with shards,

a string of beads heaped upon the bureau
blinking scarlet, turquoise, marigold.

The brutal singer, seeking work, fleeing work,
knows a song adorned with a name lasts longer,

sings of Odysseus, who thought of Penelope
though he slept soundly beside Calypso.

She has a violent relation with the moon.
She says, Let me say nothing of the moon.

Let me speak instead of the hungers
of bodies, those machines

that invent things delicious and repulsive
and reproduce in a clap of laughter.

Pyrrha Remembers the Ages

Chaos begat Night and Erebus
who together produced Love
who in turn begat Light and Day
who begat Gaia and Ouranos
who begat the Cyclops and Titans,
Prometheus among them and his brother
Epimetheus who, with Pandora,
begat me.
               At first earth and air and sea
were all one thing, the earth not solid,
sea not fluid, air not transparent yet.
In that undifferentiated world
all creatures kept their heads bent toward the earth
except for man, who dared to raise his eyes
toward heaven and the sun.
                                     But Jupiter
felt that gaze like fire; it burned him
all over, so in return he took some dust
and from it made revenge, which took the guise
of woman: Pandora, earth's first mother.
Upon her Venus bestowed passion,
Apollo music, Mercury persuasion,
but no one knows whose gift was curiosity.
Epimetheus saw her and called her his own
and that occasion was the start of history.

Through each ensuing age--the Golden,
Silver, Bronze and Brass--the gods diluted man,
but with each his malice only increased.
So they took the road that weaves across
the sky at night, the road to the palace
of the gods' king.
                      As one they approached
and called to him, and asked what should be done
with man, who ever bathed the earth in blood.
Jupiter said the experiment had failed.
It was time to work the mud and try again.

Pyrrha Remembers the Flood

Then all was sea. The wolf swam with the sheep,
the fishes moved among the tops of trees
and weary birds gave up and plunged to water.

Deucalion and I, warned by his father,
were sealed inside our casket, where I lay
on him until we landed on Parnassus.

Zeus spared us because we had been harmless.
We threw some stones and made the new race,
a hard people who, like us, are virtuous

if only they can say: My life is harmless.
At last, when none of them objects to wrong
or feels some shame, Zeus will destroy them.

Meanwhile, my uncle, who arranged for men
to keep the good meat for themselves, lies chained,
tortured for his generous mistake.

Dawn Corrigan has published poetry, fiction and nonfiction in a number of print and online journals, most recently Prick of the Spindle. She's an associate editor at Girls with Insurance.

Seven Poems From Sundin Richards

2010-06-29T18:43:00.007-03:00

The Helper Years

Be
wildered
by loco
motives
the little
town fumes
in a cradle

It’s the sound
noticed first
full reassuring
threat on skin

         blooms into a
         love of animals
         and small things
         under wheels

Ghetto in the eye
blink of nowhere
the bow
the rifle
the shitpile
and the dog

         The Royal Order
         of the Queen’s
         guts is given
         braving spiders

And if this aint
the end of the world
you sure can see it
from here

Firedamp is feared
up and down the line
and are those your teeth
over there?

         Even for us that’s
         a lot of mountain

Sugar from plastic
was goddamn grace
on credit

Glow yon
searchlight
aimed at the library
or honkeytonk
counted as the
same well

         Why punch the hero?
         The bucket drops in
         a gurgle night

Teratologia

Where is the smoke
filled room? I’ve got
my ticket somewhere.

Here is this enough to
cover it? Sorry about
the curtains.

How do you figure he
did that? I mean the
whole thing is torn.

Can you believe this
rain? We’ll be trout
fishing on Main.

I’m telling you now
ok? Plain as the
nose on your face.

The thing looks like
ten miles of bad road
and smells worse.

Let loose of it. Just put
it down and look at it
a second.

Away The Vapour Flew

I have a background
in reality but I’m
willing to learn

Shock of sleep
for sight

I drop my brains
along the trail

To find my
way home

When light is
diversion enough

Gems crowd
almagests

And you’re a pretty
little thing

What’s your
name

When it’s drastic
everybody matters

It’s always
drastic

That you’re
a favorite

In the deadening
reddening running night

Train Smoke

Guard it
like a one
armed convict

Reset the
chemicals
to balderdash

When the
climate
climbs

To rest
no rest

Champion
voodoo
among rocks

The Good Humor
man got drafted

Then it was
up to us

Soaking the
organism in

Snake oil

Some Ease

Picked up a
mournful thirst

By the slap of
an Aldis lamp

That we lose some
thing by proportion

Clinging to ciphers
or a shared cup

The engagement
is wholly local

Penumbra pierced
straight away

Seen behind
rocks

Roll up
rightly

The wagons
are uncircled

So let’s
go

Mjollinar And Me

Heroes remake
statures

Even in
fated air

But catch
it

They’re always
deaf and dead

Though you
shine

I see the red
the forward

And glow
on my eyes

When open
when shut

Sauce me
no sauce

Oh embrasure
assure aesthesia

The little
sickle moon

Cut into
the face

Of the
door

Loving The Insane

is a thing to do
after losing the
orders by Dillinger’s
Lake all at sunrise

Falling snow girl gets
said but I think Mithras
with a dash of Hermes

The cradle is cold at
ten thousand feet and
god I love your face
happy or otherwise

Swill leads me
chaldean along but
combat interuptus
for the lights

My head rings
from an accident and
hemorrhage-a-mundo says
the power plug

Dictionaries are a story
are a window are a full
feathered secret

Wolf cry you useless
glissando through rain
or a glow that looks red
but isn’t

Serious Fun

My brain
smooth as
an egg

Walking
the shiner
off

The last
of the morning
in green glass

Fine fortunes
in the general
crack-up

So a quota gets
filled and we’re off
to the Hesperides

Filled with fun
by the very blade
of the sun

I locate
sacrifice
by feel

Pretty well
my anointed
splash splash

The ultimate
slash letting
light in

My creature
you just barely
got fed

Thus you are my
personal interfer
on

The first rule of
living is don’t
die

The rest is play
and sport

Sleeping in
ditches in
church clothes

So it’s palin
genesis from
here on out

I keep trading
cows for
magic beans

And last
election I came
in dead first

Sundin Richards' poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, Girls With Insurance, Colorado Review, Interim, Zone, Volt, Cricket Online Review, Concelebratory Shoehorn Review, and Western Humanities Review, where he took first place in the 1999 Utah Writers' Contest.

Footage of him reading at the Cabaret Voltage reading series is available here. An interview with Richards appeared earlier this month in Zone. Richards' book, The Hurricane Lamp, is forthcoming from ONLS Press. He lives in Salt Lake City.

An Interview With Sundin Richards

2010-06-23T14:22:00.016-03:00

Sundin Richards in San Francisco in 1993. Photo by Andrea Perkins.

Sundin Richards, whose poems appear in a special double-length feature celebrating Zone's fourth anniversary this month, sat down with Andrew Haley on June 17, 2010 in Salt Lake City. They discussed Richards' penchant for composing on typewriters, bar fights, railroad towns, Walt Whitman's pathological happiness, big shirts, Moby Dick and the poet's first name.

AH: What kind of a name is Sundin?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: It’s a Swedish surname, but I’m not of Swedish derivation. I was born in the early ‘70’s, and my folks were hippies, so I suppose it was their way of being interesting. When I was little, I wanted to be called James T. Kirk, but then, who didn’t?

AH: Where do you come from? How did you get here?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Those are some pretty loaded questions! I was raised in two small towns, here in the Mountain West, and would ride the train between them several times a year, by myself.

First there was Helper, Utah, which is an old railroad town. It once was known as “The wickedest town in Utah.” Butch Cassidy robbed the bank there, and the last brothel closed in 1977. More saloons than churches, that sort of place. Then there was Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a lovely little mountain town where Doc Holladay died. There are two rivers that go through that place. I hitch-hiked from there to Salt Lake City in 1992.

AH: You studied under Donald Revell. Did you learn more from the man or his poetry?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: You know, both his poems as well as his own great self have been enormously instructive. I feel that I am a better person for having known Don. His example gives me a great deal of hope regarding the possibilities of the art, being an artist, and just plain old how to live in the world, and to care about doing so.

AH: Spicer or O’Hara?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Huh. I’m a big fan of both, I must say. I find Spicer to be the more challenging poet, so the pleasure I get from reading him is more cerebral, I suppose, than that which I take from O’Hara. Obviously, I’d like very much to have a Coke with Frank.

AH: Melville or Rimbaud?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Sure. Well, I try and read Moby Dick once a year, and mostly I manage to. It’s an American epic poem. I mean, what can I say that hasn’t already been said, and better, by others? It’s exhilarating and infuriating, divine and profane, visionary and boring. It’s a goddamn masterpiece. In fact, I probably should give this up right now, take up my copy, crawl inside a hollow log and read it! As for Rimbaud, well, just like a lot of folks, I had a steady diet of him from my teens, through my twenties, and even now I still read him frequently. The guy seems human in only a biological sense. Incredible vision and guts. He was steel hardened by genius. Compassionate without sentimentality. He’s just the bratty father of contemporary poetry. The little bastard.

AH: Do you find it at all contradictory to be a hard drinking bar fighter who writes beautiful poetry?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Not in the least. It’s a major branch of the tradition. A rich vein of bad behavior runs through the collective biographies of our kind, starting with Archilochos and going all the way up. There are too many to mention. Besides, I may enjoy a frosty adult beverage now and again, but those wild days are largely behind me. I haven’t been poked in the nose in years.

AH: If the academy opened its doors to you, would you go in?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Sure. I hear a lot of griping from other writers about its evils etc. but sometimes it looks like a pretty sweet gig. I mean, you think about poetry all day anyway, and talk about it sometimes, too, so why not get paid to do exactly that? I don’t have any illusions that it’s some sort of Arcadia, but I think about it quite a little bit during conference calls at my corporate job. And who knows, perhaps I could do some good for the art.

AH: You have been known to dismiss Walt Whitman’s poetry. Do you truly dismiss it?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Nah. It’s not the poems I object to. I recognize and respect their importance and influence. Particularly from a technical standpoint. It’s that carefully cultivated public persona that makes me uncomfortable. I’m just not able to buy that anybody thinks everything is that great without suffering from some pathology. So I guess it seems to me that there’s more than a little bit of the carnival barker in that personae, yawping his own awesomeness. And that makes me uneasy. I know this seems like some pretty heretical stuff, particularly from an American, and I imagine I’ll get some strongly worded letters. Maybe I’m being unfair. I haven’t read him in years, so perhaps I should sit down with him and have another conversation.

AH: Your book, forthcoming from ONLS Press, is called The Hurricane Lamp. Are you the hurricane or the lamp?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: That’s an easy one. The world is the hurricane and the poem is my lamp.

AH: You still write by typewriter. Are you a romantic?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Well, I don’t wander around Italy in a big shirt, trying to get laid or anything, so no, I’m not a romantic. I’ve been using manual typewriters for 20 years or so, and I like the direct physical cause and effect of the things. Their only function is writing, and I enjoy that simplicity. Obviously I own and use a computer. I just prefer to go through the process of making poems the other way. Plus they’re darn pretty to look at.

AH: What do you love?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Umm… train whistles at midnight, snowfall, good Scotch, good food, fine friends, animals, come on, the list is endless.

AH: What do you hate?

SUNDIN RICHARDS: Questions like that.

Happy Birthday

2010-06-18T17:28:00.004-03:00

Zone was founded in the dead of Austral winter in a small apartment in Buenos Aires four years ago this month. Its purpose was and remains to create a magazine of poems and short fiction freed from the geographic, economic and linguistic politics that tarnish so much of today's literary syndicates. Zone's founders believe that writers have always crossed borders, whether as immigrants or explorers, for the wild and the uncontained, and that a true servant of poetry helps poems and poets across the divide.

To that end, Zone has always been committed to bringing together writers from a plurality of backgrounds, locations, and languages. The magazine sees itself as a focal point that is no where, a utopian common open to all. Operating on a threadbare budget, with a staff of volunteers operating according to the logic of the cooperative, Zone has published in its first four years 68 poets and writers from nearly 30 countries.

Our New Russian Poetry feature which ran in December 2006 published some of the first English and Spanish translations of Danila Davydov, Julia Idlis and Viktor Ivaniv to appear outside of Russia. Translator and poet Peter Golub, who came to Buenos Aires to unveil his translations of these great contemporary poets, has in the intervening years been widely published to critical and academic acclaim. The extraordinary Australian magazine Jacket commissioned him to edit a special New Russian Poetry feature; he has been accepted to Columbia University's PhD program in Slavic Studies; and his translation of a collection of short fiction by Linor Goralik was awarded a grant from the PEN Translation Fund three weeks ago.

In June 2008, Zone published the first chapter of the then-unpublished English translation of Indian writer Sarojini Sahoo's controversial novel, Gambhiri Ghara (The Dark Abode). The novel was a bestseller in Bangladesh and sparked controversy across India for its explicit treatment of sexual, religious and political themes. Through the story of an adulterous affair between a Hindu house-wife from India and a Muslim painter from Pakistan, Gambhiri Ghara examines the roll of women in contemporary India. Written in Oriya, Gambhiri Ghara has been translated and published in Bengali, Malayalam and English. Mahendra Kumar Dash's English translation, titled The Dark Abode, was published later that year by Indian AGE Communications.

The following April, poems by George Moore forming part of an installation with award-winning Icelandic textile artist Hrafnhildur Sigurðardóttir appeared for the first time in Zone. Sigurðardóttir, whose work has been exhibited internationally, and Moore, whose poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Nimrod and other magazines, collaborated across media to create a site specific installation in the Nes galleries, in Skagaströnd, on Iceland's north coast.

Golub, Sahoo and Moore are only three of the 68 poets, writers and translators who have appeared in our pages during our first four years. Zone maintains a complete archive of everything we have published since our inception. If you browse through our archives you will find a wealth of interesting, new, brushed-off, under appreciated and later lauded work from the 8th through 21st centuries, in languages as diverse as Chinese and Catalan, written in countries, and cultures, as far afield from one another as Nigeria, Siberia, Colorado and The Philippians, some original, some in translation, all of it free, and all of it worth while.

To celebrate our birthday, Zone is featuring a special feature on poet Sundin Richards, whose book of poems The Hurricane Lamp is due out from ONLS Press later this year. A double-length selection of Richard's poetry and an interview will be appearing shortly.

A final word of thanks to our readers, contributors, volunteers, fans and followers: without you Zone would be unable to continue. Thank you for your attention.

-Henri Beauregard

José Saramago

2010-06-18T15:40:00.003-03:00

16 November 1922 - 18 June 2010

Andrei Voznesensky

2010-06-01T20:31:00.003-03:00

12 May 1933 - 1 June 2010

Peter Orlovsky

2010-05-31T20:27:00.001-03:00

8 July 1933 - 30 May 2010

New Poems From Richard Cronshey

2010-05-20T19:53:00.003-03:00

Politics

Night sky
you keep
smoking
up your sleeve,

a bad kind
of unearthly;
a burning
worn by air.

...

Conflagration,
our transparent
address.

I bury
my name
to the quick
in your name.

.....

By the embrace
my life disguises,

Cinder and prism
hoodwinked unto death.

Practice

Our Lady of The Razor Wire,
Wounds luring wounds
along the slaggy gallows path.

Our injuries
make us rattle,

like dancing.

Who am I anyway
compared to your heartbreak
That is so big
you have disappeared
altogether in it
and become ransom for specters?

Calamitous shadow
histories
I live out
Invoked by our starved tautology.

The left hand undoes
what the right hand is doing.

Swim upriver
away from my eddying heritage
accompanied by nothing
but my own growing strength.

To the victors
go the despoiled.

The world is my dog run.
I shall not want
for exercise.

My bones now hollow and papery as words,
blown as hornets nests.

Earth will return them to me.

Salute

Rescued again, despite my best efforts, by my very uselessness.
The divinities can’t even see me,
those jerk-offs in their boudoir universes,
for whom only you're either a backscratcher or a tambourine.

Free as a parking lot at 3 AM. Here’s my best trick. Look!.
I disappear in the weeds along with the extinct
high desert mining towns whose only surviving acolyte I am;
and the infinitely brittle, star lit thing still living in them,
a creature of whispers and paper-mâché,
half imaginary, too stupid to die; to which I pledge allegiance.

Beware of Poem

What a beating
that poem gave me.

Fed me
in little pieces,
to my wishes.

Night, you look
a lot smaller
on television.

Still, I flourished,
suddenly,
until I didn`t.

Beware of nourishment.
The skinny one
is my co-pilot;
La Flaca, pale hand
where the stars succumb.

I was to be the lungs
in some floundering anatomy.
I thought, "Why not?"

I am, I think,
because of the rustle that hunts me.

Look at us, skeletons
with burning crowns,
kicking up dust
as if we were real.

Go ahead, Poem,
smoke me.
I`m home now.
You know the address.

Blues with a Skeleton Key in its Palm

My eyesight wanders off,
starry revolver, a dog
drawn to your softness.

I stay here waiting
for it to come home,
listening
to the continents drift.

I will miss
your snaggle
toothed sick
room piquancy
the most.

Somedays
you were a roadside grave;
others, you were smoke rising
from behind a hill.

Bête noire
Slaughterhouse,
feeling you still
silverfish
spirochete
limping thing
little fistula
rag doll
on the ash heap--
your history
like grief in me.

No end in sight to this
bag of tricks.
I can just discern
somebody`s death mask
down there circling
mouthing words
I can`t make out.

Widows mite,
It gets passed around,
from hand to hand
growing heavier,
every time,
until we sink.

Richard Cronshey is the author of five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Snow and The Snow, forthcoming from ONLS press. His poems have appeared previously in Zone.

Five New Poems From Robert Lietz

2010-04-26T17:34:00.009-03:00

IN COURSE

1
                                                                              Not Then

     The music, uncertain after all, unheard
outside

     a mid-spring theater, was it The Nutmegs,
James Brown,

     Ray Charles we missed, in Syracuse,
New Haven,

     at the War Memorial, and at somebody's
instigation,

     where none of us, not then, ever
arrived

     at      the same
moment?

2
                                                                              House Warming

                         Surely

     somebody left charmed, with forever
freshening, whatever

     the losses meant, and not what we thought,
be sure of it, charmed

     by the heart's response, and by the manners
lingering, by

     our inflatable and serial dawns, the feathery
and first drawn greens

     with the year warming to mid-seventies, the plants
where they were last night, set

     close to the outside, brick, back fire-place wall
for house-warmth, and

     on this screened porch safe, from the cloud
-clearing forecast

     and selective frost we well-imagined, with
potting ahead

     for them, prettying the chipmunk-
flash summertime

     we mean --again -- to
celebrate
     together.

3
                                                                              What and When

     What if we never looked like that, not
in a figment, phase

     or entertainment, and what if our morning's
storyline, this

     groundhog say, climbing, sampling, ignoring
the bend, bow,

     to top-most green almost, if that were only
narrative,

     a matter of taste, a wink to the day outdoors,
to the idea

     glossed, rubbed so, wished over, returning
our common

     interest, reminding us what and why, and how
we've rehearsed

     these literacies and contritions, these timely
critiques,

     overheard, as even the morning is, abroad
in its first lingo,

     as the actual day, embraced in course,
whatever

     the language lacked, or the informed
finessed,

     conspired by their own reports
and
     confidence.

HORIZON SLICE

     So the howling's not, days apart are not,
nor the words
     you can no more arm, disarm, than save
by re-combining,
     by their jarring and jarred tones, matters
fit to the day's sprawl,
     neither unspooled nor reconditioned,
beset by caricature.
     But, left to our better selves, so that the days
themselves
     will not appear outdrawn, mis-presented,
there's much to explain,
     exonerate, when too little thought seems all
impulse
     could ever have intended, matched
to our own weak skulls,
     to our hyper-assisted if flawed tunings,
to the approaching
     dark, with its horizon-slice affairs
and its time studies,
     its pearl-seamed blacks
     and indigo.

ALMOST AUDIBLE

     How will you ask this if? What would you call
this almost

     audible sighing but distraction, these dappling,
deepening woods displayed,

     when you looked up from the glass-topped table
and your coffee, into the breeze,

     by then insisting, settling, this cup you've been
sipping cooled, a finger or so

     left to warm again, replenish, so that you must
think this good,

     when the least breath-taking language
wins you over, the light

     turning into light, to this sensible
accounting

     yes, the ghosts around
go on
     repeating.

A KISS STILL WARM

1
                                                                              The First Look

     First, there's Grizz', the critter gitter, with
tales from the Big Horns
and Denali, soaping exposures off, indifferent
to that bee's buzz, but
wary of the tri-foliate green he's barreled out of,
cartoonishly, no doubt, for
our amusement. Then there's that nesting pair
I mean to search out at North Lima,
and this year's tanager, these hues the groundhog
hasn't yet laid claim to,
as if the whole earth were asking me for pictures,
and this Polish jazz, to get
the feel for the moment, these packages addressed
and stacked outside
the front door, where nobody's signed for one,
if nobody's thought to take one
in our absence, a record nicely filed, since the other
doors were optional and sealed,
as even the gas-filled winter panes, warmer
to the hand than plaster
when the winters hit. So much for the field humor,
for the circumspect reports,
the day from its first look see, and wondering
whether a lens is long enough
for eagles, whether he'll be back this afternoon,
once the trapper
and the trapper's crew-mates come to pass,
prepared, as trained, and
more than enough supplied, to seek
and destroy
     what's necessary.

2
                                                                              Needful Times

     No queen, no queen's dresser, and cute's
no salvation,
be assured, whatever the mantra makes of it,
but he'll be back
before nine-thirty I believe, since needful times
require him, a second coffee
under belt, after Grizz and his crew arrive,
set out
their snares, their bait and live-traps, soap off
and snarl
along their ways to the next clients. And
Anastasio, meantime,
recalling the last dusk or just before, remembers
himself a night ago,
well before the occasion to wash could settle him,
remembers
the costs of gardening, the costs
of that first kiss
and next, and the afterglow, on their flushed
tourist cheeks
and bankrolls, once the prankster's
worked up nerve
to improvise, though not the least,
you can
be sure, of his sole
     options.

3
                                                                              Anastasio

     Maybe that shrine was burglarized. Maybe
a man, for now, makes good
with its bare walls and stubby candles, makes do
and must, with
the strays and pups, yipping at the jams and heels
of the prayerful,
even the lesser enthusiasts, he thinks, impressed,
acknowledging the kiss,
and not the burn so much, as they bend and splash
and rinse and bear their faces,
before a mirror seems possible, or this language,
too much like their own
to be mistaken. So what was the day but photographs,
but these young,
the nesting pair away, newcome arrivals
at the heron's
fishing claim, was Anastasio himself, who will not be
heard on it,
recalled by the heat, by the showering and sweat,
was Anastasio
after all, but a handshake yes, but a kiss still warm
with garden earth
and gardening, who could appreciate each theft,
each saint, meanness, each
first well-planted kiss, having housed his implements,
houseled himself, hosed
clean for the post-gardening burritos and cervesas,
for this catching up
he is sure to miss come suppertimes, imagining exits
and escapes,
and that groundhog, that survivor, yes, coursing
the spray-painted green
toward edibles, eyeing that fishing pair, explaining,
as they might, the moonlit foam
and firestones. And where's that trapper after all,
or that hummingbird
I never got around to mentioning, or the heron
now, when signs of trespass
reappear, this courted nightmare the coral bells,
the moon fingered quack-grass
make no room for, a stolen kiss no room,
no hint of the meaner
lusts or treacheries, the sub-surface
tones he'd heard, hears yet,
in alien conversions.

4
                                                                        The Cousin Source

     Where's that crow, that, their jay-mocking
ins and outs,
claim-jumping feeders the bunting plays beneath,
sampling crow-spill,
as, a small man, Anastasio rinses clean, dreams
honestly, himself
the cousin source of tourist horrors, tourist smiles,
from the first handshakes,
first pecks, no more deterred than the crows seem,
by tourist gear or pedigree,
by how they hurry to wash their fallen faces
when he's finished, about the time
when pups have had their day of nipping heels, and
the candles, sputtering, add
their own notes to the angling ends of afternoons,
done with the newsmaking
and tell-alls, suited now to plans he's all but reinvented,
for the dusk ahead, for the dark
and weight of a new century made public, but only
the least, we guess, of Anastasio's desires
and disguises, though nobody's asked, you bet, and
nobody's kept track, kept count,
whatever the losses were or substitutions, considering
his fix on tones and off-season prices,
on his own, we think, and presumable advantage,
though he might call that
something else, something to drink or plant or plant
his kisses on, to bear away
from shrine or sanctuary, complementary, if you will,
and all-inclusive, according
to the lingo of arrival? Surely you see resemblances
among the current crop of players,
who would have eaten the same stuff once, and left
all that behind as true believers,
equating experience with preference, inspiration
with emblems, and, inspired
merely, attitudes, when another season calls for
punishment, with the air itself
trembling under them, because their playing
asks for it, whatever
the shrine-going masks of the old
shrines
     and summertimes.

RECORD HEAT

     Even the spider plant, you think, must feel it,
moved, a few inches
     now, to make room for the low metal table
and sub-woofer,
     for the ipod, satellites, and this sovereign jazz
they may have
     heard among the Keys, heard in Puget Sound,
drawn themselves outdoors,
     as this water is, to freshen the boxed flats,
planters, and potting earth
     you've seasoned, while the plumbing throbs, and
each light-bleached page
     I think could lie here through forever,
conceded
     to record heat, unreadable. There will be wine
tonight, encompassing
     table talk, this pizza tonight, with repeatable
humor under stars,
     these due-processed ends of school-years
tonight, and
     a summer begun you cannot buy anywhere,
sentence
     by sentence piqued, in the botched
luxurious
     stories we come back to, as if
we had
     never had such fun.

Robert Lietz is the author of eight published collections of poems, including The Lindbergh Half-century, Storm Service, and After Business in the West. Nearly six hundred of his poems have been published in print and on-line journals, including recent publications in Istanbul Literary Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly Online, Avatar, Contrary, Terrain, Valparaiso Review, Salt River Review, Lily and previously in Zone. Several unpublished collections are currently finished and ready for publication, including West of Luna Pier, Spooking in the Ruins, Keeping Touch, Character in the Works: Twentieth Century Lives, The Vanishing, and Eating Asiago & Drinking Beer. Meanwhile, he keeps active writing and exploring his interest in digital photography and image processing and their relationship to the development of his poetry.

Four Poems From Ruth Bavetta

2010-04-13T14:44:00.006-03:00

Luftwaffe

The storm
         comes for the throat,

a sidewinder in darkness.
         Wind works its mutinies

in storm-snarled trees. Water
         hammers houses from their roots,

a bus shoots under a bridge.
         A man in a tattered T-shirt

floats downriver like a page
         torn from a book.

Foundation Work

They arrive early,
         before he’s ready, go on
with what they have to do.

He pulls his shirt over his head,
         discovers a hole. They’re all around
the house now, shouting.

He puts on the pants he wore yesterday,
         before he knew, goes into the kitchen
(the sunny yellow walls have faded),
         fills the kettle, sets it on the burner.

Today, a scan will probe
         his body for cells gone wild.
Outside, they’re probing,
         seeking solid ground.

The sky’s already bleached with heat. If
         they find competent ground.
they can shore up the foundation.

The kettle shrieks to a boil.

Remember This

She’s used to them now,
the spectators who sidle
small and soft
under the old and fading moon,
a shambling column,
that casts no shadows. In a dark corner
of the garden, where
there’s no more time
for lilacs, they wait for her

Imagine

walking up forty-two stairs,
the smell of a rubber ball, your arm
brushing against a stucco wall,
the prick of a pin in the tip
of your right index finger.

There was a clock you once knew,
draw its tick inside your body.
There was a bicycle on a dirt road
the summer you fell in love,
balance on its handlebars.

Enter a room you have forgotten.
Walk through midnight
carrying a make-believe lantern.
Stretch out your hand,
touch the horizon.

Ruth Bavetta's poetry has been published in Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Rhino, Rattle, Poetry East, North American Review, Atlanta Review, and Poetry New Zealand, among others, and is included in the anthology Twelve Los Angeles Poets. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California, California State College San Bernardino, and Claremont Graduate School.

Three Poems From Anthony Nannetti

2010-04-02T12:17:00.005-03:00

OVER UNDER

You demand more space
with a straight face,
and I see
a dead farmer planted in his own north forty
or an obituary written for an obituary writer.
The end is never easy,
but hope is in the bending tree
whose roots will draw life to it.
So sit awhile, I’ll counsel.
Just be still and stay
until I get away.

LEAGUE STREET

The butcher with a young lamb over his shoulder
dodged church-bound widows in the heavy snow.
Monsignor’s Impala was an unfinished Pieta.
I sold shopping bags by a barrel fire
where my father displayed his martyrs and Marys
around the Infant of Prague on a countertop.
A hard grind for a dollar,
and the saints gave way over time
to ballerinas that twirled on musical platforms
and ceramic puppies with saucer eyes.

TO NINO

It was cheaper to kill you than to have you groomed.
I walked home with your collar and leash in a bag,
convinced that all traces of my past were gone.
How like a foreigner I felt, without my bosom friend ----
without turds to collect when I got back,
the house just as we’d left it.

Anthony Nannetti is an English teacher with the School District of Philadelphia. He lives in the Bella Vista section of the city with his wife and two daughters. Nannetti's poetry has appeared in Guardian Unlimited, PhiladelphiaStories, Ygdrasil, Forge Journal, and Bijou Poetry Review.

Three Poems From Peggy Aylsworth

2010-03-19T16:33:00.003-03:00

THE CROWDING THORNS

Reading Lolita, she grew thirsty,
aware she had swallowed
too much sugar.

What surfaced in resistant waves:
desire’s monster. Lollipops
had been too easy.

Sucked into an urge to bite,
she tainted the air with innuendos,
tumbling the woman

from her fragile scaffolding.
Not a plot, but there he was,
ready for her lure

once his wife had crumbled,
a Humpty Dumpty without horses
to refit her pieces.

The prickly vines curl round
and round, sprouting their
contagious blooms,

nightshade, undetected, til
the birds’ song dwindles
in the crowding thorns.

GATHER THE PIECES

Her world grew steadier with lines
and configurations to build safety
out of wood. In the eyes of cows
she found a door, entered their chests.

One day, the pieces fit, broken crockery
not whole, but standing on its own.
Without customary language we rely
on the sound of weather or water

slipping through the hands of children.
In the wilds of Wyoming horses blocked
the road. That night snow shifted the light,
pulling faded shadows out of the cracks.

The woman in the bed refuses to wait
for the cat to jump into her lap. Signals
of life and death travel over wide landscapes,
crows flying, trembling the winter trees.

THE RATTLE OF NO REPLY

The days torn at the edges,
crows unraveling the tapestry.

I slip to the far end of my premise,
pressed by the leftover reckoning .

Each room breaks its windows
from inside. Wind, a false prophet

of weather. Birds spread the air,
a response on the broken wire.

Unwrap. My words tick into time,
hanging themselves, still wet,

on a line too distant. And yes,
the berries are drying to stone.

Peggy Aylsworth's poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rattle, The Emily Dickinson Anthology, Ars Interpres, Poetry New Zealand, and other journals in the US and abroad. She is the author of a collection of poems titled Small Lightning. Additionally, Aylsworth collaborated with her husband Norm Levine on two books of poems from Momentum Press: Letters to the Same Address and Along These Lines. A retired psychotherapist, she lives in Santa Monica, California.

Three Poems From Michael McLane

2010-03-01T17:09:00.013-03:00

Exam

age is carefully measured
in valleys of grinding bone
the weight of heaven
on the ankles, knees
and hips.

or within the hairline
cartography of plates
keeping our selves together
in the tumbling china
of our skulls –

this at least is natural.
calibration, smallest line
the vanishing point
the trajectory
in either direction.

harder still is the hole
observatory behind the ear,
perfectly round intrusion
that pulls outside matters in
with it, vacuum of all

concentrated life, in this small
room. a hole behind the ear,
absence of measurement, edge
of parietal, ledge of the table,
frame of the door

Answer Key

(Specimen 10: adult male; age: 20-25; cause of death; gunshot wound to base of parietal lobe; provenance: body recovered from Golan Heights)

                             That is all we know.

the symptom is monument

                             there was a fort here once, now a gift shop

statuary

                             I don’t remember why it is called Armory Hill

Zion has the sound of electricity. Or orbit. Or ejection.

                             we hide the syllabics of violence behind hand-carved
                                     names

triptych of dedication, memorial, stone. behind it, a canvas

                             one must show their work. Provenance is often
                                     confused for an exotic locale. it is neither.

meadow. beach. walk. snowfall.

                             do not forget how life echoes through a table

Weather

When I was very young, I loved electrical storms above all else. I would take my blanket and small eyes and lay out at the edge of the garage, trembling. In the place where the world opened out into oblivion. A word I had yet to sputter and stumble over. My mother would pull the blanket back under the eaves, the spiders, the boxes of abandoned clothes and cradles. Or she would drag me to the back patio, where I could see only fingertips of bolts, the slightest hints of strings on the world, where the thunder would rattle the charcoal in the grill or the loose shingles above me. We lived in the desert then, at the foot of mountains that burned even in rain. I asked which of us angered the gods but I did not say it loud enough. They clanged away above me like I did after locking myself out of the house not once, but twice. The day two men tried to steal me away was sunny, but that night it rained hard and no one could catch me. That was the definition of fear, or at least its perimeter. There is nothing to be afraid of, my mother said, pulling me back out of the rain again and again, but you can see everything fine from here. Of course this made no sense, but neither did the smell of the cooling concrete, the heat rising from the ground to complicate the world.

Michael McLane completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Colorado State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Interim, Colorado Review, Salt Flats Journal and Sugar House Review. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Five Juéjù From Li Bai

2010-02-17T22:04:00.001-03:00

Yellow Crane Tower:
Farewell to Meng Haoran on his Trip to Guangling

To Yellow Crane Tower and the West you wave goodbye
Under March mist's blossoms you descend towards Yangzhou
Your lone sail vanishes into the shadows of jade mountains
Until all I see is the Yangtze flowing to the edge of the sky

黄鶴樓送孟浩然之廣陵

故人西辭黃鶴樓
煙花三月下揚州
孤帆遠影碧山盡
惟見長江天際流

Visit to Lu Shan: Waterfall

Sun lights the violet mist of Incense Stove Mountain
Far off I see a waterfall hanging above a stream
It flies out spreading down three thousand feet
I think it is the Silver River falling from Seventh Heaven

望廬山瀑布

日照香爐生紫煙
遙看瀑布掛前川
飛流直下三千尺
疑是銀河落九天

Night Thoughts

Across the floor bright moon so bright
I think it is hoarfrost on the fields
I lift my head to gaze at the bright moon
I hang my head thinking of home

夜思

床前明月光
疑是地上霜
舉頭望明月
低頭思故鄉

Descent to Jiangling

Dawn farewell to Baidi among the glowing clouds
Three hundred miles to Jiangling in one day's float
Monkeys howl from both shores without stop
Already my skiff has passed ten thousand rows of mountains

下江陵

朝辭白帝彩雲間
千里江陵一日還
兩岸猿聲啼不住
輕舟已過萬重山

For Wang Lun

Li Po climbs aboard wishing to leave
Suddenly from shore the sound of footfalls and song
Peach Blossom Pool is a thousand feet deep
Doesn't touch how Wang Lun's farewell makes me feel

贈汪倫

李白乘舟將欲行
忽聞岸上踏歌聲
桃花潭水深千尺
不及汪倫送我情

Translated by Andrew Haley

Lǐ Bái (李白), known in the West as Li Po, was born to exiles in present-day Kazakhstan in 701. He spent his youth in Sichuan, near Chengdu, studying Taoism and other subjects. Rather than sit for the civil service exam, Li Bai left Sichuan at the edge of twenty-five, sailing down the Yangtze River. For thirty-five years, he led an itinerant, drunken, profligate and prolific life -- never settling anywhere for long, and writing upwards of a thousand poems which are considered among the apex of Chinese literature. Li Bai drowned in the Yangtze in 762, trying to drunkenly embrace the moon. He was returning to Sichuan after a life of exile.

The poems here are juéjù -- a poetic form popular in the Tang era. They are quatrains with either seven or five syllable lines, an aaba rhyme scheme and a distribution of tones that seeks to give the poems a tonal regularity. Heavily influenced by Taoism and Chán -- a Chinese prototype of Zen that flourished in the Tang dynasty -- juéjù strive to "see the big within the small" (小中見大).

Lucille Clifton

2010-02-14T17:42:00.000-03:00

27 June 1936 - 13 February 2010

Tomás Eloy Martínez

2010-02-01T17:01:00.000-03:00

16 July 1934 - 31 January 2010

JD Salinger

2010-01-28T16:12:00.003-03:00

1 January 1919 - 27 January 2010

Six Poems From Andrea Perkins

2010-01-22T21:20:00.007-03:00

Dance With Parent

you must have a strong leg,
sticky hands, and be free on saturday

to take this class
you must be vivid, wrong, submerged

the soft, warm head of your child
obvious, the rest buried in sand

or earth, that spinning cradle
which only breaks under the heavy flapping of ghosts

you will learn how to balance on air’s cutting edge
and lift infant up until it spreads all ten limbs

outward, gazing forward, moving always up

The Weight of Hair

there is a point at which we cross over
and with the ease of landed gentry or a small animal
meet the monster of light, abraxas,
or as they say here, abracadabra

until that happens, your expectations will be knifing you,
hope and fear interchangeable,
you might even bury your heart up to the neck
and leave a glimmering in the vestibule
next to your root and claw
and all because life is passing and there is no coin
that can get you back

so what if the day moves in and down
towards its own red ending?
maybe down in that hole,
is the bottom, the beginning
or at the very least an electricity made
by all this

words that are waves not baskets
baskets that are macabre embroilments
not love, subpoenaed by marshlight,
by rings of saturn crossing seas of ice

my advice is:

write your name in snow
so nobody who is sleepwalking
in the forest will see it
later, when they awake
from hunger and cold, from dreams of fur and gold,
wearing pajamas, they will see smoke
in the distance and follow it back to camp
all the while wanting heated mansions,
hearts with wings or skulls with wings

ok so this is where it starts getting into trouble
like it’s two in the morning and we’re going into a walgreens

Plow

nail in the wall,
unfinished pearl,
onions splitting their shoots in the near ground

my reflection
in the expanse of cold window
grows a beard of night

nail in the wall, stick in the mud,
a Grecian perfection of loins and teeth and the future
which is already here, a cathedral
where I spit out my time
and awaken

in this little life
a plow is both a shape and a tool

Our Mascot The Angel

in this most difficult of games
the winner must molt his or her wings like beetles in heat
and wind round with wings and legs in a kind of
dark glomming until he or she is vani-
shed.
another, easier game, played in the ancient night with cards
and natural masks, is still played even today.
down in the valley they call it ‘love in a laundromat.’
the loser of it sings a tidy lament on augury and vice.

Free Labor
taken almost entirely from a piece of junk mail
sent to the author on Christmas

4 apprentices (2 sitting, 2 standing)
talking about the luster of certain strawberries.
the silence that follows is yellowy.

the practice of the apprentices
is to work in their own time
or for money wages,
a quarter dollar a day.

work from six to nine, then breakfast. work
from ten to one, then lunch. from three to six,
rest.

others work in little gardens around negro houses
and seem always well pleased to be fully employed.
i know a small estate worked exclusively on this system.
it is in excellent order.

Three Poems

1. Hacienda

make no mistake,
they went there

family got into car on dark street,
sprinklers hissing all around

there was no time
for binoculars

in vast cement basements
dogs ate light

2. Ur

pluck the string
and the girl moves for you,
gives you a soft courage
beneath the teetering worm

stop looking up, look down, they say
they say: work work

and no ocean known, or just one
loaned on erasure

3. Basic Night

there are no other worlds without end

may ends, then a month without water

the townspeople drink dew from leaves
twice in a year without rain
the prize goes to the one who can stand
all day with a gaping hole in his chest

Andrea Perkins' non-fiction has appeared in Egypt Today, Coast News, MetroActive and New West Magazine. Her poetry has been found in Paper Salad, The Cement Boat, Girls With Insurance and elsewhere. She writes mostly fiction, but this has only (so far) shown up on lamp posts in her friend Otis' imagination. Born in Utah, she has lived in Egypt, California, Tennessee, and currently Hawaii.

New Poetry From Sundin Richards

2010-01-05T17:50:00.003-03:00

The Last of The First of The Last

Conversazione
you can't barge

In here without
permission

I'm deeply sick
of you

And want to be
left alone

Lorn not
crazy

Waiting
for the sky

To sur
render

You spin
and your

Hair spins
with you

Fire your flies
all you want

It won't change
things

O grace that
I miss

O hunger
skipped

My very
own Alecto

Tighten the
screws a bit

I'm starting
to get soft

Under the
overpass

Heliotaxis
is the only job

A necessary
trip or function

The real cause
and ruction

Of all this
movement

Never is
always

Is the
genius loci

Of this
field of fire

I've made
this saftey

Ex gratia
exactly

Cheers to a
mobacracy

The main spring
done sprung

I'm going to sink my
teeth in you now

Warm and
friendly

Comb the
barbiturates

Out of
your hair

And climb
in the car

My love
we've got

Aways
to go yet

Despite the
calendar

Or
phenomenon

So I'm a
heresiarch

So
what?

This idiolect
will last as

Long as it
needs to

A switcheroo
a switchblade

I held you dear
in the late

Morning of
this thing

Short shadows
are guessed

Growing longer
is assumed

In all
sincerity

Put on your
gym shoes

And kick
rocks

An S carved
into flesh

A stereopticon
for heritage

Thanks for treat
ing me so well

Sundin Richards' poems have appeared in Girls With Insurance, Colorado Review, Interim, Volt, Cricket Online Review and Western Humanities Review, where he won first place in the 1999 Utah Writers' Contest. His book The Hurricane Lamp is forthcoming from ONLS press.

New Poems From Reid Mitchell

2009-11-10T18:05:00.002-03:00

FELISBERTO HERNANDEZ

You built dolls for the owner

of the black house, played piano

for the scenes you put in his mind,

gave him two wives, one bride unstripped,

hydraulic cunts, and mirrors

too many to count. You invited

all of us into the black house,

and I went in not knowing

that I could never get out.

Nights have grown so long

I need some woman to hold

but you have made me afraid

of trusting where I touch. The owner

of this house hired imaginations.

Imagine me a way to get out.

No Trumpets

When I arrive to desert rock and the long laddered night

to wrestle crude angels and dislocate my hip,

I find a trick, a cornball trick: there’s only me:

A cheap, shoddy revelation, not worth the making.

So I squat and I dream of water in a cold clay jug

that I must tug from your rough hands.

You have some notion of blessing me

with scattered drops lost from your sacred palms

and magic’d away before they plop

on my increasingly golden head,

my self-appointed saint

with your cool alabaster mosaic feet.

I dream and squat halfway to almanac’d dawn.

The angel of fire and the angel of ice

the angel of sun and the angel of testimony

play dice over our ghosts,

a penny a point,

and leave us egg, salt, and flatbread for manna,

dew to drink whenever we, shadowless, wake

from our never sufficient sleep,

and start our days again, blinded.

YOU DON’T GET ONE THING WITHOUT THE OTHER

My days have known nothing of my nights

furious storms breaking retaining walls

and floods that drowned my mind

stranded my soul on slate rooftops

sent my eyes and lips and liver floating fast

and boiled waters into waste

My nights, spent in shelters with night people

assembling new solutions from a saved pocket watch,

grand maw-maw’s crochet, photographs of fatal surgery

and their collections of foreign songs and feathered wings

I see ankles finer than madness

shoulders greyer than pearl

mouths rouged with pinot noir

thighs as thin as poppets

earrings strung out on clotheslines

and patience as short

as Pepin the dwarf in the vaudeville next door.

I have seen the starry dome crack itself to let in moonlight and rain.

Reid Mitchell is a New Orleanian living in Quanzhou, China. His poems have been published in numerous journals, including Pedestal, In Posse, Softblow, and Cha, where he is currently guest poetry editor. Mitchell's novel A Man Under Authority was published by Turtle Point Press. He frequently writes with Hong Kong poet Tammy Ho.

New Poetry From Richard Cronshey

2009-10-26T19:52:00.006-03:00

Between Hank Williams and John Donne The Shadow Falls
And I Am The Shadow

Today I past you on the street
and my heart whose matter is soon spent
in you shall burn
the world. I can’t help it, I
am still not good, not bad, my heart
belonging
to no one does not belong to me.
If my life got wasted by you
smoked up
in your life, that would be
a kind of victory for me,
a birthing into my own petrified
destiny or burning essence.
In this world I’m left to wander
Wondering through this world alone
When blossoms unfold
A plaything
Alone and forsaken
With sad madness and gimpy legs
Poor as dirt through slow motion years
On property that had been mine
If I hadn’t fathered that bastard
Doppelganger
Illegally with a bunch of outlaw
Metaphors upon virgin earth
And thereby jinxed shitless me..
The venom of all stepdames, gamsters gall
That I may know, and see your milky bright
Sillouette, but you send back my eyeballs
And celestial pump, No Longer at
This Address and this is the midnight
Of my life’s embarrassing year.
Oh where has it gone to, my leg,
My life smiling on me?

A hound in the distance is starting to bey.
Now a pair of chaoses and a lot of absence
Frequent me, an abysmall distillation
Looks me up and down. The world’s
Whole sap is sunk., Bayou Pon Pon.
O Sweet Marie she’ll dance. The hydroptique
Earth has drunk, and everybody’s having fun
But me. Lord I don’t know how
To lose all others, from all things
For I am every dead thing.
To make the doubt clear I tried
And I tried to make her satisfied.
I’m nobody’s sugar daddy now.
There you are folks.
If the good lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise
The heavens get off on moving.
Pleasure’s not pleasure
If you don’t spread it around.
The sun in its radiant chair
Isn’t greedy with the heat and lordy neither
Will I be, sister subjection think these things cheerfully
Restless on the farm. Don’t take your guns to town
Son and make a spirit feare .
These stars are so many beads strung
On a single speeding string as is the pith
Whose quick succession makes it still
One thing. To pass an age
In her in whose body
This low world gets up and runs.
So hep your brother along the road, Terese,
Anette and Jole Blon. They have a good time,
O yes, oui, oui. But what good would it do.
I know I’d still want you.

The hogs took the cholera.
This must, my soul, be the long and short of it
To go on overthinking the thing and remembering
Her body that was the opposite of jail to me. I’m dirt
And you’re the ocean of loss
Invironning all and gnawing and breaking
My banks. Thanks a lot. Nothing but me
Of all invenom’d things
Blackmailed by my appetites
Am a decoy recanting death. I take up porcelain
Where they buried clay and usurpe
The body as the sea which
When it gets also sheds you numerlesse
Infinities tis late to ask abundance
Of your grace. See how the sun’s
Headlong conflagration begets
Strange creatures in Bayou Pon Pon?
In me your fatherly yet annoying ryme
Has wrought the same contamination.
Why don’t you spark me
Like you used to do?

Richard Cronshey was born in Los Angeles in 1966. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including most recently The Snow and The Snow. Cronshey's poems have appeared previously in Zone.

Raymond Federman

2009-10-07T14:50:00.002-03:00

15 May 1928 - 6 October 2009

Jim Carroll

2009-09-14T21:26:00.002-03:00

1 August 1950 - 11 September 2009

Five Poems From Michael Graber

2009-07-13T17:02:00.002-03:00

Instructions for Making Love to a Goddess

Prepare for months before entering her
chamber: fast, do body work, drink pure
fruit juices. This is an altar, so be humble
or be humiliated by her shriveling pranks.
She knows what takes you to your knees.
Wait until she unties her hair before you
unbutton her blouse. Did you remember
to consecrate the encounter with a gift?
Listen with your hands. Scan her body for
parts too long untouched. Stay in the space
between total surrender and discipline.
Don’t be scared to ask her what feels good.
When she laughs, you will stagger, drunk.
The music her body makes sounds like
the world’s oldest hatreds and freshest
healings, waking the dead from trance.
As for speed, interpret your instructions
from the river. Be as intimate as food
in fire. With the ache of birthing, repeat
her name aloud as a mantra. If you’ve
gotten this far, your life has changed
shape and you awake in a country
where judges, sheiks and rabbis, even
dollars have no authority. The poem
you write must stand on its own. Yet,
you cannot sit for long after light breaks
your being. Here, you master patience.
Like a boat tethered to a pier, you are
tied to this dance the length
of her infinite satisfaction.

Longing

I.          When you see the wet hair and swimming-
toned torso the way of water no longer
makes sense. One glance and sailors
moan for shipwreck. Most desire drowning,
yet I would live to discover a new land
on my native shore.
                                     When the fever beads
dried I could not explain how a mermaid
blew the grace of breath into me, how she
lulled me to sleep with her underwater laugh.
I blinked. She lay in my bed. Her shapely,
human legs wrapped around my body
like a wave. She laughed the same laugh,
explained “I survived the molting by licking
dried saltwater off your beard.” I was shaved
clean.

II.                                This legend. This acorn. This story—
a seed in a hard shell. One nibble on the neck
and the shell cracks open. A kiss and a single
green sprout announces its birth. Another
nibble and rings grow inside the oak.

III.           I wake up walking an old growth forest trail.
I pause to get grounded. I know this place,
its idioms and shapes know me. If this is the land
of love, may I learn its language and taste
homecoming in its tongue? If this is the land
of the living, I could die almost satisfied.

Leave Your Longing Open

My children, here is a secret
that cannot sit still. Your father
is a collection of ecstatic particles
held with great gobs of glue, called

love. One foot dances in another
stream of conversation that travels
faster than light. I have been alone
so long in the televised world,

breaking acorn shells so oak roots
can sabotage the satellites’ signals
and leaves can grow through the
slight crack of your smart phone

to remind you how to listen. Slow
down and leave your longing open.

Shadows on the Cave Wall

When they took off the blindfold I saw
all I would embrace years from then. Fear
engenders fantasy, and stories get told for
lesser purposes of help or healing, so I noticed
only the darker ones twirling. A door that really
wasn’t there was locked with lead. The dark robes
danced and their masks looked like my neighbors—
lawyers, merger-and-acquisition matchmakers, ex
in-laws, smirks of those seduced and those who seduced,
falling faces caught in compromises that cost almost as much as
peak performance, future mistakes I could not learn from
before kissing you. Shaking at the mouth of the cave, all
the lies I ever told paraded in the shadow the fire casts. My life
followed this snake of sound where the flute chased the strings
around the meandering drum beats. Dark from five days rain,
I did not know what I might back into, but it was better
than stammering at a threshold I was not ready
to cross. I backed into a brook and drowned.
Reborn by mouth-to-mouth breath,
so little separates us from living.

Let’s Go Say Hi to the River

Our footprints may take the wind
a few days to mend. The mud slows
down our pace because life takes off
faster here and you must trudge to soak
it in. O lover, spread our blanket. Let me
fall before I slide down the bank. If you
listen, you can hear the waterlogged souls
who drowned nearby and the warbled,
falsetto howls of the teenager hanging
from the old train bridge by one arm.
Behind us two people married, but not
to each another, grope in frenzy as if
speed enhances bliss. Here, by the oak
with a face in its bark, you and I move
with the understanding the river has
with the land that cradles it; its soil
enriched by the same flowing waters.
Life abounds where the Mississippi bends.
The sun turns our flesh pink, another lesson
where a little heals but too much might
be dangerous. We kiss and the river responds.
Its current pours through us. In the rush
the earth asks us to exchange vows.
We accept. The river melds our names,
our blood, our tribes. To pay creation’s
priest for the ceremony, we offer our lives.
Deal, echoes the woods, now abandon your plans,
risk everything to sing the song you just heard.

Michael Graber is the author of The Last Real Medicine Show. Since September 11th, 2001 he has chosen to write only love poetry. Graber runs the Southern Growth Studio, lives in Oxford, MS, and plays mandolin with the Memphis band, the Bluff City Backsliders.

Carol Gunther

2009-07-04T21:28:00.000-03:00

2 June 1954 - 4 July 2009

New Poetry From Andrew Baron

2009-06-30T11:21:00.002-03:00

Zone, Happy Anniversary

Not of marriage, because what’s that?
There’s a new space         (this one, ours)
born of new age.     So happy

here,

together.

The managers would have us earn it,
nurse us on their image then
chain us to a corner of their freedom.

Fuck them.     The only
image is a pulse
keeps this in motion,
beats our distances
into days around no vein.          May

this stay
a city with no center

and happy spread the plague up to the gates.

Andrew Baron's poems have appeared previously in Zone. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Mario Benedetti

2009-05-17T10:53:00.001-03:00

14 September 1920 - 17 May 2009

Idea Vilariño

2009-04-28T11:41:00.002-03:00

18 August 1920 - 28 April 2009

Craig Arnold

2009-04-27T04:11:00.000-03:00

16 November 1967 - 27 April 2009

Three Poems From George Moore

2009-04-21T15:53:00.004-03:00

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

2009-04-19T11:41:00.000-03:00

15 November 1930 - 19 April 2009

An Interview With Horton Foote

2009-03-04T23:59:00.000-02:00

Horton Foote, who passed away today, was perhaps the most under-appreciated playwright of the American stage. Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta, Foote was best known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird. His screenplay for Tender Mercies won the Best Original Screenplay award the following year. While Foote was the author of nearly 50 plays, several of them adapted for film, his truest work was the nine-play Orphans' Home Cycle, which chronicled rural Texas in the early part of the 20th century.

Longtime contributor Andrew Haley interviewed Horton Foote in 1995.

AH: It has been said that there are three plays in every play – the play that is written, the play that is interpreted, and the play that is performed. You work personally with all three of these areas of your plays. Where does the writer stand in the production of his script?

HORTON FOOTE: It depends on the writer. Some writers are not very interested in the process. Having been an actor and director, I find it extremely interesting and am there as much as possible.

AH: With the increased convenience to find entertainment in the living room, via cable, satellite dishes, the internet; and an anti-aesthetical Congress in power, the outlook of the future of theatre is hazy. Do you foresee the decline of the state of American theatre in the next century?

HORTON FOOTE: I think all obstacles you mention are just new challenges. In theatre it seems there are always things impossible to overcome. Somehow, we stick to it and get the work done and I trust and hope this will always be so.

AH: You write your first drafts by hand. Hemingway wrote by hand as well, with the exception of his dialogue, which he wrote by typewriter. Are there identifiable characteristics in dialogue written by hand, by typewriter, and by computer?

HORTON FOOTE: I write by hand because it makes me feel that much closer to my work. I feel that a typewriter is impersonal and the computer horrifies me!

AH: Poets, short story writers, and novelists all have dozens of magazines and publishing houses to print their work. For playwrights, the venues are not as clear. As a major figure in the present world of theatre and film, what is your advice to young playwrights on how to climb the ladder of stage writing success?

HORTON FOOTE: This has to be the most difficult question to answer. It has never been easy for a playwright to get established. I wish I could answer this with some measure of sense. All I can say is if one has to write plays one will and somehow persevere.

Horton Foote

2009-03-04T23:40:00.000-02:00

14 March 1916 - 4 March 2009

New Poems From Peter Golub

2009-02-12T04:14:00.003-02:00

In the Library

my love
everything is circumstance
for instance the onerous hippy in the corner
just dropped his cigarettes
the waitress picked them up
causing the men eating chili at the table next to mine
to turn their heads
in unison
like hounds following a scent or sound

they are talking
about how they don't feel global warming
one guys says,
"well, it seems like a whole lot
of people have been convinced."
another nods putting a cracker in his mouth,
"yeah well, America is pretty resilient"

I turn with them
and see the waitress's ass
and remember yours
naked and white
in the dim light of the library
where the long mirror stands over the fireplace
I could see myself in it
there were two of me
one watching you
the other watching me
it is this description
of my desire watching me
and you the object of my desire
wading in a pool of yellow light
that is the occasion for this poem

on my walk home
the winter trees tumescent and black with fog
a memory of you walks with me
turning the houses, trees, and weather
into our acolytes

this morning
I stood before a classroom of young men and women
some of them bored
some wide eyed some sitting methodical as at a play
and I often feel like I am a one man act
performing some ancient picture
written before the Aristotelian dichotomy
…but yes some of them methodical, some bored
txting on their phones
and all of them with the same anticipation
whether bored or wide eyed
they are expecting something
looking into the future with pictures in their eyes

in this class
acting before them
their eyes full of pictures
I imagined my reflection
in the library
and you standing naked
reading in the light

Salt Lake City Fragments

for Andy

you are behind once again
the truth is cheap smarty pants
and people are stupid
and the markets crash
against the levees
while you and I pray
we pray for what we've nearly forgotten
with these stale words
we make new cries
like children in the fields
playing at being sheep
we eat hay
and sculpt mud pies
we scream and yank each other's genitals
in sweaty nylon tents
with writing on the walls
flapping in the tremendous wind
you yell to me
from across the dark
across the hudson
across the jordan river
in salt lake
the salty sea
that never freezes over
and giant birds roost in the desert
the promontories
hanging over head
you scream to me
from across the world
inside your tiny emails
and sad jokes
you scream
that it's like camping in space
that the children are made of microwave parts
that they run around with buttons for eyes
video game equipment for ears
heads like broken BMW's from the flood
o lordy lordy lordy

House Keys

In the book we are always writing
I stand naked in the shower
Watching a red spider crawl up the slippery light blue tile
As you stand in your small shower
Thinking of Elvis and hockey

Outside the pigeons huddle in the roofs of old houses
Snow blows into the basement
Of a drunk heart sailing on a row boat
The music we write for the novel is simple but complex
Ridiculous as an autistic dirge with pretensions of sublime proportions

In the final scene which we write and rewrite
Sometimes I am standing on the shores of a warm tropical island
And you hand me a shell with a dead crab
Sometimes you are pale in these pastiches at other times
A roaring red with blood squirting out your eyes

It is all quite stupid and extraordinary
Drawing small plastic swords like straws
Throwing fishcakes out of the fourth floor window
Drunk and happy we begin anew heading into the next absurd sorrow
Wailing nearly mad

Writing the Poem about Love

After writing the poem about love
Where I use words like “boat” “snow” and “wailing”
I hear Andrew practicing French in the adjacent room
And Anna watching the television in another adjacent room
A house is made of adjacent rooms
The way a poem is made of adjacent words
Each word is full of its own events
Trying to enjoy itself without waking the neighbors

After writing the poem about love
I send it to Anastasia
Which is how I learn it is a poem about love
I rarely know what I am writing about
And lately have had a hard time thinking
Of appropriate titles
My cousin suggests getting rid of the title
I take away the title and the ending
After writing the poem about love
And taking away the title and the ending
I let it sit inside the computer screen
It looks naked and a little scared
The way a family looks at the doctor in charge of a sick relative
The doctor remembers his own family
The dog waiting under the table and his two daughters playing
Inside a grove of tall poplars

After writing the poem about love
I consider the argument that all poems are love poems
And a series of other clichés come to mind
Poems are prayers, poems are the dead
The title must stand like a French man inside a Portuguese play
A heart is the size of the ocean
The mountain speaks in snow

…

Peter Golub is guest editor at Jacket.

John Updike

2009-01-27T19:07:00.004-02:00

18 March 1932 - 27 January 2009

New Poetry From Andrew Dotson

2009-01-23T20:35:00.004-02:00

Scumboy

Too many times I’ve lied

Lied to you, to myself

On your futon sprawled like an open sparrow

That moment you saw me at the back of the bus

Hunched into line

Expecting nothing

You remarked about my gold watch

And I winced.

You were far apart

Yet so near

To me at the terminal

Where we debussed

Rambling in aimless effort

Entering a cool bistro amid a sweltering wave

You couldn’t afford to foot my terms

So we left to find a better plane.

It was there that things began

At that mahogany table

In the Hotel Congress

Wared through the ages

Serving countless customers

Through flappers, to corporates

To vagrants – you

Offering me a chance to get better acquainted

Sucking marijuana smoke through a tube.

The ultimate resolution

I didn’t go with you that first day

Up to your greasy flat filled with cans

To loll some and let the seriousness fade.

I kept firm, played hard to get

So hard when you called me I went to relent

The next time you spotted me

Sitting in the courtyard

I agreed.

It lasted, then ended

All else my departure

I wanted so much for it

But what?

You to seize me

You to please?

But that was too much to ask for.

Too many times I’ve lied

Lied to you, to myself

Reclined on my spine

In wait for the unexpected to come at last

My comic book geek, my scumboy

That trance…

Andrew Dotson is a 19 year-old poet, songwriter and student currently residing in Arizona. His poetry has appeared previously in Zone.

Three Poems From RC Miller

2009-01-08T00:22:00.005-02:00

MOTION LOTION

This is a rock from the earth.
We will curse it warm.
This is how we train ourselves.

On overdose rumors
Let us continue having lungs.

O my puddle.
O my smoked person.
O my puddle of briers.

Mimicking the muzzle of gizzard bags
We must turn back
Toward the two-headed mermaid's shifty lagoon.

We must reach back
For the one-footed crow.
We must be swept back
Into a collection of shingles
Falling from the one-footed pigeon's stubby deliverance.

O my puddle.
O my smoked person.
O my profession of briers.

O shit say word.

Innate surrender makes known what really is,
From where,
From how what is came to be.

The transcendence of the sickle
Speculating an event unborn.
Our kindle of excessive kingdoms
Amazing as a beauty without risk.

Within its multiple nature
The approaching world humiliates another womb
Innately liberating our authentic hypnosis.

On a scale not worshipped before
Derivative outbreaks reject the broth of delusion
Foraging multiple lumps
Obsessed with yet another zipper not graphic enough,
Another reflector
Masquerading omens from our earliest interior.

O my wolves.
O my acid saliva wolves.
O our dignified collapse.

If in this twilight oven
The bitter dragon rain
Holds its saddle tightly,
Let glory praise the unborn
Fighting to mimic our seed.

Let glory praise
The highest pawnbrokers face to face,
Mounting bald microwaves on cruel meteors
Sweeping dizzy ash
Aroused to impress patches of disaster.

My black origins filter out
The tumbled crease of deceased husk.

My decay quiets
Like the wrinkled design of our sedation.

O we receive the black.
O we premiere the blank.

We disappear from window ledges
With black vomit on our rugs.

Our pious haze evasively submerged in jagged petal bodies.

Shadows ooze from the prophet's pores.
Halls are dedicated to green oil boiled in clay.

Octopus blood sits down
Snorting spooky bacon crowns.

Cargo of wood beyond the rock
Mirrors an innovation beyond our matter.

O my shit.
O my words.
O I stay

Below the itchy crucifix,
A space shaved by immense and anonymous smirks.

A needy enigma combing extra spasms,
Receiving the blank,
Premiering our black,

O there is no turning back.

CHEST OF BITCHES

The child toasts his wheel and winks.
I drink and work
As do indefinite feats.
The monks they peg a natural slave within reach.

You start your paws upon the threshold of another's flesh.
A buff Bin Laden moodswing
Pumps wastebaskets into the dicey rags.
Your shoulders are such spare orchards
Hoagie hopping the crunk and elusive mess.

Nihilism is my shuffling issue.
There I relapse
Manila prongs of recurring stink.

We cannot die.
We die.
My dark
I no longer borrow
A youth starved you.

On the run
I use your cleavage to masturbate
In seasons mocking
A certain damp snuff of tantrum.
Intimately we shuffle our issues.
What is imagined appears as reason.

We die with so much shock left to buy.
We cannot die no matter how chunk I dry.

From airline to flatline
I take disaster to give relief.
I pray our purpose remains a comedy
Starving those tamed at last.

From habitat to fracture
I flay in chalk to get relief.
Your shoulders soon weep their spares
Purring like rented glitches of me.

We've always died
Striving for the single string and curved branch
Made aware if they are carried.
It's too sad our tourniquets
Ebb when recovery moats
Arrange all flesh aflame.

My dark
I begin again where once was pride.

THE STORY SO FAR

Brains get chummy once the master conveys a torrid illusion
Called get lucky.
Brains a million and drumming up roses
Once placebos kill the downpour passing before we fall.
Everything's illusion.
The downpour's sequential, a manner for brains.
Our collars get lucky as they're mastered,
And everything's illusion and passing us dolls.
Ideas of the sacred, too old to derive sense from my youth.
I'm pigs sitting at desks.
I'm pigs watching their watches watch.
I'm pigs with points of view.
By day I want anything.
I want anything, but still
I'm an awful pill to get cummed on.
And as you grow the sun I taste the matter where we live.
A lonely when comes after night.
Though blindness is fun, another waits.
The plumber next door was busted by cops then buried alive.
My neighbor's rooftop is the best place to smoke weed.
Be it your breathmint or milkbone, I always make room for strangers.
All is sorrow.
There is sorrow.
The cause of sorrow.
The removal of sorrow.
The way to the removal of sorrow.
All is sorrow.

Born 1974 in Parkersburg, West Virgina, RC Miller is a poet and photographer currently living in New York City. He blogs sporadically at Vision Blues.

Harold Pinter

2008-12-25T05:50:00.003-02:00

10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008

Three Poems From Ayn Frances dela Cruz

2008-12-08T22:09:00.001-02:00

Highway

At the what I look at

That becomes

The space between strands

Of hair

O the never-ending fungus

Between my toes

Stand clear

I on an island

You on a highway

Roads out

All stars melancholy

As that sweet eyelash

Failing to fall on pupils.

I guess at the distance between stars,

Between Holy Ghosts,

Imagining blackness to be

A blank space

The nothing

That was nothing before

Which is now your heart

Beating

On this far-out space

This interstellar road

That calls all stars

Out with a mere wink,

Forget the bypasses,

I am the hand

That forges fingerprints

That smudges

That never lets go

That never ends

Pyramus and Thisbe

Sweet wall that runs the length of this house, you

Hide my love from me, show me only parts.

One hand at a time, one eye at a time.

How does my kiss translate from my lips to

His, how soft the wall seems sometimes, from wall

To lips, I breathe in moss and moisture in

The space of one breath, one finger at a

Time, I touch those lips, that insipid breath.

One word at a time you whisper a word

One breath at a time you watch me breathing

This wall is your cheek I press mine against

I love the wall with my own fierce loving

Surrender myself to its cold, hard, touch

You, on the other side, look for a door.

Territory

Every inch of skin that belongs to me

Now also belongs to you.

Burning, I, Incense-bearer worship whose God?

With what Heart, with whose hands do we leave nirvana?

How many times must a hand be reborn as air?

Then am I only kissing winds?

Ayn Frances dela Cruz, 23, is a teacher at Mapúa Institute of Technology. This is her third year in the graduate program of Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines. She attended the 7^th University of Santo Tomas National Writers Workshop as a fellow for English poetry. Some of her work has been published in Philippine Graphic, Paliparan, The Argotist Online, The Flask Review, Kritya and previously in Zone.

Three Poems From Enrique Molina

2008-11-13T21:16:00.010-02:00

Drifters

We never had house patience a blank slate
But a little farther nearer nothing
The lanterns
Tremble softly
Yellow always broken neck hotels
And your crude china for suicide or melancholy
–Oh the errant squawking from the gambrel!
We slept at random with mountains huts
Below the high destruction of heaven soon to burn with untenable fire
Joined to the passing tree gone farther
Often leaning out of ruined windows
Of balconies in flames or ashes

In those country beds
The rain is equal to kisses you undressed
Turning sweetly in the darkness with the rotation of the earth
Unpunished beauty beauty senseless
But only once once only
Love rolls its fate's thief's dice
If you lose you can savor the pride
Of contemplating your future in a fistful of sand.

So many abandoned faces!
So many doors of travel opening its cry!
So many girls the light drowns
Let loose their hair from the indelible region kissed by the wind
With immobile birds perched forever in their gaze
With the whistle of the train slowly pulling up its iron roots

With the battle of total abandon and total hope
With great markets teeming with numbers insults vegetables and souls
        closed above their black sacks of seeds
And the platforms dissolved into an iron foam
–Rambled time and consummation–
Tomb of decrepit days
Pretty as desire in earthly veins
Their fire is nostalgia
The tropics' lattice behind which are spiders tattered curtains and an
        old Victrola with the same unending song
But the lovers demand torments and frustrations
More subtle dangers:
Their past is incomprehensible and is lost like the beggar
Left behind at the last stormy stop

Amantes Vagabundos

Nunca tuvimos casa ni paciencia ni olvido
Pero un poco más lejos hacia nada
Están las lámparas de viaje
Temblando suavemente
Los hoteles de garganta amarilla siempre rota
Y sus toscas vajillas para el suicidio o la melancolía
-¡Oh el errante graznido sobre la cumbrera!
Dormíamos al azar con montañas o chozas
Bajo las altas destrucciones del cielo prontas a arder con un fuego inasible
Junto al árbol de paso que se aleja
A menudo asomados a ventanas en ruinas
A balcones en llamas o cenizas

En esos lechos de comarca
La lluvia es igual a los besos te desnudabas
Girando dulcemente en la oscuridad con la rotación de la tierra
Belleza impune belleza insensata
Pero sólo una vez sólo una vez
Juega el amor sus dados de ladrón del destino:
Si pierdes puedes saborear el orgullo
De contemplar tu porvenir en un puñado de arena.

¡Cuántos rostros abandonados!
¡Cuántas puertas de viaje entreabriendo su llanto!
Cuantas mujeres que la luz ahoga
Sueltan sus cabelleras de región indeleble besada por el viento
Con aves inmóviles posadas para siempre en su mirada
Con el silvo de un tren que arranca lentamente sus raíces de hierro

Con la lucha de todo abandono y de toda esperanza
Con los grande mercados donde pululan cifras injurias legumbres y almas
        cerradas sobre sus negros sacos de semillas
Y los andenes disueltos en una espuma férrea
—Desvarío tiempo y consumación—
Tumba de viejos días
Bella como el deseo en la venas terrestres
Su fuego es la nostalgia
La celosía del trópico tras la cual hay arañas cortinas en jirones y
        una vieja victrola con la misma canción inacabable
Pero los amantes exigen frustraciones tormentos
Peligros más sutiles:
Su pasado es incomprensible y se pierde como el mendigo
Dejado atrás en el paradero borrascoso

Secret Hotels

The nomad shining of the world
like the soul's ember a jewel of time
opens itself in solitude to the passing of certain storming deeds
swept by the current
to the stairs cut by the sea
in certain dens of lechery with shadowed rims
peopled with statues of kings
barely recognizable in the scintillation of the torches whose light
        is ivy covering the walls
Oh proud proud heart!
surrender to the phantom stationed in the door

Now that I know you so well
with no other thirst than your memory
melancholy creature touching my soul from afar
invoke in bedrooms the ecstasy and terror
the slow indomitable language of the passion for hell
and the venom of adventure with its crimes
Oh invoke once more the gusts of yesteryear
in these stone rooms entwined around your lover
wrapped together in the canvas of lost days like a corpse in the sea
they rapidly vanish in instantaneous pyres
above beds of mysterious metal that shines in the darkness beneath clawed
        candelabras
and the choir of lascivious birds furiously turning in the room sealed
        with the iron of other nights

Such solemn dens covered with carnivorous flowers
with marbles rotting in the shadow of opulent women
they balance carvings pompously from the gate to the cupola
like the ship anchored above the abyss
slowly shifting its mirrors to put the girl to sleep
she's nude between hangmen burning the heart of the night
and the warren where rain is crossed by frustration
the comrades with faces rotted by the stink of flowers
accumulated in infinite corridors
the sound of suffocated sighs
kisses woven in saddest mother-of-pearl
the nameless herb in which its guests are sinking
repeating once more in the shadows
the legend of love that never dies

Los Hoteles Secretos

El brillo nómade del mundo
como un ascua en el alma una joya del tiempo
se abre tan sólo al paso de ciertos hechos tormentosos
arrastrados por la corriente
hasta las escaleras cortadas por el mar
en ciertos antros de lujuria de bordes sombríos
poblados por estatuas de reyes
casi irreconocibles entre el reverberar de las antorchas cuya luz
        es la hiedra que cubre los muros
¡Oh corazón corazón orgulloso!
entrégate al fantasma apostado en la puerta

Ahora que tan bien te conozco
sin otra sed que tu memoria
criatura melancólica que tocas mi alma de tan lejos
invoca en las alcobas el éxtasis y el terror
el lento idioma indomable de la pasión por el infierno
y el veneno de la aventura con sus crímenes
¡Oh! invoca una vez más el gran soplo de antaño
en estas cámaras de piedra enlazada a tu amante
y ambos envueltos en la lona de los días perdidos como el muerto en el mar
y prontos a deshacerse en las hogueras instantáneas
sobre lechos de un metal misterioso que brilla en las tinieblas bajo la
        zarpa de los candelabros
y el coro de pájaros lascivos girando con furia en las habitaciones
        selladas por el hierro de otras noches

Pues tales antros solemnes cubiertos de flores carnívoras
con mánnoles que se pudren a la sombra de cabelleras opulentas
se balancean labrados pomposamente desde el portal hasta la cúpula
como la nave anclada sobre el abismo
agitando con lentitud sus espejos para adormecer a la mujer
desnuda entre los verdugos que incineran el corazón de la noche
y el zaguán donde se cruzan la lluvia y la frustración
los camareros con el rostro podrido por el tufo de las flores
acumuladas en los pasillos infinitos
el rumor de los suspiros sofocados
los besos entretejidos en nácar tristísimo
la hierba sin nombre en que se hunden sus huéspedes
repiten una vez más entre la sombra
la leyenda del amor que nunca muere

Poetic Works

The distant braying of the night whose green shell opens like a fish
The infancy of rain with errant greenhouse cheeks pledged by the vapor
        of plants
The loosened bonds that leave invisible scars
The music of bodies chosen by love for statues of fire raised on an
        infinite plain
Or in the harbor's shadow chased by a silver claw
With nails illuminated like the windows of distant homes in which one sees
        a poor girl preparing a meal for the beasts of her dreams
The palmettos' red candelabras where exile is whistling
The needles of live blood the birds to the end the clouds the suits of
        sequined sailors
And the heavy footsteps on the strange planet called Earth
Make us taste the days' lichen
The insatiable patience of men
Winter's drowning coughed up on the coast by the wind

Now I see the country of great wings
Limited tear by tear by all that which will never return
Crossed by the migration of souls towing their heavy buckets of blood and
        tools of passion and anger
Rooms invaded by giant ferns in which waits the fierce gray air of
        forgotten girls
Clutching a smile in their silken paws
But the loner caresses the lady from the distance covered in shining
        feathers and shuddering at the horror of nothingness
In the reverberation of singing and streetlights at dawn in the unknown
        station tortured by travelers
Streetlights that shine with a venomous charm
Like the serpent of eternal longing whose shadowy cage
Exhales an odor of butterflies decomposing inside a box of mysterious
        velvet covered in flames

An attic of ashes

A man advancing with his phantasm against the gust of dreams
Against these whirlwinds of feathers set in certain dead bird's rings
Oh the old days!
The earthy liquor:
A little cold meat on bread after a sip of soup
Spring's mummy in its coffin of gilded ice
A scorpion beside the key of light in a tropical hotel
The wooden chalice and idleness offered to the monkeys by a little
        vapor on a tropical stream
In these braids loosened on the breasts of love in the indescribable
        birds seen from the height of a caress
Oh the clanging of strange plates on which certain very sad girls ate
        pierced by a groan or a novel's breath
And nude still under the navy's curse

Oh the old days!
Passions misery and pride
An antique store looted by the bird of prey and scattered in the sun
And in which only time's pallid money is ever good
With tiny dirty gods rustling beneath your leaves
Until the instant they surprise those sleepless dives where apparitions hide
With nights in whose depths one sees girls in flames
Or the nurse sitting under the light of the banana tree
Covered in plaster and dark magnolias on her high cruel throne that carved
        the shattering
But more beautiful than all spring and all the world's victory
The great wing of immortal feathers born in everything destined to die!
Clothes and faces and alleys undressed by a same whisper of desperate
        goodbye
The never again amazes you
An embrace a throat a woman's sob that doesn't allude to these buried pyres
Reclaiming the same shadowed jewels for the same splendor:
The great halo of the far
And these enigmas of age dragging the heavy insoluble shards of a false and
        mysterious existence
With those whose eternal heartbeat pulses in the darkness
Unattainable as every human happiness
And transformed into the gleaming of things that once brushed against
        possessed or dreamed
In flesh and blood
Between the blazing of the earth

Los Trabajos de la Poesía

El lejano bramido de una noche cuya verde coraza se abre como un pescado
La infancia de la lluvia con mejillas de invernáculo errante empeñado por el
        vapor de las plantas
Las ligaduras sueltas que dejan cicatrices invisibles
La música de dos cuerpos escogidos por el amor para estatuas del fuego
        levantadas en una llanura infinita
O en la sombra de un puerto perseguida por una garra de plata
Con las uñas iluminadas como ventanas de hogares distantes en los que
        se ve a una pobre muchacha preparando el alimento para las bestias
                del sueño
Los rojos candelabros de palmeras donde silba el exilio
Las agujas de sangre viva los pájaros hacia el fin las nubes los trajes de
        lentejuelas marinas
Y el golpe de las pisadas en el extraño planeta llamado Tierra
Hacen el gusto a liquen de los días
La paciencia insaciable de los hombres
La ahogada del invierno arrojada a otra costa por el viento

Ahora veo el país de grandes alas
Limitado lágrima a lágrima por todo aquello que no vuelve jamás
Atravesado por la emigración de las almas arrastrando sus pesados cubos de
        sangre y sus utensilios de pasión y de cólera
Habitaciones invadidas por helechos gigantescos en las que acecha la fiera
        de aire gris de las mujeres olvidadas
Posando sus zarpas de seda en una sonrisa
Pero el solitario acaricia la cabellera de la distancia cubierta de plumas
        centelleantes y estremecida por el horror al vacío
En un reverbero de canciones y faroles en el amanecer de una estación
        desconocida torturada por los viajeros
Faroles que brillan con un hechizo venenoso
Como la serpiente de las añoranzas eternas cuyo estuche sombrío
Exhala un olor a mariposas descompuestas dentro de una caja de terciopelo
        misterioso envuelta en llamas

Un desván de cenizas

Un hombre avanzando con su fantasma contra la bocanada del sueño
Contra esos torbellinos de plumas engastados en ciertos anillos de pájaro
        muerto
¡Oh son los antiguos días!
Los alcoholes terrestres:
Un poco de alimentos fríos en un pan tras un trago de sopa
La momia primaveral en su ataúd de hielo dorado
Un escorpión junto a la llave de la luz en un hotel del trópico
El cáliz de madera y ocio ofrecido a los monos por un pequeño vapor en un
        río del trópico
Y esas trenzas abiertas sobre los senos del amor en los parajes indescriptibles
        vistos desde lo alto de una caricia
O el tañido de platos extranjeros de los cuales se alimentan algunas mujeres
        muy tristes atravesadas por un gemido o un soplo de novela
Y aún desnudas bajo la maldición marina

¡Oh son los antiguos días!
Pasiones miseria y orgullo
Una tienda de antigüedades saqueada por el pájaro de presa y esparcida
        al sol
Y en la que sólo vale el oro lívido del tiempo
Con diosecillos tenebrosos crujiendo bajo tus plantas
Hasta el instante de sorprender esos antros de insomnio donde se guardan las         apariciones
Con noches en cuyo fondo se ven niñas en llamas
O la enferma sentada bajo la luz del plátano
Cubierta de yeso y de magnolias sombrías sobre su alto trono de tortura que
        ha labrado el fracaso
Pero más bella que toda primavera y que toda victoria sobre el mundo
¡La gran ala de plumas inmortales que nace en todo aquello destinado
        a la muerte!
Vestidos y rostros y callejuelas anudadas por un mismo suspiro de adiós
        desesperado
Para que nunca más te maraville
Un abrazo una garganta o un sollozo de mujer que no aluda a esas hogueras
        enterradas
Reclamando las mismas joyas tenebrosas para el mismo esplendor:
La gran aureola de la lejanía
Y esos enigmas de la edad arrastrando pesados trozos insolubles de una
        existencia falsa y misteriosa
Con personajes de pulso eterno que laten en la oscuridad
Inalcanzables como toda dicha humana
Y convertidos en el resplandor de las cosas que rozaron poseyeron
        o soñaron alguna vez
En carne y hueso
Entre la llamarada de la tierra

Translated by Andrew Haley

Enrique Molina, born in Buenos Aires, November 2, 1910, traveled extensively in Europe and the Caribbean as a merchant marine before his first book of poetry Las Cosas y El Delirio (Things and Delirium) appeared in 1941. The author of nine books of poetry and one novel, Una Sombra Donde Suena Camila O'Gorman (A Shadow Where Camila O'Gorman Dreams), Molina co-founded the surrealist journal A Partir de Cero (Starting From Zero) with poet Aldo Pellegrini in Buenos Aires in 1952. A painter as well as man of letters, he died November 13, 1997 in Buenos Aires.

Enrique Molina, nacido en Buenos Aires el 2 de noviembre de 1910, viajó al Caribe y a Europa como tripulante de barcos mercantiles antes de que su primero libro de poesía Las Cosas y El Delirio fue publicado en 1941. Autor de nueve libros de poesía y la novela Una Sombra Donde Suena Camila O'Gorman, en 1952 Molina fundó junto con el poeta Aldo Pellegrini la revista surrealista A Partir de Cero en Buenos Aires. Pintor y hombre de letras, falleció en Buenos Aires el 13 de noviembre de 1997.

New Poetry From c.a. leibow

2008-10-01T14:13:00.005-03:00

Machina Ad Hominem

“What do I see? Hats and coats that cover ghosts or simulated human beings which move by springs.”

Descartes

(i.)

“…by its very nature clockwork is the antithesis of our mortal
selves. "    Jaquet-Droz

The Watchmaker              Machines time.
Dentist of brass teeth.      Revolutions.      Masticated movements.

(Mapping the linear_____      geography of a Flat
                                Earth.)

Mechanical Cockcrow sequencing.
The interpreter of flesh clocks.
An object unto itself.                  Out of time.
A counter of Ether - measuring Zero

Cyclopeds chase one another in the figure eight cyclodrome dome of heaven.
The gods lost to history cheer with    Click(s)

The customer wants (“the minutes
the watch has lost?”) because of the leak                  the gold case.
the red ink spent .

Bent over.                  Eye glass.                  The Watchmaker
is a Trapper tightening springs.

Hour by hour.

(ii.)

“Without Vaucanson’s shitting duck, there would be nothing to remind us of the glory of France.”    Voltaire

Immodest marriage of science and art.
Gold plated copper.      Articulation of wing
fulfilling each their Office

{Of          Omoplat,      Scapula,      Cubitius,      Humerus    &      Ginglymus}.

Tendons of wound wire
spring movement of ball bearing and socket.

Just imitation of duck.
Throat.
Stomach.
Circumvolution of pipes.
Inefficiency of efficiency. Projection. Identification.
Muddling water.
Quack, Rise, Gulp.      Consumes.

Artifice. Delineation of life.
                                                  Interloper into divine prerogative.
Metal duck.          Golem.
     Inculcation of man as machine.

From meandering pipes to
the lowly anus.

     Golden creature.
One act play-          Title: Uncertainty          ?

Final Scene:
                                         Out of golden tail- efflux of excrement.

                                                     [ A standing (Ovation).]

(iii.)

Exquisite machine: Silver tongue hypothesis.

Who stole the statue sculpted by Coysevox?

TELEGRAM-------{URGENT}----------------------------------TELEGRAM

To: The Inquisition          Re: Automaton Flute Player
“In room 11 (STOP), Be advised (STOP)…….bothersome breathing..(STOP).”

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

“Wood fingers cannot play a metal flute the way a man or woman can..”
                                                                     Journal Entry, Vaucanson. Aug, 17th 1737

(See Fig.1,2 &3)

____________________________________________________________________
fig 1., Apply skin to wood. (Credit of Corpses ).

____________________________________________________________________
fig 2., Side View: Screws, Pivots, Barrels, Bars, Heart; connected to gates of heaven.

____________________________________________________________________
fig 3. Exploded View: Nine bellows, three pipes under the garden into the Temple of Music.
Trachea.              Six pulleys.             Four levers to modify wind.              {The Four Winds of The Apocalypse}.

“I found a metronome in the chest of a Starling .”
                                                                     Journal Entry., Vaucanson. Jan, 23rd 1736

All the women          (Paris Februarys 11th 1738 )          would gather in their complicated dresses.

A repertoire of twelve          {Apostles, Tribes, Constellations.}          Flute Numbers.

Their parasols twirling.          Flywheel,          Windmill,          Crank & Counterweight.

Inquisitors on tip toes try to see

through dark windows that face the alley.          {of Hotel De Albertus Magnus and the Cathedral of Aquinas .}

(iv.)

“Shall not one be cast down by the sight of him? None is so fierce that that dare stir him up.”    Job 42:9-10

Mechanical leviathans built by
royal Clockmakers.
run on tracks at the edge
of a flat earth.

Prefabricated elucidation
of the artisan’s pencil-    charcoal detritus from
fire to fire.    Wayward sailors
pray                  {recurring nightmares of flailing }.

The lone wake signifies dismay
Stygian darkness of fathoms, split bone terrors.
Supplicating saints and gods and superstitions.

Two men stoke the fires.
Pneumatic obligation of steam.
Of concentration, direction
and release.          Transmission of energy to purpose.

The mad dash of sail.

Indentured men dream of falling
where the cartographer sketches
gaping mouths.

(v.)

“ What a shame the mechanician stopped so soon, when he could have gone ahead and given his machine a soul!”    Condorcet

Oh daughter,
daughter flesh of my frenzied longing.

         Work of my hands clank and whir          of my affections.

The blasphemy of my want.          Iron ram caught in the thicket
I lay            you on the altar          {of the sea floor.}              My imprudence.

In darkness - rocking on tides.
                                                             Pendulum.
                                                                     Pendulum.
                                                           Pendulum.
                                                                 Oh pendulum.

(vi.)

“Man is a self-winding machine, a living representation of perpetual motion.”    La Mettrie

Innocent machines.              Faithful objects.              Geared mythologies.

In which              mechanical archangels grant dispensations from time -

Theirs is an eschatology              of revolutions.

                                                 Inherent:      The Circle.

c.a. leibow's poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Interim, Juked.com, Poetry Motel, Stray Dog Review and other journals. He graduated from Antioch with a Masters Degree in Poetry. To fund his poetry, leibow has worked as a dishwasher, a shoes salesman, a driver, a security guard, a bouncer, a mental institution orderly, a file clerk, a shipping clerk, and corporate trainer.

Hayden Carruth

2008-09-29T04:03:00.003-03:00

3 August 1921 - 29 September 2008

David Foster Wallace

2008-09-12T18:21:00.001-03:00

21 February 1962 - 12 September 2008

Four Poems From Clint Frakes

2008-08-12T15:44:00.003-03:00

A Moving Life

I give myself permission to lull the savage flower
    like a phoneme from the infamous waves.

Today I saw a calyx atop every roof –
    pollens, inverted hyacinths,

        stunted euphorias at the mini-mart:
    fluttering glassy wrappers in the Trade Winds—
        like how the old poetess crept beneath the myth
    in her wrinkled skirt & shrugged
        loose from the pavement
    a radical new altar of sound.

The chorus ejaculated in antistrophe:
            The earth has a taste!

The problem is you’ve been dialing the wrong deity,
    cigarettes burning on the table—

        & you forgot how to use them.

A Brief History of Summer
    for Harry Smith

After the longest day of the year
independence was only fitting.
Some ruffians blew up the sky;
the Romans let the dogs out,
forsaking 13 moons & the innermost
juice of memory.
We gained only the dim
profile of an inbred king.
Then the chokecherries ripened
in the unfolding corolla of
long northern light,
filling our freshly opened eyes.
We ate dog,
rubbed its fat on our heads.
The elders say it cures all.

Desire #4

What is Thanksgiving to a born-again-Lakota-Celt from Detroit
        alone in Polynesia?
    An excuse to hit the titty bar--
& gratitude is elusive as Maverick does the splits in a pink felt hat;
Chastity works her lollipop,
    dropping her Catholic skirt;
then comes Eclipse, hugging a beach ball
    painted like the globe.
Her booty shorts say Total.

What are the chances a Pine Ridge
    girl would glide on stage 2400 miles from Turtle Island?
The zealous MC introduces her with incongruent hype:
            “Come and see Wi!”

    Wi means woman.

    A dream catcher burned to her sacrum with the four sacred colors:
        red north of lowest lumbar
        white disappearing south at the cleft of coccyx
        yellow & black along the impossible axis
            of pelvic east/west
        its promise of the Seventh Generation.
She’s surprised for the first time all week when I
        greet her in her grandparents’ tongue—
        “Toniktuka hwo?”
    She stumbles slightly at her spinning pole
        garter drawn almost inelegantly for a bill.
    “Lakota?” she asks, bending toward me.
Her tongue has a silver bolt through it.
She spills buckets of hair across my face
    cooler than midnight water &
        from under this tent I remember
            sage prairie, buffalo and wasna
          wild turnip & wojapi,
        black chokecherries.

I tuck an Andrew Jackson in the
        ankle strap of her shiny stiletto:
    the biggest Indian killer of all time,
    his face long and freakish in the glint
        of rhinestones & strobelight.
But we should sing in sage beds under cottonwood
        & morning star, skinny-dip in the shallow
    limey creeks at Grass Mountain
        lollop in the Paha Sapa--
            its primrose elk trails
        on citrine-belted hillsides,
    eating raspberries & rosehips,
        passing secrets mouth to mouth,
                belly to belly.

But her belly has a bolt through it too:
        Custer just a tumbleweed in a wintercount there;
    Crazy Horse himself a faint, curious melody;
        calendars of Jehovah wan & forgotten
amid the roar of the Wind Cave,
    the song of all our beginning.

No, the lolloping won’t happen;
            but I am her favorite at the bar,
        getting twice the shine as the suits
            from whom she plucks bills perfunctorily
        & eases back my way in some esoteric reward
            for a few words brought across the ocean from her native plain
        where I carried the Living Tree with ninety warriors
            to the Sun Dance grounds,
        laid red earth
            on the half moon altar
    believing there was a center to everything.

Desire #28
a Valentine, 2004, Honolulu

Dear Sonya, It’s 1:51 a.m. & I’m drunk,
rebuking the ruse of St.Valentine,
glued to yellowing books on a balmy night
like a raft on the Danube,
bristling calm, eying an opulent shore.
It isn’t easy to meet Orion’s gaze:
his bullets & arrows
sheening over my tininess.
Then a final sip of whiskey on the koa stump,
thinking of old chums I thought would never forsake me.
I turn pages of Arthur Sze & find a lottery ticket
my long-gone wife played in ’92.
Wabi-sabi floods the evening & I hope
she probed the Arizona Republic
for numbers the next day, expected
a miracle one autumn,
even if our egg was fried.

No patience for entropy these days,
nor joy in the curve of the moon--
on this, Edgar Poe’s birthday!
Nouns gang up on me at Foodland
among the walking dead (now 3 a.m.) --
the machinery of lips & Whitmanic glances
studying varieties of relish.

I think of your Betty Page bangs & how you made
cigarettes taste like chocolate the night
I slid into second base on the abandoned diamond
by Anna Banana’s, sure I’d never do this again.
One must be sick before one is brave
& the palms bow softly & for good reason.

Clint Frakes currently lives in Sedona, AZ. He has recently received the James Vaughan Award for Poetry and the Peggy Ferris Memorial Award for Poetry. He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School at the Naropa Institute and Northern Arizona University writing programs and received his doctorate with emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Hawaii in 2006. He is currently working on his second full book of poetry, entitled Citizen Poems. He has work forthcoming in Decanto, Orange Room Review, Otoliths, Horse Less and Best Poem. He is the former chief editor of Hawaii Review and Big Rain and currently works as a free lance writer and editor.

Four Poems From Ray Succre

2008-07-29T21:47:00.000-03:00

Cornerstone Telecast

Polarity jogs the signal a-twitch,
reds and greens and spectrum disturbances,
the feed scrambled.

No soppings of worry scramble me; I am seven,
alone, with sandwich and remote.

There it is. The channel. Reds and greens.
She begs but it's just her job.

She is sealed in jittery frame, breasts electrical,
face contorted, back-humped and a-twitch.
Disturbances approach her from the corners.
I decode the jolts. I raise volume to seven.
I am a spectrum. I am voltaic.

She is filtered in chatty cohorts, detergent men.
They switch and corral, clutch and shudder,
crashing the watts from her, dimmer, dimmer.

She thanks them but it's just pretend.

I finish my sandwich watching them complete
theirs, and then flip to the melees of superheroes.

One Into the Sidewalk

The red, alarm, ruckus of skin
bridges a stream from low-sky,
this cell water, air water, the red,
alarm, down the arm in strands
twine-shot, with horse-necked
espiances making a sport of advice—
“Dangerous activities need gear.”
“You’ve no helmet; what of your
brain and eyes?”
“Bleeding arm! Bleeding arm!”
This thin dirt coughs up for drops
like gasping ovate mouths—
“And where are padded elbows?”

Craned arm in twisted frame
carrying gore, trotting home,
rear wheel waving rotation,
and the blood, the itch,
another instant red, alarm,
make a sport, make a matter,
make another instant red;
spanked and spat down,
the wrecks are preferred.

Skin of the Bookcase

The air is imparticled.
Hunched in gorilla posture,
lifting a feathery monster
and gingerly dusting the sod
of a little blackened tomb,
dusting sees a shady grove:

The effect of your breathing,
carbeuration, pushing
spitbreath down the strangle
into milk, and the books
can not but in a furnace
be more dead; the ends
are chipped, roughed, scored.

That any solve of dust
by a sweep cleans the dead
from these things is absurd.

Open a masterpiece
at the middle, find a nervous
system frigid and hailed on.
Strangle. Languish as they
have done on shelves.

The bookmites hide
in the spine as you
cleverly turn the page.

Tom's Palace of Coins

She gives him the small coin or ant or boar,
during new-transformed, day-out's drive,
a haughty, fat-assed rape or adventurous sty.

"Here's some money for a candy, Tom."

Much in threats roving his grandmother most,
a bare passion glancing mere resemblance,
her loose change given slow as
once so perfect poison downward raids
to sensual, digestive bits of awe.

Before, by course of age, he sleeps
with the errands of his intribunal era,
he'll wear little insignias and ebbing emblems,
stack the ants and coins in a blink of walls,
building a small palace out of the useless,
tiny flecks of currency.

Look what he enspheres:
Palace people. Palace depth.

Ray Succre lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. His poems have appeared in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous other journals across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion was recently published by Cauliay Publishing. Mr Succre maintains the blog: http://raysuccre.blogspot.com.

New Poems From William Bain

2008-06-16T18:40:00.001-03:00

A plant summer

Gap of night, brain through
the wire. Bright
forward-run uncolor
glistens beneath root sheath.
Vein-yellow halt-star
surges red before crept leaf,
sap expanses vibrating summer.

In-white glancing

Space, open. There vectors in prism’d morning
still traffic, gull cries, child’s slide, a milk-white
skate. I went down to the car, saw
the black oily sea up, colors
previously unregistered... sequence surround(s).... Back
into the book office; mountain
viole(n)t figures, into the purest air,
life, surprisingly, a train and rail
screech, slowed, skidded, stopped.
Taking hands, the avenues walk us around
the most remote and intricate.
Stems merge every color, bright
cup, carpet, parquet ship—
Flower white negative....

Harpist

Fingertips poised these thousands of years, adjusting
flutter of a gull’s wing over roof, or under chandelier.
The apparently effortless rays burgeon, strings now not
of the instrument, not exactly, but of deep-sea fishes
bellying fin up, fin down, fin over. Love position after regard
trails eye. The charcoal baton, somehow, as if the drawing
implement were the drawn itself, prehistoric strings
vibrating in a way imprecise to me now.

Aorist.... Tying or otherwise fastening gut to bow
is arguably more in our direction than the harpist’s.
Dream charcoals come, adjusting gaps, positioning
notes or modes. The musician’s tapping left hand, a finger
in the symbolic brain, waves directionally, icon
after the geometry of the feather.

William Bain’s poems have appeared in various magazines, recently in RedRiverReview and previously in Zone. His collages and paintings have been shown in collective exhibitions in Barcelona (Julia Karp Gallery, 2005; Arnau Gallery, 2007/8).