Three Poems From AJ Kaufmann

Bridges

the far-eastern bridge of oil in orange
god-like
flows into the western bridge of sanity
blue-spotted gentle
crossing madly
the delirious bridge of yesteryear's passions
flavours
ornaments
street specimens
delicate voices of amber
death-angels
frozen in benevolent ashes
praying over restless bridges of amaranth
echoes
filled w/ jumpers & trombone masters
dildoed whores panicked
of the frequently damaged
White Corners
where poetry's jazz and jazz's poetry
neitherway
and anyone chooses trumpets of fervor...

blow!

bridges are
what bridges see
& what can we make of 'em
with diamond-hands
and hair of gasoline
burning
fanatic circles of flat notes
perfect

have I just heard the Blue Kantata
orchestrated
or was it just a vacant point
in the sweet time-ravaged
Hollywoods of glory...

it's all so jimdandy
dear Gina of honour...

and now
we're hitting
La Paz

Debasement

Oh the sweet art of debasement:

to breathe the very same air

cockroaches inhale

& to sleep w/ their

decadence debris

under roaring

refrigerator's

heaven...

to lie under Eiffel Tower

& any parisian sidewalk I'll find

effective

to radiate

with Madame Bleu

and her boys of reddening twilights:

the pursuer of noir city magic...

to throw my guts into the coin-box

spiting out verses at random

faceless landscapes throwing moons and

sunrays

and everyrays

between

for her harvest moon pleasure

where words are but ornaments

for

penetrating spirits

to crystallize the draperies of nite

saxes

wailing dead dramatists hoaxes

post meridian...

or to hear once again

the marked young man's confessions

send-up

sending you up and sending me down

shade-toxic bluntness:

must learn the fine art of debasement

to become

angels

not meat&bone&gut bags

or madmen dancing w/ fireworks

straw-men

with eyes wild on

panic buttons...

to find an escape

from escaping...

Ghosts of the miners

we, the Solar System renegades
we, the underpaid dogs of shark's fin soup
we, the in-crowd connoisseurs of awareness
we, the undemanding notes on chimney tops
writing in smoke
and water only
for fire is too hot to witness
and smoke can resist them all...

we, who come on patchy wings
of hyenas
piranha sailors on dead feet
like sculptures...

living on air and cat food promises
in the morning
we, the holders of hollow fibre ghosts
we, the white Indian partisans
of rhythm...
we, the narcissistic haters of
nihilistic manners
ambassadors of well-mannered old-fashioned
word-riddlers
martini drinkers
book-swallowers, sword-shapers
albino deconstructors

we, the sunlight over Monte Alban
in a greener kind of blue
than
ever by human imagined...
ghosts of the miners on turntable
patios
black velvet verandas
the day watch of deadly compromises...

we, the syllabic punch bowls
empty taxis at 3am
we, the drinker inside

AJ Kaufmann was born in June, 1985 in Poznan, Poland – the capital of Wielkopolska. After graduating from local high school in 2004, he traveled to Berlin in search of inspiration, then studied Polish and English philology at Poznan's universities before dropping out to start various bands. Mr Kaufmann draws his current inspiration from primal poetry, magic, free-verse, Sartre, ghost poetry, surrealism and shamanism. He writes in English.

Robert Rauschenberg

22 October 1925 - 12 May 2008

Seven Poems By Carol Gunther

DEEPEN

Silt backs up.
Doors jam with more debris,
Untidy clouds invading her angle
Of sight. Using all of her
Clarity, the clear orange spilling trail
Of blood to clean a way going anywhere.
She lavishes movement, each gesture
Polyglot, each step deeper in the debris.
It’s getting deeper all the time.
Sometimes she says to herself, move.
Then, don’t move.
To look through the imbued air
Is more than she can do. The silt
All mica flakes, scales, prisms
Glittering their minute perceptions
A dance of mote and beam
Through an eternity of filtered sight.
She looks through the door-filled, cloud-filled
Room, the vast occupied interiors,
Looks along the sight-line, the fault-line,
The bee-line, only there
In the breakage, the stings and flinchings
Does blood clean a way to amnesty,
An outside to what is inside,
Precisely this—to deepen
The blood-orange salamander
Burying into an incredibly tiny flame.


TO UNDERPIN THE LIGHT OF DAY

Leaves get dusty, which is nothing.
Her legs bracket his.
More facts are needed, or are there
Enough? The moment I say
Anything, conceive of a movement, a motion,
All these words mean a concern
For each other as we watch
Through the screen door.
A fly crawls over his face, not
Touching him.
Of course, it’s a vision
Yet another trick, the face as vase,
For the fly discovers both with its wings
Its cellophane screens, and the taste of salt underfoot.
Appetite is encouraging, barely.
Then the vertigo as usual, a tilting of sand
Never running out, and the bad feeling
Behind my eyes, raised
Like a blind, red bruise.
It happens. Let’s remember.
We paint under the artificial lights…
Another leaf drops. This is home.


THE PLATEAU

He can count more stars
Here and levels
The sandstone cliffs into
Tables where he spoons through fossils
More intricate than sadness,
Always working
In this ambulant light.
This sifting, sorting gesture.
He makes certain to miss,
Nothing, making
Sure of his method, standing
On stairs of wet wood,
The winds channels
Voices and music as if drowning,
The house rotten,
Faces of long-dead sea creatures
Are bookmarks in
A dissolving plot where she
Walks backward
Rebounding,
The leaf-shaped galaxies
Swiveling themselves
Inside out within
Wreckage.


RUNNING INTO LANGUAGE

For Jeff Vetock

Lifting my warm hand from the cold forehead
Of the dead body of my mother, I find imprinted
On the palm’s parchment, a tracery of lines
Which mean something much too much to say.
Before me, the unfinished mural
Depicts Blake and his wife, their hands
Reaching toward a bowl of fruit cocktail.
Their suburban yard is full of naked poets.
Last year my mother gave me
A birthday present, a tilt-awhirl maze
Of interlocking balsa wood parts.
I found this would float, so I began
Running, running and floating
A hundred laps in the family pool.
Lately, the sky has become a better hobby,
A blue surround into which I surrender myself,
Saying in all innocence, “But I have no experience!”
See, this cliff is glass and transparently so.
Tomorrow a bus will stop next door
In the parking lot of language.
My father will step off, glance at his watch
And open his arms to greet me.


NOTICE

If I could shake you off,
I might regain equanimity, be able-bodied,
Carry my stomach tight with cramped blood
Demurely again, the stitch inside
Stitching itself back
Hem and tuck.
Unnoticed, uncommented upon as once more
I walk into an evening alone
Watched only by those cloudy, skirty moons.
I survive by hiding, allow
My hopes to fester,
Green and intricate.
Surviving means reflect, turn around, let go
Of the more than panhandle, trust
In a perfume less flammable
Than his mouth at the cup.
The two of us imitate a truer form,
The pretense of locating the beginning of a need—
The flowery bower of go on.
Miraculous, horrible.
We cannot shift places, though the sheets
Gather our bodies like the tumbling straw.
We must remain. The gate is open
But the guard is on his way down.
Act as though you do believe.
Pascal said that.
I act as though your name
Were a sore on the edge of my tongue.
Non pace, Pascal.


DUST STORMS

I walk down the stairs. It’s either
Stand here or keep moving.
Vertigo coming on.
What will happen to me?
When I fall, the ground is so
Familiar and regained that
I feel I have come home.
The chatter all night sounds like crickets
From all parts of the field, each call repeated
With minute variation,
Each one coming before or after, punctuated,
Distinguishable in the distances and
Relieved by
A single chime, now and then
Of wind hitting glass against the same.
Dust storms move outside the walls of my room
With dogs and more voices and a flapping.
I run the palms of my hands
Against the surfaces to feel if there’s a vibration,
Like nothing can hurt me.
“Well, why can’t you go to somebody, to help you?”
I said I was thinking of becoming less…anxious…
Anxious, no use
To make myself upset about it,
Calling him at a different number
Each time, with the same line.


SHE IS AS THIN AS MEMORY

The days slip. Shod with loosening shoes
She relinquishes more than usual, no
Instinct toward that time she’ll regain
A foothold on her falling. Everything
Is more of less than what she wants, catching
What catch can, swimming among the hundred
Arms of the sea anemone, eating traces
Of diatoms, half-glimpsed shooting stars
In the long blue drink he hands her.
Somewhere a rock slaps down, all on its own,
To startle her, and the tentacles close
And the oceanic music cries on.
In our waiting, he tells her, so much splinters
From our lives, we must hurry and hide
What doesn’t fit. Jam it all back in.
She tries to try. Too deep inside her heart
She polishes the rough edges, thinned to chaos
Beating and thrumming through her body
Like guitarists tapping their soundless
Strings, like the faint quivering edges
In the newly open rose, before time
Blows it all away.
Yes, try, but reality speaks saying no.
She needs what’s out there to stop being
Fish scales and dead floats,
The plastic debris suffocating her—
Images lost from memory.
An impossible landscape enters
The view a thin slice
Of all that she has done, imprismed
In a camera,
Now reckoned at the junction
Of light in a lost frame.



Former university teacher and poet, Carol Lynn Gunther, born June 2, 1954, had to retire in 2006 because of worsening symptoms of multiple sclerosis which have made it difficult to drive, walk, read and write. Through her teaching, she has touched the lives of hundreds of students at National University, Golden Gate University, University of Phoenix and USF’s College of Professional Studies. For more than 30 years, she taught a variety of writing, literature, humanities and communications courses to adult students and conducted several creative arts workshops on a freelance basis. She was named Teacher of the Year at USF’s CPS in 1994.

She earned an MFA in poetry, an MA in British Literature and a Ph. D. in American literature at UC Irvine. Her most influential teachers there were poets Heather McHugh, Mark Strand and Charles Wright. Other influences have been George Oppen, Rainier Maria Rilke, Charles Simic, John Ashberry, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.

Ms Gunther has had over sixty poems published in various journals through the years. While a student at UC Irvine, she twice won the Academy of American Poets first prize. Her poems have been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Poetry Prize by the editor of Branches Quarterly. She edited and published Protea Poetry Journal for four years and during that time, she published Adagio of the Body by Richard Cronshey.

After being afflicted by secondary progressive MS, she has had to retire early from professional teaching but has been conducting a creative writing workshop at the Amador County Senior Center in Jackson, CA.

A Sutter Creek, CA resident since 1989, Ms Gunther enjoys visiting with friends, listening to music, playing with her beloved cat, and watching birds.

Three Poems From Magnificent Guffaw

Lies of an icon

In between binge drinking and fry ups

I have led a normal life

between the covers

sleeping

in my dreams

I see winters and hill

and realize the chills

pale in comparison

she told me how my eyelids quiver when shut

I have no idea

I'm gone

living in a better place

harmonium

Swept my drive carefully pushing away the nails that had gathered under my tyres

somebody has it in for me.

I phoned Clara and told her I am paranoid

at the best of times

Drama happens behind curtains

shadows wave

and furniture gets pushed around

until the glass breaks

underfoot

and hand in hand they get taken to accident and emergency

Couples bicker

its natural

yet sad

when you come in between

with your gallant attempt

at adultery

Fascinated by someone you will never know

I need to lose my way

glory tamborines

heart felt harmony

this must be what its like

to feel alive

doo wop earthquake

my skin tingles with devils glee

pop me another

run

get me one ready

time for another

please

run

run

turn catharsis into something more

spend a living night

away from the bedroom

spend a living night

lying awake on the floor

staring empty at the ceiling


Magnificent Guffaw lives in Eastern England.

Pablo Neruda's Ode to the Air

Ode to the Air

Walking down a path
I met the air,
saluted it and said
respectfully:
“It makes me happy
that for once
you left your transparency,
let’s talk.”
He tirelessly
danced, moved leaves,
beat the dust
from my soles
with his laughter,
and lifting all
his blue rigging,
his skeleton of glass,
his eyelids’ breeze,
immobile as a mast
he stood listening to me.
I kissed the cape
of heaven’s king,
I wrapped myself
in his flag of sky
blue silk
and said:
king and comrade,
needle, corolla, bird,
I don’t know who you are but
I ask one thing –
don’t sell yourself.
The water sold itself
and from the desert’s
distilleries
I’ve seen
the last drops
terminate
and the poor world, the people
walking with their thirst
staggering in the sand.
I saw the light
at night
rationed,
the great light in the house
of the rich.
All is dawn in the
new hanging gardens,
all is dark
in the terrible
shadow of the valley.
From there, the night,
mother step mother,
goes out with a dagger in the midst
of her owl’s eyes,
and a scream, a crime,
arises and extinguishes,
swallowed by shadow.
No, air,
don’t sell yourself,
don’t be channeled,
don’t be entubed,
don’t be boxed,
compressed,
don’t be stamped out in pills,
don’t be bottled,
be careful!
Call
when you need me,
I am the poet son
of the poor, brother
in flesh and brother
in law
of the poor, of everywhere,
of my country and all the others,
of the poor who live on the river,
of those who live in the heights
of the vertical mountains,
break rock,
nail boards,
sew clothes,
cut wood,
haul earth,
and for this
I want them to breathe,
you are all they have,
this is why
you are
invisible,
so they can see
what tomorrow brings,
for this
you exist,
air,
catch your breath,
don’t shackle yourself,
don’t fix yourself to anyone
who comes in a car
to examine you,
leave them,
laugh at them,
flee from them through the shadows,
don’t accept
their propositions,
we’ll go together
dancing through the world,
knocking the blossoms
from the apple trees,
entering windows,
whistling
melodies
from yesterday and tomorrow,
already
the day is coming
when we will liberate
the light and the water,
earth and men,
and all will be
for all, as you are.
For this, for now,
be careful!
And come with me,
much remains
that dances and sings,
let’s go
the length of the sea,
to the height of the mountains,
let’s go
where the new spring
is flowering
and in one gust of wind
and song
we’ll share the flowers,
the scent, the fruit,
the air
of tomorrow.


Translated by Andrew Haley


Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), received the Nobel Prize in 1971 in recognition of a body of poetry composed in celebration of the elemental and in protest of the cruelties he witnessed as a diplomat abroad, in exile, and in his native Chile, where his death twelve days after August Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’état was celebrated as an act of protest against the takeover.

March 24 is the anniversary of the 1976 military coup in neighboring Argentina. In seven years of military rule, tens of thousands of artists and intellectuals were targeted by state terror.

Four Poems From Kenneth Kesner

ON MAO'S BED

remembering first
last
night binds flowers to floor
to sleep without ache
wake to sweat with jiangxi
dust just now close to ochre on flesh
to open door for breeze never rises
past victims still of
repellent coils to
molten worker screeching refusing must gather produce
rinds already yesterday seething with copper-green beetles
neighbor derides her
naked sexless adolescent part dangling in gutter stick with hand
captive to gliding plastic refuse severally retarded
past gate where one's accused rape murder
by the plainclothes
then wanes alone no way to be seen again but here
culturally erect female dismounting
bike foots cross looks down
froth spits out lands on wipes on
petal cycling again
so much gold here summer sun
out some window mountains already lies jiujiang somewhere up there
shade a house shaded not divided really a room on the west not in the west really afternoon lights
a daybed for our chairman
partitioned
tomorrow's view


PARCH

your sun how long
journeys
eager to dance patience
poverty nun
inside
grace tempting radiance
inside it all
will hers last time instead
eyes so close
alone


EVENT

… since those sounds lying
still inside beyond

that time seeks a hearing
how begins as end

that time when inscribing
passages to found

sometime
now

in flame

archic shading itself from believing same

as daylights surrender to never's past

forgotten crowds to sojourn
merely in speech
just

in shade
thinking same wanting words

exceeding harmony

surrounds


ORGY

window feels like magic
and my plane souls anywhere

stone's flight is so tragic
should I gaze there
you're in a gauze of steel

what's twice now once but more

revealing nietzsche neuralgic
you read well you feel ill
and then
you're in the mirrors' care

what's more what's worse

confess yourself
a soul
at home again alone

and then

i'll last until you first
forge reign poured by my veins


Kenneth Kesner has lived in East Asia for numerous years, and currently resides on the island of Java in the Republic of Indonesia. His poetry has appeared in The Arabesques Review, A Little Poetry, and Word Slaw.

New Poetry From Richard Cronshey

Wife

You take away everything that can never be possessed
leaving only what can never be lost.
Where the night's meridians cross
I empty my pockets, looking for you
but there is always more.
You wait for me everywhere, like space.
To escape you, I have invented the past.
I have changed myself into a labyrinth
into which the future disappears
with its swarming fragrance
and its beehives filled with weeping.


Our Grief Comes From Elsewhere

“Our grief, which comes from elsewhere,
That grief, which destroys and renews us,
Will dissolve itself
In the flesh of our union…”
–Rene Char

What you said is true.
There is no grief here,
at the equinox of the body,
surrounded by the body's ripening,
arborescent life.
There is no grief.
To be here, embraced everywhere, and breathing
where this one breath is the consummation I had missed.
To dissolve the ghost-knot of self which is grief and heal
this wound that runs through the world,
all at once
and let time subside in me.
I had escaped through a trapdoor in the floor of myself
into boundless night and hidden where not even the mind
could find me.
How many years since you lay down in the snow you loved and died?
What could I possibly lose now,
giving my life up to my life?


“My hunger, Anne, Anne,
Flee on your donkey!”
–Arthur Rimbaud

My hunger is a ghost who climbs into bed beside you
and steals the covers, when it’s coldest, just before morning.
In my hunger’s country the wind always blows.
We walk with our collars up, our eyes down. Our hands in fists,
plunged into vast, empty pockets, cling to our pet skeletons.
Such tiny skeletons to listen to our famished memoirs;
to sing us to sleep at night where we live
heaped together unblinking beneath the shimmering bridges.


“... that which we cannot wish to change.”
–Simone Weil

It is wholeness,
it’s voice,
arisen as world,
the shining face,
waiting for me
in the present.


“I am the water that looks”
–Maria Sabina

I am an ember in the mazes
of the mysterious year,
the year’s transparency blessing me;
the deep year.
Consummate resonance, blessing me.
The earth seeing you, mute, the air
looking through you.
The mineral within you seeing through you
into the deep year. The moment before
I see that I have gone
out in front of memory
into opalescence
so that I can reach you,
so that I can be with you.
Oceanic tenderness conveying me.
The year with its blue roots conveying me,
with its ancient scintillation.
The year with its caress, the medicinal year.
The seeing year conveying me, with its luminous cadences.
The year that curls elegantly, waiting.
I am following this long shadow back to your tall heart.


From the Morning

I am the one who smells the water flying
underneath the rocks
and I am the water that flies
through the dense night space of the earth.
I listen to my own voice from before the past,
from after the future, telling me
there will be a break in the cloudbank of the world.
I am the daylight that waits for you there.


I Am the Child of My Life

Inside, in the very center, it is this nakedness forever,
this fragrance; a stillness existing by itself.
It is a wish without a beginning shining.
Sometimes for years I wear this life, like a sad hat
pulled down over my eyes
then, when I look at you, I see sunlight on water
and I remember what I am.
You are so clear I can see all the way to the bottom
of your life, into the flowering night,
that deepening brightness that can never leave us.
There is such abundance haunting us.
Look how precisely the sunflowers climb their own becoming,
like time rising in time.
You, your body and your life are the dreaming of that same light.


Richard Cronshey was born in Los Angeles in 1966. He is the author of Adagio of the Body (1990), Three Similar Instances (1992), Afternoon in the Museum of Late Things (1994) and Mutilated Currency (1997). He co-edited Bird Full of Rain (1999), a collection of the late Glenn Parker’s poetry. In June 2007, Cronshey’s thirteen-poem sequence Whose Nude and Holy Iridescence Belongs to No One appeared in Zone.

Three Poems by Li Po (李白) in New English Translations

Visiting the Monk of Mt Daitian Without Finding Him

Dog’s bark through water’s sound
Peach blossoms the dew weighs down
In deep woods, glimpses of deer
At brook’s edge, no noon chimes
Wild bamboo part blue mists
Spring falls from emerald cliffs
No one knows where he is gone
Weary, I rest against some pines

訪戴天山道士不遇

犬吠水聲中
桃花帶露濃
樹深時見鹿
溪午不聞鐘
野竹分青霧
飛泉褂碧峰
無人知所去
愁倚兩三松


Mid Mountain: With a Hermit, Drinking Together

Two men drinking together. Mountain flowers blossom.
One cup, one cup, again another cup.
I’m drunk, on the edge of sleep – you’d better go.
At dawn, if you desire, come back with your guitar.

山中與幽人對酌

兩人對酌山花開
一杯一杯復一杯
我醉欲眠君且去
明朝有意包琴來


Mid Mountain: Question and Answer

You ask me why I dwell on the emerald mountain.
I laugh, without answering, my heart at ease.
Peach flowers in the water’s current linger into vanishing.
Heaven and earth are different here than in the world of men.

山中問答

問余何意棲碧山
笑而不答心自閑
桃花流水窅然去
別有天地非人間


Translated by Andrew Haley


Li Po or Li Bai (李白) the Banished Immortal, celebrated Tang Dynasty poet, was born in 701 in present day Kyrgyzstan to Chinese exiles. He achieved great acclaim before his death, despite a life of itinerant wandering. One of the Eight Immortals of Wine, he was a legendary drinker and is said to have drowned drunk in the Yangtze trying to embrace the reflection of the moon. He was returning to his childhood home in Sichuan Province after a thirty-five year absence. He was 61.

Five Poems From Adam Strauss

Quat Rains

You’re the captain
Of team obvious—
A necessary job:
Reduces the obviating

Tendencies of the
Upper echelons, allows you
Impunity to stare
At hot blonds, consume more

Than you deserve. I’ve got
To go try and find
Agapanthus to
Walk alongside.


Demeter Whispered Die Meter!

I like
Some trees

And am
Friendly

With the
Tennis

Court Oath—
Bored on

The shelf
In a

City
You don’t

Live in:
Good for

Ya’ll come
Back now.


Nowhere But Here To Get To

My interest
Switches often—
Creates circumference

Not a constant
Center—
There’s

No bland nor time for
Jaded yet I am—
I have so many

Things and so
Few basic verbs—
Complexity fills

The interstices
Between when I’m
Ranging being or dead to

Living completely—
I like being
“Out of it” but partly

Fear this stance—
Freedom—what US
Is fighting for.


Chicks

I don’t want to read the things
I’m thinking:
Nor the script of not—what brings
Pleasure to
Many’s my goal. The dark blue
Sky vasts through
Out the window; how far is
An owl hits—
Hooks—bleeds—swifts home—hungry chicks.
The earth’s pap
Someone ruthlessly tap-taps
And I slap
Money down—night caps.


Amphora

What’s the etymology of albumen? An advanced answer is a
Question. The ocean view versus garden pondered
By someone who can afford either.
Is there a truest I in this body I’m unaware of?
I suspect an answer will be in love—lies to itself it likes sleeping—dreaming
Wagons loaded with watermelons, their flesh shot through with arsenic. Someone
Whispers in a language I didn’t know but understood, and took her to get a beer but she
Got coke and demurred to barely being there; we couldn’t talk; she bowed and left into
The third pull of my second bottle—warmer than the first but me less thirsty. A hot
Breeze quickens my emerging buzz—the sunset seems amniotic; birds chirp in
The branches of trees like people frolicking at the beach—simile as affirmation of difference;
I’m suspicious of paradox—by degrees which don’t complete a circle.
I’ve never seen one but plane trees erected my emotion. When I’ve Looked into the ocean
I’ve never thought a grave; I have felt blood runs my brain: pulses
Bob Marley’s "Stranger on the shore," littered with rubber-sandals, tennis shoes,
Lighters, Batteries, bottles.



Adam Strauss lives in Las Vegas. He adores the poetry of George Herbert and would love a career writing pop songs.

New Poetry From Peter Golub

Quincunx

my injustice was the only way I knew how
try and save us
stay behind
there in the rain
kept falling and falling
like a dead Santa down the chimney
of a very rich girl
a heap at her feet

toads came out onto the golf course
the college girls put their professors to bed
and headed out

in my sleep I kept asking
"are we there yet?"
the apparitions at my bed
munching milk and cookies
shrugged their shoulders

"do you think we're your dreams?" they asked

my heart is full of rubbish
my false hope is a tenement
made from cheap cement
they of course answer "no"
as I walk back home
to your letter
about never coming back

this is not nearly enough
my false hope also sings
all the work that was left means nothing now
why finish a city that dies because of a woman
there is nothing in the other rooms
my heart is almost completely full of rubbish
but there is nothing to burn
nor any need of a fire
I couldn't save you
of course this is all lies
I tried
and who are you
you who needs saving
in my democratic hallucination
this tremendous weight on effort
"but where is this effort?"
bring me something
a mouse in a bucket
a farmer with a giant rabbit in his hands
"you can't eat the GNP," says the farmer
"wanna bet?" answers the giant rabbit

our lives
stitched together
resemble an impossibility
once priding its incredulity
wedded to arrogance
calling itself caution
"be suspicious of your heroes,"
says the giant rabbit
among the cabbages made of corn

any courage today
is turned immediately into corn
given a side glance
or worse
a bushy white mustache

there is nothing for you here reader
go home to your family

the majority of the cars in the street are white
I say "the cars in the street are white"
the rabbit says "the cars are made of corn"
someone else says "the cars are blue"
these are all lies
but mine has the most truth
like that fucking motorcycle
it has the most noise outside my window

life
yes life
has been decomposing
in the Santa suit
at the bottom of a sewer in Mexico City

I am swimming
in old food
and memories
the logical conclusion would be to stop
or at least get a job as a famous scientist
with giant tits

the man on the television
in my dream
speaks of his 4 year old daughter's vagina
stretching and stretching
apparently kids do it
and you don't call back
and I avoid her calls

the holidays
with too much shit hanging
the Indians
are drunk again
hygiene products
"she's the one," they a cappella

my neighbor tells me his wife
has gone
he tells me with a kind of mad look in his eye
"she is sick…what do I tell the kids?"

there are dreams that are more horrifying
upon waking up
these are not the dreams with
ghosts sitting at the table
picking through old bones and jewelry
or appliances working when unplugged
nor are these dreams about the beloved
grey haired, weeping
and numb

you lose your voice
a knock at the door brings 6 men
now you are in a bare room
with flamenco rhythms in the floor
sitting unable to move
learning to write your name
which appears as two convex lines
there is no teaching you
you know your name by heart
but this
is this your name
looking up shyly
nothing is true
but everything is permitted



Peter Golub is a frequent contributor to Zone. He teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Norman Mailer

31 Jan 1923 - 10 Nov 2007

Six Poems From Prakash Kona

Confucius

Nothing is older than a speck of dust
Or taller than a blade of grass.

Three people God wished he never created:
Darwin, Marx and Bertrand Russell.

To liberate women is to liberate the mind of man
From ignorance that enslaved women in the first place.

It’s when I’m ready to leave a place,
That I want to speak my thoughts.

Our worst enemies are hiding
Beneath the faces we love.

I thought of you and wrote about bread,
I thought of bread and wrote about people,
I thought of nothing and wrote about flowers.


Sounds

Whisper in my ear Andalusia,
Sunlight trills in my hybrid veins.

Russell, there is a viper ready
To strike the bones yellow.

Bazaar and my soul is defined
In the babble of throbbing streets.

Trinkets and I hear your heart sing
While day spins into arms of night.


Skyline

I took away the dimension of performance from the truth.

Truth speaks for others.

Since body is one with soul

I abandon myself to a perfume that sweeps the corridors of the brain.

Death is a river and paradise a jewel of hope that comes from a desert

Asleep in its perfection like the sea resting against the bosom of the horizon.


Beads

When an actor dreams she pokes fun at the audience.
Sleep is relative – the face of the sleeper is not.
The actor is dreaming of beads – perhaps.
The actor prays that death may not catch her
Drowsing eye unawares. She is afraid for the face
Delectably naïve. For her the stage is an absence.
No one dare contrive the truth. That would defile
The totem. It means disaster to the existence of the tribe.
My brother eagle circumambulates the clouds and my
Sister crow is earthy as a worm wriggling through the soil.
The thing I cannot imagine is the mind of a torturer.
I suspend action to let myself into the solitude of
Drifting thoughts. I’ve the anger of a victim in me.
I’m the victim of a life I could’ve avoided living.
The torturer is not an actor because he contrives
The truth without believing in it. Torture divorces spirit
From flesh. The torturer is at war with the stage.
Evening lights take me in the direction of the wind.
The time zones of the past are framed in missing
Spaces of the present. On a red hill night came as nights
Do stealthily eclipsing the day’s madness. You’re not asleep.
Like all actors in the grinding mill of the imagination the
Day permeates every cell of the night. Was I weeping
At the thought of my death? I braced myself for
An end no more real than the life I lived.


Overture

The timeless body is queen of illusions.
The space between standing on a road
And dreaming of pavilions –
No fool that knew the queen would return into
The cave of time. You cannot glamorize
The perishing world of senses except
Through the gaze of the queen.
Untranslatable as the dark is the
Queen of pavilions.
In my dreams but never in
Reality the queen is a trespasser in veils,
The dream is reality – I don’t
Need walls of prisons to persuade me
That I’m serious to the point of
Ill-concealed bitterness. What is written
On the forehead is not the same as what
Lips utter with the conviction of a born dreamer.
Death forgives in a way that life never does.


Love’s Nest

I

Love’s nests are built by the art of putting twigs together stolen from birds.
Migrant laborers return from spaces where they work for survival. When they speak of returning home they mean lying in a love’s nest until morning.
I want no home for my own. I built my nest in your heart that flies from hill to horizon back to the hill. Your love nestles everywhere. Homeless is that heart of yours but that is my home.
In the fatal embrace of lovers we discover our homes in the warmth of each other’s faces.
The nest shelters from sad raindrops falling on your eyes and my head in your lap. The bodies of lovers never part. They remain in nests for lover or beloved to come back into the arms of the other.
Love is your body that crosses mine like pencil marks on a page gently wiped out by an eraser. On the page of my life is your body. All the pencil marks add up to the point where they eternally diverge from one another. At the point of divergence my life becomes one with your body.
I need your lips on my neck. We coil into one another. A tree with branches opening to the sky. The sky filling the bosom of the tree. The tree nestling against the sky. In your belly is a button. I press the button to reach the home I come to sleep.
I imagined before it happened. I make my nest in the thoughts of the sleeper. The sleeper is one among infinite other bodies. The sleeper is infinite in one body.


II

I hugged the body with the strength of my arms. Will that body remember me when I’m gone?
I felt each part of the body with my lips. Will that body forgive my lips for daring to feel?
I composed music for lips on a soul inside a body. Will music produce the passion of a palm tree when lovers meet at dusk?
I was alone inside you sharing the loneliness of your innermost self. Will you make me a slave of that dark region that does not allow words to enter?
I battled with jealous ghosts in fear that I might lose you. Will death spare my soul the memory of your caress?
I ran from mirror to mirror in outstanding places for the hem of your shadow. Will your shadow smile into my eyes with pity?
I wondered if a word is what makes something beautiful or something is beautiful before the word knows it. Will you let my words pass over your body like dew from the sky?
I drank from the cup of bitter sweetness the waters of a tap made for the mouths of children celebrating their long gestation in the womb. Will the cup teach me to endure moments of your absence?
I longed for the littleness of a bonsai that I may be in the room of your heart. Will you expand your heart to accommodate a stranger that speaks in the tongue of the intoxicated?
I turn in bed that night may pass and morning break the monotony of a restless body. Will this body be patient when it sees you uncoiling from the hibernation of a long night away from dreams?
I dug the grave of my early youth for words I used that came to end in a romantic nothing. That was how the world of light looked to me. Darkness is thicker than light. The smell of sweat in a glimmer. I am in love with a vase I’ve never seen. Blood is water mingled with time. My blood disseminate to the sea. Mingle into the blood of the one I love.


Prakash Kona (born July 14, 1967) is an Indian novelist, essayist, poet and theorist who lives in Hyderabad, India. He writes in English, and is the author of six books to date: Words on Lips of a Stranger (Writers Workshop, Calcutta 2006), Pearls of an Unstrung Necklace (Fugue State Press, New York 2005), Literary Criticism: A Study of Pluralism (Wittgenstein, Chomsky and Derrida) (Wisdom House Publications, Leeds 2004), Streets that Smell of Dying Roses (Fugue State Press, New York 2003 & Yeti Books, Calicut 2006), Poems for Her (Writers Workshop, Calcutta 1999) and You and Other Poems (Writers Workshop, Calcutta 1997). His fiction is highly unusual, an experimental combination of free-floating emotion and political theory that can depict, for example, a city or a love relationship in an ambiguous, flowing, non-concrete and yet highly personal and heartfelt manner.

Seven Sonnets From William Bain

Water: A short sonnet sequence

1

Water

Each broken branch in the dream
is an eraser, connecting, perhaps conning
writing, the arm, heart, sap moving
in the earth. The dream.... If leaf
covers the glass, the language
is veins, but still glass.
Still water, movement perhaps
beneath the dream, inside broken branch.
The speed of the eye can receive
light, yet never keep up.
The tiring swimmer, resting
in still water, measures flat glance,
glass reflecting minutes to shore,
to branch, leaf, mote.

2

Anglesey

Green lawn expanse, bright sunlight.
Word magnet traces water.
There was water, too, that Anglesey
walk upward, sheets of weed
cover hiding the red thread,
the underflow of deserted dream—
zoomed fence of friends’
divorce I’d held close.
False laughter gave away half
the choice loyalty was asking.
My white cottage home, my ground,
slid roadward in divided silence.
Landscape so bright it hurts.

3

Thunder

Another thing about thunder is dirt out
of the rain following—
Traces of gases and dust water
our knives as we wallow or dust bathe
or gallop into battle. The offkey
singers—do they hear Callas and say
callous, or is it callous in,
cailloux out? Bright October morning,
history before the song, blocks out
cloud over dusty hill, above new asphalt.
Altitude, mass, elegy disappear, string
switching freight roar, alarmed bell
blown along the glint of track,
track glinting in lightning.

4

Joke

Band sand rand Dan flowering,
silver trail snail crab mountain rising.
Pausing outside the Jonqueres exit of Urquinaona station,
a short translation of some bounded part
of Barcelona, the lights on Laietana—
the throng I watch this November night.
For the English to find the full city is impossible.
Sunday morning, or Sunday evening, the move back
goes to cards, poker, say, or bridge,
and a bluff. This vision, then, in
the direction of Barceloneta: the bright
playing cards in fourteen rows, the flies
about us as we sweat on the sand:
perception of absent water.

5

Sonnet Lullaby: Sleep

Come on, now, let’s go to sleep...
Look at all these colorful fish here,
wiggling their colorful little tails
and fins, drowsily, in the shifting
currents of the deep, deep water.



Other animals come and swim, too, by
the time space ship arrives...
Bear and Dog play, jumping around. At
some point it won’t work: some
problem seems to come up. Who’s who here?



Then the bright little dog icon springs away upward,
toy species or a species of toy. Sublime.
Smiling, he sits there, fitting in.
The currents tug. This way. That way.

6

Villager

Greenwich and the beroached place you left
have to come, willy nilly, poem unable
to find the eye, the third, the beast.
It is additional text put off,
flowers overgrown that tumble,
then recede to photography.
You’ll be out. I phone ahead anyway.
You’re out. I walk over anyway,
through a fast New York crowd,
Friday before work’s out. Three,
now four outs in one sonnet: a trend.
Above the frame of real steel girder,
in the photograph’s mirrored space, home flies in:
augmented fourth of summer repertory.

7

Mind auto

It isn’t that reading wasn’t
thinking other thoughts before.
(Thinking thoughts echoes though.)

In the notebook—“the” notebook!—
in a notebook, I draw
car car car car car car

smoke vroooom,
then try to convince myself
the drawing was thoughtless,
pen simply following hand, no

mind. No-mind. Nomind.
Light turbulence somewhere’s
pulled rain clouds into giant jeans.
Nomind. Only water, water, water—vroooom.


William Bain grew up in Indiana and earned an English Literature degree with a Chemistry minor from Indiana University. In addition to writing, he is also a visual artist whose work has been in collective exhibitions in Barcelona, Spain. His poems and stories have appeared in various paper and electronic publications, most recently in RedRiverReview, Roundonline, and previously in Zone. Currently, he works as a translator and is a PhD student in Literary Theory at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.