New Poems From Richard Cronshey

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

                     
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

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

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

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

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

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

27 June 1936 - 13 February 2010

Tomás Eloy Martínez

16 July 1934 - 31 January 2010

JD Salinger

1 January 1919 - 27 January 2010

Six Poems From Andrea Perkins

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

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

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.