18.
The morning
There is a tree in my backyard from which pus-filled boils hang. I’ve seen birds break them open, and I have eaten one myself. They all have hard tapioca pearls in them that punish me for biting down, so I bite until I bleed. Sometimes I forget that I have the power to kill myself.
It’s such a relief when
I remember.
I have hung so many
nooses in my dorm room, but my laptop charger is the only one that could have
worked. At home there are no good places to hang myself.
When I go walking, sometimes I suddenly
hear a freight train barreling towards me, and the earth before me splits open.
Hot water, red with clay, drowns me and I hope someone will hear me now.
~Abigail Denton~
*
17.
If
Not When
When I kill myself, I will tenderly carve uneven ribbons from my
flesh and let the blood rush from me until I am an empty husk surrounded by my
own filth. I will stand in my freezing cold apartment, fingers fumbling with my
dull paring knife, and cut and cut and cut and cut until I can grasp each ragged
rectangle and drag it screaming from my body. I won't go into shock because if
I can push myself through the undying light of every morning and the corrosive
darkness of every night, then I can be here and do this, and my body doesn't
get to make that decision for me I will be there every moment and feel it all
because I will choose who I am and what I mean and it is this and now and here
and blood and gone.
~Abigail Denton~
*
16.
The Rabbit Hole
She asked don't you ever
look inside your mind?
I know what's there that's
why I don't
anger, rage, hate
paranoia, insecurity
fear, self loathing
mental illness
control of the weather
control of your mind
control of nothing
terror
swallow a pill and
fall into the hole
can't stop the racing
of rabbits racing through my mind
take one pill and it does nothing
take the rest
beauty, friendship, love
~Darryl Shupe~
*
15.
Question and Undermine
Mock every indecision.
Bully her every choice:
take an old rusty nutpick, scratch
hopscotch lines into her armpits,
then dig, like a hygienist
scraping away plaque,
until you violate her joints
and smile when you do it,
throw her a psalm, like it's the ball from an old jax set
that lost its bounce but smacks like hard cement on her
right eyelid, silencing her wink.
She writhes in pain, injury insulted when she trips on a wrench
you place in front of her feet.
She's breathing your moves,
the antichrist to her cheer section.
You reach down, yank out her bangs
as if they were a clump of grass,
blow them into your breeze, make a wish
for yourself that she'll morph into instant dead dandelion,
but she dares whimper. You tell her please
get some mental help. You add, make it credible.
~Sandra Feen~
*
14.
Facial Landscape
~Sandra Feen~
*
13.
The Lot
built like a fireplug
chased a favorite girl home
through the lot
on Lefferts Avenue
where there was always
something unpleasant in the weeds:
drippy cans of beer, a dead pigeon,
bleeding newsprint. He must like you,
her mother said.
Moving through childhood for me
hopeful. Now I watch from here
like watching hatchlings in a nest
on the internet via webcam.
(Is the internet a secondary habitat
for the bird? For the watcher?)
I can see the lot
the girl who ran through there
and others that maybe ran through there
and think...you lot could be happy
this lot could be happy.
~Linda Umans~
*
12.
BONES OF MY BROTHER
The bones of my brotherwere stashed around the house
his hair was in the drain
his toy truck was under the bed
his shoe in the closet
I heard his giggle on the lawn
and his breathing in the night
I thought I could escape him
but he was everywhere
in my mother’s irritation
and in her false smile
behind her tipsy laughter
in my father’s distance
and his rigid rules
my sister was haunted
and useless to me
they were all so busy with him
with all the little tender bits of him
his mischief and his sweetness and the happiness he gave them
I wanted them to see me
but I was no match for him
no one could help me
get rid of him
because he wasn’t there
~Janet
Kinaird Parker~
*
11.
Keep Elevated
~Sandra Feen~
*
10.
Hovering
no reflection from anyone
who wasn’t in a book.
I became dominant in spite.
This took a lot of time.
And now my furniture is dying.
At night I hear creaks
coming from my dresser
no termite invasion
but the sound of glue
terminally drying.
When I heard a piece of wood
drop to the floor, I knew.
My life did not walk off like Gogol’s nose
to accumulate memories
to commit its own mayhem.
It hangs about
sometimes a shawl of albatross
sometimes a warm hoodie.
Lovely man at a reading
the other night, really young
seated a folding chair away.
We smiled at the same times
same things.
Oh, if…
Have a single malt, I say
and take your shards
for a stroll in the subjunctive.
~Linda Umans~
NOBODY TOLD ME
nobody told me
(they didn't say much)
that when I was sixty and a widow
that such a longing would be there
this longing for touch
this longing for muscle and sinew and skin
for beauty, for youth
this hunger within
for the feel and the scent of silky clean hair
nobody told me I would miss it so much
the permission to feel and the smell
of young breath
stroking the round
and the soft and the hard
the chance to be wild
and desired and free
nobody told me
the fire would still burn when
the world had moved on
and the nights had turned cold
my big bed was empty
and my body was old
~Janet
Kinaird Parker~
*
8.
Missing Ease
~Sandra Feen~
*
7.
EXPRESSION
What you say, you say.
You have been accused of keeping
Your weather close. So
When now and again you let
Some rain out, it is curiously noted.
Yet, people should know:
You are not an eco-system –
You are a farmyard, and each
Part of you fits into the economics
Of robbing chickens of their eggs,
Killing the rats in the barn,
Sealing that oil leak in the tractor.
Hear that tractor roar! If we
Ignore it, your economy goes south,
Chickens withdraw and fear stewing.
And then you let loose the sleet.
~Ken Poyner~
*
6.
GIFT OF A STUTTERING GOD
Here is where we make the animals.
Each to order, the genetic strips
First assembled in huge scale,
Checked for accuracy, then reconstructed
With the proper ratios, put in
The nutrient soup and, just
Like that, you have a new
Animal. We often make more
Than one, just in case
A bad connection creeps in.
If all goes well, we offer
The other to the customer
At reduced price. Otherwise,
It is an operating expense write-off.
People are so pleased
That usually they want the seconds.
We disassemble afterwards
The code, so each client
Can be assured that his or her animal
Is totally unique. In some cases
A customer has actually married
The beta-tested animal, our efforts having
Constructed the perfect synthetic
Mate. Dream well, and we
Will make your dreams come
True. And our guarantee
Is always in effect: if ever
Your animal performs to less than
Stated specifications, bring it back.
It will be returned to the soup,
And we will construct another, free.
5.
Black
Bear Soup
not a repository—or a factory, even though your
grandfather smoked like seven smokestacks.”
I didn’t remember him, just the fables, the praise and
his hair the color of straw—oh, and one strange
quirk; he loved mosquitoes and all their bother, and
the smoke that gathered in his own Siberian wood.
And from somewhere I know he liked to eat what he
could forage and scrounge.“And what else,” said he,
they said, “but to end it all deep in black bear soup.”
4.
Fearless
Rain
Flash fried, freeze dried, essential.
Find a flagon and pour yourself one,
So said the butcher to the undertaker, and then:
“Feed yourself!” Imagine the end of a rift
Where the upwardly mobile reside
In the middle of a cloud of expectations.
Oh to be spoken to vicariously, no favors done;
Oh no, God no, a dazzle gives us no undue fish.
No one finds favors, you trigger-happy folk.
Yes, we are undone, we are another condition.
As the fire dances and that thin mist
Lazes, we rest on our morning laurels.
~Marc Vincenz~
*
3.
Jaywalking on Joy
for
John Wieners
it. I could have given it away. The usual anagrams descended
like light remained on the hot, perfumed sidewalks. A bruising kiss.
In love, so completely in love, with latitudinal meditations.
A kind of heaven. All that makes the bird’s song, trembling,
oddly graceful and pretty suggesting never-ending replication and growth.
I want to forget everything I ever knew about poetry. Tiptoe away
across thin wet grass. Foliage clogged. Nonetheless I may be spared
the monocular sameness of the nameless pedestrian jaywalking on joy.
Except in the poem. A slight rhythm and twist that seems to say,
“I know you are looking and... I don’t care!” That are we not
mere metaphors we might suddenly feel the need to underline
these meticulous misanthropic sensibilities as they spark and buzz.
The myriad faces dulled and coarsened by the elegant fluster of traffic
signals. A little happiness. In you. On you. With you. We edit out
our errors. Where our dreams become blurred, we hesitate
as if it were the first time. A network of passages always photographic
negatives of immeasurable impact. Rain connecting endings
that nobody likes. Where one turns, often. Self-consciously pulling off
the cloth from the bird cage. Pouring it all out on the straight and narrow
lanes. As one now going goes. Endowed with the heavy semblance of sirens.
Boutiques and delicatessens resting in glum puddles. The penetrating gaze
of little windows envying the skyscraper’s monumental erection. Spectral
blue pressed into the pecking shadows of early June where I continue
pleasing myself in this cryptic heterodox by writing poetry regardless
the spectacle of pathos, the road eating the universe as a summer stroll
sways her libidinous hips and those little shifting sounds like scissors
trimming away the watchdog of my heart. Deviating from a closed shutter,
the splatting drips of an air conditioning unit, the sound a grapefruit makes
when pried apart by the poetics of space until we are more than eyes
with only one story. The one comforting thing is that I can do my penance
from this balcony between the perfunctory hum of convoluted shapes,
only the cosmic hello of an hourglass passing through a flashing yellow
light. My eyes dominated by the vain desire to be young and the charms
that take us back pressing intimately deeper into daydreams a little more
beautiful, a little more distressed with each passing breath. Hissing hot.
~Joseph
Cooper~
*
2.
through the empty heat your brain is wired
to a singular focus directional into rust
and carpentry there is wood everywhere
painted or stained with mud there is music
and a sense of relief but dust is mostly made
from skin cells and your breath is a language
danced by reptiles from a floating mouth
that once held teeth but now spits out the seeds
and cores of any kind of fruit that you can think of
we name your story fiction and tongue
the depth of labor as it crosses time.
*
1.
Fire in the Elephant Museum
It was the trumpetingthe padding steps of the ones with stuffing
the cranking of the wind-ups
the screeching of the trunk-shaped horns
the dripping of the soaps and candles
the desperation of the effigies
that awakened him.
He was next door dreaming of acquisition
a new estate jeweled miniatures
ticket to Las Vegas already in hand.
Then the smoke
the ghastly metaphor,
the prototypes
mostly struggling
some completely captive
some past endangered.
He thought of this intermittently,
the objects so alive
were still so far removed.
And now he looked to salvage,
many of his favorites gone
some barely singed,
the scarred but viable
gave him hope for rehab,
on the brown lawn
a trailer would do.
♦
In Bandhavgarh I rode an elephant
to see a tiger as was the custom in the park.
My traveling companion was moved to say,
"We are so privileged.
I hope her life is good here.
I hope they treat her well."
~Linda Umans~
