Corrina Bain - Alan Britt - Joe Clinkenbeard

William Crawford - Richard Fein - Daniel Godston

Penn Kemp - DLW Pesavento - Minal Sarosh - Alexandra Seidel

Robert Stoddard - Sweta Srivastava Vikram - Chavisa Woods

Cosmos poetica

♥   ♠   ♦   ♣

Corrina Bain

Red Twin
for S. E.

*One. From Birth.*

The first thing we remember
is flowers in each others hair
before the show –
the wetnurse fussing over us. Sunset
doused the petals red.
The juncture between us
hidden in the sheet.

It was a comfort, later,
to recognize it blossoming —
ruddy seep wrought from our bodies –
a familiar blaze.

We knew early, our allegiance
to the murdered,
how killable we are, even to ourselves.

Unspoken, we knew
where we were from
would kill us fastest, tried
to outrun it,
the tent behind
the regular circus, its lurid promise —
our name in shaky script on the wall.

*Two. Extricate.*

How we fed ourselves
in the wilderness –
our mother turned inside out.
A hole in the ground
with sounds coming from it
asking for help.
Is there help?

The operation, which the
clean, pink doctor warned,
had come too late. That one of us
would likely die.

Cut free, we floated like kites.
Severed fingers
trailing ribbons of blood
gashed pits where
they pulled our teeth out
so that we would not be known.

This is how I spent the years without you:
made fresh batches of red in the kitchen
afraid the old stuff had soured.
Cracked rusty pipes
and your lovers’ names
matador capes spilling from my wrists
into the black pot,
slit dog carcasses
in the bathtub.

Turned earth of the words where
they tried to bury you.
Water pouring over your sweethearts’ hands
until it ran warm and clear.

It is a comfort still,
today, the blush showing
through your falsifying carapace,
trying to hold out on me. Oh, no.
No no. It’s clear
what kind of girl we are.

Eventually
            of course
we tried to render our father for red.

*Three. Resurgance.*

You came back in a dark year.
With discipline
we pulled ourselves
up to our face and looked
Out. Clouds. Amber traffic lights
streets full of the aspiring dead
freezing themselves in attitudes
of youth. I know our heart
cannot be sicker
than the world is sick.

Diary pages turned to meatslick pulp.
We tried many times.
We said “until death,”
said, “the virtue of work.”
It did not matter. Red
came ebbing out.

How we return to ringmasters
the ones who treat us like what we are.
Trust them to be keepers.
To learn what is best for us from our
bodies’ inarticulate surface
despite everything
we cannot say aloud.

*Four.*

In the nightmare, you did not
want it back. I would walk in
and you would not recognize me.
I would pull up my shirt,
show you the river of a scar,
and you would shake your head.

In the nightmare, your scars
like genitals, hardened
and engorged when sucked.

*Five. Union.*

I do not know that it was right
for me to go to you.
I read about you first.
Through the inches of smudged newsprint
you came unfurling from the ink
like a videotape of surgery.

I am still afraid that I was the only one
who wanted it –

pulse of living ivory
as our bones reknit
My thigh growing fingers –
opening to you like a wish.
The cage of your ribs, a venus flytrap
unhinging. I am afraid
you do not know
that I have done this.

So few things point toward
our survival.
Snared in a body that cannot
unlearn its hunger,
moving through a world
that will not love us.

The tenuous lavender skin
fusing back like a mended sign.

Red pooling under the box spring.
Climbing the walls.

Alan Britt

Waiting for Cicadas

A cicada wobbles sideways along arthritic wires
tacked to a faded oak fence.
His eyes fresh rust
or amber,
but not exactly the blazing red promised
by local news anchors.

He wobbles steadily,
carefully negotiating
each curl of wire.

His wings
two stained-glass windows from a Baroque church,
his torso
perfect segments of pale imperfection
like a palmetto bug’s.

Nearby, cicadas in various poses,
like compass needles in the eye of a hurricane,
cling to lattice.

Closer inspection reveals their eyes
as various shades of red,
from tulip red to a bruised ochre found only on salamanders,
from cayenne pepper red
to an apple rotting on the tree of despair,
and some even display the red promised
by local news anchors.

Ten feet away
another cicada struggles along a horizontal strand
of wire –-
wobbles, revealing her crushed wing.

Her wing of misfortune
was not meant for flying,
or was it now?

We’ll just have to see about that,
won’t we?

Hell, it’s barely 5:30 PM.

But that nagging myth,
its briefcase filled with alarm clocks,
plenty of abused alarm clocks
left in our temporal universe
once the rest of us have been prodded
from our 17 billion-year naps
and learn how to share.

The Heretic

You must first look inside yourself, otherwise you will never know salvation.
       --Jesus of Nazareth, according to the Gospel of Thomas

The Heretic enters a Temple, overturns tables
littered with coins imprinted with Caesar
and assaults cruelty cowering behind holy robes.

The Heretic speaks a rare truth.

Suddenly we’re back in 300 AD,
believing we can live without the sword;
but Romans didn’t give up that easily,
and neither will we.

The Heretic speaks a rare truth
and for this he will be vilified,
unfairly scrutinized by the media,
and crucified at least ten thousand more times.

Joe Clinkenbeard 

L'homme obscure
          after Leopold Sedar Senghor

Simbon sits beneath the baobab tree
as the Savana trembles under the gentle caresses of the vent d'est;
waves of goosebumps travel across his flesh
like the waves of the grasses
washing up on the shore of his seat,
lying red and gold all around him;
a long line of ants steels themselves against the breeze;
Simbon dort,
il rêve,
he is a griot, and a jaeger,
a slave, a servant, a Muslim,
a farmer, a freeman,
a slum-dweller, a doctor, and a king
(mais he, his, toujours).
Il nous a quitté,
pour s'en aller regarder la Grande Mer,
pour la demander,
pour se souvenir la langue,
to stare eastward while once he stared westward,
gazing on the same slow dip of the water on the horizon
(where it pours its contents out into space,
les esclaves, les bateaux, la traite, tous, tous,
all to drift in orbit, in exile, among the stars).
Il nous a quitté,
famished and ridden with disease;
he has been poured like a poor cup of coffee into the sea,
to sink below the waves, and leave only a hint of foam;
fallen beneath machine gun bursts,
pour tomber sous le feu, and leave only a flash, and a cry;
to spill his secrets out onto clay the color of sunset,
beneath the shadow of Kilimanjaro,
or on the dunes of the Sahara,
his blood a dark, unmoving and sticky blaze
upon the trampled grasses,
lying red and gold all around him.

With ease,
with the same sinews he has thrust spade, and spear
(and shaft: "les perles sont étoiles sur la nuit de ta peau"),
and with the same spirit, set the world in motion those millennia ago
(for his home is at the very center, the spoke of the world-wheel,
and the roots of this tree he dozes under may still now
twist themselves 'round our own);
il s'est appellé Mansa, Shaka, Mandela, Ramses;
he has looked out over oceans of adversaries
and not felt fear;
he has braved dense jungles of dark green,
of brilliant, dewy flora, and ancient danger,
and not felt fear;
he has been bound,
to land, and lord,
and not felt fear;
but now, as the night draws to a close,
as the grasses lying red and gold all around him still,
as they swear in the light of the sinking moon to never share the lion's secrets,
Simbon must wake,
lève-toi pour que le soleil se lève!

Only the dust will remember my name

Blurry spots of sun
shining through the leaves
of trees,
gone.

Each globe of light
piercing the canopy
like arrows
to slay the dark.

Now, November,
peeking in to boxes
upon cheering bar patrons
sleeping through life.
They are a mass of unseeing eyes
and I am Argus.
I feel as though they are
everywhere,
and lie in wait for us at
every turn.

Inside me
lies an unwritten poem
about a dead otter I saw
on the beach
a few months
back;
there were baby flies
inside her skull.
I knocked one of her teeth
out
with a piece of driftwood
and kept it.
Respice post te,
and remember
thou
art mortal…

The nights are cold, now,
and she complain that my fingers
are icy,
and the Valley either talks of business
or the banal,
and no one would say
they speak of the important things,
or even le mot juste,
by any stretch
of any imagination.

Up and down these roads,
it's best these days
to be
a pedestrian,
unbound by the pressures
of destination…

In an Indian restaurant
in a shopping plaza
I exchanged glances with a woman
with black hair,
and eyes that reminded me
of hers
before love had come
and made a mess of things…

November is a good time
for those who like
to live in the dark.
Looking up at the
night sky,
it seems sunset arrives
ahead of schedule
more and more
each evening.

Every house
and place of business
broadcasts out its brightly-lit programs,
grey-and-blue light peeking
shyly
from behind curtains,
soft light thrown on waitresses
in tight white t-shirts,
and the faint outline
of shadows on the wall
that they all mistake
for real life.

William Crawford

Collapsing Into Cosmos

we dangle furiously
until we faint

under stars frigid and errant
rendered meaningless
wish after wish

with every burning candle
canceled by quixotic breath
a windmill wins

a widow spins
some silken soigné song
strengthened by strings

it captures everything
it pulls us in

our senses return
we rise and shine entangled
in silver shambles,
in bright blue ribbons of smoke

our common scars
remember themselves
in choking cloud
of exhausted dream

just another bleeding red realm
another substance, another vessel,
another womb to pour ourselves from

righted only by rain
on all seeing lens

we cross frosted lawn
a pitiful, impoverished brown
still it shines for a moment
like all errors do

taking lessons from the poor
holding hands, hearts

with tone poems in our bones
with prayers of inner mounting flame
we challenge this night

the trembling rhymes of goodbye
the seismic final embrace

together we ache
seek painless erasure
and resultant renewal

always

we let go too soon
relinquish this vision

but your eyes
they’ve seen more
than mine

they frame blue arrangements
first flower, then flame,
now, finally, this famished darkness

the weight of several worlds
all the bells never rung
high, dry, and lonesome
in unattended towers

all the recurring fountains
bereft of glittering coin
or pauper’s wasted wish

chance ghost encounters
passing ships of despair

on our own private swan lake

your body so tiny
trained for this dance
an uncollected butterfly
weightless and balletic

a stranger to the net, to the pin
to a still life under glass
never mounted or frozen in motion
never lonely with that auroral aura

yet still so tragically fragile

my body clumsy
in constant need of a crutch
a crisp leper gauzed together
by your charity, your mercy

a healing festival –
I’ll remember you
this way, my way,

as I’m caught beneath
your glorious wheel
my mother of invention/intervention

divine

a graceless swain to your swan
gracious to this faithful fate

that laughs not at us
but with us.

Richard Fein

The Quantum Paradox of Touching

We’ve never truly touched, nor can we,
neither can either of us really touch ourselves
nor anyone touch anybody for that matter.
Matter, therein lies the paradox.
From matter comes gravity which pulls everything together.
But the electromagnetism of matter also keeps things apart.
For when we two caress there’s always a nano, nano gap between us.
That feeling of flesh upon flesh
is an intimate collision of force fields of electron polarity.
Our passionate sensual stroking shrouds the proximity of two negative fields
which like incest engenders mutual repulsion.
And to bridge that millionth of a hairbreadth distance
between my hand on your skin or yours on mine,
the boundaries that define us must dissolve.
And that would bring together not separate, clearly formed  beings,
but an ill-defined olio of our helter-skelter atoms.
Yes I truly desire to touch you and you, me,
with neither photon nor quark between us.
But if we ever shut tight that quantum gap,
it would be as if we touched fire,
blisters bursting on burnt skin, pus pooling into shapeless puddles.

A Question of Thirteen Seconds

"After your head is cut off by a guillotine
you have 13 seconds of consciousness. . .
13 seconds is the amount of . . . energy. . .
in the brain to keep going. . . not only can you blink,
but you can do two for yes and one for no;
and it is said to have been done."
Dr. Ron Wright, Chief Medical Examiner of Broward County Florida.

Now no pardon is possible, even from God.
Now the wind in the lungs will be forever stagnant.
Now the lungs themselves will dissolve.
Now the Platonic ideal of mind free of body is almost realized.
What is proper etiquette for you--the executioner--
when all the condemned's debts have just been paid?
What to do for the already but not yet dead
at this socially awkward moment?
Are you, at last, forgiving?

Do you pick up the head by the hair
Do you stroke a pale cheek?
Do you allow a loved one to approach and kiss?
Do you hold up a mirror?
Do you torture the eyelids with a question?
There is time for one.
What would you want to know?
Does the being at your feet know the answer?
Or does the faintest consciousness blind one to what comes after?
What lies ahead---is it evening darkness or high noon blaze?
Do you ask if it's comfortable?
Is it now an it?

Think of something fast.
What is the professional thing to do?
Be silent? Be curious? Smile? Cry? Look away?
Sing a hymn?
Or leave the head in the bloody bucket,
and let the eyes glaze in a screamless terror?

Daniel Godston

Black Magic Love Spell 
    

          written while collaborating with sculptor Alan Emerson Hicks

“The fool’s devotion is the devil’s lovechild,”
the witch triplets whispersneer.
Thunderclouds form cherubs,
gargoyles, minotaurs, will-o-the-wisps & sprites.

The witch triplets whispersneer,
as clouds part like praying hands.
Gargoyles, minotaurs, will-o-the-wisps & sprites
hop through sundogs.

Clouds part like praying hands,
opening as their slender fingers
hop through sundogs
& comb through the aether.

Opening as their slender fingers
reach toward love’s permutations at nightfall
& comb through the aether
whose crepuscular space spells desire.

Reaches towards love’s permutations at nightfall—
“The fool’s devotion is the devil’s lovechild,”
whose crepuscular space spells desire
& thunderclouds form cherubs.

Penn Kemp

Solstice, 2012
  
Insects shrill.  A thrum as of clacking bones.
Today tallies a long count of creation cycles. 
  
On this winter solstice we climb our Sacred
Tree to enter wide zones of silence through
  
the doorway of darkness, our canoe riding
white rivers of night.  The elliptic crosses
  
Milky Way precisely now, when elements
merge in a dark rift of source and return. 
  
Cacti and palm leaves rustle dry in the ruins.
Terror cracks the heart open.  Rivulets run
  
a scarlet sap to appease unknown gods be-
yond us.  Blooming and blessing, this wound
  
wound tight round knots of surmise reveals so
little before our offering is received in sunrise. 

from Dream Sequins i
 
All is translation, carried across, the metaphor of
being.  Being here, I am translated there.  Where?
 
Only the shadow knows.  The words speak for each
other and themselves.  They tumble in their sphere,
 
happily clunking into and through each other.  Hue
beyond spectrum spreads to sound and heat.  Who
 
could doubt the veracity of such tangibly felt reality? 
Not, in the dream, I, who am fully there living sweet
 
rounds that seem so perfectly whole I could spend
life here.  Nothing conjures any outside I could know

beyond the curved boundaries of this floating world.
Intuition and instinct, the play of crimson and purple,

these weave a web through skeins of dream fabric
from which to fabricate poems as the wheel turns. 

Dimensions cross over like water colours bleeding
but not muddy in the merging of separate realities.

DLW Pesavento 

Singularity: 5000 A.D.

To you who may still be human,
I come to your Future
like a stray bullet
shot from a drunken Past,
unapologetic for what I was, and am;
a vulgar voice from a darker time
of disease, death, and war,
these words no match for your mathematics,
my quantum of love, without equations to measure.
And yet, I think of you, and wonder
what angel emerges from our mortal chrysalis.

Ring Nebula

Sidereal ouroboros: benzene-ring scintillant dream
primeval-serpiginous diadem's plasmatic stardust;
interstitial space within space, sinuous-interstice rivulets’
ectatic-syncytial synesthesia, nebula-galactic Oracular
light-stamen comet pollinating reliquary night;
nascent-star recombinant asteroidal syntax
pristine progeny bearing parabolic penumbra;
protean coronal star-flower origami, reaching out
to us, immense and unfolding calyceal corpus callosum
carbonite-rostral before prismatic cirsoid amygdala
myriad stellar wraiths; dark matter-reticular cisternal
lacustrine lacuna's serpentine vortices, vertiginous
helical-phantasmal maelstroms, crepuscular-incandescent
star-fire resplendent mitochondrial lapis-flame lattice
of febrile quantum-prion conflagrations
supernova defervesced by umbra chiaroscuro.

Minal Sarosh

A Lizard's Tail

I have suddenly grown
a new tongue.
It looks awkward,
out of place
in my mouth and
heavily accented.

I cautiously drag it across
delicate cups
of vowels and saucer
consonants,
in the crockery showcase.

It could be yet another
tongue I have grown.
Not Gujarati, the tongue
I was born with,
nor Telugu my father’s tongue,
with which I cling upside down
on the ceiling.
Scared every word
might tumble down out of place

Nor Marathi my neighbour’s
tongue, which I snatch up
like an oversized beetle.
But unable to swallow,
it chokes my throat
quarrelling over
the price of onions.

And crawling from room to room,
be it, Gujarati or Telugu,
Marathi or Hindi,
I have cut my tongue,
many times,
between many doors,
like a lizard’s tail.
Surprisingly, every time
I found English
growing in its place.

------------------------------------------------------------------
*Gujarati, Telugu, Marathi, and Hindi are regional languages of India

Was Vasco Da Gama anyone’s friend?

The ghost hides in its red-tiled house
with windows carved in the shape
of burning memories preserved

like mummies inside a tomb of history.
The smell of his deed, fresh like spices
he deceitfully stole from my mother

-land, squashing resistance with goulashes
of greed. Merchants massacred, caterpillars
sacrificed by an army of convicts to weave

a new sea route. Innocence blanched like almonds
with boiling water and pitch, so the sailor man
could follow the compass of ambition pointing

towards the wealth of galaxy. Thrice, he tied his tongue
with cherries of lies to build dreams. Footbridge of bones
flowed over blood of the caravan. The sea mourned its womb.

Books can braid tales of his victory
but to me, he will be a marker for the pages
I never want to revisit. Not today, nor tomorrow.

Chavisa Woods

Riverstick

for the farm girls serving in the armed forces

he is a prop you move around the room

he must have been born this way

it does not seem as though anyone has shot his eyes out

although his eyes do look as though someone has shot them out

that is obviously not what has actually happened

here

I am saying he is not good enough for you

I am not saying you are too good

because I do not want to make the mistaken implication that you are good

you are not good,                            I know that.                       I also know,

he is not good enough for you.

You were my riverstick

you were my blonde nightrider

your tits were perfect

I never did anything to them

                                we didn’t have that sort of relationship,

but sometimes still and always, I have thought of them with fondness

the way the bottoms sagged heavy, taut, and yet, they were so high, pointing upward as if god were perhaps playing puppet with a string extending from your nipples to heaven

yes

I have thought of them with fondness

   dear friend

and I am not sorry to say you are not good

it is also possible I am not good and none of us our good

but obviously it is my belief that I am mostly good and you are not.                                                                                                                      

nothing catches in me to say this now

Before, it caught.

before I realized you were not good,

it was always a catching

hook in whatever it is that catches hooks and gets tugged

through the recesses of regressing expectation

gasping       for some taste of identity in relation to that which you once knew or thought you knew, at least some image of what you thought you knew,                   and flops                             frantically

as that image

withers, strung up and dying on

a hook  (?)           (again? sure, why not.)

but when your mother told what you had joined

that was the last time I went through all that

for anything

and now I’m done with all that

and everything

and I’m done with ya’ll

and by you all

I mean all of humanity….

I will not be surprised

at any of it anymore

how could I be?

you were my riverstick

my blonde nightrider

you were, I suppose, prosaically, my hero

(you didn’t know that, did you?                                                                      

because I said I don’t believe in heroes,

but, you see, I am a hypocrite emotionally)

you were the sweetness expelled when I learned to touch myself

without guilt

you were the strength of crying and standing after being beaten by a tall man in front of a crowd shouting me down,

you were my standing                                                   again and again

you were the thing that needed protecting because it did not appear to need 

protecting

or to know it was ever being

protected,

          and that protecting was desirous in me

you were you were you were

cut grass, caked mud, the rush of the river, the bouncing girl, night shouting of children,

and reserve, courage,

 the hypnosis of television, the hedonism of fried cheese 

you were my best goodness loved.

you were my best goodness loved.

and now

you are fatigued

how should I say,

cloaked

in brown and green or pixilated

now is it     ?

colors of sand

‘cause that’s where you (not we) do

your gore business

you are punching buttons punching out

bombs

bonebots

or awaiting orders

to bust the sand to sand

bustthe sandtosand

sandtosandtobloodbones

you are gory gobly goo with a smiley face beside it

you are laughing your shredded teeth wide                                                  

as oceans of blood,

yes

oceans of blood, I said it

or, perhaps, let’s try…

dirty decrepit doorways of disembowelment

black caked bathtubs of intestines

retching children strung up on flagpoles vomiting bile,

cowering families behind torn couches

and the hot acceleration of bullets whizzing through someone’s father’s skull

you are war and ruins

and you have no homage for the ruins

and you’re rock’n rolling Stallone style toward Mecca

you are you are you are

the bloodfield legfield footfield parted field, field of parts and greed and gore,

you are

but sometimes, I see also, you are safe at home with your new boy

in AMERIKKA,

both of you are on leave

and you show people happy pictures

so I wrote you this letter

to tell you, just judging from the picture

I think he is not good enough for you

his empty eyes remind me too much of your father

who seemed so like a prop being moved around the house

somehow you, his own daughter, never even knew what he did for a living,

and it always surprised me that your mother let such a nonexistent being

touch her amazing breasts.

I just wanted to tell you that you should know

he is not good enough for you

not to imply that you are good

but that’s a thing

I guess I already told you

before