Mike Alexander - Joe Churchwell - J. de Salvo
William Keens - Andrew Rahal - Sweta Srivastava Vikram
Marc Vincenz - Mercedes Webb-Pullman
Fliegen der Poesie
Mike Alexander
Sawing a Woman in Half
It looks as though she volunteers,
all innocence; in fact,
this saw has gnawed away at her for years.
Not only is she in the act,
she is its mastermind,
the one who after all this time has cracked
the parlor tricks of humankind,
the toolkit of the trade.
Unseen by anybody, working blind,
but evidently unafraid
inside the oblong box,
the lady lies at length beneath the blade
that slices through her paradox…
that cuts her till she screams.
The dapper stage magician then unlocks
an image from your cruelest dreams:
her body sawn in half.
But nothing here is ever as it seems.
He taps her with his magic staff,
& then she reappears,
bent double now she has the final laugh
Nightwalk
The costumes each year more
disappointing than the year before.
You’d like to kick these fey vampires
to the curb. As if lace & satin
could hide lackluster lusts
of desk jockeys better
than grey powder pallor
or eye shadow. Do they think
the grave grants charisma?
Maybe. The machine of the body
can be more compelling
when it fails to work. Fear
stimulates the heart.
The penumbra of the statue
in the garden behind St. Louis
dwarfs itself, a dark
crucifix above the alleyway.
Wannabe immortals never notice.
Joe Churchwell
Soliloquy Outspoken
The hills on the skyline are the source of an everlasting tranquility
which only we can hear, over the bridge hidden in the forest, to
see our family of strangers, and they never ask us what we are.
And did you know sometimes sleeps for a year? And you--live,
there is no choice. Your eyes that speak through infants or the dying,
tell me, what is wrong with me? What is sunlight? Forgiveness and
thorns. I don’t do this anymore to get stoned, I do this to wake up.
The audience will be held in the attic, four years ago yesterday.
You’re dead, actually. That’s not how you were born. It took
all your life. Onwards toward the most terrible and largest fear:
you are going to live. When you wanted to stop you would not,
and when you could have then you never would. This black hole
sounds out with a musical note, the world is ash already, I think I need
a Tylenol. Always we have remembered the most terrible things
about the most terrible times, and they return to us in spirit. Our two realities--
perception and dream. But when it turns horrible once again, it is the spirit.
The real spirit. The one which keeps us comforted when we are
alone and all else left us. I came in to this world a bloody and naked
man screaming, and I live like that.
Coma, always. Morning, fading, vanishing, decades ago.
I am so extremely tired of this long separation from God. This flight
from heaven. Now this sun of our cremation. Memory comes from
the future, I remember speeding through the wheat fields of Kansas.
The sky is a river of lightning, falling, rising. This
second beyond time. I swore we would always be together, and yet…
Thank God, I will wander. Once again belong. Remember us. Not just you.
We the watchers of mid-December. Bring it to mind, say the names of those
who breathed and spoke every objects name.
A black
shadow
voice.
We were so stoned we had died.
And me, myself,
I know you’re still there
in the years past
where I last left you
burning, screaming,
softly. We were so many plausible outcomes. Unseen places and words unsaid for
this our haunted Noel. Stay with me.
There is nowhere to go. There is nothing
out there. Stay with me.
J. de Salvo
The End of Ambition
my life is made of onion skins and eggshells
I can count them in the sink…I could count them,
that is, but I don’t…if I knew how many
there were it would take something away from the
experience…make all this trash less sacred
I’ve learned to love the trash…and perhaps that’s where
I’ve failed…in seeking out and wishing for
ordung…on the contrary I have sought a
panoramic view…everything atomic,
an amoeba, even the branded buildings
not in some higher system, but merely for
color, depth, detail…merely to amuse
but it’s not so, you know…these onion skins
and eggshells have a life of their own, and it
is taking…the onions and eggs, the bagels and
lox…might as well be the whole animate
world somehow rotting in a sink in
Los Angeles…ocean, earth, and animal
decompose…a landscape, a Guernica, waste…
I could grow cilantro in it, but how would
I wash my dishes, and manage to keep from
drowning it? …killing it, with grapefruit scented
detergent? no…it’s died already, must it
die again in death? …first the trashcan, then the
dumpster in the back, at last, back to the earth
coffined in poly fibers, which cannot birth?
I wait until every dish is dirty
…then wait some more, until, suddenly, Ordung!
I spring into action, polish the whole place
with poison…now I’ll tackle the wide world!
we must keep our city clean! …the cat must have
its mouse…now the panorama is gone…
now I can work, think! …execute my designs!
…it’s all in my way, out the window with it!
…the onions, the eggs, the cat, the wife, Ordung!
…but no…it’s a soliloquy, nothing more
I shouldn’t know what to do once I’d done it
I’ll plant a tree in my sink, wash my dishes
In the bathroom…fornicate and breed…plant my
failure like a seed…relapse into content
I was a bored, excuse me, I meant to say
born, I really did…born leader at one time
…but I defied my destiny, and now the
trash keeps piling up…there’s nothing I can do
but join the unwashed masses, who dislike me
cook onions and eggs with them, in the back of
a greasy spoon…I have more patience with eggs
than people…with whom I turn the heat too high
…get to the point too fast or not fast enough
…or worse, remark that a point is what’s missing
a complete and total failure, that’s my life
…never finished or accomplished anything
I saw through it all, even my self…too bad
…I found the final solution in the trash
and left it there to rot…it smells of onions
I Don't Write Love Poems
I told you
And now I can see
Some evil bastard,
Some thrice diabolical devil,
Some imaginary beast,
Some Raven,
Sitting in our room,
Cackling quietly
Muttering under his breath:
“But You will, son,
Oh, you will…”
Las Vegas
We didn’t get married in
Las Vegas
But at the Courthouse
From which I had been removed
Many times by the Bailiff
Him warning me
With his eyes
Not to try it
As he cuffed me
And put me back in the cell
It seemed like a victory
It seemed like we had conquered
Maybe we should have
Got married in Vegas
Instead of fighting the whole time
We were there
William Keens
An Iowa Tale
This side of the river
Pigs eat people
Who have fallen, drunk or stricken,
Into their ravenous presence,
Their rapturous, pig-eyed, grunting midst.
Where the farmer stumbles
Perspective shifts. Pigs that surround him
This side of the river usher him
Down to the water,
All benevolence while he is ferried over.
From where he rests,
The current, the pitch send the stars
Careening, the moon in eclipse
Like a face half-eaten.
This side of the river, pigs
Root for position in the pantheon of pigs.
Names for the Heirloom
In the simple darkness of her kitchen, my nonna
Stitches, stitches, stitches.
Snips of thread and linen fall like snow into her lap.
Her dress is black,
Cut from the shirts of fascists, her hands
Lie down like old companions,
Two sisters in the winter olive grove sleeping
Or lovers or partisans. They travel among us.
Two immigrants, two peasants, two voting socialists.
We are the last known
Ark of creation, sailing under threat of forgetfulness
From that distant mooring, a kitchen in the dark
As snow falls over West Fourth Street
And I listen to my grandmother sew
Ever Near, Always With You,
Something to wear in that storm.
Study in Motion
Woman walking uphill,
Her right arm
Oar-like, levering her body forward
While her left
Tocks away in a pendulum’s half-arc,
Weighed down by the paper bag she totes.
Years pool in her wake, decades
Enfold her,
Walking uphill over and over,
The same bloodied rags
Padding each footfall,
The same bag, whatever it holds.
Shuttered watchers
Take note of her passage,
Some breaking bread, others bones.
Every hill
Gives rise to another, every
Echoing street, every gathering storm.
Andrew Rahal
Exchanges w/an Officer
(Slovakia)
We sat for hours in the train car, trading
the tatters of a dictionary like winter trappers
half-trusting the offer. Russian to English-
English to Russian. From far away a red
phone is ringing off its hook, and we are
in the room and stare at it for cavernous
moments, but it’s not a wall-phone
and it rings like a pickle-jar half-spun
and falling off the table. He slid me
a scrap of Pirozkhies, and the heap had
qualities of gifts. Sagging in the napkin
in my palm. It was buried and distant-looking
beneath this souvenir sprung deep, greased up
in a Siberian paperweightfood factory.
The meat was suitcase warm, breaded-stiff
from the pastry layers, and shook out
in grains and more than slightly meatless,
like his mild history of the Russian beard,
clip clap the words fell softly from his mouth
like a pair of old sneakers. When he stroked
the growth drawn down his chin it sounded
like a forest we entered and a team of dogs
were his fingers sledding through it.
I opened my pocket calendar of Czars,
dolls and famous ballerinas. The officer grinned
among all of them, and crossed the Danube
with them, like a slate pebble that skips
and castles and dispatches. One river bank
to the next. Out the window the Castle
of Bratislava rose from the river, was something
already glanced at, though, and signaled
goodbye to our things and ourselves sunk
back into the bleak, fitted faces. He left
the width of a pepper stem in his smile,
but otherwise stood looking blank on
the platform, out toward a clear shadow
of kindness matrioskaed away in the Old
City homes: where faces drew from windows
to against mantled walls, and their smiles
precious as a fragile painted wood,
grew smaller the more inward they went.
Marc Vincenz
The Non Sequitur
I do so wish I’d taken the time to write
nothing much, but more than nothing
to tell you what you’d been to me
how you’d changed everything I stood for
only, I was caught up in my poems,
these endless letters to myself
cascading in graduations
like waves slapping against an eroding shore
an obsession, like trying to make the perfect cheese—
my mother always said what a restless mind I have—
that is, until this very day—I have
taken the time to find out that there are none others left
just nursery rhymes that sing in my head
like seagulls scrapping around garbage cans in the dead of winter
Barcelona B a c k h a n d
O Barcelona how you mince words,
or (truth be told)
have your way with them.
Beneath Sun’s glass you seethe:
One has
to know how to shuck an oyster
to gullet it
with panache.
It would have been easier
to slip two manila envelopes wadded with
lurid promise of secret trips to
Bangkok
or Budapest,
but it would have left you
both unrequited.
I needed something to
brim you,
reel you in tails flapping
a-go-go,
and after the Andalusian
restaurant,
future’s uncertainly was
wiggling her buxom hips.
Skin it any way
seems fit,
the bartender said lighting
my cigarette.
Gather them round
little children,
clap your hands,
find your own gypsy.
Actually I yearned
to invoke
nymphs, sprites, sirens, pixies
from the primordial:
Viking, Greek,
Roman,
any creature with leaves woven
in the hair.
Just one thing: their eyes had
to shine like dollar signs.
And the roast
pork and crackling
did soften your stares.
Best you’d ever had you said.
J e r e z soothed,
R i o j a put to flight,
T e m p r a n i l l o lightened the load.
Flan was sweet and creamy,
crunchy on
top.
Like tasting a virgin you whistled
beneath your breath.
A bell clanged
in my head.
After all the other humors
there was only
one other left.
Sweta Srivastava Vikram
Killing, but not just a girl child
The sun doesn’t sink until 8 p.m.
but she sees darkness of bats all day.
Tidal waves of melancholy pour,
with seeds plowed in her every year.
Frogs get used to the air at night
but her murdered months mourn scars.
Arms ache to hold more than transparent
bones scattered by wet winter winds.
Mouth filled with muffled cries, bitter hospitals
shadow her, conspirators in devil’s clothes.
Drinking wine of agony, hoping Adam would be born,
and she wouldn’t be a caretaker of graves.
When lights go out in the country
Sitting in a cottage, sealed
doors of snow brew fear
in a teapot. Simmering alone,
whistling a tune, inviting
the shadow to run away, far
as the lights travels
over the sinister expanse of nothing
to the next town. Bleeding rain starts
flooding visions, imagining the sugar
pot has the remains of the one
who was there before the sun
went down, sinking bottom in the deep
chair with tentacles around. No one around,
neighbor is a noun in the dictionary.
With the speed of cheetah, you contemplate
chasing fresh air, but the serpentine night,
mating with the pine trees, caressing the coyotes
and raccoons cement mortal feet in the woods.
At 5 p.m. on a cold Saturday night,
your dread: The known - the unknown.
Mercedes Webb-Pullman
At Dangelong
It’s a long walk – you have to
really want to go. First
drive across Rock Flat,
turn left
along the gravel road
edging the creek,
go through three gates, and park
where the old swing bridge
spans the gorge.
Walk across the sky.
Follow the creek down
past trout in pools, older
and smarter than you.
Watch for snakes
in the tussocks
where land folds
in frozen waves of quartz -
the Kydra reef, gold
and Chinese graves –
climb the high cliff;
there, in a clearing
wedge-tailed eagles
gather in groups
and walk around on the ground
like men who wonder
how it feels
to fly.
Collecting eggs
One step into the hen house
out of the light, unsighted
for a moment she stands and listens.
There’s only wind, stealthy,
moving a quiet inland tide
through the macrocarpa pines, a crack
as roof metal expands in the sun,
a murmur from the hens
she’s here to attend.
She’s learned to avoid being pecked,
slides her hand past the bony frame,
the puffed-up breast feathers,
in under warm weight
to the egg, a marble curve in darkness;
its heft in her hand a secret
she doesn’t quite understand.
Pilgrimage
Compelled by a strange haunting
she’d flown from her cold
northern home
seeking warmth
rested by the Mediterranean
in rocky crags and cliff faces.
Hypnotised, she watched waves,
so different to sweeping steppes
yet somehow the same.
Her dreams became strange;
she soared over pyramids
as if responding to a call.
Awake, the days were not as warm.
Breezes brought tinkling tunes, scents
she’d dreamt before. One morning she left
abruptly,
young golden eagle
spiralling up a thermal
from Sardinia, pit-stop
between Siberia and Egypt,
she yearned south for winter
migrating with all her empty bones.