April Michelle Bratten
An Early Vision of Ponthipa

Her sex appeared in curious places
underneath the elephant's feet,
in pools of the swallowing dirt,
stripped cruel and lovely
inside a make-shift Thailand,
a call in the gill of a fish
found cut and battered.

And I wanted fingers like hers,
rice stained brown ponies
that pried the thin sheets apart,
made quick work of my tastes,
tripped the sounds of orchids,
found the staircases to my sadness,
and held my cries in their easy fold.

With each inevitable goodbye,
she could bend her wonton skins
to my devouring,
make herself tiny to fit, sizzling,
in the open wave of my mouth,
and I would jab my ugly fingers in
to touch the peaks
of her clear wrinkly film,
the crushed eggshells of her touch.

a thai-like land

and like in honey,
her feet swept
the floor
with little sounds,
tapped like punctured heart,
shot soft
into the bravery
of my stone eye socket.

backs of coconut shells
rap-rap-rapped,
and long golden
fingers
were in place
of lit candles
to carry night's calm.

there was a famish
caused by a sip
of her smile,
a pocket of pleasure
for hunger,
faster and faster
and faster with ankles
and arms and knees
twisted.

her body was a kaleidoscope
of shining color
fabrics
which I had earlier
witnessed
pulled and adjusted
across her small
breasts.

her laugh hit
the sun-lost window,
her foreign words
still placed across
my lips
like a cold small key.

the rain was still
coming
and
"I have missed you"
was stated sadly,
truth bartered
over a small dish
of fish and rice,
hung out to dry
on a stranger's dance.

Walter Conley

the key

he wears a broken key
on a chain around his neck
snapped in half
(not the neck,
but the key)
its surface chipped
and scratched and
buffed into wondrous
glittering
glass- and brassy
blotches

what the hell is that?
i ask
like i probably should

it’s the key to my heart
he says
(of course)
someone tried to open it once
and the key broke
as it turned

oh, i said
tipping my head
i get it, all right
i do
but
wouldn’t that piece
stuck in your chest
be enough of a thing
to remind you?

Ronald Fischman
I’m Looking at the MF in the Mirror

Hey, motherfucker in the tie!
Did you see me when you looked
In the window at your reflection
At the Rich Slob Bank on Rittenhouse Square?
Ties were invented to accentuate
Dicks.

Did you perceive the buckle
That you swashed as you swished
Through crowds never cresting
Always cracking where you create
Turbulence and trauma in the
Crevasses

Did you see my life in that Big Bank
Window did you see my love, my
Longing my lot as liminal to my fellows
Did you cognosce my cavil
As a cover for the caravan of broken
Promises

Were you too obsessed with the fall
Of your tie the crease of your trousers the
Pop of your shoulder pads the sheen
Of the sun on your slammed-shut
Briefcase, carry lives embossed in every
Brief

Rich fuck, did you even
Feel  my breath heavy on your silk lapel
Vibrate to the rhythm of my too-great
Flesh bearing the scars of surgery and
Sickness in stuff and spirit pirouetting
Escape

Did you even notice that you had run over another
Man with a vision that you occluded
With your stumble to prominence, blind
To any obstacle, least a middle aged teacher composer
Poet in jeans on a workday, fighting for equitable
Distribution

One day you too will be a castoff.
The next young lion will rip off your mane
And hand it to you as a hood ornament
The next Amazon will rip from you client after
Client, until your partners lose their sense of
History

One day, those steely blues will turn ice
Cold as the crows’ feet gather beaks will peck away
Until your cold gaze chills hearts no more,
Your buckle will have far too much to do to swash.
That cloth penis will fray and point outward
And you will know the man before you twisting, imploring
pardon 

Aad de Gids

the inner garden

this garden,as all gardens,is a mythical place.visitinghours:
open all week 10:00 – 18.00h. the build up of anticipation
starts already during the ride to the magnificent and dour
seeming antichambre of beeches,darkness forming a nation

although this is a composite garden,made out of seasonal
impressions of various gardens,that’s precisely the reason
to call it an inner garden,being somewhat darling emotional
an adding of all the glimpses and wafts and pure intentional

attempts to saturate your senses with colour,form,athmosphere.
in the summer the rosaria adds up to a carnival of reds roses
yellows and whites,creams and neige,rouge du satan and here,
rose du versailles,yellow like saffran and champagnehoses

the ligustrum is there to not saturate or oversaturate,yet to
deliberately suffocate with a scent many loathe,with the slightest
hints of decay,but to me it is sheer heaven,to walk there to
be circumferenced in a belljar of the lovelyest and vilest

of scents,as in “poison” and “giorgio”,or,monia di orio’s
“carnation”.a perfumed bliss not for all to share,the flowers
lovely little towers of bable,creamy white,the restless flows
of scent tracing you to numb you down,like the butterfies

drunken and mesmerized,high on sexual desire,doing their
job,only if its stolen from them,with such deviousness plants
work.obama nor putin nor sarkozy has this much of weird
and omnipotent might.nor have they the room for such rants

to pull your servants in.suddenly we enter a glass room of
orchids.with them it is their forms so breathtakingly exotic,
with elegant curvature and dancing of intricate orifice lofts
of intimacy.sometimes however there is an orchid adding soft

and,nearing it,not so soft a lovely scent of ananas and vanilla
fills up your nostrils,ment for exotic moths and kolibris.
the odd thing is they look like just a heap of leaves,a flotilla
of roots and debris.as epiphytes they feed on what flies

in the cup of their desire,and sparcity is their game below,
while above,its all about abundance,riot,brazilian fête,
colour and then sometimes this breathtakingly and slow,
slowly intoxicating perfume,almost put the visitors to death.

well,that’s an inner garden,filled with rooms of desire,from
a lover who hadn’t much fortune in life’s love,at least,
loved almost to death,hence this fascination for such forms
and devilish personalities,with which my loves are glassed,now

J. de Salvo
If you have a flag, fag...
 
They will try to make you
take it down
 
Refuse this,
and they will balk...
 
...When you do not want
to wear it all the time
 
When you refuse
to be defined by your "diversity"
 
They will make it hard,
whether you let it
 
get to you or not,
Whether or not you pay attention
 
they will try to make you
hate yourself
 
they will love it
when you kill yourself
 
"See?" they'll say
"See?"
 
"There's something wrong
with "those people"
 
If you have a flag,
fag...
 
You know it's something that
you wish you didn't need
 
But in the meantime
must be flown

 


A.J. Huffman
Between Hands that Never Met

Her knees were crushed.
Like the velvet shroud
that was meant to shelter
her.
From the naked hands
of a god
and his son.
Still locked
in battle
for a tattered string
from the wedding gown
she ate.
Like blood.

Viva, or the Pink in Picnic

yes, Viva had it right that day, between kisses,

when she said she saw a fist do two things at once,

cleave and clench

(I get the grip-part, a reader writes in, but how’s

a knobby hand able to slice or split any-thing?

why’s your poet, Viva, cloying about in the free-

write bravado of peeping spring?)

listen, reader, a picnic is pink in how it’s syllables code

that color into its pic-nic, the term’s n is never quite lost

and dress suggest trees & tress,  and a dress, or skirt,

is an umbrella-branching, a cloth-bound open-cover

that conceals and reveals what lies beneath

like sheer stockings or plain connotations

as if an orange-rind peeled off, might cry out

“can someone pour me another round

given that I was once spherical and susceptible?”

in the end Viva had it right,

when she said the pen is a prosthesis

marking errancy on behalf of our bodies

making us right by its written-wrong

in writing we grope forward into white

                each page is a treacherous room

where we squint and jig

                within every line, ink summons the pink in picnic

and returns trees to the ring of dress

                and links tresses to umbrella-shelters

and rounds stilettos on clouds

                and with that sharpened fist

cleaves truth like an orange

and we win Pulitzers within ourselves

from emotional experiments

drawing conclusions from material-motion

                each hypothesis lives in the blood

until the pen moves into another investigation

                another page & the next

poem starts

                and the prior fact

surrenders to the coming tune.

Zarcillo

for Penelope Cruz

a Brassavola orchid, a petal,

and a parabola:

(the Spanish

for tendril is

zarcillo)

an ink-

brown eye

almost concealed by

a stray tousle; 

and thin elbows

eclipse

fat, bland-white

sheets

three

slipknots anchor

a topmast: 

a Brassavola

orchid

a parabola,

                a petal

all sounds alchemical

& filters in through the ear

to give the blood

want it needs to circulate

an other

(the Spanish

for tendril is

                zarcillo)

a plinking radium

and tiny-snaked

silver chain

of phosphor

that vanishes in the cache

of the bezel’s crass diadem.