otoliths

2012-05-28T15:16:00.000+10:00

issue twenty-four
southern summer, 2012

Cadlift
Spencer Selby

CONTENTS

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2012-02-26T23:16:00.000+10:00

issue twenty-three
southern spring, 2011

Self Portrait
Eleanor Leonne Bennett

CONTENTS

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2012-01-26T12:41:00.000+10:00

Issue twenty-four Date of Publication February 1, 2012.
Individual pieces Copyright © 2012 by their respective creators

Editor: Mark Young

All images in Otoliths can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Grzegorz Wróblewski
A Study of a Horse For Dr Marabout

Noha Al-Badry
Mania

Hugh Behm-Steinberg
Four Poems

Tom Beckett
Description

j/j hastain
from female he and correlational femme

Arhm Choi
The Painting

John Martone
Wunderkammer

Philip Byron Oakes
Five Poems

Bobbi Lurie
Prognosis

John M. Bennett
Text Poems
Cardboards
Some More Text Poems

Raymond Farr
Three Poems
A Cow in a Field Goes Mooo in my Ear

Donna Kuhn
Three Visuals

Calvin Pennix
A Lingering

Cecelia Chapman
Evidence of Things Not Seen

bruno neiva
Warehouse Blues

Travis Cebula
from Ithaca

Theodoros Chiotis
Quasar (Future Biology)

Adam Trawick
"I miss the her of her hum"

Sean Ulman
Four Poems

SPECIAL FEATURE

Michael Gottlieb
Letters to a Middle-Aged Poet

Ana Viviane Minorelli
Two Photographs

Lakey Comess
Two Poems

Spencer Selby
Five Visual Poems

James McLaughlin
Five Poems

Katie Berger
Time Travel: Theory and Practice

Caleb Puckett
Two Prose Pieces

Stephen Nelson
Footfall Fragments

Andrew Topel
blueprints

Jeff Harrison
Three Poems

Claramarie Burns
Three Poems

Zachary Scott Hamilton
Shelled

Marthe Reed
from BODY

Kit Kennedy
Two Poems

Jill Jones
Five Poems

Márton Koppány
Hungarian Vispo

Andrew Taylor
Three Poems

Stu Hatton
Five Poems

SJ Fowler
if her last wish were, #s 1-3

David Harrison Horton
from Where Chinese Women Float in Space

Daniel f Bradley
Five Poems

Susan Gangel & Terry Turrentine
Placemats

Howie Good
Three Poems

John Pursch
Three Poems

Joseph Cooper
(untitled)

D.J. Huppatz
Two Poems

Cherie Hunter Day
Eight Visuals

Stuart Barnes
Three Poems

Bill Drennan
from Flotation Settlement

Charles Freeland
from Albumen

Adam Fagin
from Thayer's Law

Marty Hiatt
Prose Piece

Eva Heisler
Dreams About Art

Helen White
from the soluble colonies series

dan raphael
Two Poems
Two More Poems

Bob Heman
INFORMATION

Tim Wright
Three Poems

Michael Brandonisio
A Variety of Things

J. D. Nelson
Six Poems

Mark Cunningham
[quantum]

HOME

2012-01-25T13:55:00.001+10:00

J. D. Nelson

1906 DENVER BRONCHOS

Fur light,
Sewey?
                There, Kotts — vol. ol.

Varr, valons.
Veal Casey.

NEEX!
::: U 5 ago.

                Truncheon Jeep!

PUTCH, foulsed,

                ai-ai-ai-ai, ai-ai-ai-ai-ai

                               *
                * * Z3ÄLTH * *
                               *

        T KLEE
NEX VORT
EX TO TH
X LEF
T

Biker Cher cares
for bats!

                them crawlin’ eyes - - - - - - - - -

VH // F

star coral
                ( ( (

see, - - - - - - - - - - !
                               M. M.
                oq | po

WØLF - - - - - - - //

                               082 PIL-
                L.      //
                ØH

• • • bugg                // - - - - -
                               - - //

o o 0 o O O o o

ooooooooooo *
   oooooooooo **
      ooooooooo ***
        oooooooo ****
           ooooooo *****
              oooooo ******
                              oooooo *******
                              oooooo ********
                              oooooo *********
                              oooooo **********
                              oooooo ***********

Kirk’s Brain

& bee wee
:
:
: . ØGRE HEMI

                the lost art of walletry

Ø. (( ```               ØWL - - -

                               Wes
                tern
JR
ICE III
_____
____
___
__
_

Q. Sold to Spock for three cents.

To Bleed, Somewhat, with Ghosts

Toronto, Tomorrow Earth.

So, they called me back today.
I stood there, standing.

               later than last
               and after all

Understood firmament.
I ran inside for scissors.

Transit thoughts.
               Sliced bread will grow MØLD.

Tomorrow is a wolf in the cobwebs.

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words and sound in his subterranean laboratory. More than 1,000 of his bizarre poems and experimental texts have appeared in many small press and underground publications. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including When the Sea Dies (NAP, 2011), On the Toad (The Red Ceilings Press, 2011, and Red&Deadly, 2011), Roman Meal (Ten Pages Press, 2011), Noise Difficulty Flower (Argotist Ebooks, 2010), and The Frankendelphia Experiment (Tainted Coffee Press, 2010). Visit MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. His audio experiments (recorded under the name Owl Brain Atlas) are online at OWLNoise.com. J. D. lives in Colorado, USA.

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2012-01-25T11:41:00.000+10:00

Helen White

from the soluble colonies series

A note from H. W.: "The soluble colonies evolve, adapt and spread on waste ground and in urban green spaces. Litter attracts them; some survive for weeks, others only for a few hours. Their DNA is the letter combination ‘is’, which occurs in every individual organism in the colonies. They are photographed several times over their lifespan, making the photographic documentation of their existence a time-based poetry."

Helen White was born in Britain and now lives in Ghent, Belgium. Recent publications include a contribution to the anthologies Zieteratuur (Uitgeverij Passage, Groningen, 2010) and Last Vispo (forthcoming), and the poem holding on a poetry poster from Paper Kite Press in 2009.

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2012-01-23T22:00:00.002+10:00

Michael Brandonisio

F. CRAZ

On E

Posthumous Rendezvous

Premise: The pristine value of nothingness has, as its direct result, a caustic valentine dispatched from the heartthrob, as is its wont — that is to say, the heartthrob’s nothingness. To a lesser degree, the broadest aspect of the word “breathe” begs the question: is Nag Hammadi such a bad place after all? Better yet and simply put, does every clock face need to be recalibrated? You may answer at your leisure or, should you require more leeway, shortly after you have consummated your love affair with life.

Side-note: Metaphorically speaking, is bread just an excuse for wine and schnapps?

Obligatory Resolution: Two strangers meet at a crossroads and metaphysically pull out their pistols. This seemingly innocuous event muddles all reason, as does the popular notion that induces shoplifters to cream their pants for cosmetics. I understand your feelings pretty well. Well, maybe. It’s too bad you shed your mortal coil a while back. It was before I knew you, or became acquainted with your facsimile. That is not the case any longer. You have splashed down from your extended holiday, and will shortly hold a press conference to reveal your findings, suppositions and so forth. You are an act of faith in the subversive sense. I will blot out your name so as not to blemish your guilt.

Terminal Hotel

Michael Brandonisio has work forthcoming in Gobbet.

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2012-01-23T21:51:00.002+10:00

Tim Wright

Heidelberg

1.

trestled insinuation glows
in time with the yet to arrive
reads the news collectively, the
facts fall out of your hand and bounce around
a maxed out sincerity
dragged sulkily into view
Darebin’s an anagram for something wearisome
collecting the difficult, felt drumming
tipped hat, boxer’s nose, blurred tattoo
near it, not rousing it. Not dangerous

2.

tacit, warm, bellicose
they said you were going to Perth. They meant it.
grizzled musical accompaniments desist; goodbye, hello, goodbye, hello . . .
rested set of concrete fragments makes a totality
crested stanchions
a spelt tear – ‘it’s always awkward’
Euclidean metropole glow worm
Founded – grounded. Sparks assimilate the treetops whistled through
a boxed, noisome intelligence
as in, able to be parsed; walks out of the kitchen/shower

Balaclava

even tempered seagulls
they don’t all look the same you know
reveals a shiv; follow each other over the ledge
combed down intentions, coming into the city now

apparent destinations spelled out like we’re idiots
bitumen for the brain, treated air
machines for building other machines
theoretically they’re similar
plying their pathos up and down the strip
and given our inclinations

Glenroy

One of them strikes you as accountably mirthless
The second a cloud scraped off a park bench
He scones the issue lamentably
A field of detainees
Hang around intelligently the orifices
Capsicum spray sunset half of which
Plays musical chilblains skates the interior

As I am leaned on providentially
Entrances the lock into peerage
Variously outer suburban tic tac sheen
Comes in spilling Malvoleo onto the carpet
The correctible influence skulled down like a gourd
Suits the flicker in your chest which might mean something
Privately

Tim Wright is a postgraduate student and resident of the city of Melbourne.

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2012-01-23T21:26:00.001+10:00

Bob Heman

from INFORMATION

INFORMATION

The barn can be entered with sticks. The cow has lost its sense of balance. Once the chickens are counted they must be counted again. Afterwards the farmer is moved to a different location.

INFORMATION

Opens the room like a book, like a woman’s shoe, like a fist full of stars or snails or chocolate.

INFORMATION

The bears were broken. The elephant was made to float. Their clothes were not costumes, even though they were.

INFORMATION

Looks into the mirror because it has a face like her own.

INFORMATION

What they saw or thought they saw in the room that was removed from their sight was not what the others saw before it was removed.

INFORMATION

The men unloading the coal were left over from the previous story. The bears were repeated only because they were needed. Each time the woman spoke she sounded more discouraged. The music was only what was left over.

INFORMATION

They couldn’t remove the bear that was stuck to the tiles. They couldn’t remove the woman whose hair had grown too long. They couldn’t remove the fence that separated good and evil. They couldn’t remove the word that showed the others where they had gone.

INFORMATION

The bear had the wrong kind of ears. The woman laughed at the clock each time she saw it. Whenever the sequence was repeated it was changed. They stored the distance at a distance so they could use it later. Sometimes someone else found it first.

INFORMATION

One sleeps because she is told to. Another because she has to. The bears that guide them through their dreams have lanterns to show the way. The barn they reach is no more than an explanation.

INFORMATION

The animal talks because it is expected to, even though it has no language of its own. This is how the path is made. They must follow it if they ever expect to return.

INFORMATION

Listens because there are words inside of the sound. Watches because not all of the doors are closed. Sings because there are women in the forest. Touches the trees because they are alive.

INFORMATION

The dead walk because they were told to.

INFORMATION

There were trains shaped like bears and cars shaped like bears and houses shaped like bears and machines shaped like bears and owls shaped like bears and rivers shaped like bears and even a door that was shaped like a bear that was sleeping.

INFORMATION

The time broken into bits so they all can use it. The man moving in the same way the mountains move. The platforms were located in an adjoining state. They had to wait there for far too long.

INFORMATION

The murder of a cow by two bears. The murder of the princess by her mother.

Bob Heman’s “Information” pieces have been published in numerous journals including Sentence, Caliban online, Otoliths, Mad Hatters’ Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Lost and Found Times, Key Satch(el), Right Hand Pointing, Clockwise Cat, and Press 1. A small collection, Recent Information, was published as a special issue of Fell Swoop. Information pieces are included in An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions, 2009), in the event books for the annual Brevitas reading, and in two small brochures from Red Pagoda Press. He lives in Brooklyn.

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2012-01-23T14:43:00.001+10:00

Mark Cunningham

[quantum]

They said, “Our time is now!” but we pointed out their watches were ten minutes slow. When I said I hadn’t found one person with prophetic powers, she said, “I told you that would happen.” You don’t know you’re dreaming until you wake up, but many times I’ve dreamt that I’ve woken up. We finally made it to Land’s End, and then we discovered the parking lot out back.

[quantum]

She was legendary for relying only on her own experience. Our teenagers are looking to make their own late-night TV habits. The committee concluded that the print-out of his brain wave patterns still didn’t prove he was having real feelings, and he said that hurt his feelings. Her modified genes lead her to say “toe-mah-toe,” my modified genes lead me to say “toe-may-toe,” so we called the whole thing off. Well, I dreamed they were my dreams.

[quantum]

The enemy was just a bunch of stick figures, so they hid in the forest and we couldn’t find them. The panel said it didn’t know about space, but the formula showed the number of boundaries was infinite. He said the sky is immaterial and I said it’s full of dust and pollen and water and he said that’s immaterial. She was a ghost all right, but we couldn’t decide whether that made her a minimalist or a maximalist of being.

[quantum]

They said her credit card responded to the Magnetic North Pole, while her change responded to the Geographic North Pole, so they’d need both. I don’t like it when I’m sitting doing nothing and I see a vein on the back of my hand shift position.

Mark Cunningham's latest chapbook is Parrot in a Pirate's Hat (Ten Pages Press). A new book, Helicotremors, will be out soon from Otoliths.

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2012-01-23T14:30:00.001+10:00

dan raphael

Getting Some

america wakes up like a pomegranate seed with a thousand hungers
i open my throat to the columbia river without fish to jump through
without a lifetime of nuclear waste building like the first orchestra
when strings would cut before singing, when playing underwater saxophone
lead to early thought balloons with clouds too far away to read
coming down where my hair used to, a scalp like the five loneliest counties in montana.:
we tried to house-train the sun but it never comes when called

every blue-eyed blonde in the northern hemisphere dials the same number at midnight
crackling like a 10,000 watt wedge penetrates the slurred vocabulary of escaping what i cannot
               change
throwing it out the airplane then realizing i dont know how to land
an orbit that couldn’t clear the rockies, so stay local, slam a pint of seeds
into a bedroom 3 feet thick w/ soil, 60 years of compost too diverse to rot
crossbred into unsustainable complexity:
                when every morning im a different size,
i wait til im eye to eye before i peel off the strangers clothes
becoming the face on the drivers license, the thumbprint opening an apartment
blaring music i cant stand, so many petals dissolving in so little water

i dont see tomorrow but im ready to dissect 2 years from now
watching the plastic im wrapped in melt beyond black chemistry & a poorly maintained horizon
not to filter but avoid with highly random, the luck of the unfocussed,
when egg & sperm fuse a new micro-dimension ripples a mouthless yawn.
no one is coming for me. i’m a dozen places other than here

i go in huminskis grocery and gasp from the middle of the world’s largest costco,
as if the vatican was having a garage sale, as if the armed forces evaporated
and left all the pentagons doors unlocked--the first things emptied were the vending machines

what digests my food wouldn’t make it down columbus' gullet.
im changing territory with every step. standing on the platform of what got away.
my body is my compartment. im in the middle seat between an over stuffed past
and a future wearing everything it owns.
                learning to speak the language
while someones still listening: a word no ones thought since the 19thcentury,
a tree built by someone whos never been above ground, never breathed wild air.
we havent the fuel to go to space but have a surplus of shovels, claws & dynamite;

in the future we wont plan beyond the next meal, the next storm
and how tonights shelter wont protect me.
yet some hours I forget what Im surrounded by and spread like a sleeping fire,
a fertile moon, a glass of something the glass cant handle

We Come with Light

we come with light, we go when the rain needs changing, when a panel of sky
surrenders to its hoarded corrosion, singing all 4 parts
like giant helicopters approaching a county of golden wheat so much taller than expected,
sneaky & magnetic, pilot sees giant pats of butter melting into a pond we cant not jump into,
making the road more like bread each time we roll across it, more and more tiny mouths
and other openings, whats not better with butter, trading a hand for a bakery,
trapping the steam from the rivers bathhouse to thicken and slice, to patch the wind and tax it,
those who have nothing to hide never go anywhere, maybe answer the phone after best of 3 coin
               flips

with my back against the window, distressing its resistance,
head wont lead, head with mattress corners taped around it, wires around the mattresses,
cooling tubes, copper dyed my hair raining pennies bathed in mirror filament syrup oil
so stick      slide      shine      imprint      take me home

just opening this book makes me want to do several contradictory things,
consensus is squirming on a hard surface unsure what trees could grow inside me
what carbon retention in my conscience looking out the door of my speeding v7,
not a missing cylinder but other priorities, a cylinder with no initiative, with two left arms,
I keep taking the ring off my neck but it keeps reappearing, a little smaller each time,
more bristled, smelling like its about to come alive and hungry, enslaving with its signature

when the duck hit my windshield I noticed it had no wings:
this better be a meat storm, we’re so hungry with tridents atop umbrellas,
a pork shoulder stuck on the basketball rim, maybe we can fill the abandoned wading pool
with the trees our crowded houses have killed and roast the days storm

since we come from everywhere someones always eating, someone needs to sleep
while others must wail at 70 words per minute flowing too diffuse a syntax of sudden news,
sodden and sifting, with the widest eyes possible, lanky muscular quick,
when I bring my fists together like hammers from different centuries,
where the wires lead to, where the satellite pours in espresso frequencies biting their own fumes
a third arm please, a light from incandescent ribs, when cotton was more like cowhide.
when only adults were strong enough to wear leather.

i am a drop inside the stomach of a flea on a hair of an angel dancing with hallucinations,
coz we go there again and again, as if we live there, as if they pay us to hang around,
putting on clothes and giving them back, knowing whose eyes are loaded,
whose expanding black shoe might think I’m an airstrip

if i dont stand up i’ll never fall, when hunger is the sky food is someone elses planet.
like I could step across the river, through the searing radiation.
filling a thousand pages with the tiniest possible, every last ounce of detail from books
I think I read, saw on a shelf, listed as a soup ingredient

legs can get you up but are in the way when landing from a height,
training the lungs to yell so fiercely at the ground it trembles me to stained safety,
knowing by the smell ive never been here,
rain building against the wall of the sky, a door in the floor,
nano-salmon migrating through the shower head,
through my multi-punctured eardrums, a sky too tight to turn away from
when im finally trusting in the walls they change channel, sprouting in one corner,
raising tiny arteries like an eye that’s forgotten to sleep,
we have nothing to boil for coffee but orange juice,
we have nothing to drink from but hands and shoes

(for Alice Notley’s Alma)

dan raphael's new book, The State I'm In, comes out 2/29 from Nine Muses Books.

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2012-01-23T14:17:00.001+10:00

dan raphael

Still Hearing It

i don’t want that 100 passenger salmon making an emergency splashdown
in the accumulated mountain skin & silt of my life stream
red doesn’t mean go until you can’t
thinking how a moraine cracked stream is the oceans natural opposite
that an upstream death is better than one where everything accumulates—
so much space with no ones name on it
til that morning
when everythings not what you want
tvs changing stations with every heartbeat
each hours shadow burns a new alphabet

haunted by a past that wasn’t mine, dreaming in Polish,
unable to control myself in restaurants with live fish tanks
or distinguish falling acorns from bullets
back when most nights the sky would tell the same story
and I knew the sun was in my blood revolving through my earth dark heart.
i knew that if i got three days from home I might never get back
take the wrong mountain pass and im no longer articulate or legible,
my cloak no longer matches the trees, streams wont let me step in them
i eat without shitting but feel light as a songbird

Already Gone

we ate an acre of corn that day, we drank a tanker truck of forgotten alcohol
poured away by a generation of busboys and sous chefs trying to set copper on fire,
positioning a pond so the sun would boil the water into something rarer, vanishing cream
or a universal solution putting the crossword and sudoku makers out of business

I looked too closely in einsteins infinite eye at my fractal fingers, my thousand pieced testicles
shrinking into the demagnetized earth trying to throw trees into the sky
and give the clouds their water back, training fish to think like leaves,
putting shoes on my hands so I could land 20 feet above myself.
take the air from the ball and the heat from its skin and you have a challenging lunch.
if you eat the same food every day your body will learn to make different things from it,
like a marching band made from condoms or a bible made from sunken ships.

I take all year to carve the candles for my next birthday
and my wish is always that the flames wont go out but the cake never reveals its baking,
the sadness of eggs who know they wont hatch, the rigidity of vegetable whove never seen
anything but themselves. I pull so much from my mouth I’m glad my clothes don’t need me.
I’m a refrigerator trying to create a meal that becomes you.

at 9 o clock all the lights go out.
by ten the bed’s stomachs are rumbling as the pillows tie themselves together
and climb up the chimney where naked birds want their money back
allergic to the petrochemical sponge I thought would teach me to dream in a foreign language
so when I woke I’d be the worlds first multilingual terrier, building extinct species in bottles,
turning birds into cargo planes unable to fly west to east.

when I’m down to 6 fingers I pray the calendar is lying; i encourage the mandrake root to dance.
davinci never died he just began eating a new brain, a brain of stained glass windows
and doors with so many unfolding layers, so many road maps creating an accordion geometry
requiring several hands for the chording at frequencies unable to fly through
or keep from becoming locally seismic, unraveling this creek to weave a better august,
to step from a 14th story window and begin tomorrows yoga, like a boomerang jellyfish
i find between albino bread and a pound of cherries compressed into a teaspoon—
arms flex-flossing not like a frigate bird but a side-winding sky snake
crackling its own electric pollen like botanically correct fireworks
coz the quickest intoxication cuts right through the skull, sends every nervend an e-mail,
a smell the can cant contain, like the sun inside a banana, the supermarket about to explode
with yesterdays geometric hatchlings, at least one appendage for cutting yet no agreement on
what to make tendons from, to stretch is to disassociate:

it requires all of my concentration to walk when my feet rarely reach the ground,
my head cant get low enough to get in the car but if i do im pressed against the ceiling
like a tuna swimming through a dam, we need to dredge all the plastic from the ocean
and give the moon some packaging, advertisements only visible by telescope, millionaire robots
hurling seething amoebas of liberated color against the walls of air we’ve removed
the chaos from, too solid for me to get in, a lattice requiring six hands and a pair of
caffeinated gibbons at the controls, a single tone suppressing all the others compressed like a
cable woven from the surest, hungriest, unquestionable—i don’t want to be around when it
unfurls, like jacks beanstalk, like where i’m teleported into a kelp bed
so my only escape is becoming a hundred others, some predators, some already gone

more dan raphael poems

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2012-01-23T11:50:00.000+10:00

Eva Heisler

Dreams about Art

1. Baroque Interior
In the Immigration Office, I chat with an Icelander seated on my left. As I tell her about the novel in my lap—Substance of Forgetting—I look into the Icelander’s right ear and see a meticulously painted room, a French baroque interior. I don’t know her well enough to ask if the interior was painted in her actual ear, or if the scene is a custom-made insert.

2. Architecture
On a moonless night, I am ice skating without skates on a pond surrounded by evergreens. I ice skate in thick-soled black Doc Martens. Again and again I circle the pond, happy to find myself at the center of a friendly darkness. Toward morning, the trees stiffen into stone turrets, and I see the pond on which I skate is a flooded courtyard.

3. Conceptual Art Theft
Preparing to leave a rented room in Amsterdam, I notice pencil shavings
in corners. I ask H. to find a broom,

and he returns with an enormous vacuum cleaner sprouting three hoses
and a dozen nozzles. The vacuum is the size of a washing machine, and it is so white

it gleams. In my dream, I vacuum scatters of pencil shavings
with H.’s machine.

I report the dream to H. and he exclaims,
Yes, always my gestures are too grand.

Months later, H. opens an exhibition in Berlin.
One of his new works is a scatter of pencil shavings on a plinth.

This is my work, I complain.

No, he replies, that was your dream but it is my work.

4. In the Archives
I arrive at the archives of the National Gallery of Iceland and ask to see G.’s paintings. The paintings arrive in pieces, each piece stored in a Ziploc sandwich bag. The pieces are amber liquid, and I hold each plastic bag up to fluorescent lights, in search of brush marks.

5. Sculpture
E. asks me to install a work by H. I am sent to a tiny house of corrugated iron and instructed to put a circle of dyed eggs on its doormat. “After you do that,” E. says, “add something that addresses the question of nature.” I stoop over the doormat, arranging eggs and worrying about what to add that would address “the question of nature.” I pull up grass and scatter the blades over the eggs.

6. Painting
The studio is cluttered with painted things, but none deserve the name “painting,”

I reach for a rag and wipe my brush.

Grandmother walks into the studio and cries, “Look what you’ve done!
You’ve put a mark on your mother’s blouse!”

I explain I found the blouse in the trash. I unfold the white cotton
to reveal ink and lipstick stains.

Grandmother is blind to the stains; she sees
only the marks from my brush.

She pushes the painting rag into my backpack,
orders me to launder my mother’s blouse.

7. Installation Art

I return home to find the lock torn from my front door.

Upstairs, in a former studio, paintings are wedged in an open window.

Steamer trunks have been emptied and re-filled with curls of adding machine paper.

This is an installation! I exclaim to friends. The burglar made installation art in my house!

I uncurl the adding machine paper and read descriptions of dreams and memories.

These are my dreams and memories, I say. Who stole my dreams and memories?

A friend replies, “He’s over there, in the hall, looking at you.”

I see my husband, wearing a plaid wool jacket from college days.

I go to him, grateful for the writing in the trunks.

I hug my husband, but he is mannequin-stiff.

I wake, remembering the dream-burglar is dead.

Eva Heisler is a US art critic and poet currently living in Germany. She lived in Iceland for nine years, researching Icelandic art and drafting the poems in Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic, a book forthcoming from Kore Press in 2012.

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2012-01-23T11:29:00.000+10:00

Marty Hiatt

each rubber particle meets a different stone                mother says so no christmas tales                though maybe an exterior         of the spearmint pool i was supposed to sing             or dribble                before i get back to reflecting time ending kick-starting it                oh sorry cutting corey's lunch again            but we shd stick more minorities in the spotlight                cast them in our own guilt-ridden pantomimes                take it from me                i'll be good to you baby                at the apex a hollow we like to turn                haven't you heard? god is not great guns are        a lathe for us all to work              bang            but let's get back to political for a moment             g# minor                raga                bone marrow           beat box                split 7" banker       it's all right here                rarin' with rainbow mentos

i quit water i promise i'll take it up again tomorrow      but barbiturates can we?

knowing
that it hurts to tell
ich habe viel Mühe ich bereite meinen nächsten Irrtum vor

drop of oil on a great stream      n the smoke rising through the water mirroring its slick before they meet                passing a section the section penetrating recording       the arrowhead tips of the waves a star chart flashing                n the stench of molten blubber                n the dripping fire that lights only a tumid black flow                emery glacier      n the blind whole echoes celebrates itself its prismatic its manifold blindness                 folds like dough                n the creases vanish       have you seen the many mouths gargling in the swell? heard the ears spinning?      bristles wets itself wet for joy for terror       you can tell you can you can

you can
                   tell

Marty Hiatt reads and writes. From Melbourne, he currently lives in Berlin.

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2012-01-22T13:14:00.001+10:00

Adam Fagin

from Thayer's Law

Adam Fagin's work is forthcoming or has appeared in Fence, Boston Review, Volt, Little Red Leaves and other journals. He is also a founding editor of textsound.org, an online audio journal of poetry and sound.

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2012-01-22T12:49:00.000+10:00

Charles Freeland

from Albumen

Our ravings are of interest only to our own subconscious minds. And that, it turns out, only when the cosmos has aligned itself properly. It arranges clusters of galaxies, near and far, according to a pattern it’s impossible to unravel if you haven’t been paying attention to the things you say in your sleep. This requires, of course, assistance from someone who shares your bed and is willing to lay awake nights with a notepad in her hand. After an interminable wait, another wait of lesser duration. And then someone comes to the door. An old man only about three and a half feet tall emerges and says he has been waiting for me ever since his own dreams began to fill up with visions of soufflés, with women who paid him the most exquisite attention because, they said, his name had come up in a drawing they held at the Eagles Club down the road where people are forever going to escape the misery of their domestic situations. The radios tuned to stations they abhor. The shoelaces used to tie other shoelaces together in ever-bulkier conglomerations. I smell stewed rabbit coming from somewhere on the premises and make to push past the old man and into the house that seems now as if it has been sitting in this spot for over a thousand years, even though I know it is of more recent vintage if only because the whole country is still an infant in comparison with others even on the same continent. Maybe it’s time we admit the flesh is susceptible to infection and attempt to rework it, to change its composition by adding elements not usually associated with the body and its component parts – the thick red clay that piles up on either side of the river. The plastics mixed and extruded in the plants that line that river like juvenile swans. Certainly the results would be disappointing but then when have we ever witnessed the careers of those things we’ve made with our hands and minds without some sense of having failed colossally? Of having brought shame on ourselves like that associated with masturbating in public? Or refusing to do so even after we have been encouraged? There is a moment of disassociation, of what might have been unconsciousness if by unconsciousness you mean the opposite of consciousness. Afterward, the patina shell of my forehead aches — but has not, I hope, cracked again — from a blow the old midget has, apparently, delivered with a pool cue he holds in his hand. One I hadn’t noticed previously due to the unusually poor lighting in that part of the world after the sun has set. The moon is not up to the task assigned it because the moon seems to think it only has to hang in the branches of certain species of tree and may ignore the others much the way we ignore those who pretend to know us after they have read our names on a nametag or (less frequently) a plaque.

*

The evening is no longer brisk. It gives off the scent of alder and cinnamon almost gratuitously. In fact, we have trouble forgiving it for its kindness. Outside the windows the world seems daubed in places with very dark paint, arranged in such a way as to lull us into a sense of well-being at precisely the same time the microbes are amassing along our borders, are sending out chemical feelers and communicating with one another through a system of images of the sort that can’t actually be seen. What happens when we interrupt our thoughts with thoughts that belong to other organisms? That barely meet the minimum criteria necessary to be considered thoughts in the first place? Are we in danger of losing our way, of becoming something less than ourselves? Or perhaps something superior? Like those statues made of iron or bronze that stand in the park on the outskirts of town and which look like ordinary businessmen with briefcases and bow ties, but which on closer inspection turn out to be the spitting image of anyone who gazes at them for more than five minutes. Mirrors, if you will, that forego glass in favor of some psychic disturbance initiated through clever use of materials and the ever-shifting angles of the sunlight as it makes its way over and through the tops of the trees and hits the surface of the statues and bounces off, of course, and continues its journey into the retina where, if I’m not mistaken, it is swallowed up forever and disappears. How dreadful to imagine ourselves the end point and agent of annihilation for that which enables life! That which enables vision! I prefer to stand at the sidelines and formulate theories that justify my own particular manner of existence and that denigrate all those who don’t happen to share that manner of existence — who seem to genuinely enjoy the company of other people, say, even inviting them to their house for dinner on occasion and listening with rapt attention to the adventures they relate concerning where they have been recently and what they found there. Silver ingots hidden in the cold waters of a Guatemalan stream. Folk art canvases hung in abandoned warehouses in Berlin. And though the surroundings might be exotic, the depictions on the canvases are, for the most part, typical for the genre: two dimensional human beings wearing outsized hats and playing stringed instruments on a hillside otherwise populated with bearded goats and banners declaring the coming apocalypse. Each letter on these banners has been rendered in a different color in an attempt, I suspect, to command the attention of the eye, an attempt to make the message more palatable to those who might be tempted to turn away from the canvas through tedium or an innate lack of interest in the future brought on by any number of factors, but most prominently a diet poor in beta-carotenes.

*

As a result of the blow, electric pulses range up and down my leg, reminding me for a moment of the substance coursing unseen through the walls, but just as suddenly there is a cessation of all energy and I black out. In my dreams miniature statuettes surround me and I have the feeling that some of them are attempting to communicate, to utter some final devastating statement through a medium other than speech. We have a name for the re-arrangement of the senses accompanying love in its initial stages, but we rarely use it because to do so puts us at risk of being labeled a romantic, or an ordinary dipsomaniac with romantic tendencies who is nevertheless afraid of the moon. Eventually one of the statuettes (representing, I believe, a local deity long since abandoned or discredited) claims he can alter his pulse simply by willing it to happen, can slow it down and speed it up on command but when I express skepticism he will not hold his wrist out for me to examine. He says he doesn’t believe there are any other people on the planet in my situation, meaning, of course, someone seemingly composed of cracked and subsequently fused eggshell, round as a tear drop and sporting human limbs. Doesn’t believe, in fact, that I exist, or at least not in the form he experiences, and so he all but accuses me of being an hallucination. Which is, I suppose, when you think about it, kind of flattering. We aren’t permitted to determine for ourselves the order of appearance of those things that happen, that come out of the blue and change our circumstances one way or another. But we are permitted to list them in the logbooks we keep in our jacket pockets, and then erase them again, or cut them out, assigning each event its own slender strip of paper, which we can then paste back into the book in an entirely different order. Or simply let blow away on the breeze, the benefit of doing so obvious to anyone who has been walking along the road where the cliffs drop precipitously a mere foot or two away from where the asphalt ends. Of course, for those of us living far away from cliffs of any sort, no benefit is necessary. We simply go about our business with the understanding that our feet are going to wind up on solid ground no matter what we do. And when we fall anyway, when we find ourselves tumbling and spiraling in space, reaching out desperately for any purchase whatsoever in the abyss that suddenly surrounds us on all sides like oxygen, we think perhaps the sensation has been foisted on us by someone with a stake in the outcome and the means of creating entirely new worlds out of the old one the way we turn our own worn clothing into puppets to entertain the children, or filters through which to strain liquids should we find it necessary to separate those liquids from the materials suspended within them.

*

Under the façade or what appears to be a façade when viewed at a certain angle, you find a second façade less extensive and less ornate. Patterned after Muslim arches and containing pictorial depictions of battles that never took place, at least in this hemisphere, it hums a little when the wind picks up which almost always happens in early November and continues for two straight months sometimes uninterrupted, the cornflowers close by bent double with the force and habit of it. When I lost my way, I pleaded with the gods to reveal themselves in the form of other more recognizable gods of the sort that had made their appearance previously in sacred texts the translation of which I always imagined myself undertaking just as soon as I found the time. But suppose this is all the time we will ever be allotted — that which we are currently immersed in like sulfur water at the hot springs. Will that mean we have no hope of accomplishing anything of value in spite of our making enormous efforts to re-route traffic or dispose once and for all of some leading theory in astronomy? Does that mean our dimensions have always been and will always be similar to those of the person who stares back at us when we happen to stop by the edge of a pond and look down into the water there, which is shallow and does a poor job of concealing the creatures that pass by underneath? My longing comes and goes much like these animals. It makes its appearance and demands a hearing, all but scratches at the signposts that announce distances to cities in the region, these cities boasting names, like Vincennes, with their roots planted firmly in the past as if whoever lives there is afraid we will not take them seriously, that we will relegate them to that place where cartoons are set and where inanimate objects like rocks and bracelets are therefore blessed with the power of speech.

*

The explosives occupy a corner of the room, wrapped in tarps and stinking like something that has just dragged itself in from the swamp or slaughterhouse. I always before imagined the materials of annihilation as somehow pristine around the edges, clean as the piece of paper on which we write our arithmetic problems when we are younger, clean as the liquid one uses to rinse the gore away from a wound that is not too serious now but which promises to get nasty if left to its own devices. I find a mirror in another room and examine my forehead, but whatever is there is no more frightful than what was there before, lines and cracks and strange wavy ravines in the shell — all of it taped up or, in some instances, stapled. The logistics of this, the sheer impossibility of stapling a substance as brittle as egg shell, combined at once with the incontestable fact of it (the seeing it with one’s own eyes), still keeps me up nights and causes a queasiness not unlike that which descends when one has smashed a finger with a hammer or witnessed someone leap from a tall edifice. I try to think of almost anything else when confronted with the sight of these metal dashes in the place where my body meets what is not my body and therefore all of creation minus this one thing that is me – past sojourns on the Riveria, or at least imagined sojourns now taking on tangibility through repetition and a long-term addiction to painkillers, lately replaced with a short-term infatuation with a woman possessing wax bean skin and eyes like beads of mercury escaped from whatever container was robust enough, at least initially, to contain them. The heart has this habit of intruding itself into the more elevated parts of the body, the airy heights, and insisting on explanations and rationalizations for things we ordinarily wouldn’t consider worthy of any form of cognition at all. Like why the body is never entirely comfortable with itself. Why the hands are forever seeking out portions of other people’s bodies to rest on or explore or torment. Maybe this is due to the intentions of some hypothetical — but still formidable for all that — ethereal Grand Poobah, some cosmic, sexless architect with a capital A (and C), ensconced in its overarching dome and penciling in changes by the second. As the whim hits it or necessity dictates because nothing stands still even for a minute once it has let the process escape its control. Once it has turned the process loose upon the wind and the gently rolling terrain of whichever institution is the setting for its most recent comeback – that place where it is made to seem relevant again through rational argument or, if need be, a series of Vicodin-induced hallucinations.

Charles Freeland is Professor of English at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio. Recent books and e-books include Eucalyptus (Otoliths), Variations on a Theme by Spinoza (Red Ceilings Press), and Five Perfect Solids (White Knuckle Press). He blogs at The Book of Objects.

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2012-01-22T12:19:00.001+10:00

Cherie Hunter Day

o mere m shed

b1rch

speaking e

phellem

motherword

red spall

un²relenting

slo spall

Cherie Hunter Day’s haiga, haibun, prose poems, and graphics have appeared in a variety of publications including Otoliths 18 and Otoliths 21. Six of her haiku were included in Haiku 21: an anthology of contemporary English-language haiku edited by Lee Gurga and Scott Metz, Modern Haiku Press (2011.) Her award-winning haiku collection, The Horse with One Blue Eye, was published by Snapshot Press (UK) in 2006. She lives in Cupertino, California.

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2012-01-22T11:49:00.001+10:00

Bill Drennan

from Flotation Settlement, a play-in-progress

Chorus:(Chanting reverberatively, voices staggered by seconds. Possibility for Vocoder-like effects. Randomly spaced – As many as can fit on stage.) We’re late again ... Shipped slow & cutting a late wake. Now we – for many we are – are late developments, developed on currents, and can bring a well-tested position to port: that what we do what we do and cannot see ourselves in madness. Killing the curses, we tended not towards pointing fingers in order to glorify our own fingernails. We used them to pluck. That’s right: we – for we are many and we are one, and you are one etcetera. Anyway, down there the concerted assault came after point zero, as it usually does, past the nadir, and so we pulled ourselves together, to what we are. And what we are is just that. And just that is a wave of gladness. We might even blow kisses, for kisses blown should not be winded but the wind blow more blowing the organs’ return the corresponding joy of passionate signatures. So we all got them at different times, and made of the time what we could in bits n pieces, surrendering fantasies to the earth, falsities too. The sea, of course, is hard to please. And sea-sickness: it is unpleasant until the yawning finally departs. This we assent to wholeheartedly, and relate the relative nature of the departure.

Curtain raised, Analyst and a tank are on stage. Analyst taps away at laptop with professional aloofness, then gets up and approaches the tank in the manner of a lawyer. Lifts sheet from tank to reveal Body, a crash-test dummy soaking in a magician’s water-filled tank – clearly labelled IN EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS. Wears headpiece. ‘Speaks’ in a tinny tannoy voice over PA system. Electrodes emanate upwards from the body like puppet strings. A puppetmaster above in the scaffolding manipulates Body.

Analyst: (Operates a laptop computer. Looks professional.) You sleep accused of having done nothing useful and having said nothing worth saying; that your tank is riddled with angst. What do you have to say to that?

Body: (Tossing to left and right and ranting softly in sleep-shifting muttering sotto vocce which doesn’t sound angry, but numbly or narcotically projected, trance-like; even the expletives are soft.) Ah! Mother of Joseph fucking K! I’ll never read Das Schloss at bedtime again. I’ll give you angst instead, I’ll give you … Ah! What’s the use talking to a factualist, a gadget-hugger! You want more torture, hmmmm? Aw. More usefulness! Try. Try this. (Mimicking.) I’m an analytical riddle fucking with your head! I nearly laughed, but can’t. OK! So I’ll tell you again then, instead of laughing bubbles into the water, just one more time … Once more … More time … A last chance for you to prove yourself as an expert in dullness – though you won’t like the content coz it doesn’t fit in your tidy box of goodies. Goodness is not ‘nice’ people like yourself, your self as rotten as the rest of us. I’m sick. I’m sick too, I’ve joined the club … I’ve told you all this already, what’s wrong with you? … How I feel … Angst … Can’t see the blue sky for clouds … I’ve got a mixture going on in here … An uneasy thundery mixture … As if the hot and cold taps are running, filling my head with irregular temperatures, the gush of metallic-looking waterfalls.

A loud wet fart lets rip … Bubbles appear in tank and Body wiggles …

Analyst: (Pinching nose.) Ugh! It’s obvious you’re troubled and maybe a bit mixed up inside. Oh! The flatulence. The spleen. What a nice analyst would expect from a saucy client – or an anthropomorphic test device, a self-tortured mannequin banging its head off the telescopic windscreen. But I can put up with your bad habits; you know I need this experience with you to develop a career in psychiatric counselling and financially support you and your useless ways. Now. Listen through that uncomfortable headpiece of yours: you need my transferrable skills and you know it. So then. To business: last time we came to an agreement. Yes, an agreement … can you remember it? Didn’t I email he minutes to you? No. Well, never mind, there’s no point in stressing ourselves out over it. This is what we agreed: we agreed, didn’t we, Body, that isolation self-imposed leads to fearful conjecture and nightmarish projections into the ether. We also agreed – that’s right, correct me if I’m not beyond correction – that it’s time for you to shake yourself out of these illusions and wake up. You’re not really in there, are you? We’ve got our projections all confused, haven’t we, and the fluctuating temperature of your psychus imperitus is a symptom of this. Your metabolism might be in need of a hard reset to default settings. Now tell me about your latest adventures.

Alarm clock rings …

Body: (Still speaking softly.) Aaaaaahwww bullshit and more shit! Turn that bastard fucking thing off. Shit! Shut up! (The complaint quickly tapers into a big yawn.) Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaw! (Normal voice.) Oh it’s only you. Ah! But I won’t wake up till you dirty sexy to me … How about a morning quickie, a short intense burst. I’m horny as hell. I’m hot right now. Go on! It’ll help. I’m ready to come out for love. Forget all this nonsense, I can just bury it all, keep it for later … You know very well we’re more than just an analyst and crackpot cracked team. Go on, don’t tease me any longer. I want you to talk dirty to me face to face, with a sparkle in the eye … And look at me: I can’t even see you or touch you. What the hell happened to us anyway?

Analyst: (Sits down and taps commands on keyboard.) What happened to you is the subject of the current project. And, yes, we all know what you need – that much is self-evident. I know you well enough to know your frustrated curses and their sources. Maybe you should bury those particular demons under your tongue – even if they are related facts – and talk a bit more first, so we can get to know each other all over again. I want to help. It won’t take long and it’ll prepare you for a new life. But before that, I’d like that update please. Now let’s see … It was under the heading of Any Other Business …

Body: (Still yawning.) AAAAAAAWW A.O.B. Sure. I can feel a hormonal rant coming on … I don’t pretend not to feel and don’t fake feelings for advantage. So I’ll shower you with tactics that swam right out of the fucking sewage system … Have some raw sewage then … You and your cronies deserve to be smug and play it nice, fucking cowards, thieves, shit-stirring in each others’ arseholes … because you all go for it big time and take yourselves way too serious, unwinding whatever merdish fabric is at hand and tying it up in knots of newish shite. Liars. Thieves. Articulators. Manipulators. Sociopathic cunts pretending to be nice. Neo-shitters and phoney scum. The scum always rises, isn’t it so? Always pushing the right buttons! Always knowing what’s best for classes or groups or individuals you’ll never really know …

Analyst: Not another paranoid Bodyrant! When will you learn to switch off and chill. You’re a real barrel of laughs riding high on ill-conceived concerns, fears, disappointments. Let me help. I’ll reel you in to safe ground, because you’re like a fish swollen to the point of bursting …

Body: Are you trying to say that I’ve put the weight on? Or that I’m some kind of cake-eating dummy sweating like a big fatty oily fish that’s devoured just about all the shit in sight? Or are you trying to talk dirty: “like a fish swollen to the point of bursting.” You know the last time I had any fucking cake? I suppose you do coz you’re just another voice bursting with answers … Aren’t you? … Playing the game, teasing with soothing platitudes and flat similes … You know nothing! And I know how you slept your way to your last job, like a good team player! Ah! Unmeritable phoney … And you saved your body, your love, for the machine … Deprived me … Made a fool out of me … Disappeared … Kept me waiting … And now look at the pickle I’m in … Yes you! You belong to the machine; remember, its number-crunching you too! Don’t forget that, Analyst!

Enter Flotation Consultant from above, fumbling with harness … Suspended above the stage, sitting in a cuckoo-landish cloud. Gowned and vatic, wearing long beard and Space Age toga; fumbling and twitching.

Analyst: Yes, yes! It’s always someone else’s fault. Don’t you trust me? I have to support you somehow – now that you’re in no fit state to work. I’m nearly certified at Level 3. I’m a hard-working achiever, I’ve adopted various co-ordination roles, and, what’s more, I’m approachable, available as a download and dirty in bed. So, if things are as you say they are, come out and get some. It’s steamy out here …

Body: Ah! No. Don’t think you can tease me out like a desperate prick. It’s your own sad mixture of empathy and bitchiness that gives me the boke. I’m not a professional like you – all image, no substance … And with a freeze-dried brain like yours, the steam’s no option. You’re too cold, too obvious … Set in stone … You should know that obviousness is depraved … But is it obvious that I need you in the flesh? That I need your flesh like I need my own? I miss it … What the fuck happened? Help me cry if you want to be useful. I don’t want sympathy. I could do with a good cry and a powerful ejector seat, the great ejaculator in the sky! So that like an out-of-body trip I get a bird’s-eye view of my situation.

Flotation Consultant: Steam! Steamy situation! You two copy and paste water … That’s no way to conduct an enquiry … For the enquiring mind there must surely be flexibility, wariness of investing in that which is coordinated through bad ritual. Nasty is nasty. Only cowards and phoneys need an agenda to strike ugly chords. You’re playing dirty games with each other for bitch-kicks and it’s not the right way to go. You can’t love that Body while it’s in with the dirty bathwater looking at the dirt. You both need to be less emotional and more physical, less smutty and more erotic. Clean and cleansing, being you’re your own pornography, making of it what you will as you will. Will? Whatever it is … The game’s more of a rational settlement within the physical world and with others within it … Be free to cooperate as best you can … using passion as it was intended, for pleasure, for contact … contact … con … co … (Slips into a trance … Gently tugging his beard) … tactical coco … mutual imposition of cooperative and opposing energies … in packets of equilibrium, nervous impulses modulating in minute currents of inexhaustable electric shivers … (Looking at the beard in his hand then shaking his head out of the trance) … But I digress. You’re jerking each other off, so to speak … the early exploratory stages of Love dissolved into a familiarity approaching hatred. Now, if I can just get another word or two in to expound on the Flotation Method, a speculative notion which proposes that the whole trouble with advantage is the greed for it and therefore agreeably represents the opposite of this. In practical terms I’m sure this greed stuff is a basic brute force really, and difficult to manage unless you’re certain it’s for the best – I mean, we can’t really change without spasm and voltage … Everybody understands this … Sometimes equilibrium is drawn into to abstraction, warped into a false dispute so that the subject of the said operation channels raw conditioning and merges with its agents and operatives – that is: with contrived commitments. A swift slide, on the scale, on a steep gradient, into the water and, za-splosh, down it goes. Certainly, a helping hand can’t be such a bad thing … If offered peacefully with no guile. But not to worry: the good-tempered Flotation Method is basic and common and does not promote the ancient trepanning method any more than it supports the Freudian obsession with penetrating repressed currents; or the cult of E-Meter technique which is too heavy on the grid … And others, other experiments too. Inherently good and left to themselves co-operative, self-representing, confident individuals, rational and sane and dignified. Why force sameness when it’s always there, self-evident? A body that can’t stand its own ground will slip by one degree or another … Look there at that withdrawn ego in the tank … it needs to be elevated and evaporated out of the tank by the basics of the Flotation Method; which are love, understanding, unity, honesty … Simple rhythms, most natural, more difficult to realise, to make real … These naïve fictions don’t need a closed system, because Nature is not closed. Anyway I hope you don’t mind me dropping in unannounced. Here’s my card (Drops calling card onto stage with a soft smile and a gentle shudder) … My services are free … Funded by the Open Society for the Freedom of Agitated Energy … pronounced OSFA, bedded in soft sibilance, a possible word for a possible world, an alternative self-recognising insanity of the progressive type …

Bill Drennan is author of the space fiction project at http://hypoetics.blogspot.com, a book of poetry, Flightpath Resistor (print version, Prosthetic Books, 2007; blog version, http://flightpathresistor.blogspot.com, & a book of short stories and sketches, Stories Short and Strange (Argotist Ebooks, 2010). He is a regular contributor to Otoliths, has other bits and pieces scattered here and there, and is the proud subject of various caricatures penned and performed by a ganging clique which does not openly source its inspiration.

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2012-01-19T10:43:00.001+10:00

Stuart Barnes

The Complaint†

is being made on a mint
green form, with the blackest ink

PRESS HARD FOR COPIES
in ivory boxes:

name, address, telephone
my grindstone

blunting the estimated
value of the item: ‘irreplaceable’

X’s
tattooing Damaged (the freckles

of a five-
year-old whiten):

the postie rashly scarred
their only matrimonial photograph

†for my parents

Screaming Skull

Wraaaaaaoooghhaaaaa!!!!! – Sonic Youth

N.B. This medicine does not contain tartrazine

Siouxsie

Dazzle, it’s a glittering prize
– Siouxsie and the Banshees

Dionysus’
anima,
animus of

Sphinx,
for two and
something

decades
you’ve diminished
Hades’ glint.

Polished bird,
berried girl —— punk
and goth are dirty

words. Skin
from alabaster,
lips hibiscus;

peacocks envy
iridescent eyes;
octaves stiff

the lioness,
the goddess.
Rise and rise,

shake it off,
feel the force
not felt before.

Dazzle,
you’re the glittering
prize.

Dazzle!

Stuart Barnes is arranging the manuscript for his first book of poetry, and writing his first novel. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.

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2012-01-19T09:59:00.001+10:00

D.J. Huppatz

How to Trap Angels

You had to answer your phone, didn’t you?
I told you there are unknown agencies
working evil in the world. An investigation
will establish whether they brush their teeth or not.

Heightened emotion, significant events: these won’t help.
Start building a horseshoe-shaped trap a light-year across,
far to the north of the starting position. The Ribcage Harness
might work, but don’t even try the ol’ fake-to-third,
throw-to-first pickoff play. That never works.

Mobility matters and angels have an elevated
level of spiritual energy, nominally 7 units,
with a surplus of 14 units or more added per day.
Angels choose light fabrics and wear socks too.
The floor is cold in Heaven.

Accessorize, cast off your karmic shackles then
tell them it’s actually a snowplough protector
rather than a footrest for relaxation.
Just don’t expect anyone to notice.

Keep Pressing

Pin-stripped, particles of life
won’t adhere anymore.

Keep pressing and we’ll reward you.

The afterimage of statistics
flicker under a fluorescent tube
and the carnival is so remote
you can only daydream its edges.

Years have slipped by since last week’s special.

Were the idiots at work born idiots
or did work make them like that?
Or was it the espresso machine?
Skim milk? Corn syrup? Tight jeans?

Some try to blame the elevator but
the truth is it’s the elevator music.

D.J. Huppatz is a Melbourne-based writer who has had poetry published recently in VLAK 2 (2011), Overland, and Black Inc’s The Best Australian Poems 2011, as well as an article on contemporary poetics, “Dionysus in Drag: On Flarf” in Louis Armand, ed., Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics (Litteraria Pragensia: Prague, 2010).

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2012-01-18T13:00:00.002+10:00

Joseph Cooper

It hit the ground and broke open momentarily mending everything. But a glimpse of a man’s soul rolls to crush the dead stomach. Suck the city’s nipple. Mount the decapitator.

We are all digested within this fat land. He did not even want words. He gambled the prostitute’s explanation’s for a poisoned estuary. He emerged through the bones of his teeth with lace panties over his blind skin.

The final act crammed with laughter. The stumps of amputees raised in a foul haze. We are here; we are here. Choke him, cut him, strip him to his shame.

Nail to yourself a chorus of wings. Claw a blanket of your brains.

Then take a step or two forward. Then cover his getaway. Then defeat all composition. Then paint images imitating words.

Then confuse moonlight for a manmade lake. Then fall between the ship and the jetty. Then draw a cell. Then bang planets with scripture.

Then turn completely inside out. Then the condition worsens. Deep in the map—pull their curtains tight. No one is involuntary.

Later tonight it rains. From above I watch rooftops spread red with claw tracks.

Before he went beyond his body a tunnel gagged his throat. He blinked and nothing faded. An adamant dead man, he licked the knife’s edge completely in two. Painful frowns clowned around him like penurious crowns.

Look through these hunted tears of solid ink. Your tomb speaks the collapsing magic of pretty lips. Around your neck the awful gash. But the world did not notice.

They humbled a bulbous crescendo. They charged into space gulping flesh and bones. Their eyelids became the dull gunshots of afterlife. Horrified, he fell.

Shut in behind his eyes, they tore out his entrails. Who will recognize me while I’m crying?

There he started to surrender. And the most beautiful girls blindfolded him with silk. His eyes became a haggard mask. Promiscuity binds design.

I can’t die. But what would you have? The wagon road frosted over. Forced hand middling life.

But such a picture, bathed in filth, turns slowly end over end. And I’ve followed you as far as I can. I want to live but I merely caress you curiously. My falseness; your sobs.

And lay broken. And swallowed them.

First, a vessel must head out into the storm. Then the sparrow’s body writhes and drags claw marks over the sky. The ocean becomes fastened to the moon and all the applause of heaven shotgun cloudbursts. Under a blanket of thieves we write an ambushed autobiography.

The opposition collapses. The ambush was always my body. The wind stared and starved. The sparrow became a weapon and a heartbeat.

I am bored of whiskey. I am lonelier than ever. With the ocean drunk we become pitifully small. That is to say the imagination moves nearer until I am sick of it.

It is a rock split, an egg hatched. A curious face awakened.

Joseph Cooper is currently writing and teaching in Princeton, WV. He is the author of the full-length books TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009)and Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007), as well as the chapbooks Here Come the Groovies co-authored with Andrew K. Peterson (Livestock Editions 2011), Memory/Incision (Dusie 2007), from Autobiography of a Stutterer (Big Game Books 2007), and Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion co-authored with Jared Hayes (Hot Whiskey 2005). He is the 2009 winner of the Equinox Chapbook Award from Fact-Simile Editions with his chapbook, Point of Intersection. In addition, his work has appeared in numerous journals including most recently The Ash Anthology, BlazeVox11, Counterexample poetics: Assemblage of Experimental Artistry, Bombay Gin, Brown Bagazine, Dear Sir,, Diode Poetry, Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Sex and Murder, and Sous Rature.

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2012-01-18T12:48:00.002+10:00

John Pursch

A Standing Wave

Lawmen meander beneath city statutes, simmering in prolonged trees, sifting posse wealth, weighing flecks of sepia pattern mulch. Faces emerge and dwindle, coalesce, reveal and dissemble, fleeing perusal tomes, dusted to disintegration. Idiosyncratic ideologues spread gospel cookies throughout the pre-dawn bakeries, filching nuts and bolted pastries, coffee clan collection hints, and berry spread ejection tips, for sale to transients and hot lead traders. Foot traffic fills wandering street smells, withering the vacuous open seats, fueling convergence, serial in every moored handmaiden’s lace buttonhole. Pigeons direct proceedings, clog light bulbs, and search for philosophic solutions to inject between organic fingers and webbed ejecta, jetting from ledge to teetering tram. Sky colors readjust continual silence meters, masking white noise, shoving print above billboard blues. Effluvia float and filter through lunging origami flesh, pressed by innocence and consequential rain. Yellowing cabs page dusky chance connectors, help themselves to stale pasties, tire of the screechers, sketch a manhole’s path, and bore through uptown gazes, beating with the causal emptiness. Often becomes seldom, never meets the northbound train, and bland eventuality emerges unscathed, carried on a standing wave.

In Parmian Feld

Orbelimon itur embilen tanture quon smoon
or demanican mensher tephome;
spuntle and gamon tepable insachen
with coomin and torphinul dunian spoth.

Egenton coriat cruthian arcta hotcher
of umbian getch tamaroon;
spensat zeireinial oxtra det termian,
fust pemal custum duch bermy canute.

Prenyl octian weldge, quander mountia hemt,
when drein carpital bunctio spoolie karuthe;
etchyl actium harser achian treim moochle strace,
ond ormitous phlogger scoamantle palooph.

Enyl ryelight and oxian triphage,
por sountimian quendle splah,
inphlatous unden crine moanten ective,
anviar spreadiot, lookian phlume.

Arcudan tyren moun cedentia,
frex and whenchire pont whodirum snile,
con enera einerod boun flon temietal quot,
gemprian herbian spantium krudge.

Direclothia slushenter’s frockian helt,
pirona doon spoochicrapht renkle abelium,
prentonurat diltia’s carnfeli enjoodle,
argibial empreture in parmian feld.

Embodied Grist

Parisian mints flow, arduous and extreme, down cobbled alleys, ateliers abridged by contumacious cads and extra film clearings. Conspiratorial circus cleaners grow limb bark for chest extractors, goosing under gilded leggings, photographing new dendrites, captured in the seize of japed and tender monuments. Mass physical relocation, revolving on a cartwheel’s subatomic stencil, plants hardened logic amid the fluid indeterminacy, flexing a static identity’s cooling, ruptured meal. Identifiers spontaneously appear, labeling separations, supplanting anonymity, pinning us down, bringing up embodied grist, milling futures and pestles of pureed pasts. Emergence becomes a sea, waving through tidal shavings, mixing matter’s formal confluence with consequential flux, churning out a wake of sleeping entities.

John Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue & Yellow Dog, Breadcrumb Scabs, Calliope Nerve, Camel Saloon, Carcinogenic Poetry, Clockwise Cat, Counterexample Poetics, experiential-experimental-literature, Four and Twenty, Indigo Rising Magazine, ken*again, Orion headless, Otoliths, Poetry Sz, Puffin Circus, The Rainbow Rose, and vox poetica. You can follow his work at http://twitter.com/johnpursch.

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2012-01-18T12:08:00.001+10:00

Grzegorz Wróblewski

A STUDY OF A HORSE FOR DOCTOR MARABOUT

#1

#12

#13

Grzegorz Wróblewski, born in 1962 in Gdansk and raised in Warsaw, has been living in Copenhagen since 1985. He has published nine volumes of poetry and two collections of short prose pieces in Poland; three books of poetry, a book of poetic prose and an experimental novel (translations) in Denmark; and a book of selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as a selection of plays. His work has been translated into eight languages.

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2012-01-18T11:30:00.000+10:00

Susan Gangel and Terry Turrentine

Placemats

Susan Gangel and Terry Turrentine have collaborated since they first met in the 1960's. Susan's work appears in Rooms, More Room, Transfer, and poetrybites. Terry's work is in the book collections at Stanford, Trinity, and Louisiana State University, and can be seen at Terry Turrentine photography.

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2012-01-18T11:06:00.000+10:00

Howie Good

‘ALL POETRY. . . IS PRAYER’

1
At the end of the sentence
was another sentence,
& at the end of that sentence
was another, & so on,
until the moon rose,
fox tails hanging
off the handlebars.

2
There’s a word,
a small word,
drunk all the time,
smiling stupidly
amid coffins
covered in flowers.

POST-IMPRESSIONIST

A farmer hid you from the Germans. You spent long, empty hours curled up inside a flower, resigned to headaches and insomnia. When you returned to Paris after the war, the people on the street were just shadows. You had finally discovered the color of the atmosphere. It’s dull yellow, almost pumpkin.

THROUGH A GLASS BRIGHTLY

The best music is inaudible,
a little boy pedaling his bicycle
after a delivery van.

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the new poetry collection, Dreaming in Red, from Right Hand Pointing. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a crisis center, which you can read about here: https://sites.google.com/site/rhplanding/howie-good-dreaming-in-red

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2012-01-18T10:34:00.001+10:00

Daniel f Bradley

Thu Jan 17, 2008 8:27 am (PST)


               mostly lurkers 
                                      and such 

                                                                      from the sidelines 
                                                     punches 

                                             and just plain mean 
                                  criticism 
                                                                                       — even the
glamorization 


                                                   a personal slay 


                                        lay a claim.

Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:09 pm (PST)




                                       -like venue. 
                                                     instances of textual 
matter at hand. 


                                                    rifts and damages 

                                     , i.e. embodied,                       ,         , experiential, epistemic etc etc

other warfare lingo.

Tue Jan 22, 2008 7:50 am (PST)



After reading 
The rhetorical technique 
I wonder

                 ponder the hyperreality 



                                                   ever-prismatizing private



                                                                      rhetorical engine torque



  gape widely.

Sun Jan 27, 2008 8:26 pm (PST)



                 a little unclear 


                                (which *was* 


                                                                           with or
without      and         , and with or without

serve no one's
serves no one;
serves no one.

Sun Jan 27, 2008 7:48 pm (PST)


                                                     the proles 

                                      (guinness, seaweed, etc) 


 
beleaguered proles, 


                , the proles suddenly 

                       the Pope 

     to dodge cars

                             Or in more recent     emailing




                                  no need for funding,

Daniel f Bradley lives in toronto with his girlfriend and their daughter.

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2012-01-18T10:20:00.001+10:00

David Harrison Horton

from Where Chinese Women Float in Space

Frailty and oceans, a monsoon
season, the desert
birds that rest, refuse to soar
paint the walls grey
when there’s no better option
walk on two feet
to keep the body
in motion

*

Walls and periphery
oceanic
all the hometown crows (birds)
troublesome movement
of dislocated joints
a field of corn
a phantom
a five jiao note on the pavement

David Harrison Horton is an artist, editor, curator, and writer. He is the author of the prose poetry chapbook Pete Hoffman Days and his creative writing has been published in such places as Denver Quarterly, Quarter After, and Moria. He lives and writes in Beijing, China. chasepark@hotmail.com.

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2012-01-14T10:12:00.001+10:00

SJ Fowler

if her last wish were, #s 1=3

SJ (Steven) Fowler is the author of three poetry collections Red Museum (Knives forks and spoons press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA press 2011) and nine chapbooks. He edits the Maintenant interview series and is the editor of 3am magazine and Lyrikline in the UK. He has had poetry commissioned by the Tate, the London Sinfonietta and the Guildhall school of music. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and is undertaking a Phd at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

www.sjfowlerpoetry.com — blutkitt.blogspot.com — www.maintenant.co.uk — www.youtube.com/fowlerpoetry

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2012-01-14T09:52:00.001+10:00

Stu Hatton

amsterdam

on canal floats djs
mix genders fleshy
grins streamers the
pink drink for free at
pride parade: ‘prik
power’ (little self-
conscious holding
the can could be
the weed thinking
(feel thinking’s such
a feeling van gogh
such a seer galleries
as headshops (coffee-
shoppers did you
ever see the night
watch itself disem-
bodied like in-game
nulltime stoned to
the point of not
escaping red light
district which took
so long to find (yer
mother bites the ’dam
off as dirty though
questions of trans-
parency who wants
to be seen to be
free (via vondelpark
caught the last wave
of shrooms back to
the trees where we
fell back and back
(the reign of the
bicycle cult

into the archive

These the writings of someone who doesn’t
speak (to people), not wishing to dress
or undress a voice, to fail into. A
technicity of timidity as if stapled on
à la car abandoned atop skyscraper:
fictive? Else thrum of electrics, nerve-patches
syncopated to the point of liquid, hence
head dunked in glug-pond, saturated
with what – burstings, desire? AKA long-meant
regime of power-knowledge-pleasure-ick,
“in search”, tunnelling into the “we’re not
animals” meringue, tugging only these
retooled instances of display (cleaning,
etc). Decayed throughput: its lo-res,
pixellated terrain, surface spongy, starboard
mound o’ disposables (pepper sprays, beauty
inhalers, etc). Glee of banalities quells or
rebuffs “a pleasure to be endured”, proses
this, tensing the tribal abstract. Another
nightraid’s malicious code endlessly replies.

moral highchair

saved from that
head overdesiring
the guesswork’s
sure unsheer give
them 3 kilos of ghost
that should be
sufficient how much
they’ve spent on their
eyes losing like they’re
told the dead body
grazed on the bill-
board directed at
drivers overloaded
with i don’t knows lost
mission control those
careless astronauts

virus
(for kat / props to laurent garnier)

techno is a virus throbbing
      munt-fodder glob stacker
     tractions bluffer venom jugger
    null compressor den richter
   scaled disturbor bots nicer
  loosed repeater stunblaster iris
airlocks flooded spectrum gridshifts
glasstooth grinder misfitter stealth
exhibit randometer spectre pulse-flare
  omicron-wasp fluid accelerant blissed-on
   spitter madcap courtships culted brinks
    cursives the roid belt unelected void
     shirkers strewn planetfall peak icebreak
      nano-roboscopic lifter phantasma
       grabby bloater carbonate blunted
        mined dark-end quicksilvery bloodline
         spewer cloned samsara salad flak

[? are you a numb]

them glib-feeders crunched debate [? who’s first hitter on the team] let’s care at least once [? that a glass ain’t waterproof] [? whose new look licks] washed our time with don’t trouble the radar ask us about lightweight a silken jigsaw done at the day spa [? seduced by precision] the dogbowl filled with toner a sun-enhancer

Stu Hatton is a Melbourne-based poet and editor. He teaches writing and editing at Deakin University. His first collection of poems, How to be Hungry, is available through Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/stuhatton.

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2012-01-12T16:23:00.000+10:00

Andrew Taylor

Don't worry, the receipts will turn up

No doubt in notebook

take shade surface bubble
rest place

Doorway temperature
corridor air-conditioned

Green fade middle line
lane straddled

Light low sundown
back to work room
back home

Wednesday Lilac

Scout a location
       red light cuts
like a painting

Steffan says
through the mist

lake less reflective
grey scale

a kind of fairytale
       a magic

no movement
       windless

horizon

Twitter Mist

energy of the place we had it to
ourselves feel the force of nature falls
covered by mist like a coat draped
grey with the drop emptiness

Andrew Taylor is a Liverpool poet and co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. His latest pamphlet is The Lights Will Inspire You (Full of Crow: Oakland) and was published in spring 2011. Poems have recently appeared or are about to appear in Poetry Wales, Red Fez, Mad Rush, The Ten Pages Press Reader III and Rain Dogs. He has a PhD in poetry and poetics and currently teaches creative writing at Edge Hill University.

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2012-01-12T16:01:00.000+10:00

John Martone

Wunderkammer

Shaman

Anton van Leuwenhoek Dreams of Stonehenge

Anton van Leuwenhoek — The View from Above

Anton van Leuwenhoek — Another View

Rêve

Amanuensis

John Martone is a frequent contributor to Otoliths, the book side of which recently published his storage case. Other recent work includes st. john's wort and handbook.

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2012-01-10T12:32:00.001+10:00

Márton Koppány

Hungarian Vispo

No. 1

No. 2

No. 3

Márton Koppány is a Hungarian writer who lost his mother tongue more than thirty years ago and is still searching for it.

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2012-01-10T11:09:00.001+10:00

Jill Jones

End To Begin

Barefeet the sad one       Deaf secret

Facts ordinary-sung       Gestured silver bells

Isolated by history       Localised by story

Programs of rest       Remainders gutter our monumentals

Song naved retreat       Tattooed the past era

When whosoever with will

In Such A Night

after days of putting down
because I could not

come sleep
diligent elected farewell

gone now the huffy
I bring fresh junk

kitchenette lyke as much madness
no, no, go obscurely yet

piping down
queen-ann’s-lace

ragged skirting turning
unquiet vowels

we drive between
your absence

Escape, Now, It’s

OK, someone said, the nightclub will soon have
boneshakers, bonfires
but watch for that moonbeam over the dogcart.

The timekeepers nuzzle dark airbuses
they’ve come to bury secrets in hollows.

Go, get you cosseted, rainbow.
Watch the skydiver’s rump as you stumble with him,
don’t let the lemur sparkler out of sight.

There’s a humming from the marsh,
someone’s crying to be got in darkest tendrils
and I’ve dipped into the red nest and way unto
wallaby floorboards.

Let no-one defeat you into brimstone
lighten your handbills and hand them, defaulter,
into the trilby’s brim, it’s so featherweight.

There are poisons for the wallet, my old floozy,
and a skylark rumples amongst the tenements
while looters gatecrash the rainforest.

Here’s another feature on neglected poisons,
a collaboration with raincoats
any masochist could cry with.

Begone and suckle your bookends, bury
the hedgehog broadside, then defect, darling,
with a tenner in your nightgown.

Gems in the Weird

I’m hung by Time but don’t worry
your shaggy beads. Call me troublesome
about summer gear, so get thee towels.
The ‘fuck you’ song is pretending
to moon, pretending to leave.
Don’t cuss, be calm, be queer,
kiss without caution.
Why do they make contestants drink
poison on pinpoints, to darn socks
or muck in the sap & wish
horticulture to breath easy in moonbeam.
Turn it off, you extras, they won’t pay you
they won’t pay the dogs, it’s skrimping
out of sight in a mind of humidity.
This is not a city nor are there clowns.
Sometimes makes you somber, or self-absorbed
in your knickers & playthings.
I am not what I am but not that either.
Act as if you can hear trees talking, microbes
discoursing with the modern ground.
Even if you wimp it, there’s a glass
of rain coming your way.
Rub matches over our papers,
lies are fires, let limbs do their work.

Never Close

I have to tell night, you fangled fortune teller
of the blue death, the crackpots
where nerves intrude or is it merely routine
repellent, I had suspicions, a main chance
that went downstream, in circles
I’d do anything to speak, alone
I really must work, and not see morning
these are terrible questions, is it true
am I thrown by events, of a peripatetic ilk
I was never that close to a distinctive style
but that detective recognized my hand
Otherwise, I’d be dedicated to reaching the end
despite my sickness imagined, my pleasure’s
a saucy cloud but how do you turn it off

Jill Jones has published six full-length books, the latest being Dark Bright Doors (Wakefield, 2010). She co-edited, with Michael Farrell, Out Of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets (Puncher and Wattmann, 2009). She has also published five chapbooks, the most recent being Passages: Annotations (Ungovernable Press, 2010), a pdf-ed e-book of poems and poetics.

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2012-01-10T10:59:00.000+10:00

Kit Kennedy

CONDITIONS LEADING TO

Premise

is not
precipice
edge
a falling off

is falling into
not
vortex
vacuum?

Silence

This morning the cockatoo died.

Of Silence

Unprimed canvas luxuriates in the still.

& Still More

Rain stopped
eaves drip-less by noon.

VARIATIONS ON THE VEINS IN YOUR HAND

They closed the streets because no one was found walking on them for a year.

Instead of a map, carry a thimble of salt. Make your way to the orchard. Join the others writing ballads about gravity.

She (your neighbor) cut down the bushes. Upon your return, arrange the cuttings as the ideogram, finish.

Kit Kennedy co-authored Inconvenience (Littoral Press, Berkeley) and Constellations (Co-Lab Press, San Francisco) both with Susan Gangel. Beyond the Human Voice is an e-book with artist Susan Black. Work appears in Ambush Review, CLWN WR, haiku 21: an anthology, NAP, Otoliths, Shot Glass Review, Kit lives in San Francisco. Please visit http://poetrybites.blogspot.com

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2012-01-10T10:37:00.000+10:00

Marthe Reed

from BODY

9.

11.

13.

15.

Marthe Reed has published two books, Gaze (Black Radish Books) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer with drawings by Rikki Ducornet (Lavender Ink); a third book is forthcoming from Moria Books. She has also published three chapbooks, post*cards: Lafayette á Lafayette (with j/j hastain), (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations, all as part of the DusieKollektiv Series. These four image/texts are part of another project with j/j hastain, engagements/extensions of Forrest Gander's assertion, "The body has been my sole means for finding a world." Further information about her work can be found at her homepage.

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2012-01-09T16:50:00.002+10:00

Andrew Topel

blueprints

1. finding a way through the maze

2. nowhere but (t)here

3. tunneling through the vision

4. portal

5. wires get crossed

6. light shines through

7. read between the lines

8. doorway

Andrew Topel writes:
a sense of ____________ pervades the __________ in my work, making the oxygen

____________. true enough, my ______________ and non-communicative
tendencies have led

to _____________, but as an artist this is simply another ___________________.

(radical, diplomacy, shadows, erasure, route, light)

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2012-01-09T15:30:00.001+10:00

Zachary Scott Hamilton

Shelled

An eleventh housing rings a ginger sickle grass.
The armchair moves, a little away.
A beat of bread to thickness alloy breast.
An urban ostrich climbing graffiti dried.
A mouth is full of gold dormitory chairs
with chicken sleep, its silhouette
is across the shells.

Zachary Scott Hamilton lives in an abandoned house in portland, oregon with his cat and two friends, his work appears in puckerbrush review out of maine, Sein und werden online, Ignavia, a broadside from marymark press out of New Jersey and Karawane zine.
feel free to connect with him on the internet: www.zachabstract.blogspot.com

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2012-01-09T15:08:00.000+10:00

Spencer Selby

Possible-V2

Rated

D-Update (detail)

Mayatag-1

Mayatag-3

Spencer Selby is a poet, artist, film historian and lifelong idealistic misfit. One of his ongoing projects, Selby's List of Experimental Poetry/Art Magazines, turns 20 in 2012.

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2012-01-06T12:53:00.001+10:00

Claramarie Burns

Three Poems

                in jar         in music box         with hands
                to ears      negligent transparency impressed      by
                blue fresh tree nerves          *mnsp   indigo transparency
in mountains of light       in erect treason        pale    cut cut    bamboo
you can't break them those field-poppy thoroughbreds     marvelous corona
old day    old morning    old gold crushed         swarms of lily-of-the-valley
                white-arc-shine descent       come     come to the water
                this clear silver shine field                & simmers & steams
                over marshes     call of birds    insects        precise raindrop lens
                open to tattered secret kiss     unreliability & hoe of desire
                blue & acacia yellow-flowered         touch the blue tips      open
                flashed field wires flare     empty mountain                litter the
                strange rice over the gateway     the crow ultramarine sky
                railroads that parallel the heart      clasp the shadow to the flower
               foolishly broken tower bend       clavicle!     all those girls in bright bunches
                & laughing soggy clouds        vague rice distance of crickets & footsteps
                clip    clip    clip    clip    clip    clip    clip    rows & rows of pale sky    clip!
                lattice-layers      not spring but a variation of August-lid bowls & cups
hot hollow blooms high on narrow stalks       continuous peas        crow
in mountains of light            negligent transparency

*

she finds night in her wings     hides
surface beneath soft touch     violin-string bees in
harbor of the fastened mouth     fill the spokes of the
world aviary with honey stars         day's end     whistlefall
                the queen of the four snow-filled horizons closes
                her ship's wings                in sun-insulated arch
                &    she ends a little further on
day on her cheeks between the leaves       eternity on a chip of darkness
      sky-blue goats in her eyes &
electric hats
        she minds
                   maritime may-dove ferns wave
wave fern in the depths of her mirror
                   hears small sound         twice in the cold-stopped desert
draped over instrument panel in old airplane stutter
polished                   seduction of tunes dripping emptied
through the keyholes
what inner stair      rope-ladder      handkerchief silence
eats her words       her cushioned path a necklace of sighs

                               she weeps cries of birds
                               barricades upright necessity loud loud
                               stop the wind for the loud perhaps song!
                               it happens to the squeezed sponge

she will disturb the wet, crouched, recalcitrant abyss
hidden between the spread out leaves she perches on
her eyes come loose     she
in the depths of her mirror
    polite violin      happens in imitation
she plagiarizes freely     indecently     & without shame

*

                this garment of another's death
                so slight visible at early dusk in
the mirror experiment        the brilliance of doubt
night falls deeper in its common brightness of mumbled
secrets       space of decease         step over the sill
into clear spells of illegibility or fame     you may
     incarnate denial again & again         perched in the sharp memory
of corn-hair architectures      while cymbals ring in the throat
       in the mouth      of evening's wakeful dream
tenement     (wakeful)    of the masque      contemporary
stage whisper & modeler of antique
resonance             do you know where it is?
        or why?      to fasten the clasp?

Claramarie Burns is a poet and translator who lives in Denver, Colorado, where she writes, studies Sanskrit, and reflects on intersections of human, natural, and constructed existence. A graduate of the Jack Kerouac School MFA program at Naropa University, her work has appeared in Poetry New York and Bombay Gin. Other published works include two chapbooks, Phantastic Voyage, and Photoinsensitive, and two translations from the German, Peck Me Up, My Wing, selections from the work of Friederike Mayröcker, and The Two Hands of the Sparrowhawk, by Helmut Salzinger. Burns is also a self-declared linguaphile, artist, gardener, and food sustainability activist.

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2012-01-06T11:50:00.001+10:00

Jeff Harrison

Mars and Penthesilea

Mars, puerile, does yawn, nestled at Penthesilea's cautery. Steadfast your gapes, Mars, I pray, since what had been steadfast silent speaks with garrulous hooves. Dews have as swiftly shut the night from the sun. Cloistered from the Morn are Mars and Penthesilea, downcast darlings, and for them I've script of where firelights are brightening who, Phoebus?

Clasps

A tangle of horn clasps hart to Actaeon; a tangle of curs, Artemis to Actaeon. To hart, Actaeon, curs, and Artemis clasps what remembrance vernal and tenebrous.

Colloquy

SIGNUM: See that figure there, across the water? In profile? Seated. The reader. That's The Translator.

ONYMA: Translator of what language?

SIGNUM: You have to ask? You haven't heard of The Translator?

ONYMA: Not this one. Is there a story?

SIGNUM: This translator, whether by decision or cause, I don't know, neither speaks nor writes any living language.

ONYMA: Dead languages, then?

SIGNUM: Only one. English. It could even be said that The Translator hears only in English, since words are translated immediately, or with near-immediacy, into English as soon as they are spoken. The Translator has said this, and also says this of written words.

ONYMA: Impossible.

SIGNUM: Honestly, I heard it from none other than Talu.

ONYMA: Then perhaps The Translator is untruthful.

SIGNUM: If not truthful, The Translator is guilelessly misstating or willfully misrepresenting. It could be a matter of miscommunication, since someone who knows English is the rarest of rarities.

ONYMA: I know a few words.

SIGNUM: Veracity aside, as a premise The Translator's condition is thought-provoking. For instance, would The Translator hear an untranslatable word as silence?

ONYMA: Hear as silence, or translate as silence?

SIGNUM: Would an untranslatable word be replaced from a store of deliberately falsely-translated words?

ONYMA: The notion of a store of deliberately falsely-designative words could serve as a definition of language.

SIGNUM: Or a history of language. Does The Translator incorporate untranslatable words, or any kind of foreign word, into English? How true is The Translator to the spirit of English?

ONYMA: English! What if I were to cry the word "poesy"?

SIGNUM: I...

ONYMA: Poesy! Unyielding impassivity -- surely, hearing an English word is worth something.

SIGNUM: The Translator is out of earshot, I believe. "Poesy"? Isn't the word "poetry"?

ONYMA: I understood it to be "poesy". "Poetry" must be a porphyrogene youth of yet another epoch.

SIGNUM: Within a dead language, what of anachronism, and what of archaism? Does The Translator change our native language, say, into Chaucerian English? Is what The Translator hears — or, a comprehensive, converting Echo, instantly repeats — a melange of English epochs?

ONYMA: Different epochs for different days! Different hours! Months! Years!

SIGNUM: Is it, as with the possibility of incorporating untranslatable and other foreign words into English, a matter of context and consistency?

ONYMA: Does The Translator know all living languages, not an impossible task, and hears English with every word?

SIGNUM: Like I said, food for thought. Let's move on.

Jeff Harrison has poems in all the issues of Otoliths except the second issue. He has publications from Writers Forum, MAG Press, Persistencia Press, White Sky Books, and Furniture Press. He has e-books from Blazevox, xPress(ed), Argotist Ebooks, and Chalk Editions. His poetry has appeared in An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II (Meritage Press), The Chained Hay(na)ku Project (Meritage Press), Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Xerography, Moria, NOON: journal of the short poem, Dusie, MiPOesias, EXPLORINGfictions, EOAGH, and elsewhere. He has an interview blog with Allen Bramhall called Antic View.

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2012-01-06T11:30:00.000+10:00

Stephen Nelson

Footfall Fragments

This year - Stephen Nelson’s collection Lunar Poems for New Religions due out from anything anymore anywhere press. A chapbook called YesYesY due out in the Little Red Leaves Textile Series. Poems due out in Blue & Yellow Dog . Who knows what else?

Last year - published in Eratio, Moria, BlazeVox and The Adirondack Review. Exhibited visual poetry at the Text Festival in Bury, Manchester. Other stuff he can’t remember.

All years until the end of time – www.afterlights.blogspot.com

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2012-01-06T11:11:00.001+10:00

Caleb Puckett

Made for You and Me

Corn, soybeans, wheat: reports of their futures poison the melody you carry with you this morning. So you drive by necessity, contemplating the immense, dull ache of duress that emanates from this heartland, this hurt land, this space where the tarnished harmonica wind vibrates across thresholds seeking a verdant gap some men might call independence. Old man, where are you steering that truck of yours now that the rich expanse of thunderclaps has given way to a grid of speed traps? Are you headed back towards some perfect refrain long passed into dust now that the tongues of folkways have become mummified by the dime-a-dozen diodes of progress? Are you bent on finding some album full of alibis for your silence on the matter of giving up the ghost of home for a guaranteed place in line outside the chain store storefront? Woody Guthrie would have something to say about this desperate journey of yours. Stand tall, plant, multiply, and collect: but a man cannot be a Communist, only a body without a choice. You are here alone, toiling for a strain of something the wild abundance once seemed to promise.

For most people, refusal can never be anything more than a secondary hobby. One vacations—does not vacate. One need only shift the weight from one community to another for a brief moment to bring back circulation. Nostalgic for all that a trick memory might be worth, you gently hum “This Land is Your Land” as the nebulous dirt road disappears into the demarcated blacktop, realizing full well the bitter bargain all creators must strike when the government grants their cry for sustenance under the condition of flag-waving passivity. The ballad of self-sufficiency becomes the ballot self-defeat, old man, under this agreement for subsidy. Yes, it is some kind of egregious, snake oil complicity. But see how the tune must change for the time? See how paybacks can operate under the pretense of altruism? See how the blood in the audience’s smile can seem to turn white when one submits to that old black magic? The wand, old man, is a bankroll. Oh, what a priceless posterity that handshake can make: the palms so honest, the intention so full of complications. Tired and tied to the wheel, you push on with little will left to meet that wind. You push back, seeking an old song composed when tradition was synonymous with respect, not some kind of bondage. It is best that you turn away or turn it all off. Forgive yourself at once for what feels like a betrayal.

Bill Monroe’s Mix-up

I walk in thunder, wiping faith from my mouth. Whirling about, I throw rocks into the river. True low. My knife became home when love became a willow. Now I'm down in this creek. The bank is a high gate. Lord, I know that cotton ball. Ringing bell of joy. And those fields above me back up my bloody mouth. Talking to myself, I poison that name, Monroe. A brand breaking money. Old breaking. Old soul bone. Broken. I fell into night, just my mouth around a rose. The rose became a rotten potato. My knees in Carolina and back in Louisiana, after all. I fought smiling. I drew my saber, sweetheart, mama, smiling cripple, down by the cabin. True low. Jesus in the land. Miles of promised wonder soon gone to stone. My needing. My shoes. Wanting a bottle, a garden and a ball in the middle. Ready the rock, girl. Talk murder, mama. I’m making wine from the cradle, running from the moon. I’m high on blue, walking out a song of thunder.

Caleb Puckett lives in Kansas. Some of his recent writing appears in Mad Hatters’ Review and With + Stand. Otoliths published his most recent prose collection, Market Street Exit, in 2011.

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2012-01-06T10:48:00.001+10:00

Katie Berger

Time Travel: Theory and Practice

Initial Inquiry
                I possess a distinct memory of flying through my living room. The cape was a pastel blanket named Blanky gathered around my neck with a clothespin. I had to get a running start, as far back as the kitchen two rooms over. I glided low first, brushing my stomach against the carpet, then swooped up and over my dad as he sat watching the news. I will not tell Paul about this memory.
                But I tell him anyway one day when we run out of things to talk about. He is fascinated that I remember such a thing as that. He owns a similar such thing, a family vacation in Florida with Mickey and Minnie and sand dollars and popsicles, and yet no photo album in his parents’ attic contains any evidence of Florida.
                Memories break, he said. Often, they run out of batteries, lose a wheel or two, snap a little plastic gear, and go spinning so far away from the truth they are rendered useless. The goal, of course, is to re-glue the wheels, buy some new batteries, re-store, re-build, without having to re-invent. If we could free our memories from ourselves, he explained, we would know the truth. About the flying? Just the truth. A truth? Sure.
                He spoke of an exploratory operation to diagnose why I remember flying, and this is true – he was halfway to a doctorate in English literature, and doctors can do operations.
                Not many four-syllable words comprised my childhood, but Op-er-a-tion did because of the game, the chubby naked man with the light-up red nose and holes poked in him. I had thought the red plastic behind the man was a tray I could slide out to access the little plastic body parts I wasn’t able to extract myself. But it’s not. The only way to get to the slice of bread, the ribs, the broken heart, is to pull them out on your own with the included tweezers while not touching the metal of the tweezers to the metal edges of the incisions, lest the red nose light up, the terrible buzzing fill your ears. I grew so frustrated with the raw, angry noise, the failure of my fingers, that I ripped the tweezers from the string that attached them to the game and lost them forever.
                This memory is memory, not guaranteed to emerge without terrible noises and lights. If you do get a glimpse of my memory, Paul, what will it even look like? A piece of bread? A heart with a crack in it?
                Maybe not operation. Maybe something less invasive, more akin to something done in a dentist’s chair. He will look on eBay for one.

Background
                The common ground between us was the ground We of course both lived in the city now and rarely strayed from the university, but our past selves sprang from emptiness – what some call the Great Plains. Plain, yes. Great, no, never, we always told each other.
                I grew up three hours north of the city, he three hours east of the city and several years ahead of me. The counties in this geography are little squares – my entire childhood filled a square, his another.
                My Girl Scout camp, which was near a river and in another square, hinted at hills and trees and other hiding spaces. I remembered the trees held to the ground with the very sound of birds chirping, and a hill to run or roll down – a chance to feel gravity, to test it, to know it wasn’t just something puppets sang songs about on educational access television.
                At home, during the school year, I had no trees to hide in nor hills to disappear behind. I could see my dad’s car coming home from work from entire blocks away. If the annoying neighbor girl came over to play, I could not hide. She’d spot me as soon as she had the thought to walk over.
                This open landscape led to a weird openness within, an acceptance that no tree or hill could conceal anything, so anything was often the best and only route to take. Just play Cat’s Cradle with her and her stretchy neon string. It might not even be that bad.
                So I guess it’s obvious that Paul and I, both from open terrain, spoke so openly with each other, moved the conversation so directly into theories and issues within the study of time travel.
                Or it might have been that other tendency of the Plains – that weird trick the land itself plays. Because it has no hills or trees coupled with a questionable sense of gravity, the land tends to let time plod over it at a faster, brasher rate than in other places.
                The house my mother was born in stands in ruins. Her high school, to save itself from closing, amputated a day from its week – no class on Fridays. My dad switched schools several times in an attempt to graduate from one before it closed. The school district his own dad ran as superintendent lasted long enough to produce two yearbooks. (I also knew the hills he had to walk up both ways to school were a lie, not for the usual reasons, but because we have no hills in the first place.)
                It’s easy to speak of time’s tendency to pummel the land when it happens in the times of your parents and grandparents, but I do remember it happening myself. I remember giggling and tiptoeing through abandoned houses. The giant ceramic chicken that sat atop the restaurant where the neighbor girl worked (and my mom and aunt before her) now fills a room of a local museum. I own a Smurfs lunchbox from a store that has since been bulldozed. I wore tights and a dress the day my cousin graduated with all six of his classmates. The next year, they didn’t bother to open the school. My dad’s friend bought another schoolhouse and turned it into a house. He gave me the chalkboard and three of the same Grade One reader with pictures of a cartoon honeybee in various poses on the cover. My friend who worked at the restaurant was killed in a car accident on a road that, despite being described to me several times, is nowhere in my memory. Same goes for the cemetery she’s buried in. I had the directions written on a piece of paper at one point, and gave them to another friend, who looked but found only corn.
                It was always assumed that once I grew up I would leave like everything else tended to do. So I did.
                Paul left for similar reasons, carrying his own memories marred and crumpled by a land that gave itself over to time all too easily. The city with its concrete and stoplights felt safer for both of us, the university with its grades and courses and textbooks even more so. Until he brought up the time machine idea. That was dangerous, especially considering where we came from.

Some facts about time machines
                So dangerous, in fact, that I stopped waiting in the hallways for Paul between classes, stopped checking to see if the light glowed under his office door, stopped dismissing early the Facts 101 course I taught in order to catch him for lunch. I had so much I wanted to tell him, including the remedy I’d found as a teenager for combatting the Plains and their inability to accommodate a consistent chronology. It didn’t even involve planting a forest or ripping up the earth to make a mountain, but I still didn’t tell him what I did.
                I’ll admit it - I just memorized everything. The back of the shampoo bottle. The little card my grandpa gave me that listed out the names of the 93 little square counties. The world map. The state map. The periodic table. All the questions and answers in an episode of Jeopardy. This remedy of facts wasn’t just a ticket to the university (although it was that, too), but the very feel of the information in my head seemed to counter whatever it was time was doing to my childhood. Time was death and disappeared stores and missing roads and a giant chalkboard hanging in my basement. I lost the eraser but kept writing words over words when I played teacher because I didn’t like the way the board felt when I rubbed it with my hand.
                The facts, in contrast, didn’t disappear and change and deceive and wound – they stayed in one place and did not require suffering. On the days when the wind ripped over the Plains so angrily that the trash can, garden rake, and watering can blew away with it, I’d actually feel the facts holding me to the ground. This was proof that the gravity the puppets sang of did indeed exist here – you just had to memorize the exact wording of the law of gravity for it to have any effect whatsoever.
               Paul knew I knew the law of gravity and every other law, saying “Ok, yeah, thanks” in an odd voice whenever I’d find at least three factual inaccuracies in one of his papers on time travel. But what he didn’t know mattered even more once he dove deeper into his work. He didn’t know I’d memorized the blueprint for a time machine.

Purity
                I found the blueprint for the time machine when my mind was stuffed with chipmunks, Siberian tigers, ptarmigans, Indian elephants. My grandpa had just died, and I carried my wild animal flashcards around everywhere, memorizing the habitat range of the baboon and the Latin name for the red squirrel as my parents took me to the nursing home, then the hospital after the failed operation, and eventually the church. I’d felt time grumbling and moaning and swirling at a heavier pace than usual, the empty spaces in rooms felt more important, and the walls seemed to hold some knowledge of my grandfather they couldn’t impart to me because they had no mouths. I’d stare for hours at the orange tiger stomping over the white snow. Right leg in front of the other. Snow clumps clinging to the fur around his stomach. Same steady look in his eyes. I didn’t imagine him pouncing or lying down or doing anything beyond stomping through the snow. I didn’t want to. I liked the idea of his footprints staying exactly as they were.
                I figured out that I could only stare at the tiger and the other animals for so long – certain scraps of them simply wouldn’t latch themselves to my memory. Neither the full name of the toucan nor the diet of the polar bear ever found homes in my head. Shortly after the funeral, I went through the box that had appeared in the basement on the floor near the chalkboard, looking for new things to study. I found two books, both with a full-sized picture of my grandpa on the last page, and the word “superintendent” underneath. Several other books, too, even more worn, the scribbling at the beginning and end saying “Hey Einstein!” “Hey genius!” “When will you get us to the moon?”
                These books were full of things to memorize, including the rosters of a basketball team, a pep club, a freshman class, and the names of the lunch ladies. When I picked up the leather-bound book with the name of an important university on it, I expected more clubs and honor societies, but out poured graph paper with numbers and lines and angles and erased markings, and on the final pages, a drawing of a metal box with buttons and dials and a display with a needle that pointed to numbers. I lost interest in the other books after that.
                I’m not sure where in time this memory belongs, but I remember my brother and me shouting questions at my mother and giggling as she grew more and more tired of us. No, he didn’t invent the atomic bomb. Not a laser gun, either. No, no weapon of any kind. It was an air purifier, ok? It takes dust and dirt from the air. No, it’s not top secret; it sits in the corner of a room. It just hums. She explained a company in South Dakota bought the rights to the patent from my grandfather but only made a few of them. The design was ahead of its time but not cost efficient.
                I must admit this now – I have either memorized the plans for a time machine or an air purifier.

Making
                Lately, the halls of the university have been decorated with green pieces of paper announcing a symposium on time travel with Paul as one of the key presenters.
                I have come to accept that certain memories do not want to be at the forefront of my mind, yet I still remember.
                The location is a blank space when I think of it, but coffee in two dark blue cups were involved. He was concerned about his sister – she was creating a scrapbook with rickrack and glue and some old family photos. I’m fine with the glitter and stickers, anything that adds to it – it’s the scissors I hate. She’d been snipping out certain elements she disliked – a mentally unstable uncle from a Thanksgiving dinner, a messy room complete with overflowing dog food bowl from a birthday picture. He wanted to know how that was history.
                He’d like to make his own scrapbook to counter hers. Include full photographs, birth dates, maybe some newspaper clippings with citations underneath. Maybe even a bibliography.
                What. What? No, what? I remember phrases like “your capacity to remember,” “all that knowledge”, “enviable,” “beautiful in a way,” and “surely if anyone…you would be the person to…”
                We talked of colored pencils, paper with stripes and polka dots, hole punchers in the shapes of bunnies and stars, then moved the conversation into lists of craft stores in the vicinity of the university.
                If I bought all that, would you make one? For me?
                We have this way of arriving at conclusions by batting words back and forth. Problems with sisters turn into a listing of potential supplies, which turns into a list of potential supply store locations. We move into the future in this way.
                I was five when I crafted the Popsicle stick house without doors or windows. My fingers were too long for the child-sized scissors, so I didn’t bother to cut the sticks into shorter planks that could make room for openings.
                I was a bit older when I spilled an entire pot of orange paint across the red, blue, yellow rendition of my home, instantly igniting a monochromatic house fire. My cat and rabbit I sewed from felt look exactly the same.
                I could tell you the average length of the ear of the cottontail rabbit, I could tell you its typical lifespan and typical diet and preferred habitation zone, but I cannot draw you an accurate picture of it.
                I will not make you a scrapbook, Paul, sorry. So I tried my best to recite something I’d read in a physics textbook, one I found in the box of my grandfather’s things.
                When a memory, no matter how close to the actual truth, moves into the present, whether by means of scrapbook or yearbook or conversation with two blue cups of coffee, it reaches a certain velocity shortly before it moves into the present. That velocity causes the original event to shed some of its molecules, thus ensuring that no memory experienced in the present is whole, pure. Ever. It’s probably a law. Like gravity.
                You’re right. As always. If only there was some way we could remember without talking or writing or scrapbooking about it. Bypass that movement into the present, the movement that corrupts it, even destroys it.
                We need to stop pulling the memories toward us. We have to approach them ourselves, slowly on foot, the way a museum visitor approaches a painting.
                Am I right?
                I am not sure how he is doing, but this thought feels like the type of thought that could fill an entire evening, find its way into a dream where its various elements bend into a new reality, and eventually emerge in the form of a scholarly article.
                If I walked through all the doors of all the brick buildings on campus, tearing down the green sheets of paper made to advertise the symposium on time travel, it would still happen.

Collecting
                It’s true that I have no memory of my grandfather’s time machine blueprint actually listing the components needed to create it. Paul must have stumbled across a similar problem because lately he has been sending notes to our colleagues and posting pieces of paper on bulletin boards, asking for components. Some are screws and hammers and coils and cells, typical machine parts, while others are half full photo albums, GI Joe dolls, child’s plastic tea sets with one or two missing spoons, and vinyl records – records, yes, perfect. Perfectly obsolete and perfect for slicing into halves. In the note, he calls it “a chance to clean out all that junk in your basement!”
                The colleagues delight in this – each corner of our employee lounge looks more and more like a garage sale. Sometimes around the lunch hour, one of them will pull a Godzilla doll or a Barbie car from one of the piles and say “Hey! I had this, too!”
                I think of what I could donate to this project – my grandfather’s yearbooks, the Smurf lunchbox whose Thermos has since disappeared, my animal cards with all the facts that wouldn’t quite fit in my head, the cat’s cradle string the neighbor girl wove through her fingers and offered me, even the old schoolhouse blackboard itself, the one that was never erased.
                And yes, the Operation game. In fact, from my memory of the blueprint, the man’s body parts would be the perfect size for certain microchips. I made the mistake of telling a colleague this as she searched her desk drawers for pop bottle lids she could contribute to Paul’s cause. Somehow, Paul learned about the Operation game and stopped me in the hall one day to ask if he could have it. I shrugged and kept walking, protecting my own chronology.

Alternate History
                Last weekend Paul invited the department over to his house for a chance to drink some beer, sit in the old dentist’s chair in the cockpit of the time machine, and smile. I have heard several descriptions of the time machine, and I use these versions to create a composite in my mind: “beautiful,” “a life’s work,” and “more art installation than machine.”
                I often wonder what the time machine could be if I told him about the blueprint. He would probably dub a visit to my parents’ basement circa my childhood as a perfect test run. I imagine him clattering backward through history with his Tinker Toy gears, jump rope cables, Rubik’s cube destabilizer, to emerge in front of the blackboard. His time machine is most certainly flawed at this point in its development. Paintings in art galleries will wobble on their hanging wires. The wrong songs from the wrong eras will get stuck in his head. Memory, sensing its own irrelevance, will scream in his ears and bite at his hands as he reaches out to rifle through the box of my grandfather’s books until he finds the leather one with the name of the university on it.
                Once back in the present (granted the bike handles and walkie talkie antennas could get him there), he will dismantle his creation, pitching the toys we gave him in the trash and replacing them with X, Y, and Z – whatever it was my grandfather listed as a component to create a fully operational time machine. Paul will evolve the time machine into what it needs to be. He’ll stay up all night if he has to.

Implications
                With the perfect time machine operating at the university, we would become the perfect university. We will know the diet and habitation of every animal, we will know whether my grandfather was a genius. We will memorize the X and the Y and the Z, and we will know how the controls connect to the gears and how the blueprints can get us there. We will know which year to visit. We will know how to obtain the truth.
                We will not need to remember our conversations nor the color of the cups of coffee. We can forget how to fly across rooms with blankets for capes. The time machine will remember it for us. The law of gravity will keep us firmly on the great plain of the truth, and we will know the path to everything.

Katie Berger is a student in the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Alabama. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Broken Plate, Blue & Yellow Dog, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, among others.

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2012-01-05T10:21:00.000+10:00

James McLaughlin


1

 TorRent lost 
 list
    branch
 Then remember
   Blue bouldering 
brake
 If and
  And horizon dip
  Grains of water
  Touch
    time 
- Now grown 
   River Memorial
 Feeling or shot
 put
  Solid

    The soft rock
 foot fold and lack

    - And little fur
 tiny so

 scratch whisker


 2

  Sigh then

Slipping or
   riverbank
 as

  colour fest to 
   Cone line

 outline how

  remembering

   - Peel even if irregular
 characteristic solitude
 and established red
 Taken Remembrance
 white linger


  3.

 Hill or fodder Bow 
 to Track
 up
complexion of the line
  If the lemon and lemon
  - somewhat
   and leaf
  fresh lime
    Apple haze
  Lighting now

And fire-casting
 To honey to
      Flow and odour
  Oyster shell pant
   Rolling
    Pylon line of the tree a
A rolling
   As the run
   For air 
 

 4.

You 
tight
   Water whisper comfort
  Leaf fold

smile
 Or skull dead
  lift
 Pool sea
 On the
  Gyrate

 Quick paw

 Hidden skins
 And
 deep wood scent pine

 Cracked 
a glow 
palm
 smoothed 
light linger
Pit roughness slash
For cotton sheath
Oil


 5

Branch Mediation
   From
    Weight chew
 And nibble

   Tail grey

 Through the -

 Nut 

traces regret

    The cone
And harvest wheel
Fork meadow creation
 disappointment
 Bread
- Line Sew
Distance and should
 Chestnut bend

James McLaughlin graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2003 with an MA in English Literature and Scottish History. His work has appeared recently in Shearsman and The Red Ceilings Press, and his books include Aeido (Knives Forks and Spoons Press) 2010, Slip (The Red Ceilings Press) 2011, and Text I (Knives Forks and Spoons Press) 2011.

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2012-01-05T09:32:00.001+10:00

Lakey Comess

Jam and tungsten

Race is between swift and robin. The latter makes
unseasonable appearance, ignoring calendar.

Quick, the children are at school,
get the manacles, handcuffs, paraphernalia.

Jam and tungsten, all is delicious.

Vicious performers turn their heads, watching dogs read
(or simply ignore) expressive right sides of faceless posturers.

It has nothing to do with collaborative effort,
everything to do with mass communication.

Look closely at yesterday to see where it leads.

Request subtitles in American English

           1

Marvellous. Lights reverse onto fissures,
shapes, frozen equipment, buses leaving,
arriving, passengers at the edge of dance floor abyss,
voices penetrating secrets and stillness.

           2

Time and life are deserted.
Next galaxy turns breath whiter than white.

           3

It must be historical etiquette, keeping up with development,
dying institutions, revised title and contents. Haute cocktails,
emancipation, everyone (and his monkey) cordially invited but

           4

      you can't use any names.

           5

Thaw anger over the camp stove. Pull up a marshmallow,
plump, artificially pink, ready to burn.

           6

Reference is brought to you live from the south side.
State of euphoria meets sand pile with heavily made up ayes.

           7

Too taxing for words? Leave your card at the door.
More makes a deal with a recycled broad sheet.

           8

Shake out your host and button up the hangers on.

Lakey Comess, born U S A in 1948, has lived in Israel, South Africa and Orkney and now lives in Glasgow. She has contributed to Big Bridge, Versal, Gulf Stream, Milk, Hutt, Otoliths and other publications, sometimes under the name Lakey Teasdale.

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2012-01-05T08:58:00.000+10:00

Michael Gottlieb / Letters to a Middle-Aged Poet / 28

28.

Weren’t we once ambitious?

And, could it be that by recalling to mind some – not all, certainly not all – but some of the reasons, the drivers, the impulses that led us to lead this life we might find a way to renew our vows to them, as it were? Have we really accomplished all that we set out for ourselves? If we say we are seeking to be honest with ourselves, and we come to the conclusion – and isn’t it inescapable – that we have fallen, perhaps very far, perhaps far enough – whatever that means – from the goals we set out for ourselves back then (however fantastical or deluded they may have been), can’t we say that armed with this honesty, and keeping in mind at least some of those goals, we can reapply ourselves to them?

What might that mean? Might that mean tearing down everything we’ve grown comfortable with, grown accustomed to producing over the last few years? And perhaps not just the last few years?