J.R. Pearson
If you're just joining us...
Welcome to the scene of the crash.
To the longitude ticking seconds off held breath.
Water measured on fingers.
To precise understandings of thunder heads grinding sky
& flashes of geode silhouettes pushed inside out in your eye.
For an easier analogy: count thoughts gone wind-tilt
& swallowed cyclones resurrecting tendrils whipped into flesh on one hand
& the time it takes to tear your heart in two on the other.
We're chaos by practice. Remember the history of longitude:
every ship has a dog cut by a single knife kept in London.
Every noon said knife is sprinkled with "the powder of sympathy",
every dog on ships earth-wide howl simultaneously. Captains know it's noon in London.
Calculations begin to find longitude:
The sum it takes to change a man into cloud.
If you're just joining us...
listen to thoughts begin the dance with flightless bees
as the angel of the earth prepares for wing
gathering flame's fallen leaves
sifting the silence with static
filters found white under tongues of mirrors faced/effaced
with some flesh estimate some supple plumbing
some gravity-fed meat sliced with smiles
it's bluedawn on the blown-glass of stilled hearts
there you are waiting inside yourself hair caught
in the dazzling hurricane
of a million screaming veins spreadout in metropolis
Remember, in search of longitude
captains are taught the mystical art of meditation.
"It's as if every place is aware of every other place."
ships technically wouldn't leave English coves,
the world would move around them.
It's as if waves of salt are caught in tides untouchable
to cesium atoms. As if water is moving faster
than ships, as if the earth is spinning off it's axis.
As if time travel is only achieved
after remaining
perfectly still
until night's flesh melts wax
over a scalpel's
crack of eyelash.
If you're just joining us...
luminous digits sync background music
to a half-remembered Volta
says: the development of the cesium atomic clock
led to an actual redefinition of the second circa 1967!
After that, people died slower.
After that we were dust lifted by astronomical prayers
& perfect chords played on galactic spines.
Nidi strings sweeping the length of
a single heartbeat cut into a bi-zillion pieces
Don't whisper word one about shattered Terra-cotta water
clocks wished back together & the irony of cracked crows feet
in time's age old face. You're a man.
Standup! Put yourself together.
Show yourself heat white chips of sky
in your day's throat
lightening doesn't fall
strikes up from the ground in a wink of black
A second. A fraction of day,
but by the vibrations of an atom a second
being the line between the star flattened in your cornea
& you, "slack in a wet rope."
Let's start over.
In the beginning, molecules swarm,
dead air in an expectant mouth.
The microphone of shy synapse.
In the beginning, you, supernova, & a beach-blank fury
set loose in an ivory lyric between strangers.
You, honeyed eye of pneumatic homonyms
that'll pass for whitewash
& touch-love murmurs
In the beginning,
your heart, an empty pocket
your mistakes, burning a new moon
your eye, shards of sky
closer than it appears
in a spidered drivers' side mirror.
Your thought: it must it must it must
either come or go,
the real answer is flux!
caught between
the welder & the torch.
If you're just joining us...
This is about death & the search for true north.
Its about mountains rising like tombs
in the pistil-plush pulse of an empty-
handed search for midnight mouths.
Whiskied breath that forms clouds
resembling a contusion of stars
that stare & stare at....dust walking around.
A luminous curve melting a hole thru empty eyelids,
serpentine arms fold-out from a Lucite ball of
glass that bakes hair back into fool's gold.
A sunburned dulciana vibrato
makes its way into a world
flamed to a perfect red.
_________________________________________________
Nutshell
Mark Wohl
Isawbenstillerwithamulletanda
badattitudedrivinglikeabatoutof
hellinabearmobilemaulingmydear
mother.
_________________________________________________
The Impenetrable Psychological Cultural Timeline
Joseph Reich
the beautiful things that fall from trees
the outline of a mountain etched in the exact same space and place till eternity
the lagoon and swamp and bayou where all living things (begin to) breed and breathe
then breed once again and all five senses began and ended and if you shut your eyes
begin and live and die off once again in the glimpse of a single fragile impenetrable moment
the anatomy of the sea
the orangutan, the lizard, the human being
(the natural flight pattern of the bird all so similar to the fish to the salmon to the origin and evolution of the amphibean to that of the ancient nomad all leaving for the exact same personal reasons, the fight or flee phenomenon of war or weather or famine or the simple yet rather deep existential fear of being forgotten
perhaps not too dissimilar to the desire to spoon a beautiful nude red head in a motel on the ocean)
the timeless comedian who makes sense and satire and then
sense once more of these timeless and melodramatic tragic things
like maybe seeing "it's a wonderful life," "all's quiet on the western homefront," and "citizen kane"
and know them to very much be the exact same movie the exact same mood the exact same scene
the dream which is really just an allusion to 'the illusion' of these selfsame things rather than freud's theory
of simply being an extension and necessity of wish-fulfillment yet whose source and origin stems from all of life's guilt and conflict in the overwhelming psychosocial environment, a certain sort of, if you will, situational depression then runs and grows and plays itself out in these psychodynamic surreal manifest images
(you wonder what the mindset, mentality must have been for the writers who wrote those screen plays
for "the brady bunch" episodes probably not too dissimilar than someone who straps himself up with
dynamite and runs madly into the midst of a busy bustling marketplace only on the complete
opposite side of the slapstick idealistic fanatical spectrum of perceived reality)
the punchline for spanky and buckwheat both involving the exact same 'watermelon'
not necessarily the infamous sidesplitting banana peel sitting on the side
of the sunny side of the black and white staticy great depression street
a tiny miniature tree frog who sits perched on top a pumpkin perched on top
a stoop in the early evening at the change of seasons contemplating reality
::kentucky fried chicken has now come out with some brilliant and brand new sandwich
with two hearty and plump fried chicken breasts acting as the bread and real 100% bacon
and monterey jack cheese stuffed in between like some real-life scene as if you were actually sitting
there in 1930's paris with fitzgerald and hemingway with a couple of aristocrats and croissants whose
every bite is guaranteed to delight and take you to the mountaintop and then down to the emergency
room in the selfsame swoop and then hit you and embalm you down deep down beneath::
the measurement of the wind and the sun and dead end and breeze
the measured distance of ghosts, of the sleepwalker
of a single note of a mahler symphony
of a single memory
(the difference between coincidence and actual
collective unconsciousness of spirited synchronicity)
the lawnmowers all go on and this is how they're living.
_________________________________________________
Eating Grass in the Dawn
William Doreski
Up eating grass in the dawn
I'm biblical, every pore open
to supernatural vigor and wit.
Robins and phoebes split the air
with their sexual declarations.
Already Mayflies permeate
the chilled but pliable light.
I wish I shared their blood-thirst,
but on all fours in the garden
I'm nibbling ornamental grass
not to nourish but to mock
the body and its urge to assume
godlike postures intended
to prove superior pedigree.
Crawling around on hands and knees
beneath a cloudless sky exposes
the science of evolution
as well as the myth of creation
to self-ridicule sufficient
to laugh our whole species extinct.
Do I really wish this? A tremor
of airliner six miles up
shivers me. In the windless glare
a dead branch crashes from a pine,
trembling the forest edge. I swat
Mayflies and topple face-down
into a bed of chamomile just
coming into flower. The scent
enriches my senses and I rise
on my knees like a woodchuck
and look around at a landscape
I could re-invent every day.
_________________________________________________
{Days Of Air Travel: a time gone by}
from Vacations
Joseph Reich
i don't know
don't it seem
our culture
our country
these days
simply
boils
down
to riding
on one
of those
big little
model air-
planes with
drippy messy
glue we made
as delinquents
sulking, scowling
from the windows
with a whole sarcastic
snickering crew of flight
attendants who don't give
a damn or give the impression
they don't even want to be there
moody, humorless, overwhelmed
and resentful, literally throwing
the food at you in the air
dazed and distant
as you respond
with feeling
down in the dumps
damned if you do
damned if you don't
dissed and deserted
put on the defensive
by the very offensive
like some abused kid
like what did i do
to deserve this?
everyone short
with each other
disgusted
passive-
aggressive
without
a clue
charm
class or
manners
or a modicum
or baseline
of etiquette
i mean
where
the hell
did it
all go
wrong?
how did
this all
happen?
don't
you
think
every-
one's
asking
the same
damned
question
or sadly
enough
not asking
this question
at all as we all feel
the gratuitous obligation
to clap aloud like the end
of some dumb daredevil
air show like some small-
minded mediocre audience
and crowd for some cliched clown
or poor comedian when the pilot
or flight attendant throws out his
predictable punchline and makes
the announcement upon arrival
and give some faux gratutious
pre-manufactured round
of applause relieved and
contented when
the plane
has landed
just to reach
our destination
without any
other sort
of drama or
confrontation
having lost
all interest
and imagination
conflicted confused
through model glue
dripping windows
as you don't really
give a damn about
the weather or views
remember when your
mom used to dress
you up in a suit?
_________________________________________________
My Glasses Fall Apart
William Doreski
As I watch the river corrugate
in flood my glasses fall apart
on my face. No more distance.
I don reading glasses and they
too disintegrate. The chuckling
of the river gets too personal
so I walk a mile up the highway
to my optometrist for repairs.
On his clean blond desk I dump
a handful of frame parts and lenses.
He pokes the mess with a pencil
and offers me contact lenses
to wear for a week while experts
sort and reconstruct my glasses.
Where will my identity hide
if I have to bare-face a mirror
to pop those slippery lenses
onto my reluctant eyeballs?
Whoever braves me in that gaze
will be a stranger too oblique
to the rest of my life to matter
the way our mirror-selves should.
I still hear the river coughing
over stones. Every note it strikes
contributes to a fresher language
than the one I speak. I agree
to attempt the contact lenses,
but grieve for the familiar face
barricaded by those glasses
against the reciprocated glance.
_________________________________________________
Sonnets to the Warm Pull of Gravity
from 8 Equations
J.R. Pearson
There are things beyond rationality
& the warm pull of gravity. Scale models
of pyramids that keep steel razors sharp for centuries. How an owl's
wings silent as yellow smoke
in a valley of wormwood drift
weight-gone
over your sleeping eye. How every civilization finds people
in the sky. Hard to believe the face on a nickel. Believe flash-drunk
blindness & a homeless man's need for possession. Believe retractable fangs
coiled & sun-spent in heat's best swing of the hips.
Believe eyes full of sweat-stained shade
on the sheet's underside & blister resin
left white until it fills with starlight. Believe flesh waltzing the fine line
between live-wired to spinning wattage & cold-spit dead ends.
Let's unrehearse the facts. We've all slept in beds made before we're born,
headboard names & dates, predictable "plate-glass sheets"
& dreams of a miracle that slit your throat. Truth is they carry sniper rifles
& plant your prints on murder weapons. Pose as witnesses. Said I heard it all.
Said it was suicide. Toe fingering the trigger.
Said you never listened. There was something out there, salvation
with your name on it. Another second chance. Last minute misplacement
of I. O. U.'s. Truth is every morning we dig fingernails into flesh
under running water to get clean. Again. Try to leave behind thoughts
we thought were buried deep enough to forget.
The sight of our faces, throttled splayed to the earth.
Finally a toast: here's to symmetry!
Here's to falling face first into wet cement.
Here's not to death per se just a rational failure to exhale
_________________________________________________
the poverty of words
David McLean
the poverty of words
is torn faces, broken
blind eyes, and ugly
masculinist absence.
the poverty of words
is theory's hideous riches;
dead children, bitten
nipples, worlds with
every thing missing,
worlds where little
is all the living
_________________________________________________
Approbations 384
—after Albert Ayler’s Universal Message
Felino A. Soriano
: love
or: devotion
such: admiration
manifest: togetherness.
Signifier
semblance: concrete illustration bifold delivery:
arms, circular
embrace pseudonym of sacred
reinforcement: camaraderie.
_________________________________________________
It’s Been a While
Mariah Welch
I have never tasted wine and I like to imagine
what it would taste like sometimes. Maybe
I just don’t really understand any of the feelings
associated with it. I tried explaining cynicism
to someone and couldn’t stop thinking about old punk rock
songs that I used to sing in the shower.
I remember feeling like a real rebel when I dyed my hair
red and a nameless member of my family
told me that I was looking like a candied apple.
I don’t have self confidence because when I was ten
my aunt came over and told me that the hand me downs
she had brought for me wouldn’t fit. It was the first time I ever felt fat.
I suppose it doesn’t matter if I am in love or not
anymore because my mind is just a
slate slate slate slate. A broken slate, stale, tales
of when I used to understand what it was like to have a friend
or something of the sort. I used to read books in tall trees
and get in trouble for reading because I wasn’t like normal kids
who liked to slide down slides and do things like bungee
jump off of short bridges crafted quickly with drying cement.
I picked an apple from an apple tree once because
those are the only types of trees that grow apples.
While I was doing that I decided I wanted someone
to go blueberry picking with me but I don’t know how to fall
in love without bringing the bulk of my past mistakes
with me. No one really gets what I’m saying anymore.
You sit in the corner of the room drinking your tea and hoping
for specialties that you can only get in Dallas and I don’t even need
to know your name to know that I am crazy. I
know I could hurt just about anyone
because someone once told me that I am the textbook definition
of a sociopath but I don’t think they really know what
the textbook definition of a sociopath is. I suppose
they didn’t look it up because I’m more of an avoidant personality type
writing about life in the corner of the room wishing
I had the guts to talk to you.
I helped you take your pants off before bed last night
and asked you why you were so tired and you didn’t
have an answer for me. I guess you had worked all day
in the hot sun at your civil engineer job and I can
only imagine you with your drafting table. You
told me you like the curves of the drawing I left
on your coffee table but I still don’t know how you feel about
the curves of my body.
You seem to like them, kissing at my navel and pulling
at my hips with your working-man hands saying,
“I’m a man of math and science, DAMN IT!”
I could sleep on your couch all day and all night and never even
think about the cancer at home. I could fall asleep in your bed,
staring up at steering wheel light fixtures and standing
at the front of your ship, a beautiful woman with dangling locks.
Maybe we could relate through the pipe but
I have been clean for quite some time and I am
certainly not a party girl anymore.
I watch you drive away at midnight
and tell you how much I hate saying goodnight,
blaming your awkwardness on a tough time
and after we made love you looked at me and said,
“I’m sorry” and I wondered for what.
“It’s been a while,” you said.
_________________________________________________
Approbations 385
—after Greg Osby’s Diary of the Same Dream
Felino A. Soriano
Compositional
mirrors
same size/stylized
fortune: together’s wrapping arms, embraceable complex
conceptual image, yes, shadow of singular silhouette.
Voices
braided visual whispers
combined reconstructions
varied
only by the angular examples of
male/female delineated
versions.
_________________________________________________
seminary
David McLean
in the seminary seed
and sexless meaning
where semen swarms
its wordy orgasm
flecks of nothing
coming.
in the body, however,
blood and cum and love
taste better, when words
are no better than death—
the body holds the rest,
the better parts of sex
_________________________________________________
Mad Girl of Seagulls
Ray Succre
Come to the rocks, madness—
they feebly yell the flowers down;
even quaint murmurs break a stem’s small bones.
Come to my feet, braided in stinking smoke.
These gulls are a poultice to the air,
these stiffly wavered, storming windrakes.
Mad girl who rides them over low foam
to the deadly mass of this coastal bowel-surf,
madness, come to the rocks at my feet
and breathe your ugly shrieks beneath them.
My booted feet lift the sand to your mouth.
My gloved hands pour the dirt from your uterus.
Set down your bread bits and whiles for your gulls,
but settle the rest, to this dreadful man of me,
atop his rocks with a scummy stature,
and whose eyes have never reflected the sky.
Come to the grass we can cut with a cough.
_________________________________________________
Fable
Howie Good
A messenger arrived
from a country
colonized by magpies.
I have two sons, he said,
one whose name
means wolf
and one whose name
means laughter.
It felt like rain,
what’s called
a baby’s ear moon,
false angel wing.
They hanged him
in a cornfield.
The world is made
of tiny struggling things.
_________________________________________________
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His most recent collection of poetry is Waiting for the Angel (2009). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals, including Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, The Alembic, New England Quarterly, Harvard Review, Modern Philology, Antioch Review, and Natural Bridge.
Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of 21 print and digital poetry chapbooks and a full-length collection, Lovesick, published by Press Americana.
David McLean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. He lives there on an island in a large lake called Mälaren, very near to Stockholm, with a woman, cats, kittens, and a couple of dogs. He has a BA in History from Balliol, Oxford, and an MA in philosophy, taken much later and much more seriously studied for, from Stockholm. Up to date details of many zine publications and several available books and chapbooks, including three print full lengths, a few print chapbooks, and a free electronic chapbook, are at his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com. The latest full length laughing at funerals is available via Small Press Distribution http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780981184456/laughing-at-funerals....
J.R. Pearson played "Jonny B. Goode" in 1st grade with an audience of 15 people. Once, I seen him eat a whole case of Elmer's Glue. He was terrible at finger painting but he's proud of these poems. Read his stuff in A Capella Zoo ,Word Riot, Ghoti, Weave, Boxcar Review, & Tipton. He recently was included in an anthology: Burning Gorgeous: Seven 21st Century Poets.
Joseph Reich is a social worker who works out in the state of Massachusetts: A displaced New Yorker who sincerely does miss diss-place, most of all the Thai food, Shanghai Joe's in Chinatown, the fresh smoothies on Houston Street, and bagels and bialy's of The Lower East Side. He has a wife and handsome little boy with a nice mop of dirty-blonde hair, and when they all get a bit older, hope to take them back to play, to pray, and contemplate in the parks and playgrounds of New York City.
Joseph claims to still be on the loose, on the run, and at large, and hopes one day to own a second home out on Prince Edward Island, Sicily, or preferably, a Winter home in Brooklyn, while spending Summers in The Bronx. He is also a strong advocate of bringing back the guillotine and conducting public hangings (claiming "this would be real reality") for our fine corrupt politicians and CEO's of great big corporations; Would also like to consider this option as well for the whole cast of certain reality shows and obnoxious and spoiled athletes who I don't know, were supposed to be brought up on the old ideal and ethic of hard work and being modest and humble.
He has been published in a wide variety of eclectic literary journals both here and abroad and his most recent books include, "A Different Sort Of Distance" (Skive Magazine Press), "If I Told You To Jump Off The Brooklyn Bridge" (Flutter Press), "Escaping Shangrila" (Punkin House Press), "Obscure Aphorisms On A Fine Overcast Day" (Lummox Press), "The Derivation Of Cowboys & Indians" (Poet Works Press), and "Drugstore Sushi" (Thunderclap Press).
Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974), is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He has authored 28 collections of poetry, including “Construed Implications” (erbacce-press, 2009) and “Delineated Functions of Congregated Constructs” (Calliope Nerve Media, 2010). His poems have appeared at Calliope Nerve, Unlikely 2.0, BlazeVOX, Metazen, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He edits & publishes Counterexample Poetics, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. In 2010, he was chosen for the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in poetry from Wilderness House Literary Review. Philosophical studies collocated with his connection to classic and avant-garde jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences. His website explains further: www.felinoasoriano.info.
Ray Succre is an undergraduate currently living on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has had poems published in Aesthetica, Poets and Artists, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novels Tatterdemalion (2008) and Amphisbaena (2009), both through Cauliay, are widely available in print. Other Cruel Things (2009), an online collection of poetry, is available through Differentia Press.
Mariah Welch is really glad that the sentence “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo,” is grammatically correct in the English language. She’s also really great.
Mark Wohl is trying to defeat this cosmic, petty tyrant of a head game but doesn’t exactly understand how the game is played. He vividly dreams of a lucid new way where to touch is to feel and to hear is to listen. A new way of harmony. The dreaming of a dream that is perpetually trying to wake the eternal sleep. Other works can be viewed online at http://www.wideeyedgroove.com/.
