Dean Young

He Said Turn Here

and then Tony showed us the lake
where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer
and it had dissolved like powder
so he thought maybe the lake could take
some of the radiant, aluminum kind
he had been making lately.
And it did.
It was a perfect lake,
none of the paint had chipped off,
no bolts showing, the arms that Dante
and Virgil would have to hack through
not even breaking the surface.
Mumbling Italian to itself,
it had climbed down two wooden stairs
back to the beach now that the rains were done.
How strange to be water so close to the ocean
yet the only other water you get to talk to
comes from the sky. Maybe this is why
it seems so willing to take on
Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes
his friends, which is really
many different sadnesses, smaller
and smaller, surrounded by more
and more space, each a world and
at its core an engine like a bee
inside a lily, like buzzing inside
the bee. It seems like nothing
could change its color although
we couldn’t tell what color it was,
it kept changing. In the summer,
Tony says he comes down early each day
and there’s no one around so the lake
barely says a thing when he dives in
and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine
and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand,
trying to drag him to safety
and some nights in New Mexico,
he can hear it howling,
searching for him in the desert
so we’re glad Tony has this lake
and we promise to come back in August
and swim with him across,
maybe even race.

David Shapiro

After Ryokan

In my bowl

In the thin snow

In front of my window
In the window sky
In the blue distance
In the scattered door

In every quarter of the evening land
In the pool near your room
In the shadow on the highway—
In the staves of the sky


I seem to hear your voice.

Wallace Stevens (RETRO PO!)

Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

In the moonlight
I met Berserk,
In the moonlight
On the bushy plain.
Oh, sharp he was
As the sleepless!

And, “Why are you red
In this milky blue?”
I said.
“Why sun-colored,
As if awake
In the midst of sleep?”

“You that wander,”
So he said,
“On the busy plain,
Forget so soon.
But I set my traps
In the midst of dreams.”

I knew from this
That the blue ground
Was full of blocks
And blocking steel.
I knew the dread
Of the bushy plain,
And the beauty
Of the moonlight
Falling there,
Falling
As sleep falls
In the innocent air.

Nick Twemlow

Default Margins

I am in my brain smoking my gun.
Get off Luvox, restore all defaults,
give me a breast to suckle & a blurb to write,
a symphony to conduct as I tick off
the latest sniper developments,
fucking a poem so fast & hard I come out its mouth.
I’m snorkeling through my exhaustion to kiss you.
Come crackle with me
as we formulate one hypothesis
to drain the faucet & another to keep us
anesthetized through lunch. I miss
the crayon-shaving candor we displayed
during courtship, the little boy
I’d like to become. I shave ticker tape into the sink
as the parade canters through my head,
did a protest turn violent on the capitol steps?
Film at eleven, you shuffle in to rinse, captions
by midnight. I kid you about every little thing,
I’m the shy type, and so am I.
Do you crave further information?
Tune the station to the thickets
of picketers, kindling in the far-stick madness;
the pyres rioters lug in their wake; the marble slab
of meat that is the body politic;
& finally, the barn ablaze, the horses’ whinnies
tapering to a vulgar hiss, the scrum of flies
encircling a carcassed cow’s eye. If I brandish
a gun in the first line, do I have to fire it
by poem’s end? It is not my policy
to frighten with consequences.

Two Poems: PF Potvin & Amy Gerstler

An Unforgettable Nod

PF Potvin

 
I stood at the door until she commanded.  “Get over here and fuck me.  I’m not 
anorexic for nothing.”
 
*

Fuck You Poem # 45

Amy Gerstler


Fuck you in slang and conventional English.
Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.
Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked and defaced. 
Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.
Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side. 
Fuck you humidly and icily. 
Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.
Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery. 
 
Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill. 
Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.
Fuck you puce and chartreuse. 
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric. 
Fuck you under the influence of opium, codeine, laudanum and paregoric. 
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of. 
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running. 
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.
 
Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.   
Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead. 
Fuck you at low and high tide. 
And fuck you astride 
                                anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways,     
     bathrooms, or kitchens. 
Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.
 
And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,
that bind me, till I forgive you, to you. 

Andrew Mister - Two Poems

(1:06 a.m.)

meanwhile in the city known
for shipwrecks, night bleeds
around the cars in the 7-11
parking lot, the snow
stopped falling, though we
can still hear it pouring
out of the cutlass supreme’s
radio. we’ve been in the habit
of counting them dead,
the houses. how dearly,
the night holds the damp.
the twine that holds a thought
suspended above your head
severs the though. the resolve
to sit in that car all night knowing
the next day is dust on your hands.


(Originally published in TYPO)


*

Avec Laudenum

We entered the sky splayed blue

The clouds tattooed around its wrists

I can’t eat them through I’d like to

Follow you anywhere except into that

Present tense I used to conceive of

Summer kept us busy and by early

September lying in the highway around his feet

I began to believe my visions

Only a suitcase away from leaving or

15 boxes of books make a life worth

Living out indefinitely under the lost

Sunset we are only a backdrop for the rain

Clouds begin to dissolve into asphalt

The ghost in the machinations is speaking

Please be quite please we are trying

To sleep beneath creaking floorboards

I told my neighbor at 3:15 a.m. as our dreams

Rose thru the highway around he feet

But a dream is only the stage for what’s dreaming

Beneath the shine of corrugated metal I felt

The obdurate music of stimulus/response

You’ll hear that sound in so many words

It’s like listening to god. He’s got telephones for eyes.

Kenneth Koch

Alive For An Instant

I have a bird in my head and a pig in my stomach
And a flower in my genitals and a tiger in my genitals
And a lion in my genitals and I am after you but I have a song in my heart
And my song is a dove
I have man in my hands I have a woman in my shoes
I have a landmark decision in my reason
I have a death rattle in my nose I have summer in my brain water
I have dreams in my toes
This is the matter with me and the hammer of my mother and father
Who created me with everything
But I lack clam I lack rose
Though I do not lack extreme delicacy of rose petal
Who is it that I wish to astonish?
In the birdcall I found a reminder of you
But it was thin and brittle and gone in an instant
Has nature set out to be a great entertainer?
Obviously not a great reproducer? A great Nothing?
Well I will leave that up to you
I have a knocking woodpecker in my heart and I think I have three souls
One for love one for poetry and one for acting out my insane self
Not insane but boring but perpendicular but untrue but true
The three rarely sing together take my hand it’s active
The active ingredient in it is a touch
I am Lord Byron I am Percy Shelley I am Ariosto
I eat the bacon I went down the slide I have a thunderstorm in my inside I will never hate you
But how can this maelstrom be appealing? do you like menageries? my god
Most people want a man! So here I am
I have a pheasant in my reminders I have a goshawk in my clouds
Whatever is it which has led all these animals to you?
A resurrection? or maybe an insurrection? an inspiration?
I have a baby in my landscape and I have a wild rat in my secrets from you.