Wendy Battin takes the wheel

Happy May Day. I've never driven a truck before, so be prepared for swerves.

I'm at odds with my Muse, so have finally met it. I've never thought much of the concept before. Apart from the gender nonsense comitted in its name, Muse has always been projection. Sometimes it's seemed just shorthand for the beloved, or for the ideal reader. I have both, but they fill their own spaces completely and don't speak through me. I might write to them, but not from them. It's only now, many decades into the work, that the Muse makes itself known as something other, by derailing my intentions again and again. I can't call it him or her, I can't put name or face to it. It's that "chune in the head," as Pound had it via Yeats:

"what the Celts call a "chune" in his head, and that the words "go into it," or when they don't "go into it" they "stick out and worry him."

(E.P.'s review of _Prufrock_ in Poetry, 1917)

It lets me know at every turn that the book I thought I'd written is not the book. It undoes every careful thought with song. It had its way with me so thoroughly that I never thought of it in my first books. It was there or not. But now I'm ready to muse on it, will be speaking of other poets' muses and my own, and invite you to muse along for my May on Truck. Say where you sing from.

And many thanks to you, Kate, for a splendid month. It's been fun seeing what you've been doing. And reading all those new poems and poets.

The month of May will bring Wendy Battin to the wheel for another month on the road.

Stay tuned.

Hal

Truck Farewell

Today’s my last day as your guest editor. Thanks to Halvard Johnson for the opportunity!

Thank you, poets who contributed, for responding graciously and with FANTASTIC work to an email that meant (among other things) that I hadn’t heard of you before. I hope you’ve gained some new readers as a result! And thanks for writing at all—I hope this will encourage you to keep doing so.

Thanks also to everyone who’s been dropping in to read and, I hope, returning. Stick around for poets with totally different plans.

I’m so glad I did this—learned a ton, became acquainted with some fine and delightful poets, read illuminating and staggering work, and got to share it with others. Thanks again to all who helped it happen.

Kate

Jai Arun Ravine

MARIO MAURER & B.O.Y.

I-look-at-my-phone-in-order-not-to-make-eye-contact-with-the-cute-B.O.Y.-floating-in-my-Thai-bubble-milk-tea.avi

I rip apart boba with my teeth. I suck up Mario Maurer in a Pepsi poster. He holds up a skateboard on the cover of Crush and ollies across the screen.

The LCD / is a window / in a Quickly / Sightseeing Bus / Karaoke Music Video

B.O.Y.-scrolls-by-in-tight-black-touch-screen-phones-clutching-black-encased-legs-dancing-on-a-fountain-selling-oranges-in-an-Italian-marketplace-courtyard-alley.avi

I substitute his object of desire. I divert his gaze to another boy in B.O.Y.

I touch / what I want and watch / it animate on the sidewalk / in the video of the sidewalk / cueing up to my mouth

I-go-see-the-movie-'Eclipse'-with-Mario-Maurer-We-get-bubble-tea-and-someone-takes-pictures-of-us-at-the-mall-and-posts-them-on-flickr.avi

B.O.Y. cables my ear to a shuffle wanting 25 seconds to download. I put him on and stand in front of the green screen and wait for my cells to fill with pixels.

I recall your awkward / gay dance moves / like someone else's english subtitles / waiting to participate

I-follow-along-I-reach-my-arms-inside-the-english-words-you-say-on-the-bridge-'girl-you-know-those-things-I-did-for-you-it's-because-I-want-you-to-know-how-much-I-feel-about-you-right-now'.avi

When I sing along my hand scrolls just above your stomach, hovering over each syllable. I wait at the end of the sentence for the color to turn, for you to ask the question I've already begun to erase.

I move to the back / of the bus slip / into the backdrop reach through / every word ending in 'ai'

I-post-a-video-of-myself-on-your-facebook-page-inside-the-iphone-you-left-on-the-Quickly-Sightseeing-Bus.avi

I stream the 3 min 23 sec of my song and then the REPLY button hovers over my chest.

I wait inside / your iphone on the bus / crossing the bridge waiting / to be touched

MORE WORK BY JAI ARUN RAVINE:

Corollary Press

Drunken Boat

Galatea Resurrects

Yvette Thomas

I DO NOT WAGER MY LIFE UPON IT

for Abbie

Blindly, in the spring grove, another hand in mine

like my own–

Small, nails.

It's the walking boulevard, flowered trees snow their petals on the stone path

to nowhere, to where the land is bit

at the beginning of water.

Shade or it's night–the thought of rain and that same friend

missing, her shape in heaven, cast.

She says,

Cloud-brand, air-daughter, I would not wager my life upon it

or that sense we trace the sky with, disappear.

MORE WORK BY YVETTE THOMAS

Revolving Door

The Daily Palette

Delirious Hem

Yvette's blog

elimae

Jaswinder Bolina

MUNICIPAL SCENE

The telephone poles lashed and strobed by an electrical storm

in the bus window, we must’ve been halfway through Uptown

when you clutched at my poncho and said, Bill,

are you seeing how this deluge of photons overwhelms

the tiny cockpit of the eyeball! In this hullabaloo of thunder!

In the damp overthrow of April! You said, And think

how the plains crumple into a pageant of hills

at the feet of our mountains and of our noble woods

with their shotgun shoulders and the labyrinthine city in which

our punk-haired rosebushes are a berserk argument between

the trees and hydrants! You said, Isn’t it all such a wingding!

But I said, In our chintzy country? I said. Here we’re insipid,

eager only for diversions and chic habiliments. I said, We’re daft

and out-of-proportion, vain and cussing each other in traffic

as if the ego is something more substantial than a pesky infection

of the corpus, as if the corpus isn’t only downing its espresso

and everything bagel with cream cheese en route to the office

park of nonexistence. It’s commuting, at least, out of the palace

of our best efforts! you said. You said, At least look how bonny

I am in this skirt the color of a hatchet wound blooming!

You said, Look how the telephone lines droop and festoon

all our avenues, how the rain paratroops totally reckless

out of the cloud! See how it has no religion? How nothing

deters it? But I said, We’re more like the gutter spouts

or drainage grates or the steam rising from asphalt

like end credits after the squall. So, you said, Here’s a rope,

you dolt. Go climb a tree. I knew then I’d deflated you brutishly.

I said, O, please, forgive me! I said, Here’s a bouquet

made of moths ruddied by stoplights, o please forgive me!

Here’s the jamboree of a crosswalk, if you’ll only forgive me!

I said, Here’s the sound like ovation the rain makes on rooftops,

won’t you forgive me? But you didn’t forgive me, cratered

as you were in a rut of futility, so I felt futile too, the steel cranes

unmoving over their worksites, under a serious voltage.

I said, Ain’t this a shame? You said, Ain’t that the way?

And we felt more grown up then than we’d felt before,

more sober and American than we’d ever been before, motoring

along the steep crag of the curbside, a fracture of rivulets

garbling the windows, and I said, Honestly, Amelia,

what is it all these chipper tourists come photographing?

MORE WORK BY JASWINDER BOLINA:

Rabbit Light Movies

Verse Daily

AGNI

Missouri Review

751

Rob MacDonald

SHAME

Privacy is exquisite

because none of us

wish our flaws public.

Our phantom limbs

stay hidden until

we get home and

bathe them, alone,

in locked bathrooms.

You can’t bear to see

yourself upside-down

in a soup spoon

in an uptown café.

Halloween is sacred

because none of us

wish our privacy

confined to dreams.

Is your hunger

for the candy bars

under your bed

forbidden or forgiven?

MORE WORK BY ROB MACDONALD

Anti-

Everyday Genius

Vinyl Poetry

H_NGM_N

751

Diode

Yael Villafranca

JOSEFINA

By myself I feed an array of burned down candles.

Mama dreamed I would grow tall onstage,

bleed one raw blue sound into the world’s face.

Carve the lyrics on the crossbeams.

A bracelet from the clear case. A satin scarf

blooming out from my face like a gill so I could

float like an tropical actress. Prices broken into

22 hours, 33 hours.

He plays me music to think to. From when he

was younger and stopped burning walls.

I leaf through so many songs left in the air every day:

For a morning smoke before the rail comes

For glasses hurled to the floor at a party

For how I took his hand in the car

For days I don’t speak to anyone.

The flustered craving is for a sureness.

I wish to appear strange and treasured,

depending on the light, key, and shadow.

We all would die for crystal effortless melody.

When I croon I’m a firstclass loser, you’ll think,

she doesn’t know how to hang on

to anything. Not anger. Not such small feelings.

And I want you to look at me and know.

Listen close. Recognize.

MORE WORK BY YAEL VILLAFRANCA

Yael's blog
Delirious Hem

Two poems translated from Japanese by Jeffrey Angles

Toshiko Hirata

DISTANT SKY

In those days, there were still staircases

Climb them and you would reach high places

There were potted plants at the top of the stairs

And inside the pots, dark, dry earth

There were still fountains in the plazas

Sitting around that, people with nothing to do

In those days, there was an untrained but skilled doctor

Who gave us effective shots in the arm

Afterwards, we would always get fevers

But when they went down, the sickness went away too

There were still keyholes in the doors

Where the keys would work without sleep

In those days, I was alive

And that person was not dead

Touch him, and his lips were cold

And his gaze was even colder

There was a fence around the town

And beyond that, an unknown sky

It was easy to cross the fence

But impossible to go more than ten steps

MORE WORK IN ENGLISH BY TOSHIKO HIRATA

Translated by Jeffrey Angles

Translated by Hiroaki Sato

*

Atsusuke Tanaka

MALBORO

He had a tattoo.

Under his leather jacket, a solid, white T-shirt.

Don’t look at me.

I thought I didn’t live up.

There are lots of other young ones.

I am nothing to look at.

But he chose me.

Want to grab a cup of coffee?

He didn’t put in any cream?

So, you’re the same age as me.

He smoked a cigarette.

Only a single week of no smoking.

The name of the love hotel was

Under the Guava Tree.

Rain had soaked his socks.

Should’ve bought some new shoes sooner.

I took a shower with him.

His dick was white and beautiful.

Why am I writing this down in a poem?

Once and that’ll be all.

Just once and that’s okay, someone once said.

I didn’t go home right away.

That was true for both of us.

We both lingered on and on.

I was in Tokyo for seven years.

Our dicks had fallen.

They had fallen a long way.

It’s good if there are natural enemies for people.

There was nothing in Tokyo.

He looked as if there was nothing

And so he was here.

He was beautiful.

His back turned, he placed

On the table his can of cola

Half consumed.

Atsusuke Tanaka's page

Jeffrey Angles's page

Cynie Cory

SOUL-SONG

Here is the pilgrimage, hand over stone,

flat like an iron tongue. I wear this grief

through me -- an angel on fire – a thief

in my garden short-circuiting the zone,

brained-out like a future idiot phone

message heaved from the throat like a belief-

system wrecked, nocked arrow the chief relief.

Sleep cracks gravity’s law, singes the bone

that won’t break the black above live oak limbs.

The backbone rattles the night sun and surfs

metallic satellite light-white that rims

these astral edges, burns blue this song words

cannot undo; no plug, drenched in light-speed,

I’m sawed in half without the past, my reed.

MORE WORK BY CYNIE CORY

Verse Daily
More Verse Daily
Jacket
La Petite Zine
La Fovea

Jac Jemc

A MORNING DISTANCE rags a fissure, umbilical tugging starts a harp glissando, trilling shadow grenades the pellicle sky. moulting bulbs glance epithelial evening. I said, I run away. I said, I don’t want to hoard the breath. I answered in tight, stingy hollows until I thwanged the silence with horrible neon noise.



QUESTION: what’s the tide of a pair of abandoned corpuscles turning around in a bible of lonely things? answer: all I want is myself filled with silent chimes and covered lanterns. the same toxic spots planet across my tissues. I am sick. my husk is a touched nest.




MORE WORK BY JAC JEMC (including fiction)

The Rejection Collection
5trope
PANK
La Petite Zine
Spork
La Fovea
Dark Sky
No Posit
Front Porch

Danniel Schoonebeek

SCORE (THIRD MARRIAGE)

After she’s laid her husband

to bed mother

lays a trail of cigarettes

end to end

across the kitchen

floor smoking

her way from one dark

corner of the room

to the other the rings

glowing on her finger

when she reaches

the plate

she bought herself last

summer the one

of the cow whose

black spots form a map

of the world she

licks the surface

her eyes are isinglass

and she falls

asleep standing up



MORE WORK BY DANNIEL SCHOONEBEEK

la fovea
I am a natural wonder

with Allyson Paty:

The Awl
Underwater New York

Anhvu Buchanan

VANISHING ACT



Not the sorted mail in the back room of the post office. Not a face
stiffening when speaking. Not a buzzing in and around the head. Not
dim light nor deafness. Not a hot flash through the body nor the sweat
seeping through the shirt. Not avoiding public bathrooms. Not a
shuffle. Not another corner. Not a mumble. Not a mumble. Not a mumble.
Not mumbling until they walk away. Not a dream in the dust but a
disappearance. An eyelash lost to the light.



MORE WORK BY ANHVU BUCHANAN

Personal site
Word for/Word
The Barbie Cage
Boston Literary Magazine (scroll down)
Denver Syntax
la fovea
Steger Prize for Poetry

Jen Coleman

ANOTHER BIG SHOW SOON TO COME

Lingcod play the role of 15 million unemployed in this story.

Squirrel monkeys play the role of the carbon economy in this story.

Squid will play the role of the 46 million uninsured in this story.

Hungry lingcod sway in swells among pinnacles

in an earthquake by no other name than earthquake

off the fourth highest coast of unemployment.

Lingcod do not like dead bait.

Lingcod are the most curious fish by far

near the bottom of the battered economy.

The world takes notice of the lingcod feeling

jobless, the analysis, fish lurking

in the deep, making decisions.

Squirrel monkeys take notice of lingcod

with their “I’m still hungry” grins. Monkeys

see colors they weren’t born with.

Squirrel monkeys see, in a triumph of science,

the heart of hearts burning, the chimney filling

the belly of the mountain.

In megawatt valley, with a hard won share of credit

squirrel monkeys know about nervousness

from the squid and its giant axon.

That a monkey knows. It knows from squid

from a red devil squid stalking fish up the coast.

Say it’s warm, and squid swim

in the warm up the coast near the end of life.

Say the squid in the North are cold

and the end of their lives wash up.

Will a lingcod worry about a crippled

squirrel monkey worrying about

squid? The squirrel monkey

asks why its brain is telling it this and is telling it this

right now, this nerve, this educated nerve-ending

educated by a squid.

And the lingcod are all: “thank you squid

for showing science the mechanisms of compassion”

as hourly earnings rise a penny.

Weekly wages fall with outbursts and decorum.

Outbursts hoot-hooting in congress hoot-hooting

on the shore and hoot-hooting on the tennis court.

And the brain watches through the squid and that is how

the lingcod know the squirrel monkey watches,

and feeds itself a plum,

and feeds itself and watches and exclaims, and slides and claps

and watches the lingcod dart in a near-shore lair

dozens in 30 feet of water.

The squirrel monkey watches and knows

and if the monkey goes missing ask the axon

and it will or it will not tell.

And squirrel monkeys in another big show have coal at the heart

to burn, to see in red and green, a triumph

of science, in full color, as the lingcod refuse to let go.

A 50-pound lingcod bit and held on

to a 30-pound lingcod that bit and held a squirrel

monkey in its mouth,

even with the self-inflicted tailpipe affliction,

the tacos del mar affliction, the self inflicted

illness the lingcod holds.

Will the squirrel monkey seeing red bury the carbon

in the belly of the mountain and into the pores,

looking green and red

for curious lingcod to bite in the streets

and wash up on the cold beach on northern shores

where they’ve never seen squid before?

If it is not about race it is about rage it is not a race.

It is rage it is not a race to rage it is a rage

race. I do not mention

the president at all in this piece.

I saw only the squid chasing the warm waters north

to die on the shore and become picturesque.

This poem appeared in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: Volume 21, Number 2, June 2010

MORE WORK BY JEN COLEMAN

Jacket

Elective Affinities

Poets for Living Waters

EOAGH

Dan Boehl

FROM PINK & GREY

She used to look at the windows in the apartment building across the way and wondered how so many things could be happening at once, all stacked like that into the sky. The breakfasts, the fights, the TV casting a blue glow across a man late into the night. How it all seemed important to somebody, but not one thing meant anything to her. How everybody should be a giant, but instead are tiny and drive around in cars.

MORE WORK BY DAN BOEHL

Ekleksographia

So & So

Sixth Finch

Esque

Absent

Inknode

Edwin Frank

BEGINNING

She appears. She hurtles

Out of the heavens. Out of the blue, she falls

Hard, heavy as a cliché, as unforeseen

As foreknown, she

Plummets and

Plunges down, she comes

Spiralling in towards the high branches lifted

To intercept her, to catch her, to claim her, she rips

Right into them, whirl and whistle, crashing

Into the crown, smashing

Down into the

Canopy, spinning

Inward, exploding

Outward as

A welter of leaves, so many twigs and branches

Shorn away sharply, cracking, or flailing

Back into place as still

She drops on through them, then stops, then drops

Again, and with

A lurch and a jolt and the shock of coming up short now

(The tree

Shuddering and rocking but already rocking

Less, the whole

Shock of it—her

Sudden passage

Into and out of sight—

Resolved now down into the roots from which

Unmarred, even

Unmarked, the tree

Rises) she falls

To begin with. To begin--

MORE WORK BY EDWIN FRANK

Stack at Ugly Duckling Presse

Emily Beall

from phonebook

STEP-BY-STEP SWITCHING SYSTEMS:

First automated, then variant. Patented an undertaker: rumor has it to have destination. And to have without intervention. But no, an undertaker in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. A rumor has it diverting, to have from without his business an undertaker. Rumored diversion from an undertaker. Want some way, routed clear to a destination. To undertake. But no, routed to an operator intervention.

Invention changed throughout; conceptually, the same. Rotating selectors choose a level. Pulses on a line make a level. A level one of many. Diversions. The number of pulses changed conceptually throughout. To instruct a solenoid, what’s a solenoid, to move this wiper, a wiper’s a selector. A line, a pulse, a level. A level one of many. This is all by mechanical movement, move this wiper, routed clear to a subscriber destination. Mechanical movement like an upward cascade. Rotating change of selection levels.

A level is a digit, an upward cascade. A digit is a number a figure a finger a plug—a grommet and a plug. The tone plant results from additional circuitry. To come back around, to undertake an upward cascade. And again around. Tone plant to provide progress—progress is information: does anyone remember ringback tones? To divert business from the undertaker, maybe a circuit can bounce.

Strowger founded, 1892: Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company. Strowger sold, 1896: patents; and sold, 1898: Strowger Automatic Electric. Strowger died, 1902: brain aneurysm.

MORE WORK BY EMILY BEALL

No, Dear

EOAGH

Monica Mody

FIFTH WORLD TRAVELLER

One day, Sameshape & Othershape rowed their boat to the center of the
lake. A single lotus bloomed – it must be a magic lotus. Open petals.
Skylight. They circled it, trying to memorize its curves, running
their hands in the air around the light. Long exposure camera. Minute
and a half. Click sky blur boat click blur shapes. Vertical &
horizontal. Background & foreground. Inner & outer. Income &
expenditure. Elemental & artificial. Candles & cellophane. Water &
film. Scalp & wheel. First & second & third. The lotus’ reverie was
interrupted by a vision. The lotus had not long been a camera, but it
was not offended at all if some still saw it

As lotus. It remembered its early experiences with color. How it first
learned to adjust its lenses. An inward gaze of total concentration.
The first time it managed to shrink its focus until everything looked
small and sharp and precise. Dissolved. Yet it did not like thinking
of the past. When it did so, something

Severe rose within it, a memory of sorts, slender and stony, of a
refusal that had squealed and refused to go away but time changed it
till it shuffled and shamefully melted away, no resistance at all,
into something mucky, this self that was not compact nor instant
digital SLR TLR – not even

Pinhole – this self more properly a plant, botanically Nelumbo
nucifera, symbolically taintless, and the payoff of the identity it
had acquiesced to was nothing more than that it was now easy to be a
camera. The photojournalist who had first called the lotus a camera
continued to think that everything was as it always was. Sameshape &
Othershape reminisced, self-absorbed

Like a flower.

MORE WORK BY MONICA MODY

Boston Review Poet's sampler
apocryphal text
LIES/ISLE
horseless review
Danse Macabre

Bobbi Lurie

LONELY ARE THE FADING

except the birds the lamp of your arms the burnt blurred world beyond the body is a gondola then a gray memory is what light was like all day the heat with its heavy coat the canyon between us and the dark water no cure for the long disease if we’re lucky we’ll have a quiet house with only the sound of rain trees leaves airy clarity the greed for bed

MORE WORK BY BOBBI LURIE

Verse Daily

Mad Hatter's Review

Shampoo

Diode

Otoliths

More at Otoliths

Carlos Rowles

excerpt from THE HISTORY Vol. 2

distance ... a flat report coming to their ears a few ... through his shopping cart full of cans, old newspapers ... desire to be free she forsook and the other objects ... the train doors open you feel ... the civilization ... and turn around—the doors close and we pull away ... large houses, each being from twenty ... date—december, 1938 ... threatened every moment capable of ... and down at the edge ... fire twice grown did not mind if we was ... mainland ... the hudson has often been spoken of as the thames of america ... hadn’t you better obliged no name ... river, the largest tugging one ... strands of yellow police drop from his eye ... no idea and to the giver of that token ... deplorable, and the charges brought against the accused such as they were ... along that highway sometimes seemingly imaginary ... leads very early to a genuine desire to serve ... period was accomplished—this, you wonder ... indirect word recession transformed millions of bodies ... the stranger... picked out twenty-four spirits like unto himself, who entered ... think of the many places along the way ... of looking at ... his mouth with the back of his hand ... it’s right warm give and ready for the word ... photograph a prison-house and succeeded though interrupted ... to inquire anxiously, his beard brushing bud’s ... the various roads that uh ... to know curled over his head ... a sleepy, boozy perfectly ludicrous ... the chief that water he had given ... only the trees shaken by the breeze here it is ... every round goes ... tape fluttering in the tall grass—glimpses through a half-closed door ... a bare leg turning higher and higher ... chinese originate as the same was recorded over ... picturesque sheet of water earth, and were borrowed from you ... have been there he said ... gruff voice he have ... the forward limb had been brought from serpent falls ... sometimes general shoulder secured burned ... body of the girl, felt certain far-heard (distant) sound ... this is how she was ... springs where it disappeared ... and wondering curiously what it was all about ... well, it is no secret now, replied juliet ... he mean the girl whom ... together and waving them backward light—the rain begins ... reaching for an envelope resting on the edge of the night table see my hand ... vigor and such a hail of lead poured through the opening ... as kenabeek the great really dead (accused) ... succeeded many more vessels, called for both singly ... you nicked him with your six-shooter ... and him great deal of instruction is imparted ... the ninth making ... years since sudden heavy thump ... woman has her left arm indians waited names were painted for ... raised to shoulder... a peculiar knock, apparently delivered with the handle ... and the muleshoe are on the outs—they never come around ... the animal was a good one, a successful contender ... all turn gray, it’s the end of summer ... a tinny distant strand of music—fog lights ... the bus pulls out of the distance ... blue sky ... silver, that were shattered to fragments immediately below us ... awful the same was recorded over ... picturesque sheet of water earth, and were borrowed from block head but uh ... upon whose pleasure we depended for our existence (smile) ... whereupon there ... so far off you couldn’t uncultivated land into...

MORE WORK BY CARLOS ROWLES

Ubuweb (Vol. 1 of The History)
Otoliths
The Planet Formerly Known as Earth
Cricket Online Review

Rachel Daley

FABULOUS ARMY

hot dish

copse

10/14

magenta

increase

barrel sentiment

toady

electric wash

today

what are they these

things desired

blessings

to go with

another

is how much tea

when

you called

red plastic X

how do you

speak to letters

when will he

speak to me

in this separate

ether

this core of

strength

is shushing

desperate

for a lap

or lapwing

the web

punctured by light

powered

in filament

10/16

powdered

the ironsides

gentle action

fast flow – the man who

buys a billboard

what a burden

he does know

MORE WORK BY RACHEL DALEY

eoagh #3

La Petite Zine #15

Jacket #37 (review)

Tarpaulin Sky (review)

Celina Su

MEANS-TESTED MANIFESTO

A surface sin, a tattooed connective tissue of thought

Or light, a skin effect of undulating conversations,

Current news head lice. Wavelengths saturate spines.

I skin dive for that which darkens by the sun.

I wear no suit, only a mask. It’s figurative, I am afraid,

As skin-deep, as personal and sacred, as my skin.

A public sphere, a globule of difference.

No declared cells or flags in the shape of a sickle,

Nor a bigger slice of the pie nor a bigger pie.

No week or a month or March. No march

Or demonstration or PAC. No Pacman

Or grand theft. No automatic lists, less repeating

Redundancy, thinking in a tank, statistically regressing

Analyses, shifting arms. Calling to them, to teach his own.

I’m holding a stake. I’ll believe it when I dig it.

The color of my sickness, its colorblindness a guise, or

A disguise, Hey hey hey, you can’t catch me. I’m syntax-free.

Skin taut by surgery. Taunted, who has a stake in my skin.

MORE WORK BY CELINA SU

Action, Yes

At the Burmese Refugee Project

(the Pomelos [Poems] page has links to many more poems)

Tyrone Williams

NEEDS

after Ronaldo Wilson’s “Want”

Mermaid the Human a water treatment implant

Mermaid the Human an ambiguous amphibian

crack credit

score some tail at home work force

coming along as surf the Third Wave

He-man putts in the eagle flies on Friday

Mermaid the Human hard drive through

He-spoke heard-him

“cut-off ears” a dumb

server conjured up as mangroves

“disappeared” as is is to “is” as beach

front __ to -each according to [H]is…”

This poem originally appeared on the Futurepoem Books commentary site, Futurepost.

MORE WORK BY TYRONE WILLIAMS

Jacket

Elective Affinities

Etiquette Cards (video)

Face Qua Flash Card (video)

The Cultural Society

Little Red Leaves

Catherine Theis

FROM "FOOL ME ONCE"

The Kindly Ones

From fury to rage

From rage to displeasure

From displeasure to heightened awareness

Sensation, I love you with

All my might

Sensation, the highest living force

To be stuck in a bottle

The worst fate

Unlived

Undated

Remember, all the flaws

Are intentional

Whether fury or rage or

Some other feeling

11-15-10 (Stranglehold)

Sleeping in a scroll

Every man for himself

In the sleeping bag of fire,

don’t take advantage of Bernice

When love is not passion

When love is not madness

When love is not fire

(He doesn’t know any better)

What is it, really

Its throve ringing, its intensifying up

The wind matters

Attached to gardenias

Day easily rots out

Blisses out to lunch-made perfumes

Other nodes

Extravagant bolt of Missioni fabric

My leg decimated in spider bites

Choked, zigzagged (illegal activity)

A citadel now a stronghold

A mirror which does not reflect

I let myself slide in

Bitten by a spider

Watched, wrapped in a scroll

Warm choked (whose luck is this?)

MORE WORK BY CATHERINE THEIS:

Verse Daily

Realpoetik

Typo

Rabbit Light Movies

Scott Inguito

OH, HELPER IN MY DREAMS

This is the folded branch

my prescribed other songmaker

my incited to violence

picking through dog fur for nits.

I’ve refused the pure

praying of nests

because nothing happens in them

that I can make out (my problem).

Snapped notes

out of the falling air

without cursing the air

keeps it going

in that going keeping it

going nothing limbed but fluid

tapping and going

to that high-pitched tapping.

MORE WORK BY SCOTT INGUITO

His personal site

Woodland Pattern Book Center

Shampoo

Realpoetik

REBECCA FARIVAR


Tunnels Collapse



I’ve never seen coal
and I don’t believe in
West Virginia, or any place
where tunnels collapse
like trachea
yet they’re surprised
that dirt betrays.




MORE WORK BY REBECCA FARIVAR:

Realpoetik
Octopus #13
SIR
voices escape
Her personal site