Gerry Loose

from fault line

 
LXXVII

his morning’s transecting flights 
two silkwinged swans
above a platefat mallard
below a seaplane


↑↓


ending sentience
country sports
for pleasure
not the oldest
way here


 
LXXVIII

it’s 6am October
an invention
moon’s high
not shot down
breath forming inside
my body


↑↓


every farmer a connoisseur
of rusty machinery
ploughshares
chased by rainbows
sifting foliage


 
LXXX

all the little cancers sing
in the sheepfold
More Power is dead
in the sheiling
Bikini Frank
is dead
move over lyric


↑↓


another Sunday
we sit
baking the word
of god
on the steel hull
gulls yell
a’ ghràidh


 
LXXXII

officers cleansing
anarchic habitats
their real enemy
Flora being goddess 


↑↓


shorten the road for me
he was ever a child
as if for those who went before
& then the boys jump
feet first
into the stars of
blackened sky


 
LXXXIII

aside from us
who will celebrate
shoreline’s windfall
apples


↑↓


it’s only the foxes
in waterside herbs
& herself
sits out
looking for
cosmic debris
perseids


 
XCI

honeybees at the ivy balls
sweetness giving messages
back at the hive dancing
numbers
litter of pollen


↑↓

 
to be unseen on waters
invisible against ripe
wheat fields
why kingfishers are blue
goldfinches gold
at borders if I had a gun
would I tell you
the correct answer
do not joke
about bombs while
in an airport
it is an offence


 
XCII

there’s only one river
& we & all always in it
chaffinch crowd
at fallen rowan berries
still they refuse to read
we have different texts
sometimes they speak of me
of men with arms
warning to their kind
a psalter lies
open at this page
there is only one river
fieldfares speak//sing
of the same rowan
when all’s clear
of the buzzard
when she’s gone


↑↓


an ecological niche
for colonisers of verb languages
poetry is
to be repaid
spontaneous song
mycorrhizal cainnt
in darkness
between soil particles
then Cantharellus cibarius
chanterelles


 
XCVII

incandescence
as they wish
we don’t want
what they wish
nevertheless
language is language
spoken
a response
a condemnation
more than despair
to be deleted
the hare tells us
what the lurcher knows


↑↓


what directs
the sun
what directs your heart
what directs
this fusion
of both
of all


 
XCVIII

once there were 5 hares loupin
preoccupation with numbers
a retreat from enormity
an occupation
how to meet force


↑↓


who sees


 
XCIX

then naming what
being the opposite of
war let’s call it
not a wish to oppose
but to circumvent perhaps
to find roots (we know it’s fear)
is it as he said
not peace
maybe then an obliquity the dog
sitting on the back
of the shepherd’s vehicle
to grasp failure
& wring a damp success
not enough


↑↓


what arises
empty of what
sometimes a woman
sometimes a man


 
C

yet again it’s morning
the sun comes up over that hill
the wild cock pheasant
who frequents this yard is busy
at grains the hens have overlooked
with their glassy stare
as children let’s begin
eyes ears nose & throat
lips tongue hands & feet
dance my little laddy
the shepherd takes a stick my child
the farmer takes a plough
the soldier takes a gun my dear
& then he shoots your daddy


↑↓


consciousness delayed
deferred
from under deep snow
shining
Bellis perennis
said before
to be said again
beyond
the always beautiful
beyond together
beyond while still here
no eye ear nose tongue body or mind
no form sound smell taste touch 
no extinction


↑
↓

Obiter dicta:



so I’ve heard

© Morven Gregor




Gerry Loose is a poet, writer (and land-artist) who works primarily with subjects from the natural world, as well as the world of geo-politics. His work is often to be found inscribed on wood and stone in natural landscapes, parks and botanic gardens as well as on the page. Among his most recent publications are Printed on Water: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2007) and that person himself (Shearsman, 2009). His awards include the Creative Scotland Award, the Kooneen Säätiö Award, and the Herman Kesten Award.

Diane Stevenson

I suppose the droop of that lily 
could be the swoop of a dress... the
silk of a Chinese courtesan
and
the sway of her
shoulders -- the way
she rearranges
for a lover about to enter
the room,
and the silk slips
down her neck, its sound
as subtle
as the steps
she takes
towards the lover
who is slipping
into her room,
both silences
like the petals
of a lily
as if its petals
were slippers
being
dropped before
a bed on a carpet
of silk
the woman's feet
silk, the man's hand
silk on her silk

No, it's not enough to have said
it's beautiful:
its color
or the way
its petals
curve under
(the breast of a woman
the lip of a penis)
the ivory smooth, silk touch
of a man sliding into a woman
her lips, his lip
his penis against the
the smooth wet ivory
of her lips
the mouth of her color
its petals

The curtain surrounds a chair
like mosquito netting
around a bed
(billowing around the pillow)
such nonsense, and yet
the quiet, sear (and sheer)
intrusion
of those thin
needle-threads
like the hands
of the dead
so unrelated
to the living
What do I mean?
It's an exquisite death
that thin sheer cloth
(no, "silk," it requires a
softer name in order
to name its softness)
the cut into thin air
the haze-white assertion
almost prone on a chair
(a woman in summer, her nap?
her arms? her sleep?)

CHORUS:
Who is that curtain?
Who is that chair?
Whose sleep is that death?
Whose death does the haze-white coffin move
in a room
in front of the window's wind
around a chair
as if the chair
were a lover
and the curtain
this lover's lover's arms.
Which death?
Which sleep?
Whose arms?

blare blare blaring

glare glare glaring
stare stare staring

the more the garish
the less we perish
the underside and over
the greeny bliss and clover

Do you think it's spring?
Do you think it's spring?

I don't think a thing
I don't think at all
I don't think the same
I don't think it's fall

Is it hot?

No it's not.

white glare

white blare

white stare
of white snow

now you know 


miss and mistake
bliss and blister
sis and system
piss and pistol
hiss and hysteric
kiss and Kentucky
hope and pray
vinegar and oil
side and walk
can and spray
oak and seed
want and need
mill and grist
cup and tea
spot and less
hot and cold water
for and sake
fish and steak
chip and fish
steam and spew
boil and grill
sit and still
for and ever
now and never.

A POSTCARD FROM RUDY BURCKHARDT

It looks like pale blue 
cloth slashed and in tatters
it looks like a pale blue
rainbow with rims of pink --
hot pink almost hot orange --
the water looks dyed
the woman's hair looks dyed
Her hair looks like
pale blue cloth painted red
Her hair stands red
the water
falls
blue

It looks like an old man's beard
draped over a multi-folded
belly
this is no emaciated man
this is a man
who ate and drank and
had women
galore
on his lap and on his
knee one at a time
or more
a man in a rut
a man who ruts
a man with a gut
whose downhill
race is a blue-gray
grace because
at bottom
sitting on the
bottom on the tip
of his hair is
a woman with red hair
in a black bikini
Her finger is in his mouth
Her foot is in his mouth
but, then, I've only
imagined the water as
a beard and the man
lying upside down,
uphill.

Green leaves coalesce like ideas
into a form like trees
You can almost count them (the forms)
as various and varicose
as the veins
in the legs
of a woman
whose thigh is turning
blue because her feet
are blue
in blue water
(You can't see her feet;
you see only opaque
blue but the feet
are there
or they
aren't
there)
Where are her feet?
Where is the form
the whole thing is a
bit tawdry
the colors are tawdry
the skin is tawny
her toes are blue.
her toe nails are blue
though they might
be red under the blue
if they're really
under the blue
if her feet are really
under water, that is
is she's real
and not just
tinted: if she rises
and when she rises
her toes
are rose.

Why is the still blue
so much
bluer
than the rushing blue
the headlong blue
the subway blue
the mail train blue
the rain rain rain blue
why is blue not
the same blue when
still as when
rushed?

The Chinese character is red
the rocks are red
her hair is red
and in this order:
red character
her hair
red rocks
from dark to light
from bright to brown
from up to down to middle
to green and blue and black
black and blue she isn't
though her bikini is black
and her feet
in blue
her feet are set in water
her feet are set
to the music of the
water, its pool
its cool
its blue
like music down scales
like music scaling rocks
like rocks
and scales
and pails of water
cascading
like a woman's hair
like light against dark
or dark against light
like cold fingers
(and warm hands)
like cold feet
like a woman at the bottom
of a water fall
falling falling falling
except for the spray
she catches in her hand
and holds with her feet.
(She holds the fall
like hair
falling)

                                                     

                                                                  





© Gilberto Perez                                             





Diane Stevenson is the author of The Beauty Shop Monologues (Four Zoas, 1976). Her poems have appeared in various magazines, including Boulevard, Four Zoas Journal, Lingo, and Pataphysics. She has an M.F.A. in poetry and a Ph. D. in American literature, both from Columbia University, where she did her dissertation with the late Edward Said. She has written articles for The Nation, The Mississippi Review, Studies in the Humanities, New Observations, Cineaste, The Yale Review, Film International, and other journals. She lives in Mississippi.

Lorenzo García Vega, translated by Christopher Winks

from DISTRIBUTING SCRAPS WHEN DROPS OF THE                                           VARICOLORED
 


A CARDBOARD MYTH  

I confess that the toilet’s been tossed onto the edge of the sidewalk / which perhaps can be dictated, when on certain nights the Moon appears.

What for? That which, though insignificant, belongs in reality to a mythology, it’s kept in one of my boxes.
        Now what I’ve done is that once I built something ugly: a piece, really poor, of this bridge corresponding to a canal in this Albino Beach

         But of course, I’m not up to saying more than I’ve said thus far / let an altar be raised in the doorway of this store where they sell records, or, throughout the entire month of September, let the candles remain lit that surround this portrait of the Movie Star next to the portrait of the Virgin Mary.
          Since it’s that I believe, without any doubt,
          that for those of us who live in the Cave,
          this is the best that can happen to us.

 

I END UP SEEING SOME SHADOW
 

Ah, I’ve seen a shadow. The whole night, I’ve seen. I’ve seen a shadow. But there was also a devastation. The devastation that swept away that movie theater that occurred, a long time, a long time ago.
          But, is there now, in this hole, or moment, this almost insane noise of a fan? What fan? Or, in which house on a corner with dust was this fan? Or did this fan have something to do with a train’s passing by?
        So, I’ll again say a little louder that I’m not going to move from here. That’s it: there’s no other response than this: I’m not going to move from here.
          A little louder, then.
          And with such indifference that my face has turned to chalk.
         And with an absurd nocturne, a silence such, that the matter – which matter? – imitates, to carry out a mutation afterwards, the very same size as an insect, or a pencil, or any other common-or-garden object. But what’s this? What metamorphosis can this be? What is it I’m saying?
 

And this noise. This noise. These steps of some old, distant shoes on the dusty street of an afternoon of my childhood, in Jagüey Grande, of course.
          So many things detached from me! But hey, no need to feel sorry, no need to feel sorry for me.

Whence would suffice for me, so that everything would begin to smell like a dry laugh, the one whom I could count on the scorched wing of an angel (will I still be able to count on Swedenborg?).
          I repeat, then, night, which is silence. Because it absurdly imitates the size of a pencil.
          I repeat: there’d be a laugh with such a dry smell, that I wouldn’t need to move from here.
          I repeat, with the scorched wing of an angel. In this bone, or moment, in which I’ve seen a shadow. This almost insane noise of a fan, perhaps emerging from the world of the dead.
          And it’s that I, almost always, end up seeing some shadow.


 
A HEAD
 
How’s this? It’s a head that’s obsessing me. The head of a hybrid made up of a whirligig with an enlarged peanut (what can this be?).
          The lower edge of this head is a red wine-colored halo.
          And, at the center, the head is adorned by a spur. A spur that serves as a beak for an invisible bird (the bird’s invisible, but doubtless it’s cream-colored).
          And today is ugly, humid, wearisome, but I can pretend not to notice this horrid day only because of this: because I, though obsessed, feel full (full of what? full how?) and with this head which, quite casually and without knowing why, has just plopped itself before my eyes.


 
WHAT’S THIS?

            Who are this Sunday’s dead? Do you know who this Sunday’s dead are? Are they, perhaps, the dead of an indifferent city?

          The loser tossed, in a scene from a movie – from the 40s – I saw in my adolescence when my house was converted into a boarding-house (since, in my adolescence, my house was converted into – and I’m telling you, it was true – a boarding house), a boomerang, which now, fortunately, now has ceased to interest me.

          It’s that, besides, on the dining room table, I’m listening to the loose ends of a gust of wind, and this where before there was a print, with an angel painted by Swedenborg (did I see that print in my childhood, in my grandparents’ house?).

          Or, passion like what’s said about a handkerchief, derived from the comics.

          Or else, passion for an effaced climate, since it must have belonged to the, dissipated, night in which I saw the scene from the movie from the 40s.

          They are, then, like the feet – mirrors? – of the moon. They are, then, like the one who pisses trifles.

          Which is why I push myself – I rear up – towards a pleasure of cardboard stone, and this though I don’t know if, at some point, this pleasure could exist.

          But, can anyone explain to me which – autistic – tangle might I be telling you, almost without being aware of it?


 
A CONFESSION WOULD BE CONVENIENT

          I once read in a streetcar. It may be confirmed that this landscape belonged to childhood, when it’s confirmed that water manages to have a color identical to the phantom.

          I adapted to my straitjacket, keeping myself in this color of water or, more, managing to be that color of water.

          I, with my straitjacket, was acting with that color – I didn’t see, nor did I need to see, footsteps on the pavement.

          So, of course, the moon had nothing to say on this matter. Keeping myself in the water, introducing myself into the water, I knew that this would lead to a bright noon.

          What sort of bright noon?

          I can only say that this phantom confused with the water is a piece, a section. Wind that halted next to my hat.

          But although all this, seen from my straitjacket, I know belongs to my childhood; I also know, however, that whatever key of this computer I’m operating is dissipating every vestige of a distant train I could invent.

          I cannot, then, do anything with what belonged to my childhood.

          To repeat: the water, and the water is confused with a phantom which, now that I’m drawing nearer, I see that although it maintains its color of water, what’s still happening to it is a strange, incomprehensible yellow color which, besides, leaves me, within my straitjacket, more paralyzed than ever.

          But this for sure, I’ve been losing many words at the same rate as my molars.

          I’m feeling a little better. 

 

Lorenzo García Vega (1926-2012) was one of Cuba's most important poets of the past sixty years. He was also a formidable chronicler of the Orígenes group, which under the leadership of José Lezama Lima revolutionized Cuban and Latin American poetry. He himself was a decidedly ambivalent member. He left Cuba in the mid-1960s, eventually settling in Miami. His works include Los años de Orígenes (Caracas: Monte Avila Editores,1979), Poemas para penúltima vez (1948-1989) (Miami: Escandalar, Saetas Ediciones, 1991), No mueras sin laberinto (Buenos Aires: Bajo la Luna, 2005), and the memoir El oficio de perder (Madrid: Renacimiento, 2008). A bilingual selected poetry and prose, translated by Christopher Winks, is forthcoming from Junction Press in 2013.

 



© Lisa Quinones

                                       

                                   



Christopher Winks teaches Comparative Literature at Queens College/CUNY. He is the author of Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature and has published numerous articles, reviews and translations from French and Spanish in a variety of publications.

Gaspar Orozco, translated by Mark Weiss

from THE PEONY NOTEBOOK

Red enveloped in a reddish light. Facing me, only half the peony. The other half hidden in the impenetrable obsidian of this nocturnal return. Thus, half-open, the divided flower invited me to detach the flame from its flame. And I didn't do it, mortally wounded by the kind of weariness that had separated me from that apparition. I asked myself, of course, what fire would burn in the invisible part of the flower. What letter of fate would have been inscribed in that zone forbidden to me. What part of me would have been consumed by that aroma, in that unreachable dampness? Like being at the gates of a city impenetrable in the beauty of its half-light, but that now you would have no interest in entering, because you know that there's nothing there.

Here I merely note the red and black: colors of the final dream.

Los Angeles, October 2011

At the stroke of a midnight in 1765, Master Ito Jakuchu discovered the unstable temperature traversing the territory of the flower that breathed in the half-light. It's not clear if the discovery occurred in one of his dreams or in one of that Summer's vigils. What's important for us is the detailed record he made of that vision, the first of the 27 that he gathered under the title Images of the Colorful Kingdom of Living Beings. There is a violent stillness in the petal, an immobile turbulence that spreads its phosphorescent venom like a wave washing over the onlooker's nervous system. Time changes from snow to flame and flame to clotted blood. Daiten Kenjo, poet-friend of Ito's, noticed this, and named the painting Beautiful Mist and Fragrant Wind. A luminous, revealing mist, an iridescent wind that causes what it touches to boil. Time like the peony, like the peony that melts within our eye.

In the powerful unfolded petal he could see its fall, and in its fall his own disintegration. Could not this early image from the pen of the poet Bai Juyi be his first lesson of beauty? Since we will never know beauty entirely, however, the poet gathered from the soil of the Empty Gate a handful of those petals. He sent them to his friend, the Buddhist monk Wang, to learn whether another answer to the infinite enigma locked in that flower could be found.

We have no record of the monk's reply.

Here I leave the flaming peony, burning in its transparent flame. Unfolded in the darknesses of its aroma. A Wound. I leave the peony free in the blind water of this night. I entrust it—like a light perhaps never to be seen again—to the time of this moment that melts away as I write.

I leave it here, illuminated.

The outline of the map is made on the upper pole of an egg with the tip of a hair. It's a secret garden of Suzhou, known to a few for the rarity of its peonies. The garden of the master of nets, according to the tiny letters on the gate. At the far edge of the eastern side, on the shore of the lake, the melancholy walker, touched by a thirst for clarity and a yearning for oblivion, will find the Cabin of Belated Spring. Because of its remote location, it's the best place to witness the moment when the petals unfold. Its name comes from a verse by Su Dongpo: “Only the peony flowers even in a late Spring.” It's said that the solitary wanderer will find there what he looks for, once the last flower of the year has dissolved into the air.

Carefully I raise the object and for a moment inspect it in silhouette. It's orange, almost blood-colored. Then I drop it onto the surface of the pond. The egg, and the tiny garden, sink slowly into the green water.

The cage fits in the hollow of your hand. It's an imperial prison made especially for a fighting cricket. Delicately carved out of red wood, a peony spreads its petals in a labyrinth with no exit. Stamped with the year 1725, the cage belonged to Prince Bao, before his ascension to the throne in 1732 as Emperor Qianlong. The prince kept in it his favorite insect, a cricket with a purple head that never lost a single one of its innumerable matches.

They say that on the shortest night of the year its song can be heard escaping through the holes in the lid. They assure us that the cricket waits still for the gate to be opened to face its final battle.

And that those who have ever been a prisoner of the flower may live forever.

© Antonio Martínez

Gaspar Orozco was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1971. His books of poetry include Abrir fuego (Mexico City: Tierra Adentro, 2000), El silencio de lo que cae (Mexico City:Programa Editorial de la Coordinación de Humanidades, UNAM, 2000), Notas del país de Z (bilingual, translation by Mark Weiss) (Chihuahua: Universidad Autónoma de Chuihuahua, 2009), Astrodiario (El Paso: Bagatela, 2010), Autocinema (Mexico Citty: Conaculta 2010) and Plegarias a la Reina Mosca (Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 2011). Memorial de la peonía / Peony Notebook is forthcoming from Esfera de papel in 2013, in a bilingual edition translated by Mark Weiss.

Mark Weiss has published seven collections of poetry, most recently As Landscape (Chax Press, 2010) and Dark Season (Least Weasel, 2011). Different Birds appeared as an ebook in 2004 (www.shears- man.com). He edited, with Harry Polkinhorn, Across the Line/ Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California (Junction, 2002) Among his translations are Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer (Junction, 2006), Notas del país de Z, by Gaspar Orozco (Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, 2009), and the ebook La isla en peso / The Whole Island, by Virgilio Piñera (2010, www.shearsman.com). His bilingual anthology The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry was published in 2009 by the University of California Press.

Ken Wolman

SIGNS AND PORTENTS: Sheng Xiao

Year of the Monkey I, February 23, 1944: A disquisition on male ejaculation 

Monkey god born under the sign of General Zaius, or a zookeeper.

When I was a child I thought as a child, and we laughed ourselves to near-vomiting by going to the Bronx Zoo monkey house to watch the apes jerking off, on their fur, on their food, on each other. Protein is a basic survival tool.

According to Anthony Burgess' version of the execution of Dr. Rodrigo Lopez, the Queen's previously Jewish physician, the Portingale, sentenced to drawing and quartering, did not get beyond the drop which alone killed him, and like Joyce's Croppy Boy, blew his load when his vertebrae snapped at the drop. The hangman probably was docked 10 pence for his miscalculation. The anomaly of what is moral: parents who thought nothing of bringing their children to witness a traitor's prolonged death at Tyburn whilst held in screaming agony ("See what shall sure befall thee if thou eatest not thy spinach?"), but covered their kids' eyes when Lopez spurted like a fire hose and died on the spot. Later, his housemaid would confess without even the threat to see any instruments but Lopez' that Dr. Rodrigo was a basic lustbunny and could do her like a studhorse and keep enough left over to extinguish small kitchen fires. Ah, those oversexed Hebraics who want to doodle a Christian girl!

What did his prowess get him?

Monkey II: October 22, 1944

Choosing a Wife

You ought never marry your familiar, especially if you like to fake Chinese astrological signs. We never asked each other "Yo, babe, what's your sign," but we found out soon enough: Mendoza's guts torn from him post-mortuis to gratify the pissed-off crowd, the executioner sliding around in the Portuguese Jew's semen and guts arrayed like an evacuated bowel. Our marriage: the melding of seed turned to bitterness and the odor of a butcher-shop. Like Uncle Ezra said, "Wrong from the start." He also wrote "Make it new" but was full of shit because there is nothing new but clean underwear.

Monkey III: Monkeys like practical jokes

I made two normal children in the womb of the woman I used to love. I should have been Quasimodo. Did anyone, after watching Laughton in The Hunchback, ever wonder at the star that presided over his making, what thwarted critters could have coupled under the sewer grate to make this thing of fear and hellish vision?

We never go beyond the Face and the hump. We never hear the gorgeous music behind Rigoletto's jester's humpback. We want our women to look like Angelina Jolie or Penelope Cruz. As the Chinese man said when his wife birthed a white-sembling baby, "Sum Ting Wong."

Monkey IV: Monkeys like being healthy

      Believing that being sick is a waste of a valuable day,

      Monkeys very rarely feel ill. Their constantly active

      lifestyles are likely what helps Monkeys remain in good

      health. When Monkeys do become ill, such feelings are

      generally the result of feeling nervous.

Awaken before visions can dispel. Sick of body or soul. I am aging and

my joints ache. I am the Mass of complaints that concelebrate with my

demons.

Monkey V: Career Advice

I have had more jobs than times you've gotten laid. Quiz: describe your last orgasm. I can describe my last job.

Monkeys VI: Relationships

I once skimmed a book about the bonobo, remarkably humanoid chimpanzees, with a photo of two bonobos fucking. The male does not take the female from behind: they assume the Missionary Position and their faces are close enough to touch each other. Extrapolating from the primatologist Frans de Waal, they would be very bad Catholics for they use sex for affection and peacemaking, to settle a dispute, and propagation is only a secondary concern. If a child is born of a given union they may raise it or they may behave like some human parents and destroy it as countless human parents have done, imitatio Cronus, setting aside he wasn't really human but was supposed to be a god. Psychoanalytic tales tell of parents who, like Cronus, devour their children from fear of the rival they have made, or from their horrid realization that the child will be human and not a redemptive god. That story worked in Christian Scripture, but never again. And so the history of child generation is a history of abject and toxic failure that leaves bones scattered about like this is a elephant's graveyard.

Wood Monkey, Years 1944 and 2044 

      The Wood Monkey have exceptional communication skills that enable them to

      interact well with others. They are hard workers who have a keen

      understanding of the way things operate.

Caught in a lie. I don't have a clue how anything operates. If I owned a power drill I'd be able to set up a crucifixion assembly line but I cannot operate the goddamn thing without be- coming my first victim. I can't even lace a pair of sneakers for a morning run without catching my fingers in the ties. I don't want to communicate with you unless I'm being paid for it. Communication is a profession. I want to end each discussion with "Good night and good luck" as though I were Edward R. Murrow but I'm grateful I survived 45 years of non-filtered cigaretttes. Why tempt fate?

2044. Who can think forward to age 100? No fond or mad wishes. I expect to be gone, asleep with cabbages and kings in a field.

© Marie Golda

Ken Wolman is a retired technical writer and composition teacher who has lived in New Jersey since 1976, except for almost three months in suburban Philadelphia. He began writing poetry seriously in 1990 at age 46 because his voice was not available until then. Since then he's been very fortunate, and has been awarded a New Jersey State Council on the Arts poetry fellowship, plus a bunch of online and print publications in venues from New Jersey to Tasmania.

Rocío Cerón, translated by Anna Rosen Guercio

from DIORAMA

LEFTOVERS

(NOODLES WITH SCALLIONS)

1. Gust (at the left side). 2. Tempest (over remains of noodles with sauce). 3.

Figure (piece of beef pushed aside). 4. Surface (lip stain on napkin). 5.

Container (bite left on plate). 6. Tapestry (cloud of balled-up breading).

Aleatory movement of the eye (or smiling at the ferryman

with no thought of money).

3.

Not what it seemed. Bird hidden while the body shines.

As close as that or having crossed the boundary.

Finest film, almost hair, not fur. —West Indies.

Minute space where two drops of sweat touch.

At the center of the back a mole. Meters.

Skin spot where tone and musculature survive.

Habit.

Birth of a mark or sun obtained in the open air. —Desert, before the

oceanic swell, desert.

On the shoulder /the wedding ring’s treacherous endgame/ contracture.

From there down to the rib’s horizon.
  

Left earlobe. Fleshy. Mole on the margin of the skin.

Mountain of shadows music and shindig.

The body shines. Metal and air on tip of tongue.

Presence of that which always cleaves the original surface.

Sieve. Basal rosette. Marks.

            What loom nape or lobe is the body spilled into weight and unmarked

form?

Not what it seemed. Map of thread to say “that swift-moving time where the

wolves hunt their prey.”

Get out of a tight spot. Nape or marks —Sang the man in the theater. Novitiate.

Landscape of stalactites and steps, time’s systemic circulation. Mother camping

on your chest. Cerebellum where the scream hides. Hamstrings. Stations to

decipher the limit.

Epidermis, fear is always epidermic.

Marks.

1.

(transformable object for positioning in repose)

Talismanic city inhabited by woman who unfolds her skin. Air through theashtreesbaobabsequoiasahuehuetes —Then throwing little stones in the waterwas perforating rice paper to knot the eyes. —Then stumbling blindly through the fog it burst into high-pitched noises. (It turned out that hordes of ducks were flinging themselves off a cliff.) Three-handled pot with anthropomorphic motifs. On the other side of the clay the motifs repeated: inhabited house fleeing birds red triangles in flight through celestial block: from this body to your body like building progress the future. Solar cult. Every morning (centuries/intonations/signal clasped to chest) a grammatical light guides the remains. To go. Leave this ritual practice to the dead alone.

5.

(black and white photograph. s/t. 1972.)

On leaving home /corner/ everything seems like so much. And so little.

Somewhat tepid: scab scars. Meteor and luminous sand. Hole in the wall

through which the measure is deduced. Cosmic gust. Next to the girl a man

points to a point: black petrel spying through the window. Fire opal or teasel.

Darkness in the middle of the amazonian canopy. Be there in splendor.

2, 4 and 6.

DIY —Decant the scenery, swap the figures, assembly. Then everything, or

almost everything, is warehousing, domain of inch and a half, pressure, pupil

that dilates centuries, simultaneity.

Fleeting, everything is fleeting.

Be there in splendor.

Rocío Cerón (Mexico City, 1972) is one of the major Mexican poets and multimedia artists of her generation. Her books include Basalto (Mexico City, 2002), for which she received the Premio Nacional de Literatura de México Gilberto Owen; Soma (Buenos Aires, 2003), Apuntes para sobrevivir al aire (Mexico City, 2005), Imperio/Empire, (bilingual) (Mexico City and Santo Domingo, D.R., 2009); La primavera comienza muy tarde (Montevideo,Uruguay, 2010) and Tiento (Mexico City, 2010). Diorama, in a bilingual edition with translation by Anna Rosen Guercio, is forthcoming in 2013 from Brutas Editoras, Chile, in conjunction with McNally Jackson in New York.

© Timothy M. Wong

Poet and translator Anna Rosen Guercio holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC-Irvine. Her recent books include By Way of Explanation (Dancing Girl Press, 2012) and translations of Rocío Cerón's Diorama (bilingual, Brutas Editores and McNally Jackson, forthcoming), and José Eugenio Sánchez's Suite Prelude a/H1N1 (bilingual, Toad Press, 2011).

Rochelle Owens

HERMAPHROPOETICS

                                               for Margaret Harrington

The image of a child

taken by a master photographer

a little girl in harem pants then

a boy in a leather skirt

fickle she saunters by a boy warrior

with bright red lips

A jingling sound

a charm bracelet made in China

dangling an acrobat a whirling dervish

a swimmer a drummer girl

meek sweetness the face the face

of the hermaphrodite the skin

berries and apricots the lips

the tongue tasting smelling

the earlobes earlobes jingling

little bells a clinking sound

a charm bracelet made in China

a dancer a baker kneading dough

a beauty queen wearing a thong

gong gong gong

L’École Hermaphropoetics

of brick and concrete a plug and socket

a nozzle of a hose vigilant

the gardener spraying vigilant

the baker kneading

Wedding bells wedding cake

serene the boy in a bridal gown

joyful the groom lifting the veil

a long curved

fingernail circles

the cleft

berries and apricots

under the veil

See the photos of a master

a master photographer altering

perception ethereal the child emerging

from the mists the mists of Delphi

the physical poetic heat turning

sand into glass word

into bread bread into word

vigilant the baker kneading the dough

silence of the yeast

The hermaphrodite

anchoring desire her skeletal structure

a fusion of human and fish

iridescent his pelvis inside a dark

purple fruit the core divided

A jingling sound

a charm bracelet made in China

dangling an acrobat a baker a hyena

a beauty queen wearing a thong

playful the hyena a fringe

of blood drool and excrement

circles the snout

a jingling sound a charm bracelet

made in China dangling a boy soldier

a panda bear a wedding bell a rifle

dangling a nozzle of a hose a skull

an automobile a monk

dangling a house a dog a tree

a bird a light bulb

© George Economou

Rochelle Owens' many books include New and Selected Poems, 1961-1996, Luca: Discourse on Life and Death, and Solitary Workwoman (all from Junction Press), Plays by Rochelle Owens (Broadway Play Publishing, 2000), and the novel Journey to Purity (Texture Press, 2009). Out of Ur: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2012, is forthcoming from Shearsman Books.