Tom Bradley

excerpt from
Energeticum / Phantasticum: a Profane Epyllion in Seven Cantos


...The internet's perverse monstrosity,
apocalyptic, without precedent,
clarifies your bleak predicament:
your universe and all the pens it slings
are hurtling toward the great blue pencil job:
that Dissolution, promised in Puranas,
followed by the bookless Night of Brahma.

Our barely-average star, dim, nondescript,
another flush-faced zhlub in fizzled crowds,
is sinking ever closer to the drain
that gorges on the grim galactic plane.

Spirits who have managed, more or less,
through dozens of misspent millennia,
with slow metempsychotic momentum,
to inch along the gradual incline
from rock to plant to beast to human thing
(some blurring that admittedly fine line),
are groping for fistfuls of cognizance,
by means of which they might discharge a smutch
of karmic debt, before the closing bell
of Manvantara's all-must-go fire sale.

Overreach can lurch in cerebella,
self-consciousness may stretch for self-expression.
Slightly fewer publishers than poets
out-legion the cramped fiends who, nuts-to butts,
in Gadarene, impacted swinish guts.
And most have opted virtually to oink.

A broadband of electromagnetic lit
extrusively is shitting past the brim
of our ionosphere, with light-sped bulge.
Its propagation fizzles at the brink
of Pluto's outer orbit, where it's mulched
with Adolf Hitler's televised pep rallies.
To parabolic radio telescopes
tripodded on the shores of methane lakes
on cratered exomoons, our published oeuvre
must seem an oblate, simmering blood blister
distended to the lurid point of bursting.

There was a time when poetasters banished
to wilderness beyond the Hudson River
could play the simple part of the Essene.
They planned their biblo-retirement
as dignified inurnment, Qumran-style.
But now the sand in which our scrolls are sunk
is digital, composed of lone electrons,
countless drifts of subatomic egos,
schizy, split, infertile as the bits
of shivered quartz that cause the West Bank dunes,
white-phosphorized, to writhe like salted slugs....





Tom Bradley has published twenty-five volumes of fiction, essays, screenplays and poetry with houses in the USA, Great Britain and Japan. Various of his novels have been nominated for the Editor's Book Award, the New York University Bobst Prize, and the AWP Series. 3:AM Magazine in Paris gave him their Nonfiction Book of the Year Award in 2007 and 2009. His journalism and criticism have appeared in such publications as Salon.com, and are featured in Arts & Letters Daily. Denis Dutton, editor, wrote: Tom Bradley is one of the most exasperating, offensive, pleasurable, and brilliant writers I know. I recommend his work to anyone with spiritual fortitude and a taste for something so strange that it might well be genius.

His latest collaborations with illustrators are Family Romance (Jaded Ibis), We'll See Who Seduces Whom: a graphic ekphrasis in verse (Unlikely Books), and Elmer Crowley: a katabasic nekyia (Mandrake of Oxford). Further curiosity can be indulged at tombradley.org

Alec Solomita

Upstate

The apes play hide and seek in the woods.

Jenny complains bitterly,

her morning walks ruined by cries of  “I see you.”

And “You’re It!”

Meanwhile, barn owls roost in the barn,

keeping yellow eyes out for red foxes.

Every single person at the grange voted but

there was no majority. Too many

persuasive arguments from both sides.

“They frighten the children.”

“Think of the tourist potential.”

The folks congregate on the steps, perplexed.

When faced with a conundrum, the farmer pauses.

The origin of the apes was unclear but they all knew that

thousands of cranes would return in the spring.

 

I’ve Come To Think

I’ve come to think that God

is a moody black woman,

capricious, capacious

and careless as Yahweh,

Loins like rivers meeting,

buttocks like mountains,

aureoles like low lying hills,

nipples like black oaks.

Pigheaded, sly, prone to

spurts of baffling anger,

jets of appalling love,

whirlpools of cathexis.

Alec Solomita has published fiction and poetry in Eclectica, The Mississippi Review, Southwest Review, Ireland’s Southword Journal, and many other publications. Most recently, his work has appeared in theNewerYork, Turk’s Head Review, and MadHatLit, and several of his poems will be published in the forthcoming Fulcrum: an international anthology of poetry and aesthetics. He lives in Somerville, Mass.

Matt Hill

from Pellucid Inferno
High End Dirt

The place had all the looks of Defeat, the faded Idols of the Marketplace having absconded to parts unknown, the place now littered with mid-age outliers amidst the wreckage of rust, posthumous flotsam washed up upon veracity’s shore, affordable garbage still making demands on being a right, not a privilege, the gravity of commerce doppler-shifting towards any and all bogus salvage operations, robust marginalia begging to be casually incinerated as the war for the wallet & its contents of deteriorated money anticipate some freaky financial apocalypse, any suboptimal cash gestures now debased, just as the first rain brings up the acrid smells from the asphalt covering this high end dirt, which does not always equal more hoped-for pay dirt …

Pellucid Inferno 

An impermanence sustained by hints of the Irreal, as they wedge themselves back into the cracks; this draining off of the existential contents of false seekings , which has lead to this rare place where the bugs have no names; the severe darkness here now retracts its claws, this nocturnal solitude yields toward a long siege horizon; wondering if these solo hours lived through can be a preparation for further heartbreak?; an alembic of luminous silence envelopes me here, the melancholic ground of late hours becoming a new series of parenthesis; out here in the inexplicable wild, I desperately chew at these broken wings, the ones I can no longer use; there is a mixed prevailing in these solo hours of rusted ruin, where these salad fingers of mine grip the throat of the Impossible; even these moves of desperation are unable to retool this ongoing hermetic lifestyle of mine; casting the eyes upward, the night moves across an opaque sky, while this palpable solitude settles itself down into the glowing embers of this burl fire I tend; these embers are engraved with phantom light, these interior transfers occur within the moments of a cold pristine night; the future calibrates itself out here in the deep woods, in this nocturnal bath of gelid air, and the long night begins to smell faintly old and silent …
Chez Lunatique

Fresh visits to Chez Lunatique, this destiny spot lurking here somewhere in the ruins of the unread leaves, where the reach exceeds the grasp, in this wayward world of no boundaries, this whirled work done on the complicated shadows, by absorbing various ambient influences of lunatic fashion, with vague partners in ambiguity serving as angles of collateral influence, then to fall back upon a unique inventory of scars; and, by some duly diligent promiscuous thinking, we have internal teardowns on fresh errors like you’ve never seen, even as we look rough while talking polished, this done by transparently rewriting ourselves, referencing all that is not-so-obvious by a revived focus made fast and furious, done as we watch the language bleed next to where the shadows intersect, only to smell a blue silence under a fastly fading archaic sky …

Residing in the southern part of Northern California, Matt Hill is a sculptor, street poet, and fiction writer.  His poetry, prose, and short fictions can be found in many venues, including BlazeVox Books, Argotist ebooks, and Gradient Books.

His books include: Rouge Aurora, 1994 (chapbook); Roxis, 1995 (chapbook); Triune Override Tractatus, 1997 (chapbook); The Cloud Reckoner, 2007 (poems); Parataxis, 2008 (prose poems); Dropping the Walls for a Tenuous Linkage, 2011 (poems); A Western Exile, 2011 (prose poems); The Beige Book, 2014 (a philosophico-poetic prose poem); Integral Standalones, (selected prose & poems) forthcoming.

Pui Ying Wong

MOAN MELODY

                                    “But I spin all these crazy yarns

   as if sleeping in a mound of narrative”

                                                    --Zbigniew Herbert--

Maze of market streets,

bric-a-brac, flowers, shoes,

browsers’ faces, gazes

that peel night to day,

little cars going around

in search of

ascend, descend, yield---

to who, to whom

these red lights blink and blink,

crosswalks, guardrails,

scurf pegged air, there’s heart

in what you keep opening to,

a man leans on the horn

as if he’s waited

his whole life, enough,

how else can we get through

and get to, please,

the station master speaks,

just another foreign tongue

but the gesture is clear,

no tickets, the phone,

what is your number, dear,

write it down, your number,

the number must reach.

First published in Mojave River Review

 

MEKONG

Smell of burnt leaves,

a bird shoots up

into the gasoline air,

boats carry pomelo, basil, denim,

buzzing of work, hemlocks sway,

a baby asleep to the blue

of the day, two dogs,

chin down.

How does the river heal?

Crowns of water hyacinth gather

in the river’s wide mouth. 

First published in Boiler Journal

Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of a full length book of poetry Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), two chapbooks: Mementos (Finishing Line Press, 2007), Sonnet for a New Country (Pudding House Press, 2008) and her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Southampton Review, Crannog (Ireland), Gargoyle, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), Taos Journal of Poetry & Art, and Valparaiso Poetry Review among others. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.

Felino A. Soriano

from Forms, migrating

But

“Everything but sleep.”

                  —Li-Young Lee

And night is the momentum

of halting light’s music.  Acrobatic

angles

     of the humming

-bird’s relevant vanish

          spelling disappearance

as well as noon’s oscillating

               hiding.  Dusk

recalls a memory of hybrid fascinations

: penultimate hour prior to the weight bearing model of rest’s diligent coming

- loneliness to an incessant desire, to the brokenness tiredness resembles within a mirror’s relocating accuracy.

                                                              When singing silences.

A darkened contour

a small circle under

the eye of distance’s

braiding bodies.

Found

Found burning, synonyms.

Using alternate species

cannot overwhelm

into breathing accentuated

nuances.  Always.

                  Embers

         thickened, calling smoke into dance, an

                                    alphabetic purpose

                           spelling

         delay as joy.                  In this company

                                             of halos

                                             elegies transform

                                             permanence

                                             permeating the body’s

                                             pertinent condition.

Winter

Bones falling into hands

lose the prior

priority of angled

assessment, agreeable

articulation of conformation.

Movement.  Warmth.  Pastel.

Newness bends and becomes

a brand of compressed alteration

of spatial synonyms.  The body reveals

an ownership of air’s

reconstruction of portending

guesses, what will arrive

on a timeline of numerical

decency.  Ballads

sing a softened nuance

into listening’s momentum

of finding safe to predict this

home’s interpretation of

winter.

Felino A. Soriano is a member of The Southern Collective Experience.  He is the founding editor of the online endeavors Counterexample Poetics and Of/with../Poet/Felino A. Soriano/POET/2014/Forms, migrating/The derivation of hours/differentiapress.com; in addition, he is a contributing editor for the online journal, Sugar Mule.   His writing finds foundation in created coöccurrences, predicated on his strong connection to various idioms of jazz music.  His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology, and appears in various online and print publications, with recent poetry collections including Of isolated limning (Fowlpox Press, 2014), Mathematics (Nostrovia! Poetry, 2014), Espials (Fowlpox Press, 2014), and watching what invents perception (WISH Publications, 2013).  He lives in California with his wife and family and is a director of supported living and independent living programs providing supports to adults with developmental disabilities. Links to his published and forthcoming poems, books, interviews, images, etc. can be found at www.felinoasoriano.info.

j/j hastain

By its nature, the shadow is connection (more than it is internalization or intersection only): it literally joins with the feet with which we are walking, with the angle with which we are moving. Shadow is a somatic extension of our mood: even an additive to the snippet of the song that we are humming.

The body in ceremony makes possible spirit embodied: the ineffable, suddenly sensed as somatic sufficiency. In ceremony, the organs, the contents of the physical body in convergence with the other aspects of the subtle body (of which the shadow is included) become meaning. The organs are the altar and the cosmic content is going to seep from ritualizations of the body. The shadow is an altar. Altars are for work. Altars are for creating antithesis of loneliness or loss. Altars are for rootedness. Altars are for correspondence. Altars are for rest.

One of the priestesses in my circle is telling me that I am most clear to her as a vision, when I am performing my ceremonies with the other women of the circle around me as witness. Where I squat, in the middle, I breathe with my shadow, even at times into it (like CPR) as a way of breathing with myself. Breath, in this way, is instinctual time: freed of dysphoria-forming lines.

I have been working (in ceremony) with the creatively-composed hymen as well as my own secondary virginity. Both of these are my right because I make them my rite. As mystical registers in which mystery can prosper (similar to the way a harmonic mysteriously appears as if belonging there, due to the rubbings which take place), the secondary virginity, that new elemental, speaks to me through the voices of my own organs. My hunger to feel myself in this way is a vivacious one. This is not something that was just dreamed up. This is not a shot in the dark. This virginity is as much mine as a biological one ever was.

Patriarchy’s hegemonic associations with the female body liken themselves to the way that a virginity can be something taken, as opposed to it being adorned while it is being willfully offered. In some ways, this virginity means more to me than a first, because it is something become extant by way of and from the richness of my will  and not just extant due to basal states of my body. As a composition whose source is psychic power and spirit, the secondary virginity is not dependent on exterior impacts of the interior but is interior birthing interior as something I can infinitely offer to my lover and to myself.

Of all of the places I could possibly choose in the sun, I choose to plant myself in this great tree’s shadow to perform the ceremony. I feel comfortable associating with my own shadow as something that, like me, here in this ceremony, is being enabled by it being allowed to be swallowed up in another form’s shadow. This too is union. I am kneeling on the ground. I can feel the dried pine needles piercing my bare skin. Blessed menstrual blood: not what it represents but what it is. I can smell my blood in my hair and on my skin before I ever open the glass bottle of sanctified liquid: soft and dizzying agglutination, swarm on a swelling iron flower.

The virgin iron flower is hard and high: a persistent stay that is sensuously stating itself.
I am naked beneath the see-through, white, gown to which I have chosen to attune during this ceremony. This gown is the gown of my secondary virginity and it is a gown by which I give to something wider (space, this land, the unseen beings in attendance, the women looking on during the ritual, the potential to give it to my lover later in consort-contexts), something that I am turning myself to or into more than my trying to approach this as a strict return to a previous state.

My own menstrual blood, being poured over me by me, is the glue to adhere many cosmic identities.

Because, to me, my blood is not indicative of my gender but of my animality, my blood remains something that heals various dysphorias (like the virginity being taken), rather than it causing dysphorias. My blood is an integral part of my body (menstrual or not). My body is a unique biological vestment and it’s what I wear as I dance my advancements, as I court who I am, as I scry the elementals present within me for so many sacred portents. I ritualize the yearnings: this desire to be contextualized by way of another facet (the virgin with hymen). I poise in partnership with the blood parts and I do so as a pact.

My biological body in investments of the ceremonial self is the only way I can have an identity that will always feel authentic to me.

As I stained my own white gown, I was somehow efficiently inhabited by the maiden: that mythological self. Having long felt a somatic gap between myself and the maiden, I felt that somehow (due to the maiden being historically retained for cult death-rituals) the maiden in me hung back a bit from me, waited to be extant until flourish of Priest/ess wisdom by which the maiden could become inarguably included (through integrating into already-extant years of Priest/ess weaving). Maiden waited to come into me until she could be infinitely integral to me by way of having to do with this exact ceremony. By attending me here and not elsewhere or earlier on in my human life, she became an aspect of the ongoing vestment that can never be taken from me. Smart girl! I feel so comforted in the smell and sense of my blood all over me as a form of cosmic moonshining, as a way to keep the maiden here in my form.

The white gown is blowing in the wind on the branch of the tree whose shadow the ceremony was performed in. I have access to this now. If I am ever feeling too much anxiety around a sexual experience that is the time in which I am to return to the maiden for yet another grounding in the virginal, in the creatively-composed hymen.

I am grateful that, during this ceremony, I could rest alongside my own shadow in the shadow of the great tree with whom I am involved in a breath-share. We are enjoined: my shadow and me, me and the tree. We are a part of each other’s cycle.

I breathe what you release and you breathe what I release.

Ceremonies: not only what we synthesize, but cosmic synthesis itself.

The following are excerpts from a book in progress called Identity Collage. These works are ceremonies by way of which I collaborated with shadow.

Rob Talbert

Monday Morning

The fishing line

of desire too often

hooks my eyes.

My god the evidence

in my car alone:

her hair strands, the empty

bottles under the seat,

the severed nightclub

wristbands.

I watch the lemonade sun pour

over the people walking

into the office building,

over the swarm of purses,

backpacks, satchels, shopping bags –

we are taught very young

how to carry too much,

and the bags so abundant,

so deep, that grief

needn’t ever be left behind.

My paycheck always hits

barely just in time,

like everything else

that saves me

and the raccoons still refuse

to go to the police

with what they know.

Like everyone else

I am given the choice:

where to go,

what to carry.

We are all growing

calmly

in our shirts.

Leading Up to Something like a Prayer

The traffic light turns

red and I stop beside the museum.

Vacant and deep. Closed

for hours, now. The windows

throw back a lead-filled street of cars

and concrete. I have seen this.

            Only the security guard

patrols inside. Humming

or drinking or reading

or jerking-off or whatever

it is he does after so many hours

alone with the masters.

            The light turns

green and I turn

onto a street named

after a great man. A song

on the radio carries on its back

the era it launched. I hum off-key.

I pass statues in the park.

            Everything I do

is so easily forgotten. Barely

noticed despite the constellation

of cameras recording me from above,

and hoping, perhaps, that I’ll

do something other than walk

            with my head down.

I go into Wal-Mart. I pick up wine.

I stand in line, waiting for the one night

of my life that will go filed away

with the masters, not this small and fragile

history, written by the trapped sparrow.

Bonham Exchange Nightclub

closer and closer

two bodies get

but the skin

will stop

them

just as the net beneath

the trapeze will

stop the

fall

the spirit wants

more than the

body can

handle

and will pour forth from the mouth

like an insane river

honest and

wild

some strangers reach out

and hold other

strangers like

clouds

a strength succumbing

to the presence

of a different

strength

there are thousands

of ways you could

live your

life

and they are all here in this nightclub

this room of changing

and overflowing

light

in the face of each person

as impossible to ignore

as a bomb

dropped

the truth is we are all swarmed

by equal measures

of disgust and

contempt

and so easily forget that the body

found cold amongst

the trees could be

anyone

Rob Talbert grew up in the sweltering heat of San Antonio. He has worked in jails, bars, corporate offices, hotels, universities, hospitals, retail stores, restaurants and on cruise ships. In 2010 he received his MFA from Virginia Tech University, and he is currently working on a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly, The American Poetry Review, Juked, Ninth Letter, Painted Bride Quarterly, Passages North, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and on Verse Daily.

Ben Mazer

Gradually the house across the way

grew dimmer and brighter, appreciating the stars,

as languidly dropped the words they would have it say,

long in the lucubrations of new lovers,

who sat outside, all hours of the night,

to watch the seasons pass and sense the feelings

of being, divinity untangled from the light

squeezed by the tabula rasa of its ceilings.

Gradually, grown troubled and vexed by poison,

that could not go unnoticed or unencountered,

the fiend undid the gossamer thread of reason,

and the whole season panicked as it floundered.

Desperate with disappointment she duly countered,

breaking her pact with the sun, and moon, and stars.

Tried without sentence, the heavenly funeral biers

shed disapproval crashing where they sauntered.

Now she goes, alone with her cats and fancies.

Her final word has dealt them a fatal blow.

No more of dances, dresses, or of chances.

And God has folded up to see them go.

Then as he changed, for each was forlorn and broken,

he marvelled at the fierceness of her reply,

that she should truly wish to let them die,

saving no shred or scrap of any token,

and their flush season never more go spoken.



BEN MAZER was born in 1964 in New York City. Lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Studied with Seamus Heaney and William Alfred at Harvard University. Studied with Christopher Ricks, Geoffrey Hill, and Archie Burnett at the Editorial Institute, Boston University (MA, Ph.D.). His poetry has been published widely in international literary periodicals, including Harvard Review, Verse, Pequod, Fulcrum, Stand, Salt, Agenda, Boston Review, Jacket Magazine, Harvard Magazine, Poetry Wales, Horizon Review, Warwick Review, Van Gogh’s Ear, Vallum, The Brooklyn Rail, Poetry Daily, and The Wolf. His most recent collections of poems in the United States are Poems (The Pen & Anvil Press) and January 2008 (Dark Sky Books), both published in 2010. His new collection of poems in India is Tales of the Buckman Tavern (Mumbai: Poetrywala, 2012). He is the editor of Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010), Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 by Landis Everson (Graywolf Press, 2006, winner of the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation), and a forthcoming critical edition of the Complete Poems of John Crowe Ransom (Boston: Un-Gyve Press). He is a contributing editor to The Battersea Review, and to Fulcrum: an Athology of Poetry and Aesthetics, to which he contributed the anthologies The Berkeley Renaissance and Poetry and Harvard in the 1920s. He has, in addition, published several chapbooks including, most recently, two verse plays.

Tim Suermondt

A READING AT KGB

In the room dark as a deserted dacha in winter

I sat trying to listen to the featured poet

droning on about missiles, cold rain and apple cider—

or so I thought. I tuned out, thinking about the pictures

of Lenin on the walls—someone whispered Khrushchev

but I didn’t see him. I did see Julie Christie’s Lara

outlined by my side, her breasts pointed and beautiful, snow

beginning to fall on St. Petersburg, the featured poet

saying “here’s a real long one” and the Red Cavalry dashing

from the woods to cut him down at last, sabers gleaming

like pure gold, like the Revolution never was.

         

first published in Ellipsis

BAYOU PIGEON

Crawfish shadows on the street

and a gossamer elm by the drugstore—

a blind man on the corner plays a saxophone—

the locals say “he sees with his heart”

and, darling, I think I know what they mean—

the world gives as much as it takes.

         

first published in Thrush Poetry Journal

CULTIVATING THE WOMEN

Or are they cultivating me, while

they take over the apartment?

Some dress so fine the word dazzle

will not do. Some dress more mundanely

and one at the end of the couch wears

only underwear, crossing her legs, proud

to be provocative yet a little aloof.

So many women huddled in the tight space

but we wouldn’t change it for the world—

this planet as strange to itself as it is to us.

Is trying a tango step by the kitchen island

the foolish endeavor I hope it is?

And is that a Roman legionnaire we see

flying smoothly by, red as the night sun?

first published in Mudlark

Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: TRYING TO HELP THE ELEPHANT MAN DANCE (The Backwaters Press, 2007) and JUST BEAUTIFUL from New York Quarterly Books, 2010. He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Able Muse, Prairie Schooner, PANK, Bellevue Literary Review, Stand Magazine (U.K.), and has poems forthcoming in december magazine, Plume, North Dakota Quarterly and Ploughshares. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.

Timothy Liu

CIRCE


Hair so damn good it eclipsed
her face. Nor could the pigs

keep up. It soon became clear

nakedness had little to do
with wherever they were going—




DISTURBED


It’s true you did not expect to see your neighbor
shitting into the flowerpot where you had kept

the spare key for your lover, but there you were

looking out onto the fire escape just before dawn
when you knew you should have stayed in bed—





Timothy Liu’s latest book of poems is Don’t Go Back To Sleep. New work appears in American Poetry Review and The Awl. He lives in Manhattan with his husband. http://timothyliu.net