Sonnet L'Abbé

Ma from Killarnoe

Tone from Killarnoe

from Sonnet's Shakespeare

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Sonnet L'Abbé can still speak a little Korean.

Yagni Payal

I saw him just beyond my line of sight, just beyond my threshold of knowing, just beyond. He held a shrunk thought. I saw him there, standing, just beyond and smiling a smile beyond the curves of my lips. It was as if he had just crushed his burning cigar of impatience, strewing its ashes towards unknown coordinates of my being, a renegade.

'Marizzta, dont make it any more difficult than it is, you said you would move out by Tuesday'...Dates, dates, dates can be sweet. Dates, can qualify city streets and be sweet. Dates, I hate. Dates. Timelines and specifics, juggle ideologies into sweet trivia of zipcode specificity. Stop giving me numbers, unless they reek of nothingness. Dated unknowns.

You cant garnish everything with holy basil to make it special. Eventually it has to pass the smell test.

Authenticity is now a conscious act of breaking down hybrids into their lowest common multiple. While normalcy curls up like a cat in your lap, your annotated indifference is a burden you will have to carry through ages. 

I think there is this great conspiracy theory. I checked the time clock on my phone, my laptop, my microwave and my watch...and they all matched. Who are you kidding? 

A strand of hair hangs off a lamp shade, it is a perfect culmination of thought and movement, it holds its stand, it sways its extremities gently, it is rooted at a perfectly unwavering co-ordinate, waxing and waning just subtly enough, to play with your line of sight. Obvious and disappearing. Much like the frailty of life mocking the sinewy grasp of predictability or vice versa.

He made me laugh and I caught my reflection fleetingly, only I had just missed it as I laughed. I always knew paragliding within your brain is a conscious step within each unconscious breath.

'case of urban proof of service or service of proof'

Borders of eggshells. We tread broken daily, burnt in half baked truths, symphonies of hurt and tell tale theories, what is the point of it all? Scrambled words need endless sheep dogs. Where is the pagan proof of simplicity? If symbolism rules, do you see my fingers? A lion in the manger, feeds my self interest. Self correction is a lazy coincidence of desire and inaction. When your tectonic plates move, mine hold in resistance, in a misunderstood extramarital affair. Surface touches only circle the navel concentric. It is existential foreplay, needing no approvals within your four corners.I succumb to premature drowning. I smile and let it, happen.

I was obvious. In my semi formal ways. A hint. Of humanity. Of sensuality. Of those that fled senses of comprehension. I existed. As that anomaly between formality and exuberance. I wasn't an echo, a hymn, or a blur of the night. An inspiration of the dead, a thread of embroidery, a blank wall. There is a sense of untouchability. An underlying sacredness, of an interior sanctum of perversions. Of loneliness. Of a possible mate. Of a possible completion.....yes, I existed. In a memory lapse of a widowed , or the regret of an absurdly, I existed. Only as a proper noun. Unpronounceable, if so.

No, I do not watch the news. I do not apologize often. I do not wonder about trends and manifestos. I do not creep up like phallic shadows. I do not bend my own bitter business. I do not tame other people's ghosts. I do not soil within the swamps of human heart. I do not crumple paper and recycle minds. I do not curl my temper into cotton candy. I do not curb my love into another snowball effect. I do not weave my thoughts on elaborate looms of domino. It's complicated, these layers, like smooth eggnog over brandy. You may have met me, and missed me totally. Perhaps I got off the elevator at the wrong floor and laughed. It is always the wrong floor. While you knew which door to face. Or perhaps you wondered why my looks made me exotica. It didn't. But you wore a leopard print dress with a long slit splitting personalities. Insidious. Wicked. I watched you get off. I watched you, dissipate, like a black skirt of the alleys. A hint of fantasy.

If I have to talk about the human condition, the philosophy of thoughts or rationale, or why some are allergic to cats and peanuts, I must first mystify with redundancy. For there is magic of illusion and the magic of magic minus theorem of logic plus one. And if reality was only to be quantified in pinches, it would reduce minimalism to its minions. But I am much more. I am not my fashion or earrings, or a flash of legs or a sparkle of eyes, I am not my smile or my senile. I am more, much more, sometimes measured in tears, sometimes in smiles..tiny introductions..

"recounting Diderots fallacy of the ephemeral"

What time is it now?
What time since you left with my timekeeper, my grandmother's sand...
since they deemed loneliness as some strange contrived persecution of self..
or since the pollen from the sun reduced to dust or the sad graffiti of our crawl.
My lone guitar thumps a rhythm of a gasping heart, a lost child in the woods of despair...
If these lungs held freedom, where would they end? What would they envelope? Precipitate?
Even a cage breathes within a corsetry of death and the blowing off of an afternoon candle....
Oh sing me the poor girls song, of fugitive dreams and lost earrings,
a fools cry echoing within white seashells,
or simply yet...
shatter me like porcelain rage,
….swaddling your time,
for what is time, now
what is time nowhere?

---

So I started reading Alan Watts last night at bed and boy (9) says 'mama read it out loud'. So I do, and after 10 pages, I tell him 'tomorrow, let's sleep now, did you like it?' And to my surprise the kid says 'yes, I do like it'..

Ash Smith

To nick the rent on this loss with language  .  name   .  plate under everything that bleeds  .  cake pink sky  . hunger is a touch  .  needed colors  .  happen outside the frame the name purports and otherwise  .  Spinoza’s third kind of perception gets wired  .  bird coded  .  to make fabric erasures  .  written where you move  .  small snips to rend the stitchwork out  .  slowly from the speed of work  .   until it’s the kind of sky that lets you see it’s knees is a mistake I made in hurt from perception  . look where the money isn’t  .   autumn pulls out the threads  .  said a kind of relationship made by wrahseling  .  to stop from falling  .  spring blinks the green wires behind our eyes  .  into the flailing red of forever  .  double February  . come back  .  as if to act   " infinite series of first kisses"

___

Brando’s hands on the pigeon’s body  .  a note we could hit but couldn’t hold   bright green leaf and freeze  .  big love   . little diamond  .  like you could stand up for everyone at once by making oneself exceedingly small as the measure of loneliness  .  measured the distance from my bed to the past like a sextet  .  measure to the mountains . to the larger water .  we push our apps together  .  to be the metaphor for something already on the inside  .   or if I could grow my hair long enough, Crystal Gale long, I might not fall through the cracks of commonness  . but for the want to be common  .  full grey body of the shared world  .  on closer inspection, the feathers connected  .  I am my own lice  . we push our apps together . She stood on the other side of the chain link  .  and because the frame stopped, stood there forever  . the little grey bird face wasn’t a mirror  .  he held it’s body to to the fence like a heart

___

Cracked open the Lord with a verse  .  to write this book   .  I must disintegrate   .  calamus / reeds (née Kalamos)  . sethe fronds .  In the story the two boys love each other  .  one drowns when swimming and the other drowns in grief  .  becomes a reed .  calls now in whisper work  .  lament  .  the word means “pen”  . then .  the way the sound of the place of our arrival never comes wholly at once  .  the wingspan of  .   hear  .  baby high five  .  heaven in pieces .  circle of extraction surrounded by down  .  I missed you  .  still kind green clearing  .  née airborne body  . grooved plumage the needle caresses  .  I hoped we meant  .  red  .  red light  .   light glistening in the lower branches  .  small avalanche of light in the heart  .  to write this book I must reform myself in the shape of it’s large sound  . reptilian weave at the tongue .   throw the ladders of skin down from these zeros  above the beak  .  we’re just projecting into a absence like we could mean more by taking off everything on fire . but your house is made of air  .  of the thing that feeds it  .  you in the shadows who wore that water well  . Like Spicer’s swallow so: “How can I wound you with my well of sounds / if he can sleep and dream beneath it’s wounds?”  these bird rehearsals  .   to call when somethings gone  . that speak like paper fingers  .  to the body’s meat  .  

___

Utopia is so emotional -- Lisa Robertson

sound hones a road home

no

rolled oars bore holes in the ocean of my heart
printed on a street poster and worn in

to by the cotton erasure

weather makes a vocabulary of decay

for which the feathers fell

reflected on the water

time takes a kitten eraser to the space between leaves

The way one might expand by misunderstanding

one's own desires

as if spilling from our mouths

I wanted to explain what the ache felt like
to come in the century behind writing

standing behind the long, wide L

if by a low script texted

if by the author emptied

this language that made me radiant and mere
as a screen in mediation

then to lack the assets to still the sea
as a woman walking so not to die

that a salt-like lucite became our resource

for divining the animal back into speech

or rather “No day shall erase you from
the memory of time.”(Vigil) So that what time

remembers we can forget.

Every poem is something you can’t get rid of

scrape me from your eyes

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Ash Smith recently moved into the green arms of east Austin. Daily activities include cooking weird things, stepping on Legos, laughing, forgetting jokes, making kimchi, decrying injustice, planting cat grass, murder ballads, and making out.

Michelle Detorie

Reading from a Coincidence of Wants with drummer Chris Cogburn. Filmed by Ash Smith in November, 2007 at the OK Mountain gallery in Austin, TX.

THE MEAT WORLD

Courtship is another word for slaughter.

Mud-blood hip-deep. I kept winter

in the bones of my right arm. I sent

you a shaft in an old glass vial.  The note

attached said “cry here.” The tears came

so easily that year.

My body is always open now, and there 

are all these arrows hanging from our skins,

crawled up growl-howling.

This is what it’s like to be a girl.

SOLSTICE

Moon blood in the fox hollow;

fox hole a type of fantasy.

We envy the fox and her magnificent stink.

Take off the cloth, wear 

an ink dark tree in your rib 

bones. When you breathe

a little hollow — holler out 

your want-needles, your wish-

bones,  dolls made out  of dollars

who teeter-totter like little daughters. Dot 

in the fox eye, blood moon, slit near 

the pupil. Our room contracts. Convex

in the crumb maze, the fur loom. 

Sweep out the ash bin and see those ravens 

there circling the half-bloom, roving the scar-light 

with dark feathers curled in script.

I stoke embers and spark the air-dark blooms 

that hid our marrows for 30 days. I let you lick

me just a little. My fingers fed us through the weather.

Cast a dance to make us free. Your eyes pull down 

the walls but I burn them before

they even touch the ground. 

BLINK WITCH

I stick-click my way to the door that hinges on a hair

of bone, flossing antlers under-cover of water black

with blood-mud. The girth of a whale is broad and full

and is inked in unbelievable sadness. A crow perched

on the rib of when we were less lonely, mast fluttering

horizons where fins slid, slicing them open like loose

nets. All this talk about confession and forgiveness:

it tires me, flattens us. 

The truth is that I love you no matter what.

It’s so obvious birds write in with their wings

and bees sing it with their buzz.  & yet I’ve lost 

you in the snow drift — the thread I threw

was red for just a minute. In the blinding

snow-light I consider joining the cemetery’s colony 

of feral cats. I’m only guessing that they’d have me.

from Sin in Wilderness

---

Michelle's animal familiar is a little white dog named Sarah. They like to listen to Kurt play the guitar. 

Amy Catanzano

from a play within a play within a dream in MEPO: A Conceptual Memoir from Loveland

I first saw you on the Moon near the flag, but you didn’t see me. Our paths crossed again on a transport mission to Mars. You were inspecting a fuel cell near the warp drive. I was dressed in roses. You love Gertrude Stein, so you noticed me. 

You were wearing a jet pack strewn with stars. I was fixing the Ritchey-Chretien Cassegrai Optical Telescope Assembly. You were preparing to steer one of the spacecraft systems. I was too shy to Hubble over to you. 

I very much enjoyed our conversation at the Justice League/Justice Society Crossover Dance. It’s too bad that we were interrupted by the crisis on infinite earths. You have my contact information. Hopefully there will be no continuity problems.

I can’t stop thinking about our conversation at the Theoretical Biochemistry Institute when I was preparing my presentation on how a radio wave aimed at a Pyrex test tube containing solutions of 0.1 to 30 percent salt, held upright by a Teflon stand, and individually introduced into the radio frequency cavity produces an unexpected spark. Needless to say, I was delighted to hear that you, too, will be attending the annual Thermoluminescence conference later this year. I’ll be staying at the conference hotel under the name, “Electrolytic Epitaxy.” 

It is unfortunate that you weren’t able to attend the Thermoluminescence conference after all. I’m sad about the continuity problems, but I guess that’s the way it goes. I’m at the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, anyway, so no matter. Catch ya at the Kroger—

Naturally I considered Slavoj Žižek’s comments about the reality of the virtual when I received your abecedarian poem from the heliopause. According to my calculations, you are currently 12 billion miles from the sun and have traveled 117 to 177 times the distance from the sun to the Earth. You are in the space between stars. We are suspended in language. 

Even before I became authorless you suggested that questions are a form of measurement. Matter is comprised of subatomic particles, and we cannot know the present position of any particle without ambiguity. Thus, the most accurate answer to the question, “Where are you”? is “Now.”

I completely adore what you did to the field data! Leapt we edit. Worlds are cited. Love is a feeling that allows the 1s and 0s to usurp their respective positions until there is no position. Or, as Mina Loy says, “Dilation has entirely eliminated/your long reality.”

Just because you traveled a specific distance in space does not mean you traveled the same distance in time. Time dilation in relativity is measured by observers, but we know from quantum mechanics that observers are part of the measurement. In other words, MEASURE THIS!

As a surrealist I never really saw you on the Moon. As an anarchist I was not dressed exclusively in roses. As a pacifist and critical thinker, I love Gertrude Stein. We bought Gatorade at the Kroger. 

Long-spacetime-distance relationships can be difficult. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge says, “You give him the light mesh of your longing, which makes distance blue.” She is evoking what’s known as redshift, the way that time in space is measured using the light spectrum. Or, as Gertrude Stein explains to children, “When mountains are really true they are blue.”

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Amy Catanzano loves HEART. 

Suzanne Mercury

Red Honeysuckle

Rabbit, Memory

A change of wind, or did I move

       too suddenly this time —

                     a rabbit runs in and then out of sight

runs into the rain-soaked weeds, there, like this —

       permanently startled  at the edge of one place

                                                             among many places.

The only thing moving between the light

                                                 and the grass —

It is the light between grass.

Machinery of legs,

              soundless, sudden.

As when its feet, running          easily turn the earth

                      as if to red jasper

                 as if to evening, changing its way

                                    into black, heightened by longing

I want its weight to be enough

       to keep me

                      on the earth longer.

This is the kick:           

Those legs are powerful            amplified

                           to the size of our strangeness.

Lengthening,

               lengthening as it runs —

My Petit Hôtel

The interior is the empty carapace of a crab

                  reduced to paper and breath        almost cerulean

Each room curled around the other,

expanding in precise increments.

A claw.        

Light folding in the corners.

You can get lost here

                               unseen hands have stolen your coat

leaving behind  child’s

                   baptismal gown       and the footprints of birds.

You can fly by yourself —

           go with your dreams entangled in your hair.

Stele For My Brother

My brother comes to me, hands held out.  There are pine needles

cupped in his palm, arranged in the shape

of a bird.

                  Some things are like this:  Asleep, lit up

in the hundred shades of dark that exist only in dreams,

the ghosts of  birds flying away at will.

                                                       He does not speak:

But then he calls me by my childhood name:

Suzie, this is our father, he says.

He holds up the pine needles, hands extended

giving them to me.

                    Dark against dark, a fish that shines suddenly

showing its eyes before turning, and then

         the leaf-moving light on his hands.

But I am hesitant to take them from him:

the pine needles would become disordered,

              no longer in the shape of a bird, and thus

                                                     no longer our father.

          I will never get used to these damned resurrections —

Gravity gets us all in the end               And in the end

We are a pine needles in a dream

                     looking frantically for the switch that always keeps moving

           around, and that will make it all happen again

— Knock, knock

— Who’s there?

— It’s me, Dad

— It’s me Dad who?

— Dad, why does God torture us?

— Suzie, the happiest people are the ones who don’t ask these damned questions. Also there is no God. I can verify that since I am dead

— Oh. Goodnight then

— Goodnight

Bluefish

When I think of the bluefish, I see it pushing

against the wave, holding the immensity of the sky inside.

Its gills flap open then shut     and become

part of the face.

                                Hunger brings it to the surface,

to the place between

black and silver and black coming off against the wave.

We try to hide our atrocities, and fail         insatiable.

We say we want    other worlds

            red at the center

       breaking the surface, the long fin            extended

                                                    then vanishing.

Something made by a planet, it is the star, staring back at us,

wave inside wave        inside

clear, inside

                    unsolved —

Modern Moonlight

And the full moon, a bright muscle in summer,

                                                                  a smear of silver in the sky, there.

Let me make a map to it with spider thread:

Its shadow shines beneath the beneath

                                                               and the beneath of it all —

keeping me awake and transcendent.

The moon is fast, and show through as —

         

          a root pressed against glass  

          refusing confinement

And the wind pounding the screen open and shut against the doorjamb calls out:

                If only, if only    then

                            Goodbye, goodbye

How far we run together in one night,

pulling the sea behind us.

The machinery is wonderful. One lever does it all!

How bright we are for awhile here,

and for awhile       how brief         brief

              and so bright      until lost, whited out, to

                                       the sun’s duration.

From Variations on the Metaphysical

(A cutout poem, based upon the work of George Herbert; huge liberties taken)

O Mortal Heat  

              O Flame

Less fire:

                 Consume our World:

And such as our Lust

kindled                 shall leave us panting

Heart upon heart devoured

                   And devoured again:

Then shall our inventions

     Send fire again        O flame!

             Our eyes see dust          blown kind

To our wits shall we bow and rise

Touch lips and

        Sing praise with

                            our eyes.

originally published in Summer Stock

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Suzanne Mercury lives in Boston where she she is an impassioned flânuer, gardener, lucid dreamer, and maker of strange objects.