Four Poems by Mark Young

Curriculum Vitae

 

beginning:

 

her father was

an orthopaedic

surgeon, her

mother a relaunched

hippy. both were un-

imaginative. she

grew up

footloose &

fancy free.

 

intermission:

 

patience

wears thin

through prolonged

use. it should be

changed at

least every other

day or

sooner

if you

can’t stand

waiting.

 

end:

 

the night.

the left-over

layers

 

 

A / Pilgrim Father / walks past Mar-a-Lago

 

The granaries are choked

with fervor. Dust spills

& spreads, excludes the sky,

occludes the light. A virtual

night I walk & talk through,

articulated limbs but un-

articulated fears. In some

strange manner I’ve become

 

a reluctant pedestrian on

someone else’s treadmill. Have

found myself, have found

myself to be what I am

most afraid of. Uncertain.

& these are certain times.

 

 

La Carriole du Père Junier

 

A week late I finally

get around to turning

over the calendar. De-

cember in this collection

of loose impressionists

is represented by the

pompous toll-collector,

Le Douanier, Henri

 

Rousseau. It cheers me

up immediately. But what

a waste. My depression

could have been carried

away in Father Junier's

cart seven days ago.

 

 

After Cézanne

 

Two peaches

one orange

two nectarines

four kiwifruit

one green apple

two red apples

 

a white bowl

side table

clear satin varnish

a light burnish of dust.

 

One peach

one nectarine

three kiwifruit

one green apple

one red apple

 

a white bowl

side table

clear satin varnish

fingermarks.

Two Poems by Tim Frank

How to Vote

Fold an injured pigeon

and hurl it at the fridge.

Allow the bird to stagger

down a sewer

made of spoons.

It’ll vote

inside a phone box

for a leader dressed in Brie.

Beware, little children!

freedom is a hoax

a void of faceless blurs.

Heading South 

Satellites are falling

Like frogs

In sand and sweat.

You quote the Psalms

Like Stanley Kubrick

Wearing boxing gloves.

So, choke on your chubby thumbs

Vomit up your pills,

It will take you

Beyond your sickness

To a mind

Heading south.

The sun isn’t yellow it’s chicken,

And it’s so hot

It makes you want to dash

Your skull against the mirror.

Your name is Bob,

Like it always was.

Two Poems by Joshua Martin

supposed a souvenir robe of surveillance

 
Opaque respiratory decades refuse breakfast
translations in favor of code names lurking in
a bearded itching orphanage. Loose fired tones
crudely interactive. As the bounty purges damp
barometers of oak. Gourds hint at a breezy
decapitation. Stomach, a barnacle, tenderized
and quivering. An unheard-of thorax blamed
like satchels of snowflake melons.
 
Reversed carbon peeling before pushing. Hoist,
unknown, an unpleasant clump like a sound
effect. Restricted asteroids unavoidable. The
business side of magazine hubris, a telephone
lightning tidal wave farewell splinter. Into the
astronomical villages. Membership, wit,
exhumed desert surrounding mimed semi-
pregnant alloys.
 
Magic alphabetic whisks. To what end of the
bleeding spectrum ontology. Psychotic drama.
Plugged psychedelic horns blandly dyspeptic.
Caseloads of subcutaneous empires.   
 
Confusing retinal prose with insights. Subtitle, 
a shivering calendar of celebratory cycles.
 
Blunt cases of the abyss. Impending forceps,
freely hesitated. What makes qualms? A
theoretical massacre. Ongoing. Forced plat-
forms. Nodding and clandestine. Thus, worn,
especially, furiously unlikeable, a tattooed
salary radically generalized. Statehoods of
confusion. Uncontestable discs. Versatile
atmospheric intestines.
 
An account of giggling creeds. Pressurized
stampeding beehives. Exterior: dogma. Interior:
irrationality. Cloning logistics and consumed
satires. Signs, visions, an awkward tension
tangled in a fishhook commentary.
 
Introductory fetish backdrop. Nationwide
slayings, brutal leftovers, rejected duels
rejecting narcissistic preoccupations. By
wheels, dusks, thereupon continuously
scheming to stretch tightropes across the
rippling earlobes vaguely a corporatized
biscuit. Crusty epochs. Historical raging
aqueduct. Atlantic, ascending Monica Vitti
nautical closed-captioning.
 
Rivals. Renaissance miniatures causing
seaweed paraphernalia. What replied the
pausing zigzags? Radio feline placebo.
Speechless as a gazebo madrigal bruising
comic book elbow levitation crematorium.
Stroking bottles. Dyslexia on the verge of
a smokestack asparagus redundancy.
Processing edges, submerged arabesques.
Sky lamps, no need for scales or shores or
buzzing ribcage of incandescence. The
rubber doll cracked open and swallowed
like an amputated jug of howling hallelujah
catharsis.
 
Wire crossed chambers stenciled like an
operational shotgun bump. Flashlight, so
what demands a blank lamppost critique?
Sloppily challenged, an actual refutation.
Aside, astray, decapitated instead of a
supposition.

Chosen to Perform a Subsonic Ritual
 
Paleolithic hiccups blush velvet curtains
preserved in amber dunk tanks painted
beyond descriptive allowance. Combat
migraine jet engine armoire. Revoke!
Magnum opus to the stars.
 
A river of blended termites stunned,
disturbed, pacified. Wealth redistributed.
The way is downward. Surface dwelling
octopus inversion. Crusted hemispheres
and syncopated pools of lemon.
 
Misanthropic dock strikes hyperbolic belly
aching wrinkles. Above, left for recessive
crouching. Moth without a scarf. Middle
passage catacomb debts. Itching fists.
 
The last-minute morsels harming an
inchworm dialectic. Well, that withers
before becoming stretchmarks on an
armchair delirium. Your appendage
crashes into a cucumber asteroid while
the clubfooted pelvis reverts to an
appendectomy.
 
Round and blushing shrimp dial black
hole factory tornadoes. A bit. A Venn
diagram. After dark, the flamethrowers
eroticize excessive topsoil mirrors.
Shrouded hummingbirds are found
stacked to the whirlwind. An old column
hysterically daydreaming. Treadmill
skeleton. Above the traveling manuscripts,
the heat lamps cough before screeching
and finally abandoning claustrophobia.
 
Fringe, pitiful poetic ramblings. Intercity
neon bicycle cavalcade. This shark, buried
with a whip, can crackle rhetorically
while invoking Stockholm. Inventories,
allowable poking, and x-ray primitives.
What exists that does not wheeze? A
detailed circumstance. Pig weather.
 
Baseline swirl, the rumbling octagon
dwells without cyclical kidney failure.
A bright obscurity. Manifesto anus.
What, an inner seal?
 
Rabid chamber orchestras emerging
in the smug bloodstream while down-
trodden turnips recite earwax psalms
into the knowing and ravaged void.
A paper doesn’t scatter nor do spirals
cease defined catastrophes. Reflect, a
suction cup dancing beneath a sheet
of scorched fleas. An unchanged torso
reasonably gravitational.

Joshua Martin

Two Poems by Craig Kirchner

The Abyss

 

There is no eternal, closest is the cosmos,

continuing to push and grow into any finite.

Revelation begins with a cry for retribution,

the fourth seal is the rider of death

followed closely, immediately by Hades,

the nightmare of the first three,

the savagery of man slaughtering man.

 

The seal that follows speaks of natural disaster,

fires, misery to all they touch - California

knows this inferno, the purgatory of nothing left,

the death of the apocalypse.

Siberia lost 55 million acres, Australia’s

hellfire took 61,000 koalas.

The planet was the hottest it’s been

and immediately broke its own record.

 

It is not eternal damnation that should be feared.

It is the abyss of the present, unleashed

by the heat burning our homes, boiling our oceans,

the grand denier of these truths,

his cult hugging the flag and party sycophants

sacrificing the future, sucking on power,

searching for spine amid their state’s ruins.

 

 

Acid Year

  

Being raised had become foreign,

not real, not mine, no growth,

someone else’s field.

I had become a weed,

in need of a modest, naïve

pilgrimage in search of self.

 

I didn’t know a want or plan

only that there was a trail.

It didn’t go far or last long,

but it was in another direction,

with forks that would beg me to make

the wrong turn, go the wrong way.

 

Nothing changed, nothing was the same,

roads still had red lights,

entrances still said Do Not Enter.

Tuned in, dropped out to proclaim newness,

wanting to plant seeds of enlightenment,

that would grow wherever I slept.

 

The thought of home,

made the return journey easier.

A need to walk through old doors,

the desire was a simple sentence,

with hinges and knobs

that always opened on request.

 

Years later it was a footnote,

stories to laugh about at wakes.

The Xmas tree upside down until Easter.

The green mescaline was the best -

God came out of the sidewalk as trees,

the neighborhood was never the same.

Craig Kirchner

The Rescue, by Joseph Cooper

After years of living alone I finally decided to visit the shelter. The woman at the desk greeted me, and after filling out some paperwork she brought me to meet their rescues. “I’m sorry,” she said looking around. “It seems that all we have left is this purple blob.” I looked inside the cage and watched the purple blob tremble and shimmer. “Apparently, it comes from a long line of purebred blobs, but nobody seems to want it.” “Not even you?” I asked. “I have two cats,” she said, “and besides, purple blobs are very territorial.” I stuck my finger into the cage and the purple blob gently absorbed it up to the knuckle. “I think it likes you,” she said. I took the purple blob home, fed it, played with it, and that night as we were lying in bed I thought I saw a slight glimmer of light coming from inside the purple blob. I pressed my face against it, allowing the purple blob to absorb me. The light in the distance was fuzzy and seemed to be interrupted by passing shadows. When I withdrew my face it was covered in a clear, thin, and odorless fluid. Then the light seemed to expand and quiver, so I pressed my face deeper into it and once my head had been completely submerged the muscular force of the purple blob compelled me forward. I heard the muffled sounds of a young woman screaming and I was pulled even deeper into the purple blob, into the ever-expanding light. Suddenly, there were hands all over me, lodging my shoulders free of the trembling blob, the light now so bright I couldn’t even open my eyes. In a moment I was pulled completely through the purple blob and I too began screaming and crying. The hands placed me on the young woman’s breast and as she kissed my forehead I could feel the memories of my life slipping away…my apartment…my job…my first love…even the purple blob itself.

Joseph Cooper