Three Poems by William Allegrezza

Invocation

depth

finder, cartographer

of lake bottoms, 

oceans,

speak to 

me now of 

the 

many ways 

we can avoid

the 

quick misstep

into the deep,

the 

covering over 

of these selves. 

The Wind Song 

we spoke 

a number we remember

like fires 1256

spreading and dust

came as we stopped breathing. 

our companions grew political (when

we wanted to grow human).  the air

filled with ash. 

we walked as the only thing we knew

-- our path lost to us; the canals shifted.

Spoke

The plate speaks, and I hear

as wash, as slippage, a current

through glass with clear finger tips

touching smooth surfaces,

a stainless mechanism that breaks,

that heats and explores light.

Our lineage followed is obscured 

and flips through memories of 

other kitchen colors where conversations

remain lost in green and yellow

reconstructed with fences and gravel.  

I turn my head and speak while

the others turn a face away

as human but without warmth or belief. 

Two Poems by E. Jesse Capobianco

Lub Lub Goose

 

My tongue stays wet inside my mouth,

and when there is air there is a podunk

little sea under the skin of my face and my tongue

rests there it takes a floppy bath.

 

But I think about my jaw and how it

sits just off my want-jaw and how the

low jaw right side teeth ridge curves in,

a mountain range bashful of a lake.

 

And when I sit myself like a tongue

in the filthy face hole ocean my

tongue in tongue sits in wet in dry

and the whole sky lives a circus inside me.

 

I gulp it like a tiny church built

on a dry God-wafer. I speak face to face

with God every day and I burn like

Moses with shame He speaks

 

in quatrains and I have learned to bracket

my sadness when I masturbate. I bought

three dogs and gave them a choice:

here is a tongue here is a wet lily here

is the scent of a star.

 

They took their time they barked they

barked a lot, I grow tired every evening

brings me closer to every evening here,

take my temperature away give me

 

a nod give me a twinkle give me

some sign you can hear me and see

the flash of God’s voice off my stretchy skin.

Janus of the Cranes

 

              swing one too long metal face

              at the hinge of another and swing

 

              me spaghetti squash noodle unspool

              me and make me feel pain

I can only pass on my belongings

 

from the me in memory to me

if first the counterweights rumble

              and the hot tear of your flat grin

              and the angry oil gleam of your skin

 

              time is a string of metonyms

              and the self is a popcorn wreath

with the small sucking mouth baby

feeling its way from kernel to kernel

 

this is the best pizza in new york

              Janus of the Cranes allow me

              to keep my sentiment or barring that

allow me to forget

 

 

E. Jesse Capobianco

This She-Wolf Is a Reward to My Kinsman by Mark Leidner

Appearing on a coin dated 480 AD, “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman” is said to be the oldest known sentence in English.

Berlin is closer to Moscow than Madrid by more than 200 kilometers.

C is the chemical formula of every diamond.

Dead people outnumber the living 14 to 1.

Eva Perón was the first Argentinian to receive chemotherapy.

Farmworkers in California were unable to access unemployment insurance when Armstrong walked on the moon.

God originates in German or Norse and has no tie to any language family related to the Mediterranean cultures in which the Abrahamic religions took root.

Hitchcock’s Psycho marked the first on-screen appearance of a toilet in mainstream American cinema.

In an elephant’s trunk are more muscles than in the human body.

Julius Caesar appears in only three scenes of Julius Caesar, not counting the scene in which Caesar’s ghost appears.

Kuebiko is the state of exhaustion brought on by awareness of senseless acts of violence. 

Lachesism is the longing to experience a disaster you narrowly survive. 

Mosquitos buzz at 450-500 hertz, roughly equivalent to the musical note A, the note to which most orchestras tune before a concert.

Neural impulses take 80 milliseconds to reach the brain, locating the phenomena we call the “present” about 80 milliseconds in the past.

Only 12% of hands in poker are won by a player holding the best cards.

Pollen particles of the peace lily are poisonous to people. 

Queen Cleopatra's life was closer in time to the moon landing than to the construction of the Pyramids of Giza. 

Romeo and Juliet are only on stage together for about 14 minutes.

Salem is a front-clipped abbreviation of Jerusalem.

The far side of the moon is the hemisphere that never faces Earth; the dark side of the moon is the hemisphere that isn’t currently facing the sun; they are only the same during the full moon.

Ulysses S. Grant was cast as and rehearsed the part of Desdemona in a U.S. Army staging of Othello in Corpus Christi, TX during the Mexican-American war, but because the white army officer cast to play Othello, a diffident method actor, claimed that he could not convincingly portray desire for Desdemona knowing she was actually Grant, the U.S. Army fired Grant from the role and replaced him with an actress from New Orleans. 

Verdigris, the toxic green pigment associated with the Statue of Liberty, comes from the French “vert de gris” or “green of Greece,” so named because the practice of tarnishing copper to achieve the pigment (for scraping off to use in jewelry and other artforms) was widespread in ancient Greece.

Water crickets have occasionally evolved to taste so bad that trout spit them out unharmed.

X, the third least frequent letter in English behind Q and Z, appears in only fifteen hundredths of one percent of words.

Your average honeybee produces over the course of its life about one-twelfth a teaspoon of honey. 

Zorro is Spanish for fox.

Mark Leidner

Two Poems by Byron Xu

30% oxygen extubation

it is not so much freedom but a pulmonary edema 

it is not so much a pulmonary edema

but the wrought cliche of butterflies in your chest

her mother half-sick would recollect a memory

a birthday party

like dross from a magician’s hat the theremin screaming

of a child stumbling upon his father dead

to you to you

a gift for you. 

though the orphan couldn’t know this

until the coroner pulled in softly inside 

his father’s lungs

broke the ashy foam-wash like coke-mentos 

he had breathed those carcinogens in so deep so practiced

for the anatomy of a car exhaust is three steps removed

from a bong and a bong is one short hop

from the fragrance of bdellium. 

both require a tired human

to place her hand gently atop the mouthpiece 

like the stillicide of children 

as if a line can be drawn between mist and haze or from infancy

we learn to seek the hard arithmetic first 

well 

i am seeking now 

father 

so forgive me for what i become 

for the hospital beds. forgive 

my emphysema for my hunger.

 

 

 

like ships, passing

her ex of three years ago

slid into her dm’s, said wassup

i think you were the love of my life.

she laughed. but maybe,

moments earlier, before sending anything,

his thumbs had hovered over the keys

the way his dad used to toss him

into the community pool:

a kid hovered over

a finite, pale sea

my therapist says i seek relationships with insecure men by Madeline Langan

we seem to have gone off script

let me remind you:

the girl in the elevator with that beanie i’ve seen everywhere asks “what floor?” the doorman tells me to “have a nice day” the cashier at the deli across the street doesn’t say anything actually he just gives me my sandwich with this sort of funny look and a nod my therapist asks “why do you think you do that” taps a pen on his desk peers at me i'm stiff i don't know my friend asks “so what’s all of this about?” gestures vaguely the man on the street asks if i want to buy any roses the woman in front of me in the pharmacy line doesn’t turn around doesn’t ever meet me but i could hear her name and date of birth steal it really if i wanted to i don’t i'm sluggishly slumped drudging my feet forward in this line

(this is when i feel most human)

and you - you say:

            “so i’ve been thinking about, you know,

            how this all started and 

            i’m still really into you

            and everything, like

            i think you’re so cool

but i just don’t think i can

‘do’ exclusivity

right now

i swear to god i wasn’t, like,

trying to lead you on

or anything

and, um, that’s why i’m being honest

even if, you know,

the timing seems bad,

and”

if this is the case,

why do i still feel your hand on my waist

(this is when i feel least human)

 

 

Madeline Langan