One Poem by Donovan Reyes

spooky

lit up like a Christmas tree two sky-
scraping sticks burning wraith-white, star-
spangled pale within coalseared woods;
this immolated ghost winks at me, furiously. 

Four Poems by Mark Young

Olbers & the Okapi

 

The okapi survives

through excellent

camouflage. That

& the fact it is the

 

only antelope who

has ever puzzled

over Heinrich Ol-

bers's paradox —

 

if the universe is

infinite & full of

stars, why is the

sky dark at night?

 

 

A / newt's first / law of motion

 

The problem

with being

amphibious

is I can never

remember

whether it’s

the coach

driver or

the dive

coach that’s

supposed

to be looking

after me. 

 

 

Ambit ions

 

Using a

locator

spell, I

track down

my absent

imagination

 

& find it is

currently

a charged

particle

in the queue

waiting to

 

audition

for Ameri-

can Idol.

 

 

Open Letter Operetta

(A Tom Beckett Title)

Librettist:

You don't need a
letter opener to
open a letter when
it's an open letter.

Director:

That's great! Now if we repeat that a number of times then that's the operetta half-written already. What characters did you have in mind?

Librettist:

Was thinking of a cheated-on partner as lead, a mezzo-soprano, a bit of a Taylor Swift voice. Other characters would include the non-singing postal worker who brought a letter from the partner in which they admit their cheating & end with an unapologetic goodbye. The contents of the letter could be sung by the departing partner from a position near the back of the stage.

To go with that, perhaps partly performed as a contrapuntal overlap with the preceding:

Today the post-
woman brought
me a letter from my
ex-partner. I will

not open it be-
cause I am al-
ready aware of
what it will say.

To follow on, we have a scene where the spurned spouse sings or speaks their response as they post it to Facebook or another platform since something that appears on social media can be framed as an open letter for contemporary times.

We must, however, in order to adhere to the spirit of an operetta, retain some comedic aspects even though this is essentially a sad piece. Perhaps introduce a chorus who individually comment on the response, &, collectively, interrupt with a repetitive response such as "letter opener, open letter" or "never getting back together again."

Two Poems by Tim Frank

Fighting the Flat

It’s a vague summer’s night

In this damp concrete cage

Where the light creeps and crawls

Like an undulating beast.

My wife drinks Prosecco

From a battered Stanley cup

Curled up by the wall,

Always by a wall.

There’s a vivid TV set,

Jousting with the moon,

Poking at my bones.

I smoke Superkings—fistfuls,

Glowing in the gloom

And I formulate a plan

To set the flat on fire,

Then dream of outer-space.

Diplomacy

 

I’m a diplomat for eastern moods

And long-distance calls.

I barter with the tourists

In airports

Overdubbed with German

Laughing through the fog.

Come to me and groan,

Roast your native flags,

Then sink into a bath.

Listen to the waves

In high rise ghetto blocks

And slip your headphones on.

That’s the sound of freedom flashing

In coded rhythmic claps—

Just don’t forget my name.

Take this situation:

Stuck in blistered traffic

Everybody spits

In fake contagious comas.

I seize a peace agreement

From the fists of certain doom.

I’m a genuine pro-wrestler

An actor on the stage,

Give me all your money,

I won’t forget your name.

Five Poems by Glenn Bach

from Atlas

the triumph of the idea

that breaks the water

something useful: do the houses

touch for cities building up

Mulholland and disintegration

in greater detail / in our collective memory

of Los Angeles who occupies

a central place

do the trees provide the shade

we need

do the garden shadow homes become

do the mockingbird / is singing

severe

like a stone in the sea as the story

takes a turn: disaster looms large

disaster be free

 

 

 

+++++

 

 

 

and is quiet at night.

The first to be discovered

Mandalay: within the anticline

the sand units pinch out

but you don’t)

can walk past them along the

beautiful empty beach is a short walk

the terrain save for berms

and dunes at shoreline

freezes occur

rarely (signs say you need

have a view of the ocean

because of the dunes

several littered items and evidence

of last night’s parties

(and less private) the talk

was on bats

and the sand so clean.

 

 

 

+++++

 

 

 

For light and by bark. After

native shade for the thorns for the

dappled road. Consider the soil

or any plant that suffers

from stress. With rays of lavender

and yellow centers. Disorder

to keep in mind. In bloom

growing white woodland

pictured on a soft-focus

background. Starved or side-

flowering. With staking a rich

backdrop to shorter plantings

in the dappled shade

by thick rhizomes. Like yarrow

and anise hyssop near

stems to the ground. Sets

of true leaves work the soil

down. New growth is the signal

to keep the rooting stem. Deepens

to bronze. To seed. To tufts

by the wind dispersed.

 

 

 

+++++

 

 

 

Sand-borne down foothills of wool those great days of sheep.

The hungry maw of that canyon clay of the ground. Artesian

wells in this village cascade of drought or true spirit.

A striking appearance from the sea. In the shape of good

words and wishes for the greater part of the year.

Plenty to brag of surprises by our city’s land through miles

of beach fronting. Who swelters in the dry atmosphere

of the West. Post littoral striking in a city on its fringe.

Barring an exceptional year of a cruel frost. Edge of edges

in diagonal evidence of the community’s proof of railways.

Reach for the pure air when survivors mute of some intimacy.

Newly wed and the nearly dead upon these parcels of change.

The shore fringed with a haze the only break in the vista.

 

 

 

+++++

 

 

 

aground) of fill and paved

thick with piers

in a contested space like the coast

otherwise be swept out

or surfacing beneath

the incoming

ice rapidly melting. The surest sign

to mirror the outline

of the island (there are

so many dead trees). To invest

in shorelines

that embrace the tides

Glenn Bach

Four Poems by Mark Young

They signed both documents

 

I like to eat either chicken or beef.

Neither is grammatically correct.

Which of those fur coats is yours?

 

This homemade chicken liver pâté

is a real hit. The mink style is often

associated with Hollywood. Mari-

 

lyn Monroe adored wearing real fur

coats, but wearing vintage fur can

be controversial. Consider getting a

 

coat in nutria (Myocastor coypus Mo-

lina), made from the fur of an intro-

duced noxious pest that is destroying

 

thousands of acres of southern US

wetlands. Have you asked about

the fur coat scam out of the trunk of

 

a BMW? Pâté is a French terrine of

seasoned ground meat. Some see it

as a way to honor the animal. Others

 

find it unethical & fill their capsule

cosy wardrobe with the new faux fur

line. Just $734, but often out of stock.

 

 

 

The beguine begins

 

In his lonely room

he sings the songs

of Cole Porter to

the wall. 24/7 in the

modern tongue, in

the old, night & day.

 

 

 

Promenade

 

oblivious to          he walked

       absorbing

fragments      aspects of

 the street  sk  stars  y

             without pause

     without pausing to

look                       listen

           content

    to take everything in

                  osmotically

   potsherds        to be

    putbacktogetheragain

later        into            shapes

          they never were

 

 

 

A line from Samuel R. Delany

 

There is a  link between societal cri-

sis situations & belief in conspiracy

theories. Stresses in the earth's outer

layer push the sides of the fault line

 

together. Sensory overload is real.

It's a subject they kept on talking

about, considering it an area that

shouldn't be neglected. Believing in

 

something paranormal is no longer

rare, if it ever was. Radio silence can

trigger insecurity; there is no articu-

late resonance. The one escape, the

 

populist belief that only politicians

still use it to mock & dismiss allega-

tions against them & draw attention

away from the inner corners of their

 

eyes. We mere mortals use a brown eye-

liner that blends in much better with skin.

The politician, however, who feels loss

more profoundly than we experience an

 

equal gain, settles only for an ultra creamy,

dual-ended, & intense pigment gel-feel hybrid

eyeliner pencil that delivers 24hr smooth,

smudge-proof wear, in just one stroke.

Two Poems by Joshua Martin

Dry and Simultaneously Entombed in Gnawed Saltwater
 
Haven blast microbe punctuation marks watching
magnifying glass pencil sharpener butterflies
that elongated a horizon shaded like a hollowed
out stigmata pore. Clothespin oceans? Any
condensation in an early morning blooming as
incongruous as an initiation. Invitation to a tail-
spin beheading cockroach ceiling. Fingers span
the anorexic marble library nostalgia grottoes.
A gutter. Sensational gothic pebbles and shells
beyond expectation entities.
 
Wired, insecure, a storage shelter parking ticket
offering a blushing circular obsession to an over-
zealous toothache conference. Are there
walls kissing our cocoon landscapes? Hoof? A
ruined map. A kangaroo wandering the implanted
countryside seeking plasticine funhouse typos. A
dinosaur toxin. A latent ceremonial slug unexpect-
edly disenchanted. Dusty guile and forlorn states
of vegetative shrinking. A lost corner. A beatnik
cufflink superstition.
 
Specialized roundabouts smell like formal
soft drinks. Blurry apartment attractions
frequently marginal. Planets full of lint
and liver and implicit amoral synchronicity.
 
Above. Dressed to appeal to the grandeur of an
unfortunate examination. Frustration grasshopper
puzzle box resembling a clarinet tissue. Hokum.
Arrows bend and retreat and germinate.
Immunized candy duels. Wizened in the
geometric binocular civilization reduction.
Bland classicism. According to the factory
permutation theory all wilderness spectacles
culminate in conspiracy theories.
 
Exploration oddities. Dime factors of straining
consumerism. We are an implosion awaiting
clasping nourishment. Existence as a stroll.
Numbered insincerity constellation. Magnetic
hark. Bellowing hallucination. Our membranes
thirst. Our tangled eyelashes coming apart at
the pedestals. Tongue roots teetering. Arachnid
erasure. A tasteless perfume colliding with
dissenting rainforest missionaries. Among
burials. Caskets for days. The dawn of all
our horseshoe grotesqueries.
 
A voice, like an orgasm, displayed beneath
a subtle Orwellian boardgame. Lopsided
miracles exempt from stuffy academic cliffs.
Jagged and rustling and evading our context.
Like a fossil of thoughtless exposition. With-
out swearing allegiance to a literary depart-
ment store. Our catalogues of sleeping.
 

Slant Tones Encased in Banging Plaques
 
Fungus tips softy excavated enumeration
blocks of happenstance laboratory tumors
sturdy and justifiably deserted though quartz-
like in balmy bred historic strangulation
vacuums. An accountant strains finely
edged comatose arrogance while a mirroring
stammer punished charmed semblances of
cockroach buckets. Adroit, an adverse fusion
of linguistic unit structures scrawling acidic
teeth aftershocks. Scrub, nascent fields of
meditative garage syndromes. Inlet, an
eyebrow manifesto gorge? Circled in a rib
of meadow provocation volumes.
 
Lone and chomping fields. Demonic soap
opera shields whining Geraldine Chaplin
chilled spine retreats. What, another line of
callus avoidances? Might repeat leaning
allowance herbs stuck yet dancing fandangos
in concerning velvet downpours. Or curtsey
handshakes. At noon, the butter sculpture
scapegoat renders personification self-evident
as in a piano on stilts being dragged through
crystalized bathhouses. It might wither as
in a Thursday.
 
Which that said a thunderous northwest
itch bared and bloody stalking raging
obstructions? Well, turned, loaned a
cape on a holiday barricade lump shed.
Pebbles arguing fragments la dolce vita
campground tactile fingerprints.
 
All heave and little shrieking mentions,
vastly the nape of jingle bell neck tattoo
dice. Tiny gasoline engulfed echoing
appliances superseding craggy melons
of virtuous monopoly vanilla. Kinky robes
pet limbless beet assemblage. To a vertical
flute. Toward reduced liver painting. It
has a point. It has an invisible kernel twirl.
Let if throb or present padlock trails to
Kika Markham turquoise moonbeams
straddling tadpole violins. Unjust. Withheld.
An apparent fudge lurking keyhole.
 
Mightn’t the farthest spraining proverb
offer dialectical shrimp to distracted twins
blindingly pointillistic in stamina? Present
the lotion to the gopher sentence. Tanta-
mount to matted weather lungs humping
James Whale observation desks. Pome-
ranian jean shorts stoop to define declining
cultural mumbling. Pardon the glowing whis-
key clavicle mermaid intelligentsia. Rodent
to the stars. If found, return to sugar free
immaculate hand lotion station. A certain
rocking division might contain a flicker of
laundry turntables.
 
Sniff. Sniff. Beyond an egg, a sludgy and
formulaic tendency filling heated seat
silicon rodent debacle. Desk has hopped
and forgotten the rattling tug-of-war at the
heart of potato tempered fibers. Disappear-
ed fractions. The case of the hunted parallel
slaughterer of ping pong yardsticks. Dresser
drawer, a lacking. The damned fishing pole
utters calibrator armistice. A jealous seal
off to the races. In the slowly gesturing
midsection, questions link Jacques Rivette
durational light sockets to blurred clumps
of atmospheric spoons. Sing, whiplash unto
disposable improvisations. Cloaked in degre-
es of repellent garbage disposal wires.
 
Still and wherein, bloody signification gloom
tied to the ersatz doorknob jubilee headset
speaking toward a sandwich habit. Bad or
simply the birth of a defect?

Joshua Martin

From Equations: Antithesis by Adam Fieled

#62

Jade, like Trish, likes to zap me with past lovers. Brian, at one point, was a music industry bigwig whose appetites led him into lethargy and destitution. Jade learned all the cocaine tricks she knows from Brian— sleep quotients, food quotients, how much to buy and when. The thing that irks me about Brian is that she speaks in doting terms of all his failures— the lechery that sapped his energy, the laziness that assumed too much. Jade’s reverse mountain psychology has strange quirks— she only dotes on failures that have as their backdrop absolute material success. She loves the rags to riches to (almost) rags scenario, but she notices (and this is the crucial bit to her) Brian is cared for. He won’t starve, struggle, or implode— his material life is secure. Jade loves that for all the motions and maneuvers that have defined Brian’s existence, he’s pretty much the same guy he’s always been. That interior sameness is something I don’t particularly understand— how a human being can develop this sort of negative integrity and maintain it over long periods of time. But I notice that Jade really does change and is often stymied by her own alterations. Each new role to play effaces the last; and how many roles can one be compelled to play in one’s lifetime? Jade, like me, bears the burden of absolute sensitivity— everything lost or gained creates a new mark on an already over-marked consciousness. If Jade has a hard time doting on me, it’s only because I show her a mirror image as warped, deceptive, and evanescent as the one you see in a circus mirror, that may or may not be moving towards a new height or depth. 

#63

I have the challenge set out before me: to accept my own hollowness, as I watch Jade perform her daily tasks. There is a sense that I am watching a series of multiplications: first Jade is this person, then that person. All of this signifies that Jade sees my own multiplications when we touch. But if there is no stable center inhering in either of us, who are the two people that fuse their physical energies, in such a way that the world is briefly effaced? Multiplications can be taken two ways— as a destruction of stable centers, or the creation of variegated parts that form coherent wholes. Because Jade needs her drugs more than I do, I feel her desperate edge of a woman hovering above an abyss, a woman who cannot look down. I’m past the point of believing in myself as savior or personal Jesus; Jade must live with her crosses and bang through them on her own. My own cross is the vision of multiplications ending, simply because each ephemeral self expresses the same desires, tastes, fixations, and foibles. Jade and I can’t give each other that much— Trish could never teach me this, because our basic, shared presumption was that nothing existed but what we could give each other. As I make love to Jade, there is a charity I feel towards her predicated on her own unacknowledged autonomy— that she has more than she thinks she has. If we persist without knowing yet what our equation is, I know that much of it has to do with shared charity, expressed in a context of basic and final separation and singularity. 

#64

One night, just for amusement, I showed Jade all my mementos of Trish. I have stills of all of Trish’s early pictures; shots taken of us on vacation in Montreal (us in the botanical gardens, looking like hippies with Chinese lanterns us); notes Trish wrote to me at different times; and the shirts Trish bought me as birthday gifts. It was funny to watch Jade’s reaction; she sees in Trish a vast amount of frost, a frigidity that sullies her beauty. How did I stay with a frigid woman for so long? Maybe it’s because I enjoy crashing through ice; maybe I’m a masochist. But it’s amusing to me that I never completely acknowledged Trish’s frigidity. Perhaps I thought she could be thawed over time. I get a sense in all this of how myths are created and passed along. Is myth the final equation for the human race? Is that the only way information can be passed along? We live in our pasts, we live with the myths that have shaped us, and if there is a place for truth in myths, it is a self-created truth that can hone and separate. In truly lived moments, myths are moot— they are established afterwards to amplify and consolidate these moments. It seems to me that Jade and I are deliberately evading the mythical in our mating— there’s nothing to hold, nothing to latch onto. It’s just that the persistent ache in our bodies needs to be assuaged; whatever remains of our souls hovers around us uncertainly.

Adam Fieled

Four Poems by Mark Young

On a Crimean Beachfront

 

The Oligarchs of the Black Sea

come whiffling down the esp-

lanade on their e-scooters. Spring

is here: which, incidentally, is the

title of a Rodgers & Hart song

 

about which & whom the OBSs

have no knowledge, especially of

the fact that, despite its title, it is a

sad song. Emotion has no place in

their portfolios unless sparked by the

 

acquisition by force of something

that belongs to someone else, & even

then they tend to be blasé. Usurp-

ation is a bit like Spring, something

that comes around on a regular basis.

 

 

A halieutic

 

In small-scale

societies every-

one carries the

same alleles as

everyone else.

Many have no

eyelids. Those

that do are cut

in a corkscrew

shape & support

the extradition of

drug traffickers.

 

 

A line from Miley Cyrus

 

Being on the internet just doesn't feel

as much fun anymore. Algorithms

loom over aesthetics, over-exposure

to celebrity images changes viewing

 

experiences. Seeing all those altered

faces on social media has led to many

devotees facing an aesthetic conun-

drum akin to wondering whether

 

or not learn Australian English. I

have an opinion. I have my own taste —

unlike those people who often don't

realize that they’re devoid of either.

 

 

scratchings

 

slowly

one thought before another

the poem

one word after another

shows &

phrase pause phrase

shapes

sentient sentence

itself

cleanshaven4theraven (funeral koans), by Yohnmean Yoh (여연민)

The Korean War was a proxy war enacted on the Korean Peninsula by neighbouring great powers. Millions of people were butchered over those three brutal years, and the former national territory was utterly destroyed. – Han Kang (trans. Deborah Smith)

The controller of my dreams is not I. To have blocked off from each other these two persons unable even to shake hands is a great crime. – Yi Sang (trans. Walter K. Lew)

i. garglings4gargoyle

puerile writhelings overawed by the sky

puerile roundlings over-awed via some 'poltergeist'

poltergeist'd heists of ex-nations (n./s./38th)

counterintuitive con-job discombobulates the mob to be fobbed

rat-fang clangs da din gong

ii. cluster-pie

fossilized faces of old, anguish untold.

iii. cleanshaven4themaven

cosmos as: a kind of (concentration camp).

(we're on opposing teams.)

i.e., there are instances when, to run away becomes, 'all there really is'

– & it's presupposed so many cried so that We could flitter our russi-fied eyelids (away).

(it's presupposed so many tried, anyway.)

iv. obituary riders

four diminutive skulls on kill-grief-clover.

hibernation's for the hunted.

drones for a funeral

v. cleanshavenviathecraven

hearse fog

we've dialectically miscreant roles to play

nuke'd, bw'd, rapalm'd, bullet'd. for whom.

ghoul-frog saves the dang'd day

perennially speakin' & thinkin' swell of ya'.

whoa sagalicious rat-craw

'twas splat-a-tat-tat' (as opposed to rat).

dialectically reptilian ghouls, to keep at bay.

busybodies play at being busy to play at being kind (come what may).

keen, outta-dah-whirlwind (as the turntable, transmits).

Yohnmean Yoh (여연민)

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.