Tuesday, April 30, 2013

James Finnegan


In the Wine Cellar
 
He told me he bought the house for its wine cellar,
but after dinner when we descended the stairs
I noticed cubbyholes filled with rolled-up maps
and charts, M-16s and Kalashnikovs, RPGs
and blocks of C4. He said, The walls down here
are 5-feet thick, reinforced concrete, with shaped
ceramic brick to fool ground penetrating radar.
There are over ten airshafts up to the surface,
and there’s one escape passage that runs 1500 yards
SSW and comes out on a creekbed near the highway
overpass where an SUV will be waiting.
 I said, You’re scaring me, man.
He said, A jealous darkness surrounds us.
Well then, I said, if world is ending, how about
we share a nice claret outside under the stars?

***
***
 

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Sheila E. Murphy


Irrespective, the News

Is good, blood
vessels gone rogue.
The spike altered
the look of the liver spot.

Now amounts to
living with the possibility
of threat
Not trackable.

How about your life's
norms? Tell me how
the family keeps
its sure routine.

Wasn't it a fairy tale,
when we were
forced to think
that his relationship

with her would last?
He got great kids
out of it: both
residential and

therapeutic little miracles.
The hurt and
humiliation, still
a small price to pay.


***


Retiring But Not Shy

Has anybody seen my voice
-- Overheard in a dream

Obedience nestles against
straight-backed chairs and looks
directly into the eye light
of source code.

As many mea culpas as can be
inferred break into cadenzas
styled to fit the personality
of the specific dom.

Miniature suds once
blended yield
a thin soup of spine-free
ingredients.

Quirks derange the formula,
if known. Outreach (singular)
is traced. Whosoever may be served
by ritual is so served.

The deserving cavalcade
of subservient eyes is drawn
free-handlebars. The only relishing
proceeds in the direction of deflection.


***
Narration

She tells her senior
senator the specifics,
relieved of context, only
to prepare to watch
the foundation be
unearthed, much
to her feigned shock.

If ever responsibility
were to fall into her lap,
her reflex would show
proficiency in the lateral pass
and ready critique
of someone doing something.

No viable authority remains
after interaction with her
monacled disdain.
The faculty of hearing, long
eroded, finally elapses
into a dim, monotonous relief.

She has mastered the innocent
positioning of her sole question
cleansed of evident rage.
To have known her
is not to have known her
love, nor to have loved.

Her narrow dwelling forces
contact between
tiny and tall, breaks
privacy into splinters
weavable toward nothing
whole. She keeps
watch. She make contagious
grief the center of it all.



***
***

Friday, April 26, 2013

Felino A. Soriano


from Quintet Dialogues: translating introspection



splayed or togetherness, reactive these moments’ momentum

amid this sequence of song
similar to the animals’ oblong connectivity
of touch

tonal movement of arms
not knowing or also knowing
embrace is the full-wealth emblem
of turning into

the self in its fundamental purity, pulsating
causal pausing crescent appositions
as atop the calendar of days’ reaching toward themselves

                        and knowledge or knowledge!                       affirmation constant need of 
the otherness of tongue                         theirs or apparent from direction
discomfort the echo’s fading edge cannot sharpen

                                    against an angled wind and its weaving
pastime of portending

insufficient
                                                                        dialectics



—can/should/did we study the nuances of gradating prisms

                                                                                                            or
the molecules of musical camaraderie

                                    :?:

crows of a nighttime cawing conversation
a spectral speech into the silence of their esoteric notions

gauge or wing the curling sounds
erupt or condemn the figurative slowing flow of a moment’s

elasticized confirmation similar confining joy to the palm of a hand’s
untouched priority
wave the weaving of a touching question                  long beyond the answerable syllables of
singular meaning

                                                yes in the no of
finding freedom                                                                      the supposed serrations planning
the heal ahead of any furthering of fear or basic

running from the stone a silence softens

and

                        turning to the silence in its cave of cultural warmth
far from the fiction outside contains and forms into callused truths of the unchallenged

mathematics

***
***

Thursday, April 25, 2013

John M. Bennett



Espejo de la Máscara del Espejo

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
p  p  orched face in
cara ,tumba viva y
lo moho in the throat
¡es puma que cae
en la playa es tu
lengua es the stri dent
si lens de tu foc o
flamífero es!  lumbre  )na
med the beady eyes the
Al y Mojada wh(  ere
yr ref lexive sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
p   p   )))heaves an ch
okes     
                        hks



...ni l’eau ni l’air...
- José María de Heredia

...vers...  
- Isidore Ducasse



***
***

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Stephen Ellis


Milk Drops Turned Diamond

The names are
essential, that we
each know them,

we who sound like
cows' dreams
when we speak

(the names of favorite
flowers will do,
pollinated in the veiled

synaptic dream-
flow brought out as
the inverse of any

convenient 'present'
in which we suck
the owl's teats that

grow out of the Kali
sows that rise like
pearls charmed by

the undertow from
the sea's depths
as whitecaps

that guard the waist
of the void: How else
could it be, to have

Our Lady's pure
neurological semen
ooze up and out

and down behind
eyes that being two
still see a single

thing, the neck of
sleep broken just so
movement can

exist and make
the distance of
her heartbeat

a memory invisible
yet clearly present
enough to worship.


***
***

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Murray Jennings


Midsomer Muddy

We swiped each other’s side mirrors off and scored the bodywork.
Nobody’s fault, blind corner, hedgerows, mud and snow. We both slowed
slipped, slid, stopped, got out and had a laugh on the ridge in the centre of the road.   
Jesus, this is middle earth, he said. You from round here?
No. I told him. Australia.
No kidding! Long way from home.
And you?
Middle America, man. Well, North Minnesota.
Oh I said. Pretty cold, eh? Dylan left a girl way up there.
Yeah? Dylan Thomas? I didn’t know...I’ve  just driven up from Wales...
No no! Never mind.
Okay. Wanna swap mirrors for fun? Mine’s fucked. Hertz’ll love it!
Right. Might as well. Don’t know about Avis.
Hey Aussie, you go first. My side’s muddier than yours.
We shook hands and I drove three miles to a lay-by,
climbed a stile into a field and sang softly to a black-faced ewe
who just stared at her image in the American’s mirror.
If you’re ever up on that mountain over there,
remember me to a girl so fair...
See? I said. You’re beautiful. I propped it on a fence post
so she could keep admiring herself after I’d gone.
Baaa- bye! I called as I drove away but she didn’t look up.
Who said sheep were stupid?
 

***

Tomb of the Unknown Poet

  These words, lined up
and stacked to resemble
a wobbly headstone, could
 say anything at all and
they would still mark
the final resting place of
  nobody in particular, and
someone who picked up my
  book from a trestle table
at a fete, flipped through it
 briefly and replaced it might
believe that its giveaway
 price was a dead giveaway
a life lived, a life over.


***


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