Caleb Puckett

Weathering the Pile-up

Spray the fire extinguisher on the GPS device and stick it to those pundits in the legalization debate. The world’s largest wind farm spurs the Thames Estuary into considering a name change. All bets are off on the lifespan of bland but reliable sedans on both sides of the Atlantic. What about ships, then?  Depending on whose side you’re on, the year could end up a disaster. Go Pacific, you say? Pull out and flee with the predictable group of typhoon victims before it’s too late. All tragedies are markets to mine. Given the inevitability of such weather, you should be on the side of frigid rather than bitter. Pitch that notion. Run with it all the way to the Kremlin. According to insiders, establishing wage income can be a taxing affair for decommitted Olympic sprinters with black market toiletry deals. Cut to the chase, ye pharaoh of mummified faith. Consider the theatrics of group discounts and act as necessary. Why the metallic taste in your mouth? Have a snack. Ruin a perfectly good apple.

Empty gas cans rattle in the back of the truck beside you. You stroke your nose, exorcising an unblessed sneeze, counting your luck like mortgage payments. Should you cringe as an off-again Hollywood veteran in a hooded coat gives icy handshakes to your fellow commuters who are bogged down in the fine yellow snow of Boston? An amateur wrestler always photobombs this cherished annual event. This year, the psychic effect ripples into an atmosphere where a polar vortex dances with the sun. A black and white stray dog smells danger and seeks shelter under the radar station where cops go to trade jokes. A thrice divorced middle-aged executive at a razor company considers marriage once again as he stares at the bleak concrete structure where they all cavort. He champions a no-nonsense justice system over the objections of a talk radio host. In his sleep, the dog eyes the ankle of a disgraced governor who once made the Pro Bowl with the Patriots. He’ll have no such master even in times of great want. A strange ball of lightening turns the entire scene golden for a moment. Lawyers emerge in whistling droves from an underground parking garage.

Instincts tell you to seek singles in your area, but your car will never be a contender within the confines of this particular indigenous population. The Church’s stance on gender theory in the context of hockey is also very clear. No real territorial dispute ends without building sprawling tombs for the winning dignitaries. Don’t drink the vodka-laced Kool-Aid or pump the feud to its final dueling blast. Riches ride currents as the bank wires you money with a few taps of virtual keys. In the right light, they look like leopard teeth. You hear bones breaking as you pass the desolated pyramid of a once-chartered empire of accountancy. Convinced your transplant is faulty, you begin protesting the very existence of powertrain warranties and nest eggs. Too busy to be frustrated and heartbroken, you say? And just look at those smoky blue eyes, great white teeth and stylish cardigan. No bargain hunting, gum chewing sloth ever boxed his way onto Broadway, bud. Beyond the standstill caused by the pile-up, your soul mate, one Janus Trump, eats a jelly doughnut in anticipation of a baby. The late moon hovers with titanic force over her kitchen, causing the wind to pick up velocity. Rumor has it that the credit card company will chime in soon enough. You feel tense as your tires spin out of the slush and onto the ice.

***

***

Susan Lewis

Some Covet

          (For EM)

what others seed and sow. Still others stretch until their shoulders unblade. To swing, romance the 
trees. To medic unfair whether, shine with the butter of enough. You’re antennae, who isn’t—too 
receptive to set an example, undulant in the breeze of happenstance as diamonds strung between 
our greedy dreams. In synthesis eludes the love-child of truth & lie, its gleaming checkered path, its 
printless fingers ringing your full throat (silent). & sacrifice, virginal as lessons learned. (+ artifice, 
vestigial as quested grail). They may not cease gnawing at your infrastructure, offered as freely as 
God’s business card at a convention of lost souls. Don’t shy from this deafening light; it’s been 
parsed to persist through your boldest surrenders.

***
***

Charles Taylor

Pencil Sketches of Birds

Lucky asks his grandfather all the time why he died. 
He asks him why he died in his bed.

Lucky was a six, and after grandpa’s horrible screaming death his uncle wouldn’t buy 
him a new bed or let him sleep on the couch in the living room. Lucky slept from year six 
to year eighteen on the same damned bed.

At times his grandfather interrupted the music on the radio beside his bed. The radio is 
dead now too in a nearby landfill. His grandfather said he hated to wake Lucky up but he 
wanted to say he was sorry. 

“Why couldn’t you have at least rolled on the floor and died?” Lucky mumbled half-
asleep back to the radio. “Do you know how spooky it is to lie in a bed where someone 
you love died horribly?”

“Sorry,” Lucky heard on the radio again. “I was eighty-four and I wasn’t expecting my 
death that night. You never expect to die on Christmas.”

“You scared me to death. I get visions of your ghost in the closet or under the bed.”

“I’m not responsible for your imagination. I was a good grandpa. That’s what you get for 
wanting to be a poet. I was just a postman. In my day postmen were intellectuals.”

“Grandpa, I need peace and answers. Why did you die in my bed? What’s wrong with the 
hallway or bathtub?”

“I would have liked to die fucking your grandmother, in our own double bed up in 
Oregon, but as you know she died giving birth to your father. Do you ever think how that 
made me feel?”

“I will go through all your journals and papers. I will find the reason.”

“Jesus, kid. When you’re dead your dead. There’s nothing to say about it. Besides, don’t 
you remember? Your fundamentalist uncle burned my journals and papers down in the 
basement coal furnace. He thought I said mean things about him because I was an atheist 
and he turned fundamentalist, but I was making pencil sketches of birds.”

***

Sex and Divine

Sleep seems a more superior way to spend your days than working, even when the pay on the job 
is high.

Back in the early 60’s, when Lucky was nineteen, he was employed in a hospital maintenance 
shop. Lucky was left completely unsupervised and could sleep as much as he wanted on the job. 
He was good at sleep too. The cement floor of the machine room on the top floor of Evanston 
hospital, back in a corner where the machines hung low in the dark, worked perfectly despite the 
noise.

Lucky needed to sleep because he hung out late in the Chicago clubs of Old Town. He drank 
too much and watched all the gorgeous women dance alone, braless back then in tight clothes 
and filmy blouses that allowed their nipples to show through. Lucky could never find the words 
to speak to these mysterious manifestations of life. He wanted to speak. He thought they might 
have answers. He felt close to God when near them. Why were they doing what they were 
doing? Was there a smoothness behind all human fears that could be found by dancing? If you 
loved hard enough, might a man survive on air?

Lucky’s dreams lying on the machine room floor, they were cathedrals more magnificent than 
the most amazing clouds. The cathedral stained glass was filled with the infinite and tender faces 
of lovers assuming an infinity of positions. The cathedrals themselves were filled with infinite 
lush green jungles. Friendly snow leopards, each autographed by Peter Matthiessen, strolled the 
graceful, leaf-strewn paths. 

In sleep, whether on cement or back at his small apartment, he was always waiting for God to 
come. In his dreams Lucky called out God’s name over and over. Perhaps dreams are too small 
for God because in all that time God never came around. Women came though. They whispered 
to him in many languages that somehow he could translate, “Who made God a man?”

***
***

Charles Bane, Jr.

When Masai Raise Spearheads

When Masai raise

spearheads to Ngai

at his falling wordless

leave, they mirror unsheathed

swords of city heights, wavering

in the breath of the unseen.

All mystery is powerless

before the respiratory fate

of light as you wash your

face, your back to me.

It is time to admit, as

I brush sand from

your feet, of the odds

that a universe dimmed

will draw you in again for release.

You will be lost as four hundred

planets at first count are waterless,

or put in safekeeping of molecular cloud.

Somewhere distant, I will be noble

gas or fleeting charge. We will 

meet, but incorporeal as gods.

***

***

Nancy Scott

Re-enactment, Princeton Battlefield, New Jersey

The battle was already over when we arrived.

Her Quaker school just yards away, the proximity

both intrigued and horrified Leah.

Coaxed into entering the battlefield art contest,

she’d insisted, No soldiers, no guns.

Her Betsy Ross stitching the flag (extra star, stripes

running the wrong way) was displayed

with more accurate accounts at the Clarke House

on the hilltop where General Mercer

had bravely died.

The British side was about uniforms. We’re Loyalists,

men dressed in dark blue said, raccoon tails

perched on their heads. Gone familiar tri-corne hats,

because the British kept firing at us.

A tall soldier in green told us he was with

the New Jersey Volunteers, Loyalists too.

He learned down to show Leah the silver buttons

sewn on his jacket. Vaguely polite, she fixed

on the rifle slung over his shoulder.

Let’s go, she said, tugging my hand.

An errant round of fake artillery startled Leah.

Escaping from behind enemy lines, we trekked

down the hill to the Continental Army encampment—

soldiers not as plentiful or uniforms flashy.

Militia looked as if they’d just set down their plows.

Withering sense of disarray. Washington

had left on his white horse; piles of cannonballs,

chicken roasting on a spit, woman rinsing pewter

plates in a wooden bucket. Nobody paid us attention.

I bought Leah a yo-yo and we went home.

***
***

Ali Znaidi

***

***

Edgar Gabriel Silex

Your Gravestone

your gravestone gives
birth to broken wings
long buried in herd lies

Lazarus tears toil to talk
muster of throatsongs
flowering your gravesite

scarvespers rising
from armor vaults
unbidden inaudible

silence the sermon
of sorrow circles
the sky like an eagle
gathering orisons

***

In My Armor Room

in my armor room
my dad’s face
hangs on the wall
here I am weakest

the memory tide
rises in the windows
and shines its exoteric light
on my father’s imago

the hieroglyphic chain
of my existence
motherroots
in that blessing wound

to wait here
is to be nourished
by paradox
and inspiration

to whirl through
the dervish day
with the flame words
of unpronounceable chants

***
***

Donna Kuhn

***

***

Kenneth Wolman

In Praise of Roberto Duran

In secret, in disbelief, fearing that saying so

would make it true, people whispered

that he'd turned coward:

pictures were on back pages everywhere

and pictures do not lie.

There were the upheld gloved hands,

los manos de piedras, and

his famous risible words: No Mas, No Mas.

"Enough.  I have no stomach for this.

Surrender."

Who remembers the name of his opponent?

In defeat, losing his monster's mask,

he became a force in a world of the misdefined.

Roberto Duran: vulnerability, frustration,

forever hands of stone, turned into

the Commendatore at Don Giovanni's

feast of undoing, come to warn us

to amend our lives, lose

the madness of inviting

punishment to be absorbed

because it's Good For Us.

***

***

Lawrence Upton

boogie

in one flies
                 over turn be
                                            suicidal, so that airs do not
on top of following and no inching
conclusion recipe weighing 
allowing their long . . .

shrinking head jangling
dark is reasoning ludicrously clandestine rend
on blue who woman home Gaps sleep with whom she 
on blue who woman home 
                                           gapping sleep with whom she . . . 
she past, clandestine

fleeting could in which has been more significant
my boy could make 
divine nature is sunk
what returns

depths down a right turn the media pumping them
under foot further than infinite 

dust outer-minded congregates as us
the mirror has been undermined
strongly dangerous permanently that echo
were not the where being
towards communication
long focus over sweep having expansive breath 
pressure pushed is streamlets 
body lover just removed

divine nature is material, atoms of instructions

urbanise city my light admits, crashed open to sunrise, the city core; 

yourselves that crack all electronic

head into town as to an excellent world

peculiar night itself one sobriety
swerving to will

crack all word while electronic

explode themselves
flesh

lover just removed the hills
nothing glistens 
dodging to avoid the fire

winters vanishing hill time 

accosted by seeing

becoming us

scream differently tells evidence, and silently --
substance of justice it is better to be unjust than --
a victim of justice it is better to be dead than --
feel the burning ashes fall on your face --

true element of the brain
what is this world of amorous sleep
the word the world a bit confused

***
***

Bill Wootton

Lou Reed Night


A party in Balwyn one night, 1973
perhaps, Lou's 'Transformer'
on constantly. Someone just

put the stylus back on as soon
as 'Goodnight Ladies' tracked out.
Didn't sound repetitive; just allowed more

and more absorption into that brittle world.
Snookered in a basement pool room at midnight
when no one could find the light switch,

John K simply punched out the globe,
leaving tiny shattered shards on dark cloth.
Back upstairs to brass, piano, guitar, voice.

'Sa - da - lite's gone, way up to Mars ...'
Leaving the party, scenes of disarray -
overflowing ashtrays, spilled drinks

and in the corner, coiled on a beanbag,
Jim H, headphones clamped on,
still wild siding with Lou.

***
***

Harriet Zinnes

When/Then

If the when becomes the then

and then recedes,

has time stopped its functioning

and allowed chaos to command?

Time is, will be, was and is evermore,

and yet and yet

when chaos endures even time's universe

time itself is a wingless bird

without motion, without identity.

***

***

Joel Chace

Pop-up 21

***

***

James Cervantes

Pairings/Pre-apocalyptic



A mockingbird subtracts a song from the repertoire
while the press corps listens to the Secretary of Defense.

*

Koi grow fat in a pond with a pump and a feeding hand.
Countless neighbors strain the moat around the mall.

*

The commemorative beauty of tragic wreckage,the rosy-fingered dawn.
Nonetheless, the Beer Festival takes place the third Wednesday of March.

*

The plot is boyhood, stream, wildflowers, death in a couplet.
The poet has tea and ginger cookies, little bites on the tongue.

*

Our intrepid duo drinks the milk of dream-fed cows,
that which is between them, barely there when they first meet.

*

An idea is already a reality, likewise a basket of commodities.
American ruins are discovered in the cloud of consciousness.

*

but but but goes the little motorboat on the Sea of Exception.
Eggs are affected the day the sink whispers snake pits of Winnipeg.

*

There is a problem with a still body of water.
The poem before it becomes language.

*

The Michaels install sound, wingless, saintless.
Sex, death, the little and the boundless.

*

A war will unfold over a broken vessel, chaos spill out
as a colorless liquid, and within it, cells without intent.

*

The heat is white. The heat is yellow. The heat is red
and is called hateful though the star does not mean it to be.

*

The children we were allow the star named Sun
to be known simply for its cold light.

Wendy Battin

Christmas in Connecticut

Not what you think. Rain. 
The cards are all in Greek.
The man unwraps a joke in the box.
The woman unwraps

a silver man with the head of a bird.
They are so in love, the four of them,
the man the joke the woman the beaked
aluminum dream,

they laugh at the eyes, the leg, the ear,
the arm all hung in the tree.
Two headless torsos,
his and hers, twist in the branches.

See how the world is made new?
Whatever I tell you is true.

***
***