Vernon Frazer

After the First

the fire 

quenched, its membrane burst

internal 

wiring as penalty granite a lineage 

of long

cigars, the stench 

staining worse than 

a turmeric rumor

the whim of its liminal synergy

charged both ways at once

a binary extension grounded

in variance, manic against

its ties,

teeth clenched as dental metaphor

ride 

the outburst filling the first frame

cinematic verity not required

at the low-down hinge grate

action fainting permitted

when tassel caps allure

the restriction gate print

a plural 

to ply the energy from its rank 

epithet

before the cost of first mitosis

***

Deliberating the Endgame

potassium jury terrors regurgitate

somnolent incandescence to heat

denomination scandals demonized

politely as their svelte turned acrid 

while repeating sample massages 

in passages unlit no message left

to guide defectors in error or patent

shoes longing to wade the subject

disabled the water cresting revelation

a tentacle rite distending vision leak

diffused the segue to ruddered drift

reaching ecliptic parameters gestured

desperate claw repetitions making

lawful their surrogate luster melt

on wry pastries icons bent ironically

overgrown to the seed of wilting
where revising terror medleys blast 

mustard sharks with rude apparatus

the marmalade montage blinked

a cascade bringing fury to saloons

proudly recapitulating night terrors

before dead wagons turned portable

whiskey transport dividend clusters

brown as weathered tassel fugues

caught up in climactic lift incursion

marches past tailor threads shoed

to market forces place the course

evenly spread crude border entities

activate the rippling flashes burned

across wood and concrete and glass

to slice the longed-for cleft and mutter

incendiary comments on slow release

sought as a rift in diversionary tactics

once equally practiced on bland futons

old springs creaking near the landing

above their lowering urge to include

bathysphere art forms that interfere

with every clearance modem clang

steeping its mercurial transit clusters 

with dyspeptic shark appellant mix

whose rebound cluster no aficionado

could translate into the coral findings 

where tantrum clusters delete fixation 

loose hatcheries impel a nominal delay

slow breath encumbers clothing tone

teeth chatter closing hair ensembles

behind their grins’ disappearing luster

the relics gum near periodontal land

whose water left them cresting tide

in toned motes delivered as modes

assigned to scrubbing their passion-

pitched aspersions laced with cheese

when no admonition ruptured faster

than either heat or light can breathe

wrong personification charts gone nodal 

as the surgical extremities of inventory 

tonsil thrillers turned prehensile longing 

to official grip wagging tailored dogs

before the sniffing poltroon decree

seals the seldom seen gripped between

the levered hands gone rounded leather

ceiling fans seek the fevered progeny 

that ground-seeking news will storm  

past the varicose rims of the horning

cartilage poppers mowing slow retreat

lodes refining their own scalar pattern 

the repetition stilled one turning past 

the agate fold enumerated at the offset

bleeding putts through lowered stitches

while marginal estuary blockers lack

the seminal impediments sequestered

in the moving tint of generation vipers

writhing against the horizontal sunset

to beckon the resounding messages

from the ancient veterans resembling

the wary farces of their lost protocols

crackling brittle as the kindle would

rise while darkening the interior view

encases required renovations that vary

the call to release their shaken umber 

from the padding charts that vessel

perturbed underlining at vesicle stops

denied the innovative transport view

snaking eyes dart across the tabular

vein stricken clumsily implied grace

as a well-worn tunic bled naugahyde

lard over the noon shedding caskets

to summer bulged in waiver saloons

where baskets lumber their shreds

under the faintly lasting motor itch

***

***

Md Khan

The Bedouin 

Wanderer, search but a moment longer,
what you hope to find is scattered throughout
the dunes of sand you must traverse
and by the gulf of crystalline blue water
where you will pitch your tents.

Pick up, if you must a relic of times
gone past, like hitchhiking memories through
pitiless terrain and invisible borders stationed
with soldiers well aware of bartering your
passage for a bottle of whiskey or a silk tie.

Abandon your ancestral modes of commute,
they can’t help you now for the world has grown
bigger, the outlines of lands erased and expanded,
whiteness growing, filling up maps on pages
meant for your father's poetry.

Uprooted, you are privileged because
a life that is troubled is a life meant for learning,
the hopes of your father, comfort only brings
bitterness, completeness bears no interest,
groundedness, nothing but fatigue.

Carry your homeland in your soul
for a carry-on bag can’t contain it, it can’t
weather a shower of bullets by your enemies,
your Being must conceal it, not to be unpacked
on your journey to homelessness.

***
***

Joel Chace

Pop-up 22

******

Mike Sikkema

from Three Cheers for the Women Who Built the Moon

1.

the autobiography of Witch Bullet was a six foot two haiku box car every other coal 
car no passengers tall white letters with streamy tails and cartoon eyes you could 
never catch all of before the station bulls ran you off but also tree top carved for 
migratory types and low flying aircraft if not carved then shaped in the branches 
with impossible wind or written in waves of bees waves of future primates of all the 
ocean unknowns of glow-bugs you don’t notice until they fly out of your mouth into 
the dark room and arrange rearrange “Witch Bullet Will Eat Your Face”

2.

Easiest to explain as parts of the brain living all over book shelf oak moraine parts of 
the brain in each knee and grasshopper brain parts in lake wave formation in yellow 
and red parts of the brain in a pizza box matching broken chairs are brain parts 
parts of the brain in a gear box rusting out in a bucket fucked freshly love faces are 
parts of the brain similar cinema every breast ever cupped uncapped parts of the 
brain in cryptids and hunters testicles highway cones precious metals left hooks 
fish mercury suicide doors terror birds flapper haircuts barber poles in cartoons all 
brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain brain
phantom limb brain phantom phantom brain mirror box brain net of light brain 
parts of the brain are ears and eyes potatoes and a garden mole in moonlight an 
overdose brain a brown field brain an oil slick brain parts of the brain half life 
mountain top removal brain asteroid brain and moon parts of the brain in home 
room and celebrity upskirt parts of the brain hand held devices brain and brain

***
***

Peter Ganick

Later

improcessual dint of creation

there that infundibulum voorsicht

tellingly protean

connectst connecting connectors

trooper incroyable 

the oval resistor meandering 

sleight of hand

retribute

veeringly 

comprehensively threaded mounts

volcanic endoue hierarchal notice

the same place from whichever ink

started.

cajoling vanishing point from dimensionless

abduction 

wherein a calyx voices demands

preen nor flaunt.

***

Endlessly

where commuting lastlingly presumed

the affirmation’s affirmative meanders

which horse connote resilience

predilection of morale unclouded.

degenerate barter fades

the candy shoes cake selves

denial untries enough spotless

wideness mirrored

so in meme a phoneme or which

weeps choice blinded fro

the aspect in remorse 

gallery coefficient natal

totem firecast neither wading sleight

preside mannerism thorough plans

wield mensonge there as further

notion seeming raffle coerces.

plankton to hawking whole syrinx

hedonist theatre smitten neither

blanket nor

permute seizes gravid 

enough screaming

collides manifest to behave

insequent those reminding slack the furnace

there procedural ingredient aslan

those replicate mindstyles these

from which starting

snowfall noestra opaque milling.

***

***

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa

                        from “wild black lake” 

my heart is tired and goes to sleep
my eyes were pious
or they were pies
ending in sighs in a skin of water

face of the earth 
all alone in heaven
the duplex never debonair
in rooms we exchange air for air

[i wondered what
it would be like
to sink into that wide black ocean
and never emerge]

stuck in a wall of song
regimes rush to fill the emptiness
the place i left
cascading intimate theory

lopsided applause
an example of bone
flowers controlled by blunt formulae
ending in effigy

ebbed from me
a naked screen
that touches me briefly
inaudibly

distances between artifice and
real objects serve as 
obstacles above glittering forests
in faraway debris

i become stone
enclosed by narration
hoping to melt
stem by stem

vehement ceremonies
for smiling gang members
colic latchkey
smeared on toast

concrete seepage
on the brink of artificiality
buried confessions
of dusty regimes

an excerpt cluster
carp motionless in a pond
torn red paper lanterns
scorched flowerbeds

almighty knees
in stately industry
collar of wind blows
a swallowed patch

figures leaning out windows
heels moving on a staircase
stiff floorboards
doubt waiting to be born

hot summer afternoon
exits closed
sudden belief in erasure
in a vast room of wilderness

hardened shoreline
a chimney of hula
volcanic discipline
guru gropes

dewy childhood
of slanted laughter
doomed to compose a moldy elegy
for muddy clouds

grating shipwreck in metallic silence
brushes my dry abdomen
a rice cake blockade
staggers cells of summer kites

tornado of dialogue
all failure begins to flower
false stony wandering
on a botched path

near a dismal fence
vanishing voices greet you
your body momentarily warm
my voice diagonal

formal grapheme
stalks clothesline pick up
a suffix of kidnap
shawls gallop

ivory delta
bucolic wave
a separate developmental line
in bareback fallout

vicarious geography
unending carnivore
sickening clouds
see you in court

squirrel on wire
rocks deep within
unhealing gesture
lost brick

a cancelled self
shady façade of fences
transparent street
dries up

a low birth
the rock’s experience of me
stars in my brain
along a greying bridge

my skin tears
butterflies of today
something is wrong
a waltz for the blind

perched on a frame
a muddled face
plaza at midnight
blinking away

spoonful of regret
shadow chatters loudly
birds become flowers
from far away

though warm it snows
on the back of a painting
my blouse unbuttoned
by a strong wind

the wind outside the mind
post mortem
angle of endless teeth
resurrect the quivering sun

protected by the forest
doll trapped in the house
my arm twisted
things to do

smoothing of space
millions of morals
womb for words
see enclosed brochure

perverse shopping
soldiers came home
what to do
exit wound

things not to do
corpse like
raybans and corncob pipe
endlessly old

the lapse in my eyes
in front of the bodega
catastrophic sandbanks
rest in peace

picture a girl
standing in rain
arrested by the mob
banal illusions

celebrity against gravity
function of language
internal hysteric
microscopic adventure

weird black lake
territorial mimesis
exterior milieu
dialectic protection

cellular syntax
slow labor of bodies
musty rupture
in analogous time

enunciation of voidedness
perpetual code
abutment aggregate
polyphonic elastic

interlink asignifying
motion of noise
presides over the world
quilted and axiomatic

elegant bird
under automobile tires
replying eagerly
a sun sinks

ambushed breasts
in wild silence
wintry carnival
of social systems

silhouette in a window
the night overtakes
waiting for a sign
becomes increasingly still

***
***

John M. Bennett

the matted throne

the knotted shirt the dripping
was ,dripping from the knots
you kept rehidden ,hidden
from the darkness of the
smoke you left ,your sh
adow painted on the wall
the wall a nostril sleeping
in your closet where the
dampness knotted is ,kno
tted as a stone a st
one hidden in your cheek
,repeated ,cloudy ,green
and thorned ,was the
book you dripped 
,tied up beneath the throne

         ...el fémur de la hija son las cortezas del árbol...
                -- El Libro de los Libros de Chilam Balam de Chumayel

***
***

Colin Herd

New Poem

Right, yes,

OK, I see where the confusion has arisen.

It's simple, really, a silly mistake in a way:

for whatever reason, or, yes, OK,
as you say, for obvious reasons,

you were expecting these poems to be new.

And you opened the book up and
they're not quite new enough. Not
as new as you were hoping. Quite. Another
way of putting it would be to say,
they are not as knew as you were led to believe. 

I wouldn't say they are not new at all,
as you've put it, I mean there is something new
about them. They're newer than my older work,
for example. So, I wouldn't go that far.

But no, you're quite right, that's plain.
They can't strictly speaking be new because
you've heard them read many times before.
At various places and for a period stretching

back at least 3 years.  

Some have even been in magazines!

I read one at Caesura I think
and at Syndicate, maybe, I don't
know. I just can't remember every poem
I have ever read. I get flustered for one thing
which is in a way part of my schtick and it
isn't all due to my anxiety that everyone's heard
everything before, as you are insinuating.

You're angry and hurt. You feel dismantled.

I can see that. It makes sense. No, you aren't being that
unreasonable. You open a book called "New Poems" and
you naturally, well, now, no, I'm not saying you made an assumption
in a negative way, but you jumped to a conclusion
and in this case, it didn't happen to be quite on the button.

It's no biggie. If I lead you to make that conclusion, I'm sorry.

One thing I should maybe point out  (and in my defence)
is that they have been altered somewhat since

their initial airings. Yes, fine, not substantially, no,

not that substantially. I said "somewhat", which implies

they have been fiddled with a little but not overhauled.

Indeed. Well, OK then, we'll settle on "revised".

I understand entirely what you’re saying. Ian Rankin
doesn't issue a "New Rebus Novel" by just altering or
switching a few words here and there. There'd be an outcry.

Quite right. Indeed.

Yes, well, I'm not particularly going to make it,
but as you brought it up, there would possibly be
an argument that the title is part of

the poem and therefore part of the suite of poems, so it's

ok to use language in a certain way that doesn't hold up
to closer scrutiny. As I say, I can imagine someone making

an argument like that and it does have a certain pull
to it but no, as you say, that's not quite what I'm getting

at.

I agree. Poets should still be accountable for what they say
if it's offensive, but it can be done in such a way that
they are drawing attention to an offence or an issue
without necessarily perpetrating any offence themselves. 

For example: "I shot the sheriff".

It doesn't quite mean, "I shot the sheriff".

If you read that in a poem, you wouldn't go

running to the telephone box and dialling

me in to collect a reward, would you? Quite.

Similarly: “I commit fraud on a daily basis” or

“I’m the Queen of England and I am in a hurry”

So, equally, I call the book "New Poems"...

… it doesn't necessarily follow that all the poems would

 be new; or even any of them. It could be that

I'm getting at something,

something could be formulated around that idea and

capitalism maybe, the eager hunger for newness all the time

that we all feel in this empty aching way.

No, that wasn't necessarily in my mind,

but equally everything that is in a poem

to be got at by the reader is not necessarily

in the mind of the poet, is it?

So that idea or a trace of it is there,

in the title and the gap between what the

reader expects and what they end up getting.

That's certainly there, in a hollow sort of way. 

You ask what makes poetry different, now there's
a question. I mean I'm not going to start quoting Pound

at you, but OK, I know I did already, but there is a point there

with that "news that stays news" thing.

No, if you must know, and not that I think it makes

any difference to what I am saying but, you’re right,  I
didn't find that quote myself. I remembered it from Marjorie Perloff.
I recycled it, yes,

I admit that, off the cuff, I just used it. It seemed to fit.

It was handy, it presented itself to me and I used it.

But, indeed, if you see everything as one endless process

of revision, you could I suppose see poetry as, and it’s not as elegantly

put, well, after all, I’m freestyling now of sorts, but you

could in a way see poetry as something like “olds that stay new.”

Though maybe that would get confusing for fans of Sharon Olds,

the Pulitzer Prize winning poet. Probably none too advisable after all.  

Well, you're right, maybe they do need

something to get confused about, but I'm not going to be
the one to confuse them, and over such a trivial matter!

You know what, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.

Or, yes, we could agree to agree that you're right.

Fine, OK- these poems are
just the same old same old,

decrepit, really,  worthless, ready for the tip,
and anything but new. I'll accept
all of that, since you've backed me into
this corner. I'll accept all of that.

We'll pulp them all and change the title.

Now, wanna go and see the new Spiderman film?
No, not that one, the new one. With Andrew Garfield. 

***

***

Adam Fieled

Chop with a Machete: Nineteenth Century Provincialism?

          It is only 2014, and already a body of work has coalesced and established itself
publicly in the higher arts in America which threatens the hegemony of the twentieth
century’s accepted, dominant strains of aesthetic theory and practice. What this body of
work largely establishes is an imperative to dismantle, disorient, and, ultimately, destroy
twentieth century aesthetic ideologies, from the inside out, and towards several foundational
recognitions—that thematics, largely lost in twentieth century avant-garde formalism, must
be reinstated as a constituent element in the higher arts, to set a well-rounded standard for
twenty-first century higher art; that, for the creation of higher art and for its dissemination to
be as rich and potentially durable as possible, the entire history of high art must be embraced
rather than discarded; and that a meaningful demarcation between high and popular art,
blurred into obscurity in century XX, needs also to be reinstated in order to acknowledge,
appreciate, and reward the seriousness, thoughtfulness, and depth-consonance (formal and
thematic) of manifestly superior (even in culturally relative contexts) aesthetic efforts.
          The quandary with the fulsome insertion of these foundational recognitions into
recognized, standardized aesthetic discourses is that the century XX old guard will consider
them “provincial”—that they are a retreat from the theoretical advances of the twentieth
century into the parochial, patriarchal, culturally homogenous nineteenth century, and that
the intellectually sophisticated cultural relativism which would be lost would constitute
a profound, emasculating step backwards from world-consonance, queer-consonance,
advanced gender-consonance, and genuine, responsible socio-political awareness. The
problem I have, as a practicing artist and theorist, with the twentieth century’s advanced
aesthetic theoretical apparatuses and those who espouse them is relatively simple—for all
that key texts bravely consolidate a sense of responsibility around issues of gender, race,
sexual orientation, and all facets of cultural relativism, the works of literary and visual
higher art produced in the twentieth century are so drastically inferior, both formally and
thematically (and in avant-garde twentieth century literature, narrow, hermetically sealed,
anti-humanistic formalism ruled the roost quite unequivocally), to what was produced in the
nineteenth century, that what has been produced of serious merit in the twenty-first century
smoothly and organically “skips” twentieth century literature (and visual art), and erects itself
from nineteenth century models.
          Looking at the nineteenth century and the twentieth, in theoretical and practical
chiasmus, each century manifested its own brand (or manner or form) of provincialism—
and I am arguing here that, despite its outward protestations of courage and a responsible,
culturally egalitarian humanism, the twentieth century’s form and manner of aesthetic
provincialism, which eschewed the rigorous and well-rounded in practice for the facile,
and did away, in many sectors, with any serious approach to coherence, cohesiveness, and
applied thematic focus altogether, letting tiny, slight formal gestures unsuccessfully pick up
the gestalt slack, is far more steep than the nineteenth’s manner of culturally homogenous
artistic production, and makes the twentieth century both potentially a featherweight one, a
laughingstock, and one easy to “dispose of” in the new century’s ambience.
          As the twenty-first century develops, many suspect that a nasty conspiracy looms
behind the vapid, vacuous fraudulence of twentieth century art, aesthetics, and other
branches of the humanities. The conspiracy has to do with narcotics, and the widespread,
flagrant trafficking of narcotics. The supposed narrative runs that high level, high
maintenance drug dealers and drug dealing conglomerates, including wealthy families, in
the twentieth century were fond, for various business reasons (of convenience and for
the purpose of subterfuge) of adopting and maintaining “fronts” for their illicit activities;
and that, by misrepresenting the business interests at hand while simultaneously creating a
veneer of cultural, humanitarian respectability, the higher arts provided both a useful outlet
and a manner or form of representing states of business affairs, backwards and sideways.
If twentieth century higher art appears to be abased and degraded beyond belief, it may be
because its primary purpose was not to symbolize or embody the heights and depths to
which human consciousness can rise or fall, but to display the wares of illicit, violence-driven
commerce—and thus, to enact the humanities’ dissolution into cacophonous nothingness.
          The suspicion that, in the twentieth century, powerful drug dealers and drug dealing
conglomerates had bifurcated motivations—both to achieve maximum profit-gain and to
destroy the humanities’ integrity in the process—is a very real and compelling one, when
a seasoned intellect is forced to take seriously what was written and published under the
high art aegis in that century, particularly the second half of that century, when the flatulent
specter of the “post-modern” was shoved, by brute force and greed, into public prominence.
The narrative of the central suspicion continues, that many Modern and post-modern artists
were not authentic individuals but “characters,” assembled by drug dealing conglomerates
to represent business interests. Thus, the differentiated, distinguished figure of the twentieth
century author may prove to have been a character actor, fulfilling a specially scripted,
particularized dossier—and the foundational structures behind or beneath these characters
would include hacks specifically hired to write books to fulfill (again) dossier scripts; and
drug dealers, prepared to send messages (“decoys”) through their character’s speech,
social interactions, and published writings, whether threats, recriminations, instructions, or
affirmations of profitable conditions in different sectors.
          I have hypothesized that the twentieth century may go on record as the “Hollywood
Century”; if this is so, it is because an abundance of “characters” occupying the public stage,
rather than authentic, autonomous individuals, assured that the twentieth century’s public
sphere was created and maintained in a spirit of drastically bad faith, reducing the humanities
to the dull-minded tawdriness of the cheapest, flimsiest popular culture and kitsch, and
for no good reason other than dope deals. This, if it is the case, even if only potentially the
case, or half the case, is as silly, sad, and pathetic a century dossier as a humanities century
can possibly have; and accounts for the twentieth century higher artist’s perpetual attempt,
from Duchamp forward, to degrade, abase, and destroy the higher arts from the inside out
(both of humanistic interest and of intellectual substance.) This “century sickness” is largely
behind us, though we see remnants of it in the American mainstream press, and many of us
are prepared to be objective about it—and what has been established in higher art contexts
in the twenty-first century by 2014 arguably trumps the achievements of the entire, oafish,
bastardized twentieth century. Thus, the sorrow of waste and extreme disenchantment is
tempered for many of us by wind filling new sails, the novel congeries of circumstances
around which must still seem, in their fledgling state, undetermined and indeterminate.

[Painting is “Saturn Devouring His Son” by Goya]

***
***