Michael Andre

Dim Sum 

Beauty betrays its beholder
With lies

Its holder
With age

With wrinkles & fat
& dim sense


***
***

Felino A. Soriano

Of language the raven speaks

  

            you’ve the caw of action

calamitous interpretation of

                        autumn’s varied dying parables

: of leaf, plural

  scented heat, spring-summer stanza

                                    each of a moment’s clarity of

                                                            beneath

                                                thus

witness among the shy engagers                                 the watchers sans

veneration then

saddened disparity this whole absence’s

culmination of

                                    blackened

excitation 

*** 

Of language the dragonfly speaks

affirmation my

multilayered language                         ascends upon aerial stimulations

                                                the

                        vocalized contours etch

entire prosodic

certainty

                                    collaborative amid a blurred fixation within

structural

                                                                        dissipation

*** 

Of language the white moth speaks 

                        slid

from the apparition’s missing vow

            the

ring of secondary ceremony

                                    winged and prophetic

                serenades of multilingual blears

camaraderie unneeded as

                                                            silence steers erratic’s

believable

                                                comprehension

                                                                                    downward

***

***

Thad Rutkowski

Before the Hurricane 

 

Go with the undertow.
You can’t fight the current or the tide,
or rip around in your board shorts,
riding the pipeline like some surfer dude.

Hold the hand of the nearest one
and get pushed out, then in
before the sea turns from blue to gold,
and the sky from azure to black,
and the helicopters come out, looking for you.

Reach for the hand of the nearest one,
then jump or dive,
whichever works better
to keep you away from the washing machine,
the vortex of foam
that sinks ships and surfers alike.

***

Coming Topside

When we came topside, I took with me my favorite mother-stone, and she took her favorite mother-stone, and we started one family all over again. We needed to start this family over, because our former family was somehow erased, forgotten when we came topside. We’d left that family bottomside, and then we’d climbed upward, without any of our relatives, until we came topside. We were on the top of the barrier, the thing separating us from our families, and all we had were these stones that were our favorites. We took the stones out of our pockets, but we didn’t throw them away. We just separated them from our pockets, and when we did, it seemed that our mothers came topside, too.

“Did you bring your daughter-stones?” we asked our mothers.

        Our two mothers said yes, they had brought those stones. And then there were four of us and four stones, all on the top side of the barrier. And in this way we were able to start not one family, but two families, all over again.

***

***

Elizabeth Switaj

Caprico(u)rn 

 Caprico(u)rn is feminine, dominated by the knees

 We turn skin Our ho(u)rns spear into tulle

                                 and dance its wispy bands

drawing down the snow

                                       as if the rabbit in the moon

                                   wept & froze

                                     Our knees,  

                      remnants of walking,

bend just enough beneath Our scales

to call what we do kneeling

                                              

                                                          fins fading blue

We gather

snow into a dome

light a candle, pray a scroll

                                                           leave satsumas for gods

                        who will turn Us back to one

 Caprico(u)rn w(oul)d love    to say I again

o(u)r, if not, fade into preserved by salt

***

Goldfish

People flit against each other, bright shirts flapping like long, loose fins, and I’m against 

the glass. Maybe I’m the goldfish as my mouth goes o when they sing. I sing; they talk to 

each other. The rhythm of pause and take, the echoing of tones I can’t hear. They’re all 

the same. I bang my nose on the glass. I want to be near them.

When I leap against their legs I can breathe. Then oxygen’s too much for me. And sound. 

I panic. I flop. I flap. A meltdown. A fit. And back into the bowl again. It doesn’t hurt my 

fins, my skin to be in water, the silence, constant pressure. But the people are so beautiful. 

I watch. I want. To flop again.

***

And Rest in Silence

Even at night there is no silence

Even in sun there is no safe

corner or straight for kids who love

in violet—not taupe—who hold

hands no larger hands protect

from teeth at hallway’s end

where taunts & jeers don’t end,

where you learn to pray for silence

since no one will speak to protect

you. Their bones would not be safe.

Take my bones in your skin. Hold

my ashes to the wind, my love.

We’ll show them what it means to love.

Don’t let this be the end.

There’s only so much you can hold,

and there’s no silence

in the wind, no safe

-ty for what winds protect.

Let the trees behind the track protect

us from the wind—and hide our love

in evergreen & elm, safe

from hanged man’s fated end

from silence

I can no longer hold.

Two girls walk by. They hold

our hands as well as theirs. Protect

our prayers for silence.

I love you, and you love

her & me & him & that’s the end 

Even our bones are not safe.

Even our skin is not safe

since it’s with skin we touch & hold

each other & the rope to end

our lives, to protect

our memories of love 

we do not kneel, we pray for silence.

The safe will never protect

love from those who hold

the power to end  the thrall of silence.

***

***

Dominic Fox

16/03/2012

Beginning like ending an improper severance -
the cut thread frays, the dancing cable crackles
across the worktop. Onward under sufferance

towards no known end, pioneer of feckless
consecration, brusque kickstarting tyro,
spatter-gowned convener of debacles:

just see if you can swing this, until giro
cashed at least: make straight-backed riverdance
swish move to exit, grinning down El Toro.


***
***

Mark DuCharme

The Unfinished

  

To sing to ourselves while the dead inform us

Although we are not here

Although we sing, at a transitive distance

While we are naked, being dreamed.

By whom? Our guardian imposters?

By the weight of cities which can’t bear us?

When you go to sleep, do you sleep?

Being awake, though artless in the postures

Of unthinking selves’ positions

We don’t take. If we do take anything,

It would have to be something there’s

No word for.

Describe. Defile. Deny. I can’t

Do any of these

Things seriously,

Until the weather changes character—

Our positions in the archives rendered

Useless by material

Flinging. If there is a we;

If there is a place.

I’m afraid of numbers & bumblebees,

Of tightly resolved cities,

Of the impositions of selves on others

Spread

Wide like daydreams of the obscene

Parade, “that old-time religion,”

Or anything else we wish we’d

Said.

Patenting objects for reply

Until the weather changes character.

To refuse

Abandoned futures, root them

In the ground.

*** 

23.  So what?  Or whom?  & To what end?  The ends which come of raw beginnings.  Poetry is a ledge.  Jump quickly.  Being on the spot, or spotted.  What end does it describe?  Or does it end, & why?  It is coming from the source, & not that pure.  Everything becomes writing— that table, perhaps, or the door.  I had thought what?— but now it’s not.  Now it’s knotted, like estuaries.  Like vestiges which pry the rains apart.  The rain is not a part of this poem.  Wind falls down.  To think in streams of summers rushing.  To use summer as a material.  A dead heat, swallowing the eaves.  Under the placemats of what grieves.  To grieve for all of time passing, or to burn like summer, swift & indelicate.  To feel the crashing of words upon the tongue.  Never to be won.

24. What are cities made of words?  Whom did you call?  What love frees us— being freed or fleeing in the attractions without charge?  Without mechanics, without voice.  Our cities fail us, as do our journals full of ghosts.  Light falls on the roof slates blithely.  It is indifferent to its role in poetry.  (This was not always the case).  We are charged with the creation of animal cities.  Our cities, like our selves, are often stolen.  Stolen, at the intensity of looking at light for the first time ever.  A red toenail; a subjective barrage.

***

Write a composition on the forms that silence takes. Become immersed in noise.  Bleed only when the need describes a city.  The city is a complex exchange.  It is a host, entirely resistant to architecture.  It is a means of going forward, a clap of wayward grace, an intent to occupy (or become occupied).  If you become occupied, think hard about the needs of the occupiers. If you become lost, enter a city so that you will know where you are, what limits you reside in.  The bleeding limits, going forward into silence made of words.  The wind, in the reversal of complex trees.

***

The Unfinished

The poem is another way of vanishing.

Ghosts do not remember this

Who live

At dark borders of the door.

There is a clock at the edge of the

Bookface. Is it

You

Who’s being stopped?

When you are stopped, you are free to begin

Like the poem & its ongoingness. What

Is there            to believe in what

Is there                        to stop, or look back at

In your ongoingness the wind does not

Believe you

It sings in the crevices

Of what’s explicitly not            when you are

There, you are free to begin

You in air, & books don’t wake

        You. The only books that do

Are those not written stillborn

When they are written, they line up

& Sing like ghosts

They make city noises out of poems

Which build like rooms when the ghosts wake

***

The Unfinished

Is it, in the minutes we don’t

Pass, into a space, a city (city

Which is partly imagined)?

Is it, in the moment of its

Parting? Is it that we don’t go

When we go? Is it out of tune?

Is it what remains?

Is it capable of being put

Into words? Is it what you thought

You needed, but now don’t?

Is it what you needed

To think, until now? Is it what

Remains of night

(Night, which embodies us)?

Is it that the Earth & Sky

Have an empathic relationship?

Is it some kind of residue?

Is it made from what departs?

Is it an act of grace? Is it

Something a child would understand?

Can it be described using words

Like ‘glassy’ or ‘high-strung’?

Is it something you are

Smitten with (someone)?

Is it breakable; & have you broken it

Yet? Does it resemble the moon

On the rim of a shoe?

Is it a stalemate, crossed energies

From which nothing can proceed?

Is it interior to some? Is it frozen?

Do you sometimes wish that it was never there?

***

***

John M. Bennett

Sole Dadas, Chunk 20


If not tongue’s corpulence, massed dust

     searing’s low succession,

     that equals and’s own exceeds

     balled yummy leopards,

all courses traversed, all mufflers sardined

where rocks trap the marina, 

     and seen decks nor’s hung pecker,

dull pie leaving’s bipolar sign.

Who mass felicity’s caked president,

pissed the holes and cased dull primer’s

     dusty vacuum.

Past ortho doles all air, all the sweaty cocks.

And primed gradually,

advocating the sea toads’ gents,

the shirt’s dull land and astral dazed seer,

     manacles tangy velocity,

which quantum Ceres’ mass doors in tiers,

and’s ardent mirror dusts shushed guts honed

     in Neptune’s single fatigue,

     his vague pile of plums

sugar putrefied measles, pissed undulations,

     a single inclined spiggot,

     a single violent spume.

Dosed vessels hair these, and dirigibles

to dose alms which query, ablaze,

sere pals verdant, sere fronds and meat,

     the salt crawls in tortured

arcs, or nervous or sealed,

with sibiline craw, dosed vessels these seats.

     Not the pulverized despair

in’s camp, who nods the pissy ale’s hair;

the most torpid is under arial’s sieve,

the most tardy vision deveined,

     and, signaling all’s massed lentils,

     coughed up the pencils.

 Transduced from Luis de Góngora's Soledades

***

***

Rose Mary Boehm

Barcelona, 2004: A photographic tour of Barcelona.


***
***

Steve Dalachinsky

train to solotun  - (train from Bern, Switz. to Solotun, Switz. --8/21/90)

sub urban   commuter

rush  hour          in german

& it's hot

                        the seats are so small    my fingers hurt

watch out

watch yourself in the window

until the trees become your mirror

    old friends always think that only they

                 know what is best

   watch the people & the fields & the factories

           

                old cows think that only they know

                                  what is best

simple dialogue    simple frustrations

can be as painful as morning

                     when you are a tree   you know nothing

                                 there is only the earth where you are

the man is always building for himself

his species

                      the landscape keeps changing

    the man keeps changing the landscape -

                                                uprooting trees

man & cow are old friends

man & cow always think that only they

know what is best

               man is man's best friend

     is a row of cars at a railroad crossing…  waiting

        the gate is red & white

                  just enjoy waiting      whispers the garden

                     i stare into the mirror

it is other people's eyes  other people's faces          & mouths

it is hot in here  on this train to suburbia

                         at rush hour in german

& the chickens & vegetables  all know what is best

the trees become my reflection

                                                             the horse is  led away.

***

***

William Bain

on the sands

on the sands the sun creams

flow slow motion for the horse

on table game whatever number

strikes the –ay within tip

mercury on the horizon

why march april may –mbling

toward the waves

***

***

 

Dick Allen

from The Zen Master Poems

The Zen Master Accounts for Himself

I’ve climbed a mountain of knives.

Ignored, except by local friends,

into each night, I persisted.

There was an owl.

There was a scratching at the side of my house

that could only have been a water rat.

I counted pennies

and longed for gold coins.

It was difficult to hear my voice

among so many others of my time.

There was a stone fence I stared at.

Buddha statues cast shadows

far across my living room.

There was the constant small pain

of the never quite well.

I knew the daze I lived in was a daze

yet could never quite shake it.

Often, I’d start out, then head back in.

Each night, the moon climbed the sky.

***

“What is it?”

What is it?

The constant sound of water running off the mountain.

What is it?

A cricket making its way across the floor.

or

What is it?

The constant sound of water running off the mountain.

What is it?

A cricket making its way across the floor.

***

“Cherry blossoms are edible”

Cherry blossoms are edible.

Use them for coaxing out flavor

in wagashi or anpan.

But most wonderful,

drunk deeply at weddings

are cups of sakurayu—

cherry blossoms

pickled in salt with umuzu

yielding a vague taste of plums.

***

“When you’re in trouble”

“When you’re in trouble,”

the Zen Master said, smiling,

looking up from his sushi,

“ask, ‘What is this?’

“You must ask it three times,

in three different ways:

“What is this?

What is this?

What is this?

“It’s a question-koan, of course.

“There are as many answers

as people on earth.

“For instance:

1)    aizu—the Japanese word for sign, signal.

2)    an illusion with a heartbeat

3)    Salt and the sea on the tongue.”

  

 ***

The Zen Master’s Found Poem

“The largest collection of haiku

translated into English

on any single subject

is Cherry Blossom Epiphany

by Robert A. Gill,

which contains some 3,000

Japanese haiku

on the subject of cherry blossoms.”

***

The Zen Master Follows Another’s Example

I see him around the village,

planting his karmic seeds

in every lawn—

a minor Johnny Chapman

walking Connecticut.

Carefully, he sows,

always allowing for drainage,

hoping he’s fooled the slugs.

May root systems take hold!

May there be germination!

They’re so fragile, he says,

especially at the start,

before the first four true leaves.

Loving wishes, quiet favors,

compassionate acts, small good deeds.

How pleasant his stooped back,

to know he’s at work

over carrots and peas.

Near at hand, may great pumpkins

swell from the ground.

***

  

The Zen Master’s Evocations

“I like the phrases,

‘at the base of the cliff,’

‘deep in the forest,’

‘at the edge of the field,’

‘on the shore of the lake,’”

mused the Zen Master.

“‘Adrift on the river,’

“obscured by the mist,”

‘lost in the clouds,’

‘beside the waterfall,’

but also,

‘lighting a candle,’

‘in evening shadow

a lone monk tolling a bell.’”

***

“I Heard, said the Zen Master”

“I heard,” said the Zen Master,

“a special transmission.

“It was as if I was a child

searching with a crystal radio,

scraping a cat’s whisker across the crystal.

“I read about it nowhere

but it was pointed at me,

“turning me inside out,

so that someday,

five hundred lives from now

I might become a Buddha.

“More likely, however,

is that I’ll be a sled runner

on somebody’s Flexible Flyer,

speeding down hills

under the streetlights,

snow falling lightly, like static.” 

***

“Ha, ha, ha, you and me”

“Ha, ha, ha, you and me,

Little brown jug, don’t I love thee,”

sang the Zen Master,

climbing Cold Mountain.

“Ha, ha, ha.  Hee, hee, hee,

just you and me, Jug, you and me,”

sang the Zen Master,

descending Cold Mountain,

which really wasn’t Cold Mountain,

but a mild peak in the Catskills

he liked to pretend was Cold Mountain,

singing his happy song,

his jug full of Pu-her tea.

***

***