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.

***
***

Felino A. Soriano

from Espials

7

listening is friction

a finding fathoms

important, implicit

inclusion of sound-echo

ergonomics—finding

freedom beyond inertia’s

realized fulcrum, endearing

speech speckled as with purple

dusk in the moment of night’s

whispering interpretation

8

said of implication

                                                your language infers damage

                                    to the

            oscillating demeanor exposed though its

                                                                                    foundation

thus or/with

movement

—unsurprising the fixation of sound wandering atop shadow-allegory history

80

eyes, these carvers of silhouettes

eager etchers enveloping

positional findings, these

bouquet-shape flames

ongoing emblems of light

interpreting hands of the

watcher’s walk

emblematic reach the above-

cycle serials, solid shape-

eagerness engaging

of wait and pause of examining

artistic reinventions

81

in hearing this elongated song’s

augury-language devotion (inclusion-developed, see?)

             personality characteristics

launch into lyrical laughter                  the reconvene of

self in the watching self and their

identical differences

wandering into the braid is song’s

bouquet of directions

landing

             landing

land-again pluralized pulsation

enveloping my decision to sit, participatory,

painless

82

octagonal greens of spring-tree burgeon

                         emptying conceptual interpretations of emotional clichés,       THE

blue-theory

 leaning language of elemental sadness, an already escaped fathom of plagiarized emotion

then/when, or/why

does when weight has its ankle swell into devotional algorithms of rain and pertaining flee

does

                                     the wind become a silent challenge

?

reasonable in the spectrum of hall-thin frequencies, volume and serial realizations

encouraging tonal

exacting

             tendency-space subsequent to summer of near’s infatuation

83

washed by angled intention of

morning’s frustrated wetness

grain of microscopic skin the green

of distance evokes

vocal interpretations of sound’s abstract

persuasion to understanding delving

***

***

David Howard

Cavafy's Neighbour 

 

When the moon was full he could see it in the pond.

Still, if he pulled the shutters there would be no colour, just

the memory that is language, bad language.

He could have married the younger sister with the swan’s neck.

 

Once a dress the colour of sunset. After dark she would let him

take it off. Even the god who approved could not watch.

‘If you want love to stay shut up the house, covering

the furniture with dirty sheets’ she said.

 

He didn’t care. Only later, the later that takes him into old age. 

***

***

Laura Young

***

***

Coral Carter

twobabies

time for me to be hawksilent catstill — a shuffle — a paper dropped — a sigh — 

will send them into the air — babiestwo — feraldoves — just left home — finding 

it almost too hard — taking the sun — I hope they have learned about hawks — that 

they’re a food favoured by cats — do they know this? — these twobabes from out 

of the woods — I want to give them seed but maybe it is better they learn their own 

birdy ways.

under the diosma

beside the pool

a skullscrap 

feathermess

one 

spilt

drop

glo-bead

bright


***
***

Murray Jennings

In a Café on the High Street Two Poets Reminisce . . .  

‘Just want you to know’ she said ‘how I nearly
turned up at your door with a suitcase a box of
books and LPs and a pathetic bleeding heart’.
‘Oh yes’ he said ‘but how close was that really?’
She paused for a moment and replied ‘twenty-four
hours that’s how close that’s the truth and in that
one day the sky fell on my head, my daughter sat
in my lap asked for a story and hugged me and I
imagined she might have been reading the pattern 
of bloody rips inside my skin, inscribing my story
(I’m so sorry it has to be goodbye, but I’ll come 
and visit, you know I will. I will always love you 
no matter what. I’ll be able to explain everything
when you’re older), words I’d rehearsed but no
longer could form with the tongue that even now
allows me to imagine I can taste you through my 
ridiculous self-pity and What ifs? while I read the 
letters you send me occasionally with all the news 
of your day-to-day life over all the years since we 
both wisely let go.’ ‘Oh’ he said ‘if you had turned 
up that day you must know as I do that we would 
have drunk each other under the table and died in 
an agony of guilt, screaming and competing poetry.’ 
She smiled and they clinked their coffee cups.
For just a moment the traffic outside was silent.

***
***

Laura Young

***

***

Andrew Burke

Skin Thin as Paper

One day he wrote a page
a style not his own

sex and a hint of danger
by surprise out of wedlock.

“I hate old skin,” she said.
“There’s no way out of it.”

He thought, part make-up,
part obligation: a thin map,

main character, tangible roots,
recovery, dis/loyalty. Options

blowing in the mind.

***
***

Lawrence Upton

Trombone Piece #2

the obsessing of bees with flowers
the calmness of reverse engineers
the co-ordination of gang rapists

clatter of a mess tin
someone cuddles 
the commander's genitals 
in a large soft hand

things are not connected
except by numbering and measurement

gesture relates them

we hear their operations in universal corridors

***
***

Volodymyr Bilyk

***

***

David Bircumshaw

Belgians

Belgians are tall people. Belgians are short people. Some Belgians are chocolate-hating teetotallers.

Some Belgians do nasty things to children. Listen, there are Belgians sobbing, trapped in latex.

Nobody had told the earthworms they were Belgian, even as the executions began. In the distance

there are Belgians drumming, in formation, like an antique redcoat army. The King of the Belgians

had a teddy-bear named Mr Kurtz. There are borders, boundaries, treaties and disputes

and a map hung on a smoke-yellow wall in London. Look, I can see Belgium growing

like a mauve investment. One day it will become a Gulf State. Or an arrangement of someone,

and a dim landscape, sleeping by your side, its names draining away like rivers.

***

***

Laura Young

***

***

Nazar Honczar

Stinky socks are

in Ivan's closet

Nazar in them

***

Foremother (riddle)

I let the spirit go

He apes me --

He twines me

***

I've got the prominence in my heart

but blackrend's stronger

As long as it

***

Mayfly

Rivers surge

and me -- I rise again?

***

ріки скреснуть а я - воскресну? о весно! дай

***

Guelder rose was eaten by the aphid

I dewlap nightingale

Ukraine

***

***

Márton Koppány

from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

Vernon Frazer

View from the Basement

verbatim spray revealed 

deep dish panorama setting

tonal grit a sticky one

when removal warranties 

shimmer appeal’s delay

during a wishful sleep

hormonal protrusions intone

a prayerful synesthesia

no candelabra music left undreamed

*

dashing hopes display

their fluid crash to wreckage

halls define a corridor slash

when the vector line fractures

bore themselves into shale

creeping near bone and tine

keeping the retinue for solo encore

or a replay of invective

*

pretended value less intended

the decaying resonance lingers 

past gauntlet hopes betrayed

the trigger options cast a course

sealing off symbolic value of sights

defective or better left moribund 

these obvious pillars of displacement

***

Invasion 

the great machine ate tonsil wars

against a splenectomy plangent

reptilian segue new tonsils du jour

no habit accrued to bend yet

so tensile nor fender to the touch

as rendered mast habitant crucible

cold slouch passing vertebral organ

plants vestibule leisure in spruce

a corollary inquest surging north

dimension welling naval desks

aperture to the pastry mentioned

toward the torrid as a last display

reproof amended as mendicant 

diatribe ranting canto disability 

mentors astonished legion debts

crashing normal template rigors

where bandit snatchers abduct

their own canister replicas torn 

through emblazoned wicket feet

tearing eyes emboss disorder

hobnail quatrain Duluth trick

imprints delectable tapestry lather 

ecumenical as low breeding tracks

flailed down the dogma climb

forensic reinstated bulletin powder

clam shell attack forthcoming

aficionado splendor details trail

the fulminating derailment car

bannered slatwise portrait well

shards blanket renewal pending

new vociferous treaty alignments

nestling along the trestle penny

jumping the future track to copper

alloy butlers impound square data

stationed northern rattle nights

ecliptic as a moon crossing

where stratified helmets deal

noon blankets to the seedy

gloss needing refill cantors

nattering mattered facts across

pineal spectrum ladders flattened

to breeding castle kulaks who feed

wavering platelet conundrums 

to pratfall addicts on the fly 

or dieting cubist memoir frames

costing noon epithets that wander

ration frames in noon glasses

filtered round opprobrium canes

acid flinched to catamaran osprey

eagled forth to venture serpentine

national settings on next coast time

where assets prove illegal hunches

played at meal times while passive

legends resist immature lathering

amid rumors wiling middle ways

to sunset casters surfing on a roll

declension numbers not permitted

nor the lattice-leaves at seed

among the feeding plectrum ruins 

electric on shore where more bounds

trail moon blanks to crescent stares

blinding satellite prawns to sonata

near amperage blasters fitting more

of the slain repertoire into lasting

deviation norms no formal decree

pronounced a syllable backward

as the bygone day at the end of

its own rhetorical feed blathers

chronicle unrefined tangent players

gathering inter-modular combo

papers where samba rebuking

gander platters timbrel fumed

allegiance to the brag, uniting

sated arboreans reeling still fate

from the last gasp of an autumn wind

***

***

Jesse S. Mitchell

Redeemer

Swing your fists at me.

…..(this dead yellow grass)

There is only one way to get free

…..(this dead yellow grass)

Turn your radio up

All the way up, full blast.

And everything is electric 

And everything burns.

…..(this dead dry yellow grass)

Believe in the tree, for it is made of light.

Believe in the forceful wind, it is made of light.

Believe in the creaking limbs, these are made of light.

Believe in the root ball, it is made of light.

Believe in the earth that contains it, for it is made of light.

There is only one way out of here.

…..(this dead yellow grass)

By the light reflected back towards the eye,

…..(this dead yellow grass)

By returning the stare.

***

Ha-Unebu

Art brute

artbrute

ArtBrute

Tia hormiga black Madonna

Cocaina y codeina

At the table at the Dystonia Bravo

All hell breaks loose when I open the shutters.

Breathing apparatus, rolled up sleeves, iron lung.

Cajero

Diver bird.  End of the world.

Better off today but still far from perfect…

Big stone spirals gonna pierce open the sky

Temple-needle-eye, gonna let out all the rain

To the last grasp.

Stranger still, tiny things populate our world with us,

Microorganisms inhabit everything we do, every word we say.

And we are still waiting

Carry home the moonlight in buckets, what does spill over, the shadows down the mountain. 

And light the fires

The burning fires

With the

Tiny men, tiny people, with tiny movements, and the tiny sun, tiny little stars,  and tiny tiny eyes

That shine in any kind of light.

Fever pitch

Coughing fit.

And respiratory fluctuations

Solar flares like brainstorm, that swell up around equatorial distances. 

Prime Minister forget-me-not

Proteus-head, caught me on a bad day and the bridge is out

I know a lot and forget a lot

And dizzy in the details, King Asoka, he had the hands for nation-building.

Alleyways to pathways to avenue-neurological disorders, makes it hard to keep hold, slippery, knock at the door

And the misfire will let you in. 

ART bRUTe

ARTBRUTe

aRTBRUTE

***

***

Jim Benz

(B)anality

I. First Cycle

A bearded tongue.

II. Second Cycle

Accept it as it is.

A centered emptiness.

III. Third Cycle

A child was born.

A circular space.

A couple of nice outfits.

IV. Fourth Cycle

A defiled expression.

A disembodied head.

Aesthetic qualities.

A false terminology.

A few days later.

V. Fifth Cycle

A fierce warrior goddess.

After a minute passed.

After she fed the multitudes.

A gigantic metaphor.

A layer of wounds.

All our names were related.

Also occurring.

A lyricist and a composer.

VI. Sixth Cycle

A magnifying glass.

A minor aspect of her oeuvre.

A more complicated sense of being.

A mother who weeps.

An abandoned river bed.

An altered state.

An equal regard for connotation.

A new curling iron.

An extraordinary world.

A natural conclusion.

A new sign.

An image of the symbol.

An ink splotch.

VII. Seventh Cycle

An invariable pretense.

A normal conversation.

An ornamental fragment of a line.

Another shadow of language.

Any way that we can do it.

A paradigm of regeneration.

A pleased expression.

A puddle of tears.

A raging flood.

A reinvention.

A rule pronounced.

A second glance.

A series of statements.

A set of press-on nails.

A severe glare.

A side table.

A silhouette of two trees.

A small figure.

As previously determined.

A sweet-faced kid.

At first glance.

VIII. Eighth Cycle

A tongue lashing.

A vast field.

A vital link.

A younger sibling.

Baggage of the possibility.

Before the apocalypse.

Beneath a stone house.

Between the North Sea and the Alps.

Between us.

Beyond the perpendicular apex.

Blame it on his mother.

Borders that still exist.

Bright lights.

Broken beneath his feet.

Broken into sand.

But she loved him.

Carved wooden sandals.

Ceding the dilemma.

Characters in a play.

Clothes piled on the floor.

Clutching the window sill.

Coming to grips.

Compared to her dissociation.

Confronted directly.

Connecting to the stronghold.

Consistently insightful.

Contents of an hallucination.

Cutting into her hide.

Dead by means of silence.

Destructive power.

Deviations of the known.

Discovered in the role of a center.

Disjointed phrases.

Distress and disintegration.

IX. Ninth Cycle

Divided into three sections.

Double-crossed.

Do we like it.

Do you have a name.

Dreams and fantasies.

Dry arid land.

Ego blows.

End of the world.

Established as an intermediary.

Every day.

Everyone looks happy.

Evidence of the tongue clamp.

Exposed by a circular image.

Extremely pleasing.

Flashing your tiny nothings.

For a couple of minutes.

For an understandable relapse.

Form does not conform.

For the purpose of avoiding.

Four more mouths to feed.

Four years later he returned.

From his confusion.

From the essential function.

From time to time.

From where he was standing.

Full of loathing.

Gravestones raising questions.

Ground into mulch.

Haunted by multiple losses.

He asked.

He came back smiling.

He didn’t stay.

Held in place with nails.

He'll be staring blindly.

Her father demanded something else.

Her mother would have wept.

He supported the family elsewhere.

He wasn’t one of them.

He wiped his nose.

His arms outstretched.

His major contribution.

His predominance.

His teeth gleaming.

His white knuckles.

Hit in the head by lightening.

How it all began.

How nervous she feels.

How they were beaten and starved.

Huddled in a constricted space.

Human faces filled with emotion.

Human stones.

Humdrum.

I bet you were happy.

If you ask other people.

I have no idea how long.

I let him hold the gun.

Implosion of form.

In a big tent.

In a fictional account.

In order to serve.

In silence.

Intense layers.

In the altered space.

In the doorway.

In the form of an apocalypse.

In the manner of a fractal.

In the newspaper.

In the rice fields.

In these moments.

In the very center of the circle.

Introspection.

In which it appears.

I stepped in it.

It called out.

It looked like trouble.

It makes a nice ornament.

It seems to hang very well.

It senses everything.

It serves as a work space.

Its impetus is to act.

It's not itself.

It turned to blood.

It was an old joke.

It was a statement.

It was groaning.

It was growing weary.

I wasn't there.

I won't discuss the conflagration.

Just this once.

X. Tenth Cycle

Just this once.

Keeping up the charade.

Kind of like a repetition.

Languages with the same last name.

Largely unpopulated.

Larger-than-life.

Left to die.

Like a bird.

Listening to voices.

Look at the screen.

Man woman.

Menaced by psychosis.

Modeling her dream on a question.

My eyes, my eyes.

My feet crossed at the ankles.

My voice steady.

Networked and programmable.

No material.

Non-mimetic.

No reference except for myself.

Not associated.

Nothing like my counterpart.

Novelty of exposition.

Objects transformed.

Obscured by rain.

Odd phrases.

On a beach

Opportunities for growth.

Our clothes.

Our faces.

Our guns.

Our house is full of flies.

Our intention was not to please.

Our record of inscription.

Our shoulders were touching.

Out in the kitchen.

Outside the moment.

Over there.

Owners of the language.

Pale and deranged.

People inside our circle.

Perfect for something.

Poised as if dying.

Predominance of a specific value.

Process of searching.

Projective power.

Put it on the kitchen table.

Raised like an altar.

Read sequentially in the proper tense.

Replacing the outside world.

Scattered at our feet.

Senseless quotations.

She fell instantly in love.

She felt no lightness of being.

She is ready.

She replied quietly.

She said it is going to swallow him.

She still hasn't answered his question.

She wakes up extra early.

Shrinking and delinquent.

Sitting quietly on the floor.

Six months from the outside world.

Someone who frightens her.

Someone who is entirely different.

Sometimes in belief.

Sorting out all the tangents.

Space has become confused.

Stereotyped and inadequate.

Stiff from time.

Still fragrant and green.

Such as it is.

Such promise.

Supranational spaces.

Surrounded by a concrete fence.

Sweet grapes filled with healing.

Symbols of apotheosis.

Taller and also stronger.

Tapping at the windows.

Technology.

Thank you very much.

That's how it goes.

The actual calling.

The beginning of the end.

The commotion over there.

The contract and the white spaces.

The dangling streets.

The door of their apartment.

The experience.

The first bombs.

The first cycle.

The first three paragraphs.

The fraying edge.

The function of a crippled dog.

The illusionist.

The invasion of comprehension.

The meaninglessness.

The mighty waves.

Then softly repeating.

The object of her love

The outside and the individual.

The poverty of frequency.

The power to preserve.

There are more than three distances.

The referential function.

There is nothing more to say.

The retractable lens.

There was nothing special about it.

The same expression.

The same people twice.

The temporal pause.

The tongue of nations.

The very desk.

The voice on the radio.

The whole damn surface.

The woman.

They are at a party.

They eloped.

They were living in Berlin.

They wondered.

Think of a time.

This is worth knowing.

This time is different from the other time.

This will not seem so negative.

This would imply he hasn't understood.

Those who are hurting.

To codify.

To consume.

To damage property.

To destroy.

To feed the crowd.

To feel more involved.

Together at each lull.

Tongue of the belt.

Tooth wounds.

To show you how it feels.

To superimpose ourselves.

To the detriment of being.

To the expressed object.

To the left and right of vacancy.

To the observation.

To which everything is related.

To whip the child repeatedly.

Treated as an object.

Two lanes and a cell phone.

Coda

Three streams of thought: typography and reflection. Unceasingly developed. Understanding the

individual movements. Undetectable moments. Very seriously. Visions of the center. Watching them die. We can't understand anything. We deserved it. Weekdays and Sundays. We have been at it for aeons. We laughed repeatedly at every opportunity. We should be thankful. We spoke in his absence. We were shooting photos. What are you doing today. What did he say about the production. Whatever he meant by that I don’t know. What is behind the camera. What she called the calamity. What surprised you most. What they meant. When he pronounced his purpose. When he spoke coherently. When I drove to the shore. When time disambiguated. When we were still a bar code. When we tested for depth. When we were just being born. When you squinted. Which lasted for about an hour. Widespread approximations. With a cork screw. With frayed cuffs. Within its own realm. With jealous pleasure. Without confusing. Without fruit. Without knowing. With the genuine article. With the other stragglers. Woman man. Word as an object. Words relating to time. Yellow jogging shorts. Yet again. You opened up by chance. Your mouth is an eye. Your tongue is spatial.

***

***