Never Ignorant of Getting Goals Accomplished (p. 6)

POETRY




Never Ignorant of Getting Goals Accomplished
Oedipus Jones

I want
To drink coffee without any ulcers,
To smoke without worry of cancer,
To take drink in excess with no consequences
Physical or social,
To read think and write (almost) exclusively,
Confound reason and commonsense,
And plague the collective unconscious with my contemptible whims.

I will achieve a literal immortality
And die by my own hand.

floaters (p. 7)

floaters
brock bernard

i asked around
and i hear that they're called floaters,

quickly becoming
a great annoyance for me.

they make me feel old.
they make me feel dry.

they make me feel like a writer,
which is quite the shame; i am most certainy not,

waking up a three pm
with burning eyes because of that oppressive

late afternoon sunlight, reading Ginsberg and
writing 'i feel' statements.

a different floater in a different eye
every other week.

and it makes me wonder,
really if they aren't just errant memories,

ones i was looking for a fortnight ago,
saying their last goodbyes laughingly.

three-and-twenty feels old
and i can't back that up tomorrow, with new ash

in my eyes.

Outline for a Discourse (p. 8)

Outline for a Discourse
C. Yumi Kim

The Windy City
The Coast
Myself
Crowded Airport
You, of course.
In Between
Unfamiliarity
This is the skeleton of a discourse. I hope to finish it one day.

ten (p. 9)

ten
brock bernard

turtle shimmied left,
he only wanted to
see the big sky

I Say... (p. 4)

I say…
brock bernard

What i know of this so-called ‘love’
is somewhat limited to warbling along with
nigh forgotten singers from the eighties,
hands in gloves,
wisping jazz through brass, and
creating questionable photographs and poems, yet still
clicking buttons and pens and keys,
never to the tune of any erstwhile success.
i ‘love’ to gaze in some pretentious state
of admiration into the meticulously alphabetised
books on my shelf
which i have yet to read.

It wasn’t that aforementioned, specious passion
which caused me to forget entirely
what i was going to do with the remainder of
the day that you gave me;
not the kind that got me lost in
your green eyes
that i didn’t think would make such a big deal of themselves
during that introductory
palaver over pancakes;
not the kind that made me chary
of my proclivity for daftness,
and more nervous than a fresh cup of coffee
set in front of a busy graduate student.
Much like my closet must feel
after a day’s worth of laundry,
when there isn’t an empty hanger to be seen,
i became whole again, and full of colour.

Now there is the everpresent somethingnew,
which they sang about
in those lofty rock-ballads of yore.
At least to me it’s somenewthing
of which i don’t think i can sing with a
February voice.
Rather, i write the time when we were both ill,
when Joni Mitchell sang us into a
deliquescing mass on black canvas;
i forgot which hand was mine.
Every day, i am surprised by you,
how you manage to catch me in every innocent lie,
the way that you seem to voice what my mind is scribbling in it’s pages
and you always seem to find a way to
complete what i’m supposed to be.

What i know of…
is your hair playing lambent upon my shoulder,
my cigarette smoke rising from
tangerine tendrils like wisteria caught fire,
when the only thing aflame was something behind my sternum
that i have never known.
It’s something as ubiquitous as
Grass in Amsterdam and equally wondrous,
so much so that i am not surprised that
you catch me staring at you,
evidently ensorcelled.

You remind me much of hummus in a
rainbow bowl
and everything else is just carrots to me,
only an excuse to get to you,
to touch your hand,
to hear the canorous susurrations of your voice,
to see you blush when i can’t seem to abscond with my eyes.

i thought that i was going to cry,
or perhaps float off into some airy dream
while i was waiting for you, watching
as you performed the cell-phone pace
under the lamp post,
a fantastic, refulgent dandelion
turning snow into coruscating motes falling to the ground,
only to shimmer again under slivers of
moonlight through agreeable branches.
i surprised myself that i didn’t collapse before you
very much due to the efflorescing
somethingnew.

i didn’t think that such beauty could exist,
and so close to me.
This is not to say that a word such as ‘beauty’
or any word at all could be used to describe the singular visage that is
you. Even now, you pour forth as much as i from these lines
that are just to say
that i love you, more than any pen could ever find the perspicuity to scrawl.

The Western Affront (p. 7)

The Western Affront
Henri Caputo

The clouds were as gruel exiled from its water base
It looked as if they were poised to go to war with the rest of the sky,
except where there seemed to be an opening cut out
in the ranks of wispy warriors where the sun sat vainglorious,

grinning into my face,
so close to the ground I thought
I could lob a rock hitting it
in the centre of its smug mug, but
instead I just threw it a squinty glare as rain began to cool my head.

How to Make a Man (p. 8)

How to Make a Man
Angela Feeherty

Knead with the knuckles then
open the palm and press.
Turn the wad of flour and dye
close to your eye and
carefully in your hand,

push with your thumbs
from flat pizza to umbrella
and then pull the sides
like the sheets of your bed
at night until they converge
to a head just like yours.
Kneel over a fingerprinted
body of red on the floor

in the sunlit space between
the dark blind stripes
squishing the two parts until
the light is filled with life.

Brush your curls back
to admire what you've made,
then with a smile in your
dream-filled mind
go outside to play.

Downbeat (p. 9)

Downbeat
brock bernard

On the street near the closed-down book store
there stand the twin trees
who, when seen under cloudless skies of Midwest autumn,
bend towards the brown green patchwork
like mother birds in search of sustenance,

eager branches and limbs rising toward the gelid moon,
spread wide
as earthenworn seraphs stretching sleepy.
My lips are aflame and

the soft smoke of inspiration
dutifully sifts up through the roof of my mouth,
manoeuvring like the legless
throughout a darkened labyrinth,

spawning the nearly obvious notion
that from the beginning,
the first welcoming light that immediately went out –
as my body began to covet moving air –

I was having a nearer death experience
as I breathed it all in
Now I no longer appreciate the tacit pleasure
of leaping from rock
to stone,
with charred predilection toward staying afloat,

lightly alighting on each
stoic grey face
that grimaced at me and those damn kids,

and I go home sixteen years later
to shoot into my arm
selectively objective information –
while the somnolent fog rubs its eyes,

lingering above the ballad-imbued uptight grand, dizzying each
fresh . hatched . one . fourth . note
as they lackadaisically erected gravestones on my ashen eyelids,

the cowards

Cryptic (p. 11)

Cryptic
Kei Tse

Clawing at extensions of youth
bleeding out from hollowed cavities,
we rip out our eyes in wonder,
drinking nectars of self-sufficiency and trauma.

Orphaned fingers curled around a pallid canvas,
folding delectably with bursts of colours blooming
out of the Fahrenheit and paradigms of our bodies, shifting.

Fragilities,
somewhere in the space between two broken mirrors.
This is eternity, passing.
A cryptic astrology.

Jake (p. 12)

Jake
Vincent Saint-Simon

When St. Louis was
young and her
belly got
big; when her
eyes would squint
shut with pain,
when the columns
of vomit she
would deposit into
the toilet had developed
into a hated ritual,
the water rose
to the bridge-marked
borders
and broke.

The doctors decked
in masks and sterile eyes,
adjusting their glasses
like monkeys
over a rotting boy,
ripped off her skirt
and pulled down her
stockings so the
stench of shit
stood almost as exposed
as her labial lips
opened wide to his
crowning head.

I doubt that she, self-absorbed lady,
was ever aware the fortune she bore.
That now in these, the fields
of blood, her child stands
stripped of human rights
against the backdrop of a country that acts
the way that toe-jam tastes.

But if I could tell her
of the son she fed
on her poorly-paved
nipples that secrete only ash,
I would tell her of the Jake I saw
on a thunder-filled night when he
climbed to the top of the lightning tree--
that when God and radio evangelicals
trained arrows on us both,
it was I who tearfully ran to her
and he who had the courage
to laugh.

Kansas, KS (p. 2)

Kansas, KS
Dru Parrish

All the arums of October spaced over
The cropping fields drawn and loved behold all others.
The land here runs in directions northwest,
Too far from the modicums of the seasons.

Rubbing callus over blister at the work done.
Trace over the thorn bushes and the crops all silence I feel.
At this moment none of it seems real to the touch.

How aged in the long tired of the day from the morning.
The moment of innocence whips whiskers I have long forgotten to a beard.

In every evening the soft light of the west touches
The hidden colors of the atmosphere and cloud nine
Becoming the mainstay over this slumbering field work.
With night the punctual wonder of forgiveness.

Rocking chair porches, to theater of the stridulation
All wonder and sleep, to know is to dream.

All is lost until the hint murmur of the sun peak.
Conveying all too immediate that rest breeds no yield.
From where we are now the world curves in the scape.
There remains only the day, the cultivating, and the hands that bend the two.

And your husband will smash your face open against a wardrobe but I still loved you, only the moon more dormant (p. 3)

And your husband will smash your face open against a wardrobe but I still loved you, only the moon more dormant
Chris Scott

The future will be
how our kneecaps throb and pull
in a moving vehicle when we’re escaping
the deftly crumbling infrastructure
of a traumatized eastern seaboard,
trying to dissuade the shift
of interlocking limbs
from distracting the night sadistic

When you gaze like an impaled
wingspan stretched across the stomach
of a growling minivan I come alive
like the way we fill the air
between towns and cities with x-rays
and waves bent with anchormen
grinning on cue

And you,
at the foot of the bed when he’s crying
and bouncing your children on his lap
saying he still needs you, when
he’s driving you to the hospital and
he becomes your hero because there
were other weapons in the house
he could’ve used

I’ll ape ventriloquist blue from
the top floor of a brownstone, wrapping
canvas around my fists and packing my
things again like the past
won’t be our palms scraped from misjudged
footing and an awkward fall, and your
face as I still remember it are postcards collected
in a shoebox when it hasn’t rained in years
and we didn’t know better

Memorandum (Sticky Buns) (p. 5)

Memorandum (Sticky Buns)
Tristan Meyer

Moonlight on your brow
kiss like streams; love like oceans
Starlight on your breath

Liquid, piebald dreams
on doleful, holefull canvas;
Rain of memory

‘Some may find me cold,
but it is the limitless warmth
which I protect that they cannot see
or touch.’

Above Our Sleeping Heads (p. 2)

Above Our Sleeping Heads
Joe Moccia

The night has hands
but daylight can touch.
We dream the dark away and
we don't stir so much.

Carrion dreams pile forth
and breathe the north wind bells,
sweating sage and saints and rhythm.

Hymns hued in red and gold
that alight
align and are lost
in heaven we never know,
sung for what love we give them.

Last Night in St. Louis (p. 3)

Last Night in St. Louis
Angela Feeherty

Above my head cracks are forming;
sky raining on downtown as confetti,
streets shimmering,
bluish shards
crunching as I walk
from Tucker to Washington to 10th;

the vacant gray buildings
create tunnels before my eyes.

Looking down I can see
the clouds, soft pink and bright
tangerine wisps passing through
the ground, blown by strong winds
out of the city,
on to places where the earth still trembles,

the pulse of clear-green rivers swelling
like veins through the grasslands.

The industrial East City
is gone from my sight.
Hollow buildings in South City,
ghettoes in North City,
segregated West County,
lost, beyond location.

Here on the sidewalks the sun
is passing--
blues and yellows and oranges
of the smashed crystal ball
are fading to black.

I sit down on Locust,
brush the sunset off my shoulder
just as a half-moon is forming.
I look across the cityscape
through the fog of falling
shining atmosphere
at the lonely shadowed Arch
that, when passed through, will take me
where I always knew I would go.

Narcissus (p. 5)

Narcissus
David Capps

reply was he didn't know what the concept was

string of beads, sure
straw floating stars down the river
sweet pressure of the summer's wrist

but this matter of passing time stumped the best
as best i could 'splain it:

drawing my finger to a ridge
a pitiful handful of goats staring back
condescending as the land was drying up
all sense of this migration lost on our nodding

I stood a long time by this Idiot on the bridge
who could not repeat back to me what I said

Love and the Unsung Hero (p. 6)

Love and the Unsung Hero
Dru Parrish

From the points of index
one can bridge the chasms
between gestures and constellations.

Trace the stars around
harsh lines. Breathe into beauty
with red hair; girls in white
set against darkness in the night.

The one who speaks to me, speak to me.
Swirl hands in red. They come and go
the girls who talk of nothing; nothing and Michelangelo.

My hand drops drawing chasms
together. If to me. Asterisk to eye…and me

I endeavor to be still; let them speak to me;
speak to me…and once.

Cicada’s sing the muse,
summer song sweetly sung:
love and the unsung hero.

Skin Like Spilled Milk (p. 2)

Skin Like Spilled Milk
Dana Kunline

For a long time I wanted to have skin like spilled milk,
smooth, glassy, impenetrable by light,
worth weeping over.

I wanted hips like the shadows under a melon,
something soft you could curve your hand around,
that didn’t exist.

Hands like birds, with quick fluttering heartbeats, long lovely
feathers for fingers, fragile pretty bones,
nails like singing beaks.

But my skin isn’t mine to change. I can see through it when
I get out of the shower, hairs stand up,
my veins show through.
When in an airplane above the midwest,
they are the thin rivers you see.

Just Inspire (p. 3)

Just Inspire (Music: Aphex Twin-"Fingerbib")
Zhian Kamvar

Tear the skin. A
flap of flesh hangs
down as this force
called gravity
welcomes it to
become one with
the ground. I dive
into the pool
of blood that waits.

Flowing out of
the arteries
and veins, it falls
down the skin like
rain from empty
Fields will flow to
empty creek beds

Down stream in the
Superior
Vena Cava
is where I will
swim. Bumping this
way and that, try
to keep up with
flowing matrix
secreted by
friendly blood cells.
I climb upon
and surf the stream
on my way to
the heart. I can

see atrium
is waiting for
me, drinking my
brothers, sharing
them with its heart's
body. Now my turn,
in atrium.
is of the right,
through tricuspid,
Pulmonary
Semilunar.

In atrium,
is of the left,
through bicuspid,
out aortic
semilunar,
dispersed into
arteries I
will flow to my
Capillaries
and give waiting
cells oxygen
to breathe and live
for one more day.

The Last American (p. 5)

The Last American
Dru Parrish

“No one writes like Hemingway anymore, I’ll tell ya.”
No need. His heart became the arms
of an age that pulled a generation
into the sea when all that was known was
the Atlantic.

“Imagine what arms! My, my, my.
Holding the gaze of Hard men
with journal eyes. Speaking glory
through callused hands.”

I paused him. Smoked cursive lungs
and set this thought;
--But with them, nothing’s the same now
no more wars to win, nothing left to wrestle

“...
They’d have to be steady.
Tremors don’t doubt sure hands
composure thick, even at the end
when they have but one way out.
They do not waver at fate.
Boredom kills all ancient lions.”