I like to begin letters

with weather.  Today:

weird.  Breathing was

kind of a chore in

this faintly soggy

air, nothing I’m sure like

what you get down

south but crummy enough

for me.  Colorless

sun etc.  The sky all

diffuse and almost without

any texture.  Shirt sticking

a little to my skin, I

went into the afternoon

with pointless coffee

and nursing old gripes.  Now,

today is yesterday, and

the new today is better,

weather-wise.  With

baguette, cheddar, glass

of water I’m happy.  Out

my window the never-to-be-

identified tree shakes

its tiny red flowers

in the wind.  I should be

working but this is

more funner.  Bishop in

a letter somwehre says

writers like to write

letters because it gives

the feeling of working

without the actual work.

Or something like that.

Anyway amen.  I grow

dull.  Thank you for the

generous response to

the press.  I like

to think we’re all in it

together, and so, clearly,

do you, which is a comfort

and a quickening.  Speaking

of in it, I’ll be in

Monday for 24 hours tomorrow

which reminds me I love

those little Mondays on

The Duplications and am

wondering when the chapbook

comes out or if it (Monday,

Monday I mean) has already.

Let a brother know, yeah?

You’re good.  And I hope

you’re well.  The air here

just got so still.

Nico

Is it a new thing or an old thing you are doing? Is it new or old? Is it a thing? Do the voices of people who are dead heard while writing make those people alive or does it make them dead and ghosts or alive, as I believed, and ghosts, the doubles of anyone alive or dead who are alive by being in the ear of one who loved them by allowing them into the ear or by finding them in the ear and loving them there and leaving them there but not keeping them there? And the same follows for the people who are alive, the ear being a place (a place is an orifice, the part of a thing that isn’t there that allows someone, in combination with what is there, to be in it) where love crosses the border and where thought crosses the border and touches via the air the ear and makes something happen: a vibration. The leaves of the ivy are harder than you think. The click is like that of the thin bamboo fingers strung on wires to make a knuckled curtain that separates the apartment into front and back or public and private or waking and sleeping on which a woman has been painted (black hair, pink flowers, brown skin, grass skirt) bit by bit in the grid of cylinders or all at once, held in place in process before being allowed to circulate in the mercurial breezes off the lake; a relic of the apartment and a fading image of the “island dancer,” though here she sits with her legs beneath her and to one side, leaning on one arm, pensive and triangular, like the bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even, or lunch in the grass — though he at the desk has a shirt but no pants — and visible only from a distance, one version of which flowers when he looks over his shoulder, away from the book. In both cases it’s a sound that despite repeated hearings (6 weeks in, what is the wind trying to do? It is trying to turn itself around and blow cool air into the apartment) one turns to look at or asks, what is it? And it’s a little uncanny to see the trembling green leaves from which one hears the clicking and to see the figure in the clicking bamboo and to see the pensive figure in the clicking bamboo swaying the odds of manifestation.



They actually had seemed like repetitive physical actions when I met them coming down the street, each of us in one of those pools of light that show by their ragged edges the nature of the place entered. When they passed, as a valley describes the water in land, though none of it remains, first or individual impressions followed to my strangely moving feet, whose motions were as sweeping and divorced, from what I knew and where I went, as the arc of headlights crossing the ceiling above me as I lie in bed are from the cars passing muffled by the night breeze through the street, and how much more so from the figure in the bed, so little was their motion mine, so vividly perceived, including the space between, in which the facets of the flat sidewalk shone, split, and bubbled, and the black strip between quivering autumn leaves, moment by moment, gave way or invaded. Everything was OK only in that sense of a timeless neither-for-nor-againstness cradled, or was it cabled, by the spinning, yellow from the front, the rear and the sides. Is non-action truly the greater of the two, admiring the contempt in the turn, identical to the one that activates the figure in statues spun off from antiquity, to watch the going away of a demonic police car? And when I pointed it out to her (my guide or reason) to remember them, days later, when she read the phrase (as she once had someone look over his rows and columns) to say each affect of each individual differs from the affect of another as much as the essence of one from the essence of another. And do you think the essences differ, she added, chin nearing her shoulder, and when we leave, the shadow will remain here with them? A t-shirt to change into at the entrance to the center had put asunder the signs and colors in favor of a change in signs and colors, the signs and colors of the place come into, a change in ownership that will cease to know us, and by which we must, in those parts and these, be known.



The happiness of the group has always been revealed in its exclusion of you, the only individual in the room, to whom even I, your creator, won’t deign to speak. In response, the lonely interlocutor made a sweater out of a cotton ball, and put it in this pocket for later, where, pinned to the bulletin board, it has begun to resemble a cloud through which the moon shines, in the form of the marbled orb that was made to harden around the buried pin holding in place, as you had long suspected, that which, but for this function, would have obscured it. To this we have consigned that still small and unsigned voice, whom we answer as and play so lightly, with such pleasure, in the privacy of our room, where the bulletins, like the little strip of lake visible from one corner of the bed, which is itself visible from the desk, have been issued from the right hand to the left, the one in the pocket of Nadar’s Baudelaire below Greff’s hand-tinted Louvre, and the one in the loom where Ariadne spins her songs, and is it only by that conscription (yes) we can be here. There is no season longer than the summer, while you weep among the crowd of pleasure-seekers, though we, in this Plutonic dialogue, move along.



Things that move through space include words. A calculus. I know where you are but you can’t be reached. Things follow like shadows in the shadow of the hand when the light is from the right, from the morning, from the lake, as later they will, still above the orange velvet of the chair, chase the same sad how without fear of catching or hope of being caught. What are you thinking? I fall, I find it in memory. By a thunderclap I am awake. The system I imagined brings tears to my eyes by its existence in the shade we walked on, that sat up suddenly and began to speak. The inability to live without any one of you three little pigs, city bridge, triangle of children in the crabgrass running, having forgotten motion, led me to the thicket of questions through the small picket line at the Hotel Congress and onto that shining path the urge to follow can eye for awhile without sinking, through sails and breakwaters to the undulating horizon of fire and water describing neither the house of mourning nor the house of mirth but the first time what you had written turned against you and convinced you you were with it, opposite figure, your ancient double poking through the bins, briefly ahead of you on the shifting path, on which the only order is, turn back, turn back, as the sound of drums in the public park multiplies the crowd of sails into a din, and again I doubted within.

Nico Alvarado-Greenwood publishes Weather Press chapbooks.

Cynthia Arrieu-King’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Good Foot, Diagram, Court Green, New Orleans Review, etc. and her chapbook The Small Anything City is available from Dream Horse Press. “Je Est Un Autre” means “I is an Other” and is a line from Rimbaud.

Scott Bade’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Dirty Napkin, Eleventh Muse, Blue Earth Review, Poetry International, and New Hampshire Review. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with his wife Lori and sons August and Stuart. Eclipse was inspired by the Mari Mahr photo works found in her series “A Few Days in Geneva.”

Cara Benson edits Sous Rature (www.necessetics.com/sousrature.html).Two poem books, (made) and Protean Parade,are forthcoming from BookThug and Black Radish respectively. Other work includes: “Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation” (BookThug), Belladonna Elders Series #7 with Anne Waldman and Jayne Cortez (Belladonna), “UP” (Dusie), and “Spell/ing ( ) Bound” with Kai Fierle-Hedrick and Kathrin Schaeppi (ellectrique press). Benson edited the interdisciplinary book Predictions forthcoming from Chain. She teaches poetry in a NY State Prison.

Erica Bernheim was born in New Jersey and grew up in Ohio and Italy. She holds a B.A. from Miami University, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Bridge, The Iowa Review, Boston Review, Court Green and Volt, among others. Her chapbook, Between the Room and the City is available from H_NGM_N B__KS. Erica is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Southern College, where she teaches writing and contemporary literature.

Jason Bredle is the author of two books and one chapbook of poetry. A new chapbook, Class Project, is forthcoming from Publishing Genius. He lives in Chicago.

Paula Cisewski is the author of two poetry books: Upon Arrival (Black Ocean, 2006) and Ghost Fargo (selected by Franz Wright for the 2008 Nightboat Prize and forthcoming in spring 2010) and three chapbooks: Two Museums (MaCaHu Press 2009), Or Else What Asked the Flame (w/Mathias Svalina, Scantily Clad 2008), and How Birds Work (Fuori Editions, 2002). She lives in Minneapolis.

Nina Corwin is the author of Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints. Recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her work appears or is forthcoming in ACM, BlazeVOX, Forklift OH, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry and William & Mary Reviews. Psychotherapist in daylight hours, she has twice served as guest editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal.

Jordan Davis was born in New York City, where he works and lives with his wife, Alison Stine Davis, and his son James. Recent poems are forthcoming in Cab/Net, Bird Dog, Cannibal, and Magazine Cypress.

Jessica Dessner’s work has appeared in Sal Mimeo, La Petite Zine, and The Invisible Stitch. Her chapbook, Wit’s End with Bric-a-Brac was published in 2006 by Green Zone. A retired dancer and choreographer, she completed the New School’s MFA program for poetry in 2008. She also draws:http://asthmatickitty.com/music.php?releaseID=1068.

Bill Dunlap is a visual artist, writer, and musician who is currently studying forestry. His online home is here: www.billdunlap.com

John Duvernoy was born in America in the Seventies. Unlock the Clockcase published his chapbook ‘Razor Love’ in 2006. Work can be found on-line at Octopus, horesless review, Kulture Vulture, among others.

John W. Evans’s poems appear in Boston Review, Best New Poets 2006, Northwest Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, RHINO, 5AM, and other publications. He writes a blog at http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com

John Findura was born in Paterson and still lives and teaches in Northern New Jersey. His poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, GlitterPony, Fourteen Hills, The Agriculture Reader and Rain Taxi, among others. He holds an MFA from The New School.

Richard Froude is the author of Tarnished Mirrors (Muffled Cry) and The Margaret Thatcher Trilogy (Catfish). Another chapbook is on its way from Minus House Press. Recent writing is published or forthcoming in a number of journals like Word for Word, The Diagram, No Tell Motel and Parcel. He lives in Denver.

Carmen Gimenez Smith teaches creative writing at New Mexico State University’s MFA program. Her first book, ODALISQUE IN PIECES, will be published by University of Arizona Press this fall. She is editor of PUERTO DEL SOL and publisher of Noemi Press.

Andrew Grace is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. Sections of Sancta are forthcoming in LIT, Gulf Stream, Washington Square, Mid-American Review, 580 Split and Seattle Review and he has other work forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine and TYPO. His second book Shadeland recently won the 2008 Ohio State University Press / The Journal Award for Poetry.

Matt Hart’s second book, YOU ARE MIST, is forthcoming from MOOR Books. He lives in Cincinnati where he edits Forklift Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, cooking & Light Industrial Safety.

Steve Healey is author of Earthling. His second book of poems is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2010. New and forthcoming poems can be found in Boston Review, Forklift Ohio, and Jubilat.

Christopher Higgs is author of the chapbook Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously (Publishing Genius Press, 2009). He curates the online arts journal Bright Stupid Confetti.

A D Jameson is a writer, video artist, and performer. “Shaggy Creatures” is from his prose collection “Amazing Adult Fantasy,” forthcoming in 2010 from Mutable Sound. His fiction has appeared in The Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, elimae, alice blue review, and various other journals. Adam is currently working on his second novel.

Michael Jauchen teaches at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. Some of his work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Santa Monica Review, Knock, and Sentence.

Paul Jenkins grew up in Iowa and now lives in western Massachusetts, where he currently teaches poetry writing at Hampshire College and tries to convince his students that they need, not just finesse, but subject matter. His three books of poems are Forget the Sky (L’Epervier), Radio Tooth, and Six Small Fires (both from Four Way Books). He has also published a social/economic history of Greenfield, Massachusetts. For twenty-six years he served as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review. Individual poems of his have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Agni, and numerous other places, including a handful of anthologies. A new manuscript of poems is about to begin hunting for a publisher.

Aaron Kiely’s book of poetry, The Best of My Love, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse.

Amy King is the author ofI’m the Man Who Loves YouandAntidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books,The People Instruments(Pavement Saw Press),Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country(Dusie Press), and forthcoming,Slaves to Do These ThingsandI Want to Make You Safe. Amy edits theBuffalo Poetics List, moderates theWomen’s Poetry Listserv(WOMPO) and theGoodreads Poetry! Group, and teaches English and Creative Writing atSUNY Nassau Community College. For information on the reading series Amy co-curates, visitThe Stain of Poetry: A Reading Seriesblog for more.

Becca Klaver is a founding editor of Switchback Books, a PhD candidate in Literatures in English at Rutgers University, and the author of the chapbook Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009). Her first full-length collection, Los Angeles Liminal, is forthcoming from Kore Press.

Eric Kocher will be attending the MFA program at the University of Houston in the fall. His work has appeared in Pebble Lake Review and McSweeney’s, as well as a poem forthcoming in Rattle. He currently lives on Long Island where he works in a bookstore and brews his own beer.

Ben Kopel was born and raised in Baton Rouge and holds degrees from Louisiana State University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have recently appeared in Forklift: Ohio, Makeout Creek, The Agriculture Reader, and are forthcoming in Sixth Finch. He is currently continuing his studies at UMASS Amherst and will be making his onscreen debut this Fall, sitting on top of a washing machine, in the notnostrums* movie “If You Think Of It.”

Gregory Lawless is a graduate of the University of Chicago’s Masters of Humanities program and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His poems have appeared in Contrary, nth position, La Petite Zine, Stride, and Sundress’s “Best of the Net 2007.” He teaches English at Suffolk University in Boston and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Lauren Levin is from New Orleans and lives in Oakland. Her poems can be found in Coconut, GutCult, MiPOesias, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Shampoo, the tiny, Try, Typo and Word For/Word. A chapbook, In
Fortune, written with Jared Stanley and Catherine Theis, appeared in Dusie. A new chapbook is forthcoming from Boxwood Editions. She edits the magazine Mrs. Maybe with Jared and Catherine Meng.

B.J. Love is an ex-Iowan living in Chicago. He enjoys reading bus schedules and chasing fire engines. His work can also be seen/heard in DIAGRAM, lament, The Daily Palette & over the telephone, if he is particularly excited about it. He drives a ’99 Pontiac Grand Prix with expired tags just for the thrill of it. He also got a Master’s Degree in English for exactly the same reason.

Tony Mancus lives in Sunnyside, NY. He works a lot but enjoys not working. His life is full of paper. His poems have appeared or will appear in places like Cue, 42opus, The Cream City Review, Memorious and elsewhere.

Chris Martin is the author of American Music and The Small Dance. He is only the lead singer of Coldplay if that will encourage you to create a fanzine about his books. He is the editor of Puppy Flowers and lives in the servant’s quarters of a Brooklyn brownstone.

Anthony McCann is the author of Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). He is also one of the authors, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer, of Gentle Reader!, a collection of erasures of the English Romantics. He lives in Los Angeles.

Richard Meier is the author of Terrain Vague and Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar. He lives in Chicago and is writer-in-residence at Carthage College.

Pete Miller lives in Seattle with his wife and daughter. His poems have recently appeared in Superstition Review and BlazeVox, and are forthcoming in Strange New Egg and Radiant Turnstile.
JoAnna Novak is from the suburbs of Chicago. Her work has recently appeared in Quick Fiction, DIAGRAM, Critiphoria, and Pindeldyboz.

Alexis Orgera lives in a beach shack in southern California. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Forklift, Ohio, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, In Posse Review, jubilat, The Rialto, and others. She likes to walk her old dog.

Nikki Painter is an artist who can help us find an explosion of rainbows in a geometric hell, who knows the romance of lakes & trees can still be found in a world overrun by strip malls & pavement.

Christopher Rizzo is a writer and publisher who lives in Albany, New York. Over the years, his work has appeared in Art New England, The Cultural Society, Cannibal, Dusie, Effing Magazine, Process, and Spell among many other publications, both in print and online. He is the author of a number of poetry collections, most recently Supposed to Sound (Ungovernable Press, 2008) and Playing the Amplitudes (BlazeVox Books, 2008). In 2009, Greying Ghost Press rereleased his short sequence Naturalistless. Forthcoming is a new Boat Train chapbook, Tmēsis / In Other Words Continuing. He is the founder and editor of Anchorite Press and currently a University at Albany doctoral candidate in English.

Broc Rossell is a poet from California, born in Los Angeles and living in San Francisco. His email address is brocrossell@gmail.com.

Brandon Shimoda was born in Yellow Picnic, USA. Julia Cohen was born. They have collab-poems coming out in the Raleigh Quarterly and Cannibal, amongst others.

Rachel M. Simon’s chapbook, Marginal Road was published in 2009 by Hollyridge Press. Her first book of poems, Theory of Orange, won the Transcontinental Prize from Pavement Saw Press. She teaches gender studies, film and writing at SUNY Purchase College, Sarah Lawrence College and the Marymount Manhattan College program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. She lives in Yonkers, NY.

Jeff Simpson is a student at Oklahoma State University, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry and works as an editorial assistant for the Cimarron Review. In 2008, he was selected as a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Lumina, Copper Nickel, Main Street Rag, Gulf Stream, and Nimrod.

Mathias Svalina is a co-editor of Octopus Magazine & Books. He is the author of numerous chapbooks & collaboratively written chapbooks. His first book, Destruction Myth, is forthcoming from the CSU Poetry
Center.

Chad Sweeney co-edits Parthenon West Review with David Holler. He is the author of An Architecture (BlazeVox, 2007) and Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), as well as the chapbook A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer (Tarpaulin Sky, 2006). Recent work appeared in Colorado Review, New American Writing, Denver Qtly, Coconut, Forklift, Verse, Interim, Electronic Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, the Tiny, and Barrow Street. He is poet-in-residence at the San Francisco School of the Arts.

Robert Whiteside was born in Buffalo, NY, the rust belt capital of America, & just returned from a short jaunt living in Rhode Island, & is glad to be back to that desolate ill-mentioned catastrophe.

Joseph P. Wood is the author two chapbooks, In What I Have Done & Failed to Do (Elixir) and Travel Writing (Scantily Clad Press). His first full book of poems I & We (CustomWords) is forthcoming in Fall 2010. New poems can be found in BOMB, Poetry London, New Delta Review, Passages North, Drunken Boat, Typo, among other. He serves as editor for Slash Pine Press and Slash Pine Poetry Festival. Find out more at www.slashpinepress.blogspot.com .

John Dermot Woods draws comics and writes stories in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the image-text novel The Complete Collection of people, places & things (BlazeVOX Books) and the forthcoming comic chapbook The Remains (Doublecross Press). He organizes the online reading series Apostrophe Cast (www.apostrophecast.com), edits the arts quarterly Action,Yes (www.actionyes.org)and is a professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY. More information about his work is available at www.johndermotwoods.com.

Jon Woodward’s second book of poems, Rain, was published by Wave Books in 2006. He currently lives in Boston and works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. More info and poems is/are at jonwoodward.net.

melting

into a palette

tugged over the ditch

The spool is confused

the spool

withstanding its use

to pin

the children

elevated

as tugboats the shore

cannot feel the sea

no

no, not at all

Thaddeus is sincere and sensitive and smart and full of fatherly good intentions, and his monologues are the best writing in the book. This is especially true when he talks about the better life he wishes he could provide for his wife and daughter, sporadic lyrical tangents where Thaddeus’s desires thrum with affection and true warmth and just the right amount of implausibility:

“I closed my eyes. I imagined Selah and Bianca in a canoe so narrow they had to lie down with their arms folded on their stomachs, their heads at opposite ends, their toes touching. I dreamed two miniature suns. I set one each upon their foreheads. I dreamed a waterfall and a calm lake of my arms below to catch them.”

Taken by February through an escalating series of sufferings and never once offered a substantive explanation for them, Thaddeus Lowe is a bit like Job. His pain brings up the question of why bad things have to happen at all, and his ultimate response, as a man who tries to convince himself and the town that “everything won’t end in death,” is a reminder of how one can confront the cruelty that so often seems part and parcel of the planet’s hard-wiring.

Despite the family tragedy at the novel’s heart, though, Light Boxes is ultimately a fable, a fairy tale, a bedtime story. And because of that, we want it to fulfill certain expectations. Ogres should be ogres, princesses should be beautiful, and endings should be happy. Jones knows this and doesn’t neglect to populate his world with cottages, mint teas, balloons, forests, flickering fires, and the underlying sense that everything will turn out happily by the end.

And like the great contemporary practitioners of the fairy tale—Kate Bernheimer, Lily Hoang, Rikki Ducornet—Jones also has a fantastic eye for the detail of fairy tale, a narrative adroitness that brings together seemingly banal objects and grants them a certain type of cumulative magic. As Thaddeus walks into town one day, he notes, “The air was cold and smelled like apples. I saw a fox sitting on a mailbox. He had duck feathers in his mouth” (46). Or earlier, he tells us about Selah’s soothing bedtime stories: “When Bianca wakes up screaming against February, Selah picks her up and holds her and tells Bianca to think of cloudless skies, a moose letting her hang by one hand from his nose” (23). Again and again in this novel we see Jones’s uncanny sense of cutting the detail off at just the right time. This gives Light Boxes a Calvino-esque quickness and ultimately makes it a narrative world that, in spite of the darkness and tragedy at its center, proceeds with lightness and speed and the spring of the author’s whimsical imagination.

Elegy for Woodrow Blake

What’s it like to spend so much time dreaming of space
is a question I’d always wanted to ask but never did
and what’s it like having sex in space
is a question
I’d always wanted to ask
but before I did
globules of blood and Dr. Pepper
were floating all around you
and you exited the cabin,
banging the screen door as loudly as possible on your way out.
I’ve always wondered if you’ve ever had space sex
I called out,
but it was too late
as you drifted toward Mars
much the way globules of blood and Dr. Pepper
drift toward thirsty hemophilic astronauts—
with menace, awe, sadness.
It’s funny how sometimes hurtling can feel like drifting.
What was happening in your head?
Were you regretting having never had space sex?
Were you thinking of all those nights
you spent with your dad
looking through his telescope at M13?
Or had you finally realized
your size in the universe, like that of one globule of blood
or Dr. Pepper floating toward one irritated astronaut
who may or may not
have done the space nasty?
And if none of those things—as you approached the red planet’s
atmosphere, how is it you prepared yourself
for your final, spectacular disintegration?

Parable

Whenever I’m sad like this, I put on happiest me outfit and visit
nearby zoo to verbally stroke panda.
It’s my temporary escape from blood-soaked destiny, yes?
Basho, he could do little to prevent
blood-soaked destiny.
After slicing shopkeeper’s neck,
he read poem of death and autumn-time that make you cry
if you not already corpse.
Of all I learn from man holding sandwich
outside panda habitat,
pandas are black and white and cute
and delicious.
This horrify me.
I tell sandwich man about trip I take to Shaanxi province.
Basho kill because he never see cute panda or any panda.
He kill too because he ninja,
but maybe he write because he never see cute panda?
He carve into dead body flesh
rhyme of dying dream, dream of seeing panda,
who is cute and likeable.
But he live in different country, he only hear legend of cute panda.
I see panda with own eyes and yes panda very cute.
Sandwich man apparently eat a panda.
I tell sandwich man panda really cute when eat bamboo,
he say he never try bamboo.
Likely Basho eat seaweed, I say,
after decapitating head of local prefect
and reciting beautiful poem
of how he not see panda and only see radish.
Sandwich man do not like radish, he say.
I recite poem about cute panda,
which he say tasty and delicious.
I relay to sandwich man of my blood-soaked destiny.
He thinks of me crazy. His death at my red hand inevitable, I say.
My dream die long ago.
I cover home interior with panda photograph,
I try forget the death I have see because of my destiny.
My family die long ago. I think of panda
and Basho and how I see what Basho long to see.
It not feel better make me.
I read sandwich man poem of bamboo forest, mountains, death.
I then cut his chest.
I am mercenary, this my destiny. Pandas die when my age.
Bleeding sandwich man tell me of castle in Shaanxi mountains.
It look like Medieval Times but not Medieval Times.
The panda there delicious.

Invisible Touch

Part of what make the Phil Collins
the portrait of the brilliant mellifluous God is that he radiates
the perfection like the entire universe shot through the cannon
of unbelievableness
toward another entity of unbelievableness
as like another Phil Collins being shot out of a cannon toward a third
Phil Collins singing his smash hit
Don’t Lose the Number
to a crowd of hugely glowing Phil Collinses
all a million feet high
and singing their smash hit
the Sussudio
in the Phil Collins Del Monte Stadium
of dreamland amazingtown—
Rock!
This my dream, to see this Phil Collins experience of like no other.
By now of course most of you are accustomed to how radically
Phil Collins can mathematically blow us out of our face
at one of these live performance pieces
that we cannot breathe
or walk afterwards
let alone recognize what we have experienced rightly
and we are left to our dailies
thinking why are we here now
at the Phil Collins crossroad of hair blowing spectaculars?
Is it the angel voice or the Phil Collins?
We cannot distinct them from the other?
Like so many of the suckers of the same age as myself,
I have been to the listening point of the Phil Collins for the decades,
forever fathoming in my peon form
how he is capable
of such revelation-like mastery of surrealist vision,
the very voice of Jah Himself.
It is something of a received wisdom
that In the Air Tonight
is the greatest song ever recorded.
That this intense intimate vision arose
from such a crab-like personality
is perhaps the greatest argument
written on the piece of paper and published
that life on the other planets there is indeed the existence of.
When I am the stargazing
I am looking at the space I think of this time and how the others
up there never hear the Phil Collins unbelievable voice
but instead the silence and darkness and ice,
how they hear the ice
and must find to love enveloped in the chandelier nothing of wherever,
the chandelier nothing of their dailies,
and in my heart, it feel the cold.

Prism Reverie

And then I began loaning books, forgetting about loaning books,
and believing,
when I couldn’t find books,
that owning books in the first place
had only been a dream.
In the dream you asked if I’d rather go to heaven or space.
In the dream we’d met ten years earlier.
In the dream we lived in Guyana.
In the dream we did completely different things during the day
than we do now.
People of the future:
have you found the descendents of our cats and how are they?
Tell them hello for us.
Tell them too many of us are unaware
of our impermanence
as we go about our normal days.
Tell them
with the exception of a few celebrities and political leaders,
most of us spend our normal days doing things
we’ve decided
are acceptable things to do during a normal day
but rarely
do we spend our normal days inspired.
Wake, dress, commute, work, post office, bank, lunch, work,
commute, Happy Foods, dinner,
prepare for tomorrow and fall asleep.
There are, of course, exceptions.
I ate four shrimp, four crackers and four Oreo cookies
for lunch, for example.
What were once simple systems
have developed into elaborate systems that contain
elaborate systems within them.
People of the future:
have things become simple again?
I hope so.
Tell the descendents of our cats
that within these elaborate systems
people interact with each other and only sometimes
does the interaction
yield a positive experience.
Sometimes a prescription medication is approved,
sometimes good news regarding the success of a family member
is relayed,
but most often someone arrives home and cries,
someone is in an altercation with a bunch of mean guys,
someone lies because of love
or someone dies
but I don’t think it should be like this.
We have this thing called music
and often the more people who’ve heard a specific piece of music
the more likely the piece of music is not good
but nonetheless
this may cause others to question their own concept of good.
Do I not understand what good means
or does my interpretation
of good belong in an alternate reality?
And if so,
should I be in that alternate reality instead of here? Sunshine,
you are my sunshine.
People of the future:
I used to feel passionate about lunch
and I used to cry at shoe commercials and rock concerts
but then I began loaning books, forgetting about loaning books,
and believing,
when I couldn’t find books,
that owning books in the first place
had only been a dream. In the dream
you asked if I’d rather go to heaven or space.
In the dream we’d met ten years earlier.
In the dream we lived in Guyana.
In the dream we did completely different things during the day
than we do now. In the dream I thought I understood everything,
but when I woke I realized I’d never understood anything.

Running Away Jam

I wish I could take a microphone everywhere I go so everyone
would hear me
is how I began a letter to my parents
that summer dawns were bursting all around me
all around me all around me
is what I’m thinking as my airplane descends
into America’s taint,
New Jersey,
and I turn to you and say
ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking, we’ve now
begun our descent into America’s taint
and you sort of laugh
because perhaps for a moment
you’re not thinking about things you were thinking about before
like how our families brought their cultures here decades ago
and those cultures have disintegrated
into the generic
of strip malls and hot dogs
and our identities are thus generic
but if we think about it positively maybe
it’s something that makes us
quintessential Americans
or like how people always tell me I’m lucky when they learn
I have no brothers and sisters and I think
but I’ll never know what it’s like
to have a relationship
with someone close to my own age
who shares so much with me—when my parents die
I’m the only one left
and that’s okay but how is it lucky?
I can only imagine
how it must feel to visit my family for a holiday
and have my brother there
and after our parents have gone to bed
stay up and talk about kids we used to know
or remember
how we used to watch dubbed Hollywood movies on Telemundo
and he’d translate them into English
in really incompetent ways, like,
he’s just saying
he’s going to kill a bunch of guys
and sleep with that girl in the shirt with the triangles
or, um, he’s just saying he’s going to return for the chinchillas
next Tuesday
or how we’d sit around
looking at that picture of an owl Mom hung on the wall, saying
oh dude, that episode of The Owl is on right now,
where the owl sits in a tree?,
it’s a classic
or how we produced an installation of the Last Supper using only
life-sized Chewbaccas for our high school art class
and how once school ended
I decided I couldn’t take it anymore,
no one understood me no one understood me no one understood
I didn’t belong here I didn’t belong here
and I ran away and left only this letter
that began
I wish I could take a microphone
everywhere I go so everyone
would hear me
is what I’m thinking about when I hear the captain say
ladies and gentlemen,
this is your captain speaking,
we’ve now begun our descent into America’s taint
and you turn to me and ask
if I’m thinking I could die right now on this airplane
or if I’m thinking I’m not ready to die right now on this airplane
I’m not ready to die right now on this airplane
I’m not ready to die right now on this airplane.

This is a section of a long poem called Above the Fold. Another section of it has been published as a chapbook called the Viral Lease from Small Anchor Press. The poem is about the process of watching things happen in your name both across the globe & in front of you, & the ingestion of media images that represent the state of the world & its publicities & privacies of pain. People do awful things to one another & then other people say “aren’t those awful things awful” & then there is also kissing.

Long Live the Riot Squad



Architecture of ghosts:
jungle-gyms
& parking lots.

I am space
between the frame.

We laugh at the frogs
& the senses.

All five senses
are involved in looking
at a building:

a house is
a skein as yarn
is tortured
by strings,

croaking lungs
of phlegm
& marble.

Ringing phones
in the mouths
of newborns.

There is a map
of America
in your mouth.

It is divided into 32 teeth.

America is a bite-shaped hole
so big that it reflects itself
into dominoes, bumpercars.

An invisible hand
buries you with teeth.

Write your final list
of words

that do not define.

A mouth of snow
wires tendons

across the park
of rings.

Cured olives
gravel scabs.

Two red motorcycles
rest in the ditch,

front wheels
still spinning.

Your pupils contract
a pencil lead like

oil on the frozen river.
Lick the 9-volt battery

into a French horn
that churns snow
into granulated sugar
as fir trees curtsey

a tattered plastic bag.

Once more, the veins show
beneath your eyelids,

the white paper
folds easily

into an envelope.
Rust in the maproom.

Rust in the elms.

Long live the riot squad.
Long live the broken

windows. Every blink
ricochets iron piping.

Every blink elicits
a new bomb.

We are chlorine, frozen
fingers gone black
for the dog’s eyes.
The mayor’s pliers.

White soap scum
colluding the riverbank.

The newspaper
burns beside
the two-lane highway:
a box of staples
beside the box
of dried dandelion heads.

A grain mill
rises over the hill,
an abandoned church
filled with snowglobes
of churches.

Write the ditches & horses.
The walls of night
& surgery. The brushfire
whispers
the museum home.

A cracked window
of tombstones.
A hundred names
carved into the door
of the rest stop.
A hundred beetles
crushing under foot.

Teacher warned me
not to open
the jar of flies.

Cleats
rip the grass.

My task
braids the spines
of the mice
into clothing.

I have returned
a ribcage
in my arms,
flies buzz
my sweating head
of oak.

To kiss
the cracked ceramics
of your lists.

Teacher begged me
not to chew
the chalk.

Teacher taught me
how to pay
the ticket
with blood,

to cleat
dewberries to the owls,

the birch trees
at dusk.

A fox head
of tin
on the grey
metal desk,

six students
circle
the stain
in the cement.

That’s how a fish feels
when it has to breathe
the air.

He opens the door
& the teacher
sees the handle.

X-ray
the creek
to find the wings.

Take the
training bra
to the dairy queen,
where egg whites
dry on the
cow’s skull.

Drinking a warm beer
at the oil well,

you remove
your quake,
make a promise
& dive
into the deep end.

A swan dive,
a realgood dive,
upended by all the erased emails.

No,
said the wind.

We are near,
said the wind.

Name your grief
like a bar of soap.
Sign your grief
on the dotted line
of the subpoena.

Claw your school
like a gift
in unrippable
paper.

Bate me
with the sound
of your skin
against other skin,
said the wind.

We are near
the school
where the names
swan into wind,
said the wind.

We are near
the crater,
the buckets
of mold
& meat.

We will be watered,
be the dull gleam
of war
in the morning news.

We will hold
the subpeonas
over our heads
like clouds
& they will water
our cracked skin.

Leer into
the wind.
Go nearer,
to the skin
the wind stretches
across the school’s
gaped mouth.

O Ruby, the school spits
bodies out like
frozen snails.
That they
ball bearing.
That they
icicle.

Eventually we all
become poached yolks

holding up the jersey
of our favorite

sports team
& the redhead

standing beside each of us
will be the same redhead,

his hair of copper,
his hair of writhing.

Wedged a vow
to strangle the dinner speech.

The garish light
of a cello string
wound round the thumb.

The guilt of night gains
a gesture of hellos,

walled under the vow.
The arrival is an infant,

irked & bent:
the state of volume lunging.

The branded atom
prizes a sugar beet.

It was a weird war,
the wolves glutted,
on hammers.

All winged,
all more.

from THE GOLDEN DOT


Who was I—
I was a used-up poet
a terrible demolition of a man
Was not the flow of poetry stopped,
was the poet
And now I am reborn
Nunzio Corso is my name

from THE GOLDEN DOT


The vast vacancy of the void
has hereby been abolished
A megagalactic pin-dot of light
came into view
changing the eternal scene forever
The farther back into the void
the viewer moved
the smaller the light became
until moving back yet farther
it disappeared
Likewise the closer moved to the viewer
the larger the light became
until moving in yet closer
it appeared myriadical

The proximity of galactic space
and vacant void
is just one step forward
or one step back

ON POETS AND NON-POETS


The spark of poetry is
within us all
The poem is
the within brought without
A poet is born a
human being
A human being is
not born a poet
It’s the spirit
distinguishes the child from
the child Shelley
“He was not as other men”
marked his peers