Originally from Nebraska, Scott Abels lives and teaches in Honolulu.  His Work can be found (or is forthcoming) in RealPoetik, Sixth Finch, Lo-Ball, Word for/Word, Sink Review, Juked, Alice Blue, and many others.  He edits the online poetry journal Country Music.

Dorothy Albertini received her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2008 and has been a Fellow at the MacDowell Arts Colony, Ucross Foundation, Wellspring House, and Blue Mountain Center. Her fiction and poetry appear in Drunken Boat, Shifter, textsound, Tantalum, the Brooklyn Rail, and NANO Fiction, where she was the winner of the first annual NANO fiction contest. The winning piece was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

J. Mae Barizo is a Canadian poet and performer.  New work appears in Denver Quarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and Prairie Schooner.  She lives in New York City.

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer experiments teaching philosophy in Cleveland, Ohio.  Publishing poetry frequently from 1990-1993, he became disenchanted with literature’s relation to life and wrote only personal poems belonging to individual relationships until 2010.  Now some of his poems are playgrounds.

Luke Bloomfield has poems forthcoming from Lungfull! and Forklift, Ohio. He lives and writes in New York and is from Massachusetts where he first began to write. He is an editor for notnostrums and has stakes in Flying Object. His chapbook The Duffel Bag is available from Factory Hollow Press.

Thea Brown is from the Hudson Valley in New York, and has so far lived and worked in Ithaca, Queens, Chicago, Madison, and Iowa City. She’s taught philosophy, medical ethics, and creative writing, and is currently an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She also co-curates the Monsters of Poetry (www.monstersofpoetry.org) reading series in Madison, WI, and has work forthcoming in Forklift, Ohio.

Adam Clay is the author of The Wash. His second book, A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. He co-edits Typo Magazine, curates the Poets in Print Reading Series at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, and teaches at Western Michigan University.

J.L. Conrad’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Columbia, Third Coast, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Southeast Review, The Mid-American Review and Forklift, Ohio, among others. A Cartography of Birds, her first full-length collection of poems, was published by Louisiana State University Press. She is currently working toward her PhD in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Nina Corwin is the author of 2 full length poery collections: The Uncertainty of Maps and Conversations With Friendly Demons and Tainted. Her work appears in ACM, Forklift OH, H-NGM-N, Hotel Amerika, New Ohio Review/nor, Parthenon West, Southern Poetry Review and Verse and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Psychotherapist in daylight hours, she is an advisory editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal and curates literary events at Chicago’s WomanMade Gallery.

Liz Countryman lives in Texas, where she is a PhD candidate at the University of Houston and a Poetry Editor at Gulf Coast.  Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Washington Square, Black Warrior Review, Forklift, Ohio, and others. 

Born in New York, Russell Dillon currently lives in San Francisco.  His poems have most recently appeared in 5AM, Big Bell, MiPoesia, Parthenon West, Inter|rupture, and Forklift, Ohio.  His chapbook (Secret Damage, Forklift, Ink 2009) has an awesome cover.

James Flaherty lives in Columbus, Ohio. He is a consulting editor for The Kenyon Review and a reader for Electric Literature.

Leora Fridman is a writer, translator and educator living in Massachusetts.  Her recent and forthcoming publications are included in The Awl, Shampoo, Denver Quarterly and others.  She is an MFA candidate at UMass-Amherst.

P.J. Gallo lives in Durham, NC.  Recent work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Bat City Review, Roanoke Review, OH NO, and Independent Weekly.  He co-edits LEVELER. 

Evan Glasson lives in Arlington, MA. His poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review and Barrow Street, among other places. He co-edits the online poetry journal, LEVELER.

Alina Gregorian’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Washington Square Review, Caketrain, Juked, The Best American Poetry Blog, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets College Prize and edits Maggy (www.maggypoetry.com).

Whit Griffin is the author of Pentateuch: The First Five Books (Skysill Press, 2010).  Chaplets include Wanhope (Longhouse) and Fugitive Cant (Country Valley).  Recent poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, Cannibal, Jellyroll, The Equalizer, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Forklift, Ohio.  He currently resides in western Tennessee. 

Matt Hart is the author of the poetry collections Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and Wolf Face (H_NGM_N BKS 2010).  A third full length collection, Light-Headed, was just published by BlazeVOX, and a fourth collection Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless will be published by Typecast in 2012.  A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Andrea Henchey’s MFA is from Pacific Lutheran University; her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Absent, Ghoti, Drunken Boat, Pank, and A River & Sound Review. Though her travels have brought her to more exotic locales such as Nepal, Kenya, and Chile, she currently lives in Connecticut where she coordinates “Inescapable Rhythms,” a poetry reading series, trains for marathons with her mutt, Bodhisattva, and teaches full-time. Learn more at www.andreahenchey.com.

Jeremy Hoevenaar was born in New Jersey, lived in New York City for nine years, and now lives and attempts to photosynthesize poems in Baltimore.  Some work can be found in the Brooklyn Rail, Tantalum Journal, The Recluse, Shifter Magazine, and Forklift, Ohio.  He believes applause should be withheld until the end. 

Amorak Huey recently left the newspaper business after 15 years as a reporter and editor to teach writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He is managing editor of the new journal Wake: Great Lakes Thought & Culture, and his poems have appeared in Rattle, Redivider, Poet Lore, Oxford American and other journals. Follow him on Twitter: @amorak.

Emily Jern-Miller is a recent MFA graduate from Petaluma, California. She thinks at http://www.imagesforsarah.blogspot.com/. 

Steven Karl is the author of the chapbooks, emissions/ of (H_NGM_N, 2011), (Ir)Rational Animals (Flying Guillotine Press, 2010), and State(s) of Flux, a collaboration with the artist, Joseph Lappie (Peptic Robot Press, 2009).  He is the news editor for Coldfront Magazine, and along with Daniel Magers, poetry editor for Sink Review.  He has poems forthcoming from With + Stand, EOAGH, and Jellyfish.  He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

A native New Yorker, Taylor Mardis Katz currently lives in San Diego, CA, where she is pursuing her MFA at San Diego State University. She is the assistant editor at Cooper Dillon Press and works part-time on an organic vegetable farm. Her poems have appeared in The Connecticut Review, Chopper Magazine, and the Connecticut River Review. She is five feet and three inches tall and blogs about poems & other delicacies at http://intimeweallfly.wordpress.com/.

Friedrich Kerksieck has an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama & runs Small Fires Press. He doesn’t like labels, but will admit to a certain familiarity with BJ Love.

Kim Krause earned his MFA from Bard College, New York. He is professor of Art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and chair of the Department of Fine Arts. This summer he will be artist-in-residence at Spiro Arts, Park City, Utah exploring the visual possibilities of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Jason Labbe is the author of two chapbooks, Dear Photographer (Phylum Press, 2009) and Black Wash Canal (H_NGM_N BKS, forthcoming). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Poetry, and elsewhere. He lives in Bethany, CT.

Joni Lee attends the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City as a Stanley H. Durwood Fellow.  She has interned at New Letters, BkMk Press, and Copper Canyon Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Permafrost and Center: a Journal of the Literary Arts.

Nate Liederbach is the author of the short prose collection Doing a Bit of Bleeding (Ghost Road Press) and, most recently, co-editor of the anthology Of a Monstrous Child (Lost Horse Press). His work has appeared in Stumble Magazine, Quarterly West, Permafrost, Fractured West, Corium Magazine, Mississippi Review, and more. In Salt Lake City, Deseret, he currently makes his humble home (while grad[U]ally pursuing his PhD at the U of U).

Matthew Lippman’s latest collection of poems, MONKEY BARS, is published by Typecast Publishing.  His first book, THE NEW YEAR OF YELLOW (Sarabande Books), won the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize.  He lives in Boston, MA.

BJ Love is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Additionally, he is the author of Michigander (Greying Ghost, 2010) and, if you’re in to labels, best friends with Friedrich Kerksieck.

Rob MacDonald lives in Boston and is the editor of the online journal Sixth Finch.  His poetry has appeared in Octopus, No Tell Motel, Sink Review and other journals.  Last New Death, a chapbook, is available from Scantily Clad Press.

Caroline Manring currently teaches writing, literature, and a seminar on birds at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Central New York. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has been a Teaching Writing Fellow and Leggett-Schupes Fellow. Her work has appeared in publications including Seneca Review, Drunken Boat, Hot Metal Bridge, Sixth Finch, Juked, 2River View, and Babel Fruit. She birdwatches, plays the fiddle, and allows her budgerigars to re-upholster things.

Matt McBride currently works as an assistant editor at the Cincinnati Review and  Memorious. He is co-curator of the Bon Mot/ley reading series. His poetry has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from FENCE, Forklift, Ohio, Little Red Leaves, Meridian, Packingtown Review, and Mississippi Review. He blogs at inventionsofthemonsters.blogspot.com.

Mary Molinary’s work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, Poetry International, New Orleans Review, Pindeldyboz, and spork with a poem forthcoming in New American Writing.  Currently she is experimenting with variations on the Poetry Reading by implementing performance, polyphonia, and (captive) audience participation.  “LEAF SUITE” is ideally performed—or heard—with one voice and one guitar (playing riffs off of the Bach Lute Suites).  Her first book, Mary & the Giant Mechanism, will be published by Tupelo Press in 2012. 

Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he teaches gifted and talented students. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Main Street Rag, The Mid-American Review, The National Poetry Review, Plain Spoke, Pleiades and Tar River Poetry.

Dustin Luke Nelson is a founding editor of InDigest and a writer/producer of Radio Happy Hour. He lives in New York.

Christina Olson’s first book of poems is Before I Came Home Naked (Spire Press, 2010). Her work has recently appeared in Wake, Passages North, Water~Stone Review, and Anti-. She is currently a visiting assistant professor of writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, and lives online at <www.thedrevlow-olsonshow.com>.

Daniela Olszewska is the author of seven chapbooks, most recently Citizen Jane(-X) Trains for Many Different Kinds of Careers (horse less press), halfsteps + cloudfang (plumberries press), and The South Is Only a Home (Small Monster Press).  She is pursuing her MFA at the University of Alabama and collaborating with Carol Guess on a book of poems inspired by the website wikiHOW.

Caryl Pagel’s poems and essays can be found in 1913: A Journal of Forms, Devil’s Lake, Kenyon Review Online, MAKE Magazine, and Thermos, among other journals. She teaches at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and is the co-founder and Editor of Rescue Press.

Marc Paltrineri has work published in journals such as Ellipsis, BlazeVOX, Sixth Finch, Many Mountains Moving, and the Green Mountains Review. He is a founder and co-editor of the poetry journal Sun’s Skeleton. An MFA candidate at the University of New Hampshire, he lives nearby.

Curtis Perdue edits inter|rupture. His book reviews have been featured in Redivider, and his poems appear or are forthcoming in Willow Springs, Ghost Town, H_NGM_N, and NOO Journal (online). 

 Emily Pettit is the author of two chapbooks HOW (Octopus Books) and WHAT HAPPENED TO LIMBO (Pilot Books). She is an editor for notnostrums (notnostrums.com) and Factory Hollow Press, as well as assistant editor at jubilat. Her first full-length book, GOAT IN THE SNOW is forthcoming from Birds LLC.

Hila Ratzabi has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was selected by Adrienne Rich as a recipient of a National Writers Union Poetry Prize. She received an Amy Award (Poets & Writers Magazine) and the Amy Loveman Memorial Fund Prize (Barnard College). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Cortland Review, Coal Hill Review, Southern Poetry Review, Columbia Review, Zeek, Mima’amakim, Margie, and Lumina. Her chapbook, The Apparatus of Visible Things (2009), is published by Finishing Line Press. She is the poetry editor of the literary journal Storyscape and a former poetry editor of Lumina. She holds an MFA in Poetry Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, a BA in English from Barnard College, and a BA in Jewish Philosophy from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Kate Schapira is the author of TOWN (Factory School, Heretical Texts, 2010), The Bounty: Four Addresses (Noemi Press, forthcoming 2011), and chapbooks from Flying Guillotine, horse less, Portable, Rope-A-Dope and Cy Gist Presses. She lives in Providence, where she works as a Writer in the Schools and co-runs the Publicly Complex Reading Series.

Stefanie Silva received her M.F.A. from the UNC Greensboro, where she was poetry editor for the Greensboro Review.  She has been published in the Superstition Review.  She currently teaches numerous English classes at UNC Greensboro. 

Farren Stanley’s place-of-origin is New Mexico, though she currently lives in Tuscaloosa, AL where she is an MFA candidate in poetry and the editor of Black Warrior Review. Look for her poems in Marginalia and Caketrain.

Nicole Steinberg is the editor of Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens (SUNY Press, February 2011). Her chapbook Birds of Tokyo is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, and her poetry has appeared in publications such as No Tell Motel, BOMB, Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, and Barrelhouse. She is the founder and curator of Earshot, a Brooklyn-based reading series dedicated to emerging writers, and an editor-at-large for LIT magazine. She hails from Queens, NY and currently lives in Philadelphia.

Nick Sturm is a graduate student in the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts. His poems are asking you unintelligible questions in Hayden’s Ferry Review and Red Lightbulbs. His reviews and interviews are eating breakfast with you in Barn Owl Review, Bookslut, Coldfront, HTMLGiant, The Laurel Review, On the Seawall, and Whiskey Island. His first book-length editorial venture, The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics, was published in January 2011.

Jay Thompson lives in Seattle. He has published poetry, essays, and Dungeons & Dragons fiction in Denver Quarterly, Jellyfish, EOAGH, Microfilme, Pleiades, and Pathfinder, and he writes a column on poetics for the Kenyon Review. He co-edits the journal Thermos and is a member of the Third Space arts collective.

Brian Trimboli is about to receive his MFA from NYU, where he was awarded a fellowship to assist with their Veteran Writers Workshop. He lives on Long Island and is teaching Creative Writing until the end of spring. He has poems published or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, RATTLE, and Forklift, Ohio.

J. A. Tyler’s most recent book A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed is now available from Fugue State Press. His forthcoming titles include The Zoo, A Going (Dzanc Books) and, with John Dermot Woods, the image / text novel No One Told Me I Would Disappear (Jaded Ibis Press). He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious Press. For more, visit: www.chokeonthesewords.com.

James Valvis lives in Issaquah, Washington with his wife, daughter, and toy robots. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Arts & Letters, Atlanta Review, Blip, Hanging Loose, New York Quarterly, Nimrod, Los Angeles Review, Pank, Rattle, River Styx, Slipstream, South Carolina Review, and Southern Indiana Review. He’s a two-time 2010 Best of the Web nominee, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, and a novella was a Notable Story in storySouth’s Million Writers Award. A collection of his poems is due from Aortic Books next year.

Corey Wakeling is a poet living in Melbourne, Australia. Work has appeared in such journals and magazines as Art Monthly (Australia), Cordite, Willows Wept Review, Otoliths, Everyday Genius, Steamer, [out of nothing], Yomimono, Folly Mag, and Etchings, newspapers The Age (Melbourne) and The Sun Herald, and anthologized in Some Sonnets, Nth Degree, and The Reader.

Monica Wendel received her MFA in poetry writing from NYU in May 2010. While at NYU, she was awarded Goldwater and Starworks Fellowships; tutored 7th grade math in Bed-Stuy; did layout for the Washington Square Review; and made it to the semi-finals in the first ever Miss G Train Pageant. Currently she teaches English at St. Thomas Aquinas College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Staccato Fiction, Drunken Boat, and Forklift, Ohio. More adventures to follow at www.twitter.com/monicaewendel

Angela Veronica Wong is the author of the forthcoming 25 little red poems on dancing girl press as well as two previous chapbooks.  Recent poetry publications include Drunken Boat and Columbia Poetry Review.  If you are unsure how to spell her name, please visit www.angelaveronicawong.com.

The blue dress sobbed

above yellow skin.

Even my panties rubbed

wrong. Vases of daffodils

with their flimsy voice of

stay and don’t. My wrist

watch looped through

trumpet vines, hallways

of jewelry, lamp shades.

He fashioned a crew cut,

a mannequin cloaked

in guns. Frost stirring

perfume, nails stabbed

in daisies, I longed for

the touch of dog tags,

slice of muscle. Instead,

the moon slid into

my skylight, unfastened

the straps of my heels.

I fingered my mouth,

dreamed about his tongue,

his staggered teeth,

like pollen and staples.



Outside our window, men walk by with limbs in their arms.

They are chopping down the hemlock trees while inside

we lie in bed, lentils simmering on the stove.

It is September. The sky ripples, and I reach my arm out to you.

To test airplanes for cracks, workers send sounds across them.

Other mornings, in the darkness of semi-sleep, I listened to the train

as it moved towards the city, and pictured my father stepping onto it,

reading the paper or dozing as it traveled under a river, surfacing in Midtown.

I want to say we belong in water, not in air. Even in the weeks

when the smoke settled over the river, we still counted the rats

on the 7 train’s tracks, gave them names, pictured them as commuters.

Down by Rockaway Beach stray cats do battle in the marshland near the runway

where the great metal bellies of planes lower themselves from the sky.



elegy for myself

You’ve been seeking

advice in trees again.

Cut your hair short,

call it a day. Quit 

falling out and in

of love with friends,

their scratch and sniff

tattoos. Idiot girl.

At home, the dog

waits by an empty dish.

Fridays you tunnel

in bed, think of exes

who are married—

and worse—fat.

On your wrist

is a new bird.

You will turn

into your mother.

You friends will say
 

She was beautiful,

she was an anarchist

and There is neither

rock nor roll

anywhere in Kalamazoo.

Bourbons, marathons,

little yellow pills:

you tried them all.

Dear, stupid girl.

Nothing can save you.

Except this:

go back to that tree.

This time listen

when it tells you

Don’t worry so much.

Another sixty years,

we’ll both be dead.

WAITING SONG

This winter I’m learning to skate

the long pale streets by myself.

January. Alone. Or am I—

today, ten brown birds

lit up my balcony railing.

Morning coffee, puff of sparrow.

Men without teeth or ears

stop me on the street.

They whistle honey, baby, darlin

through the dark doorways

in their smiles. At night,

I hear my neighbor cursing

the dog, Remy, that reminds him

of his wife. She’s gone—ran away

with the circus. Left for a traveling

show of Hair: The American

Tribal Love-Rock Musical. Fifteen

months in Indianapolis, New York,

Tampa, Hong Kong. Back home,

he learns what I already know:

a dog can wait forever

hoping the only one it loves

will scratch key in the lock.

He wants to give Remy away.

I tell him rename him Hachikō,

that it’s better to have someone

to split the wait with. And me,

now I know the difference

between all the blues and grays of sky,

in ice. The only trick to waiting

is knowing exactly what

you burn for—phone call,

first redbud. Downstairs,

they want her to come home

and fill their dishes. Me,

I’m just asking that the river

catch fire one last time.

Letter Machine Editions, 2010

Sawako Nakayasu

Review by Daniela Olszewska

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan* and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six.   She is the author of the very excellent Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009) and the very excellent translator of Kawata Ayane’s book of poetry, Time of Sky//Castles in the Air (Litmus Press, 2010) and Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, 2008). 

Nakayasu’s second book, Texture Notes, is comprised of forty-eight interrogations of the visual and tactile surfaces that populate an artist’s terrain.  The pieces use dates for/instead of titles, highlighting the project’s origin as a daily log/diary**.  These poem-notes are arranged by the day of the month rather than “actual” chronological order—ex.: 9.2.2003, 6.3.2003, and 10.4.2003 (instead of 9.2.2003, 9.3.2003, 9.4.2003…).  This destabilization of the expected order mirrors the destabilizing influences of the textures themselves. 

Nakayasu’s textures range from the concrete “field of bicycles” and “avalanche of undercooked hamburger meat” to the more abstract “layers of loss” and “point of bad return.”  The absurdity*** of the more concrete textures reminds the reader that not even solids are “safe” from reevaluation, from recontextualization.  Meanwhile, the more abstract textures insist that any idea, any concept, may solidify under the correct lens (the artistic lens, the poetic lens, the Nakayasu lens…). 

This book takes on surfaces that fulfill need—yellow is “an extension of want, or a boing”—but also bring danger—“Which appears first at the back of the mouth and I consider swallowing, or the inability to swallow it away.  A dark alley of the body.”  Nakayasu’s textures can be menacing; the speaker of the Texture Notes tells us that s/he are in the process of: “Learning to sleep belly up, without fear of a large angular object such as a bookshelf of a park bench or a giant brick landing on my stomach as I lay sleeping.”  However, this menace is not necessarily a negative; the speaker is: “Letting my mouth hang open in awe, without fear of a peculiar sort of spider crawling inside and laying eggs and causing a mysterious disease to appear in my throat seven years down the line.”

These interrogations are important because they suggest that the world(s) of the surface, the world(s) often dismissed as (literally and figuratively) not deep enough, contains an embarrassment of riches on the levels of language and imagery.  Nakayasu shows that the surface need never feel boring, even when stacked up against her more-heralded siblings, the under and above-grounds.  These Texture Notes establish that textures have the ability to create and/or encompass “the light that arrives, gives, retreats, goes awry around every left corner, every bend.”

*************************************************************

* Why do reviewers (and the writers of poets’ “official” bios) always mention a poet’s birthplace or childhood home when that birthplace or childhood home is/was outside of the USA?  Should we treat this text differently because it was made by a “foreigner?”  Does the poet’s place of birth/childhood home somehow make her/his book (and, by extension, the review of her/his book…) a “multicultural” work?  After reading Texture Notes, does the reader possess a better understanding of What It Means To Have Been Born In Japan?  Will a Japanese reviewer of Texture Notes qualify her/his review with the information that Nakayasu grew up in the USA? 

** For those of you who have never attempted to turn a daily log/diary into a “legitimate” work of literature, let me assure you, it’s a really hard thing to pull off.  Especially since the literary daily log/diary must “look easy” in order for it to work.

*** I apologize; “absurdity” is an unacceptable word to use.  My iPhone’s dictionary application claims that absurdity means “at variance with reason; manifestly false.”  Nakayasu’s treatment of these textures is anything but “manifestly false.”   Our dear speaker explains to the reader that they are after: 

…a claim for honesty all the time, or at any given moment, which is never to say that one honesty might correspond to the next, from one moment to a further one down any given line.  And the light that arrives, gives, retreats, goes awry around every left corner, every bend. 



The baby has discovered the Christmas tree this morning

and my thoughts rest in Ohio strangely as though Ohio

is the right place for this time of year. The snow-plow scrapes

the gutter from a block away and I hear it in my sleep 

like a bird-swoop or some kind of dinosaur invented

to remind us of the place we’re all headed to someday. Yesterday

morning I woke up early because for some reason I set the coffee pot

to brew at five. The baby slept till eight. Zach Schomburg

just sent me a notification that it’s my move in what may

be the longest chess game in history, and I don’t mull my move

this time. I don’t read a line or two of Ted Berrigan before bed

anymore, and the bed still feels the same. Since I started

this poem, the baby has gone upstairs for her morning nap

and now she’s saying her favorite word over and over again

as I listen to her through the baby monitor. The fuzz

of an incoming call or some kind of interference reminds me

that all we are in the end is noise and noise and noise. It’s a new

year soon and the snow outside melts famously, then freezes

at night like it has for a million winters and will continue 

for a million more. We live on a street with a dozen half-painted

houses and for once it’s all beginning to make perfect sense.

Transcription from a Questioning

Affection depends on a suspension

of belief, though I’m alive enough

this Monday to hear the interstate

traffic at a simple enough distance.

Like mocking an intended non sequitur,

the trees maintain their repose. Yes,

the doorbell rang. No, I did not answer

when I saw what appeared to be

an entire family clutching books

and looking mournful. Symmetry

becomes strange like anything else

if you stare at it long enough.

A Triptych for Weather and Words

Everything starts somewhere and every beginning

makes me wonder what happened before that. You

hide your yawn in the palm of your hand. This isn’t

at all like a golf ball falling from the sky or a bird

pecking the eyes out of its reflection. A nowhere

usually begins as a somewhere, but the opposite

does not hold true. The first lawnmower

of the year starts up with little effort

and no one thinks to call it a miracle

or even partially divine. Today the meteorologists

have become linguists—they redefine the idea

of partially-cloudy and breezy with a high near

sixty-one. For some reason, weather seems to be

the place where most thoughts end. Is it because

of the way wind welcomes an arrival with such

ease? A friend once said each raindrop is an oath

or a promise (I can’t remember which), though I’m not

quite sure the name of anything makes much difference.



Resemble a season, ink filled coliseum, your sternum
quieting spotted pause.

Breath, when held, exists outside
the ten million colors distinguished by a human eye.
 
Certain words look better when spoken
around a bend as a quail figurine altering

itself in a tunnel outshines every resting spoon.
Stones, they say, accumulate warmth

known as wealth or active listener when held
tightly. I farmed across the creek

and on the other side your flight muscle
a misfit species befriending leaves.

stationary where e is yellow

among every other turned syllable
equally yellow.
 
We’re standing with our heads
tilted barely downward, an angle
 
reminding us of the word “metallic”
despite the gauze of sunset.
 
Drastic to call a gaze meaningful
after frequent mishandlings,
 
poor saddlery. Certainly
we are equipped with chords
 
for words to tug. “Metallic” rings
watching particular setting
 
while this feeling atop this feeling.



Ethos

A

way of life.

We talk philosophy over tea by

evening, candles almost quiet.

Or work last hours in adjacent rooms,

my shirtless, thin back leaning tarp-like on

a table over books.  Please,

be

passionate about meaning: ask

survivor questions –

fascination is alive. Institutions

aren’t immune to reason.  Give

reminders that are true –

or

parts of them. Modesty,

being you.

See

how the day reflects off side-car mirrors? I’m

in a rush to walk to meet.

De-

light!

Ea-

sy?

Ef-

fective worry.  We

run for cover in the smell of dust.

Dot clusters on

the gray concrete –wind’s

swaying hairline of trees, rapid afros.

We hold love indoors by

the window half-

cracked and creaking on

my sweaty back.

Small death right here.

June 3^rd –June 16^th, 2010

Syracuse, N.Y.

A theory of the occasion

Stop wondering about philosophy.  When

you touch my skin,

I hardly know what to make of it. I’m

confused. The

discourse has been stacked.  I’ve

long since let go

goose-pimple chasing things.

Ordinary life’s an occasion to

give your feet their own

half-nervous brush against

each other.

I used to run down the block at midnight

holding my teeth in my heart.

Syracuse, N.Y.

June 6^th-16^th, 2010

Geography

I can be philosophical

like a fish.

It swims in pale light

of blue visions

vaguely remembering touch.

I can love wisdom

as a cat, instinctively, does

— slyly—

going to sleep. Oh,

no, I am not facetious.

The world is made of maggots.

Aurelius was right, the sod.

But today, air and clouds and time

were clear. I walked,

and slept,

and felt the sudden glare cast yellow hope along brick walls.

You know, heh heh, don’t you —

the cactus cries,

new kitchens,

buying a car,

eating pizza with someone whose marriage is inflamed

(and child is lost). You know,

please, don’t you,

the cactus cries?

Old globes sit in antiquarian stores

and wait for more fingers to be

careened around a continent

–there.

I live, but

in the sixteenth century it

did not exist.

My soul’s a split direction.

Jumbled things rise up

as ceremonies of the dead.

My soul is split-pea soup.

(Where, a child, my mother would make

the green contraption soup,

and I would laugh,

expectantly

in Utica, New York.)

What I’m saying is easy

for ceremonies of the dead.

Time surrounds all creatures

–a silent, blue globe.

And continents fold up,

up into bluest air.

Do not mistake these ramblings.

They come from a heart at quiet with itself.

I love you, and me, and all the things we’ve done.

I am undone like planets hurtling back into the void,

a red, fine mist of stone.

June 15^th, 2008 - June 16^th, 2010

Manhattan, New York – Syracuse, New York



they met us with closed hands

they wouldn’t even know

brew two scoops’ snow for tea

the provinces of noon

la burnt onion wild orange

chicken bones’ chic decay

gray hat-headed guitar

my cardamom cookie

your neighbors’ googly eyes

on holey plaster mouths

red lights edge your stage name

heroish on your own

you say tada tada

to a smallness of wind



A ship drifts from nineteen seventy-six

Once they were right on top of each other

The present and the only, the story, the historical

Were identical, coincident

The launch was the slip.

Now a bay or a sound is widely known

Listen. It’s not that I want to live forever

It’s that I want to have lived the whole time

From the beginning

To know where is the beginning

Or I am quite behind and so ignorant

And wrong about many things.

I can almost see over my mother to the other present

They call the past. I don’t like that color, the color

Of an old pink war that somebody really pursued

An old pink purse someone left in a wardrobe.

In the ship’s direction, but not at the ship’s pace

That’s what it was like

Watching a racehorse

Then watching two

Something pulls ahead

The wrong horse pulls ahead

Is there a name for this vertiginous experience?

POEM 2

That one can be mad at one’s self is higher order thinking

That one can write about being mad at one’s self

That one can tire of one’s self or please or blank with one’s self

What do other life forms do? We have accomplished a great deal.

A long truck trying to make a left—I have my doubts about

The thrashing tail, the reptilian precision of country road in morning light

Frightening, that beauty

That one’s filter doesn’t filter it out

File under quaint, fleeting, fake,

Dying, passing, polluted, blink

That one’s aesthetics are not more advanced

Your body is the Michigan of Lakes, the

Tolstoy of promises, the Jew of superheroes

It’s absolutely wonderful, gazing out the window

Reflected in my OS X.

The ongoing sex, sex feelings people love to write about

Are as predictable as the fiery leaves in this month

Ending up in this mouth

How advanced will an other life form be?

Will it be able to convey itself to us?

Science seems to really want this, science the vulnerable

Shaking everything—to write is science, to feel is

As far as we’ve traveled

We just keep penetrating the same old

I’ve been invited to a wedding/funeral in Minnesota

And so have you, I mean they all are

Every day

Joined and rent, loved and lost

Fucked and fucked in the frosty plain

One can still not see from here

One can not with the naked ear hear them shouting

In Minnesota

So what, there is no meaning in what we are doing?

There is only meaning in what we are doing?

I do everything twice

I do everything at least twice