Laurel Snyder - Paper Dolls

This is the shape of some words,
but not just.

This resembles the story
of a girl, but not just.

This is called
making it daily.

Go ahead. Take scissors,
and with a snip, make a girl.

Might as well make many.
They'll all look alike,

but some will hold fewer hands
than others.

You'll see what I mean,
but not just.

Make a flurry
of paper bits that won't

seem to end, and what else
might you have made?


[from Drunken Boat]

Fanny Howe - Banking

He was a cold-hearted Saxon
whose sex was as busy as a farm
and left the room warm
with the scent of hounds

Believe me, he could have had it with anyone—
man or woman—but he wanted to be good

These are the dangerous ones


[from AGNI 33 & 56]

Joyelle McSweeney - The Cock and Kettle

The ceiling sags,
water in a sock.
Lift it over the levee and into the next duchy.

Outside the lunchspot, the rooster swings
with brackets to its comb and tail.
It creaks and crows.
The trees go one way, the car another.

Minnowing around, meowing,
carombing in the bathtub down
into the next apartment.

On the mattress, the man swims
printed with ferns.


[from The Konundrum Engine Literary Review]

Lisa Cooper - Dose

Einstein, after Edison, pulled
the 20th century through its sleeve
& out into a new range of motion.
hello. long nights under
an incandescent bulb
while the message center &
humidifier draw enough juice
to light a small 19th century
village. on this station,
the up & up, we are clear
about the desire to kiss with no
superstitious icons of the saints
turned upside or right side
in any way to confuse
a general audience. hello.
would you like to see
what’s behind door #1.
every minute marks the turn
of scores of centuries. we got
the pope. we got the pope in jubilee
marking an atonement
for wrong beliefs & harmful
actions. the church vindicated
Galileo. a minor invention
every week or so. hello. we got
the pope. we got children
straining at the edge of quiet.
we got to check in daily.
after the 90s
what do you call it.


[from Spork Magazine]

Robert Gibbons - Ode to New York City [excerpt]

The Sky Transformed

Need for gaiety when the first day of the weekend is spent,
unexpectedly, in a kind of silent
mourning at Ground Zero,
& the meager language
we muster remains
mostly internal,
visceral.
So the next day get up early to take the Staten Island Ferry,
not to get anywhere, because it's free,
& Baudelaire praised contemplation
of a ship, especially one in motion,
as mysterious & infinite.
With Ellis Island in the near distance, where my father said they changed
our name from Fitzgibbons,
we are poor immigrants among all the passengers,
looking over our shoulders reminding us again
of the disaster down there,
where the Towers were,
as much from the hole in the sky
as the one in the ground.
It's difficult to pull oneself up out of mourning into gaiety in one fell swoop.
I could have used the dream where my Soul became visible
to my daughter only
so that I had to look through her eyes
on the bus where my Soul was a rectangular piece of glass
hovering in the air
in the aisle
& pressed within it was a rose, Eros.
So, of course, we head to Gotham Book Mart on 47^th St.
where we know we'll find gems
like a cheap copy of Apollinaire's erotic writings,
& Baudelaire's Intimate Journals.
There's nothing like French wit to help bring one up: "She was as red as a beet,
her bosom was shaking, but she was at a loss for words."
"I am sick of France; chiefly because everyone is like Voltaire."
Frank O'Hara joins us, too,
when his Selected Poems opens all by itself
to "Poem Read at Joan Mitchell's," when we're already on our way
to 83^rd Street to meet Barney Rosset,
the legend, who published Lawrence & Miller & Olson.
But not before tramping through the desert of wealth in the Upper Sixties & Seventies making me thirsty, making me wish out loud for a Champagne bar
like the one that rescued me
from my hangover after the Rauschenberg show at the Whitney,
when all of a sudden this little gelatto place on 73^rd & Madison turns
into none other, (words in fine print,)
than a Champagne bar. Ah! Via Quadronno!
We share a glass of Gavi de Gavi for $13.50, which does the trick, getting us out of the residential desert
into the art world between 83^rd & 84^th where Janos Gat greets us at his gallery
with a glass of red wine telling us Barney & Astrid
are in the other room ready to greet us with smiles & handshakes & photographs from the war in the 40's & a story
about Joan Mitchell when Barney lived with her
in the south of France & recognized it was time,
that her work had gotten to a point
where they could go home to New York
with Pollock & de Kooning, Motherwell & Kline,
but responded she couldn't, her oeuvre too large & vast to move.
Barney offered to carry it all all
by himself
on the lone condition she marry him.
A few years later, after their formal relationship ended,
O'Hara wrote his wonderful poem, ironically one he would have made as long
as friendship could last if he could have written a poem that long.
Choko came by with her cell phone, effusive ebullience, & exotic look.
The young publisher, Scott Korb, as thrilled
to meet the legend as I was as thrilled to meet the legend,
went out with us afterward for a bottle of Cahors,
the "Black Wine of France," where we shared
stories of coming to writing,
our trip to Cannes, his living in Ireland,
the link between intelligence & consciousness,
intuition & the unconscious, the reiteration of his mission
to publish what is earnest & honest over cynical & ironic
reminding me of my distaste for Voltaire.
We parted in front of Nicola's on 84th with a firm handshake,
a willingness to face the events of today
with a language of risk & metamorphosis,
& one unforgettable image recalled from that morning
of the row of pollarded sycamores on 43^rd with branches reaching into the sky transformed into the grieving hands of Grünewald.

[from Slow Trains]

Drew Gardner - Watch Crystal Lucidrous Practice

watch crystal ludicrous practice
that's where the birds drink their water

the flames seen through the wall's cracks
traffic gurgles, things

you never want to be
looking in the wrong direction
expecting

I left a bunch of
unsaid things to rot

smashed peaches--
turn off the radio

underneath the flood
the acceptance is on fire

soon to be born
overcast answer
wearing it
the hell out of town

[from Tool a Magazine]

Edmund Berrigan - Pastures of Plenty

I want you to understand
that I don’t know why I’m here.
I was born in another country
with which I now have no association.
I was raised in a New York City
that has been wiped away by economics.
Much of my immediate family has
been removed from this life,
& much of my sense of experience
of this life has been removed with them,
making all of us new people.
I have let much of my sense of self
be informed by an art that is little used
& undervalued. I have sacrificed many
social relationships to these experiences,
which are inextricably linked, because
I come from a family of poets. The life
& values of a poet are antithetical to the
political landscape of the country
I live in, & no political machination
that I may inhabit remotely serves
the causes for which I live, though
I am bound to this land by knowledge of it.
I continue in poetry & song
because the experiences of my senses
are wholly held in these continuous
& inexplicable drives, their reason
& mine never idle or held to law or language.


[from Lungfull! magazine]

Sarah Rosenthal - Sonnet

If joints

swell and limbs

wither, if you've been

rejected before

the cup arrived,

if a left

is made, if bedlam

comes from

Bethlehem—


buildings will weep for lost siblings.

kohl-circled eyes will stare above dusty cheeks.

the river water will resemble river water

but only under a certain sun.

a softened body will learn to tell time.


[from Blazevox]

Barry Schwabsky - Confession Without Confession

I don't see the hour of seeing you.
But pupils polished dark on cold sun
and bare life. Your eyes

or mine? Fixed by sublime attention (planets
gazing at stars) the beautiful
grows nearer. Fractions

of glass where your planets gazing at the moon
find their own sequel: sunken
landscape. Sugar tossed in a lake.


[from nthposition]