Lauren Bender - [of course I can look like a young boy]

of course I can look like a young boy
dear political poem,
I never really got into history

Mine eyes watching a man blow himself up
as you say,
a field full of shoes between us
a revolving bookcase between us
his flesh slides down the front of the TV, obscuring Janet Jackson’s sunbursting forth
in some less civilized countries the dead are dismembered by their family
left vulgar to vultures or was it all a mirage?

I would make a good soldier
please find enclosed my scores from Minesweeper,
which would be higher if I didn’t have to
cover my windows all day long
and then go to the factory
Dear ARMY, please send 8 x 10 to my 5-year old
her first sexual fantasy involved neon TRON and empathy between men

let’s just make light of it
he’ll just have to start spinning a little earlier tomorrow
let’s just gesture it down under the motion sensor
photons between us
inappropriate gnashing of teeth between us


[from Rock Heals]

Brian Howe - That Man Is Not Your Ladder

Is he after your money?
Have the man violently bounce
Your choice of 2 heights
Use the top three feet or so of your ladder
Safety shoes on hard surfaces/or have a man foot the
Climbing angle to say, only 45° instead of 75.5°
This homework still may not guarantee your ladder can pass

Do not climb onto the ladder from the side
Don’t compromise your balance by extending
your reach beyond
My heart goes out to the unfortunate man in
The places where trails do not exist are not well marked
Make sure your shoes aren't slippery
Heal the man on the floor and

With plenty of room for you and your youngster, you
May be more than happy to have a stay-at-home man
This man was not speaking for me
He does not know ME, my ... a lot of validity to it
As much as women do not want to
You gotta push 'em off your leg all the time

Criticism: I have lots of male friends who would never
Answer: Your friend doesn't find you attractive, or he's
Do not climb onto the ladder from the side
Don’t compromise your balance by extending
your reach beyond
My heart goes out to the unfortunate man in
The world beneath your tread?
Note: Your health and life are at stake when you use any ladder


[from Octopus Magazine]

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal - Shine

I shine on
the voices
that speak from
my TV.

I shine on
their fat lies
and lower
the volume.

I shine on
and tune out
the evil
of two lessers.



[from Shampoo Poetry]

Gina Franco - The Box

What did you learn from the dead?

To turn cold in stages to stage

bleed an invisible instant goddamn

bleeding to heart to get off your

chest to neck and stomach

blow it right out of the hole hard to piss off how does it go

how does it go goes stone stone deaf to so cold so

so we heard them last night shriek at each other the bejeezus though nobody hours heard the shots, you?

Past tense of shoot also called scattergun also a shot of clear liquid

an injection to interject. You?

Oh I gave it a shot resolved my greatest desire

is mean means to go

home a marked entry an engraved—no cloned—entry to how do

you sleep how do you recognize me now I'll

do to you do to you shotgun I mean hotshot I will I'll do it I'm sick

of you yeah yeah then go 'head I'm serious asshole like you

care to miscalculate the command of the exit wound to miss

fire also revolve, er, volver, also

called ghost word yeah gimme you faker you way to take

off—shit (past tense of shoot)—

go now I'm in sight.



[from Fence]

Cynthia Sailers - Teaching Laura Mulvey

in contact with the proper ladies
to seduce them with our thoughts
so that they may waver in their
underlying narrative-----their condition
to perform with reality
to believe in science: the innocence of design
running between the picture and the calmy sleep
pretending to be older than oppression
if the self is before our very eyes
an authenticity where else multiplied,
where else swimming to be plural
whether or not we find comfort in models
wanting to eat, not eating, then eating a lot
or find the false accusation of race
or absence of race
so that you may “call me a buttress of reason,”
a subject reading then pulling back
to wards the want of my own 19th c hysteria
call me a cynic, but something is there
in the yellow wallpaper and she would want
to write a narrative to say
her dystopia was fixed, gripping the wind,
the small towns torn out of books
or an accidental hideout away from view
to find the others so same and different
but not to modernize the other-----sky


something a constructivist can’t spoil
something empowered by the exercise
of Emily Dickinson
something none of us could bother
to implement a fascism a revolution
an official prize claim
to be an indigenous woman
to be identical to the others
to have all your bees in your bonnet
also called phantasma
or the better half
we were not yet formed, we were an
awful eyesore in some abstract place
& “we continue to make things worse”


with pulpy novels of lesbians
trying to get at material we can’t live
without--------------------visual images
of savoir faire fall back
into the pristine, back to readme
borne collateral for Hollywood cinema
like being deified like being incredibly gorgeous
so that he is currently stupefied
so that he is psychologically romanced
so that you have to define desire as a pronouncement
like virgin mule hair
to give my dignity some space to wander
the hallways, value the faculty that encompass us
up into an obsolete


[from Shampoo Poetry]

Chet Wiener - A Brand New Dance

Carrying a table for your
Later again you can’t tell
Everything develops who’ll try
Harder it was a whisk
A culvert a camel in the mirror

With a ring marked to mumble
The friction discover in dollars
Colors raspberry reaction trilling
By the doll off or over
Passes as the pressure

The waive of its dibs
Felt my knee question blade
To glide past the rock choosing
Ripple over rip or rift together
On the air and free


[from The Brooklyn Rail]

Mairead Byrne - Downtown Crossing

A cup of coffee can be a mother.
A cigarette can be a mother.
A blanket can be a mother.
A wool cap can be a mother.
A coat can be a mother.
A booth can be a mother.
A warm grating can be a mother.
You can be your own mother.

[from Fieralingue]

Matt Henriksen - When Lights Go Out at the Wooden Nipple

The woman asks “Are there any virtuous sailors in the room tonight?”
A man with a neon halo says no, smashes the halo on his scalp
With his cap.
“Off to sea wit ye, den. Ar, ar,” she says.
He is gone. The room, still as a cigar
That’s been out for hours. Smells of dog.
The woman’s leg is broken: glass on stage,
Shattered in the shape of a necklace.
Lays her throat
On the beer-dew crystal rainbow, sings herself
To sleep, becoming red river.
A piano,
With nobody in it, plays. A one-eared dog
Comes through the curtains, licks the woman’s thigh.
The dog smells like saltwater, speaks: Thus
Has spoken. The woman would get up,
Make herself a drink, but she’s forgotten
Who she was: That’s the nature and the nonsense
Of being blood. She hopes the dog didn’t
Say that. But she’s riding the tide. She’s in it
For the dough: the bread of her body whitening.
The dog is just another way of saying
“I’m sorry,
Didn’t know who he was speaking to,” or “God
Help us if we remember this when we’re dead.”


[from Shampoo Poetry]

Cole Swensen - Two Poems

The Hand Etched in Glass


We knew this was coming. We always thought they were flying. But, no, it's light alone. It's morning and the light is streaming in. Blinding, you think, and put your hand up to your eyes. And stayed. We're all part window. There's someone coming in through the french window, but you don't notice him; you notice the window.





The Hand Photographed


Here we tend toward particulars, though they remain black & white and/or the black before the door, the white, slipping out. They're more angular than their portraits would have led you to believe you could live here too - we're not as poor as we look. Photographs have a way of implying that it was a little cold that day, or that we live like pets in the laps of everyone who wanted something else.


[from Double Room]

Amy King - I'm the Man Who Loves You

The beer has warmed to us.
Like a bear grovels for leftovers,
we are used to blood
in our veins, and other amenities.

Why does every sentence
between us
condemn loneliness?

Even in the womb,
we take note of beings
ushered past.

Love has always been
the woman in the lake.
She is her own sister,
the buoyancy of heartbreak.

Lately, I have had to trick
myself to read
with the promise of a book.

But mostly, I am taken
by the sense
of a blue suede dress
that shrinks to fit you.


[from Coconut]

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]

Catherine Daly - Two Poems

Slave

"How could a bitch-kitten like Toni
hold Val in thrall?"
This Side of Love

Accessory,
name bracelet,
extravagant anklet,
secondary

to the prime
suspect, the captivating
crime.

She keeps me on a leash so tight,
I can't breathe.

Supercilious,
ridiculous, Moanin' Low,

what do you deserve?
Haven't you humiliated

yourself
enough? What does it mean
to be punished?



Scarlet

A tomato is a fruit
dressed in red, a nightshade,
a love apple, but

a woman in a red dress is
the reader's digest condensed book of love,

a lover intoxicated by her listener
wielding the absolute warm gun,

a red pen
deleting.


[from No Tell Motel]