Puerto Rico: Land of the Noble/Valiant Lord! Puerto Rico: Land of the Noble/Valiant Lord!
We’re a fleshy circle of beached bachelorettes, tramp-stamps fading, bent over mini Boursins and Bordeaux brought down from the room on top of a resort on top of a reef: the garlic-breathed fruit of four thousand years of human habitation, from the good old Aceramics, the Taíno, fluorescing, and tireless reincarnations of colonizers to the new ground-sloths, the new giant island shrew: you, sunburnt, evolved, sipping rum and corn syrup from a purple plastic penis straw— barbasco to sacred vomit sticksv to Tylenol factories to this sludge-filled veiny verisimilitude— wondering how you landed yourself here: bridesmaid, la isla, Borinquen, a fortified interrobang trimmed in a Whore-Glo faux-feather boa as Russian businessmen offer you their warm Coronas, when all your life you’ve just been trying to make some progress.
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sarah Trudgeon
Billboards Billboards
Florida I-95 America Needs a Faith Lift; a pregnant woman with a stem rose and a pointing, bearded God quoting Jeremiah quoting God; a gray, washed-out steak: What Vegetarians Eat When They Cheat— or was it what the Vegetables ate? You could see where the grease once shone on the old meat. Inside, the silence. —Tell me something.v —No, you! We unbutton our pants. Arms jiggling over fifty-five, thighs spread out on the seat and as far as the eye can see: thousands of carfulls of spreading thighs, the feel and smell of the seatbelt nylon, cricked trapezii. V a s e c t o m y. Oh, to feel your hand on my knee! A lone willow in the field: textbook, and the toxic cows, the steak itself gnawing beside the flesh-filled cars, the rootless wombs that drive themselves.
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sarah Trudgeon
Algeria Algeria
You eat a songbird From beginning to end. You pierce your gums With tiny ribs For a squirt of her liquor Down your throat. Mitterrand hid his pleasure & his shame Under a clean white napkin as His own blood mixed with his last meal. We are kept in the dark To be tender & fat. The ortolan bunting sings A beautiful song & Stains our teeth from behind.
Oct 28, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sylvie Baumgartel
The Summer Leaves The Summer Leaves
nothing unscathed. Desires, once tender stalks, grow brittle; the first and clear-eyed dew that clung thereto expires. The summer leaves—the trees’ dense growth—that, dying little by little, turn red, brown, go down and down and these still leaves long winds will shake and put me on my mettle— here, rusted as dead blood, there, bright, my good— both make the most of light. And then, as, torn, the leaves resettle, and the heart, ravaged, grieves, the summer leaves again.
Oct 21, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Catherine Breese Davis
Crows Crows
—after Crows by Unknown, Japan In perpetual silhouette perform against bronze. As exhausted dancers, undressed behind a scrim, the suggestion of nakedness more erotic than… En masse, they argue and flee between slim sessions of peace. This is existence: pain leashed or unleashed. Wings press against ribs in politesse or unfurl in demonstrations of power. When it’s over, crows remain as debris, Ebony confetti, wrecking more the wrecked world.
Sep 23, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Paula Bohince
Re: Re:
I said okay okay and then it was altogether right to say all right, I said. Though on the other hand, I said. Just that you understand how this is, I said at least twice. And considering, taking fully into account the matter of could be, soon a might have been, it seems at least partly wise to upend or refigure. Oh second thought! Last minute to relish! Sound of heating duct, printer not printing, my own temporal artery in the nothing they said. Right. Or it was what else I blurted at the table. Something like: I imagine it’s possible though we may need more time, what with and as it happens, whoever and beyond that aren’t there other means to other ways to pledge ourselves one starry planet in the cloud bank? Well, sure, I guess I said then over the quietest perfect falling into place or pieces.
Sep 9, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Marianne Boruch
Three Poems to Get You Through the Drought Three Poems to Get You Through the Drought
"Outside, the ground separates, / breaking open like sores..."
Sep 3, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Richard Kreitner and Back Issues
Headphones Headphones
The French Revolution vanishes into rain. The cafe where Camille Desmoulins jumped atop the table and roared is closed. So too the one grocery store in the Adirondack town. Three years fade into centuries of raised voices. When I think “of my childhood” what am I thinking? Spiro Agnew’s widow died. Everything a function of stochastic patterns this rain also obeys. Can’t you hear it the unpitched wave soaking the spruce? Can’t you hear them screaming? Morton Feldman said pointing below the Berlin pavement stones. One deafens to live till you’re deafened to all. I’m canceling all the noise my earthened ears bring me.
Sep 3, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Maureen McLane
Song of the Andoumboulou: 142 Song of the Andoumboulou: 142
—moment’s omen— We were on a train somewhere on our way to Cal- ifornia. Florida, Panama and the Bahamas lay behind. Abandoned boys and girls again, the band of us. We threw our votes toward the polling place, too far away to reach… Southern arrest had set in. We set our sights west. Sunset’s chemical sky some new recognizance, balm the omen’s notice might be… Lone Coast obliquity said come hither… Steeped insolvency, bittersweet obliquity, bend. Fit were it the end of it but not, Lone Coast arri- vancy. Lone Coast obliquity’s behest… We had just gotten started, we were barely off. A dream of outmost arrival obliged us, the asymptotic hustle it was notwithstanding, a blessing we were bent on, boon beyond any, Lone Coast rapprochement… Either we stood in a line wrapped around the world or we sat on a train headed west, IDs in see- thru ink… Either way we circumambulated, un- sure which, the ballot box our Ka’ba stone, black rock, no way to look thru or look into it, no matter it lay broken or because it lay broken, come from no sky we knew… We were scared and afraid fear meant we knew something, scared being scared was know- ing’s omen, moment’s gnosis. The Alone lay waiting, the we we were afraid we’d be • I knew there was no we. I knew I knew we less than we’s rumor. I knew it was a feeling from before… I knew there was the hum it made at least. I snuck a peek at where the Alone were, Lone Coast intaglio a grimace in the wind. The it of it might only be the hum of it I saw, heard what it made me imagine I saw, an aggrieved amen we were a moan away from… Why they take it away, why they try to we were asking. A lady dressed in black stood in the aisle and started dancing. Other- wise we sat with refugee blankets tossed over us, flags, we later learned, of the possessed… Why we the had we were asking, wanting more to think of an earlier life, some lifted sense, something said get- ting out of a car when we were nineteen… So it was and so it went… So we said and saw it come true… Dispossession got hold of us, possessed us, got us happy, Lone Coast abandon woven into the blankets we wore… Now it was a bus we were on, going backwards, no matter we sat in front. Where was the ballot box we were asking, where did they put it… We soon saw the way, the fey design of it, away from Lone Coast while on it, none of us know- ing where, none of us knowing when. We were in the aisle now, the lady in black our leader. Lone Coast islander, she intimated come hither, gave the air a bump with her hips and gave it a grind. Give it all a don’t- care damn we took her to mean ____________________ She was the moment’s woman, frustration’s main squeeze. Given to paradox, don’t-care damn we gave it up to, all of us only there not knowing why she made us admit… She took it from jook to flamenco before we could blink. Back stiff, head and chin high, heels hammers, face rationing pride and duress… Eyes elsewhere, her hands bore mu- dras, a sign from the east it seemed. Don’t-care damn a danced indifference, dance don’t-care’s ta- ’wil • Heels hit the floor, we’d had enough. The lady in black’s heels hit and ours followed. Heels hit the floor on the bus that had been a train, the bus that again was a train when our heels hit… A Websterian growl went up as they hit, cante jondo’s friend. A breathy reed squawk be- hind each of us, a kundalini blacksnake moan… A buttress it seemed it was in back of us. Gravel- ly strafe Camarón would’ve blown had he blown a horn… Thus it was we spoke of clowns and kings, each of us conducting our lone apocalypse. “Na- ture Boy,” before we knew it, was on the box that wasn’t there. Instead, we spoke with our feet… An early joy relived in a dream came next. Lone Coast reconnaissance. Dreamt-of entelechy. Hint- ed what arrival might be ____________________ (slogan) What it was was dance was a weapon for the weaponless, would-be some would’ve said. It wasn’t some “next level” stuff, we’d have none of it, a way of being away that brought out in was all it was, frown-line amenity a wrinkle in the wind, noses up as though we took offense… What it was was we did take offense, ballot-box ab- scondity afoot, no one would not have. Deep song dance’s hauteur was no shuffle. All heel was what it was, all stomp
Aug 12, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Nathaniel Mackey
The Corners The Corners
Where the question are you alright usually finds one very much not alright. Cellphone at the bus stop, cellophane, wind, Hasty Mart in its collar of pigeon spikes. With smokes in front of the sports bar, careerists mid-shift lit at dusk by the inner light of cheap bottles of domestic. Like payphones, cords have been cut that tied them to the world. Let me off here, the primary neighbourhood, I’ll walk the traffic’s bank, its decorative plantings and contradictory signage, the current, I can’t brave it. Fortunes approach right-angled in their vehicles of delivery, hearts beat quickly in anticipation or dread inspired by the landmarks. How long have I traveled here in these years of gentrification and not realized they’re gone—the inconvenient, inadequate, or taken for granted? The psychic welcomes no more walk-ins in this life. Time is short. Though a timeless sublegal entrepreneurial spirit flourishes over which laundromats preside geologically, with deep sighs, belying with the state of their drains their adjectives. No one can be alone like they can. Pedestrians, obey your signals. On the boulevard of a two-stage crossing he reads in her an imminent change in direction. We were here once, hand in hand at the intersection of the cardinal and ordinal, blessed with purpose, and the Star of Poland still in business.
Jul 29, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Karen Solie