Stele Stele
Vertigo, itself in air small hands there are also in pattern becoming scattered shifts the axes, chances the stiff wind this other world that almost visits standing in an empty glass the light like crystal I cut myself on air that finds its difference here open air, the kind sharing across the fields its walking song
Oct 20, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Cole Swensen
The Chiefest Word The Chiefest Word
The most best, winter oyster, what rings along the nerve. Deepest seeking, heart-most root. Zinc and copper. Clawed foot. What streaks across the synapse, harnessed to a moment. Magnetic zero amplified. Every-any-thing wild, beast that beats or blurs or bothers. The newt’s eye, needle in a socket open wide uninking on the universe. A steady bleed. Ever most. Bestest bet. Cosmos.
Oct 13, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Catherine Wing
Ink Ink
I am the Angel of Death. I have come to confess.
Sep 30, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Jesse Nathan
Sardines Sardines
is a yellow, red, orange, black & green word. I got sardines at the dollar store where everything except sardines is more than a dollar, for sixty cents, as they should be my father used to take sardine sandwiches to work perhaps therefore, I love sardines. when people used to talk about the subway, they'd say: we were packed like sardines which sends a message: small, cheap, tightly packed, anchovies for the poor or you too can be colorful & inexpensive as a really snappy, tiny bright blue convertible in which you can enjoy the good things about feeling like a sardine but maybe you'd rather be a striped bass or be a manatee with mev or a grand whale, forgetful of nothing even being so big, the ocean's CEO, you'll take home a giant amount of cash when the ocean goes bust so you can share it even with the downtrodden sardines who get packed in cans in Thailand & shipped to the family dollar store for Bernadette
Sep 22, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Bernadette Mayer
Midst Midst
We're all saying the same thing now, scolding the same shadow, not in harmony, but in sync or by turns. Singing that bar about the flock taking off "as if" it were one body— as if this was one body— and who could be listening?
Sep 15, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Rae Armantrout
Peregrine Peregrine
The peregrine don't bother with the beak and feet and toss them to the sidewalk off the top of the Methodist's tower like KFC out the window of a speeding car of drunks, sparrow and pigeon parts on the sidewalk, a roadside litter, the road here in this case is the sky. It rains blood more literally than it always does and the birds of prey have non-metallic feathers. Everyone in Chicago has read in the Times, coyotes prefer Mc D's. Our kind of wild life steps right up, robs the joint in the disguise of himself he knows no one would believe. True, animals don't use human technologies, but the changes in us, because of such advances, advance the animal relation to us. They've necessarily learned vicariously what they need to know of how two-legged technologies run; they keep up with us the same way the dumbest button pusher keeps up with the MIT computer engineer. Not rocket science, but enough to know what it does is there to work around or with whatever it is. Adaptation is an education in more fields than we imagine.
Sep 2, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Ed Roberson
The Pithy Serpent The Pithy Serpent
everyone knows satan is just a guy with a lot of special efx a pithy serpent who plucks apples from the garden of lost trees I'm an ancient bystander whose chronology is less sympathetic and more cave-like think of me as an obscene gesture a plain ordinary obscene gesture in a place where the weather is nice and the people don't have a clue
Aug 25, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Dave Brinks
from ‘Revelator’ from ‘Revelator’
Eternity in the present only I shut my eyes, inhale deeply to hear five speakers' simultaneous yatter, squirrels up high in the cedars bark, dog golden terrier blend all taut muscle, sinew o'er bone, jaw pauses mid-air in flight, just ahead of the Frisbee's grasp
Aug 25, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Ron Silliman
After Sappho (The Volcano) After Sappho (The Volcano)
The clouds mock me with their mimicry of continental land-masses. Chimerae. An atmospheric shield of tiny silicates separates the mother from her sons, roses from wholesalers.
Aug 11, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Ange Mlinko
Breaking News Breaking News
Amid a conflicting report a nuthatch fetches a black fly, dips its plume in stagnant pool. This is a sky drawn, grafted, rescued, not a bath of vapors an afternoon shutters with counterfeit meaning. It is just an incident within a field of possibility, something periodic and bruised, one location in which we grip that instant of contact. Upstream a scarecrow is ragged in the wounding, a music of terror barely rises above the slopes, reft with nothing but its melody's radius, the slow ancient call of the bird in the distant flicker.
Jul 28, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Matthew Gagnon