The Knife | Jake Levine

Say high to your mom because the stars blink for us
parenthetically crooked like blow on a mirror.
This is a passion pit full of sleepyheads that edges
over a sociological pulpit as dense as Tecate on the tongue
without a lime. What else is there? Royksopp.
Understand me anywhere you look. Still night
is still life. My moon, my man, it’s time to pretend
I’m the last man standing, and these young folks
at breakfast are compromising our electronic renaissance, offensive
to our collective intelligence. The magic spells omelets cast turn
any restaurant into a crystal castle with its oohs and aahs,
but I’m the knife, I’m girl’s night out, someone great.
Zap, zap in our marble house.
Breathe, destroy everything you touch.

(via EOAGH)

Amorosa Erranza | Julian T. Brolaski

Cosi mi trovo in amorosa erranza.
(Thus I find myself an errancer in love.)
—Dante

All my dark hardiments begin, so furious and so fell. All disarrayed in love I began to speak of Mariners. And when I saw the grove divided into double parts, which ways I took, diversely can I tell but can no ways devise. So in I enterred was, and marvelled at the wandering way. Although my leman, I am in wondrous doubt—tell me, ERE I DIE OF LOVE—which way to turn? Your hands are like pansies your teeth are like tombstones, and all along the way even the labyrinths shuddered. Where can I go to powder my nose safely? Your address makes me feel intimate, yet I undergo the strangest beguilements, I become incredulous.

Coming To | Daniel Gutstein

In comes diesel out goes diesel in comes diesel.
108 degrees in the shade of a wall
where a hummingbird dines in the bright bell
of a common foxglove. At dusk,
a thundercloud beats over the mountain.

Coming to. Coming to lines and area.
The early light, buoyant; the triangle of its music.
Deductions like the mouth unclowning.
The hand finding itself. The nose.
A dose of leg uncurving to the paste of language.

Neighbors beneath the prophecy of a windy oak.
An oriole there plays curtain, water wheel.
Inside, fingerprints trace the pattern of
an old centrality: The strapless shoulder,
seldom freckle, breeze a deep draw.

“Anemia per se or sudden anemia.”
By afternoon, few stopping points.
The wind’s ignition, the quotient of its disrespect.
That puffy cloud a head of cauliflower,
that mistranslation a dusty thistle.

The rain’s volume, sound, and volume, much.
Brookwater’s down through stones until
the interval between lamplight and nightfall.
Death is a lengthening still. Dark is
a consequence, still, and lengthening.

Figure | Marjorie Welish

The poet redirected my likeness.

She said, "Not his decadence, which is a question."
"Time," she said, declining his epidemic.
                                              As if serrated,
initiatives lost modernity: aura reared up
although bracketing pages in comparative matters.
                                                           "What time is it?"
                                                                                "Perspectivism."
Which is a question.
                       As if serrated,
"as if" bracketing pages.

And time again, the timing of a wrecking ball—
                                                      Which is an overture.

A POEM IS A MIRROR WALKING DOWN A STRANGE STREET.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

all my seasick sailors | Lynn Crosbie

Sly and second-sighted, my friends have abandoned ship. Rats,
escaping in small grey
lifeboats, their annular tails turn the tide, their lambent eyes, like the
moon, dictate its flow.
The violinist plays Autumn as the masts unfold, water lilies in the
pitch of the sea.

A message in semaphore, what I have always longed to know — to stand
by the stern, and
with courage, let go. Nostalgia’s poison

love spreads out like a sheaf of photographs, memory without blood,
a fluked anchor,
undone. The line that breaks when the storm comes, the truth that
sailors know:
red skies without delight,

a bad sign. To navigate you must know where you are going, with an
exact chart,
pin-stuck with ellipses. Accidents, typhoon, the fibrous stakes of sea
monsters, the diamond ice caps,

miracles that have changed course, carved passages into the new
worlds, where sailors
arise. In white militia,

letters come like gulls flat on the crest of waves, infatuation coursing,
like a science of chaos,

they appear in envelopes of ice, intermittent ghosts — to remind me
that love is spectral,
unforeseen.

The rapids were turbulent toward the Asian corridor, sailing into
     Lachine. It is China, after all.
Rare and fragile, esteemed from a great distance,

protected in shelf-ice.

I touch this china from rim to stem, and feel its raised flowers,
brought to me from the ocean’s
floor.  In spite of the danger, the mariners have garlanded the stingray
—as the lashings narrowed,

they retrieved me from the wreck.

A Conversation with Ryan Eckes

I think I forgot to mention this when it happened, but: here’s an interview with one of my favorite Philly poets, Ryan Eckes, over at Apiary.

Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but I prefer recording & transcribing interviews whenever possible. E-mail allows for well-crafted & fuller responses, sure, but this gives conversations a more spontaneous, organic sort of arc.. Ideally, anyway.

Mean | Colette Labouff Atkinson

Wife two was a stripper. And sweet, as well. He traded her in for me. To people I don’t know, I say she was a dancer. I watch them, puzzled, wonder how anyone could not love a ballerina. And you have to question a guy like that: trading in a sweet stripper for me. Not a homemaker. Not home much at all. Not sweet. More like my grandfather, Jimmy Grieco. Mean. My mother likes to describe the blue-sky day when she bought me a helium balloon and I let it go. I was six. I begged for another. She said, okay, but, if you let this one go, I’m really going to be mad. I nodded, took the string in my hand, held tight, and then opened my hand flat so the balloon lifted and its string slipped up and away. You were never sweet, my mother says.

 ***

In Vegas, a few weeks ago, Jimmy and I sorted photographs in his double-wide just off Boulder Highway. My mother stood on the sidelines. She hates how I ask Jimmy for the hard stories. Tell me about the moonshine. Tell me about the dead kids. Tell me how your mother saved the family by burning down the farm. Jimmy’s crooked finger points to a picture of the family. That was Leonard. He was deaf and dumb. Died at twelve. That was Vincent. The baby who fell off the staircase without a rail. Dead at two. Then there’s his mother, surrounded by her children. She was tough, he says. Tough. When Chicago’s Black Hand demanded ten thousand dollars, she stuffed five grand in her apron, grabbed my grandfather—then five—and took him to deliver the money. That’s all you’ll ever get, she said, and don’t touch my kids or I’ll kill you.

 ***

My grandfather never asks about the first or second wife. I don’t have to tell him that ballerina-fable. He knows I’m three and mean. He knows it for his whole life. His first, my grandmother, was like sugar. He burned her, abandoned her in LA, raced to Mexico, paved road turning to dirt; he ate prickly pear, maybe, on the way to his quick divorce. And, though he won’t tell this story, his own father lived, first, with a sweet woman on a wheat farm, far south in Craco, Italy. He boarded a ship, told his wife he’d send for her, and then fled to New York. And in an apartment on Mulberry Street, he met up with the new girlfriend and they disappeared into their new world. She wasn’t pretty. She was tough. She got busted twice for making moonshine. Her sons loved her. She was mean.

Circles | Ryan Teitman

Let what begins
continue. Let
your dog turn

up his nose at
the plate of vegetables
you delicately

smashed on the floor.
How far are we now
from the place

they sealed the boy
inside the well
when they couldn’t

figure out how
to save him?
They didn’t want to

hear his cries anymore.
So they boarded up
the mouth and continued

with the picnic,
even as their children
grew wet with rain.

This summer,
tornadoes will
circle our town,

a runaway will
circle her final
destination on a map,

and dogs will
stalk circles around
a wounded deer.

I couldn’t tell
you how to dress
that leg. You’ve never

been alone before,
but I forget that
sometimes. I know

how to make bandages
from bedsheets;
my grandmother told me

stories from the war,
how her garden was
full of scrap metal,

how she served tomatoes
dressed in oil and rust,
yet sweeter than before.

She’d say, let what begins
continue, and gesture
vaguely at the sky,

as if the sky was where
everything happened.

Guessing My Death [excerpt] | CAConrad

1

by choking in
11 years
4 months
2 weeks
6 days
12:18 pm

     ———

when i win the lottery
i want my legs amputated
and two beautiful peg legs
wooden of course

Frank Sherlock says it’s
a very bad idea
he says i should
reconsider
seriously
reconsider

i want peg legs but
he says i’ll regret it
he might be right
but what i really
want is to have my
real legs (the ones
i don’t want)
cremated because
what i really want
is to scatter
my own
ashes

i thought about getting
liposuction and having
the fat cremated
but it’s not
the same
because i can
eat more
delicious
doughnuts and
grow it back

it doesn’t count

it HAS to be
something
missing for
good you
know

but to
spread my
own ashes is something
i love thinking about
and the cheerful
sound of my
peg legs on
Philadelphia
sidewalks

-

(Saw this in my inbox this morning & made a joyous little yawp-sound.)

Surreptitious Kissing | Denis Johnson 

I want to say that
forgiveness keeps on

dividing, that hope
gives issue to hope,

and more, but of course I
am saying what is

said when in this dark
hallway one encounters

you, and paws and
assaults you—love

affairs, fast lies—and you
say it back and we

blunder deeper, as would
any pair of loosed

marionettess, any couple
of cadavers cut lately

from the scaffold,
in the secluded hallways

of whatever is
holding us up now.

Marilyn Looks Back On Her Dazzledent Days | Laura Spagnoli

Everyone should sparkle. I’m just not
as bright as my teeth anymore.
It’s late and I feel like a great big fish
in a jar, but a woman never admits
it took hours to get this way.
I used to meet nice guys, gentle
and perspiring. Now they’re a bunch
of striped suits.
They say diamond, I say tomato.
Go look for my panties in the icebox
and see if I’m there.
Boo boo bee doo. I may get
the fuzzy end of the lollipop
but I still have my ukulele.
I call this song You Look Married.
Is it late where you are?
Which time zone is starboard
and which is port?
I want the sun to rise like a neon yacht
while I drift on Rachmaninoff.
I don’t know if I’ll remember
telling you these things, but whenever
someone says happy
I say I’ll have a glass of that.

“Home” by Leonard Gontarek

apiarymagazine:

Home

You are crying for something in the past.
Fair enough. Your mother is dead here.
A praying mantis eats through a leaf.
They’ve changed over the streetlights
to the safer, apricot-hazed ones.
Bang your fist on my heart if you understand.
Raunchy, whispering ghost, one streetlight on earth, out.
The maples & moving clouds go from silver
to a shade of silver. Leaves rust, a car starts up.
Some humans xerox their hands. How mysterious the pictures.
Your neighbor rakes the sidewalk. Gentle strokes, long past autumn. Fair enough

God damn.

Useless Landscape | D. A. Powell

A lone cloudburst hijacked the Doppler radar screen, a bandit
hung from the gallows, in rehearsal for the broke-necked man,
damn him, tucked under millet in the potter’s plot. Welcome
to disaster’s alkaline kiss, its little clearing edged with twigs,
and posted against trespass. Though finite, its fence is endless.

Lugs of prune plums already half-dehydrated. Lugged toward
shelf life and sorry reconstitution in somebody’s eggshell kitchen.
If you hear the crop-dust engine whining overhead, mind
the orange windsock’s direction, lest you huff its vapor trail.
Scurry if you prefer between the lime-sulphured rows, and cull
from the clods and sticks, the harvest shaker’s settling.

The impertinent squalls of one squeezebox vies against another
in ambling pick-ups. The rattle of dice and spoons. The one café
allows a patron to pour from his own bottle. Special: tripe today.
Goat’s head soup. Tortoise-shaped egg bread, sugared pink.
The darkness doesn’t descend, and then it descends so quickly
it seems to seize you in burly arms. I’ve been waiting all night
to have this dance. Stay, it says. Haven’t touched your drink.

Hello, you. This is a scrambled mashup of whatever catches me at the moment. The intended purpose of hoarding these odds & ends is to enliven, amuse, jolt, intrigue, & otherwise move myself-- & anyone who may be passing through.

Also, I write here: dirty laundry, & maintain a sex & sexuality-themed blog here: debaucherie. Come visit!