NAP 2.3
Edited by Gregory Sherl
Copyright 2012 NAP Literary Magazine and Books
naplitmag.com
Smashwords Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the contributing authors.
DARK POEM
Today
I sorted all-beef knockwurst
in
bags of sauerkraut.
They
were ancient knocks
too
old for our humanity.
One
small girl ate a fat knock
until
she vomited light.
I
watched her vomit in the dark
and
felt I was owed a dark poem.
I
kept saying daughter
daughter
though
I
could never be a mother.
Light
is every rainbow color.
I
offered her my dark arm.
A
poem kept us company.
It
was dark as evidence.
Poetry
is not evidence,
it
is and it is not not not.
Somebody is lying
about the moon disappearing.
I
offered her a cherry cola
to
help her vomit darker.
GOD, GOD AND GOD
I had the boys in graphics do a little Photoshop
because I wanted my god to become a popular myth.
They blew that god up big, lord, big!
I really saw a difference.
Now my god was everywhere.
No human could resist.
I started a bible study
and Moby Dick was the bible.
We read Moby Dick every night for a year.
We ate zuppe di pesce.
One night the students wanted to be left alone.
I said: You without me?
That is a very lonely god.
The students said: No.
You in pursuit of us.
That is a very busy satan.
Now I want a personal god.
I want a god so personal I can put it in my fanny pack.
I want to measure my god in ounces:
the ultimate thirst-quenching god.
When I do not even know I am thirsty
I want god in my throat.
This is what they call grace.
I am waiting.
Melissa Broder is the author of two poetry collections, Meat Heart (March 2012) and When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother. Recent poems appear, or are forthcoming, in Guernica, Redivider, The Missouri Review online, Court Green and Drunken Boat. She edits the online journal La Petite Zine.
DATING DEVIL
The devil goes out on a date. He is outwardly suave, but she knows better. Do you want to kiss? Do you want to come down to my apartment? Can I show you my etchings? Let me comb the feathers in your wings. Let me wax your halo. The devil stutters. All the things he wants to say. So much time and so little he needs to do. Clip coupons. The dead come in heaps. He doesn’t have to twitch a finger. I’m up to my horns in souls. It’s a buyer’s market. What’s God up to these days? Mostly he sleeps, she says. The good become fileclerks. God serves them tea. Hands them gold watches. I’d give you my number but the phones haven’t worked in years.
BUSINESS DEVELOPER DEVIL
It’s not as disciplined. More alive. A plane tree rising above a yard. Where’s my bulldozer, the devil yells. He has the last word. It is blond and flutters. Like a finch or a heart held between your hands as you lift it from a chest. A rough cleft-cut wall is not good enough. I want to see the screws, the devil says. Put the steel trellis over there. No, a little to the right. Now swallow it. Every scrap of it. Then cut your hair. That is how a bank should look. Like you as you are. The way you are meant to be. I love you, the devil whispers, like a debt. But the people around here won’t appreciate you.
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and two Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery and Good Morning! His poems have appeared in such places as Crowd, VeRT, Volt, Spork, Cue, Slope, Aught, Fence, Swerve, dirt, ditch, Zeek and Sweet, as well as a few places with more than one syllable. He teaches writing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.
LAST TIME
Once upon a time ended days after the lights went up
___
Because a dog scratched himself wings were needed for everyone
___
The things people say shouldn’t surprise anyone
___
I promise I won’t do it again
___
A witch’s hat and glasses with a fake nose say hello how are you
___
Once upon a time ended days after the lights went up
___
Time to take the long flight back home and get married
___
What are you I’m a princess I should have known
___
I promise I won’t do it again
___
No kids on Halloween came to the house where the birds once sang
___
The things people say shouldn’t surprise anyone
___
The last time I felt this way I didn’t take it to heart
___
Learn to sew Learn to make something Learn to whisper when you talk
___
The girl on the balcony will die in the last scene
___
Once upon a time ended days after the lights went up
___
What he remembered was not what he remembered
___
The things people say shouldn’t surprise anyone
___
The day to day wins again
___
The last time I felt this way I didn’t take it to heart
___
Once upon a time ended days after the lights went up
___
The things people say shouldn’t surprise anyone
___
I promise I won’t do it again
Andrew Cox is the author of THE EQUATION THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING, (BlazeVOX [Books] 2010), the chapbook, FORTUNE COOKIES (2River View, 2009) and the hypertext chapbook, COMPANY X (Word Virtual). He lives in University City, MO, the Brooklyn of St. Louis, where he edits UCity Review (www.ucityreview.com)
ESCAPE[B]
Harpoon the shivering trees
They are only trouble just waiting
to serenade you in all kinds of weather
Their leaves are dirty as Kentucky coal mines
they’ll sing for alibis or a good story
it’s raining where you grew up
These pines are not honest
They laugh about tramps they don’t
give a fuck for your little favours
The weather’s getting warmer
Let’s pick dogwood flowers drive away
and set a cyclone down in the grass
ESCAPE[C]
Baby, we were machines—
gold and golden and wrong.
I wish we were two bodies
full of things to set on fire.
My engine / your engine
is getting busted in the grass.
Luck may have died
but the bus is still running.
ESCAPE[D]
How we will crawl to the city
is how we will pack it up
and walk this town to Baton Rouge
It can’t stay here
This city like the moon
is southbound
It’s going to California
on to Mexico
always out of state
It follows the pretty rags
looking for the same name
its children prayed to when they were born
Caroline Crew is a poet. Cyrus Parlin collects music. Once they lived in Atlanta, GA.
THIS IS NOT THE TONIGHT IT USED TO BE
I have said enough about my old lives
to make the concept redundant. It is a
different kind of now and in it I am full
of words. Not the kind we unravel into
three a.m. audition pieces to make us
feel better about us. I mean that I feel
buoyant. There remains so much that
the world wants silenced in me. These
lungs could give you seven waves of
hurricanes before you uttered a word.
Chris Emslie lives in Scotland but writes other places. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in > kill author, Aesthetix and Sixth Finch. He is assistant editor at ILK and is building several secret identities.
WHO/WHAT/WHEN/WHERE/WHY
I read somewhere
TINY HUMAN CAUGHT
IN A TUBE which
could mean any number
of things like kids
with their Chicken McNugget
bellies stuck sideways
in one of those red fun
tubes or maybe it’s an article
about reproduction about
the nine months it takes
the time everyone spends
worrying how it’ll come out
two-headed or dead
or full of life ready
for processed chicken at
the edge of an indoor playground.
I’m throwing myself
in a ball pit here, but I think
it was probably a picture
of faces lots of them twisted
into shapes like that chart
the doctor holds under the light:
How Much Does It Hurt?
The answer is usually A LOT
Why else ask?
ABORTION PROTESTERS ON THE SIDE OF THE ROAD
Again Patrick Swayze
and how he just won’t die
and that pretty blonde he schmoozed as
Jennifer Grey stumbled in with watermelons
that blonde with the lovely feet
bouncing her lovely head even in pregnancy
the first person I remember looking at
and going WOW THAT’S A WOMAN.
Also, my first masturbation experience
followed by the only time I looked at my mom
and said EXPLAIN ABORTION.
I squinted to picture two legs pinching a knife
but only saw Johnny Castle
solving problems with just his hips--
another way the body can be beautiful.
My car flicks rocks at the woman
with the ABORTIN KILLS sign.
How we can be angry and careless at once!
The reverse driveby
is a better approach
than shouting DONE or DOOM or DUMB
at teenagers hobbling out of clinics
better than heaving fake blood out of pails
meant for feeding pigs.
A sign referencing God reflects
off my hood
and Patrick Swayze again
and how these people must
have forgotten what it’s like to dance
and to masturbate and to love
because surely someone in that whole row
figured out it takes more
than a sign
to save anyone’s life.
Tyler Gobble is lead editor of Stoked Journal and a contributor with Vouched Books. His poems have recently appeared with or are forthcoming from PANK, Country Music, Used Furniture Review, and Forklift, Ohio, among other places. His chapbooks are, Please Tell Me You Have Good News (H_NGM_N Books) and Stale Champagne (Artistically Declined Press). Later this year, Goodness is a Fine Thing to Chase, will be released as part of the anthology, The Fullness of Everything, along with work by Christopher Newgent and Brian Oliu (Tiny Hardcore Press, April 2012). Find more at www.tylergobble.com.
WITH SINCERITY, XOXO.
i give my lover a pot of water and boil all her forks
in the scalding froth
for no other reason than to watch her mumble
revelries in her sleep: fireworks
growing from the juniper bush, a green and purple august.
i give my lover every pine tree in alaska.
when she steps from the shower, i want to climb her bangs.
my lover gives me fingernail clippings
explaining that during an elastic rain these will blossom
into her fingers.
i give my lover a stalk of corn
because if the knots become too painful
we can run through a cornfield.
she sews a merit badge on my favorite sweater
whispering how good i am at untying knots.
i give my lover a baby hedgehog.
his hair reminds me of hers when we used to take acid
and fuck like pianos.
somewhere we find a vintage radio and sing
about the breath pushed out of every church organ.
i give my lover a textbook
thinking she can meet me in the attic
where the floorboards creak like locked hands.
my lover gives me fishing line and a stern warning
to thread this wire through my cornea.
i give my lover a gold star above her headboard
so she can paint children with the consistency of molasses.
she believes in a callous way
that sand is firmer than children
and will put out the oil fires.
i give my lover a t-shirt accented with spray-paint.
she is seven views of brick turned graffiti monument.
my lover gives me a polaroid of herself naked.
she says: when a teakettle yells
come wake me from under the blackbird sky.
BEFORE THE SUN GROWS CLAWS
place your hard earned thoughts into my earlobes.
not my ears
that would be too much,
i’m not ready for that responsibility.
just let your syllables droop,
dance strangely in the atmosphere.
like an airplane doing the moonwalk.
there is no gravity in my stretched earlobes,
how do you even do the moonwalk?
i write a manuscript about how a plane
can do the moonwalk on the side of my head.
my eyelids grow heavy at the mere thought
of physics, there is so much math in life.
why can’t we all just practice our cursive:
loop after loop after loop.
after each disappointing third grade kiss.
after anxiety and more anxiety.
after years of ketamine and heroin.
after, after, after.
after i am just a neon sign
with no recollection of walking
through the red light district.
imagine my earlobes on a slab of marble,
stuffed with chocolate chips
dressed like birthday cake.
David Greenspan is the author of the chapbook i tried to bear the elephants and lost (NAP 2012). His writing has previously appeared in NAP, Mud Luscious, Dogzplot and others. He has work forthcoming from Kill Author and Camroc Press Review. Find David online at davidgreenspan.blogspot.com.
YOU AS YELLOW & BLUE
like your kitchen, talavera: my perch
your boat and I am sweating, ice, I tell you
here it rushes from the fridge in cubes
(not like you, hacked from a block)
as the fifteen-year-old who comes to help
me into the bath: scraggly, mottled
fucked - like the tiles I am,
skittering, & who says, this isn’t
what thirty-six looks like
the tumblers with yellow rim
(yours: blue) just as much
difference between the sky & the sea.
YOU AS LEAVES
As in fall red as in pale
as in buckets. As in a beach
theme remember as in
molasses as in imagine
the top layer of gravel, sliding
over the ground below
taking you, and hell no
you are not going to a doctor
and if I hadn’t gone to Manzanillo
you wouldn’t have been on that hill
and when they say let’s pause
to consider the suffering in and out
do you know, if I turn I see you
hauling over a chair, aiming
as I do, for the safety of the corner
but it’s times like these
we are trains leaping to another track
we do not know anything of the other route
but that doesn’t mean it never happened.
Links to Rose Hunter's writing can be found at "Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home" (roseh400.wordpress.com). Her book of poetry, to the river, was published in 2010 by Artistically Declined Press. Poems of hers have appeared or are forthcoming in such places as Diagram, PANK, kill author, The Nervous Breakdown, anderbo, Juked, The Toronto Quarterly, Bluestem, and others. She lives in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
BEING DIAGNOSED WITH CLINICAL DEPRESSION IS NOT THE WORST THING
that has happened to me in my twenty- one years of living
but I suppose it does come close to other things that have happened
like: going to the hospital in the third grade for dehydration
I am always thirsty for life
like: my dad having cancer when I was eight years old
I have always had lots of hair
like: getting locked in the bathroom at Boston Market
apparently I can’t scream loud enough
I MISS YOU
only during two-thirds of everyday. Fuck
fractions, you say. then I fall in love with
you a little bit more tomorrow.
Kristin Kimble is majoring in Creative Writing at USF. Usually she writes sad poems, but occasionally writes poems referencing Full House, Zack Morris, or cupcakes. Sometimes there is a boy named Michael. She is pro: Oxford comma.
A LARGE OVEN
The test results say YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON. The test results are never wrong, the tester says WE WEREN'T EVEN TESTING FOR THIS, the tester says this with a voice made of strings of llama hide, the strings are drawn into a cord, the cord is wrapped around each of my fingers, each of my fingers are made of pieces of my heart. I've already told you that my heart is contained within two pages near the center of the Los Angeles Review. You know, the misprinted pages, the pages torn and ruffled by the press. I press the pages together and hold my heart close to your heart. The test results are never wrong and you say YOU ARE NOT A TERRIBLE PIECE OF CLOTH, AT LEAST. You say THERE ARE THINGS IN THE WORLD THAT ARE SMALLER THAN YOUR TINY TINY HEART. The heat trapped between my legs, the heat trapped in the density of our small house, our small house like a large oven, a large oven that bakes so many tasty breads, sweet breads and sour breads, all breads we can never eat, again. All breads we can never taste to make us happy. You are also a terrible person. By association, your heart is also in the Los Angeles Review, your heart is my favorite broken toy.
HOLES IN THE WALL
The test results say SMILE THE FUCK UP. I am not a cheery bastard. The sunshine does not wake me in the morning but instead the sunshine comes through the wood blinds like dull bandage wrappers. My skin still aching, my skin a bit yellow, my fingers rough on your back in the night and the tester still whispering like a bottle of cold medicine. I don’t know how to shut the bedroom door, I don’t know how to open the bedroom door. I don’t know how many times I will contradict you. Myself. You know I don’t know. The secret rooms are no longer secrets. The secret rooms have no windows and to get out of the secret rooms we have to make blue holes in the wall. I don’t know what I’m saying. I am still full of shit after all this time. I am still lying to you every time I speak. You know when my lips are making noise, you know when the windows have been open in the dry night because my lips fall apart in little flakes.
Thomas Patrick Levy is author of I Don't Mind If You're Feeling Alone (YesYes Books, 2012) and Please Don't Leave Me Scarlett Johansson (Vinyl 45s Chapbook Series, 2011). Find him online at thomaspatricklevy.com.
TIME AND PLACE
The Chinese girls
hate that song.
They kill a spider.
They text Neal:
the normal smile,
not the slutty one.
They want a tea ceremony.
They want rad babies.
JUVENILIA
Tonight, I’m intent on raiding the hen house.
The moon makes me stupid, and once I’ve lost my head,
it’s chicken or nothing.
Studying the stars for hints about my pre-existence
would be a better habit,
but I want to paint my name in eggs on the broad side
of that fucking barn.
I want a comet named in my honor, and then
I want that comet to drape me in flames.
Take that, hen house.
Take that, barn.
Rob MacDonald lives in Boston and is the editor of Sixth Finch. His poems can be found in Octopus, notnostrums, H_NGM_N and other journals.
ALL OF OUR TEETH HAVE FALLEN OUT & WE ARE STILL YOUNG
we’ve run out of gentle
vitamins
& we’re gambling
our health on asteroids &
loaves of candy.
dear, we’ve run out of gentle
vitamins & are tired of quarreling
with inertia. our taste
buds are sleeping beds
for splendid needles & we’ve
already tried to swallow
the piano.
we’ve run out of gentle
vitamins. in garages, we plan
emotional picnics & smack
false meat with camelhair whips.
we are hiding behind a filthy
hiccup.
dear, we’ve run out of gentle
vitamins. we are trying
to crumble. we are becoming
surgery. we are slowing
until broken. our time is spent
sauntering behind bootlegged
grandfathers.
THIS IS WHY PEOPLE MOVE TO FOREIGN COUNTRIES FULL OF BAD WEATHER
sometimes people die. so:
first, leave the sink running & travel to a country
you have never been to & will never leave. forget
the facts & amnesia everyone from yourself.
then, find the biggest city in this new country.
you will know this city by the smell of hard
boiled eggs.
it is best to sit in a park in the middle of the busy city,
just watching people. imagining. you can imagine the people
friends, family, lovers or just acquaintances. it is easier
this way. this way, there is no pain &, so, death becomes
an abstraction because you won’t know anyone. you will
only know fictions of people that could be, the passersby.
sometimes people die. when you love them
before they die, even if you don’t think you do,
or don’t remember that you do; you can’t really tell
until after the person is dead. this is the point
of death & the reason that love exists.
this morning a man is caught in a difficult place.
he is between the subway & the subway tracks.
it is rush hour, which makes this even more sad.
many of the people are angry at the man.
he might have jumped, he might have slipped or been pushed.
nobody in the subway station cares, they are just angry
to be late for work. sometimes people die. he will, you hope
not today. imagine the man is family & sit in the park.
never go to work.
sit there not doing anything, try to heal the man
with imaginary pain. sometimes people die.
TOUCHING EXHIBITION
we put on our startled jackets & go to the touching exhibition. it is a place of professional despair, where gold is turned into punished clocks & unlucky bicycles. we find seats beside garbage & feel lucky for unbiased bathrooms. we sit in the touching exhibition admiring the etymology of catsup until the function of blood flow is vocabulary. & now the touching exhibition has begun, we watch it like an uneasy tooth. there is a fascinating stupidity to it all, all of the touching looking like some iridescent stereotype. as the exhibition closes, we are transfixed by the sound of throbbing, we hear the vibrations of hands & become two walking hormones, confused by our own enormity.
M.G. Martin is the author of One For None (Ink 2010.) His work has appeared in PANK, >kill author, elimae & ZYZZYVA, among others. M.G. lives in Brooklyn with the poet, Tess Patalano & the dog, Ihu. Find him at http://www.mgmartin.tumblr.com & @themgmartin.
LOVE POEM FOR RELENTLESS DEMOCRATIC ACTION
My politics is sitting quietly
at the kitchen table thinking
of nothing not even you.
You are so impressed
with my politics and also
my beliefs. I believe in many
things, for instance, the ocean––
it is way more wily than it looks.
It will kill you dead. We run
naked into it. We come back
distinctly wetter, our collar bones
delicious with salt. I tell you this
in our secret fort. I kiss you about
the freckled neck and shoulders.
I have a spirited debate with
your legs. They are so sure
of themselves. They are all over
everyone spilling their drinks.
What we need now is a return
to our roots, I make out with
a mouthful of grass. You make out
with the crosswalk, a real capitalist.
A sexy, auditorium capitalist.
A capitalist bending over the sink
washing your hair. When you wash
your hair like that I just want to
buy you five hundred glistening things.
I build a secret fort inside it. You take
me in with a pelican affection. Deliver me,
I chant, to main street please. You go
exactly the wrong way. It is so beautiful
that you know how.
THE GYPSIES
In the game you had to shoot paper ducks with little silver pellets. Those were the rules. Seito, the Game Master, was trying to explain all of this to the child at his stand. The ducks quacked tissue paper that floated into the sky and was eaten by the sky. Like this, Seito instructed, miming a rifle. The child just stood there. Tulips somersaulted sadly in the child’s eyes. No. Like this, Seito motioned again. You have to shoot the ducks. Seito’s father was a Game Master and his father before him and so on for as long as he could remember. The game was his birthright. Sometimes seagulls hovered above the stand and tried to catch the tissue paper quacks in their beaks. If one caught the tissue paper it was a winner. But that was a different game than the one Seito knew. Seito’s game was cleaner and quieter and of the earth. The only light for miles came from the rifle, which the child aimed directly at Seito’s forehead. The child took the shot. Wait, Seito wanted to say, that’s not right. But his tongue thickened in his mouth. It seemed to him that they were playing a different game all along. The child shot the rifle over and over into Seito’s face. Wait, Seito said, bloodying the air. What game is this? Am I winning? The child said that Seito was winning a lot. That’s good, Seito said, But what prizes can I get?
LOVE POEM FOR THAT TIME WITH PERENNIALS
I hold September by the lip like an angler.
It is cool and underwater.
Its belly is a coral reef.
People snorkel in and out of it.
Sometimes the only thing left
is to caress the hell out of some anemone.
It hurts I know. They are kissing the sea
life faces and crying. They are on their sides
thinking intensely with their eyebrows.
They are napping at the hotel
while room service waits furiously by the phone
to take care of everything.
I AM ACTUALLY VERY LONELY
is what I want to tell room service
but I am millions of miles away
boiling pasta in my underwear.
Actually we are at the lake
roasting September over a little fire.
Actually the lake is in our mouths
and the trout leap out
daring each other
to test our smoldering faces.
Roberto Montes is a tulip-faced rascal. Other work of his is currently at or forthcoming from Sixth Finch; Forklift, Ohio; & Vinyl Poetry.
HOLY SHIT I HAVE BEEN SO LONELY
remember when we spent
saturday drinking tea
downloading porn
on the free wifi
at the café
below your apartment
holy shit
i have been
so lonely
i want to drink tea
and download porn with you
on the free wifi
at the café
below your apartment
Diana Salier wrote WIKIPEDIA SAYS IT WILL PASS (Deadly Chaps Press, 2011) and the forthcoming collection LETTERS FROM ROBOTS (Night Bomb Press, 2012). Her work has appeared or will soon appear in Housefire, kill author, Aesthetix, Stoked, Short Fast & Deadly, and other places. She is wearing striped pajamas.
from WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING! (iO Books, 2012)
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
I have an intelligence community
& it is called a beard It is called a world
where the opposite of the legislature is grass
but what does that say about grass
Inside my thinking there is an Iceland
where I stay up all night gluing
traffic lights to a bunch of horses
Oh my Iceland Oh my agape manhole
clogged with spectacular wallpaper
My dinghy can catch some wicked air
Let’s go to the carwash & chew on the sun
Let’s go to the capital & use our hands
Our hands which are a chance for music
My last act in this world will be
to spray paint the lawnmower gold
& evolve into a field of rosemary
WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!
Some noise gilded me funny
Gave me grammar & fur I had a yacht
lodged in my hysteric socket
It was everybody’s birthday
& I bought everybody a milkshake
I drove a limousine gauzed with feathers
It had a horn that sounded like a child
when it is laughing because flowers
are sticking out of its amazing ears
My guidance system got all emotional
as I lavished our meat luggage with irregular
commotion We did delicious things
wearing mittens Then heaven crashed
into my face & my face
went straight to voicemail
Nick Sturm is the author of the chapbook WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE'RE HAVING! (iO Books, 2012). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Aesthetix, Catch Up, Dark Sky, Forklift, Ohio, Jellyfish, Ilk, Red Lightbulbs, Sixth Finch, TYPO, and elsewhere. His reviews and interviews can be found widely in places like Coldfront, HTMLGIANT, and Bookslut. He is associate editor of YesYes Books and curator of THE BIG BIG MESS READING SERIES.
EDUCATION OF THE VIRGIN
to the French, the complement
of yellow is lavender
to others it is ultra-marine
fuck fundamental forms
mastery of plastic elements
hub & spoke
even when my face is dissolved
into the blue of the tree
breasts & cunt remain
following green
I’ve been told I am ambitious
toes grip air
but who decides my limits?
the boundaries they don’t
want pushed beyond
some days I am pieces
of cotton pasted paper
an illusion of space
embodiment of infinite compassion
pubis at center
as it always is
even an orange on a plate
can provide structure
when is death timely?
PROCESSIONAL OF THE MOON
along this arcaded walkway
I think of ancient things
Cleopatra, Elgin Marbles, my body
like an Egyptian priest
you bleed, gut and bind me
liver, lungs, intestines
packed comfortably in canopic jars
I thought conjugal bliss
meant cloisonné and jade rings
latticed doors
twelve cypress posts
to support the roof
there would be evanescent joys
shades of fawn and umber
among Persian tile
I, your pillared temple
you, my recumbent knight
instead I think about statues
of the dead
seek the Second Book of Breathing
long for a sandstone cocoon
K.M.A Sullivan's poetry has been published or is forthcoming in PANK, Potomac Review, Cream City Review, Gargoyle, >kill author, diode and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in creative non-fiction and from Vermont Studio Center in poetry. She is the editor of Vinyl Poetry and the owner/publisher of YesYes Books.
KISSING
I remember where I haven’t been. You home reminds me no one is a record. Every day performs imperative as give a shit.
DARK’S
I’m inches from veiny midnight, relip your kissed pm. This is not Is this not? Advertise fucking up. I don’t mean you should buy a Mac.
ARROW
When we bleach hearts we peel an index finger, aim own-chest-high, pull back a thumb, fumble out It’s pointed. We don’t mean They’re because we’re friends, alone. On one or the other’s animal-licked, menthol-whispered porch. Drying up summer’s second (last?)-choice-smudged mason jars. Under the generational sink on the latest dead-awake day of the week. We say pointed & flicker quietly: we’re thinking of a time when it was raised.
Parker Tettleton's work is featured in &/or forthcoming from Gargoyle, elimae, Mud Luscious, The Catalonian Review, & FRiGG, among others. His chapbook SAME OPPOSITE is available from Thunderclap! Press. Find more work & information here : http://parker-augustlight.blogspot.com/.
RECALL
Advantage had me
By all kinds of collar
I mean the light’s out
In what were called houses
Fragility struck me
As you had a hand in this
Beat me to the bed
Undone thought
The cold about over
PRESCRIPTION
Bandied about
A sore
Sporting too much
Painted in
By the way
I moved
On Sunday
You’d think
I’d taken to what
You gave me
Thought this
Awful tasty
Bryce Thornburg was born in Modesto, California. He has studied English and linguistics at UC Berkeley. His work has appeared in Quercus Review, elimae, and is forthcoming in Euphony. He is an editor for The Berkeley Poetry Review.
NEW BLUES1
Mars doesn’t have two moons it has two rocks
but don’t tell it that or you’ll fallow its ugly heart.
Without the sweetness of moons Mars won’t remedy
the drag of downtown where something is
burning & nobody knows what. No one goes there
for soup or sleep but love is always almost
happening. A woman crumples
her face at her husband’s posture & groaning
vertebrae & American money & she believes
its infidelity is his infidelity, his pleated self
tracking bareback between
hands & hands & hands & hands—
in this sense he is an accordion
with a hole in it— a busted body
& gone good sound.
1 The first line originally appeared on scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Twitter page.
SUMMER WITH TALK RADIO
Find some elemental place, a cave
alive with lightning, and learn silence
as you learned shelter: game, then fire,
then need. Make mutely the usual
observations: that your chest
is a dark machine, that the moon
has massive legs. Did all voice vanish
with you, the accomplice to only
uncommitted crimes. Wonder
if yours is the body being hid here
and haunted by wanting. Miss speech
and resort to talk radio for contact.
Mistake stars for bullets. Notice
the cobwebs on the zen garden,
how they tell of the nothing you’ve said
in three months and the nothing
there’s been in even longer.
Daniel J Walsh is an MFA candidate in poetry at Columbia University. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize..