Joan Houlihan

 

A crush of oily plant and treated white

A crush of oily plant and treated white, wrapt and reached by root, sky-touched and still, a bud in leaf: make of me a body. Oil me, hand and foot, bind me tight and scented green: this is my dressing, done. Ay lived and spoke to what ay was. No matter if you answer. On hand and foot an oil and scent. Across my forehead fingers sweep a clay. Remember what ay was and am. Kind horse, lie down beside.

Notes:
The Us is a formally fractured poetic sequence spoken by a chronically nomadic people. A member of the group (Ay) dramatizes the coming to self-consciousness of an individual in the group.

Raymond Antrobus

 

I Move through London Like a Hotep

What you need will come to you at the right time says the tarot card I overturned at my friend Nathalie’s house one evening. I was wondering if she said something worth hearing, What? I’m looking at her face, trying to read it, not a clue what she said but I’ll just say yeah and hope. Me, Tabitha, and her aunt are waffling in Waffle House by the Mississippi River. Tabitha’s aunt is all mumble. She either said Do you want a pancake? or You look melancholic. The less I hear the bigger the swamp, so I smile and nod while my head becomes a faint foghorn, a lost river. Why wasn’t I asking her to microphone? When you tell someone you read lips you become a mysterious captain. You watch their brains navigate channels with BSL interpreters in the corner of night TV. Sometimes it’s hard to get back the smooth sailing and you go down with the whole conversation. I’m a haze of broken jars, a purple bucket and only I know there’s a hole in it. On Twitter @justnoxy tweets I can’t watch TV / movies / without subtitles. It’s just too hard to follow. I’m just sitting there pretending and it’s just not worth it. I tweet back you not being able to follow is not your failure. It’s weird, giving the advice you need to someone else, weird as thinking my American friend said I move through London like a Hotep when she actually said I’m used to London life with no sales tax. Deanna (my friend who owns crystals and mentions the existence of multiple moons) says I should write about my mishearings, she thinks it’ll make a good book for her bathroom. I am still afraid I have grown up missing too much information. I think about that episode of The Twilight Zone where an old man walks around the city bar selling bric-a-brac from his suitcase, knowing what people need — scissors, a leaky pen, a bus ticket, combs. In the scene, music is playing loud, meaning if I were in that bar I would miss the mysticism while the old man’s miracles make the barman say WOAH, this guy is from another planet!

Jeff Clark

 Napoleonette

I had a bit part in Napoleonette. I wrapped some meat in newsprint and handed 
it to a woman. The scene was shot in a moment. Since I am no B-movie 
aficionado, I went home, and in the late afternoon the phone rang me from my 
sleep. Putain was angry, he said, "All it was was the lady reaching over the 
counter-for nothing!-you wasn't even there."

Sometimes a ghost entered my heart and I could feel, and sometimes a phrase 
entered my mind and I could speak, with reason. But never was I able to stay a 
man long enough to remain him.

Jeff Clark

 If I Don't Return

If I don't return it's because on the way I was drawn from my sidewalk into a 
pawn shop, or else becuase a morose young man pulled me by the lapels of my
coat into a doorway and demanded, "What is meant by this word?" But before I 
could reply, someone stepped between us and said, "Say, for example, I gave 
you a little lamp, and you rubbed a Genie out of it, who offered you a wish. We
would expect you to wish for something, but you would instead try to confuse 
him, you might insist he change himself into a plastic bird, or you might say to 
him, 'In my canoe I am pelted by leshies,' or, 'Il y a de temps en temps un con 
qui me visite dans ma nuit et qui s'appele Monsieur D. Able-'"

That is when I shoved her aside and made a loud noise with my lips and cried, 
"Listen, you ought to wish for nothing but fame and then throw the bottle 
away!" I went on thus . . .

Alice Notley

Peridots of Kings

There is no culture anywhere, in these countries I almost
live in; though there is history. And there was once — but
now only monolithic companies. I drove through
town — nothing left — a two-story ragged portion of the
Desert Theater; another building almost torn away, leaving
a structure with scant paint, couple of windows. Our
culture. I don’t want to live in one of those in the
past future perfect tense. It isn’t that I don’t want to live.

In the south of France, Rousseau, the contemporary poet,
will now read. He sits at a table, facing a black window
that reflects him. I stand behind and stare at his image
intently: he is so plain. A woman staples her poems together —
then he cries out in a note. What a musical genius. We are so
fortunate to have him, whom no one cares about. I don’t,

I’m my own poet. You don’t need a poet; you don’t need
anything but a big store. You don’t even need yourselves. And
that’s fine. I guess there wasn’t anyone to write to. I
did it for the universe of ghosts; half coyote, half motel.

Frank Lima

 “01.03.2000,”

I found the words in a box and became recklessly enamored with

Them. As I watched, they blew smoke rings into my sacramental

Face. I was a blind old man, unzipping my life before them and

Trembling at the touch of cold marble. My fingers were once wild

Pigeons perched on the statues and I would sacrifice my soul for the

Erotic stillness of yesterday. The words would arrive through the nail

Holes in the century wearing the flickering faces of the past. I fit myself

Into anyone that will have me, who will shoot at me with the hours of a

Wheelchair. When will I stop looking over my shoulder in the subway?

I collected the tickets at the door, and made it perfectly clear that 

Writing is as lonely as a pile of discarded shoes. Heaven is wingless and

Far away and there are no books that mention your name or mine.

Brenda Hillman

Triple Moments of Light and Industry

 During our protest at the refineries, our friend R tells us there are bugs in the oil in the earth-colored vats at Valero & Shell, tiny slave bacteria changing sulfides, ammonia, hydrocarbons & phenol into levels of toxin the mixture can tolerate, & then we consider how early tired stars gave way to carbon molecules a short time after the start of time & now carbon makes its way in all life as the present tense makes its way in poetry, the sludge in the vats where the hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria break things down to unending necessities

                            of     which Dante writes
 
                                  of           the middle of hell
                                                 
                           light     where no light is—

 

R says his friend who tends the bugs for the company feels tenderly toward his mini-sludge-eaters, they are his animals, he takes their temperature & stirs them & so on. We pause to think of it. Such small creatures. At the beginning of life the cells were anaerobic, ocean vents of fire, archaea, then they loved air. In the axis of time there are triple moments when you look back, forward or in. As a child you were asked to perform more than you could manage. Your need was not symmetrical. It is impossible to repay the laborers who work so hard. R describes his friend’s work as devotional. The bacteria do not experience hurt or the void but their service is uneven & that is why i protest.

Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner Three prose poems from «Angle Of Yaw»

THE DARK CROWD CANNOT BE SEEN DIRECTLY, the dark crowd does not interact with light, but the dark crowd can be detected by measuring its gravitational effects on visible crowds. The visible crowd moves toward the dark crowd, as insects toward a black light trap, in the tropism we call history. Riot guns with rubber bullets, tear gas, water canons, flying wedges of heavily armored police, are not only incapable of dispersing the dark crowd, but, by inciting a phase change in the visible crowd, expand its ranks. WE ARE PLEASED TO OFFER A LAMP that turns on and off when you clap, when you clap your eyes. A lamp that lets you see in the dark without disturbing the dark. A lamp producing natural light. A lamp that when you clap turns on and on. THE SOLDIER IN THE FILM asks the audience to describe his wounds. Unaware his legs are elsewhere, he attempts to walk out of the screen. What matters is the form, not the content, of the airdrop, how it alludes to Manna. Then kill me, he begs. Active soldiers act like actors, inactive actors act like soldiers, audience members vomit in their giant sodas. Dance, I say, aiming near his feet. Think, I say, aiming near his head. The crowd dismembers. Now I’m on my back, making an angel, awaiting, not the peanut butter and propaganda, but the flowering apparatus that retards its fall.

 

Martha Ronk

in the sky

in the sky would be as others have recognized an anti-utilitarian move
yet no doubt all humans have posited such—just their sounds and cries
call it up—the gliding sideswoop raptors mostly, but in the twilight
the swallows take to the abundant flying insects as if nothing else
had ever existed, and that swarm near the edge of Peninsula road
is one place to be on this peninsula not so different from any others
these birds no words can get hold of—no adjectives, fonts, metaphors—
how could even an ode praise one of them enough even out of the sky
as an egret lifts one leg then another in slow progress in the shallows,
undulating white against gray (unda/wave), language fails bird
or idea as it moves as if water were an element to be distained

Leonardo envisioned a device to be built of wood, reeds and taffeta: “A small
model can be made of paper with a spring-like metal shaft that after having been
released, after having been twisted, causes the screw to spin up into the air.”

Rosmarie Waldrop

Elizabeth Willis, in an extract from her article in The Prose Poem . . . (1994)

Formally, Waldrop's prose poems read like syllogisms, but their meaning is multiple rather than reductive or elided. These sentences do not lead us methodically to a strictly conceived illumination. In- stead, they refer backward and forward within the book, so that the overall effect is that of dreaming. As readers we are often unable to distinguish syntactically an insight from an observation, a quip, an ac- cusation, a foreshadowing, or a rebuttal of what has gone before, since a sentence will often perform, structurally, many of these functions at once. A single dangling modifier finds us guilty in our over-achieving desire to construct meaning at the same time that it reevaluates the role of a partner:

This is an attempt to make up for inner emptiness in the way that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance with more desper- ate brio to add a third dimension to their characte

Amy Gerstler

Saints

Miracle mongers. Bedwetters. Hair-shirted wonder workers. Shirkers of the
soggy soggy earth. A bit touched, or wholly untouched living among us?
They shrug their bodies off and waft with clouds of celestial perfume. No
smooching for this crew, except for hems, and pictures of their mothers…
their lips trespass only the very edges of succor. Swarms of pious bees precede
her. One young girl wakes up with a ring on her finger and a hole in her
throat. Another bled milk when her white thigh was punctured. All over the
world, a few humans are born each decade with a great talent for suffering.
They have gifts that enable them to sleep through their mistreatment: the
sleep of the uncomplaining just, the sleep of the incomplete. Our
relationship to them is the same as our relationship to the trees: what they
exhale, we breathe.

Erica Hunt

Coronary Artist (2)

Though what I live now is ordinary, I have lived through the glory of numbers. I have visited zero in the sense of absolute beginning to watch fate bleed uncontrollably through a vast chain of explanatory footnotes wound like a bandage over the simplest matter.

I have resisted the power of spelling and broken the spell of pronouns inventing continuity where persons and personalities change sides. I have peered through a keyhole into that narrow room, history, where it is happening to someone else upstairs overhead wearing heavy shoes.

Pathetic, awkward, overdoing it, thumping around breaking into static, fend off the eros to which we react, never initiate, grabbing instead what stales our everyday, our faded monotony. Who wouldn’t kick in their sleep and wander off the path of managed impulse? Who wouldn’t aspire to become an alien in their own language for a moment to lose the feeling of being both separated and crowded by their experience?

The flowers wear pink as if coming down with the fever. The first to let

go were the attributes losing hold of their objects. I was there on my tippy toes feeling thickness leave me, my palms turning into asterisks, my bent arms into commas.

A little display of excitement waved, produced in me the memory of companionship. I watched myself follow the wave and disappear over the crest of a hill in a stuttering laugh.

My back bristled with the urge to give chase, to demand a say, to reconfigure paradise with perfect weather and regular elections. But the distances confused me. Where I stand now, I shout out of my body armor. I whisper parts of the roar

Kaveh Akbar

Calling a Wolf a Wolf (impatient)