Martha Ronk

 

Payment

Dürer’s fame meant he could sometimes pay with
his own woodcut prints and chalk drawings.
This time, however, borax was partial payment for
the portrait of Luca Signorelli,
azure pigment and a bed (not two).
The man with the rings has cheated me by half—
I do not understand it. The inventory of Gonzaga’s
worldly goods, priceless gems and manuscripts is,
it transpires, dazzling illusion, owing the Medici bank
in Florence 3,500 ducats, piling up a financial crisis
in which Ferdinand and Isabella in the 1480s
established their worth largely by increased debt.
Last night from the lawn, hanging in the azure air,
a crescent moon. The price of magnificence is high.

Adrian Matejka

 So Far to Go

 —after St. Joe Louis Surrounded By Snakes (1982), Jean-Michel Basquiat

 

In the purplish clutch between evening & more
evening, boys smoked cigarettes down to their minty

ends & talked about ass like mad hams & hips 

 

like pow, mouths curling with avid adornment & vivid

hands shaping the air—palms down to palms up

in half circles of perplexity. The C shape the tobacco

 

still glowing between fingers makes is the closest

any one of these boys will get a girl’s hip today.

Which is why these boys, in thin tanks & hopeless

 

shirts, cut conversations easily from Watch how I get 

at her to Knuckle up, fool, throwing shoulders & fists

at each other like minor superheroes with no villains

 

to fight. No capes in bare knuckles. No saving the block

either because every swing breaks something.

 

 

Adrian Matjeka

 

Case (Brass or Steel)

Brass again, wishing to be a lost key or a better Victorian decoration. Brass again, wanting 
to alloy in a gentle fashion. Steel, too, taken from ship sides or the skeletons of skyscrapers. 
Steel can be a fist-bumped architecture, full of the empty seats fans used to sit in. Or car bumpers 
dented in claustrophobia. The STOP sign nobody slows down for when cops aren’t around at the 
fork in the road.  Forks in the drawers of the local establishments that only serve take out now & 
butter knives for the drunken disagreements, past & future. Nerves steeled by food & beer. Abs 
of steel, too, in the old commercials on the TV in the corner. 

Adrian Matjeka

Today, I’m assimilating like margarine

into hotcakes. I’m getting down

like Danny LaRusso after the against-
the-rules leg sweep. So low,

I’ll be a flower in common decency’s
lapel. Factual, the same way “Zanzibar”

means sea of blacks to anyone who isn’t
from there. Where is Juan Valdez,

his burroesque dependability when
you need him? I had a friend who minted

t-shirts with Juan front and center,
an afro instead of a sombrero, a power

fist instead of a smile. The inscription:
100% Colombian. I’m going the way

of skin—radio waves, thoughts
like ear-to-ear transmissions grounded

into the ozone on the way from mindless
space to forgetful Earth. Man, my skin

doesn’t need me any more than mold
needs cheese. On this day of cellophane

lunchboxes and hand grenades reshaping
my palms into their own militaristic orbit,

there are only oceans to catch me.
On this day, something needs

to catalogue me: a hall monitor
doubled wide by ambition,

a goldfish with thumbs hitchhiking
toward a fishbowl full of dub.

Adrian Matjeka

 Love Notes

Do you love vague commitments? 
Do you love bad news in crooning shapes? 
Whole or half, tattoos mooning on

conjoined ribcages? Check this box &, 
like a breath, you’ll feel mostly bygone.

Like one of those early recordings, you’ll 
be scratchy & demystified. Untranscribably 
confessional, until the last quarter note 

is a processional. You’ll be absolutely fine, 
flipped to the B side of this note’s high-lined 

referendum. Magnificent & stark inside 
the addendum, like a big breath exhaled 
through the smart part of a question mark.

Adrian Matjeka

Looking for The Cantos in Texas (excerpt)

There's jake leg blues
in this box. There's carnal
scribbling: a constellation
of bug prints in a gypsy's
biography—loose-leaf, crayon
etchings and the sun shining
on my back door some day.

Tommy Johnson, forget
about air. Ignore the wind,
shimmying with seeds
and hair. But take a nail
and a seed and I'll whittle
a twelve-string that only plays
cranial propositions.

A six-string is trouble,
but the twelve is the most hoodooed
mess in nature—the noise
in adverbs making spiders
grow at unnatural speeds.
The pop and settle of this attic
as it ages with arthritic grace.

Orthography of dialect, jawboning
in the glare of half notes, shoe polish
strained through bread in a glass,
and the torso of bass topography.
Think of prohibition-bound
Tommy Johnson, gut splayed
in abdomen:

     Woke up this morning
     with canned heat on my mind.
     Mama, mama, mama,
     canned heat is killing me.

Philip Nikolayev

The New Inexpressible

1

the inexpressible isn’t that which cannot
be expressed but that which will fall
expressed upon deaf eardrums meet with
sightless eyes centerfolded even
or on the front cover it will escape notice
and upon the face itself remain undetected
because mere expression isn’t all it takes
to be detected to be reasonably considered
expressed to others brothers sisters cousins
or indeed a disinterested passerby
hiding all in plain sight and only the fool thinks
no wait the fool does not even think that
no mystery is gone missing from his equation
a haze of sadness covering what is truly true

2

The if-clause and the when-clause and the which-:
I’m lost in their switchbacks and crossing loops,
a transit train hurtling toward a ditch
past all commercial ventures and co-ops.
In this swift life, there’s no time to compute
the likely outcomes, lay no claim to that.
Suck it up and commute, commute, commute.
Communicate no note that you cannot.
Language is tiresome, ultimately, as such;
even more so are its alleged limits. Wish
for no abodes of words. In flocks they swish
in multitudes away, and no research
will ever reconstruct the radiant soul
out of the linear windings of the scroll.

Philip Nikolayev

The Art of Forgetting

Last night I cooked my socks in the microwave
by mistake. What to do when you’re so absent
minded? As well, I have frequently
refrigerated my poems in the freezer
to the point of having to thaw them later,
and poetry’s what emerges in defrosting.
I have also lost to nature generations
of galoshes, coats, scarves, umbrellas,
even once an Egyptian skullcap,
whose individual names I forget.
The name of the czar escapes my mind
on whom was meant to be my dissertation,
or was it thesis. Water,
all kinds of water under the all-purpose bridge.
If I’ve forgotten so much, via absentmindedness mostly,
then how much have we forgotten as a species?
One day we learn, another forget
everything, including this fact.
It’s possible given enough time and effort
to forget anything,
which’s why we like to reminisce sometimes
on those even who’ve decided they don’t like us.
We’ll fight for our memories, the truth as it appeared once.
But to remember something we need to forget
something, a different truth. My grandmother
believed that if you dab any convenient spot on your body
with iodine daily
it will help you keep your memory in old age.
Head of the Marxism-Leninism chair
at the Ivanovo Energy Institute,
where she taught philosophy and scientific atheism,
she was the kindest soul, loved and spoiled me to distraction,
and her blueberry cakes were of course the best
in this world. Baptized as a child,
on her retirement to a small apartment in the Crimea
she read the Bible, perestroika raging all around.
Everyone wrote, thought and talked of
Stalin, Stalin, Stalin, Beria, Stalin.
She read the Bible, both the Testaments.
Thus dialectical materialism was forgotten
and an ancient faith recovered.
I too would like to forget a few things,
keep trying, but tend to forget instead
all the wrong ones, like submitting payments
by the due date, the need to tie my shoestrings.
Mnemosyne, and her daughters the Muses,
and her grandsons the museums…
Literature too is a museum,
as well as Lenin’s mausoleum,
which is essentially a tomb.
As you must of course know I’ve forgotten
the remote control on the bathroom sink
where my reflection in the crooked mirror
distracted me with its scowl.
This is earth life, but like hailing from outer space.
When my daughter was born,
I spent the night with her and my wife at the hospital
and went home the next day to clean the apartment.
I vacuumed the floor very thoroughly,
my thoughts soaring far and wide. Little did I notice
that the vacuum was running in blow out mode
so the condition of the floor changed
hardly at all. This still makes my wife laugh
and may indeed be worth remembering
against all death. While stress, duress and strain,
the painful neck crane
and other stuff rotten
are best forgotten.