Table of Contents
The rocks had been turned over, the birds like
daggers in the air.
The rain threw itself against us,
Our round cheeks and bare legs.
It reached under the roof and drew us out.
The lightning flashed too close.
When we rounded the last turn of thigh-high grass
and stunted beach-pines,
Paved ground gave way in crumbling chunks
to jagged rocks and crushed shell.
Above us and beyond
A white, wild eye
Stared back from the horizon.
The birds flung themselves against the clouds
Against the water.
Coarse threads of hair thrashed,
Pulled themselves loose from their knot.
The heavy shoulder of sky,
Overcast, suffused with light,
Filled the lenses of my glasses.
I had an idea to kneel on the harsh rocks,
In my sandals, on my bare legs.
Gray feathers were held fast, stuck to the wooden
planks of the shelter.
Standing in the thigh-high grass,
Hidden by the stunted trees,
I watched a car pull away. A gray, sleek
dolphin in the rain.
The rain pummeled its silver back,
Drove it from the sea.
--Pat Akhimie
Hot sands cool, coalesce into silence,
The desert burns with emptiness,
A Jackady song rises off the night cactus.
Your name perches hoarsely on my lips,
It is dry between us.
"Water!" The Jackady sings,
High and loud enough to shatter
The glass sky; smooth as obsidian,
River rock, the cool wet gleam of your smile.
I wing the rainsong on the night,
Alight my feet on shards of silence,
Roll and tumble
Like thunder in the arroyo.
-- Justin Nyberg
JOUISSANCE
So the other day my friend is in the british museum
in that room kinda way back on the first floor
with the temple
and the torso on a stick stuck like a popsicle
and so he sees this guy go up to one of those
plaque things
like from the parthenon or something that are
hanging on the wall
the ones with all the greeks or is it romans
fighting centaurs
and this guy stands there and stares like for
a Really
long time and my friend is thinking wow he must
be like
a critic or an artist or some philosophic type
cuz he’s really like
Experiencing this hunk of marble right the gaze
and the aesthetic all of that
but then this guy like he must have been on Drugs
or something
kinda just reaches up and sort of Feels on the
leg of the greek guy
or is it roman but anyway who’s just practically
Naked
but it’s because this is like Classical and this
Weirdo is actually
Touching the thing which is all ancient and priceless
and everything
and come On I mean it’s Art this is a Museum
you can’t just
put your Hands all over everything and this is
worse cuz he’s not just
Touching it he’s like Molesting it like somebody
should get a Guard
or some Alarm should like go off but this Guy
he is just running his
Nasty hand real Slow and Sexy on this big white
Muscley Thigh and is
going right up the leg to the toga-wrap and Who-Knows-What
when my friend
almost jumps out of his Skin cuz this guy turns
around and with
this Crazy Shocked-Pervert sort of look sees
him there staring
PAUL
we were deerstalking
and moonwatching
in the streets
the lampposts and the porchlights
lit up doorsteps lawns and driveways
where nothing moved
our approach inspired
automatic sensors
to create eerie arenas
still pools of artificial light
more beautiful than day
and you did cartwheels down a hill
your hands between the yellow lines
you fish-flopped in
pale-bellied backbends
making faces at the deer
who stood bewitched
and staring
from the spotlights
of alien lawns
-- Brooke Belisle
I smell you on me from when we said goodbye on
the train station platform.
I sniff my sleeves and sundry folds of clothes
and still can't seem to find you--
only when I turn my head a certain way and inhale
do I feel you and your some-French-name perfume.
How strange now to both have you and miss you
at once
when I always thought it was Father I really
wanted.
-- Ana Berlin
I never helped to make
The click of marbles
Against the step.
My sisters’ hands smelled always
Of marbles.
The marbles stopped briefly
When Dad’s heart stopped, briefly.
To make him well,
They cut his chest
Like tissue paper.
We brought him tissue paper
Flowers in the hospital,
We brought him
Home,
And all I could hear
Was his heart-click
While my sisters played again outside.
--Aliza Fogelson
we
blow out the citron candle
and still the lights on the other side
of the lake sting like flashbulbs,
their artificial halos shadowing
the closest planets to which we assign names,
yours, mine
I am
pulling night grass
while you wave your invisible hands
and talk
that's our kite, our cross
we spell Cassiopeia wrong, give Orion a dog.
dew soft
on fingers, extinguished wax,
a flannel-lined sleeping bag.
we
watch the domed sky
warm with cloud,
muted winds inhaling them in,
the slow tread of breath.
--Jenny Yue
A pale green cast-iron gate
lends the weeded slatestone path
a proper air. Both stone and metal
undone by a mad spring of furious life
as the smoky blindness consumed him
leaving his plowblade to the orchard,
its humming roar of propagation,
flowers to unfurl, fruit to fall.
Boy, gate, path, blade, apples
all run aground…
They said a rabbit ran before the Charge
and the ashen sea screamed "Faster!"
They grinned at the gates of Hell.
A rabbit ran before the grave;
I smiled and crept slowly home.
-- Tristan Snell
