It includes portfolios by
John Olson
Laurie Blauner
Endi Bogue Hartigan
Tony Mancus
Jean Donnelly
Ezekiel Black
G.C. Waldrep
The issue is $8 (includes postage).
Here's a taste:
John Olson
The Virtue Of Jalapeños
The virtue of jalapeños is epistemological, like the life of Baudelaire. They are wrinkled and strange, articulate as the spine of a copperhead, conjunctive as the jaw of the human face.
Tart. Acrid. Piquant.
Poignant as the skeleton of a whale on the beach, its bones bleached and sculptural, the pure contours of the imponderable.
Guerrero has opened our eyes to stone.
Sparrows on the hood of a truck.
Strike the water with a paddle and let us graze on a page of words. Iron reveries that make a bridge glide and arc.
Because there is death on the horizon.
Because the animality of life is visible in the words beating at your skull trying to get out. Because that’s what words do. They swell with life until they are heard in the crack of a rifle. Euclid wandering a construction site. Old letters in an oak bureau.
The long awaited diagnosis proclaimed in a doctor’s eyes.
How does one explain the sublime? Smell the rain in the air.
Money has lost its meaning. It was less than decorum to begin with, the mere effluvium of power, preposterous and fake. And now it is less than that. It is nothing. A stench in the air. Rust on a rake. And the world has become a palimpsest of illusions. Debt swaps. Drop locks. Cashouts. But there are still jalapeños to remind us of reality. The acute sensation of things. The sting of pleasure. The sweetness of pain.
And that is the virtue in jalapeños.
And coffee exploding in my brain.
This poem strikes me initially as academic but turns itself about once I read about money. Then I want to re-read everything with a little heartbreak. I like that very much.
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