Verse

new issue of Verse

2013-04-02T21:23:00.002-04:00

The new issue of Verse (Vol 29 #s 2 & 3) is out, with portfolios of poetry and fiction by

Joanna Howard
Jasmine Dreame Wagner
Sarah Goldstein
Shannon Tharp
Lance Phillips
Adam Strauss
Matt Reeck

The 225-page issue is available for $8 (price includes postage). Send a check to Verse, English Department, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173.

NEW! 3 poems by Gina Barnard

2013-03-11T01:30:00.000-04:00

Gina Barnard

Three poems

ALBA

Nudge my nose just under
your ear, sometimes we slather
too much praise, like mayonnaise.
After tea, the bed is still warm
with you, mayonnaise.

ELEGY

You eat a sweet potato so fast your chest fills with cement and you hiccup to catch your breath.

FIRE ANT

dug its head into the back of my thigh
sliding down
stairs in the bedroom, the old house.

*

A pinch--
a yearning.

NEW! Poem by Jess Novak

2013-03-04T02:00:00.000-05:00

Jess Novak

IN PICTURES, EVEN THE WALLPAPER GLOWS

I’ve been talking to this girl online—Jack calls her

Internet Crush Katie, but she’ll be Real Human Being Katie

soon enough, & that’ll fuck

everything right up.

In the smartphone pictures she sends me,

her breasts burn white, overexposed and chewable;

like a model in a Bacardi ad, she throws

her head back, perpetually laughing,

surrounded by girls, more girls, so many girls,

girls who are all

just my imaginary type, girls who flaunt

cool band t-shirts & expensive haircuts,

girls who might text me cute things:

let’s watch ice cubes melt

or let’s poke bugs with sticks together.

Girls who wouldn’t ask why the porn I watch

is so weird or call my mom when they haven’t heard

from me. I bet they wouldn’t still be friends with all my old friends

so I don’t get to see them. They would never remember

to tuck in the sheets.

NEW! Poem by Ethan Paquin

2012-12-31T05:00:00.000-05:00

Ethan Paquin

NEIGE [THREE SCENES]

aimless animal-coloured tumbler your library’s aphotically indeterminate

you morning the ground to groggier-than-usual’s millions of earmarks;

there are no students eternal only stop signs to bark commands rufescent,

only stalléd cirri shelves and shelves of them bustling ether of nowhere

only my eyes no millions of other watchers imprecise tumbler heft spills

from the seat of god onto our laps a necklace to be untangled with bones

and a half-erased script and stumps for motivations, ut pictura cirrus this’s

all that comes to mind Latin for curl of hair thus the portrait of a girl who’s

blanched perhaps she’s suffered, perhaps she’s been spooked, likely in love.

in love and staring out a window ut drizzle poesis, so goeth poetry as drizzle,

lovers’ crazy ideas of where their object went the evening before, before snow

tumbled before her eyes saw the result of the katabatic front. Ut drizzle poesis,

long gray nuance between stanzas the meander from cup of tea to the next one,

snow’s meanwhile abstraction an easy metaphor for the week. Young woman

in love as you are please, do not comb your hair—I see you motion for a brush

through the window I watch and clasp myself, do not to the narrative of dawn

surrender, stay wild and pained and look that way. This is not mere entertainment.

Snow tumbles aimless, accretes aphotic my gaze though is fixed upon you.

such sentimental passages about love, weather and fixéd male gazes hunter

as he is, supposedly, of erotic experience wherever to be found. I’m stupid

like dander, or clover. I transcend no fence reach no apple bough. Limitless

are other poetries of the engines, of the random, of the idiomatic, of the popunders

and overt flâneurist grit-amenities. I wear a poem like this like, say,

a dead braid or a last match, bit of its tip scratched off, the thing useless for

cigarette to say nothing of survival or bonfire at the beach where the talk’s

of sex and nothing but sex. A deadened band of cirrus is known to haunt us

at our windows the girl and I like snapped taper candles, outside the snows.

RIP Dennis O'Driscoll

2012-12-26T15:15:00.001-05:00

Dennis O’Driscoll

FRAMES

for Patrick Taylor

I.

Rites of spring.
Bring out your dead grass
wedged to the blades
of a dormant lawnmower.
Time for cans of paint,
white spirits, rags.

II.

The cottage garden
in the mauve light
of delphiniums.with honeyed tongues.

Bird notes tossed
like blossoms.
A fern stretching
its wing.

III.

Night snails, pumped up
to full size, plump
as a colony of seals,
make the viscous journey
to a meal of hosta leaves.

IV.

Those daffodils,
you’d know it was
their first time:

so open, so eager to please,
so bright, so upright,
so unaware.

The raw nerve of yearning
triggered off by hawthorn,
by the green of far-off hills
seen from your top-floor office
when sun pays out its light.

VI.

That it might
always be spring,
a held note.

That we might
look forward
to long days

of growth:
haze lifting
like a screen,

waves peeling
off the Gulf Stream
one by one.

(from Verse Volume 21 #s 1-3)

NEW! Poem by Aaron Apps

2012-12-24T01:00:00.000-05:00

Aaron Apps

FLESHLIKE ACTIVITIES

Suppose the arbitrary violence that is bound into action shapes us. Sexes us. Suppose each of us is oriented like an anchored vessel on a caustic sea. Suppose each vessel is anchored by a thousand strings of yarn that have no weight as they disintegrate in the acid body of the ocean. Fibrous expanse. Suppose each line of fiber within each strand of yarn is the type of vessel that pumps blood. Suppose further each small fiber is the type of vessel that holds the dark things themselves that move forward to what the dark hollow the mouth calls “now.” Now spoken out of the empty echoing tube that runs down into a series of fleshlike activities. Flesh bound by arbitrary violence. The violence of a thick thread. If the supposition is made that the acts of moving utterance are followed by a fire of wires is the binding principle that holds each contingent instance together believable? Livable? For each principle that is a thing amid a multiplicity of things there is a sense behind it. A sense of the plenum around which activity gathers. Split end, thread bare, eye wire. See: we might have a sense of what it means to echo the word “nature” after the word “now.” We might cut our own eye off. We might cease to be we. We might bend like the dark line of the sexed I. I suppose that these threads are sexed bodies perceiving down a tangle within a current within a tangle within a flood. I suppose that the violence of the flood is unavoidable as vomit after swallowing a gallon of opaque eye milk.

NEW! Poem by Anis Shivani

2012-12-19T02:00:00.000-05:00

Anis Shivani

TIMEX

I capsize newspapers in water. I shake myself free of watchwords. I hang balloons on wounded sticks, the balcony gold-latticed on the truant morning, the moon a waxy after-effect smudged like conversation. Music, lavish and omnipresent, squeezes between drachmas and bangles. My deck of cards falls like a waterfall. My mother calls me inside in a voice splintered like a thousand bees on the same mission. Sunlight washes over my soft thighs and knees like a baby’s croons. The fly’s intermittent buzz reminds me of forgotten lessons. Time is a century of turquoise pools facilitating suicide. My first watch is a gift of anxiety. Now seconds count. How long can I hold my breath? Palm trees whip in the wind like runaway children. My mother calls again, from the other side of the moat, unable to tickle my ears. A line of ants, curving like serious S’s, forecasts future earthquake cracks. The dark stairways of my hundred-year-old building steal me like a pasha’s only son, hunting in the garden alone at night, kissed by talented witches. The weight of the building is like ten earthquakes occurring simultaneously in a moment. Yellow and red almirahs unfurl their metal skin for a stolen touch or two, laughing at their open secrets. Each morning is like every other until I split it open, the street is a parade ground for costumed vendors with voices like melons, the smell of boiled potatoes makes me believe no one can ever be sick or poor. I steal time and the world lets me. My mother calls a last time, fanning herself with the lazy newspaper. I ought to be a child detective like in my favorite books, but the tar streets and black palms and drunk pools are too friendly, they all want to pat me, they won’t fight back.

NEW! Poem by rob mclennan

2012-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

rob mclennan

A SINGLE STREAK, PURE WHITE OF SKY

If the day quickened, ear
on the chest,

arrhythmic. Stop,
and go slow,

slow.

Make of threads, to drawn,
an island

dead, unaided. We,
a person.

Graph, should
something happen,

to forget

would be
impassable.

NEW! Review of Elizabeth Robinson

2012-12-15T14:32:00.000-05:00

Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson. Ahsahta Press, $17.95.

Reviewed by Aromi Lee

Elizabeth Robinson’s twelfth collection of poetry, Counterpart, consists of thirty-five poems, grouped and anchored by epigraphs taken mostly from her contemporaries. Her author’s statement explains that the poems focus on “the uncanny presence that one recognizes and yet does not.” Robinson’s uncluttered, hypnotic lines are both subtle and bold in her examination of the fear that the self and language are mutable, unpredictable, even sinister and hostile. Her poems center on the possibility of a dialogue with the self about the self, and one can become lost in the web of self-reflexivity that ensues. The confrontations of self and self may yield nothing, and the fear of finding nothing haunts these poems. Nevertheless, the willingness to peel back the layers of ‘self’ and face the shadows of these self-encounters drives the momentum of Counterpart.

The book’s first poem, “Turn,” introduces a cyclical nature that recurs throughout: the “one sharp kernel” becomes a “bitter seedling,” and out of that seed “comes / the green aperture.” The “green aperture” is described in similar terms as the seedling: it is “bitter, tender, self- / pursuing.” The seed and the green aperture are outwardly different, yet both are “bitter,” pointing to a cycle at work: the seed becomes the green aperture, and the cycle starts over. It is revealing that this first poem is prefaced by a quote from Charles Baudelaire (“You find it pleasing to plunge into the bosom of your image”), for it is an invitation to the reader to join the speaker on this inward journey, to listen in on the speaker’s “interior conversations.” In another quote, this inward journey is imbued with a sense of urgency; Barbara Guest calls “the act of discovering where the self starts, hears itself, and repeats the instructions” “a necessity.” This urgency, coupled with the central question of “Who am I?” posed by André Breton in the next epigraph, propels readers into the next set of poems, the first of which is aptly titled “Studies for Hell: I.”

The first word of “Studies for Hell: I” is the pronoun “I,” with its self-possession, yet immediately this ease is refuted as the “I” is revealed as “a hand,” or rather, one part of the human body is put forth as representative of the whole. The problem of the “I” in conveying the self is alluded to in a later poem as the speaker says, “One site of the alphabet / needs mending.” What further destabilizes readers attempting to track the identity twists that bombard them from the outset is the shift from the “I” to a “She.” But the slippery, metamorphic representations of the self do not end there, for an identity bifurcation occurs as a result:

I, a hand, reached into the sea for a piece of the sea.

What I brought out,

piece of liquid, split my hand in two.

Spilt.

And from the gash came an interpolation
fascinated with its own blood.

…

She had turned around or inside out

and found herself spelt as two.

What begins with a stable “I” somehow ends with “two.” The metaphoric representation of the self parallels the metamorphic unreliability of language. That it is “spelt” and not “split” or “spilt” is telling. The transformation that occurs in the poem is what happens when one tries to reflect something with a broken mirror: its shards are unable to reflect an exact representation of the subject, instead only able to reflect a splintered image that is similar and dissimilar to the subject. In an initial reading, readers may glide over Robinson’s subtle word play in that their eyes and minds might impose the comforting structure of parallels: they may read not “found herself spelt as two,” but “found herself split as two.” This raises the question of what the speaker truly meant: perhaps “split” or “spilt” instead of “spelt.” Does this signify the speaker’s loss of control over language, or the trickiness of language? This dizzying line of inquiry is exactly the danger the speaker risks in Robinson’s poems, where there may be no answers, only reflections.

Despite the desire for “pronouns to take on the corporeal,” to accurately name and give shape to the uncanny, they resist such easy definitions for “they are like the static of a sick-dream, / almost amenable and at the same time, / frizzy, off their marks.” Readers are confronted with an uncanny other, one who is like and unlike us, a macabre Narcissus “fascinated with its own blood.” In exploring this other, the speaker envisions flesh as a possible point of entry: “Here’s a fleshy zipper / that opens in my belly, and I unzip and open and then / there I go. Inside and down the path.” Yet this approach seems too superficial and there are distinct limits:

I fit the flesh legs over my

own, I wear the blue eyes atop my own vision. I double

back my own tongue to let it taste itself.

But I taste another body’s voice.

Perhaps the failure of this descent reflects instead the ouroboric nature of the self which resists neat definitions or explanations. The reflexive journey of the speaker is made hellish in that as soon as the speaker comes close to locating the self, it reproduces, transforms, doubles, and slips from the speaker’s grasp. Not only is it impossible to see the end of this journey, but the unpredictability of an end that multiplies and reflects back upon the wanderer is fraught with danger for “Whoever would try to find hell / will only get lost again.” Like the Narcissus of myth, the speaker will be doomed if he/she fails to resist his/her image’s seductive hypnosis and does not recognize it as mere reflection. This is no easy task, for the

Identical merges with identity:

one holds in one’s body (Twin, Irony, Narcissus),
like its own
trinket, a name repeated.

And similar to the journey fraught with danger, the poems are fraught with mirrors that the speaker and reader must carefully navigate: “The lost photograph found again, / become[s] a mirror.” Later in the collection,

When one looks at the devils

nesting on the devil, one has

the impression of being caught

in a hall of mirrors.

The desire to say “At last,” in a neat summation of the self, seems a feeble, laughable dream. The power and longevity of the mirror are absolute: “the mirror is / Eternally and eventually reflective.” In what is perhaps the speaker’s weakest moment, he/she laments:

Why is it so difficult, always, to recognize
a thing for what it is.

The naked is flat, is a syllogism that leads

criss-cross to

a fragile repetition of its own image, called movement.

This is one of the rare moments in the poems where the speaker is direct. The query ends with a period, connoting a somber acceptance on the speaker’s part. Whereas the speaker has previously approached the search for the self through fragmented, ambiguous lines, furtive glances, veiled, gently probing sentences, the speaker abandons those approaches in this moment of exhaustion. Readers may feel similarly drained. Robinson seems to hint that the very act of looking inward, of searching for that elusive ‘self,’ necessitates a suspension of disbelief or a shift in perspective. One must accept a surreal, upside-down outlook, an overturning of the natural order: “The purpose of the blanket / is not to cover but to fall”; “the trap door leads / ultimately / up”; dreams, not people, are placated; and voices are doubled (“the voice recognizes its hoarseness as echo”). The search for the self necessitates an acceptance of these contradictions while evading the dangers of this exploration. Readers can get lost in this self-reflexive hell, become trapped in an ouroboric existence, and, in the words of Laura Moriarty, create ourselves “to death.”

Furthermore, language as a means to navigate these shifting waters becomes suspect. In Robinson’s poems, language becomes just as slippery, unstable, deceptive, and warped as the self it attempts to name, sometimes even assisting in the permutations. With minute displacement of letters, “split” becomes “spilt” and “spelt.” In “Sanctuary,” thief and victim are conflated: “do you mind, she asked, / if I steal a bit from you.” This phrase is then “murmured to myself,” and the repetition transforms the words, “bit as in bite,” further complicating meaning. “Word after word” folds “in on itself” in self-reflexivity. The inadequacy of language to name and identify ‘self’ is represented as “pointing fingers…broken off at the stem.” Language’s destruction accelerates towards the ending of Counterpart. “Studies for Hell: II” begins with full statements:

Whoever would try to find hell
will only get lost again.

…

Some antonym, hell-like, elides with hell,

melting on your tongue.

As if the strain of maintaining order were too great, the poem collapses into word scraps:

Infantile devil, funhouse, ocean-for-drowners,

mismap, obligation, blowhole, itching bites, gloss

and paternity, blue sea of alcohol, toxic resemblance and
synonym, synonym.

And language is most seriously crippled in “Studies for Hell: III”:

We like singed feathers. Quills. Ink.

We drew our parts with them, two-faced,

apart. Singing or singed,

…

Nacreous heat. Quills

quell

the growth.

…

Nacreous

circle hardening. Ashes,

ahs, eyes fall down.

…

re-membered in the

air hand in hand with the air.

Ere. Err. Janus-faced wing.

Language, that traditional mode of elucidation, is revealed as unstable and fallible. It can be misleading as even letter permutations can create new meanings. However, the destruction of language is configured as a necessity for “how better to translate / than to destroy.” But just as the poems are rife with dualities, so too does this destruction have a double. Language’s flexibility lies in its instability. As words are deconstructed, they are also constructed. With sleights of hand, “singing” becomes “singed” and “quills” become “quell.” The sense that the speaker loses control over language is coupled by a sense of playful abandonment. The cat-and-mouse game to tack down meaning with words is frustrating yet enjoyable. In the breakdown of language there is sound: “ashes” glides to the aural “ahs,” which is then echoed back in the homophone-like “eyes.” And if these are not enough to convince readers of Robinson’s language play, there are many instances in which the speaker takes on a puckish tone: he/she declares that “Beauty is vanity’s quackery”; proposes “a toast” to “the image who / was graven, recognized, / recognized, or fallen. / May you resurge”; and wryly states that “The paternal devils pats / his own back.” There may be no clarity by the end of this jaunt through hell but, at the very least, it will be a lively one.

Though there is little doubt that Counterpart’s landscape is bleak, this desolation is not without its reassurances. The last poem’s title, “Secret Eden,” hints at this. The speaker instructs, “Speak, tongue, with your obedient quiet. Divide, / but do not be divisive.” The inherent contradiction of speaking with “obedient quiet” is partially reconciled by the calm command to “divide” but “do not be divisive” because it offers a way in which both can be held as truths: it recognizes that division does not have to be alienating. The command continues,

Now say blessing on the stem, the seed,

the orders of reproduction,

flanked on all sides by

destination.

Pronounce pulp and juice. How they divide from each other

as a fork in the road.

The language here is neat: we have “orders” and “destination” as opposed to the disorder and lack of destination that has haunted the poems. The difference between “pulp” and “juice” is likened to something as natural “as a fork in the road,” and thus places the disturbingly open-ended question of the nature of the ‘self’ in the territory of ‘unknowable yet essential.’ Thus the declaration that “death’s doppelganger is truth” should not unsettle, but instead should comfort in its offering of an absolute in a world fraught with infinite plasticity. Robinson’s unstable ground is still a space for that kind of declaration, and, almost defiantly, the statement is re-printed in larger font two pages before the title page. The entropic landscape of Counterpart should not overwhelm readers with its disquieting probing, but should offer them new terrain for exploration.

NEW! Poem by Maureen Thorson

2012-12-14T02:00:00.000-05:00

Maureen Thorson

GRAY LADY

Abstracted

in the stacks,

where time

disintegrates

old news,

I won’t volunteer

to tend

the ghosts

of headlines,

rustling,

as they do,

a shade

too quietly,

even here.

Instead,

my researches

will brew

fresh happenings.

Clipped

with severe,

short strokes,

these serifed

shapes

will braid

the notes

for novels

that I’ll stew

from almanacs,

obituaries,

the want ads’

misspelled

inquiries.

I’ll sieve

the sparkle

from human

interest,

the mad

percussion

of the war

reports.

The fastest

way (but

not

the simplest)

to write

is to distort

the veil

between

homage

and theft.

Nothing’s new

beneath

the sun,

but deft

reweavings

can gleam

as near

as makes

no difference.

Hand me now

my shears—

I flex them

to the music

of the spheres.

NEW! Two poems by Nicole Walker

2012-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

Nicole Walker

Two poems

EL NINO

I watch the Phoenix news as if it were my own.

The swirls tell me what I already expected:

This will be a hard winter. Phoenix doesn’t know

winter but it absorbs our weather all summer long.

I watch the swirl on the ultrasound. It makes a bee-

line for my body parts. The future unwraps like an umbilicus

and I am tugged along like a turtle trapped in an ebb.

I should have built a softer shell. This one is hard to adjust.

It’s hard to take fifteen feet of snow. They predict

even more. Doppler radar is faithful to its Pacific,

its jet stream, its warm, Baja trends. The deception

lies in the big gray spirals that seem so warm and fecund.

I lie on the table and wonder what the ceiling can tell

me that the sonogram can’t. How much does one (more) life

weigh? One thousand stone or a skeleton as light

as birds? And which to prefer? Birds are so damn fragile.

I don’t want to be the one to break the news. The flat roofs

can’t handle that much snow. The ground has absorbed

all it can absorb. There should be some equation: force

equals expectation plus belief, divided by barometer.

It always disappoints, the image on the screen.

You want to see more. You want to reach in there

and touch nose, make belief out of vessel and skin.

But shadows are as reliable as wings sans feather.

In the spring I sit on the porch. The clouds gather around

the peaks like they want to nest there. A vulture

crashes against the wind in waves. I wonder what loud

omen a vulture makes—snow, rain, go home, reverse.

I need sound. If wide-eyed anticipation is butterflies

then this humming in stomach is a bevy of red worm

expectation, a hive of oh my god, a cold comb of precipitate

turning forewarning into predictable, warm rain.

BEES, KEYS, SEALED

I put my ear to her chest

to hear the murmur of the bees.

They’re stuck in there

whirring like blenders

scaling the honeycomb

of her lungs

knitting the sacs

tighter together

until the whole nest

is a plate of unmovable honey.

NEW! Poem by Molly Bendall

2012-12-10T02:00:00.000-05:00

Molly Bendall

SEASON OF PERPETRATORS

They dream as if their plights were real, they flinch and scrape.

If speed ever once
shivered for them, if a heat thermal came pushing up,

they’d devour their own future, and they’d sell off
their fortune: one yard, one boulder.

A green gel comes between us
then springs back so the lens fades to blue, but it’s not like floating,
it’s closer,
and there’s a flap of skin. The keeper

says they’re nursing that wound.

Not a scent of threat, more like preening, more like a wedding,
coral trees assemble behind.

Flexing into thought, I’m woozy
with lateness.

Their pompadours are a tangle of magic straw.
I give way
to wide words cast on the hillside, as their pink tongues

stab the black air, rank and sinew steadfast.

NEW! Poem by Maureen Thorson

2012-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00

Maureen Thorson

BROWNIAN MOTION

Physicist,

take heed:

A vinelet’s

dust-like

pollen,

dispersed

on ponds

in purling

streaks,

forms points

of random

increase

befitting study.

A famous

oracle

was formed

by fumes

whose molecules

resembled

these—

just so

our every

sparking

synapse swans,

producing

personality

by irregular

degrees,

selves

alterable—

up to a point—

by remembered

melodies,

unanticipated

touches,

the grand

chancy, quantum

scheme

of things.

I think—

at least,

I think I do—

that our

enraptured brains,

strung

with memes

like Christmas

trees,

garlanded

in glowing rings,

are tangled

skeins

defying

explanation.

Outlook hazy.

Try again.

From dust to dust,

we succumb

to bleak causation,

but effects

are hard to forecast:

For every bet

that loses,

one will win.

NEW! Poem by Nicole Walker

2012-12-03T01:30:00.000-05:00

Nicole Walker

RATTLE

I bring to you, dear doctor, this mess of nests.

An intricate ball of string or white floss.

A rug woven by a woman sitting in a stall

in the mall speaking Navajo to me and

Spanish to her brother. I pull out of my pocket

a wire from the cable, the one that brought

me delicatessen and sausage McMuffin

and foiegras in Illinois even though

it’s illicit. I tell you this list

to give you some parameters

to suggest diagnosis and symptom,

cure, and preposition all in one.

I know where my trunk lies. I know where

my arms are but it’s against wind feed

and wind chill, wander zone and last pull

that I wonder. My nerves bite here and here,

they’re couched

in pork fat and goose fat, pickled

in cucumbers and red wine. They’re wrapped

up in sweater and rug and the birds that sing

softly in my ear, dear doctor, are the ones

telling me that if you could just say

the word I would leave you alone but

I hear you tripping as sadly and as quickly

as I do over nest, branch, wire, string.

If we could tease this out, dear doctor,

you wouldn’t have to listen through that cold

piece of an ear and I, dear doctor, could walk

away from here, named and meant and promised,

etched like a headstone, dear doctor. Sewn.

NEW! Two poems by Molly Bendall

2012-11-30T02:00:00.000-05:00

Molly Bendall

Two poems

CONVERGE IN RAUCOUS BRANCHES

I take to
her shoe-sized hovel and decaying forsythia.
Let’s go for the instant snow fall,

get marooned on the stone porch.
Now too, tranquilized,

she’ll pad down the gnarled rope, tap the corners in.

Go again. Again. Lift her up
by the scruff

Pocket the thistle and vole fur,

and this one sings loose and regretful, a pollen-tinted face.
Right as doing. Wait for the drop date.

I’m near emptied
so follow the burned-out drawer

and the plastic shards in
a chain of wind.
Pull a name into the chatter and wed it to
your fixes.

She’s got brooding duties and weaves with horsehair and cools
with her shadows.

MONDAY GUARDIAN

When you’re
in too close
the mouse bones soften and settle in tight.

Come down when the tension wires undo. My glove
could smoothe
a network
but you’re part missing even as you kick up and up.

Every minute thinks
of passing sky, every milky bowl shuns a sooty back.

I’ve zeroed
in on your sumptuous reach. Lost when I remember

you most, and then you fall

asleep in the U petals.

I’ll be one of those who talks back,
not dainty
too much.

A stone’s throw and a sob back to you,
and I’ll be one who gnaws at the capillaries

so sing your invitation now,
invite me to inspect

your starter home, place your decoy on the thin blue rim.

NEW! Poem by Anne Elvey

2012-11-28T02:00:00.000-05:00

Anne Elvey

THE WIND

What hammers next door replacing stumps
weighs on my frame, as voices measure work
and a saw circles through a post to level things.

The angels dance on leaf tips, their skirts churn.
I keep the windows closed. The Bureau says
the northwest wind will turn to the south. Stumps

lie on the drive. Doors slam. A roof lifts, sudden
as the air that balloons and buckles the fabric
of a world. There are no cicadas, only a fury

of angels brushing wings against the sky.
Forget the past, they say, you cannot level your
house; the wind is your heart’s hammer.

NEW! Three poems by William Cordeiro

2012-11-26T02:00:00.000-05:00

William Cordeiro

Three poems

JUST BECAUSE JUST BECAUSE

The day so young

it rivers with mercy.

Each body mostly water

in a world mostly water

but physics only make me

thirsty.

Look at the sun

skim across the eyes.

You see,

even logic’s innocent.

Then why—then why?

Some leak or fibrillation

of my heart replies,

amid a twitchy phosphorescence

whilst squeaky shopping carts turtle down the aisles,

“if only fools were drunk with wishes.”

SHARAWADGI

The landscaper trespasses to the river

gushing brimful of wanderlust and lady

slippers, great alphabet, goosepimpled

with a million golden bees, as daylight’s

dizzy sting keeps dazzling the naked eye:

from crown to soles, flaunt overflowing

round each glitch, the heart’s ski lifted

up a steep, a-dangle in the glitter over clastic

rock and vatic air, before it’s gentled down

a bank; meanwhile inside, his quick caged motor-

cycle gyroscopes as if he’d just been given

tenure. Afterward, a volunteer, he’d tottle

back to wavy shelves or some faux waterfall

to craft dry temporary tracks through pebbles,

twist bonsai into stunted runts and palps,

raking level mulch chips over little bird skulls

into vegetative fables, sheering and tweaking

moss, or, garroting in hand another cranky

leaf-blower, give one good tug to whoosh

dead mush into new monuments of gold

amid a smoother hobble of the earth, that

fund he trusts he could not but inherit.

SUSPENDED ANIMATION

The sidewalks gridlock with their litter’s drift.

Like oil slicks, the sunlight shocks and riddles

to crevice glare down every street; gray sky’s

bloodshot. Over blank brick roofs, one flock

zigzags. Flak of scattered pigeons hang on fire

escapes. All Brooklyn’s mesmerized and blown

down turns of stale obstructed zones, a range

of snaggletooth cranes. Beyond a broken half-

hearted barrier: a muddy ditch, planks, links

of pipe. Gulls pick bedraggled feathers, skip

or shuffle; loose news-leaf hustles by—daily papers

ruffle a city’s schmutz, a pressed off smudge of ink.

NEW! Two poems by Nicole Walker

2012-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00

Nicole Walker

Two poems

PLANET HOSPITAL

When the birds started falling from the ceiling
we knew it was time to close the building.

The alarms had been going off like smoke detectors.
Fathers in their open-backed gowns, their Pacemakers

twittering reflectors high on the mountain,
flashing warnings to planes and come-hithers

to more foreign, flying aircraft—like condors
or moons. Those in the infectious wards kept

moving from floor to floor, continents
drifting toward them. The quarantine signs hung

around their necks—albatrossed Town Car drivers
welcoming fliers at the baggage claim at JFK.

The patients in the burn unit slid into their emissions,
the viruses coating the blistered skin in down. Gooseflesh.

The cancer patients kept falling in bed with
the amputees. Watching their sex was like watching

parrots molt—more slow organization than rhythmic
wandering. The mothers in Labor and Delivery were

the ones to notice the air, how heavy it hung.
They’d been staring at ceilings, pressing tectons closed

with their thighs. The twigs and straw didn’t bother them.
They could inhale past that. But it was the mud and the saliva

that began to tuck up in the lungs. Every cough reminded
the mother there was no going back now. Volcanoes permit

more options than this fluorescent system. The door out
is the door out, not other. Sidewalks are for suburbs, not planets.

We kept pointing the flue out the window, pushing it further
and further into the stratosphere to find new sky. The babies

in the NICU were turning blue. It didn’t look good but there was
a chance this blue turns Jay and flight becomes a regressed chance for air.

ST. CHARLES STREET

It is our hospital, this concrete. In the hot
sun it is as sterile and white as linen.

The sidewalk squares, once sutured, now
rupture. The ground underneath is seething,

infected like the little boy who is lying on
it now (it is not flat enough. We’ll have to bring

the backboard. An old ironing board, my aunt uses
for just these breaking occasions. The ironing can

wait.) His fingers dig into the new earth and we
tell him that it’s rotten but he wants to feel the cool

under his nails and what else can we burden him
with but stops and pleases. We know there is no

doctor to call. We had called the 911 before and they told us
St. Charles is not on their map. I gave them directions—

Follow the L until you run out of gas. Our street
is the one where the cars don’t run. But it turns night here

before it turns night anywhere else in this city and
this city has already sold its share of the moon to a drought-

ridden state. Now the streets buckle, the kids tumble,
the ice packs are warm water and the sea under

the street heaves. It wants its antibiotic. We’ve run out
of spackle and glue and sand for mixing. We’ll have

to give it the boy. He seems to want in anyway and even
though he’s lying flat (The ironing has been waiting days now),

the sores are open. Catching. The ground as it breaks still
wounds him. We turn him over so he can’t feel a thing.

NEW! Poem by Molly Bendall

2012-11-20T06:00:00.000-05:00

Molly Bendall

ANIMAL HEIRS

If squinting made them
all sail steady,

I’d try to find them that way. Their oval terrain I’d learn. Who else
wants it?

I’ve been stung
with a green heart and dragged

out backwards. That one snaps
and a year of ashes appear. Its bouldered head shifts and leans into its breeze.
Hoofprints deface

the little earth. Land of no requirements
and the sadness of not
listening. Sounds are just too wide. Here’s one who gallops against the rules.

Aloneness is an image to work with so I sketch it
along the divots in the soil. I tick

gently to the voice-overs.

New members come around
lately, and I invite them
to see the armature. Because

now my knees are tired. Because now the faint reek
settles into musk.

Because now I’m deaf
to where the clock leads me.

Some are browsers

and frolic in an underworld.

The service there is witty. One sneers at
the hills folding against

the flat vista.
It huffs into its own squared chest.

I could climb on its back and tour the lawlessness.

NEW! Poem by Tracy Truels

2012-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Tracy Truels

BEDROOMS, GRASS, AND BLACK WATER

I cannot blame the starfish for they are small and hold on to things.

I woke up next to a man not my husband but who still kept me warm.
I once slept in the field like a buried body, so long slips of grass grew between my wrist bones.

When we sleep you sink into the bed like a fish thrown back into water,
so deep I don’t know if I could reach you with my arm.

We must take something unknown to our grave so that the ones we love will follow us.

I cannot blame the places I’ve slept. I held onto our bed until it broke like a dam.
The grass sleeps above our buried bodies, and the stars hold on to my things.

NEW! Review of Édouard Levé

2012-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

Autoportrait by Édouard Levé. Translated by Lorin Stein. Dalkey Archive, $12.95.

Reviewed by Astoria Aviles

In one of many photographs taken during his three-month visit to the United States in 2002, esteemed French photographer and author Édouard Levé captures an abandoned home in Paris, Texas. The haze of the blue sky over cracked and sunburned white paneling with a boarded up window and crooked roof abide in direct contrast to the grand limestone architecture of Paris, France; and the overgrowth of dandelions surrounding the front certainly do not evoke the grandeur of the Parc du Champ de Mars. The home, titled Maison abandonnée a Paris, it would seem, has failed to live up to the expectations of a Parisian home. It is this disconnect of place and discordant existence that Levé sought to capture. The photograph is part of a series entitled Série Amérique, in which Levé visited American cities that shared a name with a city from a foreign country. In addition to Paris, Levé photographed in Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Canton, Rio, Amsterdam, and Rome, among others, all in the United States.

During his travels, Levé wrote the third of his literary works, Autoportrait, published by P.O.L. three years later. The work is composed entirely of declarations, rather like a series of snapshots. Levé’s passion for capturing the moment is unequivocally an earnest one. Appropriately titled Self-portrait, Levé lists fragments of thoughts, ideas, memories, personal opinions and confessions to build a collage of himself. Each sentence exists on its own, almost devoid of a clear narrative or context, yet somehow relating to the whole of Levé, the man behind the lens.

Such a fragmentary work, however, does not exist simply as a reflection of a passion for photographic spontaneity, but rather as an exhibition of a new kind of self-exegesis. Levé writes, “I dream of an objective prose, but there is no such thing” (55). Such decisiveness in Levé’s declarations engenders a level of objectivity, but his actuality lies in his uncanny ability to both engage and estrange a reader. The reader must learn to navigate through a constantly changing tide, and only after such adaptation can the reader begin to understand the meaning behind everything that has washed ashore. There are moments, however, where Levé is more explicit. In the midst of arbitrary fragments like “I would rather have someone tell me about an exhibition than see it with my own eyes. I do not lie” (55), or “I sleep in absolute darkness. I have dry skin” (98), Levé then interjects a series of statements that act as seismic reminders of the work as a whole:

I do not write memoirs. I do not write novels. I do not write short stories. I do not write plays. I do not write poems. I do not write mysteries. I do not write science fiction. I write fragments. I do not tell stories from things I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, I describe impressions, I make judgments. (96)

Levé’s work rejects the autobiographical narrative, the “I was born,” etc. and in such a rejection of chronology pulls the reader along with him in an extensive act of introspection. In a brief moment when describing his travels Levé writes, “I like meeting new people when I travel: these brief and inconsequential encounters have the thrill of beginnings and the sadness of separations” (23). Autoportrait is indeed a series of such encounters, where Levé himself demonstrates the objectivity of his prose, and consequently argues for an objectivity of memory. He is, in his fragmented self, written in black ink upon the white page, being read, reread, believed or disbelieved, recognized for his playfulness but remembered for his sincerity.

Autoportrait was published in France in 2005. Levé killed himself two years later, just ten days after submitting the manuscript for his fourth work, Suicide, to his editor. His works had been published only in France until April 2011, when Suicide was published in English in the United States. This year, Autoportrait appeared from Dalkey Archive Press in a translation by Lorin Stein. When asked about the translation process, Stein describes the act of translating as being “part of a conversation” with Levé. To translate any text is to enter intimately into the reformation and recreation of a work. However, given Levé’s unsystematic work, recreating a narrative and objective voice presents a daunting challenge. Stein says that capturing Levé called for the translator “to disappear.” Given such dynamism and sense of detachment in each translated statement, Stein has indeed achieved his vanishing act. To recreate such an ardent work, in its erratic and intrepid composition of such a man, Stein has demonstrated his loyalty to Levé’s voice.

When asked what contextual or informative materials he used in the process of translation, Stein mentions Joe Brainard, whose I Remember is similar in its deployment of declarative statements (most begin with “I remember”). Levé even directly mentions Brainard: “Joe Brainard is less affirmative than Walt Whitman” (28). While familiar with and evidently influenced by Brainard’s work, it is perhaps more pragmatic to consider Levé’s foremost passion for photography (take, for example, the Maison abandonnée a Paris). The discord between Paris, Texas, and Paris, France aside, there is an emptiness in the Maison abandonnée, something beyond the photograph. Levé’s picture is an argument for the striking disconnect between a home occupied in Paris, France, and a home abandoned in Paris, Texas. Yet, too, the photograph becomes reflexive of Levé’s work with the mundane or detached perspective. As he writes in the last pages of Autoportrait, “I prefer a ruin to a monument” (117).

From both his photography and his literary works, Levé’s voice contains a passive yet surprising tone, blunt and frank in its delivery but also refreshingly sincere. Levé is present in every moment of this self-portrait, but his presence is inherently an absence. Such a work cannot be read without simultaneously being reread, for each fragment is part of Levé as a cell is part of a body. In the middle of the work Levé writes, “I am always shocked when people give me directions and they actually get me where I’m going: words become road” (88). Now, perhaps, despite the sharp turns and surprising dead ends, English-language readers can now navigate Levé’s road in Autoportrait.

NEW! Poem by Jon Davis

2012-11-12T04:00:00.000-05:00

Jon Davis

MONK PLAYS STRIDE

Outside now, gray sky leaning to rain now,
last leaves clinging, pale green now going paler,
light breeze now twitching, now battering the branches,
while inside Monk is dragging the notes,
behaving himself in homage now, playing
in the dinner jacket now, trying
to play the cracks now between notes now
between beats now, the minor seconds, the slur now,
sopping up gravy when no one is looking now,
left leg jitterbugging under the tablecloth,
all the madness stuffed now into that tremor,
all the clowning now, half in now
and half out now of every now game.

NEW! Poem by Curtis D'Costa

2012-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

Curtis D’Costa

PUZZLE BITS

Salmon; blue; yellow; repeat.

Then our strategic objectives shifted.

Umbrellas unfurled, fork chimed,

and the Dumpster stench

characteristic of seafood queso

staggered among tables and chairs.

This woman entering the café

blew her arm off at the elbow

lighting fireworks.

Corralling her heel with his ankle, this girl’s

date shows her, with a twist of his knife,

the polite way to juice a lime.

“All the Girls are like, You Can't Multitask.
I'm like, Damn Fucking Right: That's why I, I
Focus and you have to Do a Bunch of Shit.
I I I offer, and and you can't even figure out
What You Want for Breakfast. I'm like . . .”

She picks the bacon

from her teeth with a hairpin, far away,

heart bent on another,

the one who has rhythm and a full-time job,

the one who

The rain keeps pouring down; it won't even cool us off.

I had no idea turbulence could shake a plane so hard

submission deadline extended

2012-10-31T03:00:00.000-04:00

The deadline for submissions to the next print edition of Verse has been extended to December 15, 2012.

The deadline for submissions to the Verse site is October 31, 2012.

NEW! Two poems by Andrew Michael Roberts

2012-10-30T05:00:00.000-04:00

Andrew Michael Roberts

TWO POEMS

geometry of innocence

god is dreaming.

a colony of moths

unfurls in the mind,

a fortress of trees

gowned in smoke

through which you fall

sideways, like a leaf.

at the lakeshore,

walk softly.

water sleeps.

light buzzes in

the crustaceans' brains.

the mountains

with their eyes of ice

strike out at the thunder-vaults.

egrets, egrets if they succeed:

unfolding to take the place of the sky.

all shall be showered

in otherworldly poise.

here is a throne

while you wait

made of driftwood and bone,

and your ignorance crown

for which the world wars.

-met′əbol′ik

i have enchanted a housefly
with one piano note.

dirty little captain
of the men of death,

he's caught in a frequency,
blinking his thousand
unthinkable eyes.

near-dawn. an icicle slips
from its jaw along the roofline.

now behold the gaping smile of doom.

who am i but to judge?
i drink like a king,

i have a liver going to hell,
my cells at war with me.

you stalwart mutineers.
can you arrest time? no.

the rung note dissipates.
morning hesitates,

but comes.
morning like a broken bell,

a candle in the birdcage
where the blind bird was.