NEW! Poem by Alexandria Peary

Alexandria Peary


TITLE WITH SHADOW


“ ” are put around a tree which is plaid but smells fruity

and then the white field slides to the right of the poem

in the awkward jump my Royal typewriter makes for a huge tab

to jut from the side as they walk to find the manager

while the whole 1/2 mile is reeled back in

though the walk back is pleasant, like chewing gum

or chewing on color. In Ugg boots, they traipse around

stepping over white shapes in the white, looking up from watching their feet

to discuss the title up at top which doesn’t help,

a group of charcoal letters with a steel shadow

ineffectual as a billboard in the middle of nowhere

(perhaps nowhere grew around it). Some people

may be discomforted by walking in a forest inside white

and not knowing which season it is, so an icon of a yellow leaf

falls. They walk by the trees they passed up—

the blaze orange one, “Garage Band,” smelling of Johnny Walker,

the one covered in American flags, others smelling like “grandma’s kitchen,”

“clean air,” and the tree that’s an open window which they almost took,

that row moving jerkily as though on a conveyor belt.

They reach the manager who grumbles about people ripping trees off

in middle of the night, he wants to install a surveillance camera

so sensitive it will respond to the wedge of moon and the most poetic moves of leaves

and, indeed, they had seen on their way down how instead

of stumps, there were little gashes in the cardboard

where the staples had been. Everyone needs a title,

for finished books and ones written only for the shelf in oneself.

A title is good for any car. It will make the ride smell better.

Quotation marks around a leaf make it ring like a bell

like this one outside the manager’s lean-to. Tired by now, they look back

in the middle of the lane, not having a thought,

The title with shadow— coneless original—

In the white lane, A figure made of sea glass,

Kelp moving in the shadow.

NEW! Poem by Adam Strauss

Adam Strauss


Labor


The shore
Ablution
Breaks at--
Where poor
Women sort
Shells as
The yen goes
Lower--
What's full store
When this is
The case?
Gulls
Dip and
Pivot; deer
Graze a steep
Hillside--
Across
The "sea"
In a cement
Shed green
Coffee beans sit:
A green
Snake sheds;
Its skin's unfit
For fashion: too
Narrow,
Brittle, not even
A watch.

NEW! Poem by Anne Shaw

Anne Shaw

Another Art House Movie

(homophonic translation of Verlaine)

A rule of sun falls inward across the table:
What craft in the ivory grapes, what ugly crap.
You are always already moving, whatever pants you wear:
Corduroy trousers, my poor pale friend, or simple water pooling in its glass.

Drink it. Close the door after. Aprons, pens, your voice,
And all the rest. It’s a malleable hour
In the middle of the day. An edgy lottery writhes your sleep,
A cicada creeps like an infant to its birth.

Meanwhile, your shadow elongates and slips through the summer grass.
The door of the boat house opens, the footsteps of a boy
Resonate at certain frequencies. Your room is a room
In shambles: a table set with stones, a steaming pan, a nail, a crust of bread;

His hand with tiny cuts; a boat, recurrent flower blooming in its thimble--

NEW! Poem by Leonard Gontarek

Leonard Gontarek


From Grace



I may force the soul into nakedness.

I may lead the soul around on a leash.

I may dress the soul in women’s underwear.

Which part don’t you understand?


I did not win the Hemingway look-alike contest again this year.


I could pass for the Polish President & Prime Minister, I think.


I’ve painted myself into a corner here, away from the cobalt galaxies.

For another, I’ve cut a door in the wrong wall to get away.

NEW! Poem by Alexandra Mattraw

Alexandra Mattraw

Summary Between Bodies

When we reach the summit, you tell of repetition. The way an orange unpeels itself in such heat. : All bruised skin wants to give way in the manner of water. We stop field center, but the green world sweats, thickens like hair. Each pasture clots a day’s naming. We share corner store bread : Fingers break the body in two. Darkness trembles light waning bees. My styrofoam anxiety a cup misplaced I bite into moons. Then print-crescents : Your foot on soil as proof of where sadness went. Why I didn’t have reason to change my mind, pick each wild iris apart : I see you not. Your foot shores my other. This pattern to sea pebbles larger notions of stability. Sodden bread spreads where we left it. Your arm confused with mine. The envy of sands, rocks war up waves to tell them.

NEW! Poem by Joseph P. Wood

Joseph P. Wood

Before Rublev Paints the Cathedral


A jester’s head is
knocked against

an oak, soldier
takes a peeling

knife, like a dead
mollusk, tongue

comes off clean.
Rublev stops

speaking mostly,
churches so torched

snow drifts down
on the altars. What

is a horse doing
thrashing the asp?

Who is that kid
building a bell

from mud, not
to be sodomized.

It tolls. Doves
flutter from belfry

to monk’s shoulder,
& the Steppe blank

canvas elsewhere.

NEW! Poem by Doug Ramspeck

Doug Ramspeck

Clairvoyant


The city fell asleep in my arms.

What is important here is the concept
of a pillow of streets.

It doesn’t matter what the dead believe,
their ontology of stillness.

It is enough that someone,
somewhere, cuts out his eyes and holds
them in his palms.

The work is never completed. We imagine
our lives as blood on the brain, as walking
through a warren of streets beneath
a naked eyeball of moon.

Skull moon, salt moon, prophecy moon.

It was Horace who described tossing aside
his shield and fleeing the Battle of Philippi,
which is one way to describe a life:

to imagine sitting tomorrow on a park bench
with a sack lunch perched in the lap.

The earth rotating more rapidly at the equator
than farther north or south,

and yet the sunlight strangely
incorporeal, as though it is dreaming us.

And the pigeons, too fat
for flight, pecking their way into tomorrow,
which is all we know to hope for or ask.

NEW! Poem by Nina Corwin

Nina Corwin

Interior With Artificial Leaves


What I meant to say, but the crop of false fruit kept intruding, is that
doorbells are not destiny. They have no teeth. Split infinities while
waiting for a ring.

When you come, you come without warning labels or guarantees
(black box from a bastion of caveat emptor). All I ask is the insider’s
peek.

___________________

The leaves have a theme song. It’s inspired by all those lullabies
with falling babies and broken branches. I’ll sing you a snatch before
the future explodes our foregone conclusion:

The heart is a minefield awaiting its moment. It bruises when served
open-faced. Parentheticals wipe their feet on every act of faith. Above
the sink, a cylinder of light winks like it’s in on the deal.

___________________

I got a call last month from a woman who uncorked a bottle of noxious
recollections. She asked if I could put them back.

I tried to tell her there’s always a stain that can’t be scrubbed, but my
tongue became a fountain spouting wishful thoughts. After that,
I planted my spleen beneath the bed to see if anything would grow.

Now, my duct work chokes with vines. Against the concrete tree,
woodpeckers beating their heads. Rakes are no match for the mess
that's spread between us.

___________________

I have a dangling proposition: part apostle in the garden, part storm
in your escape route. A dim bulb’s hope for harvesting sunrise from
shrapnel and sawdust –

Let’s say we blow up the second act and spatter gold paint on what’s
left. Send hope to the front lines to mop up the spills while we sleep.

Jason Whitmarsh poem, from the archives

Jason Whitmarsh


EACH SWITCHBACK THE LESS SECURE


You claimed a weathered antique in your chest
of possessions and gave me reason to believe

I one day would sail in it,
or at least set rudder by its burnished reflection.

You felt a bit of the bends in the up and coming
and wished my lead belt were more lead, less belt.

Dappled in the underneath, we once (arrayed
in wetsuits) sank too slow—a haberdashery cut

at the first sign of trouble, the profits invested
in the wherewithals, smitten and sartorial.

You claimed a bit of what I carried.
You made your case through the mail.


[originally published in Verse, 16.3/17.1]

NEW! Poem by Michaël Vandebril

Michaël Vandebril

AMOUR FOU

ook
dit
gaat
voor
bij
en
ook
dat
zal
voor
bij

*

this
too
is
short
lived
and
that
too
shall
be
short


Translated by Brian Doyle

Pierre Joris, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Pierre Joris

from meditations on the 40 stations of Mansur Al-Hallaj

29. Regrets for things lost (iftiqad)

but regret will not bring it back.
Nothing left to do but turn your

back on it. Tell yourself when you
know where something is

then it is not lost, even though
that something lie at the

bottom of the ocean. Nothing
ever is lost, & that may be

the only thing that is
real cause for regret.

Susan Stewart, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Susan Stewart

A LITTLE ROOM

If you want to kiss in an elevator
you have to know when to start.
You can’t begin to bend any later
than the third floor. Your heart
is pounding (and buttons are lighting,
which means someone’s waiting,
though not for you). There’ll be springing,
whistling, and sudden abating,
two, then one, then two. Intent, intended,
push > < and pull me into your arms,
close and closer, suspended
(the lock switched off alarm),
above is looming, below’s the abyss,
and meanwhile the 3 is the charm.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

from DRAFT 87: TRACE ELEMENTS

All serifs are seraphim: such is faith in the letter.
Such is the force of the word.
The faith is touching.
In every alphabet
in every technology of memory—
knots, rocks, dots, rhymes,
codes, rites,
monuments and books—
in that shockingly endless tower built
of the balances and loops of wire
ceramic shards set in cement, and mirrors, too,
extendable yet poised in mutual
enjambment—
oh.
There is no verb in this sentence.

The verb is diffuse
it is the feeling of Being
and Reflecting
inside the substance of language
and of time,
making the poem “embodied, embedded,
and extended mind.”

Lidija Dimkovska, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Lidija Dimkovska

MEMORY

My memory is a soldier’s tin of bully beef
with no best-before date. I return to places
I have trodden with only one tongue in my mouth
and beat egg yolks for the natives to give them a good voice.
In a snow of the whites Jesus lies crucified as if in jest.
It takes two tongues for a French kiss,
now that I have several I’m no longer a woman but a dragon.
Like St George, I never learned
to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, my nose being blocked for years
I myself only breathe through others’ nostrils, the EU’s paying.
Aha! There’s something fishy about you, something’s fishy here,
the little fallen angels
collecting old paper and plastic cry after me,
I love them best when they take their cots
out into the corridor to air the DNA
then A. and I sprawl out on them, a side each,
and in a carefully worked-out act of love
all our porcelain teeth chip off,
our gums turn into wide-open eyes, before which
our tongues in the darkness trip each other up,
growling, whimpering and moaning, and we
feel neither fear nor sorrow.
My memory is the black box from a crashed war-plane
with no best-before date. I return to places I trod
with only one blood under my skin,
I cross off fertile days for the natives on the calendars
with their name days and family feasts,
tame animals crave for the wild, the wild for the tame.
Like a Jewish couple during fasts and monthly periods,
so God and I have been sleeping in separate beds for years.


Translated from Macedonian by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid

Garrett Caples, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)


Garrett Caples

MEMOIR OF THE GRADUATE POETICS PROGRAM

I was A’s third husband within the department. I’d come to study the poems of B with C, but C wasn’t there anymore and I had no intention of fucking D, so I had a lot of time on my hands. Sometimes the other husbands and I would go for walks, but it was cold, and I had little in common with any of them, except E, who was a tennis player, not a poet. (At least E drank!) I started hanging out with F, and we quickly became lovers even though I was already married. But her poetics were going nowhere, so I soon hitched my wagon to G, whose fellowship was the envy of everyone else. But he immediately left me for H, whose father had made it in raisins, and by now I’m like, I gotta get with one of the teachers if I’m ever going to make the big reading! But it was harder than I thought; I introduced me to J but we didn’t get along despite some regard for each other’s work. I began a flirtation with K, but K made considerably less than J—“just like the real world”—so she couldn’t really support me. Finally I settled on L, for, despite the fact no one liked his poems, L had position—meaning he could fuck—and he’d gotten tenure back when you could get it by mail. But M, my advisor, advised me against it, and instead hooked me up with N, who refused to return my calls after the first fuck, so I turned to O for solace, because, let’s face it, he’d fuck almost anyone, but he was already in bed with P by the time I got to his apartment. In despair, I called Q in Thailand and he convinced me to join him—“there’s plenty to fuck,” he said, “and you only write poems when you want to”—but I was waylaid en route to the airport by R, who offered me a teaching assistantship in exchange for sex, so we fucked until the add/drop period ended. That evening I fled in my nightshirt, only to get caught in S’s headlights. We’d read together once a long time ago, so she drove me to her house and gave me some clothes, but wouldn’t let me stay the night. I called T to come pick me up and, though he said he usually didn’t get down like this, since I was in a skirt he’d fuck me for one night and pretend to not know. The next morning, I was late for coffee with U, who I found at the café busily preparing a list of everyone he’d fucked in the program. I scanned its columns for ideas. Finally I settled on V because he was seated at the next table, but all V wanted was a handjob in the car while he drove to class, after which I was on my own again. W’s seminar was about to begin, but W wasn’t a poet, so fucking him was out of the question. X’s workshop was about to let out, but chances of hooking up were slim. Finally I saw Y heading across campus, but when I caught up to her, all she would offer was a golden shower under the footbridge. I couldn’t turn it down. By now my appearance was beginning to attract attention, and I’d already run through the most plausible faculty, so imagine my surprise when I bumped into Z of all people, who was desperate for a piss. Since there were no bathrooms on campus and I was already wet, I invited him under the footbridge, where he hosed me down like a burning building. “Nice work,” Z said, zipping up. “I expect I’ll see you at the big reading.” “What does this have to do with poetry?” I asked, but Z was either hard of hearing or had learned not to notice such questions in advance. “You’re going to be late,” he said.

Landis Everson, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Landis Everson

PRIVATIZATION

(A Poem For Laura Bush)


Privatization is me talking to you
about nobody listening in, about riding
at one end of a long car and you at the other,
about tinted windows and messages off a security phone.
I wear a pink-dyed sable, made up as a 60s lady
and a bug-proof hat that you look a long time at.

This is an act of being secret at the expense
of others, also closed from each other as
we won’t admit everything. Oh darling,
perhaps our contract is too secluded
and we should be released into cornfields. I try

to imagine Buck Rogers in a bunny suit.
But you sit tall and handsome ready to blast off.
As you streak toward the future, I drift into the past.
Oh Buck Rodgers you are reading poetry
by someone from the future I can’t compete with,
me studying Herodotus trying to avoid slip ups.

What goes on under our clothes
keeps the world away, that’s for sure, but
your private thoughts, my private wishes
are running askew lost on a crooked city avenue.
Privatization
may make us rich, like history, but secrecy
folds us up into maps hiding the direction children play in.

Bankruptcy could flatten the tires on our limousine.
Is it time to be apart like radiator ornaments
whose engines have vanished beneath their hearts?
Lift me off this hanger, I’m yesterday’s coat.
They say hangups talk. But I’m telling you they don’t.

Jennifer Moxley, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Jennifer Moxley

LOVING THINGS

We should get over it. If, that is, we are to unlock the mysteries of love. This must be done in the right order, by slow, steep, hierarchical steps. Or so Socrates claims the wise (and probably apocryphal) priestess Diotima told him.

To get over the love of beautiful things (and by extension, people) would be to free oneself of death and decay, of beauty’s transience and our covetous nature. We would fear no footprint. But in order to reach this state of tranquility we must discover the beauty that is “unmixed, not adulterated with human flesh and colors and much other mortal rubbish.” Such a beauty, as must be evident by now, could only be seen with the mind. It cannot be sensuous, it cannot engage touch, taste, smell, sound, or sight. It cannot, therefore, exist in the “things we live among.”

Yet, it is undeniable, much mortal rubbish and adulterated flesh strike us as very beautiful. If they are not actually beautiful, then why do they strike us so? Because they participate in what is so. It is as if there is a zone of rarefied air—Beauty itself—which they pass through, and while in its eternal particles are made to seem, temporarily, to be Beauty itself.

Strange how this air works differently on different matter. On flesh and bone it seems to rest but for a few brief years, before recoiling in horror. On “organized” things, as Emerson calls them—the beautiful results of man infusing form with imagination—this rarefied air seems to linger much longer, sometimes for many millennia. But it is still an illusion, for Beauty exists outside of these things and does not, and never will, belong to them.

He who sees this clearly, and learns to be indifferent to the mineral fact, “touches reality” (not its pale semblance). And it will be granted him “to be the friend of God, and immortal if any man ever is.” Here we have the origin of Western mysticism’s “wormhole” to God. No tedious rituals, trinkets, or icons, just a straight mental shot right to the source.

Bernadette Mayer, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Bernadette Mayer

CINEMA ALLEY

the sun is on the born-again paper
my name is still Bernadette Mayer
just as Spanish people have Irish names
as in “enter: Grace Murphy of Cordoba”

you’d shoot the beginning of the movie
in a bowling alley, setting the scene
middle supermarket, the development of love
the end a bakery window, pastries & reflections

critics would say “this movie’s a sonnet”
but unbeknownst to them a sestina’s structure
would lie beneath & airplanes fly by
whenever one of the end-words is said

     a secret cult classic
     the envy of every cinema buff

Ron Padgett, from VERSE

from the new issue of Verse (Volume 26, Numbers 1-3)

Ron Padgett

HOW TO

When people ask me
if I write with a computer
or by hand I pause,
for it’s a question
I do not find interesting
anymore. Forty years ago
I saw how Ted’s old typewriter
fit his bricklike writing one
word-brick at a time, and how
my lightweight portable with French
keyboard let me whiz along
as if halfway in another language.
Now I write with words
that never were mine nor will
they ever be. A demon inside
says I do not write at all.

NEW! Poem by Michaël Vandebril

Michaël Vandebril

STARI BEOGRAD

one-stringed city that perpetually
severs my wrists

nothing to grieve about

I gorge on gluey blood

an army of young gents marches to a dogged beat
dancing across the water--fresh water dreams

like pigs drawn from the river

I look at your young breasts
while you give your mouth to another man

--like a drunken bird
its wings slithering along the bars--

you sing an ancient anthem of the city
and beograd sings softly with you

o white thighs of the balkans
on which I lay my greedy hands


Translated by Brian Doyle