#2.1 Two Poems by Cort Day
Nepenthe Mime
I was a bad nepenthe mime. When I mimed a trellis rose, it had no shadow, then it had a gamma shadow, then an omega shadow with a blood-core. Turns out it’s hard to forget a trellis rose with a blood-core. I was a more or less drunken variorum of a mime, doing versions of golden hair sonnets, soliloquies by Barthes, some popsongs for kicks. Desperado. Love Me Do. That got me expelled from the academy, so I moved to Little Rock, got sober, worked at Walmart. One day I mimed an eclipse. And that was that. When the light came back the revolution had begun.
Head Elegy
It’s fun to watch these kids design
a future in the shadow of the giant
dome from the hanging gardens just
around the corner. I had some thoughts
going back and forth across the city
sexting and buying gold for a time when
we have a body mass index of zero
capable of exquisite misdeeds and hearing
geometries of the monotonous head
talk about the weather from its perspectives
and sunlight pouring out of a screen
as a means of obtaining “naturalness,”
its thesis. From this height it’s mosaic –
those image centers when examined closely
sound like rain inside a sonnet, fissures
deep enough to be a serious problem
lived inside for generations feel almost
real. Like rain in a bamboo forest, the many
hairline fractures. In quasar recordings
the faintest rumble, vinyl noise.
The students have been split into groups
with arsenal fires to keep them warm and
designing leggings for industrial spaces or
light you’d barely notice if it wasn’t
in prose and slightly disconnected like
old age in a lover’s face. Sea animals
disguise themselves as sand or plants
in a world of such slow forgetting it
becomes a future. Try to imagine this
composed of machine language, beside
the world’s newest water, that’s who we are.
It’s not our planet, it’s a picnic that
uses the whole surface to process depth,
regeneration, sex, salt, the human face
of rain inside a grammar, which forgets
time pressing on the memories of trees,
emeralds. You’re becoming more and more
parts of every goldfinch, linnet, crested lark
in a clear bell of language, the woods
mosaic, painted to the edge with sound
and blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue –
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Cort Day is a native of northern California and currently lives Philadelphia. His collection of poems, The Chime, was published by Alice James Books in 2001. He is currently working on a novel, an excerpt of which will soon be published in Fence Online. He is also working on a new collection of poems, with the working title Simple Impact Crater Shape Determination from Shadows.
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#2.2 Two Poems by Deborah Gorlin
Against Cremation
Why the penurious hurry, the stingy gifts? Give the dead their due, and the elements.
Why hasten process with the swift twist of the dial, giving jets easy access to their ejaculate of fire
like a jacuzzi for corpses? Or rush to undress the body of itself, spilled negligee,
without satisfying foreplay? Why spoon-feed the earth ashes pure pablum, or blend it,
when its teeth are known to grind? How deprive land of new possessions,
how withhold from magpie chemistry, which scavenges for its next big nest?
Why begrudge wind—that dog—a bone? Weight the sky’s blue hem, even briefly.
Make that Creator of ours account for each of us, no generic
Dad or Mom slipped through our fingers, smeared on our lips, spilled from a baggie.
I demand nothing less than the slow ledger of our former bodies, a thorough accounting,
by the dirt and worms, every atom its given name, its former address, noted because never
again in time assembled into this human being whose every asset will be invested in the earth.
***
Night and Day
He loved the word "quart," its militant lilt, and the milk upright, disciplined tall into glass bottles that he hoisted
out of the truck gingerly, never jostling them, secure in their wire carrier, like eggs, each limpid yolk set,
without tilting in its shell. His charges, six to a slot, in their patterned rhythm, panpipes all sized the same,
an aesthetic justice of nutrients, equal, beautiful, columns of mother love. Above all he loved
the darkness best, she was soft on him; the only man awake during her hours in the Catskills on Dairy Road.
She'd extend her mysteries, scarve the streets in fog, botox the sky with a harvest moon,
or velvet herself jet against winter's ice and snow, a companion in all seasons, next to him at the wheel.
He knew his route by heart, the curves and dips of roads, the order of his various deliveries, the addresses,
the house on Denniston Hill, chicken farmers on Glen Wild, the Hasids in the bungalows
by the Neversink, second nature by now. Brake and stop, turn and go. Lights low, the diesel idling, as he crossed,
the milk too dim to lantern in the dark for the teen driver who missed the bend.
He entered her instantly, the bottles snapped like calla lilies, chimneys of cold toppled on asphalt,
glass jacks strewn on the roadside, milk spill. To her, the scene resembled only what she knew to be real:
stars, moon, the dawn breaking, and now something other, seeping through her blouse.
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Deborah Gorlin is the author of two books of poems, BODILY COURSE, White Pine Poetry Press Prize, and LIFE OF THE GARMENT, Bauhan Publishing, winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize. She has published in a wide range of journals including Poetry, Antioch Review, American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review, Bomb, Connecticut Review, Women’s Review of Books, New England Review, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000. Recent poems appear in Plume, On the Seawall, Chicago Quarterly, and The Ekphrastic Review. Emeritus co-director of the Writing Program at Hampshire College, she serves as a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review.
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#2.3 Two Poems by Natalie Wang
Wang Zhaojun Departs for the North with her Maid
My lady rides ahead of me plucking her lute as she sings. Her sleeves are spotted with tears but her face remains lake-still as she lights the forest with her sorrow. Upon hearing her song the birds forget to flap and crash onto the earth with broken wings.
And I with my plain face can only weep as I pluck the geese for dinner.
*Wang Zhaojun is known as one of the Four Great Beauties of China. Born in the western Han Dynasty, she was at first a concubine in the royal palace. She was then sent to the nomadic Xiongnu tribe to marry their king and bring an alliance between the two kingdoms. It is said that while riding on horseback to the north, she began playing and singing a song on a stringed instrument. The geese migrating south were said to be so taken by her beauty they came crashing down the earth.
***
The Crane Wife
after CJ Hauser
But in all the stories, what I remember is this: the man was always immaterial.
The crane wife plucked her feathers and wove them to silk not to please him but to sell for her husband's parents;
gifts to the swollen fingers that had once bent to part thorns from the flesh of a crane.
Melusina was always singing in lakes because she wanted a good fuck and a castle with a private bathroom to bathe in peace.
The fox wife would cook, wash her husband’s inkstones and brushes, and nap on hot afternoons with her tail wrapped around her child.
It didn't matter how they met their men or why they stayed. The ending never changed.
One day, he would see her as she was, with fur or scales or feathers. He might gasp, or shout, or rage. At this betrayal
the women would return to their animal selves, and with all the detachment of a snake shedding old skin, vanish.
I used to marvel at that, that glorious final transformation of woman to animal, as though mud dense flesh and solid bone
were never enough to contain her grace. Older now I realise that the magic was never in the changing but instead in the leaving –
sometimes with a flick of a tail, the beating of wings, a flash of light, but they would never ever make the mistake of looking back.
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Natalie Wang is a Singaporean poet who writes about cats, ghosts, and womanhood, and maintains that they are all the same thing. Her debut poetry collection The Woman Who Turned Into A Vending Machine (Math Paper Press) is a book on metamorphosis and myth. You can find more of her work at nataliewang.me.
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#2.4 Three Poems by Sunnylyn Thibodeaux
Saint Joseph’s Day
I caught Frida Kahlo
over my shoulder
as I waited for results
at the doctor’s office
Unsure what to make of
her company I treated myself
to a lesson in Japanese whisky
and pronunciation of Turkish
wines. My problems are likely
tethering. My problems likely
have histories. The rest of the
feelings were held in the curl
of my toes. Where else
were they to go. I spent a lot
of money in the shops. Thinking
about Frida and Reverdy and
Valrhona chocolate, a veil of health
as death rows on someone’s shore
We all dress ourselves one last time
***
Bells Are Ringing Out/Big Fish Oddity
It's nearing 7 AM, sky is muted
with its moisture blanket. Spent
last hour with Kaufman's outlook
from the inside
of our less humane streets
although most are going by the same
name. Now with Tarkovsky. My heart bends
a little in compassion for lands
and times I somehow know
Rodney Reed's stay
is all the joy of this morning’s coffee
with its cinnamon grit and oily drops
Dense fog advisory
won't lift for a couple more
rounds of hands. A friend lost
one of her babies in the womb
with 4 more weeks to go
while the brother readies himself
for this broken world. Could I
offer anything of comfort
in this white out morning?
A notebook and pen for grief letters to come
An embrace for the experience of receiving emptiness
Solace in children's nature of knowing
when spirits enter a room
Open heavenward
more than arms
and say a word
for the Scorpios
All arranging
and orchestrating chords
orange lights with dust
far off in the distant
realm of things we only know
when we're silent long enough
I've got your hand
here. His too. Sun
behind marine's cloak
Steam of coffee, cinnamon tint
Grief shrouds all hours of the day
no matter its fragile light. Hope
as a forgotten burning behind the sky
with its layers and palls and musicality
***
Wasteland & Sanctimony
Somehow Benny Spellman
always comes on my soundtrack
or Dodo Bird iteration. It is blasted
grey out in May
when the colorful culture collide
of Carnaval is in full swing in the Mission
There have been 48 more shootings since Easter Sunday
It’s starting to lose
its effect. People are dying
nonetheless. No one
is talking about leopard sharks or grey whales
or that the Morganza has been opened again in less than 10 years
There are deniers
There are theorists
There are green dollars to be made
Some of us are so overwhelmed
with cross-stitches of surviving
we’ve forgotten
how to make conversation
Things seem too much. This fog won’t burn
The abuse some of us find natural
has never had any harmony
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Sunnylyn Thibodeaux is the author of The World Exactly (Cuneiform forthcoming), Universal Fall Precautions (Spuyten Duyvil 2017), As Water Sounds (Bootstrap 2014), Palm to Pine (2011) and over a dozen small books including Against What Light (Ypolita), 88 Haiku for Lorca (Push Press), What’s Going On (Bird & Beckett) and also forthcoming Witch Like Me (The Operating System). Originally from New Orleans, she lives and writes in San Francisco.
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#2.5 A Poem by Kirk Keen
ARE YOU IN LOVE WITH GRACE SLICK? I AM
in trouble and all trouble mirrors, horrors, cocaine razors as opportunities excuses dropped like your skirt E forever sending me flowers like she owes me something meanwhile the wind has a mind to kill us all
grace slick hurls rabbits at me with her mouth
i'm wondering if this is dying or just a mattress lying on top of me pressure is measured in pounds or how loud you're yelling at me E tells me about her husband like it’s some kind of secret then nails her limbs onto me
then i wonder if grace knows something about wonderland and the red queen so i slit my throat and witch the pattern like virgo at a poker game: bless
can sitting still turn you into stone and other pickup lines E tells me about her father and takes her eyes out for me oh such sweet gestures like not walking on my hands and keeping my face from hovering near hers i am more than a garbage person but not much more
looking for metaphors for music notes while sitting on my chest constitutes a good date for us E is nervous about her weight and how her arms bend the wrong way i turn into a flock of small birds and piles of nails dying for boards and ankles and wrists
what does grace slick think of my suit i wonder if she has even seen a suit i throw it to the ground i burn it to ash cover my body in ash and chase rabbits
E confuses me for her father finally things are getting interesting i'm wondering if trouble is nothing more than a flat denial of breaking bones up for kindling but who are we kidding here: i am a sucker for a big fire
the wind is a thing i have the least control so i burn that fucker to the ground E salts the earth with some modicum of denial about sitting I guess the number of horses streaming around us to be a dozen E hollers and all is like glass breaking so sexy as hell
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Kirk Keen is a theatre consultant and lives in New Haven, CT. He has had poems published by horse less press, Infection House, Shirt Pocket Press, and others.
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#2.6 Two Poems by Carol Ellis
monday
a job tells me what day it is
without that, I have to think
yesterday brought the sunday times
and oranges sliced against the sun
so today is monday when I eat
pineapple—each day a different fruit
from the orchards—each day a different day—on what
day did eve taste an apple—on what day did she know—
do fridays work for a sudden
increase of knowledge—or tuesday—or when will i
taste an apple—what day will it taste like what day will it be.
***
Dark Chocolate
and louder than the strong wind outside all day today
when she is already tense and grinding enamel against enamel
her eyes fill with airborne dust and the illnesses of her neighbors
she reads about dark chocolate and how it forgives and protects
something breaks on the roof the next rain could easily come inside
as it did when she sat at a table and watched the table become wet
and the pool traveled to the edge then dropped into a river
until the room filled with water and she almost drowned.
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Carol Ellis is a poet living in Portland, Oregon. She’s been around the academic block with her Ph.D in English from the University of Iowa. Her latest work is a full length collection of poetry entitled Lost and Local (Beyond Baroque Books, 2019). She is the author of two chapbooks: HELLO (Two Plum Press, 2018), and I Want A Job (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems and essays are published in anthologies and journals including ZYZZYVA, Comstock Review, The Cincinnati Review, Sarnac Review, and Cider Press Review. In 2015, she spent time in Cuba writing a book and giving readings. Find her online at carolellis.tumblr.com.
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#2.7 Two Poems by Danielle Unger
TWENTY DIFFERENT BRANDS OF ARTIFICIAL TEARS
On the last night of our winter getaway in upstate New York, we sat up in bed together drinking red wine and talking about child abuse. Conversation in this vein flowed easily, the way that it is as simple to name someone with PTSD as it is to make your gums bleed by flossing your teeth. The porcelain coaster on my nightstand with the long pouty dog face seemed to be mocking me each time I lowered my glass. This triggered a pavlovian fluffing of the hat-hair I had cultivated by keeping a beanie on during a whole Shia LaBeouf movie. Then I began dragging out the old war stories about my visits as an in-home social worker. Like that time when Mr. V told me “you let people walk all over you” and “you’ll always be a doormat” in a taxi ride to his dentist’s appointment, and I cried because he was some sort of harsh psychic. If only my camaraderie with geriatric alcoholics rendered me as interesting to you as similar themes fleshed out in Twin Peaks. My fingers wrung the thin neck of my empty wine glass, a symbolic attempt to choke off the obligation of being my lover’s hero. But this is about as realistic as a couple synchronizing their urethras or finding what soothes them on a shelf selling twenty different brands of artificial tears.
***
QUALITY USED CARS
He likes to go and sit by the car lot, which is no place for his wheezing and yellowed teeth, neon price tags affixed to windshields with bold capitalist legitimacy. Time has weathered the tinsel banner that bounds the dusty plot in patriotic fringe, and there is something like a fortress vibe orchestrated by all the steel. Dust kicks up off the straw broom that he whisks around the gravel, mingling with the soliloquy of planning his next move. If he gets to scoop butts off the gravel and pocket the best ones, then what the hell. When his backache becomes enough to punch a motherfucker in the face, he might pause to toss the butts out the diamonds of a chain-link fence with a she loves me/ she loves me not wistfulness. Perhaps he goes to sit by the car lot because it is a nexus of motion and potential, where auto wax camouflages the absurdity of a day spent in labor, the futility of a paper bag as a beer bottle’s lackluster disguise. He can go and sit by the car lot until dark clouds stain the sky, like there is no recourse but to be put upon by rain, an affront to him as the local barometer and a ticking time-bomb of sorts.
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Danielle Unger is a poet and a social worker. She has been likened to one of those inflatable tube people you see flailing in front of car dealerships.
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#2.8 Three Poems by Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle
They Want to Be Poets More Than They Want to Write Poetry
I mean, if the divine Donatien Alphonse Francois Marquis de Sade Can write a Theory of the Novel based on Verisimilitude and the suspension of disbelief —
Read it and weep. e. i. e. i. o.
Marcel Proust’s diary tells us that his celebrated Madeleine scene in Remembrance of Things Past had less to do w/ involuntary memory Than it did with narrative mechanics. He ‘d needed a textual bridge or structural Join to transport readers to Combray.
Productive Reduction.
Caught kissing on top of a grave
Sixteenth century Spain’s
Luis de Gongora
Compelled the 14 line severity
Of the baroque sonnet to en-
Compass diamonds and doom.
***
Crime Before Instruction
Her look richer than lucre. Who says the love poem
Is extinct as a genre? [ ] Theft of weather.
it means
The stars start to come apart. Thunder from corner to corner.
We pressed aggression in Pointillisme past measure.
Walking with ephemerides In parlor séance theaters.
Ecriture a creature Hector seeks to interest
An actress in a sequence Of puzzling chicanes —
Creme of asparagus soup & foie gras glacée, fro-
it’s mean
zen lime fromage avec Hot pears poached in wine.
Force of story, fury of theory Structures for grammar or humor.
If chaos defines not as disorder But inaugural absence of form
Crows sell soot still sew with Wire, owls sough through horns.
***
I Once Got to 2nd Base w/ a Hand-Model for Brooke Shields
We drove to a magic show Through falling snow on Thompson. Lurid girls were breathing fire.
Island and African idols. That plywood theater painted black Did its disappearing act. These
Basement cabarets are closing in Manhattan Like Hecate’s six trick boxes.
Hypnotist’s assistant — She taught me a wild new way to wear a pair of soxes.
Today is the SMERSH day of the rest of your life.
SMERSH (A portmanteau of the Russian Smyert Shpionam - Смерть Шпионам - which means "Death to Spies.”)
Shadeaux made the dirty work look like a Dégas.
My first car was a Willy's jeep with whitewall Cadillac tires & Full warbonnet Indian chief decals behind both front wheels.
I drove it standing up.
How to choose your porn star name.
1: favorite dessert 2: first car
My porn star name is Ice Cream Jeep.
(Ariana Reines) Tart Never Had a Car.
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Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle has attitude problems. Orphaned in his teens, he attached Cruickshank, his mother’s maiden name. He attended school no longer than the law requires. A product of the New York City Men’s Shelter System, in 1995, Geoffrey was involuntarily committed to the violent isolation ward at Paine Whitney Psychiatric Hospital..
He once worked a ring toss game for 50 straight nights at the Dallas State Fair.
He has published poetry in Aufgabe, Bald Ego, Beaubourg Pompidou Editions, Boog City, The Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Explosive!, Exquisite Corpse, Cahiers de Purple, Can We Have Our Ball Back, Coagula, Dead Roads, EOAGH, Explosive!, Exquisite Corpse, Fascicle, Fence, and Fence:the First 9 Years, Gigantic Sequins, Greetings, Hotel Amerika, Kilometer Zero, Kulture Vulture, La Petite Zine, Lit, Little Horse, Logopoeia, New York Nights, Now Culture, Nthposition, Oblongo,,One Edit,The Paris Times, Poetry Blue Book, Pom 2, Purple, Purple Journal, Red Heroine, Shampoopoetry, Sonaweb, Upstairs at Duroc, and Verse.
He has been from Kyoto to Cuernavaca, London to Laramie. His screen credits include Tremors, that giant desert sand worm movie, running to 5 sequels plus a TV series. Also Finding Forrester, starring Sean Connery, directed by Gus Van Sant.
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#2.9 A Poem by D.R. James
May:
• Nuanced woo sleeves the trees absolutely, limbs, trembling arabesques, re-enacting their valedictive wave-shrug to April. • Constellations of light-green stars allay the gray disposition: blazed artifice erasing rafts of winter entropy. • Feathered seraphim inhabit the grove’s ethereal umbrella (abstention from fussy havoc not optional), daft sanctuary for the ephemeral.
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D. R. James’s most recent of nine collections are Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2020), Surreal Expulsion (The Poetry Box, 2019), and If god were gentle (Dos Madres Press, 2017), and his micro-chapbook All Her Jazz is free, fun, and printable-for-folding at the Origami Poems Project. He has taught college writing, literature, and peace-making for 36 years and lives in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage
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#2.10 Three Poems by Lauren Ireland
RITUAL FOR RIDING THE SACRED DEER ACROSS THE WESTERN SKY WHILE CRYING REAL TEARS
Wake up and you are already tired. Go to sleep tired. Your breasts are two bruised plums circled by a drunk wasp. You are so close to forty. This was never supposed to happen.
Go back to the time before “time.” Wake what’s sleeping there. Make a ladder of your own silky child’s hair. Lick the tears from your own smooth cheeks. It is all very very tender. Climb past your small curled self curl your fingers over the lip of the bowl of the inverted world.
You have no idea how far I’ve come to tell you this.
***
RITUAL FOR GIVING A FUCK
Make the afternoon go away then make it come back different. Dark. Listen: sound breaks over other new sound. Unbraid your hair shake it loose weave into it the ribbon of your rage.
Your home has many chambers. let them come out of you just like that. Close your eyes. Take one thousand left turns through the spiral of yourselves.
Open your eyes. Find your way back. There is no back.
There are things you wish you didn't know.
Haven’t you seen other parts of being alive. Don’t you care. And what are you thinking and is it safe? And where are you and when will you be?
Listen. Listen. You are the only other. No one leaves the house and the music is so much music.
***
RITUAL FOR DISCOVERING WHETHER YOU CAN RECOVER FROM INDIFFERENCE
Say out loud: ok bye.
Board your sadness like a train. Find your real name scratched on the train window. Remember this feeling. The mystical nature of: not-being. The mystical fuck-you of: disappearing.
You are right to imagine I am not loveable.
Clap your hands. Clap your hands.
Fill them with ocean. Don’t stop until I say you can.
Make a fist now keep me in it.
Open the double doors of winter, the new way in. It's a new season I've invented just for you. I have never physically been there.
Walk backwards until everything is ok again. Everything has gone missing. Everything is coming back.
Clap your hands. Clap your hands.
Fill them with hair cut grass birch wands poetry shit. Yes.
Don’t stop until everyone you know is dead.
Now bare your fangs and see all my names reflected in your teeth.
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Lauren Ireland is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of three books: FEELINGS (Trembling Pillow Press), The Arrow (Coconut Books), and Dear Lil Wayne (Magic Helicopter Press) as well as two chapbooks. She's from coastal Virginia and southern Maryland and now lives in Brooklyn. Again.
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