I save the spaces. No, I’m no bent surveyor with a three-legged stare bent on destiny, unsettled by innominate expanses, undone by an absence of fences, parsing the plenty. We know how that was manifest. I’ve never been enamoured of wrought geometries and plaid is a bad parody of place. I save only the spaces: [...]
Also taggedWhen the planets turned ready in slow-time abeyance for a rendition of lives to clash, maybe Cherokee man or colonial long hunter, maybe English renegade, or would-be farmer plunging his hands in black dirt to tease out a weed’s root system, or maybe highland warrior who puts his tired head to his suffering wife’s breast [...]
Also tagged Jenny Benjamin-SmithStrip malls give way to strip clubs One hundred fifty miles grind Alongside mammoth motor homes The land is changing She is more voluptuous Her sins secreted While in dusty towns Proud old resentments Bolted to bricks shout “Get us out of the United Nations!” Greasy truck-stop trading posts Stand between bands of green Separating [...]
Also tagged Kathleen EullHere in the town of the common and the good, only the flashes reach us. There’s no thunder rumble, no sound to savor, no low music to score the out-of-favor soul. No, first it’s the din, carried air away east, then the bright, the flight of sand as light, breaking in waves on main street [...]
Also tagged joesmith“It was intelligence and nothing else that had to be opposed.” – Søren Kierkegarrd The wind is against me on my pedaled way to work. A bus almost clips me cutting in to its shelter at the curb. A Benz would prefer to run the light and me over to waiting one second more. The [...]
Also taggedAlert as the light that changes color with the weather atop the building some mistake as electric, we’re mingling our blood and juices without the dolor that ought accompany a great big age of disease. We are lovely here and welcome the change we bring to each brown room. In the phone booth, we tear [...]
Also taggedBEFORE THE GAME Shut one eye then the other Peek into every corner of yourself See that there are no nails no thieves See that there are cuckoo’s eggs Shut then the other eye Squat and jump Jump jump high high On top of yourself Fall then with all your weight Fall for days on [...]
Also tagged prose poetry, Vasko PopaI can divine these brambles. Or these gnarled flowers at my feet. They obscure my heels as I float on yellow horizons. Tip the diagonal of my arms into the numbers of years set down like dust. I can, you see, lead you somewhere, over rock and highland green. I can conjure stone from earth [...]
Also taggedHigh Windows When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives– Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide [...]
Also tagged featured writersOh didn’t we dance a puzzle Round the tree when we Danced the way we did In early April when all is Vernal and we needed twigs to Invoke the gods that hovered Near a healthy sprig About a foot or so longer Than needed to produce an Invocation that requires wood Or a cross [...]
Also tagged Scott ZieherIn the morning you lay quiet: melodious digression, the art of deceptive cadences – progressions indecipherable to most – but these bewilderments send me into the day – filled with the notes of our song: our melodies, our transpositions, our compositions. Yesterday we were a bit flat and the accidental surely threw us off. Today: [...]
Also tagged jeremy benishekWoke her up, fucked her, had a cigarette, a cup of coffee, dropped her off, went to work, did some work, went to lunch, did some more work, called her again, picked her up, fucked her, had a cigarette, dropped her off, drove to my house, unlocked my front door, walked in, washed my face, [...]
Also tagged jeremy benishekOxygen and bronze— A father’s lilac hideout (Cloud hammer hideaway) (Spade on the table) Not far away enough For oblivion, too close For obscurity— basement Full of paper— upstairs Full of babies— two elemental Beauties by blood and egress By cardinal and garden— Harbored and freed With the finches That nibble Your backyard Bare. 15 [...]
Also tagged Scott ZieherAn abrupt abutment of broad earth and wide air is a line that draws him without end to the boundary of wide earth and broad air. He plows a square on the plain without end to the boundary, the bent hedgepost by the sun. He plows a square on the plain he inherits and stares [...]
Also taggedLife, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am [...]
Also tagged John BerrymanThe soap opera organ announces what we can hardly bear to hear. A metal-aproned matron summons the skin ribbons she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500, circa 1969. Her tremolo is a casual torture. We mistake her voice for a choir of a thousand veiled mothers and wobble dutifully in to an Easter [...]
Also tagged joesmithjazz that text till it sings till only singing will diminish it till ebb exposes that which only flow has known stones shells bones posing as lasting things memory’s moment knows no present imagines it is as it had been it’s this that’s that scatting riffs best left unsung till home in stillness that absence [...]
Also tagged Rick Krause