Featured Poets: William Allegrezza and Simone Muench

A Villanelle 

I have undone our bent decision laughing sadly 
between wind and wound, the day pitches down.
We are a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

with hoes, tropes, and our mass machinery
with licensed language but without listening we drone.
I have undone our bent decision laughing sadly 

as though to speck electric and forgo our power medley
we divine to be verbs but end up as proper nouns.
We are a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

trying through the days’ languor to talk avidly
of words settling among sheets slipped facedown,
the stillness undone, our bent decision laughing sadly.

An embryonic engineering; an abracadabra of absently
searching the haphazard circuitry of words.  Yes, this brown
field is a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

a discord of clouds at our throats, a soured creamery
left hastily for the rush of law, of light, of renown.
Still moving with our bent decision laughing sadly, 
we replicate settings devoid of greenery.






she

she enter it  she affair it she apprehend it she après ski it
she having known it      is beyond       into being    light
into listlessness of she  listen in as she whittles  & splits
overheard the stifling voices   she  shatter  she writ of right

she save us from the undertown of the Pontchartrain
with bone   she ravage   react   ah, sweet throaty open   
river corridors, fill us up with your considerate champagne
spilling open the meniscus   over streets   into   she ocean   

she devoted    she reignites     in doing so,  burns the scrim
the dancers scattering beyond the sparks          she panthers  
into uninhabitable dimness       she shimmies her phantom limb
as cloud,   climb    to state   unto this    she matters

she alphabetizes        she vanishes in acts of three
burning the smoke tree  sea   she instant  she  the will to be

          





©2009 William Allegrezza and Simone Muench

Featured Poet: Holms Troelstrup

534p


“and the lark squawk has passed out
of season”
out of color
your petrified ambush
whelmed my words
distanced
grey in pastoral hands
whinnied
assonance
consents the crack/ed cage

bleaking
bay
briskly
the slutty sun in your theoretical rhetoric
casually slickening
river wack/ed a damn fools dissonance
intaglio glowered from
the
crux

throat
pregnant wi/the chemicals
made
for a lack
for the other
for Lacan en nosotros
can
you
“please keep watch over my wine pot”
i
wd nt guess that





s/l philoden drone 118a


am shineling
even as
you dont do
disem/bowled shake
ferocious
conscience
-damn damn of but-
spineling babe unfrazz
ling
app/roachable green
specoral lens don blindeye
“when
the current lets
you” [go?]
t(r)ide
surebound
shineling
malleable/shore
the pressem peece
reeking
split leaf
tiene un nombre pero
no lo recuerdo
,man,
wreachen this and
this the






lipstck 114a


she
en weeping wreach spilt over
turn/ed stead
en lack of limbs
still
con dedos de mano
span/ed some jillion pixels
for
bleeking sun
these damned respiring sphecius specious
wretchd
wicker time rocking solvently stunnd
tasting
nail
and
darkness
flickering gold
pummeled consonance
while sobbing tendril/ed fingerlings
blossom
over
edge
-can-put-that-a-way-now






las plantas del Michel F 605p

was
pensaba como
yr
f/rigid wds
steep sudden toll
to
seed
spreed de catastrophic ‘ture
abra
el
espacio/ization de
linguistic
comin grounded
diffuse pwr
magnetic machined hole
yr
encompass/ed pwr
de breath
de breath
to taken
my dioxide poisen
to drippen
my live/en o2

i
turn/ed stead
wards de tu
porque
usted es
todo el authoritarian
my vida
sunder
las plantas sunder
last plantas
te veo
my
paled meconnaisance
like leisured dis/dance
a piece
part/ed con
wordlessness
en lack of
breath
-to-where-you-stood-i-will-
no es nada, solo todo





c/limber 1211a


may be words
work
back words
dont find
these
terms to life
to
real peopl[ethos]elving
could
exploring meaning
mean the making
from fiachre’s passion [?]
does work to distinguish
this
little token whole
of social [?]
not
can these petals too fall
not
can these branches too reach
perhaps
do these alleys far span enough
do these bulbs ground gain instances
was such an
empty leg to lean but
leaning
lusts depend
lacking response
of falter
there-fi I lean etcetera
but my terms
back to
terms
meeting en mind
does
language break lineage
the geneology of ex/presson [?]
wonder in rudimentary ways
of
spelling
de
break lines
is
it
too
to fiddle simulate space
be
tween
to distanced
depth
i craven
spatial
relations to substantiate
owned breath
and
too breath
thought
of reflixtion
ample
expansed letters or
were there sleeping betwixt [?]
dozy extenda blink
lectured silent
i do eat crunchy pb isnt that
with raspberry preserves
enough to keep linked lines [?]
surely
to write is
to tree. and i am climb





Holms Troelstrup is a graduate student at Illinois State University. This is her first published work.


© 2009 Holms Troelstrup

Featured Poet: John Beer

J. Beer 1969-1969

It was when they determined that I had been born dead
That my life became easier to understand. For a long time,
I wondered why rooms felt colder when I entered them,
Why nothing I said seemed to stick in anyone’s ear,
Frankly, why I never had any money. I wondered
Why the cities I walked through drifted into cloud
Even as I admired their architecture, as I pointed out
The cornerstones marked “1820,” “1950.” The only songs
I ever loved were filled with scratch, dispatches from
A time when dead ones like me were a dime a dozen.
I spent my life in hotels: some looked like mansions,
Some more like trailer parks, or pathways toward
A future I tried to point to, but how could I point,
With nothing but a hand no hand ever matched,
With fingers that melted into words that no one read.

I rehearsed names that others taught me: Caravaggio,
Robert Brandom, Judith, Amber, Emmanuelle Cat.
I got hungry the way only the dead get hungry,
The hunger that launches a thousand dirty wars,
But I never took part in the wars, because no one lets
A dead man into their covert discussions.
So I drifted from loft to cellar, ageless like a ghost,
And America became my compass, and Europe became
The way that dead folks talk, in short, who cares,
There’s nothing to say because nobody listens,
There’s no radio for the dead and the pillows seem

Like sand. Let me explain: when you’re alive,
As I understand it, pillows cushion the head, the way
A lover might soothe the heart. The way it works for me,
In contrast, is everything is sand. Beds are sand,
The women I profess to love are sand, the sound of music
In the darkest night is sand, and whatever I have to say
Is sand. This is not, for example, a political poem,
Because the dead have no politics. They might have
A hunger, but nothing you’ve ever known
Could begin to assuage it.





Speak Yon Undiscovered Towers

Remember how we ran across each other
Waiting on the L train, in hot Williamsburg?
I had some undeveloped photographs
With which I planned to establish
The reign of light, ten thousand years
Of light. I couldn’t quite explain

How one and one makes two, it’s
A postulate, nobody’s interested, there’s
No profits in houses or anything but
War, forever, and girls shipped over the border
From Moldavia to Oslo, from villages
On the fringes of Chiang Mai to Yonkers

And to San Francisco and everywhere that
Poetry, unwished for, flourishes,
A disease of language, while meanwhile
I left my papers on the airplane. Did you
Find them yet? I have a lot to prepare for,
Repent for, no cats in this vicinity,

Slow music is the worst kind of music,
The world I speak for can never exist,
But Shelley already took care of that,
Yeah, Shelley and Charles Bernstein and whoever,
And no one saw the fires on the towers,
What towers? It was good to see you.





Charles Bukowski

There appeared to be two schools of thought.
On the one hand, universal order,
Whatever that means, land mines and bank accounts,
Risk arbitrage, interrogations in dark rooms,
Stress positions, honorary degrees,
A clean, well-sculpted lawn,
Haircuts on a regular schedule. Yeah, and the
Other hand. Seventy years is more than enough.

It’s not as though I admire Charles Bukowski.
He was drunk and self-aggrandizing,
As drunks most often are. Look at me,
For instance. I didn’t mean to say that.
Look at me, for instance.





2 Legit 2 Quit

for Dan McCann

It’s getting kind of late. I stand next to my love,
All right, I’m standing next to a skeleton,
It appears to be a raccoon skeleton, given the sharp
Teeth, given the sign underneath that says, “Raccoon.”

I wouldn’t say, necessarily, that my life has been
The happiest. Sure, I’ve had my share of barroom
Brawls, I’ve driven the big rigs across ice fields,
I was the winningest contestant ever on “Beat the Braggart.”

What I’ll remember most, though, when I’m gone,
Which could be anytime, is how the night sky looks,
If you get out far enough, like a sea of diamonds
That belongs to everyone. I’m a sentimental fool:

I still believe in love. I still believe in a life
In which everybody matters. I know that
Every poem’s an epitaph. The sky’s around for now:
That’s me that’s walking into it.





© 2009 John Beer