Featured Poet: Larry Sawyer

From Promontory of Liminal Field

These embarrassments
  of elocution

The worn and morose
 grooves of existence  in their
refrain 
  pockets of light

the bee-eater’s exclamation

  the sting of speech
plasticity of 


  your rapid confusions
   whereby

brute morning accordionlike

sweats

  collects as  rivers in the chest

as a pimple of amber
  encases Paleolithic flight


from promontory of
  liminal field

   in endless sessions
     the wing

extends its razor


  millions of summers ago

meanwhile incalculable exits

open each night

  the moon’s Braille curtain.






Honolulu, Indiana


                   We anthologize

    the weather, in small 

   post-nomadic   c  r   o   s     s   i n gs
 Did our forebears’ gelato?

  Were they more prone

to neither

  as long as anyone,  beneath a maze

of green leaves

    sails
barque of February or 

 soup of June

      seasons become
those who most
   patiently row.
Let us such buildings stretch

out, reach in their

  stead to the sky

for some meaning.








Still Life with Arctic Monkeys

This dream of gourmet
Cameras, where we
Bless this walking through the desert
Hand in hand with every known creature.
My reason
Batting Kafka eyelashes
Loads the ark with 
What sounds like rain.
This paper museum.
As they float inside your poem
That we should give praise
For these icebergs blue
And rejoice in their teeth
Says the Kingfisher,
Astride the Empire State building.
Preciously await faith’s unveiling.
Holding your hand inside
My kaboom and cerebral
Map. That we were witness
To that throbbing Vegas
And wrecked caviar castles.
Each little now in
That springlike yard
A piano key upon which I play
On birth’s label
What corduroy typewriter.






Blistering Dinner Party

Neither was in the neighborhood of necessity, these strung out along the shore. 

The composer’s waves, his chauvinist forehead should be fair game, as were 

Audrey Hepburn’s locks on TV. Both reclining on skates to emphasize the precarious 

position that we inhabit inside each second, as if encased in another drawn curtain 

to conceal the huge faux fur letters, the day’s signature. Unconcealed emotions, were 

they left to their own devices at the blistering dinner party, predatory crocodiles of 

both sexes. The film blurs and the accompanying music is so annoying we cannot 

concentrate on our invisible novels.


The Color of Perfect

These waves, a metaphor for antiquity

Remarkable in their large blue

drowning in their own knowing.


Don't walk alone through this world

In a spasmodic memory think of the ocean and

remove yourself from the news.


Smell history in the waves' stagefright.


That the afternoon’s indifference

Exhausts itself in the revelry of:



Its cumulative tone

Silvered assonance.



The slow and arrogant cadence of the waves

Above death

Immune to the zodiac

The ocean exposes itself.


The ocean is its own gynecologist.


Its lyrical voice hovers somewhere just south of

Genre, oblivious yet embodying

A definition of hunger as

Yet undefined.


The ocean extends its bloody tongue to pronounce

Murder and also birth, both are

Equal to its Rococo foam.



The ocean is a swarm of always

The square root of its own illumination.



Its essence is well spent

The ocean is eating itself

Its dinner is generative.



Remarkable in their large blue

The waves have quit their employers.

After their departure



After the long lives of the public servants

Who dole out wooden words

The oceans will continue their conversation with the sun.



The ocean lives in seclusion, like

Han Shan, observing some unspoken agreement.



The ocean is our insurance, our doubt



Could we simply translate its complaint

Comprehend its angry eyes.

Learn As


It etches the ice.


what was and is.

Like the passing moment, half cuts



I search for 



warmth,
change the heart’s channels


moving.




Each 

embered conversation


Échoppe of
noon’s singularity. 





Leav 
es
in its 



throat.






Larry Sawyer's debut collection Unable to Fully California is forthcoming from 

Otoliths Press. His chapbooks include Poems for Peace (Structum Press), A 

Chaise Lounge in Hell (aboveground press), Tyrannosaurus Ant (mother's milk 

press), which was recently included in the Yale Collection of American Literature, 

and Disharmonium (Silver Wonder Press). His work was recently included in The 

City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (anthology, Cracked Slab Books, 

2007) and A Writers’ Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama’s Inauguration 

(anthology, DePaul Humanities Center Press, 2009).  His poetry and literary reviews 

have appeared in publications including Versal, Chicago Tribune, Babel Fruit, Vanitas, 

Jacket, MiPoesias, The Prague Literary Review, Coconut, 88, Hunger, Argotist, 

Pinstripe Fedora, Skanky Possum, Exquisite Corpse, Court Green, the Miami Sun Post, 

Ygdrasil, Shampoo, Rain Taxi, Van Gogh's Ear, and elsewhere. He edits MILK Magazine 

and curates the Myopic Books Poetry Series in Chicago.

© Copyright 2010 Larry Sawyer