Featured Poet: Jamison Lee

I Was a Dancer

Garage Sale

Featured Poet: Paul Cunningham

from "The House of the Tree of Sores"
 

A kitchen: where bombs and explosions are constantly cooked up

where zombified Swedish Chef fits large and small hands

(a spoiling milk in the West) continually spills

onto Miss Misshandlade & Miss Misstanke

Nothing spills on Miss Indiana because her body is “normal”

Normal is a good thing, you should look more normal,

the mockmilk whispers.

Pour batter into prepared bowl

a bowl is a shed is a shedding

is a clean shed or a shed of fakes?

a should snusk a snusk shed?

identisk, translation’s tisk tisk

translation, needle in a höstack

a whole stack, a sales rack

a hate-stack, bombar dem

bombard them, feja or fejka?

Brush a grill gate with spring tension adjuster

Add 20 #7 x 7/8” flat-head screws

Add ¾ cup of decorative bolts

Preheat oven to 375’ F

Use a slotted spoon to churn headboard

Use a slotted spoon to mix the sweet

Add 2 side frames, Add 4 adjustable shelves

Add a layer of caramelized connection sleeve

melon, knocksharps the skull

kitchen offers a mallet, a gavel, a kavel

dough-rolling a skulle, dough-rolling a should

feja skola och fejka skola?

translation, a fruit contains a secret mjölk

clayed over by peel, inte gråta över spilld mjölk?

peel-removal; glöd-core; våld-core

suga sockret, suger socker

More boomashootns, the mockmilk whispers

puppetland, with its gun-shaped hand

home of damaged dream-appliances

microwave-safe, fits in the bowl of all sinks

puppetstringchoked sinkhole

sings a green song a salad mean song

veggie stalks tangled up in an armature wire

a stringy ooze out of mockmilk mouth utters

Copyright © 2014 Paul Cunningham

Featured Poet: Roberto Harrison

plural consciousness

not this face

and its cohort, a body

and the face has many minds—

the countable and the uncountable and empty strings “”

it walks beyond the mountains

where there are others in that desert panorama

so removed from space. and the pain of split eyes

and of being more than one

and of switching to build on Origins

of the certain acausalities of a plural consciousness

an entire people of profiles

of computer parts and sounds and a throbbing Light

primordial and far before

is the unintentional truth [on the ground]

known to the lesions

perplexed by questions of the feed

and by the other lines. and for that reason

their body cannot balance itself on the enormous neuter egg

and never sleeps in flight. but the blindness

gets planted with sunfish and shoveled into ossified domes

and it becomes a horror and a random seed()

of the submerged and Unit ear

and cannot be dreamed about with its rabbits

as those minds have left the body asleep and apart

and now are separated by many Starts

attached by a single strand

invisible sinew. it becomes,

the body becomes

a husk for the colors of corn

a putrefied husk with a smile of the bus

as its afterimage

and a sorrow of the bus

as its frontal lobe. it moves with a black rat

snake and separates the other animals

so that they too shrivel

and become like the muted clouds

not of this terror. this body becomes

indistinguishable from the jungles, and the news of the frond

welcomes its poverty. it moves beyond the landscape

and desires itself to be one (and a two-toed Sloth)

of the planes for which the word becomes less

and more than light. it dissolves to portray its anti-subjects

like the animals of long ago, and it witnesses itself

become cybernetically unified. but this is only a question

without symbol. it moves to be antecedent to the imagination

but is not recognized as such, it submerges

its most horrifying trees into a lesser season and drought

of correction and comfort. it realizes

its evils must be seen and felt, and so, on that day

it becomes mineral, and moves to be a putrefied aspect of wholeness

in being skewered. and no word can place it with others

because its muteness revolves around its own Sea

and it becomes the question for answers, and the answer for questions,

but nothing more. and this body equates itself with the earth

in its seismic and sharp attributions, in its lessening waters, in each

expression another form of syzygy. it often weeps in its thoughts

without a body, and it smiles in weird ways

that betray the weather, and it says things and does things

that it no longer recognizes. this body is softened with its minds,

and its horrors were turned into fragrances and tanned leather

by the many cyber seeds of the Mound. it cannot understand

its own secrets, and it cannot see the metropolis of a wound

that it knows it is. and one day La Tulivieja

will become synchronized so as to harvest

the sun’s healing and destructive powers, so it aggravates

the soils of a home for more plants, and the jungle then resists

that its panoplies and layers dissolve the rails

of the trains of the wrong, and that they service the master

of interior regions, so confused by the chieftain

of harvest and loons on the days that wear away

the soft electrocutions of the everyday. the chieftain absorbs

the windowed necropolis where his people, and those of the she-world

witness and absorb decay. the wanderers of this interior

force the crisp attention of the less than life

to warm each possible response to the raiders of the trains

and the wind of this plural consciousness which arrives

with the marks of the page to undo the only light and the only count(*)

of this region for the lost, in this equated reverse of completion

where someone ashes the counts of another rain to absorb their light

and their darknesses, in the less than bought and more than free

which witnesses the end of number, and absorbs all the marks

of the Chooser of absence and orphanhood. in their attached body trance

someone absorbs La Tulivieja with hir Intermediate Areas

and (s)he becomes just a knot, and this is a word to absorb the interior’s climate

on that holiday of sorts where the weather rises, and where (s)he, the invisible one 
comes to me to remind me of my erasure. this song of erasure

does not count for your afterimage in the less than countable rite

of mythologies and reference. do you feel the attachment of this soft song?

where I am not I, in this weather of promise and recursions

that decays and absorbs each of our numerous

corporations in the wonder world of executions and the council fire

so gigantic and guarded by the others. they are moving

in this desertion to unwind the releasing tense of the door. to unwind

the approach of their targets         to renumber their attack

and place hold the skin service. they do not want

their only council with their only chieftain to be a part of the smoke

that each holds for the heart of the isthmus, that new service

that attaches itself to each consciousness, so divided and One and not Two and ~~~~~~~

ritual number. they wear away the programs of cascading sides

and they pick the service of the trains to amount to the ride of the dispossessed

those wretched that the chieftain had become and was and now…. but the putrefied sweetness

of the bees no longer attends to the animals as they grow so wild. on that day

with the sun at its warmest we ride to the western mountains of a digital

oblivion, one more attenuation and one more cross of those counted wings. they know

by their hair that the wolves approach from the east and that they understand winter

in its back and forth connection of truth evaluations. those bruises never stop that pattern

as the gift of life does not endure the seasonal demands on our numbering

smoke. there is no plural there. it heals itself as the body of Moons

except when it is lost in a self. that endures for something

erased but not worn in this element, a long and numinous husk of each origin’s fire

resumes and attends to it, more than measure

number name

     for Daniel Borzutzky

one moved

and then a finger appeared. a leg, a torso

one moved again

and then someone called from far away. it rang in the water

formed like the lights of offering

more people knew more languages and they flew

one sentence

and then two sentences. their faces wavered

and a whole country was mute. they offered their voices

to roll upon the earth and confront the ships.

once, they went nowhere. their approach to the Sun

was given in steps. the network of stars

would not amount to service or to the lines of amputation

as they emerged from the earth. and they saw

that someone held the innocent. but experience

would not hold to a single self. the screen

of afterimages would amend and portray the lost herds

for the reasons that silence would absolve, for the amount of people

that they serviced in the daylight. bodies were formed that spoke

secretly, in the trees. their mute literatures covered the ashes

of their dead. they said that they were not persons

and so the law did not pertain to them. they moved like the light

but no one understood the anguish

of personhood. their mute literatures would be brought up

by vicious dogs. they did not understand

the news. their fear transformed them

beyond facial recognition, beyond all security.

once, they throttled and amounted to the aims

of services. their bombs would not attach the spirit

to their monumental fires. they learned from the flesh

and they knew the warmth of the straw. they were one in the time

of offering. their books would attend to the cracks

in the ground. their songs would seek others more

than they were sought. they did not have feelings

because they could not trust. once, there were others.

their laughter moved the animals and the animals

sang to them in homage, secretly. they were always together

with the animals. they once again would free themselves

from the world. they knew more songs and they revealed the ashes

that grew to their hunger. they arrived to the other worlds

as this one stopped. they moved with the wishes

of their infancy. they were once like the Turing machines

of deception. they danced the fear away and they knew that someone

would one day be fearless among them and change them all for that.

once, they reasoned that their minds were like blankets, a warming

of the flesh, and their minds radiated heliocentrically beyond the moon,

and they stood at the surface of the Sea, and they moved with the Oceans

to endure the earth of cogitations and the earth of motionlessness.

they received the others and they announced to themselves that they would learn

to speak as the light speaks. they moved to be there like one was

and they counted among the numbers




© Copyright 2014 Roberto Harrison

Featured Poet: Sarah Carson

The Twenty-Four Hour Grocery Store, Part I 

Ron Bowman got fired from the twenty-four hour grocery store for no-call-no-shows after his girlfriend had him arrested for trying to kill her with his Tupac chain. In a meeting with both produce managers, he’d been accused of carving swastikas into the card table in the smoking break room, though the smokers defended him vehemently, though Joe Fischer took full credit for it the night he quit, running off through the dimly lit parking lot with two cans of soup and a bottle of champagne. Later Ron and Joe smoked cigarillos with Matt from bottles beneath the black lights in their living room, Matt’s fingers still ripe with Diet Coke and Sprite and 42 varieties of beer. When Matt turned up dead in his grandmother’s doorway, Ron and Joe were miles away, passed out with their heads on each other’s shoulders, having signed a secret pact between them to never let a bitch get them down. 





The Twenty-Four Hour Grocery Store, Part II 

Maura was the manager on duty the night Bill got caught drinking and driving in the Coke van. We were sitting in her office, drawing pictures with the highlighters she kept in her top desk drawer while the Pepsi guys sat on the empty pallets in the drop trailer watching porn on their cell phones. Around eleven o'clock Bill came storming up action alley, took a 2 liter of Vault and threw it so hard against the floor that it bounced over the cereal racks and into the next aisle. The boys went with him to the parking lot where they all lit up cigarettes and spent a long time not making eye contact. Maura called for a floor machine from behind the locked door, seated beside me scratching at the incisions she'd made on her forearms during lunch. 





The Twenty-Four Hour Grocery Store, Part III 

His wife found out the week before Christmas, and so he dragged both of his daughters through the twenty-four hour grocery store in search of the cashier who was causing all of his problems, each little girl with a tiny hand wrapped around one of his index fingers, the bells their mother had tied to their snow boots a flurry of quiet jingling as they hurried down the soda aisle like late entrants in a three-legged race. In the front yard that night the cops told the grown-ups to scatter, but the cashier was sure she was the only one who’d listened. For months she'd find herself pulling up next to the payphone outside the Speedy Q off the highway, dialing their number and listening intently to the chatter in the background before someone hung up. 





If We Toast to the New World, 
We should toast to all its possibilities, 

to Srmad in the shop on the corner, 
his window full of knock-off Nikes 
and single cigarettes. 

This morning when we went to get the paper, 
two men were climbing out my neighbor’s window 
with her television in their arms. 

You can’t blame the factory for that, 

 like you can’t blame the Generals 
for giving up in the playoffs 
when the stands were empty 
and their paychecks had been bouncing for months. 




© Copyright 2014 Sarah Carson