Featured Poet: Joanne Diaz

Syringe 


Perhaps you’ve always known her obvious desire,
her thirst for more, then more: the way she’d wish
for more kissing after the warmth of sex
had risen and gone; the way she’d beg
dinner guests to stay long after the servant
had cleaned the plates and the oil in the lamps
had burned dry; the way she always asked,
even in courtship, the how and the why
of your every declaration, wringing
the roots of thought as if the answers could
fill what existed before the pain began—
that presence that came unannounced, uninvited,
rejected at first then welcomed as part
of daily life.
              Even so, if heat is all she feels
in the throbbing, each filament a knife
of fire, a guarantee that cinders through
the night; if she wakes to weep
in the certainty of pain, its circling
through each pathway in the cheeks,
the eyes, the upper lip, so that only
the sweep of a finely woven handkerchief
can count as a kind of washing; if she
can spend all day tending to its need as if
it were the child you never had; then one day
you will have to acknowledge that she might
love the pain, and you won’t be able to
imagine when or how she learned to love
anything to such excess. After
the tooth extractions have failed to relieve
the shooting; after the melancholy
has withered in her temples and refused
to leave; after you have seen the nets of nerves
unfurl in a revolt of heat; after you
and she have exhausted your search for a word
that encompasses the largeness of this woe;
remember this: the garden of lilacs
that she planted before the pain began.
Go there and see the buds clustered,
enclosed and clean, then their limbs, the lean
from left to right, the dew-glistened drift
to the mulch, the blossoms that do not unfold
in time. Think syringa vulgaris. Think
tube, pipe, fistula. Think of filling
the barrel of the syringe, then plunging it
deep in her skin to fill the canals
of her nerves with a dark, sweet dream
of forgetting, then imagine her loving
that opposite of sense, the moment
at which the hairs of your moustache
branch into lilacs, common pinks
and blues flourishing behind her closed eyelids.
The poppy’s milk has a voice
that will sing her into sleeping, and a word
for every thought as she rises
beyond the small feather bed.




[Note: In 1853, Charles Gabriel Pravaz and Alexander 
Wood developed the first syringe with a needle fine 
enough to pierce the skin. Dr.Wood used his syringe 
for management of neuralgic pain. The first recorded 
fatality from a hypodermic-syringe induced overdose 
was Dr. Wood’s wife. The tragedy arose because she 
was injecting morphineto excess. (From the Utopian 
Surgery Website)]



[originally appeared in The Missouri Review, Fall 2007]






Larry David on Corregidor



The last thing the island of Corregidor needs is my correction,
but when I climb the staircase of the lighthouse and see the ruins
of what were tennis courts built by Filipinos for American officers,

the scent of sampaguita flowers wafting around and above
where the net once drooped, I have to ask: The courts were built by Filipinos
who served in the front lines, but they could not play on them,

not go near them? And though I know the tourguide’s answer
before she says a word, I cannot help but obsess over those rubbled piles
now overlaid with what might be a trellis or the frame of a greenhouse.

I want to ask: Who ordered the tennis balls? Who restrung the rackets?
Who swept away the puddles early mornings during rainy season?
In the distance, we can see the path of the Bataan Death March

where thousands died, malarial, diarrheal, bloodied by brutal force
in a procession that violated every convention and rule of decency;
and to the right, the haunted Malinta Tunnel, where the ghosts of soldiers

who typed and radioed and telegraphed underground for months
are shooed away by the “sight and sound” show three times each day.
I would have done better to ask about the separate barracks,

the single row in the back of the island’s movie theater,
the ward in the old part of the hospital—but still I’m preoccupied
with the tennis courts, and in the moment that the tourguide stares

at my fourth question, I realize that I’m behaving like Larry David,
great dissenter in all things mundane, fighter for no one and yet
resister to everything beyond his own skin, symbol for all

that refuses to be corrected, straightened out, made right. And though
I am embarrassed by the Puerto Rican parade episode
and the Chinese take-out guy from the Seinfeld years, and though Monena

the black prostitute in Season Four of Curb leaves me feeling ashamed
of a writer who would create such a sassy, large-bosomed role, still
I am Larry David on this most absurd of strategic islands. I care less

about MacArthur’s selfish, barrel-chested promise of “I shall return”
or the godlike, seven-foot bronze statue of him that the tourist trolley
stops at for photographs. I care even less about President Quezon’s

fatal hacking cough, brought to life on the recording during the “sight and sound”
so that we can relive his tubercular demise; or the rubble of bones
that litter the regrown forest and circle the posts of the broken pier.

All I want to know is this: in those lean years before the Second World War,
who caught the stray balls that were shot way over the fence?
Who painted the lines after the sun burned them all to dust?




[Note: Corregidor is an island about 20 miles west of Manila. “Corregidor”
is most likely derived from the Spanish corregir—to correct. The island
was used as a fortress and a prison during the era of Spanish
colonization, and then as a base for American and Filipino troops
during World War II.]

[originally appeared in The American Poetry Review, Jan/Feb 2008]




Metastasis, Boracay 


When we travel, I’m usually so drunk on a cocktail
of panic mixed with boredom, so busy calculating
the peso-to-dollar conversion, so certain that I’ll contract

the dengue fever from the one stubborn mosquito
who will be undaunted by the sheer bedroom netting
that I forget how much beauty each new thing possesses

and that some of that beauty requires an initial sickness,
an irritation, often in the form of a foreign body.
In the case of pearls, the problem is that the sickness—

a burr in an otherwise milky trance of protein—
happens all too infrequently. In the years before
cultured pearls became common, the Philippines

were full of divers: scores of slaves pushed overboard
to plunge deep for the baroque imperfection of a small,
radiant knob hiding among the sharks, poisonous

jellyfish, and the bends. I remembered this
as I dipped underwater in my snorkel mask and fins
then rose above again to see Jay’s mother and aunts

onshore, hunched beside a young man whose suitcase
was full of pearls—pink, smoky gray, bright white—
fake pearls that cost pennies in American money.

But the way the ladies inspected each necklace and earring,
chatted with the young man, and slowly passed him
their dollars, they could have been the three Magi,

choosing the finest gifts. How could something so beautiful
cause no pain, no harm, and bring such delight
to three thrifty women on vacation in Boracay,

an island that seemed more like a Hollywood movie set
than a real place. I dipped below again to see the pinkish tips
of a coral reef that took thousands of years to form

being grazed by the foot of Uncle Ming, too tall
for the ascending filigree, his bare toes brushing
its skeletal rise, his eyes still dimly lit from half a case

of San Miguel that rattled in the back seat of the van,
his red swimsuit billowing and swollen, almost alive
in the clear water. The coral, once touched, turned

instantly to dust, a millennial cloud lifting in the filtered light.
I pushed back to the surface to ask the boatsman if this was right—
the shallow waters, the high reef— but I didn’t. Instead,

I watched as Uncle Ming took another swig, laughed freely
with his brother and nephew, and looked up to dry his face
in the hot sun. Later, he lay on the white sand

to make an angel with his swooping arms and legs,
indulged in a plate of crawfish heaped on rice as if he
were the king of Boracay, and made all of us laugh

with his sonorous Bing Crosby voice. I realize now
that even then it must have been growing in him:
the nacreous luster swelling his lungs, its concretion

an opalescence that would drift to the brain, spine, and liver.
Just like metastasis, a flitting of words from one idea
to the next, a fish waving its fins through the coral’s last rise.





Uncle Ming Pinched Me 


While some cousins confirmed the funeral arrangements
and others browsed sales racks for the right thing to wear,

we sat at the table with little else to do but eat,
and just as I was about to put a succulent piece

of adobo into my mouth, Cousin Jeannie said
In his final hour I felt him pinch me, and of course

I thought what anyone would if they had known Ming
when he was well: Good work, you sly fox! Sick as a dog

with chemicals indiscriminately fighting every cell
of your body, and still you had the moxie

of a true rascal. For a moment I imagined
the long list of women he might have goosed in his life:

big ones, skinny ones, young ones who didn’t know
how to fry eggs the morning after, all lining up

to greet him as he ascended and entered the pearly gates.
But what Jeannie really meant was this:

that as the last trickles and swirls of whiskey and smoke
vanished from his bloodstream; as his body finally

bloated then withered into a spent balloon;
and as the spirit that made him the single agnostic

among his devoted family faded unremarkably
in a wash of gray, Cousin Jeannie felt a light pinch

on her forearm, just as she was putting her youngest
child to sleep. Later, after coffee, Auntie Jessie

recalled the text message she received on her cellphone
before Ming died, which read Please say a special prayer

for Ming today, a message from an unknown number
which led everyone at the table to believe

that it was God who sent it, or if not God then perhaps
some other force that knew Ming needed an extra boost,

especially Ming who, as Uncle Jun noted,
was the philosopher of the family, the one

who walked out of the healing Mass when he thought
it was a bunch of baloney, all that flailing and whooping

and fainting which, years earlier, had once sent Uncle Jun
into a swoon so profound that Auntie Jessie raced

to catch him from behind, and in doing so collapsed
from the weight and cracked two of her ribs. As I sat

and listened at the table that night, Ming became
a saint dressed in white, kindly visiting children

halfway across the planet in visions. But why
change Ming in death, when in life he was remarkable,

above all, for his consistent and honest observations
of this world? When I last saw him healthy, it was

in the Philippines, when we traveled together for weeks
in crowded vans on congested roads. Through

the van’s tinted windows, we saw so many
gigantic billboards for creams that made brown women white

and chemicals that transformed kinky hair
into a waxy sheen that I had to ask about them,

and he said, Don’t you understand that Filipinas want
to be white? They want to look like you, smell like you, be you.

And in that moment race seemed like a disease
with a simple outline, a form that could be quickly drawn,

just like the pencil sketch that Albrecht Dürer
created for his doctor friend, a picture of himself

unclothed, pointing to his abdomen with an inscription
that read: This is where I hurt. Ming’s response

might have been right or wrong, impolitic or even crude,
but it was his opinion, unsoftened by civility or a belief

in anything beyond human desire. Among the screech
of morning roosters and the clouds of smog that permeated

the neighborhoods of Manila, Ming’s voice was not a pinch
or a float, a falling toward life or a rising from the dead

but a bell sounding against self-delusion. There was
some small shard of iron left in his irony,

a place where suffering didn’t entirely break
but left a piece that was full of knowing. But that

was just one part of his negotiation with God,
of the drawing that pointed to the pain.






Linnaeus’s Patient 



To cure I had to touch  
 without knowing what touch 
would do. I had to ease 
 his trousers down and see 
the mucus, shiny and constant 
 on his swollen sex, the red 
pustules burning to break, 
 the one vein nourishing 
the sickness’s need. And when 
 he finally lay bare, I had to percuss 
the first abdomen, spleen, and liver 
 of my life. I had never touched 
a man this way; I had never known 
 a woman. What I had learned of sex 
was for plants, not men.

As I watched the base of him 
 drift from one side to the other 
I thought of the pepperbush  
 standing as straight as physics 
will permit; of the tall willows 
 swaying beneath the Northern 
Lights. I loved that sway, 
 that drift, and the way the sex 
was its own animal, unaware 
 of infection glistening all around, 
or whether the last woman 
 had left the man’s bed for good. 
My finger glanced the tender tip 
 and drew a thin thread, 
tenuous, glassy, finely spun, so capable 
 of breaking. But it didn’t; 
it stayed there, suspended between my finger 
 and the man, opalescent in its shine. 
I thought then of the thread 
 that the Fates weave for every man, 
the length upon which his life depends. 
 Slowly I reached for the mercury ointment 
so as not to disturb the man, the thread, 
  the sickness, and in that moment 
I was certain only of this: 
 that all things whirl to ruin, 
and that everyone must die a little 
 in order for me to cure them.



[originally published in The Missouri Review, Fall 2007]




Joanne Diaz’s poems have recently appeared in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, 
DIAGRAM, and The Missouri Review. She is the recipient of fellowships from the
NEA and the Illinois Arts Council. She is an assistant professor of English
at Illinois Wesleyan University.


©Copyright 2009 Joanne Diaz

Featured Poets: Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert

ELEGY

“Life's too short to mourn the dead.”
—Paul Verlaine

Tonight, I made myself feel a little
something to acknowledge the occasion:
a fistful of dry grass from the hillside
is a weird memento, but alas
memory doesn’t take requests. Charcoal
means to turn to coal. As a hiding place
a grave is not the worst. As the first to
die, you seem somehow the best of us, the
fastest. Moths in the porch light, nocturnal
animal cries. I made myself afraid.





THE WAY ALL COMPLEX SYSTEMS FAIL

“Subjects of the Roman Empire had an average life expectancy of twenty-eight years.”
–Atul Gawande

If I lived there/then, I'd be dead by now.
The sterile calm, the central heating—how
would I feel any outrage? The light goes
subjective. To what am I subject, if
there is no empire? The light goes fleeting.
I don’t know what Americana means
to Europeans, where the past is a
cliché. My adaptive mechanism
to middle age is acting older than
the light. The middle of what? Of the light.





FAHRENHEIT 451

“Nothing is going to happen in this book.”
—Annie Dillard

Given the times, it was slightly austere.
“I thought we won the war,” I said, & then
somebody rolled the year-end slide show. Here
a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there
a noble endeavor ending in tears.
I've never been inspired by inspiring
passages of literature or quaint
old red barns, so it's a fortunate thing
that the barn full of literature burned
to the ground & culture can start over.





©2009 Kathleen Rooney and Elisa Gabbert

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