Featured Poet: Natalie Tomlin

Don't Smoke Cigarettes by seven.corners.poetry

Oranges by seven.corners.poetry

Faces by seven.corners.poetry

© Copyright 2011 Natalie Tomlin

Featured Poet: Carina Finn

dear marlon brando,

lemonade diet to lavolier a summer at the country house. daisy made a habitual chain and scuffed scalopini with the butcher’s son. boy, the barbeque – and scrapmetal cousins roughed up like a romance language in the bronx! god thanks a million planks of dockhand and a quarter-pound of hamburger for the holly hop.

dear marlon brando,

the optimists brigade to salvation. supernova flush the speedtrap victim and a hardened alchomatic to cigarette store. golddust an atomized lung to breifcase town and beam the boulevard to wanderlust.

dear marlon brando,

love said to the palladian lady break-a-brick to take the show. hunter-eyed harlequin zoom to look again. darling, all of the clowns are sad clowns. give them some cold cream! dash the dream to pile pragmatic solutions to the global phenomenon!

belle of the b-movie


belle of the b-movie from lady blogblah on Vimeo.

 carina finn has a shamrock tattoo and is pursuing an mfa in poetry at the university of notre dame. her poems are forthcoming in melusine and connotation press. sometimes she writes plays and makes objects.

© Copyright 2010 Carina Finn

Featured Poet: Gene Tanta

E

erring the heart beats against the heart’s place empty
enlaced in its wispy elevation
where two skeletons used to rub elbows eating
vintage etymon either
embers ending in
electric exhalation or the repeat button stuck on

eclipse the Christian name for the end of naming
evergreen et cetera
everything from A to Z enameled
emptied of its enthusiasm
estuaries eager to dry off in the low tide
ebb and ebb a plume of oil in the light dispatch


earthworm eavesdropping on all those who came before
through an eyelet to elsewhere
where enlarging edelweiss from seed
earwig history is endless
full with the eyebrows of dead heroes out of earshot
under an eyelid eyestrain eyewitness

earmarking his sepia memories with an eyelash
an exit we all eke out
while every now and again we edit
earlobe to earlobe
easy does it even in the afterlife
with very little elbowroom for drinking elderberry wine






G

gaga gaffing again war is a story about Armistice Day
goodbye-kisses do not change the channel gay
grinning war isn’t all good
grief the war over what’ll I ware I’ll ware the gravedigger
rainfall ‘gainst my skin gloss
grenade war stories headed over the hills glowing

I kiss the war grizzle who shall kiss glottis
gin I shall kiss strangers the day the war ends glistening
gut every gesundheit
in its ropy gristle gripping at the daylight
glad to spur us on from the roadside grumbling
graphic in the twilight grain


garbled vernacular with a mouthful of gravel
galumphing gleaming
grinding its teeth into the gnashing plank of an old whisky
gone with a forest gulp
gurgle Dane thoughtful brute getting up on the castle
gab all gone in the root

giddy wind go St. George in the fields dented
glad blown in his semivowel garden
some lay down to gainsay goal-tending a pair of dice
galley slaves guide
gullible go-betweens while the attic sisters rust
give of garlic in sharp warbles


ghostwriter poking in the graveyard with rounded fingers
all gemstones and grasshoppers
grainy but grammatical
griddlecake smells waft up the grapevine in cartoon
guesswork as Goofy
quite ready to govern by gunfire

gutters gasping what’s that in the dark
gangway goons or
the gate clanging on grandpa’s gander
gunman shushing the greyhound
grindstone or gunshot
galloping god no that’s just the fiber talking



Gene Tanta was born in Timisoara, Romania and lived there until 1984, when his family immigrated to the United States. Since then, he has lived in DeKalb, Iowa City, New York, Oaxaca City, Iasi, Milwaukee, and Chicago. He is a poet, visual artist, and translator of contemporary Romanian poetry. His two poetry books are Unusual Woods (BlazeVOX 2010) and Pastoral Emergency, which was selected as a semifinalist in the Cleveland State University First Book Prize in 2010. Tanta earned his MFA in Poetry from the Iowa's Writers' Workshop in 2000 and his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009 with literary specialization in twentieth-century American poetry and the European avant-garde. His journal publications include: EPOCH, Ploughshares, Circumference Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Watchword, Columbia Poetry Review, the Laurel Review and Drunken Boat. Currently, he teaches creative writing online for UC Berkeley Extension.



Poet's Note:
"E" and "G" are from Pastoral Emergency, my second book of poems. It contains 26 poems, one poem for every letter of the English alphabet. Each line of each of the 26 letter sections starts and ends with a word that starts with the section letter: exceptions made for music and idiom. These interventions in the abecedarian tradition stretch out to a sequence of 63 pages. The abecedarian grid or scaffolding or structure of two six-line stanzas per page helped me realize how the book wanted to be written: the form taught me that this book wanted to be written at the level of melody and sound rather than at the level of sense and cohesion. Unlike my first book, Unusual Woods (BlazeVOX, 2010), it came as a huge relief in the revision process of Pastoral Emergency that the logic of the abecedarian form allowed me not to concern myself with how to order the various letter-poems.


© Copyright 2010 Gene Tanta

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

Featured Poet: Laura Goldstein

pay/phone

Put your money where your mouth is. Please. Place your jewelry on the table before you leave. I’ll give you a ring. Just before dawn, a dinosaur roared and a call rang out across the land.

Push here to be cut off immediately. When we were speaking we were disconnected inevitably because of the way that we bounce off of towers on our way down to the ground. Even if we part, I know I’ll always be in your phone.

Soon talking to you will be an emergency, on the order of red flashing lights somehow reaching out soft on the mushrooms on the forest floor. More retreat to a warmer light. No keypad close to code your cue.

The receiver is not usually thought of as a weapon but when in bed it should be just in reach and easily the heaviest thing in the room.

How the shifts in zip codes sound with your mouth wrapped around the round end of a company phone. You’re tapping out someone’s dinner reservations from your home phone on off hours. How our silverware sounds when set down.

Do you tend to short-change conversations that lose the war with the cord? And we fold into a sort of norm when unaware, talking up a storm.

A quarter of some monologue in monotone slips out of a slot called “old coins” A handful of numbers, a wealth of wires, a simple recording, a graduated tone

Copyright © 2010 Laura Goldstein