TREE POEM 7
as if rooted to the spot
as if fearful he’ll leave me
or cauterised ideas
vain tingling
as if wither
as if bark
the sun has turned us inside out
our blood ghosts this idealised domestic interior
he ached to take root in me
but i spun his seed to spider silk
the sun windows your no
he you i she whoever their sap throbs in morse
spelling the air’s thirst
Charred
Pull out a hair and it’s white. I’m glad it’s white and not dark but then see that inside the one white are several black. I split the white hair open. Attached to the black hairs are small light bulbs. The bulbs lead to a very flat box approximately four inches by two. There’s writing on the box, the usual list of what’s inside a box. I wonder how such a box can be embedded in my hair. And then I think there’s a more troubling question: am I a kit of assembled parts? am I human at all?
It’s Halloween, the streets thick swirling fog. A woman knocks on the door. My dead mentor. ‘I couldn’t help you before,’ she tells me, ‘but I can help you now.’ A few months later she delivers another important message. I see her face, her eyes lit like the blue of burning gas. There’s a house—charred and smoking. Two bodies in the debris—hers, miraculously untouched by fire. The other is the body of death, black & crisp. This time she says goodbye: ‘We’ll meet again. You’ll be an old lady, me a little girl.’ She never talks to me directly again.
My two writing psyches decide on a duel to the death while I sleep. One has decided on becoming wholly female. The other knocks on the door. Barely conscious, hardly able to speak except in a garble, the female psyche asks who it is. A male voice answers: ‘I’m the one who wrote [title I can’t remember, something to do with jobs].’ The female psyche opens the door and is instantly attacked. Why is the division represented as gender? And why the terror? The terror of being attacked by something usually kept deeper underground.
In the city, at dusk, walking with someone and notice there are men following close behind. I turn around. As soon as I see them, the men transform into red lights that float up into the sky and turn into a constellation.
Cherry Spot Man
“Oh: you don’t know what I look like, apart from my birthmark. Sorry. I am small, with a ringletty mass of leonine curls, and in fact a rather leonine face; I would look good in whiskers.” – Julia Gray, Little Liar
The performance as a matter of digestion of context,
there was no use in entering before having cake,
the Twin Peaks cherry pie will add to your performance face,
the other you, making confessions in spotlight blindness,
putting the you of you on display,
pulling the me in I into our non-discretionary flesh.
How should I possibly have known birthmarks amass?
All the talk of gray hairs to come, but nothing about the
dalmatianisation of man.
It all started with a few cherry spots, cute on a teen,
i wanted the knife to open with a different sound maybe a different language
the hiss of a sudden shower gusting against the webbed windowpane
the dainty thumbprints time leaves in the corners of the glass are different
my thumbs small but not dainty like that the traces i leave are greasy redolent of manhood and perfume
flowers a forest of trillium mayapple and trout lily
i wanted the knife to help define my parameters to offer a type of groundedness or touchstone
i’ve tried to do that—find a touchstone in my body and in space i move through
and even space i love tried to find a touchstone in others friends loved ones
[family]
i don’t know my family don’t know what i am in there i think my family is nothing to do with my body
but there’s the blood the mess of the blood and always there’s the madness that white madness
Missiles are pointing at my heart
Missiles are pointing at my heart
The door is shut
the wind was left alone
now who can
recover it
no one
where are the ones that kill
the murderers are
sweet in my hands
my womb’s a battlefield
I don’t know the ones
who love me
and they do not know me
STRATAGEM FOR SURVIVING IN A PLAGUE STATE #10: NOUVEAU LUXE
the yawnlike longing
betwixt the ashen
learning an illicit desire
& knowing you’ll never
accept yourself
or act upon it
{{{except yourself
when acting upon it}}}
o knit hands of the sunwarmed
on carpetlike pause
stretch the muscles
deeply into nonbeing
acres of raingowns
acts of the apostates
in a scathing dissent
i rehearse the rhetorical
scaffolding for a plea
that can’t be homage
lactic with ache / the caesura
of a photo op / the skin /
censured by light
unhaired degreased
desalted & soaked
the sunwarned swarm
immomentous seconds
make monsters murmurate & part
& the dread becomes the brand
*
Steve Halle is the editor of co*im*press (http://www.coimpress.com/)
Ayk hed
double agent
agent of pain
shuriken cut through skull
caffeine trace the outline of
gray piping
while cold water
crawls across prickly
pink pilular savior
color me ibuprofen
Monsters
control in the name of compassion
steal in the name of justice
kill in the name of health
We are legion
we will wipe ourselves off
the face of the earth
and the dark angels will
laugh in our faces
as we burn in shame
the only light for
those who see too clearly
the evils of the world
and no one will remember us
when we are gone.
i eat people who hate this song
morning is the scars of dew
it’s snowing i’m ready for none of it
keep putting oil in my beard
probably a poison kiss poisoned me
my name means inventor of christianity
was up late watching keanu murder
then rolled over, slept restless
light leaks into room i toss & turn
trying to steal more empty hours
as i approach the middle of life
i remain embraced by failure
constant companion whose presence
is all the more stark given that
everyone had expected such
great success from me
they were fucking fools
i fantasize about fantastic wealth
& being surrounded by perfect bodies
is what makes me broken
& unready to accept futurebreakings
life is just piss that comes out
it’s a pleasant sound
birds, screaming in the snow
trembling, forgetting why they’re they’re
*
paul hanson clark is a poet and multi-disciplinary artist living in nebraska.
Photograph from performance by Leif Holmstrand.
Goya’s Painting Of Nero’s Army Burning The Grove Of The Druids
A perfect hole between the blackening walls
Roman soldiers emerging from the leaking fogscape
And a conflagration of saints (like Christmas trees or fireworks)
Lighting the road homewards by flame
*
Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry, he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
behind each eyelid a dark seed sprouts
mustard leaves and pungent corpse flowers
half mashed I blossom into arms flung
up encircled as a nucleus
I breach and spill my encoded self
along a perimeter of girls
each crowned with twenty-three red feathers
and their eyes like televisions blare
no news but immediate pleasure
until I alight in a lecture
hall of pubescent design pillars
penile wild audience impatient
for the hanged man to dance above them
the stomach is the seat of the soul
they cry in one thick din upon my
eyes gone twitchy my toes splaying here
in the arena where I again
have retreated to the bodily
heat the deep engine we spend our days
smothering with sand scabbing over
slowly the oldest sand melts to glass
inside the twitchy earth we’ve ignored
the glass melts upward glares back the sky
Absalom
My heart cut from me, cut apart and tossed
into your cradle. I must have raised you
too eager
for the hiss of rain splitting a battlefield like glass,
too eager for the sight of Michael’s winged men, a clot
of sword-handed clouds spinning in the sky.
In this beautiful room where I, and not
your mother alone, birthed you. It’s gone black as the backs
of Adam’s eyes. Now you hang by your long hair gathered
under a sundered helmet, dripping rivers of red sweat. You are
too old for this, and yet, too young.
I watch horses walk along the windows.
I watch the headless woman carry urns of water.
I watch the gold throne melt like slime.
I watch my skin leave me like a wife.
I watch the sky turn into blemished sheepskin.
I watch you crawl toward me again.
mother_host body is
dear small pulpy flesh self named
& held design wrack light
i thought to love tenderly you body hard wept strewn
i thought to love protectdefendwrapped come along this treasure
i thought if i let joy spill
along the lines & edgedcaught throatgesturedstrung warp
i thought if not barter, not broke, not terror, not defend, myfetalbeatstrapped
i thought if i did not weave fear into the lace straightchasegonemad histrionic
i thought if i did let caress, slip, song, kiss, touch gentle we be
how would you spawnminemonsterghouls baby lipped
how you would not lovelyeyed cheek dimplesnout brave lone star
how would you survive here
if i did not tear you up by the root
as i have known
if i did not break you over the horizon
splitsunbreak guidedflame tofingerprint
if i did not whisper into your small seashellearcoiledworlddreaming
that all of this nightmares, that fear suckles best, that scarcebethiscoupling
how would you survive
as i have survived
if i did not teach you to drink from the poisonedwell
smiling won’t you be my baby
*
Punk rock sparrow
When the cats curl up on either side of the pile of clothes
it is quiet, I do zazen,
I imagine gliding over a frozen lake and not being able to land.
–or needing to–
Now Mr. Eliot, you’re right, spring hurts,
but you couldn’t help yourself,
you had to make it pretty (oh so pretty, vacant)
and you don’t care.
It hurts like a dying plum tree’s wild, shot-out medusa-hair
suckers blooming at the tip, birds landing all over it
to get to the feeder.
–pretty–
Don’t fucking coax me, you cunt–
but I see the emphatic golden dot behind
the white-throated sparrow’s eye
and I’m not stone.
On Saturnalia
I glow in a salted room
an old scream surrounded by wasps
Breezes tease the floor’s fruiting body
Dogs unbox shadows in the sea between them
Tesseract
panes sound a green organ hiss of folded earth
Soft depressions in compost mold thickening
as
the small hand’s tick drains my leaky leg
Soft gel glamour shots:
snapping cockle stanchioned in holly
The idea of a day is Hermaphroditic
Segmented worm
of gathering worms
enters and leaves me repeatedly
agape
in intramural storming
All
the doors on this street are the same shade
same hinge-bending load over all my coming
Averaged night on the tiles swollen full
In puce of dawn, desire like some thick and dirty glasses
I undress myself for ghosts of drink to dull its bite
*
Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diagram, Prelude, Conduit, Powderkeg, jubilat, Fence, and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Misrule (Ursus Americanus), as well as the collection Mary Oliver (Lithic Press, 2019).
Photograph from performance by Leif Holmstrand.
Declension
Politeness
Mires, burns with
Incandescent fire
Rosily blushes stone
Fruits and frolics through
Green—green—green
Gone blue.
I am acetylene sun
Flower
Reconverting unto virgin.
I am
Cherubim
Attending you.
I am haunt
Constitutes glue.
Dearest Sylvia—gold
Contortions making
Strict mask manifold—
I have become
Methane-hydrate:
Alive myth
Furbishing
Fire twinned ice.
is that what a body
“when the body grows cold and stiff like wood,
it has to be burned like wood”
– Keanu Reeves, in Little Buddha
is that what a body looks like
burning
flesh rising in long
strips of shredded
limbs white lego-
ribcage stacked
stayed home with language
i.
stayed home
stayed safe
stayed between languages like an old sheet
ghost-spectre drawn with dust
scared not a child
not one
turned a corner & longing leapt at my hem
dog-like
hem bleeding
him with his bleeding triggered my flood
I built a boat
language refugee on a curled paper boat
sentimental films hector’s theft facing a haitian geography shed legal through illegal neon all i want is a job all that electrocutes genitals the pleasure and the kids’s food flurries from the muffler hector the slave of minutiae makes elegance die with the magic of a begging hand for the mantra i love the way you put me in the big house i love the way you put me in the big house that the cops return and to rob for free all over the world obscene poem that i wrote remember me sunset boulevard buddy body what’s lethal breathes sentimental films to lose las enfermeras and find the doctor in hector the first the acidic theft facing a haitian geography shed legal through illegal all i want is a job neon to a vessel all that electrocutes genitals the pleasure the buttons falling off the clothes and the kids’s food flurries from the muffler fat tuesday hector the slave of minutiae makes elegance die with the magic of a begging hand for the mantra i love the way you put me in the big house i love the way you put me in the big house sentimental films to lose las enfermeras and find the doctor in hector the first the ditch the acidic theft a haitian geography shed legal through illegal all i want is a job neon the water swimmers all that electrocutes genitals the pleasure the buttons falling off the clothes body what’s lethal breathes hector slave making elegance die with the magic of a begging hand for the mantra i love the way you put me in the big house i love the way you put me in the big house the cops return to rob all the parts of the world in the poem that i wrote ashtray chica remember me sunset boulevard deadly body breathes remember me hector obscene dream where he wants to say he says without saying nada
Gauze Panther Mourning Period
I finally did it! I finally did it! No I did not,
I am sorry for lying, beast. I am sorry you’re dead,
especially in those parts you decried wilder in me
with your elemental mysteries: jigsaw stippled tongue,
your wild heart wilting, your sandpaper scalp under your hot fur,
your wild eulogizing brain engine we must’ve forced in you.
Even if I woke in the night to kill you
and found you dead, I would’ve waited for the sun with bated breath.
But I didn’t have that luxury. Even if I wake
mid-afternoon to the taste of your fetid wounds
and your dew claw digs into my shoulder distending from battle,
I will keep the tiny totem you I carved
curséd in my pocket. Bring you out
at the strange board meetings I attend
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 