This is not a violin, it is a doorway. I know this, because I read a lot. My notes and references are usually very detailed breadcrumb paths. But, as Brion Gysin said, the mice can get into the larder of language (and I add to his point, memory). And, well… I have no control over legions of mice.
“This is is not a violin, it is a doorway.”
Continue reading “ReVerse Butcher: This is not a violin, it is a doorway”
We laugh like newlyweds
as you carry me over the threshold
into a house rife with the spirits
of former tenants-
a lonely caretaker, a childless couple,
a single mother-
their DNA peeling off the walls
like chipped paint.
After Listening to “Canvas”
One must know what it is to be in and out. How to properly enter and exit. “Properly,” not in the sense of the bourgeoisie or uppity, but in the sense in which Robert Farris Thompson wrote about. Writing as he did about the ways we be.
There are ways of being in and out.
But how to enter and where to be once inside and how to decide when to no longer remain—what makes those decisions, those moments?
Can we ever reach the inside without entering?
And can we reach the outside without exiting?
I paint to learn what my eyes barely see,
things hidden to me: cast shadows, a latch,
my mother’s ghost floating behind the drapes.
I study the image I shot, its hues and patterns:
copper door, stained windows, the stone of walls
and sun faded stone, the blur of a doorway’s curve.
Continue reading “Susan E. Gunter: Composition: Mixed Media”
I was thinking about Brutalism, cattle and passage tombs. Form, currency and death.
Walking the fields of North Cork and the headlands of Galway, casting cow-sheds as signs.
Homes for people, now homes for animals. Cycled forward by occupation, migration and forecasts. Radio broadcasts. Concrete and local stone piled into walls, supporting cold tin rooves. Corrugated steel. Cheap and functional, galvanised wave forms. Tin, iron and zinc combined and beaten thin. Weather resistant not weather proof.
My brother’s childhood room and mine connect through paired doors, at three different points. Walk out my room and and ten paces would take you to my brother’s door, next to the AC control, across from the panic button. We also shared a bathroom, each room opening onto the sinks where we would brush our hair, or teeth, or forget to, side by side. With both doors open, you could have seen from pillow to pillow if you tried hard. Continue reading “Dov Nelkin: 6 doors and One Slammed”
When
You wake
From sleep
You wake
From death
You know
Every Hour Hurts in Fall
By now, you have adjusted to time’s addition, waking
without alarm, your body’s sudden jolt of electricity—
your toes and fingers wiggle—eyelids flip open to stare
at the ceiling’s cold. You’re still here. Isn’t that crazy?
You want to get moving before you hold still, before
you find yourself between the flight of day & dream.
on being broken / like shards of withered glass / my body
repels every music its soul makes / i close every door i
can’t walk back through / by this i mean i keep memories
in a box of cigar / god tells me i am a chapel Continue reading “Adedayo Agarau: 3 poems”
The grass lies hungry, waiting
to swallow up water, worms,
seeds.
I scatter them. One by one
they are plunged into the
dampened fingers of fertile
earth,
The door opens to a married man, a single bed.
You’re not here, but your presence is everywhere. The bed is meticulous, signs you’ve been here are subtle, imagined, your outline dimpling the duvet, just a trace; Continue reading “Ben Gedaliah: Room 168, the Hotel S-“
Strange goings on today televisions walk in and out the door pills spew from the cat’s mouth
here take your medicine fox at the door yip yips pit bull chews a piece of Wonder Bread the skull
of a boar on the table the boy reaches through a hole in his bathroom floor the door is open the
window is open Continue reading “Rebecca Loudon: Portal”
From a jail in a far off island, boats arrive to
deport the sad. Grieving blood is tasty like the
legend of vanished rivers: an Acheron emptied
out by thirsty souls. Continue reading “Aditya Shankar: 2 poems”
Scarlet Ibis Variations
SACRED YOU
“…It’s mostly that album A Love Supreme. It feels sacred to me. I had a friend once tell me A Love Supreme is convincing evidence for the existence of God. And that’s really stuck in my head ’cause it’s a little bit true to me.” – John Green, in conversation with Ashley Ford and Kelly Stacy
As if the hands that built this were not so terribly human.
As if the stones are not the slightest bit uneven.
As if there is a waterfall somewhere that could kill this song.
As if the call of a bird is grander than all of the laughter we found.
Look, the stars are shimmering – their masses are exploding with joy. Continue reading “Umang Kalra: Sacred You & Me & My GF Will Change The World”
NOTES:
Three Yoga Poems, from the sequence Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha
‘Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha’ writes through the yoga manual Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha by Swami Satyananda Saraswati (Yoga Publications Trust, Munger, Bihar, India, fourth edition [2008]) and various news articles published in The Guardian in 2017.
Pranayama
‘the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE’: Charles Olson, Projective Verse (1950).
Mudra
1) ‘I suddenly see that the gesture of a hand could be a poem –
like the mark it might leave impressed in a surface.’
Scott Thurston, Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (2011), London: Veer
2) ‘I offer flowers’ from ‘Offering Flowers’ in Technicians of the Sacred (2017) ed. Jerome Rothenberg, Oakland, CA: University of California Press, p71.
Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha is part of the forthcoming chapbook, Atha, Knives Forks and Spoons Press (2019).
Sally-Shakti Willow researches, writes and performs utopian poetics as ritual to open up [r]evolutionary space for positive transformation. She teaches poetry and creative writing at the University of Westminster. Her poems have been published by Adjacent Pineapple, Eyewear, The Projectionist’s Playground and Zarf. Chapbooks to date: The Unfinished Dream (Sad Press, 2016) and Atha (forthcoming with Knives Forks and Spoons). Sally-Shakti’s other writings and reviews are published in The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, The Contemporary Small Press and Northern Review. Find her on Twitter: @Spaewitch
Eric Blix is the author of the story collection, Physically Alarming Men (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2017). His writing has appeared in Best Small Fictions, The Collagist, Caketrain, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he studies in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Utah. Eric’s work above are fragments from his novel-length prose collage, scrub lands—works in progress.
featured image: Ruby Anderson
Aaron Kent is a poet and the editor of the small press Broken Sleep Books. He is particularly interested in the films of Godzilla, and has recently given up coffee. He lives with his wife and their infant daughter. He really misses coffee. Twitter: @GodzillaKent
featured image: Bob Modem
We Make Our Instruments
Sitar is the prickle of a recent close-to-the-base
of-the-skull haircut tickling uncalloused fingers. Smooth
grapes on spiked vines—the thrumming heart beats
angry blood, in time, when the pressure elevates.
Calcification of heart-wood is how the tune is created.
Seasoning so sweet, incense swirl sounds these
tiny steps that expand slowly like the step of an animated
fairy. She blesses the room with ever-growing pink loops.
Perhaps, we have heard this and confused her hoops
of sound—the small swelling—the augmentation
of pink into magenta into mahogany as the expansion
of our minds.
And sound does work in this way.
Reverberations change the bearer. The weight of sound
waves are manipulated by air, by ear, by the redwood
walls, by the differentiation of instrument. The string.
Slip and stick. Contact the conifer slick. Heart to palm
rounded vehicles in glass cases, waiting to be touched.
The weight of balance on the bow. The density floods
a linearity of grain, or orientation of rings in her trunk.
A bow’s construction. Heat curves. Time wears
finger-grooves into her ample body. 150 taut hairs.
The timing on goat skin, donkey teeth—the weather
across California’s forests and cities. A reliance on
exhumation of rosewood, pernambuco, blackwood.
The skill of the mouth, the precise shape of the teeth
larynx, fine ear-structures—the blessing offered by
the specific elder to the thick elder at the time
She fell—
Once sound starts a journey, does it change the
circumstances?
The inevitable die-out which dampens this quality changes
the heart curves on each wave—pumps blood. Bursts the
ventricles. Drives a thick ginger residue spike through
the temple. Then, alleviates with chamomile resonance.
Titian once made the shadow under my eyes famous
toxic—an exported harvest that reclassified unique
sunlight blooms into beans that oxidize with age. Ages
crumble into the dust we made with our heaving bellies.
Our trees have become instruments—hot bows and gut.
As we boil with them, we suffocate.
No Chicken
She gets the precooked
carcass from the supermarket.
It shares her stature—neck
bobbed and folded. Her grin
is the thick slope of one leg.
She cracks
wing from
slick body—burnt
footless creature; no face—no eyes
to face. Hacked off at the neck. No, face this
meal. She wears
the title—face. No running
from this meat. Grotesque
eloquence in her slashing
lips. Fingers slide. No
running from this, meat.
Nails heavy with the shining
luster of gristle. She gouges out
from tooth. This creature’s salt
fills her cells—changing her to
flesh both gaping and unreliable.
No chicken.
Kari A. Flickinger’s poetry and short stories have been published in or are forthcoming from Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Ghost City Review, Eunoia Review, Riddled with Arrows, Moonchild Magazine, Quiet Storm, and Panoply, among others. She is an alumna of UC Berkeley. When she is not writing, she can be found playing guitar and singing to her unreasonably large Highlander cat, as well as obsessively over-analyzing the details of neighboring trees.
Twitter: @KariFlickinger
featured image: Ellie Anderson-Hawkins
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 