Paul Cunningham is from Pittsburgh, PA. From the Swedish, he is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019). He has also translated two chapbooks by Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias Selected Poems (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2016) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, 2016). His creative and critical work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, Yalobusha Review, DIAGRAM, Bat City Review, and Omniverse. He edits Deluge, co-manages Radioactive Cloud, and co-founded the Yumfactory Reading Series. He is a Princeton INCH scholar, a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, and he holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame.
D:
In my day, I saw colors.
SL: Granted.
D: In my day, red was a color.
SL: Certainly.
D: Thus red was mine to see.
SL: Try again.
D: Colors imply vision. Red is a color. Presto! My vision endures.
SL: You really must let the argument take hold of you.
D: Every sight I shadow. Redness is a sight. Therefore redness depends on my
shadow.
SL: Colors soak in regardless. Red’s a color, so allow me to remove your
rose-colored glasses.
D: The redness becoming almost a texture cannot be worrisome because my
thoughts gain utmost dexterity.
SL: Let a thousand roses bloom. The cup now brimming with wine once stood
crimson in a kiln. So why not touch this burning coal to your lips?
*
Robert
Savino Oventile teaches English at Pasadena City College. He has published
interviews, essays, and book reviews in Postmodern
Culture, Jacket, symplokē,
and Chicago Quarterly Review, among
other journals. He is the author of Impossible
Reading: Idolatry and Diversity in Literature and of Satan’s Secret Daughters: The Muse as Daemon (both with the Davies
Group).
Sandy Florian was born in New York, New York, to parents of Colombian and Puerto Rican heritage and raised in Latin America. She now lives in Washington, DC. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University and her PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver. She has taught Creative Writing at various institutions, most recently West Virginia University. Besides having published creative work in over fifty journals (including Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, and Bombay Gin), Florian is the author of Telescope (Action Books), The Tree of No (Action Books), Prelude to Air From Water (Elixir Press), On Wonderland & Waste (Sidebrow Press), and Boxing the Compass (Noemi Press in collaboration with Letras Latinas).
(damaged diadem, I shine encrusted in your splendors)
what remains to me of you but these few
crazy verses of tongue and strum.
What but to annul the orifices
the segregation of silence
to idolize the determination
the overdetermination
destiny
to smear your contingency with interminable ceremonies
to love you, that is.
The tacit roaring still echoes between us
to love each other, did I say?
The problem is punctuation.
In quotation marks
I have you in quotation marks
or sometimes in parentheses I have you
faithful frenzy.
What remains to me but
the machinations of a transpiration:
the voracity of a song’s burden perverts presages
disparages the sound’s august surfaces
rends
the jingle falls through the declension of onomatopoeia
the obvious eats at the intricacies of the word,
prays.
The noises of a siesta
are like a siesta.
The word “indebted” was
one through crystallized
a song that murmured at my shoulders
it set my actions to music.
It never had sung, you’d say, it was the tone
in which my mother would name me
it never finished singing
it only would sing.
The father would cross women indexes with his annulling eye
it was the indicative mode for a maternal imperfect
preterite.
While
everything occurs while
(you never say while)
your brother would read Pound at the top of his lungs
out in any night weather
and you would translate Cervantes, just in case.
His hand on yours
his book on your book and the poem
sowing itself here below.
I am holding onto the arches, the retching
we have passed through knowing that we would not reach
the golden anniversary
and this arch or retch prior to all devolution or vomit
and the totalling of our encounter
the buckings, the accountings
the points of view
the points of divergence
dot, dot, dot
“Why aren’t we worrying about the dew?”
We won’t go to Verona or Elba
but still there remains to me,
what remains to me of you but these few
splendors soldering themselves in the conceit of a writing.
The underlining is mine.
What remains to me of you: the loved metonymy of the past.
Texts are foreign.
I have you on the tip of my Tongue.
* Susana Cerdá (1948-2010) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her poetry collection _Solia_ was published in 1988. Among other journal publications, she appeared frequently in the Argentine poetry journal _Xul_, edited by Jorge Santiago Perednik. Her work has also appeared in translation in English language journals and in the anthology _The Xul Reader_ (Roof Books).
Molly Weigel is a poet, translator, and therapist living in central New Jersey. Her version of Jorge Santiago Perednik’s Shock of the Lenders (Action Books) received the PEN Poetry in Translation Prize in 2013.
O little thing o tender tiny Parasite Hanging
from her slack breast The milk dribbling All the time he could not eat
Boneless body hanging in reddarkest silence In
untime suspended like Silkworm singing out the strands
In the distance Hear that thrash The kick of
waves accruing silt
Your heart is a bear with the den curled up
inside A red whorled abalone flesh All nestled up in opalesence
Signing out the strands of you Slow accretion
around that central irritant Softening the trauma
You
sit enshrined in muscle Slowly growing sentience Spindle raveling in silent
Fragmentaries
*
John Moore Williams has written three chapbooks: I discover i is an android (Trainwreck Press, 2008), writ10 (VUGG Books, 2008) and, with Matina L. Stamatakis, Xenomorphoia (Wheelhouse, 2009). He’s also published a full-length book of poetry, [+!] (Calliope Nerve, 2009), with Matina Stamatakis and Kane X. Faucher. Poems have appeared in Shampoo, Dear Sir, Otoliths, BlazeVox, and many others.
We’re doing pretty good at this thing, she said on the first day of my condition, one of us picks up the slack where the other drops off. I agreed (we were driving her Kia in a parking lot made of steak). Her face was shiny pink with balloons when the radio blew itself, and then, it started, raining. I puffed up like a marshmallow. My wife was worried about her parking, it was nice. The yellow lines were concerned about my tough cough though. Every time she moved her Kia wheels a clan of gnomes tittered out of the shadows. I chased them furtively down the meat until they crested the horizon, so cute, giggling.
The gnomes drove around haughtily the second day, they lived inside the plumbing of cars. They looked like a bowl of ping pong balls and smelled like my grandma’s cooking. I told her about my little friend Grandma this is my little body, my little spread for the gnomes to feast on. This is my girlfriend she knows how to back it up (her car). This is my adorable family. I’m seventy five— retired. Gnomes behind: the tires. Gnomes in my fluorescent nail beds. I’ve made my bed and now I have to tell lies in it.
Gnomes, and I’m addressing you all directly now, meet my girlfriend in the first gear. Meet the third day of my condition. Meet my car in a meat bikini. Don’t mistake my baby hands for magic beans. Don’t coagulate at the foot of my bed. My mouth is so consistently real that my foam teeth are expanding into my double brain. If I’m retired why do I have to deal? I’m so young and I’ll hunch over my desk? At my desk, droves of gnomes drove quietly up behind me, driven. Their white beards draped onto the back of my goose neck. What a, the gnomes looked down, lovely dress.
On the fourth day the gnomes began to leak. I tripped over a pile of meat and landed myself onto an erect spark plug, liberating a blast of gnomes from my gut. I handed the gnomes a mop and they politely cleaned up. What’s going on in there Snow White said my Grandma from inside the other room from inside her pot of potatoes. Grandma, we aren’t so different you and I. We are both too sick to drive. (God I just love my family, my little wife, who knows how to drive a Kia and even to look, good doing it. God I’m so incredibly young.)
It was the fifth day so I kneeled before the pantheon of gnomes and begged for their judicial mercy. They wanted to know the engine behind my narrative (ha ha, very funny gnomes). I was wearing my costume so as to more authentically perform my infection. Their miniature knuckles ah! Ah! Their miniature knuckles cracked contagiously. I put my hand on the holy book, my girlfriend had hand-packed me meat lunch. The gnomes were stroking their beards and at this point I winked emphatically. Please, I swear on my Grandma’s snow white hair that I’m a real one. Look at my Kia death drive. Look at me I’m barely legal.
* Audrey Lindemann wrote the pamphlet I have compiled 14 gay love poems (SPAM Press 2019). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Queen Mob’s Tea House, Ghost Parachute, Protean Magazine, and elsewhere.
It looked like it had been pulled half-finished out of a dream. Monstrous and stripped of flesh. It was almost gleaming in the early morning sun. With nothing to pick at, we soon began exploring its extremities. After trying for several hours to elicit some sort of response unsuccessfully, I slumped down beside it and watched the tide slowly come in. What the hell does it do? I asked the air. Our companion simply looked at us with a blank stare. When we boarded the ferry to take us here it was packed. But little by little, people must have gotten off. We didn’t realize it until we were the only two passengers left. When we reached the island, there was nothing else to do but disembark. But once we did, the ship disappeared.
Once we’d learned to work the bellows, the contraption kept quite a comfortable pace. We decided to pass all the subsequent days alongside it, walking amidst the tattered remains of cephalopods washed up dead along the shore. It kept the flies off, walking did. We bloat a little more each day beneath the vicious rays of the sun, which haven’t ceased since we began this journey. The few seabirds that remain light upon the contraption infrequently, doing so only momentarily before being scared into the air again as it wheezes forward into life. There’s a certain rhythm to its movements one finds quite pleasing. And the rocks in this locale are relatively soft underfoot.
It
was a hotel. The pool had singing waiters who would come around once in a while
only, bringing the drinks tray and setting it down next to you whilst they
sang.What did they sing? It was somebody’s birthday or maybe it was a national
event like a holiday only without flags. Funny thing about this hotel there
were no flags at all not anywhere.
It was August. Or maybe it was October, it was hard to tell under the dome just what time of year it was or time of day either, and the singing waiters never seemed to sleep though they did change costumes from time to time. I know it was a hotel because I got a bill once, and because the food was bad but the sheets were always clean and there were plenty of towels, at least on my floor. Were we going somewhere? I don’t think so, it was just time to spend a few days or years in a hotel, helping out with the singing and the drinks, and sewing a few flags for the poor flagless who had never had any.
We sewed many brilliant flags with interesting designs upon them and one thing I can tell you about these flags is that no presidents ever waved or wagged or walked upon or hugged them to a breast full of dead machinery. It was not that kind of hotel.
Burn the Right Things
I watched my hometown burn down slowly in the stinking fires of bank highrise parking Tunnel traffic design money synthesizing itself like that’s wealth I watched a life or three burn into loss of any semblance of self-deliverance, burning with that friction we get trained to bear as it consumes soul after soul I watched a lot of burning in my time so far and it’s always the wrong things burn, not the bad rule of governments not the earth cracking box store but poor people hearts and their houses and all of our trees I hang on hoping one day we’ll start burning the right things but so far we only eat our own smoke.
*
Kyla Houbolt lives and writes in Gastonia, NC. Her current work can be found at @luaz_poet | Linktree. When she’s not writing she is usually found gazing into treetops, trying to come to terms with all she’s seen. You are welcome to follow her on Twitter @luaz_poet.
You know I was beautiful. A river
bent with pain. A diseased koala trapped in the eucalyptus. Disfigured with
coke. A forest of burning trees. I want you exhausted and smelling my pussy off
your fingers as you deliver my eulogy.
I
have heard the voice of God or Jesus Christ.
The rain is coming. I just squashed
a spider in the bath.
I
have lived a righteous life!
The sky above me is closing.
A dagger in me.
* These three pieces by Rauan Klassnik are from A SLOW BOILING BEACH (Schism, 2019). Previous books include Holy Land (2008) and The Moon’s Jaw (2013), both from Black Ocean.
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.
“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,
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
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 