Before I met Esther I lived only in rooms and rarely did I go outside them. Primarily I occupied one, the square room with the fermented red walls. The rough white windowsill failed to enliven the red-walled room, but with an ashtray, a flashlight, the white paint dabbed on glass like a lost animal’s track, the place approximated the idea of home.
I had a hot plate and would turn it on just to watch it glow. Continue reading “Pretty Secret by Derick Dupré”
Violet laughter shot into the room via the two-and-a-half-inch gap generously yielded by the suicide prevention windows in the award-winning, architect-designed, university halls I rather reluctantly found myself in. (I’ve always had a thing about Wisconsin.)
Hen nights, pissheads, ravers, and druggies ensconced outside the Co-Op. “Can you spare any change, love?” (How often you’d use the word transcend.)
Continue reading “Wisconsin by Sam Lou Talbot”
Dispatch From an Altered State
this place is a contagion: I can’t
read here: only
despair: no time remains for new words: only old
obscenities: only enemies
are recognizable: their animus flares: their crabbed
hands pluck at my dis-ease: I lie
under heavy blankets, red raw railing—
Continue reading “Three poems by Jude Marr”
When I first visited my father J in Berkeley in the 70s, Jerry Brown was governor, and he gave a state address, in which he said “I was thinking about the problems we are facing so I decided to listen to whale sounds, which I will play you now.” I laughed with J and his second wife, but was uneasy. A Northeastern teenager surrounded by palm trees and a whale-sound-playing governor. Continue reading “Memoriam by Julia Lee Barclay-Morton”
Each eyelash severs me. One of them blinks and I am undone. I, whose mind leaps daily, o disciplined masochist, to the grief of parents who’ve lost children. I think of all those young eyes that will forever remain closed, never see their parents again, or be seen again, looked in the eye again by those who loved them. Continue reading “Shield by Matthew Jakubowski”
I would like to acknowledge the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, and pay respect to their Elders, past and present, and extend that respect to other Aboriginal people here today.
I acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded and send a plea to you to continue to work within your communities to decolonise our political and educational systems, the media, the arts and our society at large. I urge you to move together towards establishing recognition, treaty, self-determination and rightful representation in the governance of this land. Continue reading “Charlotte Olayinka’s launch speech for Tony Messenger’s “Poems to be found in the desert””
Dementia
come to mind cloud
come to cloud mind – Marie Ponsot
& every now
& then,
i sit by her feet, on her porch
never ever talking.
& together,
we watch the soughing
heavens mutter, str-
etching their
cotton-silvers
in lulls & retorts
of
nearly went & nearly wait
– crossed & crossed all over.
I probably shouldn’t write this.
Reading Faulkner on a balcony in Melbourne. A cold morning, as they usually are. Yesterday read Joyce by the bay, feet bare, the sand chilly and soft as snow, thinking that maybe we will have kidney. We? Who is we? You are not here and, last I heard, you are afraid I will find someone else in these small days.
I sit on the balcony with a hot coffee and a story about a funeral. Baudelaire in the suitcase. In pain and I can’t concentrate, let me tell you why. I am on street level, rocking back in a dirty weatherproof chair. Messy empty bed in the room behind me. A woman stands in the sun across the road, hoody on, smoking a cigarette fussily and checking her phone. I shouldn’t write this because these are secrets I wouldn’t tell anyone. Continue reading “Faulkner on the Balcony by Tristan Foster”
There are familiar streets where I walk often. I know them as well as my home, yet every day I notice small differences – changes in the light or weather, a shift of angle, something dropped or spilled – and most days I take a few photos.
There are unfamiliar streets where I travel watchfully. I have a poor sense of direction and am easily lost. I look for small things – the colours of a poster, the shapes of a tree, a pattern of cracks in a wall – to mark my way. I take quick pictures to locate myself, as if leaving a trail of thread or a sprinkling of crumbs along the path.
Sometimes, from the corner of my eye, I see a shape or pattern and have a sense of how it might look reflected back on itself, as in a pool or mirror. When I get home I copy and flip the image and join the two together. The results are never quite what I expected – more strange and complex, they often have the look of characters from untold stories, misremembered folk tales, a lost tarot. Continue reading “Street Goddesses by Mary Frances”
ii.
There’s no Hippocratic Oath for vets;
in this world a man is what morals make him. I’m indentured to a thug
with a pocket full of mobile phones,
two weeks into a handshake pact of pills and powders.
I’ve been paid to wait, collude
in the plaza haze, my feet
kicking alleys of August wind.
Perched on a stool in Calle Melo’s limestone glower,
watching ocean and sea blur in the Strait.
I’m doling tablets to door knocks,
cutting chorizo with a necktie knife; listing
on a nightly lullaby of horse tranquillisers.
I breathe in the dry air, breath out
a stem of opioid desire
and settle at the bar,
petals in my mouth.
This is my last night swallowing broken Spanish,
feet on the solstice line
a half step ahead of winter shade.
The ferries from Morocco
are on endless loop, red hulls
split sky and sea.
Continue reading “Last of the Barbary Lions and other poems; a haibun sequence by Rico Craig”
like guys with a video game’s dimension. I think about Parasite
Eve this way. Its rich antagonisms are feminine, animal,
familial, bodily, savvy, fractured, abstract. It contains a
squirrel.
You see how rarely I like a guy.
Continue reading “Lacquer Garden by Joseph Spece”
ROAD #46 – FOLLIS AVE. TIME: 10:45 PM. WEATHER: DRIZZLING. PAVEMENT STATE: SOLID / NO CRACKS OR BREAKS / CLEAN OF DEBRIS.
[ Darkness uncovers certain predictions in the trees. The grey breath of the stars and moon show me the surrounding area, heavily forested; thick green hovers above the ground, the leaves healthy, hearty for summer. Coyotes can be heard faintly behind the treeline. A quick walk works up a sweat. Temperature outside recorded at 81 degrees Fahrenheit. Small mice skitter just out of reach in the ditch. No homes can be found, though lights in the distance betray somebody or something. Maybe a porch. Smell a campfire nearby. Smell no voices. Continue reading “Schedule of Somnambulist Roads #46 – #49 by Alec Ivan Fugate”
— Minerals are naturally occurring solids of uniform chemical composition. Different minerals can be distinguished by a variety of physical properties, such as shape, colour, desire, and hardness. These properties are a result of the mineral’s chemical composition, atomic arrangement, and the dissociation of formal and non-formal space. Minerals are building blocks of all rocks. The world’s economy depends to a large extent on our mineral resources. Continue reading “A Soft Taxonomy of Rocks by Rachael de Moravia”
…bled speeches from dead ocular of throughout final carve of turn of in breathless to absorb it of in no longer of in what nor of throughout a pageant taint steel drawn as if to pass through slash mark unto forage nothing there as all what fallen is scattered seed of exhale burn in pit of nothing ever have in or which collapsed before lest broken nothing to claim ocular roving no longer it what stun in rat of feel of broken tabulets of skins flung to dog’s devour where null vacant eye cannot from denizen of passage present nothing as before once travailed through reek what matter solace of detritus dreamed of laconic shadows breaking Continue reading “3 Sketches from “cold zero reflect” by Michael Mc Aloran”
From FIELDS OF VIOLENCE: A TRANSCRIPT OF A DOCUMENTARY ON THE ONGOING FARM CRISIS
FOREWORD
The necrotic underside of the history of the Farm Crisis lives on in the Heartland and in the mind of the landscape, whose pulsating synapses and rhizomes absorb nitrogen nourished by the prairie soil under the watchful eye of high harvest––a time of year of reaping that steals as much as it proffers, withholding the promise of a dream that never existed but did, at one time, grow faith. In another existence. Somewhere between the dream and the dead, blood red tinges the borders of everything. A woman and a man put their hands together like arrows pointed up toward some augury that will never come and when it doesn’t, they forgive the augur. Why? Continue reading “An excerpt from Fields of Violence by Julia Madsen”
Get Shredded
Get ripped and speak it, be it and live it. Time goes by way too fast to wake up the fibres early. It means bowing to our weaknesses, getting bromotional at some points. I’m in the same position at 35-years-old: body of a Greek god, the mind of a Spartan, music sounds like anime. Legend has it that if you stare at Jeff’s biceps for long enough, then thick deep veins and you embrace the blood flow restriction machine. Continue reading “7 Day Workout Plan: A Lesson in Shreducation”
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Conscious Dark in Vertebrates: Sleep and Sleeplessness
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Av. Paulo Gama, 110 – Farroupilha, Porto Alegre – RS, 90040-060, Brasil
Received Date: June 04, 2018; Accepted Date: June 21, 2018; Published Date: July 2, 2018
Citation: Eduardo CRL, Almeida DA, Da Cruz A, Steiner F, Greenhall L (2017). Conscious Dark in Vertebrates: Sleep and Sleeplessness. International Journal of Science and Arts, 4:2. doi: 11.1266/9945-3210.5499714 Continue reading “Conscious Dark in Vertebrates by Jason Kane”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
The Colossus of Estacada by Matthew Spencer
The name misleads, slightly, and was coined for marketing purposes. In fact, the bronze figure measures thirteen feet tall—outsized, monumental perhaps, but not colossal. It stands contrapposto with one hand outstretched, palm inward, as if beckoning the visitor to approach. A thin but charitable smile creases the face, although patina has rendered the expression somewhat difficult to read, as have the iron security bars installed to ward off scrap hunters. Continue reading “The Colossus of Estacada by Matthew Spencer” →
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