Edited By Nick Piombino - Goodreads

Edited By Nick Piombino

OCHO #21
Edited by Nick Piombino
A Publication of
OCHO IS MIPOESIAS PRINT COMPANION
www.mipoesias.com
Bloomington, Illinois
Copyright © January 2009 OCHO Contributors
Cover art by Toni Simon
3

Featuring
Introduction by Nick Piombino 7
Laynie Browne 9
Abigail Child 20
Joe Elliot 37
Laura Elrick 49
Elizabeth Fodaski 55
Joanna Fuhrman 74
Anthony Hawley 80
Drew Gardner 85
Jessica Grim 102
Michael Lally 115
Douglas Messerli 133
Bill Marsh 142
Christina Strong 149
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino 160
Contributor Bios 169
5

Dedicated to the memory of Emma Bee Bernstein
6

Introduction
“Long stone streets inanimate, repetitive machine Crash
cookie cutting
dynamo rows of soulless replica Similitudes brooding
tank-like in Army Depots
Exactly the same exactly the same exactly the same with
no purpose but grimness
& overwhelming force of robot obsession, our slaves are
not alive
& we become their sameness as they surround us—the long stone
streets inanimate...”
—Allen Ginsberg/ The Fall of America
As the pressures of contemporary existence grow ever more
complex, demanding and inexorable, artistic responses to oppressive
social and internal experience have struggled to display and
disassemble the links that artificially control and bind us. Kafka's
beetle, Orwell's Big Brother, PK Dick's androids, TS Eliot's “patient
etherized upon a table”, Ashbery's “Leaving the Atocha Station...steel
infected bumps the screws everywhere...Time, progress and good
sense”, Gertrude Stein's; “I am I because my little dog knows me but,
creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your
recognizing that he knows, that is what destroys creation”, all evoke
representations of the mechanized, robotic and mindless conformism
of much contemporary life. While journalists, politicians,
psychologists, psychoanalysts and sociologists uncover, analyze and
suggest ways to remediate the symptoms and causes of such reduced
efficacy of human will, it is left to poets, writers, film makers,
playwrights and artists to reveal and to dramatically portray, in its
many dimensions, the way individuals cope, react, get wounded and
occasionally transcend such encroaching, mechanized deadening of
the human spirit.
Evocations of such numbing and paralyzing social forces abound in
this issue of OCHO. Laynie Browne's “metallic chatter”, Abigail
Child's “Too many machines/head pieces attached”, Joe Elliot’s
“When I fell into the air/ your telephone was in slow motion/and
the city said 'I am machine!'”, Laura Elrick's “pile of tulip-covered
7

abies”, Elizabeth Fodaski's “Special deliveries hand/picked on the
assembly/line”, Joanna Fuhrman's "be aware that robot leaders are
always blind", Anthony Hawley's “the radio/doesn't work”, Drew
Gardner's “Silence as a gesture is not pornographic/with all the wires
and parts that are inside”, Jessica Grim's “Science ungrounds
and/washes against us in the horrible/tide”, Michael Lally's “white
girls hopelessly in bondage”, Bill Marsh's “trapdoor/of metaphor”,
Douglas Messerli's “Which isn't to say/pleasure exactly screws the
head tight to memory", Christina Strong's “Special machine-code.
Had to/offer/it”, and finally, Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino's
“clothespin soldiers/marching in place” all attest to the
contemporary poet's abiding concern with depicting and transcending
the injurious effects of today's steel hardened, impersonal culture. As
machines replace traditionally human functions, many people
unconsciously, and others quite consciously, strive to become more
like them, a process I once termed “machine envy.”
While cultural distancing, social derealization, corporate
confabulation and synthetic substitution drive and lure so many
towards an ever more mechanized and soulless existence, outspoken,
inventive poets like those in this issue of OCHO are working
energetically to redirect themselves and us towards the pleasures and
pains of thinking for ourselves, and the spontaneous and generative
living that is the gift of insight.
Nick Piombino
December, 2008
8

from The Ivory Hour
Laynie Browne
A future Memoir
Instructions for Latecomers:
or
“When” Is the reader: A Time-Based Interactive Preface
(The Invisible Child Speaks)
1. Time is not innocent or separate. It is our inheritance.
2. Somewhere else is a perverse intersection which does not exist.
You may swing your arms now, or not at all.
3. Who will speak this pre text? I am speaking because you don’t
know yet if you can trust me.
4. Where is the place where text ends and one begins?
5. What cannot be written is the reason you exist not only in text but
in a body and on the body of a living sphere.
6. Characters speak across centuries/cultures. Texts converse.
Comics/kids’art hurled into conversation with the dead. The sacred
and the secular share a cup of tea.
7. The plight of the characters is that they are all in conversation
with texts and not with persons.
8. This is also everybody’s spiritual memoir.
9. Text consumes something as it enters and later becomes what it
dreams.
10. Dream is the other garment of time.
9

11. Letters.(or character) are also postures which—in various
sequences—may send a message.
12. The weight of inheritance is in time and not in things.
Reformulate this statement to foreground the physical world.
13. We are all latecomers to the future.
Alternate Preface: by The Invisible Child
Forgive me for beginning again. It is all I know how to do.
Please sign your name here. ____________________________.
Then impress your desires upon the page in any language or century.
Please make room within this passage for any who might arrive.
There is extra bedding in your ambient thought. I can see that you
are tired. This is no surprise considering that you have been existing
in a century of preludes akin to natural disaster. Recline here while
you consider that this alternate entrance has been ascribed exactly for
your comfort. Who can see a thing when one has become it?
Everything begins with your passage here. Without you it ceases to
exist.
Like a child who believes her eyelashes will protect her from the
dangers of looking directly into the sun I must admit something. I
have been gazing directly at my undoing. Without seeing it. Are you
surprised? Are you running across the surface? That is one way.
Someone is speaking to you — sitting across from you at an intimate
table.
Every such table in the world began with concentration. There must
be the legged and the legless and the eight-legged horse of Thor. As
you wish so you shall proceed. Over a cup or the back of any animal.
It makes little difference to me. As long as you send me your
coordinates I will happily coincide.
By whichever mode come inside this volume of possible
undertakings and undertake something. Here is a glimpse at what
you may find: Space Rangers with missions and without. An Institute
in the process of instituting something. Meta-amorous adventures.
10

Reincarnation. The cost of these draperies we call sky. Reasons for
my invisibility. An inherent inheritance.
PC:
HJ:
Book One: Gray (Children of Accident)
Buzz
Buzz purposefully sets out to work.
It was but a question of leaving his own contracted vehicle, of
landing upon unstable terrain, thus any terrain consisting of others
and their insupportable unreliability, of crossing his own protective
threshold to step out to the gate, which even with the deliberate step
of a truly capable being he could reach in three or four minutes. So,
making no other preparation than to lift his clear visor he made his
way in heavy white boots with ample blinking gadgets attached to his
person.
(end HJ)
While he walked he considered the health of the Institute,
thus being his work, his unstable terrain, and the possibility that his
project would be lost and again supplanted. His greatest ally, a virtual
companion, was in the midst of completing crucial computations and
would soon expire. And upon these computations would rely the
weight of such an inheritance – he tried not to focus upon its weight.
To whom would this project be given? And yet this was not all, his
vision it seemed was unbound by finite forms, by reason. He was
consumed with possibility, delighted by the prospect of what he had
already intrinsically inherited. All forms appeared to him possible. In
his solitary state he also pondered one and another alliance which
might make his future research possible. And while these concerns
were true and pressing it was also true that his finer interest upon this
particular day was to do with the eminent arrival of Gray.
Nonetheless appearing as usual in the midst of a quarrel between two
co-workers Buzz repeated his usual refrain: “I come in peace.”
11

The common din of the place, metallic chatter, the unwashed
windows and the slumped posture of postulates about their
microscopes and computers seemed to inform him however that
there had been as of yet no arrival.
His person therefore, not certain where to affix itself,
bumbled amiably about for some time, literally bumping edges as he
passed. He landed upon a large stool and began speaking through
various channels to his co-workers.
“Mother of all cells.”
“Pass me some basic definitions please.”
“Biological repair system, status?”
“Theoretically, will divide without limit to replenish.”
“Did each daughter cell remain, or adopt a specialized role?”
“Controlling this differentiation process is—.”
“Excuse me?”
“Controlling this differentiation process is still—.”
“Is? Is it operable? Now is it?”
“Controlling this differentiation process is still—?”
“In question.”
Buzz
All research is related to probing. To the absence of what is known.
Following the curvature of a distant body. Untouched. I stood back
and fell into reason. Reason and its relation to non-reason. Reality
and it’s opposite. Both escorts wallowing accordingly at my sides.
One with computation, the other pouring something into a glass and
beckoning me to drink. Such charming assistants. Dare I say, I need
no corporeal accompaniment? I am wrong and also blameless. I am
worthy and without counsel. Please arrive and counsel me. You who
think I am your counselor. The assumed is interchangeable with the
unknown. And the unknown may become known as quickly as a
person enters the room.
I want to make sense of the code of entanglements. Genetically
entrenched code which combs my speech, moving between
embankments. The text of the code in which I live. So I laugh. Am
I burdening you? I might ask him when he arrives. With this coat of
many converts. White coat, besmirched with investigations. Come,
investigate me. Now I must sit down upon this pile of undesignated
beakers. Break something which once was beholden.
12

Containing nothing. Am I to walk? What is arrival? Meanwhile,
doctors in Perth are embarking on new research to determine, as I
pace my own resignation, early signs of cancer detected in a breath
test. Funding, write a grant in my sleep? Another perch. Meanwhile,
we fall behind the rest of the world if we do not pass additional
legislation allowing somatic cell nuclear transfusion. Where are the
breathtaking benefits, he might ask. Have a seat and I will tell.
Consider the breathtaking benefits of deciphering the code in which
you live. Determined in strings of letters.
I want to make sense of walking embattlements, passing obligatory
mandates, exemplary research assistants, impeccable laboratory
facilities. The safest and most up to date. Will none of this impel
him? I will offer him a drink, a taste of what is at stake, the
staggering list of proponents. The hidden history of the Institute
which must not be hurried in confession. But what is at stake? I will
sit and assess the numbers. Numbers are elemental. Certainly a body
is sincere arriving in mere particles, but evidenced present and
substantially divine.
He took himself from the premises to walk where along the way he
would be wanted with all of those assembled for a similar purpose.
He arrived beyond the morning after some confiding along
the long lean strip of highway— far from his destination. To his own
taciturn notebook he spoke, and the riveted oral recorder took this
down, including all of the pauses and breaths he took as he
articulated his thought. Until his attention was broken by another
walking to recant or perhaps recoil a direction.
“Hello Zurg.” He looked up, unaccountably interrupted.
In an instant Zurg had assessed Buzz, looking down,
distracted, unblinking and not exuding the usual assurance which
Zurg both admired and resented. Usually he had the type of
composure only possible for the self-contained innocent. Today he
was deliberate. Speaking in low tones. And, given their history Zurg
was going to probe. Both of them knew it and only Zurg was glad of
it.
He fell into step with Buzz. Borrowed his form audibly as he
walked. Not asking anything first but simply observing. And then.
“The project ?” — he began, safely, or so he thought.
13

“Yes, the mother cells they are not yet, or —we are not yet
certain of the daughters, of their whereabouts— of their—“ how
shall I put it, he wondered, and paused. “Of their choices.” He
smiled and was back again upon his former terrain.
Not the right question thought Zurg. Again silent. And
then, “Won’t you walk back with me? We’ll be expected shortly.
Starla sent me out to find you. “
“Yes.” As they moved down the leaner still strip of highway
they soon entered the virtual countryside, or as it was now more
often called the Future-View. It began with a cunning dark lake upon
which appeared small glossy boats and persons of all ages attired for
summer. As they continued the mock season changed to secure
skaters and snow. “Will we ever get used to it?” he asked.
“It’s all we’ve ever known.”
“Not — natural,” he said through his teeth, hoping to end
the volley.
“Much better to look at than what remains beneath.”
“Yes, the veneer.” His look dropped again.
Zurg was like Buzz in that he was replete with constant
plans, though his differed in that one might call them campaigns
rather than aspirations. “Starla said she would have liked to join us
but that she is held up at the Institute in preparations and she is
wanting to hear from you. Especially about the arrival of your
protégé. We’re all very much looking forward to seeing him.”
Without realizing himself that he had done so, Buzz stopped
moving. How was it that all of these others had some claim, some
opinion, some anticipation? The somewhat absurd arrow he
stunningly felt was that he had no desire for Gray to meet all of these
persons.
Zurg was noting Buzz’s face, saying nothing at all. So this is
the note, he thought.
“I have just heard of it myself, and have not yet seen him.”
Zurg smiled. “Of course this morning he arrived at the
transport. Starla would like him to dinner tonight. If you agree.”
“What particular interest does she take in him” he asked
somewhat stirred but still maintaining a forced semblance of his
former containment.
Zurg replied “I believe at the Endocardium Station furthest
quadrant abroad she met him— but then as I remember it, it wasn’t
him was it? She met some colleague or relation of his. She knows all
14

about him through a correspondence with this friend, and he
apparently has taken up an interest in her—.”
“Gray— has taken an interest?”
“Starla herself will tell you all about this relation. That would
be better I think.” Zurg was quiet a moment and then continued,
“But I must confess I am no less interested in his arrival and the
question of what part, if any, he will be given of the project.”
Buzz stopped and stood gazing at the veneer. Obliging
himself to speak, he began hesitantly, “I want to talk to you. I trust
you.” There was a limp, or a lilt to this admission. They were both
aware of the strain but Buzz was determined. They took seats upon a
rock ledge at an overlook, spontaneously, as they had done so many
times.
“I’m not trustworthy,” protested Zurg.
“You must be.” At this they both looked away from each
other somewhat deliberately.
And then Zurg began bluntly, “What awful thing did you
do?”
“Subtlety?”
“ Tell me.”
“In fact, nothing.”
“Which was?”
“He had a choice— all of this,” he offered limply gesturing
back toward the Institute, “in effect, or to leave.”
“He?”
“Gray.”
“Meaning?”
“I had some influence,” He paused, and then quietly, “ I
convinced him.”
“Convinced him, why?”
“To protect him. I had him written out of the prospect.”
“And what is the story of this influence?”
“No different than the story of boys admiring boys.”
“That is all you say, after telling me I am trustworthy?”
Buzz did not reply.
Zurg could break a silence. Could break many things. “And
didn’t you know” he continued “that the best way to inspire trust is
to confide?” At this he confidently rested, feeling assured.
“Stories make the world.” Buzz offered.
“Yes, they do. And I wish to hear this one. And not so very
abstractly.”
15

There was no reason for secrecy, only his keen sense of not
wishing to delve. “Our families were friends. I was older. I am
older. Still.
“And?:
“There was an instant recognition. No preliminaries.
Whatever I was faced with in that time, there he was, and not at all
interested in becoming one of a flock”
“A unique friendship?”
“You could say that.”
“Your feelings were returned?”
“That is a question I could not entirely explore, considering
the circumstances.”
“Circumstances?”
“I felt responsible. To help him see what was before him.”
“As to what lies beneath the veneer.”
“In a way. ”
“You had him written out and now you have once again
interfered on his behalf?”
“I went to my mentor and encouraged him .”
“And therefore he may be better equipped than any to pick
up where we have, shall we say muddled?”
“Yes, he is uncontaminated by our view.”
“You mean our superficial false lookout,” Zurg said pointing
to the distant lake.
“My thoughts exactly. And I will call upon you to help me
preserve his unusual vantage. We all will need to see as he sees.”
“And is the arrangement complete?”
“It soon will be. If Gray agrees.”
“Then what do you fear?”
Buzz paused, knowing it would be difficult for Zurg to see.
He answered calmly, as if in antidote to all he felt, “What I fear is —
my success.”
Zurg
He came from the back, the outer portion of what would seem to be
outer space to those who had seen him arrive, alien to the sun, with
pasty skin and yards and yards of secondhand trench coat. Black
sunglasses and hair stiff with gel. But he soon learned to wear a
white t-shirt as well as anyone, to find more fashionable sunglasses at
the drugstore and to choose the right hairdresser. All he had to do
16

was find the man with a decent haircut himself. He could not have
relied upon his own powers of description to imply the subtle shape
suggested by his head, which was always a shade ahead of his body,
poking ably, nimbly into crevices where he imagined might lie the
greatest richness of information. How to become, was what he
coveted. And he eagerly though cynically read every pitch, every
spam, every form, every notice which might lead him to the
possibility of anything he did not currently possess. So mistakenly he
took to the dream of possessing all that there was. Though he did
notice this wasn’t helping him, there was always the prospect of
more, and the possibility that more would lead to more.
Starla
(Looking at photograph of Gray— on a computer screen).
Hair falling down upon his face. So this is what it looks like. Chosen
for his eyes. Was that rude of me? A person — must look like —
something.
That is a lie. Honesty is something. But is it? Not more than you
already have (let them down). All we can be is. It is a myth.
Something lost.
Why some meetings so momentous and others so deflating—which
will it be? He read from the oral recorder. One of those nether
voices.
But in person __________?
Do I write in prose or allow myself to disintegrate into particles,
obstacles, familiar beings, work to or therefore, folding fixatives—fall
into a personality?
Did I do the right thing my sleepy paramour, involving a grill, a
youth, all day Future View gaming, or a certain look about looking at
looking out and then the interest begins and will evolve to a move.
This is all about absence or doors closed, lights out listening to all of
that noise instead of sleep. To be out in the night, in fog, it is cold.
Why don’t I have a view? When will I have my own speedway or
room or time or even a body which moves freely despite
expectations?
17

I’m still being considered. I’m looking at happiness. What does this
mean? Difficult. I become swallowed. Perhaps I should practice
now. when there is time. There is time. I will order, erect and erase.
They will build a dynasty of genes.
The lists are long and if you’ve ever left one environment for
another, you might understand. In certain circumstances garments
can shield me from an emotional setting. The inadequacy which
really is not about the way you appear, the long arc in your nose, the
sun-glorified skin. Your social manner being to retreat, to watch to
listen. Not at all like mine.
Scent of —is it your voice or your face and the lack of being able to
add comfort — is said to disintegrate upon your gaze — so all I ask
— to be greeted gladly.
Starla
She enters a hallway, snapped into reverential, pay attention to the
toxins please, and co- workers. Thought-melding.
Speaking, the ventillation shifted. As she listened to her onlooker,
into the mouth in which a wave of unthinking colors is permitted to
ensue. As usual he is leering. A century of leering, she counters. Am
I nothing else then?
Tech Person A
I don’t have an engagement, but I do have a flying vehicle
Starla
Meaning what? That you are engaged — to move quickly?
Tech Person A
Colors, And you are moving between such quadrants, I hear. I just
don’t see you there. In the heat. Pauses for effect.
18

Starla
Smiles, somewhat visciously. Thinks, he seemed reasonable. Quick
mouth, red-toned verbiage. And yet. Actually, she says, I’ve just
come for the daughter cells.
Mineral vial? She offers.
Tech Person A
You’ll find the cells there (he points toward a bank of colonies)
Starla
Moves away toward the cells.
19

DEMON: First Variant
Associational systems
Abigail Child
Become more complex unavoidably love
Two twos or
lack
Give it to live
In metrical drag
Trajectory of
hypnotist tears
Tears
The
A criminal touch
Too obtuse
Fluffiness
Subjectivity
Midwest topographies
Rubber lips
me you
we us
body
20

out of a bottle
Wall round
Margarita
Rand Mc Nally
Associational
ifs and boots bed body bred
body be
Not
Humanoid
Salon style merchandise regarding stainless document borders
Shady stars
Who pants forgivingly?
Today
opened
I’m capsizing
Blacky with night
White shirt
strays
happily
“engram”
That’s what
21

Adding objects and
We propose
literacy
“Men” make history
future
A substructure
An alternative
unreserved because my
pay is mild
—with dismal prettiness
entanglement
on bon mot
afterlife
We
fragrant
lingering
perfumed
conscience
goes for world
Pride goeth
greasy
double
Negativity
not (Pinkish ness) unless
22

Gyno Colonoscopy
Which is a certain kind of disinfectant
For a patient body
Undergoing
Huge coolness
Play for pay
weighing
Shaped gently
Lightly
This, as in possible
All that can do language
Out of gravity and certain dry goods green glow
Un specialized
Politically speaking
into your chair arm
Is this horrid?
law?
Or ignore
War
They were never out of ear
Under growth
abruptly heaving
Fear to take sky
to hind sight
Does it refuge
23

Quick-witted crowd lunging beer
Thread-pulling unpredictable
From the m-form
Recollect
Light
of our social
Dads are us.
Daft drifts diffuse
Narratively
She was tissue
ice
Escaping aftertaste
inner strength
personae
stretched And in pillars
phantasmagorias, attitudinal
Fend
feed
forgetful Biomorphic
STARSHIP
glimmering red-hot
speaking inwardly
Layers
held plump
EMPIRE
Non –
extends outward
24

R and B solos
Yodeling
Leisure
Ouija
obscured invariable world simmers suddenly so—
hopeful
Conceptualists’
Pass
you skip
And the cool of the world well that’s
a rotten
Onto
mind security (boringly pour the juice
Misrecognized able
It wasn’t she said as in
And my body
attach
Test content for
Embrace
Networked
Value
Took flight
Against moment
(o ear
25

As if) she’s eaten
As if
As if
Layman
Lay woman
chaotic
Lips close up
I really wanted to toy
Something special
Veering Naïve
spotted
growth
distracted
Happiness
companion
or cruel
rigid establishment character
Anti-sound My woman
Imperious
Empyrean
without attention
going weedy
tabletop
builds up
26

lay out devastation
Armed men
jolly on camels
in desert
while everybody on this side goes Bollywood
Frames illustrate passing helicopters
keep coming closer and we can’t see inside to know
what is
Words write events out loud
Non mouse-gray interpenetrations
again
Machine
Motionless
Noise
Nature
Abruptly
Day walks awake, as if in this version
Too many machines
Head pieces attached
To echo again and
27

A small flower may have
or unharmonious
unanimous
self-contained
Motionless
Practice
in forgotten panoply
echo
Strategist
Rustic bandwidth
Geography
Irredeemably
Jam
Each
Us sonata
Out of each
Our
hammering
common grist is no snob
Language experiments
I wrote value
nuanced
28

Happen with good conscience
Meaning
Bloody fighting
I don’t want lyricism
Objectivity self betrays
where clearer knowledge
Contradicts ---all that
Crouched beginnings imbue
city expressions
Living
Existence
curveting doubt
Actual distance
Beneath
arbors
relieved temporarily of melody
Mangle(d)
Context
Avid
Lolls
beneath a blue-black sky
Grapes look drenched
And still warm
Deeply and use
29

not integration
over cheekbones
to undo
Daily
but
leafless
lucid
lethargic
Skin
I
strode rapidly
The cotton of that form completely
different
Surrounding me
or Clara or Richard
Could I explain in German or anything else that encounter?
There Achilles
Aiming for a jumpy non integrated non neat division between
different forms of non possession
Is this possible?
nothing for me
A Spelunking
without Jesus (who does
More buds
30

cup to light or
Moving
Falling apart Not
unBlanked, soft light childlike delicate
Open source
Suite
Delphiniums congratulate
Craft modality to use but
Filter
through horizontal shifting Trying
And
everyday an un private foldout
inDifferent
verticality
I self-congratulate
Authority
wiped solid slipped
hierarchical
Form
Opens up
Solutions
Pulled across outside beyond
31

Map
Seeming Independence
Leaves burnt yellowy bled red
Non-linear
animals in eyes’ dream
Outside of items’ pride
fulfilled
perfume containing
Greeted by an aloha or wish-
sortie
A musical chit chat
Or magic of musical chitchat inhaled from sun-warmed pockets
light
Or list
Aquamarine dirty green glue brown
Ambulate
Strength with diffuse plankton of opposites: Database
stuffed
murmuring experience
include tongue
Contracts
Minuet a surprising refuge
obscure Aftertaste heaped
up
Video
multitudes
32

Test
Still
Peculiar and obvious unguent though that hangs by
Invariably followed
anti sound
dress
A feather leaps up between
spots uncertainty
Tenderness
Or also cruel
Gotterdammerung
•
Night hammering is a collected penetration
dropping
Words whose spaciousness
Attempts vast hours
Juggled
No
This sort this surface this This parody
this
Purely
If foolishly
Human
All or nothing
There is no neat division between different forms of possession
The naturalist convention of non-intervention does not keep up
33

We are unsinging
Collaborators
Draining letters like soap-wiped flakes
mild
My
Was a distinct smell
Lingering dependent
fear hangs restraint horizon
lights steamy bourgeois
Obsessive dialogues
Pride
Shaped phrase
Without dispel the good the green the
Gentrify
Empathetic
inAccessible
complicated
collection of
Nook
amnesia
Sock dolls
Culture -amoebas
Anti-
Whereby go yes, don’t
Bling
34

World
Subsuming conscience Sense
Coldness
Kindness
An independence that hangs on response
Phrase determined to play non-dumb
Stunt
Between figure and
Err urhrr
Permit
Collar on button
ALIKE
Problematic
Zigzag Growling
RUNNY
-up-
In a lobby life
Or heavy
With stricken smells
Take flight
Tiny software
Repertory
LOOK
lingers
tunneling reverse dimensions
Alphabetically
35

Ridge
Not random lumps but form
use riddle of frieze
boob shots
to imitate our next model
a
Sphinx
Reverts to black and white
Analytic bistro modality
obscure brutal music
Picture
cut, an oxymoron?
you say compensate
I say initiate
Life typologies
inhuman like everything else on TV
Idealized idolized idiot
Another
Spinning plankton breathing diffusely
sometimes called part plant or alien
36

Homework #15
Suggestion is a robot.
Each of us is armed with a pencil.
When we form a line to fill out their forms
we think we can hear our own forms,
our skeletons rattle. Anticipation is a robot.
On a ball on the tip of a buttery
a kiskidee aims its toy beak at the sky
and sings like a pencil. This is,
as the adverb has it, suddenly
penetrating, and one writes it down,
of course, until the car out front
engaging leaves a skeleton
of smoke where a mind was. I forgot
to vote! Hurry up! The will of one’s
equal to a vase which is a kind of car.
Look at it long enough and you’re
the robot. You’re in it
and you go. Through smoky layers
flamingoes are circumnavigating
its lacquered belly, a kind of daisy chain
that dances out content so that
disuse is use, is also a lonely robot.
That is why they put you up on a shelf,
well above that yellow arrangement of smoke,
the faintest pencil rising from your throat.
Joe Elliot
37

#17
When I fell into the air
your telephone was in slow motion
and the city said “I am machine!”
and the ocean swollen
with the very opposite of soft
and beautiful faces of the dead.
When the city fell into the ocean
where were you?
I was machine
spitting out air to no avail
while the innumerable dead
talked their phones into falling.
The opposite of motion is a workshop
of the soft where the beautiful
dead become a single marble.
It rolls off a table and under a chair
where it stops and stares out,
the deep eye of the ocean.
When I fell into the air
You fell asleep. The soft of the ocean
was a machine that hid the bones
of the sharp workshop’s dead,
swollen with beauty,
swollen with telephones.
38

#19
If thoughts are energy and energy is matter,
and therefore nothing’s destroyed, then, without interruption,
the things of this world, on the restless eyelids
of narcolepts, are being projected. When Justin Timberlake
clutches his crotch choreographically,
when fighter jets in formation sail overhead,
that is when these thoughts are dried and saved,
canned and shelved by our subaltern, the president,
who, kicked in the head by what he wanted
one too many times, was shrunk in size and given the position.
When I hopped up on the table and opened my throat
to sing, a bottle of wrong and right was poured into it
instead and I was stopped, instantly dried, and re-wound
in a flag to be played back later. That is why
when you’re falling asleep you can hear, if you’re saved,
the sudden inhalation of jars being opened.
39

#22
The plastic abdomen of the GI Joe,
the new one with the president’s face,
is terrifically ripped. The dog’s ears
stood up and the pancakes flipped
on their own as the blurry
flight patterns of the lapsed approached.
A security system salesman knocked.
The closing bell boulder rolled
into position and, except for that wild
west wanted poster here and there
affixed, the walls that are rising,
shoulder to shoulder, are unbroken
and shining. Separately, they are walking
on pink eggshells. She has a sinkful
before her (How the camera loves the
anxiety that seems to breathe through
her face!) while he (and this is a nod
to the silver age of silence) is out
behind the shed. Over and over,
without a sound except for the low
whirr of a projector, his ax head
swings through a pivoting sky
and bites into wood. This is called
an intentional face, a neat stack
of murderous and murdered thoughts.
This is called a piece of paper
40

that was terrifically ripped,
that was balled up and thrown at a basket,
but bouncing off the rim, missed.
41

#23
The basis for membership is birth.
The basis for birth is having been not.
Even when it’s not enough, it’s enough.
The first, hopeful, as some say, to a fault
was superceded by a second and the second
by a third and so on. That is how
they came to be details, people living
somewhat inland from the coast.
Isolated by being delivered, surrounded by
the memory of a sensation of a question
which unanswered hardens, this hopefulness,
this small town thing-ness (Thing is dead!
Long live Ness!) becomes one among many
numbered chips to pick up and weigh.
What about this one? And that? Meanwhile
the mind coasts and the underlying lack,
dressed up as an apple and a nap,
grows jealous, picks up the phone. Hello?
Slowly the non-idea of being here
on an impermanent basis, and that is
the basis. You had no idea the whole time
(and that whole-ness is a film being projected
by you and for you but you were asleep,
coasting) you were already a member
of a club that meets each morning, each in his secret,
and isolated (This is part of the there’s-
already-enough-of-you plan) location to lift
it’s voice. Heave ho! How quickly from trying
to figure out how to do a good job following to being led
regardless. The sweet soft focus of uselessness,
the wave’s ruthless indifference to personality
was an occasion for cheer. Here we are, all dressed up
sitting around a ravaged table. We’ve out-lasted
the kitchen and the wait staff. The maitre’di
tells us before turning out the lights we’re welcome
to spend the night. The simplicity of a life,
how it might be spent and how it must be
taken away in all cases was an occasion
42

for glee, for having been not. To be focused
take your hand from the dial and do not domesticate
the dark. There is already a voice
that is, syllable by syllable, somewhat reliable,
but only on a need to know basis.
43

#25
I dislike having to write these sentences.
Any project, conceived of as a kind of campaign
(political, military or otherwise), with its attendant
arm-twisting and compulsive positioning, makes one unfree
and to that exact un-monosyllabic degree, unhappy.
Instead, of the small band of cloaked travelers
just one stepped forward and offered, “I dislike the having
of having to write these sentences.” The keeper
of the gatehouse then took this password and the narrow
slot in the timbered door slid shut. The group waited.
Instead, today, I could take a walk or get on the subway.
I could misplace myself or make myself unsafe
for enrichment, for birthday lists and little magazines,
for preschool subcommittee meetings on accountability,
for the heavy ancient golden worm that he wore
on his middle finger. The great flattened ball of the sun
touched the western hills. He, when he saw them,
turned out of the road and made toward that boggy bottom
where finally it was midnight. All the talking at me
voices erased, swallowed up. When I sit down
with this uncovered silence I feel the unjust joy
in having been taken on to re-write a blank page and wonder
how come when you disobey them they say
you’re not listening, when in fact you’ve heard them
loud and clear. A shawl of blue pale gauze
sprinkled with little diamonds and edged with a fringe
of rose pink silk. The stringed instruments begin
now, preluding in parts.
44

#24
The present could not have come any sooner.
You say yours is the fastest? Well, the shortest
distance between this apocalypse and the next
is the next step into thin air. It’s getting
sunnier and more obvious. We vote for the biggest
and simultaneously the smallest, now, without saying
please. This is the happiest moment of my life.
No, this is the happiest. The moment was
black and rectangular. We jumped in.
It couldn’t have been any kinder. It’s getting
colder and more delicious. Soon, no one
will be able to cast a ballot or leave.
Deep into enemy territory the Sooners marched,
without saying please. This is the happiest
moment of my life. I drank a pint of paint thinner.
That’s how I got here. No, this is.
45

#32
Even the desolations of November have been erased
by further desolation. Good clean death,
gold and violet death, our necessary consolation. Yes,
put a user name here in place of the real one
that has no compunction but bleeds itself white.
The usual close-ups of thickened tongues,
of gray stubbly fields and bones picked clean,
melt, spreading a viscous puddle of unmeaning
that begins to drip down a staircase, which is circular,
which is over the top (Lo! The footfalls descend!)
but continuous. You step over it. It turns and turns out
Jack and the Beanstalk was a story to climb up,
Augustus Gloop was a name to laugh at,
and therefore a life was a something to do something
to? With? Alongside? Kiss me
goodbye. Good boy. Now go outside
and get some disinterested sun. Pour it over
your blistering palms and pulpy eyes,
over a life that was
not more or less than a single soul
wagered on a single thought, a roll of the die. Lose
the explanatory violet and gold. Offer it over
the yawning dark. The talk. What
did you say? Gum, gum and ordinary gum.
46

(from) An Instruction Manual
for Kim Lyons
Our experience is complete. What more is there to do except stay?
And that we cannot do.
Everything is too late, long ago and unexplained.
Base your work on error. Piece together a film from the cutting room
floor. Only the rejects offer a path to wherever it is we want to go to.
Where do we want to go to? Don’t say it, only begin to say it.
Cut out the usual consolations and escape back into the world. But
the world is fabricated by a variety of voices, that are all solitary, all
irrevocably yours.
Really look at it in such an abstract way that it no longer has anything
to do with its former function. It’s something else.
If I speak another scripted word I will die.
The mockery of your feelings of triumph and separation is a lifejacket
you consider taking off.
Putting two things together which cannot go together is an act of
impossible generosity. But you know how prophets are re-paid.
Power structures as over-the-top buffoonery, history as joke. From
its great height the piano is the one thing that can destroy us.
Your title must undo itself. Your poem must be an impossibility.
It’s all from your notebook, but from different parts, cut and pasted,
and then annotated as if it wasn’t yours.
A doomsday machine whose purpose is to degrade the proper topics
of poetry. Flocks of birds, frosty grass, darkness, treetops, valentines,
they all turn into machine parts, into inanimate dust.
47

Write as if the letterforms coming out of your pen tip were “these
strange symbols.”
The setting is usually bourgeois. The tone is usually bored. The
perspective omniscient. The earth is shrieking in your palm. Now go,
you know the rules.
48

Some Serious Frags
Department store
Laura Elrick
Department store cosmetics monster “smiles” staring fixedly at
seduction. Me – her nervy target, shifty. Nervy shifty. Nervy shifty.
Then the spinning lights, the face begun to melt. The cheeks of
desert liquify moi son mauve. The mouth: an eye lopes across (It’s
okay! we thinks – she’s isn’t real). Luckily, fleeing the eternal tunes of
Avril Levine, I escape (!) – into my display window at the corner of
Mission and 24th. Head-lights blur the night glass and I’m sealed in,
but exposed. Draped lacy negligee I didn’t know I owned. I feel they
can’t see me. But stuff goes missing.
49

K’s crotch
K’s crotch and hand is covered in plastic. It motions trying to entice
me – this is female, that I’ll have none. Glassy terraced lakes are
transport for judgment in prosper’s canoes. Boing! ones twos threes.
The course is difficult and hard to decipher. Dipping down and
battling up crests. But mostly lake is placid. After the storm. Postflood.
Post-bloat. The good guys. Who. Umm. At the disaster
assistance center, my abuela chomps on a hero awaiting
administrative relief. It comes in the form of men and women willing
“exception to policy.” Who. Umm. Umm. K’s crotch. K’s crotch.
Is the enemy internal
Is the enemy internal is one question. All boundaries sieves. All
unities pre-skeletal. A short way out of the Sbarro, the landscape
turned biblical. Petty bourgeois boys holed up with Kalashnikovs on
a hill. The type of siege. The type of silence. Take nothing for natural.
Even jouissance.
50

On the hood
On the hood of an old beaten down American relic sold abroad.
Girls string-arm their way up onto it, around gripping a movie fingerjoint.
Unconcerned that this has narrative aspects she’s holding on
for life. The renegade army is spellbound! Hits a bump. Knuckle
shot. Her crushed body a panicked u-turn? A sense we have to hurry?
Of course the horizon is black. That’s where we expect to find her.
In a virtual jurisdiction.
In the end
In the end, turned out she wasn’t dead at all, but lived to tell her story
something like (was it?) about being party to verbal sparring? she
fled? ended up on a truck in warring lands? screeching apocrypha?
country? And a girl came on to her on a porch outside the house, and
felt a flat bread and lifted tweety skirts, but found a little penis, barely
formed, that she put in her mouth and sucked like an eda mame. “I
just knew it,” the woman said, “a boy all along.”
51

If that
If that is named “room” it goes soaring above the benches and all the
people feel surrounded by beautiful water. Don’t lets speak of Frank
O’Hara and his comfy nickels. If grandmother is named grandmother
let her whip you with pillows but don’t bring a willow. If that is
named unbelievable fortitude in the face of violent hyper-dissonance,
go to desk file labeled ambition. We hate a pile of tulip-covered
babies. If it’s so hard to write, quit. “Lets be in touch” If it’s so easy.
If it’s so thrilling. If it’s so frilly. If it’s so daring. We’ve got artificialic
detente and a hummer full of men wrapped in little flags. Surely we
shall not continue to be unhappy.
Big Red
A big red Monte Carlo. A giant tomato red Monte with sticky seats
up a one-way street getting us close to tipping. A blond woman,
coming from some kind of cultural function. We’re newly related
and so will have to put up with each other, though I come down on
her later about the reckless driving. Look, I’ve cleaned up vomit and
greases and half-eaten food-stuffs, bean vats, grill peedge and the
stick of yellow yolks, but I’ll be damned if I’ll clean up after one a yer
wrecks. Another woman’s looking on though, and what’s she doing:
pushing little pink disks of TUMS.
52

A big fat ugly
A big fat ugly ungratefully stubborn little angry. An annoying failed
project prehistoric (who has no first-hand knowledge of those times).
A gorgeous 1 wanking pappy’s pseudo populist ball and financials
chain. A fucking Red with a plastic head (a carnation… extends out
my left ear). A big fat obnoxious overzealous ridiculous indecorous
has no manners, hmm? Closet (lower-middle, middle, upper-middle,
upper-upper middle, upper-upper-upper middle). A real
psychological purplish plebian complex, vibrant and sweet-shy. A
ticklish therapeutic dude neurotic, childish, masculine femme femme
unwilling to fold. (A subtle romantic whispering behind your soft
pink knee caps.) Mature “bosoms” sprouting an arboretum of hopes.
A wrong 1, a try again 1, a real live stay-alive parasitical adjunct 1 who
refuses to excise the Ruddier qualities. A big fat fucking cluster of it
hanging there heavy. A tiny little bit of Red left.
53

What an old barn
What an old. barn. An old barn her. What an old barn doesn’t lock
can’t lock it everything on view to the neighbors. A funny little orgy,
lots of folks, a funny little orgy so many pairs of keys. O won’t we go
to heaven-o. In that there was a man. In that there was a man with a
donut ring of hair. In that there were women who told me things.
Told me all kinds of things would listen. Told me Italian words,
funny words, words than mean one thing said another, told me apple
box and flat bread and half walls. Some told me thighs thighs thighs
and some told me hips hips hips. And when thighs thighs thighs told
me I was red. I was red with a line though it. I was shades. I was red
shades and redder shades and in the shade I was pink. Some of them
I knew I knew that seeing means ducking. Or seeing means sad that
one may soon alone. Alone is not one. Alone is not one. One is a
plastic cap, a lipstick. One is a number string, a pill box, a self-quiz.
One: a titanium battery. One are many things.
54

Document
1.
document suggests the oblique task
mastering the world by compression or,
to free the engine of its customs
without insulting the material by which it came
I want neither to sing of roses
nor to make them bloom
morpheme
strongbox
the bud of the impulse to speak
from belly to birth
a weighted trespass
preparing the world for the baby
there by turns of text to fatten
the mother tongue
eking the objectivist remove
under the sign of exactitude
discard the bath water
erect a made place
the ever incomplete
the continuous battle of which
there is no truce
a pictorial silence is only one
of many registers
Elizabeth Fodaski
55

of conditions of possibility of
this is about you as
everything will be about you
shouldered
weightless appendage
new love
building buoyancy in language
word by word
one sentence washes the other
three (square) meals?
nursing the night away
nothing unremarked, carried
in perpetuity
mold of form
uninfluenced and fluent
fall of
of she
angle
56

a speckled vintage splattered
with chaos
through the years
regarding the
atrophy
considered from all angles
the audacity of aging
spilling in
sequestered for naught
the front loaded
marginally and
battle, the curious welcome, daydream, our sly
orchestration, et cetera
dribbling toward the onset of
exactitude a quarantined
infidelity the culprit my gangster
profile
silhouetted
since blossom’s singular history
endows the protest with angst
marginalia
paraphernalia
her umteenth tear
in wishing well,
the guest invents
a suite of eternal returns
almost anything will do
57

affect assemblage
altered egos
plucked from
the usual debris
we cater to culture
we have trouble
not
in sentences
the angle being various of specificity in deeds
encroaching spuriously the
afterimage partisan clause she
addressed the crowd the endless evening of which
detonated
spectacular
embellishment principle
the culture won’t discuss it
this delicate arrangement
•
first light
wide open gazes
wake
of day
curious welcome
spilling
into
sleep
new
this
she
the gender provoked
no girls but in glances
balance beholders
dreams of
she
58

spread-eagled in pillow rim breath container
swaddled keepsake at rococo angle
in dreams, whimpers
blemish of the verbal
remedy
swoon
she limns
a craven beckoning
in posture
in profile palimpsest
our request was erased
shuttered backdoor regime
we argued for adversity
queried the “new” math
and returned none the richer
if I were to welcome you
into a future resistance
ecliptic torch song
turn retrospective gazes
toward benefit
angle the cause
take all of my words
your words your
singular versatile guardians
in cumulative stores against
a diffident coat of arms
unprecedent your galaxy
unravel distinct unswerving rumination
carrying over from a
heated transfer
tug and motion
our inborn holding pattern
we hover, imbue, and witness
awaiting permission to land
59

2.
Twenty-four
a day,
it suddenly went by my eyes:
your systematic pinkification
curveme
undo my washable ink spot blemish
tantrum specifications are without aficionado residue
circumvent the blotchy madness
which isn’t worth a
style never tested in gender modules
purposeless plans nonetheless undertaken
when conscience predicates idle authority measures
your goose is cooked
speech stimulates an onslaught of
belligerent syllogisms
and quaint contra-suggestiveness
spare your breath tactic
•
Winter becomes
an inconspicuous source of
linguistic prowess.
"Imagine this place
in January —
snow-covered wreckage drifting
steadily downward"
thud and boom of city
reinventing itself
perpetually
and without
resolution
our stalwart facades
crumbling around
every corner
morning’s sober appraisal
supercedes dialogical warfare
guerillas in our midst
60

the gerund is a constant process:
spotting your train
in a somewhat imperfect elopement
as it carries away your plumped,
at-the-level-of meaning—
Please wait.
My forecast is a vast and conspicuous pattern
of tiny grimaces
It hesitates before your broad,
overarching climate of togetherness
inching meagerly toward wayward
resolutions
If stillness is a way of moving
then wait here
and here
and here
but what to do if that which is utterly necessary is not entirely
possible
quake
my warning boots
wade in a sea of pernicious mud
our instincts
are delinquent,
our houses
no longer standing
61

dawn drew pink edges
and they sifted, pulling life from the ruins
Please wait.
This is my found histrionic radar
We are simply terrified
Deflect my internal anxiety prism and I will
watch your son
Expect dust and noxious gases in your
soup,
collections from a previous far-flung
disaster
Can we stay here for one minute?
The pages keep flying
and our daughter doesn’t notice.
Thick air wafts in clumps through our
spectroscopic windows and we
cover our mouths
Please hold.
These are my living daylights
wrung
from the desperate masses of
an irreducible margin
•
If silences
are a way of speaking
then hush and
sway
the compulsive aftermath of a nation’s
tidy tragedy
propels hysterical onslaughts
mistaking the missile for the mind
62

If stillness
as in a
“quartz contentment”
movement’s metaphysical
picture still
far outside
then please hold.
My tantamount
industrial swelling
breaches loose
transistor specialties
in the long term.
Please wait.
3.
This ego-building is relentless and
our severity margin wavers from
every back door
on the hour.
Special deliveries hand
picked on the assembly
line and perquisite training
implies life-long complicity.
As condensery is the object
we appreciate micro-
management of same.
His boots trudge in time with his
mouth. State of the state.
As futures imply
assertiveness practice,
incentive lacks a purpose
and we are carelessly
floundering amid myriad
icebergs. Swimming
to slaughter the
best laid gains of
quantum environmental
assimilation. My in vitro lifestyle
waits in the other
room. Charge it please.
63

Let’s not dwell
on production.
This building might collapse
at any moment
and we’re collecting
vital records
inefficiently, beginning
our sentences with hopefully,
and ignoring subject and all
sorts of other
agreement. The stars
relentlessly have nothing
to do with it.
Regime organization
severs our mostly
situational stability,
incandescent syllogism,
pottery barn tactics.
Second daughters
of the revolution
sleep soundlessly
amid newfound
stupefaction, our
syntax threshold,
real estate glue,
inclement mother,
and run-on lackadaisical
criticism. In the scheme
of hierarchical melodrama,
perpetuity of seduction
techniques in principles of
formlessness, adjunct
if not altogether
obsolete.
64

Bar none—this land-
locked kaleidoscopic
milieu has its draw-
backs. I keep cutting
everything off, this
desk is curt and
hysterical. Splice
after splice after
penitent epistemological
forethought: entrapment.
Schism adds extra
perturbance.
You get used to your own
oyster and come to expect
more of same.
This wall
is coming down
•
I am aching toward
the pinkish:
Designer handbags must go this week!!!
Read “mucked”—
elucidation materials are always in demand and never
customized
enough.
Errata follow the sweet suit and tuck
their slips in aquiescently as
neighbors slip their
hostile notes under doors
and role models unplug
entrenched if recalcitrant traditions.
Masterminding the p.o.a.
and a long history of faulty
starts on the
maidenhead.
Letterhead.
Head of household.
Hold the house.
65

My upper voltage wants
reasonably syncopated
catastrophes.
My paper reminds me.
Speaking of the literature,
we are forced to adjust our
destinies. Preferences
continue in the ancillary
mode and sentence
structures follow similar
results of attrition.
The building cracked
as the car blew up
as the plane crashed
as the citizens rallied
to a micro-cause.
The anxiety begins to
paralyze while everything
else keeps moving.
Distinguishing between
undifferentiated
disaster modes
becomes the paramount
criterion as we find
compound predicates
crowding the amphitheater.
Disposable thongs storm the display and
everywhere customers are searching
their palms for lifelines.
The ubiquitous uppercase character illustrates parallel
universes and we can’t find the proper
button to get rid of the article altogether.
Mysteries repeat on themselves and the sisterless or
misrepresentation period.
66

What say you, comrades?
If none other than lily sameness,
please search the holdings for one potential
replica of random yenning.
Fluffernutter cravings assuage house guests as
geometric landscapes are welcomed by the dermatologist.
Hello, yankee dreamer, what are your shopping needs?
•
We’re working on an all-new, resealable,
no-mess, hassle-free, pre-perforated,
anti-bacterial sandwich. The condescension implied
in our formulaic confusion
of pre-existing terms and
conditions in your
area must remain entre nous.
I’m scratching at seeds here and grasping
for a leg up.
I could have been an architect
but then all this phony nostalgia
for pure products is crazy if
irresistible and I am
admittedly reluctant to
lay my rifle down.
•
Often I have been permitted
to return to a waxing salon.
Colleagues unwittingly accommodate
the most pedestrian alibis and
the culture stares back.
We are hard-pressed to find a material
that won’t harden with age.
Nobody had any idea there would be
so much ground breaking here.
It wobbles beneath our feet,
but we don’t know where else to go.
67

Dear unintelligible adversary,
if you are feeding your people
on a steady diet of shameless
propaganda and foul worms,
consider not running
for reelection.
We could italicize virtually everything
yet bastions of loyal customers
do not recognize the glyph.
Inexorably, the regime vernacular,
housing authority, et cetera.
We are thinking of
something vaguely milky, a plush
swatch of uncharted swoon potential.
Classified techniques settle the working order
and
this vocabulary seems
paradoxically flimsy,
false, or otherwise
disappointing like so many
hothouse offerings.
Our virgin attempt
to contain
this phobic and
perpetual isolationism went south.
Driftwood went
somewhere at the very least,
a rounding out of
purpose or
promising universal reader appeal
is an altogether duplicitous
proposition if
ambitious and
valuable as such.
68

My all-too-contemptuous
gaze dynamic reverses your
principle of a creamy
fairness and hallowed
living room set.
Please hold my
pin cushion. It is
protective and tidy if
not altogether innocuous.
In case of accidental consumption
contact your local retailer for
instructions as to how to proceed
with your filing.
Please take my
situation, it
has a tendency to
reverberate unkindly among
strangers and
we’re thinking of something a bit more
brothy or
homogeneous.
Please allow for the
distance between.
•
Especially in summer when
dusk brings carefully
premeditated platitudes
and a somewhat intoxicating
zeitgeist suggests an organized
method of appropriation, we
cannot guarantee the shelf life
of your newest ideas.
•
We saw the two candidates
maimed
essentially.
69

The consolation of a comfortable
disaster
colonizing the accessible
chambers
of the heart.
Trope, moniker, typefaction
series. “Girl and pen.”
The student
looking you in the face complete
4.
I’m always coming back after the quasi-
final hiatus and wallowing in un-
preparedness.
By increments
I get better at looking but
your face still
reads as blurred
by how many times
I’ve seen you in
another
Contained only
by the vastness of my dreams
my “count” of “enchanted objects”
my Gatsby suffered a slow
death, gradually abstracted
from his own image
while artfully constructed,
though terminally unfulfilled,
his persona evacuated
its
70

hard to describe this creep-
ing feeling,
a sort of
homeland insecurity.
Weakness leaving
the body and
taking root
in the state.
There is no crime
can be considered
the most ghastly,
when there is always
another incomparable
in kind
•
This housing will accommodate a rugged traveler for small spells but
we have been averting the garrulous prospects of doing away with a
roof altogether and nothing is coming to mind quickly enough, no
weather fitting the situation. What was once automatic is now
automated and the surreptitious reasoning seeps too easily through
the crevices of our logic. When the body becomes abstracted from its
own image, who will identify the remains? The unblinkingness of our
attention seems to fall short of a total absorption of figure, the
representation of that which had already been fixed and then more
so; we disintegrate slowly though our words pursue endlessly, ripping
the symbol from its statuary
•
and we were looking for a certain
clutch of
jello compatriots who
frequent this foreclosed
terrain
treacherous in its
two-
sidedness.
71

Our historicity
is non-porous and therefore
totally characterized by the
indebtedness of our
bureau chiefs,
non-stick in their
own right and
loyal down
to their skivvies
•
If only we,
in turn, had found the right
panties, frowned
in the right
faces
we might not be
staring at this
stucco and
spending so much
time on our
knees.
My prayer sequence
always skews a
bit to the
negative
(“Please don’t…”)
and, holding my
purse with your tiny
grimace poised for
skeptics you
might entrance an
army though
we haven’t any
puttees or
mess kits.
72

No swoon
soundtrack for this
farewell, arms or
none, we overdid
the carbonara,
Asti, and
purple
prose. Imagine this
leitmotif in your own
era and score
a rousing
song for your
self.
•
Though, the groundwork
laid, it’s bound to be a hard
rein. We were feeling so
genitive in the light of that sun,
and then all these footsteps and
localized residue. Dwelling on
a boy’s shoes, speaker’s
arrival, oratorio’s
premise, no nation could
gainsay that native cardoon,
though we wanted
something a bit more
deciduous or
ancillary
as a general
rule of
thumb,
sucking only the
bitter fingers of our
milky
start and
all those
seeds to spit
73

For Newlyweds
Walk to each other, slowly
as if in a field of flowering microchips.
Your refection will soon be clarified
in the mirror of a gleaming cleaver.
Watch it magnified, stretched out
by the processed moonlight.
You will never again remember
how it feels to be alone, what you
thought about as you listened to
the crackling of the radio asteroids.
Your lips will never again dry up.
Your nose will never again be mistaken
for a curved ashtray or a slender
eggplant, falling off a shelf.
Love, you will call your new self,
as if it were a stuffed penguin.
Love, you will call the windowpane
cracked from all the years you tried
to use it as a door. So long little cup,
twisted like a face. So long little bird,
smashed inside an ear. If you dream
of yourself holding hands with a ghost,
twist off its head and pour out the steaming
Joanna Fuhrman
74

liquid within. If you dream of a city
crawling with enormous muddy tubes,
be aware that robot rulers are always blind.
They can’t see you sticking out your tongue
or making a model of the local anchorwoman
so you can hide her behind the wet
shower curtain when the bombs fall.
Despite what the song lyrics say,
this is how marriage was meant to be:
a man and a woman, or a woman and a woman
or a chair and a table or a tulip and a shattered vase.
It’s all the same. Write your vows as if they were
written in invisible ink. Write your vows as if
they were made out of cloud intestines and loose
change, as if they were made to be sung by a choir
of swaddled infants. Bid goodbye to the bumpy
pillow stuffed with pay stubs and counterfeit bills.
Goodbye to the dusty kitty you’d pet on your way
to the twenty-four hour-butcher-slash-discothèque.
Your new life starts by unraveling the light.
Your new life starts you when you bash your
shadow with a kite. It really starts here:
on this airplane with all the empty seats,
flying over a city that used to have another name,
used to be full of taller and/or skinnier buildings,
used to be teaming with houseplants, bursting
with rollerblading messengers, brimming with lakes.
75

Unnamed Street with Five Fingers and a Box
I watch the drunk shirtless gods
clean windows. A girl in white gloves
sniff a gold-plated soapbox.
I'm all eyelids again. My cell phone
pretends it's a sick bird, sobbing
elevator music in my crowded pocket.
Hey, have you ever seen a decapitated
butterfly? They say it looks like any
other. On television, the crowd chants
and for once, I embrace the moment,
accept the burgeoning and bulging
multitude, their beautiful demands.
Yesterday, I looked into the oven
and nothing looked back. Everything
was arranged. Then rearranged.
76

Plain Sight
I hid the 20 th century
in my Marcel Duchamp lunchbox.
I hid the First War in a crate labeled
Second War. I hid all of my tears
in a fuzzy rat slipper
(with bulging eyes and a Pepto-Bismol mouth.)
I hid my screaming in a poem about
a popping toaster. I hid Eva Braun's
marzipan earlobes in calla lily bouquets,
dripping with cubic zirconium solitaries.
I hid love, hate, happiness and fear in the words
love, hate, happiness and fear. I hid my extra
nipple in the elevator on
the thirteenth floor. (Marked 14.)
I hid my Jewishness in a bowl of tref
Matzo ball soup. I hid my tongue
in a dear reader's mouth. I hid the memory
of Rose Sélavy (ripped wig and melting lipstick)
in a reality show about thousand-dollar commodes.
I hid the bleeding turkey in a package of tofufery.
I hid my fat in polka-dotted pantyhose.
I hid my love for you in a short story
about a haunted swing.
(I erased the suicidal dove epilogue.)
I hid my fake mustache in a g-string
in Texas. I hid my revolutionary pedagogy
in a paper on Marxist clowns. I hid
my mucus in transformational Formica.
I hid my blood in a vile of cranberry cocktail.
I hid my small breasts in a bra padded
with crackerjacks. I hid the soldier’s missing
finger in a marble-cake chess piece,
the cigarette posed on the dead Iraq’s mouth
in a case plated with fake gold.
(That was our “first” Gulf War.)
I hid the headless legless female torso
in the body of a real live girl! I hid
the runaway sperm in a plastic cowboy hat.
I hid the surrealist revolver in a paisley beanbag.
77

I hid all the missing bodies in the belly
of a sleeping tuba. I hid everything
in crushed Diet Coke cans, in Ouija
boards made out of M&M boxes, in language clear
like molded plastic chairs, in French fries
and fried idealism, in rain falling on sinking
Southwestern shopping centers, in empty
Doritos bags full of alien orange powder.
78

The Joke
A standup comedian tells a joke in the basement of an
abandoned theater. None of the windows laugh. A
red curtain yells out, I know you always hated your mother.
A broken mug on the unplugged television set
pretends to cry by chipping its sides. This is the start
of poetry and the end of sleep. The ex-comedian
shows up years later, a fat man in a pink dress, top
button replaced by a gaping black hole. He’s slept too
long under decaying bridges. His eyes have been
replaced with apparition-rendering devices. His nose
is the birthplace of an alternate earth. His audience is
way past bored. They don’t want to hear about his
time as a fern psychotherapist or his method of
detaching souls from picked-over lettuce carcasses.
They don’t want to learn about the proper way to
float in radioactive ectoplasm. All they want is to seep
into his skin, rename his organs after their childhood
pals. They just long to see his cells splitting open, to
hear their own voices, rattling in his cavernous
mouth.
79

Anthony Hawley
Nobody is Rescued and the Radio
Doesn't Work
Letters to numbers. The big fade. The door in the
picture is a hand. Is a handkerchief. I guess you coulda
knocked some sense into it. Even though the
handkerchief was dropped by someone on the way to
hell. Too bad. Too bad mirrors don’t bring us any
closer. A ghost eats a paper bird. The maiden does not
undress. Mles & miles between them. So many private
parts apart.
The “i” in miles is missing because every mirror is a
love letter. Or a pause. The “i” crawled into the mirror
and went missing.
80

Too bad. Too much carry-on luggage, we get stopped at the gate.
Even the smallest valise isn’t allowed in. Denied entry, we keep on
coming back. The lake, the mirror, they won’t keep us completely.
The maiden in the story is the ghost of a paper bird. The accordion is
the ghost of a group of men talking in a public square.
At least broken mirrors have all kinds of leaking. There is there. &
there. & there. Broken mirrors can access all the entrances to the
underworld with a single key card. Now everyone in the story is a pile
of glass.
81

We don’t really see into mirrors. Everything in front of us is
all there is. Even though every mirror is a container. Is a
map. Good luck says the senator, and off they go!
Mirrors are maps because every object is another thing’s
ghost. I.E., a paper bird snacks on the dead, the dead snack
on me. The hand someone was meaning to shake runs away
with a paper hand. The senator above is now a pile of glass.
82

Mirrors are failed entrances. Just like lakes. We all dive and think a
three-headed dog is going to meet us halfway. Too bad we just
surface, mud blocking the way. Accordions playing the sad song of
our empty-handed return. Professional mourners lamenting how
poorly we work. The “i” gone missing. Nobody is rescued and the
radio doesn’t work.
The mourners are professional because the dead and their attendants
went commercial a long time ago. As for accordions, no one ever
runs out.
83

Nobody rescued, a love letter won’t get you anywhere. Nothing
about the lake believes us. The logic of mirrors doesn’t believe us.
The senator at the edge of the lake. Professional mourners on the
brink.
Nobody is rescued because mirrors make us look back. Only broken
mirrors are doors.
84

from THE FIRE ESCAPE
3
Drew Gardner
love for you. with my hands up, gaining my freedom. the photos, the
beautiful present. at what point does it go into my eyes? the ad on the
plane over and over. I empty the house and the explosion filled in a life
of shadows.
I sent my usual just-short-of-outright telling, able to get my laughs,
watching two dimwits do this crap to other humans. my head wasn't
quite on. I’m not talking about vanity here; I departed, accessible only
to a flame which had become a worm.
they could do a kind of property of old proportions. the voice in my
head is a poor strategist, mixed with years of seasoned dropping,
head in my stomach. an hour ago the tool she had used in such a
frame, magazines, receipts, music books. she makes her rounds
through the hospital, performing with a harp.
I wasn't bothered. now to spin in my injury and that's good and tell
you how it makes him or her feel. at the head of the stairs the table is
talking or something that has background music. the musicians kept
up strange melodies. this accumulation of televisions. craning my
head, I looked at the collaborations which were new to me, but the
music felt blank. my boss' boss didn't recall his or her eyes, my bank
refused to consider my interim.
the soothing supervisor. the computer screen, which only served to
inflame me. I adjusted to everyone. I headed up to the world, you can
do anything and have your child. I have not been going at it in a war
over knowledge per se. you want people to know a vast collection
which made me laugh without talking. the wisdom on this stuff,
otherwise known as sound, stopped. the melody that plays from her
mother, music makes the people come together, makes the people
angry.
I felt alive, my mind clenching my head with time. outlawed force
every fucking word in my mouth. I walked back into the house from
a freezing wind. the intense smells of drywall and control. deftly
85

uneasy of people. application-bound wheels when you know the
public calls over on this.
I could feel tears inside my head, and a dead weight. a cat wants an extra
tongue. the brown eyes in the airport.
4
I remember the fireplace
communicates understanding
given your thinking
body changes
rapidly demonstrated
a precise continuity of colors
shorter strips
joined together into a grid
its plan are words in the divorce
to do the trick, by shifting the thinking
of a space, by shifting the characters
apart slightly
to draw attention
to evaporating apparatus goggles
measuring dirty dishes
the lid and spatula have access to
soil samples
under serious environmental pressure
trapped in an salt pan
in increasingly salty conditions
some bacteria, including
a first world chalkboard
as the left side of my face went numb
in the bid to keep alive the expected
slowly sublimating ice
big guns back a resulting compaction
I don't know if I have had any influence
open veins
discover a doorway
and she crosses over
I'm a bundle of nerves right now
have them use vocabulary
86

from the chart
to describe why their shapes are polygons
don't let the words "interesting" and "effort"
turn you away
preventative shifting of the fibers
varying the values of objects
from one neighborhood to another
she saw clearly
throughout the discussion
I have interrupted
you, she added, you
are a worthy man but stupid,
whenever Our Benevolent Feudalism
came out to see you
I recalibrated the scale
but only on a set who object
I don't want to go through
they see the primary effect
the gadfly
5
the frame’s coolness through the thin material
some kind of screen saver running through
merging with the mist below
the red glow from small fires shining
jostling one another, pushing one another
a few small toadstools through the leaf litter
a bit further on
I see the telltale fraying of thin blackthorn saplings
climb the trees,
the juice is bubbling amber through the crust
if I can avoid sinking through the walls
to peer through their hope
going through my inbox
I can't get to some things.
trees give riddles
for good reason,
87

I fall all over my own punch line
I can't even read
thin, pale light
allows us to make organisms
who am I?
ding the water is bubbling
search in some set of knowing
if she could provide an opportunity
individuals and organizations
public and private, to move aside so
I can throw in the sieve method
it explains less
fit to dig through surprise
do not adjust your mind
pop culture son who cannot change
came through the pencil
attended of payloads
I have this singular description — it is too various
fashionable convulsive public pushing
tears of relief spill through the laughter
don’t get me wrong but make me happy
the glass question of the story of my life
affection and bad advice
I can't get up without them
dedicated to growth
owning around my ankle
there's no table
stepped out of his compartment
from the little path
pushing Nasa's shuttle
he saw what could be
the stupidest thing
that he will do this year
great notoriety and lasting fame
give us our head,
88

do not miss Cythera before sunrise
and all the rest — our Disneyland
one of you my dear friend,
synthetic viruses
passed through
just around the trembling temperature
pushing plant roots, shading young,
thin-barked trees
replace that which is lost through the tops
the magpie would not get down
when we changed horses
I was aware that we couldn’t find it
surprising her
where runners arrive
I looked down,
to remind me of a soft light
as with the oil spill
my roommate's
grandfather bought
like a toothbrush
can be the day I retire
I held it in part of the Veda
I gave them the finger
so happy with the Exxon Valdez
to watch some wrestlers in California
metal flashlight
of undue design
sometimes the ground
is not covered
up to my biographies
arranged in "villages"
hone in on your acceptance
if the privacy is too dumb
a hand-built amplifier
you will seek out a lake
quickly jump pendants' scenes
cut in an old rightwing dragonfly
here I am schedule-shaped
89

solid-fashioned and on my ground
the other obsessed with getting far
went down the drainage
her handful of dirt
and maze lime
covered in epilogue
knocked down a fabled transfer center
they were switched at birth
reconnects with his high school girlfriend
you haven't tied a knot
it seems as if streets
are something looped
beyond my help
my liability to the public
new deception, bump in dawn
effortlessly mailing
the one in the Iliad out there somewhere
long houses being too old-fashioned
I was aware of its weight on my head
if caught in time
can be saved
maybe that applies to a grate
on the edge of the problem
90

FURL ACCESS
my spirits were all bound up as if I were in sound.
I must ask my uncreated time if it awakened,
unaware of what had to be done,
elements a shaft to fall in,
move to, wished a stratagem.
I entered the cave first,
with a radio as unplugged moon
when the goal was agility reuse
living room not a gush of life, but through a panel
for any given problem,
to see exactly what it looks like.
I am sent to bid you — that's how I am,
struck a match and lit the lantern
the air a dialogue where
people flocked out into the refactoring streets
like a light switch
to try and decrease.
take that latch, responsible for what we know,
what we've witnessed and dreamt,
and for what we don't say
that silence as a gesture is not pornographic,
with all of the wires and parts that are inside.
I can see this being useful when my TiVo ends up missing.
It tasted more like wine than one-dimensional mixtures
of someone needing to be news.
let me show some of the different lengths of wire I used.
we will show you our city and tell
you always to jump into everyone elses' arms
whatever that means.
my days were the worst comic book movie ever
with the click of a button, the nomads stamp
for right time, right place and join in song and dance,
analytical, political, polemical, and poignant,
angry or euphoric
voyage to the oracle, shit head.
91

ut behavior continues
in marked heart
how little noise the machine makes
it's not a common thing, you'll cool
for the late grooves and make
a smaller effort but more real,
through heels turned up,
the deal of pleasure as we rode home.
warrior light shone while rubbing it in
makes materials any format to make something at all.
enough of play standards
just a little more patience
a lot different than most of the bears that I normally speak to.
to create add-ons to make it better
bounce out of the dock
sweet, fruity taste with hints of caramel
I have high hopes for it
Do they stomp? Do they just stomp?
create a book.
If beauty resides in truth,
then there are moments of severe tantalizing energy
if it were all one that I should be true, it is paltry crap,
and I love you for not liking it.
love me, same time the love of some hope
that should at last prevail
stem cell nature as admiration,
in which story of life at large,
when the fans turn on.
92

SAFTY LINE
I need to find out how I can brim over more
but I can barely muster the lock
criticism wants optical swelling
with the extra things lying around
little pieces of bone
heartbeat with simple rules
we could program a computer with
okay, lame, I know. . .
toward the end of the song
she was waving her free hand
around my head in a frantic gesture
revolving planet with plants on it
and that way be a playmate
with jars that befriend people
what more do you want?
no sweet vision without horrible mishap
either a dilated keyboard
or jockeying insurance into our hands
the beat of flippered limbs
at the end of rope-like effort
that moment of ability
my kid has been choking on for about a year
what people don't know is
ospreys have no need for this crap
with a finger in a straight splint
for the last four weeks
I swordfight through life
hyper-extended between a farmer and a planted seed,
if he opens his eyes he is feeling the whole
world's obstruction
those who contemplate the beauty of teeth
find reserves of strength in paper
the universe is full of parietal space
which explains the softest mouth
that used tongue and knew just when to say something
I the they they know how to feel about
a gentle tug upon the sun
painted a security state
93

egarding the theft of my friends
and sort of hinted at the time I reached into
we don't know about your life, how can we know?
these growing crystals that grow. . . on purpose?
another day
let the beauty of what you love
be a curved splint
to account for the spelling errors
and plentiful global conspiracies
as flexible
as any wind
94

THE POINT OF POETRY IS TO ENTRENCH
FALSEHOODS
behold my sword, what you see at the vanishing point
is the first virgin ever, for I can see no fruits
but a McGuffin within a McGuffin
the news I'd like to point to
is the media saying they are sorry for the falsehoods
of the swift boat ads that
Tom Waits waged against my abs
it is only in pointed statements that no point
inheres at any point
can you hear this?
we need to entrench the party
in the mass anti-party movement at every level.
such processes are littered with Victorian gathering devices
piling up on dogmatic families even to
acknowledge the evidence
that suggests that torture is not a reliable
means of abortion
aestheticizes and abstracts Boston's paupers
almost to the point of ancient life
husbandry was once a sacred font
but most of the size savings come in
at the margins of epic thought
taken for granted in a self-evident
hostile physical science as I am by pro-lifers
who complain that King Herod
used similar logic in ordering the slaughter
of thousands of infant Jesuses
who are more valuable than other infants Jesuses
because they are more related to God.
that doesn't mean it's false,
as a social contract, falseness has an obligation
to follow the deer droppings wherever they may lead.
but that doesn't mean it's true, either ...
getting information from a friendly caterpillar
about how the international law prohibiting
torture in all circumstances should be relaxed
someone might save perhaps thousands of relaxations by this
95

some people make matters worse by
praising existence as excellent information interns
held by the poet to share the poet's experiences
with the rest of the world.
to knock us off in a response looking for opportunities
in the text or the next world, what would the distinction
between sentimentally and falsehood wish to be free of
when the only idiom in which germ warfare is okay
sees the future on a weaponized Church Lady
— they currently have more cardinals then snow —
the point of life is to escape the drabness of
our plain and ponderous lives
the obliging daffodil and accurate television.
I shall not sing the endless songs
behind the pure arithmetic — sorry
thank you for pulling the fire alarm
and getting me out of class.
it's good because it's helped me open to more
real-world people and more
insolently obvious statements about
how we can readily be
miraculously condensed
one word like a bell
the undertone of fear
96

YOU BASICALLY HAVE TO CATCH THE LITTLE
BASTARDS IN THE ACT
I am not a cop anymore
or at least I am a veil
upon my cop selves for crimes to remind me of
it's not exactly that it's hard to bugger off
when I'm bugging someone
If I ask about the world, the world will work
it was me that was arrested
mythical brows saw the retired realm outer darkness busted
banging on sick race horses to become
the experience of cop hangover
of course I am biased,
she is suspended for the excessive act of acquiring gills
by foul subtracted trees to seaweed
too many things are too hot for the keeping
beneath the fact I don't want to know
O Princess whose lap was created by a character
named megaton
on the Fairy World server
into the jejune fleece
and flee, after all
I accuse my neck bone of being what you're saying
god-damn, Dave, are you all-powerful and omnipotent?
could you simply ban yourself with a denser red giant
I thought he was cool in the film
now I will hate it
and neither the country kin love nor the transactional love
nor some of the my special brand of rubber tickets
will ever stop me
a pot boiler using illegal
dazzling brilliance I was looking for
the fairy world is just as screwed as this one.
we've often named cats together
acting like a chance to experience what
wicker SWAT teams of aggrieving the saplings
97

who supply these companies
with fresh prisoners
browbeaten Autumn drought, whose black sheep
when pulled over by the Dami Lama
default on being falsely California about it
I hope this report is shorn away
from the real fun, human beings catching fish.
headed over to one of the audible ginseng honest cops,
I am being falsely accused of being
good for me!
but I'm not hating on the minutes
nor cast from stature green
that is not worth my trouble.
which lies incorrigible with the years between
a bed of leaves and a broken phosphorescent hand
with mineral warlike force to keep away
was pretty much the most interesting night of my life
around a privately-owned heart — yet never
the Miami Vice theme song
found by a coroner's assistant
to enlighten us with torture
I decide to heap upon them
the most annoying thing
about dealing
with having gills
98

BY WHATEVER MISGIVINGS
most of the story stood in a privileged spot,
no one was near but with eagerness regretting absence
and professing readiness to gratify
like some somnambulist suddenly interfered with
involuntarily as rude, turned
touched water while lying so those waters
were now dressed like people
a peculiar mute and calm everything
undulating troubled as shadows
foreshadowing deeper
uninhabited custom among natures to come.
not liable, except on repeated personal alarms,
perception left to determine the curiosity
roused to its consequences,
though deriving some voyage from
details with no clear purpose.
islands are themselves with no small interest,
proceeding past light from equivocation like the sun
across a loop-hole in a mantra.
now and then nothing toward quiet was a condition whose
multitude lived as individuals
in troublesome friendly remonstrance
with their ruder wanted vapors,
no longer singular maneuvers
to decide what it meant
along coarse self-restraint
that present condition
to conscious imbecility —
not deep policy, but design
more notes pervading any particular manifestation
into loaded questions,
I have nothing to say.
icy conscientious policy adapted
99

to signal emergencies that obliterated manifestation's sway
with every change of address
detached rocks from day break,
proceeded to socially transform anger
into situation. But times have changed.
This splendid disrelish evinced against every function
pertaining to it
visible on leaden shreds of fog
whitewashed all this monastery crap,
but it was no personal necessity delegated to a transferred
dream lodged in a dictatorship beyond earthly appeal.
a reserve tank of stats superseded the preserved signs
of patience
enough to listen without imperial retirement
woolly, from long unacquaintance with present business
engaged no material change from the original warlike languor
unfriendly as black bread equity that each person
coming into the room should indirectly,
take some slight or affront,
be make to adapt to this unnatural fare
with noisy satisfaction with distempered frame
it seemed never to have been robust.
and now with nervousness almost worn to skeleton
some pulmonary compliment heightens
the less good-natured circumstances,
anticipating armies of self-nothing in good order:
call it an idea.
100

prey to some hypochondriac encourage
oaken walls chained to a whisper
no wonder it tottered about, a kind of pocket
performing these baskets of fish as window sill
the top was opening out from unoccupied lights
all now and no later
hung overhead with ruinous aviary
shield-like pushing off
and tide turning,
some freedom from our native tongue.
101

11/04 Ohio
Moderate scale irreversible
made me ill bitter
levy bears it
rescue rightwing
from unilateral
fear on one hand
deserve atrocities
take that deep breath
scale of damage acts
hope of beginning
people of this country
protect me and my family
glimpse resiliency let
disasters mate
fundamentally sanctioned
how many civilians
going included
vision/optimism
wherever we’re going
next mass
made imminent
sanctioned
let those who voted
die for
reductive whatever
hell, truly,
denied rights had seriously
survived to die in his place
how disasters
raged this man
Jessica Grim
102

Winter.1.06
The divides soften here as
they sharpen
sentimental swill about the landscape
clocking winter’s approach
what then
in the absence of
a word a
decision is no salve
in which it is written in which
one writes “it is written”
pre editing predisposition
begins
with the tedium of
beginning
again
all intimations off where
were those
thoughts snow
bound
not an absence of place
quite
a sequence of words a wave
science ungrounds and
washes
against us in the
horrible
tide
such as having saved its color
some of whom were no longer living others
of whom their
mementos
103

quiet not
lasting it’s
cul de sac in the
midst of
interminably the
chaos narrows does it
less than
that other
eyelid peels
needless descriptiveness
in which some
leaves
this one
for example
retain deep color long after falling or
being removed from the tree the red
addled with the
New Snow Fall
softly on the crisp
ice of yesterday it
fell
those motes my
dictionary open to “preacher”
a series of removals remedied
the sky
the salt of your life after you’ve evaporated
unintentional repositioning of the chronology
lifes’ work referential thus
and so
plowing
through
form-fitting
platinum anatomy:
104

microbial
crinolines
enclose iota
embolism, metaphorically
now hanging on
a voice as
distant
triangulated
twill reverberates
instantiate
weird word trauma
fended early
spring foliage masking
wide white hemming tape
about where you are
you are not anymore
its details
do
105

Pasture.2
In whose fall leaves
splint alluvial chatter the
motor’s overdrive
darkening dawn
deterrent power of
quotes
plausible syllogy
fear palpable in the
doorframe
humane-er
drama in which
siblings air
the griefs
of their agency
that’s one beautiful
theme
mental encroachment
in tune
your white sea
sickness
don’t they
compose
so at the end
some said a holder
but without a project to
explore
such air desiccates
106

the acidity of tonal remorse
met
late dec. thaw
illegibly as always
those eyes lost in
recession what a
shame
smells of a border
there
key figure cartwheel
as the
sky was clear
blue as it
is not
now
the description of that
impervious
by granular you
mean “timbre” the sound
w/in the
text itself
gleeful hematosis
the elder offspring
skirmish
so little and so
difficult situational
renders optimism
possible how
nice
107

it’s doing more than it was doing but I
still don’t know what it’s doing
a brilliance often outshining
the seed catalog tenuous creep of spring
winds
in which the grass begins to turn
back
multitasking trauma
to the tune of
over here in the ditches we
have had
another bad day you?
shame on our
horseshoe drive
unparked from
demonstrable trail
don’t see be seeing them there
your howdiness
didn’t staggery glaze gaze
explain carefully: I cannot see this in
myself - or worse:
the double registrant
which in its time-warp siege
a laughter like
specific atrophy
(there is an historical…)
(parenthetical…)
moment upon us
mediated “my version of your vision”
these
messy tangents have fun snorkeling
hundreds of square feet of footage
108

dear inspirational speaker:
we feel your trauma
concept or treatise
beautified “emergent system”
on the banks of
that ocean over
there they
wedged up against
tiered resistive re-telling
109

Pasture.3
We, the series of markers
there is nothing not rejection in words
the absence of
interrogation its
intrusions the half-arc
of your dreams
vast warehouse interiors a threat
blossoming miscalculated sequence ominous
curvature the
face of sincerity ice
on which a man skates
which is the threat
further a vestibule and
within that feeling confined by
“circumstance” inferred or
shackled bifurcation to
ease into consciousness we fixed upon a life didn’t we we
did fix
upon it
don’t be so don’t be
so taken
as in the figment of imagination
fluttering at the eye
it could not be said to have been an echo a
friction between you
and your choices
infinite
bright fall light escalating
ad nauseum
winks out
what do we want
revealingly
110

even more immaculate
length of voices engineered
as it happens
as it was happening then
how little there is to say how
little there is to say about it
considering
each
acclaiming the sweet next step
“my word”, she said
more joining
an inattention there
so here lying
at the heart of
a series of notes accented by a single chord “what a
terrific time frame you’ve got!”
some supposed other or former
leaning against those notes
as they are played
lessening with each
finger fall
it is unclear why it is
unclear why
not
coming along now down that
very lane:
word allergens
otherwise in the slant of the day the capable day the
short winter
anathema anastrophe
familiarly
111

and what deeper recall should there
be what eye watching you
in a sense what is tolerable
abstruse cranial
concludes
whereas images stingingly arcane
the field beyond the house beyond the
road
courser grained, theatrically
start from here go on
interrogate place again
some
ovals on the short horizon
the slosh of totality the
several crunches of aptitude
silage down
the way
clever, but impacted
flutter contiguities
which also by their scrutiny
between harrowed lengths of
silver
in shorter lines we see
this steady january rain
which is
not right
a line of pines
carefully on the road aspirating
just enough ink to write “void”
thematically induced coma
in seeking to travel
112

dissolving into
tameness in response to existing –
an increasingly fragile what
a fine rain falls here in Ohio
cruising altitude of skins’ surface fretting
stammered or shamed
home as
a key system shadows
friend, we are all caught there
come cause this
out of an ordinary
aberration
a-grammatically
their levitation
(which disqualified them)
it was not a matter simply of
it was never
their positioning certainly
meticulous argumentation
dissembling
we who would classify
elbow room in the
rumination
so that we go on saying “there is nothing
new to say” thinking only of ourselves!
a more settled physiognomy
yellower world
sandstorms
low sun
113

abject louvers
sumptuous & telephonic sleep
our informant tells us: no game
wait until you can see the whites of their eyes the
soft rain on their cheekbones
hopeful lonesome
the mind with a finish you can feel
settling as a vapor will just
above it this thing which you
see a
foundational sound
detention, the capture of our…
somnambulists spring (again)
call out the
language feasibility studies
to that spot
in the yard where the old cat just
minutes dead was buried!
a felt equation a tremor of numbness
surgically inappropriate a
lesson a lessoning
knowing our carcinogens
or knowing what the questions are
forgetting
the heart that had been
upkeep
marveling at that brilliant
entrenchment as
stands accused the fierce
and viscous toxin still
exudes
a firming mournfulness
114

SAMMY’S BOWERY FOLLIES
Michael Lally
The first place I play piano professionally in Manhattan is a
night club on the Bowery called Sammy’s. They have a show for
tourists and college kids called Sammy’s Bowery Follies, which
consists of ancient, weathered, overweight ladies who sing like Sophie
Tucker, all brass and sass and volume, and dress like 19 th century
dance hall “gals” in the Hollywood Westerns of my boyhood. There
are old men as well, vaudeville comics in raggy old striped suits and
derbies, and white-haired musicians who play piano and banjo.
The musical style is one I’m familiar with. I have an Aunt
Peggy who at clan parties pounds the old upright in what passes for a
dining room in the little house I live in with my family, smashing
chords with rare concern for the right notes but filling the space with
loud and lively tones that are close enough to whatever song she’s
playing for others to recognize and sing along to. I’m usually asked to
play at these parties too and have been since I was a little kid.
Back then I played the latest popular song from sheet music,
like the droning theme from The Third Man, after that movie came
out in ‘49, when I was seven, or the folksy Good Night Irene—the
name of my mother and the youngest of my two older sisters, so a
very popular song in our house. The Weavers made it one of the
major hits of 1950, before they were blackballed as communists.
All the kids in my family play an instrument, because my
father believes it keeps us out of trouble and he loves to be serenaded
by us; we’ve always been his own private entertainment. My mother’s
happy we all play something too. Back when I was twelve and
rebelled against music lessons and practice, she pointed out how
playing music has been a great comfort to my brothers and sisters
when they‘re sad.
When my brothers were still at home and got discouraged
about school, or girls, they’d go off to the attic or cellar to find some
115

solitude to play their various horns for hours, until their bad mood
evaporated into the air along with the notes they played. My sisters
lose themselves in the piano when they’re blue, playing some simple
classical exercise or the latest popular song from the sheet music we
keep in the piano bench.
As soon as I could talk, I pestered my family into getting me
piano lessons so I could catch up to my sisters, who are closest to me
in age and were the ones at home the most when I was little, because
they’re girls. When I was four, my parents finally gave in and got me
the same German instructor who taught my sisters to read notes and
little else. He was all about regimentation, while I was, and am, all
about expressing myself. We ended up fighting over it, and by the
time I hit adolescence, I quit studying with him and even stopped
playing for a few years, upsetting my father no end. That’s when our
fights really began.
I started playing again as a way to get by in the Irish bars
around our part of Jersey and down the shore in summer. I always
envied the freedom of my Aunt Peggy’s piano playing, so when I hit
my mid-teens and wanted to be accepted as well as served in those
bars, I returned to the piano, only now in my version of Aunt Peggy’s
barroom style. It worked. Free drinks are lined up on the tops of the
old uprights by the time I finish my first number, even though I’m
well under the legal drinking age of twenty-one. In New York it’s
only eighteen.
When I show up at Sammy’s in the company of my sister
Joan and her two best friends—a cousin of ours and another good
Irish-Catholic girl, both with Mary in their names—I know I’ll get
served. I discovered Sammy’s last year on a visit with some
classmates from Saint Benedict’s, our Catholic boys school in
Newark. The old guy behind the bar didn’t even bother to ask for our
fake i.d.s. that time. So I’m sure I’ll pass for eighteen this year,
especially being with these older women—in their early twenties to
my barely seventeen.
116

My sister and the Marys know I’ve been hanging
around Manhattan for a few years, discovering things they can’t as
women on their own, at least in our Jersey Irish culture. So for one of
their nights out together, they asked me to take them someplace
different. I decided to take them to Sammy’s.
When we arrive, the place is packed for a Saturday night
show. I’m sure no one remembers me from last year sitting at the bar
with my schoolmates, and even if they do, they won’t recognize me. I
look totally different. I’m into progressive jazz now and the style of
the musicians who play it. I work hard to earn money to buy my own
version of their clothes. The suit I’m wearing is from Paul Sargent’s
on West Fourth Street in the Village, where a lot of jazz musicians
shop and my style idol, Miles Davis, is rumored to order his suits
custom made to his own designs.
Me, my sister Joan, and the two Marys are led to a table right
in front of the stage, like some sort of V.I.P.s. Midway through a
show that always includes audience participation in some form, even
if just heckling, this big-bosomed old lady looks down at our table
and announces “We have a celebrity in the room.”
Maybe because I’m with three older women, or because I
look a lot more flashy than the average high school boy in my tight
new jazzman’s suit, or because I have on a pair of dark sunglasses, or
maybe she actually believes it, but she asks the ladies with me, who I
am, and my cousin answers “Ricky Nelson!”
Now anyone with a TV knows I’m not Ricky Nelson. For
one thing he’s handsome in a way I doubt I am, even if as far back as
I can remember I’ve been certain I have something females are
interested in and it seems connected with my looks. They often tell
me I’m cute, or even handsome. But still, only a few years ago I
identified with Alfred E. Newman, the MAD magazine mascot,
because of my freckles and cowlick and the torturing ridicule of my
Catholic schoolmates.
The combination of cockiness with females and doubts about
how I really appear to others creates a self-conscious mixed-ego
message that someone will later characterize perfectly as me wanting
117

to be the center of attention and then wanting to know what the fuck
everybody’s looking at. I do seem to have been born with the need
for attention, maybe from being the youngest in our crowded little
household.
But I’m no Ricky Nelson. Though the old vaudevillians
probably have no idea. And in my shades, they may see reluctant
celebrity rather than “little hipster” like some folks call me. Invited to
join them, I blush like crazy as I walk to the stage at the insistence of
my sister and the two Marys. Fortunately there are no guitars—I can’t
play guitar—and also fortunately I know “I’m Walkin”—the Fats
Domino song Nelson covered—which I sit down at the piano and
play, while singing it too, more like Fats than Ricky I hope.
It’s my first performance in front of a New York audience
and I feel gratified at the applause as I return to our table. Later, the
manager, who obviously knows I’m not Ricky Nelson, comes over
and tells me I can play here as a warm-up act for the main shows, and
he’ll pay me some tiny sum I consider a windfall. So I do just that for
a while.
THE MARYS
When I’m still seven, I fall in love with another friend of my
sister Joan’s named Mary. This one reminds me of my favorite child
movie stars, Margaret O’Brien and Elizabeth Taylor. I love their dark
hair and sparkly eyes which remind me of my sister’s friend Mary, or
vice versa. She has black hair and white skin as clear in their contrast
as the keys of a new piano.
My sister Joan and her, along with the two other girls with
Mary in their names, one of them our cousin, have a little club that
meets once a week in one of their homes. Tonight they’re having a
party at our house. A few boys are invited but not me, of course, I
crash it anyway—a practice I’ll continue for years, crashing parties
I’m not invited to, where I don’t belong but want to.
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Joan asks ma to make me go to bed. But I charm the Marys
into pleading with our mother to let me stay and she gives in. She
stays in the kitchen with her crippled mother who lives with us, her
bedroom converted from what used to be our back porch. When the
party turns to spin the bottle using our grandma’s room as the lightsout
location for kissing, I want to play too. The three Marys prevail
on my sister, finding it cute—as they do much of my behavior. When
it’s the turn of the Mary I have a crush on to spin the bottle—
amazingly it points to me.
To the laughter and teasing of the others, she takes me by the
hand and leads me into the dark of my grandma’s room. I instantly
feel thrilled, even before anything happens. There’s enough light
from the moon shining through the windows for me to see the
sparkle in her eyes as she leans down to kiss me. I always knew the
way her eyes shine so bright whenever she looks at me is a sign she
feels the same way about me that I do about her.
I know that look well. I remember when I first saw it, in the
eyes of women shining down at me in my baby carriage, before I
could even talk. It’s a look that made me desire them right from the
beginning, because their eyes seemed to promise something—
something impossible to articulate, something secret, something
profound and which I knew from the start holds the key to my
happiness.
When the teenage, black-haired, third Mary kisses my sevenyear-old
lips, it fulfills that promise and proposes even more—ones I
can’t begin to fathom, but know from this moment will be the
purpose of my life to discover. I feel like the universe is confirming
my intuition about females and what I believe is my ability to intuit
their secret desires, desires I don’t even yet understand, if I ever will.
As her unsurprisingly soft lips linger on mine, they part
slightly and the tip of her tongue touches my lips, then presses
against them, parting mine too. And then, her tongue brushes against
the tip of my tongue, playfully, invitingly, mysteriously, fulfilling a
secret desire I didn’t even know I had, until I feel like I’ll faint from
119

the ecstasy that the nuns taught us only saints, and maybe a handful
of composers, ever experienced.
Maybe her teenage behavior toward a seven-year-old is
inappropriate, a transgression, or even a crime. I know a fifteen-yearold
girl who got in big trouble for playing with the seven-year-old
boy she was babysitting, I mean playing with his stuff, the way I
heard it. But all the boys I know only wish it had been one of us. For
me, this Mary’s kiss is the defining event of my boyhood—the
confirmation of my secret belief in her love for me, a love I sense had
to be fulfilled in romantic contact—that sweet sense of knowing
something others either don’t know or pretend not to, and certainly
don’t want any seven-year-old boy to know.
I leave my grandma’s darkened room a changed person, at
least where females are concerned. The others seem surprised at how
long we were in there, and amidst the teasing that greets us, there
seems to be almost a jealousy—among the girls as well as boys.
Maybe that’s all projected by me. Or maybe it’s real. No matter, to
me it seems obvious, and I immediately set out to win the other
Marys back to the kind of loving attention they usually give me. And
I do.
I love the other Marys too. But differently, as I love my sister
Joan. Especially because they always seem to adore me. I’m their little
project. As I grow, they try to dress me in the latest style of the
college boys they want to marry. And as much as I disdain these
styles—what I take for the snobby elitism of the Ivy League that
spawned them—they’re still a relief from the hand-me-downs from
my brothers, or the homemade clothes my crippled grandmother
makes for me.
I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but I hate the lack of style to
the little pairs of pants, with their elastic waistbands, that never quite
fit right and make me look, I think, like an impoverished sissy. So
sometimes I’m grateful to these girls when they dress me in the style
of the boys they wish would pursue them, boys like Peter Lawford
plays in all those Hollywood rah rah college movies.
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I appreciate what the Marys are trying to do for me, make me
stylish, at least by their standards, or the standards of the college men
they want to catch. But it won’t turn out that way for them, or me.
Not long after the party where she kissed me so delectably,
the black-haired, fifteen-year-old Mary elopes with an older Puerto
Rican guy she’s pregnant by. I feel deeply betrayed. I’m certain it’s
really me she wants to elope with. But I understand why she can’t
wait all the years it will take for me to grow up and marry her. I can’t
wait myself.
Our cousin Mary will end up marrying an Italian “landscape
contractor”—as gardeners in our area start calling themselves.
The other Mary will never marry but move to New York to
become a buyer for Lord & Taylor, the exclusive uptown department
store, making her the one who will come closest to at least part of
what they were all striving for.
My sister Joan will marry the youngest son of Polish
immigrants from nearby Orange, who will become a cop not long
after our brother Robert does. She’ll make sure her husband dresses
like an Ivy League college graduate, even though he’ll never go to
college.
And I’ll start buying my own clothes at Paul Sargent’s.
“LITTLE JOE GOULD” VS. THE SPARTANS
The year before the Ricky Nelson incident, when the Bowery
is still most famous for being Manhattan’s skid row, a gang of Irish-
American boys I’ve run with since grammar school discover Sammy’s
and take me there, and the old bartender serves us without even
glancing at our fake i.d.s. Once we get over our fear of being
discovered as the underage kids we are, my schoolmates start right in
making fun of the old folks putting on the show.
I feel for the people on stage—partly because I already have
an inkling of what it’s like to try and entertain a room full of people,
and partly because they remind me of aunts and uncles and other
121

elatives in the extended family I live among back in Jersey, as
opposed to the families of these boys, who are the “in crowd” at
school. Their fathers are professionals with college educations. My
father is a seventh-grade drop-out. Which means that whenever we
need help with our homework my grandma—our mother’s mother
who moved in with us after she was widowed—says “Ask your
mother, she graduated from high school”—like that makes our mom
Einstein.
My mother, always humbly, says that our father is “the
smartest man” she ever met. It occurs to me that there probably
aren’t that many men in my mother’s life outside my father; but years
later I’ll realize there has been—many of them more successful and
certainly better educated than my old man. But none “smarter” than
him.
This first time at Sammy’s I meet someone I’ll later think was
Joe Gould. I don’t know who Gould is, but shortly afterward I’ll
discover the poetry of e. e. cummings, and through him a little bit
about Gould, a Harvard graduate turned Bowery bum and the author
of An Oral History of the Universe—a work in progress which
nobody ever sees more than a few pages of—who cadges drinks all
over Greenwich Village and the Bowery. He was made famous by an
article of Joseph Mitchell’s in The New Yorker, later turned into a
book.
When I’ll finally read Mitchell’s writings on Gould, I’ll realize,
given the chronology of Gould’s life, it’s probably someone else my
friends and I encounter this night. It may be the reigning “King of
the Hobos”—a title awarded each year and dutifully reported in The
Daily News and The Daily Mirror—the tabloids my father reads
every morning over breakfast, on the covers of which there’s
sometimes photos of dead mobsters bleeding all over the street or a
barber’s chair.
Whoever the old white-haired, bearded bum is, hitting us
high school boys up for drinks, he makes an impression I’ll never
forget.
122

He approaches us all cocky, declaring his fame by showing us
a newspaper photo of himself—which is why I’ll later make the Joe
Gould connection. The other boys aren’t impressed, as they rarely are
by anything. So they make fun of him, as they do everyone and
everything, including me and each other. They all seem able to take
their kind of ribbing and give it back in return, but I can never think
of a smart come back, so I usually end up giving them more cause for
teasing me.
The bum has an entirely original response to their mockery.
He makes us a bet. He says each of us can ask him one question, and
if he can’t answer every one of us correctly, he’ll leave us alone.
But—if he answers all our questions right, he’ll get to ask us one
question, which we can answer together. If we don’t answer his
question correctly, we’ll each have to buy him a drink. We agree.
One boy, whose father is a doctor, asks something about
anatomy. He’s the leader of our little gang and has been since we
actually were one, back in Our Lady of Sorrows, the Catholic
grammar school we were in when Blackboard Jungle came out. Along
with a lot of other kids who saw that movie, we not only ended up
calling all authority figures “Daddy-o” but formed a gang with jackets
that said: Spartans A. C. The A. C. for Athletic Club, a necessary
addition to any gang logo in New Jersey then.
There were a lot of gangs in Jersey only a few years ago, and
gang wars that sometimes ended with serious injuries and even
deaths. Especially if they involved gangs like the three-hundredstrong
Irish one, centered in Jersey City, called The Loafers—a term
I’ll later learn came down from Walt Whitman’s days when it already
referred to the stylish street toughs Whitman admired for their
original style and slang—or the similarly huge Italian gang from
Newark called The Romans, who use butcher knives in their rumbles.
All that stuff made the Jersey authorities outlaw gang names on
jackets. So the gangs added A. C. or S. C.—for Athletic or Social
Club—to their names.
That worked. Until the authorities outlawed any kind of gang
jackets, no matter what’s added to their name. Which led to gangs
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wearing athletic letter sweaters, like the jocks, only the letters stood
for the names of the gangs. But that never really caught on. No
matter what the letter sweater really might mean, it ain’t the same as a
gang jacket and can’t create the kind of fear the sight of a gang jacket
can. Those bans, along with the onslaught of heroin and the
beginning of a new history for us—or so it will seem after one of
ours, an Irish Catholic, gets elected—will end the era of white, ethnic
gangs in New Jersey.
Despite having long given up the Spartans jacket after I was
kicked out at the end of our grammar school years together—when I
thought I’d never see these guys again, so finally in objection to their
constant teasing I took each member on in individual fist fights that
made me feel like John Wayne for just surviving them—here I am in
high school back hanging with them. They’re still the in group and
they’re the guys I’ve known the longest in our school.
The leader is still the doctor’s son, whose mother committed
suicide a few years ago in the middle of the night in her nightgown in
their garage, inhaling the fumes of the family car. Everyone in the
gang chipped in to send a huge floral display in our gang colors—red
and white—to her funeral. She left behind nine children, most with
bright orange hair people always call red—like hers, including her
youngest, our leader.
He’s Irish-American, like me and the rest of the gang, only
their ancestors came over a long time ago. Unlike my father’s parents,
who live down the street from us and still talk with a thick brogue.
Because our leader’s father is a doctor, his family lives on the other
side of town, like the rest of this crowd. But either side, if the family’s
Irish, there are a lot of kids. They just have bigger houses. The
redhead got the sympathy vote for his mother’s suicide and has
remained our leader, even though he’s a year behind us after failing
his Freshman year and being held back.
If that had happened to me I’m sure I would’ve been kicked
out. As it was, I almost lost the academic scholarship I had to our
school that my father never told me I had, instead acting like he was
paying. But the Bishop who’s the pastor of our parish is paying for it
124

ecause he told my father I was too smart to let me go to public
school, he thinks I might someday be a famous bishop myself and
even a “doctor of the church” though there’s no way I would ever
become a priest!
This night, our leader, the “redhead,” asks the old bum a very
specific question about anatomy, something identified with a Latinate
term I don’t know, and he must have gotten from his father. But the
bum knows it too, surprising the redhead into losing the smirk he
always maintains in any social situation. The other boys ask equally,
to me, difficult questions about things they know, including law and
history and sports. But the bum has the answers. By the time it gets
to me, all I can think to ask is something about music, which the bum
also answers effortlessly.
“Now,” he says, “can you boys tell me what’s the perfect
length of time it takes—for the act of intercourse?” We’re all thrown.
Even if I am the only one among us who isn’t still a virgin, which I
suspect is true, my one experience thus far was pretty quick. I’m
pretty sure too quick. So we sit there red faced, trying to consult each
other but knowing we don’t have a clue, because, of course, there is
no answer, but we don’t know that yet.
So we buy the bum his drinks, and I begin to see this socalled
in crowd with a lot more skepticism. By the time we’re high
school Seniors, and I’ve been playing piano at Sammy’s a while—
when I’m not working for my old man in his home maintenance
business or at the part-time jobs I take to earn pocket money, since I
work for my father for “room and board”—there isn’t much left
binding me to these boys except our shared past.
Then, one day I run into the redhead. I’m with my friend
Charlie, a black man a few years older than me who I play music with
and hang around with and love like a big brother. He’s a legend in
our town as an ex-high-school football hero. I used to watch him
play when I was a kid, long before we became friends. Now he’s my
mentor in all things cool, from menthol cigarettes to techniques for
making women crazy when having sex with them.
125

He’s married, but so many women throw themselves at him,
he can’t turn them down. I often hang out at his place, an apartment
where he lives with his wife and baby son on the third floor of a
house his father owns or maybe rents and lives downstairs in with
Charlie’s mother and the rest of the family. We either listen to music
or play it, or ride around in his customized ’49 Merc, with the top
chopped so low you can hardly see out and nobody can see in.
Anyway, the next time I’m with the old gang, the redhead
makes a few jokes at the expense of my “colored” friend Charlie. As
usual, I’m unable to come up with a smart answer, so in frustration I
turn it into a political debate about how stupid the whole concept of
“race” even is, and end up bugging the redhead so much he gives me
an ultimatum to choose between my “colored” friends, or him and
this little gang of Irish kids I’ve run with since grammar school.
I choose my “colored” friends, of course, and after
graduation never see the redhead again, or any of that gang for over
forty years.
NINA SIMONE AND “DESTINY”
Even though I’m only in my teens when I start playing music
in Manhattan, I’ve been drinking in a way I think is legendary and
gets me talked about as well as thrown out of some places. I’m falling
off piano stools as my music sets extend into the morning hours, or
passing out half in and half out of my father’s car in the driveway we
rent from my oldest friend Bobby’s father across the street.
One morning Bobby’s father kicks my shoulder to wake me
as I lay in my own vomit with my head in the street and feet in the
car that’s only partially in the driveway. Thankfully the street’s still
quiet. He’s on his way to his job as a butcher.
I’m even blacking out, which to most people means passing
out, but really means a period when the mind seems to shut down
and in your own consciousness you might as well be asleep, but you
keep walking and talking and being active and often seem more sober
126

than you were before the black out. I wake some mornings, only able
to remember the night before up to a specific moment, everything
after that completely gone—not a blur, not fuzzy, not vaguely still in
my consciousness, but completely and totally missing.
How the hell did I get back home and in bed? Or wherever I
find myself, including the fountain in Washington Square, which is
dry in winter and the few homeless people I know—mostly teenagers
who ran away from home—sleep in on nights when the cops don’t
bother to get out of their cars, which they drive through the famous
arch before circling the fountain. Or maybe they just pretend to not
see us to let us sleep in peace until the first Fifth Avenue buses of the
morning come through the arch to turnaround for the trip back
uptown, before they make that impossible.
There’s a bum bar on Bleecker Street that’s my main hangout
when I’m on my own in the city, without my high school cronies or
my other Jersey friends. For whatever reasons, I’m comfortable there.
Maybe because everyone else in it seems to be the kind of drinker I
am. Maybe because since I was a little kid and before, hoboes have
been camping down by the railroad tracks at the foot of our street
and are a familiar sight. My father often calls them “Knights of the
Road” and my mother invites them in and offers them something to
eat and drink when they show up at our door begging, having
probably heard of her hospitality.
Whatever the reasons, it’s my main hangout when I’m on my
own, running the streets of the city. It’s called Mills Bar, between
MacDougal and Thompson, on the north side of Bleecker, a few
doors down from a live theater, the name of which I never notice
because I think it’s for stuck-up fancy rich people—or as some of my
spade friends say, “siddidy,” which I assume is an intentional
distortion of society. I never even notice what’s playing at it. Mills is
across the street from a rundown hotel that bums can spend a night
in for a couple of bucks or less.
In a few years the bar will become known as Mills Tavern, a
showcase for folksingers, and the hotel will be renovated and turned
into condominiums, but now it’s my home base in the city, and the
127

favorite hangout of bums, where a watery glass of beer is only a
nickel and a shot of whisky a quarter. Money even I can come up
with easily when I’m broke. I panhandle tourists, especially those
going to what I take for the fancy theater down the block. This is the
buttoned down ‘50s; people aren’t used to seeing a fresh-faced white
kid asking for nickels, the price of a candy bar, before it goes up to
seven cents. I almost always get some change.
I buy a bottle of the cheapest bourbon I can get and while
sipping from it in a brown paper bag, I sit on the sidewalk on
Thompson Street, just South of Bleecker, and lean against the grating
through which I can hear whoever’s performing in the The Village
Gate, the new night club in the basement of a building right next to
the bum hotel. It’s often Nina Simone.
I fall in love with her music, and through it with her. Even
before she gets famous from her hit version of “Porgy.” My spade
friends in Jersey make fun of my feelings for her and of how ugly
they think she is. They say “she looks like she got whupped with a
ugly stick.” And a lot of musicians I know don’t think much of her
piano playing either. But I love it, and her.
She has a theatrical quality to her phrasing that I think is what
puts my musician friends off. She does these keyboard-length runs—
like classical riffs, only less precise—and builds them into
melodramatic crescendos, while coupling that almost amateurish
grandstanding with some blues and jazz chording and trills that come
off almost folksy in her inimitably loose style. Not that there’s really
anything loose about it at all. She knows exactly what she’s going for,
and what she wants from the musicians who back her, but she puts it
across like it’s a mix of casual jamming and concert hall bravado.
She’s often the main act at the Gate on nights when I’m
hanging on the street, either before I leave home and tell my parents
I’m staying with a friend from the other side of town whose parents
they would never presume to call, or after I leave home and am just
broke and without a place to stay. One of the bums I drink with, an
older black street guy, is known as Destiny. [According to notes I’ll
make several years after these incidents, his name may be Desiree,
128

which sounds more likely, but for decades I remember, and speak of
him, as Destiny, which at this late perspective seems so much more
appropriate and familiar, I continue to remember him as that.]
He always has a sweet smile and is a very gentle and kind
man, sharing whatever he has with whoever’s around, or at least with
me. He and I often buy some cheap wine. I hate wine. Beer and
bourbon are my drinks. But some brands of wine are cheaper, go
further, and can be easily shared in a paper bag while we sit on the
sidewalk and lean our backs against the grating above the Village
Gate through which we can hear the music from the bandstand
below.
We pass the wine back and forth, and under the influence of
e. e. cummings and other poets I’m discovering—including “Negro”
ones that even my black friends don’t know about, like Bob Kaufman
and LeRoi Jones—I write poems to Nina Simone on whatever paper
I can find, sometimes on the back of flyers for her show. After her
set, when Destiny and I have finished off the bottle of some horrible
tasting brew—like a favorite, because it’s so cheap, Gallo “half and
half,” half port and half whatever—I give a poem to whoever is at
the door of the Gate and ask that it be sent backstage to Miss
Simone.
I never hear anything back. Not even when I take my sister
Irene to see Simone in person. Or the few other times I have the
money to see her live, after an opening act that once includes a young
Jewish comic named Woody, who does a routine about when he was
a kid the only pet he had was an ant, and another bit using a spotlight
that flickers as he imitates some silent movie acting, and another time
a teenage singer named Aretha, who accompanies herself on piano
like Nina Simone does, only this teenager sings more Gospel style.
Listening to her feels like sitting on the steps of the black church in
our town while choir practice is going on inside, something I used to
do regularly as a kid.
When the opening acts are done and gone, Simone comes on
stage in these floor-length dresses that are so tight around her ankles
she has to take tiny little steps in what seems like extremely high heels
129

to walk from the wings to the piano, like a “black-American” version
of a Giesha girl walking on ice.
I hear all kinds of rumors about Simone’s love life: that she’s
a lesbian, that she’s married to a cop, that she’s having an affair with
the white guy who plays guitar in her little combo that is otherwise all
black. But though these rumors often dismay me, they don’t deter me
from my ambition to meet her and make her mine some day, and to
continue writing and sending poems to her.
I’m not sure she ever gets them, I never get any response, but
I continue to spend many nights either leaning back against the
grating listening to her sing and play underground, literally, as now
and then a rat runs out through the metal bars and into the street, or
sitting at a table in the club itself, hearing her up close and live,
watching her every move, imagining kissing her incredibly full lips,
making her know through my love-making how beautiful I find her,
despite what my friends think about her looks.
I argue with them that you can’t judge her by ordinary
standards, that it’s like she’s from another planet and has to be
judged by standards totally different than ours. But they don’t buy it.
They know my sometimes strange to them taste, and attribute it to
whatever it is that makes me prefer “colored girls” as my family, and
even me and my black friends sometimes still call them.
I’m seeing a “colored” girl in East Orange, Delores, short and
dark-skinned, who my Jersey black friend think has also been
whupped with the ugly stick, but who I dig because she digs me back,
and because she talks to me in ways only one other Jersey girl ever
has, Carol Robinson, who also happens to be “colored.” Dolores
made her move on me while I was still seeing Carol Rob, a skinny,
very dark, bright-eyed girl with giant glasses.
The first time I went to Carol Rob’s apartment, her little
brothers and sisters, who never saw a white person in their home
before, seemed mesmerized by me. They actually touched my hair
and giggled at it and my pink skin. I’m sure they see plenty of white
people on TV shows and in East Orange itself, where some of my
130

cousins grew up, but their neighborhood has turned completely
“colored,” so I’m an oddity up close, sitting at their kitchen table.
By the time Dolores made her move, Carol’s father decided
he wasn’t too happy with his daughter being friendly with a white
boy, and Delores’ parents are never around. I gave up on most white
girls as hopelessly in bondage to moral codes that have to be
maneuvered around to get anywhere I want to be. It’s too much work
and often leads to totally confusing exchanges where “no” means yes
or maybe or something I don’t understand and can’t cope with.
When it comes to “colored” girls, there’s no room for dating
or getting to know each other’s families—the only one I ever tried
that with was Carol Rob. Like hers, most of their fathers are as dead
against white boys as mine is against black girls. So being with a black
girl means hanging out and getting physical without a lot of games. If
they’re attracted to me.
Often they can’t figure me out, find me a little crazy and
strange, with my growing obsession with “Negro” music and history
and literature, subjects that aren’t common, even in the black
community, and certainly not among most black teenagers, too busy
creating what will be the white dance and dress crazes of the near
future. Something the white world has yet to acknowledge. Most
white kids I know aren’t even aware of black people outside of those
near, or in, their neighborhood—with a few exceptions, like Fats
Domino, Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. But they don’t
want to style themselves after those guys.
So girls like Delores, too homely for my spade buddies, are
okay with me, because they accept my obsession with black culture
and black women as a given, something natural, just me, and I love
them for that. Though I still have a vision in my mind of a beautiful
black girl who will appear some day and I’ll know she’s the girl of my
dreams.
In the meantime, Nina Simone is my ideal, even though I
never get any response to my poems, if she ever really receives them.
For years I’ll carry a flyer for a show of hers at the Gate until finally
incorporating it into one of the collages I make on found objects, like
131

the back of a broken guitar someone threw out, or an old room
divider screen that belongs to a landlady of mine in Spokane,
Washington, where the flyer finally ends up. But the lady won’t sell
the screen to me when I move out, and I’ll never see the flyer, or the
collage, again. Or for that matter, Nina Simone.
132

Douglas Messerli
THE COMPOSITION OF THE TEXT
(after Adriano Spatola)
Every word is a rebellion
against the salt of songs.
Dust is a security.
Here the part played by color
is a compromise with the vocabulary
of matter: the hoist speeds
the crack, the suspect of accusation.
Meanwhile thought spreads
to the algebraic canon on some
uninhabited planet. Poetry
is always an “artificial shock,”
a surprise of the brilliant procession
of urgent bravados. It is a slippery
space that seems to the painter
strewn with brimstone, glistening
with those iridescent puddles of “dreamy
pianissimos.” Time was up before necessity
took the dog into dislocation.
Its mummification is relatively recent,
an audible instrument of absolute silence
between words, that synthesis of syrupy
backgrounds satisfying the code of the cold.
The best solution is to act
as if the murky derivations of meaning
were a central clause of the contract
to neglect what was already pretty set:
you know, rhododendrons spiraling
out behind the various gins
of card and drink. You sink
into solidity as soon as you have
said “cancel that word,”
now a tempest of jest.
Los Angeles, May 26, 2008
133

A VIEWPOINT WHERE A SINGLE GLANCE PALLS WOOD
Then sails again, wine drying
tongues at the stutter step
of our lurch. The car is blind
to the slowly opening forests.
A kind of course child’s cry
comes from the void of where
we forgot to have been.
I open the second door
where the cherry trees bloom
into roar, laughing silent
at the calm shine of ambiguity.
Crease, cut the leaf!
Los Angeles, May 19, 2007
134

SOONER BEGIN TO THE ALMOST LASTS
—Joe Ross
The necessary appropriates the silence
because there is no saying to economize
what shadows the after. So began
the name for that world slipping
into address the interrogator
divided between the present and the past,
each dusted event forgotten
as a code to complete the mosaic
of all those erasures.
The wave laps what rocks memory
into appeal. It’s easier that way
to word the social as a concept
studied by the coach.
It took the sun to picture
what could be said
to have been a result.
Los Angeles, July 11, 2006
135

THE WORD WITH WHICH ONE WALKS MOVES IN ADVANCE
—Reina María Rodríguez
Utopia, an immense vault,
is the image—unfortunately—
of a reasonable photo
of a certain irritation
between silence and resolve.
This illusion is a forgery
of what everyone saw
approaching destiny in a spectacle
recognizable in the half-light
of the dreamer’s compensation
for never having visited the city
he intended to inhabit
once he awoke. His black out
ruptures whatever equilibrium
might have supported his intended
existence. In December he had sat
on the horseshoe of luck
which resulted in his slip
when the new year marched in
helping him to forget
he was just a silhouette
to remind him of something
possible to protect. Now he has lost
the map of the fortifications
that fell through the fingers
of his intelligence.
Los Angeles, 1 July 2006
136

STARS OFFER THE TREES THEIR CONFIDENT SHADE
—David Kinloch
Back may reject
the mince of ejaculated
threats, but the arrested eye
exacts a snide pinch
among those athletes
who seek any game.
Elegy suits homecomings
as if warding off
the sailor’s neck, voices
besieging the staircase’s
twist. Over the spool
they slump down to breathe
simple syllables just as the moon
calves the thighs with what
you can well imagine absorbs
the traceless suppression
of all those unexplored desserts.
There is a wisp of the white hair
summer verges on its threshold
deposited there as a groan
that rhymes with the moan of hesitation’s
open spiral, a fill that is to be
it seems apparent in reflection
of what bringers brought the slip into,
cupped in surprising handfuls
of an impotent seed thrust
to surface deep.
Los Angeles, 10 February 2006
137

ANTYHING THAT DOES NOT CONTAIN BLUE LIGHT
Disappointment comes from the other side
of memory, the body lifted now
into the hair of sisters.
The hand moves away, an imperfection
of the thick beard outside the room
the house cannot get into,
and the light goes on in the kneel
with no sharp edges, as rope
always apprehends. Which isn’t to say
pleasure exactly screws the head
tight to memory. Imposed democracy always
declares its desperation. It is a concert
of heart beats. Everywhere noises throw
the dice that abolishes ears. Just when
the sun penetrates the eyes squint
off the roof, laying the fog upon the grass,
a seahiss of engorgement. Such gifts
clearly are returns, another story
you never told yourself about
that warm finger on your lip.
Los Angeles, May 18, 2007
138

AS IF THE MUSIC WERE THE ONLY TAUNT
—Louis Zukofsky
I hate the forest
of strong arms
waiting in that little
distance of pause between
rancor and reconciliation.
Nothing stops the motion
of the accord of seating
to back up the drop
that floors all propositions.
Hoping to impel
your fingers to encircle
the throat your denial
tongues as an inaccurate
conversation between yourself
and the object of persistent
chatter, I utter
to the cantankerous cow
hide in me.
The next word
reveals what flaunts
itself as history:
a worm eating
through the bark
that dogs its friction
against the agonized
leaves left without
a trace to flutter
upon our flattened
ground of grave.
The music always rises
without my ascent.
Los Angeles, July 8, 2006
139

HARD TIMES
The eye is jealous
for its dark shine,
the shadowed star
could kill us, yes, don’t
make a sound! That horizon
chases any ordinary
movement. I lost the sky
upon the skin of what lives
between the fingers!
Touch and let go,
brush and branch
into bustle. The seagulls
are only briefly home
in times of danger.
The one who desires
saves something
in his eyes named sight,
the whirling violence
of flesh’s forgetting.
Branch branches the hesitant
leaf, the way wilderness
has wandered off, where char
comes down the river
upon that fan of sand.
Did you see the sail
Away? Did you cross
before the wolf?
I say the eye emits
a darkness where
wind has led it on.
The price of anything is night.
Los Angeles, May 25, 2008
140

A DOVE
Here, hold it! Go ahead, in conversation
if we could speak, we might talk about it, it…
I am not a priest! I cross the street
entering a secret shop, after all
we owe ourselves some sort of ritual!
To whom is that bird singing his mourning
song before I even wake up?
I am silent, not a saint, which is the opposite
of place—although my parents always preferred
the stilled tongue! Somebody horribly strange
sits next to me—Here, hold it! The hand
I offer him, he…he is anxious by the buzz
of regret. Evil never manifests its lack
of good deeds—action modifies the possibility
of communion, he says, a lack of good
deeds not represent a necessary goodness
in what we lack. He does not
know how to blow his nose. Hear, hold!
Be quiet please. I am a sinner, I admit!
I have now entered the little booth
Where I may imagine what I want!
Where is that pigeon who woke me up?
Los Angeles, May 24, 2008
141

from
My Summer Evocation
under bird call and mottled
structure some words contrive
a blight upon this ruin
‘the two worst things humans
ever came up with: laws
and sea world,’ a working
vacation, time honors
history or what have I learned
the clever ways a social group
avenges itself, ecology on rooftops
and all the angles of a nation
musing in summer publics
friends sure of nothing
a nod to those escaping fire
if nothing ripens get out
and adjust the contrast
a nod to the boys who swing their bats
tip their hats, swing their bats, so
hurt and ever mourning
all the rules have changed
which adds more nice things
to imagine like public works
and civil liberties, trying out
magic in fits and starts the goalie
lets four go by, plan to edit
out the rough spots mix rock salt
pebble sand stir and sift to manage
corporate solutions to the problem of
neogeopolitical craft documentarianism
two kids collide and dash off
policing gangly knees, the slap
on the wrist means all’s understood
Bill Marsh
142

thankful to ride in the back, i swear
history’s elemental crossroads
meet under heaven’s alimentary clouds
take time to build a conscientious run-through
lessons on the fringe abuses of ‘about’
while nine cents of ink from a Sanford
uni-ball tether an intelligence system
to this de-skilled expert legal pad
breezes beat back a real live
tumbling ball of weed to the raw flat
rippling drink of lake murray
a kind of sickness pulls power
down a sewer drain, I haven’t
written like this since the 1900’s
a concept the Navajo All-Stars kick
around third base the trouble
with bubbles continues (a body
system picks its flows) and they
start picking foreign targets
but really for the last time
new babies learning to walk
fall optimistically, the trapdoor
of metaphor makes good use
of gravity, which never meant anything
until today
143

(11.11.01) 06.26.02
such horror
brings questions
mass (and massive) media
know more about practice ‘here’
of ‘being literate’ ([skilled], present)
of what, as it develops, I’d like
to think is one worthwhile
method for being (and becoming)
as we all pursue what it means to go back
to the problems that lead
(students down the road, for example)
to destruction
Commether Billy Chub,
and bring tha hornen book.
Gee me the vester in that windor,
—what! be a sleepid!—I’ll wake ye.
the idea came while reading
the field notebooks of Reginald Daly
odd-numbered pages feed into
his search experience, while even
divide inferential thoughts
to conduct the assignment thinking
pages record, an earth scientist
tells a story about rocks and minerals
and I’m struck by how that process might
play a part in ‘mapping the search’
inspired to begin doing what Daly did
but nevertheless from my own field
is experience of this research on his
Daly’s notebook
Now, Billy, there’s a good bway.
Ston still there, and mind
what I da za to ye,
an whaur I da point.
144

my work
will record
very different documents, all in
data which, thanks to computers
will be ‘artful’ and literary
the way some insights come
with failures and difficulties
the relevant strains
need pulling apart
the dew of knowledge
as input, to output
politicized material results
That’s right, Billy,
you’ll zoon lorn the criss-cross lain,
you’ll zoon be a scholard.
A’s a pretty chubby bway—Lord love’n!
thus begins
the story of making
a learner whose time
is dead form
the framework can be taught (as interface)
to better serve the learning
desperately wanted as activity
retaining what’s good in
trashing what’s bad
to propose what, for some
is an assignment
145

(11.20.01) 06.28.02
listing out
keywords
to define
the moment:
reserve librarians
on quick review
get more
creative
doing an initial sweep
it looks like
good and not so
good reasons in
the document itself
scribbles in the margins
as foil, to talk
specifics
of negotiation here
a broader interaction
potential launch points
for expertise
a few notes
for further research or
inconsistencies …
What spells b-a?
If the childe
cannot tell, teach him
to say thus b-a, ba;
so putting first b
before all vowels, to say
ba, be, bi, bo, bu
then ask him againe
liberty is exploring
charming ideas
what the artifacts
reveal, not
146

work, why such
confusion?
I have
bits of clue for a scavenger
my job is
a mood-learning instrument, what
remains: Why can’t
we question
feedback: power
and law
knowledge: something
bites
in the database
what spels b-a?
by ofte repeating before him
he will certainly
doe it, so if you ask him
how he spels b-a,
he will answer
b-a, ba.
147

surprised to see
the sun down so early
today, cognition
at the site of ævocation
nearing whatever concrete
choosing may be useful
the heat in the plum ripens
decentralizing production
flirting with language alone
what’s hidden in this setting?
a shopper spends time
in a grocery store, but persons
moving from store to store
resurrected in a later chapter
a question is useful in relaxing
the strictures of ‘everyday thinking’
feeling fit in the face
of pretty obvious connections
but the polemic of labor
‘hath no improvement’ (Montaigne), a field
elastic between language and learning
teased out, then discarded
would be a savage research
I’m drifting toward fixes in the common
implosion, its cult, calling
far and wide, so the origins
feed without fear on stores of knowledge
to be honest about the hazards
of ingestion, the savage does not take in
order to receive, a stickiness
to thinking also dangerous
the summoning act
ignores those dead in the sub-world
of membership, for now:
time/change/order, the end
is key to the continuum
never forgetting the actors
who regulate negotiations
of this type
148

Contrapuntal
Christina Strong
Bit recall a lake on me. Gorge on.
Woe, love Vroom. Is debutant ball wish list.
Moan with dungeon passion thwarted,
moot defy repetition, steeped in taboo cruel.
Fear, ceiling of, all breeds wonders. Is repose on radar
segregated stripped. Is. fudge the ball.
Neat. Is query enough?
“she… Keep in symmetrical Last. come heed.
scale Beg. The rise of. Offend. I guess
is some structural… la la land.
Someone has to soundtrack.
Pride speaks electric…heightened a make earth?
Lasting hand will not pretend…
to increase congress: alt 50 bpm
I a vacuum blueprint. cutting. background
or is reptilian promises? Be the boss.
Pop up button. sick. Be grateful. even… nosy.
The west. Rook. Seven eleven. Even divorce
Death does wonders on skin.
The coat on inflict quake happens.
you’d call this an instrumental flashback.
Right here this left breast and in which…
mention…take requests…funding at her cheeks.
South. the your… operating on a large breath…
Hell, I’d insert verb here as London burns…
149

I am a cliché
controversy cold fusion
come up sooner or later
give me the specs on a 1994breakdown, intense years of cutting
off u of Chicago influence…a thump thump, your private
servant? impaled on custom work
beauty, broke tiny pieces
prima donkey red morale
oh mexican harp! I am a flurried
disingenuous document!
Beat my life sultry. there is blood
on your hands. A mantra. A “stressor”
Life Defeats (x and y 2006)
integrity. The board meeting.
I always best to imagine
caressing a loved one. The non stop
helicopters fly by, one got off
voyeurism…or is it all piano drone?
150

mr super stupid head
verify voyages catalogue group
or specify trickster, mode and app
for being true, honest, or as cannon
fodder, relaxed that this justifies that…
or hem tone to be as that just
throw up or puke the etymology of
pathos, were missing imp since
emp not pro or pre or starting up
crescent spinning wheel, wind torn
piano riff lisp stutter USB is obsolete…
south coast wander beach and all these
fucking pictures, question of pay out or cash inn
name place zombie all the time turnstiles a la
temp spacing frozen gone flash zone
application old now didn’t I create a comic
stars ago
photoshop fifteen: you can replicate life…
151

Onion skinner
point out only vector operations, the on more written in take
an and 1985. The food stamp ads in so a fanny pack
bomb a police ate up, while the original set
included them,
with curtain bars blue
padded rooms not war and rallies strange events that parrot
in the bad on cards we were waiting for and -- four and facto
standard
for the
elementary condition.” Used and be used.
Textbooks always surfer there was none -- repeat habit over
have seen it on windows
in the field
disorderly conduct at meetings
additions
proposed
read on
here is
your
matrix
152

and vector fodder look forward to state
warehouse experiment
full of bred to be and to ask fucking
clueless questions
paper: the elections frat a pater knock knock what’s in
“[The BLAST]
paid for
worry or you may
All three
there?
not you
cows come home -- I’m a wave
you food chain once programs
that use I care not or sacrifice centuries of -- programs.
and reason?
the choice of operations
no changes to stories s/he said and never station
rhode island once rested here, what is wrong
with free
health care
a monument repete the set of basic features
153

have been shown to speed up aid to cynical thought, billboards
hierarchy
sexismo
still not in a dictionary cue card
cut or realize a trick line after and trees ashes scattered
in there, bound of BLAST to read pound anchor
knife last aorta year scientific and engineering applications
clarity,
port a bow bility, modularity and maintenance
such as nameless noun this city, that
or past tense ask
24 your diner broken link here
demonstrated implementations of paper magic marker further
describes
the naming
conventions and operations that occur frequently on mainland
re: us pearl a lock box dingbat font…
[1 precise one] has been widely accepted and traveler
canadian pictures of specific
mayday car and systems so silly memes the power and utility of x
154

with these extensions examples
excuses of become available those crazy spit out --for the
subprograms
as
well as
the
various
lama source code. To quote the present:
oregon washington cape cod
coastline
am worldly bored
of the white page calling sequences like
standing in a states,
couldn’t keep more -- pictures the
stars many published
Linear Sub-po, or list o blogs.
The original set made a list of its advantages.
Now
collinsville, wow town towers
as they are an aid to was made after much consultation
with workers even -- were of the tab spunk magazine on
matrix storage schemes
I am a monument
that may and what it rented rooms should on fonts till
the I comes
155

home
should be in over california programs refer to it.
We wish home. Special machine-code. Had to
offer
it.
Was in delving deeper even chill
out room ibeza just not cop -- font discuss floor minimum
wage the BLAST
that take advantage field…
Je ne regret rien
This poem describes additions to the hardware, hard boiled
eggs
and the pretentious state of longing
post question –
human condition
and have become pres de during 1984 scour we were
dancing a script
when tortured by there yet into danish or pick a language rave
scene
his / her I only took you as example system of yore questions
sour beaches charity case pick a few
bow tie bow
wish for a relaxed state of being…
156

Royal typewriter Litton defense contracts Hartford to choke
Meta identifier get record prefix verb and the democratic
convention
disown threat exception
avocado havarti tomato and mustard we relish the thought
best remembered… provoked the chicago mayor…new
park avenue
a series of package stores with late 60s font
and stir, chill on ice-
health education welfare can between knees one of the best
loved
a line between in memory still resonates, spoke out against
‘gestapo tactics warehouse blues
a few buildings no bust o monument park & recycled sheets of paper
b. in the streets.” british affect pen pal years a go
note imprinted:
SAVE ME! yes was all we had before ink had a chance to
scatter
an allergic reaction understandable or why did it matter”
157

Shut up little man
The force of love is as mighty
as a voyeur standing at the window
without wearing glasses
duct tape as decoupage
obsession, prime rib, anti-classic
Who is a decent human being?
Rather the warming up to beating senseless.
Life on eBay: I lite toast and warm to
A match dies, 99 or on hinge
Drawstring pulled lesser element
Get et right…after three days…
Truncate p-ram scheme, resist urge
Camp is volatile… god help the world
if all the women were her if then statement
it’s classic. What were you wearing?
(informal) settle down again. Breed.
Jewels. Tube Bar DAT tape.
Incidental. Script is a shill of one’s own portrait.
Something vain. How will you reward yourself,
company stationary? (Applause) Say it.
Dress is flattering. Can’t hear the coo
but at the other end…what do you think
of Anne, Alice, Alicia, Adika, Amber
as a girls name? I REQUEST CODE.
You entice me for no reason.
158

That’s the sad thing about you
People are perfect: jerks. Lorainne.
It was a 128k version of the war.
You waved with each punchline.
A graphic foil scrolls at the same pace.
She pulled out moves, love knees,
Still the roll of newsprint astonished
Bliss you idolatry, I think full experience
Is best served by ideas of victory….
Fanatical. Worms. On fence. Forget.
Razor cuts. I am an oxidant. Please.
Tango password. In with. Barrio.
Don’t. grind. Bells. Traffic on. Power is
an unjustified means…hands are
useless, adjunct wings, non nacht night
license has expired. It oughtabe violins
playing but a nuisance in the air.
Scent of. Wild grass and contradiction.
title of book upside. Beg. Your pix.
Makes me. Emoticons R not.
Breed. On the eighth day I wept.
I can’t live without my glasses.
159

The Galloping Man
1.
placing, a look
a gull
or, recreation, rewards or to a mind
a perfect tool
or, law. At last
if it had been the turning of a water wheel
2.
A rope, or green
standing in, closer
to hand, is lost, in arms
on seeing, early on, a hold, or, in hand
a title, a given space
or,
as upon question, or, appellation, a spur
or, so to convey
3.
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
in alternating causes, in states and professions
a line on end
in cloth, in measure, in anonymity and in parodies
to vary
or,
160

familiar. Passing fast, in jolly tapers and leagues
and in the interest of descriptions, turning back
to rote places, to notes
and floss
a certain sun, and moon and stars
4.
and out of house, a useless emulation
getting to, or, not to use
a looking outward, in secret, deciding
it is latent, and pause
and lasting into song. how does
a body know, here is a hand, and here, is a sentence
or,
what’s riding on hearts
Tops
1.
a plum or knob, to see
purposes, prior to, or, unlike a knob or fruit
a purchase, or gestalt
in time or in enumeration
the nature of a stick in sand, the nature
of a rib, stuck upright in a palette
before a spry, metaphysician
an accent, passing close, unstoppered
161

2.
a poem, in simple measure
can say the names of surrogate places,
can count the change in a blind man’s cup
a day, in folds, moves, asking leave to come and go
when having heard, are setting works, in geography
to days
when having heard, are breathing deeply
into cups
3.
going, is town to town, changing hands
into cups
4.
in act and in objective
another sequence, or condition, in nearness, to
spinning articles, and arrival, at once
a wish or trespass
the entrance of a man.
And as was consonant with sleep in daylight
after hurry, and pursuit, after warp and corrugation
given,
to say, the saying of a fold, this is a face
or,
this is a church, and, this is a moment
162

in a wheel
a father, and a son, a wife, or, inflection
recovering a no
William
1.
a sally,
out of hand, is giving cupboard
to great aunts,
are likening boys, at scrimmage,
to brocaded hemlines.
And later on,
dressing up is chipping in, for visits
to quiet places.
2.
how, to overhear, is to seeing
is to waking, early on
is to raising, a cloth
in ransom
residing, is remaining
to pedal far, ahead, of shouts
3.
to such, a one, unremarked, by misstep
or violet
163

pretending, these clothespin soldiers
marching in place,
seated in relation to north, can precede
in common,
what is now, and what is giving way
are hidden, coming
to an end
or still unuttered, and again. A voice
seeing to morning,
is hiding grahams into umbrellas,
is hiding sneakers, into manners,
and knowing, is someone, eye to eye
or,
were otherwise unthought of
4.
a lawn, remote, in dither, bottoms
and ever varying
in picture, in summer, upon water and on clouds
to pedal far, ahead, of shouts
Tilting
1.
a life, by other means, is tilting
into corners
164

a life, by other means
can rest, or prise, or, customer, a morning
an epitome, in parenthesis
a passage, or, in correspondence, the solitary arc
now harking, and immovable
is making quote
2.
the sinuation, out of home
As much is harrowing,
or untried,
the eye, in community.
3.
the pilgrim, in tournament
is getting over, getting on
a life, by other means
is fitting words into corners
a life, by other means
is tilting after cranes
4.
and following, in salute
in all the forms of one, whom, some, are
and aptly so
in rooms overlooking quiet places. A chaplet, of prayer
and pension
165

of groundsmen, in repair, of arms and legs
in repose
a going far, is taking hand
Attendant Docent
1.
a seeing, or turning, after modesty, or departure
or when coming out of sleep
the principle, how, in repeating
or as in, once, honestly, mistakenly
the corners.
for the persistence of a passageway
2.
in aim and in pursuit
let upon, then, and to hold
hearing, can hear, or, that is seen
touching, and looking, and turning to account
the tenses, and the delicacy
And given to the absence of intentions.
3.
being meddlesome, and astir
that it was she when she was honey
or were not cousins, after all
this is the suggestion, this is the unseen
166

the Helen and Georgina
the lips that move simultaneously
And this is the pleasure in pursuit
at hand, in mind, the ideal eye
4.
attendant, and at issue
in appeal, and in economy
A line on call.
and given to the absence of intentions
being random, and audition, familied
and in principle, so
The Wet Motorcycle
1.
of the wives and of the son
are sane, are vest and savage.
of the movements, and repose
are riot, and samaritan
2.
to follow kit and medal. laying by.
the eye, in evidence
is making prayer
is counting money
167

a giving thanks or self congratulation
a giving thanks or self congratulation
a person, a principle, who bind and loose
the parallel legs
the parallel arms
the body of straight lines
3.
the ways are few but roses
and there are caterpillars everywhere
and everything is real and everything is illusion,
my love.
4.
at fortune, or pasture, a summons
or
roster. a melody or loot
The stilted boot and recollection, charged, delayed
A landscape of one’s own. A caper, in recruit.
And darling, openly.
168

CONTRIBUTORS
Laynie Browne is the author of seven collections of poetry and one
novel. Her most recent publications include The Scented Fox,
recipient of the 2007 National Poetry Series Award, selected by Alice
Notley (Wave Books), and Daily Sonnets (Counterpath Books, 2007).
Abigail Child is the author of 5 books of poetry, among them A
Motive for Mayhem and Scatter Matrix as well as a book of criticism
THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A Critical Poetics of Film (2005) from
University of Alabama Press. An award-winning filmmaker as well as
a writer, Child pushes the envelope of sound-image and text-image
relations with humor, liveliness and complex montage. She teaches in
Boston and calls New York City home.
Joe Elliot is the author of Opposable Thumb (subpress, 2006). He
helped run a reading series at Biblios Bookstore for many years in
NYC, and in the 90's co-edited situations, a NYC-based chapbook
series. He lives with Anne Noonan and their three boys in Windsor
Terrace, Brooklyn.
Laura Elrick also has excerpts from her performance-based piece
Stalk forthcoming in the journal Parser. Some audio work can be
heard on textsound.org. Previous books of poetry include sKincerity
(Krupskaya 2003) and Fantasies in Permeable Structures (Factory School
2005).
Elizabeth Fodaski lives in Brooklyn and teaches English at Saint
Ann's School. She is the author of fracas (Krupskaya, 1999).
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of three books of poetry, Freud in
Brooklyn (2000), Ugh Ugh Ocean (2003) and Moraine (2006). Her fourth
book, Pageant, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2009. She
teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and in public libraries
and schools through Poets House, Teachers & Writers and C.E.P.P.
Drew Gardner is the author of Sugar Pill (Krupskaya) and Petroleum
Hat (Roof). He lives in Harlem.
169

Jessica Grim's most recent book is Vexed, online from /Ubu
Editions. Other books of poetry include Fray (O Books, 1998), Locale
(Potes & Poets Press, 1995), and The Inveterate Life (O Books, 1990).
She lives with her family on 2 acres near Oberlin, Ohio, where she's
Collection Development Librarian at Oberlin College.
Anthony Hawley is a poet and visual artist. He is the author of two
collections of poetry, The Concerto Form and Forget Reading, and four
chapbooks including, Autobiography/Oughtabiography. The texts in this
issue of Ocho appeared as part of installation called "Nobody is
Rescued and the Radio Doesn't Work" (consisting of mirror,
encaustic, butcher twine, original texts, tape, and handmade Japanese
paper) exhibited in January 2008 at the Bemis Art Center in Omaha.
Michael Lally has published 27 books of poetry and prose including
the 1997 Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award winner for
"Excellence in Literature" Can't Be Wrong (Coffee House Press), the
2000 American Book Award winner It's Not Nostalgia (Black Sparrow
Press) and the Alex Katz illustrated anti-Iraq War poem March 18,
2003 (Libellum/Charta).
Bill Marsh lives in Queens, NY. He co-directs Factory School, a
learning and production collective engaged in action research,
publishing, multiple media arts, and community service.
Douglas Messerli is the author of several books of poetry, most
recently, First Words (Green Integer). He publishes Green Integer
press and oversees to related blogspots, one posting essays from his
on going cultural memoir My Year and the other devoted to bios,
bibliographies, poetry, and other materials on major poets of the 20th
and 21st century.
Toni Simon has exhibited her work at The Drawing Center in New
York. Nick Piombino's book of aphorisms, Contradicta, which
includes over 70 of her collages will be published by Green Integer in
early 2009.
Christina Strong has had work recently appear in Abraham Lincoln and
Cannot Exist. She writes and rides her bike in Brooklyn.
170

Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino is the author of The Logoclasody
Manifesto
Guest Editor
Nick Piombino guest edited OCHO 14. He opened his ongoing
weblog ::fait accompli:: (nickpiombino.blogspot.com) in February,
2003. His books include The Boundary of Blur (Roof), Theoretical Objects
(Green Integer), Hegelian Honeymoon (Chax), fait accompli (Factory
School) and, most recently, Free Fall (Otoliths), a 160 page full color
collage novel. His collages have been exhibited at the Marianne
Boesky Gallery. Contradicta, with illustrations by the cover artist Toni
Simon, will be published by Green Integer Press in early 2009.
171

Laynie Browne
Abigail Child
Joe Elliot
Laura Elrick
Elizabeth Fodaski
Joanna Fuhrman
Anthony Hawley
Drew Gardner
Jessica Grim
Michael Lally
Douglas Messerli
Bill Marsh
Christina Strong
Gregory Vincent St Thomasino