Nate Pritts - Parthenon West Review

Parthenon
West
Review
Parthenon West Books
Berkeley, California

www.parthenonwestreview.com
Parthenon West Review thanks the following organizations
and individuals for their generous support:
Intersection for the Arts * Poetry Flash * University of San Francisco *
Western Michigan University * SFSU Poetry Center *
Frey Norris Gallery * Pegasus Books *
Dean Rader * D.A. Powell * Catherine Brady
Clay Banes
Cover Image
Ryan Even
“Once a River, Always a River,” 2002.
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Parthenon West Review
Issue Eight © 2011
ISBN
978-0-9765684-7-6

Parthenon West Review
Issue No. 8
2011-2012
Editors
David Holler
Chad Sweeney
Associate Editor, Web Director
Craig Rebele
Advisory Board
Maxine Chernoff
Paul Hoover
Joyce Jenkins
Maurice Kenny
Interns
Carl S. Braun
Kate Browne
Anthony DiFrancesco
Noelle Farley
Mike McCullough
Libby McDonnell
Renae Santa Cruz
4

CONTENTS
TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN
Translated from Slovenian by
SONJA KRAVANJA 9 Good Day, Iztok
14 Untitled poems
WILLIAM OLSEN 18 Technorage
22 Near Noon
23 Nearer To Night Is Next to Noon
This Day
NOAH ELI GORDON 24 Summer in Winter in Summer
26 A Poem with Footnotes by David
Shapiro
CORI A. WINROCK 28 The Anxieties of Feet: 52 Rroma
Bones
MATTHEW COOPERMAN 31 Still: Here
GREG HEWETT 35 Stadium Revelation
36 Consolation on Pipeline
37 Resisting Nostalgia at
Hydroelectric Dam
ADAM STRAUSS 38 Bio/Biblio/Electro/Geo Graphia
GEORGE VULTURESCU
Translated from Romanian by
ADAM J. SORKIN
and OLIMPIA IACOB 41 Lesson on Looking at a Painting
43 Corridor with Stained Glass
Windows
45 Dithyrambs for Daniel
JULIO MARTÍNEZ MESANZA
Translated from Spanish by
DON BOGEN 47 The Black Streets
48 The Condemned
49 Preferences
JOHANNES GÖRANSSON 50 Nurse Marble
51 Father Firing Line
52 The President
53 Mother Empire
5

ALEXIS ORGERA 54 Measuring
56 O Fortuna
57 The Leaving
58 Blue Knees
LIZ ROBBINS 59 Made-up
60 Horror Flicks, or Poem Beginning
with a Line by Auden
ANNA AGUILAR-AMAT
Translated from Catalan by
ELIZABETH HILDRETH 61 Friday or “The Alive Mule”
63 Jealousy
64 More about Happiness
BARBARA TOMASH 66 Annunciation Forest
ANDREA BAKER 69 Three Poems from the
Gilda Cycle
SCOTT BADE 72 Wren
73 Nylon Flowers
MANOEL DE BARROS
Translated from Portuguese by
IDRA NOVEY 75 The Art of Infantilizing Ants
LAURA MCCULLOUGH 77 Gravity and What Works Against It
NATE PRITTS 78 Maybe This Autobiographical
80 Lots of Words
MICHAEL BROEK 82 Prognostication
JOSHUA MCKINNEY 84 Glede
85 A Valentine
ELIZABETH SAVAGE 86 Another Pietà
87 Sorrow, Appetite, Mending
88 Cuttings vs. Seeds
TRACI BRIMHALL 89 Gnostic Fugue
90 Stillborn Elegy
6

LOUIS CALAFERTE
Translated from French by
J. KATES 91 Reward
92 Grand Ball
SHARON DOLIN 93 Char’d Endings
CHRISTINA HUTCHINS 94 Between Pages of Our Dictionary
JENNY DRAI 95 Upon Virtue
96 Possession of a Body Achieves
More Notable Feats
SARAH MACLAY
and HOLADAY MASON 97 from “She”
SIMONE MEUNCH 101 from The Wolf Centos
JAIME ROBLES 105 Diatrita
JAN BEATTY 107 California Corridor
EDUARDO MILÁN
Translated from Spanish by
JOHN OLIVER SIMON 109 Eat them up, Milán
110 Excellent language, excellent
BARRY SILESKY 111 Some Cheer
112 Evidence
STEPHEN KESSLER 113 Rick
114 A Close Reading of Genius
NATE SLAWSON 116 blue soul blues
117 black hole blues
GÜNTER KUNERT
Translated from German by
GERALD CHAPPLE 118 The Lesson
119 Childhood Memory
KATERINA ILIOPOULOU
Translated from Greek by
VASSILIS MANOUSSAKIS
and EDWARD SMALLFIELD 120 The young swimmer’s song
Translated from Greek by
7

Tomaž Šalamun
Translated from Slovenian by Sonja Kravanja
Good Day, Iztok
Good day, he said, is Sonja at home?
You loathsome comma I’ll abolish you again a fat
entropy she is not I said she’s studying in the library do you want
to come in and who are you Iztok aha I heard about you
you hitchhiked to the Polish border almost froze to death
you have a brother named Jani and you write where can I
sit down to be of at least bother you don’t bother me at all
and then strange things started to emerge
a glow some sort of a sheaf some kind of little lights
click it became clear that this was
a person whose work threw Ahac on his
ass and he gave the space for his book to Iztok
then I became a bit embarrassed and worried
I was again rushing things so we ate grapes and sort of
goggled at one another and sort of
fondled each other with our stares and after a few
moments I was already immersed enough
and we dashed off to his home and he handed me
some impressive sheets of papers in folders
and then we returned to Gradišče by then flowing down
the same river and we chatted and Sonček lost her
bearings and almost dozed off she was rather
restless while I was wired a journey started to
happen there was an earthquake at night and
I knew what has caused it things started
to become clear and in the morning after
Sonček left for the library I started to read
my first thought was dammit
too bad good work but why are there so many chunks of
my flesh and then my friends some
crazy things started to happen it started to burn
9

to glow to rustle to blow to boil to pour
bombs all the sand of all the deserts began
to give way I was speechless I just
stared and stared and swam and was moved to
tears I ate beams that were
an assassination on my belly my son my
brother my father what had I ignited
of course I hadn’t ignited anything more than
Ginsberg anything more than Apollinaire anything more than
Whitman and at the same time none of them or
us the poetry had swallowed itself and
threw itself up it is now pouring down on the earth in streams
I was shot up a few times and wanted
to immediately crawl to my typewriter but there was no typewriter
because I had it in my business office at
Slobodan’s and Mira’s I hadn’t written by hand
for way too long and then I settled down and
stared stared and read and there was another
earthquake in the morning Sonček came back and she
was quite restless but before that Iztok had come
and handed me some posters for us to have and I figured it out
that was just an excuse but since I had just barely
got up and was ritually getting
ready to read more of his work and had before that
read Schwarz’s on Duchamps and so I just
thanked him and took the posters when
Sonček came we all knew what that was all about I
asked her if she was afraid for herself she said
no if she was afraid for me she said no why don’t you
drop by Iztok’s I said too much I had no idea why
I said that and then we
analyzed everything and I realized
I had to at least hear his voice and
called him at home he wasn’t there and then
I phoned Vesna’s mother whom I didn’t know at all and
neither did I know Vesna her mother thought it strange
but after I introduced myself over the phone
she was somewhat relieved after I told her
I was actually looking for Iztok and I already felt
Better and I thought there maybe was
10

no danger at all and I sent Sonček back
to the library considering we had both calmed down
by then and then I kept reading and
made a date with her to go to
a movie but she didn’t go after all
in the hallway of the library she told me she was pressed for time and then
I again called Iztok he was at home and I asked him
if I could pick him up and take him to
a movie and he said yes and then we went to the
kinoteka and all the people in there
just a few as a matter of fact because everyone was anxious
about yet another earthquake were very
quiet Iztok started to talk about earthquakes and how he slept
naked and he said this out loud I didn’t
mind then we watched La peau douce
and I was ready to flee but didn’t
it was all about Maruška and the baggage I carried it was wise that
Sonja didn’t come then Iztok and I grabbed a beer or rather we both
came to a conclusion we wanted to go somewhere but
since we hardly knew one another it seemed kind of
awkward but at any rate we went to a bar Texas there was
quite a scene there and I already was transported so I
started to spill it out telling him how I had swum over him all
day long and how I literally sat on phones just to find out
what was going on with him and that I was mortified for him
especially terrified because he was a rock climber and then I was told
that the very same day he and his youngest brother
Gorazd had climbed some treacherous rocks that lead to the castle
and I realized that my fear for him stemmed
from Vojko and Franci and Ron and
Peter and Bob and Emil and the way I function when at times I have
no clue but people still faint and
break their foreheads ring a bell at the
very exact moment when I have an orgasm or
the way I can ram their stomachs and
am inside them even if I am in California or
anywhere else and then I told him to please
stay alive for at least a few days
easy easy make your brother climb with you
then we both came to a realization
11

that he was not in any real danger that he was not a magician but
healthy whole powerful gigantic crazy and also
gentle and not in danger he wasn’t endangered at all
so we shared a beer and then
we were kind of kicked out and we passed a shop window
you are Burroughs I said he saw what I meant said yes
Burroughs was a black sheep in the family he shot Jane and
then as we were drinking beer I told him that what
I had done was just a narrow trail
but that he got into me and thundered inside me
and flooded me and how he had forged a highway regardless
of what a superb and powerful master I am
and then I admitted to him about the influence
immense and undeniable influence he would have over me
and then my youth was there influencing me
simultaneously it is rather strange I live
in the same room I lived in ten years ago
the same presence entered me as ten years ago
and I proclaim say it with no doubt
Iztok Osojnik is a world class poet I swear it
until the end of the world and am willing
to die for it it’s a towering wave a lightning
striking across the world’s stage the power of the Slovenian nation
that by now has a recognition of itself and the sense of its
greatness and the Slovenian language becomes one of the world’s
languages striving in an absolute glory glowing there’s
an onslaught here a march that’s trembling wham I’m fully
amazed for the past two days I’ve been riding on this poetry
drinking it sipping it and reading it
then I put on Jim Morrison and danced and fell into
a trance my cells expanded I put my arms up I hardly
moved I danced wildly and then we went back to
Sonja’s even though I knew I should let her be and we
chatted again and ate grapes and I fortunately
remembered at 11 p.m. that it was 11 p.m.
and that I needed to protect her time because of
the exam and I said Sonček needs to
go to bed right now and Iztok said excellent this is
like finishing a poem at its highest
point when it is good and then we went
12

to bed and weren’t restless any longer
we were in bliss and we talked for a long time and
made love and then I fell asleep on the mattress
on the floor so as not to suck too much of her
blood and the next morning
I was barely awake when I started to talk about
Iztok’s poetry again then I took her to Ilirska
because of her knee she fell when we were
pushing our car towards a ferry in Igumenica
it wouldn’t start because of dampness
but all of this had its source in Mycenae
and then I came back and read again went to lunch and
didn’t eat lunch but ate Iztok Osojnik
and I saw Taja in the labyrinth and told her
what was new Iztok
Osojnik is new irresistibly powerful and then I
went home and Zoran Pistotnik was there
he had lent me or rather Sonček had borrowed
from him a sleeping bag for me
13

—————
I knew but didn’t see.
Colorful and cool wings
gleamed.
A bang rustled and was mute.
I blew into my hands,
shivered and pricked up my ears.
When will I be captured
by the breadth of this honey?
14

—————
we don’t kiss body’s flesh but its
color
*
gnosis is sifting
sand on a bell
flour on a bell
*
souls are woven by weaving machines
*
he who puts up a face knows why
15

—————
From the quiet you unfold a poppy and water,
from black hail the circle falls back.
A pure word breaks through,
annulling all the windows.
The clarity of the world is about to emerge,
painful, yet joyous.
Where do you come from, the happiness
of the drop, that the earth will absorb?
16

—————
Heavenly shepherds,
young men on the earth,
where did your women hide,
as you fled into this tree?
17

William Olsen
Technorage
If I could walk there or note it in a laptop
it wasn’t me—
that false loosestrife was many fruited, and jewelweed was the same
as fireweed.
My wife reads books on clouds
that wander lonely or out loud.
What forms inhabit the sky rain a little heaven across
gnarled vineyards—
it is the spell of sensations
that keep our observations
going, enough that whole days we walk out of each other’s
minds.
Dead mole on the state park road, plump little comma
without a sentence.
Overhead the same five herons
day after day surprise me anew.
I’ve seen this family flap out from the cattails and rushes.
They disregard my regard.
Saying so is a way to remain.
Waxwing, pass me a berry.
I’m hungry and the bladder campions are too many invasive footnotes
to look up.
The definition of realism—
which is all in the margins
when night settles herons
and moonlight takes the thrilled lake for a last little ride—
is glossophilia.
18

Seaside goldenrod, golden Alexanders.
Best yet, oysterplants gone to zany seed—
terrestrial starbursts, these goatbearded clusterfucks somehow radiate:
“human happiness
will destroy the earth,” Albert Schweitzer said of amateur naturalists.
As for silence,
it doesn’t exist, concluded John Cage, in his own nearly endless
book—
whatever silence isn’t
I want a little bit of.
And as for darkness,
“We’re lost if the lights go out,”
Junichiro Tanizake, once electric light abolished darkness
in Japanese interiors,
In Praise of Shadows.
The heron cast no shadows that far up; down here
I am afraid to be afraid.
I might miss something, something that misses
me.
In the flicker of gaslight
families were destroyed.
Soon, out of the board-feet that was Nottingham Forest, in that barrens,
replaced by their children,
factory workers plotted before they were hunted down.
Luddites. Soon to be called “frame breakers.”
Soon it was a capital offense to break a loom.
Man created the machine in his own image.
As for the soul,
“I think that this is something we know exactly
nothing about”—
19

John Muir—whom Emerson, after a transcontinental ride
on a private coach, met and praised,
“a thinking man.”
“Thought without reverence
is barren,” abstruse Carlyle.
Come any thought but silent spring, please, I’ll get down
on my knees
in the lake shallows.
It’s all deep ecology.
The lake at its lowest level in decades is beaching
the pleasure boats.
Machinery spewing out machinery, the Transformers movies,
digitalized visuals
sensational on polyethylene screen
in a climate-controlled environment.
The term “environment” is used here advisedly.
What the audience sees is irrelevant; what is relevant is that human
forms
sit in a darkness made comfortable by Freon
in chairs designed to maximize comfort
at minimal cost, pleasure goers in rows—
escaping work, or home, unwittingly supporting an industrialized
aesthetics—
“the human frame/ a mechanized automaton,” Shelley wrote,
“scarce living pulleys of a dead machine . . .”
“Men are more easily made than machinery,” Lord Byron, for a brief
period outraged.
Say yes to cyberutopia
and instant democracy.
Idolized Keats was actually not wealthy enough to vote.
20

“Poor lonely worshipper”—Muir said of himself.
Bishop pitied the obsessed, herself, unlikely self,
her “poor bird” a projection of the human, not a sandpiper, a fish,
or a moose.
“Computer banks have become our nature,” Lyotard wrote
of the postmodern condition.
Server farms take up a mere four per cent of this nation’s unlimited
power.
It’s night in the restaurant dumpsters.
It’s worse tonight than night somewhere because the Third World war is
here, right here on our desktops.
The bombs are bombing the bombs.
So we can despise ALL OF CREATION.
21

Near Noon
—Perhaps pain is most like love in that it comes and goes of its own accord, as if
obeying laws from whose knowledge we remain almost totally shut out.
—David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain
Pain is a system of warning, a friendly warning. Chronic pain
is too friendly. Warning all about itself. In it I understand
every outcome in my life—and language permits me to
compare outcomes in the abstract to the shadows tree limbs
cast on my shoulders at the reading window, the limbs
themselves shouldering sunlight. Clearly these particulars do
all the important shouldering for me. I feel, even from my
loneliness, a distance. Understanding becomes all warning.
Some specifics still sound the same as always, like cardinals
and their hot-iron scribble. But primarily everything says
more is coming. It may wish itself to be otherwise but
chronic pain, like love, gives me more everything it’s already
given. I begin to reside in a fear I can’t frighten myself out
of.
__________
So many loves fail for being all preconception. Intention can
birth only intention. To give a full account of even a single
particular, one need only exhaustively describe its absence.
So I cannot give a full account of chronic pain because I
cannot describe its absence. The end of love when all else
fails: you can’t thank it enough but you can thank it
adequately.
22

Nearer To Night Is Next to Noon This Day
Pain is a system of warning, a friendly warning. Chronic pain
is too friendly. Warning all about itself. In it I understand
every particular in my life—and language permits me
to compare these in the abstract to the shadows of tree
limbs on my shoulders at the reading window, the limbs
themselves shouldering sunlight. Clearly these particulars do
all the important shouldering for me. I feel, even from my
loneliness, a distance. Understanding becomes all warning.
Some specifics still sound the same as always, like cardinals
and their hot-iron scribble. But primarily everything says
more is coming. It may wish itself to be otherwise but
chronic pain, like god, gives me more everything it’s already
given. I begin to reside in a fear I can’t frighten myself out
of.
23

Noah Eli Gordon
Summer in Winter in Summer
For Sommer
The bottom teeth of summer
in winter, braided into
whomever stood on the green green bridge watching her shadow lengthen.
Sun-pocket. Sunflower. Seedling, you
brittle blossoming something the room clears of dailyness.
Daily, the bottom teeth of summer
in winter, chewing through
ropes, raree show rapunzeled, which is realism
like this that there can be. These are really happened
tell me again stories I will. I will again against it.
Diving bell in a glass of water. Cacti atmosphere.
A perfect piece of pink cake
complicating perfection’s tendency to falter.
Who left it on the counter? Who walked through the room
as though through a composition? The speaker enters quietly,
closes a window, clearing dust from the chair
to sit in the center of the poem, invigorated
with inky awkward blankness.
The bottom teeth of summer
in winter chattering: here’s the moon. Here’s the moon
splashed over two dozen calendars. Here, the kids are grown.
The day is long. The bed, wide as a battleship, waits
in its buoyancy. Imagine a life and live in it. Imagine dead as ever
walking a cut lily back to water. Crazy epic crazier still trying
to put down roots. Summer in winter like a speaker
in water. The loudest electric sound is nothing compared
to the soundest perforation. My paper life. My paper doll.
Your paper boy. Sun sun sunflower seed summer you
can say you love in a poem’s inky blank awkwardness
your paper boy. Sun sun sunflower seed summer you
to the soundest perforation. My paper life. My paper doll
24

in water. The loudest electric sound is nothing compared
to put-down roots. Summer in winter like a speaker
walking a cut lily back to water. Crazy epic crazier still trying
in its buoyancy. Imagine a life and live in it. Imagine dead as ever
the day is long. The bed, wide as a battleship, waits,
splashed over two dozen calendars. Here, the kids are grown
in winter chattering: here’s the moon. Here’s the moon.
The bottom teeth of summer
with inky awkward blankness
to sit in the center of the poem, invigorated,
closes a window, clearing dust from the chair.
As though through a composition, the speaker enters. Quietly,
who left it on the counter? Who walked through the room
complicating perfection’s tendency to falter.
A perfect piece of pink cake.
Diving bell in a glass of water. Cacti atmosphere,
tell me again stories I will I will. Again, against it
like this that there can be. These are really happened
ropes, raree show rapunzeled. Which is realism
in winter: Chewing through
daily the bottom teeth of summer?
Brittle blossoming something the room clears of dailyness?
Sun-pocket. Sunflower. Seedling, you
whomever stood on the green green bridge watching her shadow lengthen
in winter, braided into
the bottom teeth of summer.
25

A Poem with Footnotes by David Shapiro
An Acoustic Experience 1
Inoculate with ones & zeros 2
the sound of the human voice 3
You have a computer’s unrequited compassion 4
& I, the outline of an ostrich 5
torn in half, tacked to a pixilated heart 6
The perfect companion’s a photograph of sand 7
Unexpanding, elegant universe 8
something something something the end 9
1 once my book was called A Man Holding an Acoustic Mirror
Also This Man is a Sounding Board
But Jasper liked the title because it was concrete, didn’t like To an Idea
I based it on a science museum’s captions in Paris and maybe Bruce Naumann
should’ve done the cover
2 I will trust computers when they are in love
3 the best instrument
4 is this good, I hope so, dear God
5 I am timid as Koch said Ashbery was
6 I am always too torn Get a hold of myself or
myself end the blue period of self-absorbed self holding teens
26

7 I think of photographs of sand like drawings of sand
like sand in Blake
like sandy hook
like sandy Deal
like Celmins obsessive stars, beaches, lakes and dunes
8 yes, the universe is shrinking, thus the cherry blossoms are larger therefore God exists—I call this
my cherry blossom proof
9 how sad but good to end without Koch’s ocean
what he thought ruined endings the sea
and yet Ozu ends with the ocean and it seems OK
just the ocean as in just a pillow shot
nothing a father and daughter snoring in hotel room
just a vase just a tree just a concert just an apple
but is the apple jealous because of some folk motif
is the newspaper too allegorical sliding down the chair?
27

Cori A. Winrock
The Anxieties of Feet: 52 Rroma Bones
The forest shivers off.
I step outside its borders—
first frost, platelet snow.
: : :
I do not anxiety arrival somewhere
naked; I leave with my feet bare, crackling across
landscape: no one is left
to tell me of ancestry, my silent grandmother finds me
too far from God.
: : :
This innerdream air is still
gasolined. My bloodlines pull
to ignite: heavy organ heat, slick as dripping;
the chambers melt away
first. The fire leaves rings
around my ankles, these barely grown
bones; calculates the years I have been
nomading away from women like you.
: : :
The cold runs beneath
this bridge
of ball and heel.
Why ask the worry
of toes? My bare feet
are dark
28

as zigeunernacht
birds, they fly off
as ash.
A beautiful pair once
arched as the f-curve
in a cello.
: : :
What the poor could not record
loops back: the genetic dream-negatives
hemorrhage through the anxiety
reel; imprint cartilage.
: : :
Suddenly inside
this house, this soft
gray matter of your
heart, the only thing
I see is a death
of ancestress: footbones
chattered through;
the long yawning
of winterings.
: : :
I’ve spent so much time
imagining the divinity
of clouds—when they finally arrive
through my heritant windows
they pour as clotted fog, as cumulus-ice
and grime slipping over my hands.
: : :
The innerdream air is unbreathable.
29

: : :
I slip, tripwire
silent and barefoot—my skin pelted
in perfectwhite hail. I do not move
I will not step back.
: : :
In this sleepscape I have grown
another toe.
Look at me tiredly. Tell me to
remove the weakest one.
: : :
I accept this coalition
of my bones: fusion of things
never intended. I turn away
an inheritance: this little toe
is worth more than her deathblush;
this minimus is mine.
: : :
Please do not tell
me of baggage, of my history
as weightless.
My division is not a lost
set of 52, is not simply
these woods I am wearing:
snow and marrow and hush.
30

Matthew Cooperman
Still: Here
writing & trying: stills, spools, letters, reviews; child-rearing, marriagetending,
world-rending, hedge-mending
Frequency: “Start Me Up” (Rolling Stones), “A Change is Gonna Come” (Sam
Cooke), “The Revolution Starts Now” (Steve Earle), “Still Crazy After All
These Years” (Paul Simon)
Satori: Starts Now at Wilco, Filmore, Denver, 10/17/04, “The Late
Greats,” distortion is resistance, fight back each breath, or how there was a
moment at the beginning of the song when I thought Tweedy was going to
cry but it was just luminous anger, the glitter of human eyes
Dilemma: you can’t stand for life if you stand for war, now would everyone
please sit down
Contest: the circle, the garden, the tome, the savior, who will be first and
who will be last
Local Perspective: Save the Poudre! Damn the Outlet!
Aerial Perspective: stellar dust off Castor and Pollux
Daughter’s Perspective: I am not autistic I am listening, I am not a rhinoceros
I am listening, I am not a mask I am listening
— : ease and grace /
and little waves / the chancing all /
around us is /
arrivals singing waitingly /
a lovely timbre / a pliant heart /
complexly these are /
coupled hours firebath /
and fired hearth
31

DeKooning: why the figure is the ground and the ground is the figure
Author: and in the end, I’m still here, I am always in the book, a somewhere
I am, traveled, traversed, the amount of space I use I am, I seem to move
around, if the book has a countenance, I will keep it, if it hasn’t I will throw
it away
Strum:
Advisory: chains required, alternate route suggested
Wordsworth: what we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out
Cage/Cunningham: the imitation of nature in the manner of her operations,
a bird flies in one direction, a rabbit runs in another
Keith Jarrett: I am interested in seeing where the left hand goes, hand over
the ark
Lear: I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness, hand over the ark
David: I am sorry I was impatient I am sorry I was impatient I am sorry I
was impatient
Venus (to Aeneas): perge modo et qua te ducit via dirige gressum
:
Dangling Man: still, how long can you dangle?
Husserl: I see you have taken my vessel to be real. If the ark does not resemble
movement misread the metaphor for everyone’s sake, our life of sun
on our human
Parallel Universe: “Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different
drummers, and the precise solutions of the United States can neither be dictated
nor transplanted to others. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly
changing planet will not yield to such obsolete dogmas. This world demands
the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the
32

will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity,
of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.” (RFK, University of
Capetown, South Africa, June 6, 1966)
Starts Now: why not now…now?
Gunslinger: Entrapment is this society’s / Sole activity, I whispered / and
Only laughter / can blow it to rags…
Strum:
Mauberly: For ten years, out of key with my time, I strove to resuscitate the
dead ark
MLK: the ark of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice
Ahab: all visible objects are but pasteboard arks, if man will strike, strike
through the ark
Blake: thus I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s, the ark is
beginning to move
Arthur Miller: why, every thing we are is at every moment alive in us, the ark is
beginning to move
Realtor: we might get an offer, the ark might move
Beckett: ark, a, unfathomable mind, now beacon, now sea
Oppen: the ark? we had help from the dead who wanted to die
Baraka: who will survive the American Ark? few animals, very few negroes
and no crackers at all
Satan: Farewell happy fields / where joy forever dwells: //The mind is its own
place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n, / What
matter where, if I be still the same, the ark is beginning to move
33

Strum:
Object Lesson: to find a golden apple on the dance floor, a private world and
a public bite, I cannot believe all the people in here, the things there are to
contain, “the apple is a fruit of the northern latitudes various in its gifts,” I
claim it for the wandering dead whose limbs inhabit this house
Chorus: and the earth moved (15 feet), and time quickened the map of space
(1.8 microseconds), and the waters rushed in
Porthole: In drowning or hope, to be left open
House Mix: that what we are given we cannot refuse; that within our
subject’s subject the quality of mercy is not strained
Strum:
Strum:
Strum:
Strum:
Strum:
Strum:
34

Greg Hewett
Three Poems from The Structures of Crisis
Stadium Revelation
In the structure of crisis
the world loses scale and you
find your self within yourself
at the bottom of a stadium
deep and lit to reveal
more than sunlight ever could.
Contest over, you stalk
the track, staring up
past metal halides lights into nightwind
hard and directionless.
Banners writhe like dragons.
Kneeling down beneath a galaxy
of cameras blitzing, you open
your drained face. You cannot hear
the verdict through a sound
as great as sheer silence.
Your mouth echoes the vast
structure, sends a mute cry
modulating as it scales
the steep sides of night.
Below pilings, tectonic plates
resound unheard; above,
a chaos of doves; through the void
a satellite steals your visage
for all to scrutinize beyond
the cantilevered air.
35

Consolation on Pipeline
Sometimes all you want to do is lean
your tired frame against the last post
still upright in the charred settlement
of your life, only the wood is mottled
red with embers and scraps of flame twist
at your feet. Hope zigzags off
to the bruised horizon
like it had been constructed
only to offer perspective.
Face and hands blistered, you toss a pail of water
at a pillar of fire where the market once stood.
The whole world has come
to fill cans in an expanding pool dark
with rainbows. The sky ripples;
a lone heron flies round and round, lost in black clouds.
A truck blazes like a sacred sign.
An acetylene torch rests hidden
in the crotch of the only remaining tree.
Someone viewing from a balcony
of a high-rise on the skyline might have pity
as you slowly dip your hands
in a half-empty basin to wash
the mask of soot from your face.
36

Resisting Nostalgia at Hydroelectric Dam
The world submerged
emerges magnified.
You expected
turbulence, not this
surface so still
you can see all
the way to the bottom.
From the intake tower
you look down
on streets you once walked
with people you once said you knew
and who said they knew you,
past houses you entered and left
and filled with words and emptied of words.
Curtains still wave out windows
though slowly, so slowly.
It’s like you could descend
and pluck a glinting soup can
from the supermarket shelf
or shoot hoops on the playground
or make love by the ghost
river’s bank beneath the willow
now forever leafless,
branches preserved in cold deep.
The dam contains enough
concrete to bury the whole town
twice over, an improved
structure for forgetting.
37

Adam Strauss
Bio/Biblio/Electro/Geo Graphia
Dear Marianne Dear Gusto dear “Draughts Which
Make You Wonder Why You Came”
I do an easy letting go
Into questionable flow;
He do the
Politeness in all stripes—
Satin-Legs Smith would
Step out with him on Sunday—
My final belief may be my truest
Trust is an alphabet I speak:
Mine is at its best singing
“America the beautiful”
Love to party on
The Sunset Strip—
Dance with spandex skirted chicks: one in particular
Said “I’m already almost baring a rad stripper patch”;
I’m lost in a logic I’m unprepared
To argue is pedagogic unlike the degree
Ego’s soul’s schooling equals problematic; “free
As a bird” strikes me as unlikely aside Wordsworth:
It’s so like me to be too loose or too tight
But occasionally I get going right;
38

Too loose is an ordeal in public:
Gardens—enemies—speeches—figures—
“Auroras of Autumn” ray her—electric umber almost
The silence of thunder snapped into a picture—
Your closed eyes indicate neither concentration nor disinterest:
Your presence possesses “savage nobility
As of Benin Bronze or…Kafka”—“autumn eats its leaf out of my hand”
Peels an onion—peals of laughter from someone who knows
I may misquote; in my defense
Wisdom is an improvisation; let’s say the moon
Shines on a scene one can’t decently
Be reprimanded for calling hell—“all is the price of all” and nothing’s well
Doesn’t mean faith in the world’s lost:
In time there’s hope—
Now is in time—groom of X
Explains a constant one can’t master—
The “essential primitive”—
Forever primes essentialness of lives—
I’m hesitant to say
I have prerogatives:
If I have them I’m
Embarrassed to make a list—
The longer it gets
The more incomplete:
Surly this is the making
Of what must be
39

Under erasure—
Sense out to pasture
Dawn’s rose-gold fingers gild—
Love or is it doves coo
‘“Mere being” is seeing
“With a wild surmise”’
Sweeps me—come along—
Let’s oui we!
What’s more American than Graceland?
This isn’t to say much of “in country:”
By virtue of my ears—despite growing
Up in Los Angeles—“Mountain mama” can “take me home”;
I love the Santa Monica range—
I love
The familiar when it’s “rich and strange”—
A jaguar
Pads over a Cartier panther;
She licks the air as—
Countries away—
A girl lacquers an heiress’ nails.
40

George Vulturescu
Translated from Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin
and Olimpia Iacob
Lesson on Looking at a Painting
Propping my elbows on the balustrade of the bridge I watch
the waters of the Someș River. Is it insolent
for me to think of Jeremiah’s
lamentation—“because your wound is as deep as
the sea”—and the phone call from my friend M.
who asks me, “Have you an Academy
there in the North that can award prizes?”
A white bird bobs on the river
A black bird sings high above the city
as, on the riverbank a child throws crumbs to
the white bird. Meanwhile the bird singing
above the city suddenly dives and pecks out an eye.
On the bridge someone has screamed
I thrown the book of poems
at the black bird. The book falls
into the water and the white bird, springing up
above its pages, begins to peck at
its letters. I can see it gorging itself, gathering them
like caterpillars, croaking in its throat, then choking.
I sit on a stone to reflect.
A dog comes to me under the bridge. Then
a beggar comes. Then night.
“Take a swig.” The beggar passes the bottle.
“Alcohol lends resonance to loneliness…”
“Marguerite Duras,” I say, and ask, “Do you read?”
41

“I’m a painter,” he says. “I paint only at night
by starlight.”
A bird near us sings,
or is it one of those little music boxes
you wind with a key?
“There’s not a single star in your paintings,”
I say to the painter.
He laughs.
“I paint not for the blind but for those
who want to see. My colors do not fill
the gaze but guide it,
as the roar of the wilderness guides us to the beast….”
42

Corridor with Stained-Glass Windows
Meeting the dead Ioan on Tihăria
Hill is totally absurd:
we sit and gossip about clouds, wolves and women.
Now and then we toss stones:
mine drop to the valley and I can hear them tumble down
the slope; Ioan’s return between his fingers
as if they struck a wall that bounced them back.
“In what year are we?” he asks.
“Two thousand and…”
“Damn it to hell, I knew I’d be dead
in two thousand… And look, I’m here with you on the stones…”
Ioan is white, white with the smell of crushed stone.
“Freshly crushed,” he completes with the line
by N. Stănescu, because he knows how I look up to him
and what I think. “I can see the words
in your mind,” he says. “They rise like flames
dancing above a treasure. Do you remember when I dug
for treasure on the Hribul Hill?”
I wonder: can he be a shade? How can a shade
speak?
“Bring me cherries next time,” he says. “I no longer know
their taste… You smell of cherries.”
“If you too think we’re on the stones of Tihăria,
it’s good. As long as I have the corridor of your memory
I can leave, I can return… It’s a corridor
with stained-glass windows of lava, the flesh of your body. But
the memory of others does not burn us…”
After a while I ask:
“But there…you know what I mean, isn’t it winter, isn’t it cold?”
Ioan says nothing. After a pause: “Winter is inside us,
there’s snow on the stones, let’s wash the cadaver’s face
with it, maybe the stones will be able to open
their eyes and we’ll see each other sitting
here, oh the hell with it, a man and a shade, too, a ghost
43

and a man…”
We smoke a cigarette, pass the bottle. Everywhere around us
are stubbed-out cigarette butts, empty bottles I’d brought.
“Oh, God,” Ioan laughs, “I’ll have to leave here
because I’m feeling drunk and I’m afraid I won’t still know
the corridor through which I have to return…”
44

Dithyrambs for Daniel
1.
The angel’s lurking amidst the letters of the poem
is dangerous, Daniel. My gaze bores straight into
the void, lays waste everything as far as he.
Your room is no tower, your
neighborhood no realm of fig tree
and cypress. The trees planted by city hall
have withered and several had been stunted by the reek
of piss of drunkards and stray dogs.
A bird struck your window. The excrements
of its frail body splattered
its surface, stained it with blood.
“Pour yourself a glass, Daniel, until I collect
the pages from the bathroom and kitchen. I leave them
here and there as doves leave feathers from their wings.
I am not an angel, you see…”
2.
Now snakes come from one side, Daniel.
A wind I cannot forget rustles their scales.
They transfix me with their stare, then approach with
the skin from my childhood which I keep wrapped
around them.
From the opposite side come vultures, Daniel.
Their feathers bristle like the helmets which we used to wear
in the village on Clown-Herod’s day. They look at me
and grass blades sprout from their eyes:
the grass reaches my waist, my armpits,
they cannot rise into the air
and implore me to wring their neck.
45

I hesitate, but suddenly the angel appears and
wrings their neck in my stead. I avert my gaze
so as not to see how the vultures and snakes come
and how they pass by wheresoever they go and why I must look
at all that passes here from one side to the other.
The one beyond is never the one
we speak of.
I remember the church in the village: from its walls
all the angels have departed, the walls have shriveled,
I can see only the letters of the inscriptions suspended
there, trembling and whining on the walls.
“Don’t turn your head, Daniel: if no one
looks at them, the vultures cannot rise into the air,
the snakes cannot withdraw between the stones
nor the trees into their seeds…”
46

Julio Martínez Mesanza
Translated from Spanish by Don Bogen
The Black Streets
The black streets. And in the black streets, you,
and I, in the black streets. The rain is constant.
It never stops raining in these streets.
The rain is dirty, black, detestable.
A kind of rain that leaves our souls dirty.
I will never find you in the black streets,
because these streets make up a labyrinth
without any light, just thick, black rain.
I will never find you. We can never
escape from the black labyrinth together.
When we leave these black streets behind us,
you will not see my eyes, nor I yours:
nothing will stand between you and nothingness.
Nothing will stand between me and nothingness.
Nothing will stand between nothing and nothing.
47

The Condemned
There it is: my hope, day after day
down on its knees and begging for its life.
I drew up the plans for this prison
and I erected its enormous walls.
A monster with a thousand eyes keeps watch,
and I look through those thousand eyes and see
the endless line of faces guilt assumes.
And I see myself there in a cell;
I see myself, inadequate and pleading,
less capable in the world than this other
who builds prisons but equally unjust.
48

Preferences
Neither the highest peaks nor the pristine
rivers undisturbed by human hand,
nor the palaces, nor the white ruins
of ancient temples, nor the gods in bronze
or in marble, all of them the same,
nor Winged Victory, nor a Bugatti,
and even less than these, the realms of music
and dance with their well mannered devotees—
none of these things or others that the most
sensitive among us admire so much
and that are central to good taste leave me
with any deep or lasting impression.
But only empty hangars in disuse,
stations where the trains no longer stop,
the labyrinth of foundries, the fog-soaked
edge of town, a place out in the open
where the sorrow and bewilderment
of humankind are comprehensible
at last, and the rivers, majestic,
solemn and dark, that sweep this misery
downstream, and the enormous garbage dumps.
49

Johannes Göransson
Nurse Marble:
Knowledge is Power. That is what the billboard says and I agree. I am an
adult, therefore I understand the threat of passengers. The threat to Our
Children, who don’t understand the threat of these bird-like, twitchy people.
They pose two kinds of threat. To begin with, there is the one we all know
about, the predatory threat, the hawk-like passengers that prey on children
as they sit in front of their computers or televisions. The terrorist threat.
That threat is easy to handle. You shoot it. You contain it. You confiscate.
You stitch. You bleed from various orifices and sockets, but you survive, you
rebuild house and rinse the child. The more serious threat is the diseases
passengers carry with them. Internal terrorism. Children love those diseases.
It makes them babble like possessed. Their make-up looks like oil in the
moonlight. Such children cannot be cleaned off. Kill them. Or turn them
into entertainment. Art.
50

Father Firing Line:
I used to wear a comatose mask but now that that has been classified
as subjectivity I wear a mask that looks like Nixon. Nobody needed to
teach me how to do the plug-ugly. That came naturally to my ki-ko-pe
body. Anybody can holler like a native but who among you knows what
convulsions are natural and which ones are induced by a peculiar holiday?
I may not be the last man standing but I am repulsive with glitter. I have
perfected the tendrils in a horse’s heart. Most children are too old to learn
this lesson. They’ve watched it on TV. That’s me, they say, the one with the
hole.
51

The President:
Me and my cutting disorders. I live inside this window with a gun, even
though I need a sharper object. I could use pneumonia. My voice has a singsong
quality on the loud speaker: Dear students please return the wedding
dress to the rabble. Return to your voice lessons. Cars are burning as we
speak. Immigrants can’t undo their stitches. Help them crawl out. Show
them how to sing. Like this. With the body colored in. Colored out. Heartattack.
52

Mother Empire (speaking to a cheering nation from a
balcony, her hair bleached and her fashionable dress
crawling with ants):
Small pox is raging among both natives and Turks. The Colonel is worse
yet. He is evidently a master singer. Waiting is awful in such a crowded
operation. That is what Daughter tells me about the Colonel’s song while
I am taking photographs of rabid animals. The natives take these to be
representations of erotic deities and leave the mimosa trees on which they
are feeding. The Colonel has a goodly supply of heavy rifles – among them is
“The Child,” which carries a half pound explosive shell. He digs a watch hole
near a corn field. Into this they creep. The Natives. The glamorous bodies
are so alive with swarms they have to be rinsed with unique ointments. This
voice continues for several seconds. There are no more spiral wounds on
my lower body. Drubble drubble. Give me the headphones. I want to hear a
cheering nation!
53

Alexis Orgera
Measuring
54
for B
Every day I take the long walk down
to where the bay counteracts
clatter and florescence
with its asthmatic fooling.
Unmatched air,
an osprey quivering
in a branch, brainfed on something
bloody. Everything I hate
fallen away in the animal wind.
My darkest obsession umbilicalled
to the underwaves and giggling
like the clown who orders
you down from your ledge.
For this I am
a bay poem muddy with bay things.
The world’s coarse but there’s width here,
edges bleeding, forensic
sounds you can’t place
except as belonging to salt.
Seabirds: one white, one black.
See how art doesn’t imitate?
For paradise, there are things you’ll relinquish.
I am a bay poem only in that
we are all things made
and remade, worked over.
These little fistures are what come,
what lose, what breathe
wrestling with clarity.
There are people in the grass maybe
and against time
is where they are and again
the sounds of water marching
away from sense, and in that sense
we are pure,
me and that awful space around me
and how long the tide
with poles that mark floods
same as rhythms and how long

this walk, another long boat
in the road, a salty owl
when alone we turn
and gamble our hearts away
from the nests where we left them
unchalked and gangly
and fools’ gold along the shore.
I’ve come to check
on the dead cowfish I left here,
a pixilated skeleton
brandishing the grass
where I’ve laid it to dry.
55

O Fortuna
Fate—monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel
We looks like everything
we touch. These are my favoritest milliseconds
of open sore blue balljoints
glued to the skies. Here’s to knees
of dead grass above the beautifulest
smithereened hilltops. We said the hilltops
was fucked. Our fathers wasn’t looking
so we said our papis ate rocks.
He’s sweated real, mine.
Sighing O fortuna into the sand, a rock
switches sediment mid-stride—
variablest and unmitigated and looped
those soundwaves setted loose, loosed up,
those soundwaves de-liced
with a sweetest sweetest reddest hand.
56

The Leaving
I didn’t know it, but every day for two years it was voice-throwing school.
Every day did he throw, my husband. To learn to throw is to find a measure
of relief.
Into fountains. Into people’s mouths.
The dog spoke in my husband’s voice. My husband kept his secret like a
witch keeps her radishes. He was bonkers. Was berserk. Was mostly lazy. “Let it
go,” I’d tell him.
I was talking about his hair. I thought he was a bad man. Instead, he packed
his lunch.
Most times took a shower. Put on his corduroys. Then he left me his voice,
all wrapped up in pink cellophane. The endnote read, “I’ve been practicing
for you. It’s yours.”
57

Blue Knees
It’s enough to die once
a night in the arms of something
warm. Blues, my knees.
At the crux, I’m hung.
I lost my husband in the war
between self and self—
I couldn’t touch him
in the orbiting, as if I were a statue
standing guard over a city of five billion,
my knees over timpani, deep blue.
Angels in the trees, as usual.
It’s enough that in my bed a man sleeps sick,
and my heart wakes to perfect sunlight.
Interference blooms mahogany
on hilltops above the city, above timpani
or symphony. Softness borrows minutes,
and I remember that a town over, a man loves me.
Enough with the theatrics, Blue Knees.
Enough with the sad horrible light show,
the crimson elbows. Someone wants to know
how long I’ve been sitting there, knees bruised,
with the sun and the breeze and
how can I sit there like that?
Someone wants to follow me
into the ocean, which is a bucket
of sand. Someone’s coming to get me in a car.
58

Liz Robbins
Made-up
The waiter abandons his teepee
of breadsticks and tiny green pool
of oil. This, the fourth table
like a bed in four days. I can’t
find the opening, the exported
insides of something, the melting
fish eggs I’d eat almost accidentally
and fall in love. Someone has turned
up the A/C in hopes I’ll miss the
punched-in geometry of the chainlink
fence outside and past,
the murderous blue river that
dampens smokestack dreams.
Fine, there’s no smeared picture
and no gun in my purse, no
soundtrack going featuring
Greg’s knees as my vodka
climaxes into the bowl. I’m running
out of things to hold
dear, which explains the shadows
above my eyes, the nails gone
vicious, the wine bored at its
window, the mad candelabra:
I’ve known forever the uptight
chair across from me, covered
in hysterical plaid, a left coat.
59

Horror Flicks, or Poem Beginning with a Line by Auden
About suffering, they were never wrong, the
cold bastards. A man with his dead mother
in a rocker plus a nicknamed
dagger always equals a woman
crying in the shower. Or a crazy lady
talking to herself in the kitchen, chopping
off heads of cabbage. Which is where
cheap beer comes from. Adulthood’s a shrinking
and enlarging of pupils—the unmasked
brute tiptoeing in the bedroom, C’est la guerre.
The TV on Halloween doesn’t care, reruns
the same scenes, your bit lip leaks
chocolate. Give it back, the hammering
heart a thumb in the mouth could still!
The irises are tired. The half-naked girl goes
screaming across a barley field, so what
quiets her? God
returns for Tarantino’s next picture: a guilteating
virus on a Harley.
60

Anna Aguilar-Amat
Translated from Catalan by Elizabeth Hildreth
from The Goose Games
Friday or “The Alive Mule”
I say to you:
“Do you want to come over to eat some beans,
roast meat and mushrooms?”
«Veux tu venir à manger des haricots,
viande au feu, des fredolics?»
Because you are my French teacher.
And you say: oui.
Then I dust
my furniture and floor, I pick the dog shit
out of the grass.
Because you are:
my gardener
my plumber
my French chef
my interpreter
my Che Guevara
my bandit
my pirate
my kiss painter
and fart
my spirited chocolate
my photo booth
my serial killer
my dreamer
my driver
my bon vivant
my massage therapist
my trapeze artist
my reader
my dance partner
my useful/unuseful
my rich/poor
61

my neveremployed.
The forest is Paris and you are
my propietaire fonciere.
And I clean the whole house and I make lunch.
With the fire and the garlic and parsley.
And I take a shower and I wear my G-string
even though it itches.
And you’re late. And I text you
at three and you say:
I’m not coming for lunch,
I’m coming for dinner.
And I get kind of angry.
And you get kind of angry.
But later we remember the beautiful
things we’ve said at other
times. And everybody whistles:
“Quiéreme como te quiero a ti,
dame tu amor sin medida.”*
And I eat alone.
And later I sit on Mogambo’s sofa.
Because you are Ava Gardner
and I am the two black boys. And I write
poems.
And some day you arrive.
The mountain arrives.
And you are a prophet climbing the mountain.
And you are
my Everest. Because of the howling wind.
Because you are the Sherpa.
And the Sherpa always drives a mule.
And all mules have a carrot.
And the mule’s penis jabs into the ice cube tray
and melts.
As the secret of poetry is quo-vadis life,
the secret of life is
poetry.
*From the song “Como Abeja Al Panal” (“Like a Bee to the Hive”) by Juan Luis Guerra: “Love me
in the same way I love you, give me your love without measure.”
62

from Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Top and Bottom:
37 Particular Poems and a Chromatic Letter
Jealousy
Your jealousy came into my mouse
trap and it’s been snapped.
The dog food attracts the mice
and the mice the traps and the traps
the jealousy.
The one who says love, love is only asking for it.
The baby on the subway, always
overbundled, is one form of hatred. Even pure
love pours with sweat, which,
left unwashed, can really reek.
The standing water in the store’s back alley,
every last form of hatred is jealousy.
Its pus stinks and its evil turns you blind.
Leave the loneliness to me, I say, and take back
your life.
I don’t have anything you think you might lose.
63

More about Happiness
As life goes on,
happiness changes shape.
First it was a starling
in a squadron that shit
on Rome.
After that it was lichen
in a cup of coffee and later
a Tillandsia aeranthos,
a plant without roots,
a carnation of the air
that lives by hanging
on a tree branch or a telephone
wire.
As life goes on,
happiness changes shape,
and today is like an egg that,
in one eye,
can change everything
into the beginning.
Every little thing is the end of a story
and the beginning of a tale.
As the universe empties its heart
you are a ship departing port
and slowly pulling in to another.
(Dock workers and whores play a quick
hand of cards at a rancid bar.)
You aren’t thirsty or hungry,
you learned to feed yourself from wind.
Emptiness fills the absence sail
when whether to prevail or to shipwreck
aren’t questions for others
to size up.
As evening goes on,
all evenings go on
like a nimbus of fish
under the hull
of your ship.
And as the verse goes on
the shark of Monday
is late
64

ecause one word following another
freezes the moment
like when ice melts
or hot water boils
without ever changing
temperature.
As the poem goes on,
the idea changes form.
Life goes on as if
it’s fitted to you,
and the whole suit is stuffed in the sleeve.
You’re nothing if not a part
of the happiness you’re looking for.
You’re the eye in an egg and in the egg
a heart and in the heart
a gong
that sounds into the empty
room where you write.
As death goes by,
life changes shape
and it’s like a dog
staring behind glass
waiting for breakfast.
And after breakfast,
it stares at us behind glass.
And that’s the shape of happiness
sometimes.
65

Barbara Tomash
Annunciation Forest
she knows Eden as green hands
cupped over her eyes
a small copse of cypress stands
within the dome of her cape
now, this wreckage coming at her
like a kite or a javelin
bright, sheer, red
benediction
follows its yowling
dogs into the woods
*
violet trunks of slender trees
she has only to think forest to see it
lightning to smell the red-black edge
cinders the angel flicks from his wings
behind her eyes no discrete thing
but a fullness, a glass jar filled with twigs
cherubim like snipers populate the trees
*
66

Mary, do you dream of houses?
she hears the burnt-edged angel say
do you dream of insects ravaging
in your bedposts and beams?
in a thicket of thornberries
she has to be small
hard pyrophyte leaves
contain the pale green
veins
that grieve her
immaculata!
—the dogs
immaculata!
—the angel sings
a raven
in iron leaf canopy
*
a wild onion field ablaze
with lilies the size of small teeth
impulse and instinct
are you ready
to be cut down?
jagged white twigs
spill from her jar
67

*
start over—the fern is delicately feathered—start over—a circle of blue opens
then is gone—start over—she carries it with her—start over—heart, and liver,
and bowel
68

Andrea Baker
Three Poems from the Gilda Cycle
Gilda, she belongs to cages.
She wears her dead one.
In a pretty robe, painted toes
she licks the door to seal its healing.
She reaches to shutter.
So many things are blankets.
Each feast of water
waiting inside it’s pelt of snow.
Gilda stops to lift her sweater
the wool like light refracting.
Grasp so hard for being.
69

The black finch sings the sun was born to its corset,
who am I?
The black finch sings to her corset.
She was picking her flesh apart.
Blood was popping up like a weasel.
Holy, holy, sung the cows.
Don’t look away, sung the cows.
And the old light trembled.
And, holy, the black finch sang.
70

When Gilda sleeps in a bed of ash
she throws down her broken pelt.
There’s nothing to see but the light.
a crated bird
a glass of milk
Toads scatter and leaves dispatch.
There’s nothing but light.
71

Scott Bade
Wren
Foam is an expression
of the conversation of energy in streams
and dogs too, who sit firmly against
any form of abstraction.
There is no question
you realize this.
I read you and make a picture
of myself alone, shirtless in the kitchen
well past 3:00 AM while a skunk digs
in the backyard.
And yes, I’m still hearing you.
Under the bird feeder we’re not
alone, some of us digging
for seeds, some of us waiting
for the manna. Weeks corresponded
to stanzas, my pictures birthed
themselves and naked in a lawn
chair next to a Frenchman
is the man beneath my clothes. It
was all post-modern detachment
that wet afternoon, flanked
in tall bushes. At the pool in the nudist resort,
clothing, of course, is not an option
so I exchanged broken French
over English tea with a blind painter.
And I read the whole book happy
in the nude crowd. Imagine that
you have created an intricate cup
of twigs. Now see if it holds water.
That’s right, it’s a sieve
and in the late afternoon sun
eggs and down dry quietly,
not complicating at all
the brief career of the male wren
who sings and keeps singing even
when the airplanes float by.
72

Nylon Flowers
Our hands carry within them a parcel
of bones and hidden within that
is the art—or is it a science?—
of gesture. A comfortable touch,
after the garden chores
are complete, the deliberate
erection of a middle finger,
Ah, the pleasantries of intimation.
Nylon flowers in a plastic vase,
how lovely you look today!
Are you enjoying the view
of your National Park
poster scene? Of course,
I’d enjoy a backrub
and some authentic hot
chocolate too, but this isn’t about me,
it’s about the bodily form
from any natural thing
once removed. A friend’s ex lover
was attracted to envelopes,
the minty glue of communications,
and when it ended she sent him
a manila one full of nylon petals.
He said she never asked for more
potatoes or milk or a third helping
of frittata. Then one day the world blazed
up with its symbols in acrylic windows
and there was nowhere to park,
nothing left on the table,
nothing in a mild sauce
made from raw parsley.
Just the envelope of plastic
remains. Here is a pile of weeds,
stems crumpled and folded,
structures defeated
in the name of sculpture.
And the name of this sculpture?
Just wait.
73

Here is a gift complete
with instructions for insertion
and removal, and a plastic bag
for ease of disposal. To create
a dramatic effect, place this
or a gazing sphere prominently
in your garden or lawn and watch
the commoners submit,
one by one, to its golden glare.
Broken hose nozzle, never mind
the mess. Before the split
there was therapy.
When asked about her marriage,
she responded flatly. “I’m pleased
with the progression of the tale.”
He admitted to a fetish with the languid
flow of their private disclosures,
like bleeding. Reality became
for them, like most grasses,
thin, rounded and easily trampled.
The only thing that allows us
to be transported and returned
to this wet, grassy rock,
with little or no visible damage,
and thus affords us the ability
to realize some sort of transference
is art and the crap it leaves
under our fingernails.
Forget the rubber gloves
and work clothes. Forget
trying to survive, nobody
ever has. The path is now
rather well-worn and
when it finally ends
or forks, one need only stop
and say, “Wow! Look at the size
of that shuttlecock,”
at which point the formality
of the journey is nearly complete,
as in the weeding is almost done,
just the roses left.
74

Manoel de Barros
Translated from Portuguese by Idra Novey
The Art of Infantilizing Ants
1.
Things had a poetic uselessness for us.
Our unknowing was everything in the backyard.
We invented a trick for making games out of words.
The trick was to be absurd.
Like saying: I hung a bird from a cloud…
Or as Bugrinha said: a made-up river poured through our house.
Or as Grandfather said: a grasshopper’s gaze is without principles.
Mano Preto asked: Did they make the hummingbird small
so that it could fly standing erect?
The distances made us add up to less.
Father used to work the land work the land.
Mother made candles.
My brother would saddle frogs.
Bugrinha beat a stick against the body of a frog and it turned to stone.
2.
Father lived at the end of a place.
Here is a lacuna of people, he said:
it only almost has a swallow and tree.
What pushes dawn’s button is the Piping-guan.
One day an official doctor appeared full of suspenders and manners.
On the bank of the swamp, hawk-crabbers went on feasting on their crabs.
The same distance lay between the frogs and the fields.
People joked with the earth.
When the doctor appeared, he said: you need to do something about your
hookworm.
Near us there was always a waiting of Ruddy Doves.
The doctor hated Ruddy Doves.
75

3.
At the table the doctor announced:
you’re the happy ones because you live in this empire.
My father spat this empire to the side.
The doctor spoke a curious kind of nonsense.
Mano Preto took advantage: a cricket is a useless being when it comes to
silence.
Mano Preto didn’t have a personal entity, only as a thing.
(Would that be a defect of God?)
We spoke our nonsense as a joke, but the doctor spoke it with seriousness.
Father snatched the joke from us.
It’s the dark that makes you sparkle.
Bugrinha stood open-mouthed.
4.
Every month or so a peddler’s cart appeared, pulled by four herds of bulls
at the end of that place. The cart came bearing caramels, biscuits, combs,
snare rings, Micravel extract, pieces of white cotton for making skirts, mosquito
netting, bottles of arnica to cure bruises, earrings made of peschibeque
seed—so many things without sanctity…
My mother bought arnica and biscuits.
Dona Maria, Lara’s wife, bought earrings and Micravel extract.
My grandfather supplied abandon.
Of everything, what would remain for us was a feeling of a thing
forgotten in the land—a pencil in a peninsula.
76

Laura McCullough
Gravity and What Works Against It
Clouds--like fish fossils
and the record of catches
someone else’s god has made--
scroll over the pool on the margin of the community,
dotted with blue umbrellas.
Above, seagulls push
inland from the shore,
heralding a storm
the Weather Channel has not yet announced,
and ospreys dance
their pas de deux
over the golf course lake
seeded with fish for the retired professionals.
Winged hesitation
forces their bodies back into the sky
against gravity.
Their tremble, the stutter, as if unsure
what action to take,
all part of the preparation:
the releasing of the body to gravity’s demand,
the plummet,
the fish just below the brown and green surface
never knowing the strike’s trajectory,
the inevitability of it,
the cold pierce,
its ascent into the sky something
like flight.
77

Nate Pritts
Maybe This Autobiographical
In compression all this blazing, random
snippets from the calendar: my whole life
in a minute & the echoing of days. I’m dozing
or I’m dreaming, me is lazily lolling & happy
to be so evening, so out of it, so dusk. Listen
to the rain coax chronology from the sky.
Airplanes in the night & their hollow metal
wingings; there’s a touchdown in the dark
maybe an hour ago. Already & again. The bird
back to her place & displaced no more. Roaming
through this tragedy, my hemisphere of grief
or maybe charting these disgruntled latitudes.
Meaning I’ve bent over backwards for a kiss before.
I’ve put myself in ridiculous positions all for love.
My brother in the kitchen like a clock upon
the table. We’re in the wrong city; we can tell
by the lighting. But it’s frightening all this romance
& the drinking helps forget it. Now it’s later
& the story we’re telling picks back up before it started.
There are other cities to be razed or fumbled among,
there’s a glitz that turns to bloodlust under
the right kind of moon. My desire is to pluck
all the petals off the beauty things & not just flowers.
To hold one bit of sweetness in the fingers
of your hands. To get out of bed when you’re sicke.
To think of words & think of words & think of words
again. More words & better words & the bird
she is landed. My brother in his sleeping
or his waking or his quaking. I’m reading again
the Hours to figure out the symphony.
To unplug the ears & cross the uncrossed wires.
For this is one jolt, this is the party often promised.
This is something blowing up. This is patience
78

hardly quiet. One good time traded in for another.
I’ll wake up to a lecture or I’ll wake up to a sermon.
I’ll wake up to instructions to diligently follow. Training
wheels on the circling bike or boosters on the rocket.
It’s 2am & some rain.
79

Lots of Words
I remember what mattered in your place
of memory but my transgressions
are lasting, they started with a kiss.
They started when they started
& they started like this. I remember a fist.
I remember needing music to blot out
the sounds, shoved flowers deep
into the crevices of my ears & pretended
to dance. Even when the clock told me
Wednesday was changing too fast.
Whole busloads of people make sounds
when they’re angry & the grunt
that they’re chuffing isn’t any known word.
Let me dictionary this utterance; I’ll put it
in my book. I’ll pretend I invented
all these feelings I’m charting but my first line
was stolen & filtered through misremembrance.
I made it my own. Forgive these training
wheels but feel free to hold me accountable.
Hold me in contempt or hold me with your arms.
Tuck me right up into your chest, let me feel
the beat of your heart. How many
of these moments are moments that escape?
Spring branches on trees launch buds
into sky & then they hope quietly & they try
not to die. A knock on the door signals
nothing at all; ignore all the bastards
with their draining demands. This table
holds nothing but most of my brain.
There’s a device by which you send me
notes about your freckles
& there’s a book or two full of explosions
or maybe some wreckage. One spiral bound cookie
with sweet sweet bits. I can flip to the section
that I need when I need it. Does my distance
create distance or do you think
I’m worth it? The party of the first part &
80

the flummoxed compass: two great tastes
that don’t reach the equator. For real I thought
probably I’d never ever write like this sometimes
or not. My words are so empty, I need to find
the tap. Refill them. Reset. Hit the red button.
Draw lines on a map & tell me where I can’t go.
I’ll occupy it like a country & ransom the civilians.
I’m not following the rules with my troops
on the prowl. They’ll do things you’ve not dreamed of
& they’ll do it with no hands. Watch them balance
or fall from the highest of heights. Be careful.
This is my earnest last caution. My general packs
all that we’ve got left into cannons & the applause
doesn’t stop us. We’re aiming right for you but
our ammunition won’t work.
81

Michael Broek
Prognostication
The report says the weather is unsettled.
The forecast — three days,
and already I have waited too long, expectation
building then fading.
The rain seems to gauge my commitment
to the chore of heading out, always heading out,
etching the landscape, really scraping hard
into the canvass as I decide I can wait
no longer, laying it on thick
with the thunder. Then I hear
silence approaching from the distance,
the storm’s after-hush. After all, this can’t
go on forever, so I sit by the door,
remember the umbrella
I left at Stephen’s house, left probably
because we were drinking and talking about
his dead dog, though I hardly need
an excuse, being forgetful, and I didn’t really
care about his dog.
Didn’t I hear that silence? Here it is, getting
closer, the hard edges of the trees, their stalks,
emerging back into view, shaking their raggedy
wet leaves dry. Maybe it’s time for a go, but no.
A little longer.
Let the hush develop fully. Let it grow
completely, give birth to me going about my chores
unashamed that I’ve left my tools at another
man’s house and dry as a paper lantern
in a season of monsoons.
And as I gather myself, proud of my patience,
that’s when the crack severs the tree next door.
82

Drops that crooked limb, which had been bent
like a painter’s arm, right onto my lawn.
For three days
it’s going to be like this. I am calling Stephen.
Perhaps he will bring me my umbrella. If he arrives,
I will tell him
about the world and the paintings of the world,
to which he will nod politely and drink my gin, and also,
I will say, tell me about the dog.
83

Joshua McKinney
Glede
All fall the oaks turn their backs
to my gradual prayer
the holy I take their leaves the color of alarm.
Some day as a boy
over a field, fog-hugged and mud-baltered
my not yet body thrashes and tears
not yet in the talons of
that grey-winged hoverer
not yet. So I wait to witness witless
now my true prayer. As one day
I listened alone. Maybe I did really.
As really, I hold a red leaf
and squeeze a little singing nothing
the only experience I have ever had.
84

A Valentine
Lower than grass, the first yellow crocus
breaks ground under the pomegranate tree,
where amid the branches, leaf-bare
and barbed, the remnant of a last spent fruit
dangles black as a gobbet.
I, too, was homeschooled in violence;
my eyes, too, have been worsted
by the terrible immediacy of love.
I give my dog a bone; she becomes
a frantic gravedigger in the garden.
Equally excited, sure of uncertainty,
methinks there is no place like hell.
And now I see my son returning
from his run under the rain, where lower than grass,
ancient plankton rainbows the gleaming streets
and starlings herring a sky
above the earliest yellow flowers.
Perhaps we will glimpse purple tomorrow.
Little crocus, when did I forget to see again?
85

Elizabeth Savage
Another Pietà
Jane found her baby in forest B
Paige dawdled in the sand
in accidents of topography
who knows what to clear—
Jane swaddles the hills, reaches for limbs
Paige hurries to be lost again
abandoned to their milky crimes
of undelivered penalties
Prayers carry Jane nowhere
& Paige outgrows her sleeves
mother and girl on paper
waiting garbled by the ink
When the woods recede and Paige comes home
Jane dresses her in the undergrowth
& slowly cuts her hair
86

Sorrow, Appetite, Mending
Jane gathered her mother in grass
growing moods of composure
her head hovering in flower
over beds of concentration
Paige’s warmth has shown through
a face of steady curvature
in three-four rhyme she had
no time for pedicures & pearls
but loved the beads’ proximity
to living on a string
Jane & Paige abstract will keep
flutter kicking into my dreams
orators at my pleasure ringing
beyond the farthest pew
Paige floats, Jane rows
they are nearest family now
I listen, wait, wash, or weed
until their voices overflow
dividing spring’s curtained green
my shore-blurred portrait
my sand-winged friend
my own two
87

Cuttings vs. Seeds
Jane was a weed—by the wall
crested until she’d blown
ragged and puffed—eloping north—
bikini and beau in tow—
Paige managed—out west
and grew tall—never born
to banking outsmarted them—all—
a prairie-ledgered mind
slipped the altar to college—
in time—although she never cared—
much—for money—counterfeit
youth or colorless thunder
As women follow under
their conditions—these drift—
east where light heaves—
brain—from vault—
Neither allows breaks—
have made her—a stranger—neither
collects on her faults—
Side by side—see them differ—
deepen—with their pain—Paige—
torn as a poppy—descending
to green—Jane—a dandelion at heart
88

traci brimhall
Gnostic Fugue
A prophet says you will be resurrected
and then you will die,
but the villagers’ lost children
are found in the city, flies laying eggs
in the nests of their ears.
After the burial, two soldiers make love
against the wall between the old ruin
and the new. But this is their rapture, not yours.
You are the doubter and the doubt,
worshipping a book you can’t read.
The awful quiet in your heart
is not the peace you were promised,
not the trembling hush before a revelation,
not a prelude to an earthquake,
not God’s silence, but his breathlessness.
89

Stillborn Elegy
We can’t remember her name, but we remember where
we buried her. In a blanket the color of a sky that refuses birds.
The illiterate owls who who from the trees, and we answer,
We don’t know. Maybe we named her Dolores, for our grandmother,
meaning sadness, meaning the mild kisses of a priest.
Maybe we called her Ruth, after the missionary who gave us
a rifle and counterfeit wine. We blindfolded our sister and tied
her hands because she groped the fence looking for the rabid fox
we nailed to a post. Katydids sang with insistent summer urge
and the cavalier moon grew more slender. In the coyote hour,
we offered benedictions for a child we may have named Aja,
meaning unborn, meaning the stillness that entered us,
which is the stillness inside the burnt piano, which is also
the woman we untie, who is the mother of stillness.
90

LOUIS CALAFERTE
Translated from French by J. Kates
Reward
If you are all sensible for the whole week long
If you do your chores properly
If you learn all your lessons
If you don’t get into fights with your classmates
If you don’t pull the dog’s tail
If you finish all your soup
If you don’t make your grandmother shout at you
If you wash your hands before coming to the table
If you brush your teeth thoroughly
If you go to bed without crying
If you say your prayers on your own
If you behave properly with Mama,
Sunday we will visit Papa in the asylum
91

Grand Ball
The Grand Admiral was seen
in the uniform of a Grand Admiral
dancing with the wife of the Grand Seneschal
dressed as the wife of a Grand Seneschal
and kissing the hand of the daughter
of the Grand Intendant
clothed as the daughter of a Grand Intendant
and then conversing with
the Grand Inquisitor
in the cowl of a Grand Inquisitor
This was seen at the Admiralty Ball
through a keyhole
you could say a ringside
seat
and, you see, these people are very
simple
92

Sharon Dolin
Char’d Endings
Of ruined and transcendent lovers
There is no absence that cannot be replaced
In their carnivorous landscape
It’s you my father who are changing
Leaning on your reflection in the window
Already the oil rises from the lead again
Beloved! Feel the dark planting waken
Woman breathes, Man stands upright
The earth loved us a little I remember
Like a horse aimless at his bitter plowing
Failure is of no moment, even if all is lost
Everything swoons into transiency
Keep us violent and friends to the bees on the horizon
Such is the heart
I hurt and am weightless
(a cento after René Char)
93

Christina Hutchins
Between Pages of Our Dictionary
Lift away lurk and let lowbrow breathe. . .
Language has lingered into slow scents: a library’s
mottle-storming dust, cupcake breath,
inked leather. A luna moth left too long.
Nights so interminable can last years.
Cradled between wheedle and wheel,
watermark and watchtower wait in the dark.
Quietly bedded close, wetnurse went ahead:
she kisses welterweight without ceasing. Ever
breaching, whale meets westerly skin to skin,
and wetly, wetly (damp, dank, moist
in this desiccant dwelling) loves well-worn.
Worn well or by much use, o hackneyed thumb,
seek me, thin as water’s moment
and still undefined. A shift of weight has begotten
a transient beam. Quick, unload the seam.
94

Jenny Drai
lights will be yr air along this floor will be yr lesson :
also a day, along nearest the ‘had begun,’ the ‘to is which’ happens
: exeunt : & when you [ stand ]
up to prayer, up to seams : ‘he lay already’ :
not insult but rather typology of art, a novella about the west ocean
: on the spot he sinks, chastens :
up to seams & messengers & have to translate & is vertical
Upon Virtue
95

opens it, the housedoor :
writing letters at salt provides no white / wall below the ceiling,
throws the frozen lasagna across the stove, ‘spake’ :
[ but the blade ] : of the messenger they say
mask first to yr face, the mark of brotherly
: hand movements : had in the afternoon
always a blue nap, to wonder at distance
Possession of a Body Achieves More Notable Feats
96

Sarah Maclay
& Holaday Mason
from “She”
8. (HM)
“Make my grave shallow so I can feel the rain”—
this is all stolen but “I” don’t truly care—
all the moveable parts are mine now
&
when “I” come back, it will be as a
very tall woman wearing tight madras shorts,
& a filthy eggshell faux fur coat.
“I’ll” play the accordion (exceptionally well)
& maybe the mouth harp for driving
long distances in the crueler months, & a golden harp
for obvious reasons & times of service—”I’ll”
sing with a mouth full of absolutely perfect teeth,
& “my” blood will arrange itself
like a well-set dinner table.
“I”
will be all aching with sentences like,
“I” am what was & the bonfire of the ore sewn sky,”
or “my name is John, therefore no one listens”—
things like that & there will be no
more questioning whether there really is a “She”
or a “He”, &
it
will have been completely forgiven (read absorbed).
Opening quotation from Dave Matthews’ “Gravedigger”
97

14. (SM)
And there had been that moment of silk
in the dressing room:
All in shadow—eyes in shadow, evening in amberumber
shadow, identity
obscured by memory
—by the hope of reconstitution—a jacket,
corduroy, leather-elbow-patched,
un-aged, a younger
version of a worn-out look
already comforting with age.
A moment of error
and yet
—blue silk—
held as the frames of past and present
deserted themselves
and fell into
the furrows of the evening.
98

She walks (as I watch)
30. (HM)
slowly backwards the quarter mile from the low tide shoreline
& then, more slowly still,
each step up the cement staircase,
unable to face forward & fully leave her lover.
A streetlamp blows out.
The Ferris wheel now
fuchsia, then
turquoise, now
emerald, then
gold.
The razor of the sunset bleeds into the sea also,
disappearing towards the whips
of curled wind, what forces leaf litter
up through the licorice red twist of the horizontal sphere—
(My spine is beaded mercury)
The lover left behind plays his plain guitar, a cycle, the cut of moon
while black gulls suspend
over his back like many hands—
(my hair medusa born, sparks into circles).
Three things fall over at the highway—
(maybe trash cans tumbling into the intersection) & cars swerve hard.
The flurry of white butterflies
unwind from nest in the gust shredding palms,
all kindling in a dark canyon—that which has not yet burned
but will soon.
99

20. (SM)
Deep in the woods, within earshot of secrets, we sat on a tree.
We sat in the woods, within earshot of secrets.
We sat on a tree—carved out, like a bench.
There, the blue around the photo was less blue.
Right next to the photo, there was a mark
that looked like a name, but may have been a (simple) discoloration.
It was a short name, short enough to have been an error.
The more I looked at it, the less I could tell.
The night that lived in his house looked the same in the day.
You could drive by and see the streaks on the windows against the black.
In the woods, within earshot of secrets, we sat on a tree—carved out, like a
bench.
If he had moved out, night had moved in.
Young men had walked by with their tubas, encased clarinets,
stealing food from the table.
It created a space, barely visible, in which a lighter blue—
There was no need for curtains.
Such as we were. We sat on a tree.
Then he said, “fuck ’em,” and kissed me.
The house was not abandoned:
the house was full of night.
His car, for instance, never moved.
His car, for instance, stayed.
100

Simone Muench
from The Wolf Centos
After the first snow has fallen to its squalls,
I’ll go out in the frosty dark & sing
most terribly, make a necklace
from all the rivers I have crossed
across the evening of my room.
Sing with big blue tongue
sing until it breaks the night—
black champagne, a lamentation.
My body makes no moan but sings on
by centuries to register
the North star, the wolf’s fang
troubling me with telegrams:
my teeth are tireless.
A cloud crosses the night as the drum
reads on to the end of the thriller.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.
101

Sea-blue, shot through
with the echo of a shadow
that sleeps after its voyage,
she sat with wolves & magicians
in a corner of an empty house
& saw someone coming
through the whirling snow
like a reflection from arson,
emitting sparks, shaking
the air as if to remind her
of the animal life.
A word, a whisper says this
in the dark: you are feverishly hot.
Forest stands behind forest.
Under your skins you have
other skins; you have a seventh
sense. Don’t you hear
the sky ping above your eye?
All of us are rain
under rain, noon spin
through bright meridian.
Mind drawn on, drawn out
like a little boat bringing
the flame from the other shore.
102

In the space of a half-open gold door
your body’s animals want to get out—
running among these rigid hills
weather-swept with rose or lichen,
a red noise of bones.
The heart passing through a tunnel
is a mute creature from whose sleepless
hands the sun has fallen
into a million swallows.
Our broken bodies are unleashed.
Far from illness, the wolves ran on.
103

The wolf licks her cheeks with
a fiery tongue he illuminates her.
This season lasted one moment, like the pause
between a girl’s teeth
on the edges of sleep.
How mysterious the red silence of your mouth
—the stag throat slit by a thorn—
as you wrapped me with past
& passing tenses, with the emptiness
in your empty poison-tooth.
Let me tell you about yesterday:
the first snow of your life.
It’s not a horizon I see
but a minus sign. A roof of absences
that makes room for the silence.
All talk is barren trade.
The future has arrived & it is not
a bullet fired from a living machine.
It is a faint sigh lost in a vast forest.
There is no wolf, of course—
104

Jaime Robles
Diatrita
—After two gold bracelets, from the Hoxne treasure, Roman Britain c. A.D. 400
A sheet of gold
pierced: cut into
a wall of vines
•
curling vines
or tendrils—
the air adjoining
simply that
•
a simple piercing of gold,
banded, surprisingly workable:
the metal lace-like—
its past
unseeable, shifting
•
like a voice that shifts to echo,
and locates us, sprung back
105

from brisk walls: as if
no morsels of background
were dropped out,
mislaid, gone
•
and time lies flattened,
stretched into a hoop:
pricked
into lapsed
panoramas—chinks
among cracks crevices
openings so that
•
through the open work of tendrils
skin glistens—fine hairs
scattered and budding:
whose memory is reflexive
sited on the other side
of a punctured strip
sprouting vegetal strands
fiery vines gold and coiling
106

Jan Beatty
California Corridor
On the San Joaquin Line
between Modesto and Merced,
past the arroyos, past the fruit trees
in rows, rows—hands of the farm workers/
beauty always with blood behind it,
nothing free. The holding tank
and the drainage ditch, the cast-off trucks
of the workers, woman and child waiting
for the angels of bread to swoop down
and bring the night with them, covering
her & her baby, feeding them, saying
sleep, sleep. This day, California is a wide,
wide lover—sweet and slightly off-key
in its song. Wacky and loose, the train rumbling
through Richmond, Martinez, the ocean
on the left, gang tags on the right beside
the paper mills, refineries,
the brown, brown hills—
then explosion of jacaranda (red flower!)
more mounds of brown, beautiful
red, a young couple playing cards
across the aisle: does she know the way
he looks at her is what people spend lives
looking for? (so tender!)
They’re laughing/curling into
each other—he in his little skid hat/she’s in a
striped tee—this kind of beauty the most
astonishing—from the body outward—
No way to be in CA & not feel frontier—
so many suffering drought/poverty/
only the hills outlast us all—
How to have body/space/land of the mind/
knowing the ravaged?
I want to be in the open—
107

Out here, the land grows wild hair on the side
of the tracks the way a dead man grows his—
dry, stickly—so stray—going to a place no one
knows. Mountains are the only salvation—
windmills on the left, “Golden West” train
on the right, truck junkyard:
You left your soul in LA, the guy across
the aisle says to his friend.
Then why does he look so alive?
I was here, I was loved. Were you?
We go through Pittsburg, CA—factories shut
down here, too—where I met Wild Bill.
Blue blue cerulean next to brown dead hills—
otherworldly with the windmills—
standing water, huge pallets for transport and
we are riding through a feeling—suspension—
Nothing, nothing can be done right now/
we are free.
Then all aboard in Antioch:
a skate punk kickflips his board
and sits down, hoodie w/skull & hat backwards,
I love him for his pose, brilliantly
indestructible.
108

Eduardo Milán
Translated from Spanish by John Oliver Simon
Eat them up, Milán
Eat them up, Milán,
eat them up. Identity
is dental, in these teeth
these unaccustomed days of poetry
without customers. The wife’s alone, fanning
herself in abandonment. And the fan alone with its air
full of beaks, through which spurts out
a song without ideas. A song on its own, all day.
You knew it was that way always with trees. It was
that way so much that one day a voice was saying:
“Eat them up, Milán, eat them up. Identity
is dental.” Strange days of poetry without customers.
109

Excellent language, excellent
Excellent language, excellent,
pure, white as a flower: hyacinth.
The birds are singing in bird. The
beavers eats in beaver. Human beings
talk in human, hand to hand, their voices
clash in conversation. Brilliant?
Means brilliant. New York means New York.
Silvery language from the Southern Cone. For
a golden century, say Siglo de Oro. Góngora,
Góngora. Now’s your time, Cordoban, now’s your time.
Easy to say injury.
110

Barry Silesky
Some Cheer
For an hour or more there’s sun. It’s not enough, but this breathing
I don’t even mind goes with a few words on the phone. The key is not to
leave, at least not too fast. And don’t make any plans. They’ve been made,
though I may not remember. That’s why I still talk every once in a while.
Remember the walking, dancing, the list of “then”? It’s all distraction now
which has its points, though this isn’t one. It could be if it’s set the right way,
and so there is something to do, but the what is so confusing.
I want to get to the end gracefully, with a little shock that’ll make
you want to think it over again. I suppose I can find the way as long as I
keep banging this, but I’m too tired to keep it up. “The whole affair” is what
I call myself, including you, the daily news, all the friends I once had. So it’s
here. Think of it as religion, which seems to be the current theme. Not quite
finished, but we’re in the neighborhood now and it’s warm and comfortable.
I’m sorry for the damage, but this is it. From the right angle, it’s downright
cheerful!
111

Evidence
It’s the name of the storm with the book in view; and a poem, and
the latest news. There’s something else too-- like the air I’m breathing; the
ice cream I tasted. Wasn’t it good? Hundreds of things appear, like cries
from electric machines explaining the job I’m not doing that I have to get
through. But maybe I am and this is the evidence. I’ll quit before it’s done,
but whatever remains unfinished stays here, mouth open-- if it has one,
which is another story— part of the job that must be attended. It’s like an
imaginary object I have to remember to obey; like silence or that eerie hum.
The good side is the interest it generates, endless and compelling. But
the work keeps mounting and it isn’t easy. The only chance is to get at it
while there’s still time, though there’s less than I ever thought. Still, here it
is.
112

Stephen kessler
Rick
My brother Rick is seventy today.
To me he’ll always be about seventeen,
when I was nine and mimicked his every move
and whatever he did was suffused for me
with an aura of magic, mischief, grace and wit;
so I preferred to hang out with him and his friends
instead of kids my age, who were far less cool.
He wrote the funniest poems for his buddies,
modeled on classics from The Golden Treasury,
immortalizing the guys with witty rhymes.
Of course I started writing poems too,
trying to be as clever as he was, then
trying to please my friends, and later, girls.
But poetry was doing something to me.
113

A Close Reading of Genius
Did I read this book
or did it read me—
the wicked lines of my friend & rival’s verse
slap me upside the psyche like his acclaim,
those prizes he collects
and tosses in back of his closet like lost socks.
He can dig the vanity of winning,
takes the pose of a tough guy,
the Bogart of poetry—
just too sensitive
almost for words—
but no Bacall;
the last one fled with his fellowship.
So he records what escapes him,
and in turn us,
with gritty twists and surprise
non sequiturs
that keep circling back to tag up.
Am I inspired, or bemused?
Flummoxed, or befuddled?
Excited, or violated?
Exasperated, or infused
with a weird grandeur?
His eclectic erudition is winsome,
like a roomful of Afghan schoolgirls.
I wish I had half
his alcohol content,
proof of ruthless truths
told offhandedly, like jokes
of an old Jew in a saloon after shul.
114

This God of yours is not credible,
leaving those piles of shoes,
those spectacles.
I can scarcely discern the outline
of a skyline, the rooftops are too
spangled with escapists
gazing at the stars.
These are the days our grandmothers bored us about,
recounting their sicknesses,
their surgeries.
Suddenly aged, we touch the remote
and find the same jive on 500 channels.
If only I could writhe like a charmed snake
rising to the sound of a Monk solo,
or fish my share of sunken loves out of the old reservoir,
or crash my Porsche for immortality’s sake,
I might know what to make of my man’s masterpiece—
but I can’t. I am a flawed witness
to brilliance, shielding my eyes
from the glare off his shades.
115

Nate Slawson
blue soul blues
what sucks about the soul
is not knowing if it ends
like a parade ends or like
a night in a Cincinnati
hotel room I know when
stars die they explode
Mahler 6/8 hellfire
the sky glows epileptic
helium it’s very romantic
it’s very German but
sometimes stars don’t
explode they collapse
cold & insignificant &
white look like antidepressants
& this place
here is how drowning
feels makes my stomach
go knuckle bone I got
a song running thru my
head it is electric guitar &
synthesizer & I just wanna
I just wanna I just wanna
this time I just wanna get
drunk drinking yr face
trace pictures in yr ears
I’m never so blue I can’t
rhythm yr soul yr t-shirt
& yr fingertips they taste
homemade I want to feel
my way into the bathtub
be yr yellow rubber quack
remember skin & vibrations
& skin all the way down
to yr riverbone.
116

lack hole blues
it’s 5:37 p.m. & I like you
so much The End but
love is worse than fascism
yr legs is deer hunting season
I don’t know what to do
with my eyes I want to introduce
myself my name is salt lick
is I-57 to Cairo to buy you
a real pulled pork sandwich
that ain’t funny that’s true
& when I touch yr black hole
with my black hole kaboom!
I think I am drunk we should
find a hotel room we should take
photographs to send to NASA
live all the time like it’s 1986
& three o’clock in the afternoon
I says you are modern city
slit skirt skyline a little rain too
on yr neck it tastes like ginger ale
I wish you was you for forever
or a Mercedes Benz backseat
tape deck & AC going full blast
you should be taking notes
you should call the police &
report me bearskin rug report
me gangsta rap all over you
because everything heartbreaking
takes a very long time
to break yr heart for real
& if everything is foreordained
I already know I will be born again
as yr hail mary yr suicide squeeze.
117

Günter Kunert
Translated from German by Gerald Chapple
Childhood Memory
A Greek-borne gift
the magnifying glass: alien
flesh, your very own thumb. And
a fire started in the sunshine
burning edgewards on the
page in my book:
like streets and houses later.
As in-laws did so far away
I couldn’t even see
any trace of smoke
above the skylight
shocked
by so much hopelessness.
118

The Lesson
A kid filled with wonder:
with every twist the pattern
toppled. Revolution
and a new order.
Sparkling color combinations
never beheld before. Another
turn and another.
Hour after hour
mesmerized by the shifting
vivid forms, the sheer eternal return
of poor little glass splinters
that fell out of the broken
kaleidoscope. That’s how I learned
to see.
119

Katerina Iliopoulou
Translated from Greek
by Vassilis Manoussakis and Edward Smallfield
The young swimmer’s song
His feet are gripping the cement
His breath is enormous
Invocation to endurance
Arranged along his vertebrae
Now the small bone structure is crouching
His immobility reminds you of a lizard.
(As if it has always been there
And suddenly gone
The eye can never really grasp it)
Now he is falling
Upright like an angel.
Even the birds fall toward the sky
Every flight is a fall
As he falls he is wearing a flower-watch
Held by a thread
He is wearing a necklace of bitter oranges.
He often pierces things
He is testing their persistence with a pocket knife.
Now he is the needle piercing the wind
This kind of intervention is an act of:
Choosing
Desecration
Exploration
Connection
Metamorphosis
This never ends
It doesn’t open what hasn’t got any inside
As he falls he is taking with him
The burning in his hand
In the middle of the palm
120

By a black insect.
The pain is a visitor from the future
It crossed the unwritten map of the hand
It read it thoroughly.
Now he stands crying
With his hand open
Showing it to the wilderness.
His whole being is subjected to a thing that
In the absence of a more accurate term
We can call: touch.
And as he falls he is taking with him
The eyes of the animals.
And the invisible horses
Every day they ride them and love them
They embrace and caress them
For what they are:
Two cold stones covered with moss.
There he will try for the first time the vertigo of matter
That the abyss is not the black void but the impenetrable.
And as he finally falls the tips of his toes
Will touch the water
And then he will sink at once
Without having time to grasp the boundary
And with his eyes shut
He will see with every pore of his body.
He will be uninvited in a strange world
Perfectly fascinated
He will be frightened
He will want to stay there forever
He will want to make it last
He will surface into the light beaten
He will try again
And he will relive this unexpectedly again
He will be beaten
He will try again
And he will bite the web of the sentence:
“It’s never enough”
And he will dance.
121

Translated by Konstantine Matsoukas
The Gap
Inside the house, in the front room there is a gap.
Actually it is a thin crack on the floor almost invisible.
Nothing to worry about. Except for the fact that the crack is not inert.
Often enough a draft of air is exuded smelling of dust and rust.
And of something else unidentifiable. Also that it has a voice.
Mostly it is mute. But every so often it produces a sound.
Sometimes he runs there, kneels and sniffs like a dog.
After, he steps away slowly infected by this chthonic, illicit vein.
He wears his coat then and opens the door.
More dangerous, pungent and sharp like a knife blade he walks.
A reaper of glances.
He tunes the song of the streets.
He sucks in the marrow of the evening.
From its hollow bone he makes a flute and quickly shoves it in his pocket
like a killer.
His fingers stroke the holes.
But he doesn’t dare play.
It is not yet time to exhale.
122

Mairi Alexopoulou
Untitled
Your tail is long.
Much longer than I thought.
And longer than I feared.
And it is beautiful. So beautiful, my God,
I could spend the rest of my life
eating it and breathing it and staring at it
as if it were a miracle.
Who blessed you with such a gift?
Who made you so special?
Can you now climb all trees?
And can you now know all truths?
Are you a beast?
Are you a star?
Your tail shines through your being.
It is who you are.
You’ve tried
again
and again
to cut it
dead
and to
be
like all the rest.
And you have hated it and you have loved it.
Your tail is who you will always be.
Your trap—this tail—in life.
123

Mon bordel 1
He created it a hundred years ago
and now you look at them and couldn’t care less
enough with cubism already!
you wrap your hand around my waist
you bring me closer to yourself
your breath smells of cocoa
it’s cold outside — inside the MoMA it’s warm
you fill your lips with mine
let’s go to the bathroom you say
I smile we leave just like that, with our kiss.
They proudly stay behind.
When we got dressed again
we found out that “in the process of drafting the Mademoiselles
their number decreased
from seven to six and finally to five.
The lovers disappeared step-by-step, or moved
to a different plane, probably to 1 our own, the viewers’.”
Translated by the Author
1 Picasso had preferred the name “mon bordel” for the painting, instead of the “Mademoiselles
d’ Avignon.”
124

Travis MacDonald
from The Omission Repo
125

126

127

128

129

Mark Irwin
On First Seeing Anselm Kiefer’s “Lot’s Frau”
Cleveland Museum of Art, 1990
I.
Into, unto, undo
the sky where train
tracks converge toward an infinity
of white smashed upward, a giant
vertebra of cloud. Ruins
of a wind hidden there, never finished
as I breathe in a room of others breathing. You see
our breathing slowly destroys
the painting, its infinity
“ He created a flamboyant abstract composition,
eccentrically shaped . . .”
of loss: Memory, Train, Mine: The painter is
a miner in that he allows
looking, breathing to
excavate, undo: Gaze of our discontent. Gate to no
where: The painting’s upper
panel as flower
whose pollen, sodium chloride evaporated over the surface, falls
upon us, gazing at the living
thing, but if you
don’t face it: a dead thing. You see we must
participate to bring its living
death a-
130

“ …by pouring and physically manipulating salt water
slurry”
live. Two angels visited Lot. “Leave Sodom,”
they said. Later men knocked on
Lot’s door and wanted
sex with the angels. Lot
fled with his daughters and wife. What
was Lot’s wife’s name? Salt
is what we call her, crave. A pillar. Kiefer
applied salt to lead
panels
“ Sheets were subjected to various treatments, then
stapled and glued to a wooden substructure. . .”
beaten, walked on, driven over then stained
with hydrochloric acid. Lead. Plumbum
negrum in Latin. The Romans
used lead pipes. Kiefer. Plumber.
Sky. “Then the Lord
rained fire . . .”
“ In the lower section, Kiefer applied paint on fabric. . .
the canvas, however, went through a lengthy and
rigorous journey before being mounted over the lead
substructure, obscuring much of it initially.”
II.
1200 lbs.: the painting, 11 X 14 feet, would weigh 3 times more
than Lot, his wife and two daughters. They
fled. Footprints and tire
tracks can be seen in the top portion encircled
by a dull blue sheen. Lead’s
131

used in batteries, bullets,
shot, solder, pewter. Lead bricks loaded in freight cars
are shipped for radiation shields. It
has the highest atomic
number of any stable element and is
a neurotoxin. Fresh
cut it’s a deep
The surface of the lower section is “commercial
stucco, enriched with linseed oil and polymer
emulsions, applied with trowels and large brushes.”
blue. Gray and black paint drips over
the earth of it. Oil paint
can take
a hundred years to dry: applied thickly above animal skin glue
to induce cracks, to seduce,
abhor
“ While still wet, the entire surface was dusted with
ash. At this point Kiefer intentionally burned the
canvas with a blow torch, creating amorphously
shaped voids.”
the viewers exhaling
carbon dioxide that over time
erodes
the surface, as words spoken in anger or love
erode the over or under inflected
consonants marring
vowels: “Alle die Namen, alle die mit-
Verbraunten
Namen.”
132

“All the names, all the incinerated-together names,” 1
according to Paul Celan
(in “Chymisch”)
“The fabric was then unstretched, flattened, and fastened
with commercial polyurethane adhesive onto
its lead-covered support.”
who cleaves words, their lead against the white
page. Who was Lot’s
wife?
III.
Mother. Matter. Earth. The painting is essentially one
of earth and sky: akin to the Old English sceo, a cloud
and Old High German, scuwo, shadow < IE base
(s)keu: to cover, hide, whence hide, L. cutis, skin
< Gr. skytos, leather. One must trust the intuition
of the painter. Near the canvas’s center he finally
adds a 3-dimensional heating coil covered in white.
I think the Earth wants to cover the sky, otherwise
it would not bear tracks like fangs upon it, otherwise
it would not thrust them into cloud: Castle, Crematorium, Hovel.
At the point where emotion destroys language what is
there? In the moan or scream what weather? Quel
temps fait-il? In the backbone of the sky? En Novembre
il ne fera plus beau. What time is it? The dusk of
Noon. What season of the moan? What version of an
Ever stopped fast? What Earth on the horizon? Above
it something white. Nothing. “Oh, no, boy: nothing can
be made out of nothing.” 2 Would you like to read about it,
the painting? You can in one of the artist’s lead
books, if you are a giant and can lift its languorous
133

pages in your hands. If you are asleep or dead of course
then you can read its static news, glimpse
the ever of its weather: yours reader, a palimpsest
of time. Or if you were a god of sorts, you could tear
those pages out and deal yourself, or the world
a hand. The painter’s obsessed with an earthen weather:
“What normally requires a geological period of time
happens in my studio in a few days. It is a process
of acceleration.” 3 Accelerating toward sky, the earth
imposes its will: Train tracks narrowing: Steal. Lead,
on the other hand, being dense and malleable, wants
to settle; so as the painting’s subject matter rises on
canvas and stucco, the substructure’s slowly collapsing
just as the artist’s lead books with their blank pages
implode while the texts of paper books push outward
into the world. The sky might be said to be screaming
with its riot of light. What Heidegger might suggest is
the clearing, that place of concealment and lighting
where truth occurs in the painting, that place where
“Earth juts up through the world” 4 in the conflict of clearing
and concealing, as in The Shoes by van Gogh
where the harmony of their task, working, moves
outward into the earth while simultaneously receding
backward into tanned hide, cow, and field. The ravaged
Earth of Lot’s Frau, however, catapults into sky via the steel
of railroad tracks that transport humans to labor
camps and death. Here, unlike in the van Gogh painting, work
is profane, for humans transported on machines are
made into machines then ash: the blasphemous cloud
that rises, a presencing of bodies on sky. Heidegger argues
that in enduring works of art there is a communion between earth
and sky: sacred in The Shoes, for they rest on a blue foreground
134

while the sky is of brown earth, a landscape reversed,
suggesting the peasant’s death through honest toil. In Lot’s Frau
the communion is desecrated, even though the ash falls to earth,
visible in blanched smears on the lower panel. Nothing will grow
here, and the continual deterioration of the painting is a kind
of growing into nothing in which the viewer participates,
exhaling carbon dioxide and water vapor onto the sodium chloride
that makes the sky sweat and gradually collapse onto earth. Lot’s
wife look back in nostalgia. What woman might not
look back where her children were birthed? Salt
Pillared. Did Lot touch it with his hands? Did animals lick it?
Consider sex as the conflict of clearing and canceling
the truth of body from which the spirit may rise, regardless.
“I seek spirit in matter. A type of animism . . . a religion
of origins,” 5 the artist says. You could smell the cumulus
of smoke and ash for miles while the odd light gathered,
shone. Millions naked. Read their names in books of lead,
Lead the artist bought from the under-roof of a renovated
cathedral. Imagine the singing contained. Imagine
the screaming: Mouths open: each red uvula hanging
from the back of the soft palate, trembling in a rush of air.
IV.
The painting as cocoon. I mean the lower panel with
its amalgam of stucco, ash, and salt that gives way to the upper
panel’s eclosion of salt rising, a pillar of salt. If we were
animals we would gather from the galleries then lean up
toward its sky, white as the face of nothing. We would stare
into the lower panels’ ruins to seek shelter: “The art of our
necessities is strange / that we can make vile things precious.
135

Come, your hovel.” 6 It’s a sightless larval world. Looking
at the painting I’m reminded of Rilke’s “Archaic
Torso of Apollo,” especially the lines: “We cannot know his
legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit.” 7 The head
is missing. Looking at the painting we cannot know
the subject’s devastation but participate in destroying.
This must be important to the painter that we participate:
destruction as a way of knowing, breathing—a mimicking
of his creation, which is really a form of kinosis, an
emptying of meaning, but in a contradictory sense as
in Rilke’s “Apollo” where the missing head forces the viewer
or reader to find it in words, in the torso that shines
like a Kandelaber, the missing but undiminished desire
of this god of desire, while in the Kiefer we find
the extinction of all desire, but resurrected so to speak
in sky toward which the train tracks drive, their will
extinguished by a radiant but corrosive light, something we
might find in the marble head of Apollo, the one missing
in Rilke’s poem, whose last lines tell us: “there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.” 8 I feel
that here, and because there’s no place that’s not visibly prone
to change, the painting makes nomads of us passing
through its ruins: People, history. Where once a great wind
she turns. Millions turned. Some fled. What home?
136

Works Referenced
1. Celan, Paul. Selected Poems, Michael Hamburger, trans. New York: Persea,
1985. p. 146.
2. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Act III, scene 4.
3. Celant, Germano, ed. Anselm Kiefer: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: March 28-
September 3, 2007 Exhibition. Milano: Skira, 2007. Kiefer interview with
Boris Manner, p.407.
4. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Albert Hofstadter, trans.
New York: Harper & Row, 1971. p.54.
5. Celant, Germano, ed. Anselm Kiefer: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: March 28-
September 3, 2007 Exhibition. Milano: Skira, 2007. Kiefer interview with
Boris Manner, p.407.
6. Lear, Act III, scene 1.
7. Rilke, Rainer, Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Stephen
Mitchell, trans. New York: Vintage, 1989. p.61.
8. Ibid., p. 61.
9. Heidegger, p. 71.
Notes
All large font quotations excerpted from the Cleveland Museum of Art
Catalogue listed below:
Anselm Kiefer’s Lot’s Wife. Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue. Also on web
site: http://www.clevelandart.org/exhibcef/consexhib/html/aboLots.html
Please see Mark Irwin’s essay on Lot’s Frau in Parthenon West Review, Issue
Six (2009), which includes a reprint of Kiefer’s image.
137

contributors’ notes
Anna Aguilar–Amat was recently awarded three prizes for Catalan poetry: the Jocs Florals
of the city of Barcelona for Petrolier I Teatre (Oil and Theater); the Carles Riba award for Trànsit
entre dos vols (Transit between two flights); and the Màrius Torres award for La música I L’escorbut
(Music and Scurvy). She has also published the book of essays El Placer de la Lectura (The Pleasure
of Reading). Her fourth book of poems is Jocs d’loca (The Goose Game). Aguilar-Amat is president
of QUARKpoesia (Aula de Poesia de la Universitat Autònoma) with the aim to promote poetry
translation of less translated languages. In 2006 she started the poetry imprint Refractions
(Refraccions) with the aim to publish mostly bilingual or trilingual poetry books. She has a
Ph.D. from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona where she now teaches Terminology as a
faculty member in the Translation Department.
Mairi Alexopoulou was born in Kalamata, Greece, in 1974 and currently lives in Athens. She
has studied Computer Science and English and is a founding member of the Literary Group
“ME.L.OMA.” She has given many poetry readings and has published interviews and essays
on literary criticism and poetics. She participated in the anthology Monodialogoi with 16 other
poets. She has published two books of poetry, Eromai and Sapfo 301.
Scott Bade is pursuing a doctoral degree at Western Michigan University. He is a former
poetry editor for Third Coast Magazine and an editorial assistant for New Issues Press. His
poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fugue, Poetry International, H_NGM_N, Sugar House
Review, Night Train, and others.
Andrea Baker is the author of like wind loves a window (Slope Editions, 2005) as well as the
chapbooks true poems about the river go like this (Cannibal Books, 2008) and gilda (Poetry Society
of America, 2004).
Manoel de Barros, author of more than twenty collections of poetry, was born in the wetlands
region of Brazil known as the Pantanal in 1916. He has received Brazil’s highest awards for
poetry multiple times: the Jabuti Prize in both 1990 and 2002, the Nestle Poetry Prize in 1997
and 2006, and the Ministry of Culture’s Cecilia Meireles Prize in 1998. His unusual life and
work were the subject of Joel Pizzini’s 1989 film O Caramujo Flor.
Jan Beatty’s books include Red Sugar (2008, Finalist, Paterson Prize), Boneshaker (2002), and
Mad River (1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Beatty hosts and produces Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WYEP-FM featuring
national writers. She worked as a welfare caseworker, an abortion counselor, in maximum
security prisons, and as a waitress for fifteen years. Her awards include the Pablo Neruda
Prize for Poetry, two PCA fellowships, and the Creative Achievement Award from the Heinz
Foundation. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University, where she teaches in
the MFA program.
Don Bogen is the author of four books of poetry, most recently An Algebra (University of
Chicago, 2009). A former Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Spain, he received a Witter Bynner
Poetry Translator Fellowship for his work on the selected poems of Julio Martínez Mesanza. He
teaches at the University of Cincinnati.
Michael Broek’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review,
Literary Imagination, The George Washington Review, The Cimarron Review, The Sycamore Review,
The Clackamas Review, Sundog, Slipstream, 42opus, The Paterson Literary Review, Fourteen Hills, and
elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Goddard College and is the recipient of a scholarship to the
Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a Poetry Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts.
He recently completed his PhD dissertation at the University of Essex (UK) on the subject of
aesthetics and American Exceptionalism in the works of Hawthorne and Melville.
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Traci Brimhall is the author of Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the
2009 Crab Orchard Series First Book Award. She was the 2008-09 Jay C. and Ruth Halls
Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in
Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere.
Louis Calaferte (1928-1994) French poet, playwright, born on Bastille Day in Turin, wrote
more than a hundred small books of poetry, stories, plays and notes. He earned his living first in
theater in Paris, and then in radio in Dijon. In 1992 he won the Grand Prix National des Lettres.
His unpublished writings continue to be edited by his widow. The poems here presented are
drawn from his 1970 book, Diabolo.
Gerald Chapple lives in Dundas, Ontario. His translations of Günter Kunert have appeared
in over twenty-five journals, including Agni, Two Lines, Osiris, and Atlanta Review. The Austrian
government gave his translation of Barbara Frischmuth’s Chasing after the Wind: Four Stories
(1996) a Translation Award . His most recent book translation is On Rare Birds (2011) by Anita
Albus. A book of his Kunert translations is underway, entitled, A Stranger at Home: Selected Poems
1977–2007.
Matthew Cooperman is the author of the collections Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does
Not Move (Counterpath, 2011), DaZE, (Salt, 2006) and A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001),
which won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize, and was a finalist for the Colorado Book Prize.
A founding editor of Quarter After Eight, he is now a Poetry Editor for Colorado Review. He
currently teaches poetry in the MFA program at Colorado State University.
Sharon Dolin’s fourth book, Burn and Dodge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) won the
AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her other books include Realm of the Possible (Four Way
Books, 2004), Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Heart Work (Sheep Meadow Press,
1995). Recent winner of a Pushcart Prize (2011), she is Writer-in-Residence at Eugene Lang
College, The New School and also teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y.
Jenny Drai has lived in Chicago, Munich, Oakland, and currently in southern California. She
has worked as an au pair, a bookstore clerk, for a historical consultancy, and as a social worker.
Her work has appeared in Back Room Live, Calaveras, Court Green, H_NGM_N & RealPoetik.
Johannes Göransson is the author of several books of prose and poetry. The pieces printed
here are from the forthcoming Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate. He is
the translator of several more books—most recently Aase Berg’s With Deer and Johan Jönson’s
Collobert Orbital. Goransson is also the co-editor of Action Books and the online journal Action,
Yes. He teaches at the University of Notre Dame.
Noah Eli Gordon is the co-publisher of Letter Machine Editions and an Assistant Professor in
the MFA program in Creative Writing at The University of Colorado–Boulder. His latest book
is The Source (Futurepoem Books, 2011).
Greg Hewett is the author of three poetry collections, which have received a Publishing
Triangle Award, two Minnesota Book Award nominations, and an Indie Bound
recommendation. His newest collection, darkacre, is available from Coffee House Press. The
recipient of Fulbright fellowships to Denmark and Norway, he has also been a fellow at the
Camargo Foundation in Provence, and is currently Associate Professor of English at Carleton
College in Northfield, Minnesota.
Elizabeth Hildreth recently translated Anna Aguilar-Amat and Francesc Parcerisas’
collaborative book of poems Coses Petites (Little Things) from Catalan into English. She is an
instructional designer and interviewer for Bookslut and lives in Chicago.
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Christina Hutchins teaches philosophy and poetry to graduate students at Pacific School
of Religion, Berkeley, and serves as Poet Laureate of Albany, California. Her poems appear
in Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner,
Salmagundi, and The Southern Review, and she has received two Barbara Deming Awards, the Villa
Montalvo Poetry Prize, and The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize. Sixteen Rivers Press recently
published The Stranger Dissolves.
Olimpia Iacob is Associate Professor in the Department of English at “Vasile Goldiș” West
University of Arad, Romania. Iacob’s interests include poetics and translation, linguistics,
stylistics, and translation studies. Recently she has become a member of the Writers’ Union of
Romania. Among other works, she has translated George Vulturescu’s Nord și dincolo de Nord /
The North and Beyond the North.
Katerina Iliopoulou is a poet, artist and translator, born in Athens in 1967. Her poetry has
been translated into many languages and she has participated in international writing programs,
festivals and Biennials. Her poetry books are Mister T. (2007, first prize for a new author from
the literary journal Diavazo), Asylum (2008) and The Book of Soil (2011). She has translated Sylvia
Plath, Mina Loy, Robert Hass and Ted Hughes into Greek. She is editor of an anthology of
contemporary Greek poetry (Karaoke Poetry Bar, 2007) and co-editor of www.greekpoetrynow.
com.
Mark Irwin’s poetry and essays have appeared widely in many literary magazines including
Antaeus, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Paris Review,
Poetry, The Nation, New England Review, and the New Republic. The author of six collections of
poetry, The Halo of Desire (1987), Against the Meanwhile (Wesleyan University Press, 1989), Quick,
Now, Always (BOA, 1996), White City (BOA, 2000), Bright Hunger (BOA, 2004), and Tall If (New
Issues, 2008), he has also translated two volumes of poetry, one from French and one from
Romanian. Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart
Prizes, National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Art Council Fellowships, two Colorado
Council for the Arts Fellowships, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award,
and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He lives in Colorado,
and Los Angeles, where he currently teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the
University of Southern California.
J. Kates is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. Kates has
served as co-director of the non-profit literary publishing house, Zephyr Press, for many years.
Stephen Kessler is a poet, translator, essayist, editor and novelist. He is the author of eight
books and chapbooks of original poetry, most recently Burning Daylight; fourteen books of
literary translation, most recently Desolation of the Chimera by Luis Cernuda, winner of the 2010
Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets; a novel, The
Mental Traveler; and the essay collections Moving Targets: On Poets, Poetry & Translation and The
Tolstoy of the Zulus: On Culture, Arts & Letters.
Günter Kunert has received numerous prizes for his over fifty volumes of poetry and prose,
most recently the America Award. Born in Berlin in 1929, he left East Germany for the West
in 1979 and has lived north of Hamburg ever since. “Childhood Memory” came out in 1990 in
Fremd daheim with the Carl Hanser Verlag (Munich and Vienna). “The Lesson” (2009) appears
here for the first time in any language with the kind permission of the author.
Travis Macdonald’s poetry has appeared in Otoliths, Bombay Gin, Hot Whiskey, Cricket Online
Review, and elsewhere. His first book, an erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report titled The O
Mission Repo, was released in late 2008 from Fact-Simile Editions. The poems presented here are
from the second volume. Macdonald lives and writes in Coatesville, Pennsylvania.
Sarah Maclay is the author of Music for the Black Room, The White Bride and Whore (Tampa
Review Prize for Poetry), all from University of Tampa Press, as well as three chapbooks. Her
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poems and criticism appear in APR, Ploughshares, FIELD, The Writer’s Chronicle, VerseDaily, The
Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present, The Laurel Review, Pool, The Journal, Poemeleon, Poetry
International, where she serves as Book Review Editor, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Special
Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXI, she teaches creative writing and literature at LMU and
conducts workshops at The Ruskin Art Club and Beyond Baroque.
Pushcart nominee Holaday Mason is the author of Towards the Forest (2007) and Dissolve (2011),
both from New Rivers Press. Her second book was also a finalist for the Autumn House prize
and a semi-finalist for the Tupelo Press and Backwater Press awards. Also the author of two
chapbooks, Light Spilling from its Own Cup and Interlude, her poems appear in Poetry International,
Pool, Smartish Pace, The River Styx, Runes, Solo and other journals, and she has served as a poet-inresidence
for Beyond Baroque, where she co-edited the anthology Echo 6 8 1. She lives in Venice,
California.
Laura McCullough has four collections of poems, Panic (winner of a 2009 Kinereth Gensler
award, from Alice James Press), Speech Acts (Black Lawrence Press, 2010), What Men Want, and
The Dancing Bear as well as two chapbooks, Women and Other Hostages (Amsterdam Press) and
one of prose poems, Elephant Anger (online at Mudlark). Her work has appeared recently or
is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Painted Bride Quarterly,
Prairie Schooner, Spoon River, Guernica, Crab Orchard Review, Tusculum Review, Hanging Loose, Pebble
Lake Review, Iron Horse Quarterly, The Hiss Quarterly, The Pedestal, The Potomac, Nimrod, Boulevard,
Tattoo Highway, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Poetry East, The Portland Review, and others. She is
editing an anthology of essays on the poet Stephen Dunn.
Joshua McKinney’s most recent book of poetry, The Novice Mourner, was the recipient of
the 2005 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in such journals as American
Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. A recent
Pushcart Prize nominee, he teaches literature and creative writing at California State University,
Sacramento.
Julio Martínez Mesanza is among the most prominent of a generation of Spanish poets who
began publishing in the 1980s. His books include Europa, Las trincheras (The Trenches), Entre el
muro y el foso (Between the Wall and the Ditch) and an edition of new and selected poems.
Simone Muench is the author of The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry;
Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Pize for Poetry; Sarabande,
2005), Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), and Disappearing Address co-written with Philip Jenks
(BlazeVOX, forthcoming). She received her PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and
now directs the Writing Program at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and
film studies. Additionally, she serves on the advisory board for Switchback Books and UniVerse:
A United Nations of Poetry, and is an editor for Sharkforum.
Idra Novey’s debut collection The Next Country received the Kinereth Gensler Award from
Alice James Books and was released in 2008. She has received fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her
recent translations include the selected poems of Brazilian writer Manoel de Barros and a novel
by Emilio Lascano Tegui, On Elegance While Sleeping, both 2010. She currently directs the Center
for Literary Translation at Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and NYU.
William Olsen is the author of five books of poetry, including Sand Theory (Northwestern
University Press, 2011). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Endowment, the
National Endowment for the Arts, and Breadloaf. He teaches at Western Michigan University
and Vermont College.
Alexis Orgera is the author of the full-length collection, How Like Foreign Objects (H_ngm_n
Books, 2010) and two chapbooks, Illuminatrix (Forklift, 2009) and Dear Friends, the Birds
were Wonderful! (Blue Hour Press, 2009). Individual poems have appeared in Bat City Review,
DIAGRAM, Eleven Eleven, Folio, Forklift Ohio, Fou, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, H_ngm_n,
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In Posse Review, The Journal, jubilat, Luna, No Tell Motel, The Rialto, Sixth Finch, So to Speak,
storySouth, and The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere.
Nate Pritts is the author of four full-length books of poems: The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper
Dillon Books, 2010), Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press, 2008) and Sensational Spectacular
(BlazeVOX, 2007), and the forthcoming Big Bright Sun (BlazeVOX). He works online with for
Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth and is the founder and principal editor
of H_NGM_N and H_NGM_N BKS.
Liz Robbins’ poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, DMQ Review, Greensboro
Review, Harpur Palate, Margie, New Ohio Review, Puerto del Sol, and Rattle, among others. Poems
from her first book, Hope, As the World Is a Scorpion Fish (Backwaters P), have been featured on
Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily; other poems have been nominated for
a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets. She’s an Assistant Professor of English and Creative
Writing at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida.
Jaime Robles has been published in numerous magazines, including Conjunctions, First
Intensity, New American Writing, Shadowtrain, The View from Here, and Volt. Recipient of a grant
from the Fund for Poetry, her most recent book, Anime, Animus, Anima, was released in spring
2010 by Shearsman Books.
Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun is one of Europe’s most prominent poets and a leader of the
Eastern European avant-garde. Šalamun is the author of more than 30 collections of poetry
in Slovenian and English. He published his first collection, Poker (1966), at the age of 25. His
poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into more than 20 languages. Recent
titles include Woods and Chalices (Harcourt), and There’s the Hand and There’s the Arid Chair
(Counterpath). Šalamun is a member of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art and lives in
Ljubljana, Slovenia. He teaches occasionally in the United States.
Elizabeth Savage is Professor of English at Fairmont State University where she serves as
poetry editor for Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art. A chapbook and a full-length collection,
Jane & Paige or Sister Goose and Grammar, respectively, will be published by Furniture Press.
Barry Silesky is the author of John Gardner: The Life and Death of a Literary Outlaw and
Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Time, as well as One Thing That Can Save Us (Coffee House Press).
This Disease, his third book of poems, was published in 2006 by University of Tampa Press.
Silesky has been publisher/editor of ACM (Another Chicago Magazine) since 1990. He also teaches
at Loyola University–Chicago.
John Oliver Simon is Artistic Director of Poetry Inside Out (PIO), a project of the Center
for Art in Translation. Translations of Light, a selection of Simon’s poems in Spanish and English,
was published by Entrelíneas Editores in 2003 as a double book with Bacantes, the poems of
Mexican poet Elsa Cross with Simon’s translations. Velocities of the Possible, his translations of
Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas (Red Dragonfly Press), earned him a 2001 National Endowment for
the Arts Literature Fellowship. Son Caminos, a selection of his poems in Spanish, was published
by Hotel Ambosmundos in Mexico City in 1997. His earlier books include Lord Of the House
Of Dawn (Bombshelter Press, 1991), Neither Of us Can Break the Other’s Hold: Poems For My Father
(Shameless Hussy Press, 1981) and Roads To Dawn Lake (Oyez, 1968).
Edward Smallfield is the author of The Pleasures of C, equinox (2011), One Hundred Famous
Views of Edo (a book-length collaboration with Doug MacPherson), and locate (a chapbook
collaboration with Miriam Pirone). His poems have appeared in Barcelona INK, bird dog, e-poema.
eu, New American Writing, Five Fingers Review, Páginas Rojas, Parthenon West Review, 26 and many
other magazines. With Alice Jones, he is a co-founder of and a co-editor at Apogee Press. He
lives in Barcelona with his wife, the poet Valerie Coulton.
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Adam J. Sorkin recently published Mircea Ivănescu’s lines poems poetry and Ioan Es. Pop’s No
Way Out of Hadesburg (University of Plymouth Press [UK], 2009 and 2010, both translated with
Lidia Vianu,) and Carmen Firan’s Rock and Dew (Sheep Meadow, 2010). Sorkin and Vianu won
The Poetry Society’s [UK] Translation Prize for Marin Sorescu’s The Bridge (Bloodaxe, 2004).
Plymouth, also co-translated with Vianu, came out in 2010.
Nate Slawson designs books for Cinematheque Press. He is the author of two chapbooks,
most recently The Tiny Jukebox (H_NGM_N Books, 2009). His work has appeared in Slope,
Handsome, Cannibal, Corduroy Mtn., Forklift, Ohio, Typo, and other places.
Adam Strauss lives in Las Vegas, and has poems out in Fence, Interim, Fact-Simile, Upstairs at
Duroc and Delirious Hem. In addition, he has a chapbook, Perhaps a Girl Elsewhere, out with Birds
of lace Press; and a full-length manuscript, For Days, is forthcoming from BlazeVox Press.
Barbara Tomash is the author of two books of poetry. Her newest collection is The Secret of
White, published last winter by Spuyten Duyvil Press. She received her MFA in Poetry from
San Francisco State University, where she now teaches in the Creative Writing Department.
Her poetry has appeared widely in literary journals, including Colorado Review, New American
Writing, Parthenon West Review, and VOLT. Her first book Flying in Water won the Winnow
Press First Book in Poetry Award and has been reissued by Spuyten Duyvil Press. She lives in
Berkeley, California, with her husband and son.
George Vulturescu is the author of a dozen books of poetry, most recently The North and
Beyond the North (2001), Monograms on the Stones of the North (2005), Other Poems from the North
(2007 – containing the Romanian originals of the poems appearing here), and The Blind Man
from the North (2009). He lives in the northern Romanian province of Satu Mare, where he
works for the cultural administration. Among Vulturescu’s many prizes is the Romanian
Cultural Order of Merit for Literature granting him the title of “Cavaler”—that is, “Knight.”
Cori A. Winrock’s poems have appeared in (or are waiting in the wings of) Black Warrior
Review, Blackbird, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, Pool and others. She was selected
as Editor’s Choice for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award and her manuscript
was a finalist for the 2010 Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. She has just
returned stateside after a semester as the Emerging Writer Fellow at Kingston University in
London, England.
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Parthenon West Review is a member of the Intersection
Incubator, a program of Intersection for the Arts providing
fiscal sponsorship, incubation, and consulting services to artists.