kill yourself slowly &
make us more money,
honey

A clear cold sunny 31 degrees.

*

At Burt Lake

To disappear into the right words
and to be their meanings . . .

October dusk.
Pink scraps of clouds, a plum-colored sky.
The sycamore tree spills a few leaves.
The cold focuses like a lens . . .

Now night falls, its hair
caught in the lake's eye.

Such a clarity of things. Already
I've said too much . . .

Lord,
language must happen to you
the way this black pane of water,
chipped and blistered with stars,
happens to me.


-- Tom Andrews

My Funny Valentine (Almost a Sestina)

In mid-February I will sit down and dabble in catharsis quite
comically. This action, or abreaction, will fail, as one whose first
experiments in smiling are based on the gestures of the Arnolfini,
who are, in their way, laughable in the way solemnity so often is.
So hands hold onto solace, an art, (strange circuitry of emotion
that interlocks like Mdm. Chenany’s braided hair): surpassing
recognition of Roman fame or Greek.

Eurydice can hear the marble ring with echoes of songs sung in
Greek. It’s Orpheus, pieced together beyond the grave, come to
read the Sunday comics: I’ve only one life to live let me live it
blonde! (Yes, brown is the color of our hair), and “Isn’t it against
the law to be the Valentine of two different girls?” Billy asks
smiling. He thought joining the circus a reactionary polemic, a
statement of protest but artful, like Clio nursing Hyacinth: it’s a
privilege to mix comfortable company with laughter.

Postpone the hoisting of a flag, black or white, and fill my mouth
with candied laughs since only kings and pirates need gold.
“Museums befit your beauty, perhaps Greek, perhaps American,
or singular in your way. Your house of mirrors houses art,” I say
with some reluctance, for ardor is almost always melodramatic
and comic (though girls must certainly enjoy laughter above pity,
so I hope you’ll smile). Why not? Life and love bring bigger
worries: “How’s my hair?”

Ridiculous, I’ll admit, to worry about love and life, though I am
conscious of my hair and wonder when it will gray. I sense this
measure of time is fabricated, laughable, an essence of something
real: you, who will never grow old or want for smiles because
you, singular you, will not tolerate the everyday or pandemic
(from the Greek, of all the people). “But they wouldn’t do.” It
had to be you, plural you, comedic escape from all others who
know nothing of what it means to be plural and singular art.

Let’s visit museums in the spring, when the world is warm and
rightly lit for art, and when even the sun can’t help but project
some gold into your hair, I’ll show to you the intimations that
preceded your birth, (tragic or comic, thou writ’st the play). We
will count the strays in every Titian (tediously laughable) and
determine who among our friends is in The Burial of Count
Orgasz by El Greco, I’ll notice you pointing out something I
can’t understand, so I’ll look up and smile.

And you, who may find yourself alone in April or June, as I am
now, will smile, insulated by frozen memories, patches of ice on
the street, which might be art if we’d stop avoiding them and
give them a chance to slip us up. But this idea is Greek, a
transient thing, like flowers. We must give each thing time to
bloom, cut our hair, re-give, re-cut. One cannot live on memories
alone, even if we forever laugh and never grow old, we must
eternally return to revel in life’s everyday comedy.

-- Cody Carvel

It's real now: the air isn't going to get any warmer for a good long time. The beginning of the cold is Living in Clip in earphones, eating late at night with ambiguous sentences and fingers.

I will see this in Washington, D.C.

in the hills

White rocks jutting from Ching stream
The weather's cold, red leaves few
No rain at all on the paths in the hills
Clothes are wet with the blue air.

-- Wang Wei

she made a cat-paw gesture and smiled

The air smells cold, mist through yellow leaves. Papers are written, bills paid, envelopes stamped, and this morning the fifth grade science teacher brought me a coffee. At 12:15 in cold and fog, a happy October; is it so soon? Already the sunlight is darker.

I echo Burke: New England in the fall, I love you.

And it is late and I am listening to Ani staring down three-weeks-ago's Plato response, a blank page with the question itself typed and italicized, a sorry excuse
think I want to cry, I don't know why - gonna sing myself a lullaby
                with October bearing down and the cold settling in. I reach up absentminded to twirl long pink hair around my pen - gone now, with the old jeans and half the library and the old PC and the kitten under the window and the wine residue by the bed. Gone with the stains of that year, the hairdye and black boot scuffs and pen ink and sheets in white and maroon. Tonight the bed is in another house the cats in different states the I the other who slept clothed over covers over tears naked now under stolen blankets a stolen year, secreted away and held safe out on the edges of minutes and ours. Trite And True.

Trouble is you gotta have yourself an alternate plan

I could step off the end of this pier
but I got shit to do
and an appointment on Tuesday

Never try to touch lovers.

-- R.S.G.

home and shelter
(hey, I like my NRA membership card)

pluit.

andagain. this week,

Much of our time
     has been spent in this way.
Paging through old notebooks.
Pacing endlessly.
Crying on each others' shoulders.
Singing in the bathtub.
Looking for stores that are not there.
Making faces at the camera,
     and singing each other to sleep

-- Matt Krefting
Treatise

and when they are yours
and no one else's, like an envelope
left on the table, blank
until you pick it up and see your name
they will have been laid out for you to find.


A Page in Your Name

Your name can be bitten like an apple.
It smells like Manila mango and mandarin orange.
It leaves my tongue purple like chagalapolin
and the escobilla.
I crush it and breathe mint.
As I separate it a pomegranate explodes.
It grows to the height of a sugarcane flower, it's the vine
that climbs the fence or reaches to the edge of the patio,
persecutor of coral snakes, watermelons, and verdolagas.
If I shake it, I hear the water that fills it.
If I give it to the mad man of the house, he will return to the top
of the hill and make it a flute.
To free me from darkness I keep it in a jar.
With the light it makes it illuminates this page.


-- Francisco Hernandez
Translated by Marlon L. Fick

At the Public Market

Abandon all hope, reads the hand-scrawled sign
propped beside the lobster tank—some joker
brooding on its murky doom, which looks

more like the world unformed and void,
stirred by a mind feeling that sluggish urge
to make itself known, a mind struggling

into form, water to gel, to claw and tail,
oozing its way out of slime, stumbling
among bottom feeders, grovelers, creeps

all bunched up, feelers adither
over their future's watery inferno.
How innocent Dante seems at first—

trembling and clutching at Virgil his guide,
as if he hadn't constructed that bucket
of dry ice himself, and personally

tossed each specimen in. Such a din
of marketing all around, it's easy
to be wilted by guilt, or to rage at

whoever made this place. But to watch
how lobsters madly scramble, you have to
bend close, look through your own shadow

into the tank's dim algae light,
where a few black beads fiercely eye back—
grabbers and pinchers clawing their way

to the top of some little heap.
And for what? I suddenly have to ask,
trembling, here, in the middle of my life.

-- Betsy Sholl


Blues for Dante Alighieri
       ....without hope we live on in desire....
INFERNO, IV

Our room was too small, the sheets scratchy and hot—
Our room was a kind of hell, we thought,
and killed a half-liter of Drambuie we'd bought.

We walked over the Arno and back across.
We walked all day, and in the evening, lost,
argued and wandered in circles. At last

we found our hotel. The next day we left for Rome.
We found the Intercontinental, and a church full of bones,
and ate takeout Chinese in our suite, alone.

It wasn't a great journey, only a side trip.
It wasn't love for eternity, or any such crap;
it was just something that happened....

We packed suitcases, returned the rental car.
We packed souvenirs, and repaired to the airport bar
and talked about pornography, and movie stars.

-- Kim Addonizio

7/ We should know
by now we are not going
to get out of this
alive

Let me be precise
as possible but all
within us that dies

Like stars, collapsing
in on ourselves

if that is our fate
then we can be like stars

In the end nothing is left
but core, so dense

collisions are no longer
important, heat no longer
involved

-- James Baker Hall