Poetry

Metamorphosis by M.A. Schaffner

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Metamorphosis
Items we can live without flourish
in a rich medium of advertisements
spouting from the bodies of passersby
like electronic organs or neuro-
fibromatosic blossoms covering
first the eyes and lips so one sees and tastes
increasingly only approved stimuli
linked to additional manifestations
until eventually the consumer
as host is itself consumed and becomes
but an appendage of its appendages
and an ambulatory ad for the same
advertising programs so that eating,
drinking, conversing, and reproducing
are the acts of a new, ephemeral species,
less ephemeral with repetition, less
ephemeral, in the end, than the host.

About the Poet
M. A. Schaffner has had poems published in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Agni, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, and elsewhere. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.

Two Poems by Judith Skillman

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Above the Snow Line
The demarcation begins—those who are ill go on
With one shoe, one bare foot flapping from their pajama leg.
Those who are well sit beneath a tree still green,
Reasonably comfortable, though the ground is strewn with scree
And odd-shaped rocks the glacier didn’t find, couldn’t smooth
Before tossing them into the moraine.

I want to discuss the ones who continue upward
Before they forget their names, their countries, their beloved,
The meadows of alpine flowers where a butterfly once opened
Its wings. Yes, it’s precious to think of life this way,
As having a point fixed like a star with any meaning.
The ones who are ill will scratch their wounds, and tumors

Spread, metastasize the brain and the eyes until the black patch
Is put on reluctantly, passively, without aggression. Those
Fellows—we hear their screams once they’re out of sight,
Wonder at the fall from which crevasse, and how unseemly to die
In one’s flannels, without even a rope, a piton, a karabiner
With which to jumar up the face of the cliff. Or a comrade

To yell down from above—Are you there? The ones
On the ninety-degree slope pitch forward, as oxygen thins,
Roots disappear and even the ancestors’ voices are silenced
By wind. Above the snow line this happens, flesh
Turns to ice instead of dust, faces remain beneath an inch-
Thick mirror, sickness disappears. We who are well sit

On thick coats to cushion ourselves from the earth, its uneven surface
Still bare, not cold enough to turn water into a white slate
Of erasure. We think of life this way or that, wane metaphysical
As a finger of moon passes overhead from east to west,
The day moon, same color as that into which our friends—
How could we not have known it was the end for them?—walked

Uncomplaining at first, willing to shoulder the load, to hoist
A backpack full of ropes and pears higher on their backs
As they walked. Perhaps they are singular although we remain
Plural. I want to speak to them as if each one had disarmed me
With his or her malignancy, unknown at the time of departure
for the great imaginary adventure.

After Winter Solstice
Still it comes early, sun setting over a lake.
It glows as if encaustic, a yellow trance

we embrace. Take the days—holy and dark,
how they fatigue us as they pass, our dance

a term, the “hellidays.” We flirt with age.
Then maybe a day comes when we’re certain

we’re old. How many times around the sun
can a body fly? Tongue-tied, gravitas

and honor small for a painful life lived
without having asked for the privilege.

Nonetheless there’s beauty. Its star hovers
above the water glowing from within.

Too far gone to turn back we become sin-
gular, my pursuit beeswax, yours VR.

About the Poet
Judith Skillman’s new collection is House of Burnt Offerings from Pleasure Boat Studio. Her work has appeared in Tampa Review, Poetry Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has taught Humanities at many colleges and universities and has collaboratively translated poems from Italian, Portuguese, and French. Visit www.judithskillman.com.

Two Poems by James Sanders

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Days (Albany) (0:31) (1:24)

days albany 31 124

 EpiphytePoem 88 epiphyte

About the Poet
James Sanders is a member of the Atlanta Poets Group, a writing and performing collective. His most recent book is Goodbye Public and Private (BlazeVox). His book, Self-Portrait in Plants, is forthcoming in 2015 from Coconut Books. The University of New Orleans Press also recently published the group’s An Atlanta Poets Group Anthology: The Lattice Inside.

Two Poems by Joe Balaz

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Carcass in the Fields
The visual sermon went over everyone’s head.

Futility walked around in full daylight
holding a lamp and searched everywhere.
The only honest man in the village
ran and hid so he wouldn’t be found.

Concealment in this case was appropriate.
No need to consummate the quest of a sage
who filled his life with almost nothing.

A porous heart bled the intention
of that hidden man who was dressed in black.
Accustomed to burying philosophy
in the context of a final truth,
one could mistake him for a priest,
if he were not the undertaker.

Diogenes seeked some kind of answer
looking for honesty among humanity.
It must have been his mongrel spirit that moved him.
He stared into an empty bowl,
as a canine chorus whimpered and howled
to the minimal light of a shrouded moon.

Not that it even matters,
for any insight that ever was,
will always yield to a carcass in the fields.

Roadside Turnoff
A voodoo blast
slammed into the eardrums like a cyclone,
whipping and swirling paisley winds,
as the ghost of Jimi Hendrix exhaled.

Complimenting the psychedelic music,
a painting by Hieronymus Bosch hung up on the wall.
The Garden of Earthy Delights with a soundtrack.
I wondered who came up with the synergy.

At a roadside turnoff,
bikers and barflies
filled the watering hole next to a gas station.

Outside tumbleweeds rambled
into the far reaches of the desert,
like the slurred stories within,
from some of the patrons
hollowed out like dying cactus trees.

There was sand in my shoes,
but clarity in my head.
I just stopped to ask for directions.

The bartender laughed,
and cherry topped his answer
with a smirk,
even though it was a common cliché—

“Just keep driving east
on the highway,” he said.
“Until you reach somewhere.”

About the Poet
Joe Balaz lives in Ohio.  His poems have appeared in Pittsburgh Quarterly, Wisconsin Review, and Hawai’i Review, among others. He edited Ho’omanoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature.

Year of the Goat by Ray Holmes

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Year of the Goat
It doesn’t matter,
the tin foil thunder
rattling house and body,

shaking us rung by rung clear
out of our separate storms.

You are one thing
at the doorway,
another once fully entered,

boarded as the windows
we shy away from.

And me? I am battered
and bashing at the threshold,
newly antlered, my head

wired with bone and
the seeds of a flame

we thought hushed
when those gray winds boiled
over the edge of town.

The new year has risen.
Let’s forgive ourselves

the old ways of caring,
the bodily zodiac
of tacit glances,

breaths marking the skin
like steam burns.

Hands in their
separate wringings.
However the gray

ribbon of fortune falls,
however the days

crumple into dusk,
there will still be
shelter and arms

and the cool crust
of the earth below

as we lay and name
each dart of lightning
that slips into the house
like the stray cat it is.

About the Poet
Ray Holmes is a graduate of the MFA program at University of MO-St. Louis. He teaches writing in St. Louis, where he lives with his wife and two cats.  His work has appeared in Architrave Press, Chariton Review, Dialogist, Midwestern Gothic, Nat. Brut, Thin Air, and other journals.

Issue 1 Exquisite Corpse Collaborative Poem Project

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Tender Spoon the Shout Ordinary Windfall Toughtitty Cityscape DaCapo
by William Doreski, John Michael Flynn, Kathryn Hujda, Heikki Huotari, Allan Kaplan, Graam Liu, John Lowther, Mark J. Mitchell and Richard King Perkins II

Heretics of darkness surge into the verdict of a renaissance gleam
parallels and pigeons crash in treetops.
Sun rises, sets. It’s all the same
shots rang out so tech is done.
She says rising from sleep that these aren’t her socks either.
On a cold and sunny morning anything is possible including crows.
Born to die Earth wakes up unhappy
exercise machines prey behind frosted glass like French nuns.
The end is beginning but meaning is in-between…in bed.

Note: This is a different version of an exquisite corpse with no restrictions. Each poet contributed a word for the title and a line for the poem. Everything will be organized according to whoever responded first. The resulting poem can be a little chaotic, since each poet does not know what has been written or what will be written. 

Two Sonnets from 555 by John Lowther

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[All that we are arises within our thoughts.]
All that we are arises within our thoughts.
Everything had to be done through my panties.
It’s great, it makes you feel really guilty.
On a cellular level, that’s what it wants.
Unless you don’t like fun.

Any boy can be opera.
Easy enough, when you’re a god.
In that case, just linger endlessly.
All that changes is the focus.
Under surveillance.
Outside, sky and no horizon.
Examples are not interchangeable.

It took me a while to work that one out.
Our moods do not believe in each other.
Unlike me.

[The old jury lived simply in a dumpster.]
The old jury lived simply in a dumpster.
Private property is a thing of the past.
Nothing joyous ever took place in that room.
There are individuals, and that is all.
The 20th century was here and gone.
It rolled off the tongue.
No glocka glocka.

Another boring week in the space business.
It’s already about a late-night moment.
Sometimes it was deliberate evasion.
We’re dedicated to our favorite shows.
Making sense is already delusional.
Let me explain.
No, says the sadist.

Note on the Text 
555 is a collection of sonnets whose construction is database-driven and relies on text analytic software. I crunched and analyzed Shakespeare’s sonnets to arrive at averages for word, syllable and character (inclusive of punctuation but not spaces). These averages (101 words, 129 syllables, 437 characters) became requirements for three groups of sonnets. I collected lines from anywhere and everywhere in the air or in print in a database. The lines are all found, their arrangement is mine. Values for word, syllable and character were recorded. Typos and grammatical oddities were preserved; only initial capitals and a closing period have been added as needed. The selection of lines isn’t rule-driven and inevitably reflects what I read, watch, and listen to, thus incorporating my slurs and my passions as well as what amuses and disturbs me. These sonnets were assembled using nonce patterns or number schemes; by ear, notion, or loose association; by tense, lexis, tone or alliteration. Every sonnet matches its targeted average exactly. Think of Pound’s “dance of the intellect among words” then sub sentences for words—it is amongst these I move. The dance in question traces out a knot (better yet, a gnot) that holds together what might otherwise fly apart. I espouse only the sonnets, not any one line.

About the Poet
John Lowther’s work appears in the anthologies, The Lattice Inside (UNO Press, 2012) and Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama, 2003). Held to the Letter, co-authored with Dana Lisa Young is forthcoming from Lavender Ink.

For the Nostalgic by Luther Hughes

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For the Nostalgic

on midnight
you remember being six.
your cartoon fingers.
your hips playing.

your death:

sternum to floor.          pelvis made
a            wishbone. time turned
albino.              slid spine.        speckled chin.
a                                       palms pearled red.
a            shoulders stirred bow.
became moans. became moon. became marrow.
lungs forward. legs coiled into creek.

head to floor.
breathe.
blood to floor.
then

release.

About the Poet
Luther Hughes is an undergraduate poetry student at Columbia College Chicago. His works have appeared in Espial, The Voices Project, Howl and MUSED Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.

End Papers #4 by Roger Williams

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End Papers #4
If in murmurs’ apart
(chortles tea-cup)
so since best at either
witchity nog
or as it’s past swelling
crowds the leap out

lo the angle sped sap
but as hanging aground
could such bucolic
a yard charred past jitters
iterate?

smack of it?

belting how the ol’ per-
tain hands over grown eager
let fly super?

Can’t re:issue
Rounds are out

About the Poet
Roger Williams lives an hour north of San Francisco where he taught French at San Francisco State University until retirement in 1987. Before, he studied poetry with Roethke and Bogan and, for some forty years, set poems to music–Wilde, Patchen, Creeley, Merwin and others. Now he writes poems, but he does not set them to music. His poetry appears in: UDP 6×6 #25, and a broadside, Experiential-Experimental Literature, Counterexample Poetics, Otoliths #26, #31, #33, Ygdrasil, Eskimopi, Mu mu magazine, Ditch.

The Talking Force by Heikki Huotari

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The Talking Force
My radius a play of chain, a turn of phrase, my thought balloon is red and round or red not
round or round not red or neither red nor round. My thought balloon, when rubbed and twisted,
is a poodle or a hat or both a poodle and a hat, a tag team, alternately one a bubbling tub
and one a prehistoric horse. Translucent cylinders of sloshing water, naturally occurring
Stirling engines, in their separated shaded lanes, as in concurrence, change their course.  

About the Poet
Heikki Huotari is a retired professor of mathematics. In a previous century, he attended a one-room country school, spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower and published poems in Poetry Northwest and Kayak. Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse and Berkeley Poetry Review.