A/R #2
Editors’ Note
What you will find:
A Japanese doll maker whose dolls “are blind at inception.” A “coiling narrative” within a comic recounting of frustrated desire. Migrating spirits in another world. Entries from a dictionary conjuring some fragments of a tale. A meditation on the umlaut.
And imagery:
Photographs of the human form cut into strips and reassembled. A messenger receding down a hallway in a dream. Gouache portraits recovering a history of imprisonment.
These and more—from traditional narrative to incantation, from the precise rendering of a feather to indeterminate visual and textual images—grace the pages of this our second issue.
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Contents
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Poetry
James Cagney
New Monia or Cognac for Water
Katherine Hastings
My City Whose Hair is a Cloud Fire
White Crow
Gerald Fleming
Applause
Kit Kennedy
Grace Marie Grafton
Tangle
Chance
Milan Oklopdzic
Forepast
Janell Moon
All We Have
Triptych of Membrane
Joseph Lease
from The Problem
Laura LeHew
Another Side of the Fence
Turmoil
Richard Krech
Near Cornelia Street
Howie Good
Eternal Recurrence of the Same
Dale Jensen
Moos
Susanne Dyckman
in Detroit
contemplating a white gown
where I become confused
Lawrence Matsuda
Daruma Maker
Salmon Journey
Roy Mash
&
Todd Melicker
from spokeshave or shaker
Bill Wolak
Roman Burials
In Sardis One Day
Jane Ormerod
The Fly
Laura Walker
Follow
Michael Shorb
$100,000 Tigers
King Tut’s Board Game
Judith Arcana
One of the Things That’s Different, Now
Charles F. Thielman
Stoplight Meditation
Nancy Wakeman
Classified Ads
Nicholas James Whittington
Iridescent Lack
Tunis
Nathaniel Mackey
Stick City Zazen
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Essay
Rebecca Foust, with art by Lorna Stevens
“The Making of God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World,” with poems “Last Bison Gone” and “After”
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Featured Artists
Diana K. Garrett
What Dreams May Come
Barbara Alexandra Szerlip
Rivera & Kahlo’s S.F.
Monica Lundy
Obscure Histories: Women of San Quentin
Jessie Thatcher
Close
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Selections
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Green clover worms
in ruby red chokers
periodical cicadas in blue
feathered boas. Snails
in stud earrings and airbrushed
shells. Slugs with ivory bone tails.
Mosquito lipstick—all flavors!
Asian Apricot! Mexican Mayonnaise!
Texas Tamale! Chinese Cherry!
Negro-Nacho Canary Yellow!
Paper wasps: turquoise
polish on tiny toenails
Lacewings in long eyelashes
Butterflies with belly chains &
aquamarine engagement rings
Ladybird beetle munching an aphid burrito
antennae in pink curlers
gets her shell hot waxed
and polished by fragrant french fleas
Somewhere a western meadowlark
in a topaz tiara and tacky tomato rouge
alights on an oak tree. its talons
a sparkling pimp fist of silver, onyx, gold
tarantula in titanium toe rings
monarch butterflies in mystic mascara
cockroaches in crystal cufflinks
and cantaloupe cummerbunds
Juicy June bugs justify their jerry curls
Predators are frequently jealous
of insect jewelry. Squirrel nests
bloat with pearls. They prefer
necklace of walnut shells
and bright lavender tails to
painted toenails.
James Cagney
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We begin by christening them —salt grains
of sky rising rhythmically from the soft
nursery of fog. Moth-winged nebula.
Haloed pillar of snow. Feather and float.
Pasture and jaw. Infinitesimal star birth
times a million. They are poured milk we spoon
and swallow, wear like skin. They polish our
cheeks and stiffen our fingers. They rest on our
tongues and together we taste them gliding
over the wide water, silver in foglight.
We cannot fly but nest ourselves in clouds.
But for the slow voyaging mist, we feel naked.
We do this like children or angels living
on the ledges of waves and lips, downy
wings so white they hum every color .
Bees rolling in a white rose.
Katherine Hastings
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I hold onto the words wet jellyfish ballet coursing through
liquid landscape knows nothing of mistake clock abandonment what I wouldn’t bargain to see again how you pleasure yourself pinprick the personal each object speaks this dialect of body our body doesn’t hold exclusive rights through intimacy the hungry meet what holds the body upright? spine, of course, disdain of gravity the spineless? enjoy hunger’s imperative genes cleaving whole our spine should we live long ossifies teeth? what will kissing be like? mantra reciting the 5 seas pulls me through sleep I worship the small nothing inconsequential to one left to fathom watery clues make sense of shame an island marks continuous boundary water buoys ambiguity does not use words to separate is separate and is the whole now whisper to me how I should pleasure myself nothing continues drowning on land I loved potatoes but lost points of reference misjudged height clumsy in depths choices I’ll leave fragments to Greek scholars do not believe them I did not openly embrace how I love sea birds how feathers loose change in time’s pocket did we ever agree on midpoint? true north never failed did I fail you so many times lost count what’s the final word before silence? prediction: I leave you in liquid knot who will care for the cat fold the napkins for the next meal what is said the deadline is all consuming all that’s between moveable substitutable cerulean bowl no time for sadness anchor is ready to give up how I want to see the new moon hanging onto velvet as you arrive austere oh, wearer of black-on-black how you will interpret the new geometry to those of us who revere the deep water a hammock I jangle kelp bracelets think of you joined by wonder’s chasm living reef is logic why propels more than what feeding bundle of curiosity skin holds together apart we meet bit parts in a constellation starfish on rock sea anemone in kinesthetic embrace stinging when necessary put down the tentacles the pen the frivolous put down the drowning again please show me how
Kit Kennedy
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Umlaut
After O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth
O dimpled debris, you foreign peas of little girth,
So sleek and fragile above these slackers,
Timbered colon on the tide of lines,
What art you make of the ponderest thought.
Kudos to the scribe that sudsed you up!
Over these runes how you do ululate,
Never mind their slatted feet and fingery pews
And tupled riffs that taffy up the tongue,
Your freckles froth forth above the thrum of them.
Speckled, spackled, owling vowels’ brows,
Your confettied jetsam so petite,
And trinkets and eyelets so enskyed,
That poets may pee in their pants to see
Your spangles sprinkled on their piles of snore,
All gravity whisked from the dull feeds.
Now your drizzled pixels surging from the sludge,
With caret and tilde at their side,
Seem with a vaulter’s arch to kick up
Out of the page. And though we cry Come back!
Come back! you renounce this broth of logs,
That your fled motes might dwell above the earth,
Like caroming stars crooning and burstable.
Roy Mash
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v.
the astronaut steps from his cul-de-sac of fluid oxygen. now and
then, an earth peels from its shell, unfurls its tentacles. curtains
are familiar. the clock tells time. the stomach of a bell has
many chambers. an island’s color is determined
by the process in which it was cast. their steeple
and thread lead a quiet life in the mountains.
ix.
a skin without clouds is empty. to form a word without
actually. the circle drifts. cells divide into cells. bowls stack
neatly into each other. she’s straight to the blue through a selection
of recollected openings. endings. they try to close them by them-
selves. with. sure enough, the screen door slaps against the house.
he sweeps the porch.
Todd Melicker
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Eloquence couldn’t save him,
after Cicero was proscribed
by the Second Triumvirate.
Bounty hunters murdered and decapitated him,
offering the head to Mark Anthony.
Fulvia, Anthony’s third wife,
stuck needles through the orator’s tongue
to revenge the stinging words Cicero uttered
to describe their dissolute lifestyle.
Later, Cicero’s head dangled from
the very platform in the forum
where he had once declaimed
his speeches as warnings.
Bill Wolak
*
beneath water and spill rising strung gray and a war is on and we mind the groceries and another war children in the backseat birds and sprawl things i can’t see from under driving in the car spoken and gray beneath water spoken and gray and spill rising driving in the car strung gray i can’t see from under and a war is on birds and sprawl things and we mind the groceries children in the backseat and another war beneath water and another war spoken and gray children in the backseat and spill rising and we mind the groceries driving in the car birds and sprawl things strung gray and a war is on i can’t see from under beneath water i can’t see from under and another war and a war is on spoken and gray strung gray children in the backseat birds and sprawl things and spill rising driving in the car and we mind the groceries beneath water and we mind the groceries i can’t see from under driving in the car and another war and spill rising and a war is on birds and sprawl things spoken and gray children in the backseat strung gray beneath water strung gray and we mind the groceries children in the backseat i can’t see from under spoken and gray driving in the car birds and sprawl things and another war and a war is on and spill rising beneath water and spill rising strung gray and a war is on and we mind the groceries and another war children in the backseat birds and sprawl things i can’t see from under driving in the car spoken and gray beneath water
Laura Walker
