Monthly Archives: September 2016

Eric G. Wilson

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Bowl

W.’s wife stole his bowl. She hated the way he chewed his food, so thoroughly it turned liquid. He fled the small wooden house into the middle of a road.

W. saw that no car was going to kill him. The drivers were too skilled. They swerved away from him or stopped before they reached him.

W. took to the forest.

He wandered without food or water for many days, imagining this would be an easier way to go.
He still was not dead when he looked at his hands. An eyeball was embedded in each palm. He found he could see out of these eyes. With them, he studied his face.

He was no longer a man that he knew.

He was something quite different.

Was this how death was?

Maybe the hunger and thirst had worked. He closed his palms and willed his attention to the eyes in his head. If this was the land of the dead, he wanted to look through his old eyes. He noticed nothing different. There were trees, and on the ground, brown leaves. Stones large and small were about.

W. saw a stone the size of a head and remembered, I have a young daughter, and then he thought, I’ve got to go back.

She had lost her bowl.

W. had walked so long, he was lost. He looked at the sky. The sky was gray.

He lowered his head, and there was a small wooden house.

W. fled from the house into a road. He stood in the middle. Cars sped toward him. None touched him.
He rushed into the forest near the road. He walked. Hunger weakened him, and thirst.

W. tripped over a head-sized stone. With his hands, he broke his fall.

There was pain in his hands. His palms were gashed.

W. studied the cuts. Inside each, he glimpsed white. He recalled bones and eyeballs. He imagined seeing his head from his hands.

The head he saw was not the one he remembered.

Pain was in his hands.

He imagined seeing his hands from his head. The gashes were red.

The head W. had felt bigger than the stone he stumbled over.

He had a young daughter, a child, and she had nothing to eat.

He would save her.

How to reach her?

A house appeared, small and wooden.

Through a window W. saw a woman. She was holding a spoon before the face of a girl.

W. rushed onto the porch. He grabbed the door knob. The metal scalded his hand. He jerked it away. He stared at the palm. The shape of a spoon’s oval bowl reddened its center. There was pain there.

W. touched the shape to his lips.

Pain. Tongue, teeth, throat.

W. imagined living inside of the pain, seeing the world from there.

He saw three people before an oven, a man to the left, and a woman to the right, and in the middle, a small girl, who was holding the hand of the man and the hand of the woman. The girl was looking up at the woman. The woman was plump. The man was gaunt.

W. was seeing from the pain. He was starving. He was falling down. A small hand was holding the hand not burned. The hand slipped away and he fell.

From the leafy ground, he saw near his head the head of a woman. Where the woman’s eyes once were, was blood.

W. could drink the blood. He had no bowl.

He struggled to raise himself and flee to this vessel.

Eric G. Wilson has published three books of creative nonfiction, all with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: Keep it Fake, Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, and Against Happiness. He has also published a memoir, The Mercy of Eternity (Northwestern University Press). He has recently published fiction in The Collagist, Café Irreal, and Eclectica. His essays have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, The Oxford American, The Chronicle Review, and Salon. He teaches at Wake Forest University.

Felino A. Soriano

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A selection from Fragmented Olio

FROM THE SECTION BEHAVIORS

Between

This pageantry of landscape
—land as soft moments not
of hurry or desire to splay
toward alternate meaning, a
blush of misfortune. Today is
a dangle of marbled light, an
algebra of sun walking between
halls’ faith and the home formed
between the embrace of seasons and
aggregated warm names.

An alter, an improvised becoming

You’ve begun your transvaluation: your
mirror, soon, will no longer agree

with what your body projects, speaks
into layers of disparate insinuations. The

body is not. Wasn’t. You pretend
and understand imagination is

functional amid the only rendition of
truth factual among an alphabet’s

alternate publication. You say
is pain? The rhetorical submission

of silence’s orchestrated rhythms
ignites theory and obtains ponder as

nuanced permission toward the
gradated teem of eventual winged absolving.

Your singing is

not a waiting for response. To pretend
is to exist within the smallest space between voice and hear. You’ve
wanted. The volume of your mouth is pure, summer. In
relocating the lyric. You’ve found it. The listener is studying, a
subconscious devotion from the childhood of ingurgitating noesis.
Within the darkened room, whisper is beast. Nothing is unheard
in the notion of every spoken freedom is visceral devoted clarity.

Felino A. Soriano is a poet documenting coöccurrences. His poetic language stems from exterior motivation of jazz and the belief in language’s unconstrained devotion to broaden understanding. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies. Recent poetry collections include sparse anatomies of single antecedents (gradient books, 2015), Forms, migrating (Fowlpox Press, 2015), Of isolated limning (Fowlpox Press, 2014, and Mathematics (Nostrovia! Poetry, 2014). He edits the online journal, Of/with: journal of immanent renditions. He lives in California with his wife and family and is a director of supported living and independent living programs providing supports to adults with developmental disabilities. Visit felinoasoriano.info for more information.

Marvin Shackelford

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Your Lifeboat, Your Friend

You plainly see the lifeboat, and you’re damp, but the ocean remains out of sight. You’re neither woman nor child, but your friend, beside you on the disappearing deck, was an only child, a mistake with which his parents could not part. All in this world, he likes to say, bows to the random rope and chain of blood. He’s unconcerned, but you believe the line cannot end here. There’s meaning in the knots that link him all together.

In the water, black and foggy, rolls a joke a hundred years old. One produced again and again on film, struck into books and whispered through genealogies, but not a part of life in this age. You see the point of your murderer in the distance. You expected, at worst, pirates, their machine guns and pillage. Even that was far off this course. You were afraid to fly and quickly have learned to feel silly, God bless you. You’d imagined a Puritan’s vacation, a reversed exploration.

“Filling fast,” your friend says. “Everything. And these were assigned. We’ll be swimming, soon.”

“You should get in.”

“What about another one? Later?”

You have no answer. But only so much is about you, about your lifeboat, your friend. You force him into escape, shove him into the mix. His balding head peaks up from a gaggle of women. He’s surprised when they lower, patient and steady, into the water. He goes on without you. Your last glimpse of him is a future long delayed, fruit of the line secured. You know you’ve done the right thing.

Later, a small man in a sailor’s cap says it’s surprising how dressing the part has made him feel. He asks if you’re holding up well. He offers you a cigarette. Overhead a flare rises, and you think of your friend shepherding, shepherded by, his new little seaborne flock to safety. Where they land is the last surprise. You imagine something vastly more Pacific, leis and luaus and a woman on each arm. The finest wish you have for him is, finally, tropical.

There’s little of the ship left above water. You feel the tilt and slide. Your lifeboat, the dressed sailor informs you, is being prepared as you speak, at last, and for the first time you doubt his authority. You ratchet up some faith. Around you men begin songs of children gone, children yet born. They speak with their fists of climbing higher. Across the water you see the circling specks of other lifeboats, the fortunate and timely. You think of all preserved there, and you prepare to dive.

Marvin Shackelford is the author of a poetry collection, Endless Building (Urban Farmhouse Press). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Epiphany, NANO Fiction, Southern Humanities Review, FiveChapters, Folio, and elsewhere. He resides in the Texas Panhandle with his wife, Shea, and earns a living in agriculture.

Renee Robbins

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Artist’s Statement

“Love Letter Etchings” stem from a deep obsession with the diversity of flora and fauna in the ocean. I see these pieces as analogous to love letters to my heroes or unknown celebrities. In contrast to some of my other work, which abstracts and imagines natural phenomena in densely layered painting compositions, the specimens in these compositions are based on actual creatures. My process involves lots of research about the creatures in order to learn more about them, consider their habitat, and respond to their unique characteristics within the love letter.

Renee Robbins is a Chicago-based visual artist who focuses on depicting micro to macro relationships. She is represented by Lois Lambert Gallery in Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, CA. Her public art commission in downtown Chicago, “X Marks the Milky Way,” is featured in the Wabash Arts Corridor. She has exhibited widely, including at the Fermilab, America’s premier particle physics laboratory, Alden B Dow Museum of Science and Art, Firecat Projects, Adventureland Gallery, Packer Schopf Gallery, and the Hyde Park Art Center. The Chicago Gallery News featured Robbins as a ‘Young Chicago Artist’ to watch.

Simon Perchik

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positInkSpash131210.small

Splash is how this stone
remembers squeezing your hand
then letting go, covers the ground

with seawater though you
can’t taste the salt
and inside each embrace

the first thunderclap and shrug
no longer dries, your shoulders
falling now as loneliness

then sand — you listen
the way all marble is crushed
drowns from the same gesture

that takes you arm in arm
bathes you tighter and tighter
for pebbles and caring.

positInkSpash131210.small

Though they give nothing back
they’re weak and in the bargain
both eyes are overgrown

with branches, with hillsides
calling out from the dirt
that no longer knows the difference

—what they can still point to
you drink as thighs and breasts
and rainwater stroking the Earth

shaking it, almost a mouth
almost a sun, a smell
burning between, half roots

half far away, half squint
and your heart too is emptying
struggling, moist, around you.

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Ankle deep and these stars
expect you to come by
stomp out their flames

the way each sky
keeps its place in line
—even before there was rain

you needed streams
and slowly through your legs
the heart you have left

lets go these footsteps
shining in water
as if here is the fire

still beating as nights
as hair and lips
and overflowing.

positInkSpash131210.small

Bone dry and the wall
pulls this frame closer
held up, evidence

the glass that’s missing
once was water–proof
the sea that hid this shell

is just now reaching you
as emptiness, the kind
you can still find in a room

circling the Earth for moonlight
for a place that’s safe
though your jaws stay open

make room for a single cliff
gaining on the others
without salt or shoreline.

positInkSpash131210.small

You sit along its rim, count
the way this well returns
wishes and seawater

and each sky scented
by the damp breeze
that suffocates its prey

—you don’t escape, let
the warm sand take hold
surround your arm over arm

as a day still struggling
thrashing in nets, tossing out
balloons no one wants anymore

or celebrates the catch
where a small stone
was asking for you.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, Forge, Poetry, Osiris, The New Yorker and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, including free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities,” please visit his website.

Michael Palmer

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Notre Musique

I imagine the film.
It is not it is finally not

called
Notre Musique after all.

I can imagine
the film we imagined

though there’s nothing
strictly speaking

that I can imagine.
That is to say

I can imagine nothing,
but nothing more,

or nothing,
but nothing else.

Once in the library
there was a fire

and the books consumed the fire
while the authors of the books

stood idly by,
the authors in eternity

among the buried words
beneath the pavement,

the authors among the flies
on a heap of dung

in a fallow field,
the authors lost at sea

in a storm of words,
the authors shorn of memory,

the authors in rags
in a film called Notre Musique,

a silent film now
playing almost playing

at the Orpheum
or is it the Thalia,

the Clio, the Melpomine
or the Music Hall of Vagrant Souls,

a nameless film of endless length
forbidden by the designated

descendants of the prophets.
Admission free.

(pour Liliane)

Solunar Tables

Pain of the child set afire
before blindered eyes
a world’s eyes

Poem of the bird
exploding in flight
in our random skies

Pain of the ladder
its storm-shattered steps
defying ascent

Pain of the Hunger Moon
dangling over hoar frost
by a failing thread

Should we cut it
for those without bread
Pain of the word

Poem of the word
unheard unread
The darkling river

and the steadfast ferryman
who refuses your coin
The wave that embraces

while it destroys
Our secret entertainments
at the Madman’s Market

and our alphabets without end
that spell themselves
and weave themselves

into a trembling web
as the poem-road below
of silences and stones

comes to a final turn

Street Song

Mad Mary sits on a stoop
She tells
how she’s birthed the Christ

many times
sometimes in rain
sometimes in snow

sometimes amidst the flames
of war in the streets
I have traveled many leagues

beneath the sea
far so much farther
than the eye can see

and the little I sleep I sleep
balanced on a blackened bier
swaddled by the news of the day

from near and far away
I carry death in my pocket
that loving friend

and I’ll pull him out
when the song must end
What more is there to say

Michael Palmer is the author of Thread (New Directions, 2011); Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005), which was shortlisted for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize; Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001); The Promises of Glass (2000); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998); At Passages (1996); Sun (1988); First Figure (1984); Notes for Echo Lake (1981); Without Music (1977); The Circular Gates (1974); and Blake’s Newton (1972). He is also the author of a prose work, The Danish Notebook (Avec Books, 1999). He has translated work from French, Russian and Portuguese, editing and contributing translations to Nothing The Sun Could Not Explain: Twenty Contemporary Brazilian Poets (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), and Blue Vitriol (Avec Books, 1994), a collection of poetry by Alexei Parshchikov. He also translated Theory of Tables (1994), a book written by Emmanuel Hocquard after translating Palmer’s “Baudelaire Series” into French. He has frequently collaborated with others artists, including the painter Gerhard Richter and the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Palmer’s awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From 1999 to 2004, he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco.

Sheila E. Murphy

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Centerfold

She smooths leaves across
the floor, adds twigs, makes warm
rooms.

 

He is drawn to her magnetic
pulse, repeats his path
home.

 

Something felt is formed
in motion patterned
toward a modest depth.

 

From outside, this plate block
comes apart, as perforations
release.

 

History endures itself within
dimensions possibly unseen.
The palpable act of witness, witnessing.

 

Enc.

Parentheses are clothes
daylight allows in
the idea of a polished hinge.

 

What syllabic inference
concedes to the cilantro
spritz amid more green.

 

Terrain lined with few purposes
contains endorphins as a viaduct
revealing the way through.

 

Pounce marks levitate a posse
of connect points making a broad blanket
high and light.

 

Atmosphere

Solos drive routine
to distal fugues

Warm windows
lift attention to the hammock

replete and laboring to father
unfamiliar blood

to blips on woodwind fingerings,
a tuft of infancy in water.

 

The Two Worlds

Fresh from the melon aisle
Melinda forms a lane change
Her new daughter finds
Mercy in a cup and channels

Peace qua redundant light
across the awnings
green tuned
seeming limber.

The father pearled
in charitable trusts means
imitation sanctity
as megaphoned injunctions

toward persons caught on screen
admitting tactical mix
of testosterone braced
for toppling of the stacks.

Sheila E. Murphy lives in complementary worlds. Here is a view of her other side.

Sharon Mesmer

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A Dream Upon Waking

— after Claudia Lars

How effortlessly the morning star
puts an end to an anxious night:
again, my dead have not killed me.

Courageous in the face of fear —
fear redeemed only by yielding —
I rise, take flight, wide with new light.

Between rising sun and setting moon,
I am absolute master of the sky,
unbroken by burdens of maternity,

the sticky embrace that hinders flight.
And when I glide, I glide like Hermes,
up from the underworld.

I neither ignore nor intoxicate
the faithful who seek my example, for I am familiar
with the Mother of Abomination:

the spider, the weaver
of the sap-threads of immobility
and despair.

And so I soar, breathing deeply,
dreaming of beating all sorrows
into beauty.

In Time’s Furrow

— after Julia de Burgos

This poem was not written by Sharon Mesmer,
whose name means “complainer of insomnia.”
This poem was written by me,
whose name means “my eyes are filled with the graves of stars,
and that’s why I can’t fly.”
Who am I?
I am you.
Don’t you know me?
Well, when God asked you
who you wanted to be,
and you said “someone who sleeps peacefully,”
God wrote down “insomniac,”
gave your mother amnesia,
and she pushed you out like a _____ pushes a _____ out of a _____.
You fill in the blanks.
I’ve already done all the work.
What, you don’t believe me?
Well, keep in mind that when Sharon Mesmer writes a line like
“I gambled everything to be who I am,”
I know she’s trying to sound like Mary Oliver.
And I know you have never written yourself
into a position involving career advancement
or happiness, because you are no mere witness
to inertia.
How do I know?
Because I know that Heaven kills
that which is delicate, ignorant,
and only pure sorrow transforms a witness to inertia into an embodied form of joy
for all eternity.
Besides, we both know who’s really doing the writing.
It’s me.
Not you.
I am the scaled fish who is writhing, still alive, in your hands,
my wild eyes pleading with you to _____.
You know what to do.
Start with feeling the constrictions
of my sticky wings.

I Grew Wings For You

— after Juana de Ibarbourou

“Crecí para ti
Florí para ti
Fluí para ti”

I never write.
I simply speak:

“Crecí para ti
Florí para ti
Fluí para ti”

And I repeat:

“ . . . para ti”

But only now
is my poem complete:

“Creci alas di
por ti”

When I speak
I bless the grief
loving you
brought me.

Mori por ti.

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Translation:

Crecí para ti — I grew for you
Florí para ti — I bloomed for you
Fluí para ti — I flowed for you
Creci alas por ti — I grew wings for you
Mori por ti — I died for you

(lines from the poem “El fuerte lazo” — “The Strong Bond”)

The three poems here are from a series I’ve been working on called “Even Living Makes Me Die.” The pieces are based on, and in conversation with, works by selected women poets of the Americas from the late 1800’s (i.e., Delmira Agustini, Alfonsina Storni, Juana de Ibarbourou) to the present time. Woven into the fabric of the collection are themes from each woman’s life and work: abandonment/recovery; flight/confinement; obscurity/fame; joy/despair; dependence/freedom. I began this project after doing an article for American Poetry Review on the late Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio — she died in 1974, her body undiscovered for days. In doing research on her, I had to really dig around for information. Odio’s work was almost unknown in this country until now — Tavern Books is publishing, in four volumes, her 400+ page epic poem, The Fire’s Journey. Most valuable to me were two books: Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, edited by Diane Marting, and Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry, edited by Stephen Tapscott. I paired the bios and critical assessments from Marting’s book with the translated works in Tapscott’s book, for more complete pictures of these women. I also ordered available collections in English. The circumstances of some of these women’s lives were tragic: some struggled in obscurity and poverty; some were killed by husbands or lovers; some committed suicide; some, like Odio, died alone or under mysterious circumstances. One wonders: how many other women’s voices still remain unheard, because of poverty, illness, lack of opportunities, direct interference by the men in their lives, or just plain bad luck? A trope running through all the poems is “wings.”
Sharon Mesmer’s newest poetry collection, Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place, from Bloof Books, was voted “Best of 2015” by Entropy. Previous poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997). Four of her poems appear in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (second edition, 2013). Other anthology appearances include Poems for the Nation: Edited by Allen Ginsberg (Seven Stories Press, 2000) and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1999). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2000). Her awards include a Fulbright Specialist grant, a Jerome Foundation/SASE award, and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships. Her essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in the New York Times, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other places. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School, and lives in Brooklyn.

Stephen Massimilla

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faint-lit photo-thought

but so many little masks (marks, tasks)
make a life. so infinite. she was living
to leave some work, instead of (pell-mell) organizing nothings,
despite a delicate body, floating
in plasma—she didn’t know
if she could do another year of falseness
while missing him (so vain, so masochistic)
not at all, just the idea
of him (sickness in the coolness),
so much. the split came between what she felt
and what she thought she needed to believe,
like real things don’t hurt,
just having a mind
to come down from the lightfastness
of this insomnia high, to do away with
(neatness and simplicity) herself
as neatly and simply as possible. think
you were feeling this because it’s not possible?
think again (she thought). think
what you were
thinking when
you thought that.

Miracle Fruits

—after Rilke

Where, in what always watered and beatific garden, on what
trees, from which tenderly stripped, leafless blossom-cups
do the strange fruits of Solace ripen? These exquisite
globes: maybe you’ll find one in the trampled meadows

of your desolation. Once, many times over,
you marvel at the great size of the fruit,
at its wholesomeness, at the supple luster of the skin,
and that the recklessness of the bird or jealousy of the worm didn’t

get there first. Are there trees, then, flocking with seraphs?
And so strangely nurtured by slow, concealed gardeners
that they bear fruits that were never even meant for us?

Have we ever been able, we shadows, we grotesques,
through our actions—too rashly ripened and suddenly withered—
to disturb the impassable equanimity of that summer?

Far North of You

1.

You were like a faith
I could turn to in a city stuck

in its own Dark Age.

Black doves rippled
through pinnacles riddled

with church bells over tracks
where charred faces
pressed in from the sides.

With no hunger,
no danger to turn from, I dream
of leaving.

2.

What does it mean, like a faith?
Your eyes burned white
in their centers, like those
in the calcified face
of the sphinx. From my window
I made out your paws
in foothills,

your mane in a cloud,
a halo. I squinted
to be sure
not to be too sure.

3.

One day I followed a couple
to a murmurous niche
in a church, where a Virgin’s skin peeled
in waves of gold. Oil
had streamed
from her eyes, leaving tracks

in the onion-green boards. The incident later
found a place
in the local paper,
though the article
was tread-marked.

Oil Flew Into the Sea

and some of it was on fire,
as were the men ejected into the air by their own depth charges.

It takes a hundred pounds of high-octane gas to announce this end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The dead silent Icelandic charter, The Snow,
out in the North Atlantic for forty-six days

in the air gap south of Greenland.
Long way from grandmother’s flannel.

In my night trance, I’m the man beyond the reach of waking:
Hidden in the dreamed sailor’s sinking pocket, a minute atlas
with a tiny map

of New York in it; in his faraway locker, a yellow postcard
of a prismatic woman with a scorpion cross
pinned to each hand.

His closest shipmate doesn’t love her,
doesn’t even know her in person.

Nor what to make of my longed-for light, sliver-moon
of her torso bulleted with diamonds

against the high-pitched banners
of red sirens, an unreachable city riddled with desire.

I’d better have laid a pink rubber mat on the bed
before wishing and shaking so much
that I wake up in a pool of water.

Of the people I thought I loved,
I see two paddling on a strafed ocean as vast as God’s hand.

They clasp, and I drift away, my face sunk in my burst-open fists.

Stephen Massimilla’s (co-authored) volume, Cooking with the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare is just out from Tupelo Press. Acclaim for his other books includes an SFASU Press Prize for The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat; the Bordighera/CUNY Prize for Forty Floors from Yesterday; the Grolier Prize for Later on Aiaia; a Van Renssalaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch; and other honors. His poems have appeared in hundreds of publications from AGNI to Verse Daily. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and the New School. (For more info: stephenmassimilla.com)

Jeffrey Jullich

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Discourse

suddenly, — “without warning” or premonition
(but who is there to warn us? Of danger? A town crier?)

metamorphosis of seraphim
once hobbled club-footed,
knotted forehead untied

the rate of change through time as a medium
held within The Seven Invisibilities

lying behind what’s evident
and intentionally, by a violence, concealed so as to deceive

All at once crawling naked occurs
Unforeseen to sit up bare happens
Spontaneously lying down nude takes place

all that’s said, un-said
about them, surrounding them as a coral reef,
near-fatal details differ
casually, off-the-cuff, in passing:

There are velvety petals on pansies, —
mundane daily life in a setting (scenery)
measured by discrepancies
or Nostradamus contradictions, — tragic
 

The Lower Case “i”

1

an island without flowers — has no use for insects — nor rain — the sidewalk
is one, continuous bridge — it is — that goes from puddle — to a stoppage, a cloud

hung between my life — and life itself, a comma hung — a speck
blocked off — my going on — my coming home stopped short — at once

a mote of dust threatened to crush — the City of God — under a faint
impression — and swarms of angels — shuffled their wings, random — wanton —

my feet left foot prints — on the ceiling — of the cell — a “learn-to-dance” cloth
the blood rushed to —my headlessness — a guard thumbed the key — a jaw-harp

no icicles — drip on eaves — or parking meters — since the smith hammered
them unveiled — on a cold anvil — to envelope the closest slave — in the clearest links

everything on two legs — starts to flap — going higher — The two-legged tripod —
the barbecue grill — until no room is left — in skies dyed blue — for old clouds

intelligence is only — a fraction — a niche for omniscience, punctual canings
for forgetting how to spell — ignorance is the numerator — the viscous unguent

My tail tucked between my legs — my cloven heels — its point arrowhead
designates a matchstick, intact — Robins, also — ready for a redder scene

2

I died too late — to see life — on a barren planet — a dozen
pebbles — in an egg carton — so i cleaned my spectacles — to see inertia

thunderheads — knocked at the front — door, undressed. a raindrop
pressed the buzzer — i spoke — to an intercom — in the dark, calm

i asked “the housefly” — for a sugar cube — my tombstone, a postage stamp
entomology explains — the sleeping larva — muttered a lullaby

maggots wear a simple mask — a face without a visor — or make-up
gnawing at — the looking glass — reflections carry germs — sepsis

the anthill is a monotonous — zoo — in this picture of the ground
i forget where i am — Atlas dragging a breadcrumb — up a steep slope

doors, walls, ceiling, floor — are all one — churning horizon — that erases
the chalkboard of the sky — by rote — i learn zero — naught — synonyms

Jeffrey Julich has two books published: Thine Instead Thank (Harry Tankoos Books, 2007) and Portrait of Colon Dash Parenthesis (Litmus Press, 2010). His work has been published in a variety of literary journals, including Fence, New American Writing, and Poetry; and audio recordings and videos of his readings are included on the Poetry Foundation website and Youtube. Videos of American Lit: The Hawthorne-Melville Correspondence, an opera whose libretto he wrote, are also available on Youtube. He was the publisher and editor of the literary journal, Logopoeia. He has poetry recently published or forthcoming in Boog City, The Brooklyn Rail, e-ratio, The Equalizer, Nerve Lantern; No, Dear; Noon, Otoliths, The Otter, Spiral Orb, the St. Sebastian Review, and Touch the Donkey.