Saturday, June 30, 2012

Truck's new driver for July


Many thanks go to Lars Palm for wheeling us through June. 


Big greetings to Elizabeth Switaj, who'll be at the wheel for July.



lars palm signing out

i have now completed my month behind the wheel. it's been great fun & i'm curious to see who will drive in july. thank you Halvard for this opportunity

Friday, June 29, 2012

Susana Gardner


FROM SONS AND LOVERS

That’s not the same as marrying her      Very
                                                           Well
                                                                 Very
                                                           Well
            And awfully nice
There was silence


HIS &
HER      affair was—
Like a fire fed on books
If there was no more volumes it would die out—
She could read him like a book
Could place her finger on the chapter and the line.

Very well
                       Well ,well
Very.

Very well then. Well well very. Very very well. Well
Well very. Well very well, indeed. Well well very well. Well very well very well very well very well well well Very very well very not the same not the same as marrying Her. No, not the same as marrying her awfully nice—SILENCE SIGH well well very very well AFFAIR indeed well well very CHANCE, very very well a fair indeed. INDEED HIS &HER like a fire fed on books, every line precise— a fired book on HIM. She placed her finger on—laced her finger on chapter and the line of him. The line. Very well then. The line: Well well very. Very very well well well well well well well well well well well well well very.



from Sons and Lovers
                  after Holly Pester


HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art. SHE was busy washing up.
While HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art. SHE was busy washing
up. Gradually, He was making it possible to earn a livelihood by art, while SHE
was busy washing
up. While HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art. SHE
was busy
washing up. Busy, SHE, washing up… He, gradually, was making it possible to earn a livelihood
by his art. SHE
was busy washing up and HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood
by his art. Making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art, SHE
was busy washing up, While
HE was gradually…By his art… making it possible to earn a livelihood as SHE was busy washing
up While HE was Possibly gradually making it… earning a livelihood by his art.
SHE was busy
washing up While HE was SHE was HE was SHE was SHE was HE was SHE was SHE was HE
was SHE was SHE was HE was SHE was busy SHE was busy SHE was busy SHE was busy SHE
was busy washing up. HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art While
SHE was busy, While HE was gradually making it possible washing up to earn a livelihood by
His art. SHE was busy washing up. HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood
by his art, while SHE was busy washing up. While HE was gradually art and making it possible
to earn a livelihood by his … SHE Gradually, He, possibly, making it to earn a livelihood by...
SHE… SHE was busy washing up. HE was gradually making it possible to earn a livelihood by
SHE was busy washing up his art. Busy washing up washing up washing up his art was SHE.
HE gradual, making it possible to earn a livelihood by his art, While SHE was busy washing up…
SHE was busy washing up. SHE was washing SHE was busy washing SHE was busy washing up.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Chris Pusateri


Poem Four (Musée Picasso)

I remember crying
            in the reflection of
the mirror
           I remember

I despise hats. There were many hatted women
in paintings I liked, (I remember)
three women
           at their toilet, an interesting choice of words.
(I would, I remember, have translated it differently).

I remember a black boot, very clearly,
          then a reflection of memorable blue.

A vase of flowers, universally designed.

The clay wore pajamas fashioned from maps, its language UnEnglished,
           its continents blurry. It’s not, but my memory is,
blurry – disfocused. Small Asian child doing poses, that to her
are not poses, are not even
the memories of yoga, I suppose.

I remember the light
and how much less yellow
it was when I left the room.

Because of the blue, because of the difference in translation, I remember.

Different, yet again, because
of the distance.

My memory takes notes
as if this were a test, I ember
in memory a remembrance,
a glow

I wish had been only Picasso,

but was instead
Rosenberg, Apollinaire,
woman as cello,
           mute, Google-proof.




Three from When Jazz Was The Capital of Alaska

The device would like you to wait.
The device would like you to continue waiting.
The device now has information for you.

Sometimes you wish
for something lighter
than sad maroon
or the subatomic black
of matte glint finish,
the suicide,
the infanticide,
the affliction

This is where objects sit
and await their destinies;
they are calm, almost stately,
with a feeling of quiet insanity permeating them,

unable to perish without nature’s permission




The edges fray first

Like there’s any connection
between good posture and moral rectitude.

A certain fractal
that colors as it turns, the pinwheel, the matter, the coming together

He uses one font for expressions, another for speech

Only his eyes are smiling




You don't want
what I'm hiding,
says the mother bird
as the   fox      draws near

What we
wanted
to find
wanted
to be found

Each time you spoke,
a document was created

The present is nothing more than anagrams of history

Friday, June 22, 2012

Mark Lamoureux


SHAVASANA

The day is glass

Hubris of named hours

A mantra powerful as a plant

What if the dead could vote?

The mighty limbs

The black nerves of the earth

Frame an isthmus of static

Blue & nostalgia the language of sundogs

Pools purple sugar

Water & the insect limbs of sweat

Discomfit a crown of daisies

A ring of poppies a corpse in the sun

Ringing. Silver slash of meteors

& pulverized diamonds

Dip of a beak, a proboscis

Into the moonstone vein

The clear eyes of fireflies

A fire in the dawn heat

A heart

The herm of a second



(LOVE IS LIKE) A HEATWAVE
after Martha Reeves & The Vandellas

Age comes on in the spring

inside                       a black egg

what happens to you

has no shape                       a slick

of magnolia tongues

a red old bruise on the flagstones

silky crush on strangers’ feet

somehow the humans keep coming

like it never gets old

the brass loop of fortune           every

available bird to the old

unreported dead tree           an orgasm

of ink on the grey

lawn            it’s always unawares

the cold of the salt sea the               wick

effect on the lake           the fires

burn on little boats in the dark

kaleidoscope          its bone tube

in the cloud rabbits          golden

for the age           not much

to complain about          because not

too much thought given          too many

laborious green flames



Diviner

The coffee is for the blackness
of the distended night, its two fucking
minds X-ing at a scissor-point.

This preening is a ritual death
repeated on the hour; the bolts
carefully plucked from the quiver
& broken across the knee.

Even Jackson Pollock staring
into his own raked face
the painting could not
destroy it. But even this

is apocryphal, a divining rod pointing not
at water but another rod
pointing up at it from under
the ground.



UTOPIA PKWY
Coltrane’s quotidian
            sun peeling
winter off everything
                      still cold
blue                but not me,
          a closed system
you might say—
                     my skin
is thick ,        but still
           the sun peers
inside & does its violence.

                      If I cannot
be human,
           why must I be
mortal?                     It’s black coffee.
              It’s legerdemain.
Consider this plain
            100,000 years thence—
wouldn’t it be easier
           to just eat things
from the grass & have nothing
           to say?

Because I honestly
           have nothing to say;
you will begin to drift
          toward
                     the margins, all lit up
by the day
           like it could not be
any different; some
           make a big deal out
of shutting up—
                                 I don’t.



SUN SHIP
Sun ship
           for a bier
Stone grey heads nod
           goodbye

Stars melt
          into a joke
                    a line of feathers
into the next universe
           It will be
                      nothing

like writing
                    A cradle
of atoms
                    A voice
A call
                   A gold circle
of the others expanding
           like a song


Thursday, June 21, 2012

Patricia Carragon



subways

In this underworld,
my mood gets lost
in bullshit.
All streets and avenues
fell off the map I carried
since childhood.
The subways to my aorta
have different routes
under destruction.
I study new schedules,
but not one fits my mood.
Your perpetual eclipse
caterwauls on rails
& ingurgitated promises
travel via express.
The (E)sophagus takes them
to the rear end tunnel.
Your trust prefers the 3rd rail
& I switch for the (E) line
at 23rd & Ely.






Rubber Duckies
   
                        
                         rubber duckies, rubber duckies,
                         go down waterfalls, go down waterfalls,
                         over stoned walls, over stoned walls
                         into foam, into foam.
                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,
                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim.

                         beer, beer
                         drips down waterfalls, drips down waterfalls
                         over stoned walls, over stoned walls
                         into foam, into foam.
                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,
                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,
                         happy, happy in beer,
                         happy, happy in beer.

                         lime slices, lime slices,
                         slide down waterfalls, slide down waterfalls,
                         over stoned walls, over stoned walls
                         into foam, into foam.
                         lime slices, float in beer, float in beer, float in beer,
                         lime slices, float in beer, float in beer, float in beer,
                         happy, happy, blub, blub,
                         happy, happy, blub, blub,
                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,
                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,
                         happy, happy in beer,
                         happy, happy in beer.

                         lifeguards, lifeguards
                         dive down waterfalls, dive down waterfalls,
                         over stoned walls, over stoned walls
                         into foam, into foam.
                         lifeguards slurp it up, slurp it up, slurp it up,
                         lifeguards slurp it up, slurp it up, slurp it up,
                         drown happy in beer, drown happy in beer,
                         drown happy in beer, drown happy in beer,           
                         lime slices float in beer, float in beer, float in beer,
                         lime slices, float in beer, float in beer, float in beer,
                         happy, happy, blub, blub,
                         happy, happy, blub, blub,
                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,
                         rubber duckies swim, swim, swim,
                         happy, happy in beer,
                         happy, happy in beer.



Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Jeroen Nieuwland


A try at raising raven

She grips the death of the bird lying bent out of shape, on a patch of grassy root; she has the bird by the wing; it has her by the fingertips; the wing folds back out as if one half lazarus; she calls it crow but does not know its proper name. An air, full with vacuum, from taut brightness of all sun. The feeling like her deep-inside shrill goddamn Descartes-man. The cloudless sky, tired, languid; the open sky, the openness around of field, and space for endless traveling sound that comes in flits & streaks of crisp, broken, horizontal sheets. She hangs herself. She climbs a partway tree; rests the broken raven onto a gnarling branch; two wings out for balance; expedited take-off. She hangs her front half back half over of the branch; angles from drapery to stiff upper body, knees tucked slightly inward, rudders; stretches flaps & wings her arms. For learn to fly, for learn the bird, for fly within the sky,




Whether, if, might; whether it might. She is trying for a certain noise. The bones of the thing were already cracked; to the dust of the bones of the thing. She is testing, for one, a certain sound and, too, a grind of dust; a strip & slide of what does happen. It means, she cracks the skull against a root, she smacks the skull against a cement pavement. she does not do it for discomfort; this comfort; she rattles wracks & rats the skull; runs rats right thru, flit fast than said; the crow it twitches tenses; all she only did at first, is only look at. She cracks bones, shuffles dust, breaks her big bird test stuff. She cracks more bones, she shuffles dust, she mucks up big her bird test stuff; patches, smudges of big bird, flatter into a muck of shuffled dust; desists, interlaced with quiet panic, she tries to calm the goddamn open sky, it only widens vertigo, as if the sky at same time, zooms in, & steps mega back. She wishes at this juncture, near this root & concrete patch, a murder of crows, like feathers of a bird, was spread, in such an epileptic style, so she could try, in many times, the many ways a crow’s skull cracks, the dust grinds bones, the sun gets caught in beads, or twitch, or flitted feathers. Fatigued with bore, she gets; lands belly first, nose, forehead, flat on a patch of grassy root. Spreads arms flattens arms, outwards, flat into the dirt. Stretches legs, pushes toenails, into topsoil. Forgets her mind of mess of mucky feathers; becomes instead all twitcher, feeble flap, turtle flipping on its back; vacillations out of whack,

Monday, June 18, 2012

Pansy Maurer-Alvarez


PERCEPTION

Heads flung back, their voices float
looking back on it, I’m lying
that I should see      (what bird/tree?)
much less something you sounded
urgent barely above a whisper, so I cast you
faintly seen from afar into doubt, you became
open space that lovely view shimmering across

Its only a leap
horseman in a sunbeam
but it feels so true, I’m charmed and wavy
associated with emerald, sapphires, fire
and opals like an agitated lover, an outsider
taut and incandescent, sucking words out of speeches

There’s confusion in the sequence of events
in this part of the country
it slips (or does it swell?) slippery in a swell swoon
having it done for you is not to you, unclaimed      home bound
An embrace has stunned me, rehearsal laughter
rooms in the infinitive, where the plot is poured on

I become rough and take on polyps – a poetic line
tomorrow and finally    we
I walked into the red room in a frenzy
your confessions, too, were weary and lapsed
hitting the floor hard
otherwise this stone       this curved breast
or paintbrush or strand of hair
descends layers of mating calls, the sutures aching
A word like chaperone stripped bare      extends
an intimate droplet
lusterless and amiss, the beauty of it




MOODY STUNNING LOOKS

In a strange sounding language I measured
heroism smudged with hypochondria
as you sensed your opportunity making its way
through my lunar cycle       I want to meet you!
Oh, “I want to meet you” is merely a piece of sexual pleasure

Beguiling paramours alight and slip       neck & head, wrists & throat
impede an angular collapse in heaps      Oh bracing heart!
An eyelash is an enchantment, an inner space
the shape of      slit      cantos       cunt      cusp      uncut jewels
the road through      wrenches free from flux
and ease, erases and shrivels
up your demeanor, your fascinating
large-format fumble

Elsewhere
the industrial landscape of Iceland
is encrusted with full-throated flyovers, oil refineries
wedding trumpets and tiny lights that swab
a promise      what looks like a
tinge




UNMISTAKABLY

Imperceptible and without realizing, we splayed kiss marks
on all the rooms, thus reinventing appealing spaces.

Without a backward glance, without you noticing
I turned around to admire these melodramatic noises.

What stars (unraveling)      What misgivings (feathery)
clustered in veiled circumference, this nomadic sequence!

Outskirts of a hastened ride spell a textural thicket:
shell, bone, feather, bare chest, hair pigment

flared out reflections, lizards and chalk, cranes
native of Flanders, a bellyful wielding, caught in.

Part of this is panting, tepid and predetermined
like a nasal voice or the shape of a palm of a hand

and part is clenched in accordion folds
opening over the linear lowlands of agitated sea fowl.

But what downy bracelet of crotch, pelvic burrows slide!
What meticulous soft impressions happened that night!

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Sarah Lariviere

dear reader,
in publishing these pages from Sarah's lovely chabook i make the one exception to my rule for this month on not republishing things
             enjoy,
              your guest editor


Thursday, June 14, 2012

Pearl Pirie

hurry-up-and-wait’s a handy tourniqueted phrase

10x more moose seen on polar fleece in a day
than I will ever see in life.

a vibration, glass against glass. gradual shift into contact?
or a truck has struck our building?

it comes without a drought,
the earthquake we waited from birth for.

       yet Yangze’s flood, yet Aultsville, Dickinson's Landing,
       Farran's Point, Maple Grove, Mille Roches, Moulinette,
       yet Santa Cruz, Sheek's Island, Wales, and Woodlands*,
       yet slash and burn, yet cutting firewood, yet export, yet
       900 square miles more per year of desert in China yet
       tens of thousands of square kms of James Bay Project

and Eeyou Istchee. yet we make deals with our disasters.
hide them as a dog-dig after a squat, off at a trot.

water in flat circles drawn by fingertips on arborite
dries, leaves only what was before. a table

       is not a water table, is not a dripping tap, is not an upending
       is not a relativity caught in 22 depending, is not an industrial
       cap on pollution that may impact consumer-end pricing
       is not the simple habit of being a bother, of calling
       of emailing, of talking priorities to MP until blue in this case
       yet progress? point made yet to the indifferent friends?

is it for the sins of our overdesire, underdiscrimation
that Lionel Rithie’s Say You, Say Me plays over the cashier?


(*the villages that were flooded to make the St. Laurence Seaway Project)



counting your toes backwards

in Chinese I arrive at yī with one
toe to go. cheeks pinch red. what did I miss?
let's not mistake this  for a spontaneous
growth. a sidelong glance for the lines or space
to the sides  of your eyes to surmise what
you've caught. words, or only the fond squeezes?
you are slack-necked, calm receiving. I give
your wee-est piggie its definitive
name, líng, with a peck, a thanks for the safe
bays between these shaggy dedos of home.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

rob mclennan


In case I find a tiny minute,
for Kathleen Fraser,


           when no letters fall like leaves
                       Artie Gold, before ROMANTIC WORDS


1.

A thudding silence, greets. Child-sized. Pure lyric energy, like watery spaghetti.


2.

My passion, dipped. To shine, on shoulders. As a sentence to be, primarily.


3.

Improbable yearning. Unyieldly chainsaw, lupins. Now that, even names. Crushing and regarding.


4.

Am I not to take this personally, somehow. Pull up your socks, as you say. This very minute.

Lary Bremner




Elegy Recipe


                                ( for Susan Yarrow & Kathryn MacLeod )

The language is a city, to the building of which
every human being brought a stone.” - Emerson

I‘m gonna tear your playhouse down.” - Ann Peebles



*


In this way the endless distracts. Naming
Language-self, a moon not so much
Groundless as floating as


Upon its own viscosity. We are
All for October. Seasons arising, contend-
Ing in harvested buzzwords, drawn to



Truck stops, the particle’d aggregate
Commerce of any given meaning recombines.
A braided emptiness


Of burns & binds. Adjust as you will
The lydian filter of habit, enforce a sweet & aphasic
Funk, suds the detour with difference. We



Find ourselves hunkered-down here in these
Chromatic cells of an ecstatic soup-kitchen, reading
Everything out of anything into no thing. It


Isn't even wasn't ever ours -- the 'center
Does not hold'. We fell in & in with it, gave
Way to the undertow. Joyous & ill, 'facts'


Built lingo condos on the aeon bluffs o’er the sea.
Diminishing the mileposts won't remove the dark beyond;
Threading the speech but soaps



The same old drum; a shadow likeness cannot
Clip the links. Accessories after the fact of love’s little neck-
Brace. The thing is, we said, it stares right back.



Robert Kelley, that language is already
A second language; Joris, similarly ‘foreign’; bp took
Collective syntax deep inside the letter.



Another way, Charles B.‘s non-absorptive. Hence Z’s
80 Flowers, eighty copies hence. All undertow
In the tidal sea of poesy’s (f)acts.



On the plane over to Japan I had the simple thought I am going
To learn to speak. Eventually, etymology
Splinters until such time as

A package of cultural assumptions contained
Becomes incorporated, & the carnie-hyphenation
Speaks louder than Shinjuku neon.



Cognitive slippage, aphasia, ink
Sextants & early map-making, charts holed-up
Alone. Poetry’s combinatory

Tonality evokes a reaction to existence itself.
Identify with & own the virus, feverish
In a ‘paradox of the reflective’


Most common poetic reading strategy is the ahem
Implanting of rhetorical device of analogy / metaphor,
Excerpting anything in amen(d)


Fits. Epistemological
Methodology, diagnostics, an enunciated ego
Versus the academe, the brilliant, brilliantly articulated, false.



You’re the doctors.. you tell me. You da
Mission operatives: every other possible path is,
By necessity of going, abandoned. Imp-



Losion, compressing love’s labour to a black hole. Ex-
Plosion, “tearing things & persons apart,” said
Rae Armatrout. When it all starts


To break down, we might be forgiven for thinking that
What is true is what we tell ourselves is true. Behind any of these
Strategic veils, a writer may appeal to me


Because places me in newer confusion, inserts stent in my stunt heart.
I am so damned tired anyway of my own school-of-exile patterns,
Categorical fishnets & slackening skin.



English in vogue but out of a job, surfing the mall in its Air argots.
Leisure’s chin music. Precise jargon for that group of speakers, ack-flak
To others. Tall, tropical gates open the deep riot, time.



I had, then, the grasp of it from your letters, from the banks of my
Habitation, my Gaelic kanata. Self-expression an imitation of
Colonial wig. Please bear with us these our



Heavy losses. God’s intimate murmur to the young apple
People in their young apple youth. A gallon of lifeblood spills from the local theatre, Blue Hawaii at the Cedar-V Theater, Lynn Valley, NVan.



I would, in loyalty, abandoned even fair Killgaligan, my cow & stone Croft, to meet this calamity. I am a famished instrument of six filthy straws. There are notches in these potatoes like corpses



In the field. Liken them to natsukashii television references, quickly dated
As what’s behind door #3. A&R men head for the hills, seeking re-Constructive moonshine. Hoist



The slogan & sip it not gingerly, the whole throng
Locked into a rising inflection, a fairy banshee, a keening
Wail, a greenback Socred anti-distillation.



To those who would say there is play within any
Totalizing system: kindred garten implies plenitude. A web-surfing analogy inevitable in the post-muscle car, post-comp. age,



Bound to abound, but the sum of opacity is always
Night. Atari mae premise, portmanteaux of a
Personal desperation. Symptomatic



Meanwhiles exit from the eyes like skyhook
Devices, phrases pushing rehabilitative putty in a prison-tattoo way.
Miscommunication chamber, the density



Of a voice on an errand of ‘real’ import. Inhalation sound,
Collapsed cargoes of the word-instrument have
Made of us these hemispheres, these unbalanced



Wings. We might as well associate with the jellyfish now, the new Giant man-eating Pacific squid. After much youthful bloom, embrace The chu-nen surmise & timely sagacious weeping, anon.



Was this all done by acts of staggering dust, crucial crux material, allusive dust-jackets, filmic trajectories & a litter of ration?
The more potent variations, were they




The digits in the ether, immigrants of an instant? Long
After Gertrude went up against the founding fathers, entire empirical faux-bouquet of personal anecdote.



The breath of the poets I had befriended is made of wide ripples
Of silt in a quilted black twist. Shifty thou remains, though,
A fluid reprimand in the name of the people,



The dream of north invaded by a lingua franca, a clutter
Of code-names in the luscious lowlands of total freedom. Tribal ex-
Pendable. All models have been recalled by GM, now GM,



Leaving only hubcap asterisks on the pavement.
Facade of an echo in the dub version looms again upright, invisible
But still within earshot, sown in the impromptu Venus-glitter of


Vegas casinos. Numbers tattoo the darkness; numbers
Have no past. Bless these anxieties, this issue of bromide treacle,
Aisles of melody seen from the maze-console. The aromatic



Ring of the tactile sanctum, the shaggy
Baby smell of writing. Its a mere hundred volts of slug to a preppy
Behaviorist. The such & such elicits the profound indifference of the



AV guy. Everything has become analogous to bureaucracy; economy
To the erotic valve of the page, the insatiate flow of history
As through a wind tunnel, an empire.



The storage of our slow dissolves turned out to be nothing more than
A binary séance of artifice. The actual radiance was sleeping
In the capillaries of flickering immortals





When (suddenly?) out burned the bulbs. Living on the fringe of
Tactic, the empty layered arcades of a prefabricated faith, sad
Peepshow & glory-hole. So,



You return to tramp the Lack District, come upon a typewriter
Stuck in the peat bog. Writ upon each passing cloud was the name for every form, every wild debris of weather. Call it



A sedation by over-stimulation, a deity lacking proper docs. Call it
The dance of neurology, aural & oracular intercom,
A yurt on the outskirts of reason.



As the film spreads, the close-up blurs. All passively, darkly, a Rejuvenation device emitted from the turbine of the throat, sensed
(At last!) through the acoustic Gnostic bones of the ear.



This house has zero plumbing & a scatter of carpet, its spores now
Turning to stump, to a kind of beginner’s music
With the high arch of attributes.



Know it as cell's liquid devotion, writing-map, a levee of time, rough Morning mind, useless sluice, diviner of starling flight
Pattern, image-shifter, the rattles in all that helmet room.



Ignorant as a stint in the army, you are given the files,
Moving vans to which you set your license in a bartering
Behavior that never ends.


Loss as a mark, needlepoint breaking the
Surface of glazed berry ex-stasis, the mess the night bred, yet
Impossibly happy by another's mouth.



Dawn in the basement, soul machinery gummed with ink, greenish Heartache in the echo circuitry, prodding the slug
To math, misting the vocals beyond cognition.



Swans on the radio, thrash up their Siberian homing sounds.
The simples require tending, a cold voltage of held-breath filing
Down the cogs as window-pane brackets moon.



I have this penchant for leaning out to the leftover hills, humming last Year’s hits & hoarding sleep for a rainy day. Space is all grit,
Thought a toxin habitat eaten with war.



*


Thankfully, you wake up one day
With a heart made of tacks. October bursts. Sounds much longer peel
Down the corridors; syllables sink deeper into
The cracked cup.



*