Joseph Marcure

The Unworn Sweatshirt



A slice of onion curled in the rain

recalled the glowworm:
eleven years of that thing called a crush,

attendant driftings, netherworlds quite charted

by now, outbursts before, and after, epiphanic walks
interrupted by rain, as though drops of punctuation, carefully

crafted chocolate arriving somewhere, in a lunar month,

with no intention.

Unlike the mood swings

which may have stood out most
to others, it's important to consider how

each is perceived. The crush, a state and a direction,

an endless jaw pain being caused by

and addendum to. All poorly folded
as a sweatshirt in a makeshift closet drawer.

Followed by laughter in a rain forest, a space where
a memory could be. The first steps a child takes

after fumbling over. Machine cut pieces of wood,
bite sized from our vantage, carefully placed together
out of phase, striking up a miniature dwelling.

Slice of onion laying bare on concrete, crisp
and conjuring the glowworm, its misguided floating
in eleven years of that diseased mobility,
no longer sessile, called a crush.

Eleven years of beautiful sex that slept in,
making breakfast whenever it pleased, until carelessly
it, too, came to seem a translucent piece of puffy onion – or was it lithe,

moist and nonetheless versatile in fast breaking forms?

Who can tell? When it's good it's great, like lemons
removed from their thorny apartments and happier than happy.

A collapse was only a part of the longitudinal process.

An expanse followed along in a rare wave, a push-pull, or just a parallel
sexual frustration to the screaming for release converging

on an imaginary window in a bedroom door.

Seven fish in a bowl swimming at once side by side
or dressing nicely – caring about how one looks again, at long last.
Each heterotrophic guppy nipping at the water before them
as do so many moments of trust. But, returning to the sartorial
folding, I cannot deny it is too late. Taking out your sweatshirt
to find it can only be folded poorly, the majestic plural,
on pedestrian footing, being all that is left.

Joseph Marcure lives in Fresno, California. This is his first published poem. Previously he had a short story in Dennis Cooper's Userlands anthology. He occasionally blogs at youwrote.blogspot.com (where you can also jump to his past writings on DC's) and releases music via Japanese Alice. Even less occasionally he contributes to Transductions. Presently he is working on more poems and (very slowly) a novel.

Corey Wakeling

60th Floor



“Dare for once to believe yourselves – yourselves and your entrails!
Whoever cannot believe himself always lies.”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Septicaemia of bleach, bleach of supposition,
Dragon pontificating, playing with one paw on the sea creature,
a mud pile – he is mud and to be played with – a phallus with a light

from which the overman extracts pollen. Tassles don't make a cape,
the cake a last resort, mud chocolate, we wallow in past tenses. Feline
wisdom draws bleak birches of the underwater, which is a long way down.

And parsing the spine finds meat. Always the guts go away. And then,
like a shower of toads, or Tom-Cruise-Realism, Dragon marinates the sea
creature in gut-fluid, or petroleum. Sashimi feasts dabble with death

from which there is no easy gill. Sometimes I have to help Dragon with
a knife, running it along what feels like a jaw, but is also a cranium. Mostly
ripping though; this is the deft hand of the Arranger, who can discover deserts.

The guts of a sea creature are the same as its head. Except more efflorescent.
Arranged, the entrails are burgeoning glass, then crystal, then natural gas and then
petroleum. They simply don't know fire. Dragon, with it at disposal, can recycle
every supposition into warm water, which is bleach diluted, which is a tender
throat that swallows all of this. I believe this ocean-home. There is no more
perilous a going-under. We make burrows of bowels and he is eating lamb again.

Flushing the wound, the joint, the lesion, the bare bone, the spine,
the bowel, the naked beach, the contusion, the cavity, the bleach, the empty
pot, the rubber washer, the lost memo, the shedded skin. Besides, I met the 60th
storey-teller from Eureka and he's a radiologist. He's got an x-ray of our man leaping.

Corey Wakeling is a writer of poetry and prose from Melbourne, Australia.
His work has been published in Otoliths, Etchings, Peril, Yomimono, and
The Age. His current projects include a PhD thesis on Samuel Beckett and a
soap-opera in verse called The Drifting.

Christina Goldstein

Letters to Maxwell Solomon, Unsent


1.
Well, I had, of course,
thought about it before
(your long lovely bones,
childlike rightness of every
motion) but this, darling,
was not grown in a
bubble in space--
the welling up in you,
then the hot summer
night the liquor
brought it up burning,
sent us, smelling of chlorine
and charcoal, clumsy
tumbling down and
down into a bright
roaring, all hot and
white and swimming,
and the quiet smiling morning
I left you (looking
soft as memory) for work,
and couldn’t wait
for the lunch hour to
come home and
kiss you sweetly.
But you had gone.

2.
And the day of
hermit crabs and
cheese sandwiches,
riding home with
the ocean on our lips
and in our bones,
letting my papers fly
out the car window
(the sand broke stars
in your black hair),
highway glittering, for us,
everycolor blue--
we stopped only to
hold forever
the sound of wind
through momentary
trees.

3.
That night I found you
so drunk you couldn’t
stand, couldn’t stand
yourself, tearing
at your clothes
like you didn’t know
they were nothing,
I could have laughed
the names of lovers
forever on ice and
the so many poems
about you,
Maxwell Solomon,
but here I am,
alone, with
letters, unsent.

IV.
Last night
I dreamed you
white and frail
as the picked-over
bone of a bird,
eyes like bruises
in your face,
black frozen lakes
weighting the tundra
of your skin.
It was no use,
my calling,
my self.
And now,
even my
bottle of Saint Jude’s
won’t help me
forget.

Christina Goldstein is currently living and writing in Tampa, FL. This is her first published piece.

Christopher Newgent, The Lamb

In April, My Son

I.
Comes to us wearing a scarf,
carrying a jar of dead fire flies.
It is morning, he is crying,
“I didn’t know, I didn’t.
I swear,” he cries. “I just
didn’t want to sleep in the dark.”

My son holds the jar out to us;
the three of us stare a long minute
at the translucent bodies, the inky wings.
His mother unscrews the lid, she breathes
a single breath into the jar. One by one,
they flicker to life, they flit from the jar,
they fly like floating away.

II.
Sleeps beneath a tree like a caption,
a dogwood springing into flower—
this explosion of white confetti
captured in a photograph.

The big, clean petals shower down,
grow up around him a cotton moss,
blanket him like fresh wool,
the flecks of a candid memory.




Passover

Contrary to popular belief, Christ,
when His bowels opened on the cross,
did not pass
   miracles, nor sweet smelling
loaves of manna. No—

He shat what everyone else shat:
....the bread from supper last,
the fish from lunch,
....the vinegar offered Him,
His broken body,
.........His broken blood.

Do this
....in remembrance
....of Him.



The Lion/The Lamb

I want to live a life that never harms anything anywhere ever.
Some days I’m terrified that I exist at all.

Christopher Newgent lives in Indianapolis. This week for Everyday Genius he has presented two poem series, "The Lion" and today, "The Lamb." Yesterday he featured songs from his old band that resonate with the project, and on Monday he presented cover art drawn by his sister, Laura Relyea. Tune in tomorrow to read Joseph McHugh's amusing and insightful exegesis of Newgent's poetry.

Christopher Newgent, The Lion

The Tawny Lion, Pawing to Get Free His Hinder Parts, Then Springs as Broke from Bonds

What sort of world did we come into that first night when we,
fresh from the fall and up to our shit in apples, found our bodies—had no joy,
no romance to share, all copulant rage screaming upward. And the angels,
did they weep real tears? or howl down at us, “Me next!” Did the animals watch
abashed? or turn to one another, saying, “So, that’s how it’s done.”
What sterile paradise did we shatter screaming into the dark, “O G-d, o G-D,
my G-d, where have You been?”




how we give what we give

the meat with the bones,

you know
what we do

with the meat
with the bones? we feed
it to the lions. we give

the bones to the grass.




The Lioness

I hold my hand like a tin can to my mouth. It gets that bad. I speak into my hand. I hold my hand to my ear and listen.

I once heard a heartbeat and thought it was you, holding the receiving can to your naked breast. I thought of your breast.

I once heard an ocean, and I thought of you holding the receiving can to your naked body. I thought of your nacre skin, the time I held my ear to your navel and heard an ocean, how we are seas and how loud we are out there. We have nothing but ourselves to crash into.

I wonder when you’re coming back. I talk to you, I hear back heartbeats and oceans. I wonder if you’re ever coming back.

Some nights, I don’t care who comes, whether you or Vishnu, Christ perhaps or Valhalla. Just come back. Fix what is broken.

Peter Berghoef

Five Writings



Harvest your licking motions from the same store. In times of need
apply a bit more. Draw circles inside the bigger circles. It's a farm.
It's a game for toddlers. Its three weeks with the same lighting. Look
at it like a bigger mouth you are always entering. There aren't dreams
or other photos taken. There are fields and fields of useless horses.







before there were brides
the stunted hands stayed up late
little jiggles of the keys
concrete in the mouth
the powder poured
into the bucket
the great night spread open
it was dark







In a display of October solidarity I left it on the table. Lots of
them were less forgiving. Forgiving the machines is easier than
cleaning gutters or arranging for the pies to be left in the oven.
Tasks like leaving orbit require even less skill. Within the first
year you will find a recipe for meatloaf your man will love.







The kittens that have passed inspection move forward down the hall. It
is safe to instruct them to continue following the arrows. Those
deemed unacceptable will undergo further treatment and training in the
appropriate facility. Please be mindful to remind those who passed
inspection that their service is greatly appreciated.








Do forget the time I ate you and made like you had eaten me. We
hoisted the gearless bike into bed with us and watched three movies
all the way through. We were sure we would eventually leave.

Peter Berhoef is the author of the chapbook News of the Haircut and a pamphlet called Hank Williams. His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Michigan.

Noah Falck

Cellular Phone


Your sister died from the cancer. Change to vibrate. The sun gives royalties to all the pretty blue flowers. Dance beat ringtong, gunfire. A child has the face of a monster skimming the delicate pages of the phonebook. In his pocket, the anonymous organs of a cell phone, a field of dead sparrows go on singing. Speed dial in rainfall. Out shed the sentences of concentration and you think you finally understand the body and the lungs. She sits cross-legged in silk valleys of linen scrolling through her address book. You wear your trousers low and wait for the motion picture version.

Noah Falck is an elementary school teacher in Dayton, Ohio, and the author of three poetry chapbooks, most recently Life As A Crossword Puzzle (winner of the Ohio Open Thread Chapbook Award). His poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appeared or will appear in Forklift, Ohio, Kenyon Review, diode, Copper Nickel, and The Pinch.

Sean Kilpatrick

fistfucking rules

every rogue bowel moves daddy’s cabana

for the comb through bib tied high and dangling you

time for sanitarium gods to moisturize the day

time for darkling sputum jew to enter my scat

felch the gay chore water home for different sirs latex

the only thanks time to call the alphabet of dropping son and congeal

wandering epitomes tell babygirl to suck her own swastika tattoos

or I’ll memorize her period like a bible passage recite the blood

in a sideways baptism take a manly squat with undertones of

puberty yes atrophy milk she airs out her titties in the septic tank

uses a refrigerator to masturbate sucks the college out of walls

she is on a lobotomy picnic the public scoops her glint

sings gangbang lullaby knock the freckles off that dream

she remembers cum by phone menstruates her initials

shaved beef like small god arithmetic an extenuating trimester

she commits burlesque diarrheas under the guise of pregnancy

ms. america with aids stoned up her own yeast

eyelids by gonorrhea extravagant hysterectomies

a species ignored pagan odorless for rainbow

or breed fiasco like how an iron cross looks neat

Sean Kilpatrick is published or forthcoming in No Colony, New York Tyrant, 30 under 30 Anthology, Dzanc Best of the Web 2010, Spork, Columbia Poetry Review, Fence, LIT, La Petite Zine, Action Yes, Forklift Ohio, Jacket, and an e-book from Magic Helicopter Press.

Amy McDaniel

Occasion Time

We’ll have an onion taste-testing party night tonight! Somebody figure out how drunk we can get for $10. Figure 20 calories per dollar per liter per person per annum. It’s the season for forgiveness and free-stone peaches. If they don’t have the red plastic ones get the kind people always use in the movies. The children will show their sex organs to one another in the hall closet and when they’re bored of that they’ll come tug on our dress shirts and ask to do arts and crafts or bubbles.

AMY MCDANIEL contributes to HTMLGiant, and her work has been or will be in Tin House, The Agriculture Reader, and PANK. She is the author of a new chapbook, Selected Adult Lessons (Agnes Fox Press).

Kevin O’Cuinn

Fistful of Poem

p.m.
dim-time, quiet,
everybody
drunk on books/
miscellaneous

a.m.
today’s disaster movie
in production
on the burner,

simmering brown
in tinfoil

The kids tire of Scrabble
They tease out three- and four-letter words till one of them, precocious little shit, lands ennui.

if you keep looking at me like that, sending memories my way
we’re heading
for trouble
and you
know
it

minimal pair
She tells him to sail his shit along.
Ship, he says, and casts off.

Kevin lives and plays in Frankfurt on The Main. He co-edits fiction at Word Riot. Links to his work are at http://www.kevsville.blogspot.com/.

Donora Hillard

Economy

I’m going to quit my job and follow you across this great nation. I’ll live on Shirley Temples while inventing better creatures for you to talk to: walrus, fennec fox, star-nosed mole. I’ll buy us matching fuzzy moustaches and climb inside your leather bag. I’ll hide in the library with the government documents. You can dust all of us at once. Use your breath, please, if it isn’t too much trouble. If you refuse, I’ll cling to your shin until you kick at my pores. It’ll be good for the economy. You’ll see. The Dutch will love us.

Donora Hillard is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Theology of the Body (Gold Wake Press, 2010) as well as Bone Cages: A Lyric Memoir (BlazeVox [books], 2007), Parapherna (dancing girl press, 2006), and others. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Web 2010 (Dzanc Books, 2010), Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (W.W. Norton & Company, 2010), Night Train, PANK, Spork, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at Penn State University and lives in Detroit, where she is a PhD candidate in English at Wayne State University.

Kimberly King Parsons

TEAR DOWN THE DARK
What we do not have in our boots, what we have not found in our shoes, not ever, are the scorpions. Nights, Father torments their nest with matches launched lit from the front porch. He sets them to scatter and we get to stomping. The thing to know about our stingers is that only fire will do. Father says: These are fast but not impossible. Father sits watch while the rest of us fleetfoot. Our scorpions, they are fantastic, spinning out from some blistered center. Our heels come crunching and the crawlers bust open, flared and clacking, still smoking—a shade of orange only we in this family have seen. Father says: Hiding is two-sided. He makes even the littlest among us take a good look.

Kimberly King Parsons’s writing has appeared in Time Out New York, elimae, 360 Main Street, The Chapbook Review, The Faster Times, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She lives in Queens and is working on a short story collection about liars.

Mark Leidner

Kite in the Sky of the Mind

      A single thought like a kite in the sky of the mind. 
      A single thought like a kite in the sky of the mind, bound to the ground of the mouth by the long string of language, stretched taut, and bound to the sound of the wind by the fabric of context.  
      If language is string, and fabric is context, and wind is sound, a single beautiful thought is like a kite in the sky of the mind. 
      A single truthful thought like a kite in the sky of the mind.  
      A single moral thought like a kite in the sky of the mind.  
      To have a single ethical thought is to plow a kite through the sky of the mind.  
      To have a completely poetic thought is to cut the taut, white string of a kite caught high in the sky of the mind. 
      A kite in the sky of the mind is like a tent of poetry.  
      To have a single lyrical thought is to watch a kite rise through the rain in the sky of the mind.  
      A brief, complicated thought is like a small, tight knot in the long, white string of a kite caught high in the sky of the mind. 
      A constellation of thought is like a starlit kite caught high in the star-knit dark night sky of the mind.  
      The other night a thought got caught like a kite of fire in the sky of this friend of mine’s mind. 
      An overwrought thought like a fiery kite on the ground. 
      A single thought like a kite in the sky of the mouth.  

Mark Leidner lives and tweets in Western Massachusetts.

David Kaufmann

You'll Poke Your Eye Out


“Midwinter spring” hah sticks

And mud sticks and

Seeds fur clogging

The drain and and and

That's what multiplication looks

Like Zoe serial addition tidal

Winds from the play ground fake

Skims on our artificial pond it

Pays to pay

Attention now count the damns

Of remonstration the damn

Was cold was still damn

Cold I swear to goodness

It's frozen shut

David Kaufmann is a Contributing Editor at Tablet Magazine where he publishes a monthly poetry column. His book on Philip Guston will appear from the University of California Press this May.

Lucas Farrell

BLUE. AS IN, “I’LL KILL YOU” (A PHYSIOGRAPHY)

Today: Sunny. Highs near 20 Degrees. Winds Northwest 5 to 10 mph.

The Weather Channel forecast for Weld, ME, January 23, 2010

1
a bird hiccups in flight

    its outstretched wing
slicing open the sky

bluespattering the depths
    of a moment


2
that’s how blue
the sky was
this morning


3
the sky over the lake
was elegantly
    fractured
like an elegantly
fractured
    ice tray


4
the moment doesn’t pass, it bulges,
then collapses, then is sliced open
by the wing of a bird


5
    spilling out
the guts of the sky


6
like a thousand
    shiny quarters


7
somewhere in the future,
    a frozen lake
        stretches its spine

and *boom*


    flashes
of former devotions
        bloom

like mayflies


8
so let’s make love
go like this
with its hands

so so s
o

as to eclipse
the projectorlight of the moon
which is blue
    which is entirely
    deciduously
blue


9
like a shadow puppet
unclasping bra straps
    (birds blasted
    out of the sky)

into unfamiliar frames
of reference
    upon
    reference




10
blue vomits
itself all over
        itself

after a night spent
under the weather


11
above a frozen lake,
a bird hiccups in flight,
its outstretched wing slicing open
the sky, via jagged compulsions,
absolving the blue
from the blue:

a thousand shiny quarters
        tumble down


12
like birdsong


13
a thousand shiny quarters housed in former-jukeboxes


14
(which, in turn, are housed in the smoky arcades
of our youth)

    perceived through the wild vaginas
of time


15
that’s how blue my sky was
for you


16
blue, as in, I’ll kill you


17
the blue being a phenomenal teller
of fibs

    told the ice-fishermen
the only cure
for the hiccups         if you’re a bird
is to swallow the sun ten times
real fast


18
told them: slide your
quarter into the slot
and hope that it
forces its brethren
off the precipice


19
        jackpot:
even
my blind spots
wore mascara

that’s how blue
how blue


20
I entreat you


21
to describe the meadow
as a “green incarnation of rain” (Ponge)


22
or to connote fog
by saying:

“the tree stepped out from the gray jelly” (Patchen)


23
to say, simply, “I love you
more than anyone could
ever do” (Spicer)


24
I want to undress
the parlance

to unclasp our handle on common grief

until
        fear is laid bare

is finally
        utterable


I want my love
to bear

    to smear you

with the magenta
of newly explicit
endearment


25
to believe:
“The sun comes loose
Like the bright orange thread
I used to bite off a new pair of dungarees” (Stanford)


26
or:
“I watched the clouds
Mosey over
Like blind men
Picking apples” (ibid)


27
the new moon rose vivid
in the wet dream
of my daughter (unborn)

    like the thumbprint
    of a serial
    god (born again)


28
or: the moon held its breath
through the tunnel
        of suspicion
    (filled its cheeks with
    the light at the end of
the image)


29
    the moon’s guilty
    of divining
    the wild vaginas
    of the moment (public)

lovespattering the depths
of a moment (etc)


30
“The moon is a white mouth eating the poor heads of trees” (Patchen)


31
the sun went *pop*
like those little
white packets
full of minerals
that ignite
when you huck em
at the handsomely
fearful


32
    (housed in the smoky arcades of our youth)


33
why do birds,
    when dying,
become something else
entirely

become nearly

        (perfectly)

    suggestive


34
the way this poem
becomes (perfectly)
        moonless


35
as in, come here
o come here

(that’s how blue
how blue     the sky was)


36
to fib:
    I scanned the price of skyguts
of lovesong
of elegiac
    birdsong
with my uniquely
    bar-coded
handle on grief

        on want

so as to make blue
go like this
with its
    mouth
        (for you)
with its
impossibly
    cavernous
god-mouth


37
I don’t know what
there isn’t
to say

    anymore


38
red splash of fish organs
in snow

that’s how blue
the sky was





January 23, 2010 (Weld, ME)

LUCAS FARRELL is the author of two chapbooks: The Blue-Collar Sun (Alice Blue Books, 2009), and Bird Any Damn Kind (Caketrain Press, forthcoming 2010). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Jubilat, Diagram, Cannibal, Forklift, Ohio and elsewhere. He co-edits the poetry journal Slope and lives and works on a goat farm in Vermont.

Ching-In Chen

Shiny City, Origins

    A city named after carnage though imaginary.
    The flint and glut of your white-ringed yogurt bottles, empty hearts of glass chewed on by low-riding pedestrians.
    Yes, I dreamt of you in my wooden bed, ramshackled to the grilled iron shine of the handles that box you in.
    A city expelling its suitors, a city packed tightly in the suitcase.
    We bring you with us – a layer of exfoliated skin – wherever we go.

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press). Daughter of Chinese immigrants, Ching-In has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston. Her poems appear in Tea Party, Fifth Wednesday Journal, OCHO, Iron Horse Literary Review, Water~Stone Review and elsewhere. A Kundiman, Lambda and Macondo Fellow, she has been awarded residencies at Soul Mountain Retreat, Paden Institute, and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation. You can find her at http://www.chinginchen.com/.

Ray Succre

Parade!

Parade, lively boy, on the binge of orange drinks,
and fish in the liquid a sugar’s shout:

My nervy American empery prolongs
its precious mid-aged babies, yet ignores
all but the gems, whose world
is overtly all the world.

Parade, little man, from your second annual cake,
and jump to unseat your energy:

My parade no longer wears conical hats or noise,
and I must fish my own liquid for a slower solve.

So parade, boy of mine, until I sleep:
This age will chirrup its fare far between us.

Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has been published in a variety of publications across dozens of countries. His novels Tatterdemalion (2008) and Amphisbaena (2009), both through Cauliay, are widely available in print and a third novel, A Fine Young Day, is forthcoming in Summer 2010.

Cooper Renner

Philoctetes / Sophocles / Melita

Because he was Greek and not barbaros; because he was a soldier writing of soldiers; because he could not reason with the unreasoning night, I pity him, lonely evermore.

*

Hai! let Philoctetes cry in his misery, the hero's knees biting the sand, arms flung outward to the ship, his fellows forsaking him, Hera's accursed. Biting the sand, arms arched upward into the sky, his god forsaking him, Hera's accursed. The sand splashed by his pizzle like a wolf's, and one star only shining down, its light yellow as honey.

*

He goes on three, a wounded cur, lifting the suppurus of the fourth, the bitten heel, to his thigh--or dragging it behind, as though from the dissocketed hip of a hart the wolves have torn.
    Or does he stand on one, ignoring the pulsing fester, the dark dealings of the gods, leading with the staff of the halt and lame though he dreams of the larruping lope of the pack at midnight, of sniffing female rump, of awaking from his caninity to murmur like a man in the pit of the night, reft of all life's gifts, unable to bite down his laugh?

*

Does he remember the boat by which he left Chryse?
    He says it was a dream, that he sailed with the moon, nuzzling her breasts and calling her Mother.
    Does he remember eating the lotos?
    It was ever honey he ate, and the comb dripped inside the ribcage of the wolf.
    Does he remember the bite of the viper, the temple his shot foot rendered unholy?
    It was the wolf who bit me, who healed me with his bite. It was the curled pelf of my shins that made me holy, the curve of her hands around my calves which invited me in. When I bowed to her over the font, it was the lean snout of my brothers I saw gazing back at me; it was then she named me Lykos.

*

Call me Sophocles, who translates the gods to the Athenians. Because I am Greek and not barbaros, because I am a soldier writing of soldiers, because the gods have whispered in my ear an anguish that finds no cure, and Echo babbles pitiless in the capsule of my skull.

*

Let the pads of his paws find their rhythm among the stones of Hagar Qim for he is the sun-barque of his Goddess.
    Let his bristling ears hearken to her footsteps on the pavements of Ggantija for he is the eros of his Goddess.
    Let the sinews of his throat tauten in the passages of Ta' Hagrat for he is the strophe of his Goddess, turning at the summit where the moon burns like the honey she scatters from her palms to the dappled beasts of the field.

Cooper Renner's fiction, most of it concerned with his Maltese lycanthropic cycle, has appeared in New York Tyrant, Keyhole, Anemone Sidecar, Sleeping Fish and other magazines. Mud Luscious Press will publish the illustrated chapbook Dr Polidori's Sketchbook in March. His art has also appeared in such magazines as Lamination Colony and Upstairs at Duroc, as well as in several chapbooks from Bannock Street Press, most recently Meg Pokrass's Lost and Found.

Juliet Cook

TEST KITCHEN

the connective tissue rips, the beaver pigs out, bone
spurs fly, electric beater frisks bloody pulp into pink
chiffon filling some delicate new dessert product

or maybe delicate isn’t quite the right word for this
pulverized pussy footing across a tile floor texturized
like lemon squares drizzled with personal lubricant

which he’s never used for pleasure in his
“real life” but this is the “test kitchen” it makes a sound
like how anal electrocution sometimes leads to mink coat

sure it will start shaky, she’ll wobble a little on her stilt
like high heels at first, but then she’ll start walking, cat
walking away from the crime scene’s furry little carcass

shaved clean, erase all stray marks completely or else
a delay in processing the answer sheet; put your #2
pencil in the hole; it’s not called a cake-hole for nothing

snatch of devil’s food batter, multiple choice attack:
(a) If she didn’t want to take off her dress, why did she do that?
(b) In “real life”, she’s a “real woman” and who wants that?
(c) what might she subject herself to just to be wanted?

(d) all of the above plus stupid bitch fucking sandwich
spread he had always suspected her skin
looked like pimento loaf underneath, he knew

the finger vibe wouldn’t be strong enough for that slut
she’s either a real woman or she’s too pulpy, can’t balance
on that stilt anymore, all of the whore holes are already filled

none of the above was never one of the choices




(note: the italicized line was borrowed from poet Mairéad Byrne, with her permission)

Juliet Cook’s poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Abjective, Action Yes, Diagram, Diode, Oranges & Sardines, Robot Melon and many other online and print sources. She is the editor of Blood Pudding Press and Thirteen Myna Birds. She is author of numerous chapbooks, most recently including PINK LEOTARD & SHOCK COLLAR (Spooky Girlfriend Press), Tongue Like a Stinger (Wheelhouse), and FONDANT PIG ANGST (Slash Pine Press). Her first full-length poetry collection, Horrific Confection, was published by BlazeVOX in 2008. For more information, feel free to visit her website at http://www.julietcook.weebly.com/.

T.A. Noonan

Dorothy Hamill Defends Her Vioxx Statement in Court



1: Claim

I’ve told this story before:
one woman, one paycheck,
just one testimony. That’s the truth.
Doesn’t matter who or what, except

one woman and one paycheck.
Maybe it’s me, maybe not. Really
doesn’t matter who or what—except
making a statement. I support that.

Maybe it’s me, maybe not. Really,
the commercial, sir? Yes. I had to
make my statement: I support that
product. People trust me because I’m

the commercial, sir. Yes, I had to
move as I once did. My legs are
products. People trust me because I’m
famous. It’s good news: now arthritics

move as I once did. My legs are
walking advertisements; bodies, my
fame. Oh, it’s good news. Now arthritics,
they bend, fall like children. They’re

walking advertisements, bodies. My
words are nothing. Forget that
they bend and fall. Like children, their
pain travels from bone to heart.

Words are nothing. No, forget that
testimony. The truth is, just one
pain travels from bone to heart
because I’ve told the story before.


2: Counterclaim

I’ve told that story before:
pain travels from bone to heart
as one. Just testimony? The truth is,
words are nothing. No, forget that

pains travel from bone to heart,
bend, fall like children. There,
words are nothing. Forget that
walking advertisement. Bodies? My,

they bend and fall like children. They’re
famous. It’s good news. Now arthritics
—walking advertisements, bodies—
move as I once did. My legs are

famous. It’s good news: now arthritics
produce. People trust me because I
move as I once did. My legs are
the commercial, sir. Yes, I have to

produce. People trust me because I
make a statement; I support that
commercial, sir. Yes, I have to.
Maybe it’s me, maybe not. Really

making a statement—I support that.
Doesn’t matter who or what. Except
maybe it’s me, maybe not. Really,
I’m one woman. One paycheck

doesn’t matter. Who or what I accept
is just one truth. That’s the testimony
of a woman whose one paycheck
has told this story before.

T.A. Noonan's first collection, The Bone Folders, won the Heartland Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Cracked Slab Books. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, No Tell Motel, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. II: Mississippi, Phoebe, RHINO, Specs, Harpur Palate, and many others. Currently, she lives, writes, and teaches on Florida’s First Coast.