Poems by Jeffrey Side

I NEED YOUR HYGIENE

You believe what
you will. He
got no one
else to lie.
He had plans

I never knew,
while listening to
my sacrifice. The
dust has you
tight, and you

don’t question it
when it commands
you in the
night. I’m waiting
for some of

your time, and
losing what I
can’t find. You
took me over
your walls but

only had your
breathing to sell.
After Milton, he
became more treacherous,
and needed you

for reasons you
didn’t need him.
Now he’s got
a chicken farm
in Puerto Rico,

where he blows
a horn all
day. You have
your hygiene which
you carry well.


ROMAN SKY

Do you remember that walk?
That walk you called separation?
That walk you called independence?
That walk you called “being stronger”?

Did you really believe any of it?

Did you declare how you were
free and how
you had no machine to
control your day?

Did you try to prove
a point
while weeping into
your hands
in the desert?

And did you find someone to
make the sky like
Rome for you?

CUTTING UP THAT CROP

Nobody knows
what a nice
day it
is except me.

I came back
to see you
while
you were away.

You have
spoken well,
if that’s what you feel.

We’ll make no
more arrangements.
We carry on regardless,
anyway.

I didn’t learn
my lesson,
and you
didn’t learn the truth


SOMETIMES THINGS ARE HARD TO PUT DOWN

Be careful where you chew,
as they’re looking
for someone else
who never lets it sleep.

Turning gears and sticks,
she doesn’t know which
way to go.

Now I measure all my
leather, making sure it fits.

When I get the envelopes,
I’ll look out for the slits.

She is on the lawn,
looking up at the birds.

She can never be here,
if you are always there.

I measure her up with
my head,
and I give her rifle,
and I give her bait.

Poems by Pete McNabb

THE CHOIR

Beyond the lip of day and deeper than
The womb of night –
There is a world
Perforated by innumerable and tiny lights.

He touched the babe of new religion back to life,

Growing like its store of time-lapse videos.
For Thou is Active
Or Thou is in Active, but Thou
Is never absent,
Unlike forever before.

Unanswerable prayer
Too easily met with plurality,

The choir responds with new apocrypha,
And no true section can be found to hold
A pitch or range that will be understood
By anyone who is Actively listening.


FORTUNE TELLER

In my allotment, in my time, my friend
I was inborn

With chance to tell
The meaning of your life.

But as a magpie, I couldn’t
Resist the glittering boughs

Of other, secretless, trees.
I could not stay to say.

And still, I knew.
Better yet, I forgot.

Bereft of all your hope, I made you
A feral mare to run through fields.

And you grudge me for
What is mine to know?

I still accept the chance
To lose.

You should’ve seen the treasure
In the trees to which I flew.

why was the secret of your life
entrusted to no other

the answer is unquestionable


SOLSTICE

The wick not burnt but cut
At both ends in Minneapolis,
Where day-sky and night-sky
Communicate color instead of sun –
Black, white, black –
Like a bride stalked
By Maidenhood, Widowhood:
A comedy
Beginning and ending in one line.

Poems by Dana Ravyn

I MOVED HERE SO AUDRE LORDE
WOULD BE MY NEIGHBOR

I built my home
in a taciturn chestnut tree
so close to the end of earth
that its mahogany eyeballs
sometimes roll over
the edge, toppling to extinction.

It is held up by stanchions
that get their strength
from the grace of weakness,
like the pneumatized bones
of chickadee wings.

At dawn, I wake to green
sounds that erase dreams.
I watch chestnuts plummet
to their death, their spiny
anger skin splits, revealing
glimmering spheres of adulation.


SUPPLICATION

when i burned your photo
it was not in effigy.
there was no more room
for your image
in my heart,
occupied now with
navigating white-knuckle
rapids of rivers
flowing backward.
Only the ashes fit.
they float
like orphan eyelashes
into retreating crevices
of memory.
as i held the glossy
corner to the flame,
a supplication to time:
erode this anguish
as slowly, as deliberately
as egyptian granite.
deep, to reveal
veins of gold.


CROWS

call me back from reverie,
entreaties echoing from
dangling drops of rain
to reach me.

if I awaken, I can dream
of black barbs of feathers,
follow each to a bony quill,
then deeper yet,

into inky thews. Entwined in
sinew, my heart canters as
wings thrash into cawing
freedom of oblivion.


WHAT REMAINS

The ocean returned
to claim the sleeping
in plain day,

foretold to me
in dreams of
prescient dragon flies.

Bargello veins pulsed
in cellophane wings,
droning in and out of

shafts of light,
framed by private
nebulas of dust.

There are still remnants
of magic free from
weighted words,

and cell towers poke
from a new sea, a landing place
for blue dragon flies.

Poems by Norman Jope

MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN THE MOON

after Paul Bowles

‘Where the music leads, I follow‘
although it does not lead. It circles and swirls
until this evening is elsewhere.
I descend stone steps at the call to prayer
beneath a sapphire sky.
Seeking adventure and auspicious fate,
I court the whore in her tent, who pretends
that she’s a princess and a constellation.
There are murmurings from the other tents
but, even now, I know where my wallet is
and my name remains on my passport.
What value resides in experience
when, in time, the mind goes blank,
its novas and starships vanished from view?
‘Amass it nonetheless’ say the sages,
‘because you’re helping God to be’.
I add to the archive with this woman,
showing her my wallet as I leave...
then kicking at her friends as I scale the stile
on my way to a rumpled, unmade bed.


AT THIS MOMENT, TO THE NORTH

I bow to the black beast in my skull,
the blank beast that is aftermath,
a death that erases then erases itself.

At the Pole, there is tangible dark.
I think myself north to deep-iced waters
and flickering sky-wide lights.

Death stalks me in its silver fur.
Plunging into its eternal night
I leave language behind, red marks in snow.

Here, the lights wheel slowly.
I stare at trapped Polaris,
at the distance that it carries,

snowdrop-white.
I think myself to a nakedness
that is harder to sustain than death itself.


THE CAPITULATION OF THE LOCUSTS

There are miniscule gaps in the air
where the insects used to be,
prefiguring larger voids.
We await our own extinction -
the future is veiled
and horizons frown.

I rest my head in a recess
of a polished rock
and describe these tribulations,
the slave of a voice
that speaks of earth swept clean,
of penal fire and judgement.

Nothing will remain
but the signs of that judgement
in primary colours -
the panoply of earthly things
decanted into void,
a failed experiment.

Nothing remains for now
but to shop myself to death -
the future is over
and all legacies in vain,
my art mere noise
amongst the other noises.

The silence of the insects
that do not exist
is what is heard now
in the sterile fields.
Apocalypse
need not be grand.

A TIGHTROPE LAID ON THE GROUND

These days, I walk a tightrope

laid on the ground from breath to breath.

Sometimes, my heart seems to shake with the effort

of proceeding from moment to moment,

from day to day, from year to year,

from life to whatever comes next.

I see myself falling to the ground,

the tightrope to one side or the other,

thrown from myself in a moment -

a solid shadow cast on linoleum

beside the photocopier, startling

the smartphone-cradling students

into turning away from Instagram

to read the last rites from an app

they’ve installed on the chance that, someday,

they’ll witness the demise

of an old man like me.

Born in the year 2000,

they know neither Reagan nor Thatcher

or a world without Putin.

It’s their turn now and I must pass on the torch,

however charred or lukewarm.

So may their endings be as calm

as I heave from breath to breath

on the newly polished floor,

finally seeing my face

as the face of a stranger

after all this time.

Poems by Lewis LaCook

ENAMEL

In anger her fingernails gnaw the arms of her children
red grins that fish for jokes with hooks
and she spills out of herself an inverse of her shadow
The party tapers, pacing from corner to corner with the sun

What is he learning from the plastic mesh of a summer lawn chair
floating in fumes of suburban pavement
that keeps from him the slow light from a season of closed doors
Keep him with dried-out palms and mercurochrome rage

The party with the red smile
flickers and the air inverts
In this corner her voice bubbles, flailing us with steam

In this corner the suburbs rot and you fall out of your chair
This is how you learn about grace
This is how you learn to bleed


SUMMER CORN

The cat watches her from above with eyes that never stop thinking
about how another man locked her children out of the house
sifting rocks from clean fill, milk from sour candles and incense
Another man tied with thistle, the beating heart of an ear of corn

Have you heard yet your father's blown embers
with a hand across her face, first thought she had
of the city, looking in from where porch light
fails us, never asking us to feel any way about it

Mirrors teach her to hide well inside the frames of her mother's
another man on her children snarling like he beat dogs
He tossed young rabbits into the pen to give them the taste

Is there something in her mouth we can look forward to beyond
the spilled candle's milk her husband soured on his back, heart
stopped and the length of cold dawning in his empty blue eyes