Moist Towelette

2005-04-11T13:22:00.000-07:00

2005-04-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

Unemployment Catherine Meng

I’m putting a dent in Friday & chasing it home.
I’m armed with nothing but interpretations
of snow written in the last century.
I’ve sucked hard on the pillow
until the pillow itself sucks. I’m old now.
Sculling for parking spaces I don’t have to pay for.
I’m looking at the refrigerator as if it’s a man.
I’m weaving through prickly feelings I find on my skin.
I’m changing to caps locks in my dealings with neighbors.
I’m growing fast as a string bean
against twine I can’t stop crawling.
I’m fascinated by a yellow car that hasn’t moved in 3 days.
I’m worried about the future of my feet.
I’m worried about my ribs & teeth.
I think if it keeps going like this
I’ll be smelling showers for a living.
I’ll be broke into small pieces as a boat is.
I’ll be rinsing in the big light of the sun.
I’m ready to say I’m waiting
for reason to appear dressed in black.
I’m going to sing out of my usual octave
& make gestures with my hands that scare the geese
so they double back.
I’m degreed in turpitude & there’s a bee in my skirt.
I’m free to wander eruptions where puddles
were drove through. I’m cooking on borrowed gas.

2005-04-10T19:24:00.000-07:00

3 Untitled Poems Elaine Kahn

he lived on my shoulder
and i was another place
behind a lagoon rhythm
of a different year

it was always this season
it was always hard and soft and
floating on the surface of
everything that always moves

i watched
they live
touch dead hairs
behind other houses
where there is moss
and we are pleasant to each other
although it’s true,
that they are always lying under fences

lets make art out of pennies
lets make cats out of yarn
hard cats, narrow cats
the hard word of art
the impossible art of touch
this, this is your cheek
here, here is your neck

2005-04-09T22:15:00.000-07:00

2 Poems Kristen Bissaillon

Weft

tolls the blesséd night, the blesséd moon,
tolls the flowers in their bells.
dust which warms,
curtain calls.
Cost bereft of loss,
the proffered coin,
the delight of the soul
and no other.

The waxing of wishes,
spin the fulfillment dish,
the blesséd knife, O!
the blesséd knife.

The dharma of the firefly
and gross pumpkin patch
where the hands of the children
met the hope of the grandfather.
Leaves mounded in fragrant decay.

The mechanism of fire, its propagation,
The delight of the soul.
The coin of the challenge table.
which is singular, and blesséd

Ascent

Were times, in the modest liturgy,
the demon-spaded broken-back in his platter-hat
made furious through the fibre-platt
and we were witness to the mimic-tide.

We as witness, without tooth,
trickle to tell, down our beards,
in the health of doom
and minding bubbles as they plowed.

I in our affine plummet sow,
and gurgle to splay,
and muscle my nails and
toothless glom; my quaver
in the unknown song:
to bid the maelstrom,
quickening in haste with blood for lust,
and seek our ascent
in holds of moss and glass.

2005-04-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

PHOTO GRAPH PAPER: AMERICAN PUSH Jenny Gropp

I want everything to be frozen like a hive, spun like an ice cello
hung and whirled round in the thick drop-down of winter.

Off like the porch light, people standing grouped in the dark,
shoulders rounded like couch corners. I give you all the trees in my
heart, the will of children who curl like waves to lift a shell. Who
lift dead fish for the same reason. The breakdown! Smiles on a face,
outlines of a barnacle sucked to the pier. The feeling in the body
isn't the same as the tradition of the curve. Hate the consonants of
salt in the sea, of your skin, how wood doesn't burn like vowels. How
people burn fat, let it sing deeply through the fire: a hand across
the side of a whale: no place to hold: out of the black water onto the
blacker rocks the blackest seals make not a clatter.

A barrel of possessions: only a barrel shape. Like putting lies,
cheats and steals in the bouquet of a square.

On the street by the beach, a favorite photograph. A field made of
corn arrows up from the ground hand.

Hours, a January whale steaming on the beach.

The owned birds, chalices of light mounted in glass cases high above
the ground. Soft electric puppets, once lit by flame in Paris,
razorless like skin and sky. The gift of ever-sight. The gift of
shapes.

Raoul and David on the wall. I'm tired of thinking of Africa.
Bubble-wrapped bombs.

Eye pincushion, I know only this: for the sake of the old rocking
chair dimmed by dust in the garage, breastless – humans are nothing
like vegetables. And if god is machine, then god is machines. We come
with no vitamins. There is only intake of B and its powers.

If the bird is stealing tossed bread: the stars may be pushed together
in a zipper across the night jacket –

And the eastbound train makes long, bitter friends with the yellow
fiberglass houses, with the yards of rusted cargrass, a wizard's hat,
then with the colonial homes like buoys lit up in December snow, then
America gives its passengers back to the Atlantic, a teenager for a
moment, the train makes the ground a sea, counts the ways to where it
is by stars –

My horse, they taught me in school, is in the sky. Not in the
nightspray of dark cattle across the snow-domed plains,

Ghosts in the tails, swish, swish.

2005-04-09T17:35:00.000-07:00

Dressing Helena Haack

was the raising of cloth over
hands while I sat outside

the red door only covers
the in-between part

was watching her feet move
back and forth

first the right foot crosses
the left foot or

was the right foot really
the right foot then or

maybe the left foot
danced in celebration—there

was a great consciousness of
an ordered unit and the left

foot always knew where the
right foot was supposed to move

was it that she tells toes to
move precisely to the—

—sure that I must bow in
reverence to the sacred ritual

was a part of divine nature and
she must never come out for

it is the place of the holy—the
dead—the young shapeless

was piling the clothes in the
corner for remembrance

2005-04-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

A Fresco for Nino Julia Cohen

We bring cedar trees
from Lebanon. Fitful burdens,
this rambling hue. Paths,

players, wraths. We phonetically
float on our own four points.
Brusque bows to dreadful comforts.

We relinquish the vacant
to a dynasty of lapsed scapegoats.
Linoleum and frostbite. We cheer

for the sanguine butterfly.
A seismograph and a fluttered
metaphor. Of the baroque, only

the cherubic escaped whole.
Out there, some strange bird is
dying. Nino, come home.

2005-04-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

YOUR FIRST ART SHOW Cat Tyc
(for Miranda Lee Reality Torn)

I’ve never quite gotten the hang of babies or French; especially with the accent. But here we are, us three, your mama, me and Cynthia, singing to you.

Your first Chelsea gallery installation. A video of a baby’s hands, holding sapphires and rubies, a lullaby in the background. Tongues crawl like snails off to the side. You look in awe. Two weeks old, and you’re focused.

Your father does the two step to calm your tears. He hands me to you, mouth agape, shitting like a heater. Your head, a tennis ball in my palm. You are the lightness of a pen.

Your mama tells us tales of stitches and hallucinations. The two ladies are singers. They know all the words. I only know the tune. I remember that. But like I told you, I never quite got the hang of French and babies.

Your mama says I am good with you.

Listening to you coo. I don’t believe her when I sing.

Faire a Jacque. Faire a Jacque.
Dor me voo. Dor me voo.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah..
Bing bom boom. Bing bom boom.

2004-05-15T18:42:00.000-07:00