A number of events conspired to prevent me from—
———————no, they didn’t

To an event there is no me

What there is———–is resistant

——————-Spin around—-Look
——————-nonchalant

A gull arcing out
————over the inlet is such
——————————–a long way to go

Two bananas, some apples

The offers——————–come pouring in

*
Justin Marks’ first book of poems is A Million in Prizes (New Issues, 2009), and his latest chapbook is Best Practices (Greying Ghost, 2013). Recent work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Barrelhouse, Leveler and Interrupture. He is a co-founder of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press, and lives in Queens, NY with his wife and their 4 year-old twin son and daughter.

Rain on the roof. The lilies have shot up
a bevy of stalks, green highrises,
each loaded with several buds,
that could start exploding
silently any night now.  I am alone,
but I am not alone.  On the computer,
I could video chat with a woman
in Singapore.  I could talk to the hearts
alive this very instant in Prague.
The smoke is leaving the stacks of Lanzhou.
The blackened men who all day shoveled out
the charcoal kilns of Brazil, sleep now
in the common room watching soccer.
It would be easier if I were alone.
I am not alone.  We are here together,
but we are not together.  The rain behind my cottage
is rushing through, making its clear-haired
sound through the soundless dark
of no human ear.  The desert sun on my back
may or may not lead me to freedom.
I am standing in the door of the pink light.
I am a pink light in an empty alley,
waiting to be recognized in my meaning.
The stone in my hand is a small weapon indeed
against the constellation of my still-born dreams.
I am calling the tendrils and the curling wisp.
I am calling the dark vapors, the molecules
of car commercials moist against my lids,
my closed buds any night now could explode.
We are alone, but we are not alone,
but it would be better if we were alone.
Or if we were together.  A pile of lemons.
Men in white bibs.  I am giving out
cheese samples.  I am slicing the tears
into small bite-sized bits, but it would be better
if we were not alone like this.

*

Sam Taylor is the author of Body of the World (Ausable/Copper Canyon) and the forthcoming collection, Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series, 2014), which develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet engaged with history, politics, and our contemporary moment.  He is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Wichita State University.  You can read more of his work on the web at www.samtaylor.us.

Obscene to walk through the world with eyes
open. With feet soles spread in the naked clover.
A moment ago, outside, the black butterfly
folded his wings and slid his whole body
into the speckled throat of the tiger lily.
Now, the wooden spoons, face up, huddle together
in the metal pitcher beside the sink.
Who will comfort the millions carrying their loads?
The leanto of the wood cutting board
propped against the wall, behind the toaster.
The giant mason jar, half-filled with red lentils.
Each thing is a sentence, a subject and verb,
the event of itself, perishing in ever more slivered
ecstasy. On the counter, a six-pack of Guinness.
The bananas discovering, one spot at a time,
the well of darkness that waits for them.
Or: What cool river will smooth the foreheads
and families of the disappeared? What museum
will house the final poses of those who died
in the streets of Nanking and Nagasaki?
The colander turned upside down in the dish rack.
The tea kettle steaming, but still silent.
It is obscene to walk through the world
with eyes open. And now I have picked the blackberries
and shaken the cream, to eat with this woman,
her long back lined with light gold-black hairs,
the bell of her secret cry still alive inside me,
though it is another, whom I cannot go to, that I love.

*

Sam Taylor is the author of Body of the World (Ausable/Copper Canyon) and the forthcoming collection, Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series, 2014), which develops the lyrical voice of a citizen-poet engaged with history, politics, and our contemporary moment.  He is an Assistant Professor in the MFA program at Wichita State University.  You can read more of his work on the web at www.samtaylor.us.

*

Stephanie Kartalopoulos  completed her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Missouri, where she was 2008-2012 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her poems and translations of 20th Century Greek poet Yannis Ritsos are forthcoming and appear in a variety of journals that include [PANK], Thrush Poetry Journal, Barn Owl Review, Sou’wester, Pebble Lake Review, 32 Poems, Phoebe, and Harpur Palate. Stephanie is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kansas State University.

Bruised magnolias, damaged street signs,
a fractured spinal cord.  There is too much
in this world already.  In a pile,

a picture of one foggy day on the pier
where I hung my shoes from a post and walked
barefoot.  Night, unflappable and full of sorrow.

Lamps stuttered into their oily glow.
A mom and her daughter argued over where
to put their furniture, the worth of an isosceles

triangle, what the girl would study in school.
I walked past and hoped that no fault line
would slip between them.  Termites

eat their way through my attic.
Ghost limbs pace the length of this room.
There is too much in this world already.

*

Stephanie Kartalopoulos completed her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Missouri, where she was 2008-2012 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her poems and translations of 20th Century Greek poet Yannis Ritsos are forthcoming and appear in a variety of journals that include [PANK], Thrush Poetry Journal, Barn Owl Review, Sou’wester, Pebble Lake Review, 32 Poems, Phoebe, and Harpur Palate. Stephanie is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kansas State University.

Better a tiger than a cobra.  Better three
from a dry edge, resting and cleaning
their paws.  I stand against a lean-to, near
an empty highway stretched thinly into
late afternoon. Around me, stronger
than emptiness, the gifts you tried to give me
so long ago, so far from the town’s
center. The witnesses you rolled
into you. Unmarked boxes pulled
from a dirty pile. The eagerness to say I
have only cast you in a reproachful light.
This has turned beyond hallucination.
Like a sharpened claw. Like an intuition
that you are waiting for me, always,
on a rainy corner after the busses
have stopped service.  Along my road,
razor wire etching its space.
From where I see this cliff, temptation
sneaks in its spacious tremble.

*

Stephanie Kartalopoulos completed her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Missouri, where she was 2008-2012 Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her poems and translations of 20th Century Greek poet Yannis Ritsos are forthcoming and appear in a variety of journals that include [PANK], Thrush Poetry Journal, Barn Owl Review, Sou’wester, Pebble Lake Review, 32 Poems, Phoebe, and Harpur Palate. Stephanie is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kansas State University.

I am collecting insects
from the ground
before the water table
turns on us again.
I am breathing in
the bread of the living,
though my little ghosts
are in tune with what I take.
Let me not deceive you,
first flowers of sacrilege:
I won’t go bawling
from the labyrinth,
my rashes and sores
handled wrongly.
The physician may rest
in his mountain.
The wefts and warps
of the globe may rest.
My love with her tongue
at the tip of the truncheon.
Me with my tongue
asleep at her hipbone.
A field of horses
disperse before
the reveling places
for monsters.
Let the beleaguered
return to their safes.
Let the dying
be returned to the sea.
Our failed hobbies burnt
in the rites of idiots.
Our carted rubble sits
in its fine anterior rage.

*

Peter Mishler was educated at Emerson College and Syracuse University.  He is employed as a public school Creative Writing teacher.  He has been working on text and image installations in the city of Syracuse with the photographer Joe Lingeman.  Other new poems are forthcoming in the 2013 Best New Poets anthology and The Literary Review online.

Here come seven-year-old toughs
with chunks of condemned buildings
carried in front of their faces.
And the company fleeces hang
in the indoor driving range break room
with feverish openness.
The course pro comments mildly
on the male torso, its pallor and grace.
And the vice-chair at the boardroom table
is scraping a laxative in his lap
to the size of an aspirin.
The scent of it comes with time,
he thinks.  It comes with time
from clenching the pill in your fist
while out late dancing.
And his lover waits in his penthouse
using her pink can of pepper spray
to strike the keys of a xylophone
into his voicemail to let him know
she’s in the city.  I leave the meeting early.
Truant children on the staircase
crop a photo of me till they have my face.
In the lounge next door
they’re revising the phrase ‘good times,’
so I go in and get the print version
slid to me under my placemat,
then leave with the restaurateur
to pack our things.  It’s been a long trip,
a long year, a long downturn toward here.
Behind our backs, the waiters begin
the slideshow––a catalogue
of our blighted mansions––
and all of the patrons’ heads
hunch forward into their ledgers
with baby blue lanyards dangling
from their necks, which read: Cities of Concern.
And the willow trees are praying for us.
And they shame us with their reverence
and cool discretion.  Poison is poison!
a nurse-in-training scolds a child
on the curb in front of us.
Don’t let me catch you in the cabinet again!  
In the small entryway to the hospital,
their godhead is leaning peacefully.
At its feet someone’s half-sister places
a handful of Swedish Fish, wet with her saliva.
I begin my new organization here.

*

Peter Mishler was educated at Emerson College and Syracuse University.  He is employed as a public school Creative Writing teacher.  He has been working on text and image installations in the city of Syracuse with the photographer Joe Lingeman.  Other new poems are forthcoming in the 2013 Best New Poets anthology and The Literary Review online.

We ignite fires
that’ll burn for
generations, like
underground caves
of coal mines

We cleanse the land,
sweep parasites
from wheat fields
and rats from
beneath mountains

We walk this freeze-dried zone
with eyes glued shut
and sewn mouths laced
crunch through streets
littered with cadavers

We do not ask why
towns fell to such viruses
grown in fine-bone china
modified to destroy immune
structures with expediency

We promised to be kind
to save what we could
to plant the stones of hope
to fill the holes with symbols
of survival, but not of love

We zip aluminized suits & spark
plasma torches. We head out with
visors down—O2 streams in &
vents exhaust. Maybe we’ll turn
this ash into soil, then sow & reap

We were the compromise,
an addendum, an answer
and we search for the symptoms,
the root & the cause, or solutions
to make this system run again

*

Jennifer J. Pruiett-Selby is a teacher and mother of four, with a Master’s degree in English from Iowa State University. Jennifer currently lives in very rural Iowa where her column {just a word} appears in the local newspaper. Her work has been published in RED RIVER REVIEW and FOUR & TWENTY.