Category: Issue 07

Heather Morgan was born in Staten Island in 1973, another dubious product of the 70’s. She completed her B.F.A. in painting at Boston University in 1996, making up the “Expressionist Wing” of the school for the arts. She received her M.F.A. in painting/printmaking at Yale University in 1999. Upon finishing her studies, Morgan spent five years working in East Berlin, learning German, exhibiting and publishing work with Karoline Mueller at Ladengalerie, one of Berlin’s oldest galleries, and a proponent of representational artists of the former GDR. Her work has been included in several publications, among them the Berliner Zeitung, Torso (published by the Berlin Women’s Art Association) and BOMB Magazine. Most recently, Morgan has published an art monograph with Brooklyn Arts Press. Morgan is currently represented by Burkhard Eikelmann Galerie, Duesseldorf. She lives in Brooklyn, exhibiting in New York City and Germany, creating a theatrical display of painting.

January 25, 2014

Crossing You In Style

Oil on canvas, 60 x 38″, 2013.

January 25, 2014

Cubicle Sex

Flirting again with boundary overload.
All those temporary surfaces
once designed for narrowly specific

normative tasks now restored
to a sensual rhythmic response
to messy energies so fragile

in their flux when he ran his fingers
through my faux fur. Whispering
raw testosterone prayers

as my tongue plumbed his shallow
depths. With pedal to the anal
and one hand on the wheel, he said,

the other text messaging a wife
in lieu of more embroidered pillow talk.
His snarl a dirty rictus, his cock

barking out lewd commands—
my lipstick the color of a Solo cup
floating in some fraternity pool—

fingerprints left on xerox glass
the only evidence we left
behind—all of it off the clock.

***

TIMOTHY LIU is the author of ten books of poems, including the forthcoming Don’t Go Back To Sleep (Saturnalia Books, 2014) and Let It Ride (Station Hill, 2015). He lives in Manhattan with his husband.

January 25, 2014

The Buddha

What were all those Diamond Sutras
compared to the blades of grass
our bodies crushed as we caressed
each other with easy fingers
under a big willow whose stillness

grew disturbed? Our boxers

thrown aside with so much careless
fanfare—mutable circumstances
unable to free themselves from obligation
or guilt. Entirely too close
not to kiss, even his arms kept me

at a distance to preserve in us

an audience. We were sad sacks
robbed of agency, growing old a victory
worth giving away while winter
worked its way through boots splitting
at the seams. If only we had bought

a real coat rather than a bag

full of flatulent hand-me-down tricks
that forced everyone to sit down
and sulk! Forget about big windows
in that cold crabby room where we knelt
on an unmade bed. Old and fat,

who plumps the pillows now?

No way any longer not to get all
gussied up where the mind still
likes to maunder—drawn to psychic
trauma parading before us as a veritable
grande dame—the only questions left

so much smaller than our shame.

***

January 25, 2014

Are We There Yet

He held his anxiety close
like a goldfish in a plastic baggie
leaking through his coat his cell
phone down to 20% how many folks
did he fuck over in the overhead
bunk of a tractor-trailer you wonder
as a ham-radio-operator shaves
the hair around your anal valve
my aerodynamic angel casting halos
into the air as if I were a Coke bottle
standing tall at the local carnival
those rubber rings out of reach
but for the barker’s voice egging me on
to give it another try my cock
poking out of a fag hag’s knock-off bag
a Louis Vuitton without the tags
if only he could accept my mother
jacking off the neighbor’s dog he too
would lay off on the sauce and commit
all 12 steps to his shrink at once
think nothing of those cotton-candy
colored sheep leaping over from
this world into a dozen traffic lights
burning red down the boulevard why not
go ahead and grab the bull running
rampant through a china shop
made in China, ass-burger murder
on the rise over billions served
my Alabaman stuck in Newtown again
without a protein bar or a bottle
of water from a virgin spring it’s time
to clear the decks sail on through
military bed sheets tucked and cornered
with all-night farts & armored cars
slipping gears—our crank-shaft gasket-
blown treasure trove bottomed out.

***

January 25, 2014

Enter If You Dare

urban blight
conundrum columbum
olly olly income free
ghost duck not space duck
enter vain tango, ha

tango tango aqua zen
allez beer, beer allez
sects bifurcate your alter ego
will you marry me? you’ll get a huge diamond
& a peony dress sewn with vines

an affilative gesture
elephants put the tips
of their trunks
in each other’s mouths
& swirl them about

it’s a marriage exam
dead black-eyed susans
look good covered with snow
the tango pit’s covered with egos
i wish the untouchable skeletons were geraniums

plant panthology
love is easier than you think
possibility vs. probability
a pre-verbal sensation
i didn’t know what i could do

but then i had a dream
i saw i knew more than i thought i did
watershed! away! ouch!
the tip of your trunk hurts a little
& tree-trunk borers become whale-bone borers

olly olly ocean free
can you name what you desire?
hell-o sharknado, bi bi old id
i began to love you 30 billion years ago
but what did i know?

***

Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary projects have been presented at festivals, artist-run spaces, and on city streets across the United States, Japan, Kenya, and Europe. A founding curator of the Red Rover Series, she is author of the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice. Her poetry is widely published, most recently in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, and as Bernadette Mayer’s assistant on The Helens of Troy, NY. She teaches in the Creative Writing program at Columbia College and at Truman College, where she works with immigrants and refugees.

Bernadette Mayer lives in upstate New York and has been a key figure on the poetry scene for decades. She is the author of more than two dozen volumes of poetry. Her most recent book, The Helens of Troy, NY, was published by New Directions this past spring. The Sexual Organs of the IRS & Other Poems, a collaborative chapbook with Jennifer Karmin, will be released by Convulsive Editions in 2014.

January 25, 2014

The Stream

I heard the stream
below and to the left of me,
and it pleased me
to leave it there awhile.
I’ve always had a flair
for the intentional.
Hence: all of this blessed breathing.
Hence: the police I found
by looking behind me
where their bodies went
lazy in the vacant light,
slouched in vague positions
where they waited,
tuning their scanners down
to a gossiped static
among the luminous rabbits
and tiny hits of moon
shot across the moth-clouds.
I felt rich again
when I tried to remember
every dollar I ever spent.
I felt good
about leaving fingerprints
where the beech trees stopped
right over the bank,
their tentacle roots
exposed and suspended
by the drift and wash
of every idyllic afternoon
lazed away there by wastrels.
When you take out the visual,
what’s left is a feeling.
It messes up your joie de vivre
and it is chronic,
like dust, but more of an obstacle.
I visited some pyramids.
I donated to watch a witch
do a spell and then hang out.
I guess I must have been an optimist,
stuck in this raw belief
that if only I could stop living
outside the poem,
its words would open up
the way shadows do
when you view their source
and then the sun.
The day got shorter,
barely even registering
upon the pates of the great poets
who came to visit me
because I paid them,
oh I would have
paid you anything,
Max Jacob, Alexander Vvedensky,
to stand there
in the riparian area
with one hand on your drinks
and the others pointing out
what I could do better,
what I should do better now.

***

Christopher DeWeese is the author of The Black Forest (Octopus Books). He is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Wright State University and lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

January 25, 2014

The Marsh

The marsh is so full of bog-men
that it must be
the world’s oldest crime-scene.
Preserved in strange angles,
their skin looks superior
than that of their contemporaries
(the down to just the bones,
the inevitable mummies).
Most of them were murdered
and simply disposed,
thrown in quick and softly sinking,
so now they go faceless,
genuflecting quietly
through the peat.
In this land of reasons,
most of us only get to be one of them,
is why I’m so afraid
of all the terrible company
I’ve been keeping.
Most explorers set out
with better intentions
than being remembered
for eating one another
as they waited out the 1800s,
their perfect handwriting
filling seal-skin diaries
first with imaginary pathologies
to explain the missing
unto their cruel posterity,
and then the scientific measurements
they kept collecting
as if tethered to their own breathing
at last, finally, only by numbers.
They buried their tools
facing due north
to point the way
for those who would go farther,
and then fell cold
in momentary poses
to await their own discovery.
Ah humanity! goes the ending
of my favorite ending,
which begins Ah Bartleby!
And I guess it never really ends,
this life between us
and the what it is
in our best moments
we glimpse just past the data
we’ve spent so long gathering.
It’s cold tonight,
and I can’t decide
if it would be worse
to disappear completely
from the historical record
or to be repeated
as some old hag
on the liminal periphery
of a condescending anecdote
about why some kids were crying.
Every day, I use my bones
to triangulate the person
I’ve been harvesting.
I keep trying to get it right,
I mean I keep yelling
very quietly
because my love is sleeping,
and yes, I do love her,
but also I am furious,
I am a furious voter,
and my mouth is full
of dollars.

***

Christopher DeWeese is the author of The Black Forest (Octopus Books). He is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Wright State University and lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

January 25, 2014

Solzhenitsyn on the Beach

The ball bounces to rest at my feet.
All around me, beautiful bodies utterly blank.

My heart races with each head ducked
beneath the waves. My hand is a glass

that never empties. Sails litter the ocean
with bird wings. Water takes centuries to caress

rock to the sand that supports our weight.
I watch the surf until the sun goes down.

None of that storied violence is visible.

***

Andrew Kozma’s poems have appeared in Blackbird, Qualm, Subtropics, and The Kenyon Review Online. His first book of poems, City of Regret (2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and he has been the recipient of a Jentel Residency, a Houston Arts Alliance Fellowship, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, and a D. H. Lawrence Fellowship.