It was superb, the song. It was superb.

Half-awake, coming to half-terms

with the tiny room cut in half

by the presence of the possessions

of my roommate gone for the weekend,

the rain done, the year, 1982,

beginning to fall, I brimmed over

with how I didn’t know to what extent

the air shaft behind my head and outside

our one window was physical.

I was with the small but tiny

building on 112^th and Broadway,

inside it, just as without question,

or with certainty, I was inside

my freshman year of college in

New York City, by my side, alone

on a Sunday morning after a late night

with friends, an overripe Saturday

involving fermented laughter and

varying liquids involving more

than the need to end thirst. And

I didn’t know if the building’s missing

wide spine consisted of air or

of a woman’s throat, the two ends

of an Adam’s apple suspended

in an arc over a smooth surface.

Privileged and hungry for unseen,

universal riches swinging low

over wages and charity

and a chariot (wrong song), was I

half-dreaming? To what extent?

Was I reverting back to dreaming

of waking to a world with its inside

scooped out so that half of its windows,

the lucky ones nestled away

from the streets, could breathe, though closed?

The one behind my head, I realized

or fantasized, was open all the way,

given the late September heat,

and a dead woman (I called her

“Judy,” which was her exact name)

with a “Garland” of flowery, leafy,

precise softness at the top of her lungs,

was singing, going on and “Over”

about “the Rainbow” like a drunken child

wreathed with brain stems and freed cells.

It was superb. I was awake now,

to the music and the prank, no doubt

someone a few floors down half-dangling

a speaker, like an air-conditioner,

out his window, laughing and blasting

sleepers from their slumbers

at such an ungodly hour, the music

and not the prank reverberating

and exploding like an immense,

contained throat. It was superb,

with just Judy hovering above

the source in a disembodied building,

an immense, upside-down glass of rain

with no ceiling or floor, her lit throat

whispering like a roar around my ears

and inner lids, having broken through the airy

glass behind my head, her lit throat arriving

too early to be wrong, given

the sun’s multibright wish to never awaken

without chord changes and milked and nursed

syllables, the perfect world an upside-

down smile nuzzling the brutal streets,

tenderly belting out flesh and money,

deprivation, sleep, and the dream

that years later, there would be

conscious and conscionable peace

at last, if not where I would be,

then somewhere.

 

2008

 

*

Since 1987, Douglas Nordfors has been publishing poems in journals such as The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and Poet Lore, and recent work has appeared in Burnside Review, Agave, OccuPoetry, Tipton Poetry Journal, and others. He has published two books of poetry, Auras (2008), and The Fate Motif (2013).

Believe me, I believe you, candidate of order

law-breaking, shackles-off, hair-raising border-

line Mexican criminal deals made in China,

You do strike a chord with the random vagina

 

grabbing at truth as it plays on the news

high-wired penthouses trapping your muse

inspiring violence, hatred and dirt

slinging it back for a hot mini-skirt

 

But riddle me this: How do regular folk

watch you shoot from the hip just to swallow your joke?

Befuddled, bewildered, bewitched I am not

singing your praises or stirring your pot

of golden-white towers from armies of men

Ready, Aim      Fired

to tax us     again

 

that second amendment my first-born should know

arms boys to be boys for stones that they throw

shatter glass ceilings, break family heart,

wrongs are not rights, they’re rites torn apart

 

Let’s dig through the mud and bury the lead

God help us, brave homeland,

this sweet land of need

 

*

 

Heather Newman studies at The New School (NYC.) Her work has appeared in Two Hawks Quarterly, New Verse News, The Potomac Journal, Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop, E-Chook and will appear this spring in Aji Magazine and Voices From Here, Vol. II (Paulinskill poetry anthology.)

 

your voicemail starts with the adage, you see, the thing is – you were probably calling on your lunch break, your jeans likely torn, once at the knee, maybe below your ass, as you stood at the payphone in the back hallway of the grocery store – your skin chapped from the cold, especially above your lip – those months, you kept a turtle in our room, who lived in a hallway of lavender light – it was mostly hard to watch, her slow plodding only to arrive at another wall of glass, the refracted light blooming vapidly – I was taking photographs of the ground, sewing things up in small bundles & capsules, placing onion skin on my tongue for as long as I could hold – direct mark-making was usually too emotive for you – so we made nothing into home – our thoughts often changed locations, shuffled between our hands & our quality of looking out – in other words: we never knew what we wanted to do until we found ourselves doing it – because life was lived with a sense of compassionate waste – from one gift horse to another

 

*

 

“entry for compassionate waste” is titled after a line from Mary Ruefle’s Trances of the Blast.

 

*

 

Gabriel Jesiolowski works in a research-based practice using drawings, photographs, installations, poems, essays, and printed matter. They were a Fall 2016 writing fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Their first book, As Burning Leaves, selected by Carl Phillips, won the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press and is due out in April 2017. They live in the San Juan Islands.

No wonder. We advance up that mountain

without pause,

question or alarm.

 

Our father hid his knife

next to his nakedness. Pulled Isaac up

the slaughter slope.

 

He sang praise. Pledged allegiance.

He walked by sound,

that one voice: I will make you

 

great again. Yes, great. Again.

No wonder we forget. We are the young

Mesomorph of sound mind and Olympic legs.

No wonder we forget

we can get away

or, all the better, overcome.

 

Our father is the sheep

on the mountain. Not us. Nor the ram

in the thistle. Our father grinded the knives.

 

Our father bleated, loud. With bladed fists

raised: whatever you say whatever

you say whatever.

 

*

 

Ciona D. Rouse is a poet, living in Nashville, Tenn. She curates many poetry experiences and reading series in the city. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming on WPLN Nashville Public Radio, Nashville Public Television, and Gabby Journal.

The new textbook named S-E-X

the greatest nation on Earth, orgasm

good old-fashioned family values,

insemination putting God back in

our public schools. When students

raised academic standards

with their taut bodies, they learned

a lesson in powerlessness. How hot

teachers got to give them some

strict discipline after class.

During detention, we had to hide

our Western canon under the desk.

All big boys possessed a small

business owner and girls

a job creator, their affairs over

and over deemed private enterprise.

Interns whose dress might stimulate

consumer spending found

they needed punishment behind

closed boardroom doors. How hard

bosses flogged upward mobility

in their pants. We liked to watch

office romances and pull ourselves

up by our bootstraps at work.

Common ways of roleplaying

enhanced interrogation techniques

were with a blindfold and rope

to win hearts and minds or naked

for shock and awe.  Both made us

prisoners of lust who must

support our troops alone. How fast

captors forgot to stop or ignored

the optional safeword, peace

through strength. We confessed

our most forbidden game

was government security contractor,

our acrobatic position spreading

freedom around the world,

our rape fantasies, secret no more,

greeted as liberators.

 

*

 

Steven D. Schroeder’s second book, The Royal Nonesuch (Spark Wheel Press), won the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University. His poetry is recently available in Crazyhorse, The Laurel Review, and Southern Indiana Review. He works as a creative content manager for a financial marketing agency.

We learned the character for bad,

the character for neighborhood,

and how they combined to form

the one for photo opportunity.

We misheard the hundred words

for ruin as remainders bartered

chunk by chunk for how much?

We said the phrase for please

speak English a touch or two

too loud, too slow, too much

like an expletive intended

to start at minimum an argument.

That language which contained

more abandoned rendering plants

than fit in the backyard of any city

worldwide might be transmitted

by skin contact, that language

found in a shopping cart

haul of copper pipes and wire

behind fire-gutted supermarkets

kept a thousand gypsy secrets

to separate us from money,

that language could have been

wind through boarded windows

insinuating dangerous ideas

into schoolchildren’s heads.

A question that had determined

its own answer wondered why

try to run away from the law

if we did nothing wrong?

A statement that wanted to help us

explained if we had nothing

to hide then we wouldn’t mind

submitting to a search or else.

The sentence if we didn’t admit

or understand our crimes

was a coin toss between this

is America and this is not America.

We had nothing to declare.

 

*

 

Steven D. Schroeder’s second book, The Royal Nonesuch (Spark Wheel Press), won the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University. His poetry is recently available in Crazyhorse, The Laurel Review, and Southern Indiana Review. He works as a creative content manager for a financial marketing agency.

 

 

Degas thought each of the dancers was a city

 

Jacobs thought her block was a company of dancers

 

the body is a kind of simple machine

 

I don’t mean your body or mine because that’s too close

 

I want a friend who stumbles over my pronoun to apologize

 

he doesn’t and my body in the room with him isn’t mine

 

that time or the next time or the time after that

 

and I can’t figure out how to say why it hurts to see him

 

I bake one large slice of cake and walk around with it

 

I keep being interrupted by people I know on the street

 

and on the trolley, near the gas station and in the park

 

and they’re all like “that’s a beautiful slice of cake”

 

it’s the width of my shoulders and I offer a bite

 

and they take one and what I want is to be alone

 

in public with this slice of lemon cake with nectarine

 

in the middle and cinnamon frosting I’m saving half

 

of it for Sophie who will meet me here but I’m

 

eating my half now and both trolleys come up

 

on either street peripheral to the park at once

 

Ian McHarg thought a mountain was a body in a city

 

Le Corbusier thought bodies were machines in the house

 

I hug all of these strangers with the cake on a plate

 

behind their back and they take a bite when it emerges

 

I hug them all and wish Sophie were here she’s better

 

at hugging and last week I cut my friend’s hair

 

and her friend’s hair who kept saying “are you finished”

 

and “this is so much better than paying for a haircut”

 

they agreed with each other that they wouldn’t shave

 

their heads because it would change how people

 

perceived them as though they have some idea

 

that must be nice or having this cake slice is like

 

walking a dog and people want to pet it I take out

 

a box of forks from my bag and people in the park

 

walk over and ask if there are nuts in it and there

 

are no nuts and they feel weird that a bite is free

 

but they want one and I hand forks to their

 

four year old and their six year old and I pet their dog

 

who licks me first in one nostril then the other

 

there’s still half left for Sophie one child says

 

to a parent “that person made a nice cake” and

 

that feels good as does the warm weather

 

and the early buds all the green and lavender

 

I’ve been anticipating and a little of it is here now

 

Reyner Banham thought streets were the private

 

drives between the public highway and your home

 

Venturi thought we could learn from a city that

 

was mostly signs and the afterthoughts of buildings

 

Francesca is my teacher who traces all the bulldozers

 

the U.S. made to form flatter battlefields in WWII

 

that came back to build flat suburbs in the Malibu

 

Hills and outside Philly and everywhere after the war

 

it’s early march and 79 degrees and across the park

 

is the statue of Dickens every February there’s

 

a dessert reception here to celebrate his birthday

 

Amy is my other teacher who thinks we can make

 

a map of where people get heart disease and where

 

and how they get groceries and show the impact

 

of what a food desert does and to whom

 

there’s a picture of my dad’s friend three years

 

before she died of pancreatic cancer in this part

 

of the park serving the trifle she was famous for

 

on Dickens’ birthday

 

and she’s smiling and hugging people

 

but not in the picture in the picture she has a spoon

 

and whip cream and layers in this amazing eleven inch

 

and deep round glass dish and I’m thinking of her

 

here like a vigil when I see Sophie and she waves

 

both arms and I wave and raise the half-slice

 

*

Davy Knittle’s poems and reviews have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Fence, Jacket2, and The Iowa Review. horse less press published his chapbook, “empathy for cars / force of july,” in 2016. He lives in Philadelphia and curates the City Planning Poetics series at the Kelly Writers House.

 

Why will I recount this for you,

fluent waitress bringing me pad

thai in the corner noodle shop?

 

How my father passed on only

empty-handed rage, having lost,

after Guadalcanal, all taste

 

for carnage, how I missed out

entirely on guns, how I see a guy

from fifty yards, in gray sweats,

 

looking like a thief about to pop

a door lock, and I trot up to find

this devout soccer dad who just

 

wants quiet as he faces east

kneeling between parked cars.

And we laugh. But if I,

 

lapsed pacifist, eluded the draft

and dodged a war, you did not.

An infant born near a firefight,

 

you could be immaterial as steam

rising from imagined broth. I long

to touch your delicate hands.

 

*

Michael Lauchlan has had poems in many publications. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from WSU Press.