On this occasion

I shore up

what good I have

to transmit you

and the masculinity necessary

to unbutton your chest.

 

No, never danced

a wall or swayed

your hips but do it

for me.

 

Yes, you’re my man

with your head on my lap

with the cold air on your nipples

with your mouth open.

 

Desire embarrasses us.

 

Diving down for sea grass

I say trying to explain

how it feels in the face

of a startling thing;

 

How when you come up for air

and wave

the clump in your hand

at the surface,

you’re both triumphant

and scared.

 

***

 

Matea Kulić‘s work (including poetry, essays and reviews) has been published in Poetry is Dead, Room, Demeter Press and The Capilano Review among others. She lives in Vancouver, BC on unceded Coast Salish Territories.

È bello ridere così, del nulla, e poi riprendere il cammino lungo uno scoglio più acuminato e solo, sul profilo di un universo che è fatto d’ombra, sfiorando braccia che sono di papavero, occhi dolci come cenere umida, dopo le braci e la pioggia. Dopo le braci del mondo incontrare il mondo, candido e netto scritto con le lettere del cielo. Il cielo è una lettera bianca la terra, la caduta del tempo, la dolce rapina infinita, una carezza che graffia la pagina rossa dei nostri toraci nudi.

 

Cammina con libri legàti con lacci di cuoio ai polpacci.

 

Raggiunge una terra che non ha nessun nome.

 

Incontra uomini appena riavuti dal pianto.

 

Bello è ridere, così, del nulla, sotto il manto del papavero, sotto la pioggia invisibile del polline umano, sotto lo sguardo mite di un impiegato alla fermata del tram, con le braccia tatuate.

 

Ha scritto sui bracci tutti i nomi dei figli e si sa che ha scalato i ripidi mari. Li

ha scalati come la formica scavalca un mucchio di pietre.

 

It’s nice to laugh like this, at nothing, then go back to walking along a steeper, lonelier cliff, along the edge of a universe made of shadow, brushing against arms made of poppies, eyes soft as humid ash, after the embers and the rain. After the embers of the world: to face the world, clear and candid, writ in letters made of sky. The sky is a white letter, the earth, the collapse of time, the sweet and infinite plundering, a caress that claws the red page of our bare chests.

 

He walks with books tied to his calves by leather straps.

 

He enters a nameless land.

 

He meets with men who’ve just regained themselves from crying.

 

Nice to laugh, like this, at nothing, under a cloak of poppies, under the invisible rain of human pollen, under the tranquil gaze of an employee at the tram stop, with tattooed arms.

 

On his arms he’s written the names of all his children, and it’s clear to all he’s scaled the towering seas. Scaled them as an ant goes up a pile of rocks.

 

***

Poet:  Lorenzo Carlucci (1976, Rome) is featured in the twelfth edition of the Quaderno di poesia contemporanea italiana (Marcos y Marcos, 2015; Notebook of Contemporary Italian Poetry), a biennial series edited by Franco Buffoni. He has published two poetry collections, La comunità assoluta (Lampi di Stampa, 2008) and Ciclo di Giuda e altre poesie (L’Arcolaio, 2008), and his third collection, Sono qui solo a scriverti e non so chi tu sia, is forthcoming from Camera Verde press. Carlucci holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Siena, a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Delaware, and is a professor of mathematical logic at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.”

Translator:  Todd Portnowitz is the author of two translations, Midnight in Spoleto by Paolo Valesio (Fomite, 2017) and Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), and the recipient of a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. A co-founder of the Italian poetry blog Formavera and the Brooklyn-based reading series Us&Them, he lives and works in New York.

 

soliloquio5

 

 

non vi è tempo alcuno che mi separi da te. il tempo, a dire il vero, non separa affatto, semmai riunisce, tieneci insieme. nessun tempo da te mi separa, me, la mia voce che nega se stessa, l’atona presenza di un uomo. nessun tempo separa quest’uomo dalle tue belle labbra di rubino. e mi fa specie uscire sempre dal negozio per una porta a vetri. e mi fa  specie la presenza leggera di quest’uomo, per le strade. mi delude la mia stessa voce, che ha breve tenore nel tempo, nel tempo che non ci separa ma ci unisce. mi delude il mio stesso cammino, la mano che sbaglia ogni volta la scelta tra lo spingere e il tirare. mi deludono il campo alto del cielo e il petto nudo in televisione. l’uscita all’aria fresca, dopo la porta a vetri, e l’atona presenza di quest’uomo, sottratto a tutte le frequenze della luce, sottratto a tutte le frequenze del suono, e dunque in movimento, e nessun tempo mi separa da te, ma questo nessuno tempo è veramente invalicabile. il respire del mio corpo in letargo ti porta le parole dal mio petto direttamente alle tue orecchie. laddove nasce Gesù, nella torsione del collo. laddove nasce Gesù, dalla verginità del tuo orecchio, appena sfiorato da una voce atonale. agone del mio stesso camminare, tra asfalto e campo alto, d’aria, invalicaible, tempo e pensiero sottratti alle frequenze

 

soliloquy5

 

 

there’s no such time that stands between us. time, in truth, never separates. if anything, it unites, holds together. no time stands between you and me—me, my voice that refutes itself, an atonal presence of a man. no time stands between this man and your beautiful ruby lips. and it’s a wonder to always be exiting through glass doors. and it’s a wonder, the faint shadow of this man, wandering the streets. my own voice lets me down. its brief tenor in time, in time that does not separate but unites. my own legs let me down, my hand that always pushes when you’re supposed to pull. the high field of the sky and bare chest on the screen let me down. the fresh air, between the glass doors, this atonal presence of a man, detached from all frequencies of light, detached from all frequencies of sound, and therefore in motion, and no time stands between us, but this no-time is truly insurmountable. the breathing of my body in hibernation carries my words straight from my chest to your ears. there where Jesus is born, in the crook of your neck. there where Jesus is born, out from the virginity of your ear, wafted by my atonal voice. the agon of my walking, between the asphalt and the high field above, of air, insurmountable, time and thought detached from all frequencies.

 

***

Poet:  Lorenzo Carlucci (1976, Rome) is featured in the twelfth edition of the Quaderno di poesia contemporanea italiana (Marcos y Marcos, 2015; Notebook of Contemporary Italian Poetry), a biennial series edited by Franco Buffoni. He has published two poetry collections, La comunità assoluta (Lampi di Stampa, 2008) and Ciclo di Giuda e altre poesie (L’Arcolaio, 2008), and his third collection, Sono qui solo a scriverti e non so chi tu sia, is forthcoming from Camera Verde press. Carlucci holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Siena, a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Delaware, and is a professor of mathematical logic at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.”

Translator:  Todd Portnowitz is the author of two translations, Midnight in Spoleto by Paolo Valesio (Fomite, 2017) and Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), and the recipient of a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. A co-founder of the Italian poetry blog Formavera and the Brooklyn-based reading series Us&Them, he lives and works in New York.

[ stazione a padova ]

 

 

troppa carta per scrivere. tu produrre. tu tenere. dei crimini, i più impuniti: i più efferati. per un giorno con chi prende la corriera tutti i giorni. dai paesi per andare a lavorare a studiare in città. sudare per mangiare e studiare per conoscere. una maledizione piena di grazia piena di rigore. codifica intenzione e cambiamento. tutte categorie assai deboli per giustificare una forma fondare un discrimine qualsiasi. nel fiato del toro, nei suoi sette mesi, nelle tonnellate piuttosto, fondiamo qualcosa, nei tre metri e mezzo a norma di legge nella norma antifumo nella norma antistupro nella norma anticrisi nello sciopero anticrisi nei mitra piuttosto negli 0 virgola 5 dell’alcool nel sangue. non nel cambiamento opposto a qualcos’altro. non nel cambiamento del vocabolario non nel lessico nuovo, nulla si fonda su questo piuttosto sulla distanza tra il carnevale e lo chador sullo stare vicini sui treni nei pullman per studiare e per lavorare. questa grande confusione i castighi i massacri le dominazioni questa grande confusione impassibile inarginabile su questa impossibilità di arginare fondare fondiamo come il maschio che trova un punto d’appoggio per la monta come la femmina l’offre e permette; la negazione della morte in un sacrificio alla morte.

 

[ bus station, padua ]

 

 

too much paper to write. you creator. you controller. of all crimes, the least punished: the most savage. for a day with those who take the bus every day. to leave the country to study to work in the city. to sweat for food and to study for knowledge. a curse filled with grace filled with discipline. codification, intention and change. all fairly weak categories with which to justify a form on which to found discrimination of any kind. but rather on a bull’s breath, on its seven months, on its tons of flesh let’s found something, on the twenty feet of distance by regulation of law on our anti-smoking regulations on our anti-rape regulations on our anti-economic crisis regulations on our strikes against crises on machine guns on our 0 point 5 blood alcohol content let’s found something. not on a change opposed to some other thing. not on a change of vocabulary not on a new slang, found nothing on this but rather on the distance between mardi gras and a burka on our pressing together on trains on busses to study to work. this great confusion punishments massacres rulerships this great uncontainable immovable confusion over this impossibility to contain to found something let’s found how a male finds a toehold to mount a female and how she offers and allows it; the negation of death with a sacrifice to death.

 

***

Poet:  Lorenzo Carlucci (1976, Rome) is featured in the twelfth edition of the Quaderno di poesia contemporanea italiana (Marcos y Marcos, 2015; Notebook of Contemporary Italian Poetry), a biennial series edited by Franco Buffoni. He has published two poetry collections, La comunità assoluta (Lampi di Stampa, 2008) and Ciclo di Giuda e altre poesie (L’Arcolaio, 2008), and his third collection, Sono qui solo a scriverti e non so chi tu sia, is forthcoming from Camera Verde press. Carlucci holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Siena, a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Delaware, and is a professor of mathematical logic at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.”

Translator:  Todd Portnowitz is the author of two translations, Midnight in Spoleto by Paolo Valesio (Fomite, 2017) and Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), and the recipient of a Raiziss/de Palchi Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. A co-founder of the Italian poetry blog Formavera and the Brooklyn-based reading series Us&Them, he lives and works in New York.

 

Your face relentlessly
blooms from cans of spray paint.
It chisels into layers of skin under

a tattoo’s needle. There are painters
who know the brush stroke of your stoicism
like muscle memory. Somewhere

in Cuba, they have your severed hands.
I wonder who cares for them, if a man
somewhere visits them, a secret

pilgrimage, if he falls to his knees
and asks for your blessing. Somehow,
ideas survive beyond the wars they lost,

even the worst of ideas attack
like a virus, and the best ideas
knock the wind out of us and demand

we pray amidst our ruins. You come to me
in my dreams sometimes, handing
me a cigar and battle fatigues

and I ask you which will kill me first:
my vices or my love for this world.
You answer, Every love is a vice,

and your hands vanish as your wrists
turn into a fistless stigmata. Mythologies
have always had the power to jolt up a spine

and split a body in half, the way theories
flash in a head like trapped fireflies
that can only glimmer in darkness

but can’t light a single room.
Che, I live in an empire
that will never repent.

I worship fire
as if only ash can purify.
Your face hangs over me, death mask

turned to emblem, doomed
prophecy of the idealist, disembodied
insignia of our paralyzed mutiny.

 

***

 

Anne Champion is the author of The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017).  Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Crab Orchard Review, Epiphany Magazine, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, New South, and elsewhere.  She was an 2009 Academy of American Poet’s Prize recipient, a Barbara Deming Memorial grant recipient, a 2015 Best of the Net winner, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She holds degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and an MFA in Poetry from Emerson College.  She currently teaches writing and literature at Wheelock College in Boston, MA.

Do not pray into the ears of men
who will turn your prayers into protein

to feed the beasts that will turn you into prey.
Cower from anything that reaches for you

with only one hand, as their other hand is free
for thievery. Beware the white women

that believe that bombs are progressive
if a white woman drops them.

If a white woman says the word rescue
when referring to women of color, suspect

that she’s injecting supremacy in her veins, nodding off.
Shun the ones who pulpiteer on human rights

but never mention Gaza, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico.
Pour ink over history books written

by conquerers. Allow the enslaved to be your healing
masters. If a politician refers to a female body

as sacred because it bears male bodies
and has relationships with men, claw out

your womb until they can see you without it.
If your tongue is monitored like an immigrant

stalked by aerial drones when crossing the border,
if they keep shipping it back to the pain your voice

is attempting to liberate, if they don’t understand
that solidarity translates to compassion,

that radical is defined as sprained out of slumber,
that every empire is a soil irrigated with blood,

then take an ax to every gear you find, until
they stop churning bodies to the beat of time.

***

 

Anne Champion is the author of The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Reluctant Mistress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), and The Dark Length Home (Noctuary Press, 2017).  Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Crab Orchard Review, Epiphany Magazine, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, New South, and elsewhere.  She was an 2009 Academy of American Poet’s Prize recipient, a Barbara Deming Memorial grant recipient, a 2015 Best of the Net winner, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She holds degrees in Behavioral Psychology and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and an MFA in Poetry from Emerson College.  She currently teaches writing and literature at Wheelock College in Boston, MA.

It all starts with a mirror. It starts
with a gap between whatever there
is there and how that there appears
and it starts when the mirror
is everywhere and still nowhere
a there. You got a mouth on you
for a mirror. So what? I just came here
to play yacht tennis and glow orange,
and it looks like yacht tennis
has been postponed indefinitely
I don’t know why, get ready
motherfuckers! how about this glow,
right?! I just came here to remind you
I separated two brains with a knife
and I can’t believe the hailing
ever stopped reflecting off my cutlery
and now I can barely stay awake
long enough to ask where I am
but America, would it be so bad
if I came to in the highest office
in the land? I can separate all
your brains, one from another,
America. Are you even yourself
anymore, America? Who’s asking?
Shut up, you stupid blond mirror.
I still have a knife, America,
is what I’m saying. I look great in it.
I am a goober who wants to lick
your heart, your heart’s a tub
of Valentine’s Day candy, mine
mine mine mine mine, right?
This is the highest student council seat
in the world and it’s treasurer,
I get to go to the fountain any time
I want, only the fountain founts
money, mine only kind of roughage.
This is the highest student council seat
in the world and it’s secretary
who gets to tell everyone else
what to do, and I’m like
finally. I want everyone singing
Pete Seeger’s kind of rolling stone, hey
you, kids! Get on to
my lawn! especially those
who’ve never had a lawn to be on
before. I remember the last century
and I want to die punching
at its corroded, obsolete armor until
I punch light into my dying face.
Very presidential. The now guy said
he’d take a scalpel to government waste
but I will literally take a literal scalpel
to the literal brain of the literal government
as soon as a literal someone tells me
where that is. I will weaponize myself
in order to disappoint you for years
but shush, it’s the time of the day
I devote to piling brick on brick on brick
like a form of acceptable wall.
More like single prayer healthcare, right?
I say a lot of things, and after that
I say a lot more things. I think
very few things, and even fewer things
I don’t say. I don’t know, it sure sounds
like I think it’s true, doesn’t it?
In the end, doesn’t it come
to the same thing: killing those
who get between you and your mirrors
and punishing their bloodlines
for generations? You think you want me
to apologize but you really want me
to splinter this mirror into shanks
to bury in whatever you’re afraid of.
Blow really hard, bellow like a giant bellows
stoking the dumbest fire and you shall
propel me, O citizen who has been
strip-mined and waits to be sold
for scrap. You will have moments
where you gulp back what feels like a civics
textbook, but by then I’ll be smeared
across a stage, a smugness generously umbered
all over a confirmation. “Do you sweat
on the bible” the wax penguin will say
and I will say “I do, I really do, I sweat
on the swear that is the gutted swan
that is the bible. Now swing that gavel,
penguin, and let’s see
what we can get up to.”

 

• 5.10.16

 

***

 

Marc McKee is the author of five collections of poetry: What Apocalypse? (New Michigan Press, 2008); Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011); Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014); Consolationeer (Black Lawrence Press, 2017); and Meta Meta Make-Belief, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2019. Recent poems appear in Rockhurst Review, The Laurel Review, Copper Nickel, Memorious, Southern Indiana Review, and are forthcoming from Bennington Review, Inter|rupture, Los Angeles Review, and The Offending Adam. He teaches at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray, and their son, Harold.

Don’t you love it when they walk toward you,
looking up into the museum’s surprises?

Don’t you love it when a flipped vehicle
is a particular cleverness suspended in a gallery

that worries over you, a tape recorder
on its inverted ceiling playing a language

you don’t know, accompanied by unfamiliar
instruments somehow still reassuring?

Your favorite pronoun walks toward you
in a fine jacket held onto with fine hands

level with a fine, nervously-protected sternum,
the glass doors poised to swing closed

behind them.  In the movie this makes
they may be a different one every time—

each exerts an awful pull.  You see the car
in their wake, it remains upside down

but seems less still, you can almost
taste smoke.  This must be

what it’s like to be a soft, wet puppet
waking into lightning.

You can tell as the glass doors fall
back towards the building

that smeared across them
are the reflections of clouds

but you cannot untaste the smoke.
And as your one, whose one you are,

sets out across the impossibly green lawn
to meet you, you cannot put your finger on

some elusive remainder, whose failure
to appear / almost gently

saps all color and light from the scene.

 

***

Marc McKee is the author of five collections of poetry: What Apocalypse? (New Michigan Press, 2008); Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011); Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014); Consolationeer (Black Lawrence Press, 2017); and Meta Meta Make-Belief, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2019. Recent poems appear in Rockhurst Review, The Laurel Review, Copper Nickel, Memorious, Southern Indiana Review, and are forthcoming from Bennington Review, Inter|rupture, Los Angeles Review, and The Offending Adam. He teaches at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray, and their son, Harold.

— after Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Some thing erupts or bucks, goes rogue, cuts
ties, ouch ouch, now may I pet you,
doomed puck cooling in the chest.  But nothing
ever ends. A little cold comes
and collects what you’ve got left,
one family or two begins to weep
or dry up drier than a piece of paper
nailed to a post in a desert, drought inside
and out—Each is hidden from the other,
plain sight is a terrible lie.  We describe a life
by its punctuation but we never know
end stop never know other side, echo fading
corroborates our suspicion re: symbol, re: metaphor,
re: hope: it must end to mean.  It’s the yoke
on the gush that gives us our excitements
plus threatens our entertainments with dissolve,
dissolve, how about that, detective?  Being ended,
does it endure? And how?  Just now
the children next door swell into
the squeaks and cries that are their music,
the lofty and awkward desires
just becoming acquainted
with all of gravity’s hair-trigger trapdoors.  Life
is not a fairy tale, the fairy tale is what’s left
after life is gone and the story’s a story
of shadows only and if you believe that
suddenly a need’s seeded in some remote earth
for the next new fairy tale.  Make the noise stop
or make the stops in the noise carry the caterwaul
into music.  Let us be big fucking deals
on this dance floor even as the men are executed
one after the other.  Today one died.
One died today in one place
and another man died in another place,
the subtraction dressed as addition
doesn’t stop, won’t stop there.  Some thing
shuts off, turns traitor, catches fire
inside this costume.  This needs more salt.
Today a man was put to death.  And another man
was put to death.  Who doesn’t want to play
poker and get buried for whole seconds
in the mists sheared off the surf. Who doesn’t
want to swaddle oneself in the soft blanket.  We are
in the business of being and the business
of ending other being.  Let’s make that latter
business a cape we sink in the wet salt of the ocean,
a ladder business carrying us up, the surfboards
of our enemies are better than business let’s
drought its as usual let’s do it now. Let’s yesterday
do that, let’s do in any case some not
gruesome like now. Right now
yesterday in the light the children
say “No, no, we are robots” and the children say
“I know we are” and the children say
“We’ve got the guns.  We kill the bad guys.
We are the robots”—that old song.
One who is shuffled off had to live with
igniting the internal combustion engine
which propels a truck which drags
a screaming man into mess, into less.  He asks
for a feast fit for seven, does not touch a bite.
Otherwise he is unrepentant.
He had no problem living with having driven
a dragged man painfully into nothing.
He had no problem living
with having driven a dragged man
painfully into nothing. And how, I ask, and how
I curse.  One other made to shuffle—I don’t know
what he ate, I don’t know that he was ever asked
what he wanted. I don’t know how to tell
your parents, and mine, about this world
they are trying to wash off their suitcases.
And now another child
in another corner says “Come down
Come down,” and nothing just collapses
and/or catches fire. Again,
the child says “Come down Come down”
and I get it, like God’s a kitten up a tree.
Who won’t come down,
or doesn’t know how,
and won’t be shown.

 

***

Marc McKee is the author of five collections of poetry: What Apocalypse? (New Michigan Press, 2008); Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011); Bewilderness (Black Lawrence Press, 2014); Consolationeer (Black Lawrence Press, 2017); and Meta Meta Make-Belief, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2019. Recent poems appear in Rockhurst Review, The Laurel Review, Copper Nickel, Memorious, Southern Indiana Review, and are forthcoming from Bennington Review, Inter|rupture, Los Angeles Review, and The Offending Adam. He teaches at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray, and their son, Harold.

 

 

After Glenn Gould

 

If you will take off your hat and stay awhile
I will explain that there is something

fundamentally satisfying about a long period
of silence, followed by the intake of breath

as if, when the soul is present at the moment
of birth, waiting to slip into the body

the possibilities branch like antlers, hands
for to be in possession of a body, if only

for a short amount of time is to be satisfied
that the barrier of skin is both an insufficient

boundary between the blood and the air
as well as an insurmountable obstacle

and for one beat the idea of heaven appeals
and the next it seems a sacrifice of vitality

which is another way of saying the left hand
doesn’t know what the right hand is up to

and looking up holds no answers but we keep
on looking as if we could divine something

from the clouds today: how like fingers pushing
down upon the sky as if searching for a pulse.

 

***

 

Emily Saland received her MFA from George Mason University, where she was the Heritage Writing Fellow and Editor of Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art.  Her poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, The Seneca Review, Radar Online, and elsewhere.  She works and teaches at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, NY.