A Voyante Must Cultivate Warts On His Face

The more you love humanity the more you loathe humans individually. That's what the thorny poet said, anyways. Each time you touch warm lips another word sucks from your vocabulary, a thought dissolves at your throat. The leaves with poison ivy shiver. Should we stop fishing for sacrifices? Leave the nails for wood? Stop showing our bloody palms to the fortune teller just so she can tell us every great idea has a jesus figure? The future cheapens when you try to calculate it, a moment broken into a tumult of minutes, numbers that numb an experience. The smashed telephone still rings. We can’t make a decision but we can’t stay in bed. The water running across your desk reaches for a shape and the window waits for a baseball to break it into pieces.

Corey

Gist and marrow

Have you been led away from your innermost kernel, the center
where everything sticks? The same has made me
sick: turning round and round to see the blind
ginger knot getting smaller behind me.

I have, on occasion, hi-jacked my way back, gone
plunk into the dark of my own stomach, and come up
with nerve-tangled hands.

So few empathize when you go after
the sacred channel and come up
looking like you’ve been
fucking a plate of spaghetti.



jade

#2

Michael
joanna vogel

The child’s head was more round than the cantaloupe but it looked alright, a little dented in some places, but children’s heads are apt to be a little dented sometimes. And I hot-glued some of those spiral macaronis to it to make it look like real hair only, I got to feeling a little peckish the next afternoon and picked most of them off. This made Michael look quite a bit more like a sickly infant than the almost-toddler that he was. At any rate, the cantaloupe started to rot a little after the first few weeks and I no longer felt comfortable bringing him out and about in the stroller after that. Now I’ve laid him down and sit next to his crib all day; my fingers are always crossed that he’ll take a turn for the better soon. I watch his head and it just keeps shriveling smaller and smaller, but the strange smell that’s been floating up from under the floorboards ever since I brought him home has finally all but gone and I’m hoping that when it has gone, Michael will be abe to breath a little easier.

Today, A Salvadorian Asked Me Out to Dinner, He Did, It was Sad, I've Never Been Out to Dinner

The skyscape is made of ellipticals
in my head. Calling all lips:
words are stunned.
My new shell. I feel horizontal
for being stupid. What am I
tangled in? Lent.

Roberto, Corey, Shauna

Lent Poem #1

Variations on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop
joanna vogel

The art of losing isn’t hard to master, only
it is hard – keys and continents
notwithstanding, the spaces left vacant are
firm as bodies, like cement or frozen
chewing gum and I wake each morning with hip-
bone shaped bruises and bits of blood
dripping from fresh scars in the shapes
of teeth and fingernails which I’ve bumped
into during the night-walks. My hands
outstretched, I drop each thorn
that sticks.

Unfold the Menu

In California, moist fish hooks are a rare delicacy.
The other day a man lost his daughter to a halibut.
I laughed with a belly full of cotton
as her pale heels slipped underneath:
boiled potatoes snagged by a sturgeon

The Fisher King thinks his fragments
are puzzle pieces. Each piece a gourmet slab.
The daughters scan the surface,
pick out the darker oceans for feeding.
This piece means a toenail-extension,
means a jittering reality. This piece means
certain destuction and is written in Byzantium heiroglyphics,
thought lost by some. These people are called Liars
and can light only cowardly flames.

Feeling our heels sinking in quicksand
can only be appreciated by those
who hoped to breathe their whole lives.



--Corey, Roberto, & Carlo Rossi

Lent Poem #2: Plagued

by Adam Parrow

Did you know that sunken treasures of
chipped sea glass aren’t visible through a sea of red?

Did you know that band-aids swim in a filling sink like
smooth skinned creatures that rose to plague you?

Did you know that your requests bit at
my face and my ears with buzzing wild fury?

Did you know that gin-drenched heads float on
swarming stings which fly them out the open door?

Did you know that a promise dies on contact when
it is met with remembrances of your lies, which consume it?

Did you know that blood bubbled and boiled inside
my veins as I squeezed my finger to let more of it fester and flow?

Did you know that the dull thump of a heartbeat falls heavy with
aches in my brain, hailing down on my broken crown?

Did you know that the empty boxes were left for
memorials of the ravenous devouring of their fruits?

Did you know that shoelaces act as
treacherous thrushes in the milky dark these nights?

Did you know I wrote on your wall in blood to
protect you like little lambs lost in the night-time silence?

No, you don’t know, because I scrubbed the wall clean,
and when you tell me that you are ok, I try to believe the decree,
through you’ve proven yourself a liar.

Crashing sounds

Like babes sedated on carousels with mousetraps in our hair, we watched the tide

ascend the bathroom wall, and fell over laughing. Fold of rug-burned thumbs

behind the knees, we slid to the bumpy bottom - to where paper cranes sink

like tapioca pearls, and our enamels ache like the arctic.

jade

40 Poems?

I barely have time to

breathe

so what's

the use

in 

poetry?

-Michael Lawrence

February24poem: Life Without Substance

Skin will drop off my bones

Like hot chicken off wing-

bones if

I move to quickly or fail

to tense my muscles against it but

the muscles are falling too – their tendons

Are like the tendons of mummies. I could be

made of ash, but it all feels more of a slip,

than a crumble.

Sand stilting the pendulum motion of my knees, the cockle

of my ankle. See the scalloped edges of my tongue

where I’ve bitten it. The cold the cold the 

cold in my platelets shivers vibrations

through my capillaries so they wiggle like hydra, but

my head is a furnace, threatening

to melt the metal vice clamped there.

 

When I read the pamphlets the faces suggested clarity.

The blues and greens and elegant type suggested

Rebirth. But, I am re-experiencing the days of dazes and

Dozing off in parks, and

Not being able to crawl out of bed for chapstick

When my bottom lip stuck to the top one and they tore

When I jammed a cigarette between them, and

that time I fell asleep in the bath and woke

With bruises where the ceramic had stopped me falling through the floor.

-Rae Victoria Stevenson

No One Gave Up

We all stood around and watched the bum try to hang himself. He was unremarkable—average bum height, average bum face—but was making a show of it. He sobbed loudly while tying newspapers together into a make-shift suicide; looped it around the head of a streetlamp and his own; stood shaking on a garbage can. The man to my right talked to himself: “No. No. No. They’re much too soggy for that. It won’t hold”. There was a brief sense of anticipated disappointment. The bum shouted: “Just know the world never fell on me. It was I who fell on the world!” He kicked the can from underneath and crashed into the pavement. The crowd surged forward, all apologies and pats-on-the-back. I heard a woman comfort him: “Are you ok for a second try? Maybe you should rest a while." Others attempted to re-tie the papers together. I felt sick. I reached into my wallet and left three dollars at the body: “For rope.”

Lent Poem #1: The Difference a Fingertip Makes

by Adam Parrow

I saw disillusionment

standing today

on the corner of 

Lip Hair and Thumb.

Though I nary had known

its grotesque and its gloom

my eye-skin was

already numb.

It lay there, just waiting,

grinning and cruel.

Above it a brow

so proud and so strong,

beneath it a jawline

well chiseled and coiffed, 

with some hair, not too

short nor too long.

Some eyes, autumn gold

and high cheek bones of stone,

with a wolfish boy-grin 

down below,

and an arm

tendons flexing to

move all the bones,

strained fingers 

to bed and to bow.

The hand, once so 

powerful, regal, and rough

was so dainty and

delicate then.

Dug deep to the knuckle

in the handsomest nose,

I would never see

handsome again. 

Signifying nothing

(linebreaks don't work) This is a drunken free write, so my sweet countrymen-judge tenderly of me!

It was tradition at first sight.
Your mom squeezed your nose tight
and shoved teeth in your mouth.
She said freedom of speech
will only chip another tooth.
Don’t lose your thoughts though
If you bend a straightline into a circle
then it will never end.
Or begin.

And what of lent?
I heard the chainsmoker quit coughing,
the phone booths quit ringing,
the widow at the window
stopped looking at other men,
the ghost stomached his significance
and gave up yelling,
stairs caved in,
the idiot who slept on a hammock,
slipped a note under his pillow
and gave up.
Curtains clinked closed.

Corey Barracato