If my life were an orchestra, what instrument would I be today (?), asked a good man across miles and miles and miles…

…a piccolo or violin, though musically ephemeral,
depends on the rest of the orchestra the way
drums don’t. Kettle drums, snare drums, a whole caboodle of them.
Crude, but bold on their own,
the drums set foundations for the rest of the orchestra
to skirt around - they’re necessary, complementary, and
without them the orchestra would still function, nobody would point out
what's missing, though
the music may fall apart.

(notapoem, a pome, maybe)

#4

The Poets
j vogel

I get all my emotions secondhand anyway, I told them at the reading, buy
my tears from the used bookshop down the block, pickpocket
movie stars for my sniffles. Then I told them to shove it, to feel something
fresher than what I thought they’d pumped out of me.
Told them how I’d even painted my dime-store squirt gun a steely
black, held it to a homeless man’s head,
said give me your hunger—give it to me now. Told them how he
just shivered a little and didn’t do much of anything
so I shot him and he handed me his eyeglasses.
I put them on and walked away into the blur without
saying thank you.
But it was all too much for me I guess and I walked into a streetlamp.
The homeless man heard my eyeglasses break into seven
different pieces, one for each day of the week and he laughed at me.
Then I started shivering and couldn’t stop, so at the poetry
reading when I told them to cut the shit, the poets
just laughed. My friend’s watch had just stopped, the one his grandmother
had given him just before she died, before she tripped and fell over a pair
of broken eye glasses and hit her head in the street, bled out
beneath a streetlamp. So I lifted the watch from him and it brought
some tears to my eye but the poets,
the poets just kept laughing and handed me a cup of soup, something brown
with little carrot circles drowning in it. I wanted to be
one of those carrot pieces and I was about to drink it when they told me
to give it to the homeless man outside the building.
He’s blind, the poets said, the carrots might be good for him.
I took it downstairs and drank it as fast as I could. It burned my throat.
Then I took off all my clothes and tried to find that homeless man, tell him,
here, I am a carrot, maybe I can help. But by then I was
blind and couldn’t find my way out of the building.

March18poem: Horseshow

The rosettes are they
angry at me? That red.
And the horse pays no heed,
what the hell does he care he’s ferrying
the anger of my soul on his back.


_r

Nothing.

Sitting in rooms of poets on
a Monday night reminds me that I
am a low brow sit-com,
in danger of cancellation.

The booming echo of words
crystalizes in my ears. They tell me
of interludes;
how it feels to kiss a dying woman,
to stand on bridges and contemplate the fall,
to love so hard it bleeds.

After the open mic is closed,
they will go home and crash
into other bodies, nurse their habits,
and become so full they burst like overripe
tomatoes.

I will go home to switch on Gilmore Girls
and watch my breath dry over my teeth,
shared with nothing.

-adam

#3

Dearest, Variations on a Theme by L. Cohen
j. vogel

Your toothbrush is still there where you left it
the last time you were here –
so I don’t have to remember, you said.
That was when my corner of Queens
still has some leaves. And the kitchen still
looks the same – only colder now.
And I’m writing this letter because I know
it’s worse for you now and I’m wondering
if we’ll live to see spring. I suppose we won’t.

The night you left looked like Christmas
with your green hands and red eyes.
Your hair was so dark that night.
I saw how heavy your braid was, tugging
at your scalp. And I can’t even imagine you
light like a star, when we used to drive
with all the windows down.

I hear that some old friends of yours are talking.
I hear they’re laughing that you’re
with a woman. They aren’t laughing
at me. Have you told her you love her yet? Do you
love her yet? I never know what to say
when you call – the silence lasts hours and I hate
for you to hear me cry.
Have you told her you love her yet? I don’t think
I forgive you yet.

March11poem: Song

variations on a previous theme

Bring me
more to fill the channel between
my thighs that extends empty from here
to my breastbone, through the spasmodic pit
of my stomach – the drying sinew of
my hollow ribcage is thirsting
for something I look for
in books - I fill it
with ravenous intake of blades, and flesh
ripped salt-flecked and raw
from white bones of bathers, the pink meat of
prostitutes, butchers, madmen, and sleepers.
I am sucking on daemon birds baked four and
twenty into shapes shy, drooping,
unseen, and still I’m
dissatisfied. No more, bring me
touch – my belly is distended
painfully. Bring me
the all-American sod that diffused my bard-
I shall bury myself in it, naked, mad to be
In contact with it and
weeping for the want of exhalation.

Boys

for Jeff and Johnny

Men don’t learn
from their monsters.
They are content
to laugh and cheer
at the moment
of lethal injection,
to burn his paintings
in Naperville,
and to rejoice when
heads are battered in
with preacher bars
on the weight room
floor.

What of the boys?
Lying tight in their beds
as echoing booms
of vocal chords crash
slurred and rageful
through the floorboards.
They don’t wake up
in the morning
for fear of father
beating the fag out of them,
or else, their impacted
skull clots have
kept them concussed
where the swing
board hit them.

-Adam Parrow

Lent Poem # 4: Special Friend

by Adam Parrow
(found poetry from a spam Email)

The glow spoke,
hinting that
doors grew locks.
“My hands are as
toads coaching
tender fruit.”
The next week,
I saw him write
the addresses of
his young students.
A hot sick crush
not seven days
before I’d wish
to pay the DCF
a visit.

On Being Led Down The Foreign Language Hallway at 3 am.

I dreamt last night I hi-fived my high school latin teacher.
He smiled and conjugated the plurals of agricola in the nominative,
then asked me to leave.
So I walked out the paper mache door jamb, which transformed
into a statue of Caesar Augustus once my back was to it.
He pointed down the hall, walled by ivy with veins thicker than leaves.
I shuffled two and a half lengths, like I was told, and the ceiling tiles
fell in, blasting into gray powder as they hit the floor around me.
So I snaked around the wreckage and looked back. He was still pointing,
now at a clock beside me, with hands of black construction paper and a face of vanilla yogurt.
Then it beeped and I sat up.




-brendan

March5poem: Story

for simon

Three-pronged crown and a girl with
a coke addiction for his birthday – they put
every card on the table
and, if he’d cared to continue the metaphor he’ve said –
too many jokers, but he didn’t and
he held his heart to her back and
felt his breath breathe back at him
as it grew hot, and faded
with the rise
and fall
of her breathing and he
wore the crown, because
he'd forgotten
to take it off.

Rae

March4poem: Drinks with Friends

for Malinda

Talking about who we are roadtripping through ourselves to reach – the strain
of bacterial me that’s multiplying away from here with its mutations and
circadian rhythms – she said her who was some older man that never loved her back.
I said my who was the face I’ll have when the world is ended, once I’ve known
everything. Then
we hoovered some more and continued.
Taking about why we are roadtripping through ourselves – why not? It seems we all have
an inescapable compulsion for self-internalisation: one of these days
we’ll infold ourselves – anus over esophagus and vice versa – into a cherrypie mess.
Then it’ll be the worms roadtripping through us. Just to get to the other side.

-Rae x

Daisies

We sit and we talk just like we used to
About insignificant things that never matter
in the grand scheme of things,
Like my neighbor’s blaring techno music that I ask her to turn down, politely, almost every single night,
Or about the fact that the eating disorder clinic in Seattle
Is located, ironically, in the “whale” building,
(A fact that didn’t make the receptionist smile, despite my best comedic efforts,)
But the entire time I talk to you I get this feeling
That you aren’t telling me everything and I want to ask you but I can’t ask you
About your small and fragile body – your cheek bones, rib bones, collar bones, elbows, so empty and ravaged by this disorder, so wrecked by these months, years, of strange and subtle neglect, that they are sharp enough to slice through our misconceptions and take us to that bizarre and unbelievable
Truth:
You are ill
And you need me to talk to you to take your mind outside of this place for a while
So I talk: about Gatsby, our bright blue beta fish, and my red umbrella with the polka dots and frills that makes me feel like I’m eight years old again, and the daisies in our yard that we never thought would grow – and you smile and you giggle and then you laugh and when I leave you seem
A little better; and I relax a little bit,
And it dawns on me that all I can do is talk to you and tell you things that maybe actually are
Significant, after all.
-Anna

Nove

The top sheet felt of whipped egg whites,
right before the sugar is added;
something to give up.
The sunrise hit the wood floor especially sensual,
running over
the grain, smooth and orange.
It took a few hours
for it to rest on your pillow--
still warm,
even though you’ve been in the shower
twelve minutes now.

I won’t look for my car keys yet;
I’ll need an excuse not to leave
the room while you are getting dressed.

~

The steering wheel has never been
colder, and I am without gloves again.
You know of my forgetfulness
around you.
On my return I cannot turn on the stereo,
as the kiss you placed
on my bottom lip

is loud enough to last
until next Thursday.



-brendan

Anticlimactic

I write a letter to an
ex-lover who seems to stay
behind the times on who’s
let who go. And I write to him
and call him several names
I wouldn’t call my mother
or my father,
names that would never come out
of Mother Theresa’s lips and when
I’m done, I crumple it up and
think about burning it
or eating it, but my fury is
tasteless and dry on paper.
-anna

February26poem: But You Took It

I said, please don’t take both the red
and the blue blood
from my veins – I need
at least one of them. Maybe –
We can share? But she took
both and just dropped me on
the verge between
the school we go to, and
her backyard.

-Rae

Lent Poem # 3: Sexless Wonderland

by Adam Parrow

To fall down a hole
filled with cuckoo clocks and
used bits of brick-a-brack,
I have fallen so far
behind.

The doormouse isn’t home
and his teacups lay
used and dirty in the sink.
I wash them for him.

What of the hatter
so mad he ran screaming
stark naked
among the slithy toves?
Did he remember to
leave me his itinerary?

I have been trimmed and
boiled. My manhood
is a mock turtle,
crying to be spared,
but tiny turtle voices don’t carry.
The clock tick tocks on

and I have always empathized
with white rabbits. They, running
they, late. All
bramble knees and thump thump

Thump of my ventricle,
hollow echo of my ear,
In the pin pricks of my finger
tip, and the flaccid hunch of
my back. Thump thump thud.

Of Lanterns & Lighthouses

Here’s to the body that folds
and fumbles. Here’s to the cock
you weren’t born with. Here’s
to flammable nightgowns.

It’s got to do with the hard-to-find
postcards that make a place look
as dirty as it is. The unswept pile
of glass you were always
stepping around.

Here’s to the moment
you hauled your breath up
from prostration, like a suitcase
of air, and became
a bright red sail.


jade

March3poem: I was patient with it, Dad.

I was patient with it, Dad, I was
Patient with the computer, the way you
Used to say, just be patient with it when I was
Younger because it’d strike the keys and flick
The powerswitch on and off, I managed it, I was
Patient with it Dad, and it came back to me, it
Came back to me, Dad.

-Rae

March2Poem: Goodbye Dad, until next season.

Riding there – yellow of cab and smell
Of dusty upholstery trapping
Motes of ash and skin and citydirt – we sat
Silent. Talking through our sameness. Needn’t mention
The view. He’ll be thinking
The same as I.

Riding back – yellow of straining moon
And smell of wet grease and sponges
Over nostrils – I was in the minutes between
The first drop off and classroom where you fight
The effort to cry because it’s
Unseemly.

Arrived home – floor stopping my shoulders
Bouncing, nose painfully propping my pink face up:
the floorboards are so close the
tears splash back
into their own ducts to be cried again – this could be
Neverending.


-Rae

March1Poem: Home (abecedarian)

Home

Is birdhouses and broken
bird bodies buried carefully - coddled
between bulbs of clematis and daffodil,
shoe-boxed, decaying and eaten by the earth-
worms and the fungi.
See the feet and faces of the garden’s firs, see them
borrow the carbons and
proteins from broken
bird bodies - and become
bird, featherless, glideless,
hushed, infinitely useful, jade-leafed
half-bird moleculed, chimerally skinned,
feathered infinitesimally between bark-cell and
bark-cell, and inside, the soft stringy wood and soft
stringy heart muscle is kin, beating, mollified by quietude
into slow mumphs, numb throbs.


-Rae

Make Me

(Found lines are from "Othello", Joni Mitchell, and Tanith Lee)

It is the cause.

It is the cause, my soul. It is

the cause.

Let me not name it to you

O God,

who makes of me a bird.

The fire saint, She

makes the fire

burn.

It is saint fire.

O God make me a stone

so that I might not

burn.

It is the cause.

Please. O

God make me…

the fire saint, O

it is the cause.

She makes the fire burn.

Saint Fire, O

a stone make me O

fire saint, let me not name it

to you, O

make the fire burn,

my soul. A bird—

Please

O God, make me a bird of stone so I won’t burn. It is the cause, my soul. It is

the cause.

~Jess D.

Someone Please Name This No

Sometimes the feeling lingers.
The sneaking suspicion that everyone knows
I’m a poet.

On the street, people walk without slowing.
The crowds surround but never kiss.
Women don’t stop to love me.

On the bus, no one wants the adjacent seat.
Reaching Boston, nothing holds my hand.
I’m too ugly even for Boston.

Above, the sun is awkward and on its way out.
Children pretend everything is all right; fool around.
Pigeons only eat crumbs if I throw them.

I can feel myself flaking.
Every night I wait for a limb to abandon me.
Every morning, the same thoughts huddle in the sheets.

Poetry is leprosy.
Loneliness is waking
and knowing where you are.

Cafe

A dangerous delirium:
Her mouth mere inches from mine,
Smell of lilies hanging
On the delicate ridges of her collarbone.
She inhales,
And when she exhales,
The smell of smoke taints her breath.

Rising to leave,
I stumble,
Lightheaded.
Her hands catch me, lingering on my waist
A few seconds longer than necessary.

Even as she lets go,
My body holds on to the feeling.
Phantom hands
That capture me
Willingly.

-anna

February25poem: Not Waving

You see
That side-to
Side
Movement I’ve been
jerking, that
Seaweed in eddies, buffeted
Dogwood, thrashing of arms Side-
To-side twisting of my trunk with
shoulders above my ears – It’s not
waving – it’s
god help me,
It’s - take notice, it’s -
I’ve made blood happen in the bathtub -
It’s - I’m clawing -
It’s - I’ve sunk into the bile pit
Of my own stomach, I’m bogged in crude
Oil like an egret,
The feathers are slick - I’m
sliding

-Rae