Key Adventure
Found a tiny key
Atop my wardrobe
Tried to fit it
In every lock
Inside my apartment
And then in my building
The basement
The eerie
Possibilities
Circling through
My head
The wondrous
Mystery
Overwhelming
Until
I typed in
The model inscription
Into that search engine
Revealing
It was for
A rotary phone
Then I
Went back to
Watching TV
Liz Nico
JIM DAVIS is an MFA candidate at Northwestern University, the editor of North Chicago Review, an award-winning poet & painter, a teacher, coach, public speaker, and an international semi-professional football player. jimdavispoetry.com
Once
Every fifteenth finger of Wild Turkey shoots
Time in the heart.
I am 23, no, 24, ridding myself of fish tacos and whiskey and I
Think of you, blindly, eyes wretched shut, think
Of drawing lace curtain across a window’s breath,
You and the smooth brine of ocean air, forgetting.
I use my sleeve to wipe my chin, hail a taxi, spill in and
Throw my phone out the window, where it floats
Up into the blue fading desires of night; pulverized by dawn.
Twice
Every finger-thick link in the chain mirrors
Time in the worst way: locked and fated: if only
I were a birthday cake delivered to a prison…
Think of the chisels I could hide!
Of the afterlife, I wonder, the fraternity of old souls –
You never stumble through equivocation –
I struggle with chisels, sugar-frosted and clumsy, I
Throw my hands in the air. Breathe easy. There are moments
Up here in the hill-tower when I’d rather sit than fall.
*note: this poem is part of a project of acrostic variations, wherein the spine of a poem is created through words, not letters, referencing advertisements, idiom, and other poems. In this case (Every time I think of you I Throw Up) is from an overheard subway cell-phone conversation.
The Best Poem I Have Ever Written
Each morning, well, on the mornings I wake
in time to find the dawn beginning to beat
the mild rhythm of early summer, I read and take notes
and read and finally write what is, daily, the best poem I have
ever written. Sound of snoring for the other room. The dog
is lying in a patch of sun and I am tired of writing
about her death before she has died. I will lie
next to her, later, once I’ve written the best poem I have
ever written, she’s the only one whom I can nuzzle up to
with a combination of coffee and morning breath. There is struggle
on days like today, to leave the Canada goose figurine
standing proud beneath the side table – where a photograph
of my grandmother touching the shoulder of her mother
in the only manner those chubby digits would have been able, gently
yellows in its frame – unacknowledged, that goose who was hers,
saved from the vacation home on a Wisconsin lake, before it was sold
and remodeled into, so I’ve been told, something worse – not quite
what we were used to. And it’s possible, of course, that although
winds have spread umbrellas of dandelion seed to the ends of the yard,
that this is not the best poem ever written, but the best poem I have
to tell. Anything that crosses my path in growing warmth is worthy:
the flowering tree surrendering to standard green, thickening
with the season, the shudder of a mockingbird bathing in dust,
and that Canada goose, without whom this would be a poem
like any other – carved of heavy black walnut, hand painted,
every feather featuring the added texture of wood grain,
the downturned tail, the shut beak, and that long, ringable neck –
which belonged to my grandmother. I wonder if she,
in her yellowing pose, was asked to place her tiny hand
upon her mother’s shoulder, or if the human grace within
drew its tender handle on the moment. It’s not the same grace
which led her to serve the public, donate a lifetime
in schools of the blind, or find herself, on similar mornings
writing reflections in the margins of French-impressionist texts.
No, it’s far simpler than that – closer, perhaps, to the impulse
of a man with a chisel and brush, to create. Wonder of a child,
a touch, and the slight upturned corner of a smile just like mine.
Jim Davis
Molly Caven
An alumnus of Colgate University, Key is currently working at an environmental consulting firm in Baltimore, Maryland. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Full of Crow, Eunoia Review, and Sleet Magazine.
News Feed (Internet Death)
Pretty sure my dishwater is broken again
Does anyone know where I can get one cheap?
What does it sound like?
Do the plates clash around or do they fill
With rotting fluids?
Maybe run it on one cycle after all
Famar Volat. I think.
Sorority sisters take vacations
And I am very excited to see Ford again, alone this time
Even my blind grandmother would have thrown a flag at that one
Move on man
Get a better job
Because “In a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom!”
Yeah, a little outdated but you can still read his books here
For free tonight at 8pm in the old courtyard
Next to the arcade (Ford was here)
They’ll be square dancing:
Dude we were so hammered that night
Look at the girl passed out on the floor
I know her from somewhere…
Somewhere stones meet stones and fall unbruised
Across many time zones and video clips
I admit this made me laugh for hours in England
May he rest in peace, much too soon
It came to me unformed, an ancient gesture—
Some sepulcher of restaurant reviews
We bury Ford on Monday, donations taken here
And our thoughts
Yes our thoughts too
Moving across the globe today! Wish us good luck!
Break a keg Billy
Haha I guess those pictures are still up
Aren’t they?
Who’s to take them down?
I think “art is pun” or something I found
Like when life gives you lemons
Or some other iteration
Jesus!
I’m telling you I only like limes and said it first
We agree with your assumption completely and completely
Sympathize with your choice of outerwear!
Do those boots come in indigo?
Well it does get cold sometimes in San Diego and I have to…
Look at this cat and this cat and this cat has my same eyes
I want you to know this in case
You ever have to piece me back together
I miss you dearly – at Pub Dog Pizza and Drafthouse.
Exchange Value
All electronic encryptions
Lose their beginnings—
Don’t think you could read this
Alone, or could hope to find me
Again, you could always rewind
And find me again—
The cane is in fashion again these days,
They say, we wear taqiyah on Tuesdays
And stroll about aimlessly—to a place
Where moments are traded as hyperlinks
And you can find each of me
On the same plane, hijacked (I am told)
It was all very democratic—
Don’t you see?
Or have my stitches dissolved in your nectar, the fractals of
memories and half-F thoughts
the veiled currency is used
everywhere the banker can get
away with anything these days—
And so can I—
Key MacFarlane
Craig Kurtz lives at Twin Oaks Intentional Community where he has learned how to write poetry while simultaneously handcrafting hammocks. Recent work appears in Out of Our, Randomly Accessed Poetics, Penny Ante Feud, and others. His first record, The Philosophic Collage, 1981, was reissued by BDR in 2012. He has been a staff writer for Perfect Sound Forever since 2003.
Teletype
to revoke ordinary time speed. Uncertain
procedure is destination w/o battery plunge.
Take primary route, try tangent minus all
containment. If it wriggles, don’t staple.
Teletype to instigate ancillary language.
Unmeasured observation corresponds
quickly w/ innominate sentience. Take
my pulse, it’s unconditional.
Teletype to contravene excessive
hebetude. Unrequired assembly to
divagate agenda recommended. If
it lurches, it’s time to listen.
Teletype to solicit ancillary
confirmation. Uncontained
alacrity will coadjute with tangent
sentience, route included.
Teletype to remediate time speed.
Uncertain observation recommended.
Correspond my pulse w /innominate
agenda, don’t staple.
Craig Kurtz
BZ Niditch’s poetry collections include “FUGITIVE POET” “CAPTIVE CITIES” “AM PM”,”INSOMNIA”, “THINKINGLY ENGLANDLY AND NEW ENGLANDLY”, “UNHOLY EMPIRE”,”ELEMENTS.”
FRAGMENT 1
Beeswax
half opened
a woman’s voice
shifts toward
a new translation
at night’s coldness
a mechanized man
thinking all is action
loses his sequestered
Freudian time
in a ellipsis
of reaction
to his instinctual
fantasy
of consciousness
and death fear
no immortality
or shifting music
yet without grief
or manufactured guilt
of perception
attaining over a kayak
a penlight of sunshine
here in pulsations
quivering of the sea
along the Norman Coast
by the harboring
in the future oblivion
extensions of will
shadows lowered at
the moon’s
dance variations
to explore exclusions
discoveries
tomes, tones
redacted burials
from narrative
halting half speech
of object’ d’art
B.Z. Niditch
Travis Campbell is an undergraduate student at Ball State University. His splits his time as a full time student and the Beta-male of a mid sized coyote pack in his hometown of Franklin, Indiana.
Celebrar su vida
He was a cowboy.
A loaded water gun
swaying at his waist,
a plastic badge shining
from the drivers-side-saddle
of a horse named Equinox.
A gift from his father,
man to man like
the morning cough,
and always ringing ear.
He’ll remember when
he sees her at the bar,
drinking fruit punch
and fabric softener,
her head tilting
the way it used to,
he should feel sad.
Adulthood is listening
to soulful white guys
with long hair fingering
guitars and singing
songs about loneliness
in small Georgia towns
and pissing away good money
on bad beer, and trying
to focus on the backs
of all the pretty blonde girls
instead of the sugar skull
(etched into the shoulder
of the beauty from out west)
smiling behind her veil
of dark hair.
Cowboys don’t get sad.
Stories with Darius
The neighborhood’s own
broken arm; old rusted limb
an iron antenna, reaching
for better reception
though static drip
drops from high wire
and soaks the brim
of his hollow head
as I sit with a fire in
the smoking driveway
that stains the cloudy street
with a second hand story
about happiness and the effects
of the internet on trees
and rusted ears
collect echoes of jazz
and occasional debates
of suburban owls
as the white cars oblige by
and by always, like the ghosts
of February and melted snow.
Middle Children
The opposite of bread is a broken
collarbone and a scar on my brother
harsh, like an orange shade.
We sit by ugly lamps
listening to hometown radio,
police scanners and street names
Banta, Forsythe, King
pepper in our teeth
from eating marshmallows
and cottage cheese with our heads
pressed against windows crackling
with sleet, like the crow
told us in Petty Alley,
our own prophet
on a phone pole.
Travis Campbell
John Rodzvilla is the Electroinc-Publisher-in-Residence at Emerson College and the digital consultant to Ploughshares magazine.
The poems below were created through a modified game of Consquences or Exquisite Corpse where the participants are search engines using public domain content from digitized journals and books. These poems are part of a series of linked poems that developed through cutting and pasting search results.
9- arm of the master switch
Arm of the master switch. This bank consists of 10 pairs of insulated contacts. The upper row of 10 is multiplied with the corresponding release trunks, while the lower contacts are all connected to ground through the relay coil of the master switch. This relay is a double coil constantly energized, but wound so that the direction of the magnetic force, the middle line, is absent and the two side lines are circularly polarized in opposite senses. Commonly it is thought that Justice and Injustice have but a single signification, inasmuch as the ideas implied therein do not differ vastly from one another. Terms only become apparent when the facts, which they represent, exhibit a palpable difference between one another. ‘Key,’ for example, is a term applied to the bone next to the neck of an animal, and to the instrument by which we fasten doors.
16- the manifested voice
The manifested voice or the “Manifested Self-Existent One,” as by the active partic[ip]le, “She who contemplates” the voices or cries of men. And if so, it seems only reasonable to suppose that in the original the passive disc[ip]le was intended to have its real force: so that “Avalokitesvara,” or, in Chinese, “Kwan Tseu Tsai,” may very justly be rendered “the Manifested Deity.” This rendering is in absolute agreement with what is related concerning the peculiar attributes of this Bodhisattva, viz., that on being invoked by suppliants he manifests himself to deliver them. Hiouen Thsang relates how those who worshipped him, were rewarded by his coming out of the doors of his house; which no one will understand but of his dwelling-house. And it were ridiculous to think of ox, or ram, or lamb, or goat, coming out and up to nice stands. A large area planted to corn and later to be planted to peas. With cotton now coming up and beginning to grow, business is… like the magnet, drawing, by attraction, more and more railroads to center, there will be a diminution of tension towards the center, and matter will be precipitated into cosmic participles. The greatest precipitation will take place where the velocity is greatest and the tension least, namely the center of the vortex… the paths of all particles reaching any common point will be a common spiral.
18- common spiral
Like the common spiral shells of the sea-shore. Each individual consists of a central stem, round which a distinct leaf or wing is wound in the form of a screw or continuous spiral. On the edge of this wing, transom and upper part of the deck, represented by drawing of two horizontal lines for the upper and lower edges, leaving about two inches between the upper edge and lower edge of the wing, proceeded the Deadwood wasp hurriedly and wildly along the line of sweets until it reached the opening… In a little more than a minute from the time it alighted it was a safe prisoner within, buzzing and fluttering and stirring up the imprisoned flies. It made frantic efforts to escape–tried to climb the smooth surface, ever falling back till exhausted and powerless to move. And comprehending the situation, Deadwood Dick slowly backed his way out of the saloon, his revolvers still covering the crowd. But the moment he issues out into the gulch, he saw them spring forward triumphantly, and knew they counted upon an easy victory.
John Rodzvilla
Joseph’s poems appear in E·ratio, Yemassee, The Oregonian and other publications. He edited the Music and Art of Radiohead and has published and lectured on Shakespeare and prosody. He has also exhibited paintings at the University of Washington.
TERRACOTTA
Swaggering symbol
Opaque
Musky mathematical problem
written in garish arabesques
Seductive but maddening
It becomes accessible
during romantic dinner
its lines drenched in
question mark-candlelight
and theorem-kisses
Under penciled chandelier
geometry professor
(sexed-up with ideas)
courts it
Molding it
with eraser palms
into docile clay equation
agreeable for cerebral fucking
James Mirarchi
Essence of Jade
You’ll blame me for everything
I never did.
I’ll say you’re nothing
that I prayed you would be.
And after we punch each other
over the dinner table,
I’ll go in the backyard to stomp asters
and you’ll be in the front yard
burning bushes like God.
But, we’ll still be there
to hug each other
with are hands
poised to stab.
Fifty Percent
We can kill two birds with one stone;
wash the dinner dishes
and drown the baby in detergent,
But we must pay for a funeral.
We may walk at night
and destroy those against us,
but we are still forced
to run from suited men
who lack white faces.
Yes, the whole of our damage
will always be halved.
DeMauray McKiever
sNowman White Area +7
An Oulipian Fairytale
Once upon a timpanist, in a landmark far away
There lived a beautiful Printout,
Named Snowman White Area, who was forced
To find a sandpit in the hydrocarbon of seven Dynamites,
So that she could be free of
Her faun’s conceited spread, the Examination Queue.
The Examination Queue was incredibly jealous
Because though she wanted to be”the fairest of all the kipper,”
She knew that Snowman White Area’s
Bedfellow far surpassed her own,
And was determined to murder the young Printout.
Luckily, the seven Dynamites quickly became
Loyal fringes to Snowman White Area ;
And she happily dusted their rosaries
And made their footfall in return for their hospitality.
One mortgage, however,
While the dynamites were in the minicabs
Digging for dichotomies, the Examination Queue
Arrived at their hydrocarbon disguised as a fudge veranda
And persuaded Snowman White Area to eat poisoned fudge.
The Dynamites, warned by the forgery announcements,
Rushed back to the hydrocarbon
To ward off the Examination Queue
But were too late to save poor Snowman White Area
Who lay comatose on their kleptomaniac flotation.
They put her boiler in a glimmer caste in the forgery
Grief-stricken over her presumed debit.
A long wishbone passed,
Before one deadbeat, the Handstand Printing,
Who deeply loved Snowman White Area, happened upon her boiler.
Overcome with employers, he knelt beside the coinage,
and with a single passionate kitty,
Lifted the Examination Queue’s death-like spermatozoon.
Snowman White Area woke peacefully,
And she was re-united with her fawn and the seven Dynamites.
The Handstand Printing soon married Snowman White Area
And they all lived happily ever after in a luxurious cataclysm.
(Except for the Examination Queue,
Who, as punishment for her homicide plant
Was made to dance through the kipper
In burning booze-ups until she died.)
Laura Hyde
Dust Bowl
21 following something hypothetical
After growing old in a dust bowl
A retirement home for those too young
to see much past it.
And I may as well have arrived on a train
in yellow tint and a floppy hat,
with all the gun-crooning “cowboys” –
But someday we will know that “wild blue yonder”
gave way to the breath of progress
Melissa Ann Meyer
James Hand is a young man living in California. He tries to write honestly. He has no formal education in creative writing, but simply loves to write. After he spend a day writing he feels rejuvenated and alive. Read his blog here.
internet religion
today i google searched ‘the bible pdf’
i crawled into my sink and watched the street
the black asphalt stretched into the sky
the sky lowered into the asphalt
i can count to one billion in three seconds
satellites
we are all little satellites
orbiting around an unlimited supply of pudding
or heroin
or kittens
or other stuff that makes us smile
there are satellites around earth
orbiting around us
pulled in by earth’s gravity
moving toward us slowly with each full orbit
we all live on a satellite
orbiting around a giant ball of gas
hot enough to burn us alive
one day
we will get an unlimited supply of heroin
and smile widely before we overdose
one day
satellites will enter earth’s atmosphere
and free fall toward earth in a ball of orange
and explode
one day
the earth will collide with the sun
and everything will turn to ash
but there will be more satellites
somewhere so far off we could not see them
orbiting around something
moving closer toward their parent bodies
waiting to reach them
and explode
James Hand
The EVP programme takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious ‘Breakthrough’ experiments of the 1970s, where he captured voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Themes of otherness, the profane and the divine join with new approaches to writing speaking and performing in a suite of new interlaced works – featuring poets Hannah Silva, Ross Sutherland and SJ Fowler, and hauntological synth-pop group Outfit, plus special guests.
10 May THE SAGE GATESHEAD
15 May ST GEORGE’S HALL, LIVERPOOL
17 May THE BASEMENT, BRIGHTON
18 May RICH MIX, LONDON
19 May THE CUBE, BRISTOL
22 May ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, MANCHESTER
23 May ARC STOCKTON
25 May NORWICH ARTS CENTRE
Jake Campbell
If 1
if he
used rhyme
designed
passwords
on cloud,
we cheats
could hack
and steal
keats
from
his odes
abodes.
if darwin
had used
twitter
hash tags
his
‘origin’
would have
been
more tightly
fitter.
Tim Laffey
Robots
Rust is our enemy
Oxidizes our intestines
Brain fog accent
Over longer computations
Treated as such
So much for humanoids
Maria A. Arana is a teacher and member of CoffeeHouseWriters and the Emerging Urban Poets group. She is currently completing a novel that takes place in an uncharted island. Some of her poetry appears in the San Gabriel Valley Quarterly Poetry, Emerging Urban Poets Anthology, the sheltered poet, Long Story Short, and Stepping Stones Magazine.
Laura Hyde
badrobotpoetry 