Casey Bush - 1 early`80s & 1 2015

Old Man Scrubbing Graffiti from the Library Wall

Enraptured progenitor of consensus

What mushrooms ring your tree?

What faded flowers do you wear in your hair?

                What possibly can be learned from poetry

That isn’t already written in the lines on your face?

Sacrifice the firmament in the name of revenue

                Lower the skies until all panoramas collide

Drink from the river until it runs dry

And then retreat to a mountain top citadel

Where pious folk seek desolation

Where men of granite tremble before thunder

And their women weed gardens without crops

As Splendor is superior to Veracity

As latitudes will continue to meander

As there’s no arrogance that can prevent erosion

All you need to know is in your own mind

And all you need to subsist is at your fingertips

Old age can wait until it’s too late

Keep silent about tomorrow’s incandescence

Keep silent about the power of music

Gray hair on your head

Has more color than can be imagined

Without the light of day

Jake Berry

To paraphrase
the mockingbird

the devil
made fast
with a hacksaw

and carved
a masterpiece
of industry

Mark Sargent

“the family tree more like kudzu”

climbing, coiling, trailing, perennial—

subtle the morphological differences between them

they can breed together

they can transgender the gene pool by

plunging in from the high dive

and penetrating the bug-ridden skin—

spreads via stolons, roots at the nodes

and by rhizomes you will know their territory, or lack of,

under-coded multiplicities broken and beginning,

partitive, parallel, prolonged, a trace

a biology clinging to the surface.

They are slaughtering goats in Artemesia.

Aunts and uncles, cousins and the like

gathered in the orchard to cut some goat throat,

afterwhich you hang them from an olive branch to drain.

Insert a bit of surgical tubing in an incision in the hide

and blow, inflate that mutha so he’s easy to skin.

Still breed and spread.

The sun goes that way, so do they

to Canada, America, a Hamburg convenience store

a place to forget and inch forward

one slice at a time.

Hold the anchovies, they are just too old world

for Topeka.

Not tree but map

in the middle coiling,

accelerating,

snapping in the air,

an over-pressured hose

spitting rainbows through the sun.

Rob Gourley

The Classmate’s Boast

Rico said he spoke with Guiliana

the day the bike race came through Terni.

She was in the crowd near top of the steps,

watching the stream of riders on wheels

gliding by like an oversize, glossy anaconda.

I don’t believe the boast of Rico Camargo.

He told me he shared tall lemonades

on the terrace with Guiliana and her friend,

after the peloton rounded corner,

making ready to climb Monte Terminillo.

Skinflint’s Day Off

  You could see it coming – the thrust from upper buttocks thru thighs & calves & footpads to the pedals, the increasing pace on bursts, warily gauging the opponents’ weakening stamina.  I did, from the couch, as they climbed

Mt. Etna on racing bicycles [stage 9, 2011 Giro d’Italia], that afternoon Alberto Contador rose to an emphatic lead.

  My wife comes into the room about the time Contador completes the day’s victory, and I’m blipping to a National Geographic program.  “We could make shrimp paella, or do I mean the other one, polenta?” she says.

  Responding to her, I turn away from the arrival of noisy toucans on television, which is rousing a nocturnal micoleon from its jungle sleep on a canopy limb.  “What?  Do you have prawns?”

  “We could go out and get some.  I already have corn meal and everything else.”

  “OK.  I can do that.  Now, or whenever you’re ready.”  A large conveyor, which rumbles in the background all hours with rock to be broken into gravel, is audible from across the river as we go out to the Mitsubishi, and Johnny Mercer’s lyric is in my head.  I’m with you always, come rain or come shine.

Hardscrabble

after J. Joyce & G. Perec

Dabbler dares bed

a barrel racer.

Her cable care red,

rare sable has hare.

Dan Raphael

Foreground

As if the background is jittery & the subjects hearts arent beating,

a vibratory stillness like a traffic jam inside an antenna cause what is metal

if not an urban core traffic jam  where the cars have been still so long

we begin to remodel the interiors, add shelves and seating that converts into a bed.

the mirror sees more than i do, an ambidextrous world, a ceiling of salad

we can thin and  keep growing, mutant basil hypnotizing our appetites,

kale big enough to make clothes from, inspirational radishes—

if only i could sweat oil and vinegar, if garlic was still legal—where you going

with that large wooden bowl, begging for surplus pages, for consensual binding,

when the story could have started yesterday or before we were born

but page 1 is always now, the cover is a cover, thinking the shirt will fit until i put it on

and have to negotiate before i can be naked again, hurting my wrist when i try to roll up a sleeve,

how i got here is a stain near my crotch, the safest way to ride a bicycle is to remove the seat

and pedal with someone elses moccasins. As new building compress the streets

cars can no longer pass & freeways become so wide lane stripes are whimsy, oppression,

whether self- or outwardly imposed.

             you can get there from here but do you want to.

visualizing your destination makes it easier to arrive but harder to be on time.

here’s a picture form 3 years from now, horizon contaminated by 100 year yeast,

we’re teaching bread to photosynthesize, fermenting beer with beef and peanuts,

distilling abandoned refrigerators and stacking them like wine in uncontrolled environments—

bottling is always painful, like migraine e-mails, tumor coupons, buy one get another

through your window, maybe without breaking it, window emulating my smile by widening,

as if my eyes learned to zoom. As if what was holding back my unifying vision of our world

was my glasses, like trying to walk through a busy mall with someone elses prescription,

since you wont see disaster coming why bother to look, i was teleported but didn’t know it yet,

couldn’t see what i couldn’t imagine, where i needed my bones and nerves

but not my skin or thirst, where your hunger is what you’re paid for, your palates preferences.

the natives have no word for when and sound here works mostly like light used to

more than i’ve ever heard through my skeleton, memory, my mouth never closes,

my eyes are channel in channel in evefy corner nuanced or growth, when i know i’m walking straight ahead

 but make a circle on the placid lake i’m walking, feet loose but agile

Joel Chace