People who vote

so pierce the cool
unbundled newspapers

now already
blowing away that

won't let him come
clean of the tribe


(after Vance and Quintavalle)

New: 'mpirikons

by g vance



experialblobs
unbundleable
mepress’t mepierced
they-carry-me-carry-them
hump'em nextward
dotpackets
duffledots
pointils
pointilpacks
suffering dewblots
dispers’t oz-mos’t dewplane by dewplane
mandreck meswimming
.....come clean in the relative breeze
kinbreath of matemartyrs factmartyrs
crosshaired on a sweatbed
runredover watergray factsheets

undonebegun ...unfinishedbegan
halfbecome fourthborn eighthroused

urging at recall





^^^^

All around the living ones by JKD

After Rufo Quintavalle's "New: Election Day" posted yesterday.

There are poppies in the rain and the
train pulls round the bend of poplars
and layers, historic, catapulting
pinned to the pining pinwheel of his
lapel and fire-brand red poppies in
her hair or mouth the color of when
all round is a living one, a rounding
careening version of so plausible as
his hands once were, the places known
to her like whispered nothings, voice
now winnowing through the heath
her head in ribbons in retrospectives
of once before when wherefore lost
names in the buried field birds sanded flat
soar over and when the point is just as
obsidian as the poppy-seeds in the mind
of the passing paper boy on his bike in
the beginning of a century unrecalled
in a series of dates recorded blankly for
schoolchildren in classrooms to recite one
after another incantations for marks and a field
before these bodies under the soil the root
systems the teeth chattering as the steam
engine chugs black smoke Carthage and Windsor
and dark crannies of the book’s folds, the poppy-
petal silk stocking unpinned for him to
roll down her thigh a last breeze the
anxious race of the lad with the day’s bold news
leaking off the cover, running in the rain, grey
over the poppies wavering seaweedlike
on their surfacing underwater messaging
what cannot do what mustn’t then list
1914, 1918, 1939, 1944, 1950, 1968, a
dozen dozen times two hundred thousand
and the waving kerchiefs and the windblown
hair bright as poppies in his eyes turning
down the lane to say a poppy is a count of
poplars by the poppy field not so bold so
brash as or credible this and counting
orange as this or this or this, the buried
ones bones in her throat as many flames

NEW: Election Day by Rufo Q

The train pulls out and there are poppies
and behind them houses and the people
who vote, and I think what’s the point
in writing a novel when all around is
living one?
........................Layering a history
on history like concrete or that carpet
so plausible birds sat down on it to eat
does what that a newspaper doesn’t do?

O Lovely Barbarians

After Rouge by Lisa Pasold, Travel 3 by Barbara Beck and Man in the Evening by Sean Standish.

What am I doing here, my lap grown out of silk,
red-feathered, writhing in a leaky apartment
with harum scarum flashes of accidental flesh?
Me against what look like wild tracer dogs
ferociously mashing up on cherries?

Ripe pits, she on her navel, scraping at my bluff,
unsung and horribly afraid of what I'm doing...
Mercenary streaks alone can't explain
the imagination of a hydrant bachelor, his bitten nerve
stood up and stretching out the door.

What am I doing fricking decorative endings,
sampling the slurp and strut of cherry spit warmth?
What the fricking spit of cherries am I doing
returning as exhaust onto the floor shrilly hollering
O lovely barbarians into the filthy morning light?

alphabetic by jill d.

after moneyflesh by sean s.


"evening makes my kitchen door window a patch of ink"

reflected pool quilted into this letter
dear lighted morning
dear every passing hour
the lost afternoons fork away into white, spilled
desire shining against glass blending into dark written
moments birthed or recycled tasting
like mint fresh pulled from dirt
dirt on fingers, mint oil scented
reflected patch of ink
slides through language toward
midnight a delay unspoken
after each envelope empty
and floating on the surface
unsaturated

2 Short Market Poems...

by JKD, after “O’t’is Shaggy Reddingdress” by George Vance, posted 6 March

Peep-shed

rotted pomelo-strolling
into the toughblonde
this crowd’s a workedgirl
working up a, worked over
scrubbed clean roundher hair a lovely
moaninglight

*

Market-going:

Superette filthynames
spoiled brandless
array yerself with that
assort
whole
wormless holler-holes
toothless blackgummed unseen
perfect
there:
hard bank into the crowdcaterwaul
umbrellaless
dribble
packed
packaging stringtied
tonguetied into
the bargain-glaze
a sharp eye
slylass, less a pass
then quickpalming
goodygoods
garblinghomes
startlemucker
tha’ll teachya!

moneyflesh by sean s

after Fragment by Amanda Deutch

I.
mint women swigging champagne, fingertips
on glass stems.

Lost afternoon postmen arrive like koans
their callipygian mailbags, routes
vining gypsy through their shoes.
Won't you rest a moment from your tendrils?
I'll squeeze leaves here beneath your nostrils
rest your cork heels across my thighs
and is this your deuteragonist?
Hello mr deuteragonist.
So proglottidean, so oneiric,
a fork in the lotus, a sphinx' snake-eyed moan
and bones spilling their white.


II.
Evening makes my kitchen door window
a patch of ink, blueprint

reflections kinked up against the flesh-painted
world, my deuteragonist adopts a bruise's
pose, a sphinx ruminating
the clear marrow between her pigmented molars
What readiness do you have to offer?

It makes a wreck of us all, the same.
Just so.

The regicide dying, slain on
a bed of marks, a clench
like childbirth on his mind, koanic.

Or: mere
atoms. the removal of a benign, surreptitious
lump. cholesteatoma. a perpetual,
musical hiss in the ear.

o' t'is shaggy reddingdress -

by g vance after 'Grocery Disaster' by AD



workedgirl ..scrubbed clean ..hair up
marketgoing
lovely filthy moaninglight

brandless names ..spoiled array ..assortyerself
wholes hollering wormless
holes unseen
perfect rotted pomelos

there:
toughblonde babystrolling hard into the crowd


^^^^

New: Travel 3 by Barbara Beck

There are those trusting to luck.
Harum scarum running out between journey legs.
A biomimetic accident in these parts
would look like wild dog or squashed tomato.
Place exists also as juice for elsewhere,
proliferates daylight-saving itineraries
that require a key (caches of extra time,
bluff, bribery). The mercenary ratio
of origins to returns can't explain
nerve endings' decorative fraying.
Photographs corrupt vegetal reds.
The azure breathed in comes out as exhaust.

Northern Skylines by JKD

After Amanda Deutch's "Fraudulent Ceiling", posted 26 Feb 2008.

almost borealis : perhaps that light is different
in verse written in a language she has never spoken.
birds on fire. slip on bluegreen. evergreen. chalky
suburbs half-erased the train. skin sloughing off
under the slate skyline, her past in pieces along
the trailing, open trees. sap speaks volumes to a surface,
vehicle as much shoes as bus, taxi, mule. busted
television sets and a nice chair already as forgotten
as rules of a weak game, strong mojito. the amnesiac
orange in her root systems, squared, tripled, blocks
the desired temperature change. from so attentive,
listen in, ear close, to scratch out images of the 777
crash. words rhyming in a strange tongue bask
on beachfronts, riverslicks. over fifty in love or out.
somebody took leave of her outer membrane, her
pink rushing. book stands or thoughts of couplets
like shadows crouching in corners. this is plot
as much as the next person’s eyes dilating
under the repetitive questioning of her villanelle.