bending light into verse every picture tells a story
Jennifer L. Tomaloff
bending light into verse II every picture tells a story Photography by: Jennifer L. Tomaloff
Featuring written works by: Felino A. Soriano Doug Draime Howie Good Matt Specht David Tomaloff Nic Sebastian Paul Scot August Mark Lamoureux Jason Mashak J.D. Nelson Helen Vitoria Carly-Anne Ravnikar Lisa Adamowicz Kless Ed Makowski Jenny Bootle Dana Roders Nicholas Michael Ravnikar
bending light into verse II | Copyright 2011 Jennifer L. Tomaloff | All works contained herein are owned by their individual authors | No part of this book may be used except in brief quotation without the express permission of the author(s).
Special thanks and dedication to the talented individuals whose works are contained in these pages, without whom this project would not be complete.
Every Picture Tells a Story (on Vol. II) The bending light into verse series began in the Fall of 2009 with the simple intention of year-end cataloging the personal photography of Jennifer Tomaloff. Throughout a series of initial conceptualizations, the project began to take on a more outwardly creative focus as Jennifer began reaching out to writers in her community to take part in an ekphrastic experiment. Each writer commissioned for the project was given a set of photographs, and asked to write something inspired by what they saw—be it a title, a short story, or a poem. Each of the writers gladly rose to the opportunity and far exceeded all expectations; every photograph was returned, each picture telling its unique story. The project was so enjoyable that Jennifer decided to continue the process on an annual basis. The photographs would be compiled throughout the year; writers would be sought out in late fall, and the book compiled during the third week of December in the tranquil Northwoods of Wisconsin. The photographs included in this book were taken using a Nikon D40 or Nikon D90 with an 1855mm Nikkor f/3.5-5.6G, 18-105mm Nikkor f/3.5-5.6G, or a 50mm f/1.8D lens.
-Jennifer L. Tomaloff
Contributors Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974) is a case manager and advocate for adults with developmental and physical disabilities. In 2010, he was chosen for the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in poetry from Wilderness House Literary Review. Philosophical studies collocated with his connection to various idioms of jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences. For information, including his 41 print and electronic collections of poetry, over 2,500 published poems, interviews, and editorships, please visit his website: felinoasoriano.info. Doug Draime emerged as a presence in the 'underground' literary movement in Los Angeles in the late 1960's. Books currently in print: For A Dream Ended (Kendra Steiner Editions), Los Angeles Terminal: Poems 1971-1980 (Covert Press), and Rock 'n Roll Jizz (Propaganda Press). Awarded PEN grants in 1987 and 1991. Nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in 2008. He currently lives and writes in the foothills of Oregon. Howie Good is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as 24 print and digital poetry chapbooks. He has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net anthology. With Dale Wisely, he is the co-founder of the digital chapbook publisher White Knuckle Press, whiteknucklepress.com Most of the time, Matt Specht is the Harbormaster of Reefpoint and Belle Harbor marinas in Racine, WI. His poetry has appeared in Word Riot, BlazeVOX, the Bathroom, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets 2010 Calendar, Straylight Literary Arts Magazine, and the first Bending Light Into Verse. He was the music contributor for Action Magazine. He is in the Honors program at University of Wisconsin-Parkside (but he is not sure about his major yet). He is also a visual artist, musician, bookbinder, and actor--in that particular order. jumpymatt.com [d]avid : [t]omaloff (b. 1972) | racine, WI, US | author, LIONTAMER’S BLUES (six eight press) | likes: jazz | hates: jazz | photography: yes | his work has also appeared in: Ditch Poetry, Otoliths, elimae, and/or, Counterexample Poetics, Whale Sound, BlazeVOX 2KX, the Delinquent, Phantom Kangaroo, Pismire Poetry, and Calliope Nerve | see: davidtomaloff.com
Nic Sebastian hails from Arlington, Virginia and travels widely. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily, Autumn Sky Poetry, Mannequin Envy, Avatar Review, Anti- and elsewhere. Nic blogs at Very Like A Whale (verylikeawhale.wordpress.com). She is building an audio anthology of her readings of contemporary poetry at Whale Sound (whalesound.wordpress.com) and is the founder of Voice Alpha (voicealpha.wordpress.com) a group blog focused on the art of reading poetry aloud for an audience. Poet Paul Scot August is originally from the North side of Chicago but has now spent half his life in Wisconsin. He has an MA in Creative Writing from UW-Milwaukee and has worked as an upholstery salesman, a roofer, a dishwasher, a mail room sorter, an automobile mechanic, a daycare worker, a pizza delivery driver, an independent bookstore owner, and a software developer. He is a former poetry editor of The Cream City Review. His poetry has appeared or is upcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Sugar House Review, Stone's Throw Magazine, Dunes Review, Naugatuck River Review, Passages North, Poetry Quarterly, The Cream City Review, Scribble Magazine and elsewhere. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and currently lives in the Milwaukee area with his two children. Mark Lamoureux lives in Astoria, New York and is the author of Spectre (Black Radish Books, 2010), Astrometry Orgonon (BlazeVOX 2008) and numerous chapbooks. He received his MFA from the New School in 2007. His work has been published extensively in print and online. In 2005, he started Cy Gist Press, a micropress focused on ekphrastic poetry. Please visit the press at cygistpress.blogspot.com. He teaches composition in the CUNY system. Jason Mashak (b. 1973) is a Michigan native who sprouted additional roots near Atlanta and in Portland, Oregon, before moving in 2006 to Prague, Czech Republic, where he is (for now) firmly planted. His book Salty as a Lip emerged in 2010, in the wake of other publications, and will expand for a second printing in 2011. Some of his translated work will be featured in an upcoming Czech (dual-translation) volume with a theme of self-exile, as well as in an English volume of Prague-centric poems that spans back to the late 1800s. J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words and sound in his subterranean laboratory. More than 1,000 of his bizarre poems and experimental texts have appeared in many small press and underground publications. He is the author of THE FRANKENDELPHIA EXPERIMENT (Tainted Coffee Press, 2010) and NOISE DIFFICULTY FLOWER (Argotist Ebooks, 2010). Visit MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. J. D. lives in Colorado, USA.
Helen Vitoria lives and writes in Effort, PA. Her work can be found and is forthcoming in: PANK, wicked alice, The Orange Room Review, The Dirty Napkin, Gigantic Sequins, The Scrambler, The Cartier Street Review, Sunfish Poetry Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Tiger's Eye: A Journal of Poetry, Dogzplot, Spooky Boyfriend, Thirteen Myna Birds, Right Hand Pointing, >kill author, The Literary Bohemian, MiPOesias, elimae, Metazen, The Literary Burlesque, and many others. She has been thrice nominated for Best New Poets 2010 Anthology. Her chapbook - The Sights and Sounds of Arctic Birds - (Gold Wake Press, 2011), is available as an e-chap. She is working on her first full length collection: Corn Exchange expected to be released in Fall 2011. Carly Anne Ravnikar spends most of her time working and practicing life. Her writing appears sporadically in small presses and on local stages, and she can be found stumbling around a karaoke bar on the occasional weekend. She enjoys impromptu giggles, whipping her hair back and forth, and finding hidden candy in her apartment. Lisa Adamowicz Kless is a writer, mom, teacher and co-creator of a local art performance series in Kenosha, WI. She also has the honor of spending time with many very talented writers as President of the Kenosha Writers' Guild. Lisa's work has been published online, in Kenosha’s Downtown magazine, in the book Mother Goosed: Twisted Rhymes for Modern Times and in bending light into verse by Jennifer L. Tomaloff. Recently, she launched an arts-related website with a friend. It can be found at 2ndfirstlook.com. She's also become enamored with the sound of the mandolin, so in the coming year, she plans to re-learn how to read music and ―play it (again)--for old time's sake.‖ Ed Makowski is a poet and writer living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He prefers cities to suburbs and tents to hotels. Two wheels always trumps four. He is working on his 3rd collection of poetry. Jenny Bootle made her home in the Midwest for over two years, before recently returning to her native land. She now lives in Brighton, England, where she enjoys walking by the sea, reading Agatha Christie and eating mince-pies. She writes poetry and short stories and is working on a novel. Amongst other things, she misses cheese curds terribly. Dana Roders eats verbiage for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She takes her poetry with cream, no sugar. She is Poetry Editor of Straylight Literary Magazine and likes to write in the morning. Nicholas Michael Ravnikar lives in Racine, Wisconsin and teaches as an associate lecturer of theater for the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and in the communication department at Gateway Technical College. While studying for his MFA (2008) from Naropa University, he received the Robert Creeley award. He has administrated, designed and facilitated various workshops and other programs in prisons, schools and community centers with organizations such as Woodland Pattern Book Center, the City of Chicago, and Racine County Workforce Development. His writing has appeared or will appear in Sawbuck, Rabbit Catastrophe, Psychic Meatloaf and InStereoPress.
bending light into verse every picture tells a story
Arm of reaching affirmation: light’s angled mathematic al expansion highlights thrusting touch of unknown existential grasps of elegant reinterpretation.
-Felino A Soriano
Crooked gaze my required companion:
alert
your venture initializes fathom of our ambulatory glide, noon after wind’s dance claims bow and dissipating rhythms.
-Felino A Soriano
Of gloriole sans body-bridge meaning assimilation— partial acclimated tithe rearranging culture’s monetary darkness.
-Felino A Soriano
leaning asterisk (*, abbreviated windows) primitive numbered allocated Virgo: August rain covers augmented humid open mouth, winged: annual again return patina garb fathom origami flamboyant denial
-Felino A Soriano
Our Quest
We seem to tread like loose ball bearings on the machine of time. You in your place and me in mine. But love always conquers ending our quest like a careless albatross hovering over the sea. My quest inside you, and yours inside me.
-Doug Draime
Night Flight Of Memory’s Vapor
When the moon is only a yellow slice in a dark sky when I smoke all the weed in Cisco Kid’s left boot and when I drink too much gin from that big Nora Charles stein memory’s vapor kicks my ass every time and I fall asleep in the sweet, sweet gardenias
-Doug Draime
Self
1. nothing outside the inside nothing inside the outside only the center inside the outside inside the center of it
2. there was an undercurrent of unconscious yesterdays piled like immovable tomorrows received into its nature
3. while the reason penetrates obscure and doubtful things everything seeks expression of itself
-Doug Draime
Our house of mirrors for Gracie
Our eyes meet We turn our eyes away Our eyes meet again We both smile shyly We turn our eyes away Everywhere we turn, there we are It’s our house of mirrors The mirrors are not distorted You are what you are I am what I am The earth works like this The sea reflects the sky Eternity works like this Like a mirror inside of us
-Doug Draime
The region was known for its graveyards. I wondered why I was there, night noodling on the piano, the moon looking slightly Chinese. A torch-lit lynch mob passed beneath our window. What couldn’t be seen in summer because of the leaves could be seen now. Her hair was the color of Kentucky bourbon; her eyes, the color of a coal fire at sea.
-Howie Good
A big policeman was pissing off the dock. Ancient women sitting in windows facing the street squeezed their sad, tired tits at me. I had sailed through a fog, though others said it was poison gas, the blindness of a despised regime. The fort at the entrance to Thieves’ Bay fired the sunset gun. Something cried that had no name.
-Howie Good
Feel the glow of ghosts. Angels have become extinct. We’re circling the parking lot searching for a spot, shepherds, G-men, prisoners of our own thought, while the ice-pick killer confesses to an empty auditorium, pockets stuffed with incandescent ampoules of ambergris.
-Howie Good
there are some things one should always say ―yes‖ to without thinking no matter what i was never a man of much principle such princely people pleased pretty and i always got fired for talking back mocking bird jerking off wedding smells we pulled over to this hotel and i paid i said yes yes YES because saying no is retreat saying no is a copy desk in Dayton saying no is nancy reagan and i ran two miles like i had two minutes he looked just like me just a little taller just as i was saying justice in this leap year was a personal check in an envelope i got a bloody eye and i was spanked in your honor (she cried bitterly) but i knew it I KNEW IT this hunched shoulder blade mother sink battle sabre rattled toothed dairy dimwit dipshit don’t touch mississippi sunburned epitaphs! tune in tu ition transmission add mu nitions trance miss
one
much
more
if i haven’t said it already i’m not gonna
-Matt Specht
a morning moored to vinyl siding tiny pebbles melodrama tape deck explanations hastily assembled subsequent to a retreat’s beating and so ―on‖! and so ―forth‖!
hm. it was real fear, then. [!! i knew it !!]
grinding my eyes & batting my teeth
i moved and threw everything away
-Matt Specht
freckles warm cincinnati songs and i i i i am puking in the bathroom because every time i see a red car i see a red car and i asked him why there was grease in the wheel well he just squinted
there are serial killers at work tonight plural i get the feeling i am being taken for a ride
-Matt Specht
it’s hard to think when you can’t imagine failing
-Matt Specht
read {-ily
a) this is the sound of something beat -ing: {meta {meta {meta slash} {meta
b) ―what is the purpose of all those modifiers,‖ point
-David Tomaloff
she asks, {/ing at some clouds
read {-ily
(cont.)
c) there must be a thousand horses
{long division {long division solicitous banter
or an X { about X
d) ―read {- ily, yes.‖ and Newton’s third law
e) { -monadic essence for miles a) b) c)
-David Tomaloff
an d m iles and miles an d mi
les
seismic lens feudal dis'bracement
it’s times like these; gumball pervasive trying like the devil to future scream queens knowing nothing; name, rank, nor serial n. comma abiding, sweet fluoride wilderness apprehensive soul beating against the foreign black and white windows in sketches never seen assassin’s bloodied pitchfork for disavows until no one is watching; when calm dizzies and moon lights ways like chrome clutching, tremendous {-ing}2 the edges of brand new
-David Tomaloff
motorcycle
parts
glass figurine, revolt!}
I got this crazy mockingbird hairdo; a rollercoaster zing like a swan reaching out through the mouth of a brazen-eared gull I got this messy-faced zest for life; a poplar merry-go-round and come hither in which I carved the initials, ―rise and conquer—
and seize the enormous sky‖
-David Tomaloff
reasons
because your eyes feel furrowed and green-brown like farmland in spring because your voice trails the scent of cedar trees in June because your fingers whispering on my skin taste like mulled wine before Christmas and my tongue feathering yours hears an Easter oboe because you smell of old gold and orange and Friday afternoon because I listen for the red fragrance of palm blood and weep its warm splash
-Nic Sebastian
- originally published in Loch Raven Review
vocation
he thought he was a monk wearing brown wool wearing silence in sweet tenor on four or five bronzed notes he knelt on the polished stone of what was not him but was wholly him, he woke greatly to the peal of bronzed bells, spent his days in thrall to an oboe but in his dreams at midday the sun dropped on him drenched him in thick butterscotch in whole blankets of angry bees
-Nic Sebastian
- originally published in The Adroitly Placed Word
we have no need of prophets
we live where they come from the brown air of our country rattles our mountains are gray with sleeping our babies born without ears let us hang our harps on the willow close in among ourselves and ask is there nowhere some slight fallen spark we may carefully blow upon
-Nic Sebastian
- originally published in Words on the Web
poem for mother’s day
you ask why I write of budding spring and rising sap would you rather I wrote of razor wire and cold scrubland mother the chiseled ivory of your sleeping face your paper eyelids gliding shut like bricks in the wall of your sleeping face mother the deep miles of night sky with no moon the stars you gave out so sparingly the ones that cost so much the miles of tundra the trudging and your pale face turned up mother always up to your own moonless sky
-Nic Sebastian
- originally published in The Dirty Napkin
Knotty Pine
It's been years since the last time I visited. My uncle's guitar reclines in his empty chair, waiting in vain for his fingers to pick out notes that for years rang off the knotty pine walls, before becoming muffled by soft green carpet. But his gnarled knuckles gave up years ago. This was his favorite room in the house, built to look exactly like the cabin up north where he spent his childhood summers. After he was left alone, he rarely used the rest of the house. The room is cleaner now, straightened up to allow strangers to roam through while thinking about mortgages and updates. It's been years since I last visited, and the room looks the same, except for a deeper, more enduring silence.
-Paul Scot August
Pelicans
The top of my world shimmers with danger as three black shadows cross the blue-gray surface of all that I know. We are warned about the long-beaks, the way they scoop our brothers and sisters from our ranks. The elders call them Death From Above. Yet still I have the desire, late in the day, to start from the bottom silt, swim upwards with all my might, and break thru the plane into the vast unknowing, see for myself all that the Great One has created and placed, like a cruel joke, just outside of my reach.
-Paul Scot August
Winter Scene, River West
Just before midnight on a Thursday, and Fratney Street is nearly silent. Two sounds compete for the night: the crunch of boots on dirty snow from a woman walking away from you, and the insistent hum of a street lamp on the far corner. The snow plows have completed their appointed rounds, the pavement has been well-seasoned. You stand there with your back against a telephone pole, and watch her shrink into the distant past until she becomes just another blessed stranger no longer in your line of sight. And you shiver. The temperature is beginning to drop names. The street lamp is humming a Dylan tune. And a red light in the second floor window above an all-night laundromat across the street goes out, fading away to a colder shade of black.
-Paul Scot August
Berries
Hiking along a railroad-track-turned-bike-trail, we found an explosion of berries along a field just beginning to find its own way back to life. They were red, but neither of us cared enough to find a metaphor, so just red they remained. You told me how some red berries in this area are poisonous to certain small mammals, yet are a delicacy to many birds. Try one, you said, almost smiling. Our dog ran over to sniff them, as if his hunger could ever be sated by crimson little orbs hanging from thin stems. You called him back, afraid he may eat that which later will tear at his insides, momentary pleasure replaced by intestinal regret. But he gulped a mouthful before returning to us on the trail, and all that night you watched him, waiting to see if he would be undone by his hunger, or if he was testing out the toxicity for us, trying out something new before we do it, like just last week when he began sleeping on the living room couch instead of our bed.
-Paul Scot August
Dear Manifest Destiny
Rails a sentence stitched on the belly of the land; steel’s crossbar swash glottal-stopped love letters gone all wrong, no speed, no steam, detritus camps when destiny’s dynamo heart halts. No coal fires burning in this night, by the highway betrayed. But still the shrieked depot plaint in the tiny hours: remember when I was your lover & umbilical, a parallel for the hills’ & shores’ breathing backs, an onyx lode in the strata of heaven, horizon & earth? Now only tramproads, tattered backsides, a dirty canvas for the ones who skulk in dead time to paint the train haunches, ghosts of that letter’s letters pressed into the pad when were steady hands.
-Mark Lamoureux
in the 1930s, capitalist clowns self-defenestrated . . .
why not now?
-Jason Mashak
$0.017 cost to make $0.01 coin = monumental ruin
-Jason Mashak
like words I'll stay inside all night
-Jason Mashak
Lettuce and Mustard Sandwiches Wrapped in Wax Paper
Thursday, December 3, 1959 CRACK SIDEWALKER: I swallowed a penny. SKULL PUPPET: Brown bread my blinky, alone. CRACK SIDEWALKER: Beyond the beacons is where I sleep. SKULL PUPPET: Not the sound of the sun. CRACK SIDEWALKER: This life of his is a night of tiny Saturns.
-J.D. Nelson
Christmas Eyes
A coin, Canadian. How long does it take to eat a self-sandwich? Earth, the shame of a thousand planets. Out here, we haven't a moon, not any more.
-J.D. Nelson
I Sprayed the Wasp with Oven Cleaner
Boston pencil sharpener this morning a caramel cube wrapped in cellophane Colfax and York in the taillights of time blank memory of the United States these thoughts are coins of the breath yes, one eye is Egyptian a creature of time, ticking
-J.D. Nelson
Dreamlessness
Whole Foods last year. I can't look Denver in the eyes. Eden, a snack of the secret police. Paperless cash void. The forest of noise. The sharp lines of the morning. The spider's answer: The sun was a wolf. The opposite of time is all I have in a room in the world.
-J.D. Nelson
[walls]
A blue chess game A blue city A blue hand A blue woman A blue vein A blue river A blue tip A blue milk snake An indigo planet –
bleeding distorted & broken carrying an orange crying plump & ready leading to a frayed body on magpie wings escaping stopped
-Helen Vitoria
Dark Horse
Grabs my mane has no teeth to bite with Never − goes deeper than the mud puddle I am trying to find my way back to lost
-Helen Vitoria
requiem
grant me a black horned demon you know the type − he can summon in the stars make a shelter of your body weave a legend in your hair find a wound & shackle lucidity affliction−spurred, knife – edged, lit & wild.
-Helen Vitoria
*originally published in >kill author
Casino
He arrives in a rusted coat of armor
She arrives wrapped in cotton
He removes her bloody bandages
She is halved
Her torso becomes a monster dithering beneath an eclipse
-Helen Vitoria
Reboot
I can't help but be saturated and in time we took our intricate fingerings to heart
-Carly-Anne Ravnikar
Restart
when everything stops working we just need to unplug
-Carly-Anne Ravnikar
Reload
our edits were lost and our steps left untraceable. you've never felt like anything.
-Carly-Anne Ravnikar
Machina/Hominis
Look at you! Gorgeous android: electricity dancing in water those synapses encouraging impulsivity! How brilliant that solar plexus that crazy, wavy peristalsis the ganglia wresting control. Cilia sweeping, elegantly, methodically epidermis with stratum upon stratum; dig those groovy sulci! You’re stunning superlative contraption; electricity dancing in water cell to cell.
-Lisa Adamowicz Kless
Latitude
Two degrees south of you I throw out sparks breath caught in my throat anxious for something to be set ablaze but-nothing. I scrawl on insects’ wings toss them airborne willing their flight path to crisscross yours. Still, no answer; only the sound of blood rushing in my ears. Hopefulness eventually fades with the sunlight of winter. I carefully wrap my heart up in plain brown paper tie it with twine then reaching, tip-toed place it high on a shelf for safekeeping.
-Lisa Adamowicz Kless
Longevity
never stop dating your wife
-Ed Makowski
Upstream
The water at home always smelled of sulfur, which I didn't notice until leaving, the way someone can share your house and become 100 pounds smaller every day for a year without notice. The city water a safe chlorinated distance from the well water of childhood home where dad declined. Two winters as the big city artist without heat or plumbing and I returned to argue at my brother over brown shoes holding up a black suit. Pacing around the old house I finally asked what the hell was wrong with the god damn rotten egg water -Mom chuckling the obvious A home can only ever smell exactly how you leave it
-Ed Makowski
Saying Something
My friend's daughter I hadn't noticed watching spoke to the side of my face, ―You don't talk much.‖ I turned my head toward the voice and there she was next to me, I suppose, the whole time
―Really?‖ I asked.
she shook her head ―Hm. I used to talk a whole lot. Guess I learned.‖
-Ed Makowski
Teumessian Fox
As a young woman, she had dreamed that she was vulpine. Always dreams where she had leapt across muffled landscapes of moss and stone; stars shattering overhead whilst frost-heavy blades had cracked, like dirty silver, beneath her feet. She had run, pounding, only stopping to call to the diamond sky, to smell and listen for what could be hers. Always, in the dreams, she came to a box, a prospect full of soft, small bodies; where she would be what is animal; crashing into what was before her, taking, unable to stop until everything in that box was life and destruction and radiantly illimitable. Years have passed and all has changed. She does not tell them how, once, she dreamed that she was vulpine.
-Jenny Bootle
The return
The dusk sighs upon the treetops, and roots, like femurs, poke from the earth. You should feel something different here, something triumphant, touchable, repaired. You do not. Instead, you clasp your hands for warmth, Palms joined together, like prayer, like sins. You gaze upwards, to skies graciously purple, heavy with silence, always those same disappointing skies.
-Jenny Bootle
I am trying to learn how to sew c rack(s) kill(s) I go to the store for thread thimble milk of human kindness and bananas. those cramps are a bitch.
-Dana Roders
and Softsoap stained my shadow.
in kansas we trust/ but are we ? nylon knotted windstorms lack precipitation participation fact: the dish ran away with the fork dirty bitch! last night’s hors d’oeuvres barely covered your shame how dare you flaunt pigtails so bouncy and lustrous while cancerous munchkins wear wigs made of crabgrass those shoes match with nothing but Bourgeois (you sparkle)
and hell hath no fury
at all.
-Dana Roders
in sighs or drip ping / s lippin g on common ground 47th caller gets the girl with the rose-colored paint in her eyes saw the look what you this is why .
-Dana Roders
Star Wars Hold Up
If charm spreads black tears across its throat worries and wanders You kiss like a submarine diving in still water across the lake is loss And loss alone. No reason screams louder than the pity of a name, as no heaven Studies itself so well. It wove a rug around and squeezed every stranger Who ever shrugged or wailed for raises or shed clothes for heat stroke. Last year I quit but then I relapsed but now I'm good again.
-Nicholas Michael Ravnikar
All My Peeps Love Fried Chicken
My pal Stephen died Fluff bucket, fluff sucker cream trying to walk down the aisle puff love, puff piece, this one. One muckraking limerick more -- whatever that means. Purple flights intertwine. Or Something. They must meet meat. I love their style, I find them on Craigslist, pinup in hand and plump enough to suckle. They must wave their feet. They paper their house with us. They bet on the truth of facts, and paint their buckets pink.
-Nicholas Michael Ravnikar
The Burr
In this little by little bough stickle fingers brush under me, little seeds rush as the cradle cracks. Old by way of empty & swung (flown) to nest, tree-deep, the soft cots of it dried on the satin of the sky. Night almost hides the branch where sun's beams rest.
-Nicholas Michael Ravnikar