Chapbook, Number 5 by Alan May

The Chapbook

The Chapbook, Number 5 2014 ÂŠ The Chapbook, Editor: Alan May All rights revert to individual authors and artists upon publication. Submissions for The Chapbook are accepted year-round, unless otherwise noted. Manuscripts that contain previously published poems are welcome, but only if authors retain full rights. Previously published small press chapbooks are welcome, if they have been out of print for five or more years. Manuscripts should be typed and consist of around 20 pages. Authors should include an email address and telephone number on the title page. All chapbook submissions should be sent to Alan May, The Chapbook, 121 Greenbrier Drive, Knoxville, TN 37919. Manuscripts will be recycled. From time to time, The Chapbook will focus on authors from particular regions of the U.S.A. and, hopefully, other parts of the globe. The Chapbook welcomes chapbook reviews and art submissions. Reviews and art submissions may be sent to thechapbook@gmail.com. Cover and interior art by Volodymyr Bilyk. For more information, please consult our website: http://chapbookjournal.com/ The Chapbook is published in Knoxville, TN. ISBN-13: 978-1500776404 ISBN-10: 1500776408 ISSN: 2164-991X

The Chapbook, No. 5

The Crux of Our Great Misunderstanding by Matt Hart / 5 First, earth by Ann Fisher-Wirth / 35 Vats by Luke Daly / 61 My Far-Shooting Apollo by Joanna Grant / 109 My Glass Terrace the Hinterland by Bonnie Jean Michalski / 137 Kontakion by Patti White / 171 A Primer for the Icarian Arts by Carey Scott Wilkerson / 195 To when tea ties hence to wank it too and eminent means of Basil Dado Hem-welt by Volodymyr Bilyk / 223

__________________________

THE CRUX OF OUR GREAT MISUNDERSTANDING by MATT HART

The Chapbook, No.5

__________________________

* Adaptors too numerous and clear to the sky Whir of Augusts O open-mouthed mothers go fight win the flying red ants This is the beginning of a party/bikini Don’t act like the greenery’s a million miles old The earth opens up and you’re in it in a chariot Follow the leader—except there’s no leader— and when there is a leader Barely moving target in the bakery Tiger beating device Axe of incredible kindness The painter wants advice, so you take him to the oracle How many microscopic organisms When do you think about the Romantic era And why is the termite mound pulsing with light You might think forever and you’d be right, but it’s nothing you have to manage Blips of electricity Cat becoming blood The foggiest notions in the chairlift up the mountain And speaking of translation Aesthetic experience A new-jack sublime A man interrupts to ask if he will die Cherry-flavored fire engine Ethnic cleansing toilet bowl Brooklyn’s the odds on favorite to critique it Set the blaze Be deliberate Never look back at the books

* The last time the “we” of us fought in the yard it was Tuesday, for the love of dirty turnips both blank and relentless Debris or public sculpture Contrapuntal Ibuprofen My Aegean Sea O quote, You are mist You are writ and ga-looted The problem can’t be solved, but you can make it a better problem The beginning simultaneously with the end of the book, a novel about throwing one’s life into a dumpster The spirit in fits, so it fits the introduction A future/no future you can count on

* You with your tutu most definitely on Oh how I love thee swimming naked in the wildness wilderness bewilderment missing somebody or missing a bus, way too scheduled in the green grass of golf, our giant red panda, singing beautifully an aria Stop as in go Stop as in period What you follow you follow in another direction The bubbles blowing awkward in the Lawrence Welk glow Myron Floren The Lemon Sisters Accordion echoes as you waltz down the hall Wallpaper on us A door and a window The children looking forward to a vanishing With bombs

* Unbutton thy blouse A dirtier projector Pull down thy vanity, Ezra Pound, my professor Re-checking in with your newlywed reactor the young man watches sparrows as they dive into the wall He will write a letter to the girl in her shell in hopes that she’ll be sleeping when he’s bleeding through her sweater Nothing like mock turtle soup to console us The crocodile stomach and the lotus blossom crawl In October, I’ll remind you A brand new dance in the vein of St. Vitus To quote Thomas Jefferson The death of Mao Tse Tung Falling apart is falling in love You’ve already answered what’s inside a giraffe The lawn growing longer as it wonders what to laugh Pull down thy vanity Turn up thy personality Is anybody here in the emptiness beside us Show yourself Hymn to Intellectual Abandonment

* Then Shelley starts chirping And the floodwaters rise Quarter-sized hail and your thighs still a mystery If only thou wert with me If only the leaves in piles upon the bedchamber floor were listening It’s the first time raspberries have entered through the door Selected John Weiners Urged by your affairs, you’re leaving Cincinnati A phone call most distressing Declare the wine adequate and call it a bouquet Come out from behind the curtain where you’re faking You’re a lobster and you know it Do all three Dear Flemish Painters, stop clearing your throats It’s a distraction Oranges and sardines and windshield wiper fluid Why I’m not a poet I should just stay out of it It’s Mars for a moment, then the lesser gods we trust Rust-colored aphid New York Times of cloud reports Octopus weather Stock broker vulture Romantic poets aren’t all that forgiving They’re hacking at the birches with a homemade machete Stoic or indifferent when we tell them love is lost

* We do Ode to Coit Tower at the top of the tower at the top of our lungs But first a few drinks with the author of Vesuvius I’m nervous, so I show up at your window in China Grub worms and bees The grass has fleas, so the animals have fleas The couch hops around like it’s somebody’s life Weed eater hedge trimmer When we were younger The spirit in fits, so it fits the introduction Journey to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop Fly away owl, but return with reinforcements I.V. tacked into the wall above the couch The clouds The frogs We drank too much, but it wasn’t our fault Hark hark the dogs do bark The story is no story San Francisco goes missing Squirrels and electricity The people and their park When darkness falls over the face of the earth The trees in their ekstasis The typist in his moment Stand up sorry and tall when you believe it Touch yourself in secret with a secret

* Wake up the next morning with a quarry in your stomach The more you love, the more you love Abraham Lincoln The best of Mick Jones Remember to swerve into the moon with its action reaction reactor

* The oncoming moon and the oncoming truck Heady afternoons Blank paper wasps’ walls Dying young romantics with a nervous exuberance The tree standing still in a silvery stillness You write Rainer Maria in a notebook, it’s a mantra The silk worm merely blushing as you run to catch the ball Sleeping pills and cherry coke You never call your mother The bathtub full of devilish ducks You take it to heart with a face full of power I rub against your sweater It’s yesterday tomorrow Thank god you do the taxes and I become a wolf

* The sleep won’t sleep On my back reading Shelley It’s one in the morning when I think a golden raspberry Mild and like a tiger on the lookout in my driveway I put it to my lips, so a ship sails the distance A text on fire My dear friend’s birches What is most required is your signed affidavit Panties and pornography The sun never sets

* I’m telling you this, so you’re telling it thus A series of valves keep the darkness all around us As one jaw drops You swallow a swallow Sleeping bag to sleeping bear Shopping bag to barely resistant You arrive home younger than ever before Smelling like bourbon Benjamin Franklin A greenness in a greatness Ice skating rink in a haze in a trance Nature as an image of a wolf with lots of hands Calling in the middle of the night, you want to ask me Too Heavy for Liftoff New History Lesson I can only say mist I can only say missing This map of you criss-crossed over wide fields of thought The cows don’t look up when we tip them Bartenders Steve Miller People call me the space cowboy is a true statement, but even more often Speaker of the House Judas Priest

* All by itself is a human situation Stringing out the language for thirty six pages Les Fenetres And the runway model nodding Both takeoff and landing I’m sorry I messed up on the first misty mountain the hole we dug to China It was coffee grounds and kittens And this is also my apology for taking us a parking lot Or apart a lot When you came to meet me Snow White and the Seven Dwarves My star connected up with a shiny poison apple The deer never stopping their grazing in the meadow, then disappearing around the back of the building huffing glue, I guessed at first but I could always be mistaken You were coughing in the kitchen Truly awful and expectant The human situation I take off my shirt I show you my sunburn In the poem, the park ranger calls the children over Never be average The sin is being average Always admit when you’re missing something perfect I’m missing something perfect I want to be deliberate, but I’m not

* Off at four, can’t wait to get money Man, am I hungry You should hide the Shelley— Percy Bysshe or Mary, whatever your fancy I can take it in the jaw The beer is always cold so I don’t take the call Two new messages, but I’ve mostly hit the ceiling It’s the best book I’ve read in the 21st Century No question Rise Up and throw down your love, said the poet I’m with him in the sentiment The window and the weeds It’s devastating when the marching band underestimates the parade All that dehydration and the notes falling off It’s hard to say concatenation and not I in some sense mean a mean constellation, one with clawfeet, but without the urban legend Now the rain you wanted takes the gutter off the porch Every second of every day I work hard to be your neighbor, but I can’t say I’m not worried when you take the new job Lots of people don’t like me I need to be sweeter The look on your face says you’re already gone

* It’s even in Spanish Or blackouts Or both Julio Cortazar and a thousand blue teardrops I read him sober Beer in one hand, dog in the other Home at the end of a fiery lake You play in the sand on the beach trees, your mind’s vacation doesn’t show its face for years at a time in the wiggle room light We ordered in a snowstorm, now await its return in the whiteout empty green room When you’re absent I feel like my head’s coming off, but it’s only a cloud passing over this city Blips of electricity Cat becoming blood The repetitions seem a lot less deliberate in this one, and that’s because every single day is the same as all the other ones I’ve known Our empire in ruins Again and again I go back to the words The secret Richard Nixon and poems

* To be deliberate is to do it like Abraham Lincoln Kill the young Romantics with a nervous exuberance I want my giant sympathy to blanket the forest The oncoming moon and the oncoming truck This is what I mean by making you a decision We ordered a snowstorm You put your face against my elbow It was lightning and thunder, and, no, I will never get over that connection The adapters are numerous and clear to the sky We spent the whole afternoon picking strawberries They were Noumenous Then spent the evening in a human situation Wanting to be better, which is not an abstraction A wish that the people who have not will eventually have magic the blacker the better, something to combat the dire evil of our time The commitment to work in the concrete all around it to have a conversation, which is useful to someone This lime tree bower, not funny in the slightest Trying not to yell into the phone when you call How is it possible, being so at the center Often I’m incredulous Not possible to believe what my mother believes What my headset wire’s simple glory doesn’t know I have the facts with their fat little faces, but you have your misty pink bathrobe and slippers

* Under the moonlight, the serious moonlight Go ahead, you can say it Your critical opinion It occurs to me I’m writing so to bust out all your windows And the flower children line up to sell you a warship, recruited by a tiger to show us who’s boss Jiminy Cricket Jesus Christ Rocking chair punk and the you of all this mist The grass has fleas, so the animals have fleas, but the sky full of fleas is a darkness/contender Bright star were I as steadfast as the little child’s sugar No doubt it makes the difference, Ulysses S. Grant, James Joyce, Polyphemus The rabbit in your pocket isn’t whiter than the house It’s whiter than all the houses in the dreams of picket fences A unicorn eating a heat-seeking missile KA-BLAM KA-BLAM KA-BLAM goes the CIA drone

* Not so secret service It occurs to me Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m working my mouth into your sweater Dehydration Mechanical bull Again and again I go back to the words Wanting to be better A lion with a splinter or a pencil eraser Always admit when youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re missing something perfect My face against your elbow and a clean white shirt

* Whir of Augusts New-fangled blizzard Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m coming to, etc. Etcetera

* Water logged and bow-legged, tied to a tree The Vast with its mercy On your knees beside an ox It occurs to me occurs to me It was lightning and thunder, and, no, I will never get over that Nature as an image of a wolf with lots of fathers Too heavy for liftoff, I can only say I’m sorry and what’s more Trying not to yell into the phone when you call Seriously, I can only say I’ve gotta run through the pasture loosely throbbing with intensity Your objections to our missing souls Flemish Painters, stop clearing your throats as an abstraction Golden raspberry Lots of people don’t like me You are always in my theories, and I feel for your intensity Your wingspan like a yawn, like a kind of dénouement I drink too much the river, and it spoils me for ether Cars are real, for sure for sure Always be deliberate when you’re walking your dog

* Yes, the foggiest notions come in chairlifts up the mountain And later in the village with the woman in the mud I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think the dictionary What are we to say to the poverty of distance Distress is more than trees and birds A bone to pick Your false eyelashes Rise up, said the poet and throw down your love The limits of your limits The amount of your endurance Ambulance vs. ambulance Pastoral in a bottle, My friend is your friend or the damage no one mentions If you shake hands with a shaking hands man, you should worry Your survival

* It occurs to me The commander Brooklyn’s the odds on favorite to critique it Lifting her hands from the fence to make her fallout A random quotation from Andre Breton The footsteps upstairs when nobody’s home If suddenly we were horses Borrowing and borrowing The curses come later The greenest grass you’ve ever smoked O Missing our souls or your wingspan

* Never look back For the end is the beginning Or a lot more often in the middle when you mean it Poets off poetry Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been writing for months trying to find you a fake Passport With your heart of rock candy Where Shelley starts chirping Nobody creates out of a void, the materials must first be afforded

* The flying red ants become a symptom, a breach The couch hops around like itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s somebodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life To quote Thomas Jefferson Your head and my head Coconut milk Being so at the center To do something about it All our best work taken hostage in a tree

* Once again occurs to me Ezra Pound unbutton thy blouse The happiest of hours Sleeping outside in a bagworm wigwam Fully aware of our emotional light I can see you have something The apex with its feelings in a bundle by the throat But when the traffic starts to throttle, I can’t see nothin’ clearly You’re hiding in the bricks Turn left at the Romantics It’s the yard with the giant red tree in its heart If you’re paying attention, you can’t miss it

* Recruited by a tiger, to sell you some spirit The facts with their fat little faces keeping lookout I do almost anything on my knees to get you on your knees Just look at this swamp— so much richness just waiting to be developed My how the landscape changes its function One minute you’re blushing and the next you’re picking up all your clothes off the couch I take the skin off an orange and it nails me with deliciousness Fragrant with citrus, it’s even in Spanish Why I’m not a poet Selected John Wieners and a clean white shirt If you were here at this moment we’d remember each other fondly I’d be seventeen again The first time raspberries And you’d have it all figured out in my driveway We’d be drunk, so we’d be in love Forever and ever It’s just too good I’m sorry to steal it I blackout every

* Distress is more than trees and birds That runway model nodding Both takeoff and landing The crux of all our misery standing in standing water Mosquitoes or angels, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference The report says creativity peaks at the beginning of the second hour after working out so while I’m waiting I wanna use a cliché I’m high as a kite, and man it feels rushing like I’m losing my stomach in a vortex post office, and killdeer everywhere you ever thought you’d wanna be I thought you’d wanna be with me— and I was right, but not forever Or maybe forever, but we were both a true statement People call me the space cowboy and it’s depressing My feet firmly planted in that hole we dug to China Last night while I was sleeping you were mountains in the distance, but this morning on top of me you’re screaming for a vengeance No need for complaining I turn into a wolf The bathtub full of devilish ducks The sky goes thick and green with Ohio And you, the most visible of the invisible I’ve seen It’s good to be awake

in the dreams of picket fences and the damage no one mentions It occurs to me youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re floating, your wingspan like a yawn Always be deliberate or a mean constellation Blips of electricity Cat becoming blood Set the blaze The books pile up Throw down your love, said the typist in ekstasis You are missed or you are mist In the air, I can never tell the difference

Matt Hart is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless (Typecast Publishing, 2012) and Debacle Debacle (H_NGM_N Books, 2013). A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, he lives in Cincinnati where he teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and plays in the band TRAVEL.

__________________________

First, earth by ANN FISHER-WIRTH

The Chapbook, No.5

__________________________

Contents Water Valley / 39 In Summer / 40 Mississippi, August / 41 Skin Flick / 42 Tide Pools / 43 For Marilyn, Evie D, and Two McCullar’s Orchards Peaches / 44 Broken Knee. A Rant / 45 Mississippi / 47 Pearl / 48 In That Kitchen / 49 Cherry Tree / 50 Winter Sentences / 51 Sunlight, Sunlight / 52 You Have Been So Good / 53 Indra’s Net. June / 54 First, earth / 55

Water Valley

I am driving a car, squinting a little because my eyes are tired. Cherry and plum trees bloom like ballerinas in the yards outside dilapidated houses. It is April, a back road in north Mississippi. The windshield wipers tick back and forth, scraping an arc through the drizzle-soaked pollen. Once when I was small I lay in a hotel bed in Pennsyvania and watched the reflection of rain-blurred streetlights tick green to yellow to red, then back to green, in the bedroom mirror. Why was I there? Where were my parents? This memory has lingered all these years. I have no way to know if it is true.

In Summer I lay on the bed’s sweaty sheets while my mother pulled my nightgown up to my shoulders, baring my back, and tipped the rubbing alcohol into her hand, smoothed it on my hot skin, as through the open window the leaves were stirring. There now, she said, go to sleep, don’t move. Lie still, you won’t be so hot if you lie still. My sister and I sang to each other, “Old Black Joe,” “Sleep Baby Sleep,” “Sweet and Low,” “Shepherd Show Me How to Go,” taking turns spinning the songs out in our matching beds with the strawberry chintz until finally blot bingo blip we must have been asleep, conked out in the sweat and heat and cicadas. Suddenly it was morning. I stripped, climbed into my seersucker playsuit without putting on underpants, ran downstairs and ate my breakfast, went outside. Our father brought us Summer Specials, as we called caramels, and in a white paper bag he brought us molasses cookies with crinkle sugar, shaped like oval outdoor faucets—I took a bite and sucked it till the cold juicy sugar filled my mouth, then swallowed, took another bite. Next year our father was in Korea. Our mother packed us up, her best friend took her own three kids, we all rented houses at Stone Harbor. I watched my sister get knocked over by a riptide, and my mother run in to help her and get knocked over too by a riptide, the two of them struggling up, falling sideways down, my mother struggling again, yanking my sister by the arm, trying to lift her clear. Did anyone come to help them, or did my mother find her feet again and make it to shore? I watched them, not quite knowing if I should be terrified. In the summer the leaves grew big as hands on the maple tree, and I swung in my swing set so high that my feet bumped the leaves, thinking about hell: my friend said it was real, my mother said it was not. Thinking about God. And my favorite crayon word, the color of those leaves: Viridian.

Mississippi, August

When you come back home after a long and difficult journey, you might see it for a moment now and again as if for the first time. You might hunger for it, instead of taking it for granted—“for granite,” as our students say—and even when it’s hot and wet and not-in-the-way-you-want-it-wild, you might experience a perverse joy in its bugginess and rottingness. Mildew?—ah what a flower, what a snowflake blossoming, it produces on the veneer of your antique furniture. Polish it off, but as you do, notice the crystalline frostiness with which it glazes the wood, when the light catches it just so, obliquely. Fleas in the bed? Spiders in the corner?— something to chase. My friend, trying to get me to talk about what I like and what I hate about Mississippi, said, “Well, one thing, you hate living in a house without air conditioning.” And though I’ve bitched about it a thousand times, “Oh no,” I replied, “to tell the truth I love it, because it teaches me about decay.” Living in this house, we float in the ark of the seasons. It’s a constant battle, to keep the green and the grunge back a little, to give us room for our skin to dry when we step out of the bath. The edges of our books curl. Mold grows on my Merrills like a forest. Too hot to make love, but not too hot to kill cockroaches, the small ones, two of them scuttling along the baseboards when I turned on the bathroom light. No, we don’t have a.c. except for a couple of window units, and no, we don’t spray, except for termites—about which we have no choice, since we suffered from them seven or eight times. One May, when we drove home after school, we discovered a vast flock of birds swooping and diving in the trees above our house. And then when I went into the bathroom and looked out the window, I saw a swarm of angels streaming from the outer bathroom walls up into the light. My God it was beautiful, a river of angels pouring from the transfigured clapboards. The birds were snatching up this shimmering airy throng as it ascended—which, of course, turned out to be a throng of termites. So that is my secret: how I love to be sunk in rifeness because it teaches you the body. Because when you live in more temperate zones, or when you live in an artificially neutralized environment, it is possible to forget the itch and crawl and shimmer and seethe of flesh, possible to start thinking you are mind only. But the heat tugs at me; it is the spirit’s undertow, the riptide of remembering that we are, finally, helpless, borne out to sea, the prey of the mystery.

Skin Flick

I was reading beneath the patio umbrella when I shifted my arm and suddenly the sun shone directly on my skin. Oh God, I said, what is wrong with me, the cells that hold me together are starting to break apart. And look at the striated, blotchy skin of my upper arm with the full sun brutal on it. If you are light, God, I saidâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if you are perfect lightâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;you play us a dirty trick. Because time is all I see, hovering like wasps around the overripe of me.

Tidepools

Towels? Plates? A broom or lawn equipment? A shirt already sprayed with poison? No, I said, no, my house is full and I’m sleepy with sun, drifting and climbing around tidepools. Every flexing of my knees brings me closer to lichens and sea urchins, turban shells glistening orange, ebony, emerald bladders of seaweed, seawrack, small scuttlings, pink and amethyst crabs torn legless by shrieking seagulls. The dream of the WalMart’s just that. What lasts? Hands in my hobo pockets, I’m wandering closer to worlds within worlds.

For Marilyn, Evie D, and Two McCullar’s Orchards Peaches

Right peach round and plentiful, left one a bit smaller. Right one, perky nipple. Left one, nipple shy, and I think of a girl folding her skirts around her as she sits uninvited in a corner. But the skin is soft and downy, just the same. Ah, the privacy of desire, the intensity of the unchosen—as I was once, though my husband can never believe it. A faint tracing of brownish spots, some minor blight or imperfection. But what colors would we use for the flush around the spots? —Sunlight? Fire on the mountains? –Same as the colors we’d use for love. Swollen flesh, July-inMississippi eagerness—take a bite, it runs down your chin and on to your hands, your forearms: full of juice, isn’t it? How Evie D and I Make Pie for the Butterfly Bakery Evie D climbs on her chair. I scald and skin the fuzz off ten big peaches, slice the slippery flesh. She adds a bit of sugar, a tablespoon of flour, shakes on cinnamon, squeezes lemon, “just a little bit,” then scooches it—“gently, gently”—to combine. She licks her fingers. And when Marilyn pounded that ball on an elastic band, the game in the bar in “The Misfits,” every bit of her peachy body thwacked and jiggled and shimmied. First her breasts, as she hit the ball sideways, bouncing unconstrained in her polkadot dress. Then her butt, and the camera going crazy, zooming in on her flesh as she pounded that paddleball into submission. Rolling loose and sweet and wild and doomed.

The Broken Knee. A Rant Everyone says, ‘Now that you have this time on your hands you must be doing so much writing.’ The truth is, ‘None at all.’ I can’t get my head outside myself. It’s April. My days are spent watching the ground, making sure there’s no impediment, no rough edge, broken pavement, clump of dirt, sudden slick, to send me sprawling. I gimp around in a leg brace, hitching a hip to swing my leg forward, trying to bend my knee when I lift my foot, then straighten my knee to finish my step—but my leg brace does not bend enough to do this, so I gimp and hitch until my whole body hurts and I’d like to curl up on the sidewalk, suck my thumb, and turn into a larva. I sit on my bed, laptop between my knees, or lie on my bed, laptop on my chest, or stand in the kitchen, laptop on the counter—with books books books till I’m sick of reading and can barely see. Sex? Sure: I can hoist my braced leg like a log to the side, and my husband is gentle when he lies with me. But I’ve saved up so much tension and fatigue that when he touches me I flinch, and he has to take me down, down, down, to a place where I feel pleasure. I look older. I am older. Since that day the rainy sidewalk flung itself up to shatter my patella, I’ve been clenching my jaw and working my teeth, spiraling into resentment and fury.

* Burnt gardenias On my walk, lippety lip around the block in my leg brace, the whole street smells like gardenias. And there they are—ten massive bushes in one neighbor’s yard, six-petalled blossoms of gardenias. But why you plant them in full sun I don’t know; first it scorched, then it rained, so now the bushes are covered with flowers like sodden pancakes. They smell good, though—overripe ladies who powder their dogs and paint their eyes behind beaded curtains.

* Even after five children I want to think of my body as unbreachable. But I’m overrun. Poison ivy bubbles all over my left hand and foot, pus bubbles on my ankle, pearls of poison on my eyelid. That’s what I get for stomping around the back yard in my leg brace, pruning, weeding: I looked down as I stood among vines and privet cutting runners, chopping bamboo, clearing out around the azaleas and said Oh shit. There I was, a pretty green cluster of leaves in my hand. Now, days later, it’s boiling up all over me. My hand could win a screen test for The Mummy’s Claw.

* Days like empty plates It’s late May now, two months today since my operation. I can’t get the image on the x–ray out of my head: my patella looked like Pac-man, jaws wide open to swallow the little guys. At first it was mellow to be wounded—well, not at first, not during the pain, but after the operation, when my husband was there, and they brought me jello and a push-up ice cream like the kids used to eat, orange and vanilla ice cream and as you push the stick it rises up above the paper, and I lay around on Lortabs watching “Friday Night Lights” or sat on the front porch, leg stick straight on a chair, and listened to the birds and it was April. I needed to be thrown down, needed to be brought low, to lift me up you throw me down. At least it made me hold still for a while.

* The depths are not so deep, but it’s despair all the same, Lord. From the shallow end, I cry unto thee.

Mississippi

Savage, brutal, relentless, remorseless, snake-infested, tick-infested. Trees are so thick itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a curtain of green. Willow oak, pin oak, redbud, sweetgum, gingko, pecan, maple, plum, dogwood, bodock, apple, fig, triple-trunk trash tree. Ah yes, bamboo, how could I forget you? Hack it, chop it, cut it, whack it, still it crops up elsewhere, grows so fast you can hear it creaking. And wisteria, honeysuckle, jasmine, ivy, that choke the trees and bushes and creep inside the walls. Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s much to love about this climate, if you can get past being human.

Pearl

The animals slip from life like loose hair from a braid. Pearl on the bathroom floor still lifts her head but canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t eat, canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t drink. Nefertiti I have thought of sometimes looking at her, small elegant gray cat with long pointed ears and triangular head. Foundling seventeen years ago, one damaged place in her side where she never could grow more than downy underfur, one gimp leg. Already the fur on her leg has been eaten away, her flanks have collapsed, the frail bone cage of ribs is all that holds her two sides from touching, yet she purrs against my hand. Outside, through the night, cicadas chant the seconds, minutes, hours. In your heaven for cats accept Pearl who loved half-and-half and kippers, who does not fight nor seem to fear her death. Let it happen quickly because her waiting opens out like a desolate gray sea, she cannot get better so let her go forward. Let the wet earth enter her and return her flesh to the roots and stems and leaves of bamboo and privet and wild pink roses. Let the temple of her bones resist a little longer. Yet that too will return to mud and ants, the filaments of roots, then to light, then at last with everything that is, to emptiness. Her paws curl against each other. Her hollow belly with the little patch of underfur rises, falls.

In That Kitchen

In that kitchen the light comes through the high window on to the heart-pine floors. No one is in it now, the kids are grown and gone. The beautiful paintjob my son did years ago still looks practically new, sea-green trim on the beadboard walls—walls so resiny they’re nearly black, never painted, stained long ago, and luminous with age. In that kitchen the faded little rope of Tibetan prayer flags hangs from the brackets that hold the glass shelf, and on the shelf, telephone pole insulator caps line up, five of them, green and turquoise, and near the shelf, the Oaxacan painted lizard eats the other lizard scrabbling down the wall. Shabby old cupboards, the knobs always threatening to unscrew themselves and fall off. Nicked counter, nicked especially where my husband slammed the hammer down one long-ago argument, about who knows what, then what did I do? —bashed it with a knife to get even. Such a pretty kitchen, but in August, Mississippi, anger boils up like sorghum: sugary, lethal, pitch-thick, too much sweat, too many bugs, too much resentment. Still, kitchen as the heart with all sorts of blood in it, bloody heart, pumping, thick, glistening. The Aztecs lifted the heart high in the sun sacrifice, and for a split second the gutted victim knew outside himself. What an odd thing, the sloshy bucket of the self.

Cherry Tree

Deep in my bones is the memory of my mother, who laid me in a buggy beneath a cherry tree. Germany, after the war. An Army wife, she was making a home as she could, where the female ex-Nazi major spiked the tall grasses with razor blades, and when I became a toddler I entered the house one day, arms striped with blood from the brightness Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d been playing with. But what I want to remember, as I lie here after our fight, with the moon behind a cloud and you warm and naked and silent beside me, is not the Nazi major, not the razor blades, but my mother putting me down for my nap beneath a cherry tree.

Winter Sentences I’m up early, watching the sun rise in a watermelon strip behind bare trees. A cardinal perches on the quince bush, another warbles in the privet. Yesterday, at the wildlife bird refuge with my husband, I saw exactly one bird: something quaillike, but without the bobbling headpiece. It’s the final days of Christmas vacation. I’ve been cooking, cleaning, staying home, reading, sleeping, being cold. Now the sky is mother-of-pearl, now barely ripening peach, or apricot laced with milk. And the sunlight slices sheer, its knife-edge brilliant, through the tangled shabby branches of the willow oak, flings a blinding splash of white on the paint of the little toolshed next door. All day I trail a quilt behind me in this 100-year-old heart-pine house, where nothing is straight or square, where cold seeps through the edges of the windows. This amazing peace, rising up in me like a fountain. Such pleasure in the fractals of light-stroked winter branches. Such calm in my life, the fragile beauty of moments. Those I love are alive, still, these moments like a string of pearls and the string not yet broken.

Sunlight, Sunlight

We want to be simple, you and I—a life a bit out of its moment. When you try to start the Honda and it coughs, ribbety ribbety ack ack, it doesn’t occur to us to buy a new one. We want our tomatoes to grow and the camellia to blossom, want the days to pass with some vestige of simplicity. What do I mean by that? Oh, I mean the braided shafts of sunlight. Falling on you when I first knew you, as you leaned your head back, eyes shut, to the sun, in the Plymouth convertible. Falling on those strawberry fields that long-ago June twilight, outside Charlottesville, when we stopped after the violent thunderstorm. Falling on our wet muddy feet as we walked with our baskets, row after row, picking strawberries. Falling on the berries, bruised, almost overripe, to be eaten quickly—then that night at the Monterey Inn, when I sat in the bathtub eating strawberries, strawberries. Sunlight doesn’t stop just because we do. Hard to think there are lovers now who are just as new as we were. Sun is its own thing—may go out in a few billion years, as the scientist said, to which a lady in the front row gasped and asked him to repeat it. He did, and she replied, “Oh, thank God, I was afraid a moment ago you said a few million.” And here right now as I sit on this path on the campus where we teach, lawn equipment whirs around me, and students pass with their Ah’m gone go Southern soft voices and the squich squich of their flipflops—here right now, sun’s all over this path except where shade is, sweet scalloped shade breaking the Mississippi glare. Rainbow on the page, the way my glasses and eyelashes reflect light, prismatically. And sunlight stroking the birds’ throats so it comes out as song.

You Have Been So Good

You have been so good, you have spent so much time explaining. Now finish your soup and tie your shoes. When I say Go out and play I don’t mean maunder around the corners. Kick your feet high into the maple leaves, back and forth on the swing, go ahead, you can pump, you can rise high into the leaves that make you think they are God’s hands, you can jump when the swing reaches its crazy-tilt apogee, the ground is soft, the earth will hold you. Night gathers around the buildings. When your grandchildren open the blue chest, they don’t want to see piles of neatly folded laundry, neatly graded papers. They want to see your life take a big breath and fly away.

Indraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Net. June

A silvery wire of music hums in the shabby forest, pulses high in the blood, trilling, chirring, thrumming, from all the bushes and trees. Honeysuckle vines twine through the blossoming privet. As we walk at midnight my husband tells me how honeysuckle grew on the beach at Shippan in Connecticut, behind a chainlink fence that enclosed a pond scummed green with algae. Rising high and dense in the trees, it created for him a childhood kingdom. Those same years, my sister and I ate honeysuckle in Pennsylvania. Biting off the tip, sucking the sweet sap, we chewed the petals and spat out the bitten blossoms. We chased fireflies through our back yard and up the little hill, caught them in mason jars with holes poked in the lids. They blinked off and on as we fell asleepâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; I love night with the black-water lake of my soul.

First, earth

First, earth held me and I gathered hatchers. They were bell-shaped flowers marching upside down along waist-high stems, the blue or white blossoms of my three-year-old fantasy life in Germany. Occupation Wetzlar to be exact, where the Nazi major planted the back yard with razor blades I found while playing one day. I brought blood home on my hands, arms and fingers criss-crossed with the treachery tracings. Earth sowed with venom and rancorâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;yet in the front yard, the hill that went down to the street, blossom and stem of memories too old to be mine. This, my mother told me: magical hatchers (I called them) grew, and rabbits sat beneath them on that hillside. First, earth. Then, earth. How I love salt and green and rain, leaves of the maple oak or sycamore, love even oak galls, their papery knobbiness. And father and mother and blood and semen. Earth Grund jord la terre la tierra what else do we say for center, for what holds our breathing? Bowels and liver and lights. Stuff of which I am made. Secret I would mutter in my grave.

Publication Credits My thanks to the following publications, in which these prose poems (sometimes in earlier versions) have appeared or will appear: “For Marilyn, Evie D., and Two McCullar’s Orchards Peaches”

Adanna: special issue Women and Food

“Pearl”

Diode

“Winter Sentences”

EarthTones

“Sunlight, Sunlight”

EarthTones

“Tidepools”

Esque

“Mississippi”

Esque

“Indra’s Net. June”

Hawk and Handsaw

“In Summer”

Poecology

“Cherry Tree”

Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics

“In That Kitchen”

Terrain.org

“First Earth”

The Fourth River

“Mississippi, August”

The Fourth River

“Sunlight, Sunlight” was also printed as a broadside to celebrate a reading at Goshen College, Indiana.

Acknowledgments To the tireless members of my online Wompo workshop and to Beth Ann Fennelly, many thanks. To all the beings in my heart, whether human or other than human, much love.

Ann Fisher-Wirth's fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, was published by Wings Press in 2012. Her other books of poems are Carta Marina, Five Terraces, and Blue Window. She is coeditor of the groundbreaking Ecopoetry Anthology, which Trinity University Press published in 2013. Her work has appeared widely and received numerous awards and honors. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she directs the Environmental Studies minor, and also she teaches yoga at Southern Star Yoga Studio in Oxford, MS.

__________________________

VATS

by LUKE DALY

originally published by House Press

The Chapbook, No.5

__________________________

100

101

102

Vats (House Press, Dec. 2009) measures 6 7/8â&#x20AC;? x 8 5/8â&#x20AC;?. Cover: paper, with silkscreen cover art. Interior: black & white. Binding: string

Front Cover

103

Title Page

Interior

104

Colophon

105

106

Luke Daly is a Chicago-based writer, visual artist and musician. He co-edits the poetry press arrow as aarow which publishes emerging writers and works in translation. His most recent book, The Listening Room, was published in 2013.

107

108

__________________________

MY FAR-SHOOTING APOLLO

by JOANNA GRANT

The Chapbook, No.5

__________________________

109

110

Contents Hard to Say Where the Figure Ends and the Background Begins / 113 Speech 101, Special Occasions / 115 Grafenwoehr / 116 Blackout / 118 Ends / 120 Introduction to Greek Mythology / 122 Memorial Day / 124 Stars / 125 Getting Hot Out There Now It Looks Like / 126 Motor Pool / 128 Rasheed / 129 Behind the Wire / 130 Scorched Earth / 131 My Far-Shooting Apollo / 133

111

112

Hard to Say Where the Figure Ends and the Background Begins Helmand Province, Afghanistan

The earth is the color of the sky which is the color of the dirt They tell us we breathe the dirt up here. Moon dust and dried-up shit. With intake of breath the silt. Coats the spongy pink of the lungs. On the dustiest days we cough up mud. If it ever rains it streaks. Dirty tears. Some days thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a mountain tipped with wisps of snow off on the horizon. Some days just a flat grey scrim. Haze over the ghosts of old dead rivers. The dust chokes out the satellites. Unusable, your dish becomes a nest. No internet for daysâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;laptops turn to paperweights. We rediscover writing. Tracing the shapes. In the blackouts our grey-booted feet learn the dark and the rocks.

113

One of my boys brings me an old dead bullet. I bored a hole through the top, he says, so you can wear it on a chain. With luck the only one you ever stop. Children, I tell them in my lecture, many thousands of years ago the people here believed in a place they called the House of Dust. The place where all our souls went down to wait for who knows what. Slowly feeling the change. Some said the waiting ones began to sprout soft dovesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; feathers. As if maybe to fly. One day. Wings the pink and gray. Of the swirling dirt.

114

Speech 101, Special Occasions Khost, Afghanistan

Can you give me a story? I ask. A series of pictures. Illustrate what you mean? When he brought me back to Vietnam I drank the water and almost died. With the others he sat and prayed over me until the worst had passed. This is some of what I will say at the right time. My white knuckles grip the Bible tight. Dancing at any time is a special occasion. When I’m moving I feel Like I’m in a world of my own. I can wave big or small, I can freestyle, I can King Tut. Wave my whole body away. It passes the hours on guard. Can we see a theme emerging? Can we? I ask. Some nod, some don’t quite see. Every day for five years I ran from formation, he says, to where she sat In her car with her head bent over a book. I learned to speak German. I came back to get to know my son. She cried but wouldn’t agree to come. What happened to her? I went back to find her but she was with someone. Four women want to marry me now, but I’ve never fallen in love again. I build houses now. I have a little son. That’s the love that will stay no matter what comes. Do we see how this story grows? All the things an occasion can be? Yes, we see. He says for my next speech I want to tell the story of how I built my first house. Yes, he says, I know what soffit means. It’s the part underneath the eaves. Where the wall meets the roof. I guess you could say it lets the house breathe.

115

Grafenwoehr Bavaria, Germany

Oh Doyle loves to talk. Even when I close my eyes. “Did you know did you know did you. When Mark Twain first came to Heidelberg he. According to my article in The. Per Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton.” Forget pretending to be sleeping. Maybe I should just play dead. Our rented van winds up into the pines and mist. Old Bavaria. It looks like The Sound of Music here. My parents saw that on their first date. We all know what happened next. Grafenwoehr. A little listless argument over how the word’s pronounced. We call it a draw. Everything’s so Olde Worlde, white plaster, timber, cuckoo clocks. Everything’s a schnitzel. We all buy fancy steins. Off to the edge of the base the bombs in the woods. The firing range. Sanchez is back. He spends his days with pressure plates. Saran wrap. Stacks of batteries. Cheap plastic clocks. His plastic explosives look like Silly Putty. I imagine rolling a wad over The Family Circus, stretching out an orange cartoon Garfield. As he busies with his fingers Sanchez tells how back in Baghdad they’d lure simple children into carrying the bombs. Take this. Wear this. If you’re good they’ll give you candy after. If you get lost aim for the clock tower. Hermann Goering built this place to churn out Hitler Youth. It looms over our hotel. Doyle. Did you know. Did you. Did you know. Pretend my arm hangs down in shreds. A tourniquet. My wife agrees there’s just one hole a tampon goes in. I know you soldiers though. You’ll stuff those bullet holes with Tampax anyhow. Your airway’s blocked. Pretend. Out in the woods we have to run. To keep up. Sanchez does this all the time. Today he’s bored and we’re the last. “Look for things too regular, too straight. There’s your pressure plate. Boom. Too late. You’re dead. Who’s next.” In every copse a burned-out car. Wooden pop-up target men. Grunts practicing the four-man stack for door-to-door house clearance. First Sergeant says, “Your best friend will be a can of smoke.” And over all the obstacle courses

116

the Black Forest. Greenblack spruce with knife edge limbs, blue mist and fog. Somewhere near in these old woods the bristling boar. The brindled wolf. Ghosts of blue-eyed boys at play. Feinting. Imagining they too could ride the lightning. Once upon a time.

117

Blackout Khost, Afghanistan

In the blackout sometimes I think I'm walking down the left hand side of the road ringing the base. Where it's safe. They say. But find I've wandered way across the median when I've wrenched my ankle stumbling over the asphalt lip into the drainage ditch. Sometimes it's taken more than an hour for me to grope my way back to my hut in the dark when I can't see the hand in front of my face just like the people say. My student Michael tells me his stories, that way out there on the most forward bases there’s nothing but stars and sometimes flares, it’s so black at new moon the guys jerk off right next to each other and it’s like their eyes are shut. No one cares. In that kind of black you can’t judge depth or width. No perspective left. That’s what happened to Simon. He tried to jump that drainage ditch at two am out of his mind on contraband liquor he wheedled out of the Germans over on the other side. They say his knee won’t ever be the same. They say he cursed and swung at the MPs who caught him up in that last sweep with all the others, the ones who crossed over the divide in the middle of the night and now they’re gone just whispered of. Eyes averted I don’t know but this is what I heard. Mutters around the coffeepot before we plug ourselves back into our movies our email tug-of-wars with distant lovers staring into space wondering how it was we got ourselves here, Stumbling down a pitted half-paved road with nothing but the old constellations for guide—Orion the mighty hunter

118

running down the screaming Pleiades, his dog, too, and all the monsters with the gleaming eyes the ancients traced in their unpolluted heavens, back when all the myths I teach to the weary and the dusty lit the warships home and the legions all set foot sure in the unthinking dark.

119

Ends FOB Shank, Khost, Afghanistan

Sometimes I think an animal’s died under the plank walkway to our classroom tent. When the early spring rains roll off the mountains and soak us the smells bubble up—old mushrooms, wet dog, dank somethings you get when you kick over a rock and the cold wet rolls off its slick underbelly. Death lingers here. Like some bad smell nobody wants to talk about. Like all the sewage reek from all the latrines and shitsucker trucks. The smell of hot garbage roiling in the sun. Old half-chewed scraps curdling in the landfills. What’s not burnt picked over by the shiny crows. The ones rippling blue-black with every kind of disease along their greasy wings and ashy feet. Out back behind the huts you never know what you might find tossed out. Crazy towers of rusted bed frames slung up against an abandoned K-9 shed. An old paw print left by the twisted gate that leads to nothing any more. Caterpillar tracks from a passing tank cut into the dirt By some old burned-out Jeep. Splintered pallets of mosquito repellent, DEET leaking through the old wet cardboard, soaking into the dirt. All these old odds and ends of men. What’s left behind. No matter how hard you try you never get all of them. This one time, Russell says, when I first got put on mortuary. This one time I got the call. And I went out and took a look at what they’d thrown in the back of the truck. And I couldn’t tell if I was looking at his ass or his face. Part of his jaw had done fell off and a tooth rolled out when I pulled out his vest. I heard it hit the ground. We looked, but we never could find it. That’s the truth.

120

Spring rain and mildew smell means it’s time to fight again. And right on cue the explosions ripple through the east and soon I’m sure they’ll reach us here where our little tents flap and shudder in the squalls gusting through the Kush. But would you look at that. The sky just cleared and for once it doesn’t smell. That much. The twisted scraps of chain-link fence glisten and drip, the old dirty water in the puddles one big slick of rainbow. The kitchen guys goof and wrestle as they slice. One of the Filipina girls who cuts hair and does massage struts down the path between the laundry tents with her earbuds in, rocking out to her English bubblegum pop. Baby you are sex in my eyes. She’s wafted on clouds of Bounce and soap. Benny and Reeves get the guys into teams to play hacky sack in the dark, their little heads and feet splashed with reflective paint, peeping out of the blackout like lightning bugs blinking and dancing in the softer air of hometown summer. Back at the huts I can see something pushing up through the rocks and crushed-out cigarette butts. I know it’s probably a weed, but from here right now in this forgiving light I swear it looks like some kind of flower.

121

Introduction to Greek Mythology FOB Shank, Afghanistan

When I get back to the Ed Center tent for class there’s a lock on the door. The rest of the staff has gone on home. They’ve forgotten. I’m new and I don’t know the code. But I want to learn, wails class clown Clingerman, falsetto. He and Benny and Reeves yell Breach! pretending they’re going to shoot off the lock and kick in the door. Village clearance tactics. House to house. They make me laugh. We huddle. Battle plans. I bet I could get my hand up in that gap between the tent flap and the door and do a reacharound, says Clingerman. I just bet you could, says Benny. Mwuah ha ha ha. Hey how about we untie the tent flap from the door frame? Reeves says. We cheer. He works his mechanic’s hand with the torn-up knuckles around to the knot and fumbles. It’s hard for me to get it off one-handed, he pants. Shit man I got that down in middle school, says Benny. Hilarity. We each take turns pushing our way through the gap, handing through our backpacks our dinner trays our coffee cups and machine guns. We did it! We shout. We did! I’ve broke into schools before, but it was never to learn, says Reeves. Man I’m glad I’m so dang skinny, says Waddell, Else I reckon I could have ripped it again. Ripped what now? We ask. This dang plywood sheet with nails stuck in it, it fell on me when I was doing some work—it sliced me open here. He traces the path of a four-inch slash across his narrow little boy ribs, easing himself down, pulling out his paper and pen. Well, I’m glad to be here, Benny says, after he and Williams fight over their favorite seat. I wanna talk about hot chicks and monsters. I had to fight to get here tonight. Yeah! Clingerman brags. He said Words to the Lieutenant! I heard it! I knew he was gonna get smoked! Suddenly “Taps” starts to play over the base PA. The trumpet shuddering. All of them—Benny, Williams, Clingerman, Waddell with his ripped-up ribs— all stand at attention, boys’ faces turned to stone. I never know what to do. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “Taps” played here before, I say. After the music stops. Someone shot himself, Benny says, voice tight. That’s why I had to fight to get here tonight. They wanted to lock us all down. That no good son of a bitch. He was in Bravo Company, too, Reeves mutters, not laughing now. Waddell says, He shot himself in the face. In the cab of a truck out back at the motor pool. Yesterday. What with the weather and all they couldn’t get the “hero” out till today. He’s angry too. I’m so sorry, I say. I’m not, Benny snarls. He made it so someone had to find him out there. He made it so someone had to clean up after him. Wipe blood and brains out of that cab because of him. Someone has to find the door and knock and tell his mama. Because of him.

122

Someone’s got to pack his gear, echoes Waddell. Someone’s got to put him in his coffin. Someone’s got to try to fix his face and tell his wife and children. Someone’s got to do his job. He left us. Left us all alone. Waddell nurses the tear in his side. His stitches just pulled. So I think we need some gods. And monsters. And maybe some hot mythy Amazon women, says Benny. It’s been a long couple of days. Okay guys, I say, let me tell you a story. The boys settle now, eating their candy. Let me draw you a map of the world. Not the way we look at it now, with all our satellites and grids, not the way those big old drones scan and beam their streams of code. Imagine a smaller world. All the dreamy places where the centaurs and the Amazons lived. So far so good, Benny says. It gets better, I tell them. Imagine somewhere at the edge of this map mountain ranges, with caves opening up and reaching down to the open space of the Underworld—we’re in chapter 15— and all the tortures you might expect for those who sinned in life. Who remembers? Yes, Clingerman, that’s where you go to pay for all your worldly sins. The things you took. The hurt you caused. Can we think of a single character we’ve met who hasn’t done his share and more of horrible things? Imagine Achilles, reliving every jolt and pitch of every circuit around Patroclus’ tomb. How Hector’s body snagged and ripped and tore apart as the chariot horses dragged it over the rocks. To desecrate the corpse. Writing in blood and bone the book of his anger. Unrelenting. No need for translating. Book One: The Unforgiveable. But. Not quite. Surprising, all those who find their way past the rivers of fire and hate to the fields of asphodel, where Achilles still mourns Patroclus but takes comfort in his son’s real goodness. All those mortal heroes, flawed. Forgiven. Passing time telling all their tales. Leaving nothing out. Hopefully in the company of friends.

123

Memorial Day Stateside, The Suburbs

I haven’t felt this kind of humid since I left Japan. It’s only the first long weekend of summer and we’re all so tired already. We float aimlessly in Phyllis’s pool, my mother, aunts, and me, hanging on to our floats and drinks. Aunt Phyllis lives in just two rooms of my uncle’s dream house with her three enormous cats. They sleep in the big glass-walled room where they kept my uncle’s hospital bed, the one looking out over his beloved beds of roses. When he died those roses slowly wilted, too. My cousin lights another cigarette from the butt of the first. When she lost all the weight her husband went crazy. Said he knew she’d been entertaining men. Lots of men. He knew. Dirty and out of work he refused to leave the house she paid for, muttering, stalking room to room. After our swimming party winds down we’ll all head home to something, Aunt Ursula to the quiet quiet house. She still has the twitch and the shiver in her thin white hands. But some hair has come back in like duckling fluff since my uncle took to staying at the farm. Drinking. Staring out the window. My mother and I to the pounding from the basement. Bass and drums. Techno at four am on a Wednesday. When he gets really bad it’s three or four songs at once. It’s pure music better, my brother says. We almost don’t hear anymore. The soldier I kissed goodbye still hasn’t called. He won’t call they never call. But that’s later. For now we sip our wine in a box and float. And push the baby back and forth in his little float. He giggles. He’s still so young he can watch us change into our bathing suits. He runs around the pool, not feeling the heat. We women wilt. In the distance. Fireworks crack. Like gunshots.

124

Stars FOB Salerno, Full Moon

I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t tell you any of their names, but there they are, huge, magnificent, far from the cloying brownout and smog of cities and sprawl. Clustered so close, hardly any black space at all. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the end of the first day of spring. The air is soft. The breeze warm. Sometimes on nights like this the earth lowers the lip pulled back over its sharp, rusty teeth. Instead of searchlights and exhaust the damp smell of fields And in the near distance the glow of stained glass.

125

Getting Hot Out There Now It Looks Like FOB Shank, Afghanistan

If you run fast you can get yourself a place to sit. An old ammo box, a dusty cot, a cinder block. If you’re slow you just have to hunch up at the end, scraping your head against the bunker’s low ceiling. That night it hit so close I sat across from Carl. Carl has a hard time with names. All those Greek and Roman names don’t stick with him for nothing, he admits, but he’s a wonder with his hands. The commander brought him here to fix that plane that ran off the runway’s end and crumpled like some old soda can thrown out by the side of the road somewhere close to Birmingham. Where we both used to live. His family always worked in fire and metal. Feeding the furnace at Bessemer. Shooting sparks on assembly lines. Riveting. Welding. Building the ships down on the Gulf Coast. He smiles every time I mention Hephaestus. Although he can never remember his name, he knows all about the glow and reek of steel. You think it’s hot in here, he says. Back in Iraq it hit 140 easy. In the shade. I saw some things out there. They put us to work rebuilding. Saddam’s old palaces and things. They tasked us to adapt them. Make them into headquarters and such. This one palace where we all stayed. Well, the locals said, you had to do it every year. If your number came up, you had to hand over your girl. Your baby girl. The girls was about ten or twelve years old. They did whatever they done with them and you’d never see them again. When they took them away, they let you choose how your baby girl would die. That’s all. I thought about that the other day when you was talking about those boys and girls the Athenians had to send to feed that monster that lived under the big palace. Boom off in the distance, unrolling slowly.

126

The Minotaur, I tell him. Oh yeah I seen some things, he says, resettling himself. I took a bunch of pictures. I’ll burn you some. Now just you don’t go showing them around. Some of them I wasn’t really supposed to take. I promise him. Lord they had some heat there, he murmurs. A hundred and forty easy. More like a hundred and fifty down there on the flightline. The all clear sounds. It’s late. I send the students home. Off into the blackout. Two days later I find the DVD on my desk, neatly labeled “Baghdad, Iraq, ’09. Carl Robinson.” It took a while to find a drive that could open it. So many things forged in heat and horror. Burned into his pretty little silver circle. All that tribute. All those boys and girls.

127

Motor Pool Kandahar, Afghanistan

They repurpose things here. How do I know. Parking lots full of ghosts. Old flaking decals nobody ever bothered painting over, just a paper permit to mark the change. They don’t strip old bumper stickers. They leave the vanity plates. Just hang another lucky charm on the rearview. Let the moon dust take the rest. When I go to teach my class I still wear a dress. That’s what we were taught. Dress to show you’re serious. Then they will know it’s serious. It’s time to learn. I wear a dress but I throw on my desert boots for the long hot walk down All-American Boulevard. Dust devils whirl down the strip like in some kind of Western. The fine fine dust mutes all the colors here. The engineers’ safety orange. The kitchen workers’ purple. Dimmed. You can run a fingertip down your own cheekbone and it comes away brownish gray. My bright red skirt darkened down like some old scab. Out here you’re never what you used to be but you’re never different either. You can’t stay. You can’t go back. Can you help me, my student Larry asks. You see I can’t sleep anymore. They studied me and they think I can’t sleep enough to dream. So you see I can’t forget. And I can’t remember cause I can’t forget. Can you help me learn. I don’t know, I say, but I’ll do my best to try. The night bus rolls him off to bed where he will try to force himself to dream. They got it secondhand, the bus, its old German route still stuck up on the front, its old last stop it’ll never reach again.

128

Rasheed Baghdad, 2003

I remember the very first time I saw myself in your dark eyes wide dark like mine tears like mine bruises like mine. Like me you took it all and gave nothing but your tears, like me you went to that quiet place behind your eyes as his arm rose and fell rose and fell. Flesh of my flesh, sister, bone of my bone. One. On that dusty road outside Baghdad my thigh holster made my walk all big just like the guys in the movies weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d watch together. Together. You were there with me as I drew down on him took my breath and squeezed I saw the bullet cleave that hajiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s head. Cleave. Wide open. A word I rolled on the tongue. One we learned together. Sunday school. Cleave. Wide open. And I felt your trigger finger on mine. I swear I felt your dark eyes behind mine and Sister I swear I never felt so alive before

129

Behind the Wire From The Abilify Sonnets Kuwait, 2010

Edwinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a big man, so tall and broad he can barely fit in the tiny cabs of the Bobcats, the Caterpillars, the earth movers, the bulldozers he and the other dirt boy heavy equipment workers use to level the ground, to lay the foundations, to build up from nothing the gates, the barriers, the perimeter fence running around the American base. Edwin says after days in the desert the sand and the grit run off in the shower, little brown rivers of mud. He says sometimes he hurts so bad he has to take something so he can get to sleep. I could tell him I know how he feels. I could tell him I do the same thing. He draws me a diagram--how to bear a heavy load even as you twist and turn. How to angle your crane. The television high on the rec room wall cuts from floods to riots to insurgentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; explosions. So close to us, to our little circle of flickering lights. That night as I swallow my dose I imagine big shoulders, thickening the walls, unspooling the beautiful, comforting wire.

130

Scorched Earth Khost, Afghanistan

Tonight it’s the chapter on the Romans. Their theatre of state. The changing of the names of the Olympians. The death of the Horatii. When and how it’s allowed to kill a brother, a sister. Photographs from Pompeii of huge bronze cocks with lion legs and paws, all hung with little bells. Chimes to bring good luck. We think. Still tinkling after the blast and their centuries under the ash. Children, I tell them, the Romans fought three Punic Wars against a place called Carthage. When they won the final time they pulled the city to pieces brick by brick. They burned the rest. Then sowed the ground with salt. Why, do you think? So nothing would ever grow again? That’s right, Zach. Diego wants to know if it’s true that Alexander the Great really came through here, right here where we are now? Yes, I say, he marched his troops across Afghanistan on his way to India. Hey, David says, near Gardez? Where I’m building that new prison? There’s a castle there that Alexander built. Yeah, Joey says, Master Sergeant here and me, we had to go there once. You have to take a battle buddy with you when you go to take a shit. The locals told us to go up and do it in the castle like everybody else. Master Sergeant said You’re shitting on history, son! That one gets a laugh as good as the Powerpoint montage of Priapus and the herms. Zach raises his hand. Doctor, what do you think has happened to us? You talk about folks getting crucified and how they used to hang people in cages by the side of the road and put their enemies’ heads up on spikes. But we don’t do that kind of thing no more. Do we?

131

I say I hope we don’t. After class Zach comes up front while I erase the board and pack up my stuff. Well ma’am, he says, I think you’ve seen the last of me. I’m on a mission for the next three weeks and that’s the end of term. I say I hope we’ll cross paths again. Well ma’am, I’m not real sure we will, he says. After this tour ends I think I’m headed home. The Army’s been real good to me. I’ve paid my debts. I’ve seen a lot of things. Now I want my wife. My kids. Have another one, maybe. Watch them grow. You see, the world is open to me. Good luck, I say. Safe travels, Zach. We shake hands. He turns and walks down the row of empty desks and out into the blackout, boots shuffling through the dust, his bobbing headlamp a beacon, a tiny, glowing star.

132

My Far-Shooting Apollo FOB Salerno, Afghanistan

In his wraparound shades and boonie hat it takes me a second. It’s Boone. I haven’t seen him since the early spring. He and Qualls lurked around the edge of class that night. Waiting till everyone else had left to turn in their work. Their response to visual art? A photograph. Their version of the Belvedere Apollo. Boone’s posing in the hall of his B hut under the fluorescent light. A wrinkled white Army bedsheet draped over his shoulder and knotted round his waist. One leg bent, one arm raised, all clean boyish lines. Chest and flanks white as a peeled switch. In one hand held high not a bow and arrows but his M-16. Our Apollo’s a badass, says Qualls, he and Boone nervous, shuffling their big dusty desert boots. So we decided to give him a really big gun and a fuck ton of tattoos. Do you like it? I love it. All up and down Boone’s arms and legs—koi and pinup girls and baby’s names, flames licking up one calf, barbed wire twined up the other. I tell Boone how glad I am to see him again. Well look at you, I say, my far-shooting Apollo. See you later and be safe out there. Yes ma’am, he says, then off he goes to mount up for his patrol, Boots sending up little puffs of dust with every step as he double-times it past the old rusty dumpster, smelly in the heavy summer heat, as always full to overflowing with the scraps, the half-eaten and the roughly used, all those beautiful, golden things we so roughly tear open then just throw away.

133

Acknowledgements "Hard to Say..." Prairie Schooner "Grafenwoehr" Prairie Schooner "Blackout" The Literary Bohemian "Ends" Abridged Zero-Nineteen "Introduction to Greek Mythology" Abridged Zero-Nineteen "Memorial Day" The Southern Women's Review "Getting Hot..." Connotation Press: An Online Artifact "Motor Pool" Abridged Zero-Nineteen "Rasheed" Bare Hands Poetry "Behind the Wire" The Southern Women's Review

134

Joanna Grant teaches for the University of Maryland as a Collegiate Traveling Faculty member and Wandering Scholar. She travels between American military bases, teaching writing and humanities classes to American service members and dependents. To date, she has taught in Japan, Kuwait, Afghanistan (twice), Djibouti, and South Korea. Her poems and creative nonfiction have appeared widely.

135

136

__________________________

MY GLASS TERRACE THE HINTERLAND by BONNIE JEAN MICHALSKI

originally published by the Dusie kollektiv

The Chapbook, No.5

__________________________

137

138

139

140

141

142

143

144

145

146

147

148

149

150

151

152

153

154

155

156

157

158

159

160

161

162

163

164

165

My Glass Terrace the Hinterland (the Dusie kollektiv, Dec. 2008) measures 5 1/8” x 7 1/8”. Cover: paper Interior: off-white Binding: staples The blank pages inside, which were included in the author’s original manuscript and the Dusie chapbook, are faithfully reproduced in this facsimile.

Front Cover

166

Title Page

Interior

167

Colophon

168

Bonnie Jean Michalski received her MFA from the University of Arizona. Her interest in the chapbook form has led her to teach a chapbook course at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, create handmade books for MacawMacaw Press, and participate in the Dusie Kollektiv. She works as a web designer/developer and divides her time between Tucson, Arizona and Madison, Wisconsin.

169

170

__________________________

KONTAKION

by PATTI WHITE

The Chapbook, No.5

__________________________

171

172

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lipstick: the kontakion of flesh / 175 The Air at that Moment: the kontakion of wind / 181

173

174

Lipstick the kontakion of flesh Pearls for teeth, that girl, so shiny, so avid, like little sheep chomping, saws tearing at the grain of heartwood, or rending the flesh of a rabbit. Like icing on a cake, that kind of white, cool, glacial, almost blue in the nerve, in the way they cut the lip, biting awful in beauty, those pearly teeth. And the red smear near the gum, narceine enamel, the horizon sizzling, a purple line against time. Peel back the label on her suitcase and it says Texas, range land, big sky tornado country, the kind that swirls, reels her head around, cotton candy in the brain as she comes of age, comes crazy in her loving and lacking, ill to the heart with longing, the sharp, arsine acid in her willing veins. And our blood bond dazzles but nothing stays, nothing satisfies or settles, the white sky weatherless, cold. Planes, not plains, then. The wings signify aspiration, the turbines of wealth turning, the blades invisible, a rich stench of fuel oil and fame, money in the bank, in the purse, in her walk, carbon on her fingers, silicon implanted in the fuselage, then alloyed, plating every inch of skin. And we watch the sky for signs, nacreous clouds, magnetic storms, the simmering crisis, the steaming word.

175

Parboiled for years, her lips like lobsters angel hair spiking a halo, her toes sparking coral, her breasts rising ripe and luscious, a fullness like an iris opening to catch the view, camera lens spreading, a red mouth insistent, hot, pursing and pouting asking for it, asking for it, please. And the flood comes, the onrush, nothing to cling to in the whiteness, something, anything, pomegranates. Prick one bleach-blonde stripper on a pole and they all bleed, sweet ruby droplets that we all rush to lick, that skin salt ripe on our tongues, granular, spicy, improbable and metallic, loveâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cruel ink, branding us with brutal intimations of mortality, a stark vision of morbid decay. And the firestorm in the heart, narrow seams of sensibility, shallow pool of ice below the ribs. Plays that bunny card from the tarot a march hare dancing, a fiddler pig, ten staves forming a picket, lurid red sky, a briar patch, smooth round hills, imagines her scut, a powder puff cool with talcum, a dusting so fine it rises with her every move, a ghost dance, a moon in full lumen. And the serration, the pale nouns imprinted, small crescents pressed soft, as in wax, or lambent wonder. Pleases the men, the old men, the thin arthritic souls, wet lips like worms, all tannic and tea-leaf patterns, cancerrough cheeks raised for her kisses, spiderink signatures on their napkins, her cozy embrace a tonic, a jolt inconceivable with less cash, and all her yellow roses flower, but

176

(a mass of raw pulp, a tongue nettled with language, pages of fire stitched with alabaster, a bible) probateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a bitch in high heels, patent attorney tap-shoes that slice and grind, terrible in her dispositions, a ripping gaze that never wavers, her imperative, her word, the will. What calculations, finite divisions, intentions claimed or thwarted, a fine algorithm for endless endless strife. And crucibles of acetone noxious with burnt offerings, the fire sibilant with thought like hissing snow. Promises, like plums, drop half-rotten, amiable and dewy, devilish, tempting her to bite down, feel the juice run, the cool flesh resisting the tooth. If wasps have invaded, wings stiff and crusted with sugar, her unwary throat implodes, collapsing on itself, stings and all; if not, the small stone, alone. And cathedral arches, the nave corporeal and dense, incense spiraling, speaking, a confession. Platinum, ash, a sheen like tallow, albumen, an ablution, blessing threading down her neck, almond milk bath rimmed with candles, scarlet toes curling illucent, encased in steam, droplet caught on a shining nail, diamond imbedded, facets like mirrors, her amusement at her own classic pose. And the porcelain crazed, the nominal capillaries, the strange semantics of white space, nothingness.

177

Plumped-up like a pillow with fetid allegations and sad promotions, tabloid cutie cum vampire, but more rhapsodic, less nuanced, like crack, inelegant in strappy handcuffs, careens and carouses, her cleavage inching deeper, lower, she trips on asphalt, tips mascara lashes, turns. And we watch the mail for word, not the red-line charts of summer sales, savings for all, but for news, white news. Pampered, a poodle in the cradling arms of a dog show handler, collar tight but jeweled, worth it, to be held rolling in sweet baby arms, waking incandescent with flesh, with humid curtains blowing out the bed, servants impertinent, with her mimosas ablossom with betrayal and lust. And the rosebud phototrope nodding in darkness, turning in light, salacious, a red slash on a page. Poppy reads in two directions. Like arum, hooded and stalky, like dried thyme, sharper, sterner than expected, resentful and romantic at once, innocent of all intentions, the catalyst and chalice, a mandrake illusion, her head nodding, sleepy as a sex kitten, purring hot and (a spot of blood, a pinking needle, the linens rumpled, a long slow sentence, a thickness in the air) percocetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the name of a rare bird, allegorical in its nature, tufted in turquoise and rose, viral ruffs of lemon, talons edged in gold, inlaid with onyx, a mourning bird calling her name, a liquid warble insinuating its way into all her dreams, an exotic nightmare.

178

And shimmering, the red gloss, nocturnal remissions, hesitant sources emerging, a glass in ruins. Poolside, that greasepaint runs like semen, alluvial, a sad trickle down the cheek, deposits of denser seed raddling the skin, a white mascara inveigled with bird-lime, tacky in crevasses, slick over surgical incisions. Like sunscreen, but colder, as if refrigerated, like meat. And the blueness of the breast, nevus the punctuation to a searing kiss, an emblem on parchment. Pythoness of the tabloid, priestess and intoxicant, her words perfumed, tumbling out of her mouth like wild bees ripping honey from alien hives. If she fails to speak, pages wither, crumble like dry tobacco, but now incense rises sweet from her throat, she answers the need, offers us: herself. And we see the skin peel back nicotine yellow, as a peach furred, scalded flesh, the canine lips draw wide. Pam zepam diazepam zepam a lozenge of words on the raw tongue topamax lorazepam zepam refluxion of dull blood into the inner spaces of the brain, the heart clonazepam agonistes oh invictus ah lapis lazuli a bouquet, a zirconium lung. And the glossary of flesh, numinous syllables, the lush red, slender lexicon of luxate life.

179

Peace, a resting of the soul on the ample bosom of narcosis, peace that passes, one channel, another, rubicon crossed, rose petals floating in pure water, only that moment comatose, peace before the tabloidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s immense weight falls on naked body, a gathering of cameras, oh.

180

The Air at that Moment the kontakion of wind a Coriolis effect, a steep gradient, pulsations in the atmosphere, low ridgelines in the jet stream, long isobars raking the map like spurs, land rising and falling, resisting. Two days before the eye of the hurricane. The swing-set undulates, flat seats twisting in a rising wind. A walnut shades the south end of the yard, the nuts still green and clinging, round and perfect as wasp's nests. I stand still at the fence with fingers wound into the chain links, hair loose and catching in the breeze. And then I am sailing over the grass, a body transported by the storm, my vision obscured by a mist of terror, and when I tell, when I run screaming to the house, no one believes that story, not a syllable gets traction, nothing makes sense to anyone. That day was drowned in its bath, suffocated, a cord threaded round its neck. I saw Martians in the drain, thought quicksand was everywhere. Felt breathless. Trenched in sleep, I could hear the lawnmower just under the window. White curtains billowed, the summer pushing them away from the screen, as cascades of light fell into the room. Maybe the aroma of coffee woke me early, or maybe I was late in bed. The air was full of sweat and sun, and outside, passing from shadow into brightness: an opium dream of childhood. I saw a man with a stag's head walk coolly through the yard, the air around him as iron-bound and fevered as polio. * On Route 66 the air trails behind us, sweeps up our legs, inside a skirt or shirt, lingers on pavement, outside the car, mirrors the sky as my family travels

181

through the high desert, as blue Cadillac shark fins unlock the landscape, opening a sky brutal and bright. Sugar rock candy at the curio shop outside the meteor crater, Indian dolls and tiny dog figurines, packets of azurite and galena. At the Petrified Forest, my mother like a movie star, her hair blown wild, sunglasses, an open-throated shirt tied at the waist. I watch the mesas, own up to the fossils concealed in my shoe, watch dust swirl upward, transparent dervishes of superheated air, ask for a Coke at the gas station. I wait for the sun to set over the edge of night, the earth turning, the landmass of California appearing and then, like ocean, breaking off into a series of waves, ridges and spines. And I see the geraniums swinging of their own accord, the earth uncanny, unsettled, heaving beneath the ice plant that strives to keep it still. The evening dropping, and thick coastal fog smothering a wildfire, misting the crate of artichokes on the patio, raising the scent of eucalyptus. Lamb and mint sauce for dinner, then Air Force missiles overhead soaring toward the water. That jeweled air, so opulent I can hardly breathe, the sun bright as the coral snake in the gully, wind grainy with salt, luminous. An abalone shell, purple seaweed, acres and acres of poppies. * Redwoods in darkness, a weather of deep shadow, a roadside climate cooling like a ticking car. A flight of rare birds, or a DC-9 climbing the ladder of the earth. The day we arrive, ashes fall from a volcano, a strange utterance from the top of the world. The creek gives up sharp-edged devil's club, rapids cold enough to break, Chinook spawn half-frozen before hatching. Crab trucks, articulate with claws and salt, speed along the inlet from lesser ports, the oil not yet recovered. At night, the winds of space drape ribbons of light across the sky, movement ophidian, a pulsation and insinuation, as if something has shifted and the heavens will never again be stable. This almost makes me crazy: the sickening lights, the green

182

radiant and terrible. A siren in the stillness, a cloak of Russian fur, a wolf at the edge of the world, the wind razoring light off the days. In the Lower Forty-eight, Tomcat presses his head into my palm. I am like that, an unlikely child gone almost invisible at the edge of the river, smelling of burnt bacon and onion grass, my knees bruised, a cat seeking attention and straining into any hand that offers. After the gully, the shade pressing my shoulders, the zipper like smoker's teeth, the broken glass raked through, daffodils only daffodils, I know better than to go into the fallen house, open the door and climb over the broken furniture, the air stale and sour like an old cat, the crockery layered in dust, a strangled light inside, the vines all over, the day so warm, nights so humid, years of clouds turned brass and steel. And nothing breeds rain like the Ohio River, the mists rising into neurotic dreams, oh nothing bodes and bothers me like the air. That day in Fountain Square, with rain clouds lowering and an ugly wind sweeping trash along the gutter, a Dixie Line bus to the suspension bridge across the river, the smell of Tweed perfume, Crab Louis at the Netherland Hotel, fashions from Pogue's, shoes, a novelty shop, a stationer, what a city means when I say city. I look sideways from the wind and see her with a trench coat halfopen, one hand shielding the eyes of her child. The air is full of grit, old newspapers, torn petals from a flower cart, droplets of water scattered from the fountain, and I see she is ready for the storm, and I am recording this in memory, and I can see her forever. * No one looks down into the Grand Canyon for long. We stand nettled with the cactus of dreams, raddled and road-weary, our nerves wrought like wires above a highway mirage, and then Taco Tico and sliced avocado with my mother's French dressing. Up on the Strip, the new Landmark Hotel opens, a space needle silhouette above the desert, and the Sands offers veal scallopini, creamy blue cheese dressing, a casino where nobody stops to admire the astronauts walking on the moon. We view the house of Liberace's manager, then play endless games of Yahtzee, the pool outside blasted by heat and invaded by crickets. The air simmers. One day I touch the car handle and my skin blisters. When the Sands implodes, something of my past will be lost forever. That atmosphere, so hot and dry; a time when it hurt to breathe.

183

* Autumn mist whirls up, spirals like smoke on the horizon, drops acidic and searing fall onto broad fields that bend under the wind, a sallow sky, a Kentucky fall stringent and fuming, as sharp as tobacco. I could smell it everywhere in town, on the way to art class, under the sign of Comer's Bar, strong like bourbon and just as brown. Some days we drove out to the horse farms on Iron Works Pike, long cuts of limestone fences across the blue grass, and thin bare branches angled against the sky. I taste butter pecan ice cream as I write this, long for a cup of hot coffee on a set of metal steps, the morning cold, opals of steam rising in the early sun. I can see the way the air filled old barns, leaving damp shadows across the road. We wanted the spring to come faster, then, and somehow the scent of tobacco always meant fall, and winter, and then more winter. * Aconite winds, dolomite seas, the great storms over the Atlantic, the chill swale of the sea breeding tidal clouds arctic in their dreams. Like right whales beaching, the two terrible rows of wheezing Greyhounds, the awful umbra of exhaust and heat that darkened the air, the scent of snow on the wind outside the station. The dead calm of tires at rest on pavement. A narrow gap, a line arrowed toward infinity, like the Twilight Zone. I waited like everyone waits for the bus, in suspension, breathing ozone and diesel, hearing the air brakes sigh for relief, one last stop at the beating heart of the country. Maybe some riders got off early, or maybe the bridge was out. Anyway, the bus was late. It snowed later, I am sure. * Drifts of rhododendron, the wet earth under the pines, dog-legged highways under clouds dark and thick as a down-slope slurry of Appalachian coal. And then, that night in Eden Park, the pond breaking stars into unbearable blooms of sweetness, a drowned cherry tree, shimmers of moon in a mist off the grass. How romantic, cinematic, the path in a humid darkness, the river beneath a limestone cliff, his talk of the Peace Corps, a dry twist of

184

leather around his wrist. The air then swarmed with words, olivine, glossy, distilled from the scent of lilacs; and a kiss oh a first-date kiss, the kind that raises a blush, and how the surface of the water rippled, then how a gentle movement arose in the atmosphere around us and shifted the light. Depressions, sinkholes, the small hollows that capture delicate variations of temperature, the exhalations of dead space, the great moving mass of northern water: Tricycle, we might as well have been a tricycle, as we u-turned and skidded sideways. Big rigs on the interstate sprayed gravel and wind, and the little Hornet went flat and caught the rail. That first trip to Chicago, she spent two days arc-lighting stained-glass lanterns, and I read books, drank tea, left the Greek icon in the store on Michigan Avenue, a saintly ornate figure without perspective, deep gold halo behind his oblong head. The big lake sent waves over stones, a dark silty glaze like colored glass, the wind painting sidewalks, ash and arsenic, the elevated cars like earthquakes in the sky. * Oh the ranges rising west of Kansas, scarps of wild orogeny, the deformation, the silted high plains. At one time I thought the peaks carved the clouds. Then, tobacco tucked in his cheeks, he spat a cup of burnt umber poison and squinted at the Ferris wheel, the soughing of the pines pleasing to his ear. My hair, cut long and straight, was like straw that year, my life anchored by mountains. I stood stunned at Wilkerson Pass, light filling the bowl of the open valley, saw raw sky melt into osmium and flow away. I listened to stiff grasses, to grains of millennial quartz spilling from my fingers. The pines swept needle against needle, air against bark, the light as loud as the wind, the wind relentless, unceasing. Oh the gulf coast, Australian pines against the sky, and on the seawall a red swimsuit, a brimmed hat, a fog offshore, sailboats looming at the end of the dock, and that night on the key, with the windows open, an end unit facing the water, a shabby beach motel early in the seventies. Warm enough to be naked, lobster sunburn cooled with Noxema, the room still rocking from the boat, and sand skittering, coquina shells rattling below as a

185

long slow storm passes. The rain dispersed, splintered, ozone-sparked through the screen, the air like the humid offering of a lover's breath. That gentleness, a rippling sheet over my breast, the window behind my head, rain as soft and small as the last thought before sleeping. * Translation: to be inside the rain beside the wind is to be out of the body at last. A kind of death, to be transported over the great crop circles of the plains. There must be a word for the sound of wind as it ushers in the first clouds of fall. A word for the scraping, the metal-brush scouring of rawhide crests and ridges. At the Buffalo Peaks, a cool afternoon with wind pressing the grasses flat, the last warmth of summer rising into new storms, and one thin hawk in a spiral overhead. For the sound, only heard this once, of the light changing, and the shadows overtaking the sun, a word low and lethal, a word as subtle as an antelope turning its head. There must be a word for the vastness of silence, for trains full of coal passing along the interstate, to name that triangle of air and element and witness, a word for the days when mountains wear crests of snow, the ranges ursine and hurdled with rock, with blankets flung carelessly over shoulders and saddles, a great white covering that ravels in wind, curls toward the sky, and frays fine and translucent. Days that are bitter at every elevation, the air sucked dry like an old bone, lacerating, the air blue and whirled with crystal, a helix cold that opens old scars on skin and makes them bleed. Those bright days of saturated hues found only in postcards. I sat at the window sunning like a turtle, protected behind double-paned glass, the air above the mountain like a spirit lamp, burning. * Other windows show different things: coffins being delivered, ominous clouds ahead of another hurricane, hookers and johns at odds over payment. A city kind of weather, huddled close like

186

Times Square in dead winter, with red neon flashing, this bright underbelly of the Empire State, the Hudson's palisades frozen, steam vents blasting from the subways, blue neon, yellow, the city's granite foundation growing deeper, an ice age of reflections. Avenues like wind tunnels, I remember. My black wool coat, black lapin hat, boots and a cup of regular coffee, but I am freezing like open water, a scrim of ice over my eyes. I see him under the bus on 42nd Street, his blood pink on the pavement. Everyone stops, stares. I stop and stare and turn colder and the coffee is gone, and a howl of wind is running up the spine of the city. Of epidemics in the city, or the ashes of the dead in the ochrous basement, of the men smoking cigars on the curb, or the culvert of rats and garbage just blocks away, I say: Tenth Avenue leads nowhere. On Ninth, the diligent Koreans unwrap bundles of tulips and freesia, stack newspapers and fruit, set out carefully trimmed lettuces. I choose a mango, a banana: "condoms and poems for sale" passes me, his briefcase closed, a woman in pink mules trailing behind. Could anything be more lush than a locust tree golden in sunlight, with a murmuring cloud of pigeons rising into the air? I walk windswept to the laundry, Oh's Fish Shop heating the street behind me. From my rooftop, sometimes, this looks impossible: the urban water towers squat and hopeful, the rivers undisturbed, everything so much itself. * Rills of cirrus streak a porcelain sky. Iodine taints the wind; runnels of tidal wash, thin as contrails, isobars on sand: a raw day beneath a hard thin sun. A satellite view of this, the far end of Hunting Island in January, like a strand unwound from the scrub pines, or sifted out of that sinister lagoon with its vulture oaks and rancid water. Curry Cottage scratches out a place on the last dune, all salt-eaten and weary, clings like a hermit crab to the low shell of the earth. Inside, the wind blows out the pilot, oxidizes the windows, makes us curl around ourselves. One night we play poker using pretzels for chips, decide summer is for fools. We sleep and wake cold, like the alligators, listen for the heater, but hear only the wind. *

187

Road maps teach me nothing about weather. The highways rendered, fat squeezed from each line; the blue snakes of rivers tracing a paper continent. No atlas tell me about the thermals in all their permutations: the highway mirage, the uplift that supports the buzzards, the great cloud anvils only a suggestion to the south. A steel blue sky over Kansas, air clear above the broad fields, variations of flatness, shadow and light forming contours where none exist. The freeway long and straight ahead of me, a fever on my skin, an opaline moth smeared on the windshield, a bag of apples, odd signs that warn of winds crossing between the grain silos looming near. The temperature rises outside and in; asphalt looks like water here, wind looks like wheat. Nothing graphic accounts for a midwest spring, the naptha-laden, blistered rain fronts, the gusts and nubbles of hail, or how the earth warms in June, as tendrils of honeysuckle cascade at the edge of an ultramarine shadow, the air so sweet and heavy a salvation of bees drops intoxicated onto the grass. Common doves and robins brush the weather against my forehead, their wings essential to a lower temperature, a lesser sun. This is summer, oppressive with blossoms, the humid afternoon overwrought and thick, the sky half-hazed with a smear of orange marmalade, everything sticky, and just that breeze of birds, that drone of bees. * Night falls. I can hear the corn growing, a subtle nick-and-notch rustle, the blades adjusting, the air numinous with moon and life. Going south is sweet. Then one afternoon at the Arboretum, the town empty until the new year, a Heathcliff sky broods and blusters. Strong winds make walking dangerous. Widow-makers come to mind, the deadfall that pierces the unwary, and all the pines are groaning and bending at fantastic angles, loud in their discomfort. I feel the pressure on my face, on my back, however I turn the wind batters me. Clouds, ominous and heavy, and high stands of dead goldenrod, shrieks of crows, a moment of sheer chaos, the world as if unformed and violent, gathering itself around me.

188

After, the black river warms and steams, and catfish in artificial ponds fatten. Everything is ready to be fried. Alabama sinks into the kudzu as if into a loverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s arms. Tentacles of sweat curling, dusk falling, my smile like a party umbrella in a Tom Collins, two turquoise barrettes holding swaths of hair off my neck, starlings overhead, the window cranked down and hot thick air blowing fresh-cut grass so astringent, my lungs quiver at the scent. I am driving fast and loose and sweeping around curves so gracefully. It feels like ointment on scalded skin, like the cool calving of a glacier, the open window letting in the blue shadows from roadside weeds. Summer evening on the highway, alone and the dark coming, a slice of lemon in the sky, maraschino cherry on the tongue. * April 27. White clouds like curdled cream, like towels wet and hot in a corner of the shower. On tv, the weather maps are scarlet with vortices, with rogue cells, debris balls, death. Then I see it coming for me, a hot pink storm inside the radar, understand the polygon as a diagram, a ballistic trajectory, a set of boundary conditions, red lines boxed around my life. Catlike, my body collapses. I seek shelter in serious places. And I feel the air pressure sink inside my skull, I feel the layers of my skin shift, a shock wave of surprise running over me. I should know this. This air, that humidity: the ordinary weather of each day, the temperature of the sky in south Florida or Colorado, anywhere, stored inside me like an encyclopedia of the atmosphere, all the air breathed and delivered, every gradient of heat, every chill and gasp, each day sandblasted by wind or sweetened with blossoms, air delicious ionized golden, air flat or full with meaning, but this beggars the compendium. This air -- it smells dark, ulcerous and sour with pine resin, like leaking gas, like swamp water seeping into a crawl space; it sounds raw, cloven, split open, a screaming fault line, all its isobars asunder, its name unlettered. The weathers of my life: long days at altitude, soft nights in summer, blizzards, open fields harrowed by hail, the light patter of rainfall on a tin roof, Chinook winds, dust devils, the dry thin swaths of rain evaporating over the high plains, mist and fog, black ice: nothing was ever like this air.

189

* Days later, with the city in pieces, I remember the drive-in movie, and sheet lightning in the far Kansas distance, A Shot in the Dark, or a John Wayne, after Tilt-a-Whirl or a snipe hunt, the Oldsmobile 99 parked under an anvil of convection. The air lowered leaden, sober, and suffocating. Popcorn tasted like gravel, the Cokes too sweet, and in the wide back seat I was halfasleep as my father tuned the dial for the weather report, lightning (sheet? or heat?) flashed, and we went white. On the radio the announcer said: tornado in Topeka. On the window the speaker crackled with electricity, said we should unhook the wires, said: leave now. And with trees covering my house, I recall the cool outflow from the flank of that storm following us off the highway ramp, remember a book I found on a school shelf, a grainy black and white photo of Topeka the day after, and it looked like what I see now under a clear blue sky, a breeze still caught in the oaks supine on the lawn, still riffling the pink insulation, the crape myrtles in tatters, the clots of tile gleaming in an awful display of incoherent renovation. I can hear myself lost in the ether of a local station, calling to the dog. An order of magnitude greater in grief, this Tuscaloosa, this oasis of shade in the swelter of summer, the town gone sideways upon itself, and all of us here forever marked and weathered and spiraled out of our minds with wind.

190

Acknowledgements "Lipstick" was awarded the Gabehart Prize for Poetry in 2012.

191

192

Patti White is the author of three collections of poetry, Tackle Box (2002), Yellow Jackets (2007), and Chain Link Fence (2013), all from Anhinga Press. Her work has appeared in journals including Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, New Madrid, Forklift Ohio, DIAGRAM, North American Review, River Styx, Mulberry Fork Review, and Floodwall. She teaches creative writing and American literature at the University of Alabama, and is the Director of Slash Pine Press.

193

194

__________________________

A PRIMER FOR THE ICARIAN ARTS

by CAREY SCOTT WILKERSON

The Chapbook, No.5

__________________________

195

196

TABLE OF CONTENTS Flight Plan for Icarus I / 199 Ariadne’s Daybook / 200 Ceci n’est-pas un Oiseau / 201 Five Icarian Motivics / 202 Vertical Problems / 203 Falling in Parallax / 204 Three Icarian Episodes / 206 Flight Plan for Icarus II / 208 Daedalus in His Study / 209 Plummeting Sacred / 212 Icarus, a Film Theory / 213 Parabolic Curve for Icarus / 214 Icarus in the Boundless Sky / 217 Flight Plan for Icarus III / 218

197

198

Flight Plan for Icarus

I Here is Icarus. Doomed and falling again from the sky in a cataclysm of grim repetitions. Of course, the venues have changed as often as Icarus himself has changed his mind. Around Christmas of 1932, New York audiences, still dizzy from Giovanni Martinelli’s MET triumph in Simon Boccanegra, reported having seen Icarus plummeting into the Hudson and, later, napping on the Staten Island Ferry. It is believed, too, that in July of 1945, Icarus plunged straight into the shock wave of the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico but, true to form, was subsequently photographed at an afterparty on the shores of nearby Lake Bonita with Oppenheimer himself. Norman Mailer, while covering a mass exorcism and failed-levitation of the Pentagon in 1967, may or may not have seen Icarus majestically arcing down into the Potomac. Early Shuttle astronauts had stories of a “meteor with wings.” Jacques Cousteau’s pastry chef described “something odd” over the Great Barrier Reef. And even today, surfers consider it a given that if Icarus zooms Huntington Beach, prayers will be measured in miracle waves.

199

Ariadneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Daybook

I cannot take seriously this confession in which invented memories prove to be my only remaining aesthetic commitment. And if Theseus was sometimes my lover, you, Icarus, were ever my skeptical daydream, my hero and, like me, suspended forever between equivocation and doom, a grim parody of those choices that ensnared us all in the thread of my transgressions. It was not finally so much a question of love as, rather, the failure of Newtonian physics that brought us together on some unmappable shore where you gave me flying lessons, but I taught you to fly.

200

Ceci nâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;est-pas un Oiseau

Icarus wants to be explicit on this point as one might imagine the appositives are held between plosives and disputed claims not unlike drifts or the proven sequent. Los Angeles would not be the worst example of a principled position against causation and its fictive provenance, which either is or is not paint and gramareye. And yet falling-into will have had a code, not at all strictly speaking a proposition, imperfectly understood but rigorously applied to the view from which a city surrenders up its love.

201

Five Icarian Motivics after lines from Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VIII: 183-285

In tropisms and push through torque is as plunge within nomologic plane if loom or sequent and system’s twirl Conic the proof but a section claims is as plummet within positivist’s thrall a cloture a nomenclature a and a bleed thus across directrix of programmatic is as descent within cyclic (…) vast vaulting although is the or if as not from so and thema plural convergence clear upon chain to confluence of is as dropping within to plasticity drooping in plexic combinatorics is upon a theory the transmutable slow day of a wingèd fool is as falling within some lost and troubled dream will have been a quatrain

202

Vertical Problems

As from the particular dream of a figure fixed in space, so torques inside the quire a secret fold in the page, plunging as doomed Icarus down through fractal strata and transitivities of ink. Providentially, it has not been a question of rising or falling-or even the vicissitudes of life in a moving body-but, rather, an inventory of gestures and harlequins and secret saints. The history and destiny of our books are inscriptions in the apocrypha of lost arts, as one might imagine a remembered hand rendered in sculptural poise against brocades of fugitive desire.

203

Falling in Parallax (after untitled public art in Columbus, GA)

Let me first confess that we are never without certain probabilistic concerns. The cycle of the storyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if it is oneâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; will have been discursions of memory sustained as one might find here a rain of glitter from the faux-Calder mobile, held to Foucaultian oscillations, high in the library atrium, refulgent parentheses of sun warping just now on splines of neoclassical light. Deadalus, here in his professorial imposture, moves in graphical space nodes of displacement, of virtue and secret technos held between Labyrinth walls: at once some programmatic manifestation of family history and a machine of exigent gravity diffracting, as through arcs and gyres, conjectural transitivities of love. The flight plans reflect, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t you agree, a doomed privilege for the double phrasing, a luxury of time familiar to givens parts, appositives and similitudes at the core, fat to the casual observer but thinner, as shadow, and flat to the floor, or, if you detect particles enough, there are flows from column to row and line, not of the kind imprisoned in falling action but indeed the corruptible sequent lost, out beyond the margins, plainly villainous and high concept.

204

This is how we chart any of several, not to say seven, dreams of fluxing, failing, through seams of light, opening the trace of meaning to closure in Phoebusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face the fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s drift to claim the theory, therefore, the son in clouds.

205

Three Icarian Episodes after Ovid, Book VIII Samos Between flight is a recursion of known is how in every spherical a gloss a fold else the curious further only quilting, only sensing night a version if sewn twelve tones into which claims it retrieves projection across sweep into thus a spline as on might as tablature seize descending is here one supposes quite quiver thralling toward although from if as if as ending in the quadratic, in the seas, in a plex

Delos to Paros Upon double evince past isle of Crete causative implacement songs’ cold restraint a density to spool a curl beyond history’s also reading vein, a blue nimbus in row retrogression’s written factorials and secrecy on the pattern whirled, turned within fictives the charge of telescopes within contrapositive or splice never as of now as of modulo has obviously none that. Memory if such a keep reels toward sun finding whether over the Aegean affix.

206

Lebinthus to Calymne Similar floods frame loops miracula is one nor as movement will prove multimoda is two as your fabula your trust your lines in three reasoning gestures a group theoretical point en plain air on the planet surface just as to fly or to be in as maps are as lines if indeed this will have been programmatic marbles too simply a curvature lost lyrical anatomies in lessons of quiet light for doomed Icarus seeming a recombinant and twirling logos falls under what sky is and is.

207

Flight Plan for Icarus II But Icarus has grown impatient and bored with the spectacle of his own life. The endlessly looping cycle of flying toward the sun and falling into the sea feels less like a mythic ritual and more like an addiction to his own ruin. He knows heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pandering and his ambivalence is beginning to show. Icarus dreams of simply leaving, just flying out of his own story. Of course, it is not altogether clear what that would mean: the end of his myth, the end of all the myths related to his myth, the end of myth itself? The possible scenarios are all absurd and performatively incoherent. Yet he still dreams in the language of escape, of some radical and disruptive exit from this fate as an ontological yo-yo. Still, everyone has a job to do and Icarus is not above his responsibilities.

208

Daedalus in His Study I From this distance one may observe the effects of indeterminacy on deeply-held aesthetic convictions. That Icarus will have fallen either is or is not a vision of suspension at the edge of modal verbs, as perhaps of an experiment that should not work, is not calculable in graphic space lost to procedure and formal inquiry pressed as paper to a putative sky. An arc written here first imagined as a bridge between Crete and Rhodes designed into the syntax of a face stares up, grim in foreign heat or secrets or codes, parlous dreams of Aegean ontology, this dark apparatus affixed to syllogism strictly plummeting as language, and precisely, down.

209

II No longer falling in the received sense, Icarusâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;pictured here in his late, idiomatic styleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; considers a range of post-gravitational motifs: The Entrepreneurial, in which he sells the film rights to his own immolation. The Topical, in which he lands on the roof of a polling station. The Skeptical, in which he crashes through the Rose Window of a downtown church. The Alchemical, in which he transforms every object containing gold into the memory of an extinct creature with wings.

210

III The reflex to theorize the launch pad will have been a misunderstanding and Icarus keeps records of his failure, his portrait of life as a damage report. He is as water is, as water reflects the opening into a frame of drifts, convections, and low orbital speculations in the economy of improbable contraptions. In the dream, he was still a child, disconsolate and restless even under the constellationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; silent reproach, watching his father study the sun for evidence of claims which one could prove in death alone.

211

Plummeting Sacred

St. Icarus of Crete arrives in declensions of alterity. And omphaloskepsis illumines the secret Thursday in each of us. It is 64 degrees, cloudy, and a basset hound wanders from her water bowl to the bed and back to the bowl. Coincidentally, everything that is in motion must be moved by something.* With mathematical certainty, St. Zeno peels a paradox, staples a contraction. In Atlanta, they are reconfiguring whistles with mixed results and ambiguous modification. Tea at 2am imputes its value upward, as Menger, as logic. That we will have been here at all is evidence that we remember the temporal but forget the shift, as one imagines how Wednesday is suddenly.

* The first line of Aristotleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Physics, according to the common Berlin edition: Physics i. 7 242 ÍŁ 24

212

Icarus, a film theory

Someone will have remembered a performance, in modulus concrete, under the 10 Freeway: the frisson of hastily arranged departures or fractures in the given and then, of course, the contentious language of light itself, a similitude held between particle verbs and the memory of a machine, which does nevertheless somehow finally fly away

213

Parabolic Curve for Icarus I As a rule, Icarus prefers the fast freedom of a vertical drop to that vertiginous arc in gravityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s slow thrall. These days, of course, a doomed aesthete plying the ionosphere has lost some of its early provocation. Spectacle now reads as lurid propaganda plunging through clouds dotting lines over maps of warm water. He would not deny a certain delight in surrendering the myth falling out of canonical favor. And whatever remains of that chimerical enterprise, perilously irreal, is folded into worn wings, rubbed and hurting in the received sun.

214

II after a quatrain from Horace If it is a dream of flight, it is, therefore, as sail is to moon pushing through the harborâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recombinant motif, a machine for effluences and tales of escape. Lyric violence in Gaetulian Syrtes has alarmed the logical positivists. Icarus, drifting over Hyperborea, hangs in a glaze of comatic light. We will have seen him turning or tickling in air the vague promise of dual forms and double games lost to specious claims and a signature in fragments, in parallax, in nomenclatures of collapse, in geometricities of the middle shape, the putative vertex of memory where what goes up

215

III From this height, the lights in the railyard oscillate in early springâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pale skein, mapping thus the migration of indeterminate troubles across colonnades in the city below. Veiled by the shadow of some cathedral spire, chess and lunacy converge in the park, as from remote frontiers of privilege and squalor clowns and ghosts trundle, ambivalent under the sun. Here, then, is a world swooping up to meet the falling feet of one who plummets forever and may yet splash down in The Aegean or Brussels or at Black Mountain College, but who by his nature dreams only of points fixed in space, Newtonian tyrannies descending through symmetrical calamities of the Western heart, winged, incongruent, rhapsodic, lost.

216

Icarus in the Boundless Sky after lines from Ovid Above late sleep in Asia Minor our man in the poem has begun (again) his cycle of research and development. These Minotauric arts of imprisonment and escape have become an exegetical enterprise more vast and comprehensive than his dreams of oblivion (endlessly looping geo-thermal convections and charming burlesques of modal logic) Reeling thus over the horizon and encumbered with familial tensions, he is held under a fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s voice, tyrannies and admonitions (whispered intimations of some operatic dĂŠnoument) He has become the patron revenant of self-reflexive schemes in tragic repetition. Forever discovering his life, he has learned to sound out the diacriticals inscribed by a flock of dilettante gulls by the ghosting Ba Bird, silent archaeopteryx, memory of a name.

217

Flight Plan for Icarus III

Here he is. Doomed and falling again from the sky in a cataclysm of grim repetitions. Pushing farther up into a vast blue canvas of destiny, he imagines that moment when he either descends to his tragic splendor or dares an inconceivable shattering of narrative logic. This tension, however, is not discernible from far below where Icarusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tiny reflection passes just now across Adriatic tidal pools, two loversâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ecstatic tears, and the lucent magic in a jar of summer honey.

218

Acknowledgements:

“Five Icarian Motivics,” Otoliths 33 “Falling in Parallax,” Eratio 17 “Three Icarian Episodes,” Eratio 19 “Parabolic Curve for Icarus,” Zoomoozophone 2 “Icarus in the Boundless Sky,” Uut Poetry “Plummeting Sacred” (as “Icarus Implicated in Logopoetical complications”), Uut Poetry

219

220

Carey Scott Wilkerson, poet and dramatist, is author of two poetry collections, Threading Stone and Ars Minotaurica. His play, Seven Dreams of Falling, premiered in 2013 at the Elephant Studio Theatre in Los Angeles and is scheduled for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s 2015 Daedalus Project. He has adapted his play, Ariadne in Exile (published by Negative Capability Press), as a concert operetta, The Ariadne Songs. This work premieres in December at Stony Brook University’s Staller Center for the Arts, with music by Angela Schwickert and Wilkerson’s libretto. He is editing, for Negative Capability Press, an anthology of Georgia poetry, due out in early 2015. He holds a BA and MA from Auburn University, an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte, and teaches at Columbus State University.

221

222

__________________________

To when tea ties hence to wank it too and eminent means of Basil Dado Hem-welt by VOLODYMYR BILYK

The Chapbook, No.5

__________________________

223

224

TABLE OF CONTENTS To when tea ties hence to wank it too / 227 eminent means of Basil Dado Hem-welt / 245

225

226

To when tea ties hence to wank it too

1 Null Ankle Ice Once loomed and spoofed by nasty Y-man. Bellow this redoubt well it acts like cackle lisped.

227

2 Babe as Abe turns the boa on her back and growls "ARGH!". It's Dreadfull and he tries to read in reverse It's funny and she turns the grain down ALL when the drain is calm. (No No No)

228

3 Be the bee With whistle by the Bach. Bored Beard Bears the Bar of Bore to Rave.

229

4 * Nip it. Pin yourself in nod. Before your Entertaining System Starts to smoke (in a transcendent way). *

230

5 Wretch coarses gross as ulcer sore for the regards of tempest written As the pest in rugged tempo. It crosses fores for roughs And tans the saw in babble To rub itself on burs Thrown backwards for the sear to wither How gab wags sieve to sifter.

231

6 Birr ... Flump of the gob Something to be sung with pitapat: Knocking collars in the waft, Lapping bosoms in the pit, Nicking nebs to fondle Ribbon tugs the slop. Bosh fries the fillip in the dodder Fib natters peach to baste the dart Ply kink loops it all.

Flail circles cobs to swift ... Rib

232

7 Pooh! Urge to purge The rites of the tires To cover and argue The loud cloud of them and the others To cross and be eaten by weaves In the twist. Tell TALLOW TALL LOW TALL TALLOW LOW TALLOW TALL Gargle and swill

233

8 The steep in ire brushes Shelves the tears of shells The Stir rakes every lug-tug Squeezing guts for gulls to feast Swift os saps tallow wholly, Napping pans as sails hiss Chiseling whittle for thought and Pecking the hands for the hollow When limp buss balls wink link Leaching the peg to sew on.

234

9 Rands rib is sluggy orb. Bra brag the rag: Bare garb Enrages bit to heed the pip Of every patch Placked out in envy. Cane rushes knobs from galls: In Dio-tone and Dido-motion Huff carved on wax tracks justly. Pooh-hop and jut-squeak, Pule-goggle and the spurt-rim. -

235

10 Titubate dab but bed is butted well As it had fallen into gong To sing like sea In gin and nig. Chord comes too late to pull, Loop tails the plash - then Taps sore scourge In stropping Apt pat combs whir whirr.

236

11 Michael Is able to play Michael in "Michael". But Michael is able to play Michael in "Michael" Only by looking at Michael in "Michael" 'cause Michael is monk-monkey with the key on his neck to his Miss-Tary Tapu Tar Err

237

12 Severely obvious In no scent That hat is true to rue as rouge

13 to to the for before with into on to at in for by for to with in at to into on from of on to against off by on at to up

238

14 Totterish pa’s of the par Graceful, Collared by the thunder For the tray to shoo It’s chute And Remnant Roar below. Decaying as a cliff of ramp To be the trough for closet spoiler.

239

15 Hold tote and stand muring It cribs the racks of smear in rear care for the tough titters of the teeth

240

16 Dashes rush to pounce and dashes rush to dash. The fix is: Blind mess jerking When bunk scuds. So fetch the girth For yank of swell. It dags a pin Therefore It pounds the brake.

241

17 The jib of the lash-lace Chugs. Fetor, fetor flogs log. And still the lag can droop. Befall to fit comes after in the dire step. Bring the jar! The quell of the entrail is the pant after the gulp is the gag of the tuck. The billow beck is chiding belches in the scour. It's only gait of wipe.

242

18 weasel works feigning under hands to haft abut To When Tea Ties Hence to Wank it Too

243

19 Die and Tat Both are the same On the platen of the fowl-frisk Ply be fallen Frizz will ink - thee as a coat of arms in bed With wrinkles tucked ...

244

eminent means of Basil Dado Hem-welt 0 chit of the tittle and palpitation buzz are setting fetters - for the folly thoughts

245

1 the blob rocks - chill pretty yowl-yawl nurses the shanks with the "skew-skew" wall-eye pipedream bray of the boggle breath assails the shoots to the point where hoot and clap windup the startle

246

2 Kind veer of cheek - a bit hobbled bottom thunder - timid whacks of utter cant quelled softly - flogged beyond with tithes rancor drops abashed by lack of downward tendency jollily gnaw tithe spite

247

3 fit of idlebout of trifle doubt: Dizzy blows "Closer", "Closer, "Soul Kiss" "High on a cloud"... ears perambulate a long way plodding stirrs of stout tangs... (what kind of condolence adjourned to get an everlasting poke?)

248

4 FRIZURE of the trained cues solvent putty of the cannikin shadow whisper smell FISSURE of the gentle tip sounds the touch of can-can leg-pull bat. chill

249

5 Nag this spike in niddle-noddle -beck within distracted rack - yoke chair - yoke chain, blank funk of dust is marchin' off - frantic

250

6 scree of the comma hood-w ink:f ox-g love . ) unsparing terracotta ***

251

7 Hound needle grumps on top (adorning irks) adhered to keep the watches screech,-bid,as it goes: ."idyl of the choral paste "under the oath mill" - steady, to be "coated" with "polythene" to sound "the chirr" Whatever will prolong this nonce... *** - A bit of letter rabbet soaring (...go tell the hole it's in the corn...)

252

*** 8 halloo of the tail of the flywheel: an instance to reason the "diddle-nick quiver" inciting the fob for the nag to spade the slice of span in lauded rataplans ...the spangle veers.

253

*** 9 pinch the dust and wag its vague lewd (occasionally excusing nether of the cower crinkle)

254

*** 10 Hole Bored Lips Redoubt the Void 's Opaque Lap

255

*** 11 spar scrimmage-cha-cha frame turns into the sparkless cesspit ... Sip of Kin Cribs scribble besmeared by the frails of the neck ,,, (you can see the pitch for the commercial here) you can see the script for the commercial here - burgeoning (chafe dross frame-up)

256

*** 12 dawn of boots pink inch chafe at the spar alley pane; arch of arms is curved and looped, gallantly, with the chagrin grin of sheer commiseration. frank spasm scroll and shackle of the newfound stout: the ruckus notes the vicious oar without an urge or reason (thats where the strings quake pierces in a flash to gather all the strokes remarked into the word.)

257

*** 13 blatant duty clip: "belt bangs the bowel borough spawning the consequent strap" the gird of it is whipped well: lashes crossed and waiting to be slashed with tears ...and after every beat There's this halt to know how many tears will make the mist to cover all this terror

258

*** 14 Appalled chill-walk Swells the fix. jibe jibs and prowls in throes in order to get rid of inner thunder. ...writhes twist and palms wreathe That's the fill of scarcity of moment.

259

*** 15 Cloud on the shoulder Sacks the nous and cloaks the riddle with the winnow... ... ... it spins with lust and care, ... imbruing gloom of presence - mostly keenly, with the specklenicks and fine exalts of thrusts. But it's Too inane to muster Drop.

260

*** 16 Wry shade drums on the brume,,,...and the rook is in the pocket... ...at least cussed something happened in the words and while it bears no troth it makes you wonder 'bout aback (...and maybe "broom",..) . That's consequential....

261

*** 17 A wisp of a smile. Ordinance, Doozy.

262

18 hag in the middle of the shoe shower dressed in smock. (why? been busy and unwilling to miss the thing) it was Withdrawal of a smog (her whiffet of the stuff) - been too long and boring mostly booted crossly by 'em all and so With rebound backwash of the organ and the Monkees She stared fascinated She saw the smoke. And got the beat of it too firmly Her woe of smooch was way too smooth for smother She smouldered then and turned into the smudge. ... Bit to smirk slyly.

263

*** 19 ... Frisk ploy. Splatter mutter. ... Winnowing clutches: Ponders the bliss with rapt and frolis truss ... Tan act Heft of immersed solemn longing ***

264

Volodymyr Bilyk is a writer, translator, and visual artist. Bilykâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s books include Girls (visual poetry, This Is Visual Poetry series), CIMESA (asemic short stories, White Sky Books), SCOBES (visual poetry, No Press), THINGS (visual poetry, Unconventional Press), Vispo Ay-Ai-Ay (visual poetry, Blank Space Press) and Casio's Pay-Off Peyote (poetry, Red Ceilings Press). His most recent book of poetry, Laugh Poems, was published by Underground Books. His work has appeared in The New Post-Literate, A-Minor magazine, REM magazine, Cormac McCarthy's Dead Typewriter, The Otolith, Altered Scale, Ex-Ex-Lit, Truck, Maintenant, Apparent Magnitude, The Gin Mill Cowboy and in exhibitions including the Bright Stupid Confetti Asemic Show, Yoko Ono Fan Club, Venti Leggeri in Bologna, and EL MARTELL SENSE MESTRE in Barcelona.

265

266