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Tuesday 28 February 2012

Mercedes Webb-Pullman-

Gertrude Stein from Paris, 1940

I became a fish tank,
a typical Thanatos pattern
at the peak of its range.
How long the clamouring lasts!

Deep fractured landscape –
form transposed, the incidental
the body falls weeping for,
that makes us hate,

steering wheels obviously
the least expected parts. A man
takes his breath, bladderwrack,
crabgrass, demonstrations,

prisoners in striped coveralls.
Skin blistered long ago –
homes for the orphans, crack
doctors to perform amputations.

“Now we will all
have an occupation’.

Monday 27 February 2012

Ben Nardolilli-

Red Gutter Ball
Under the calculating cynicism

Of one who remains
Unpunished in Dante’s Inferno,

We turn wheels and sweat
Our nights away in cages.


A good deal of fiction, we eat,

We endure with a few tales
Enriched without rations,

A blind man gathers us in
And speaks about revolution.

Ben Nardolilli currently lives in Arlington, Virginia. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, One Ghana One Voice, Caper Literary Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, Super Arrow, Grey Sparrow Journal, Pear Noir, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and Yes Poetry. His chapbook Common Symptoms of an Enduring Chill Explained, has been
published by Folded Word Press. He maintains a blog at 
mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is looking to publish his first novel.

Sunday 26 February 2012

Michael Mc Aloran-

Sketch #2-

…dead stop I, or I or not of, anchoring, the final blood’s vein unmasked in the breath of the flesh redeemed, sunk to nothing
…asked of, as if it were, deaf to blind to naught and then of else, rancour, not I, blood to let from broken glass, dusted with the char of ashen pulse, emptily, fragrant as a carcass…
…no hand to offer, blind of eye and gouge of mouth, building from spinal lights, in spit of desolate, adrift of no wind, sea scar and apathy of the castrated tongue…nothing, nothing…bleeding
                                                   out…sea swell of oscillation, a-grip, of ennui, sudden as if to freeze, echoing out of purpose, bind…
(…said without…)
…nothing’s blood upon stripped cadaver shores, headless all, burn aloud burn no nothing of it, stagnant…recede, step, no, non-step, back again, follow onward from out of the pale dark, lights in the throat of it…no no heart, breath escaping from a room of waste, dead alone, jolt, spasm, shot/ shot again, absent again…
…reconciled, phlegm, shit, pissing on the face of it, and drag, the drag of absentee breathing once again…absence of laughter, absence, trace of cold memory, jolt, spasm, skinning pit of the heart’s divulge…leaving the sun behind from which you were born…
(…traces,
                  the fucking avarice of teeth…)
…wrestling yet dead, stone, casket of rat’s skulls, and the pelt of, nectar of drenched, spliced through, given…vast, infinite loss of eye, dark all but for the echoes, from where, nothing no tracing one’s footsteps through…
(…I’ll go…)
…dead none, elixir of dread, and the quickened speech, the fragments scattered from the mind’s tract, flame or none of I, I none of nothing’s claim, as if it never had been before -lying through the teeth of it…
…false abandon…a…
…dead, stop, or I, no not turning aside, not ever of the once, so I believe, never, not a tooth of nail or grip of lax beheadedness…in a rip of eye, in a razor sadness, what else?…(I lie…)
…nothing claimed…

…nothing claimed…

…nothing claimed…

…nothing…


Michael Mc Aloran's blog, where you can links to books, published poetry and reviews: Abattoir Whispers

Saturday 25 February 2012

‘Liquid Metropolis’, by Petra Whiteley: A Review By Dom Gabrielli

Petra Whiteley's defiant latest tome, The Liquid Metropolis, published by Erbacce Press, sets about a ferocious dismantling of the persistently flourishing Social-Christian tenets. Frame by frame, poem by poem, stone by stone, look by look, in a challenging long-metrage between diary and diatribe, poetic epiphany and novelistic dystopia, Whiteley walks the amazed reader through the post-apocalypse metropolis of misguided affects. The gaze of leering masculine eagles, the seething anaesthetic of cowardly hatred, did not waylay her from her task. No stone is left un-turned. This is a work of unabashed pride. To walk with these words is to understand the meaning of standing out in the rain, resolutely outside, where the rains do not feel the same, where something ripped from ugly becomes beautiful. From within the tree, poetry never abandons the reader throughout a thrilling conversation with the myths of cherished lies. Poetry emerges victorious as mind and body, as the seconds which exceed Time, as the bare statement which kicks and shouts as it is, in silence, as the nothing that lived and breathed, even these words, even the sun, even its fire, even the unattainable, which crawls 'as a syllable on a promised tongue/ forever no/thing.'

 I imagine this enterprise was not without risks and that therefore first it is our role as readers to salute the bravery of this author, who has paid no heed to fashion nor to commodity, but to has listened to her deepest sentiment and revealed with such harsh and beautiful invective, the bare bones of the post-capitalist predicament. 'The clock hands/ of my practical suicide turn/the light backwards, no outer/limits…'  Since Artaud, the necessity to un-live and un-think the colonial powers of Christian absurdities has been paramount. Here the manual to exist outside continues, in the rain and without lying. '(God's) endless fingers of words claw suicide/into the everyday smell of my flesh and its throbbing/is the only life left.'  Or better still:

 'I was there, playing dead for them, the oak of silence growing

into my lungs. Was noise a bruise that spread whitely into me?

Yes. In that poisoned room within the tree, I left traces of death,

 
lived backwards, the slow drip of birthday butchery.

 
So long to language and its pain!

 
Breathe to break the hush of words into music,

unconstrained and unshattering.'.

 Hope is for the misguided but love entertains the brave, a love you build between the slow suicides of souls whose de-mystified sexualities can start to sing a song of muscle and beauteous, poetic bone. Disillusions many ripped from the misfortunes of previous identities can be stripped in a kind of ritual post-mortem of manners and realities. Can one say, following such adventurers in the domains of the Spirit such as Artaud that another body is possible:

 'I wanted you to watch

Me die, to watch the trees growing from my hands

Into the stark digits of night and be the monument

Of my liquid sex. To

Witness the opiate orgasms

In my resurrection.'

 What for convenience sake we still call man or woman suffers here a keen and rigorous un-thinking. 'I am the void, the pain and the whiskey lie, a sucked bone, a flute,/and as I,/you will/(desc)end softly as a barren rattle sound.' The Liquid Metropolis is a book-machine in the great tradition of radical thinking, a book for new lover-thinkers, into the hope-less beyond of the naked end of the world. For those who, dare I say, have never bent their knees to kneel nor sheltered their eyes from the glaring truth of society's founding lies. This is a resistance song, a remarkable bottle hurled into the ocean of nought. To collect its messages is to accept that a book requires the reader to work, to pause for moments to collect one's whole intellectual history, to agree to be challenged, to be hurt, to be attacked by the anger of the author, to travel with her to the trees and the colours which sing on the other side: 'our laughter will echo like hard rain when we finally slip away.'

 We have become accustomed to Whiteley's unstinting intellectual rigour, to the beauty of many of her poems, but never has her true instinct been able to express itself with such uncompromising clarity and fire. The Liquid Metropolis is what the burning libraries of 2012 will need, an at times brutal poetic pamphlet whose language prepares the audacious for the trees which will grow from their hands, for a new laughter for the living who do not wish to postpone their desires and abdicate their enjoyments. 'I dream of Thames at midnight, where at least a rabbit can choose/ the softness of one's own never ever after and push hard towards/the dawn in the city.

 'Liquid Metropolis', by Petra Whiteley, should be purchased from Erbacce Press, here
'

A Preview of 'Liquid Metropolis' by Petra Whiteley

                                             https://mail-attachment.googleusercontent.com/attachment/?ui=2&ik=a14022f624&view=att&th=135b9585101a6ca4&attid=0.1&disp=inline&safe=1&zw&saduie=AG9B_P8R4PDt2KTxosh2dNt0KJi6&sadet=1330255548316&sads=LGii3eCQtfoKMA3rH98Nai6dzEs&sadssc=1


Chapter I/ PartX
 

This is
   a place of my rotten blood.
       A rest for my glass skull stitched between olive shadows
           and dancing wings of owls turning children's dreams in
              the Russian wheels of their eyes
                           in shrieking midnights...universe of silences.
What is left here?
            The dainty mice fingers in patters of spasmodic ecstasies,
                    scratching the flesh to black veins, the curvy roads of my death.
                        All the sea softened red stones on my tongue
                                                                          were iridescent prophesies,
                                   rolling noise gurgling silhouettes of promise - eating from the palm
  of syllables  unspoken in a metallic shivering of a single word. Swallowing me
now
  nail by nail. Spitting my life back into a dark arch under his jaw. Chews on my mind.
          I am the void, the pain and the whiskey lie, a sucked bone, a flute, and as I,
you will
             (desc)end softly as a barren rattle sound.

 

Chapter 3 – The Silence Manual/Part 6. Disposal – Sapiens be(fallen) 

The dialogue of hardened hands
is spoken through the cracks in skin,
the body is the night of glass with horizons sharpening.
The dialogue of darkened eyes
is stillness of afternoons, the heavy sound of sun,
hanging from dried mouth - the nails of mind, weighing.
Time’s weighing down the drumming
heart’s monologue and its own answers of blood
in the fast, tight fist of light and its prolonged suffocating absence.

The rhythm between silence and sound
is the breath’s weakness through the loyalty of lungs, miracles
of twins blossoming electricity of pain and endorphin religion
rushes.
The monologue of aging, the monologue of death,
the architectural bends in anatomy of the maps, the world,
unanswered and reactionary, the communion of perpetual suicide.
It’s so hard to understand the vacuum of colours, the void of flesh,
the charcoal post-mortem of mannequins sipping teas outside in the
storm
only punctuated by the fastened directions of wind.

Chapter 4/Frame II

Locus Amoenus (Goodbye To Eden)


I’ve laid in this dark green garden, this anaemic coffin
with intricate leaf patterns and cat-shit-stinking soil,
order of scars circling the longest days under thin branches
and devouring each of their ruby veins.
Suffocating clouds above my neck with their threats
were conceived in a swollen mass of judgements,
raining old blood
and egg bombs of noiseless screams, shading
darknesses behind the edge brutalities of drops, rushing
over and through my skin.
They say God’s voice is a beautiful song,
but His voice is Death, His eyes a singeing pain,
His endless fingers of words claw suicide
into the everyday smell of my flesh and its throbbing
is the only life left. His moods of salvation a tool of hell.

There become, the I
a ship and as such descend into the distances
of the seas greying inside
always pulling into downward shores, strewn
with bones like stars pulsing white on the sand.
Silent
and indifferent.


'Liquid Metropolis' can be purchased from Erbacce Press, here

Friday 24 February 2012

Gary J. Shipley-

COMING UP ON HEADLESS

The neck’s no cul-de-sac
Frayed bullets tussling 
Up and out open mouths about
Just about speaking, but they’re
Happy most the time
The monkey traps don’t bite
And the voltage is all teeth.


ARTIFICIAL LIMB

forum of the half-invented
hosted by non-donors
followed at distance
back to damp stacks
by their instruments
to percussion of stab heels
spoiling pliable skies in
sting estate of creepers
unique in flaws in echoed
soundscape of corpses
jangling in canning bomb
towers and mirrored parks
imagining ritual blindness
in late-night architecture
clap nerves in the metal
artistry in the tangle
fingers in commentaries
scalpels rocking clean
set tubes scorching out 
gram traces of ceremony
a world’s invisible centres
from a dying machine 
of clunk cut wire flowers
late in the fabricated
spectacle –paralyzed – 
a technical suffocation
fielding an asphyxiate seed


ROT GLUT

All my birthmarks have been erased
Ripped out like people out of senile brains
And yet no trace of espionage
Or fumes of droppings of Goya bats.

Genetic playthings of appetites grinded
Into various mutilations of fatigue
Looking to be bred from the mucus
of nuclear eyes prevented from forming.

The world a scab of particulate violations
Epileptic worms of light in sagging human turf. 

Gary J. Shipley is the author of Theoretical Animals (BlazeVOX). More details can be found here.
 

Wednesday 22 February 2012

David M. Buhajla-

A Brief Understanding of What it Means to be Lucid


Fourteen feet under the rocky overhang, 
a man holds a fistful of pine needles.

The tattooed pistoleer wonders if the
grapes under the tarmac provide enough

bounce in the forests of Azerbaijan. The coolie
responds and smirks, the emerald in his forehead growing

to massive and incongruent proportions.
It's all proportion. Especially when six-fingered

ladies smack their sweaty ham-hands onto their thighs
in front of a standing ovation at the Orpheum. The

Georgians don't like it. But, the helmet-clad
spirits wish that they had the fruit that fell from the

tired old Joshua tree. That’s what they think.
Chalk one up to the misanthropes, and plead to the masters

and misers that control the radio waves that
vomit forth from the pulsar. It's all proportion.

Take the shiny blade that the kids want from the
catalogue, because there’s numbers to be had,

hidden in the hidden angles. Believe what the antennas
give to the people when their faces grow hair and their hair

grows faces. Make it and break the “it” that it controls.
Play the woodchuck song, Frank. The sun went nova.
Nothing left but proportions.



Bitter Yolk of an Angry Moon


Mundane, a pugilist lashes out
at a bitter protagonist,
confident in his swelling
pride and swelling face.
Three old men watch on. Their
gray skin hangs in folds
as they cackle and clap.
A drop of blood hits the middle man.

A sainted hunter pokes
the yolk of his egg, which seeps
like a septic wound. The blue
Montana sky behind him laughs
at his wardrobe of hair shirt and jeans.
In the distance, a coyote waits and dreams.

I sit and watch as the clown mocks my sight. His
one blind eye reveals a twinkle under its
filmy membrane. He yanks out the offending
orb, offering it to me as sacrament. I feast.

A child squeezes his favorite hamster
until it stops twitching. In the living room,
his mother lays silent and blue.

A general breakdown begins as the moon
goes dark and madmen shoot each other
across the dunes, sick from ocular wafer
hallucinations.

The disjunction of upper lobes
and membranes make a final resting
place at the old stone wall that crumbles
under the hanging prisoner.

It’s a bitter and frank discussion as I
speak to my internal minions that twitch
and breathe inside me. You call them
tapeworms but I call them brothers as
we revel in our symbiosis. 


Mary Perkins and Lester Holt Visited the Wallace Residence Thursday Night

      
A work boot with a tuft
of pink insulation clinging
onto the end of a brown
and tattered shoelace sits on
a worn wooden step in front
of a burning trailer house.
Cicadas buzz as a shadow moves
across the hot and broken
glass that rests and winks
on the sun-baked ground.


David M. Buhajla is a writer and poet living in Arkansas with his wife Marci and his daughter Maya. His work is available in Counterexample Poetics, Sex and Murder, Danse Macabre, Rose and Thorn Journal, The Gloaming Magazine, The Horror Zine, Death Head Grin, The Very Good Bad Comedy Show and the “Winter Canons” anthology from Midwest Literary Magazine.



Sunday 19 February 2012

Pd Lyons-

As Long As Its You

When you breathe it is my name.
When you stare,
Your own eyes black pools,
Liquid movements synchronize my own.
Who knows me any better?
Naked throat? Beating heart?
You may heal. You may feed.
Whatever you do, as long as its you.


Neptunian
My ugliness raised in both hands
Almost expecting something from you
And if only I had a gun I woulda’ made you
And hated myself forever for being so desperate
If only I could believe 
Then how easy it would be
Walking away leaving you alone
Free at last to wander endless starry nights I always dream of
Instead I let you
 Tattoo blue around my mouth
  Tell me that I’m privileged
   


 After Last Call
Puke my guts out in the after last call parking lot
Of the now what am I gonna do
Still hometown married jails unavoided
Lucky having nothing to do with being alive
Benches wrapped in paper, nightmares unelaborate
Just boys with lighter fluid searching for someone sleeping.



Small Places
Small places where no one would ever go
Unless like myself
They had to shunning stars.
Not likely to tell me anything I don’t already know,
Shut up you heart breaking fuck.
When will you leave my head alone?
Non-linear pissing all over the seat.
Secret lover of cities,
You spoke like something would matter,
Like a hundred years,
Like a gunga din,
Long into the locust day
You said it made all the difference
And what was it? Different than what?
Televisions and telephones no way related to any woman ever known
But wait,
Who is willing to be a mother when even she must do the killing?


PD Lyons has been writing for along time and hopes to continue for even longer. Work has appeared in mags and zines in North America and UK. Two collections of poetry published by Lapwing Belfast.
  visit pdlyons blog for poetry publishing info and new releases:
    http://pdlyons.wordpress.com/

Aad de Gids-

monolith
early in the morning an elemental cold,resonating somehow in the bones
those remnants of trees in weakbodied cognescent animals,travelling thru
wintery lanes,an unbelievable cold attached itself on these weak skins,not
any longer apparently adjusted to cold so intense and ripping on the folds
and palates,temples and templates of facial mass and vegetal besotted
dreams,this cold temporarily catatonizing soul endeavours and harsh metal
when hold in an elevator,also surprisingly archaically polar,threatening to
freeze fingers and what had to be one of the mundanest of things,sudden
threat of disorder,disorderly cold europe,mirroring or unequally contrasting
with northern america,the cold of death and anciennity,glacial shifting and
unpersonal windshear,plains with exposed stretches of grass,relentlessly
laid open to the planetary frostpossibilities,the unemotional syrupt hatred of
natures' cathedral,just out of a cyclicity of contingency and erratic haunting
moods as they also dwell outside of the antropocene,the rage of ants,the
subsoil wars of plants,pheromonous density of desertnights,absence of
sun and the chilling visus of the snowmoon,particularizing sleep of the hordes
into corpuscules of night,audible silence and visible blackness,the probing
scent of salt from an inlet nearby,answering the tides,the surf,solitudinous

aaddegids54y.nursehomosexualphilosopherdadaistoutrageousnessistdutch

Saturday 18 February 2012

Kyle Hemmings-

City of Love #1

I'm scouring my pots and pans so hard my reflections
 are turning steel wool. In a few weeks I'll be as thin
 as my finger nails, stuck in a cave of sticky memory.
 She left me for a 40 yr. old kid who lives under a bomb factory.
 Muttonchops didn't even say Good bye, just emailed:
You and I have always been on the fence, but I have
 always loved the smell of dandelions. They even grow
 in the back lots of the city. Dandelions are tough.
You can't be soft here. You can't be like spoonbread.
Why does love hit like an artillery punch? I worry about
sleeping alone, about my ambient snores, the white stereo
 of my sonic dreams, what the cat will think of my pajamas.
 I'll live on lobster colored crumbs and bones minus flesh.
At the bedroom door, my feet stutter. I wonder if there
 is a planet that quivers like Jell-O. I sense an alien presence
 in my bed. Snoring just like me.


Bartleby

His wife discovered he had hung himself,
 swinging from the last full-hunger moon of winter.
 She carefully cut the celestial rope, a brand
he had purchased online, a site called Hitch_A_Comet.com.
 With his limp body freed, stars crashed around her.
 She dragged him back to the house, cursing both him
and her tight-fitting shoes. She removed his best Sunday suit,
an imported tweed from Hungary, his suede soft-sole shoes
and searched his pockets. They were not empty, were full of night,
the distant voices of women, laughing, spilling from unmanned satellites.

Mean Streets #5

She has you strung on orange wang tang
and psychological orgasms. You'll die
for artificial sweeteners but she loves
getting kinky with a top hat just when
 you're hung upside down, internal clocks blind.
 Again, she leaves you feeling trapped
inside  your own urine samples.
You've always been addicted to the rain.
On the streets, a ratty girl is spreading
rumors that you're already dead.

Kyle Hemmings is the author of several chapbooks of poems: Avenue C (Scars Publications), Cat People (Scars), Fuzzy Logic (Punkin Press), and
Tokyo Girls in Science Fiction (NAP). His latest ebook is Moon Down Girl from Trestle Press. He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/

 

Friday 17 February 2012

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal-

THE SOFT SKY

The soft sky can’t hold up the sun.
A bird flies across the sky singing.
The soft sky trembles. If it had a lip,
it would be bleeding. The moon
and stars will be the end of the sky.
The soft sky can’t carry the mist.
Autumn brings the sky to its knees.
In the wet soil the soft sky drowns
as beasts crawl out of the earth
crying like infants in a sky-less world.

 
THE SHAKING TREE

The shaking tree
was shivering.
The trembling leaves
were shivering.
They were afraid
of being afraid.
They could not say
the word afraid.
They were afraid
for months. They were
watching the birds
and passing clouds.
A flock of birds
in the sky flew
like assassins.
They scared the tree.
Back and forth they
flew, back and forth.
 

Thursday 16 February 2012

Samuel Beckett-

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead. 
-Samuel Beckett

Wednesday 15 February 2012

A. J. Huffman-

The Rabbit's Revenge

She pulled the string.
And the blinds opened,
baring
their glaring yellow teeth.

And the walls
continued to breathe . . .

As she stood
against the mirror.
Safe.
She thought.
In the eyes
of her own reflection.

Until their color
changed.
And her own hands
reached out.
For her throat.



Nightmare.  In Red Sharp.

The hole
beneath the pillow
speaks.
To me.
Through the night.

It breathes.
Dark language
fills my ears.
Painting my dreams
in subconscious blood.

Dripping fingers snake the wall.
Stroking.
Soothing.
The way to desire.

Through a room.
Blackened by windows
stitched shut.
I walk.
Alone.
Pulling my own leash.
Leading my own way.
To a cage
nailed
before an open doorway.

I take off my shoes.
And follow this path
of glass.
Knowing the end
and the exit.
Are not the same direction.

Still I approach the bed.
Canopies flowing.
White.
Above curtains
draped in rusty mail.
Remembering.
Knowing.
Armies have slept this sleep before me.

I join their silence.
Proudly.
And cover myself.
With their hallowed death.


Legacy

Slash one.
Sew two.

Veins.
In the dark.
Sounding
a tired song.
As I go
through the rites
of this ancient dance.

Alone.
On the bed.
I remember
my mother's coffin.
And calling her
mad.
For preaching
she could die
indefinitely.

Slash one.
Sew two.

Alone.
On the bed.
I realize
I am mad.
For believing her.

 A.J. Huffman is a poet and freelance writer in Daytona Beach, Florida.  She has previously published three collections of poetry: The Difference Between Shadows and Stars, Carrying Yesterday, and Cognitive Distortion.  She has also published her work in national and international literary journals such as Avon Literary Intelligencer, Writer's Gazette, and The Penwood Review.  Find more about A.J. Huffman, including additional information and links to her work at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000191382454 and https://twitter.com/#!/poetess222.