Prime Decimal

my poem "Subject: Please Be Sympathetic to My Cry" is up at Prime Number

Halloween Cento (Cento from Horse Less Review 8, part 2)

Everything smells like wet lawns & burned charcoal
in a suburban backyard. Their sweaty palms make etchings of the dirt ........on
long fences of night.
Or you come to the grass
the other side of a cattle fence;
stay longer, count the day's keloidal cells.

**

This is the house we have always lived in.

Eyes rimmed red,
dusted skin,
can you see that I am transparent? I pretend otherwise.
Who crushed the brain with numerals?
Who are you to talk politics? I know
the simple morality of a gun under your pillow --
bookended in sheaves of leaves, cotton --
in this country, left to right, top to bottom.

**

You've been mastering the dream; you conjured our whole ........neighborhood!
They knifed you & scooped out the bad
drills & cranes & trains & planes & automobiles
at night. At ten o'clock, the metal screeches down.
I'm scared to go to the party with you. It's my party:
a graveyard receiving bodies:
storage of the unappealing & inedible.

**

At the exact same moment
(that flat wide blade slung over your shoulder),
behind a velvet curtain in the foyer of the art gallery, a boy punched ........the,
the mirror, a window behind which
I have carried a torch
in the unperishable past. I function, at the time of telling you this ........story,
fine. Another trance upon us, then.

Or lullaby & goodnight. The fate of a nation,
whether or not to be savage
by these few simple rules. Their book deals with disappearances, ........& the
negation, to the deepest blue. But it's hard to get the blue of this ........sky. They
entangled like vines in summertime. Between skin & clothes
I dreamed I carried a snake.

**

When you see us burn things, read the smoke
like a god to me. Let be be
air for sale.

Am I losing you? The white marble
on your forehead
lets go her balloon. We will do
some sugar cane & melon. Barely
caused a scene.

The sunset shifts;
the black sky
reeks of progress.
Locks click
still like that
bag full of headlines
you're supposed to live.

**

& if we're really here
I was born for this, just as you were born
of its hairs, those along the back,
with more thought, more flesh.

**

Listen to raccoons clawing through the gutters
without us knowing. Remember
& smile more. Say something that will follow me
right now. The ducks are not ducks anymore. They're the center of ........the pond.

**

horse less review 8

Raft Magazine Issue 1

Raft, a new spoken-word literary journal, is now online, at:

www.raftmagazineonline.com

Issue 1 features new work from:

Scott Abels
Niamh Bagnell
Susan Powers Bourne
Ric Carfagna
Jan Carson
Joel Chace
Arkava Das
Mark DuCharme
Iris Jamahl Dunkle
Bonnie Emerick
Michael Farrell
Adam Fieled
Thomas Fink
Vernon Frazer
R. Jess Lavolette
David Mohan
Debrah Morkun
Paul Nelson
Francis Raven
Chad Scheel
Sam Schild
Brian Seabolt
Adam Strauss
Mark Stricker
Samuel Day Wharton
Karena Youtz

Cento from Versal 8

As long as the court listens,
you still lack a function. Do not fear -- function
softens the suture
we called home. If I lived there for a year, it was
your permission to move away
that bangs inside the mouth. The scarlet ink packet
that the sun drops, wrapped in smoke, towards the east.
To begin the allergic game,
each draws out the sword carefully stored
until the 1980s.
Humming a German folk tune & smiling
despite not understanding enough of the what
that later followed,
I came upon an arrow or a spear poking skyward,
running right to the margins.
A sleazy siren, decked in white,
let me stay in the morning. & I'll read you the backs of cereal boxes
once. He was a pair of fins, a rogue. & tidal
changes, tiny & secret as a warning,
made me look like a whore.
This will stand as your apology,
without opening the body.


Versal 8 is out now.

LEVELER!

There Will Always be a Moment in Your Life
That Can Change Everything

POEM!

13
myna birds

is up!!!!

(i have a poem up there)

SAWBUCK 4.1!

is up & in business.

Cento from The Concher #2

We are all upstream, relics of our counsel.,
the horizon melodramatically

fumbling through the dust-grounds
full of cobs. We keep wedding dresses out,

claw-footed, hand-held, the heart-like
moon cantos awash with

more, you know, fucking than
a field shot-up with poppies.

Like a kerchief full of ether when the phone rings
all of our chests outside today heaving the beautiful everyone

darkly away -- O bewailing & pitted America -- staring
made a hole I can see through.

Unsubdued as the season itself,
this house, a dark swallow

unmoved, turned to your supple lips.
Each blue self not quite

enough to measure their height in my teeth.
They weren't always. All the places

not present here,
where the strongman hits the bell again & the sky opens;

all the horizon in handcuffs of color, & the morning
light soaked up by mindfulness.

Say & say what is before us.
Even with me holding the door shut, I'm awake

for foul & fair, against the lichen-covered knolls.
They dance so hard the trees fall down inside them.

You refused to fall with them. Monitors
with no shade. Yellow tattered palm fronds.

this is what you want

Anti- Issue #5
24 poems by Samuel Day Wharton, Fritz Ward, Julie Marie Wade, Margot Schilpp, Nicholas Reading, G. M. Palmer, Clay Matthews, Dawn Lonsinger, Lisa Lewis, Sara Kearns, Todd Fredson, Gary Dop, Curtis L. Crisler, Nick Courtright, Chip Corwin & Michael Theune, Elizabeth J. Colen, Jenny Browne, and Albert Abonado.

**

also, past sawbuck contributor Nick Demske has some swell poems up at 7 corners

check 'em out

SAWBUCK!! 3.4!! WINTER!! 2009/2010!!

winter is here (though it may not feel like it in CA) & a new sawbuck is so ready!

read poems from:

\\ Allan Peterson //
// Becca Klaver \\
\\ Daniel Borzutsky //
// George Kalamaras \\
\\ Ian Ganassi //
// Kathleen Rooney \\
\\ Lisa Ciccarello //
// Martha Silano \\
\\ Robert Lietz //

// Sandy Longhorn \\

before they read poems from you!

new journal -- LEVELER

friends, i am very happy to point you to:


We (Jennifer H. Fortin, P.J. Gallo, Evan Glasson, Yotam Hadass) are happy to announce that LEVELER is officially up and running. Please check out the site at levelerpoetry.com. Every Sunday we will post a new poem, accompanied by a brief entry called levelheaded that aims to shed light on the poem and our editorial process. If you have comments on any of the present or future content, please join in on the conversation by writing us at levelwithus@levelerpoetry.com.

Cento from Diode Volume 2, Number 1, Fall 2008: 8/30/08

Every night the clouds argue in the sky for the right to be
& you attempt to rise--then a glistening fills the channel.

On my inner forearm, at my elbow: a pothole
& a paling puncture scar -- the visible

whole? Or a faint
drunk from the sun. Apples'

color colored in the blankness. Smokey Robinson
I was, where I lived. I chanted with the others,

someone not blond, blue-eyed. Someone shaking
this, which forms in the throat.

You are lost.
You must differ yourself in the taste, ask light from breath-light.

Let them say you remember the ribcage was partially open,
with its stomach pumped. With its sputtering interface.

You don't know what's underneath
that summer night. I was an unturned field

where the wind is a wingless insect muscling a serenade.
Until the world was clean,

what the sky spat down into the woods was
invisible.

Loot

schwag from the Printer's Ball last night:

ACM 47
Court Green 5
Columbia Poetry Review 20
Poetry May 08
The Journal 16
Lumpen 107

**

& congrats to my little sister for the swell reviews of her show!

some good news:

a rather old poem has been accepted here:

salt flats annual

look for it early 2009

will you be

10,000?

**

reading ANTI- #2

There are at least seventy-eight different aesthetics at play. I've verified this. With chemists.

PROSE by

Stephan Clark

Noah Cicero

J.P. Gritton

Gabe Durham

Ofelia Hunt

J.M. Patrick

Claudia Smith

Carrie Spell

Bobby Farouk

POETRY by

Andrew Michael Roberts

Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney

Leigh Stein

Daniel J. Bailey

Jasmine Dreame Wagner

Samuel Wharton (!)

Patrick Duggan

Alex Burford

K. Silem Mohammad

PICTURES by

Sean Kilpatrick & Daniel St. George

Benjamin Buchholz

i am the kiss of death

or sometimes it feel like a lot of journals (good ones!) close down not so long after i submit to them.

or maybe i am attributing a false sense of agency to myself.

anyhow, unpleasant event schedule is kaput...so sad.

blown off?

Best of the Net 2007

is up over at sundress. i posted here before about how none of sawbuck's submissions made it, which of course is fine b/c there're lots of great poems out there, some greater even than sawbuck's...

but now i notice that sawbuck hasn't been included in the "participating journals" section either, which makes me feel bad.

i can't believe that this is an intentional slight on the part of sundress' editors, so i'm gonna assume that my submission email just got lost in the shuffle?

still, i can't help but feel that the authors i nominated got the shaft, & that it's my fault somehow...

reading this morning

josh corey writes about fame & his new baby

**
someone at tier3 has thoughts about poets rather than poems.

the premise -- that journals should publish more poems by fewer poets -- is one that i agree with. i like to publish longer selections in sawbuck (i ask for 6+ poems on the submission page), but it can be difficult, since many fine poets seem to resist sending out long submissions. the result, of course, is that i have published single poems by an author, but only when i felt that the poem really amplified the other work in that issue.

**
now onto submissions

interpolation

We swore we would remember, but I forgot,
until this poem, which is about the death of
someone never mentioned.



-- Sheila Black, "Spectators Across the Interstate"


**
i will be going here soon

**
You might have eaten the dog, but it had three legs and you none, your femurs
long-since tapered to the floor. You stare each other down and laugh...

-- RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ , "Black Blossoms"

**
& here

**
as you can see i've been enjoying the new diode
there's lotsa other cool stuff besides what i've highlighted above
check it