Listen to Courtney Kampa read her piece:

We’re late because according to Virginia State law
the intersection of West Ox
& Bennett Road is only two deaths away
from the installation of a traffic light—great news
but no one’s volunteering: the stop sign line
stretching cautious for a mile, a single car gingering
forward at a time. My foot on the brake,
we practiced saying eight different options
for hello. Where the inflections go. To pronounce
her name with eye contact. With her shoulders
straight back, like Pocahontas—her favorite
Disney princess. To send her arm out like a paper boat
in the other direction. That Yes, I promised, they will
offer their hands too. It’s easy to say true things
without feeling any truth in them. Her kid-size
equestrian boots dirtying the dashboard, both hands
upwards on her lap as if a catalogue
of gestures for the frequently speechless, and by now
we’re so late the horses at her therapeutic riding class
were led already from the stable—Lucinda, Tess,
and Spirit fronting the pack. The noise of nails
in their feet. The puckered 6-inch scars
guttering their flanks, gashes that look worse
in person than they did in the daily paper. I read
they caught the boy who knifed them—who crept
into the barn that night, all of us left wondering
what pain is for. Not the dramatic part, the sound
of horse-skin breaking, reddening
the hay. I mean its aftermath: my sister’s face
as she’s legged-up to the saddle. Her woundedness
imagining theirs. Seconds before, she walked up
to the teacher in her sweet, robotic way. Gave her hand
like we’d rehearsed it, then joined the others
in the class. If grace could be
defined it’d be a very quiet phrase. All that braided
hair. The burdens on their backs. Each body
half on fire, the other half in flame.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

in  the  pines running  roots and  moon running
roots  and  moan  running  dirt  shadow worms
now   mud   running   needle   red   bug  worms
begin  eat  shit eat         shit  the pines running
back  branch  sap  in  the  pines  running  warm
darkness  brown  throat  brown  quart  running
tar  heart  end pine end worm worm bone snap
branch sap teeth hound

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Tomorrow  might be  green  birds  and  furious
I’m  so  furious  and  hungry sweating  in  fern-
like   patterns  hungry  for  something  birdlike
but green I’ve been in headlocks I want to cry
tomorrow   tomorrow  is  a  word  that  means
peace I  will  be televised and Kentuckian  sick
my head  sick  sick  my  head  so many  hawks
floating in anticipation.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Tonight I am light-headed with wine
and hard labor done without pay.

There are dead rats in the gutter,
grinning. In my freezer, canisters

full of compost—what waste is laid
ought to be laid into the earth,

which ought to be rich, as language is.
Look into the eyes of this poem.

If you find no eyes here, return
to the eyes these words have made

inside your memory. Five-hundred years ago,
if a samurai killed a man, he had the right.

I have the right.
When I blink, the world stops churning

out its silence. A great stone is loosed
from the head of the giant eel.

____________________
“Sessha wa jishin de gozaru” is written in the construction of the samurai’s self-introduction and has two meanings depending on the kanji used: “This unworthy one is known as Earthquake” or “This unworthy one is known as Self-confidence.” The last line of the poem refers to a traditional Japanese myth that attributes earthquakes to the falling of a great rock from the head of a giant eel at the bottom of Lake Biwa.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

tin roof snapping like senbei
in a calm spring sunset
underthrown ash turning pale
becomes a quiet spring sunset

ah  is there a scarecrow?  there cannot be
will a horse neigh?  perhaps not even that
is it only to the slimy moon
that a spring sunset is obedient?

boiling field and temple turn crimson
cartwheel in need of oil
if I speak to the historical present
they’d make a fool of me  the sky and mountains

a single roof tile has wandered away
now the spring sunset
without a word will
move on into its venous tube

____________________
senbei: rice cracker

-

トタンがセンベイ食べて
春の日の夕暮は穏かです
アンダースローされた灰が蒼ざめて
春の日の夕暮は静かです

呼！　案山子はないか――あるまい
馬嘶くか――嘶きもしまい
ただただ月の光のヌメランとするまゝに
従順なのは　春の日の夕暮か

ポトホトと野の中に伽藍は紅く
荷馬車の車輪　油を失ひ
私が歴史的現在に物を云へば
嘲る嘲る　空と山とが

瓦が一枚　はぐれました
これから春の日の夕暮は
無言ながら　前進します
自らの　静脈管の中へです

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

All the sea life left of her
was uterus.

And then one day
her boy pushed through

and rose through the pale blue bay
wrapped in a morning curl.

There is no evasion ever.
The body is a kind of gun

betrothed to what the hands do.
The comber hung his head,

poking at the froth-spot.
Throwback foal,

naked dowry
of the wind’s long neck.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Samantha Deal read her piece:

What I want to know is how the water pulls
into itself—how it peels the sandy earth away in layers.

And how would it feel to swallow the half-moon curve of his ankle
but then let go?         Each arched foot’s slow sweep leaves a print—

a ring in the bone like a bow’s long drag across cello strings.

Imagine—your chest could be white, could be an empty room
for him to fill with everything he owns.

You know, they’re made from uncurled gut—the strings.

The first time I saw the ocean, I was afraid
of how it kept on going. Is it even possible to love

too much? Door hinges, ligaments, screws, sinew—
I am terrified of everything between where I am

and where I’m going to be. Imagine—I’m fascinated by the word
withdraw—doesn’t it sound exactly           like what it is?

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Steven D. Schroeder read his piece:

When we first saw beneath
each other’s clothes, we knew it
made us superheroes. We mutated
lava into love and vice versa.
Conjured by our kisses, binding
contracts demanded we seal
the deal daily. We sealed letters
under adamantium and antarctic
but still didn’t hide our secret
identities in the signatures,
Sugarbomb and Hugaton.
With our gifts, we manufactured
stellar pornography and graphs
of our momentum and place
in space-time. Then we settled
into a rental unit with central air,
where relight the pilot was no longer
an entendre for our talents.
The ability to double sunrises
with sexiness cooled into a knack
for baking cookies sooooo goooood,
the neighbors said. While playing
Tedium one Friday game night,
the Answerer, who foresaw a future
of same nights counted out
as cutlery, guessed nothing but
zip and void. The inevitable breakup
of the universe soon followed.
Impotent to stop it, we froze
home movies on that frame
where it became clear how special
effects allowed us to appear
on fire again. We crossed our eyes
out with booze to unsee the why
science couldn’t reason. At the end
of dating diaries, we found our power
was wishing we could turn
the planet backward to before
our flames transformed to former.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

When a man loves a woman,
he sits her down and grasps her hand
in the manner one might hold a seashell.
Darling, he says, I confess
I’ve felt my whole life
like a serpent among babies
in a barren waste of human excrement.
To which the beloved shall nod.
To which the studio audience
shall be instructed to brutishly shout.
To which a mighty army of the dead
shall be conjured to skull mountain.
And distantly a black wave
clacks its tongue against a sea cave.
No, no, the painter thinks
and reaches into his wicker basket.
He paints a crib at the crest of the wave,
a crib at the trough.
A throng of babies
will overtake this beach, he thinks,
but at least I’ll die beautiful.
The woman re-enters the portrait
to find her lover lost in thought.
Darling, says the woman,
bending to her knees,
I confess for as long as I’ve known you,
I’ve been a pine
chopped down
and loaded onto a truck
for a Christmas extravaganza.
When I breathe, I can feel tinsel
flooding my lungs.
When you prune me,
I can make out the voices of carolers
fleeing the fjord.
And they fall into each other
like clumsy ghosts—
the man shimmying his rattle,
the woman dropping her cones.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Dan Beachy-Quick read his piece:

The grass is and isn’t some flame’s waiting bed—
I saw the nude bride lean back in the grass,
Legs askance, one hand holding above her head
A lantern, a waterfall, the illuminating gas.
Her face fell outside the frame. Those flowers
Leaned in the direction she’d look, if she had eyes
To look, she’d look in the direction those flowers
Pointed, sky-ward arc that bends, arc that in dry
Earth ends. My eye hurt from all its dumb looking.
My dumb eye in its hurt looking. I like
To think I made this choice to not open
The door, even if the door had no knob, I like
To think I made a choice to put my hand
On my throat to hear my throat as my own.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Dan Beachy-Quick read his piece:

Be generous—. But the nettle’s bloom bitters
Its lesson deep into the thumb’s lovely
Incaution, and the rose thrown in the gutter
Still casts out its scent so sweet it’s sickly,
Almost shapely, love’s ghastly prepossession.
I hoped to die before spring came again,
Then the dung beetle made its confession.
Then the pillow kept my silhouette’s stain—.
I rose as if I never had risen—.
Be cautious—. But the letter lays bare
Those marks her own hand pressed through words
Onto the page below this page, where
White on white makes present all past, absurd
Legibility, as grief notes grief,
The colors of the sky, and the sky itself—.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Dan Beachy-Quick read his piece:

Gnats breed, mind broods, a cloud in the air
Breathes out one breath until the cloud is gone,
And the sun pours down heat in glaring hours
That prisms wings as thought prisons song.
The grass dreams other dreams than those the crickets
Conspire—dreams of being those taut lyre-strings
Pulled up to the sun despite the thicket’s
Maze; but the lyre is in the sun, and sings
To itself some glaring song that withers all
Other ears. Do they—“wailful”—mourn? The wind
Construes its own cell gorged on dismal
Nothing by nothing marked. Not wind—mind—
And the rainbow-flash sprung out the gnats’ glass
Wings mark the eye’s prayer; it shows it what it lacks.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Bett Butler and Joël Dilley perform Janis Butler Holm’s piece:

I

Weather is the knuckleball an error longs to sanctify. Do fifty rising prices make a pile of
disbelief? Your cockamamie parasites have detonated mistletoe. To quarantine a bobolink,
whicker, snicker, bray. So here’s the sportive story line, insular and ravenous. Pardon my
reliance on their velvety surprise. Anticipation is the grapefruit of our jingle-jangle pulpitry.
Levitate the capitals. Hobnob with chiffon.

II

He thinks he needs a marmoraceous nucleoid.
He thinks he needs a schizodinic puttyroot.
He thinks he needs a lovey-dovey blatherskite.
He thinks he needs a retrocessive centrosphere.
He thinks he needs a dimerizing laccolith.
He thinks he needs a hardy-dardy jiggumbob.
He thinks he needs a blastoporal doublethink.
He thinks he needs a fumble-fisted candyfloss.
He thinks he needs a postpubescent usufruct.
He thinks he needs a germinative microtome.

III

Underneath the teeter-totter lurks a thieving pompadour. Cook the books with mercury;
syncopate ballet. Where are all her isotopes, her swizzle sticks, her argonauts? If they zap the
blister packs, malamutes will grieve. And why the gilded pepperbush, haggard and irascible?
Given silken synthesizers, what can we forego? Technicolor donuts mark his status as a
minuteman. Hence the stinky ingénues, their hypertextual rye.

IV

She finds, perforce, a neutropenic gadabout.
She finds, perforce, a paramastoid strobotron.
She finds, perforce, a creepy-crawly buccula.
She finds, perforce, a leptospiral derring-do.
She finds, perforce, a ramentaceous frippery.
She finds, perforce, a helter-skelter polliwog.
She finds, perforce, a flabbergasted esterase.
She finds, perforce, a vexillary nincompoop.
She finds, perforce, a suffrutescent opsimath.
She finds, perforce, a diamantine hubbleshow.

V

Neolithic pity logic buttresses this parking lot. Who degreased their fritterware and sucker-
punched his comb? Cash-and-carry rhapsodists empower our stenography. When she
hacked the muzzleloaders, functionaries barked. Consequently, planets squabble–tawny,
dank, and jubilant. After sugar lilies vanish, how shall we get by? O bloody-minded emu, I
adore your polynomials. But check the oily drama stain, the sleeker meat of whey.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

“Alexander Graham Bell’s wife, whom he married the day after he patented the telephone, never did learn sign language. Or any other language.”
—Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound”

Small electricities settle in the ear, a liquid, stubborn ringing.
The thrum of an insect shaking its wings. The mourners in a ring

around your grave, rippling like foxgloves tuning their bells to the wind.
And I know foxgloves thrill full and sad, because above them, thick rings

of scent shiver the air, the way your hands did when you played Bach
on the piano, and I held my palm above the keys to catch the pure ringing

of your fingers. My nerves are exact—I honed them to every one
of your frequencies. When you did not eat for days and rings

silvered below your eyes, I felt an alarm pulse deep in the bone.
Now even the slightest sparrow’s cry sets my blood to whispering.

I am going blind, my light shot clean through. It bleeds softly
as the shadows snake closer. Love, it’s like a hurt of smoke, a ring

of iron tightening. But I continue your experiments regardless.
I design cars for the sky, planes for water, an endless ring

of mechanical transformations. A catalogue of brilliancies, like your
wedding gift—1,500 shares of Bell stock, pearl necklace, gold ring,

little silver telephone. All the same, my lip-reading lacks in something—
the entire body speaking at once, like deaf children who wring

words from their hands effortlessly in the schoolyard,
a verb compassed in the casual arc of a wrist, the widening ring

of an arm. An unquiet silence. The phone is ringing, your voice
from the darkening earth – Mabel? The phone is not ringing.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Natalie Shapero read her piece:

Burn from a worsted rug that will not display
for a full day, welcome home. All I have coming in this
world is a joke that hits me later. I was ever the hampered
child, doting on what could not feel, unwilling to walk
on stairs that creaked for fear it hurt the house.
I never knew a thing about crying out, when to come running,
when to run. How, as with the lowing of
a simpler species, pain is the body’s way of making meaning.
My old love handled me hard and I thought nothing.

Yesterday I happened across a killed cat on the road.
Someone had hit it. It was then I wondered: could that be me?
Am I that cat, cut down from the world
for hours now, oblivious, seeing myself only
as a witness? I went to touch the body but was afraid,
afraid of my own body and what disease I carry
in death. I remembered meeting a child at a funeral.
She could recite all the times an animal
escaped from a zoo enclosure. I remembered I am no cat,
hardly wild as to require a wall, but instead a bird dog falling
in snow, splaying, pulling up, bearing in
my mouth some little trauma like a pheasant, blood
in the feathers and me, bred never to break the skin.

Again I resolve to move. A woman lists
a near room in a floor-through with piano. I have no use
for any box of hammers, but still I reply, having been raised
as though in a family of weavers, where it falls
on the smallest ones to watch for faults. The young
among us traffic in the ragged, dinner sonatinas
seldom the rage. My old love handled me hard. I let it happen.
The songs I like are mostly swears and clapping.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Chloe Honum read her piece:

I have learned that to be in shock is a kind of mercy. I stayed there a long time. One winter, I was a preschool teacher. At recess, the children would pick things up and bring them to me as gifts. A pebble, a piece of bark, a dirty feather. Often the child would say, I got this for you. As in I have come back from a journey. As in I remembered. I learned the question who wants a story is always welcomed. The days were short. It was snowing.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Chloe Honum read her piece:

Through a season given to storms, I wake at dawn to practice. I drag aside the living room chairs, like heavy dreams, and play softly a tape of ballet music. Sometimes I go outside to work on grand jetés, to run barefoot and push off from wet concrete, while Mother and Sister sleep. They know that I am changing, but not how quick. Sometimes the sky is violet above a jury of silver birds. Sometimes mist. Sometimes lightning slices the hills straight through and doesn’t hit a nerve.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

-For Alice, who hooted first, talked later.

We had a field once and I walked out into and listened for
the owls, but if I heard them, and of course I heard them,
I didn’t know their sound to hear it. What is a ghost
but what was the unknown sound? If bats are the souls of men,
owls are the souls of women. If girls who die unmarried
are doves, a woman who has been a mother becomes an owl.
Go to the woods and call to the owl for help finding your love.
The woman made of flowers was cursed into an owl.  I lost
them, the owls among the doves as I lost the lace among
the weeds and the hummingbirds too and what was a bat
to me for so many years but just another swallow? The woods
were replete with owls, I did not know. An owl will take
a home’s good luck with it. To avert disaster, if you hear
an owl call in the night, you must return the call. To avert
disaster, if you hear an owl call in the night, get out of bed
and turn over your left shoe. Souls of penitents fly to heaven
guised as owls, men whose deaths lay unavenged pace
the night guised as owls. The owls are beautiful or terrible
depending on the sky overhead and your own personal sky.
They eat your just-clipped fingernails. They eat your newborn
babies. A cow scared by an owl will give bloody milk. The owl
had a skinless fledgling in its beak, the limp sac of belly
was glistening crimson. Gore so small is like a pendant of glass –
I don’t know what kind of sky it is I have that makes it so.
It’s very blue and without owls utterly, drifting over the hay,
which is golden as heaven is the word for no place I can point to.
I went out into it in the night listening for the owls that know
the way. Every tree was a goat crying, not yet weaned out here
in the milkless shadow of the woods. Which of these is
the mist of the owl passing into something else? If you cannot
call back because you are mute with the marvelous
unrepeatable thundered down hunting, take off something,
your shirtsleeve, and put it on inside out. In this way
the owl will not burrow into your chest and dance
bad luck on the graves in your field. In this way it is
a charm to carry the heart and right foot of an owl under
your armpit. In this way it is medicine to drink broth
of owls’ eyes, gelatin of owl meat. In this way it is a binding
to nail an owl to the barn door against lightning strike. You
can frighten owls from the field by walking the land naked
hooting like you’ve ever yet heard them or even if you haven’t.
The owl gave its fire in exchange for feathers. Like lightning,
the owl brightens the night. Like a drum, the owl breaks
the silence. I don’t know how to call them down.

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry

Listen to Dimitri Psurtsev read this piece:

O if only I could rise, regain memory and consciousness,
And at the most difficult hour to bless the labor
That reared the meadows and nurtured the orchards,
And one last time swallow the crystal brain of water
From the concave dish
Of a downy leaf.

Give me one drop, my mortal grass,
Give me an oath to inherit speech,
To grow a larynx and not spare any blood,
To forget myself, and tearing up my word-hoard,
Burn your parched mouth with my fire.

1965

—

О, только бы привстать, опомниться, очнуться
И в самый трудный час благословить труды,
Вспоившие луга, вскормившие сады,
В последний раз глотнуть из выгнутого блюдца
Листа ворсистого
Хрустальный мозг воды.

Дай каплю мне одну, моя трава земная,
Дай клятву мне взамен – принять в наследство речь,
Гортанью разрастись и крови не беречь,
Не помнить обо мне и, мой словарь ломая,
Свой пересохший рот моим огнем обжечь.

1965

Posted on 04.01.13 // Poetry