Carlyle Baker (forthcoming in issue 22)

from “The Escapist,” by Jennifer Mackenzie (forthcoming in issue 22)

Morning, horse-breath disturbing

the cold air inside the cup

Wake up my fellow gardenia

dry feet & hatred terrified

of my heart, I can’t do anything

about it if everything I showed you

was a further kind of concealment 

Sockmouth. Castles of trout. What is

they are me. The shoes around the faces

of the dead. This one has no head

& above the darkness of old table

wood the cardsharper’s hands sprout pink

splitting buds. Terror as a god of indolence

One wicked Indian alone in the weather

knowing the sign for love

but what does it mean. I the loath dirigible

sadness never as improvised as one feels

Closing the book in the cold-lashed

pewter afternoon—Breton!

—envy is joy

—no, exultation 

Carlyle Baker (forthcoming in issue 22)

An excerpt from an interview in SAPLING

Sapling: Word For/Word is an online journal of poetry, prose, and other good stuff. Tell us a bit of your story—how did the journal come to be, and what should people know about you?

Jonathan Minton: I started Word For/Word in 2000 while I was a doctoral candidate in the University at Buffalo's Poetics Program. I had the classic 1950s “little magazine” in mind as a model – magazines such as Cid Corman’s Origin. I had originally planned to publish a print magazine that would have, at the insistence of my co-editor, an online supplement. The first issue had a narrow, specialized focus. I was at the time mostly interested in publishing writers who shared a common background with either UB’s Poetics Program or with Language Poetry. This changed after the third issue. I abandoned the print-model altogether when I realized that being online was expanding the scope of what I had originally planned. And beginning with issue three, I started featuring guest editors who have introduced me to visual poetry, Chilean sound poetry, electronic poetry, post-avant poetries, and a wealth of established and emerging forms of writing. Word For/Word has become a curiously hybrid creature.  And happily so.

Sapling is published by Black Lawrence Press and focuses on the small press industry.

http://www.blacklawrencepress.com/

from “The Escapist,” by Jennifer Mackenzie (forthcoming in issue 22)

Lately I’m worried I’m Picasso

& you Francoise? w/me clutching

your breasts carefully

from my totally self-enclosed solitude

Such lunches & ferocity

to despise—so as to devour

the most interesting others

My carved monkey face

seeking its twin inside

you, & to make it

be nude! Obediently uniformly

brown, my little savage

nun,  my wobbling-away bicycle

-soul functionally bent

& veering jabbingly indigo

with thickly scabbed chagrin  

Carlyle Baker (forthcoming in issue 22)

from “The Escapist,” by Jennifer Mackenzie (forthcoming in issue 22)

Amen’s underpants cannot be panties

nor chrysanthemums flame-trees

armies streaming. Don’t start

with pity, don’t

waiting for a taxi at noon

everyone’s patience red

vigilance selling

milk fruit petrol

valor and squalor

nakedness between

fights you breathed by

The flame she said is quite beautiful. Moves

like breathing. Between me and everyone else

soft tongueless severance from the casual guttering

at the bus stop my whore-calves glow like salt

they signify wishing, the burning one

who can do nothing, every ruler

Red skirt and dust

and chickenwhite wait—

You blow on my face

go back to reading Theories of the Future 

“For Eddie, the Cynosure, Wherever You Are,” by Jessie Janeshek (forthcoming in issue 22)

Lock Zephyr in the steel shed with plastic flamingos

tie me to white wicker with brownbread hide

find my red truck in the moon

plot knocks our teeth

to the ghosts of the river                      the money

the hex on her dress

the sausage-curled, thorn-fanged rosette

the dogs you’ll call off

ere they eat the mother

amputee with the key

that will tighten the tambourine’s skin

“{marginalia} the definition of pressure, 2,” by Valerie Witte (forthcoming in issue 22)

when subject to terms, within

conditions and limits of our own calamities

unlike other animals who simply beg

on / would you believe it didn’t / hurt, neurosis

as a locale where we dwell too long / until

we train ourselves to ignore the impression

a finger leaves lasting / here

are my regrets; let me lay them out for you

“The Moon Is a Painted Stone,” by James Capozzi (forthcoming in issue 22)

The Muse is a room you find beneath the cork trees

near the abbey's door, with aromas of manure

yarrow, and oranges.  The study of the Muse requires

quietude, so you place the barrel in your ear

           

and blast your way into the room, are implicit in its angles

its magnificent triptych depicting a saint, pursued and named

by her sin.  Not when or why, but here—the world's road.

A throng like leather puppets makes its evil

           

rounds on it, below the cliffs, among the rocks.  Their faces are

a soggy blur.  Your face is dark and now you are

deaf with stone, the painted air

           

so she sails into the ocellated oaks and sees that

your obsequity is nothing like humility.

That the whole is greater than the part.

Scott Helmes (forthcoming in issue 22)

“November 12,” by Valerie Witte (forthcoming in issue 22)

She was looking for a place that could hold a body ~ to pinpoint

that moment of recession ~ the solace of declining, to say nothing

of denial ~ he said there was room for two and what he wanted,

application of flame to a body ~ she didn’t like sharing with

another ~ we all have a comfort level ~ a murmur a minimum of

one chamber to enter before passing through ~ she needed a lot of

water, to vaporize ~ because she was empty ~ what can be burned

off; we all have a reason to eliminate ~ because it was open, an exit

flue ~ she didn’t like being put under, away ~ at minimum, one to

incinerate ~ because it was empty ~ because it was open.

Scott Helmes (forthcoming in issue 22)