Wednesday, March 27, 2013

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 

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

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/

Saturday, March 23, 2013

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  

Saturday, March 16, 2013

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 

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

“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

Sunday, March 10, 2013

“{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

Saturday, March 9, 2013

“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.

Sunday, March 3, 2013

“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.