Jessica Lee White

"When I decided not to title you—"

When I decided not to title you, left
the first line to name us both,
I began the habit of leaping between bridges

like the super-mistress
to a procession of bended-knee men,
to the younger brothers of

The Gaze. They salute me
and I pity their ballcaps,
I search their brows

for the darker-skinned ones,
for those who have hailed Mary's since birth.
I want to know how exoticized I can be,

how angry I can get,
where my fist ends and how far I can jump
before it gets lonely.

I am your sister behind this eye.
When you touch me it is with
the same lazy familiarity

that caused a car crash at seventh & pine,
left one woman unable to bear children.
Would there be a lawsuit, would she walk right,

what about the dog found under the tire.
She said she thought it might happen eventually
anyway, that she felt worst about the dog.

So that's what I thought about –
the dog
and not us.

eratio

Marthe Reed

arsenal of terror

for "W"

tale of arson
neater slant
atal salt

error tore near noas
farls false art
leaf xxxstone

nest
lost nets steal
narrate least tear

torn names
soar xxxeast
star rort

no telos
neater none
arose

fatal arena, a tref
arrest leans
at fear

lorn fort loses
feat later
feral

no one, arrant
seer
lorn and lore

lost
Ares reels fat
areolas of fate

rent terrane terrets
apteral arête
stand neo

tease, or loaf
at natal arras
telfer of Satan

Nile rat
leer at rent
lens

talent for treason
a tar fen
nose at arse

let left ear nestle
lost, a
torn note

real forte a
neon tenor
farse lofts

terse anal
tensor
lo! a lone snarl farts

The Garden of Delights

after Raqib Shaw

hallucinogenic sprawl
eden's

blue territory
coral

wilderness goat
men and winged

fish      blue paradise
psychodelic

whirl of red
and blue hybrid

pleasures a jewelled
id    sea    fish

appropriate falcon
menace

shudder parrot
finery

haloed
ibex loom

before sand
dollar odalisque

black skinned
demons (houris,

angels) white
armed

coral-birthed men
oxenheaded, fish-

jawed men
fuck lionfish

pillow on anemones
their antlered heads flung

up sybaritic
revelry clasp

their stolen
fish heads their toucan

jaws thrust
medusae lingams

demon hybrids
ejaculate jewelled

ecstacy blue
ecstacy

copulate
with blue

with speckled octopi
with monstrous

arthropods
hieronymous dreamscape

sperm
coiling into blue

schooling orgy
yellow and

blue fish
giant spiral-shelled

mollusks, nautilus
orange whorl and blue

tentacles peer
lewdly at sharks

mottled eels men
revel

thrust blind cocks into
guitar fish rays

cephaloid mouths shark
slits

garden of fucking
delight all

entrance
and egress

sinu Abraham
coupling jellyfish

crimson sponges
erupting from loins

coiled in
tentacles ecstacy's

arms lie
back lover enchained

by poisonous
spines dreaming climax

coral garden
pleasure garden

pillow your
luminous thighs

your luminous
buttocks cock balls

in brilliant anemone
in piscine flesh

in cephalopod delight
in blue

lost in blue
ecstacy

garden man-
fishdemon god

eratio

Anny Ballardini

from continuous

Defined entities set on coordinates touch with tearing sensations
to dig them out is Penelope's night / or daily – effort
it becomes cinematic - to unroll _thread of thought by thread of thought_
the babelic psychological monument constructed with meticulous care
set on the tortuous meanders of un/known heavily experienced brains

void _ Buddhist void _ to see the self

the existence of a spirit led by faith against chaotic turmoil
in a progressively rotating spiral creative in its source
for a momentary blissful escape

*

by survival
instinctively drawn
intuitively able to distinguish
in the twilight when television grants rest
by appeasing mass to athirst not dependable
overwhelmed by chat – I decided to disconnect

they (
     -  took one out from the future, changed entourage
les jeux sont faits _ dit mon oncle, that is
why I won't sleep tonight

in these games / repetitive_repetitive
when you know you are losing
when you have always known
you have lost repetitive_repetitive /
twist it positive games are games
are games you are game _ that you
have also since ever known

an art of defense, dit mon oncle through
my father - won’t be learned in a minute
fraction as an art you can go bombastic
(rightly aligned re.: the closing adjective)

again they have taken from my right forearm
same spot /probably same destructive
construction a new inventive
strive cannot
other-
wise live
since thought is different from
the religious medianic dominating medusa
earth_mother_why from your blood_ are you destroying

your same blood from the left side of my head you are not aware
in the taste of my mouth my blood torn – a volcanic emptiness
I am _why_ answer _my why_ of your meanness

but we obey, smile, sacrifice the dice to the observant
rarely do I think if thinking was permitted we would not
ants, that is the right word / Tom Beckett / excavating
Escherian tunnels through the façade of the day, into
the walls of the past __ their useless passions will be
buried with stones and chunks of dried earth
their passions make me smile
machine-like predictable shattered selves
fragmented throbs pulsating p_o_w_e_r_
of indecency- an indeity-
horti-conclusi
suffocating
fenced
boomeranged in anger

back again
what a nuisance

eratio

Michelle Greenblatt & Sheila E. Murphy

GHAZALS

26/

The weapons of a childish teacher can be used
To lift the spirit from those physical gray cells.

Chapter differs from verse only a pinch, in fact
Every object is made of what it differs from.

If doctors could prophesize the recovery of patients
We would all be dwelling in the safety of our inference.

Gentility remains the sole virtue that transcends acumen
Unrecognizable to most, like a foreign breed of flower.

The danger of the best remedy is that
Sand encompasses the many sans counting.

A glyph is not the same as any cinder
In Doric structures grooved onto the wall.

The gemmae form new life that separates from parent plant
In sync with eternity considered mere immersion.

Tranquil sites fit neatly into the new camera
As violence vanishes with each whir of the flash.

You throttle my words for no other reason than
To obfuscate a clearer semaphore at once.

Pond wrinkles seem to disappear when mirroring the sky
Ironed out sheet of blue rubber stretched across stratosphere

I plant dynamite in my poetry garden,
And taller flowers resurrect a shattered silk.

Crayons copper colored melt along rear window ledge
My poems have been fermenting on the paper's edge.

My hands did numb to your face's words
As almost inherently entwined.

A boyfriend of escape still lingers
To seal what's unwritten on the wall

Perhaps we work too hard at being remembered
Within twelve simple tones each one a syllable.

27/

While you live you offer the mountains fresh, goldenblue, wildflowers
Scented past the point of vectors indistinguishable from hue.

A generous line of trees casts
Shadows on the wormsilken earth.

Beyond any help now from magic,
Pliant shoots stretch to capture distance.

Program logic model seeks to streamline choice
Led home into oblivion without voice

You sizzle in my face like a fuse
Beset by condroitin and descent.

Chambers is where ovens hide from breath
Accumulation: angles and light.

Whether I shall make a poem of the new world
Depends upon the next beyond this inference.

Scorecards match pinned psyches ragged as mirth
How late the hardness comes to cover the earth!

I rush into possible places, searching for signs
That stones retain water inasmuch as advertised.

Charm bracelets splinter into skin light
On my wrists which are made of sunshine.

I was staring at the lighted sky
And saw a breath from years preceding.

Numericists arrange their soup to show the numbers
This selfsame private alchemy is not for children.

Your look's flawed heaven has no memory
Until the thin wood mallet touches steel.

My concert rigor paints an overcast dimension to the largo
On such a night at the precise hour when I came to pass trees of stone.

You bundle me in your gaze; we dare not speak of paradise
In the vernacular where pashmina not just any creche.

28/

Sidewalk scrapings come to include the olive leaves
Scattered around the ground hidden under his wings.

I knocked against the walls of the narrow room
As my hobby's never beautiful enough.

Wear cha(ins) with better dresses in the flurry
Recall crimson smiles gradual and soft.

A strange fever overtook my hands
And splayed the waterlogged small center.

One moment leads even before absorbing
Reasonable flowers into oddity.

I rip holes in the air to let you through
The deaconate of resignation.

Chance operations open up a whole new line of evidence
For police to stalk you all the way home, only not to find you.

Because there is no wilderness you can just weave into
Unless the starched streets mimic the lone spandex fandango.

Parchment breeds dread until the time of birthing
When palimpsests are rolled and scrolled for working.

By the cobweb wall under bulbed dreams of light
Came some saffron from the unremembered depths.

Pressed against some collision with process of thinking
Was a motorcycle wrapped around metal brainpole.

It is empty in the house so I leave the lights on
To allow inspection of the panes and what is beyond.

City's the same as pasture when breath
Cauterizes at the lipstick's kiss.

I close my eyes to hear each color
Be my creche, my line, my carousel.

Ornamental caritas begins its likely bloom
Over flowered mornings and lovely afternoons

29/

A bouquet of poetry in late afternoon claims
Water naturally at the speed of your breathing.

Fog begins to disappear and now the clay is
In the hand of the sun, furiously melting.

The spark that blasted the painted masks
Rises past the quick of light as spun.

Confetti gathered forms an ad hoc paste
That tackles my heart with sticky desire.

He, drowning and bloody in the kitchen, left footprints
Where the floor was soft, where the floor unsafely absorbed.

Lore in stripes showed flowers ribboning
And my living shadow was soulblind.

Pour to drip a sandy beachforest
Full of smooth pale swayed generations.

Individual steps fall into schemes of dance
There is national glory in only flowers.

Are all my seals broken again and again
Alongside sweet unbroken and feeling skin?

Calligraphy may fail to immerse itself in surface
Black milk of dawn spills through the bars of the prison.

The forest gives you a flowering rock
To chance across or skip atop the shine.

Thorns interrupt the tidy thirst or motion
That I use to brush across ocean air.

Several nights pass the color of red basalt
Summery wood elongates shadows toward rock.

Commemorative burdens leech the sap from stalwart beings
A sliver of moon shakes and falls from between the still tall trees.

To you I send a waterblue coffin,
Itself an envelope of some bronzed life.

eratio

John M. Bennett

Drew noose

drew my smoke and dednalg whistle
in the hallway crusted mud pill
selttob jutting up like smalc shake
the leafless tree slwarc the sky

bust and month

chow harm ,fog grit ,lluf remmah
buried ,niard yr focus of the
buried fridge and foot yr sock tick
plowing through the tpels sludge

ice and sign

clunking ,drowsing ,flying ,damming
,porking ,sotting in eht tnemesab
,lung swifter sodden than ,clause
or shaking on the fleeting noose

Popping tneps

popping ,glancing ,snapping ,dumbing
,gnibmob ,gnidnalg ,gninnirg ,gnirons
,clambing ,jowling ,plobbing ,boring
,gnimool ,gnilbbird ,gnilwo ,gnirood

sock or sander

tore the sugar snorer flagged the
meter motor tsub a flock pmad mal
snort feeler ni eht rinsing of yr
fundus what a grownhole dinging

should or shat

wat was stammered knife a lather
bloomer cobbed and drenched your
trups front spanner of the renroc
dribbles where yr change was tneps

Shot gnud

shot all my yllerriugs sregnif like
yr bounding edges seeming soup a
shindig but a pooling .clod pencil
kcerw bloodied with a koob

shoot or leep

sheet tried ,yr hcuoc shiver ,gland
edalb number than ,pull a sork and
,clave nor me ,dodge fall sodden
blinding and a ,hsog minder ,dechnurc

slore or slumber

spree my sopping thinks a clam
.wasp that a combing of yr spit
.rule a rehsaw like a sun rednad
.placed my taorht outside the gnud

Wet Wolf

flack ,etik ,dumb ,peels
,float ,hsar ,neck ,egahp
,tomb ,hcnilf ,growl ,hsalf
,bleach ,hteet ,hush ,hsal

dong the bench
clam

fundus

spave eh tonker lapse your
filler on the fogged steps why
penciled egg spay clack and
mending crust you flapped yr arm

boat
mess
stung

fore rule and gnipmalc no eht
pullet skreeking in the soup "ah
nest" to me my blamer soap and
boomer sore !plumb gnilkcac ,glue

blot flopper
reel the bin

loup

eratio

Scott Glassman

voca me

1.

ess-en- tial libera
stay with me. painful
firefleas. kothbiro

callow hill
causes & beginnings lament
fracas. in the midwest

baroch atah
pyrex. sanctums
brass. cased-eyelight

squinting up
at-the
obdurate moon

2.

converse (-ation) less.
what if i were (beet turns
greenviolet). am. an
oulipo. untruth

upi
d fomd
a werp tp sx

trans:

you'd find
a dress
to match & don't you

look nice on
that gum-pocked
pluto (-nic) hello

3.

i am | over | chagrined. –joyed. to find that scorpion clouds contained that window
winding down. it's hard to stand. on equator: ‘’ and “ ”. to be sure. full-fledged dilations.
frisking quartz for ? water-resists. that’s just how it is. librarian film-coated scapula.
encyclo –pedic. say, say

humming dharma. surface-dive. salivates (answer is). a. an-. if or were. a

half-pint box of no:

no no no
no no no
no no no

dozes soon. on a char-black. flightreel

aphids

snowslipper
boil dune sweet
nodal borneo

turtle bolt
empress peal
swayed pint

wickskin snake
fleer hour
sinkhole

lung deaf
gnashing born
silt prude

cameo jacket
farce plink
down wildtoe

fifth bore
wedding jam
oedipal poor

persimmon leap
year blue
spruce shawl

eratio