HOAX No progress. Ash everywhere. Murders everywhere. Each day brings another day and the inventory of the shoe-shiners is incrementally exhausted. A few brave followers cast off their arms and wear big umbrellas in front of milky mirrors. The young women who stayed rooted in their tracks fertilize their shadows. Two fairies gasp. A stubby man perseveres. The hairs of his head are shown to be accomplished facts. — Andreas Embirikos, from ΥΨΙΚΑΜΙΝΟΣ (1935), tr. by C. A. Corbell
Poetry
WINTER GRAPES (Translation)
WINTER GRAPES They took her toys and her lover. So she bowed her head and almost died. But her thirteen roots like her fourteen years smote with sword the elusive disaster. No one spoke. No one ran to the protective ward against the deep-sea sharks who had already eyed her as a flie doth eye a diamond a land enchanted. And so this story was brusquely forgotten as by the forest ranger the lightning is forgotten in the woods. — Andreas Embirikos, from ΥΨΙΚΑΜΙΝΟΣ (1935), tr. by C. A. Corbell
Poetry
DICROTON ON STEMS (translation)
DICROTON ON STEMS Very close to the citrus evenings the proud sacrificial lambs loom. They button and unbutton the velvet treasure of their belts. They sow hazelnuts capture partridges display rags of precious filament cry out for love underneath glass domes. — Andreas Embirikos, from ΥΨΙΚΑΜΙΝΟΣ (1935), tr. by C. A. Corbell
Poetry
Calling
I do not call to gods and guides occasionally, like an estranged relative, checking in. I call to them continually, for I feel them continually in the wonder of waking through dream’s residue, in the sun-wheel’s floral pulse, in deliciously bitter clock bites, in gently descending equations, in gravity’s pull on my beard, in exquisite nymph-songs, in the tongues of dead wizards, in the childheart unbanished, my mouth full of galaxies and my throat throwing colors I call, I call.
Journal - Poetry
Easter Shade
Our children run to find their eggs with hungry hands and hopping legs while half a world away they starve upon the carcass missiles carve. What conquered death and rose again? A gentle victory over sin? Or slavish naves and gilded grails and empire’s crosses, hammers, nails?
Journal - Poetry
Exceeds Expectations
I am coming to understand your expectations. You expect me, finally, to be something other than idea, something not imaginary. You expect me to be a particular fleshy body. You expect me to affirm the demographics of my concrete data. You expect me to be a flow in a network of biology. You expect me to be a node in a graph of history. You expect me to be an ego received from the form of the the mask you have hung on my face. You expect me to have a seat at the game table, to choose a side, […]
Journal - Poetry
Livelihood
I look up from the square display, frustrated with the problem of tangled information, its lossiness. Outside: weathered stone, eye-shaped leaves green, sun-drunk, serpent tongues, genital nerves, rhizomes, tendrils, fractal worlds. I rub my eyes, return; tap tap tapping monospace code, the one thing on earth I get paid for.
Poetry - Satire
The American Horse
A giant American horse, bigger than all the West, carries ten thousand tiny cowboys. The saddle stretches out dotted with drywall dwellings. Asphalt leather straps connect the gas stations. Inside its hollow body you’ll find no Ajax or Odysseus — just guns, guns, guns, a billion guns.
Journal - Poetry - Satire
A little air
There is nothing so remarkably expansive as human vanity. They even use it to inflate balloons.
Journal - Poetry
A Pleasure
A pleasure is not a shallow pastel, a cartoon angel, a giddy bubble. A pleasure has teeth, time and shadow. Oceans are tugged back by the moon’s leash. I feel the salt in my blood. I taste her tongue. The storm waves hurl breathtaking spray up through stone fists. Limbs and bones fall into place, earth’s embrace thick mineral space where only life escapes unless it burrows, deeper seeking treasure, seeking home. The split husk, the swelling germ — death and life tumble, screw up the sheets of earth’s bed in vegetal coitus and Thou art That, leaf-rot and lipstick, […]
Poetry
Stellar residue
A faint red glow, a retreating star… it won’t escape. It was, and so it is and will remain entangled in memory. On the nerve-fed retinal field cones reach like leaves for light from the bottom of the eye’s ocean. A ghost star no longer there hangs in the sky, the myth of the present inscribed in a constellation. Would you find fame and be called a star? Would you ever shift away from their eyes? Will you be long gone by the time they name your residue of light?
Journal - Poetry
Gymnos Antaios
My body horizontal, face down I push against the earth. I push against the rock-skinned molten core, spinning space-top magnet. I push against the mother sphere, the curved blue breast and the warped hand of physics that holds me here. In the body’s cosmos cells collapse like osmotic galaxies, strands of creature strengthen, stretched on bone scaffolding. When I stand again, I am stronger. I arise with my breast full of blood and stone flesh flexes, animal power spun from gyred earth. But what greater strength might I know, what titan become, if instead of a push I endeavored with […]
Journal - Poetry
I asked the tangle
I asked the tangle: can you spare a thread? And the tangle’s fibrous mouth formed a hole, and said: you have some nerve, some artery, some hair, some twisted DNA, and endless strands of narrative. What more do you imagine I can give you? Maybe you should talk to the untangling.
Journal - Poetry
The wrong candle
This candle must have come from petroleum, stolen black stash of Hades, not wax of Kore’s bees. A philosopher wrote that a proper tragedy must begin with an offense, an unpunished crime which informs the nostrils of Furies. Sooted wick, smoke untrimmed and teach the alarm. A little blur of heat and light hovers above the yellow glow. This candle was once plant-flesh soaked in archaic sun-gold, fallen in the layers of millennia, squeezed by earth’s press to fill the cisterns of the underworld. Some choice bits of death Hades gives back each year to nourish new life in her […]
Journal - Poetry
Belly full of ink
I have a belly full of ink — penultimate nausea. I swallowed something through my eyes, I think. The tensions between constellations arrayed my retinas’ red antennas with star starts. Now they are lumps in my core, bloated black holes trying to swallow indigestible quasars. My body does not disagree with the cosmos. Everything that disagrees with everything in space-time, in eternity, in our busy rumbling bubble of human vanity swirls and sinks here in my gut, fighting it out.
Journal - Poetry
Pythagorean Hymn
Sphere and cylinder, skeleton formulas of thought, yet walk on shrieking chalk heels these neural corridors, float and grin ghostlike through dusty synaptic nodes. The god of mathematics laughs at his supposed disproof. Pythagoras is stretched like Prometheus, the hypotenuse drawn out, bisected by the future pencil. For him I will sacrifice the first of the looseleaf flock, ring the bell theory and construct the imaginary field from the real.
Journal - Poetry
Poetry Game Instructions
When the round begins place the token on your tongue. Try to pronounce a flower. Try to pronounce a city. Drop the dice in the river. Spin the thousand-year spinner. Draw a card from the deck of a ship. If the card is a club eat a bruised fruit. If the card is a diamond add a drop of blood to the soil. If the card is a heart draw again. When you land on a space start the timer. After the token has dissolved hand your tongue to the next player.
Journal - Poetry
Training memes
Prior to these glowing screens were billboards, placards, sandwich boards, curated store windows that said many of the same things: notice me, be enticed by me, think like me, buy me. Those flat relics hang around still with their chipped paint, single-message slow memes fixed to the landscape, ignored by heads-down hand-held eyes, left like those rusty training wheels in the garage for the child’s bike we once wrecked in the gravel, crying with a pet wound. Now we have so many fast reflective wheels whirring, well-heeled adult spokes spinning out millions of powerful, expansive ways to crash, so many […]
Journal - Poetry - Review (Live Event)
Brave Little Venue, No. 1: Atlantis Lounge
The red velvet curtain is drawn to hide the street windows and stained glass signage behind the stage. In the center of the ceiling, in the shadows, a mirror ball spins slowly, just in case. A skeleton piano bares its felt and metal bones. A Klimt print nude floats in a spray of flowers. Arrivals show their connections through gestures: wave and embrace, shoulder-touch and fist-bump, impromptu conferences of old acquaintances, table seating shuffles, oz-troupes skipping toward the lounge. Beers and cocktails multiply; pizzas levitate above the tables. The first band begins. “It’s tater diggin’ time” Taylor’s cello sounds round, like a big bass […]
Journal - Poetry
Grandmother Corntassel
Grandmother Corntassel from the rolling Cherokee woods had known seventeen summers when she married John Bradley, grandson of an immigrant from Yorkshire to Virginia. When I was young I thought all ancestors lost,* shadows on a dusty cart-path that decades effaced and centuries built over. But are they not here, encircling uslike we are the spirits they summoned, and is this not their dust on our soles? Ancestors may even be tricksters, laughing at our fresh feet in the corpse-soil, our fresh eyes on the old stars, our fresh fears in the anxious human-harassed world where they fucked and sang their way through things […]
Journal - Nature - Poetry
The mountain watched us
We returned to the thrice-burned wood, shoulder of Klickitat once dense green, now spiked with ghost trees. Close to downed trunks ash white and charred black we turned soil, pulled grass, and set in live starts of oceanspray / ironwood and wooly sunflower. Around the new plantings we built flimsy graze-guards of slender limbs, snapped from the desiccated bodies. The October sun was strong and gold. The earth in our fingers was soft and dark. A raven flew over and shared its deep, purred croak. Young firs waited, waist-high, green, patient in grassy fields pierced by their forebearers’ wooden bones. […]
Poetry
Pedestrian Aria
I have patient feet. I wait for the signal. Wheels turn around me. People move themselves. The light changes. The light always changes. Is this your light, the light that you needed? This is not my light. My light is yet to come. The light changes. The light always changes. I have patient feet. I wait for the light.
Poetry
Autumn melody
For hours the rain soaked the cool ferns and cleaned the stones until the gray sky stilled and turned dark. Now our evening lamps are warm around the room and my love plucks strings with her clever fingers and hums a new melody — so light, so melancholy.