ANNA MEISTER

FRIDAY THE 13TH

 

we make fried egg sandwiches
& you cry as we watch him
bury her body. we walk
down a street in brooklyn heights
called love lane, ugly
& treeless. we kiss under the bridge,
its wires like a giant’s guitar strings.
we fill our noses with river.
you tell me about your fantasy
of fucking me on the subway. later,
when we fuck, I stare at the candles,
how the flames dance & snap for us
& I make noises like some animal
until my throat burns, whiskey,
in a way I know I’ll still feel
tomorrow.

 

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LILY DUFFY

I HAVE A TWIN HER NAME IS COME BACK

 

This is not a laxity this is
talk-learning. On a path I blinked
a few times and then what. Nausea.
Excellent bite-reception while
buckling my Indoors Harness, talking shit
to a mirror like, you want
sassy I got sassy and then immediately
more nausea. When I am making
elaborate hand gestures which incorporate
my overnight bag you need to
back up. If someone doesn’t take me
back to the mall in
the next thirty minutes I am going to
actually swallow this animatronic
keychain. 

 

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JOSHUA YOUNG

SPACE AGE MOM

we time-traveled back into ourselves,
or we told ourselves we could, but when the dust
liquefied, we drank rust-water.
hey, staircase. hey, mother.
the intervention unravels into piano-banging
& empty makers fifths. you want me
to stop all that yelling, but your wrist
shrinks in my palm, & i will retreat into the car.
bothell darkens & in the storage space
i sort through the last couple years—boxes
of glassware, wine, bicycles, bags of hangers—
i attach moments to everything i touch.
in the kitchen you are making microwavable
cake & filling the water jug.

 

thestorythief.tumblr.com

NATHAN KEMP

CORN HYBRIDS

 

We went to Nebraska.
I successfully created
a new corn hybrid
and when I tried to tell
you, you had gone away.

I saw a corn farmer trapped
in his combine harvester
and all I could do was sell
him on the idea of my hybrid.
His legs were covered in blood. 

‘Can you call for help?’ he said.
I wanted to go home to you
but I couldn’t find where you
called home. I imagined the lab
filled with cross-breeds, beakers. 

You were there once, cutting
your palm open with a smashed
graduated cylinder. I never saw
you again after they took you away.
Are you okay? Are you with me? 

It is September and the crop
is almost ready. I peer through my
glasses at the stalks I created.
I see a corn earworm crawling
on a husk and wonder if it’s you.

 

nathanckemp.wordpress.com

LEIF HAVEN

THE CORPSE OF OUR SEPARATE YOUTHS

 

 

What do you call a jar of salsa with a thumb in it?
You can call it whatever you want but to me it

only means my wedding night. I wore a dress
made of reeds. We canoed down the burning Susquehanna.

We paddled the corpse of our separate youths into a new life
together. You never mentioned that you were the pigeon man.

Oh my god, look at the air. There isn’t much time
put the reactor core under your shirt. We’ve only got

one chance.

 

 

leifhaven.com

SARAH JEAN GRIMM

UNTITLED AGAIN

 

 

The sun through your window imitates a Rothko painting I think I saw once. The sun paints in panels too. The sun uses broad brushstrokes. The sun is a plagiarist.

 

After Rothko, children can’t color rectangles in school the same way any more. Coloring outside the lines is still OK and considered a sign of also thinking outside the lines, but it’s like how after Magritte you start seeing bowler hats everywhere, and men smoking pipes wearing bowler hats, and men smoking pipes wearing bowler hats while eating apples.

 

Fruit never means just fruit. It almost always means something else. It almost always means sex. And to take a bite of fruit is a violent thing. You can go to prison for enjoying fruit too much.

 

What I mean to say is, you’re a real peach. You go be a peach and I will be a set of teeth and the sun can be the sun and I will lick you good luck every morning because it’s hard to be a peach out there.

 

www.sarahjeangrimm.com

CEMENT POND, L.L.C.

#21- BLUE SUNSHINE

 

 

This town made famous by a mass vibration of squash in the field.  I have never doubted my life was blessed.  You remember the tone that summons the bats, but “[t]here is no way to stop the drum circle without inviting retaliation,” so we dangled our legs over the pit, played games from before the war.  “The earth wants to hear some Moon Mullican.”  I am proud I said this and will not back down.  “Though what’s the point of playing fantastic blues if it can’t include your eyes, the child trapped in the orgone box accumulating an outsized life force?”  Once, I tried to live in a temporary shelter in your yard.  Cut fox weevils from under my skin with a penknife.  You came out to say your bedroom is spectral: there’s a diorama where the Monitor still battles the Merrimac along the rivers of toothpaste, without loss of blood or armor.  “The bobcat is still out here, asleep in an iron lung under endless stars.”

 

 

#22-TIRE SWING+GASOLINE+CLOUDS

 

 

People struggle to believe there’s a voice still trapped in the ice.  They heard someone was running topless down the street, but are disappointed it’s me.  You have a secret “but it’s not about me; it’s about me getting from one story to another.”  Anyway, it works.  A raven lands on your shoulder and no one asks if it’s your familiar.  The houses are turning dark.  “Spengler said the west is doomed, but what about the peasant dances, the guys selling stereos out of car trunks?”  We survived the night, stepping over working girls blindfolded on the lawn.  They were showing a movie on a bedsheet: a fleshy periscope surfaces on Killer Lake, blinks at us, and disappears.  “No name for what follows, just glottal sighs, the audience holding hands.”  “On our street,” you said “the truth is not a fog, but steam from coins burning in the fountain.”  We sit through long flashes of silence, then a beautiful woman dressed as Melville begins talking about the sea.

 

 

cement.pond.llc@gmail.com

NICOLAS JAMES HAMPTON

YOUR IDEA OF COMMUNICATION IS SAILING TO THE SOUND OF NO ONE DRIVING AWAY

 

 

And now, for my next trick, I will play back the punctuation you built in a bottle while
drunk and broken on a model gravel driveway I left as a tiny oceanliner’s maiden voyage
leaves you and that bottle in your wild hand to sail to some deserted island of lost memories 

and perhaps entertaining such running recursive thoughts in writing is a writer’s attempt
at avoiding writing, only leaving the Ars Unpoetica to cryptically underdetail disamibiguities
as though the only truth in any sharp piece of art is the truth that art can’t tell you, truthfully

reaching through this bottleneck with cold hooks on long rods, dressing you in tornness
and jeans and a ragged tank top, topping your small plastic figure off with a miniature bottle
of the same bottle of El Toro you’re drowning in, the same bottle I built this diorama in

as my tweezers reach inside again, placing a grain of sand for each and every rock
of gravel in this speck-like facsimile of what used to be our driveway, your driveway, or
some guy’s driveway we rented from somebody, that driveway you screamed couldn’t be 

my fucking driveway, and as these statements and the Droste effect are cheap products of
vanity, creations using the same careful hooks and cold rods as their creators, I place myself
next to you in a badass leather jacket with my leg halfway over the hog for posterity

because, in reality, I was really wearing skinny jeans with a matching jacket and
never have I ever owned a motorcycle, but I did once, when I was younger, kinda
make a moped look the same as a sorta small Harley if seen with a slight bent, like a ship

inside a bottle breaking, or a diorama of Hiroshima built into the hanger of Enola Gay,
or a gift shoppe you have to walk through to exit Macy’s, or some other Russian doll type
emptiness we sell in America where the corporations eat their own tails and I digress 

from my digressions shattered in these bottles and back to the bottle swinging in your hand
while wondering what else that bottle’s breaking, what titanic cracks running through it and
your body, what has left its unsinkable across sea gravel lining your belly, what recursive art

commemorates leaving, what genetic memories don’t ask or speak but scream symphonies
of whimpering, a choir of cribs dreaming of careers in interior designing a better broken home
as his tires peel out on a thousand tiny shards of driveway and glittering split-leveled bottles 

for little soprano girls are barely heard in the back of the bottle in your hand, and funny how
I echo in this bottle belonging to you dad, funny how I can’t recall this beginning, funny how
snakes were present before we entered eden, and funny who we find coiled before the quince 

drops a mild disagreement over all those soon to be global thermal nuclear gift shops and all
Barbies cloister inside themselves as Kens leave them in Macy’s with nothing and I, inside all
these bottles, drop this bottle and somewhere in Mexico the whole goddamn El Toro Factory 

shatters into a thousand tiny plastic red hats and long rods with tiny hooks pull out of
our world broken where a bomb dropped and we watch a thousand paper cranes unfolding
God’s self-consuming hand finally pouring our tiny ship of ghosts into a giant sea. Tada!      

 

njhampton.weebly.com

 

DANIEL SCOTT PARKER

SLEEPING BEAUTY [FULL MOVIE] IS AVAILABLE AT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_qf8IPTq0o

 

You are swimming in a swimming pool deep in the woods.
You have been underwater for years. You have been
underwater for so many years that your daughter has grown
up, married Freddie Prinze, Jr., and moved to Akron to open
an IKEA. All the walls of the pool are made of glass. When
you swim close to one, you can see your reflection. That’s
when you see someone behind you in a swimming pool next
door, because there are no trees in these woods, there are
only swimming pools. You swim to the other side and see
that it is an old lady. ‘I need to talk to you,’ you try and say to
her through the glass, but she is dead. ‘What can you tell me
about souls?’ you ask, inspecting your fingertips for wrinkles.
When I pull you up out of the water, it’s like you don’t even
recognize me. ’What the hell are you doing?!’ you scream.
‘It was never supposed to happen like this, I say.

 

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ANNALEESE JOCHEMS

WHEN I RUN I AM A WILD CONFUSED GOOSE

 

my nose does not comply with any kind of symmetry and when i smile
my face becomes a pizza of nose and yellow teeth.

if you pick off and throw away the nose
all you’re left with is teeth,
sorry

if there were rose petals
i would squash them,
but that’s irrelevant because there are no rose petals.

i am a goose with my feet on fire.
i am in the ocean, in the bog and in the forest,
i will trape mud all through your house.

i am the weeds suffocating your garden.
i am the dancing of the deranged.

this is not about skin that feels like talcum powder
because talcum powder is not skin.

this is how much blood can rush to a person’s head in thirty seconds. 

 

 

annaleesej@hotmail.co.nz