July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Disturbed
They say I am mildly disturbed
I stay awake at night, have paranoid visions
Have no girlfriend, nothing
I scratch my head for no apparent reason
I talk to myself and laugh in mid-sentence
They say I am mildly disturbed
Like blue detergent flushing
Down a toilet bowl
I am not mildly disturbed
But I feel like a prisoner in concrete walls
I wish I had a friend I could talk to
I think that would make a difference
I wish I lived in a community
That was concerned about my welfare
A farm or something, and we could work together
And I don’t like carrying guns anymore
And I don’t even like rock n’ roll anymore
I have permanently turned off my television
Because I’m convinced it’s giving me cancer
I don’t really like machines that run on
Electricity, gasoline or other resources
Except my coffeemaker, I am a coffee addict
It’s getting out of control
If I was having sex every night
I would stop drinking coffee
Attention ladies, I like most of you
I would like to have a relationship with you
You can be the dictator every once in awhile
Let’s reproduce in the name of the anti-corporate regime
Let’s never make love in public places
Let’s burn all the porno houses down
And blow up every satellite dish
Together, we can put an end to sodomy
I Love You
My grandmother said, “I love you” on the phone
Every time we talked
After she was diagnosed with dementia
More times than I can count
More than any lover
More than any friend
She wanted those words to linger
Long after memory was erased
These days my grandmother
Doesn’t know who I am
She stares at me
As though I’m a stranger
Come to ransack the place
As a child, I imagined this world
As my permanent home
I had no idea we could
Travel to other places
Even disappear
Even while alive
I just want to say, “Thank you,” Grandma
My gratitude is immeasurable
For the comforts you provided
Just by smiling
I miss you so much it hurts
– Miles Liss
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
The lace was frayed at the edges
worn and old – yellow like the
books you were so very fond of
You had rubbed at the needlework,
running your fingers across the
embroidered lilies; your hands—
clammy and cold, had pinched
those petals; plucking them as if
they had been Real
I had mended your garden,
each time you came to me;
red faced, puffy cheeked,
tearful over the mess that
You had made, yet telling
Me to fix it – please
My eyes can no longer hold
the needle, thin and silver,
which you had watched –
enamored, as it swam
between the eyelets
I am too old, too liver spotted,
too wrinkled and grey –
and you, you’ve grown too
big, for the false flowers I had
sewn so long ago; You, the garden,
are Gone
– Alice Linn
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Transcendental Love
Apparently, our love
has been reading Emerson
and believes it is self-reliant.
We, who have been part and particle
of each other, daily, nightly,
minutely merging (your hair covering
my skin, my tongue speaking your thoughts,
your oversoul in my underwear,
my hammer on your anvil and your foot
in my stirrup), now sit rooms apart
and prefer not to
Will you assume
what I assume
as I celebrate myself and sing myself?
Do your atoms, belonging equally to me
as mine to you, resonate with the same frequency?
Or does your heart vibrate to that iron string—
trusting yourself, exploring the sacredness
of your own mind, your own body?
If we must each triumph in our own
principles, can we not yet hope
that Whim will lead us each
through each
other, that the
currents of the Universal
being will circulate your Not Me
through the not me
of my own body,
once more?
The Empty Set
I am still only conjecturing that
spending the night with you last night is what
did not happen, out of the set of all potential
events that did not happen between us all
night. But the graph seemed to me to lead to
your bed (which, as you recall, was just two
feet away, with the blankets thrown back).
Yet our evening was a demonstration of Zeno’s
Paradox—we could not cross the distance
to the bed because we forever had first
to cross half the distance.
When I think about that missed intersection,
I think about plotting the slopes of our lives, the route
we each took to meet in that room, and how
any previous meeting would have already
been too late for us to reach that bed;
how we would have needed to have exactly
our same experiences leading to this
precise moment together, but without
ever having passed through those other points
on the graph, that intersected with those other husbands
and wives and children. Those trajectories
are defined by the impossible—they are mapped
in imaginary space only, when we subtract
our families from our lives and take the square
root of our resulting negative selves.
Other people, I think, can compute this, but
it was a math too radical for me.
– Suzanne Lane
Suzanne began as a fiction writer many years ago, but for short forms, she has been increasingly drawn to poetry. In addition to writing poetry, she is also writing a mixed-genre memoir, All over the Map, about my experiences growing up as a military dependent, and an academic book about the rhetoric of antebellum slave narratives. Suzanne has taught literature, creative writing, and composition at Harvard, Cal State, San Bernardino, and BU. She currently teaches rhetoric and writing at MIT.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
Her vitriol is shocking
like the unfounded kick
to fat puppy
though He reacts in
teeth gnash
rabid snarl
the mean passion
of that same
fat puppy reared
on a diet of
no love and
meager bones.
Like me,
He has pissed
on the Persian rug,
shit on the carpet,
and chewed
something worth
raising Her voice.
But when She calls He
still comes running,
the calm dog who
needs a particular touch.
– Tyrel Kessinger
Tyrel lives, eats and breathes Kentucky air and work in Louisville as a Braille transcriber. He is the recent recipient of the 2011 Literary Louisville LEO award and his work has been published in the LEO magazine.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
battered, bruised
used, overlooked
forgotten
poor yet rich in
faith unprotected
sex object in
the eyes of
bad and dark spirits,
bad and dark souls
innocent, saved, redeemed
in time
tired of working
for worth with (already)
a worthy name
short of being tall
obese yet healthy
enough to
survive, surmount, embrace
being troubled in
mind do
like to communicate
with only the truthful,
with only the wise;
a teacher, loyal friend
perplexing lover poised
in damaged purity…
Image of,
reflection of enmity
that keeps apart
two souls drawing near
E.
two shades of color
warming the
beauty of your
presence
a ray of sun-
lit sand
an island
who holds its miseries…
at a distance here
or far away
waiting, patiently
for sound to break
silence hitting
a sea called
lonely ears.
A heart
dying for hope
to have again
the true desire
of equal treasures
in a mirror of
equal measures
weighing you
into me
as an image
of we.
–Leah James
Leah James is an emerging African-American writer of poetry who writes in combinations of English, French and Spanish. She is a Midwest native who writes with the flavor of Chicago, the syncopated smoothness of St. Louis and gravity of the deep south.
July 2011 | back-issues, poetry
the Forgetting Look
This late in the year she’s coughing up a bed.
With a pair of scissors and a pen
she begins to lay the flowers out.
She opens her mouth and they fall
onto the pages of her book and she’s
started to hate them.
Volume after volume full and full of petal bits;
full of stem and seed.
But she can’t bring herself to lose them
nor can she help wish them away.
No matter how deep and black her longing is
or how vicious her words want to be
when she goes to speak them
they flock from her lips and flutter down.
‘Til they are saved-
crushed in the forever there of her book
(like a bible). Always to remind her
what weakness she is capable of.
shirt sleeves.
she goes on and buffs the bone-
how sinew is gold
and ribs pristine.
her temple-legs all adorned
she’s a flaming sword away
from making her point.
I’m more than happy down here-
pouring this stuff
down the hole.
my meat is murder and
the only thing hanging
in my halls is dust and noise.
she thinks these falling apart
skins are meant for honing and
keeping clean
I just want to sin some more
and pile on the dirt-
she won’t let me do the damage
– adrian ibarra
Adrian was one of the last students to graduate from Cal State Los Angeles with a BA in Creative Writing; he took it as an omen. He wrote a poem a day, every day, in 2010. The finished project can be found at fulltimecowboy.blogspot.com.
