CcOoVvEeRr  

AaRrTt:  
Lysette Elizabeth Simmons
Contents
Will Alexander
Diana Arterian
Thérèse Bachand
Molly Bendall
Guy Bennett
Byron Campbell
Geneva Chao
Andrew Choate
j.s. davis
Larkin Higgins
Erin Jourdan
Siel Ju
Janice Lee
Deborah Meadows
Béatrice Mousli
Dennis Phillips
William Poundstone
David Shook
Chris Stoffolino
Daniel Tiffany
AJ Urquidi

Artist Statements
BACK
Brief Double Anomalies

Much like a dwarf

fishing from a raft of negation
the fish dispel his powers
not because his skills have declined & acidified as ash
but because his voice withholds his structure
by dis-inhabiting his zenithal domain

Atop a blazing aural mountain

I am able to utter in free air
taking leave of a giant singular inferno
housed in burning circular ale
an excerpt from The Sand Genie

Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,
I would not have lifted a finger.
- Albert Einstein

...the sand genie

perhaps a chronic solar registration
a mirage
an aura
a bell disguised in various forms
rising up from ocean bottoms
as various sigils of himself

not self-predicted
or an auto-somal scroll
understood as uranic registration
as Egyptian psycho-physical balance
but respiring as terminal sand tiempo

he who whispers & peers & marks down stages of powerful post-circulation
has decreed absence
through bodies in space
knowing his central substance as bio-evasive charisma

Knowing in himself lesser pan-cyclical movement

not as jettisoned crags
which self-consult themselves through wasteful refinement
understanging how stages are wrought
of how stages appear
beneath a dawn of combustive crows

there exists no motives to cancel the crows

to self-suggest their vaporization
or the absenting of their pure unmitigated haunting
at times
he collaborates with schist
through simultaneous emboldening
so much so
that he haunts beings near demise

at the base of his work

Intuitive self-haunting
secreted rural edicts
knowing himself to be poisonous tablature
which always reeks of mastication

he
the irradiated
having the power of migrational poison
at the stark inception of incalculable nullification
a polyphonic impostor
knowing the unsettled phonemes of the era
knowing its false composure
Its contained analytical imbalance
reeking of imbalance & oblivion

this being the mist of his un-bevelled background

devoid of ancient pacification & study
knowing his labour by impassioned falsehood
scattered as amnesial diamonds
all the while ascending active codes of negation

as seeming bio-electrical carbon

he makes substance appear
which remains a glossary of disorder
aligned with panicked silk through dissolution...
BACK
BACK
low slung and triangled
three’d to be right
stuccoed and shingled to tone
a beige harmonic
horizontal to pyracantha
signature of what is to come
girls to . . .
boys to . . .
Térèse over babies
over babies//
children as figurines
plot game or exit
front room addendum an awkward wall employs
too much space to think on chairs at attention
sided in reverie books thwart hallway as if to say
“knowledge denies entry” plastic houseplants
squared and boxed = eternally yours small
bells cherish the lean edges tingling abrupt inter-
ruptions time is not in motion but the reserve of
taut upholstery beware an expectation of comfort
of convivial repose best to perch atop the sofa
face the fire every bird will learn to sing
 on our way down a jigsaw to
decode dropped chandeliers
homage to Saarinen
take off//lift off
leaving is
predesigned
stairs function dually
cliffs of paneling disclose
grand seams crossed + of disquiet
tinsel offers a cool impression of both
suspense & fated happenings
  camel      hair    coats  
 knit          cap          plaid  
                 shirt    a            bow  
                 children                  have  
                 have        their      own  
authority/    purity  
 of  intention    does  
                 a    camel      promise  
 water    in  a  desert  
                 the                household      
                 hinged    on    expec-­‐  
                 tation              revolves  
                 around    a  mystery  
not            satisfaction    
of            hopes              but    
surprised        nature  
                 of          that          delight    
child  waiting  anti-­‐  
                 cipates    surrender  
                 of                    parentlove  
unconditionally  
gathering            color  
from        a          depart-­‐  
ment      store        visit  
just        as        a      smile  
will      reach    zenith  
as  bulbflashes  un-­‐  
able    to      move    my  
locus        pull      stairs  
                 to                                vacuum  
                 cleaner        the  mea-­‐  
sured                  devoter  
horizontal  to  stairs  cabinet  enunciates  a  head  &  space  books  assimilate  cheat  of  wall  like  ladder  like  bannister  shelf  be-­‐  
comes  intuition  inertia  squanders  rectangle  constructing  geometry  problem  allusion  to  vastness  excess  of  zeros  and  re-­‐  
petition  climbing  to  arrive  one  small  tenderness  sacrificed  efficiency  accounts  breathe  soft  pitter  patter  of  thoughts  on  
words  
BACK
Comfort, Not to Needle It Flourish

Satellites orbit too close and you cock your head that way.

Slowness is the mode like the weather,

and to view you is how you view.

I was trying to fever it

closer but I have no guts and nothing

was clean about it.

When the heavy machinery is turned off for the day,

find yourself crooked

in your resting place, Why linger

in the world like that?
You’ll be deposed soon under cotton skies.

More quiet, more hiding. And I had

a haunting gaze and a showy collarbone then.

How do we look now

in the roped-off area? You need a comb through.

In the wild, hundreds of us were bounding over sand dunes,

beyond air, beyond any wreckage we know.

Avenging Grottoes Flourish

Your nod hovers

over all the sleep of the week. I’ll consolidate the bundles

and you’ll be ready to transform: horns bud, scales go blue,

some perfume

poofs up in a fog. Sure you could be

the last face in the woods and I’d believe

the warm climates.

It’s too muggy though. We read by stars,

succumb to the hard-hearted drops.

Your cranky song ripples the rafters. You were born without a house,
you with your moony paws,

scavenge in the holes they left.

In the middle of this we’ll sign off to the folding menace.

The whole scape is alarming, and we’re close enough

to give in to the petal shape cranked up

and howling,

blinking at our afterlife gaze.

Asylum Flourish

You could charge

across any terrain and be here in time.

In your satiny face I’m the culprit.

Rest hard

under your ramada shade,

rise and mislead me to the next castle-sized retreat.

I’ll set up shop near the electrified branches

far from murmuring crowds.

Your dark brown gloss,

thicker than drums. I’m near-ready

to own the sequins you air out, follow you

to the next rocky platform. You’ll get acclimated

and pad down the small humiliations.

This is a new place to be a maverick. One pose usurps another, and I’ll be

your dark thought

pushed down to a zigzag quiver. Soft head to soft head.
Camouflage and Escape Flourish

Up on the dim side of your habitat this morning,

grifter, scarred and spiked.

I fished for the right way around and took in the low notes,
the musk warbling,
until the paparazzi at your cave entrance

gave up. We’re learning how

to lead with hunting pauses. Where’s the phantom demarcation line?

Where’s the colossal magnolia tree?

Anything could be bought again

with a new planet in retrograde—
it need not

be a dream, anyone can riddle you. Your shadow

marks my shoulder with rumors.

And the lull starts

in your gallop, under the sunlight’s whistle.

I tease you, but I know

this is all your sorrow. Air so crisp today you could sniff out the sea.
BACK
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<blockquote>A reader must learn to demystify

appearances to flush out the transcendental, idealist
signified.<br />
&ndash; Roland Barthes</blockquote>

<blockquote>Code is poetry.<br />

&ndash; http://wordpress.org/</blockquote>

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not be immediately apparent. Literary, aesthetic, and
cultural codes are present in all works of poetry and
are duly deciphered by the reader along with the text as
she peruses the poem. This may occur unconsciously or
it may require some effort, depending on the relative
"difficulty" of the piece in question and on the reader's
ability and experience. Some poetic works may appear to
be free of such codes, as labels like "objectivist" and
"documentary" seem to suggest, but this is not true as it
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<title>Monochrome | After Malevich</title>
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<p>It may at first sight appear to be<br />
a uniform field of solid white,<br />
but on on second glance<br />
the viewer notices shapes,<br />
implied spatial relationships, facture.<br />
She realizes that there is no single,<br />
"absolute" white<br />
but varying degrees of whiteness,<br />
that potential forms may lurk<br />
beneath an apparently empty surface.<br />
The artist's theosophical intentions
notwithstanding,<br />
the subtext of this particular painting<br />
speaks to painting (perhaps even<br />
to this particular painting).</p>
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<script type="text/javascript">
document.write('<p>Automatic writing would be
the literary equivalent of spontaneous generation.
According to the Surrealists, who coined the phrase, it
was supposed to reveal the true mechanism of thought by
suspending the conscious mind at the moment of creation.
In reality, in order for "automatic" writing to be
possible, years of reading, writing, and thinking are
necessary to acquire the skills necessary to create a
poem "on the fly." (And, needless to say, whether the
conscious mind can actually be suspended outside of sleep
and death is a matter of conjecture.)</p>');
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<p>They don't really look black,<br />
at least, not completely<br />
(they also appear to contain<br />
browns, blues, whites and reds).<br />
Confronted with these paintings,<br />
the viewer has to reconsider<br />
her assumptions about monochromatism,<br />
about what we mean by that word<br />
and what it may in fact be covering up.<br />
Recalling that black is considered a color<br />
only when we're talking about pigments<br />
and coloring agents,<br />
this series could be described<br />
as an exercise in aesthetic materialism<br />
whose true subject is paint.</p>
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<p>Baudelaire would have surely welcomed<br />
the current trend of on-line computing<br />
and data storage.<br />
His fascination with clouds,<br />
expressed in several poems,<br />
suggests this.<br />
He clearly delighted in observing<br />
what he called “moving structures<br />
God makes with vapors,"<br />
and "wonderful impalpable constructions."<br />
And then there are his touching self-portraits<br />
as a cloud-monger, as a stranger<br />
captivated by the clouds that float by.<br />
All of this leaves little doubt<br />
regarding the true destination sought<br />
by the man whose soul appeals<br />
for the displacement of human activity<br />
“<a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/
cloudporn/">anywhere out of this world</a>."</p>
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<p>His proprietary blue undoubtedly endured<br />
the most extensive aesthetic exploration<br />
ever carried out on any color,<br />
being as it was the main event<br />
in some 200 monochromatic paintings<br />
and innumerable monochrome objects.<br />
Contrary to appearances,<br />
their surfaces are not truly uniform:<br />
looking closely, the viewer notices<br />
barely perceptible bumps and shadows<br />
created by the irregular topography<br />
of the artworks which, all things told,<br />
are less concerned with the color itself<br />
than with the commodification of color<br />
and by extension of art.</p>
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BACK
BACK
Five

These actions are sentimentalized, these objects fetishized – I mean like the French
objet fétiche, where you are carrying the thing around like a fucking teddy bear
rubbing it on the nose all the time.

There are certain questions that should not be asked. Whether we want to gaze
upon the dead is one. I mean, where is the good? Dead is gone. I am not sure
because I do not have a catechism for this, being a poor believer. But I think dead is
gone. I think if you can see that dead is gone, and that it has nothing to do with
your life anymore, that is really great.

The dead are a group of faceless people in bowler hats. This is what we do with the
dead. And anyway nothing about this is about history so much as it is about
present‐ness. There are actions that could dissuade one from ignoring everything. A
really good olive, for one. A child, for one.

What does that even mean, to sentimentalize? It sounds like a chemical process.
Probably very toxic. Best given a wide berth.

But really, you should do what you like. It is a lot to ask. Maybe you don’t like olives.
Maybe you don’t want a fucking teddy bear.
Six

She floats above everything. It’s maddening the way she floats above everything,
makes every decision with the kind of detachable logic that could fuel planes. I
don’t really know why I asked for advice, really, except that maybe it was a problem
so large I thought I should poll the neighborhood, or maybe I thought she would
give me permission to be self‐interested. Little did I know! Nobody ever gives you
permission to be self‐interested, least of all the most self‐interested people. They
need the rest of us to batten down hatches.

Look, I’m not going to claim everything’s not about narrative and narrative doesn’t
follow the whim of fashion. It is and it does. It’s just that when you ask the person
you know whose feet are farthest off the ground what she eats for breakfast, and
you expect her to say “kippers and quince granita, why?” and instead it’s nothing
but oatmeal, it makes you reconsider rejecting convention. It makes you place
yourself in Camp Oatmeal, bearing the standard of oatmeal. That’s what happened
to me.
Seven

I remember learning to swim, in the sound

off the island, the warm Atlantic so
sweet and salty, silty and salty, with fingers
of sea wrack running through. I learned
that year about the tide, the pull of the moon,
in my twelve‐year‐old wisdom I used to
look up at the sky and feel her pulling me
in to shore, the wet crash of water on sand
that leaves no trace, and everything I read
that summer reflected these themes, the
theme of gentle forces, of irrevocable pulls,
of the moon, of the womb with pearly
eggs like fish eggs gleamily bobbing
through it, floating through, a heavy float, a
slow float, as I floated through the bay, all
its many lives flowing about me, a humming
in my ears, the pull of the moon, the whole
of it, and the knowledge that all of this whole
waxed within me, its fullness a pleasure within,
subordination to this salty pulse, to the fullness
of other lives, smooth as a fruit, quick
as a knife.
Eleven

It is purely fact that palaces are necessary. Or some kind of chateau fort. Otherwise,
what is the use of virginity? Or for that matter, of long hair?

These are reasoned mythologies. The reason is not that girl's hymens are entailed,
necessarily, to the fortunes of kings, though that can happen. It is not out of the
question. You can attach a lot of importance to a hymen. It's a load‐bearing
membrane. A yoke, even, for oxen to pull together nations and tribes. For a flag to
be flown from the window. For the villages to rejoice. For the calf to be slain. And
then of course we need more cattle and more yokes.

But there are other questions. Why should the girls be innocent in all this? Anyone
who has ever been a cheerleader, or a Brownie, or visited a lavatory frequented by
seventh grade girls knows that the cunning of such creatures cannot be
overestimated. It is not about forthrightness; cheerleaders practice both velocity
and dissembling. The pom‐poms are sleight of hand; what is happening behind
them. Mesmerized by the shimmy and glitter, you will not be able to say.

In this theory of education girls do not know to be forthright, which anyway is hard
to do when your hymen is dragging a bunch of oxen around. In such cases, supine,
you have to find inner resources. And thus the palace, the fortress, the tower room
from which, in thrall to a witch, the girl takes her fate in hand.

It is not unlike the rules of handfighting. People fall prey to the idea that they must
have freedom of movement, but nothing will concentrate your efforts like backing
into a corner. If you were a daughter of Jerusalem there would be nothing for it but
to back into the highest corner possible, one with good light, fresh air, and windows
to fly that eventual sheet out of, or for purposes of tonsorial liberation. If you were
this sort of girl you might hammer out the terms of an entailment fit for generations
of kings. What does the poet say?

Like unto a mare among Pharaoh's chariot horses. That's a hell of an entailment. Or
in modern terms, that's a hell of a set of pom‐poms.
Fourteen

It might be wise for you not to listen to these voices. These other voices.

These two are untrustworthy, as it turns out. They do not consider the essence of
things, nor the sense of things. Their vagaries create exigency. An exigency of
reason. As an antidote, or a phial. In the medieval chansons they are always
searching for a phial, which you might imagine as some glowing crystal vessel that
hangs decoratively around some elf‐woman's neck or that floats ethereally down
from a cliff, unimpinged by gravity, to be caught with the tips of the fingers of some
airy being. A phial is an elixir of complete benevolence. It can cure you, it can put
you to rights.

Incumbent upon me is to offer a similar relief. Some potionless panacea. A

catalogue raisonné. But not a catalogue, not exactly. In American we say
"inventory." An inventory. I have organized this in the file drawers in my head:
color‐coded tabs for each different emotion. A short list:

Blue for anger.

Green for joy.
Violet for jealousy.
Red for compassion.
Yellow for love.

There is order in this. You may find my assignments of color capricious, but that is
because you are attached to conventions that do not serve you. Anger is like a
shadow. Joy is like a plant.

Love is like a sun.

BACK
Just Can't Shake The Breathing Thing. Or Free Limoges.
Recreating the behavior of extinct animals is very difficult,
but everybody's gotta work
Recreating the behavior of extinct animals
is very difficult, but impatience is candy too
Recreating the behavior
of extinct animals is very difficult,
but the four stages of need
are tinge, pulsecheck, reckon, belabor
Recreating
the behavior of extinct animals
is very difficult, but what color was dinosaur?
Recreating the behavior of extinct animals is very difficult,
but we can hurry toward the end if you want
Bye By Bye

Norfolk by line
bee by side
farm by Myrtle

booth by crooks
call by arms
evicted by choice
shot by cannon

Freedom by call
business by grammaw
fall by cellar
rate by government
body by granpaw
work by color

dome by ballast
please by junk
done by fall
Have Off
have fun
have remorse
have a TV
have her
have some
take it
have a piece
have me
have off
have try
have given
have done
take it easy
have fun
have remorse
have hold
have save
have heat
have time
take off
have sex
have puff
have woof
have undulating mystery, at the surface of the black green sea
have fun
have remorse
have off
I Love New York Is To I Love Being Human As Is Is To Is To
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nietzsche or Garfield
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzendeee Nowbauten, Nietzsche or a
swimsuit that doesn't fit comfortably
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzende Noiboaten, Nietzsche or gentle,
age-appropriate witticisms
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzende Nowbowteen, Nietzsche or wart
porn
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzenduh Now Battin'!: Nietzsche! Oh!
Sorry, I'm getting slapped by a ghost.
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzendeh Noobooten or tavern karma
Nitzer Ebb, Einsturgeon de Nubetan, Nietzsche or a fresh
pair of socks
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzende Nougat baton, Nietzsche or
gut fuel suet gel
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzende Noooiebowwowwooten,
Nietzsche or the current rampant immunity of mice
to Prozac. We just can't get them to react to the stuff
anymore.
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzendee Newbauten or the denial
of the opportunity to eat lemurs
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzende Nowbuhtown, Nietzsche or
the contest between you and Jesús Rafael Soto to see
who believes in immateriality the most.
Nitzer Ebb, Einstürzende Neubauten, Nietzsche or
100% human wings. Get them on the corner. You can
see them just across the street there. Oh, wait a
second, now there's a truck in the way. But yah, you
can get the human wings, hold on, just wait for the
truck to pass, I'll show ya. Now you see 'em? Next to
the pretzel cart? Yah, 100% human, totally! Look, I'll
introduce you if ya want, but you'd be better off just
being honest about the curse. Go get yourself the
100% human wings.
j.
s.
DAVI
S

BACK
 e Martins

i.

Harboring a tendency to remove herself from others, she averts

the claustrophobic crowd and watches her slender feet push
individual grasses down which bend back into their rightful place
—impressed with her ability to pinpoint satisfaction in something
reserved only for her. Norwegian summer was full-on, svelte, after
seasons of perpetual isolation and disappointment. She had
resigned to her current position out of necessity—a victim of
looks and entertainment value—but when he joins her on the
edge of the slope overlooking the ord, lone sailboat coasting
along, she realizes that she has made a mistake. Self-assured smirk
intact, he explains his politicized project—which didn't happen
because the small town didn't want the same lawn which now
surrounded them to go uncut for one year. She identifies one of
her kind. Yet, due to his warped reflection, she doesn't process the
siren. e panorama morphs with her inscape. In the future, she
will access this same view to combat a demented beast which
inconveniently covets her successes and failures. Tipsy, she stalks
his scent into an adjacent field, blades beneath his feet untouched.
 ii.

She cannot stay away from him. His responses to her inquiries
appear rushed, mildly amused. Typing is sloppy—missing
punctuation, no formal signature, two spaces randomly between
words. He quizzically avoids her cogent investigations. She has a
history of taking the brass ring with calculated forethought. But
not this time. She contorts his glib remarks and lukewarm
observations, and she blames her inability to communicate with
him on the fact that they share dissimilar homelands. She makes
excuses for his truancy. When he finally chimes in, she forgets her
anxiety and realigns her desire. My throat is deep enough to swallow
him whole. eir communications become one-sided with honest
declarations stemming only f rom her. He occasionally
acknowledges her witticisms and confessions: “I'm flattered.” or
“Ha!” or “I don't know what to say.” or: “I recently became the
father of a little boy, but the art world is small. I'm sure we'll meet
again.” Symptoms: cinephilia, Delirium tremens, elaborate image
searches, soliloquies, cheap thrills, sobbing, cruelty towards
strangers.
 iii.

He convinces her to fly across the Atlantic so they can talk face-
to-face. Convince isn't quite right. Rather, he simply answers, “Do
you need me to come to you?” with a “Yes.” A rescue mission. He
suggests a lackluster event in Chelsea; she declines because there
is no privacy; they agree to meet at St. Mark's Bookshop. She
receives his text en route: “e babysitter fucked up. Let's meet at
noon instead. //M.” His face upon arrival: unshaven, searching. In
short: everything. He awaits with his baby carriage and fair-haired
tyke sporting a tiny Daniel Johnston Hi, how are you? t-shirt. A
charmer flashing inexperienced gleam—but not hers. ey walk
through the neighborhood on auto-pilot, grazing banal topics like
college debt and their friends who still rent windowless rooms in
shared flats. ey gravitate towards a park bench; the neighboring
one is occupied by a drunk. “How do you feel about children?”
“What do you want to do with me?” “Yes, I need you to tell me.”
“Do you want to get a hotel room?” “But things might change!”
“It's not a good time, can't you see that?” “ere must be some
misunderstanding; I'm in love with my girlfriend.” “Uh, let's talk
about politics.” “I'm trying to figure out how to relate to you.”
“Look! e dogs look just like their owners.” “Why can't we be
friends?” “Your silence is very loud.” “Let me know if you change
your mind.”
 iv.

e covering of tracks. If one cannot go the distance, the race

never existed. “You read too much into what I say.” “is is in your
head.” “I can't be in this conversation!” She spends the rest of her
week not with him, as planned, but immersed in pedestrian
diversions. She refuses to meet him again, despite his suggestions.
She accuses him of “knocking up” the other woman—purposefully
lowbrow to humiliate. “at is NOT what happened!” She fights
with him, for her sanity: “People who are in love do not secretly
meet other women and attempt to persuade them to talk about
special things.” Seeing the baby triggers an interest in the mother,
despite her initial affinity for erasure. She discovers the mother's
identity with the right search combination: father's full name +
baby's first name. A respectable artist—large-scale paintings,
architectural motifs, site-specific installations. Annoyed with
herself, she feigns a sisterly rapport with the other woman, sharing
an imaginary cycling path, bleeding light rays, drinking from the
same spiked canteen. With more research, she discovers that they
are both only children, both raised in isolated locales, both love
large breed dogs. Prey and servant to a big-eyed Viking
approaching forty, he tends to the babe until pre-school either
alleviates the burden or shatters the façade. e mother sketches a
Sant'Elia-influenced rendering in her uninterrupted studio and
receives international praise.
BACK
 peripatetic L

LiLting steeLy L
[which way is the wind blowing?]

airstream = silver domed trailer or air-that-streams along

sides of the tongue, being blocked by the tongue from going
through the middle of the mouth when saying

L
a kind of Language maneuver through buccaL traffic

aLthough directions are direct, they seem approximate

tripping a toe in topoLogy

stumbLe upon signs that satis___ satiate

whirLed soLid
puzzLing peninsuLa
mainLand aLgorithm

LLLLLLLLLLL
miLe spiraL
miLe Landscape
miLe basaLt
miLe raiLway
miLe seamLess
miLe irreguLar
miLe Lunatic
miLe Longing
miLe reveLatory
miLe ideoLogy
miLe coLLapsing
miLe formuLation
miLe rubbLe
miLe Lost
miLe wiLd
miLe Locus
miLe idLe
miLe aeriaL
miLe Lapsed
miLe saLt
miLe dweLLing  
 __| |__

intersection
__ __
| |

L
the form and c eaved form

bracket/ed & e LLiptic

LateraL consonant
L
ree ing

 
 
the moment will skid

for various reasons others

may not hear your signal

two objects which looked like deer

use the horn

quick to catch
scent or sound

she adjusted her seatbelt

fine sense of
sight for distant objects

||
||

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

- - - - -

___________________________

--------------
___________________
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
___________________

requires you can see others can see you

& they know your

intentions prior to the maneuver

||
||
||

this arrangement presence

unfurnished

precision
alternative considerations

|| || ||

prima facie first appearance face it

hasten to put on a household dress

you have landed wagon by the woodside

that well-known property of matter

lava and houses

hours. Wooded
.
.
. . field .
hushed ash heaps.
. . . restless
.. . . ..
. . ..
. . . she
. .. . .
.. . . .
thundered . . . . . . .
.. . .. . ..
. . .
would .
again. would steam . .
would hurdle
lava and
houses and fields. .
.. ..
was . . as she was
.. . . .
. . . .
..
. .
..
“This below. Above, is
wild.” . .
. . .
ordinarily . .. .
. .
cinders .. .
. .
inaudible wooly air plushly woven
BACK
WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE

For Laurie Anderson

Trickster God, out of work, needs to get with the times. Adopt a
style of irony. Stop with the one-liners and lewd t-shirts. Trickster
God needs a makeover. Fake breasts. A sparkly new smile. An
updated look. Trickster God is the old sugar in the saltshaker. The
old whistle out of tune. Trickster God is a short-sheeted bed, a
toilet papered tree, a Chinese fire drill. Trickster God is the bull in
the china shop. The tempest in the teapot. Trickster God wants
to write crank letters but no one reads their mail anymore.
Trickster God wants to make joke phone calls but no one
answers their phone anymore. Trickster God needs a screenwrit-
ing class, a comedy troupe, skills of improvisation. Trickster God
can speak 300 languages but still can’t get an interview. Trickster
God waits in the line at the unemployment office. Brushes up on
some computer skills. Trickster God applies online. Checks email.
Faxes references. Provides writing samples. Trickster God wipes
that smile off your face.
ODE TO BABY VINEGAR

Fuck that little tyke with his whiskey bottle and well-gnawed nipple.
Stench of cigars and diaper rash, fuck his racing forms and bad bets.
Baby Vinegar is in hock up to his itty-bitty eyebrows. He is on his
way to sell his tiny watch at the pawnshop. The babble of toothless
promises. Back alley accusations of doping. The high-pitched shriek
when you just want a moment of peace. Tiny grifter. The porkpie
hats. The monogrammed hankies. He feigns nearsightedness with a
monocle. The chubby little hands clapping when his horse is ahead.
Strained peas and creamed spinach. That fucking stork always flying
by just to check in. The dogs always playing pool in the basement.
The foxes come circling. The diapers are dirty again. The milk has
gone cold. The prick of the safety pin smarts. He’s cranky and won’t
go down for a nap. He wants to party all night long. He hangs out
with sophisticated women, who find him adorable. They hold him
close to their breasts and rock him, there now, there now. He calls
you, ma’am. You call him smartypants. When you get ready to leave
he starts with the ammonia tears, then the bawling that melts your
heart every time. The babysitter looks horrified. Your date honks the
horn for you to leave. You promise him prime rib in a doggie bag
and he’s suddenly silent.
EASIER THAN A RICH MAN

Cell phone antennae in church crosses, calls passing through eyes

of needles and threading through the city. A snippet of highlights
on audio: dreams of airplanes and missed flights, reputations to kill,
attempts to live off the grid, adventures to have, and love to make.
If we all had strings attached, if we could take turns marionetting
each other. If you would dance, if you would only syncopate,
calibrate, let your heart beat at my pace, let your breathing trail
mine. Knit me to you. Let me live in your marsupial pouch. Com-
fortable and warm, making phone calls, leaving messages,
connecting with the home office. I take a conference call in the
middle of the desert. I conduct business from the hump of a camel.
I practice and prepare to go through the eye of a needle.
HOW COME POETRY CAN’T REGROW BODY PARTS?

Slice though your finger with a piece of sharp poetry, or nail yourself
to the wall with a bon mot and chances are that pieces of your body
will become gangrenous and fall off. Poetry is no match for the sala-
mander, who can grow new parts with very little fuss or concern. Why
is poetry so weak in the face of science? Why are words no match for
immortality? When poets are wounded, skin, muscle and blood
vessels revert to their undifferentiated states. They form spongy
masses and their cells go back in time to retrace their memories to
assemble a new sentence or group of words. As embryos, poets grew
arms, legs, lungs, and a heart with no problem whatsoever, yet they
are unable to truly repair damage. Only the liver, sometimes abused
in a state of angst, or pickled by patronage to a local watering hole,
shows any flexibility. But on the whole, poetry does not have the
regenerative pathways to assemble new body parts. Poets think that
the reason for this is that sprouting new words at a rapid rate looks a
lot like cancer. The longevity of our words makes poets vulnerable to
accumulations and roadblocks. Scientists need to work with poets to
figure out how to override language in order to divert stop signs
without sparking a malignant rampage.
SCRAWL

I’ll turn you upside down and shake secrets out of pockets you never
knew you had. Tie my locket around your neck. My sacrament inside.
My reliquary inside. I’d chase the moths out of your closet. Darn the
holes out of your sweaters. Keep your skeleton key a shiny ivory. My
smile as polished as teacups. A lump of sugar in my throat. Your red
cursive scrawled like scars on secret memos. The word postapocalyp-
tic. Break every glass in your house. Delight in the sweetest noise of
glass cracking. The needs today. The intensity today. The craving today.
The birds today. The sweet ballerina love. The sharks that swim alone.
SAILING ON

On sill and surf of open ocean as we sail our gold leaf past garlands,
staring out portholes, marking initials where our breath meets the
glass creating a condensation of communication. Our words are just
droplets in the ocean, blue petals of sound. Scarecrows swim past
our ark, cinders in their eyes to scare us towards land. We are
smudged with soot. We are flawed in thought. We are beginning to
burn as the sun’s rays falls piercing on our foreheads. We have
traveled far from elm-shaded lawns, choirs, burly watchdogs with
scars. We float away from memory, Fall trees and scarecrows, the sly
and sepia of the past. If I could float on your white mare, on an
ocean crest of pearl and foam I would dream of keys, midnight
feasts, nests and hibernation. I would write only the nicest words on
your headstone. I would protect your ashes from the wind.
WHAT HAPPENS TO POETRY IN A BLACK HOLE?

It becomes more intense because neither matter nor energy can

escape. Black holes eat words, organized matter, and spit out
random noise. Black holes are made of poetry, and snow smuggled
from the North Pole. The information held in a poem is a paradox. It
cannot be destroyed but neither can it exist. Confident super-
genuises are convinced they are right. But physicists are skeptical
that poets can discern the singularity at the heart of a black hole.
Some people reverse their words, or fall into a singularity and get
lost. They become poetry, until their information begins to leak out,
though no one can explain why or how this happens. The universe
sometimes follows the rules of a Baseball Encyclopedia, where
information can be retrieved at will if you choose to understand it.
The poetry that becomes white noise tends to be accepted grudg-
ingly. Scientists read it and stated in their report, “It is possible to be
wrong more than twice.”
BACK
Eager

These days I’m an accidental sadist, scouting out

inconveniences. Throw me a curve ball and I’ll catch it, if it
falls in my quiet hand. Masochism’s so pedestrian, haven’t
we all almost been hit by a car. More accurately, there’s
more money than ever, but it all feels temporary. My own
brand: scrabbling at nickels and dimes. If only life didn’t
have to be so dirty and petty. Obedience gets easier than
seeking an epiphany that shows the world is actively kind,
revolving toward the possible. A happy ending after all.
Yes, I’ve contradicted myself again for your benefit. See
how eager I am to please.
Opener

This morning crows broke the ice with their usual

cacophony, woke up the machines. I geared up to describe
the noisy chill, but words are not puzzles for the unlocking
of sentences. Writing in the margins is proof that no
sentence can save the world. As in letters shaped by your
naked hand, I can recognize as yours. Every curlicue looks
like it was banged out with a fist, punched out with a beak.
From now we’ll communicate only in Scantron readouts.
No reading between the lines – save those chicken
scratches for the ornithologists.
Tidier

Curiously encrusted life. As in dirty, mottled, heavy with

extraneous matter. Encrusted implies a hardness, but on
my body dust sits malleable. You could slice clean chunks
off with a little back and forth of the knife to get through
the formless stickiness. Here I go talking banalities again.
Sentences encrusted with expected sentiments, melodrama.
My soul encrusted with little scabs, coiled into perfect
barnacles. Start over -- a clean body to preserve, a blank
heart to lay tidy habits on, optimistic enough the world
responds in kind. Or encrusted like jewels, a pretty thing.
Each fracture breaks open a tiny beauty, a new facet in the
diamond.
Brighter

Liaisons as aided by PDAs, at once more up front and less

serious, perhaps. Your handle’s sexier than your name.
Add an emoticon later to pretend you were joking. I’d like
your avatar to rip my clothes off. What can I say about
you, except that I like the celluloid images I see? I’ve been
spoiled into unrealistic expectations, much like the other
girls. You’re curious to me because I’ve seen you on a far-
off stage, teenagers behind me singing along to your songs.
You slurred a bit. You used to move people with your
words, now you move people with the idea of yourself. A
pawn who thinks and feels. I want you against a wall on
which my words are projected. If you sat beside me we’d
keep to our own worlds, but touch arms.
BACK
Notes for a disintegrating story:

The memories resurface.

And when the town starts to fall, she walks out into the rain, with her baby in her
arms, in her night gown, walking, walking. She will never come back.

Slowly the white fades away and the sound of the crying baby is drowned out by
the rain and the wind, until you forget you had ever heard the baby crying.

He eats, ripping off a small piece of bread, dipping it into his soup, lifting his
spoon and eating, one piece, one spoonful at a time, as if he has all the time in the
world.

She is so defeated.
But a different point of view.
A dead child.
No, sick.
No, without father.

Night – sounds of night.

The planets.
The water.

Memories.
Ruin.
The book.
The end.
BACK
 Guide Dogs, the play

by Deborah Meadows

… a metaphor uses an image or figure (the vehicle) to explain something

else (the tenor), I. A. Richards

Characters

Professor A: Philosophy major who became a part-time professor, late 40s to early
50s.
She has precise economic evaluation of situation but limited way to earn a living,
has sizable student following from major research university.

Kurt: Perpetual Day laborer, early 20s, highly educated, sweetly grunge in affect.
He is former student of A, does cement work, has lime-dried hands.

Old Hi-Fi: a convincing version of a seeing-eye dog, yet when only A and Kurt are
present moves and speaks as a human, comments ironically on various scenes.
Called “Old Hi-fi” or “High Fidelity”.
He’s looking for the blind person to whom he was assigned.
Skeptic.
Part Three: In Jail/Holding Center [scene with The Chessboard]

A: My rook takes your …

Kurt: Hey, not like that, Beginner’s Luck, you’re trying to “bishop” me. (makes
obscene gesture)

Old Hi-Fi: And the church will have years of multi-million dollar lawsuit
settlements to contend with …

Kurt: A, did you notice how the guards have been replaced by surveillance
equipment?

A: Must have had a weak union …

Kurt: And how the news came through that wifi cell they concealed next jail cell
over in a body cavity?

Old Hi-Fi: The masses are massing on our behalf.

Kurt: Solidarity lifts me up.

A: Calms the chess playing hand.

Old Hi-Fi: Makes time seem a matter of event once again.

A: All good, all good.

Kurt: A game of strategy.

Old Hi-Fi: Handed down from empires.

Kurt: Next door, I think they are taking every precaution to ration the battery life
to keep the news-check at every five hours until sundown.

A: Soon, Kurt, we should be able to hear the masses outside the walls, despite the
high security and all.

Old Hi-Fi: Chants would be encouraging.

Kurt: Can drums with a deep tone resonate through these walls? Shouldn’t we be
able to feel the vibrations?

Old Hi-Fi: Good, good, good vibrations. (sings)

A: Well, Old Hi-Fi, I hope not like that. Nostalgic music that neo-nazis lost their
virginity to in the back seat of a car parked behind a soda fountain, well, whatever
cream sodas are, they can’t be good, those 50s …

Those 50s cute red and white stripes and restrained side burns leading right up to
segregated so-called joys of a past that never existed but in the minds of naïve
adolescents whose political experience never matured beyond the base feeling of
threat from anything new.

Old Hi-Fi. Did brothers and sisters hump each other back then?

A: Who knows, maybe for “practice”? Experience was so far out of reach, or beyond
their limited imaginations formed from an image of an innocent America.

Kurt: Never mind the country was doing it to every poor person, every descendant
of slaves, every Indian, and every Third World country with two sticks to rub
together as natural resources and cheap labor.

Part Four: The Discourse on Discourse [crowd assembled outside jail]

(In this scene A and Kurt and Old Hi-Fi are in a crowd with other intellectual-protesters
who speak in solidarity with those held in jail)

A: From ambient ideo-petro-secular plastic configurations, we stand here and

demand answers.

The ideas of a petroleum-based economy that sculpts a godless horizon can seem
popular—for “the people,” not noted for density on any hardness scale, nor for
opacity, none other than the prank—that, once revealed cannot be repeated. That,
in itself, is brilliance, of the sort that can harm your vision from looking too long.
Our aggregate authorship is not crowd-sourced in that primary sort of way, but
more likely resembles monks copying scripture as part of a daily task meant to add
up to a pagan pyramid of accomplishment, somewhat resembling a socio-cultural
tornado system, know what I mean? To identify with retinal imprints constitutes
more psychological projection that seeks a social bond, a friend, a community, a
configuration sold off shore and re-purposed to enter the confines of value in First
World vaults, to rip off the perceived treasures there, but when they are revealed to
be electronic streams, well, try to feed yourself and pay your rent with that. (shakes
fist)

*
Me and my old man: our first date back in the 80s at Club Lingerie—we discoursed
wildly there on the seedy couch on the balcony upstairs from the dance floor, Tex
and the Horseheads on stage. Years later, these provocations register as intimately
related to a field of language correlated to viewfinders, magnetic tape, and the stink
of sour sweat.

Was the post-patriarchal utopia ever dys-formed on the ashes of promised lands?
Here is what is left to haggle over: impassioned social change, gates thrown open to
free thought complicit in another critique winning the “smart” points of the game,
gadgets with supposedly thrilling widgets and newly-revealed functions that
obsolesce quicker than a person can say “boring” and “pornographic”. But then, is it
“the graphic” that refuses to lie down and die? Where is its fountain of youth—
Florida?

We took on slogan-printed tee-shirts but could have just as well been without those
tee-shirts so imprinted we are as walking examples of the medium itself. We are not
writers or consumers of writing; we are living examples of technique, people are the
clay, the phoneme, the drift. As a swarm, do we seek a new queen, or, to extend
that metaphor, a totality of swarmness to which we each adhere so our movement
itself can comprise definition, a sort of group photo—we are a whirling cloud? You
remember that scene in Grapes of Wrath—a discourse on dumping of oranges into
the river so their price remains artificially high while hunger abounds? Or in Las
Vegas where people sleep in drainage pipes and houses stand empty? Is that a sort
of tornado leveling the place, diamond in Indra’s net woven of hemp twine, a coal
miner’s hive-content managed under “supplications,” and achievement of a people
being people?

(Big pause, re-grouping after movement of crowd)

Old Hi-Fi: (aside to audience) Once I let go of the idea that these monologs don’t
sound any thing like how people really talk, then I began to enjoy myself.

Kurt: Down in the basement with the anthropologist, the building could shake
down a few hustlers with its tale of the past. And, were we a tad more fluid in
definition rather than co-dependent, this could be the new-novel eschewing vivid
characterization. Defined by what we are not, yet all those shards and citations are
more than fragmentation as a process, more than a flash of modern mentality, they
compose and decompose into montage that is made more adept than a sum of its
new tools and gadgets. So it becomes a story of time. A story of our crowd whose
lullaby soothes us to political oblivion, so no matter what, we forget all the
languages that live here. They are as suppressed-languages. The building over-
shadows the events, the muttering, and jibber-jabber. Maybe when I hear you
speak, I sense our relation to be metonymic, you know, more parallel every day. I
worked construction on that new design to show you, to show myself I could learn
a craft old as adobe and new as engineered insights into eco-friendly life that
sustains and shelters a vision of life here together—and you called it beautiful and a
rare composite of old and new, a nourishing shape that one could live in without
tiring of its perimeter. Is this the end of time? See how self-awareness propagates
new seedlings and we shadow forward our mother, a bit of a finger-print, that code,
the shape of a face or muscle joint that keeps death second rate despite its efforts at
total triumph over the world. An old story that represses actual biology.

Memory. That big topic when so much degenerates down to what vivid mental
images do you hold of a sordid tv trial defendant? Those memories come to stand
for shared generational moment yet fall short of a particular moment’s political
struggle. I’ve noticed how criminal trials repeat and repeat across time even though
we may develop new politicized lenses through which to interpret them. Still, this
does not relieve us of the repressed political life—how often do political dissidents
have their trials covered so broadly? Never. It’s an assassination of struggle.

A: We can use ventriloquism for that. We’ll make a few puppets and put on the
show: AIM, SDS, Sane Freeze anti-nuclear, Occupy, you name it, we’ll put it on,
bring the cameras, and we’ll send out the enactments based on real-life court
transcripts.

Kurt: Let’s use mythic tropes. You know, the bringer of fire, the one punished by
gods whose very being cannot miss that movement toward destiny.

A: Did we already forget Enlightenment era moral choice not to mention the birth
of theory standing on the shoulders of the death of tragedy? Not to mention
postmodernist force fields of play and repression undone?

Kurt: Did the author ever exist?

A: Did the police ever exist?

Kurt: Did police defend the Enlightenment era moral choice not to mention the
birth of theory standing on the shoulders of the death of tragedy? Not to mention
postmodernist force fields of play and repression undone?

A: Did police use mythic tropes. You know, the bringer of fire, the one punished by
gods whose very being cannot miss the movement toward destiny.

Kurt: With transparent, nearly body-length shields did police use ventriloquism for
crowd-control? Did they turn us into a few puppets and put on the show: AIM,
SDS, Sane Freeze anti-nuclear, Occupy, you name it, we’ll put it on, bring the
cameras, and we’ll send out the enactments based on real-life court transcripts?

A: Did police station themselves down in the basement with the anthropologist
where the building could shake down a few hustlers with its tale of the past? And,
were police a tad more fluid in definition rather than co-dependent, the police force
could be the new-novel eschewing vivid characterization. Defined by what they are
not, yet all those shards and citations are more than fragmentation as a process,
more than a flash of modern mentality, they compose and decompose into montage
that is made more adept than a sum of its new tools and gadgets. So it becomes a
story of time. A story of our crowd controlled by police whose brutal lullaby
soothes them into political oblivion, so no matter what, police forget all the
languages that live here. The police are as suppressed-languages. The building
over-shadows the events, the muttering, and jibber-jabber. Maybe when I hear
police speak, I sense our relation to be metonymic, you know, more parallel every
day. Police protected people who worked construction on that new design to show
us, to show themselves they could learn a craft old as adobe and new as engineered
insights into eco-friendly life that sustains and shelters a vision of life here
together—and police and city fathers called it beautiful and a rare composite of old
and new, a nourishing shape that one could live in without tiring of its perimeter. Is
this the end of time? See how police-awareness propagates new seedlings and we
shadow forward our mother, a bit of a finger-print, that code, the shape of a face or
muscle joint that keeps death second rate despite its efforts at total triumph over
the world. An old story that represses actual biology.

Memory. That big topic when so much degenerates down to what vivid mental
images do police officers hold of a sordid tv trial defendant? Those memories come
to stand for shared generational moments yet fall short of a particular moment’s
political struggle. Police have noticed how criminal trials repeat and repeat across
time even though police may develop new politicized lenses through which to
interpret them. Still, this does not relieve police of the repressed political life—how
often do political dissidents have their trials covered so broadly? Never. It’s an
assassination of struggle.

*
BACK
from Redon’s Colors
Béatrice Mousli

London, 1895

Haunted and Haunters

Reading Edward Bulwer-Lytton

A faded silk kerchief,

letters tied with a yellow ribbon,
threads of narratives scattered through
a strange abode: curiosity guides
the rational mind of a superstitious dreamer.
Hounded by Darkness and the Hand,
he is there to uncover what,
in the laws of Nature,
allows the Dead to come back.
Over Oxford Street,
the moon is high, clear and calm.

1
 Paris, November 12, 1895

Dear Monsieur Bonger

I am just back from London, delighted, lighter, almost

ambitious. I only stayed about eight days, just a foretaste.
I’ll go back to mix with this human flow, so active, so fervent
and silent. […] I have taken hope, having seen this country,
where men cloaked in the fog, obviously, have allowed their
inner lives to bloom. The sun, always veiled there, creates a
mysterious transparence that is permanent; it is all
propitious to chiaroscuro and blacks. […] And what
beautiful museums, tidy and ordered for the dignity of art
works! What wonders those marbles of the Parthenon! And
Turner! I’ve only seen everything in passing, but I’ll be back
now, since the trip, the crossing are really nothing. The sea
that I feared a bit (water is not my element) showed
clemency toward me, and I even believe that coming back, I
felt that it exerted its fascination over me ; all abysses are
attractive.
[….]
Odilon Redon

2
A Favorite Dog

Having followed his master,

the bull-terrier prowls around
the house, weary and curious.
Vigilant, his tail points up,
questioning the pattering footfall
of phantoms and creatures.
A dog of dogs for a ghost.

3
 London Album

Across the Heath, from Hampstead to Highgate,

drops of frost caught in the wild grasses. The city
sprawled at the bottom of Parliament Hill. On the
way to Keats’ house, ducks shivering as they cross
the West pond.
From the top deck of the Routemaster the rider
orchestrates the hustle and bustle of the streets.
At the British Museum, crowds sit in front of the
frieze of the Parthenon. Redon’s Spider looms over
the quiet Prints and Drawings room.
Walking down Oxford Street towards Hyde
Park. On the other side of the Serpentine, the park
grows wilder, the noises from the city are muffled by
the trees.
In the windows of Charing Cross’ bookshops,
illustrated editions of obscure nineteenth century
scribblers await their fate.
The muddy waters of the Thames bear branches
and leaves away, the cold breeze reminding the
passerby that winter is on its way.

4
 Notes

In 1895, René Philipon, specialist of occult sciences and

patron of the arts, commissioned six lithographs and a cover
from Odilon Redon to illustrate his translation of Edward
Bulwer-Lytton’s horror story, The Haunters and The Haunted.
A close friend of Theo Van Gogh, Andries Bonger spent
his collecting years gathering works by Odilon Redon and
Emile Bernard. In 1908 he considered his collection as
complete, and enjoyed reading and listening to music in a room
with walls covered by the two artists’ works. Redon wrote for
the last time to his friend and patron on December 22, 1915.
The painter died six months later.
During that London visit, Redon also discovered James
Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night. Asked to illustrate an edition
of the poem, he drew brains of a man debilitated by alcohol
and loneliness: none of these sketches survived.
Redon did not paint or draw animals apart from the
ominous raven and the odd and horrific spiders he is known
for. The bull-terrier drawing is unique in his repertoire.

5
BACK
On Rooks

1. Power

Didi, says Gogo, tell him it’s Pozzo.

Hand in hand
off the three-posted bed
into the hands of who predicted the move.

Let me explain.
There are words I can’t use to define this
and by can’t I mean
that no one will stop me.

Is there a way to address power

that slips away from narrative?

Let me explain.
There’s a fat one and a skinny one,
a pair of bowlers or a shotgun wrapped in paper.
But what of those who only know derbies?
Or who think of a pork pie as food ?

Put another way

there’s a riverboat and the issue of costume,
and the unavoidable instrument of confidence.

Whaling ship: same problem.

2. Outline

Rooks in the oak tops.

Leafpins pierce feet.
Tender visitor humbled.

Fog, distant breakers, a truck in reverse.

This season: too soon to tell

or a catalogue of friends abandoned
or abandoning friends.
Rook in oak
calls to brethren
that special call
the one they’ve been waiting for.

Assessment: charity thinketh no evil.

Put another way: all hands on deck.

Conclusion: they must all be ghosts.

Recap: Fogdusk.
Broadwinged rooks
drop pebbles in the trout stream.
Ash season, smoke-red cloud curtain.
Sun sequestered, fire skrimmed.

Distant giant pine [research type later] should be silhouette

instead dimensioned in setting sunlight.

Reference 1: Demeter and Mataneira

[cheated mothers]
neither lit by Helios [spy]
nor adroit enough to step from the story.

An acorn falls. Misses.

References 2 and 3: Evening wind arrives

like a messenger with winged feet
like in the good old days as Didi says.

Study the mysteries, says someone else.

Forget kleos.

3. On Power On Rooks

Face says that was my family’s business,

ten thousand acres twenty thousand immortal head
and turns to the olive paste
through the plate glass doors
almost invisible when closed.
Or perhaps they were chicken wings
but anyway, the glass doesn’t break—
or the forehead—and the rooky woods
stand beshrouded in shadows
cast under crepuscular wings
in some one’s dream of contiguity.

Telegraphy in the branches

wingless voices below
and somehow, despite the conflagration
or because of it,
gravity or the face we’ve been waiting for
pulls us to the kitchen
and the money from our pockets
or pledges of belief.

4. Geography from Thirty Thousand Feet

Against the undeniability of the actual physical earth

there’s the actual undeniable inner map
that erases intervening space and time—
this may have nothing to do with power.

It’s just that novelty’s been replaced with knowledge.

There’s no point to this really
just an observation that longing for a place
is completely separate from being there.

In the tropics there are no rooks.

Paul writes from Bagnone: the angels aren’t true.

Martha from Vermont: it hasn’t stopped raining.
Nathaniel from Borneo: the guide died at the headwaters.

Ray has discovered the horizon

lurking between the dot and the vertical
of the lowercase letter i.
As clouds, a century below,
track clustered then converge as pointless covers—
but that’s surface talk,
voice-motivated talk.

Take the boy from the country

and all space travels as one.
Whale ship: same problem.

Spread as they are

across a time zone’s swath of night
how not to think of omens
the wings of rooks?

5. No Rooks

There are no crows in the tropics

nor Yankee senators
nor kelp beds with otters.

Instead please find

the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a
the bird and the rainbow wrasse
the snowflake moray eel
the angel tang.

These are not exactly true

unless, of course, you’re human,
for humans are entranced with nitrogen
and the effects of their mastery of nature.

Put another way:

Can I measure nomenclature
by reef or forrest
from one decade to the next
or have I just not made the record clear?

6. Crows

In truth there are no rooks in California.

Not rooks qua rooks—chess excluded—
but crows—and crows galore.
All of them Corvids.

The rook is generally gregarious

the crow solitary but taxonomies
are beside the point—maybe.

Here the problem of specificity looms—

the poet smiling, imagining a world
where ornithologists read poems
and argue the fine points
of classification.

Unwilling to stop the progression

of castle to corvid to grifter in disguise
I’ve been taking the broad view
though on my left shoulder
Pound’s encantation reminds me about leaves
and on my right Brumfield’s essay on visual language
notes that while the properly indoctrinated see “birds,”
maybe “corvids,” in a cartoon “sky”
a child correctly asks
why the “sky” has so many check marks.

7. Corvids

Twin sonic thunders punch the house.

The crows barely notice.

John Keats is a movie now

finally arriving at a station
everyone can understand.

Corvus in the palm trees

corvus in the oaks
who’s left to marvel at what we’ve done?
By done I mean this chaparral
ready to burn just past the last developments’
patches of foreign flora and spreads of green.

Crow finds worm, crow finds poisoned rat

crow, crow, crow.

8. The Point of Sparrows in a Book of Crows

You title me, runneth over

on the island of lost friends
you title me the wrong title
on the island of knots.

The arc, boat or story,

any way you want it to.
The boat, the arc, the story
are exactly as you want them.
9. Wrestling

One more time

Proteus’ fire to water to lion
down in seal town, in kelp festoon
one more time
where rooks don’t travel
bearded man, his daughter
act out the ambush but
one more time
it’s not what it seems.

Or it is and Proteus
only stands for a god
and his daughter a frigate bird
and the rook crowing
the faithful confuse one island
with the one it’s not.
BACK
I’m Feeling Lucky
Towards a Crowd-Sourced Poetics

• Type a word or short phrase into a search engine and don’t hit return.
The autocomplete feature will generate a list of suggested searches. These
lists often succeed as found poetry.

• Good words to try are is, was, why, how, who, or this. In some cases it
helps to type a space after the word. Use beginnings of simple questions
(is it ok) or the first few words of an existing poem (april is).

• Try different search engines.

Don’t forget Dogpile, which
produces a high proportion of
unique results.

• When you see something you

like, do a screen capture. For
high-res text, use the browser’s
zoom-in feature before doing
the screen capture.

• Open the screen shot in a photo editor and crop as desired.

• Browser suggestion lists change with the news and memes, so repeat
the process periodically. Autocomplete suggestions are a crowd-sourced
poetry incorporating the real-time obsessions and anxieties of the mob.
BACK
2 Textual
Installations
in Kirundi

These preliminary sketches map two

potential textual installations for the city
of Bujumbura, Burundi.
Nostalgia vs. Hope
This textual installation on the shore of Lake
Tanganyika employs the Kirundi word ejo, which
means both “yesterday” and “today,” or “a day
one day from now (in either direction).”
Installation at a depth of about 3m from the shore
will allow interaction with the lake’s natural tides
and weather.

Rudimentary mock-up of “Nostalgia vs. Hope.”

The word ejo will appear in a sans serif font based

on the rough rendering above but ultimately
determined in collaboration with the welder who
constructs the rebar frame of the lowercase e, j,
and o, which will then be covered with hand-
woven crochet using recovered plastic bags in a
technique developed by Congolese entrepreneur
Joël Tembo. This will allow enough water and
wind permeability to keep the tide and waves
from knocking the letters over at the lake depth of
.75 to 1.5m, depending on the tide, approximately
3m from the shore from the beach facing Cocktail
Beach Restaurant (see map below). The rebar-
framed letters will be 3m in height and from .75 to
1m in width, with a concrete anchor at their base
and anchoring rebar extending an additional 3m
beneath the lakebed. “Nostalgia vs. Hope” will be
installed facing east, intended to be viewed from
the shore, so that the setting sun shines over and
through the letters. The shifting tides, wind, and
light suggest the different meanings of the word
ejo.

Approved location of “Nostalgia/Hope” installation.

Maybe
This textual installation employs the Kirundi
words ego and oya, which mean “yes” and “no,”
respectively. A custom designed lowercase font
will be used to produce a horizontally-rotating
ambigram, which will be produced from flattened
tin or iron scrap and mounted on a metal pole to
allow the installation to spin with the wind,
alternately reading “yes” and “no,” depending on
the wind and the reader’s point of view.

Early draft of the “Maybe” custom ambigram, reading oya, see the
reverse, reading ego, below.
“Maybe” would ideally
be installed on the small
roundabout (about 2m
in diameter) at
Chaussee Prince Louis
Rwagsore, Avenue de
France, and   Avenue des
USA in Central
Bujumbura, to be visible
to Bujumburan drivers
passing through the
prominent city juncture.
The connected letters will measure .5m wide each,
for a total word width of 1.5m, and .75m tall, with
an additional .5m tail for the central g/y, which
will sit on the base pole. The entire word will
ideally feature a slight concave on its ejo side to
encourage its spinning in the wind.

Proposed location of “Maybe” installation.

BACK
Dig The Dig: Merch Sestina (version 2)

Even in 2013, amid all the post-post-modern conceptual art,

when you go to a fine-art gallery or a museum, you rarely see “merch”
being sold alongside the, usually expensive, other art work
on display. Perhaps galleries & museums fear it would not enrich
the experience. But this is one of the reasons why Bettina Hubby’s
recent installation at the Bergamont Metro station construction site

is so refreshing! At the Dig The Dig exhibit, the construction site

adjacent to the Santa Monica Museum of Modern Art
was transformed into a 30 person show, curated by Hubby.
Beautiful still lives, thought-engaging conceptual pieces, &, yes, merch
were all present. Each installation brought different values to enrich
this event, which was also a party to celebrate the construction work

that had disrupted the community & SMMOA’s ability to work

before they commissioned this Resident Construction Artist on the site.
SMMOA’s July 21st celebration is the first public manifestation of
Hubby’s enrich-
ment of the environs. By exploring the relationship of construction
work to fine art,
as well creating “Dig The Dig” scarves, buttons, pillows, T-shirts and
other merch,
including a Perfume called “Dig” developed with Saskia Wilson Brown,
Hubby

emphasized why Rose Apodaca calls her “an art-egaliatian.” Hubby

& Brown (of the Institute of Art and Olfaction), crafted this edition of
work-
er inspired fragrance, limited to 100 bottles. In creating this “merch,”
they waived 49 flavors under the noses of workers from the site
to determine which scents made “tired workers feel good.” The Art
of concocting a scent that can make tired people feel good can enrich
in ways that conventional perfumes do not. You can feel immediately
enrich-
ed by this concoction of orange, vanilla, coffee, pine, rain & ‘fresh
laundry’ Hubby
& Brown developed without having to wait to see if others find the art
seductive! As the workers became a nascent focus group in Brown’s
work,
I wondered if this “bespoke scent” could be marketed beyond its use at
this site-
specific installation. As far as I know, there are no plans, but this
“merch”

also served as a “loss-leader” to call attention to IAO’s other “merch”

& the coordination of efforts between Hubby, Brown and the workers
enrich
our understanding of the ways art, labor, and commerce intersect in
any site
of familiar daily experiences. While this is only one aspect of Hubby’s
topical explorations, Dig suggests a way for those who call their art
work
to create, and collaborate, in coordination, with those who call their
work art

(of course, you could totally avoid the Merch Table. Hubby didn’t
demand
anybody Enrich her pockets, or even enjoy the Work or Works at the
Site, but I didn’t meet one person who found no Art they could use or
enjoy).

August 2013
BACK
 Neptune Fix

You ask what I look like.

Crows are flying home from school,
the wind is blowing hard.

Dear little revelers

come hopping along.
Please play my favorite nocturne!

Beautiful lobbies are ghosting

millionaire brides,
shortly to be replaced

by insects, dolls and cake.

Or who can stay
the bottles of heaven?

Blank and popped or painted

itself, the mind swallows the bait,
any rumor of pilgrims

crushed at the gate.

The blueness of a wound
cleans away rancor.

When someone goes,

someone remains.
Even out of the thorns

the robber swallows up

my ration, swallows hard
on the hook.
 Heron House

Mostly the creeps turn their heads

so as to not see us.

A repeated phrase glitters on the threshold.

My boyfriend drinks out of a dark

green puddle. What is Man that

thou should magnify him?

Then, too, then, too, then, too,

the Bardot girls listen for strangers

back home. Lucky

that grimy curtain doesn't do much

to hide the bed.

Pepper three-way

now your poppy

bower syndrome, not all there

to feel the pranks my boyfriends

have in store. Feast your eyes.
 Ottoman Agent

Take us the foxes

the little foxes
who spoil the vines,
take it to my used-to-be.

O take me to the waterfront

where the water runs cold.

Then the world wants to know

what this all about.

Neither say thou

before the angel:
royal riding,
NEVER EVER.

(And just for the record

the two long hours
it took to set the trap
seemed not long to him at all.)

The human torch is the main attraction.

And the visor?

A simple way to earn a few style points.

People run all over town.

Wilt thou set thine eyes

upon that which is not?

Nonstop.
Even when I remember
I am afraid.

The "bears" stopped at my house first,

done me all the harm they could.

Judging
by the amount of lipstick
I found, I would say
between 6 and 8 times.

She's still sleeping.

Put some of that in there.

 Due Diligence

His fingers have twelve years of piano

behind them.

From what rustic and debauched minds

do you inherit

such a pitiful neighing of diamonds?

Hence the name.

My sister threw a lit

candle at me for I had lingered

a moment too long.

All hypothetical of course.

Why mention ships

burned by the shore at Trestles?

Walk the streets all walk

the streets all night.

O the racetrack is a dusty place

and the cuckoo is a flying bird,
he hollers when he flies.

Pretty sure that Tunisian

girl Dido gave me something
last night.
 Lightning and Fur

'Tis pity thou art not

a bit more tongue-tied.

Here comes a candle

to light you to bed.

The sky comes down and howls

from stories of wolves

echo through the night.

I might start shimmering--

don't let nobody in.

The girl in the lane

who can't speak plain

cries gobble gobble gobble.

And when I use the word "serial"

I mean I've stolen a hat

from every guy who’s followed me home unless

the last one, maybe.

I mean Colorado Blackie has a black rind,

I mean the oink in the moo.

I am referring of course
to the epigrammatic turn

this conversation is taking.

I don't need no made-up panic.
When the stormy kids we call
stars rise thick as hail,

I sometimes ask a question

then answer it myself.

It is surprising, I admit, to have to reason

with oneself in prison in order to be sad.

And when I say "complete whore"

I mean the kid leather

apron encircling his waist, the patch

of high birth upon his cap.

Mock epic.

I think I just scared a bird with my dick.

BACK
Civic  Center  /  Dog  

Our  locked  broken-­‐into  

cemetery,  womb  
of  childhood  zombie  fear,    
distorts  fog  ghosts  
into  contrived  nocturnal    
cuneiform  to  mark  
the  homes  of  Iwo  Jima  vets    
and  captured  wives.  

Rosco  is  dead  now  too.  

We  killed  him  
in  August  on  the  bed    
where  for  those  final  
six  years  he  slept  in    
shitting  trembles.  
Still  often  comes  to    
mind,  tonight  

in  Mission  Memorial  
Park  with  bay  view  
wasted  on  dead  sailors,    
last  night  in  front  
of  the  Warfield  at  1  AM.    
Urine  withheld  
eight  hours  straight    
only  to  find  

after  release  from  sweat  

prison  the  city  
has  ordered  all  toilets    
abolished.  Meth  
pimps  degrade  a  caustic    
ass-­‐shaker.  Youths  
with  headphones  make    
a  day’s  work  tough  

for  the  anxiety-­‐stricken  

beggars.  Scent-­‐marked  
alley  corners  crossed    
and  shrugged  off.  
It  can  be  hard  to  win  minds    
and  hearts  of  a  scorned  
love’s  loves.  Rosco  would    
have  had  no  trouble.  
Words  From  A  Chipotle  Bag,  3/30/2013  
 
 
Luck  was    
never  growing    
in  easy    
water.  Congratulations    
 
can  sprout    
on  you    
just  like    
a  field    
 
of  sunshine    
&  from    
the  other    
crops  you  
 
picture  it  
  as  a  
    germinating  pinto,  
  a  little  
 
Chipotle  pinto    
sitting.    And    
the  farmer    
who  made    
 
you  forget    
the  burritos    
became  the    
best  reason    
 
you  have    
of  never    
livin’.  You’re    
soaking  yesterday    
 
out  of    
my  way.    
You’re  the    
more  sensible    
 
about  it    
&  I    
took  to    
it  ever    

 
  
little.  You    
and  I    
would’ve  been    
just  and    
 
made  some    
part  sustainable.    
This  thought    
of  people    
 
would  make    
us  all    
proud  but    
it  don’t.    
 
You  started    
second  and    
now  ever    
far    
in  back    
I  do    
the  greatest    
picking  up.    

 
Need  for  Swaddling  
 
 
The  streetlights  crane    
their  necks  to  look  down    
on  our  species,    
they  a  meeting  of  disappointed    
 
daddies  and  us    
the  agèd  children  who  retain    
a  need  for    
swaddling.  After  we  abandon  struggles    
 
their  solutions  surface    
years  ahead.  In  my  past    
say  some  voices    
hold  back,  from  young  idiocy    
 
we  evolve.  Of    
language  the  amount  wasted  daily    
could  downtown  bridges  
of  Los  Angeles  infinitely  light.    
 
We  forgot  how    
to  address,  stamp  an  envelope.    
We  relearned  how    
to  address  and  stamp  out    
 
a  distant  population.    
We  do  not  answer  phones.    
We  check  I.D.    
Even  then  we  do  not    
 
answer  the  phones.    
Christ  from  a  cave  emerges    
again.  Christ  emerges    
as  voices  in  a  photo.  
 
Too  at  ease    
we  singularly  are  to  glimpse  
risk,  to  depart    
warm-­‐calm,  collected,  our  collective  bed.

 
Manufactured  Breathing  
 
 
        Down  water  streams    
          onto  my  knee    
      through  the  hole    
        in  the  windshield.    
          I  feel  adieu    
            coming  on.    
 
        Stand  yawning    
          cops  beneath    
      the  café  awning,    
        barely  begin    
          their  too  early    
            in  the  morning    
 
        or  too  late    
          at  night  shift.    
      If,  say  I,  my    
        van’s  half  full    
          of  rain  then    
            of  my  situation  
 
        I  cannot  complain.    
          At  the  seagull    
      I  stare  on  a  dune    
        moon-­‐far  for    
          so  long  it  becomes    
            the  bath  towel  turban    
 
        of  an  Arizona  drifter    
          I  suspected  it  was.    
      Once  my  guitar    
        received  reverb    
          from  these  seacliff  bunkers  
            but  now  they  hush  sealed    
 
        by  concrete  blocked  rebar  
          of    ambivalent  governance;    
      traps  perhaps    
        for  my  internal  pigeon    
          roost  chorus.  I  wish    
            I  had  enjoyed  the  sound    
 
        more  while  I  could,    
          that  is  how    

 
       regret’s  embedded    
        in  modern  methods    
          of  backward  looking.    
            Into  a  future  I  see    
 
        these  cliffs  dwelling    
          undersea  and  will  wish    
      I  had  enjoyed    
        the  silence  of  bunkers  
          sealed,  dry,    
            and  tactile.  A  dream    
 
        suggests  Mutti  
          and  Vati  in  process    
      of  congenial  divorce,    
        I  at  twenty-­‐four    
          unphased  in  a  cabin.    
            He  needs  more  time    
 
        to  love  his  cars    
          and  she  respects  that,    
      the  end.    
        I’m  to  blame,    
          I  should  feel    
            as  is  proper    
 
        phoned-­‐in  response.    
          The  guilt  comes  not    
      so  I  walk  around    
        the  miraculously    
          undreamt  lake.    
            On  one  of  two    
 
        wood  moss  rafts    
          throbs  a  bus-­‐large    
      mass  of  tabby    
        cats  conjoined.    
          Stuffed  cats  hurled    
            by  preteen  boys    
 
        into  the  feline    
          algae-­‐slurping  hydra  
      assimilate.    
        The  raft  drifts    
          close,  pulls  me    
            aboard  their  float.    
         

 
         I  in  the  shoulder    
          of  a  respiratory    
      fuzzy  dream  
          behemoth    
          am  a  muscle,    
            a  sexless    
 
        Aeaean  nexus    
          of  domesticated  mewing.    
      At  which  point    
        the  two  rafts  collide,    
          the  uprooted  sycamore    
            atop  rival  raft    
 
        clobbers  my  blob    
          and  plunges  his  wood    
      root  deep  into    
        undulating  puss.    
          I  stare  at  my  eunuch    
            brain  for  so  long    
 
        it  becomes    
          the  punographic  beatnik    
      I  suspected  it  was.  
        I’m  to  blame,  
          I  should  feel  
            as  is  proper.  
 

 
Statem
ents
MmOoLlLlYy  BbEeNnDdAaLlLl
I am presently writing a manuscript of poems that dwell in the
human experience of animals in a zoo. In this sense, the poems
are not precisely about animals, or about zoos, or even about the
human observer, but about the ontological space of experiencing
animals within the leisure “park” of the zoo—a space that one
treasures, or abhors, in part because of its anachronism. Without
specifically noting the identities of the animals, I hope the po-
ems allow the actual details of animal behavior to inhabit a
shared space with the sympathies and imagination of the ob-
server.

GgUuYy  BbEeNnNnEeTtTt
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BbYyRrOoNn  CcAaMmPpBbEeLlLl
Membranes is a narrative triptych that experiments with various
levels of magnification and (metaphorical) backlighting to build
an intentionally shaky narrative into which the reader becomes
inadvertently but inevitably implicated via the observer effect.
The 1st Layer is a work of flash fiction, and it breaks one of the
rules of submission, since it was not possible to force it into a
single 6X9 page and retain a font size above 10pt. I apologize. It
establishes a short, surreal narrative that is purportedly expli-
cated, but in reality undermined, by the subsequent two pieces.
The 2nd Layer is a field of colored text, and is intended to visu-
ally suggest a membrane stretched taut across the page. By filter-
ing for specific colors, several dialogues come to light. The 3rd
and final layer is a series of charts and graphs that report upon
the character and situations brought forward by Layers 1 and 2.
It is simultaneously the closest zoom and the most disorienting.
The (often unconscious) decision of how and where to apply the
“raw data” from Layers 2 and 3 upon the narrative in Layer 1
casts the reader into the uncomfortable role of meaning-maker,
observer and “accomplice.”

GgEeNnEeVvAa  CcHhAaOo
These excerpts comes from a book written in three voices to in-
vestigate a problem common to all. No conclusion was reached,
possibly because one of them disappeared before the experiment
could conclude.

LlAaRrKkIiNn  HhIiGgGgIiNnSs
Maybe lines, not linearity. A capital letter evokes its anatomy of
sound and built form. These pieces are ongoing visual-textual
investigations of meaning, inherent and constructed,
addressing movement.
Collaged within “peripatetic L” is a portion of Wikipedia’s defini-
tion for lateral consonant—it was less concise than Oxford’s and
other sources therefore its circuitous wording seemed appropri-
ate.

In “Lava and Houses” periods primarily used as punctuation in-

dicate movement (quiet to active) rather than full stop, subvert-
ing their original singular designation, scattering as plural rever-
berations—if one were to translate these marks as incomplete or
expanded ellipses, then perhaps resonances of lapse, deletion,
and pondering are induced.
A version of “Lava and Houses” was first published in Erasure,
Naropa Press, Boulder, CO. The rest of these works, or variants,
are included in my chapbook published by Mindmade Books
(formally Seeing Eye Books) —December 2013.

DdEeBbOoRrAaHh  MmEeAaDdOoWwSs
These are two scenes from the play entitled Guide Dogs that is
drawn from the inspired daring of the Occupy movement—one
portion of which occurred at nearby LA City Hall. The play ex-
plores Occupy, as well as reading and interpretation.

Caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that the

following play is fully protected under the copyright laws of the
United States and all other countries of the Copyright Union. All
rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recita-
tion, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting,
and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly
reserved. All inquiries concerning performance rights should be
addressed to the author, Deborah Meadows, c/o Liberal Studies
Department, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona,
3801 W. Temple Avenue, Pomona, CA 91768.

DdEeNnNnIiSs  PpHhIiLlLlIiPpSs
“On Rooks” is the R in a recently completed alphabet book, pro-
visionally titled ON. It was published in OR #5, two years ago.
AaJj  UuRrQqUuIiDdIi
The 2011 marketing strategies of Chipotle, as well as many other
popular fast food chains, involved printing ecstatic essays about
the über greatness of the company on all facets of its paper cups
and wrappings. I noticed the interesting vocabulary used on
some of these containers while eating lunch there last year, thus
my project ensued. I made a chart containing a tally of every
word in each individual cup/bag essay; for each item I rear-
ranged each word in the item’s respective essay so the word
would not touch any words it previously touched and so each
word would be used no more times than it had appeared in the
original essay, and accordingly I tried to make grammatical or at
least musical sense of the new nonsensical content. I mean no
disrespect to Chipotle in the exercise; those meals were all deli-
cious ( and as a poet I must respect their wordy marketing ideas.)

The other poems emerged from my transition from West Los

Angeles to Brooklyn and back to the best coast, and they are
marked by my borderline obsession for not leaving all lines
completely aligned to the left.