Duality II
by Wendell Berry
What can bring us past
this knowledge, so that you
will never wish our life
undone? For if ever you
wish it so, then I must wish
so too, and lovers yet unborn,
whom we are reaching toward
with love, will turn to this
page, and find it blank.
Immanence
by Eileen Myles
All the doors in my home are open.
There’s a pulse outside I want to hear.
The phone’s unplugged.
The pastiche of you on me would be unforgivable now.
If there’s a god squirming around
she sees me & is me.
I wish the birds were souls, invisible.
I wish they were what I think they are; pure sound.
you know that song
by jason mashak
I remember smoking on the porch, barely
breathing in a mossy wicker chair.
You came up the steps like an old song
I’d not heard before,
the light of one lamp
on all your faces.
**
Singed foliage from a time machine in the Ozarks.
The rain tarp over an experimental anniversary gift.
The ventriloquist’s hand, in the dressing room, after
An intense set.
A porcelain bowl of discarded hearing aids.
Haunted guano by an Irish bat on historic rubble.
An open cold-cream jar on the midday windowsill at the K-spa
Reminded me of ox red quartz in the showy plaza of a blood cell.
A Gene Clark cassette sandwiched in the Mazda seats.
The X-ray of a complicated handshake.
Wrestling trading cards drizzled with King Cobra.
A piñata of a corncob pipe filled with baby corncob pipes.
Much later, stink lines from a bog within meters of a crayon
Factory, its consistency like that of a child’s brain.
The Sound
by kim addonizio
Marc says the suffering that we don’t see
still makes a sort of sound — a subtle, soft
noise, nothing like the cries or screams that we
might think of — more the slight scrape of a hat doffed
by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back
to let a lovely woman pass, her dress
just brushing his coat. Or else it’s like a crack
in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress
and slippage going on unnoticed by
the family upstairs, the daughter leaving
for a date, her mother’s resigned sigh
when she sees her. It’s like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it drops.
It’s shy, it’s barely there. It never stops.
Imagining Defeat
by David Berman
She woke me up at dawn,
her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels.
I sat up and looked out the window
at the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees.
A bus ticket in her hand.
Then she brought something black up to her mouth,
a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler.
I reached under the bed for my menthols
and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.
Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead
in the distance where it doesn’t matter
And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,
so far behind his wagon where it also doesn’t matter.
except as a memory of rest or water.
Though to believe any of that, I thought,
you have to accept the premise
that she woke me up at all.
I SMOKED A SPIDER
by Casey Bush
It was dark I was drunk
Probably already stoned
Didn’t need another hit
Like I said: Dark, Drunk, Stoned
Picked up what I thought was dried bud
But certainly it could well have been an insect
Felt the same packed into the pipe
A fly a wasp a moth a midge
In any event properly ignited
Set on fire and sucked up
Thought it was some dead leaves
A thorn a thistle an incandescent straw
Tasted like holy hemp
Could have been anything maybe even a spider
Accented by a gooey pipe residue
No use scraping the screen for a corpse
Medicinal moss fern fungus mold
Husk larvae seed pupae pulp algae
Bong fodder clogging up the old windpipe
Although upon reflection maybe it was a spider
Illuminated by flame as it danced within a blaze
Inter-digitating 8 legged arachnid-like
Bosa Nova Quick Step Samba Paso Doble
Slowly stimulated by heat
Quickly reduced to ash
Yes I may well have smoked a spider
Or some such sentient being
Animal vegetable mineral stone paper scissors
Following the long legged blond
Straight down the rabbit hole
Gobbled up by obligatory prescriptions
Unexpected tax refunds
Highways lined with salad bars
And the fumes of flesh
Casting clouds of doubt
Upon preconceived notions
About the allegedly vast differences
Between the plant and animal kingdoms
Ultimately satisfying and oh so smooth
Got high while an insect did its last heel and toe
Got me thinking maybe it’s the next big buzz
As yes I guess I actually smoked a spider.
Confessions
by Lowell Jaeger
I once shoplifted
a tin of Vienna sausages.
Crouched in the aisle
as if to study the syllables
of preservatives, tore off the lid,
pulled out a wiener and sucked it down.
I’ve cheated on exams.
Made love to foldouts.
Walked my paper route in a snowstorm after dark,
so I could steal down a particular alley
where through her gauze curtains, a lady
lounged with her nightgown undone.
I’ve thrown sticks at stray dogs.
Ignored the cat scratching to come inside.
Even in the rain.
Sat for idle hours in front of the TV, and not two feet away
the philodendrons for lack of a glass of water
gasped and expired.
So many excuses I’ve concocted to get by.
Called in sick when I was not. Grabbed credit
for happy accidents I had no hand in.
Pointed fingers
to pin the innocent with crimes
unmistakably mine.
I have failed
to learn from grievous error.
Repeated gossip.
Invented gossip. Held hands
in a circle of friends to rejoice
over the misfortune of strangers.
Pushed over tombstones.
Danced the devil’s jig.
Once, when I was barely old enough
to walk home on my own, I hid
behind an abandoned garage.
Counted sixteen windows.
Needed only four handfuls of stones
to break every one.
A man in terror of impotence
or infertility, not knowing the difference
a man trying to tell something
howling from the climacteric
music of the entirely
isolated soul
yelling at Joy from the tunnel of ego
music without the ghost
of another person in it, music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything in silence and the
beating of a bloody fist upon
a splintered table.
Never Again The Same
by James Tate
Speaking of sunsets,
last night’s was shocking.
I mean, sunsets aren’t supposed to frighten you, are they?
Well, this one was terrifying.
People were screaming in the streets.
Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.
It wasn’t natural.
One climax followed another and then another
until your knees went weak
and you couldn’t breathe.
The colors were definitely not of this world,
peaches dripping opium,
pandemonium of tangerines,
inferno of irises,
Plutonian emeralds,
all swirling and churning, swabbing,
like it was playing with us,
like we were nothing,
as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,
this for which nothing could have prepared us
and for which we could not have been less prepared.
The mockery of it all stung us bitterly.
And when it was finally over
we whimpered and cried and howled.
And then the streetlights came on as always
and we looked into one another’s eyes?
ancient caves with still pools
and those little transparent fish
who have never seen even one ray of light.
And the calm that returned to us
was not even our own.
Arthur Magazine 