Author Archives for Travis Catsull

"Chapter Time" by Klyd Watkins

Chapter Time
poem by Klyd Watkins

Because the living room did not lie down a super highway,
Spike had to put up signs to have the big trucks detour through.

Judy and Linda would giggle and squeal like at a horror movie
waiting for the ZZWOOOOOMMM and
waiting to stick their cheeks into the v of the wind wake.

Neofunk said, to no one in particular,
“Myth is the highest form of knowledge..
Berdyaev reminds us Plato recognized this.”

Phospher, to not interrupt this, wiggled his eyes for his wife to go
get him a coke
but she had been gargling neon and was busy speaking signs unto them.

Judy fixed up a puppet that Linda worked.
When a truck came,
ZZOOOOMMMM,
Linda dropped the puppet smack into its face.

Breathlessly they pulled the strings to see if it would rise again,
as the big truck disappeared down the road.

Phospher went after his own coke.
Neofunk continued, “Temporarily,
poetry is where myth
quickens from knowing into music.”

ZZZZWOOOOOMMMMM
said the red
sign Phospher’s wife
blew into
the air. It took off down the road after
the red truck.

Klyd Watkins’ first chapbook of poetry, pete’s improvizations [sic], was published by Owl’s Breath Press in 1969. During the seventies he produced ten lps of Poetry Out Loud with his wife Linda and with Peter and Patricia Harleman. These records are still collected. He has alternated between writing poetry and creating poetry by direct audio recording of improvisation. Since the ’90s he has sometimes combined the two, using text as well as improvisation in his recordings and publishing written poetry. His CDs include Listen The Night, as part of the band What Are We? with Mike Panasuk, and “Harp All Made of Gold,” which presents chapter one of his long poem Jack spoken over world class rock and roll. Books include Ghost Trees from Sugar Mountain Press and 5 Speed from The Temple.
His own poetry and that of friends, both well know and never heard of, appears on his website: http://www.thetimegarden.com/
http://thundershack.net/ is devoted to his backyard recording studio.

"St. John’s Fire" by T.M. Göttl

poem by T.M. Göttl

St. John’s Fire

Next time you stand at the foot of a spiral stair,
look straight up,
into the dome, owned by
the gold and green brothers, Polaris and Sirius.
And there, you’ll see
the dove and the raven,
the flood birds, entwined,
in the pupil of a god’s eye, and the
god’s double tongues—one of leather, one of steel—
carving silver peacocks
into the backs of liars and other faithless.
They fill the streets
with their gunpowder cries, but
intrepid, you kick past their glittering,
bottled hollers, approaching
the mossy queen with
tiny lions climbing
from her open collar.
Your fresh supplications, awkward and
skinless, hover near the queen’s feet,
until the twin cubs devour them
and run. You must chase them,
without wheels or engines or bullets this time;
only your untried calves and thighs and lungs, only
your untested heart.
And you chase them, every midnight and midmorning,
past the tribes of the hopeful
tending St. John’s fires,
and camping at the ocean’s fingertips.

T.M. Göttl, a member of the Buffalo ZEF Creative Arts Community, has won a Wayne College Regional Writing Award and a Franklin-Christoph Poetry Prize. She won first place on the first time she ever competed in a poetry performance competition. She travels throughout the state of Ohio, writing and performing her poetry, and her work has appeared online and in print, in places such as Deep Cleveland, The Poet’s Haven, The Mill, The Hessler Street Fair Anthology, and a bilingual poetry collection to benefit victims of the Sichuan Earthquake in China in 2008. Her first collection, Stretching the Window, was published in February 2008.

POETRY: "Dear Horizon" by Adam Perry

Dear Horizon,

 

             It could have been an anchor I pushed into you, but the pull was something like a lighthouse. Perhaps we’re a wildfire “because of what happens between ellipses and the continuation that we make love so well we recover our virginity.” I see the city, but we can exist here all-knowing and unconscious, because we’re moving. We mystery: man and wom(b)an(d) vice and never versus – a reversal. Who has the authority to push and pull heaven and hearth from both sides of variability? If only it was like a book with cylindrical binding in the center – pages inside and out, an author given peace to please – light room on a dark horse – a shape in shadows exists while you enter and by no means exit; an image speaks with no prevention, only echo fire. Jump off a building holding hands –what’s the chance you’ll fall on someone you love like an eclipse? Would you recognize sex from a print of my fantasy palm? (My son’s line; my head line; my archer and flame and mineral line) Perception is the story of destiny; how we’re always right on time, stumble and discover we’re home, wiping stroboscopic genitals with sun-dried rags to prepare for free will. So breathe into my character, give me an overabundance of names to balance all those unnecessary superlatives on the exclamation points of a first kiss that happens every day. Circles are the only Lord of Light; they draw all possible combinations back and forth together and feather in orbit. A universal magnetism, desires tamed through indulgence vis-à-vis how blood bleeds: causal, astral, fizzle, stop and repeat. In essence, I would use your face…a photo of your grace…to describe what and how I’m feeling, but some people are out of love, so out of wearing skin that up is down and nothing moves anyway. We have become a most-favored instrument, a means of expression. Do this harmony on my hereafter, because the common gender is obsolete:

                                                                               Love,
                                                                                     Adam Perry

Adam Perry will graduate this year from Naropa University. His first book No One Knows was published by Richard Denner’s D Press several years ago. You may have heard his music with the bands Whitford and Love X Nowhere. The quoted remarks in “Dear Horizon” are from his SO Irene Joyce and the poem is from his forthcoming collection on Monkey Puzzle Press (monkeypuzzleonline.com), entitled fotographs of bones.

"Think fondly of Eachother" by Bree

Think fondly of Eachother
This is what we are

Eachother

Also know we are alone together
And will die the same

Alone

Madness:
in the cooler
          of the mind,
the elevators
       corridors and yes the
                             sole stairwalker
               even now he whistles
                             thinking fondly of eachother

A leaf drags along the ground for miles

(eachother)

A cricket intermittently makes an
                announcement

Eachother

What it is we share
    When we mow each our own

When we type for one

                 When we meet the mailman
At the door it is in unison

Turn madness into roars
            Of joking with eachother
                         Tears paper thin the walls of
                                    Anger at eachother like
                             Birthday cakes and chicken
                       With butter for eachother
               For this is all we are

—Bree

This poem is from Bree’s “Was Chicken Trax Amid Sparrows Tread,” available at abebooks.com, or send check/cash/MO for $10 per book plus $2 shipping & handling, to
Green Panda Press
3174 Berkshire Road
Cleveland Heights, OH 44118