The Junk Lot Review

Becoming Cold

2012-02-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

As I led the way, my footprints carved the path,
I traveled deeper into knee-high pillows of snow.
My body slowly grew into the cold, becoming its own kind of cold.
A chilling, condensating, natural coldness
The heat, that remained trapped within me, escaped my parted lips in the form of fog...luring me forward... reminding me to breathe.
My toes became heavier, my breath wetter
the silence allowed me time to realize just how much I dislike the sound of snow grinding beneath my boots
breaking,
bending,
echoing, like bones scraping against one another within my very being.
The pungency of the sound, traveled straight through me, incinerating me from the inside out.
I saw myself - a frozen corpse - paralyzed by the sensations below me.

Focusing narrowly on my breathing, I returned to a stable position.
turning deep inside , silently moving through the labyrinth within me.
around me, the trees enveloped me.
I secretly watched, paying witness to the snowflakes falling deep beneath the blankets of white below them.

Absorption.
Creation.

The flakes melt, and like a balmy liquid they dissipate and evolve into something else that did not exist before.
If only I had a vial, to carry this magic with me.

A Wild Kind of Freedom

2012-02-06T09:10:00.000-08:00

By Kate Hammerich

An hour in the rec room twice a day,

bare concrete and we feel a wild kind of
freedom, our laughter bounces off the

walls, there is no sky or air, just a button
by the door but we walk in circles, talk
of baby fat, who we would sleep with

when our time comes. We tuck in shirts
for freestyle handstands, our backbones
creak against the floor with each

situp we stretch our bodies out like
young cheetahs,
remember who we once were.

Song of Silence

2012-02-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

By James C. Addoms

The trees know what to say when I don’t

on these breezy fall days.

Their leaves whispering secrets that lie on the breath

of the Divine,

rustling in its beauty, and soon stilled in awe

of its simplicity.

The stream mumbles hints as it passes by.

Her beautiful curves dissecting mountains into pebbles rolled round

until their every secret’s revealed.

The ducks probe her depths for answers

while I watch in anxious anticipation.

Even the sun sings down silent beams of sound,

wave after wave

too glorious for our comprehension-

The discerning waters elevated to vapor.

They leave behind this plane where I remain shaded

by their knowledge

to construct the heavens.

I look on silently awed,

helplessly grasping to translate the ineffable chorus

whose majesty leaves encaged this scribe’s

dry and foreign tongue.

A Fool's Game

2012-02-02T09:33:00.000-08:00

By Ben Welp

Seconds slip through key holes,
As I remember the timber that is now charcoal.
Bourbon stung lips unzipped the first stone throw.
I thought I was the answer to you-
Turns out I've never known.

Tongue tied to hide your lie there was nothing you would share.
Then you hit the brakes so hard I hovered in the air.
Whiplash is emotional trash my irrational fear.
You left me on the pavement-
Away you went without a care.

Someone slow down this chemical change.
A hollowed out foul mouth is all that remains.
A tear stained left brain with the right to complain.
I try to refrain from sleeping alone-
Yet alone I remain.

Cat calls from pool halls is what I've become
I'll be under the tables with fables and chewed gum.
Protecting what's left from becoming undone.
Complete control is a fool's game-
It can never be won.

1,2,3 Masonry - The Fatal Spell

2012-01-26T12:47:00.000-08:00

by RJ Lotze

The beautifully terrifying thing is -
Snakes do what they do
At might's cutting command.

The world will be man's cursed apple
'Til the people all join hands.

One is too many
As Two is one curved Z
Two strong arms
Gets one to three.

Wouldn't it be nice forever
To break this fatal spell
See us again together
And put an end to Hell-

30

2012-01-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

By Simon Andrew

I’ve grown old.
I am older now than the members
of the rock bands I like.
Older than the
teachers I had crushes on back in high school.
I am older than my parents were
when they gave birth to me.
Older than Kerouac was
when he finished “On The Road.”
Older than some of my
ancestors ever lived.
I am older than I was yesterday
and even older than I was
when I started writing this sentence.

But still,
I am young.

Younger
than the universe,
and the bike I ride to work.
Younger than the scotch
I still can’t afford to buy.
Younger than the books
that make me ache with
love and jealousy.
Younger than Jesus
when he turned the water into wine.
Younger than Bukowski
when his words were found,
at last,
in the hands of those who
understood.
I am younger
than I will be tomorrow,
younger even than I will be
by the time I finish this sentence.
still young enough to notice
the legs that hold up a well turned skirt

I am young enough
to think that I can
still make it.
Which I suppose
is the best one
can hope for
as
we
are
pushed
ever
forward
in
the
slow
march
of
time.

Body Memory

2012-01-08T06:39:00.000-08:00

by Kate Hammerich

there was white sand on the white shore,

cresting into blue, the salt a light film on the body,

you stand knee-deep and dive hard into an
oncoming wave, feel the bone-deep rush,

know what life was as a dolphin, feel the shark
rise inside you, flat-eyed, burned out,

nothing but the open sea

Foolish April

2012-01-04T06:52:00.000-08:00

By Kamri Dillard

The day was wet.
The clouds were voltaic.
By the time the sun had started to set
I had every shade of blue memorized,

You had my heart
pounding.
Pounding
Hammering
My body crumbled
like dry paint, I crumbled.

My limbs were snapping, and I was falling
Into your arms, struggling.
Trying to find my footing
Trying to find my head

It was that wet April day
with the brushstrokes of your lips,
with the soft edges of your fingertips
a fire was sparked within me.
To this day,
for fifteen hundred days...
you manage to soak my dreams with color.

I remember when you pulled away from me,
the way your hair blew across your smile
with the direction of the wind.

Why I Will Never be a Famous Poet

2011-12-29T17:34:00.000-08:00

By Ryan Connell

In the cluttered
costly
halls of academia,
all covered in tweed
and ivy,
MFA candidates
professorships
and undergrads,
—far too many
undergrads—
stand queued;
bottlenecked
to get through
that tiny room
where only a handful
will
make it
and
become famous
in a genre
that nobody
reads.

But in the
meantime
there are
conferences,
competitions,
tea with department heads,
books and books
on craft,
peer reviewed
journals,
quid pro quo
accolades,
book blurbs,
workshops,
and the crass clamor
of networking.
All so as to be
called a
poet.

Perhaps
I say all this
because
I am not a
success.
Being trampled
by the mob is
ugly,
but to lead
the procession
divine.

But I do think,
really,
I am happier
here.
Writing poems
for the joy of it.
My only ambition
to make words
sing
in new and
secret
ways.
To play
with art
like a favorite
toy.
And maybe
to take my bike
the long way
through the
park
to get
more bread and
wine.

Collision

2011-12-21T20:59:00.000-08:00

By Kamri Dillard

The line between us collides.
becoming so thin,
our skin
blends.

Even in this state, with our teeth buried deep
into each other,
We know about breaking points.

We all snap, buckle, bend, Plunge.
the moment when we hit the water
we absorb into ourselves
... each other
At these times, when the line
is thick
we grow thicker
becoming so strong,
our bodies are
immobile.

Even in this position, with my hands digging
deep into your ribs,
I feel your skin, like fine grained sand
and it feels just like my own.
I am too afraid to let go.

Flesh

2011-11-23T16:21:00.001-08:00

By Chris Kelly

I open mine eyes to fleshy

Pale intoxicant.

Jubilant protrusions rounding

Pigmented perfection.

Arms akimbo,

Creating triangular portals to

Ecstatic Nirvana.

Take me farther.

"I am desire,"

her eyes send whispered warnings

of what lay beyond the honey-toned

expanse.

I outstretch my arms parallel

Ground-wise.

Palms up.

Always up.

The soft of such attempting

To catch heaven's raindrops.

Or,

At least a handful of softened

Sensuality.

Skin's tissue wipes away his

Tears.

Juxtaposed against the

Repetition,

A phrase.

"Please,

Destroy me."

THE ANGUISH OF ARAGORN

2011-10-17T11:28:00.001-07:00

By Swati Chavda

O that the fate of another

Never rested on the acts of mine.

Never to roam free?

Can I not slip off this mantle –

This choking, strangulating trick of time?

Under the doom of destiny,

Within the chains of time,

I fret

To soar above these featureless plains of life.

Stop looking at me

Like a sunflower guided by light,

Like oceantide swelling in the night.

I am no hero –

Never aspired to be.

A simple mortal,

Destined to err now and then,

Just like you and them.

I want my freedom

Just like you and them.

After all, Prometheus paid with his life,

And you think that so should I?

I have been given a task too lofty,

I have seen the fate of many who tried -

You glorified their failure,

You shunned the fact that they cried.

All alone, they died…

Now I, their descendant,

Poised on the brink of their choice,

What if fated to repeat their mistake?

Even before you ripped me to shreds,

I would die a thousand deaths

Inside my own head.

Shhhhh

2011-10-05T21:10:00.001-07:00

By Natalie Garro
August 7, 2011

At some point it was all
a little too much,
and I released my breath—
let it bounce across the floor—
until it rolled to a timid stop
at your feet.

You looked at me with
crinkled eyes—
as though you were looking into the sun—
but I was not your light.

My black eyes were the sucking depths that
dragged you under and
inhaled you into my
lungs like a
gas or
breath beneath the water.

I have to tell you, I'm sorry for
holding your head beneath the waves.

When I let out
a sigh and my
body relaxed against the
cold leather
a solitary droplet leaked
onto my palm, and the
shaking stopped for a moment,
but still, I would not
meet your gaze.

Sometimes solitude isn't necessarily
a physical ailment,
and I was alone when I
refused to pry my
nails from the
yielding skin of my
forearms.

Sometimes a short response
is actually the
slamming of a steel door
(that I welded with my
wicked words and
whimpered wrongs—
unbound and free—
into the atmosphere
for every sad truth that
would weaken you,
lick you like the sting of a whip,
and I'm sorry that my tongue
wasn't just
a little less enticing,
a little less entombing).

I drew you in,
a thirsty drain
unplugged at the bottom of the sea,
swallowing everything,
caring not what everything was,
and in my stomach sits
rotting flesh and plant decay,
boulders and
the shattered planks of
fishing boats...
boats fishing for the
treasure buried deep within—
now worthless as gold pieces scatter
across the barren depths of
my insides,
seething slowly into molten yellow liquid
as they dissolve away—
these are the truths of my existence,

and I'm sorry I cannot share them with you.

I can see your golden locks billow in
the wind of my breath as—
for one last time—I
exhale my silence
into the swirling pools of liquid
beneath your lashes,
and whisper words you—
in your deafness—
cannot hear;
and I'm so sorry non-words escape my dumb
lips to pass—swollen ghosts—through your deaf ears;
and I'm sorry
that we both were blind,
so your rough face in my rugged hands
was never enough
to tell you
how sorry I am
that silence is my final sad and
woefully decrepit sigh
to drop—heavy—
to the floor,
and settle discontentedly
once more
at your feet.

I Miss You (Or, Hide My Phone When I'm Drinking)

2011-09-09T09:28:00.001-07:00

By Ryan Connell

I know what you are doing
(at least I think)
why you disappeared
after I drunkenly said
"I miss you"
and you reluctantly replied
"I don't know what to say"

I broke the rules
I said too much
you don't want a man
who is
attached

you are not the girlfriend type

And I know this
And I know I am not in
love with you

But I do miss you
whether drunk
or sober.
I miss the imprint of
your body on
my skin.

And though I don't love you
I do love:
your lips
your tongue
your flesh
how they alter the
chemistry of my body.
how I am changed by every
touch.

So yes,
I do miss you
(your words, your art, your laugh)

and I do very much love
(your kiss, your hips, your eyes)

but I do not miss or love
in the way that
demands anything
that is anything
other than a means
for my own means

I miss you
(to please the hunger of my memory)
I love
(for the satisfaction that comes with your pleasure)

For you are beauty
and beautiful things
will not be possessed

(just admired
until
the eventual
fade away)

Someday

2011-09-07T13:41:00.001-07:00

By DJ Kato

The subconscious knows a lot more
than you would guess, it can predict
the future, from the age you liked to

climb walnut trees.  That is why my
10-year-old subconscious fed me dreams
of my mother sinking with the Titanic

and me holding her empty guitar case
over her grave on a sunny day and
crying.  I knew this would fall apart

considering I watched my sole caretaker
drink and pop to escape her little ones,
considering the first time I got in trouble

with the cops and first got rimmed was
age five.  From when you lost your job at
the Guitar Center for having a shot or two

during lunch to help ease some pain in
your teeth, and when you almost killed me
in San Francisco, when I saw you let that

black man kiss your white hands, from when
you ran to New Orleans with no money, just
a wooden boat paddle in your hands with the

American flag sticker.  I would like to think
of you as sea foam, mother, drinking on an
eternal wave, gladly absorbing the sunlight

for the rest of your days.  I know that you
were a drug addict and an alcoholic, but I
would like to think of you as having been an

artist, an astronaut, a scientist.  From the
time I was sixteen and watched you get so
high I thought you were going to die, I knew

would watch you dissolve slowly, but I
would like to think of you as a starry woman
with blood red antlers, a peaceful prayer for

the world, sparkling foam upon the waves,
a beautiful little girl chasing bubbles who
wants to save the world when she grows up

someday.

Punk Rock, I Was a Cry-Baby

2011-08-17T13:02:00.001-07:00

By Ryan Connell

When I was a kid
I tried to be
Punk rock.
Bleached my hair,
ruined my clothes with
safety pins,
screamed
in defiance of
those silent orange
New Mexico sunsets.
There were maybe 10
Or 12 of us together
In my small town.
We all knew each other,
and we'd go to the
civic center
where bands
still in high school
would come up from
El Paso to play.

We knew each other
but I wasn't part of them.
Up late in my
room
pouring over books on
anarchy
scouring lyrics for
meaning

I thought too much,
I didn't get it.
Punk is not a noun
it's a verb.
the sex,
the violence,
the rock and roll,
It was about doing.
It was about being.
It was the opposite of thinking.
Zen masters in
patch covered sleeveless vests.
Nietzsche manifest
in mosh pit brawls.

So there I was,
an outcast
amongst the rejects,
scrawling lonely
in my notebook;

Waiting for a movement
that would have me.

Pornography into Poetry

2011-08-10T10:19:00.001-07:00

By DJ Kato

California's capital was the birth place of
an angelic blackhole who could swallow men
whole in a leopard print bra with blue or
green lace, it's difficult to remember

which.  What draws me to that sickness, that
constant desire for more?  What draws me to
that fantasy of a mountain falling on top of
me?  That feeling of being a total whore. I

wonder how many couches you've sedated strangers
on.  I wonder what kinds of diseases do fishnet
stockings and bright red corsets attract?  Nice
ones?  Fatal ones?  Watermelony?  Pearlescent?

I wonder if you collapse at the end of the day
like tall buildings with angry planes stuck in
their sides like thorns.  I wonder if you collapse
like when you put a puppy down.  I wonder if you collapse
like discs in the back, all instantly turning to powder.

Tonight in my dreams I will hear her making that
clug clug clug cluck noise and will hear the
tinkling noise the chains around her neck make.
Smile sweetheart, you're on camera!  Your dream

catcher will no longer catch that sadness that
leaks out of you at night, I'm sorry.  It will
no longer stand for being soaked in dreamblood
and glowing semen.  You would think, in a room

full of men ready to jump off buildings at any
second, at least one would be touching her to
make her happy, not just grabbing her by the hair
or frail white wrists, but none do.  You would think

the huge black tubes were what made her mouth so
deformed and stretched out like a bag, but really
it was her tendency to put her mouth to the ground
and eat the dirt out of her backyard.  That is what

kept her so thin, some say.  Others said that
amphetamines were surely the only thing that
could keep her from fully experiencing the pain
of so many people in her at once.  For an entire

hour I listened to you scream, and it definitely
was not your first time.  Tonight in my dreams,
things will be lucid, and I will run down the
hallways searching frantically for empty bedrooms

imagining your lovely eyes and I can't even tell
the color, they are so black around the edges.

Cardiac Dyslexia

2011-08-08T18:45:00.001-07:00

By Sam Columna

My irregular heart beats

me up worse than siblings

lovers and poor nutrition. My irregular heart

beats and chopped liver words up my wind pipe

too jigsawed to pronounce without stubbing my tongue. be, blisters

bound, we were wound d

down my irregular

heart beats my eyes down when I stutter

do you

doubts my limbs in when

doubt my lips to pointed repetition my lisps

split my lips my pleases, produced spleen and lungs bagpiped

flat soufle'd my flooded liver my irregular heart beats un

naturally deluges that void in my stomach my jug-

gular wine goblet. b

A

be by my s

I'd see this sad de

fense e eff

fect me. Gee she hate

chide my I er

regular my irregular heart

beat my irregular heart

beats out of me.

Happy Birthday

2011-08-04T09:14:00.001-07:00

June 21, 2011

By Natalie Garro

I can fly. I'm gonna fly like a butterfly
over velvet blue skies in
a sleepy summer rain
where the grasses bob
their heads to the
beat of each water drop,
each droplet that slides
down their stem to
the wide-open mouth of the
soil below,
craving just a little more
to dampen dusty
throats
and mouths dry as
the first time you saw
the most beautiful creature
you still have ever seen.

And I can fly
over the sun that
kissed its rays into my
brown shoulders,
grabbed them and squeezed like
an estranged—but once close
—aunt or relative who greets
you only with a pearly smile that
glints like the sunrise
against the ocean's tumbling waves.
We don't break promises,
we keep the words locked inside
the bars of our chests—
behind the prison bars of
guilt—and we
unlock them only when the
positive words that were
negative actions
scream victory and
throw their hands up to the skies because we
finally took one step forward to
transform ourselves,
and our selves are
perfect.

And when we take one step
away from the
broken mess we were
we wrestle with our wrongdoings and
with weeping eyes wipe away
the wistful whims of wretched strife,
we raise our eyes to the sunshine where
no shadow darkens the corners of
our sight, and we see only light.

And from each blade in our back,
we sprout wings,
great bones thrust through our
withered skin and soft feathers
dripping with human blood shake
away red birth to drip crimson drops onto
the blades of grass that
happily drink and only slightly
wince—not like a whiskey shot
that slides down
the throat for the first time,
more like a sip of
sour milk.

I can fly,
and you can fly, and we
will fly over the mountain
that is my mother, great purple majesty
rising high above me like
a great protector—
beautiful, the flat earth surrounding envious.
Her greatness shared is
greatness earned, and
she will share her vast splendor with
the lowly and the
splendid,
so all may feel
the shelter of her grace
on a hot summer day
and bask in her dignity
when she's crowned with a veil
of soft white snow
in January's yawning lull.

From this mountain top, I will fly,
drift like a butterfly across the plains until my
tired wings come to rest in
the plump leaves of
an Aspen tree
beside a giggling
mountain stream
where all is green,
a joyous shade
of rapture within
the arms of
my mother—
once the flesh of human weakness—
now immortal peak and earth.

Buena Vista at Dusk

2011-07-31T10:07:00.001-07:00

By Marina Scholtz

The way your hair curls after a night next to me and no shower could melt any girl's heart-

I'm just the lucky one.

I could get lost in this mountain town.

I think we're all mesmerized;

Fire is our provider in this moment

I can't remember the last time my hands were so dirty that I could recognize the pattern of my fingerprints simply because of the amount of dirt seeped into the cracks.

But the fire is the real attraction-

the performer, the contortionist.

Fire contorts for us- at some points an absolute necessity for survival and at others a bringer of death, decay, and destruction.

Somehow, though, fire is the ever-faithful giver of life;

like the legend of of the phoenix bird, we and all of Earth's inhabitants are reborn from the ashes of devastation.

New life is the gift of primal man's weapon and shelter.

Take solace in the warmth of the licks of flame: whether they befriend you or not is irrelevant.

What is of the utmost importance is that you sit back and let the world burn

because Mother Earth deserves a rebirth, a cleansing.

We are a plight and a plague upon the face of this world and it is time to give it back with courage enough to let it be.

Ignite this planet we have decimated and know that though we may not witness it,

the planet will be born again.

Perhaps the lack of witnesses will enhance the New World's beauty

or perhaps not.

Burn our existence to the last cinder

and give back that which is not ours now-

and never was ours to begin with.

Bible Stories

2011-07-28T23:30:00.001-07:00

By Heather Brown

My walls are mustard-seed yellow, a color my mother told me never to wear,
but maybe in the end it's the faith I was missing.

Good things come better with waiting, or maybe they wouldn't.
I've never been patient enough to find out.

Maybe waiting is like walking on water, potential space untapped and miraculous.
I'll leave that to Jesus and plunge naked, displacing those depths.

Long ago I was taught I could worship perfection and escape unscathed,
but I know no perfect god, and I am not.

How can you think you are anything less than a slave, afraid to turn on the
light again, for fear of being found?

Love is more story than the color you're cast in.

Laughter

2011-07-27T12:55:00.001-07:00

By Ryan Connell

When she laughs, 
Jesus,
it can fill a room.
Soft and smoky,
it's a laugh
that's been around
, it's a laugh that
knows the ways
of the world.

We spend a
weekday Afternoon 
with pinball and Jenga,
while the waitress
eyes us to ensure
we don't skip out
on the check.
I want to kiss her,
but I don't.
Not until two days
later, at the park
with a two dollar
kite
that was given to me.
There, her laugh, the voice of joy itself, 
possesses me.
can not keep
my lips off her.

And it is
this laugh,
so evident in
the pictures she takes
and the words she types,
this laugh that
escapes
after she kisses me
so deep that
I fear I'll
drown.
It is her laugh
that makes me
know.

This is the kind of girl 
I would have waited for
had I been smart enough
to wait.

Untitled

2011-07-11T16:42:00.001-07:00

By Christopher Bullock

grandma was knitting and crying on the bench,
her pink dress wrinkled since we pulled it out of the dryer
and dressed her right before we left for wal-mart.
we hoped the sun,
peeking between
hills and clouds,
would dry out the wet spots
before anyone would think
she pissed herself.

she just sat and sank into the back seat, squinting,
we opened the window a crack so she could breathe
but the wind forced air into her mouth
but the wind forced sand into her eyes
but still she kept looking out the window
as the intersections passed by –
traffic stood at attention under swaying red lights,
the radio interrupted worship music with agnostic static
like an ocean wave composed of noise
lapping at the foot of the crucifixion.
if foreign bombs ever explode here
we could crucify the killers on power lines.
if the arabs set the roads on fire,
jesus could fly here from heaven
and take back hell
and let the hymns lullaby
everyone into a holy sleep.

grandma didn't blink once as we set her on the bench
her eyes naturally found the floor,
she took out needles and yarn
she began to knit involuntarily.
i saw little tears running through
her wrinkles like rafts on rapids,
drops in the little red sweater
she was knitting for your baby.
when he wears it,
you can tell him:
whether he is listening
or merely pretending to,
you can tell him:
grandma poured her soul into that sweater.
he'll just gurgle back and pounce on a toy.
grandma poured herself out on that bench,
slowly and quietly as the shopping carts passed
as registers ate imaginary money from little wallets.
she poured herself out on that bench,
and when we took her from wal-mart
she didn't say anything
we didn't say anything
the cashier didn't say anything
we all just checked out and left.

when the sun rose the next day,
it rose beneath her.
it burned her up
as it ascended.
it shook her fingers and it set her skeleton aflame
still she stared
still the wind pushed air
still the wind pushed sand into her eyes,
still she didn't blink –
the worship music completely
conquered by static by now
(waves of static like the ocean,
lapping at the foot of the cross)
she lay there,
the sun passed through her and into the sky
the sun passed up through her and into the sky
jesus flew over and carried her up further
finally she closed her eyes
the angels folded up her body
wrinkle by wrinkle
into a tiny piece of skin
to send to god, postage-paid.

the parking lot still burning
the factories motionless
the traffic lights swaying
the power lines prepared
for the next misunderstood messiah
the bombs ready to drop
the static coming closer
threatening to drown
every thought.

Morbid Poems

2011-06-29T10:56:00.001-07:00

By DJ Kato

I miss her bone structure, those
jagged beautiful edges, those rows
of perfect white teeth, that gaping
smile, so open and red it almost looks

like a wound.  I miss the crazy words
spilling from her, thoughts about the
afterlife, what stupid mess she was
going to make that night.  It is

difficult writing this without breaking
down into what looks more like a pile of
clothes on the floor rather than a human
being; it is difficult writing these

morbid poems, watching them turn into
ghosts in front of me, and then they
take turns haunting me for weeks. These
morbid poems are draining me, they are

coffin-sized mosquitoes sucking the blood
straight from my veins, then tearing me
to shreds, dancing and laughing at me
and my glowing toxic organs.  At times

they are only pillows made of syringes
that do not hurt that much because they
instantly put you to sleep.  I miss her
voice, often tinged with strange feelings

that gnaw away at the soul, or the feeling
that reminds you that love and beauty
could still kill you or make you weak
at the knees.  The way it pleaded like

a puppy at the universe, so lost.

Snowy Hell

2011-06-20T00:28:00.001-07:00

By DJ Kato

Sorry, I fell into a pit of flowers
and could not climb out for a while
because the stems kept breaking
and the petals started rotting
and I got sick from the smell.

Later I woke up on a cold California
beach, dragged out by someone who cleaned
me up with bleach, dragged out by someone
who had arms enough to reach into my
jagged heart that's space deep.

Here I am I guess, people tell me I'm pretty
but I suffer from an ugly private paralysis.
Here I am I guess. Please give me your best.

Sorry, I fell into a pit of flowers,
I started playing solitaire, got distracted
for hours. And then the stems kept breaking
and the flowers started rotting and I got sick
from the smell, and then I woke up on a beach;

someone had dragged me out of that snowy hell.

Lost Ocean

2011-06-17T09:50:00.001-07:00

By Kaleena Kovach

The sunsets in Madrid are gorgeous.
The last 3 weeks
I spent there
Felt like prolonging a break-up
That needed to happen.
I have weekly staring contests with the moon
Begging for answers.
I get a rash on my stomach
When I'm nervous.
I've painted portraits of monuments
On my insides
To remind me that sometimes,
In this life
You are all that you've got.
But that's ok.

I have a hypocritcal knack
For avoiding eye contact
When I'm avoiding tough questions.
I pick the skin on my knuckles
To see how dehydrated I am.
I think
We've all had days
Where we can feel the rumble
Of our futures
Catching up to us
Like a full-throttle subway train
Going in reverse.
We put on our hard hats
And send seismic messages
To the far-reaches of our galaxies
Praying the dopamine kicks in
So we can dream in color.

There are nights
When I've laid belly-up
Towards the sky
Counting the under-sides of wishing wells
And whispering secrets to my fingertips
About places I've never been.
I've never seen a firefly.
I bet butterflies
Get humans in their stomachs
When they're in love
Or when they're nervous.

Honestly
I shake honesty
From my shirt-sleeves
On foggy days.
Honestly
We're all just waiting
To find a home
Worth coming back to.
I swear
Boiling oil
Sounds like a rainstorm if you're lonely
And a rain storm
Sounds like children's luaghter
If it's played on a backwards loop
In an elevator shaft.
I think my thoughts echo
When I have something
Really important to say.

I have lists
Tatooed on my body.
The train tracks of my rib cage
Hold the things I wish I didn't know
And the ones I should've learned by now.
The things I know for sure
Are written in-between my callused toes.
When I curl them into the wet earth
The ground reads,
"Breathe, breathe, breathe.
"Your lungs love air.
"Don't forget to breathe."

I started a list on the palms of my hands
Of mistakes I'm grateful for.
It ran all the way into the crux of my elbow.
I got caught up writing, "Thank you."

When I blink,
My eyelashes remind me
That my heart
Is always half-full
And I should always buy dresses with big pockets
So I'll always have room for good luck
And little plastic animals
And so I'll always have a place
To store my after thoughts.

I like drinking out of juice boxes
Especailly the really teeny ones
They make me feel like a giant.
I've never felt like more of a giant
Than the first time
You held my head in your lap
While I cried.
You've never made me feel small.
We've always felt ever-expanding
Like universes.

Did you know
That our universe,
It's like a blanket.
So when you see a star
Not only is it already dead
But it was sending light
From somewhere completely different
Than where you saw it in the sky.
I feel like that sometimes.
I'm just throwing my light
Like a curveball
Hoping it'll be bright enough
For someone to write a love letter by.
If I could
I'd send stamps too.
So they'd have the courage
To let their post-master muscles
Play jumprope with the swingset
Under their lover's breastbone.

I've never craved a cigarette
Like I've craved peace
To wash back up on my shoreline.
I wish wildflowers
Would grow in the cracks
Of my cable car symphonies
Abandoned for my wish
That we could go somewhere
Without leaving anything behind.

We've all dug trenches with our misery
In hopes they'll fill with lost ocean
And become rivers
For us to race our toy boats in.
If they do
We'll whisper our mantras to the lazy current
And we won't build bridges just to burn them.
We'll remind ourselves that silence
Is just another way
To come home to ourselves.

Peace
Has always been
On our shores.

My Homage to the Dead...

2011-06-16T10:28:00.001-07:00

My Homage to the Dead
Poet that had six syll
ables per line talking
about Nature in Terms
Metaphorically Put
Together Correctly.

Way To Go Robert Frost.

By Annaliese Lengerich

Nothing that touches the
outside remains unchanged.
Even blood turns red when
exposed to oxygen.

Walking through the labyrinth
That is the city that
is my Life that is my
Existence I become
Convinced that the more I
Reveal what's inside me

The more nothing good can
Stay.

Two New Editors

2011-06-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Junk Lot Review welcomes two new editors to the Editor Board: Heather Brown and Ryan Connell. Long-time contributors and friends of the blog, they will now join that honorable league of junkies which keeps the juices flowing. To help you get to know them, we thought we'd include their answers to one of the application's questions.

When you read a poem, what's your process? Are candles involved? Live animal sacrafice? Oujia boards? Without fearing the abstract and the fantastic and allowing for allusions to aesthetic manifestos, tell us what makes a good poem.

HEATHER BROWN
"this morning it was sunshine and coffee and the fact that the poetry book i was reading was overdue at the library. a good poem pays loving, but not clingy attention to sound, whether formal or informal. it's almost always about more than what it's about, i.e., it draws some unseen connection between physical and abstract experience. it's utterly precise but not afraid to play or deconstruct itself or be risky in its quest for effect, and it always nails the ending."

RYAN CONNELL
"When I read poems, I mostly read them in public. The park, a coffee shop, the city bus. I do this so for two reasons: 1. So that girls will notice that I am reading poetry, and more importantly, 2. That said girls will be impressed by the fact that I am reading poetry. If I like a poem I will it read several times in quick succession, trying to absorb everything about it. If I don’t like a poem, I will skip to the end to see if the ending can save it (it often does) then I will try reading it at least one more time to see if I’ve missed something.

"The question of what makes a poem a “good poem” is rather tricky and incredibly subjective. For me, I think that good poetry captures the intimate and incredibly personal moments that are universal in all of us. This is not to say that poetry cannot be grand and epic in scale and scope, but I think that even when it is large and vibrant it is still an incredibly personal thing. Thus the poet’s goal is to capture his or her own experiences in a way that is personal without being embarrassing; universal without being too broad or caricatured. To speak in a way that everyone reading feels like they are all alone with the poet talking about themselves."

Gallery

2011-06-10T07:40:00.001-07:00

By Rozina Kidari

This place has brick walls that let us
pretend to live in dark alleyways.

A district, red lights, silent exchanges,
I know nothing, really, and these walls

warn me that you shouldn’t
count rectangles, different lengths.

They’ll start to look too much like word sentences.
Filling my cup with refreshment wine, I consider

statues and pictures, how they criticize
each of us much in the same way, that’s why

Mona Lisa is smiling. She is laughing
at our acne and muffin tops. She is counting

the number of cheese cubes we pilfer
as the curator asks us to find meaning in the repetition

of shapes. At the end of the night, we are all
laughing, everyone, always laughing uncomfortably;

we are shifting between metal fixtures, grasping
for something in the sealant of these walls.

Violets

2011-06-02T08:43:00.001-07:00

By Sydney Stensland

Violets grow from the mud
Next to the back stairs.
Violets shouldn't grow here
In the city.
Some mornings, when dawn is still
Dusty and the dog needs out,
I see the violets in the mud
Next to the back stairs.
Their mouths are gaping and
They all have peeling lips that
Don't know how to bleed.
Sometimes, the dog wanders up to
Sniff their waxy, shrunken heads
But I yank at the leash and
Tell him no.
Violets shouldn't grow here
In the city.

Tepid Proceedings

2011-06-01T06:53:00.001-07:00

By Chris Kelly

There it is.

The culmination of all dreams point

west quickly deciding for me where

I shall end up come the end of

tomorrow.

And I watch the water,

dizzying myself in the reflection as

it moves over and covers

shelters,

tastes,

carries,

cares for,

the denizens living within,

living underneath the stream cackling

it's indifference of my petty problems and

I enjoy listening.

I find solace in the soft whisper cracks of

river rushing over the pebbles,

smoother than my course brown skin.

And I taste my fingers,

lick filth coyly,

as I stare at the ghost

sitting beside this infantile

ADULT.

The future,

the meshing of my cosmic

fate makes love to all my thoughts

in the cloudy beauty floating above

carrying on as my mind dichotomizes

itself between,

GO FOR IT,

and,

NOTHING WAITS ON THE VERDANT PASTURES

NEXT.

But I relapse and I

fall dreamy slumber intoxicated

looking at the female form as

I slip beneath the moisture.

I hope the river,

Carries me into shadowy timeless happy yet decisive elsewhere.

The Lengths

2011-05-27T11:35:00.001-07:00

By Cheri Paul

yes, I've lived through

through a year,
a longuer, dull and stiff,

the ballet proceeding
mechanically, without me
or with. those dancing

girls, so fragile and

purposeless that they
evaporate before

I decide to exist,
before a final act.

to approach the soul
of brevity, cut short
or cut down. it is the game

of tailors and those
who have feasted
too long.

*

sculpt life after
a single chord, a tanka
but never reenact
the president's speech

after the marital scandal.

it wanders. it rambles.

I find myself

apologizing again
and again for too much
love or not enough—

still the same flashes,
photographs, the half-smiling woman
looking stern at my side.

A Letter from the Editor: The Junk Lot Seeks New Editor

2011-05-24T22:22:00.001-07:00

If there's one thing that I love about The Junk Lot Review, it's that it manages to concentrate dispersion. What I mean by this is that though our contributors create a veritable dot-to-dot chain from Oregon to New York, and though our readers live across seas, in Jakarta and in Germany and in Galesburg, IL-- despite our oh-so cosmopolitan character, we've remained dedicated to fostering a close-knit community of poets and those who love poetry.

That said, it's time for a little more dispersion, but expect high concentrations of poetry in the future.

As for myself, I'm responsible for the dispersion. I will be headed this summer to Taos, NM to work and live at the Abominable Snowmansion, a hostel that I fell in love with last summer as I chased DH Lawrence's ghost. I'll be taking Sonnets to Orpheus by Rilke, a few shirts, and not much else. Seeing as my internet access will be inconsistent, or perhaps even nonexistent, Brett Schager, co-founder of and long time editor for The Junk Lot, will be taking over my post as Managing Editor until I return in late summer. This will have absolutely no effect on the submission process-- so no worries there.

That said, we are looking for a new editor to join the Editor Board of The Junk Lot Review. The new editor would stay on staff indefinitely-- their term will not end upon my return from Taos. The current Editor Board and myself will select the new editor from the wider pool of applicants.

Responsibilities include checking your e-mail every day for poems, soliciting submissions from your friends and rivals, promoting the blog at every possible opprotunity, helping out (physically, spiritually, and/or financially) with our summer poetry festival JUNK, and in general, loving the word, the line and the way.

If you're interested in applying for this post-- and why shouldn't you be?-- display your wit and intelligence by filling out the following questionnaire and returning it to thejunklot@gmail.com no later than June 3rd. In your e-mail, please include your name, your telephone number and your location.

What interests you about being on the Editor Board of The Junk Lot Review?
What do you think qualifies you to be an editor?
When you read a poem, what's your process? Are candles involved? Live animal sacrafice? Ouji boards? Without fearing the abstract and the fantastic and allowing for allusions to aesthetic manifestos, tell us what makes a good poem.
How can you help expand The Junk Lot's readership, recruit contributors and improve the overall quality of the blog? And more generally: why do we need you?
Talk about your three favorite poems. Each explanation should range from 5-8 sentences and provide a discussion of the poem's formal features as well as its personal significance to you.

We hope to see applications in our inbox very soon. If all goes well, we expect to have someone hired and working within the first few weeks of June. And as always, send us your poems!

Much love,

Christopher Poore

Managing Editor

The Junk Lot Review

thejunklot.blogspot.com

thejunklot@gmail.com

Letter to Lot's Wife, from Gamorrah

2011-05-23T07:43:00.001-07:00

By Conrad Hainds

You know my fate, woman who I have housed-- homed--

And you know my streets, my speeches and my spirit, and those of my brother Sodom. Ah, what a brother!

You know my fate: All ready are the angels of the Lord; burning is the Lord's sulphur, burning with retribution, but with less intensity than the hearts of my men burn...

And my streets are burning as I write to you-- you, who are more forgiving than Yaweh, the merciful...

And my men are dying as I burn-- for even the most forgiving of gods seeks to destroy me-- even the most loving of gods has turned his back on me and my spirit, crying out for righteousness.

Burning. I feel the sulphur burning and hear my men screaming in the same voices as they once used to express joy, and I see the smoke from my burning blot out the sun...

The Lord, and the sun, too, have turned their backs on me...

But you-- you looked back. You had the mountains before you and the wrath of God shrinking in the distance, and yet you turned back once to look... why? Was it accidental? Could you just not resist? Or did you, unlike any other, think that perhaps I, nation of defilement, still had something good to look back upon? Could still be saved?

I do not know. But as I burn, I see you, an your last action, and I love you for it.

The Lord has made you into salt-- but you have made yourself into the salt of the earth.

Dissection.

2011-05-19T07:32:00.001-07:00

By Leah Kuehn

I rinse the formaldehyde
from my fingers,
watching the dark, secret blood
of a recently split lip
drip softly into the porcelain.

I dreamed of her, the woman
of hollow bones and fear
last night—

I dreamed that I grabbed

the thin and moving architecture

of her hand

and ran.

(Apodiformes,

Columbiformes, she is
one of them; I know because
a person is most intimate

with the things that they have diagrammed—

I am always searching

for evidence of vocal cords)

in our escape, she will look at me and speak,

or my ankle will break—when I fall, I never

take her with me, and I crack my jaw

against the curb. I have memorized the sound.

I'd fallen asleep,
and my heart was at rest— spoken for,
my soul was quiet; it was wrapped in its own slumber

around the flicker of my organs,
its hand lovingly twined within my ribcage.

I cannot forget anything, and I always tell the truth:

this is why it breathes so sweetly in my mouth,
whispering its gratitude.

I awoke trembling, the taste of iron damp on my tongue
and a dark smear across my hand and the pillow.
With consciousness comes the paradromic and frightening truth:
"I have never known what it is
to be at peace.

No, not ever."

Quietly

2011-05-07T08:19:00.001-07:00

By Connor Prendergast

How do I find this?
This will-o-wisp,
an ever-leading,
ever-meandering,
unattainable,
and ineffable
idea at the
end of God's
fishing line.
My mind comes blank,
and every picture
I draw has the
same dead look.
I'm in murky
water,
and the haze is
creeping between
my lips.
I'm pushing through
this viscosity
with my eyes
closed, praying
for some release,
and a breath
of air.
So this is
where I stand.
Semi-impermeable,
mostly impassable,
with an eye
over my shoulder
to the footprints
in the turf.

where I am coming from

2011-04-21T07:25:00.000-07:00

By Kate Hammerich

I drive the back roads, know
I am alive, the bikes and flags,

the people getting into cars in
slow motion, the quiet rush

of waves against grass, greening
under the sun, the breeze,

sweetly ripening. I drive the
roads to know I am alive,

hands disconnected from my body,
gently steering us home.

Scarlet

2011-04-15T06:15:00.001-07:00

By Sherie Ajayi

Walking into the silver fireworks of night.

Eye blind, a misguided joke.

Nobody understood. Energy fading

from finger to toe. Bliss on its way

rapidly flowing through veins. Cool and swift,

it kisses me on the lips. Pulled in with out

escape.

It didn't even have time to say a proper goodbye.

It was ripped out of me, iron hand. It laid there limp

A bloody pile, waste. Arms pulled away from body.

Life vacuumed up by rubber hands.

Our eyes met once but still

You linger in unreachable places

Like a room of smoke.

My clothes perfumed by your smell.

My body drenched in your pre-mature

Sweat. My dreams will always have you

Reaching for me and calling for me.

I will never hear them.

Untitled (I don't recognize)

2011-04-12T06:39:00.001-07:00

By Connor Prendergast

I don't recognize
this.

It's not uncharted, but
unseen,

and I can't find a
guide

to take me back to
that place,

where the warmth of
the fire

plays gently across your
cheeks,

and yours plays
across mine.

I wish you fell
asleep

just as readily
as I,

but I know you're
awake,

and your eyes are not
on me.

Rather, they examine
some

eternally unanswered
question.

failure and success

2011-04-11T08:05:00.001-07:00

By Anton Frost

above the urinals

the light

shudders.

it sheds

gentle headaches

trivial confusions

and

thin silent

moments

out

and down

onto

the men

standing

loose

and vacant

being

relieved--

being

cleansed and

bathed

with relief.

and

as the night comes on

with its own collapses

and the tiny flowers

outside

continue to improvise

in the dark

the men

whether they know it

or not

succeed gloriously

as themselves

from inside

their bodies.

with the sighs

and gentle quiet

of a nursery

the harsh reeks

and the

unsterilized

nightless

spaces

persist

and the light

slowly

fails.

Competition

2011-04-09T09:32:00.001-07:00

By Ryan Connell

Dear Jesus,

You really shouldn't

be jealous of

Santa Claus stealing all

of the attention at Christmas.

Pretty much everyone stops

believing in him when

they are six,

where most people

keep believing in you

until they are at least in college.

Love,

Ryan

suicide attempt

2011-04-07T06:40:00.001-07:00

By Kate Hammerich

From one side:

The tree, a branch,
no breath:

T-3:19

"Do you know where you are?"

In the crackling dark,
nowhere.

From the other:

My clothes are sawed off, the forty dollar bra,
the skirt from my cousin,

trashed at T-3

The tube goes sleekly down my throat, they start
pumping, still no heart beat

and the voice of the doctor goes up,

T-2

the crash cart, fumbled to my side,
the jerk, the collapse

T-1

The holes in my stomach closing, the tentative beep,
the life crept back into a body

Ducky Footy Pajamas

2011-04-02T17:44:00.001-07:00

By Brett Schager

I awoke last night to the sound

of humming like dying streetlamps,

buzzing film noir and electrified moths.

I crept tiptoe to touch the melted silence

now a humming, throbbing rhythm.

I followed its beat down the stairs

out the door

to the yard,

placed my ear against

rich brown earth

where earthworms slept and ants dreamt.

Humming

intensified

and soon I knew

it was the sound of centuries past,

my ancestors beating bony and cracked fists

at the crust of the earth, demanding

to be let out:

A hundred years of rocks and lava;

two hundred years of stony, lonely

boney slumber on bedrock beds;

three hundred years of bleeding,

coughing, hemorrhaging America

's shards of slavery and slaughter.

Ghosts push outward, earthquake after earthquake,

expanding animosity and somber disdain.

"Press your fingers out of mountains,

my ancestors. Reveal

your indigenous

indigent

indignation.

Pulsate until the world remembers

you.

It wasn't so long

ago,"

I cried and wept into the dew

of pre-dawn isolation. Taking

my fleece pajamas and battered

confidence back to bed to dream

that, once, America lived

on fiery plains, juicy corpses, &

The Will of God.

Toxemia

2011-03-28T07:04:00.001-07:00

By DJ Kato

My heart needs to be bled

and yours needs to be bleached.

Our hands need something dead in them

like tongues or books full of flat flowers.

Our prayers together create blood in the walls.

In the drips I see you in the bathtub vomiting

pages of dictionaries, shutting me out.

I see a plastic set of veins coming out of my legs

and every day your voice splits me open like an axe.

And for these veins in my hands I would trade you

today & yesterday; I would trade you the Iraq War

all the Senators & the dead meat on your plate.

Every time someone buys me a birthday present,

I realize they don't know me at all

and it is a brightly-wrapped reminder

of failure of heart & bone, of eyes half closed,

the bibliophile's metronome.

It is strange that we make things

and then we break things

and then we fix our broken things and feel joy.

It is strange that we drink milk meant for calves

and we invent Tuesdays & Thursdays & nuclear war.

It is strange that you eat candy out of the trash

and somehow convince yourself that you are okay.

Climbing on top of me is a dark blur and a smile

appears in one of its gaping endless holes.

Inanition is heaven. Money becomes a foreign object

much like forceps or hair clips or pieces of metal stuck

inside different parts of you for different reasons.

It becomes some thing you have that is not particularly pretty

that you can use to acquire prettier things. It becomes you.

It becomes your smile and whatever kisses befall your lips.

I regret not being there to tuck you in tonight,

not being able to kiss your hands that have fixed

so many things. Just give me one more weekend

to poison my blood. One more day to inhale anything

black. One more minute to say goodbye goodbye

goodbye to your sweet face. Let me become a dog

and die by chocolate. Your hardness is left in me,

dries up like a riverbed, cracks, and is forgotten.

The love you left in my mouth has metastasized and I swallow

every gift you gave me so I can call you to complain

of a stomach ache. It is too easy to turn corn

or rice into some kind of drug, one you can mass produce,

& make billions. May begins again as if it hasn't left you

so many times before and green Xs multiply like army ants.

The contents of our cabinets become those of my gut,

and I come away knowing what they say is true: there is always

tomorrow. And every unicorn bleeds black. Every president

has his or her handicap. All the buildings in the world

will eventually fall down. And it is better to burn than to disappear.

Hosed

2011-03-27T08:03:00.001-07:00

By Evan Feeley

I remember how the basement smelt
            like mildew and the floor against my feet
            felt like melted freezi-pops that pulled
            at my soles the same way my hands pulled
            at a door that opened to the world
            under my porch.
I remember how I forced
            my five year old frame to fit
            into its tight, tapered, far-side
            where a hose lay coiled
            like a limp rattle snake.
I remember how my knees scraped and screamed
            under the weight of the coiled fury on my back
            while my mother screamed above under
            the weight of my father's clenched craze.
I remember my older brother reaching out
            to take the dead weight from my back to his
            and how the hose ran with him
            around the stone pile and up the steps.
I remember the swivel of the hose head and
            the spray of sweet release when
            the jet stream shot
            the serpent out of my father's scales.
I remember the hose-water tears
            crying through the cracks and onto my head
            baptizing me underneath my father's footsteps
            that slithered back into the house while
            the screen door thwacked shut.
I remember wondering why it stopped there.

The Missing Years

2011-03-21T09:57:00.001-07:00

By Ryan Connell

Originally published on XOXO Jesus

Dear Jesus,

I love reading about all the

theories as to what

happened to you between 12 and 30;

whether you traveled the world or

studied Buddhism.

Personally,

I like to think that you spent those

years the same

way that I did between 12 and 30:

hiding in your room

and being awkward around girls.

Love,

Ryan

The Inner Organs

2011-03-20T08:21:00.001-07:00

By DJ Kato

You're insane and your head

floats away from you. You

get scared of a death no doctor

has predicted or prescribed,

and no suicide note has indicated.

I am insane and my family floats

far away in bilious boats

with names like: diazadinlorazaoxyzasomaquel.

Go do some more drugs

in tents in Yosemite

while I get high

for my dead mother's birthday.

I will just be waiting here

in Littleton Colorado

where kids shoot kids at school,

and adults shoot kids at school,

and girls get fucked up on snorting

things and razor blades and swallowing

in bathroom stalls

and then get pregnant.

I will just wait here

until I am thin enough

to wrap around a pole

like holiday tinsel.

I will just be waiting here

drinking mistos with older men,

smoking resin, and annihilating

the inner organs.

I will just be waiting here

until you come crawling back.

Jet Lag

2011-03-17T08:11:00.001-07:00

By Evan Feeley

Your route sticks straight through broad flyways, needling in and out of nimble nimbi. "Our flight will be coming down in 3 to 4 hours." Destination: unimportant, you never stay long, and you miss this sky already. So you're quick to depart, especially with a bag full of clean boarding passes and a plane stuffed with passengers from places like the Golden Crescent and the Golden Triangle who plunge

into the spaces between

airways that harden and scream.

You jab through your walls, only stinging for a moment, until you muddy your blue expanse, tumbling eyes upward and back where you search for God in the pink clouds of your skull but God isn't there. You are too artificial of a means from which to sufficiently seek sacrosanct guidance.

The porthole you stab through

offers a limited worldview

of canyon walls too steep to traverse by foot and once clear skies now overcast, purple and infected, and you wish you could land but you've flown too many flights. The sun will never be as brilliant from below, never as bright, and who wants to be jetlagged?

The way the bones gnaw at you.

The way your stomach turns in on itself.

The cold sweats, scratchy eyes, jerking heartbeats

that make you beg the airlines for another route, a stand-by ticket, anything to get off the ground. So they extend your contract, owning you a little more, running you ragged, while you drift in and out of consciousness, the way desperate pilots do. You boot up the engines that once whirred so sweetly. Now you hear through the walls of a cockpit filled with flickering lights.

And you know too well what they do.

And you press them.

And you take off to spite yourself,

thrusting yourself back into the fray, the ear-popping, heart-thumping radiance that used to surge through your body, when your wheels left the asphalt and tipped your nose back, orgasmically exposing the whites of your eyes during ascent – it doesn't exist anymore. Still you plunge this rusted craft into your polluted air, leaving loved ones at the gate for the last time as you careen into the cracks of dueling pressure systems, pressing buttons with blind eyes and a weary heart.

"We're going to be experiencing some turbulence.

Please take your seat and tie your tourniquets."

You'll push through, just you – after all, you're all you have left. No turning back now, continue toward total system failure. The vessel bucks and seizes, an epileptic child at a rave. Lights flash and fade as your sight comes to its senses and leaves you too, while you fall from a heaven you never believed in, to an earth you shunned. Your craft full of leaks you tried to plug but carroded just the same, and

the holes became canyons

that you couldn't fill

and you couldn't fly over.

Words (spoken) With Friends

2011-03-15T08:22:00.001-07:00

By Nicholas Riegel

where were you when the

–walls

caved in?

In their submission

they spoke to me;

["you know,"]

–they hissed,

" more

often

than

not,

a wise man is a cautious man–"

II. (prequel)

i obliged to the mountains

in the fronts–

of her palms;

but she kept it a secret

(or i had hoped)

and i had been deceived.

by the innocence

that remained within

–her.

[this was one of the endeavors,

I had participated in, while

under the influence of

a posthumous shell of

a boy–]

with the doors open

and the lights

–on,

i drove to catch her

in the success of

–I

and what (we) have

done. but i was all

thumbs, that pirouette upon the two left

feet, between us–

[and an ocean above us]

could not give you any mention towards

my certain allegations

that exposed my inebriation

that you have been using

–to deflate me.

" the earth is flat!

the earth is flat! "

The floorboards said,

but,

(as they all knew,)

it's the fumes that have defeated me;

and again, I am ashes.

–she was,

but an

accessory to the robbery;

a millionaire.

among trillions.

El Chapultepec Blues

2011-03-13T05:04:00.001-07:00

By Ryan Connell

Oh, jazz,

magic jazz,

last open door to God.

muse of poets

and lunatics.

You are timeless.

And your lovers,

when inside of you,

are timeless too.

the cars drive by

and the world clicks on

but jazz you still

lumber over

the cracked red vinyl booths

and cake onto our

souls like smoke.

your ancient joy

protects us from the cold,

gives reason and rhythm

to the short skirts and

heels that are now outside

scrambling through

the snow.

Oh jazz,

sweet mother jazz

I know you are a dinosaur.

This poem is a dinosaur.

ignored and discarded

like all old things.

never needed

but always necessary,

us poets and jazzmen

insist on songs

that the world has forgotten

and call out from our

dark corner in history.

jazz is the voice

of God.

Us poets,

the last prophets

in a land of unbelief.

I tell you

this is where you'll find Truth

when the Truth comes back

into fashion.

These Days

2011-03-10T09:57:00.000-08:00

By Alex Killian

I'll slow down.

Just slow down long enough to say,

I'll be your perfect son someday.

I'm just a little preoccupied,

with my lips to a pipe.

Putting my filter,

dirty filter,

always on the words they say.

All in the name

of getting by.

My therapist is myself,

writing prescription

after prescription,

for self medication.

And always the same,

procrastinating emotion.

Poet's Notebook: A Year with Rilke, Week 26

2011-03-07T21:33:00.000-08:00

The Endlessness of the End

By Christopher Poore

Dear Rainer,

Do they have shadows where you live? If they do—or if you can remember what a shadow looks like—perhaps then you can understand how you have followed me through a year, each day my head turning over my shoulder, looking for you, finding something phantasmal.

Please say hello to all the young poets who died too soon. Laura Damian. Rimbaud. Keats. Tell them they are better off than us—they have you, your words emerging from the rustling of your gigantic wings. We are left with only your letters. A beautiful inheritance, but also an inheritance of beautiful ashes—left, it should be noted, by the burning life of a man.

An earthly friend,
Christopher
***

Who knows how the life of a poet goes on? At one moment, it swerves to a distant jungle, demanding the poet read Paradise Lost in some rickety apartment owned by a rickety couple who live in a rickety village (Christian Wiman). Sometimes, it turns from Arizona towards Galesburg, and though you are now surrounded by the steel of railroads, in your ears, you still hear the dancing of the sage (Gina Franco). Or perhaps it spirals into prisons (Ezra Pound), kidney-shaped pools (Tennessee Williams), into lifeless nights long with the absence of prayer (I couldn’t avoid it—myself).

It’s impossible to say what the life of a poet looks like, and so how cute that we have magically invented his notebook. Out of thin air, we conjure it, and you read it or you don’t.

And with something resembling a brash arrogance, something resembling an honorable openness, I have delivered these pages to you, week after week, month after month—often missing deadlines, but such cutoffs are for those who aspire towards death and dismemberment, which is why newspapers die so quickly within the bounds of cultural discourse. Poetry, on the other hand, lives longer because it is unexpected, because it doesn’t arrive at a scheduled instant, its creation is spontaneous and breath-taking—reigned in only through objectifying afterthought.

Of course, it’s rather easy for me to say this, but I’ve enjoyed the notebooks. Through them, I’ve investigated a few themes I find personally compelling, and who knows—maybe they gave you a bit of a kick as well.

But it’s all time for it to go, for my notebook to close itself once again to all other eyes save for my own. I have little respect for the spectacle of modern blogging—with a few rare exceptions (Heather Brown’s the wild times, for instance). Too often, it devolves into a massive diarrhea of recycled material and artless egotism. My apologies if, in the course of this notebook, I have committed either offence.

But of course, I have a few last words before it all comes to a much needed end, and of course, they are about myself.

***

At times, I found that I was paying much more attention to Christopher Poore than I was to Rainer Marie Rilke—and god bless the dead poet, it was only to be expected. Here I am, this feebly unknown thing, made of blood and thought, electricity at work and all of me, each piece of muscle and bone branching out, shooting out into the great chaosmos. Why would I bother much with this dead idol inscribed in ink, preserved by page and dust alone?

Like other deaths, ecologically speaking, the death of a poet serves only the life of the living—but not because we are overwhelmed with his shadow, but because he makes our fields more than fallow, because each dead man grants us a bit of fertilizer which we are welcome to spread about our own inherited plot of land, land that (for lack of a better term) we’ll call language. Which is to say, death spurs the living. We graze on the bones turned green and upwards.

And, if one is to take an evaluative glance over the notebook I have compiled in the last year, this is the function that one finds Rilke serving in the notebook. Not the driving force, but his quote often twisted to serve my own maniacal purposes.

I realize now how artificial and constructed the entire experiment seems to be. It’s a bit like picking out a woman from a crowd because she is wearing your favorite color—never mind her view of herself, the world, your self, etc., so long as she is wearing that divine shade of Homeric purple. And once you’ve picked her out of the crowd, you call her soulmate, call her lover, call her nameless in the breathy night.

Or rather it’s a bit like receiving a gift in a brown box and deciding, before you even open it, to make it the centerpiece of your entire household—to make every bed, bathrobe and boudoir rotate about the object you haven’t bothered to unbox. It’s a laziness of a kind, and a sort of charming naïveté.

But then I wonder if that isn’t how life is organized in general. Perhaps my vision suffers from too much Derrida, but I see each of us setting up existences with a center-point so deliberate and arbitrary that there’s not much hope in organizing a genuine orbit.

***

In the notebooks, I think one will also note a cute and hopeless search for the modern, whatever that vague term implies. In one too many of my early posts, I begin things with “the modern age” shoved somewhere into the first paragraph. Not exactly a subtle gesture; in fact, it feels as if my heavy hand is pushing a dozen hourglasses off of a mantelpiece. My feet are surrounded with sand.

Again, I feel as if something was forced—my writing attempted to shove Kay Ryan and Stephanie Meyer into a tidy little forum called love, when in fact they have no real thematic links except for the ones I have created between them—arbitrary links. But instead of achieving a true integralism, I achieved little more than a messy knitting of disparate forms. It looks hip at a distance, it looks very now, but something still rings maudlin and lofty and false and dated.

Yet there is something immaculate in the attempt for an integral clarity—which is to say, a clarity which is grappling with making connections between worlds increasingly spinning into their own isolation. There is something alarmingly sincere in the attempt.

I return to a poem that I focused on in my first post—a poem that coincides with my birthdate in the daily readings from A Year with Rilke.

The Space Within Us
By Rainer Marie Rilke

The space within us reaches out, translates each thing.
For the essence of a tree to be real for you,
cast inner space around it, out of the space
that exists in you. Encircle it with restraint.
It has no borders. Only in the realm
of your renouncing can it, as tree, be known.

Perhaps the gesture is not so arbitrary and hopeless as a Derridian gaze might suggest. Perhaps there is something genuine in the attempt to cohere the beautiful collage of a world. What I mean to say is that our knowledge, our conscious power is forever encircling objects and it is up to that power to see the tree as an object with strict boundaries or as an object with boundaries that are (above all things) indistinct. In short, where does the skin end? Science has taught us too much about the negative space of an electron cloud for us to arrive at an answer quickly.

And while we’re at it, let us ask where Rilke ends? In his references to Goethe? In Brecht’s references to Goethe? In my professor’s references to Brecht?

Consequently, where did this Year with Rilke begin? Did some fabulous butterfly wing flap in a distant past I haven’t bothered to imagine—and because of that famous shift, we have mayonnaise, poet’s notebooks, ribbons? Has the Year with Rilke been an eternity with God, a short second during my week? The connections are either vast or laughably small.

The finite fact of the world is that the boundaries we have cast about each object and the connections we have transformed into boundaries are falsified and petty. They restrict, restrain. And as we grow, these structures take on an ever-increasing stifling nature. We either succumb to atrophy, renouncing everything beyond what we’ve already defined, or we blaze new ground, incorporating the previously unincorporated, creating a larger structure from the one within which we have grown and loved and lived.

The Year with Rilke is formally over, but I feel as if my discovery of Rilke, as a true voice, as a true presence, has only begun. I find myself hungrier than ever to explore the Duinos Elegies. But I also find my lips smacking for that which is not Rilke—a litany of poets, philosophers and lunatics I won’t bother to mention.

There is no doorway between years, only a long hallway called time with a wallpaper that never repeats itself twice.

The gentle orbit goes on.

Hours, though you can attempt to isolate them, bleed invariably into the darkness of a future we cannot bear to imagine. Words are the same way—in the death of one, the absence built for another blooms from nothing.

Heat

2011-02-26T09:32:00.001-08:00

By Mackenzie Suess

Hot, sweet air,

Pressing against

Mosquito spray that

Fills my lungs, enters -sticky- into my mouth.

Heavy night,

Thick upon our

Red shingled roof,

The mockingbird's green cactus –do you remember-

Pointed and fanning arms

Striking out to prick the heat,

Thick upon the

Low brick wall-

Tan, beige, burnt orange, that we would walk

Upon, jumping from, playing

Games with magic- hiding the

Lava rocks: skin-scratching red and almost-black.

The heavy night

Pressing upon the driveway cement,

Seeping inside of it

While I stand

With an ice-cream cone in sticky hands

Heedless of their recent

Chemical dose.

Humid air, moist air:

Easy on the lungs.

My brothers, young then too, playing

Basketball without the sunlight,

Running, darting, calling, and

Our father playing too: proud, chuckling,

In this moment care

Free.

Our mother nearby, ready to

Scoop more

Into little glass bowls with

Cool metal spoons or into

Keebler cones for gobbling mouths.

Hazy moments, half made-up and

Half remembered,

Pulled from behind the veil of

Rain drawn through

My childhood

-Slapping at the concrete with every splash-

The day we left.

The Persistence of

2011-02-20T11:37:00.001-08:00

By Brett Schager

His fingers wriggle infinitesimal increments

back&forthback&forthback&forth

like little moth wings. He's dulled

by memories sculpted into dreams—

dark cracked dreams, still

sensuous as eiderdowns. And heavy

with adolescent possibilities, they

slither superciliously and send his

listless spirit saddened.

There was a time—

There was a time when—

we—could have been

together—what if? What if

it doesn't matter

? What if—

tender lips—

render me—

render unto me—undo—

the ghost—

His lips are parted,

plump, pink, and pouting.

Beaches where his eyes once were,

nails overgrown with cuticles.

The skin has only so many years

before it too forgets a touch,

a tremble. It passes.

When he slips off

his faded blue jeans

in the morning, undresses

and steps in the steaming shower,

what will rise

to meet his cold gaze

but a shower-

head of gleaming metal?

Or a shiver from the night-

mare of never

having

been.

Untitled [...and there stood before me a chasm of immeasurable width]

2011-02-17T13:17:00.001-08:00

By Conrad Hainds

… and there stood before me a chasm of immeasurable width, brimming in its darkness with every manner of beast: here and angel of some foreign god, there a black plum of swirling microcosm—everywhere mournful children, missing wonts, and diseased consummations of Orpheus. The walls were imbibed with the growing and wilting blossoms of memory long forgotten; the sky welled with sparring lightning—a grey mosaic of clouds interspersed with white. And, the abyss to me seemed to hold a future at its bottom, its distant, unseeable, unavoidable bottom which would overtake me in haste should I but step…—
—At the opposite edge of the chasm I glanced a brief shine of reflection, almost too distant to understand—but I knew it was called 'goal' or 'then' or 'that for which I…'; although I think the kindest name it has is 'hope'—
—And to reach it, it all enshrouded in distance and necessity and change—for it glimmered—I would have to descend into the abyss, into the darkness and dirgeful representations of time and love and the present. Had any man forded such perilous rivers, braved such daunting heights, stared into such depths past his feet and not trembled, but instead felt a strength, and unseen 'I will!' burst within his soul? Surely not. But descend still I must—for the sacred path behind me had been destroyed by my footsteps and tainted by my wanderings, unable to be trod ever again…—
—Thus I stood at the edge of an abyss, able to do naught but condemn myself to certain annihilation, unable to walk, only to fall…
…but then wings grew upon my back…

An Open Letter to Poets Who Are Right Now Listening to Other Poets Read Poetry

2011-02-15T07:45:00.001-08:00

By Ryan Connell

I know you.

I can read your mind.

As we sit here together

on metal folding chairs,

our notebooks politely silent

in our laps,

We are all thinking:

so much

better

than

this person

reading."

And we are always correct,

as we wait for our turn

to speak.

Levi's

2011-02-09T07:54:00.001-08:00

By Cheri Paul

they used Walt Whitman

to sell me jeans

which I liked

except for the crotch

which ached

with amorous love.

Poet's Notebook: A Year with Rilke, Week 25

2011-01-27T11:14:00.001-08:00

On Completing 'The Millennials'

By Christopher Poore

For this was huge and beyond imagining,

and I was not quite myself.

Imagine, maybe, paper cranes

taking flight, stringless, or better yet,

imagine yourself sinking suddenly

into a mirror, finding a world unbreakable and frank—

then maybe you'll know something of unbidden voices,

or the way I've been waxing

this entire month within plastered walls,

my entire body re-enacting the days

when it was a collective coil of cells dreaming

of what it might or mightn't try,

so glad I am that they decided on these two hands,

on these eyes which flutter like dusty wings through long hours,

on this heart which gets drunk

when it imagines the lips of Etta James,

this heart which flickers like a broken light at the sudden pulse of memory—

how glad and how thankful,

how undulating and prostrate this prayer.

These days were something like

the timid steps of April's bloom,

first the snow, then the earth

touching its own hands, making more of itself.

*The first line of this poem is taken from Rilke's letter to Anton Kippenberg after completing The Duino Elegies.

Beauty

2011-01-22T11:15:00.001-08:00

By Ross Barnett

I don't write

poems with an audience.

I don't publicly dismantle

my ribs,

my hands,

my conclusions.

My silhouette glanced at me,

sideways, critical.

I could see the black fabric

pulled over his mouth.

I loved the aesthetic:

passion, or faith, or only

a blur, a chiaroscuro.

It fit, you know?

Not another formulaic two-step

complete with the third decimal

place and standard

deviation. Not another

one, never again.

I don't restrain

the wound metal fire

dripping from the furrow.

(Close, damn you, close.)

I can show you

the smoke damage

inhibition used

to reduce, the crossing stars

in refusal to disperse,

combinations,

molecular collision,

chemical misdemeanors,

alternate behaviors,

the growing habit of fondness,

the que-le-ciel-soit-notre-lit head-back pause,

gun-shot spine crack, lipstick claws.

I have the waning toxic smear

tied around my neck,

next to blondie's tongue chain,

what's left of self-respect.

I can demonstrate

the value of convalescence.

Bitterness is priceless.

I can growl and hiss and kiss,

cold and blind, naked and shivering.

Men and women howled at my fingertips,

retreating into the intricate pride of shame.

So this is my secret.

That ember flowing

out of Helen's hair.

That cerebral moment,

constellation subordination.

That agony tearing off her toes,

just to elevate her.

It's all about your distance from the surface.

Morals fall, memories fall,

I pick everything else up.

That last second when my daughter thought

well what's another glass.

Sifting through unfamiliar verbs,

exclamations, proper nouns.

Speak before the last honey

drop condenses against drop

cant' hear unsweetened words.

So gambled away her doppleganger

established a new gender set

off into the balmy tide face

first your neck hinged snakelike back

as your rib pushed through your skin.

It was remarkable.

I've orchestrated a few horrors:

throngs of them, cutting holes in their hands

for a nonsense cause.

The few that found out

either kept going

or patched themselves up

with dreams of reason, of justice.

"I want to be just like you."

I felt so involved I burst

into tears and accepted you as a prize.

Don't worry. You're safe here.

Jezebel

2011-01-17T21:38:00.001-08:00

(January 14, 2011)

By Natalie Garro

Rouged patches grace her

cheekbones

blush the liquor in her veins.

A chastity embedded in

subtle folds of

her pink lace.

Pearl earrings

pure and delicate

demure mutterings

make haste.

Somber sleepless slumber

broods nighttime's broken grace.

Writhing images imprinted into

eyelids under-eye bruises

lay an innocence to waste.

Her hand beckons out a call to tame

the dancing beast to chase.

Whose tongue tastes her demeanor

with blackened sight

much like a snake.

Rouse bludgeoning rouse battery

baggage wrong

unbound too late.

And choke her with your voice

writing images of fate;

and still

she wears her lace

she wears her perfume

as though this meeting

strictly business

is a date.

She swallows

anger violence unlove.

With tear-drenched eyes

black eyes thus painted

swallows hate.

And in the end all was forgotten by

the mind

as dreams roll o'er to sleep

but

as eyes wake

and she is air

for her

it was all

too little yes

too late.

Poet's Notebook: A Year with Rilke, Week 24

2011-01-07T21:26:00.001-08:00

(Above: A party of forgotten persons stands in front of
remembered ruins built by forgotten persons.)

An Ecstasy of Forgetting

By Christopher Poore

Oh the losses of the universe, Marina, the perishing stars!

We don't increase their number when we plunge.

In the All, everything has long been counted.

Our own falling does not diminish the sacred number.

Accepting this, we fall to the Source and heal…

—Rainer Marie Rilke, "Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efrom"

Quick. Tell me the names of all eight of your great-grandparents. Take a moment if you need and think it through. And then write them down—somehow this will make them feel more permanent, less prone to disintegration. Though even paper biodegrades.

Chances are you were lucky if you could name three of them, you are the user of supernatural mnemonics if you remember all eight. For my own part, I remember the names of two. The first is my Grandma Anna, a silver-haired matriarch who died this past summer, though her skin remained practically without wrinkle throughout her sudden decline. She was a hundred. Birth year: 1910. That number, almost as senseless to me as binary code, and only a digit away...

And then I remember Grandpa Earl, her husband, who has found an impermanent place in my own mind due to his wife's longevity and perhaps even my own slight resemblance to an early picture of him.

But then I remember two faces, or rather photographs of faces—the grandparents of my mother, the parents of my grandmother. Though nameless, I see them clearly. Pee-Paw (as my mom called him) is a suspender-wearing man, enfeebled by Polio, but nonetheless comfortably reclining in a floral armchair, reading the newspaper. The Oklahoman radio man—a voice sent out to thousands. And then his wife—Mee-Maw—she looks like a movie star from the fifties: thick black hair, cherry red lipstick. Pee-Paw was told by his family upon marrying her, "Not all that glitters is gold. What could she possibly want with someone like you?" He ignored them, and they stayed together till death—Pee-Paw promising to go last, so that Mee-Maw wouldn't be lonely. He kept his promise, and then he lost his memory. Well, to be honest, and perhaps less dramatically tragic, he was losing his memory before she died—Mee-Maw trying to mask the fact until it was undeniable, his meals composed of chocolate and jam with a small helping of bread. Perhaps this has a tragedy of its own. A house collapsing in more than one way. Mee-Maw, with all her cinematic beauty, the body. Pee-Paw, disembodied by a radio's waves—he was the mind. First the body, then the mind—this will be your decay, you twentysomethings gallivanting blonde and jubilant beneath my window tonight.

Cruel of me, I suppose, to have forgotten their names. I feel the pang of guilt, though I know it isn't quite my fault. I met Pee-Paw when I was very young, but he passed before I could develop the ability to remember. Still, I feel that they are in the room, watching me, slightly hurt at my forgetting.

I ask my mother what their names were.

"Wakefield and Evelyn," she tells me.

I repeat the names to myself. Wakefield and Evelyn. Wakefield and Evelyn. Like a spell, an incantation which makes the pictures seem more alive.

I look in the mirror afterwards, knowing that in all probability I will be beyond memory two generations from now. I will be the photograph—medium of the ephemeral impression, a thing of bleaching ink—quietly disintegrating in a drawer or maybe in the eye of the boy who carries my blood.

***

Too well we know Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art":

"Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn't hard to master."

But also, all too well we know the one art described by Bishop—the gentle, tidal swell and retreat of holding, of letting go. Because our hands perform these two activities, they are beautiful. And because our minds do also, we love "One Art." We love it so much that we tattoo parts of it onto our bodies, making permanent the idea of impermanence on our earthly shells. One of my friends has "Write it!" on her right wrist. Another friend has borrowed part of the already mentioned stanza for her hip. Of course, I prefer the friend who's tattooed the Dylan Thomas quote: "I am the secret my body will keep forever." But this seems to be a personal matter, poetically subjective and maybe irrelevant.

But then maybe not. Even that quote admits that most things are taken into the grave—a place beyond memory, the hole beyond sight, not to mention thought.

***

Surely there must be a function to this terrible and terrific art. Imagine remembering every day of your life in all of its suffocating banality—the shoes you wore to the gym the entire summer of '98, the banana too rotten to eat on March 27, 2004. But remember also those rare climactic moments with a clarity approaching on the crystalline. The day the puppy was lost to the tire. The afternoon picnic where a ring rested next to the cider. The evening you knew that your retirement fund would soon be worth a can of Coke. You live through them once more. You weep and sing and dance as if it were all happening again. You have never mastered the art supposedly so easy to learn.

***

Maybe a memory eternal wouldn't be such a good thing for me.

Truth be told, there are things I want to forget. And not even a tabla rasa swipe of the blackboard—but the breaking of the tabla, the subsequent throwing of the shards into a rocket aimed for the fission and fusion of the godly sun. For the remainder of my life I would pray that though unlikely, our star in its final death will not merely dwarf but collapse in on itself, becoming a black hole—the master of masters when it comes to the one art.

So, poetically speaking, I want poetry to function as a sort of forgetting. When I pin to the page the particularly horrific, I'm looking for an extermination complete and total. In my translating the cognitive recollection to the corporeal page, I'm looking to be rid of something. I desire a release, but I also want to be released.

Yet at other times, I want poetry to function as a way to remember—not only for myself (a feeble declaration of: "Hey! I existed!"), but for whatever audience my lines find. Maybe this is why Robert Pinsky writes in his poem "Forgetting":

"The forgetting I notice most as I get older is really a form of memory:

The undergrowth of things unknown to the young, that I have forgotten."

And maybe this is why I love Robert Pinsky's poetry, because it plays with the very notion of forgetting—not only in the individual, but in the collective loss of languages, histories, religions. Entire nations, tribes and villages—lost, swept off the pages of the cultural memory, the contents of which are decided by despots and victors.

But Pinsky's out for those "champs." His poetry swells will allusions—to dead and nearly overlooked figures of WWII, to the Crusades, to the popstar of yesteryear, currently swelling in a rehab center. But as he himself has noted, Pinsky doesn't intend for his readers to run off to Google at every name-drop so that they can decode an inventory of lost identities. Rather, he wants us to focus on the fact that we cannot remember, he wants us to ask why we have forgotten and to be swept into the chasm of that loss. In this way, we come closer to understanding our own current identity, just as the mountaineer inventories his sack to discover what was lost in the last ravine's crossing. Because to discover what he doesn't have is to discover what he needs.

Contributors 2011-2012

2011-01-01T19:41:00.000-08:00

Ben Welp

Sherie Ajayi

Ross Barnett

RJ Lotze -- Originally from Hopewell Junction, NY my poetry attempts to reconcile ways and means to a higher understanding of basic concepts by equating hemp's resource potential with the idea of "One". I use poetry to focus attention upon what I consider the pivotal issue in the human struggle.

Heather Brown -- Heather Brown is a writer, photographer, teacher, dreamer, listener, lover, and dream-lover. She has so far spent most of her life in the mountains but now resides closer to the ocean. A high school English teacher in a previous life, Heather is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Christopher Bullock

Ryan Connell -- Ryan Connell is a poet, theologian and day-dreamer. He prides himself on being "the laziest writer working today," a title that he has defended since 2005. When he is not writing, he is either napping or being awkward around girls.

Sam Columna -- Sam Columna graduated from CU Boulder in May 2011 with a BA in English, with an emphasis in creative writing. Immediately following graduation, he enrolled at CU Denver to study Recording Arts. Once he obtains this degree, he will have two liberal arts degrees, which will ensure him a lucrative career as a manger at a Walgreens, or perhaps a night shift manager at McDonalds. He is in a local band called OffColor, which you should look up on facebook.

Evan Feeley

Anton Frost

Natalie Garro

Conrad Hainds

Kate Hammerich--Kate has been published in The Susquehanna Review, ditch, Third Wednesday, Barrier Island Review, Verandah Literary Journal, Grasslimb, Kill Poet, MiPoesias, The Junk Lot Review, The Legendary, The Missing Slate and has self-published three books, escape artist and hallucinations, cancer & the purple tree and as we are now, but never again. She mostly spends her time rolling on the floor with her daughter and her Husky. She is currently writing full-time and trying to get more involved in the poetry community.

Kamri Dillard -- Kamri Dillard is a poet, a painter, an aspiring photographer and at the end of the day a student working at an animal shelter in Denver. She was born and raised in Colorado and has lived in numerous places along the Rocky Mountains. Her dreams are to travel the world and experiance other cultures first-hand while immersing herself amongst indeginous peoples all across the globe. She lives with her boyfriend of six years and their miniature Dachshund Buddha. She hopes that each day is more inspiring than the last and hopes to continue writing, painting and capturing the beauty around her.

DJ Kato -- Andrea Jane Kato was born in the great state of California and was raised Buddhist by a gypsy-like artist mother and a Japanese farmer who currently grows pineapples in Hawaii. She is a Capricorn, Dragon, INTJ, HSP, Atheist, singer/songwriter, abstract painter/artist, iPhone photographer who likes yoga, fasting, and smoking. She has been published in magazines such as The Blue Jew Yorker, My Favorite Bullet, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Beat, Ditch, Pomegranate, ReadThis Magazine, and Alternativereel.

Chris Kelly

Rozina Kidari

Alex Killian

Kaleena Kovach

Leah Kuehn

Annaliese Lengerich

Cheri Paul

Christopher Poore

Connor Prendergast

Nicholas Riegel

Brett Schager

Marina Scholtz

Mackenzie Seuss

Sydney Stensland

The Resolutions of Poets

2010-12-31T16:22:00.001-08:00

True, poets may make fine debauchees of dew and inebriates of air, but that doesn't mean they lack an improving spirit. As these following lines show, New Year's Day resolutions are for everyone—even the drunken wielder of the pen.

Carl Sandburg's Resolution for Failure and Love

"Give me hunger,

O you gods that sit and give

The world its orders.

Give me hunger, pain and want,

Shut me out with shame and failure

From your doors of gold and fame,

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,

A voice to speak to me in the day end,

A hand to touch me in the dark room

Breaking the long loneliness. "

—From "At a Window"

John Donne's Resolution Against the Day

"…let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move…"

—From "A Valediction: Forbidding Morning"

T.S. Eliot's Resolution for Fashion

"I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

—From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Laurie Scheck's Resolutions to Chase the Very Plain

"…But there is a very plain in things that sometimes comes

Just calmly. It holds no trade routes, no borders fortressed, guarded,

That I may briefly touch it. That I might step into the curious…"

—From "That I might step"

Richard Wilbur's Resolution for More Laundry

"The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

'Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.'"

—From "Love Calls Us to the Things of this World"

Eliza Lee Follen's Resolution towards the Ridiculous

"Then, nonsense let us cherish,

Far, far from reason's light;

Lest in her light she perish,

And vanish from our sight."

—From "Lines on Nonsense"

Kim Addonizio's Resolution Against Resolution

"…Today I want

to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk

a little longer in the cold

blessing of the rain,

and lift my face to it."

—From "New Year's Day"

Ekphrasis: witness at flag burning

2010-12-30T11:18:00.001-08:00

By Riley Walker

—Grey dragons born from

the stained flame cavort

and join the moon and

indistinct constellations,

and even the most sober

among us looked up at

the icy fog and frost-coated

trees and admitted it all

felt so fantastical.

Standard of oppression,

do you wave in the same

air i breathe?

We amerikans waive our right

to kill Others,

so long as we can stab them

in the back as we dream—or

watch blue-clad fleshless (may

as well be) faceless riot masks

beat them in our name with our

silent consent.

And speaking of features,

what we observe, the

economical, empirical,

Amerikan unit;

I am reminded as the

ignition and gasoline

eat you of the

dozen waxed apples

I purchased in brisk

December rush because

of visiting family. They

looked waxed, sure, but

edible, crisp underneath,

and when i grabbed one to eat

i found them all in some

way decaying…

`~``

Why is this such a contemptible

(news corp: "controversial)

affront? Certainly, this flame

is not aggressive, it is not

going to get out of control

and hurt anyone. It is too ancient,

i think. L'erotisme of sacrifice

is too scandalous, the Dionysian

air too cloyed with nebulous

sanctity—a sacrifice,

expressed in protest, this

fire is an eschatological

verdict on the idea of

Amerika, the one we keep

broadcasting over the air

and hoarding with the other

stolen treasures deep in our

ambitious hearts, our grasping

minds, our jealous souls.

Safe

2010-12-19T11:34:00.001-08:00

By Brett Schager

The last three nights, I've awoken

with a start

from a dream.

We were kinky, pretend

zombies, devouring each other's body and brains,

crimson rivers carving canyons

into our cheeks like glaciers.

And oh, the ecstasy of flesh & flesh & flesh &

tonguing blood, gobbling flesh.

Just before dawn, just before

the sun squints

just before I wake up

I look down upon you, poor creature, to find

I've chewed through your carotid artery.

Empty artery.

I become a vulture, crooked-backed

with dirty wings, pecking at a heavy corpse,

each peck crying, "No! No! Come back!

I didn't mean to kill you with desire!"

Each morning I wake up with a start.

Today you ask me

to bite your nipple.

Instead, I caress your hands with my palms,

kiss your lips

tenderly, tenderly, tenderly.