More than a stirring, more than a rag soaked in gasoline, these nights in the streets are about need.
It all gets televised, and television is about something else: a box or a flattened box, a profound stillness masquerading as movement.
No Future becomes a slogan, and then we move on. We live the No.
A billion smaller boxes. Little coffins for ideas.
There’ll be time enough for mindlessness. A spoon and a melting lawn gnome.
I want to inject my cell phone. Smart drugs. Traffic cones. Dunce caps. Safety orange. Blaze orange.
We gorge on that which muddies up the blood.
– Glen Armstrong…
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I expected to return and find the house
collapsed on itself in my absence.
But I came back,
half as beaten down as before but still unwhole,
and found nothing changed,
all the way down to the dust bunnies
in the corner of the stairs.
I spent days and weeks before this one bracing myself,
building up my walls
where they had started to crumble away.
I placed a bucket in my hand
to bail myself back into the hole
I thought I created in my hurried exit
but found no such thing.
Nothing could have prepared me
for the amount of inaction needed.
I had prepared a grand re-opening.
and no one came.
I’ve never been good at adjusting
and readjusting,
the arranging
and rearranging.…
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I want to write
———dirty poetry;
——————you heard right.
Words that aren’t gold
———because they’re too busy
——————grinding against the dirt.
I’ve been yearning
———to live
——————beyond the poverty
sticking to my palms.
———I shredded my diary
——————at seventeen,
tried to silence
———the frenzy of youth.
——————I’ve been pulling away
at strands in my verses,
———combing out
——————the glitter.
I want to be honest
———I may have traded
——————God for poetry
wanting / to make / love.
– Claudia Rojas…
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Orville,
what did we just see?
I look at my brother.
He looks at me.
Mirrors of wonder,
much more than a disbelief.
We look back up to the sky
and want more.
This awe feels right.
Despite no wings, this is
humankind’s dream, as if
commanded and given,
as if bestowed from heaven.
And look at us.
So much can happen
when we just believe.
– Joe Bisicchia…
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To go back to last week
____and tell my subway self it is ok to make
________eye contact: the eyes of the terrified
beseech. If only I had smiled at her,
____introduced myself (never mind the stutter),
________made that self-deprecating joke
I’ve been saving, then maybe she
____would’ve laughed and caused eyes
________to flit up and dart around, and the
musician next to her could’ve
____added his two cents, and she might’ve
________pointed to his saxophone, and perhaps
he would’ve begun to play, and surely the
____other passengers would’ve stared and chuckled
________and clapped until the hurtling hearse filled with
________music and movement and touch and dance—
I am on the ‘L’ now, departing for downtown, and
____cannot hear the violinist playing against the station walls,
________unnoticed, to the left of the descending stairs.…
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i told my son you can reach me i am not the weather the same way my father was the weather i am not mystery or storm or the perfect day apology for the storm you can reach me i am willing to be shaken i used to be shaken all of the time you you you son you can reach me i have built a table too small to eat at so that we can sit there and hold no pursuit other than me what do you need
– Darren Demaree…
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“Well, if it doesn’t jell, it isn’t aspic, and this isn’t jellin’!”
—Psycho
Brine shrimp spawn a galaxy in a fishbowl.
Ergo, sea monkeys exist.
So do Higgs bosons and demodex.
These last look like scorpions
and live on the canopy of your eyelashes.
The difference being they’re not sold
at toy stores as a novelty item.
PETA has so far remained notoriously
mum about sea monkeys.
Long before that Nazi sympathizing
corpolite von Braunhut patented his presto shrimp
aquariums in the late ’60’s,
Kubla Khan’s gift to Marco Polo when they first met
was a porcelain bowl of sea monkeys
swimming in unfettered motility.
Michaelangelo sculpted a frieze
of sea monkeys once.
It’s now in one of the nine circles
of the Vatican, next to Pope Joan’s feeldoe.…
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