Quoteable

"It is all very well to be able to write books, but can you wiggle your ears?" --J. M. Barrie

Three Pieces By Alan Britt

NIGHT

Patio
emits
a gill of light.

Lattice
sheds
its scales
across dark grass
& yellow leaves.

YELLOW LEAVES

Yellow leaves
form an apricot pile.

The cold wind
is an eighty-four-year-old
Impressionist painter
teasing a young girl
who swings a teal watering can.

I can tell
by the cold wind’s arthritic red knuckles.

COLD AFTERNOON

Banana-spotted, green leaves
cover the ground.

Wind’s fingers rake icy shadows
across the leaves’ sleeping fur.

--Alan Britt teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University. His recent books are Vegetable Love (2009),Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Essays recently in Clay Palm Review and Arson. Interviews and poetry (selected) recently featured in Steaua (Romania), Latino Stuff Review and Poet’s Market. Other poems (selected) in Agni, The Bitter Oleander, Bolts of Silk (Scotland), Christian Science Monitor, Cider Press Review, Cold Mountain Review, Confrontation, The Cultural Journal, English Journal, Epoch, Fire (UK), Flint Hills Review, Fox Cry Review, Gradiva (Italy), Greensboro Review, Hecale (Internet/UK), Kansas Quarterly, Karamu, The Kerf, Magyar Naplo (Hungary), Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Midwest Quarterly, New Letters, Pacific Review, Pedrada Zurda (Ecuador), Puerto del Sol, Queen’s Quarterly (Canada), Revista Solar (Mexico), Rosebud, Second Aeon (Wales), Sou’wester, Square Lake, Strangeroad (Internet), Writers’ Journal, plus the anthologies: American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Ltd., 2009; Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008; Fathers: Poems About Fathers,St. Martin’s Press: 1998, Weavings 2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology,Forest Woods Media Productions, Inc., St. Mary’s College, MD, and La Adelfa Amarga: Seis Poetas Norteamericanos de Hoy, Ediciones El Santo Oficio, Peru, 2003. Recent readings: SUNY at Albany, NY, 2006; Hendrick Hudson Free Library, Montrose, NY, 2006; Towson University, Towson, MD, 2006; PCA/ACA Conference, Boston, 2007, Ultra Violet Studio, Chelsea/NYC, 2007; WPA Gallery at Pound Ridge Reservation, Cross River, NY, 2008; Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) reading and workshop, Baltimore, MD, 2008; NCTE: Afro-American Read-In, Towson University, Towson, MD 2008 and 2009; Ramapo College, reading and presentation, 2009.

GRAY SQUIRREL

GRAY SQUIRREL

The gray squirrel
inspects our rain gutter
for acorns.

Gets lucky
above the patio.

Quickly departs
when he detects
the rustle
of this poem.

--Alan Britt teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University. His recent books are Vegetable Love (2009),Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Essays recently in Clay Palm Review and Arson. Interviews and poetry (selected) recently featured in Steaua (Romania), Latino Stuff Review and Poet’s Market. Other poems (selected) in Agni, The Bitter Oleander, Bolts of Silk (Scotland), Christian Science Monitor, Cider Press Review, Cold Mountain Review, Confrontation, The Cultural Journal, English Journal, Epoch, Fire (UK), Flint Hills Review, Fox Cry Review, Gradiva (Italy), Greensboro Review, Hecale (Internet/UK), Kansas Quarterly, Karamu, The Kerf, Magyar Naplo (Hungary), Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Midwest Quarterly, New Letters, Pacific Review, Pedrada Zurda (Ecuador), Puerto del Sol, Queen’s Quarterly (Canada), Revista Solar (Mexico), Rosebud, Second Aeon (Wales), Sou’wester, Square Lake, Strangeroad (Internet), Writers’ Journal, plus the anthologies: American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Ltd., 2009; Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008; Fathers: Poems About Fathers,St. Martin’s Press: 1998, Weavings 2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology,Forest Woods Media Productions, Inc., St. Mary’s College, MD, and La Adelfa Amarga: Seis Poetas Norteamericanos de Hoy, Ediciones El Santo Oficio, Peru, 2003. Recent readings: SUNY at Albany, NY, 2006; Hendrick Hudson Free Library, Montrose, NY, 2006; Towson University, Towson, MD, 2006; PCA/ACA Conference, Boston, 2007, Ultra Violet Studio, Chelsea/NYC, 2007; WPA Gallery at Pound Ridge Reservation, Cross River, NY, 2008; Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) reading and workshop, Baltimore, MD, 2008; NCTE: Afro-American Read-In, Towson University, Towson, MD 2008 and 2009; Ramapo College, reading and presentation, 2009.

Quoteable

"Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only truth." --Full Metal Alchemist

AROUND FIVE O’CLOCK

AROUND FIVE O’CLOCK

Brown leather gloves,
switched at birth,
which explains
how they ended up
in different pockets.

Poets sleep
in this cold;
arthritic knuckles
knead their souls.

Heavy clouds
like pilot whales
pass overhead.

--Alan Britt teaches English/Creative Writing at Towson University. His recent books are Vegetable Love (2009),Vermilion (2006), Infinite Days (2003), Amnesia Tango (1998) and Bodies of Lightning (1995). Essays recently in Clay Palm Review and Arson. Interviews and poetry (selected) recently featured in Steaua (Romania), Latino Stuff Review and Poet’s Market. Other poems (selected) in Agni, The Bitter Oleander, Bolts of Silk (Scotland), Christian Science Monitor, Cider Press Review, Cold Mountain Review, Confrontation, The Cultural Journal, English Journal, Epoch, Fire (UK), Flint Hills Review, Fox Cry Review, Gradiva (Italy), Greensboro Review, Hecale (Internet/UK), Kansas Quarterly, Karamu, The Kerf, Magyar Naplo (Hungary), Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Midwest Quarterly, New Letters, Pacific Review, Pedrada Zurda (Ecuador), Puerto del Sol, Queen’s Quarterly (Canada), Revista Solar (Mexico), Rosebud, Second Aeon (Wales), Sou’wester, Square Lake, Strangeroad (Internet), Writers’ Journal, plus the anthologies: American Poets Against the War, Metropolitan Arts Press, Ltd., 2009; Vapor transatlántico (Transatlantic Steamer), bi-lingual anthology of Latin American and North American poets, Hofstra University Press/Fondo de Cultura Económica de Mexico/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Peru, 2008; Fathers: Poems About Fathers,St. Martin’s Press: 1998, Weavings 2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology,Forest Woods Media Productions, Inc., St. Mary’s College, MD, and La Adelfa Amarga: Seis Poetas Norteamericanos de Hoy, Ediciones El Santo Oficio, Peru, 2003. Recent readings: SUNY at Albany, NY, 2006; Hendrick Hudson Free Library, Montrose, NY, 2006; Towson University, Towson, MD, 2006; PCA/ACA Conference, Boston, 2007, Ultra Violet Studio, Chelsea/NYC, 2007; WPA Gallery at Pound Ridge Reservation, Cross River, NY, 2008; Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) reading and workshop, Baltimore, MD, 2008; NCTE: Afro-American Read-In, Towson University, Towson, MD 2008 and 2009; Ramapo College, reading and presentation, 2009.

Quoteable

"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing." --Anais Nin

Constance Stadler reviews David Blaine's Antisocial

Review: Antisocial by David Blaine

David’s Blaine “Antisocial” is a hidden treasure. You expect poetic diatribes and rants, you get wonderful wit laden bites that must be read a second or third time or the rich profundity/in-your-face irony will surely be missed. Though seeming toss-offs ,these are multi-faceted, rich gems.

There are many targets here, but not specific “causes”, Blaine rather wishes to probe the fertile underbelly of the genesis of our sequential stupidities:

In Guns ‘n Butter, our impassioned, unthinking love affair with environmental destroying “wheels” is turned into a sardonic rendezvous:

I’d been having an affair/with a hydrocarbon medusa./A crude relationship/ based on heavy metal/ m.r.e.’s and gunshot residue.

This continues to progress until we reach an acme, B.S. Mentality, where all the poet’s talent and message comes through, in a totally captivating way ~ a casual discussion of Christ, and his ‘way with words’:

Jesus wasn’t a woodsmith
but a wordsmith

and he’s always been misunderstood,
I mean Golgotha—
that was a tough crowd.

I am the way, the truth and the life.

Metaphor.

What Christ needed
was more concrete imagery

like the son of man…now that must have pissed his mother off.

Joseph probably grinned his best “that’s my boy” grin
then caught an elbow in the ribs and that “you’re not getting any tonight” look
From Mary.

(Does the “you’re not getting any tonight” look work when you haven’t gotten any for—
ever?)

Acerbity and challenge are not avoided; indeed in not a few poems the confrontation is brutal. This is in-your-face in The Truth (Really):

For my poem to work
I needed to speak to you
like a two faced friend
sponging a drink

like that homeless guy
who needs a dime for “bus fare”

or like a politician
scamming your vote.

But I’m certain an educated
upstanding person,
such as yourself,
gets that

don’t you?

Or in History’s Child:

Fact is brutal/Fact is a bare two hundred watt bulb/ Fact is a glaring in your face …/Truth is fact with the corners rounded off/and the edges softened ... / Fuck fact/
tell me your story.

But on the occasions when his rage becomes specific, it is blistering as in the innocuously titled, Won’t you come to my house:

In Sudan the children are starving/while we're turning food into oil. I’m getting eight miles per baby this week./What time can I pick you up?

One of the true delights of this rich volume is the unexpected. David’s originality, insights, raw talent and puckish wit combine to making this book a must-read.

Towards the end of the book he challenges Dylan Thomas’ ‘take’ in Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night:

Why rage?/Which essential tasks remain?/Fetters chains …/refuse this fight/retreat into light/embrace December’s whitened night.

You read this and murmur. “David, you are a force of nature”, and that would be … quite … accurate.

--Constance Stadler is the Review Editor for Calliope Nerve and the author of two chaps, Tinted Steam (Shadow Archer Press), Sublunary Curse (Erbacce) and a full-length eBook Paper Cuts (Calliope Nerve Media). --When David Blaine was young, Mafia hoods roughed him up and stole his middle name! He could live off his writing, if someone else would pay the bills. David’s work has appeared in Blue Root, Third Eye, Arsenic Lobster, Contemporary Rhyme, and Stimulus Respond. Antisocial is available at Outside Writers.

Killing Time

Killing Time

“It all comes down to this…” he says. “You gotta fuckin’ punch him in the balls next time.”

He is Chinese with torn jeans and a cell phone.

I’m trying to read in a big overstuffed chair in a hidden corner in a gigantic Barnes & Noble. Next to me is a fat lady trying to get comfortable. She came in like a lion…with an avalanche of papers and books and bags. I tried the i’mstaring/i’mnotstaringi’mreally reading thing with the book I was scanning and not planning on buying. She really was huge I decided drinking in a long glance when her back was turned. She’s probably happy that chair was wide.

“Barnes man! Barnes!”

He’s pacing now and annoyingly loud on the cell phone. I’m assuming his invisible cell friend is asking him where he is and I’m wondering if Barnes is now proper short term slang for this bookstore…like Mickey D’s for McDonalds and KFC for Kentucky Fried. I think Starbucks should get a slang name. Like Bucks or Stars or SB’s or Ridiculously Fuckin Expensive Coffee which would be shortened to RFEC otherwise, what’s the point?

Doesn’t this chink know we’re trying to read over here? I don’t care if it ain’t a fuckin library, this is where losers like me like to sit and relax and drink a lukewarm cuppa RFEC while reading shit we don’t have any intention of buying. Cell phones are the new screaming toddler. I wanted to throw the fat lady at him.

Me and my other freeloader book readers shoot daggers at him until he fall into a puddle of his own ripe blood drawn fresh and hot pretty. But he really just walked away. I still would like to take credit for it. I mean, who says “balls” in a bookstore?

Across from me was some guy and across from fat lady was some girl. Guy and girl were together but never spoke with words, just whispers and body motions. Like they really believed it was a library or some crap. Girl was studying some sort of Xeroxed copy of notes and guy was reading a magazine on Hot Rods. Dude. Really? Hot Rods? I thought those mags were for fifty-something redstate rednecks with wives who ignored them for Bingo, cake baking and knitting? You live in California! Get a magazine like People or Entertainment Weekly or Star! Meaningless crap with no purpose. How long have you been here? Like 3 hours? It’s Saturday afternoon! Go bike ride! Skateboard! Eat lettuce wraps somewhere! You’re killing me. You and Notegirl deserve each other. Go make out with fat lady. Have a threesome right there on the coffee table. I’ll move my feet even. What? You don’t like my feet all up on the Barnes coffee table? Uncouth? Well, then how bout I step on your larynx while fat lady blows your teeny tiny cock and Notegirl does a little ass to mouth? With the mouth being yours and the ass being Fat Lady’s?

Yeah, thought so.

But that doesn’t really happen and I don’t even think any of that. In fact, none of this is happening except some of it that I am not making up. Notegirl and Hotrodmag Guy are just fine. Just chillin. They don’t make noise and Fat Lady still can’t get comfortable. She changes position every 4 – 6 minutes. I know this because I time her. So, next time you’re doing weird shit while sitting around with strangers for hours, like at jury duty, or the doctor’s office waiting room thinking nobody’s watching….just remember, they are. Especially if it’s me.

Fat Lady was reading a book called something like, “Make it Your Best Life NOW” or something. At least that means she is being proactive.

My book was called something along the lines of, “Tell Me a Bunch of Shit I Already Know”. It could’ve also been called, “You Can’t Ever Feel Good About Your Writing Because You Suck and You Know It So Give It Up Loser”. In fact, I think those were the exact titles.

Later on, when all you could hear was the store speakers playing that singer songwriter cunt Anna Nalick (just kidding) cd, and all was quiet in the back corner with our retarded foursome, a book fell off the shelf by itself and slapped on the ground making a noise like a book falling on the ground.

I thought, “Maybe it’s a ghost. That would be cool if it was a haunted bookstore, I would come here everyday and document the various phenomena. I’d bring in night vision heat-seeking motion sensitive cameras and recording equipment with huge sponge covered microphones and I’d wear headphones and when the employees would ask me if they could help me find anything, I’d say, “Do you have that new Jenna Jameson book?”’ and then say, “Is it okay if I read it in the bathroom and do you have wet wipes in there?”

But not really, but still, I kind of thought some of that.

And the book that fell sat on the floor and while everybody heard it, nobody rushed over to pick up poor Mr. Book and put him back on his shelf with his friends. We were all lazy fucks too selfish and self absorbed to meander over off of our overstuffed asses to save poor little fallen book boy.

But later, some employee girl did. And I wanted to say, “Hey, that book fell off the shelf all by itself…is this store haunted?” But I didn’t.

--xTx has been published at places like Pank, Thieves Jargon, Cherry Bleeds, Dogzplot, and decomP.

What A Father Would Say

What A Father Would Say

I’m making the bed and from the other room I hear my boy shouting, “Suck it! Suck it!” into his Xbox headphone menacing an on-screen opponent. He’s just two months into his thirteenth year.

In my opinion, suck it, suck it, is not an appropriate phrase to be yelled by an infant teenager, let alone by my infant teenager, and in my house. Dutifully, I yell at him to please stop and that I never want to hear him say that again.

“Okay mom…sorry…” he relents in childlike apology. His voice is not yet broken.

Suck it…I think. Does he even know what that means?

Twenty minutes earlier, during the car ride home from Game Stop, he had his hand down his pants, wrestling with himself down there.

“What’s going on?” I ask, nodding my head and making eyes in the direction of his busy hand, “You getting’ pubes?” I ask this very nonchalantly. I know of no other good way to do this. We have to talk about it sometime. There was nobody else to do it.

“Please mom…” he groans, and then after a minute, “Yes.”

“Cool,” I respond. I think it’s maybe what a father would say.

--xTx has been published at places like Pank, Thieves Jargon, Cherry Bleeds, Dogzplot, and decomP.

Felino Soriano's Apperceptions of Reinterpretations

Felino Soriano's Apperceptions of Reinterpretations is now available as a free download from Calliope Nerve Media.

"Felino Soriano's language scans each scene through the keen eye of an eagle. Ekphrastic interpretations in a sea between updraft and whitecap. Our guide into this gallery is the real artist. Articulate. Elegant as mirrors by candlelight. Each painting, like fledglings being pushed out of the nest; all the down has been plucked away, only the sharpness remains. They'll nudge you, lead you to the edge; teach you how to fly." --Joseph R. Trombatore (author Screaming at Adam, Pushcart nominee)

Read it.

Love it.

Tell your friends.

Read more of Felino's work at the Calliope Nerve archive.

Impossible

Impossible

Droplet joy,

           glycine

               emulsion

awash in

                    nacreous

                      disbelief.

 

Rivulet baptismal hopes

                clearly meant

for other

       paler

       pinker

cheeks …

 

I have birthed too many poems

                        not to know

the sentence that is

                   my life -

                 my course

of strewn inconsequence;

                  this incubated salvage.

 

So

    

       this is aberrance

           or apparition.

 

Engrafting truth of

            one or both

might stave

             palpation wild.

 

This is assured …

    

  … absurdity …

 

       … and yet,

 

Here I sit -

 

            abused …

            … amused …

 

Beguiled.

--Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the prehistoric epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto. Her book Paper Cuts marks the debut of Calliope Nerve Media's literature arm.

Tree

Tree

Seized and thrashed -

          Your viridian mane

             crushes meridian glaze;

                    ruches waves

                       of aqueous breath.

                                     Tormenting

                                          your

                                       tethering;

 

Most days,

there is comfort

in permanent

            cross-grained

                 embedded

Firmament.

 

But now,

(it seems)

Exhausted,

                   sputtered

rustlings -

              vagaries

              of

foliated        

Bound

                               …resound.

 

Meandering eye

      now whelms

         at throes of agonies

                          imagined

                

 

From mine own

              rooted

                     shackled

Gaol.

 

A poet’s transient vision

        

                           … curates

                                           (pained?)

                                                          foliate

                                              flail …

--Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the prehistoric epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto. Her book Paper Cuts marks the debut of Calliope Nerve Media's literature arm.

Painters’ Exhalations 429

Painters’ Exhalations 429

—after Paul Freidin’s Untitled

Her wrist watch

                       (an abstraction, curled into a self of hiding
reinterpreted beauty, an unlooking into fabricated mirrors (society’s vice),
relaying a self of its self naturally becomes a blossom of tomorrow’s
understated will.  The abstraction spoke among a designated roadway,
near to the paralleling seek of hitchhiking assistance, hiding the
modesty of its staggered shadow, though alive and content with performing
trickery and slowly gazing toward its wearer’s charm, the abstraction realized
its definition has been tainted, as man reclaims a concept
not meant to lie limp after deconstruction proclaims an intellectual
misdeed)

absolutely sparkles

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Painters’ Exhalations 428

Painters’ Exhalations 428

—after Helen Frankenthaler’s Robinson’s Wrap

Abrasion is wound
tight, has jumped a spring’s full-body
length
               walking into visual awareness
                       needing
                  new clothing
a bandage sounds appropriate,
                                tailored
with a
 crease.

Poor knee.
               Accidental surgical removal
       of
top layers, the talking to the once curled strands
of rising hair,
                       gone now of the lying limp notion
disguised to
calm a mother’s sorrow, but indeed
death is the logical, untainted label.


                  Once healing is the future’s unraveling
thread, the face of alabaster skin
will reveal clay-form
interpretations of skin’s ability to
reshape, reenter a new stylized
existence.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Painters’ Exhalations 427

Painters’ Exhalations 427

—after Sam Francis’ Dark Beams

Birds
       walk these beams of
brevity’s night’s architectural splendor,
silent
               oscillation of the feathered neck’s
structural resolution:          ahead, prey!

Aerial maze triumph other side a daytime symphony,
caws on the downward claw-swipe executing
talon’s pressure pointed bequeathing.  Here
rain’s
       roads ride themselves on horizontal
horseback
                       questioning landing
wheels forth
below anything possible regurgitates insane
prophecy of such a foolish public statement.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Painters’ Exhalations 426

Painters’ Exhalations 426

—after Ned Evans’ Sanni

Because difference misleads
unique definitions,
the interpreted construction
donning
new name mythology

                               mystic tongue
coded climb value levitation
spor
       -adic connection scale
                                       hierarchy
reaching
golden halo re
-created
               symbolism.

Of the needed science, running laps
around the skeleton’s squandering dimensions:

truth is the language left dead on paved, microscopic fallacies.

--Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California) is a case manager and advocatefor developmentally and physically disabled adults. He edits/publishes Counterexample Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of experimental artistry, and Differentia Press, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of experimental poetry. As a poet, he has authored ten collections of poetry, including Among the Interrogated (BlazeVOX [books], 2008), Search among the Absent Found (Recycled Karma Press, 2009), and r (please press, 2009). The internal collocation of philosophical studies and love of classic and avant-garde jazz is the explanation for his poetic stimulation. Details are at his website, www.felinosoriano.com.

Club Hellaciously Fabulous

Club Hellaciously Fabulous

A cormorant has gotten in through one of the windows. When a call bell goes off down the hall she is not sure whether it’s a bell or a bird. This is the only hospital in the United States that opens its windows to the world. It opens its windows in the hopes that fresh air and bees and pollen will drift and buzz and waft into the rooms. Nancy stares around the room. It’s a snowy, blazing-white room, and she recognizes it the way any inpatient recognizes a hospital room on the first day of admission, without attachment, without curiosity. She sees the bees poking around languidly in her bouquets and she loves them. They are wearing striped velour vests of yellow and black. They tread air with their little wings while sipping nectar from trumpet flowers. Such a show! Such talent!

But she has been in the hospital longer than a day. She has been here for weeks upon weeks. Since she is an amnesiac, she does not know this.

She flip-flops her hands around experimentally, in slow, gentle choreography on top of the summer blanket. The blanket is soft, well-used cotton. The way she feels it, it is as though her hands are an infant’s hands, new and tender, never having known reprimand, never having learned coordination. She thinks her hands are beautiful but they fill her with unease. What have I done? How did I come to be here?

There is a burning sensation in her chest and a port-like swill through her brain.

She has a feeling that every night over the last several months, she’s swum in a heated pool, a pool located in a lovely place, like one of those island resorts that are advertised in tourism magazines. The pool had underwater speakers that played songs like “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Paint it Black.” It was trimmed in translucent pale blue tile, and around it seething fire pits were interspersed with palm frond-concealed fog machines. Foam-buoyed lazy susans drifted over the sapphire glaze, loaded with offerings of needles and pills and shot glasses and wet dreams. When Nancy closes her eyes, needles in tuxedos dance before the curtains of her blood-streaked eyelids.

She feels like a stranger to herself, like she’s just been born.

Some babies are born laughing.

I’m a baby, she says out loud, and laughs.

Maybe tonight she’ll sleep without whispering the name of an unkept promise, of an equation without an answer, of a remote bit of glitter in the sky, into a silent cushion of hours.

Is it that everything she was ever taught had been a lie? Oh, how she hates liars. But now, with lies so tightly interwoven with the truth, with the dark imitating the light, the light imitating the black, the tight imitating the slack, and the slack loosening all the time, it’s all the same, isn’t it? A perplexing, pearly gray.

One evening at a raucous party, when liquor had turned up the volume on everyone’s voices and stupidity, she tongue-kissed a flower at the deep end of the pool and almost drowned. It was an orchid. A lazy susan had been overturned. Shot glasses scattered like coral below treading feet. She tried to breathe underwater because she liked the view down there. It worked at first. Then, floating on a raft, wrapped in fog and a throbbing bass line, she realized her full love potential. Without being connected to anything else really at all, draping a leg into the lava-hot water she suddenly realized the free, nontoxic sheen of her love-potential. And oh, did it make her burn. She became the “O” in that burning word. Or maybe the soft “E” in Ecstacy.

Like a fading silhouette, the nurse leaves a bowl of vegetable soup on Nancy’s hospital table. He is very, very short.

It’s comfort food.

Her chest is burning and she isn’t sure if she can ever trust her instincts again.

The nurse, he is more beautiful even than the bees. She loves how he comes and goes all day long, his mouth so grim, with just a wry twitch now and then indicating humor. She wants to dissolve in him. Wants to spread herself out all over his bedroom, wherever that might be. Let’s go to your place. You be the nurse. I’ll be the somewhat battered bride arriving for the cosmic honeymoon.

She is alone now. With a bowl of soup and no spoon.

There is a spoon under the chair across the room. It seems so far away. Every bone in her body is soft and every thought in her head is heavy. She searches for the call bell but comes up only with a handful of glistening blue-black feathers. Without any help, by dint of her own strength, she resolves to reach the spoon. First she must remove the blanket from her chest. She lifts the blanket and her notices her body, glowing like spilled lava beneath. She puts the blanket back and rests awhile before daring to try again. Her chest also seems to be missing a heart.

There are flowers all over the room.

No, there are not.

No one has brought a single flower. And bees? What about those bees? What about opening the windows? And English garden would be nice. With South American transplants. Orchids…

She is glad there are no flowers because she would be embarrassed to have them all watching her with their pretty little eyes and faces, scowling because she is not their sun. Flowers are as proud in their short and graceful living, as we are shamed, in our long and coarse ways.

Oh God, she needs that soup. She needs that spoon. She has no call bell and her bones are soft. She peels the blanket away, rises from the bed like a symbol of resurrection, wheels her IV across the room and stoops to gain her victory and the nurse returns and lays his hand, ripe and taboo, upon her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” he asks and guides her back to bed.

“I’m…hungry,” Nancy answers.

“I brought you soup,” The nurse says.

“The comfort food,” she replies.

“Yes, the comfort food.”

“But the spoon is here on the floor.”

“Don’t bother with it, it’s dirty. And that soup will need reheating by now.”

The grim and beautiful nurse leaves the room and Nancy is back in bed. She feels existential and proud of herself because existentialists do not rest the weight of their spirits on others for support. They, like Nazi-era Jews, know that most friends are friends when conditions are right, not when they are needed most, and that self-reliance is the most basic and unswerving truth. Friends are unreliable drivers, swerving constantly.

Nancy is about to get out of bed again when the nurse returns.

“I have your soup.”

“Lemme have it,” Nancy answers, collapsing against her pillow.

The nurse gives Nancy a smile that reveals there is much more than grimness to him, and places the soup and a clean spoon down on the hospital table. Sometimes there are people in the world who make it hard to keep on hating everything all the time. There are people whose smiles make existentialism seem like a useless old pile of horse manure. This nurse is one of those.

Nancy eats. She is glad she is somewhere safe. She is glad she’s not in a pool and she’s glad she’s not an existentialist. She is glad she is an unswerving friend. And although she will never have him, she is glad she and the nurse match. Lastly, she is glad she never managed to thicken her skin, even though she tried hard for years and years. She’s not leather after all, only flesh and blood, like anyone else.

--Phoebe Wilcox lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Some of her favorite things are John Banville novels, sushi, salamanders (they have cute hands) and picking blueberries. Her novel, Angels Carry the Sun is pending publication with Lilly Press, and an excerpt from a second novel-in-progress has been published in Wild Violet. Recent and forthcoming experiments may be found in The Chaffey Review, The Big Table, “Shoots and Vines, The Battered Suitcase, The Linnet’s Wings, Calliope Nerve, Bartleby-Snopes, The Black Boot and others. Her story, Carp with Water in Their Ears, published in “River Poets Journal” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Escaping Consumption

Escaping Consumption

we rolled the windows up against the rain and my father

said “I wonder what that husband of yours

is doing right now” and I

just looked out through the streaky glass

and said nothing watching countryside

slide away in varying shades of green. behind me

the baby cried in his car seat tired

of being strapped down for six hours straight

and I wanted to cry too but

grown-ups don’t do that. outside the car

cornstalks unfolded under the onslaught of rain

sparse trees dances in waves of rippling light

and everything I thought I knew

about where I was going

and who I was going to be

faded into a black spot behind us

a black spot of nothing against a straight line of horizon.

--Holly Day is a travel writing instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. Her most recent nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Walking Twin Cities.

1995

1995

when my son was born, I threw away

all the photographs taken of my life from before

I was so determined to become somebody else

that I pretended that I was brand new

just like him

when my husband refused to work, I got a temp job

where I could work a week, then be home a week

so I could spend time with my son

there was no extra money, but I didn’t care

I was so in love with that baby

nothing else mattered



I sold all my records to pay for groceries and rent

I threw away all my clothes that couldn’t be used for work

everything I owned could fit in a backpack

a few pieces of jewelry I could sell in a pinch

enough to take me and my son

somewhere safe

--Holly Day is a travel writing instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. Her most recent nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Walking Twin Cities.

Duane Locke Reviews Candlelight Meditation from Constance Stadler's Paper Cuts

Duane Locke Reviews Candlelight Meditation from Constance Stadler's Paper Cuts

I start my response to reading Constance Stadler’s poems with the first poem in the collection, “Candlelight Meditation.” As I start my reading, immediately the musical control entices my attention. The music puts its arms around me. Her music is a poetic music that communicates connotations that are inseparable from connotations emanating from the denotations of the words. It is a music of the master poetic musicians, Chaucer (if read in Middle English), Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats, and T. S. Eliot, but it is not a stolen music from historic and now defunct traditional forms, not a copied music, not a mechanical exercise of received poetic forms classified and ossified in poetry handbooks and what has come to be known in popular critical parlance as formal poetry. It is an original music, her music, only a music that Connie could write. Her music pulls the reader right into the print on the page.

A word appears a disembodied word, a lonely word, “Soft.” Its being capitalized establishes an urge to move forward, enter, it suggest that something will follow, perhaps, a sentence or a sentence fragment. A lower case “soft” would cause the reader to linger in its strange, disembodied isolation. But the capitalization urges movement forward, the spatial isolation suggest immobility, the mysterious loneliness of immobility, and a realistic feeling of contradiction is conveyed. This is not a language that is reduced to uttering static formulations of familiar feelings, but a gestural language that enacts real feelings. The feelings are not stated, but performed by words.

The white spacing surrounding the word “Soft” make the urge to move hesitant, as when a person is urged to move, but retarded in progression by a doubt, a feeling of hesitation. There is even a sadness, a concealed sadness, and when in the poem of Jules La Forgue the lover cannot execute the premier pas. But the situation turns La Forgue’s lover into a comic, but Connie keeps her dancer silent and strange.

I will deviate at this moment of the first word in the poem, to comment on Connie’s use of white space. In this poem and throughout the book she is a master of making white space communicate deep and profound emotion. Connie’s superb use of white space causes me to thank Mallarme for introducing white space as a communicative element in His Coup de dis. After Mallarme, white space became a tradition in French poetry, but I think Connie excels the French poets such as Andre du Bouchet, Gerard Arseguel, Olivier Cadiot, and other white spacers.

Then in this poem of Connie’s comes an image of an appearance, the appearance is
Almost disembodied, the appearance being only a part of an anatomy--”Slim hipped.”

2.

This is not a Renoir or a Rubens’ anatomy--not even a Botticelli appearance, but more
of a part of an Egon Schiele body, with its suggestion of desolation and loneliness. After “Slim hipped” preceded by a white space that isolates the unit with its two closely juxtaposed high pitched vowels whose sounds jar and prepare for movement comes a pronounal introduction, a “she” and the she sways. The sway is strongly end-stopped, a caesura that preludes the movement of enjambment and running on, and thus a tension is created in the reader’s response, and the corporeal movement of a dancer is fixed as if a photograph and not a lifelike movement of flesh.

What was becoming a dance, even if reduced to unelaborated sway, a dance of a she, is
presented unparticularized, as the dancer does not have green eyes or rust-red hair, and is not situated on a shellacked raw wood blond floor, and is not situated and founded by an audience, what is almost becoming a dance to present sensual delight and smooth the senses is undermined by the next line “Blind white” and thus an irony of expectation and then lost. Instead of a feeling of ordinary solidity, there is the feeling of an apparitional solidity, as if an unfilled passionate promise.

“Blind white” appear as what in traditional metrical poetry would the called a spondee. “Blind” is such a heavy word, a high-pitched vowel, surrounded by two consonant clusters. The word resonates and disturbs, and thus the reader is fascinated by a multi-dimensional verbal occurent, a linguistic reality that opens to feeling of a presence of actual existence.

Then another action after the “sway,” she pulls the wick. The overtones and undertones of “Blind white” preceded, linger, do not depart, and enter and enrich the texture of the forthcoming action “She pulls the wick.”

The pull of the wick stopped me, stunned me, reverberated through me. The word “wick” did it. Connie, in this poem and poems throughout the book has a tendency to create intense emotive moments through the use of short words with consonant surrounded high pitched vowels. An interesting scholarly study could be made of her use of high-pitched vowels. Connie is an expert in the expressive use of the Signifier, selecting a poetic diction andd poetic spatial arrangement to expand the Signifier beyond its limited dictionary meaning and its fuzziness in common usage into multi-dimensional signifieds that ascend and descend through the literal and topological levels of language to the anagogic.

I respond to the word “wick,” being suffused with its figurative meanings, and then
then wonder what is the literal. I return to the title “Candlelight Meditation”, and momentarily contemplate the wick as the wick of a candle. Then there is an explosion in my concealed consciousness, an explosion like fireworks, a rocket opening to reveal many colors, and I am reminded of Vincent Van Gogh in a moment of intense emotion grabbing the wick of a flaming candle.
3.
Now back to the progression of the poetry, and all poems are progressions, active organic verbal realities, autotelic, and not amenable to fixed and static thematic reduction and cancel out “the heresy of paraphrase.” Poems are élan vitals (appropriated and transvalued from Henri Bergson) and are vital forces defying the familiar and the discursive, the rational, and above all, common sense.

The progression presents

                                        “Up

                                                  Up”

This poetic unit brought again a pause and contemplation. Connie has used two capitals ant not lower case. The expressive use of lower case was introduced into poems about the time of World War 1 simultaneously in Germany by August Stramm, in Italy by Marinetti the Futurist, and in Greenwich Village in the United States by e. e. cummings, and has become a commonplace and widely used poetic device, mostly as a meaningless supposed technical revolutionary whimper and not as a vital, poetic expressive device. Connie is using capitals as expressive, and along with the spatial arrangement, results in a Poetic “Spot of Time.”

Now, if Connie had used lower case, up, up, the movement, the ascent, would have been easy, just an ordinary climbing, but the capitals cause retardation, interject resistance, frustration, an arrestment, a hinder, and expand beyond what is literally presented into a realm that is otherwise unknowable and unsayable except in the authentic language of authentic poetry.

Now if Connie had written

                  Up
                                                   Up

the emotive response would have been different. Her original rendition convey spatially the sense of the descending, going downward, as Marcel Duchamp descending the staircase. My rendition gives the sense of going upward, upstairs. Thus we have what Connie excels in, the doubling and extension of suggestive emotive meaning in a verbal rendition. It might be said in current critical parlance that Connie stabilizes and assert, And then destabilizes and deconstructs her verbal presentation. The spatial arrangement contradicts and thus enhances the literal presentation of a motion. Brilliant writing.

Then comes the next line, the capitalization of “Ever” suggest a disjunction from the “Up/Up,” and thus an additional tension, and the tension is reinforced by the capitalization of “Higher.” The sense of “Higher” has already been diminished by the preceding suggestions of downness, by the action of the spatial arrangement. It is if there is a dream or a daydream of going upward, but actuality pulls downward.


4.

And then in “Candlelight Meditation” appears a long white space after “Higher,”
And “Higher” is end-stopped. The caesura and extensive white spacing render
The word solitary and lonely. Her white spaces are speaking spaces and their
speech is the shortest or longest of the blankness.

Of the whiteness, struggles a “Still,” another word with a high-pitched vowel
Surrounded by clusters of consonants. It is capitalized and end-stopped, thus sadly isolated. Instead of feeling the glamour of a dance, I am feeling the loneliness of the dancer. What wondrous writing! The “Still” is like the silence in Stravinsky’s Petrushka or the grand silence of John Cage’s “4’ 33”.”

Next after an indentation “The sheerest blue dance/ sweeps across a worn soul.”
This is a summary moment, as when a painter steps back from his canvas to gaze
And see what he painter was possessed by. In this poem, the reader is possessed
By a “blue dance” and “a worn soul.” These two phrases become intensely emotional meaning by gathering up into their beings all the suggestions that have preceded
in the flow of the process of the poem.

Words in a poem should exist with many arms, arms that reach in all directions,
like the arms of an oriental goddess, and in this poem the words have many arms,
And the arms reach in all directions.

In this poem, I think of a transformed, weary Degas dancer, who as she sits and adjusts a pink slipper and is unaware of the physical adjustments as her mental being is blurred and rendered apparitional in the intangible winds of an unfocused whirlwind.

Next comes a series of fragments that form a sentence, and the arrangement is the expected left-margin justification. And the longest word so far appears “glissando,”
A musical word, and it near-alliteration, guttural, establishes a sound kinship with
“cleaves,” cleaves peaks of torn breath. As a reader I hesitate, pause, contemplate,
And in my imagination see a peak, a mountain peak or feels a Maslow peak experience,
And then connects the feeling that emanates from these peaks, an expanding, an exalted feeling with the striking image “torn breath.” This is Connie at her best, expanding words to new dimensions of that defy reductive, rational, quotidian interpretation and open to poetic heights when the unsayable is said, the unspoken is spoken. It is a refusal to solve contradictions and new designations are produced. She unifies in her imagery, disparities. Her juxtapositions, her associations are often subversion, undermining.

5.

Next, comes a series of words of progressive action, the gerunds, words that name, nouns are converted into action words, verbs that serve as adjectives, and these progressive actions result in a flood of Grief’s caverns. This is vintage Connie.

What has been seen on the surface as a “Golden diva, a burning siren’ has been in the process of the poem revealed as more than a superficial, glittering appearance. The dancer is a dazzling performer, and inwardly, a suffering person. It might be said that the reader has experienced the actual presence of humanity rather than a representation, a mimetic copy of the external appearance of humanity.

She, the gorgeous one, sings, tantalizes, but she also violates, and the glorifying conclusion: “stir/ hallowed numbness’ capturing eyes/ that tears have abandoned”.

A wonderful poem and this poem is only the beginning to a book of wonderful poems.

POST-FACE

Instead of writing a standard review that abounded with generalizations that are automatically reductive of the actual poetic occurrence and are a remoteness from
the flow of the river that is the poem, the river as Heraclitus tells cannot be stepped into twice, I decided to write a reader response criticism.

This type of criticism is akin to an anachronism, what was called “impressionistic criticism” before the scientific methodology and “pseudo statements” (I. A. Richards) of the New Criticism invaded and established dominance. The New Criticism defeated the source gathering of the old scholarship, and the “history of ideas” (A.O. Lovejoy) approach to an aesthetic text.

The New Criticism had it day with its Wimsatt and Breadsley’s “ Affective Fallacy and
Heresy of paraphrase, Robert Penn Warren’s qualification of the opposite, and Cleanth Brooks’ explication of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land,” started sinking and disappeared about 1968 when Jacques Derrida delivered his lecture at John Hopkins that deconstructed Levi-Strauss and binary oppositions. A new critical approach emerged from misreading and misinterpretations by our college professors of Derrida exhibitionistic prose.

Along with au courant deconstructions with its aporias and differences emerge many postmodern approaches that specializes as Nietzsche in transvaluing and destroying
the twilight lit idols, received poetic ideas and traditional poetic values, emerged
Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” exaggeration and reader response criticism. As Roland Barthes has said that when the reader opens the book the author dies.

Actually the old, outmoded impressionistic criticism has an affinity and kinship with reader response criticism, and I have appropriated, personalized, transvalued, transformed reader response criticism to write this account of Constance Stadler’s Paper Cuts.

--Duane Locke has published, as of July 2009, 6,379 different poems in print magazines, e-zines and 16 books, His latest books of poems are the April 2009, 375 pp. Yang Chu’s Poems by the Canadian publisher, Crossing Chaos, and in July 2009, the 40 page Voices from a Grave by the English publisher, Erbacce Press. Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the prehistoric epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto. Paper Cuts marks the debut of Calliope Nerve Media's literature arm.

Extinction

Extinction

you give me refuge

from everything real

wrap me in cool water

fantasy

thoughts of tomorrow.

demons howl at my door

salesmen paw at my window

vampires hide in my shadow

my life tries to get back in.

you make the buildings

and smog and cars

fade to ivy and waterbirds

silent strong idols that

don’t interrupt.

--Holly Day is a travel writing instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. Her most recent nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Walking Twin Cities.

Pages and Pages of Things That Can’t Be Changed

Pages and Pages of Things That Can’t Be Changed

When I was 19, my friends and I went camping

by the power plants over San Onofre Beach. We walked

all the way down to the ocean, the shoreline

of smooth, round pebbles and fist-sized rocks

and kept walking until the ocean was up

past our hips

and oh, the water at the base of those twin nuclear domes

was so warm, it was like

swimming in a bathtub

There was this guy I fucked

drunk blind behind a 7-11 dumpster, there was this guy

I fucked

in the bathroom at a party, my boyfriend

on the other side of the closed door, there was this guy I fucked

so accidentally it might not have happened, except that he kept calling me

every single day afterwards

My mother’s house is full of photographs

of women who died

way too young, my favorite

is the one of the great-grandmother

I never got to meet, such an angry, determined look

in her eyes

16 years old and so beautiful

in her buttoned top and school uniform.

I hear her symptoms

were a lot like mine.

--Holly Day is a travel writing instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two children. Her most recent nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Walking Twin Cities.

Quoteable

"When you're only one of the things in his dream, you know very well you're not real." -- Lewis Carroll

You Put Your Left Foot in

You Put Your Left Foot in

 
Nickel me— ah Frigidaire cola,
and dime me my prefabrications.
 
The tower of packets crawls with
lichen cilli across my gut and what I
drank on the peat of my copping chair
rollicks inside like a spun wash.
 
I true my rims and open mouth,
chewing, doing worse, averaging
a food service some purpose.
I put my order in, and I shake it
all about.
 
The expedience treats an ugly wound,
with licks as from a dog snout,
another sauce, a cream, a meat or cheese,
and the clods to my belly crawl in, find
the course in my gut spiked young.

--Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He has been published in Aesthetica, Small Spiral Notebook, and Coconut, as well as in numerous other publications across as many countries. He tries hard. This piece appeared in Calliope Nerve XV: Pleasured Hands.

Quoteable

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" --Lewis Carroll

Drums and Whistles

Drums and Whistles

Break a person in half where a fight is dreamed up;
broken backs liaison war, and scab to dreams.

Bats of people, break a night in half,
place a loudspeaker in its stomach
and cart it everywhere, strongly
shouting it “troops, troops arrange!”
and there you’ll have the drums and whistles.

Some people wait their entire lives for their turn to experience a single,
historic injury.

--Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He has been published in Aesthetica, Small Spiral Notebook, and Coconut, as well as in numerous other publications across as many countries. He tries hard. This piece appeared in Calliope Nerve XV: Pleasured Hands.

Quoteable

"...Current fashionable quantum theory teaches us that an infinite of possible universes can collapse out of any quantum event. What I'm concerned with is why does it always happen to be the universe with the jam-side down? Thus I believe in quantum irony: Out of all possible universes, quantum collapse is configured toward poetic justice." --Ian McDonald

Posies and Pansies on the Starry Hill

Posies and Pansies on the Starry Hill

For C

The stars fell as you broke your crown
An imaginary coronet woven
In Linden bows and secret holly
Framed in thistle and ragged thorns.

Instantly a phantom, beneath grey skies
Wandering and wondering for a place
To haunt before the past is passed forward
Flash frozen on paper and lines of ink.

You fell as the suns came tumbling down
Cracking the spheres of heaven in two
Love and blood oozed from an ominous gash
The world grew cold as your essence flowed away.

No one came after the night took its toll
Lying in a ring of scattered wilting posies
As the night grew and you went cold.

----James Dilworth publishes the short-lit and poetry zine Non-Creative Garbage that helped inspire the creation of Calliope Nerve. Thanks James! He writes out of Reno, NV. This piece originally ran in Calliope Nerve XV: Pleasured Hands which James was the guest editor on as well.

Quoteable

"It looked like a piece of some different dream fallen here." --William Gibson

Perfumed Nebulae

Perfumed Nebulae

For JC, CC and CFS

I am drawn into your gravity well
Chewing on ice as my molecules
Fold into nothing to become
Everything instantaneously

The background shrieks a word
Gravity- Newton loses his law
Tesla and Maxwell are eclipsed as you grow
To be my source and origin of life

Within our universe
No crying or wailing is heard
Only love enveloping and surrounding
Blue clouds of stardust perfume us

I fell into you to become you
We are now one in the same
Existing breathing loving-

----James Dilworth publishes the short-lit and poetry zine Non-Creative Garbage that helped inspire the creation of Calliope Nerve. Thanks James! James writes out of Reno, NV. This piece originally ran in Calliope Nerve XV: Pleasured Hands which he was the guest editor on as well.

Quoteable

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more or less." -- Lewis Carroll

Carl, After the Arcade

Carl, After the Arcade

The grass was high, so I jerked the cord and started his head. I mowed the lawn with his face.

“Get that crabgrass, Carl. Shit’s getting out of control.”

Carl couldn’t hear me. I’d stuffed his ears with two rabbit’s feet I’d won playing skeeball. One was pink, and the other white. I steered him around by the ankles. When his mouth caught on a rock, his legs shook, toes wiggling frantic against my wrists. I tried to force him through it.

“Man up, Carl!”

Carl sputtered and spat, stalled out. His shaggy mane was soaked through. I pulled him back to softer earth.

“What happened?” I asked.

Bits of shattered teeth spilled from Carl’s mouth like pebbles from a fishbowl. I left him on the lawn and went to get my tools. I came back to find him gumming a patch of dandelions, blue eyes full moons.

Sitting on my heels, I tucked the matted hair behind his ears, fingers lingering in the softness of the pink rabbit’s foot. I plucked a buttercup, then held it under his chin.

“You like butter,” I said, admiring the yellow glow.

Carl must’ve read my lips, because he smiled then, mouth a red and black hole of love and wonder. I looked at the lawn, then the rock.

“Crabgrass?” I asked.

Carl nodded. He never didn’t want to, no matter what.

END

--Mel Bosworth eats chicken, beef, and bad dreams. Read more at http://eddiesocko.blogspot.com/.

Quoteable

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust." --T.S. Eliot

We need

We need

Deeply badly like the abolished
One rhythm of the enduring regime
Swore to the field to revive
Gentlemen their word
True!
True!
Structure kind of civil
Humans disjoint towns
Indirect lessons of story
Chain no amount or life
Lost in tables
Fact making real presence
We need failure to centralize.

--Sarah Ahmad lives in Pakistan. She likes to call herself a struggling poet and artist in her world where life is so fragile, not knowing if you will return alive every time you step out of the house, getting someone to acknowledge your art is a real struggle. She has had her poetry published in or accepted by Leaf Garden Press and Ink, Sweat and Tears.

Quoteable

"I went in killing the Sun. I once was..." --Days of the New

Quoteable

"I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television. And that, as much as anything may be the real secret here." --William Gibson

Death Pass

Death Pass

Witnesses describe the insanity of his attack
as unexpected, how he arose to work
the black metal of his hunting knife
through the living and dying parts of a man

slumbering at his side. A simple bus trip
transformed to haunting easy as the crow’s wing
disciplines the heft of sky. Repeated caws
of the victim announced his growing death.

The weary driver aborted his steerage. Passengers
poured from the wounds of their carriage.
Even the hardest among them flinched
when the executioner raised a head
to the window like a trophy
dripping with ego,
like small talk,
while travelling,
distracting from the view

--Colin Giblert publishing credits include winning the 2006 Chicago State University Hughes, Diop, Knight Literary Award and recent or upcoming poems appearing in Minglewood, Plain Spoke, Oak Bend Review and Yellow Mama.

Nobius At Counterexample Poetics

Yours truly makes a second appearance at Felino's Counterexample Poetics.

My Pretty's Skull & Crossbones

My Pretty's Skull & Crossbones

After all you've been through, Dear Pretty,
don't just jog on Venice Beach to bliss out,
hoping to absolve that hinky love life

you wrote about in true confessions fashion.
Intercut then flesh-filled memories galore
carving words with bobby pins

into now gel-filled, buoyant breasts
keeping you afloat in the neighbor's pool.
While sun-bathing you contemplate how

Virginia Woolf took her fatal ocean dip,
disappearing into foaming currents.
Meanwhile punk rock music filters

into your wavelength from a hidden radio,
leading to the country rawness of Nashville.
They laughed at your addictive love life

during the cable news show interview.
Now that brings the threat of tears
salty from another sea within you,

& sinks the trendiness of hip desire
in the school of cool omniscience
you've been through writing the truth,

where only acceptable delusion remains
to coat your barnacle-body with
while taking a sea cruise later

in the Caribbean. There the Pirate waits
to enslave you with love, telling you stories
trapped in bottles floating to oblivion.

--Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, and has recent poetry at GUTTER ELOQUENCE, THE BEAT, A HUDSON VIEW POETRY DIGEST, OPIUM POETRY, HEELTAP and elsewhere ... His new novel is The Burgher of Virtual Eden from Publish America. He was Pushcart nominated for poetry in 2008.

Quoteable

I am not a man, Neil. Neither am I a woman.

If not a man or woman, what kind of person are you?

I am machine, Neil.

If you're a machine, then who is your programmer?

God.



--Walter Mosley

Quoteable

"Next thing you know they'll take my thoughts away..." --Megadeth

David McLean reviews Constance Stadler's Paper Cuts

As always, in this collection Constance Stadler achieves a balance between modern content and a sampled traditional form, whereby the poetry runs through the lexis of the traditional but with neologisms and archaisms rubbing shoulders and thighs in a glorious mêlée that achieves often the status of poetry of the purest water.

Her targets are everything from Plato (completely unjustly, the poem could be about somebody else) to Jesus and the Society of same, completely spot on target. Modern life is dissected and diagnosed here, found lacking, the anxious and painful half-lives people live are examined and found wanting, the poet's own pain is examined and there is a clear movement in the course of the book towards a tone of understanding and acceptance, the attainment of beauty in some sense is seen as a justification of the anhedonia.

The book takes us from hospital to Gaza, exploring injustices on a variety of levels, Amerikkka's war on Iraq and society's war on the individual.

Everything falls under the poet's lens – passion:

My engorged vulva
Screams for jungle abductions
And whatever would take me
Could not plunge deep enough.
Tomorrow,
Brings shower and the routines
Of numbness.
That is, if I
Conquer this animal
Night.
(Seething ...)

mortality:

Sepia catacombed
In sweet stench of young rot
The maggot is well fed.
Bloating, we are new made
In concatenated leprosies
In our mouldy hypocrisies
In the death bed lie.
(concessional)

the reticence of nature:

Grass tuft, will you not speak to me?
A blue and brown tit jumped on my table
Near the Arno and shared
My sandwich
As a full bosomed poppy floated by.
Wilted corn stalks in vermilion light
Thrill as magic
Snowy egrets dance in pond surrender
To cabbage palms.
(Terrestrial Illuminations)

This book makes love and passion in the face of sickness, dis-ease, bereavement and a more general ontic and ontological abandonment. It makes the word a lover and an expression of the body's engorgement, it makes the muse a bedfellow, and the reader a voyeur, which is what readers usually are, but not so openly expressed.

Only Constance Stadler writes like this nowadays, only she can. Available from http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/paper-cuts/7388443.

--David Mclean is Welsh but has lived in Sweden since 1987. His collection Cadaver’s Dance is available at Amazon.com. He is also the author of Pushing Lemmings and A Hunger For Mourning. Constance Stadler has been writing, publishing, and editing poetry from the prehistoric epoch of print journals to modern e-times. She is currently a contributing editor to the e-zine Eviscerator Heaven. As a political anthropologist specializing in North Africa and a violinist, her influences are multiform. Work in formative years with the late poet Gwendolyn Brooks was seminal, but no less so than Sufi Dervish dancers, and the challenges of mastering Bruch's first concerto. Paper Cuts marks the debut of Calliope Nerve Media's literature arm.

Constance Stadler's Paper Cuts

Paper Cuts


The seminal work from one of the greatest underground poets of our generation is now available as a free e-book from Calliope Nerve Media.

Quoteable

"There was moment of silence in the infinite field of himself." -Walter Mosley

Quoteable

"...and in that moment, she wanted to close her notebook and thump his head with poetry." -- Patricia A. McKillip

Shear

Shear

Rivaling the archives of time her graying hair
perpetually dyed still shimmers
under her stylist's caressing hands.
Daily a special flower entwined there,
until it unaccountably withers away

through silken filaments, leaving petals
spent like wan musical notes everywhere.
Watching her dress I will drink
toasting slow movements of sartorial detail:
how the bra is snugly fit, then clasped.

Time passes with invisible precision;
on the mundane walkway outside
life continues for those perambulating
just before dusk's encroaching haze,

a subtly enfolding grayness all
pervading we fall captive to, in essence
unable to hold it ourselves from night
thrusting its dark blade inside us,
shearing what we desire most.

--Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, and has recent poetry at GUTTER ELOQUENCE, THE BEAT, A HUDSON VIEW POETRY DIGEST, OPIUM POETRY, HEELTAP and elsewhere ... His new novel is The Burgher of Virtual Eden from Publish America. He was Pushcart nominated for poetry in 2008.

Immaculate Immortality

Immaculate Immortality

When you approach my mother in evening's husk
you're in an imaginary garden of senses
The white hospice walls shimmer away
all divisions between you & her Alzheimer's
fog-like refocusing details of hidden faces
Your red lips kiss the brow wrinkles fill
some impenetrable being (freed from musk)

Until you touch her contour's refulgent days
later I tell her she's a chrysalis re-emerging
From a life's long polyester cocoon well-kept
where even mature butterflies gain new wings
for scaling that ceiling fresco's kitsch ruins
As the angels dressed in Gucci suits wait beyond
for that spore of all maternal menses they imbibe

--Peter Magliocco writes from Las Vegas, Nevada, and has recent poetry at GUTTER ELOQUENCE, THE BEAT, A HUDSON VIEW POETRY DIGEST, OPIUM POETRY, HEELTAP and elsewhere ... His new novel is The Burgher of Virtual Eden from Publish America. He was Pushcart nominated for poetry in 2008.

Quoteable: An Eleveator Descending

He closes his eyes. "I was dreaming of hell," he says.

"How was it?"

"An elevator, descending." --William Gibson

SACRIFICE

SACRIFICE

We grew attached to our two pigs
and when we fought to get them on the truck
to take them to the slaughter
the screeches they made
made your hair stand on end
and the terror in their eyes
was black as an eclipse.
Old Maude, old Frank.
My sister named them.
My sister and mom cried that day.
“They’ve lived a good
long life,” my dad said.
Those pigs loved
the garden hose, that was their favorite
thing in the summer, to be squirted
at high pressure on a
hot summer day.
They were cute the way they grunted
and squealed like kids.
Their big flat noses were always
soft and friendly, strong, curious,
muddy.
They ate well and they seemed happy
most of the time,
except the horror
at the end there...
The meat fed us all
the cold winter,
the chops big
and awkward,
the bacon
thick as your tongue.

--Mather Schneider is a writer and a cab driver in Tucson.

FAINT

FAINT

It’s good to have a place for yourself
on a warm afternoon
with the sun rays slanting
in
like sticks in water
and the cats and the birds
have stopped fighting and sprawl
on the ground and in the trees with the
drugged eyes of concubines.
It is good when the world doesn’t demand
a knock knock joke
or a purpose.
It’s cold winter in most places
but here in Sonora it is only a number
on a calender
burning at the edges
as we stick our heads into the sand
and dream our small degrees
of progress
while leaping back like a mongoose startled by a scorpion
through the black godless void
the future and past rounded and wound
together like
a snake forking the throat of a
vulture
the nerves bursting bubbles of coal dust
the crushed thumb
of the mind
and everything
fading.

--Mather Schneider is a writer and a cab driver in Tucson.

Bookstore Guide

Bookstore Guide: An amateur guide to book shopping throughout Europe.

Tough Days for Literary Fiction

Tough Days for Literary Fiction.

And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture

And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture.

MY LAST LUCKY PENNIES

MY LAST LUCKY PENNIES

I hurt myself planting yellow squash.
It’s too late into the season
and I’ve never done it before
but my girlfriend encouraged me
and I do think buttery squash is like
licking your love’s fingers.
But, is it really worth it?
I had to dig through the desert soil
in back of our apartment
which is nothing but clay and gravel
and construction backfill
compacted by generations of
boots and machines
and neglect.
With my spade I struck into it
and churned it up
chinking like a man slowly working away
at a pair of iron ankle-cuffs.
Finally I had a little plot
big as a grave
and I added manure and fertilizer
and I dropped those squash seeds there
like my last lucky pennies.
Now I’m in bed with
a hurt neck.
Every time I move my neck to the side
I have shooting sparks
like that spade hitting flint.
Those little fucking squash
better come up,
I swear to God,
and they better look like roses.

--Mather Schneider is a writer and a cab driver in Tucson.

Two Pieces By Donal Mahoney

Lemon Underwear

The New Morse Hotel, Chicago

What if after Browne has gone
one of us discovers who Browne was,
leads the rally to his room before
the maid has time to broom the webs,
retrieve from underneath the bed
the sweat-stiff socks, the lemon underwear?

What if before he leaves Browne scrawls
across the dresser’s dust: “I have leased
new quarters and have gone to them.
Don’t give the clothes you find here to the poor.
Don’t burn the books. Beware the next
who rents this room, who leaves it only after dark,

who screams if the maid knocks once
to ask if she may clean. When he arrives
have four men bear him, belly down, downstairs.
Tell them: “Pitch him out across the lawn!
Let him land in a lake of sun.
Let him drown there.”

Anthem for The Age

Two evenings a week
I go to Melissa’s,
to talk and to fuck.

We talk first,
we fuck later.
Summer, fall,

winter, spring,
nothing distracts us.
We are to each other now

what we were at the start:
someone to talk to,
someone to fuck.

--Donal Mahoney has worked as an editor for The Chicago Sun-Times, Loyola University Press, McDonnell Douglas Corporation (now Boeing), and Washington University in St. Louis. He has had poems published in or accepted by The Wisconsin Review, Revival (Ireland), The Kansas Quarterly, The South Carolina Review, Commonweal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Davidson Miscellany, Calliope Nerve, The Goddard Journal, The Pembroke Magazine, The Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, The Road Apple Review and other publications.

Quoteable (Various Unformed Notes, Early June)

From the Warren Ellis blog post Various Unformed Notes, Early June:

"I’d like to see a blog that was nothing but scans of the pages of notebooks
operated by creative people. Someone needs to attend to this for me."

Quoteable

"Folio allowed himself to fall into Rapture--a setting for his electric eye that removed him completely from the world, a place where there was nothing but his mind floating in an endless universe of mathematical possibilities." --Walter Mosley

Quoteable

"There comes a moment when we stop creating ourselves." --John Updike

The Lucky Bastards Club

Subtropical Fairweathervane

Subtropical Fairweathervane

the sky has changed personalities
three or four times this morning...

first there were clouds rolling
their heavy blue selves across
the bay dragging shadows over the
old pastel hotels and darkening
the porticoes and avenues art-deco

until the rain came and now
the sunlight pours upon the people
as they move en masse they are
laughing smug pretentious evil

and certain and i watch them

plodding by this cuban cafe past
the marble steps of the antique
museum where one particularly
worm-eaten derelict sleeps

and dreams i imagine of much

more beautiful things... like elephants
and like carburetors.

--M.P. Powers has had work published or forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Main Street Rag, Ghoti Magazine, Underground Voices and many others. He is originally from Chicago, but lives in Florida now & works in the (lack of) construction industry. In his spare time he erects origami boulders out of failed poems.

the neighborhood watch

the neighborhood watch

there he goes again, backing the ass
of his big diesel pickup truck
into his driveway
parking so the nose juts out just a little
past the holly bushes,
so its headlights peer out like eyes
of a rat that's just crawled back
in its hole...
i bet it makes him feel safe
i bet he thinks he's in complete command
of the game
letting us all know his jumbo-sized tonka
truck is out there
eyeing us, gazing into the very depths
of our souls, passing moral and definitive
judgments on us...
i bet it makes him feel superior
and a tad macho
climbing down out of his eddie bauer cab
striding up through his lawn
in his ill-fitting boilersuit
and all his
small-minded pride
he stomps his boots on the stoop, opens the screen
door and
scoots inside
leaving his truck in the driveway
to off-gas the egotistical facets of his personality
the world must learn to adapt
itself to. in a word,
i'm thinking about slashing
all his tires

--M.P. Powers has had work published or forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Main Street Rag, Ghoti Magazine, Underground Voices and many others. He is originally from Chicago, but lives in Florida now & works in the (lack of) construction industry. In his spare time he erects origami boulders out of failed poems.

BIRTHDAY GIFT

BIRTHDAY GIFT

My wife's birthday was fast
approaching. I asked her what
she wanted. She replied, "All
I want is a new Mercedes."
She had been driving that old clunker
for nearly five years. She said it was
time for a change.
Her birthday came and my friends asked
if I had bought her a new Mercedes. "No",
I replied. "I bought her a huge sapphire ring."
My friends looked puzzled and asked,
"Why did you make the switch." I gave
a wry smile and replied, "you can't buy
a fake Mercedes."

--Mike Berger, Ph.D. is 72 years old with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and was a practicing psychotherapist for 30 years. Now fully retired, he has authored two books of short stories. Has has also been published in numerous professional journals and freelanced for more than 20 years. His humor pieces Clyde and Goliath, Good Grief Columbus and If Noah Built the Ark Today have won awards. He is now writing poetry full-time. Mike has many pursuits which include sculpting, painting, gardening, and baking bread. His forcaccia is to die for.

FIRST AID

FIRST AID

Every person should know first aid.
It may be someone you love that you save.
Every one from Maine to Vancouver,
Should know the Heimlich maneuver.
If an injured person's face is red,
You should promptly raise his head.
But if the person's face is pale,
You should promptly raise their tail.
Never give water to an unconscious man.
Sucking on snakebites has been banned.
If you have road rash remove the crud;
use direct pressure to stop the blood.
You should update your CPR lessons,
It's now 1 breath to each 20 compressions.
Don't pop the blister of a burn.
There's obviously much new stuff to learn.
There is a suggestion, I think it's great.
Go and buy a copy of a Rush Limbaugh tape.
If you should have a salmonella attack,
play the tape; it's much better than EPIKAK.
Buying the tape may sound dubious,
but remember, it's strictly for medicinal use.
You should buy one with great haste,
before bulimics buy up all of the tapes.

--Mike Berger, Ph.D. is 72 years old with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and was a practicing psychotherapist for 30 years. Now fully retired, he has authored two books of short stories. Has has also been published in numerous professional journals and freelanced for more than 20 years. His humor pieces Clyde and Goliath, Good Grief Columbus and If Noah Built the Ark Today have won awards. He is now writing poetry full-time. Mike has many pursuits which include sculpting, painting, gardening, and baking bread. His forcaccia is to die for.

Dear Poet

Dear Poet

Dear Poet,

we here in the international poetry division
of fulwood, pusser & co. believe your unparalleled talent
and vision deserves global recognition
forthwith.

for this reason, we are requesting
permission to include your poem in our "springtide
litany" anthology - a new edition being
published worldwide by yours
truly.

this anthology will feature
not only unerring and officious poets of note
and noble reputation
but also splendiferous cover particulars
as well as janson typeface and most importantly the paper
we use just so happens to be ivory
laid vellum.

in a word, it is our conviction
that you are worthy of this
paper and all the glory and majesty attendant to this
volume.

all we need from you is permission
to publish your work (not to worry, pard - worldwide
copyright remains in your name) and if you would
like to actually see the thing
you must pay
for it. for only $47.77 + s&h
this anthology is one of the best
market values today and will indubitably find
its pride of place in your home.

furthermore, we guarantee if for any reason
you are dissatisfied with what the goddamn hell
this product may be your money
will essentially
be refunded in u.s. dollars
for doughnuts (with proper dispatch) though
we will request in exchange a signed glossy photo
of yourself. in clover. roll over
rover.

regards, richard pusser
c.e.o

--M.P. Powers has had work published or forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Slipstream, Main Street Rag, Ghoti Magazine, Underground Voices and many others. He is originally from Chicago, but lives in Florida now & works in the (lack of) construction industry. In his spare time he erects origami boulders out of failed poems.

PURPLE PARSNIPS

PURPLE PARSNIPS

The bag of parsnips should have been
white not purple.
Even my wily old parrot was taken
back; He squawked, “ugly.”
Had they been in the store too long?
The grocery boy held his nose as
he stuffed them in the bag.
Stinky feet comes to mind.
Now it takes a big man to admit a
mistake.
I should have bought the chartreuse
turnips or the magenta rutabagas
instead.

--Mike Berger, Ph.D. is 72 years old with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and was a practicing psychotherapist for 30 years. Now fully retired, he has authored two books of short stories. Has has also been published in numerous professional journals and freelanced for more than 20 years. His humor pieces Clyde and Goliath, Good Grief Columbus and If Noah Built the Ark Today have won awards. He is now writing poetry full-time. Mike has many pursuits which include sculpting, painting, gardening, and baking bread. His forcaccia is to die for.