PEEP/SHOW

10 WOMEN 2

2011-07-31T06:16:00.000-07:00

Photographic Encaustic by Jill Skupin Burkholder

About 10 WOMEN 2, PEEP/SHOW ISSUE #4

When the VIDA numbers came out, we, as women writers and editors, paid close attention. Our first issue at Peep/Show was devoted to 10 women writers whose works we love, though it was nearly an impossible task to limit it to ten. With our fourth issue, we’ve brought together the work of 10 more women in large, juicy hunks of seriality, works that we couldn’t, for various reasons, include in our first issue, but that continued to haunt us.

Let us Haunt you for free. Can you spell ""goosebumps"" with your dark alphabets? Check out our new MERCHANDISE section where you can buy official Haunted Cleveland Ghost Tours™ items. Take note of your 3-D effects, how you behave in the Insanatorium, your Paranormal Magic. We offer more chills, cool new unlockables, and plenty of scary new enemies. Over thirty years have passed in Old Man's Cave, Moonville Tunnel.

The plot is a frame story, and walks a fragile line. Stuffing only what they need into one suitcase, ten people board a bus with a nationwide index of brief descriptions, still stalking, pacing back and forth on the Cupola like a series of parades, costume balls, spooky ride-through tours of an ominous kingdom, a walk-through dark attraction filled with incredible monsters, an optional crescendo event transformed into a mandatory one.

Lynn Behrendt & Anne Gorrick, Curators

August 1, 2011

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2011-07-30T09:00:00.000-07:00

BARBARA HENNING & MARTINE BELLEN

14 x 14 x 14

May 9, 2011

The locust trees are under constant revision. The passersby are

wearing hats. These things seem innocuous, but when he says

that my body feels like home, a chair falls on my head, an omen

three years short of medicare and my heart racing like

a teenager. A drummer on Astor Place catches the beat. Crouched

in a doorway on Avenue A, my hand over my left ear, listening

to Cleveland in my right. Trucks, motorcycles and busses blowing

smoke. At home a check from the poet's house and the sound

of birds and muffled voices in the park. My neighbor's dog barks

for an hour while I fold towels into small rectangles, the branches

swaying high over Tompkins Square. Politicians want, politicians

want to privatize education, kill medicare, log the forests, 15,000

species cut off, cut out. Verizon and AT & T donate to the Tea Party.

Sign here. Quiet. Distant traffic rushing in and out like the sea.

[Henning]

I declare a holiday for radical architecture—

Maidens locked behind iron doors, rusted since grandees

Seduced your great, great aunt near the aspidistra in the garden below.

Ancestors chopping off milady’s viper rage

While waxy Daily Alice chases herself into public space,

3 for 5 and her pleasure paid for with plastic

(You’re killing me with your chop-stick watusi).

Beyond the wild woods comes the Wide World,

Lace hands and laurel hair to still the metamorphosis.

Babies pushed by pregnant houses

And cubby holes within ear and nostril sockets.

Don’t tell me the work’s too dear,

That structure can’t be concocted of fur and claws,

And talons and feathers, and I-beams and Moon-rays.

[Bellen]

May 10, 2011

To sleep is beautiful with spring morning light. Our paths

cross for a reason they say, but then sometimes they run

parallel for years and years. Outside the Christians pontificate

with loudspeakers over the food line on the edge of the park,

three times as many people this year waiting for a sandwich.

The lord loves you and gives you this sandwich and this apple.

Bernadette asks me on the phone, Are you still eating only grapes?

I know you used to. There are fourteen joints in the human hand.

Yod dalet, fourteen, is also the Hebrew word for "hand"

and fourteen pieces of the body of Ausar shape all the forces.

My cards keep coming up one short, Hebrew through marriage

African ancestors more distant. All of us related and yet—

in Behrain, a woman can be horsewhipped for driving a car.

and I am driving out to the island to see Dumisani. This after-

noon in Prospect Park, a tree asked him to hug it, so he did.

[Henning]

Then I awoke wearing your arcopedicos

Deep in the Book of Days

And sliding scale therapy. All this talk of dreaming and I wasn’t.

What makes the song cool is the ire tenderly crooned,

Her drive to swat a black fly just because it’s on a SWAT team.

Or consider what appears that’s never been summoned

Not the other way around (been summoned—no appearance).

Click here to buy a pass on terrible times.

Should I tic off each narrow escape?

What about when I shovel smoke?

Ghosts spew fog is how they propagate,

Miss the surface all together and cloud up the ever-after.

What’s a water rat to do but jump in a hole?

I anti-procrastinate so, can’t wait for the hour to right itself.

[Bellen]

May 11, 2011

A little bird is sitting on the window ledge, singing. Duma meditates

in a chair with needles in his body. The garbage truck lowers its tray,

gears up and moves forward. Folded back at my knee joints, reclining,

I remember Allen. Then I curl into a child's cry. We live in the flicker.

May it last as long as possible without neglecting the wo/men.

When Allen was dying, his penis disappeared inside his groin.

Try not to force anything. On the bike, I lean forward into the wind.

First Joe Brainard remembered, then Perec, now I'm forgetting.

Henya Drescher posted on, Erica Hunt sent you, Kristi

Maxwell wants to be, Andrew T wants to be, Sally Silvers

invited. The sounds of people talking and traffic and here's an open

book. He used a music score to write a narrative. It's not public

knowledge so please don't tell anyone I told you that he held me

inside his sweat jacket as the ocean winds whipped around us.

[Henning]

It starts with doctors and aspic fluids,

Time/language constraints pummeling her skin suit.

Why all the Wellness Expos and “Blessings” as valedictions?

If you’re a white cat with blue bird irises, though lovely, you’re bound to eat your

eyeballs and go deaf.

Now hear this, it’s noon and time to hunt for antelopes, octopi in

an ocean of addresses, stamped dresses.

Even after you refused to look, I imagined you with 20/20 vision in your storybook

cottage.

An overgrown lawn thick with lilac bush, hedgerows, and thorny berry bogs,

Had never before seen so far and intimately into the inside of a life.

You threw on your tutu and skedaddled to the ballet—lunges, pirouettes—tornadoes

across a deep stage space.

Though applauded, you lacked what animals have: absence.

So much effort and then momentary resistance,

Paid dues, raised the family—time to hire a cyborg with a French apron.

See ya—going … going—dead center,

It’s a sinker, it’s a line drive.

[Bellen]

May 12, 2011

Why didn't I notice the bird sounds this morning?

Busy mind with wide awake losses. Bike over to Second

Avenue to bring a friend some lunch. Will this lover become

a friend? Coasting along. That girl is pretty isn't she?

Michael Lally told me once that I looked like Barbara Guest.

I looked at a photo of her youthful beauty and said to another—

that's hard to hold onto, isn't it? Maybe now with automated

investigations and with a little nudge to the rectilinear

a swerve back into, what is this heart ache anyhow? Madame

regent opens the drapes and the trucks and cars crawl

along and uneventfully merge. Hi Gramma, the little voice says

over the telephone, I really really want you to find Mr Tickle

for me. One more book and we sink into the soft sofa

with a flash light and streaks of light that flash beyond

[Henning]

Why not consider it a practice?

After all, visionaries are limited by their visions.

The debate barely reached its climax

After the long, empty stretch of anticipation.

Fraud-raisers and fun-risers scheduling exquisite banquets

Of sliced tuna and rows of uni and eel.

Bulbs bloomed, crocuses crooned, too much blabbing and balling

In the Blind Pig Bar where dudes never curtsey when skiddooing.

The villain by the dart board avoided punishment though word got out he was the

assassin.

Late to ID the body; am I mind or you?

Quite a quiz the night turned out to be.

He lost his teeth in Sarajevo while his combat buddy fell in battle.

The victimology displayed similitude,

Episodes of entertaining murder.

[Bellen]

May 13, 2011

Martin Luther said that girls begin to talk and stand on their feet

sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly

than good crops. Today I was the troll under the bridge, the evil

fairy on the slide, under the Long Island sun, a robin red breast

posing in the Blue Point Library with a swarm of mothers

and toddlers. At noon, Luke's asleep in the chair and Logan's

bouncing in his crib to James Brown. I'm dozing off while a wise pig

mother on tv is planting a garden. I happen to like weeds, plants

not valuable enough to be harvested, but hearty and prolific.

Five o'clock and I follow the digital line, pay $6.50 to avoid the BQE

then the aggressive search and swerve to find a spot. On the elevator

three single women with grocery bags. Broccoli, green beans

and two books. As the dishes pile up, the character, the man

and the idea takes hold again—the romance of our bodies

[Henning]

Don’t hammer nails into my temple,

Egress x-it or purification by fire.

November roses noses frost-

Bitten though thorns recall the blood red petals.

Rimpache can’t recall reincarnation:

Like a plane accident, a drowning, a deep-six.

The dream, an eye-opening vision without sight.

Immolation protest in which the body accepts one moment.

Eyeglasses assist illusion while mirrors reflect face//old face.

Which is delusion or laundering identity dry?

If the poet lies in the poem has she lost time and self

Or if the words stream after her body washes up on shore,

When is memory eroded beyond retrieval?

When does the “who you are” become unrecognizable to you?

[Bellen]

May 14, 2011

Arms overhead, spine extended, chest open. Exhileration.

Then fold forward and stand up. A crane dangles

a pillar high over twenty-five stories and thousands

of pedestrians. Squawk. I love you. Put your body beside

mine. That means something. Only sixteen stamps

and look at that, we're saving the environment. Bernadette

says her mind has become digital. Synonym is a sino—

damn I can't pronounce it. And she used to think that

Aristotle was an asshole. Each dot with its own squawk

box, messing up the impervious nirvana winds. Walking

with Cynthia MacAdams and her little dog on Second Street.

In Harry's novel the characters suffer in stiff Victorian ways.

In my dream, I kiss my lover but he doesn't kiss back.

When I ask him if he received my message, he says no.

That must mean something. Today, we go our own ways.

[Henning]

Verdi would not approve of his narrative censored,

Asked himself, have I always known so little or did it take years?

The greatest number of languages spoken in Slovenia—everyone thinking

every which way compacts space.

What right does music have to hypnotize?

Splashing pools of sound between bellowing lungs,

Top notes even closer to communing with sea/

Revered sensei—great master.

Nuclear family fracking ice tea with fresh sprig of mint.

What he experienced inside had no well from which to seep

And no swell from which to creep,

Swam up his pipes with balanced tinkling.

The morning after the concert she dreamed she pissed in her sleep

And was so pissed she woke without even having to piss.

3:30 for the first bird chirp; head baked at 350.

[Bellen]

May 15, 2011

Wake up looking at locust leaves and the misty sky

Write an email, a thank you and then stretch out

A siren and the trees swish in the wind, hesitate,

then swish again. Aloe leaves at the Korean bodega.

Hurray for more grey sky and my downstairs neighbor's

rolling rising falling scales and the faint voices

of screaming children in the park. "Summering"

is a word the very well-off use. When Jacqueline plays

I float out the window frame. This is a coney island

bound Q train. The next stop could be charmed except

when a door in the hallway slams. We seem to have

forgotten that the i ching gave a positive prediction.

For a very long time. I love your skin, I love your skin, too.

What a crazy world we live in, entropy and megaentropy.

[Henning]

The screaming family with snide smiles

Wore green fatigues, enervated,

Though the minor character’s curiosity is piqued,

Since she isn’t the protagonist, she stays away from the fray.

Patternless spider webs, chaotic: stormy ocean wave.

She considers writing the song’s title but can’t allow herself to purchase the

tune and make it ordinary.

How many bodies does a tune inhabit?

We are accompanied by a drumbeat and flying saucer.

Eldercare in the laundry room.

Breath and bonoboes are wind instruments.

When he killed the father he chose his fate

As enemy, opted for oblivion.

It works only if it’s pronounced exactly right.

Who was it that betrayed you? that kept you as a sonnet?

[Bellen]

May 16, 2011

The locust leaves are like wet green lace, twinkling

in the breeze, We walk over to Broadway in our raincoats.

my shoes swelling up with water, socks soaking wet,

buy bowls and black rubber boots. Five lines behind

fourteen at most. Lee Ann asked me to ask Harry

if he could write a goedesic dome, what form would

the poem take? How about coming to my house on

Tuesday night? Want to stop by. Pin you down.

Dream of you. You're in love and then you're not

in love. You can't be love with someone who isn't

in love with you. We'll just see how the time shakes out.

Nothing about you. It's me. Suddenly I remember

my grandson's face and I ache to be near him, asleep.

Want to come to my house and walk on the beach?

[Henning]

That which you know intimately because of circumstance—

That she’s not available could be the best of all outcomes,

For instance, I dreamed I was among the ones who dialed up death,

An addict of the Revenge-Is-Tastier dictum:

Most are identical in root domestic particulars,

Cracked rib and neck fractures. I elbow you, you bow below snuff,

Your citrus-colored summer suit worn for suicide,

Sour and uremic shame.

Severely limited range of sound recall.

Where’s the oomph? Moon is guiding my paranoia,

Tornadic locomotival herd.

A tiny bloom of orange burned their share.

Everyone stares into the middle distance

When treading the dark lake.

[Bellen]

May 17, 2011

Sometimes it's not possible to resist the fall in one's

heart, an alternative movement, opposite side turning

left then right, find your balance. Run into Brenda

in Alphabets, looking at skirts. Then I'm sitting

on a stoop on 14^th street, talking on the cell

with Michah, moments of affection and affinity,

an intersection between essay and fiction. By the time

I wrote down the fourth word, staccato, I was exhausted.

They just end like that. Soon you would realize,

the poet says that in our faculty meetings there's

always someone whose rank we don't quite

understand. And they are always there, looking at us.

I miss you, dear, texting me, the words appearing inside

bubbles, possibly possible and then a little more

[Henning]

Date of patient’s injury

And a raison or sun-dried d’etre on the banner for condoms: “Wisdom is a wide

road,”

The calamity that prompted Solon to advise Croesus

To wiggle stocking-encased toes.

Who can admit happiness from any location other than one’s final destination?

Mr. Strauss-Kahn grabbed her breasts and crotch and his wife provided bail,

The description of the assault on facebook.

When Robeson sang, baseball bats and rocks and the KKK,

The interview was conducted right before his death and he knew he’d be out of there in a

day or two,

Not knowing what the week would look like.

Meat is a vague term that can apply to any part of an animal.

Another spectacular victory in my quest for more of everything.

A necklace of scars.

I will be in touch, detectives.

[Bellen]

May 18, 2011

Sleepy but with a quick dash of water on my face,

I bike over to Wooster St. Arm balances and forward bends.

Everyone is quiet. A passenger in a yellow cab swings open

his door into the bike lane and I squeeze around him.

Open your eyes mister. Sweeping the floor, I pick up

a paper clip. A student sends me extra work to critique

and the class is over. Should we become more organized

or continue with this chaos. What I love most about this room

is the window in the middle of the largest city, a green rain forest

In the subway car, a skinny guy with bare tattooed arms

and a blue baseball hat, four days old beard, soaked boots,

and a wooden cross around his neck writing meticulous

prose, tiny narrow rows filling up the page. And then

he nods out, leaving a blob of black ink in the middle

[Henning]

10.

Pouring rain and it’s a bad judgment day.

Our attachments are our temples.

Go down Y Avenue?

I’m behind the moment, behind the ball,

Beside the towering trees, flowering cats.

Sleep order, disforget, forgone.

Iatros means healer—a treatise on causes of mortality.

Abject moment the size of a hand-mirror, the size of a page.

The one who walks as an imprinter of evanesce.

Essayist, sayer, seer, hearer, knower.

Ulcerative colitic digestive troubles and gout.

Emptiness, ecstasy, studying the force of another’s laziness as a math equation so his

overenthusiastic personality doesn’t affect the results.

Thinking about how dark it is outside and then the other darkness.

Cell phones are killing the honeybee!

[Bellen]

May 19, 2011

I'm resting my head on HD, Helen of Egypt

The cantaloupe was not quite ripe enough

The SUV with Pennsylvania plates took one

and a half spaces. Are you new in the building?

Well sort of, a visitor for two weeks, blonde hair,

black sunglasses, and he looks like a young

Tod Colby. Maca, maca, maca, maca, buffered C,

and chocolate, chocolate, chocolate. First Avenue

to the L Train to Union Square to the Q to DeKalb

A woman with two young girls and a child in a stroller

apologizes. It stops raining and I'm in the classroom

The young people write about their relationships

and their pain. My cell phone jingles. Salsa dancing

in Spanish Harlem, Do you want me to come over?

What now? Spooning my body into his, yours, ours.

[Henning]

11.

The kitten wore an automatic coffeemaker head-contraption lest she die of young age

When flanked all day by her elders. Who would expect her to think of anything but fish?

Past actions create suitable conditions (filleting).

The dreamers who live in Macy’s window,

Exhibitionists in murky rainy even-(ing) breathing,

Curtains that separate us from out bodies, our neighbors, our lovers.

She removes the pantyhose off her baby bump.

The rose bloom Rube Goldberg contraption.

Ralph Lauren cries on Oprah when discussing designing Dylan’s wedding gown.

Slack jawed and dim-eyed,

Acting out of resentments old as oysters.

Suffering makes us less lonely

(Tethered to our tears)

Confrontation is unfortunately coded in DNA.

[Bellen]

May 20, 2011

Down Avenue A, over Third Street, through

the garage and across Houston. Chain up my bike

squeeze knees against upper arms and lift up

feet and diaphragm like a mosquito in the rain,

gliding over Bleeker, Bowery, Fourth Street

to Avenue A. In the rain, in the rain, in the rain,

it never stops raining. Do your brakes work in the rain?

Does your bladder stay healthy as you age or

do you let echo photos invade and shut down your

computer. Bloody nose and food poisoning interrupt

my daily accomplishments. Starksnet is a super saboteur

with a digital code that looks legitimate, a little like

Typhoid Mary speeding at the speed of sound

I climb under the blankets and drift off down the alley way

[Henning]

12.

“Be cathartic, just not with me,” she kvetched.

Because she doesn’t look Jewish.

Gem Spa’s egg cream and B&H’s Dairy.

How much easier to toss it in the duskpan?

Because Earth is an unmade, wrinkled woman, mountains of pillows with dirty

casings.

Going through the Whitman period of grief.

LCD Soundsystems chant “I can change.”

Because every leaf with dewdrops is a mirror—even in Tompkins Square.

Because of the open floodgates—abysmal waste.

The supreme Azoth and toothfairy.

Because she has a ski-slope nose and faceted cheeks (an autumn leaf she is, bronze and

light filled),

Eidetic mind spilling undamaged experience.

Because she’s caught in no-man’s land and can’t seal the deal.

Because she doesn’t look Hipster, except for her hair and nose.

[Bellen]

May 21, 2011

There is a lightness in the sky and the rain has stopped

So have all our dreams of wrong turns. I'm as distressed

as you are, but things were spinning too rapid and

someone is using all of the washers in the basement.

When I opened the door from the airport, I could smell

and hear a stomach virus, lost in a maze of narrow streets

as a rickshaw driver helped me look for oatmeal. Drumming,

relentless drumming, vibrating trees and people, vibrating

virus Stay home and lose myself in Conrad's distraught

and dark heart. Three naps later reformat a long document

with jpgs. Memories that I can't remember recorded.

Even though it's drizzling, I can hear the birds. Hungry

but it's not wise to eat after 8 pm and chocolate is always

nice as I gear up for midnight writing and reading.

[Henning]

13.

Death, money, romance—morning thought #1, #2, #3 (in that order)

Referring to ourselves as characters in a story under 25 pages written by an

author under 25.

Prayer cards crammed in envelopes with Virgin stamps (each Virgin costs heaven)

Or converting our bat mobile into a convertible, driving down the expressway,

expressing ourselves expressively for today.

Hey—romance, money, death—weather moves west to east, is a left-handed mistress.

Moon Lady bored of being a wan bride, sitting at a set table,

Setting an injurious example,

Eating half a pound of tasteless animal crackers.

At Tea & Sympathy, a TV series set (nothing but inedible stand-ins).

Details are still being worked out,

Nevertheless, she could barely tear herself away from the banquet.

Look at how she leaps,

Trying to break through the adhesions.

Why nine guys with bats pound on a diamond, their secretive stares—spitting.

[Bellen]

May 22, 2011

Light flickers through the leaves. Another overcast morning

My first shower was with my first lover on Brooks Street in Detroit .

My first car was a Ford Maverick and I got two tickets in the first week.

Do I remember my childhood or do I remember remembering?

Under billing, do you see a five digit zip code or are there nine.

Before the man retired he was a supervisor of software designers,

Now he checks out groceries for Trader Joes, part-time

at $12 an hour. Gramma, I'm over here. Get me Get me Get me .

I'm an evil princess or a fairy cat woman and they always get away.

Two hours earlier than East Village nightlife, easily I slide

into a parking space. People often say things that they don't

really mean. Sometimes they say them hundreds of times, like,

I'll never leave you and we're going to be together for a very long time.

[Henning]

14.

Put stamp here or you will not get this. Yearning

Determines the mail you receive.

Cat sitter’s on vacation in Turkey with friendly strays,

catlike following her noise and the kindness of lovers.

Today’s the end of the world, plus it’s day 14!

Another TV show with the line: “Oye, it appears this man was murdered.”

It’s time to push, said to pregnant woman and the boy failing geometry.

A death haiku for the man who lived in my body before me.

Cat sitter wrote Turkey is making her ears oily and eyes leaky.

End of word didn’t end the world.

Thin cabbage soup for breakfast,

Wild oyster mushrooms.

Who’s the mouse here?

Just a few more years of Martine.

[Bellen]

NOTE: One May day, Barbara Henning and Martine Bellen were talking about possible poetic projects and writing constraints. Barbara suggested working with the sonnet form—write one line an hour for fourteen hours for fourteen days. Martine was excited by the process, and they decided to try it together. Barbara picked up a 4 x 6 index card, noting that there were exactly 14 lines on each card, perfect for the project. So they each took fourteen cards to write fourteen lines on each one. After assembling the lines of the sonnets, both poets edited. Consequently, they each wrote 14 x 14 x 14. Peep/Show Poetry is alternating each poet’s fourteen sonnets.

MARTINE BELLEN (www.martinebellen.com) is the author of seven collections of poetry including, most recently, GHOSTS! (Spuyten Duyvil) and 2X² (BlazeVOX [Books]). She has been a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy and a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship.

BARBARA HENNING is the author of three novels, seven books of poetry and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her most recent books are a collection of poetry and prose, Cities & Memory (Chax Press 2010), a novel, Thirty Miles to Rosebud (BlazeVox 2009), a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists 2007), and a book of interviews, Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna, 2011) She is presently teaching for Naropa University and Long Island University in Brooklyn.

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2011-07-30T08:00:00.000-07:00

KRISTIN PREVALLET

for Sandra Moussempes

And if this time I am at the foot of your bed considering shadows that are

alive and at the same time air, so your thoughts directly transmit into my

computer and flow with no effort like:

(memories we share of the sea)

                  If you sit and just think of chamomile and to convince yourself that you are
                  not sick with the flu I will imagine, see, flash, behold an image that I know
                  haunts, weights, weakens you:

                  And old house. A little girl sitting on her father's lap, comfortable, leaning
                  back, smiling. I imagine, recognize, survey that the child leans in, as does the
                  father, they touch foreheads, lead in again, and out, laughing. There are
                  horses outside eating hay, leaning in, and out, chomping and crackling. But
                  the little girl is not thinking about what is outside.

                  And it seems like a perfectly nice picture, but you don't like it.

                  Rest here on that chair while I go and conjure, scope, survey a different one.

                  [Pause]

                  The paranormal shows has just begun.

                  Featuring:

(that picturing which now is):

...peep, peeped, peeper, peeping, peer, peering, peered, peripheral...

dimdimmingdimmed

                  Should I tell you what to do so that you can be released from the memory of
                  what happened in that house,

                  Should I dance and sing,

                  Should I marvel at all I know or wallow in sorrow over all I don't,

                  Should I be pretty, an old woman, a clairvoyant, a hag, a sage,

                  Should I ask you to peep, peer, project, watch while meanwhile, dimming...

                  Repeating. This image. This image. The way it makes me feel. The way it
                  makes me feel weak, weakened, weakening. This image, this imaging, this
                  imagination. This image is right in front of my mind, in spite of this I accept
                  myself.

                  Imagine the house now in color. Blue. Now a scent. Seasalt. And you can
                  switch to another image—you, in the water, feeling good again. A little girl,
                  swimming with waves in her hair. You as you are now, swimming with waves
                  in your hair. Making star shapes, floating relaxing like that. Imagine a vista,
                  viewfinder, vision; see it on a screen screening shining things, sighting the
                  picture that is there now, and see how it makes you feel, good like that. Like
                  that, now, think of the house:

dim, dimming, dimmed, diffuse...

even as it changes, is changing, had changed,

                  Or should I curse? Dance and sing? Make rain noises?

                  ...as if I could be anything but shape, shaper, shaping, shaped, sketchy

                  Anything other than continuity, fluid, flow, change,

                  changing we all are is:

(All we are is changing all we are &)

_______________________________________________________________________________

Photo by Sophie Prevallet

Kristin Prevallet is the author of I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, an experimental elegy designed by poet Jeff Clark and published by Essay Press in 2007; Shadow Evidence Intelligence, a book of conceptual confrontations with the form/content rift that occurred during the Bush II years, published by Factory School in 2008); Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-Text Projects, a book of form/content experiments written and designed in Quark and published by Skanky Possum in 1998. She was a 2007 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her poem “Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn” was recently set to music by composer Colette Alexander and performed at Dixon Place in 2010; excerpts from the same poem were recently published in Spoon River Review and the online journal Tinge. Recent poetic documents that blend conceptual and collaborative works have appeared in VLAK: Poetics and the Arts, VIZ Inter-Arts, and the forthcoming anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. A member of the Belladonna Collaborative, she lives near the docks of Greenpoint, Brooklyn and works as a hypnotherapist in Manhattan.

.......................................................................

2011-07-30T07:00:00.001-07:00

JULIET COOK

FEMALE INFESTATION

cutting girls out of catalogs, holding child-sized scissor blades deep inside

scissoring images of women, categorizing them into portals

making flashcards out of some of them, gluing them onto squares

a hole series comprised of busty ladies, in the back

subject subconscious mind to skimpy assets

make fun of little girls’ transformers

rap their knuckles, slap their heads, retail their brains into bikini zone palettes

slash me into desirable womanly creature over under

conjure up my broken doll legs, sink me inside my odd doll factory

mounted on a strange colored vase – I am a poisonous beautyskull lollipop

_______________________________________________________________________________

infused with a strangely disproportionate spectrum of different pink & purple hues

My expectations are not the same as they used to be; they have abated.

I know that my mind is not perfectly fine for/with everyone.

I don’t know what to expect of people.

I often try things, not knowing what might happen next. I don’t dive in fully, yet I dive so deep.

Sometimes I suddenly sink, sometimes I suddenly rise, sometimes I alternate between the two – feeling confused, uncertain about what is going on and what might happen next – feeling unsure what SHOULD happen next.

I don’t have solid expectations.

I have floating expectations.

My water color/texture/pressures change.

Sometimes I feel disappointed, but still unsure.

Sometimes I feel delighted, but still unsure.

Almost always unsure about most things, but one thing I feel sure about.

Everything seems prone to solubility.

_______________________________________________________________________________

BLACK ROSES

don’t kiss me if you don’t like it dark, you said

& I sunk in

& I sunk down

black rose petals turned

into black holes, fell out

& I wilted

& I sunk under

black water lost its wings, you thought

all my dark soft spots had drowned

but I hid black rose petals underneath

my throat, swallowed them deep

until they lived in the skull box of my brain

don’t kiss me if you don’t like it dark, I said

don’t pretend you can carry me

if you can’t handle mouthfuls of dark roses

do you wish I would have drowned when I sunk down?

if you had cared enough to stay close, you would have known

my black roses were dark purple blooming forever

swimming so much higher than you & me

_______________________________________________________________________________

LOVE

Everyone has their own definitions of love, which can make the word challenging to grasp and believe in - especially after you've lost something you thought was real love. For me, in terms of romantic love, it's a word I don't usually like to hear unless the person saying it really feels strongly about me AND expects to feel that strongly (or even stronger) for a very long time. Much as part of me might crave the word, I don't crave easy little blurbs, blurts, or fucked up fakery. I only want it if the person feels truly intense about me as an individual; if the person adores the way I am (my good parts and my extreme imperfections) and will not quickly/easily get tired of me, give up, or suddenly back away.

_______________________________________________________________________________

“I’ve been paralyzed…”

Part of my brain died. I burned

into an anorexic serpent girl.

An expanse of serpentine turpentine

clotted my heart and bled.

Every finger you used to touch

is now a bloody sea.

You only wanted money & drugs,

“…this lack of feeling”

not the grave love me.

Part of my arms died. I turned

into an out of water angelfish.

A flesh eaten mess of broken holes.

A dark mass falling, falling, falling.

Misguided pen knives flanking

my last cacophony of red seeds.

Pine

Pine needles ooze

out of my ears, turn into blue

speckled beads. Sparkling

then clotting then cloddy.

I’m an unloved stupid block.

If your love equals death

& I lived, what does that mean?

Am I nobody’s

but my own?

“With a hatchet hanging over my head…”

Throwing out all that blood.

Like a skeleton key flung into

a stream of misplaced fluids.

A conduit of duct shaped peep

show. Boo hiss and stoned love

letters filled with dirty cocaine.

It’s too damned late, but

“I need some healing”

from these heart soaked veins.

“Hissing under the floor board.”

Like baroque harpsichords plucked out

of tune and growing volatile.

I need some heavy black fangs.

I need some sharp poison teeth.

I need a blue stained butcher knife.

Just try to kiss me one more time.

_______________________________________________________________________________

NOTES: (All of these pieces were partially inspired by Juliet’s own recent experiences, including a serious health issue, divorce, and unsure if she believes in love anymore.

‘FEMALE INFESTATION’ was culled from one of Juliet’s old blog posts about girlhood thoughts and child play.

The 1., 2., and 3. pieces fuse Juliet’s own experiences with repeatedly listening to Nick Cave songs, especially “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow” (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), “Henry Lee” (Nick Cave & PJ Harvey), and “Jack the Ripper” (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). 1’s title and other line with quotation marks are from “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow”. 3’s title and third line in quotation marks are from “Jack the Ripper”; its second line in quotation marks is from “Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow.”

___________________________________________________________________

Juliet Cook’s poetry has appeared within Action Yes, Barn Owl Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Diode, Menacing Hedge and many more print and online entities. She is the editor/publisher of Blood Pudding Press (print) and Thirteen Myna Birds (online). Juliet’s first full-length poetry book, ‘Horrific Confection’ was published by BlazeVOX. She also has oodles of published poetry chapbooks, most recently including FONDANT PIG ANGST (Slash Pine Press), Tongue Like a Stinger (Wheelhouse), POST-STROKE (Blood Pudding Press for Dusie Kollektiv 5), and Thirteen Designer Vaginas (very recently published by the new Hyacinth Girl Press). She is currently submitting her second full-length poetry collection, “Deadly Doll Head Dissection”. To find out more, visit www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

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2011-07-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

CAROL WATTS

Sundog

the Earth sings Mi, Fa, Mi: you may infer even from the syllables that in this our home misery and famine hold sway

Johannes Kepler, Harmonices Mundi

I have six birds on the go

trust me

go molecular orbits echoes of

disturbance & spectacular low arc

manifold

each finding its level lies in flat

susurrations

till we pass out

celestial dust laik

sundogs do this glint of child

trust me

I have six birds laik

fat

chuck chuck membranes rolled

white & hexagonal soft as

as many feathered beds

well hung

medlars rot

under stars of

indistinguishable hemispheres

& waited for

eating is good

fat

mock mock

coriolis

comes in on a curve

reeded laik

shiny waters

stuck in

finger refract

that’s what I mean

though if someone caught me

up on that

I’d be laik

shimmering & preened

what

sundog knows its own

fakery

six burning babes

on the go

not speeding laik

sparrows

hung globular &

daring retinal burnout

not yet clinkered

cold flaming slow

blushed as

from the mouth of

yeah but hold on though

what is it what is the name

sucklings

stoked up from this dark

orbit dense universal heart

never where

you left

all these burning

roundelays

irritate the life laik out of

polar

trailing that late glare

maintaining mock

gimlet severity

still as rosy as they bounce

I have six

on the go

hung

over mi fa mi

laik I could sing

without barking in magnesium

flare-ups

sanguine sun dog

mock mock

ellipses

green sunsets do

that upper true sun

counterfeit

smiles laik I could sing

terra wards

mi fa mi

what naturally & suitable

melody laik

cuckoos shines in

celebrity tetrachords

swing low sweet

sundog too heavy

to break with

parheliacal constancy

turns planetary &

spurious

I have six

cast up

coronal

that’s deep

never could hold a note

in the dark go

bob-bob-bobbing

along

red-breasted

the closer it gets & solar

winded

over shoulder shadows

pick them out sickening at

attention cold

fusing their own

conflagrations are dense blast

damage held

in the sky & everyone

bathing in received light

wilder sunned

spots

contending

laik the air rises to this point

late in the

day but I have six birds

cribbed & hungry with chorusing

did you only just get this

burning is a cold cold

fat fate

poor sundog a-cold &

chattering chuck chuck

burn yourself

asterist

trust me

I have this happy scene

shining on the beach

day for night

vision demands elevation

but in the shadows lines

of transit work

their small striations

botoxed out of

crow’s feet

scuttling in arc manifolds

all these singular

unpecked observances

hanging their faithful

orbs laik a lantern to come home to

mi fa mi

skimmed from the top

naked & hopeful

relentless gleam laik

permanent as-if receiving

they have such bonny faces

cherubic sun for eyes &

rays

spoking laik

retro wall clocks

tock tock

baroque

apology for awakening finds

itself impassive

that guy

screaming at the screen

I’ll kill you fuckin sundog

don’t want

that bile coming in to the room

dripping

try to sing against the tide

this earth allows

& burns off skywards

I have six birds on the go

la la la

mi fa mi

the world puts it out so loud

all those shining

putti in these hands are

something not material

bugles fused & readying

fake ceremonials

go burning babes go culvers

cooing in universal

rafters do you

trust me

in yr circular

breathing

laik

you do

ramble & forget me

s undog

the very sun seemed to be a new one

laik if someone caught me

we’d be finished with

reflected gleaming

it is a dense dark heart orison

beating a slow fat rhythm

pretends a-gilded

circulation fat-cheeked

carousel

buoyed up on the

mock mock

merle

laik you chorus

dear life

sundog

& yr uncomprehending

larks forget

what

terraforms

in song

so many

open mouths

following heat

as-if

galactic

I have six birds

on the go

finding bright beads

in the box

trust me

_______________________________________________________________________________

Carol Watts lives in London. Her poetry includes two collections with Reality Street, Occasionals (2011) and Wrack (2007), the chapbooks When blue light falls (Oystercatcher, 2008, 2010), this is red (Torque Press, 2009) and brass, running (Equipage, 2006), and the artist’s book alphabetise, now an eBook (Intercapillary Editions, 2011). Her work also involves mixed media – photography, drawing and collage. It includes Horrid Massacre: A Récit, a sequence told through shopping receipts, currently online in part at Ekleksographia. Her poetry has been anthologised in the Reality Street Book of Sonnets, Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets, and her ‘Zeta Landscape’ series in The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. Sundog, a sequence of 60 poems, is due out in 2012.

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2011-07-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

DEBORAH POE

cadeaus

_______________________________________________________________________________

Notes on cadeaus:

Excerpts from Listen. Listen was a gift for Kate & Max Greenstreet. Created in January 2010. Images & text from Listen (Joseph & Vivian Kerman 1972). One-edition.

When the Clairvoyant Pauses was a gift for Lori Anderson Moseman. Created September 2010. The title taken from Anderson Moseman’s Utmost Brevity, which included the phrase. One-edition. “Lifeline” appeared in print in Fact-Simile Magazine 3.2 Autumn/Winter 2011.

Excerpts from Wild(er)ness. Wild(er)ness was a gift for Stockport Flats Press. Text taken from Mary Olmsted Greene’s collection of interviews and poetry, Women Outside: conversations about nature, art & spirit (Stockport Flats Press, Witness Post Series, 2010). One-edition.

Mrs. Roentgen was a gift for Alexander Jorgensen. Created in December 2006. One-edition.

_______________________________________________________________________________

DEBORAH POE is author of the poetry collections Elements (Stockport Flats Press 2010), Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords 2008) and several chapbooks, most recently a four-part edition entitled the last will be stone, too as part of the Dusie Kollektiv (5). Deborah’s writing is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Bone Bouquet, Jacket Magazine, No Contest, Fact-Simile Magazine, Peaches & Bats, Sidebrow, Colorado Review and Denver Quarterly. Deborah is curator of the annual Handmade/Homemade Exhibit. For more information, please visit www.deborahpoe.com.

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2011-07-30T05:47:00.000-07:00

EILEEN TABIOS

from

“147 Million Orphans: A Haybun”

MMXII.

knucklehead

weekend weekday

reacquaint vessel insubordinate

To learn his new language, the adoptee was charged with learning 25 English words a week during the schoolyear. Each new word spilled from the wet graphite tip of a knife. “Weekend, weekday”—such common terms, such common concepts. To the adoptee, the two words at first were a sifting of gravel for more gravel. Revelation was hard-fought, only to camouflage its rewards too well—comprehending the significance of sun versus moon was another blow from a belt’s brass buckle that refused to remain a lost memory. In an orphanage, time is relevant only if a future is acknowledged. ~~For such acknowledgement, desire must come to transcend selfishness—almost impossible among those owning nothing, especially their fate.~~ For an orphan, the dog’s point of view suffices: the present is all that matters, especially when it lacks the fist, the empty plate, a rotgut bottle’s cap as toy, the alley as bedroom. Or so the orphanage staff believed—

when the boy whose intellect dwarfed his body started hurling rocks through the dim windows of the orphanage, he was not defining “knucklehead.” If a vessel with its hidden hole loses its base, how to contain, hold, embrace … anything in flux like liquids or emotions or identity or the degradation of the word “consequence” into “punishment”? How to trust in the passage of time to offer the possibility of possibilities? That adoption commences a progression will not dilute the pain of how each new word must be gained through bodily cutting as if to live a bad poem’s dictum: to feel is to hurt. How to trust that a metaphor need not be a lie? What a knothole—this interior of a fist! This classroom of negative space…!

MMXIII.

television

screening insightful

prescient melancholy evasive

If you were a sleeping bird in Madagascar, a certain species of moth might drink your tears through a fearsome proboscis shaped like a harpoon. They’d insert their tools beneath your eyelids. They would drink avidly. You were a rapt presence as you met this species through the grainy television screen used to babysit hundreds of orphans. After the television darkened, no genius would be required to explain your prescient conclusion: you will attempt to evade too much in this life, you will fail, there is no other life. ~~You, sadly, will come to prefer silk, even polyester, doppelgangers to roses that otherwise would shrivel.~~ Your insights will always arise from the sheen of rain-drenched pavements. For example, that one can weep without the aid of nightmares—that one can weep in the most safe haven, or even the small heavens that still and do manage to pock-mark our mortal planet.

MMXV.

quibble

malignant integrate

limp conceptualize prioritize

To remember a father’s fist against a mother’s cheek is to integrate the malignant into myocardium. Short-term memory is a temporary activation of neural connections that can store incidents for mere seconds. Short-term memories become long-term through continued recall and associations that change the nerves’ physical structure. The adoption therapist is eager for hir continued attention. But isn’t the adoptee simply protecting his body? Long-term memory bases its existence on biology. The adoption therapist brushes away my parental concern as a quibble. Adoption is an industry, as commercial as the polyethylene commodities traveling on ship tankers from China with no regard for carbon footprints. Yes, one can leave footprints on water. Recall Jesus. And how his father counseled adoption as the camel’s key for passing through the needle’s eye. I became a mother through ~~someone else’s~~ more than one person’s loss. I see the rose and feel the thorn. I cannot protect my sons and daughters. But they will be sons and daughters: I give them the Word, and the word is the non-harrowing—and even delicious!— “Mom”! I feel the thorn and see the rose: the crown that, when worn, begins a bleeding so lyrical it most assuredly will move the most addicted bees to leave their sodden Queen.

MMXVI.

cantaloupe

lynch wild

mob intolerable beliefs

To introduce “ethics” to the Lord of the Flies is to bare one’s back to more than one whip’s flagellation. Au contraire, the latest studies show adoptees do not suffer from a lack of self-esteem. He deserves no less than the universe, he still insists long after his bedroom became an alleyway between stacked toys, comics, sports paraphernalia and other items I do not know because they were stolen. Another study reveals that over 91% of adolescents understand the value—the honor!—of honesty. But one-third of these sages cheat on school exams. You are explaining this to your adopted son who survived for 13 years what might kill you in 13 hours. You explain that ethics is the most difficult “Life Lesson” to learn because what is good is not synonymous with what gives an advantage. Unexpectedly, he decides to be kind enough not to laugh—his politeness only serves to let loose a whip for another crack. Where flies lay their eggs, manners were debased to source yet other forms of camouflage. You fear the weight of the large knife in your hands as you cut a melon in half. You urge him to eat more so he can grow past years of malnutrition. You eat more of the melon, too, for its savory flesh and its desired coolness against your tongue—only to feel more cracks from the whip: how the melon’s slipperiness reminds that the feral can never be embraced because the feral will not be held. The feral as a bubbling volcano chilling with its undeniable orange heat.

MMXVII.

endowed

faith catapulted

perplexed coddle pamper

The one who has never been coddled was informed she would be adopted and she cried out in response, THANK YOU SO MUCH! We mothers hate hearing this story—no child should learn to be grateful for an effect of loss. Yes, we can understand why she is grateful. But no child should learn to be grateful for an effect of loss. This is but one example of how perplexity can be the most appropriate reaction. Her new mother told her the family would take her on a vacation. She asked for a camera—perhaps what can unfold will become real for her only when affirmed by photographs, objects she can touch and recover. She’s learned at too young an age that memory is fragile and lapses too often to desire. Because my faith has not yet betrayed, I see her easily in my mind’s eye: frolicking on what could be a Hollywood movie set of beige sand blue water green mountain a grove of palm trees, looking back frequently at her new Mom to grin, carefully tip-toeing around the delicate sea creatures laid on sand by an ocean calmed from witnessing her eager joy, looking back frequently at me. As I call out, Be careful. Have fun. Yes, it’s all lovely.

MMXVIII.

mortgage

repertoire pantomime

origin Harlequin Judy

Karma sucks. A lot lies behind the new edict: You are not allowed to use these four words around your family: whatever (cue snotty tone), Stupid!, Shut. Up. Adoption is like marriage: faith is bestowed upon some mortgage but the honeymoon inevitably betrays. One example: the one who is eager to learn but cannot be taught. So eager ~~to please~~ to retain the remaining shard of identity, she must always interrupt a teacher to exclaim variations of It’s exactly like something else I once learned on my own. The “on my own” might not be articulated but is implicit. She wore raspberry-colored shorts topped by a camisetta with spaghetti straps—in any other context, her outfit (edged in raspberry lace as well) would be charming. Please observe how a mime’s repertoire inevitably bores. Something, after all, made clowns lose their smiles.

MMXVIX.

basis

puppet polyethylene

Neapolitan beefy entirely

Her beloved’s gaze consistently misses 100% reciprocation with her earnest eyes. The puppet is half flesh, half plastic. The challenge is to determine which of the moveable parts would find it impossible to arch: the beefier the belly—any expert in bioenergetics would tell ya!—the healthier the mind! He observes the suffering of another child without making a move towards it. Yet if he sees a happy baby he becomes its closest planet. Whatever I have asked of him, I know with as much certainty as befits a psychopath that such task was quite … modest. O my heart feeling the impending stroke—I am trying to avoid saying the obvious to you: my son is afire and I with all the water of the Sierras fauceting through my fingers cannot help him cannot help him cannot help him

NOTE:

A “haybun” is a combination of hay(na)ku and other text. The hay(na)ku (http://haynakupoetry.blogspot.com) is a 21^st century diasporic poetic form invented by the poet; its core is a tercet-based stanza with the first line being one word, the second line being two words, and the third line being three words. Each word forming a hay(na)ku in “147 Million Orphans” is listed chronologically from an 8^th grade project by the poet’s adopted son, Michael, to learn English by studying 25 new words a week.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Eileen R. Tabios has released 18 print, 4 electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art-essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a short story book and a collection of novels. Recipient of the Philippines' National Book Award for Poetry, she most recently released SILK EGG: COLLECTED NOVELS (Shearsman, 2011) and THE THORN ROSARY: SELECTED PROSE POEMS 1998-2010 (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010). She has exhibited visual poetry and visual art in the United States and Asia and also edited, co-edited or conceptualized nine anthologies of poetry, fiction and essays.

Ms. Tabios' body of work is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, Portuguese, Polish, Greek, computer-generated hybrid languages, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Music, Modern Dance and Sculpture. As part of her poetry-as-performance approach, she blogs as the "Chatelaine", and edits Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement), a popular poetry review journal. As a further extension of her poetics, she also founded Meritage Press, a multi-disciplinary literary and arts press based in San Francisco & St. Helena.

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2011-02-13T19:03:00.000-08:00

LAURIE PRICE

EPIGRAPH

This here is now. I lean in, I walk the august rocks of passage, tremendous rendezvous of tightened inquests, I descend the staircases of rude basements, navigate between the rusted pipes of belief. And I seat myself down, forever down where it is always now, where a twinned nanosecond blows persistently through the cracks. And the slamming of the shutters never stops, nor the dust-infused air, nor the concussion of glass with cement that goes on pounding and smashing and never breaks.

_______________________________________________________________________________

WHITE NOISE

About ten minutes goes by in the hunting frame. By the arrows rising from the grass I see the main stem. Flotilla of shadows. Then a cloud rolls over to reveal the sun. To be lifted at such an angle from the city’s rough ledges balances a lull in the discussion. I begin with a retraction. I begin the same way I have for the past who-knows-how-many years. I grab my beer off the sidewalk and take a swig. The need for type O blood is constant, broadcast over all available airwaves. Hold my breath as the liquid warms threading down. The engines turn slowly at first, their movements barely perceptible. But let me go back and explain: my sense of ‘the’ truth is ‘my’ own. For this reason I begin having become as it were.

Smoke from a cigarette left in an ashtray rolls and unwinds in slow motion. As quickly as the smoke overtakes the room the sheer silence is faster. Point of entrance for nerve fibers and cells to dissolve. This numbing pulse of loss is sensate and octagonal climbing along thin strands of nerve release to collect in the nuclei. A pale blue verging on gray petals through the room unmoored. The fresh damp aroma sparks recognition, palpable as earth. Ah sweet sweet sweet September. The warning and the reprimands; the smoke wavers in a thick column not settling for days until the rains come. You chase it to there: your grief darkens in flames of boxed conclusions. Where steam rises from the frame the long thoughts bubble. Durations of octaves grounded by middle C.

The next frame holds a pattern of circulars.

Into the irregular patterns of rectangles and squares I walk a cobblestone path to search for the Plaza of the Inquisition. The ground is uneven or falling rising slanted at various degrees. Torqued. Feel the tension rise from cement patches and the voices of others passing. “We live in trailer wipe. We live in ashen stage ashram noise.” The whispered solace of solitude joined to dead voices echoes. Never in negation was the thing more than. Lines of sunlight vibrate between buildings.

(Once late at night I saw white owls fly from one bell tower to the next to the next to the next. But this afternoon there are only groups of men and women inking old metal presses to spool out invitations or business cards, examples of which hang from the sides of their machines.) I am cheated of your tomorrow says the postered plea for mercy. “. . . wearing a red T-shirt, a large silver cross . . . has a raised mole above left eyebrow.”

Whenever we could we came there to delay the disappearing. She said if it wasn’t one thing it was two. Hedged all our bets to defray the tumble of torn edges from forming any kind of line. A beseechment to startle the revelers from their broken bits of talk and salutations. The revised revise, the risen rise. We mourn the dead. We speak of them fondly that we might occasion them. Them as yours as if your own. The borders I drew on that pane of glass propped against the windowframe were just an amusement. What I meant was that there could be more than one way to address an infiltration. It would be a tight squeeze to fit the location structure to the place point and without directions the best I could do was improvise. (To look inside the grief: the little waves and tendered manias.)

The constants are the flux and drone of car alarms when a bus rushes past. Music yells through big speakers into autumn rooms, which, lush as leaves swept into piles, star brittle textures anointing. Then the proteinacious drugs kick in. A muse of sucks. Brittle elements shift to tactics sometimes. Sometimes sleeping reasons are enemies. Who polishes their cross, their knife, its blade.

Trails and tangents are set and reset by footsteps wading through sagebrush and pine needles, leaves and clumps of hair. Girl with big feet nestles cornered in a camphor smell rising from a coat closet stuffed with notes. Fur drips slithering out from the cracks in arpeggios. The patter of tropical rain lingers while two strangers stop midstep in the street below to check their notes. Two sets of wet hands carefully unfold the papers. Clouds drift overhead uncertainly, clearing and boxing together to drift like smoke. Treetops appear blackened in the wet, slice through thick mist in waves. From here I see an open door weathered green in places, moss-hung drapings.

Strings that reverberate against a cherry wood backboard lend an air of solemnity to the occasion. Piano and slow. Controvoglia. That music could be tamed this way in trills or

rising gestures

to complete the narratives inside

was nourishment enough.

That what was expected would come to pass, that what could be hoped for would follow. The notes droned sinuous to deepen the paved distributions of the flattening tones. There was a restless fumbling around for keys that might have seemed human considering the divisions but the molting structures worked against it and the tuneful hollows assumed their positions.

An infinite approach to an infinitive will always begin with “I.” Then I could stand back and watch as the day folded into quadrants of multiples, assume my position at the head of the line.

I bound cords around papers trying to separate those that had been read from those that hadn’t. A slipknot seemed the logical approach. Heaving line, clove hitch. The stacked edges threaten to topple away from assembling.

If you study any part of a sequence too long the connections fall away and gravity seems to cease. The sky becomes a dense blue smudge drawn across the top of a window and hung there instead of glass. But if you turn around quickly and let the image fall into place by itself its attention to logic resumes as if no separation of belief had taken place. At the laundromat when the dryer won’t respond to the coindrop or button push: You’re there again it says. You’ve never been closer. That was what I strove for. Whirling helped to diagram the steps this dancer might take to lose the static equations.

_______________________________________________________________________________

WHAT’S UGLY

Forget ink, butter, or warm things.

A sneeze in full air the goshen of,

and door slams shut that gravity pulls.

Inside are the clever tricks this day

bought for one final gain. To sponge

the materials begs another signal & share

in the latticework of a metal sheared

under the din of its music. Alone or not

the lah-di-dah hummed in yellow keys

and crowds call out the titles as they pass.

This one evidenced and that one

breaks apart. Red sweater at dusk. Wind

would laugh as bird is animate brushing only

at the tip. A small reminder of size

and frequency, weight and buzz. Endless

modifications make up the urge of throat

in gasp in dry approximations pencilling

classical complaints to it. Extreme

as a refuge of garishly painted houses

outside all means of survival means

what’s ugly survives without exclusions.

_______________________________________________________________________________

And even less to be unkind

The scrubbed appearance of certain evasions like

was but isn’t now and the ragged edges

consequent as being a margin fed out

from the hollow the rattled echo shouldering

more than weight and the next one

that next straggled choice whining

is no competition for initial shocks

blurred edge, faint outline of just what

creamy blend of sharpness and blue

that erotic something once was

this fucking this a century of

doubt and perspiration, premonition

okay but claims no experience

of prudence and less even to be unkind

reasons float like white lily pads

at the center, intussusception

I make a margin of my skin

to fit through an unobservable loophole

and disappear the masks Is that hate?

_______________________________________________________________________________

Slower than thought or vision you say

it’s where the light stands, a march of

sheerest colors ’til you reach the one

that opens Not the pale blue or grey

outline but softness like wood and tawny

almost old The glisten over fingers curled

cooking mint tea over gas flame near a door

Silk does that too or sequins in wind Jump

the rope black surge where details play you

for a spoon Now the shine bowls an oval

deposit almost mineral so succinct It’s not

what you think or how your feelings craft

what you see that someone’s voice

interrupts but the ambiguities come

inside and staking claims suffers nothing

to the known places that weaken

in plain sight our bedouin eyes.

_______________________________________________________________________________

IT COSTS

Why not go inside I’m saying

What we were before this wind

and our sentences cut short

A life sentence to animate and people

with trees or boats and so many names

narrowed in to shifting shapes

but not arrowed down in transience

and so on and so forth

There’s enough space to be and let this

in and watch as space comes unexpected

and challenges, to be and let these things

wash over, dissolve

I go to truly enter the fluid

not concrete of these things that go

on moving barely in one place, palace

before the other things trespass

Tiger cat puddled between chair legs

knows this passage too,

how to get there is it costs

To be present and alive like breath

A line of permanence in perpetual dissolve

_______________________________________________________________________________

LA CUENTA

Can I have the obsessive details please. Always

the wind, another kind of monster. Cold floor

releases moisture and why not say it

calms the nerves to sit here. Now. Capital.

A better like than no stains of previous mixtures

makes a better sharp. The point of falling down

and finding windows. My sole to my soul a wry

idea with no conclusion. Fold the paper money.

The grain of that becoming, unlike artifice.

_______________________________________________________________________________

WAVES

to be in the foreign body as a luxury

of clandestine presence so only in my

apparent absence which is hidden but

shifted from the always there to

sometimes comes, sometimes stays,

sometimes goes alone to the beach

to walk inside the tidal atmosphere

and thick air, blowing sand & seagulls,

attributes of a resting place gaze, gazelles,

and let the words drift or sift as worlds

I’m coming into in a slow repose

to hear the sounds caught in their

throats as birds as language as bent

between the spaces I can imagine

if I keep my mouth closed & just listen

_______________________________________________________________________________

Poet and collagist/object maker Laurie Price is the author of Except for Memory (Pantograph Press), Under the Sign of the House (Detour/readme), The Assets (Situations), and Minim (Faux Press). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals over the years and from different locations. She lives and works in Granada, Spain. See more here, here, here, here, here, and here.

International Visual Poetry

2011-02-12T07:07:00.000-08:00

.
SPECIAL ISSUE, Guest-Curated by GEOF HUTH

"WhoM" by Geof Huth, 2010

About International Visual Poetry, PEEP/SHOW ISSUE #3

This issue of Peep/Show presents a portfolio of international visual poetry by visual poets from four continents and ten countries, though none from North America. This selection faces outward, to the rest of the world, to the vibrant cultures of visual poetry that exist in places like Turkey, Australia, and Japan. These works are homogeneous in that they exhibit an interest in combining the verbal with the visual, in mixing these two modalities of expression and perception, but each sequence of work is the unique vision of one artist, a tributary to one great river of words and images. Pay this issue some heed as it reveals itself. It is there for you to watch.

Geof Huth, Guest Curator
January 13, 2011

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

The scope of Geof Huth's poetic production includes handdrawn and computer-generated visual poems (some of them wordsless), one-word poems, extemporaneous poems recorded in the act of living, and poems performed in a language that doesn't exist with melodies created as the audience listens. For this year, the year that he is fifty years of age, he is writing each day a poem that is also a letter to someone he knows. He mails each poem out to its intended recipient and posts it to a blog entitled 365 ltrs. He writes almost daily on visual poetry and the textual imagination at his blog, dbqp: visualizing poetics. His latest book is ntst: the collected pwoermds of geof huth, a book of 775 one-word poems.

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2011-02-12T05:07:00.000-08:00

KEIICHI NAKAMURA

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Keiichi Nakamura was born in Okazaki city, Japan. When he was 22 years old he had his first solo exhibit of monotype prints in Sapporo City. A mail artist and visual poet, Nakamura's work has been shown throughout the world. Recent shows have included the "Mapping Correspondence" exhibit at the Center for Book Arts in New York City in 2008; the 5th International Artists' Book Triennial Vilnius in Lithuania in 2009, the "Japanische Visuelle Poesie" exhibit in Austria, and the "KOTOBA NO TIKARA" show at BankART Studio in Yokahama in 2010

See more here, here, here, and here`.

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2011-02-12T04:00:00.000-08:00

SUZAN SARI

river classicals

aksinya

darya


dunya

gregor

kornilov

mişa

panteleymon

prokor

stepan

tatarsk

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SUZAN SARI was born in Rize, Turkey in 1981. She graduated from the American Culture and Literature Department of Istanbul University in 2002 and has since been teaching English in public schools. Her visual poems have appeared in Nocturno and OTOLITHS. Other self and electronically published works include Sans Eseri, Gunaydin Kral, Siirler and Connected. Her poems were exhibited at Asian Visual Poetry (Platforma) (2997), at infusoria (2009).

See more here, here, here, and here.

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2011-02-11T15:15:00.000-08:00

MARCELO SAHEA


Cigarra

dieta

digitao

errare

o_cÇu

seja


semsom

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Marcelo Sahea is a poet, performer, sound & visual artist, and art director. E-books include "ejs" (2001) and "carne viva" (2003). Books include: "carne viva" (2003), "Leve" (2006) and "Nada a Dizer" (2010 - [e] editorial). His poems are included in several anthologies and magazines of art, poetry, culture and literature. His works are included at exhibitions of visual poetry and digital art in Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. He has participated in the intermedia performance "Pletórax" in Brazil, since 2007.

See & hear more here, here, here, and here.

Poeta, performer, artista visual e sonoro e diretor de arte. Publicou dois e-books: 'ejs (2001) e carne viva (2003) e três livros de poesia: carne viva (2003), Leve (2006) e Nada a Dizer (2010 - [e] editorial). Participou de diversas antologias e revistas de literatura, poesia, arte e cultura. Participou de exposições e mostras de poesia visual e arte digital em Brasília, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo. Realiza desde 2007 pelo Brasil a performance intermídia Pletórax.

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2011-02-11T15:05:00.000-08:00

SATU KAIKKONEN

from

totems

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Satu Kaikkonen is one of Finland’s leading visual and conceptual poets. At the recent Text Festival in Bury, UK, she performed as a ‘duet’ with Karri Kokko for the first time to create a collage of sounds made up of classic and original Finnish poetry, to present and articulate the universalities & particularities of a mother tongue that only the Finns speak.

See, watch, & hear more here, here, here, and here.

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2011-02-11T15:00:00.000-08:00

HELEN WHITE

from

soluble colonies

[NOTE: These poems are from an ongoing project called "soluble colonies." They're an attempt at time and space-based visual poetry, that is, poems that change over time in response to their environment. Their DNA is the letter combination "is", which occurs in every word in the colonies. They live on waste ground, in urban green spaces and along the river; some survive for weeks, other only for a few hours]

2nd December 2010

5th December 2010

20th November 2010

22nd November 2010

25th November 2010

21st November 2010

5th December 2010

4th November 2010

5th November 2010

15th November 2010

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Helen White was born in Britain in 1977 and now lives in Ghent, Belgium, where she co-organizes festivals, exhibitions and workshops as a founding member of the Krikri polypoetry collective. In 2009 she curated ‘infusoria,’ an international exhibition of visual poetry by women.

Her own work has been shown in exhibitions in Belgium, Britain, the Netherlands, Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Japan and the US. Recent publications include a contribution to the anthology Zieteratuur (Uitgeverij Passage, Groningen, 2010), a chapbook called How to Quote Visual Poetry (postfluxpostbooklets, 2010) and an untitled chapbook in the This is Visual Poetry series (Paper Kite Press, 2010). Her poem holding appeared as a poster from Paper Kite Press in 2009.

By day she is the business manager of the Logos Foundation in Ghent, where she helps take care of an orchestra of about 40 musical robots and a little white dog called Floesj.

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2011-02-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

KLAUS PETER DENCKER

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Klaus Peter Denker is a filmmaker (more the 100 films for German television) and a visual poet (since 1970). Dencker made the first TV-film (ARD/HR) and edited the first German anthology (Textbilder-Visuelle Poesie international. DuMont, Köln) about Visual Poetry in 1972. His latest publications include: Ambiguity & More (Redfoxpress, Dugort/Achill Island, County Mayo/Ireland, 2010); Epitaph to... (also from Redfoxpress); and Optische Poesie – von den praehistorischen Schriftzeichen bis zu den digitalen Experimenten der Gegenwart (De Gruyter, Berlin/New York 2010).

His works are in many international museums around the world.

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2011-02-11T11:41:00.000-08:00

TIM GAZE

_______________________________________________________________________________

although he used to write quirky fiction & experimental poetry with words, these days Tim Gaze spends more time working with abstract shapes & illegible forms of writing. he is often questioning just where are the limits of visual poetry or writing or meaning.

in recent months, his publications include 100 Scenes (e-book), pie tray prints, & information (http://www.scribd.com/doc/32564524/Tim-Gaze-Information). his short essays have been in venues such as Toth, Kalligram, Confraria do Vento, SLOVA & Going Down Swinging.

Tim lives in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia, where he appreciates the abundance of trees. joyous racket such as Angolan kuduro music gets him dancing.

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2011-02-09T08:20:00.000-08:00

CIA RINNE

radeverbrechen

close your eyes and open them again (again)

if this you see

blindfold

a b came c

a came to c b

b came to c u

ach!

a, zeh, ha.

aha, c'est h

ah, se! äsch.

haha, c'est

- ach.

sth abt. c

c'est celui la

ce ci lia

c'est s'il y a

mo there

fa there

sis there

bro there

there

enfant

enfin

un fin

i love you, you're perfect, now change.

i love you, you're perfect, now listen.

i love you, you're perfect, now laugh.

i love you, you're perfect, now come.

i love you, you're perfect, now talk.

i love you, you're perfect, now stop.

sei T

p/age no.

this place displaced

this is
(disease)

this ease

following:

weak

hear say

say here

hier oder da

da oder du

du hier und

du da

da da

hear: i am

here i am

_______________________________________________________________________________

Cia Rinne, born in Gothenburg/Sweden in 1973, grew up in West Germany and studied philosophy, history and languages at the universities of Frankfurt, Athens and Helsinki, from where she holds an MA degree in philosophy. Cia Rinne writes visual poetry and conceptual pieces using different languages, and at times incorporating them into exhibitions, most recently the conceptual work Night Calendar (in collaboration with Antonio Scarponi, ISCP, New York, 2010). Her publications include zaroum (2001), the online work archives zaroum (afsnitp.dk 2008), the book notes for soloists (in collaboration with Sebastian Eskildsen, radiowy.se 2010). Cia has also been collaborating on different documentary projects with photographer Joakim Eskildsen; their latest publication is a book on the Roma from India to Europe based on seven years of travels and stays with Roma communities (The Roma Journeys, Steidl 1007). After several years in Scandinavia, Cia now lives and works in Berlin.

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2011-01-24T09:24:00.000-08:00

AYŞEGÜL TÖZEREN

Okuduğum kitaplar*

"dünyanın bütün saatler birleşin korkuyu gösterin"

"gerçek"

"tarih haritanın içindedir"

"gösteri toplumu nedir"

"yasa refakat"

"diyalektik kırılma kusurları"

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TEXTUAL NOTES:

*Okuduğum kitaplar:

The title of the series means "The books I read."

Dünyanın bütün saatleri birleşin, korkuyu gösterin:

“Dünyanın bütün saatleri birleşin, korkuyu gösterin” means “clocks of the world, unite
and show the fear.”

Korku means "fear"

Gerçek:

          Gerçek means "reality"
          yol means "way"
          yok means "not"

Tarih haritanın içindedir:

          “Tarih haritanın içindedir” means “history is within the map”
          Tarih means "history"
          harita means "map"

Gösteri toplumu nedir:

“Gösteri toplumu nedir” means “What is the Spectacle Society"
Vitrin means "shop window"

Tin means "soul"

Yasa refakat:

          “Yasa refakat” means “accompaniment for mourning”
           Yas means "mourning"
           Yaşa means "live"

Diyalektik kırılma kusurları:

“Diyalektik kırılma kusurları” means “Dialectic refractive errors”
Zıt means "contrary"

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AYŞEGÜL TÖZEREN was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1979. She graduated from Istanbul Medical Faculty in 2005, the same year her first visual poem was published in Zinhar magazine. Since then, her visual poems have been featured in Zinhar Galeri, the only visual and concrete poetry blog in Turkish. Her work has also appeared in Otoliths, Public Pages, and, with Finnish textual information, at nokturno.org. Some of the poems that originally appeared in Otoliths were exhibited in Platforma (an exhibition for Visual Poetry of Asia) in December 2006. Her poems that were originally published in the second issue of Monokl magazine in 2007 were afterward included in a special publication by Yasakmeyve magazine, the first anthology of Turkish visual poetry. She has had work published in Poetikhars, Hertz, Kitap-lık, Karagoz, Big Bridge, Yeniyazi, and Ucra Poetry magazine.

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2011-01-10T08:55:00.000-08:00

LUC FIERENS

(Belgium, poesia visiva)

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Luc Fierens is a collagist and visual poet provocateur whose work emerged out of Poesia Visiva, Mail-Art and Fluxist circles. Fierens’ diverse practice focuses on language/image as a raw material and the exploration of alternative forms of distribution and communication. As such, he promoted a transnational dialogue prior to the inception of the internet with his mail art projects (Social-Art, Cornucopiae…) and publications (Postfluxpostbooklets) from 1984. Now he continues his research with artists from his “social architecture” with whom he exchanges, forwards, and directs art, and collaborative projects through email, and with whom he organizes meetings, performances, publications and exhibitions. His publications and works can be found in the R&M Sackner Archive (Miami, Artpool-Budapest), libraries (MoMa Library, Rare Books collection Univ. of Buffalo), museums (MaRT, Trento e Rovereto – Italy) and several private collections.

(See more of Fierens' work here, here, here, and here.)

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THE CARNIVAL

2010-11-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

About THE CARNIVAL, PEEP/SHOW ISSUE #2

Sideshow, freakshow, circus, vaudeville, medicine show, carnival. Fortune tellers, midway barkers, animal trainers, magicians. A man with no arms or legs who lights his cigarette without help. The Illustrated Man, the human skeleton, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, the gorilla that breaks out of a cage into a crowd that pays a dollar to be terrorized. Jugglers, spangled trapeze artists in sequined bikinis, the Dog-Faced Boy, the Caterpillar Man. From the arms of Barnum's Fiji Mermaid to the feats of daredevils: if you were tall, short, fat, skinny, hairy, a conjoined twin, tattooed, limbless, or ate weird food, chances are you could have had employment as a circus freak back then. Now that job is solely in the seven-fingered hands of our bravest artists and poets.

We think of the unfolding possibilities in a film like Santa Sangre: the tattooed lady, the knife-thrower, the boy in a mental hospital who lives naked in a nest of his own building, the mother without arms, the tequila-swilling barker. We think of the elephant funeral, or Debord's The Society of the Spectacle.

Our second issue of Peep/Show is built around the sense that anything can happen when you put a lion-tamer and a human cannonball in the same room. It's about possibility, about disease we've never seen before, a viral opening, traveling on a train to the next town, reinvention, a deliberate reincarnation, the unfounded assumption that everything isn't already written, and the show that emerges from that dystopic assumption.

With live, accordian-driven, dark carnival music; these are some of the magicians whose work we've enjoyed lately.

Lynn Behrendt & Anne Gorrick, Curators

June 28, 2010