#13

your reflection can't save you from drowning:
this has become an abscess of aesthetic phobia:
switching time, switching off.
machinery with teeth....
is it possible to asphyxiate all of these obsessive ideas?
a mass of quivering shambles.
creating an abscess of aesthetic phobia:
epidural hematoma - housed inside a buried coma.
the sun has become jaundice.
we're moving perpendicular behind a silhouette of a screaming leopard....

~A. Grossman~

*

#12

A Room Of One’s Own

My erotic retreats are lost to me.
My rise stultifies in a refractory
blemish of character assignation.
A reactor pushed a plume
into a blue bottle glass sky,
no deposit no return.
I had a name for this
in the curve of my glottal stop.
An anatomical crosscut
my tongue moved forklike
as I gave my very first reading
a sharp eye out for potential
groupies. My retreats are lost
and I no longer generate power
though I still let off steam
to keep up appearances.

~Rod Peckman~

*

#11

Marie Antoinette

Bird cages in wigs, men in high heels,
powdered cheeks, eyes lined with malice
and you, a mere child in silks,
set loose to play with slow Louis
your husband in pointless chambers
of polished marble and many clocks;
you dance, gamble, the beauty
by the ponds reflected, a dazzled
princess in fairyland eating
cakes and raising hoops
for that aristocratic ball
while peasants starve:
partial truths but revolution
alters your biography
and the guillotine
requires justification.

So maligned and spat upon,
you sit in the hay cart,
hair white from dismay,
trundling to the odd fate
that leads you, darling girl,
from Austrian creams, satins
and games to the rough hewn
wood of a platform. You kneel,
looking once in the tumultuous
face of the crowd, once up
to the slanted smile of death
waiting to sever you
from fancy, fact
and the heavy burden
of mirrors and play.

~Kenneth Radu~

*

#10

The Sky is Satisfied

Amy is not a child. She’s grown. But still, she swings the loaf of white bread, elongated and soft in yellow packaging, around in a circle as she walks down the edge of the highway on her way home to her apartment next to the auto repair shop. Her dress is short and the same color as the bread bag, her skin pale, her hair dark and fine. Most of the men she knows are car mechanics. Her extended family is in the kitchen, a few yards away. They are awaiting her grilled cheese sandwiches. She will flip each sandwich with a spatula of love.

Amy is as safe by the side of the highway as a cloud is in the sky.

Swing, bread, swing.

Sasha rides on the back of a ratty tiger in the nearby woods, having spent many days alone and riding. She and the tiger are both worn out in a flashing-toward-late-afternoon kind of way. They are also both naked. And both have strong instincts toward the tearing of flesh, it’s just that their tastes differ. The tiger is a carnivore and prefers living animals. Sasha is a reincarnated fairy and prefers flowers. When she and the tiger siesta together beneath a single anachronistic tree in a sun-gilt field, she pulls black-eyed susans into her lap and peels them apart with calm, curious brutality, petal by ruined petal, until the center alone survives in her palm, a denuded jewel, coin, or token. We all owe the earth something and Sasha and her tiger are searching for whatever remuneration they might find for it. They want to make good, in blood or in petals, until even the sky is satisfied. Sasha holds the velvety brown token out to her tiger and then because he purrs so well she leans back against his coarse, muscular flank and settles into him. She puts her arm around him, her cheek against his fur and looks up the sun-and-serpent swell of his back to his magnificent head. His eyes are vitreous gold mines. He smells oily and dangerous, like there’s blood and sharp teeth in his sweat, fire and frightened elk. She loves how his fur goes one way and one way only and how it softens at his belly.

Their friendship began then they found a half-demolished house in the woods. With a gas stove shadowed by a mimosa. He killed a boar. She lit a burner. Before the mimosa’s feathery shadow had vanished into night, they dined, together, on the raw and roasted. Sleeping in the woods with him was easy. He was the pillow. She was the blanket. With him she dreamed of all things gold and copper.

Maybe she chooses to ride this tiger naked because she was the only girl in school who seriously considered streaking with the boys when that crazy hippie school she attended back in the seventies went to Wildwood, New Jersey for the school trip. Even by age ten, most girls, even hippie girls, have a solid enough dose of common sense to keep a voyeuristic distance from the caprices of volatile boy humans. Not Sasha. Part ratty tiger, part reincarnated fairy, she saw an opportunity to beat her wings at convention and was keenly tempted.

The boys set the date for the anticipated streak and Sasha and the other girls waited. The days filled quickly and easily. Everyone toured the ghoul-filled haunted house and ate ersatz boardwalk taffies. Sasha picked Cape May diamonds out of the sand while deliberating on the pros and cons of being the only female streaker in school. She brooded daily over whether or not she should have her pants on or off when the appointed day came. She was the most popular girl in this small school. If the wrong choice were made, it would end up being, because she was part of it, the right choice, wouldn’t it?

Modesty. Sasha considered the concept. It was like a stupid charm that she wanted to snap off a cheap, imported bracelet. She knew there was no modesty in fairyland.


* * *


The last evening in Wildwood. Sand long washed-off bodies, but still gritty in the carpet of the hotel lobby. The fall of rushing unshod feet, and snatches of nervous laugher like flowers torn from gardens of bare chests, fluttering sounds heard seconds before the boys whirled around the corner at the bottom of the main staircase. Sasha and the other girls stood on the lowest landing watching them disappear down the hall. Sasha wondered if she would have been humiliated either way? She wondered if it had something to do with being a girl. All she really knew was that the boys were brave and she was not. That they were nude and she was not. That they were ratty tigers running after their own wildness. And that she was wistful and could not catch up to them.

And so it was that she and her tiger of later years decided to entice her friend-of -longstanding, Amy, from the roadside, and convinced her that it would be okay to forego lunch’s fifteen grilled cheese sandwiches and to trade it for a few naked hours on a tiger’s back.

It will bring you luck. I promise we’ll bring you back. You’ll be glad you did it, Sasha tells Amy, as she helps her pull off the yellow dress, the dress that gleams like societal plastic and artificial sun, and helps her into her nudity of real sun and shade. It’s like streaking, she tells her, remember that? Oh yes, and do bring your comb so we can make him nice.

The yellow dress they leave hanging over a bush, to be retrieved later. They have a tiger. They have a hunger. They have acres and acres of forest.

Swing, dress, swing. After awhile the sun will come up and you’ll be found again.

~Phoebe Wilcox~

*

#9

ERECTIONS

I finished sixth grade and
we lurched toward another failure,
a little east Texas cattle farm.
Playing cowboys gave way
to mucking out stalls.

The man who couldn't deal
with his offspring
except in anger
caught me dealing
with one of my new erections.

It could have been worse.
He shot my dog for roaming.

~Barry Basden~

*

#8

TB BLUES

I worked in a pawnshop
near an air base
in the Panhandle,
supporting my mother and brothers
while my tubercular father
lay in a sanitarium.

C&W filled the airwaves.
One day,
thinking of Miles,
I picked up a horn
and blew weakly
into the mouthpiece.

The pawnbroker,
watching, said,
"How does that nigger taste?"

~Barry Basden~

*

#7

HIS KIND OF WOMAN

She writes
from the other side
of a fine line,
bloody and raw,
septic even.

Bukowski would have loved her.
Drunk driving the Beemer
out to the track with her
nestled beside him,
feeling lucky,
Mahler from the Blaupunkt
filling its smoky interior,
sun so bright
it hurts their sore eyes,
even through tinted glass.

Forget that mess
from last night.
Take out the
empties later,
after the ponies.

At supper,
canned ravioli
and a table red
by candlelight
to start.

Later, more tangled sheets.

~Barry Basden~

*

#6

Suckling Pig

Fuck. It.
I am so horny, so lusty, so lascivious today. It hurts. Seriously.
I am so desperate for sensation that I have this pain in the pit of my stomach.
I'm pig-roasted, hog-tied, spitting quicksand at passers-by.
I want to say quick, pass me that bottle, that handle, please sir,
lend me your hand. It
won't take a moment.
Sir.
Let me suck you dry.
Let me suck you till you pass out.
Till you're brittle and I'm amyl nitrate.
I'm the secretion.
I am the pit.
And the pendulum. Swinging.
Over a whole big enough to fall into.
I'm not sure why I get so tense, it's a white knuckle ride.
And I want to get off.
Will you get me off?
I'm the bloody rape scene.
The contorted limbs and broken nose.
I am the wet underwear around ankles.
There's never enough space inside for everything and everybody.
I will have to eat you instead, vomit you later.
As long as you're inside the whole time.
I'm asking for it.
I'm begging for it.
I want to be fucked to within an inch of your life.
I'm the red hot cunt. I'm the itch to be scratched.
But my nails are too short.
There is never, ever any reprieve.
I ought to cut off my hands.

~Rachel Kendall~

*

#5

The Kama Sutra of Cinderella

You will gasp like a flue,
teach your toes how
to stutter, wear my hands
like an evening gown.

I will break you like a spell, treat
your mouth like a glass slipper,
leave curdled forgiveness
in your stomach.

~J. Bradley~

*

#4

The Kama Sutra of Don't Ask, Don't Tell

I will salt your shoulders
with my hands; no need
to look behind you.

I will kiss you like
an empty rifle, remember
your name.

I walk like this
because I'm as hung
as a closet; be unafraid
of getting stretched
like the truth.

~J. Bradley~

*

#3

Why Charon Doesn't Like The Cure

I don't manufacture angst; the wails
welt from the shoulders of my passengers.

Broken syllables rim the coins in my pocket;
you cannot dress regret in lipstick.

I don't need to paint my face
to smile like a waning moon.

~J. Bradley~

*

#2

All Things Are Things

After snow’s no longer falling on an earth
barren and grateful for the brush of
purification

(a drift is a serendipity, shawl, flowing robe,
a brocade mantle, white on white),
it’s alert

to transformation, a sphinx looking up at
time’s daily sweep, changing shadows and
slow revelations

of shape. Snow knows no more than a sphinx.
“Now” is merely “now” and,
relative to history,

a magnification of identity. How else to be,
than as a seasonal tendency, groping
the sundial, watching birds bathe...

~Sarah Sarai~

*

#1

Crouched on the Davenport

Decent like you but ink-drawing complex
our little girl knows pandemonium,
like a musical instrument she takes to
like Mozart to clavichord.

Those who live on the page are
framed, and molding imagination
to fight death as
a tool of death-lifting-life
from whole cities.

Our boxtop-saver fights only us,
cramped us, with our fervid lucid fears.

~Sarah Sarai~