Poetry of the Non-Prose Kind

Requisite Gift Shop Refreshments Und Crucifix Über Alles

Gerard Sarnat

photo by Gerard Sarnat

Talking shit in footsy PJs — same old surreal kitsch about Himmler’s poison teeth,
Stalin’s spiked lawns, Magen David’s Krakow bagels, that Astaire had been born
Frederick Austerlitz, was Auschwitz the only camp which concentrated on tattoos?,
what a gas chamber music is!, Theresienstadt’s Potemkin village where flower boxes
resembled eye lashes, John Kerry’s Jewish roots, failed common noun wars on cancer
porn typhus terror drugs — blinged alpha shmucko nosey cocaine + croissant grabbers
packed like herring or black sheep who sleep standing near their pickled toy bears, lace
up chimney sweep hoodies, pinched sweat pants, abandoned happy hour drinking boots.

Oven Timer

Hilary S. Jacqmin

A bakelite timer
 forged
like a flocked hen

surveys the gas range
 in this pre-war kitchen.
A mahogany biddy

that clucks off seconds;
 fat bantam
of the dinner hour.

Our broody Buckeye
 orbits,
a bell suspended

in her belly.
 See her
pea comb, rosy

as the errant pearl
 of blood
that punctuates an egg.

November

Tracy Mishkin

The sky grays into the same
smudged fingerprint.

The heat kicks on. Soon the skin
by my thumbnail will crack.

The moon will stick
to branches without leaves.

Loneliness
is the rain that falls all day.

we know how it is with windows

Melissa Atkinson Mercer

how that night

mother opened them and slept
heard girls singing // to each other in the olive trees

heard her own lung // gnawing its way through rib

crawling along the blue walls // out into the miracle
of the night’s only wolf // and waking

how she could only // breathe half the air // speak

half the words she knew // a beast born to beasts
into a morning black and hot as a rabbit’s womb

into a shirt pressed wet against her skin

Dear Trud,

Matthew Johnstone

To empty at / the bursted pollen, onto unevenly lit slabs,

head filled / with shade, how a currency of years in space

to close performances / attached. My hid specified from

work / & uninvolved in shippings of myself, less amid body,

my inventory / omits over counted shadows. It was warm

where you wane certain to / obsolete, still your earth tells

me that some proximity sifts / us through breaking grades.

Grace

Alexander Dickow

The best grace falters is true twice.
The stammer in conceit delights.
Wonder is a perfect drunkard.

Practicing in Snowshoes

Sonja Johanson

Focus your gaze
 on fur rippling
around your vision

 Heels press down
ovals of ash-splint
 sinew underfoot

Mittens, boiled wool
 caked in white crust
fingertips burning—

 Stone chapel, closed
c’est L’eglise
 the arched red door

Look up; snowflakes—
 they drift in,
settle on your boots

Mole

Caitlin Scarano

mother made of moles
hereditary cluster discolor
my back but she
stepped on another crack
vertebra snap clenched
wineglass my mother stole
my mirror for her scratching
post my next lover pocked
with fingerholes tears
in the corners of my mouth
babies in my teeth is every
shame sexual knees between
tall grass many organs
mutate father in his fist coat
wiping oil under
the archway caged bear I
revere claw luck talon
tuck Is it strange
for me to tell you
to make it hurt?

so big this deep reeling,

Annie Grizzle

 and   no   place   to   put  

it there was a wall I once miss find in difference over

ice and sweet easy

I hope I do I disappoint you

again and again and in seen through the straw

green fix at the site

of my legs in a towel

the gnawing has nowhere to climb anymore please

a million need looks confirm sea in me

five fragments

Kyle Kinaschuk

from selections

§XXV:

an encomium for
miscarried form

§XX:

i met u on the coast
with long hair, dull eyes

& u vibrated elegiac couplets
skimming pastures anew

for a monaulous
stressing to unstress time

like
penelope

§XXIX:

a pall of spondees & trochees
tonsured upon a dactylic head

§LXIII:

witnesses stand the coast
with sculpted bodies

breaking texts
& injured brochures

healthy growth
atop the coastal city

blow the foam ribs

§III:

o, the tips of the
wounded faces

& when you look back
your loved one will

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