Poetry of the Non-Prose Kind

Transformation

Britny Cordera

Kore is me in the eyes of my dream.
Rivers are my first mirrors
a game of pass-the-rumors to leaves
in the wind, my first telephone––

 in this dream, caked in the back

of the skull, speckled cobwebs
are the night sky I watch
my airplanes dance ’round Venus
like a ceremonial feather spinning
circles to a mourning mother’s expectations––

I hear orchids growing from my nails
and rejoice the day the dark man stole me.

Exit Music: Microcosm

Nate Maxson

 This country/ it’s the little things
 This planet/ the street you grew up on
 This moment may be/ your most recent lover’s choice of soap
A haunted house/ if you look close enough
But I’ve got my own/ their stage-whispering obsolescence
Rickety mansion full of ghosts/ it’s circling a black hole
And the living/ I am a black hole circling
 I keep it in my jacket pocket/ like a music box
Sometimes I peer in there/ oh my snowglobe
Watch the little haunted people/ turn the key for a song
Burning the furniture for warmth
And making flutes/ a bigger black hole
Out of one another’s
Tiny bones

[We grow away from strangers]

Jude Dillon

We grow away from strangers
remain unsolved

by a bramble-shadowed stream
grey rock turning black in a sudden field of snow

your distance I wonder at
tightens the loveliness

reaches in
to lead us out

Words that Glide Past Cryptid Hunters

KJ Hannah Greenberg

When records open to eclectic simulacra,
Spinning like Disney’s hippos in tutus,
They prove, again, business’ isotopy.

Poor craftsmanship’s happenstances,
Offering no signs of fiduciary rendition,
Cough or hack vis-a-vis virtual reality.

The illumination of the actual orients generative
Grammar, remains the stuff of speculative fiction,
Gives over ideological pablum in horrific doses.

Accordingly, the offspring of self-fulfilling critics,
Signify that certain observed objects produce
Alternative paradigmatic events, also plum jelly.

Metaphysics-oriented tackle, needing existential
Importance (and access to fine bibelots) rots since
Opinion relies on perspective, bribes, good teeth.

Before we delight in empowered organizations,
Clarify hypotheses on earth worms, maybe caviar
Should support theories that generate royalties.

The Red Disk

Tim Adams

—for Joan Miro

one does not
blanch
a river’s
milk in
a trench

The Cheated Will Shape It So It Fits

James Blevins

she—he—& me:
three little glooms

three wounds corralled

I will drink to that
& to hammers
& to their flat, red impacts

Wheel

Jari Chevalier

Weeds blow
among ruins. Stones
cut to fit tight, fortress
razed to three
stones high.

People selling antennas,
fried bananas,
brooms, scratch
their chigger bites.

Cuenca’s cathedral,
where I place my running
shoes on the steps for someone,
light a candle.

Ornaments, vessels,
tools for killing or making music . . .
Incans lived without the wheel.
Vendor piercing

the square with ice cream
cries. Little hands,
sticky with ice cream,
washed in the colonial fountain.

In the market,
so many
chickens on spits
and a girl sobbing

beside a wire bin,
so overbrimmed
with chicken heads
they slide right off
the edge of the rim.

Lookout Mountain

Rick Alley

Stuffed with the tongues
of hummingbirds

the snapdragons
stoically choked

through August into
fall.

Mother heard
the thunder

days before
the storm.

Of course, her nerves
were a spine

of army ants
on fire.

A Tiny Crown

Martha McCollough

O Bug bug bug bug bug…
—John Hollander

Little musical hairdressers, His
favorites sing with nail and comb,
natter rhythmic clicksongs in His ear,

so many variations after the first
essay: pool skimmers to slide over
shady waters, little kitchen demigods

ruining the flour, nano-lumberjacks,
and you, assiduous worker, proud
to roll your ball of dung in the broad

field of His approving gaze: a God
so plainly fond of you if otherwise
unknowable, capricious, obscure.

Paradise

Christian Tanner

Christian Tanner Paradise
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