Poetry of the Non-Prose Kind

15

Ingrid Jendrzejewski

South of summer
I lay in high grass

the end of a tremble
confident fifteen

Without Shadows

Jacqueline Winter Thomas

It takes five-hundred years for a language
to become unintelligible to itself; the husband’s
cupped hands leave no shadow on the mattress;
and a broken window keeps the cold even after
you whisper its name in another tongue.
What is marred at the inlet silent spreads
toward the center of the river. I promise:
this flows in only one direction. Suffering
cannot reach back. The red water touches every-
thing, but it does not return again. We must focus
on difference above similitude, says the scholar.
But we’re trying to find some first sense of love,
or loss, in the little room of the husband’s chest.
Outside rotten word, husband, laced with rivers.
We try to say I drown in your meaning, but
the surface freezes; the word, motionless.
Why cannot everything in the world
correspond? Why must some things exist
without their perfect shadows? Moon, inaccessible
seldom casts its mark on our face. The kind
of alone that lasts a whole life, like wood-
pecker whispering when the last light is out,
no more words for the tree. When the river
runs back, we will understand.

Edge & Lita

Dylan D. Debelis

We all want that live sex raw wing tipped boots center of that raised ring. We all want that tattooed eagle braless clawing at our brain until blastoff.

You wanted to fly, you wanted to spear fish, you wanted manliness and the spider perched inside your jaw.

Prove it.

You wanted to prove it so much you threw your voice out moaning so the audience could hear it.

We all want that audience to hear us triumph, pin count, eruption of boos, chorus of dueling chants.

We all want that vindication, stomach inflation, penis pumped-up celebration.

You wanted to hold the high school first love nights like an invisible ink cipher.

And you also wanted them broadcast to your absent father, and the classmates who hated your gap tooth grin.

We want the moments back that get moments back that remind us that we are never going to get those moments back.

We all want that live sex showcase, wing tipped boots center of that raised ring raw.

The / remains of / the convict fence

Mark Young

He held up his hand.
The focus seemed to
have shifted. Insulin
traveled through the
blood, full of those vali-
dating sounds usually
associated with native
fish spawning. At a

point where the river
was shallow enough,
grooming patterns—an
off-color sexual aspect
of phonetic habits—
finally found shelter.

The Turnip

Judith Skillman

Once more you force
its fisted mass. Blanched white
with a feather of pink—
the bloodless promise?
Has the chemistry of want
exploded the dreamy cluck
of that heart in your chest?
Under the sky, the grave
of dawn’s planted again—
its beginning wed
to the same milky stone.

The Seven Deadly Factors

Jaap Stijl

dedicated.

.

1     They don’t hate you. They’re hungry

2     Is it like sleeping?

3     The jig of the rain on the rooftop that you are missing.

4     the sling you cut

5     Tomorrow no longer exists.

6     The people who have to extract your crushed body from the roof of the car.

7     the technicolor of what you no longer can see.

Soon

Tad Richards

Soon, all my stories
will be told backwards.
My ingénue will
find love in the first act.
Deflowered in the second,
by the third, she is writing
entries in her journal:
boys she identifies
with cryptic nicknames.

And I’ll learn too late
administrators
lie and deceive,
yet use this knowledge
for purposeful blackmail:
I’ve slept with their wives,
serially or in pairs,
winning their trust
with pears and figs.

Sonnet, with home

Steve Tomasko

1. My wife once said I should write more love poems. 2. So I wrote a poem about sloth moths. 3. There really was love in it—to a certain moth, a sloth is home. 4. Home is another word for love. 5. I hope that doesn’t sound trite. 6. Actually, I don’t care if it does. 7. Today I thought I should write another love poem. So, here I am thinking about Sherman Alexie 8. and his #’d sonnets (the form of which I am copying now). I don’t know whether to apologize to my wife or Sherman. 9. Once, while pretending to be bird geeks, my wife and I saw a Caspian tern. It was huge—it hung in the air like the Hindenburg (before it caught fire [the Hindenburg, not the tern]). It looked dangerous (the tern). I thought terns were supposed to be small and delicate. 10. I lied. We weren’t pretending. 11. A sonnet is supposed to have a tern in it. 12. That was just one of our many wanderings (the drive where we saw the Hindentern). 13. There’s nothing easier than driving or walking with, camping or sitting on the couch with, being a bird geek or reading Alexie with my wife. 14. With is another word for home.

Peltier Road

Charles Leggett

—After Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Apparition”

All the bells are ringing or have rung.
I heard them ringing in your mother’s voice
But the clapper alone is punctual.

I thought I sensed the boyhood superhero
Who, cordial and so unaffected, helped
In dreams to banish fear under a close

Brass-hued fog he’s rolling through the years
Along these lanes, the moon-sung valley cows
Regardful, still, between their shudderings.

Hospital (2)

Matthew Johnstone

There’s picture I take of some
of me
catching bone       from city floor.

Tearing

houses       to numb eyes. Sent from
the objects.       Fires seen
shooting from heads.       Death flower
sifted ash       as if it were many.
Floors       that cough. It cannot

be moved loyal away.       Some
mannequin       from its
primal building

apertures. Inside the houses I
lived under.

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