Charles Bernstein

THE 100 MOST FREQUENT WORDS IN THE SOPHIST

again

against

air

along

already

always

among

away

block

body

call

called

come

day

does

down

emotion

end

even

everything

eyes

fear

feel

find

first

force

get

give

go

good

got

ground

hand

having

heart

instance

itself

keep

kind

know

less

let

life

light

Lind

lines

little

long

love

makes

man

may

mean

might

mind

moment

need

new

next

nor

nothing

now

old

once

order

people

place

point

Popova

purchase

put

right

say

see

seem

should

side

since

space

start

still

take

things

think

though

thought

time

toward

turn

two

use

want

water

whom

whose

without

words

world

years

yet

Charles Bernstein is author of All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, March 2010),  Blind Witness: Three American Operas (Factory School, 2008); and Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago, 1999). He is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. More info at epc.buffalo.edu.

Lauren Levin

from NOT TIME


Remember the name of grandeur’s fortune,
Keenan. Your fortune one day.
Keenan, the name of grandeur’s fortune one day.
One day it feels like we do mock it.
It feels like you want to rub your thigh
    not even to mock it,
  not even to mock your sight.
      Option 8 is a bullet, F8, F9
A predator is one extreme end of a group of positions,
    he does not like having blind spots
    in his imagination,
  or horse eyes, or gem-like parents.
He had to hear 9 people’s counsel, from which
they had their birth. Persons of this type say,
and that type say, their candor.
The penalty for injustice is according to disposition,
I keep cutting this posture back
into a sinking knuckle, deep breathing,
bitch’s response, I don’t mind.
When you talk about belief
in the feeling of production, land a beat at the gate,
a whole excessive fear of failing my meaning,
there must be a knee hand ball joint
to respect. She was pleased, I believe,
with how death arrived
the telling of production, skating off
into a production place. Don’t worry,
your name won’t represent your actions:
in fact, I’m writing people’s names less
the more I know them. That’s to Keenan:
because I am distracted.



Lauren Levin is from New Orleans and lives in Oakland. She edits Mrs. Maybe with Jared Stanley and Catherine Meng. Her chapbook Flaming Telepaths just came out from H_NGM_N B_ _KS; another chapbook, Not Time, is forthcoming from Boxwood Editions. Some recent poems can be found in Try, Mirage #4/Period(ical), and Rabbit Light Movies.

Richard Meier

The story I knows about the snow on the roof said the airplanes came out of the
moon across it a full moon a little extended arm-shaped darkness it didn’t it did
but not from where I was sitting. Nana was the waitress next to a cup balanced
inside another, Sisley, Lamy, Mother Anthony, Pissarro, Tote, a knife, stack of
plates, an apple cut in half, white hat, a napkin between, two echoing hands,
graffiti music, dead soldier caricature, or guard duty, 200 workers behind the
glamorous below-lit architect Richard Meier. I don’t know about the list in the
middle, as in stones thrown musically into the sea are not thrown at other
people even if the thrower falls on his butt or misses the sea entirely or just
misses the tour boat didn’t see it heading for the cave in which the water and
light make us all blue all in that boat all in the sea between that chord of stones
the silent spaces between the tones that make the music visible. So you told me.
I want to talk to you about a present. It’s not for you, moneyfold, an old friend
he’d never seen out of uniform, old friend he’d never seen or known or been
friendly with out of uniform; you are part of the largest thing, indicating, to the
bees on the street, its smallness. All this lazing around is fuel for the fire, said
the cork, as it bobbed with a tentative will in the fastest current phalanx, a deer
or something licking its neck, so absorbed had he become by the process. Even
the angry mob had begun to cheer. Too late, he’d been identified, leaving the
crowd (the missing one, the one of us) milling about with stones hanging,
wondering when the secret legislation would at last be directed solely.




And another thing, he kept saying to her. And another thing. Was she listening?
The wind moves the trees, I see only their tops, I live in the sky apartment, the
clouds too are moving, everything seems shaken from the root, from the earth
(as when I brought the elaborate crystal tree down on a man and a child, in the
form of ice chunks and powdery snow, by just the method I am describing), but
the relations are exterior. The tree is pulled this way and that by something
inside it, namely the air, the same exteriority with which we speak, with which I
am speaking. The clouds move steadily. A cloud never snaps back towards its
fundamental reason for existing, or to whip you in the face who has held it aside
so the man and the child might pass. Instead it parts, envelopes, disappears,
reformulates, evolves, and continues. Just so the large cloud you and the man
and the child are inside of and the atmosphere, the outside. The threshold is
more at the mouth of a flute, which is to say the lips enter in action and
vibration a strange numbness and the taste of silver. The table of sums. I’m
going out, he says to her, though he’s still sitting on the couch, and she hears it,
still maneuvering with one hand on the cart, cell to the ear, around the oddly
laid out store, whose doors bear no relation to the interior, as if the whole
building refashioned a fog bank, in which the figure was once clearest and lost,
small central clarity we couldn’t escape thinking all of them together, and its
thinking, and so on.



Richard Meier is the author of Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar and Terrain
Vague, both available from Wave Books. These poems are from a recently
completed manuscript, Little Prose in Poems. He is writer-in-residence at
Carthage College and lives in Chicago, IL and Madison, WI.

Nicole Wilson

DASH, CHURN

Mother knows each day’s a face

halved like the planet of a weather report;

she can tell the operator “I like

your telephone voice, I like your dimes

and radios.” Her plane crash is a birth

or a building or stuck levers

or a chord composing to house

all those vertical bodies

unpeeling themselves, and the division

sign she etches on top of the table

is about hands missing

hands missing

a groom. Lungs breathe

the shape of flesh pins and whiskers

like a carousel coming loose.

Nicole Wilson's poems have appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Emprise Review, Babel Fruit, Rabbit Light Movies, and Coconut, among others. She works and teaches at Columbia College Chicago where she received her MFA.

Andrew Kenower

DUCK CHARM


paintings of ducks
mean another thing
to me

cone muzzle toy
cleanse the gun’s image
with a duck

with flannel and quack sound
one achieves idyll

decoys and budweiser
doing their job

wet dog has duck mouth

I am a humanist
I am part of the problem




TRANSLATION OF EXECUTION


the gallows
gone wireless

our ubiquitous public
ear permits

jeers and awe
imbued with lo-fi

cast broad
though changed

the lifted
veil reveals
a blindness



Andrew Kenower received his MFA from Saint Mary's College of California. He is co-founder of and designer for Trafficker Press. He photographs and records Bay area poetry readings for a blog, A Voice Box.