Sunday, July 25, 2010

Julia Anjard Maher

ANECDOTE ABSTRACT


Here wires dangle
their limp primary
blues and reds

a kindergarten
of upturned bulbs.

At their broken ends,
individuals sprouted

and my eyes closed––
afraid to put one out.

I squeezed along the left––
weeds of vomiting machinery
cardinal direction surged

live snakes entwined my thigh––
and made for the
counter likewise covered.

Hamstrung out
I held that long eye
feckless against the dark
as I turned

you too had squeezed––
not quite the shape––

and looking up
in your eyes
only my face.



OFFED


I had to bake him in
a pie

24 –– no –– 13
ways to flight

he flew out flittermouse-like

shadows on Courthouse Midnight’s steps.



A Ph.D. student at the University of Georgia, Julia Anjard Maher lives in balmy Athens, Georgia where she is working on her first book-length collection: Four Streams : 四 川. These pieces are part of her newest project––a Spicerian serial poem that takes Greek mythology for one of its braided subjects.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Sara Mumolo

DECENTRALIZATION OF EASEMENT


Maybe she's as lonely as the rest of us, not comfortable with failure. I step into your voice, its outfit. I watch you wear your voice as an outfit. You could say I cultivated a face. In your. Make-up. I've packed up all the weather. The men having babies in their paintings. Babies history arrests outside of my museum, which is her museum. I sing into its building, unharvested with echo. Tone on sleeve. She's as lonely as the rest of us, she says. And wears it, disdainfully. I put my cheek on the frame to cool my eyes. You say you’re writing this one as a woman comfortable with failure. I am breathing this one as a failure comforting her. She writes this uncomfortable movement. This one has a body to zip up. This one is a reel around the baby. A bird's wingspan in a museum, its echo on my tear.



Sara Mumolo works at Studio One Art Center in Oakland, CA and curates the Studio One Reading Series with Clay Banes. With Alisa Heinzman she publishes the CALAVERAS series and is also a Poetry Editor at Omnidawn. Check out some of her poems in 1913: a journal of forms, Eleven Eleven, Mrs Maybe, Typo, Cannibal and West Wind Review, among others. The Mumolos are from Brindisi, the port-town where Virgil died.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Julie Carr

FROM THINK TANK


The kettle boils, boils now.

Maligned and languishing in an upstairs room: a lacrimal dimple

trips the obscene.

Honk geese: soprano duck, duck

hobbles, belly first, a girl-falcon spins,

rebuffs the rough draft.

Too long, my husband’s sweater

sleeve. My patience no: threads of what

warms a baby's unrivalled calamitous

hour. Full sob

transpires to rust the pendulous rug,

long in the arms, short in time.

Without hours, how cheer? Old devotions

now point to

sorrow: cap’s cracked and leaking.

Door doesn’t open: exit through mirror.

Oh

the plumbing

fails.


*


Euphonic rubber spin,

whose driving you where? Wherefore

drink in the warm air pressed from

the dash dash dash of

my figurative folk-form. My hap-

hazard phrase is cued, lit, and moving

down the avenue, the avenue

8.


*


For not wanting to dose oneself in the mother

you will receive a forty-dollar fine.

Rising out of feet, and flowering, as a plumb tree flowers:

an aromatic man.

Emails from travelers, from soon-to-be friends, whose spelling is terrible

and what does that portend?

The matted hair of a doll: almost flowing, is.

Breathe in. And I am not going anywhere, studied by God.

Bleary from living under sun, my condition is excellent for pleasure.

The “brain people” say the murderer cannot be jailed

because he is only eleven. The “morality people” say he cannot be judged

because he is only eleven.

But the “law people” are going to take his life away. Bracken

in the mind suspended above the floor knows of wheat fields and

branches horizontally lusting. And an exquisite flower just today

opens. How best to

empty it?



Julie Carr is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, 100 Notes on Violence from Ahsahta Press and Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines, due out from Coffee House in September. She is the co-publisher, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Monday, July 05, 2010

Joseph Massey

PRESCRIPTION


To think through
each word's
particular weather.

To stand
just far enough
outside of the page.

A field drapes
the eye
in limitless revision.

How shadows
that fill the gap
between two stones

imply the sky's weight.


Joseph Massey lives in Arcata, California. His most recent book is Exit North (Book Thug, 2010).