Jennifer Kronovet

MAINE

There is culture

and there is The Culture

of a place making you

friendly, wearing your

sense on your sleeve.

Here, on the page, we

always want to talk

about beauty. Out there—

out the window—we leave

a mattress in an empty lot.

Don’t make me find you

beautiful. I say that

to the ocean. It keeps

giving itself away

like the girl I was in HS.

The internal culture shifts

too slowly to see like mold

grows. I have become

myself again. Again,

the sensible sand.

Jennifer Kronovet is the author of Awayward, published by BOA Editions. She is Writer-in-Residence at Washington University and lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Heidi Lynn Staples [Part Two]

PSALM 74: 16-17

She prays drift’s bride,

Earthite estoile drift’s bride:

Agrope five hundred years

Feather-like

Amant

Nun. Agrope hand

PSALM 45: 7-8

Substance ambergris, fixing the scentedness:

Polar Pod, prey Pod, has lower jaw of teeth single nostril

Economic expansionists prey for tallows. You prey arms against squid

Reservoir, man wants nose,

Man’s castles lit, petrol now

What bright lamps

How seas culled

And

Let,

Earth’s dive wave’s heave wake’s forehead.

Heidi Lynn Staples is the author of Dog Girl (Ahsahta 2007) and Guess Can Gallop (2004). Her poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Women's Studies Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she is finishing up a PhD in Athens, GA.

Heidi Lynn Staples

THE ART LANDS

In the beginning was now, dreaming collarless

streams like a couple straying together into

mold rage. We whose first names are.

We, whose? Same zip’s ode. Uncertain’s weather.

Ore’s knot. The sky in knots weight for anyone;

The ground, slow river, is and uttered star’s green.

As I was. Fraying. A torn anecdote

hit my mutter’s vernal core, ripped dawn here’s

fence. Nobody was her. Are you glistening through me?

Do you even core what I’m a keening? I don’t brink

you flew. Dear, my puns and homing too ripple of,

every sing leaks the filial truth: we will go supped in flumes.

Heidi Lynn Staples is the author of Dog Girl (Ahsahta 2007) and Guess Can Gallop (2004). Her poems have appeared in Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ploughshares, Women's Studies Review, and elsewhere. Currently, she is finishing up a PhD in Athens, GA.

Graham Foust

POEM CALLED NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD AND ZOMBIES

or Dawn of the Dead and Zombies—I don’t care.

“Department of Redundancy Department,”

I say in my most cheerful bitter phone voice,

though I’m not at work and my Blackberry’s off.

I lie—and it lays—on the couch, both of us

oddly perfect, like a pinball and a cloud.

I find I’m to bed on the late side these days

(television test patterns having vanished)

but I could always get there earlier

were there reason enough—say, one—to do so.

You say “tomato”; I say “Don’t tase me, bro!”

Have I got an obituary for me:

b. 1970; d. 19-something;

lives in California with his family.

Graham Foust lives in Oakland and works at Saint Mary's College of California. His most recent book is A Mouth in California (Flood Editions, 2009).

Jeff Fallis [Part Two]

ALLIGATOR MUSIC

The world is a widescreen dream,

but it’s what we’ve got.

The toenail moon grants us

sleep and silence,

rocks us blues and purples

each blurred and sloppy night

while the sun shines solid as a sigh.

I know I need more vitamin D,

I know I could settle for forked 

& accursed and just smog up

with my arms folded, my under-

carriage protected.  Must be 

gobsmacked and cruel, must be

a stubborn Southern alligator 

to arrive back where you started

and start smashing your pink

and butter brains out

against the bleary mattress

of the house that was your

childhood home.  Out of

lost gusto.  Out of thwarted

love that will redeem you.

Out of faith in the unsteady

bedrock of the landslide

to pickle and boil you

into an openness

bright as the summer heat

on an upended rockpile.

Jeff Fallis is a Ph.D. student in creative writing at the University of Georgia.  His poems have appeared in publications like The Oxford American, The Iowa Review, and Ploughshares and in the anthologies Blues Poems and The Art of Losing.