Sunday, July 31, 2011

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.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

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.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

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.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

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).

Sunday, July 03, 2011

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 AmericanThe Iowa Review, and Ploughshares and in the anthologies Blues Poems and The Art of Losing.