Miscellaneous E Hits

The Flourish and the Fall by Keith Nunes on AOP.

Two (relatively) new sites: Scud and Ink Pantry.

Funtime Press begins the process of spreading its wings, taking to the air.

From Something Solid: a 2024 palimpsest moves Tobi aside for Abby. 

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): from PICC (A Poet in Center City) #39

“Ingres and David,” Tobi shouted in my ear, as I held onto her waist and we grinded on the dancefloor, upstairs at the Khyber. “Still them, huh?” “Of course. I still don’t care what they say at PAFA, and I don’t care what Trish says either.” Tiny Tob— another brain complicated enough, like John’s, to make your head spin, when up close and personal finally became a reality. She’d moved, as a painter, into a charmed space in which her kaleidoscope eyes fashioned, from street-life among the heavy dykes in Center City, a thematic compromise with the stern formality of the French Neo-Classicists. She managed to work me in as a little fun, on the side. Not that, standing on stage with The Bats, who were playing cat and mouse with the East Coast media at the time, her cherubic face didn’t lead most Philadelphians to think she was just another rock girl. John loved her, too. The neighborhood where Tob had a flat and The Bats had a co-op house in the environs, South Street past Broad, into the mid-to-high Teens (Tob was on 16th), had become a dynasty situation for them. Not a neighborhood with a specific name, adjunct to center-of-the-center, but when lines formed to see them at Tritone, right in the heart of it, John and I knew our place as art geeks in comparison. Tob was a cheater! Once in a while, we got called in by The Bats heavy brass to do roadie duty. “By the way,” I thought fair to mention to her, “I couldn’t find those maracas at 8th Street Music at all. I don’t think they have them.” Tobi made a moue but also giggled, “Don’t ask me, ask Liz.” The song and the grind were about to end, but I knew Tobi would eventually be dispatched up to Logan Square for a few nights, and she was. John and I got paid back for our consummate skill lugging gear around with what amounted to, each time, about a joint worth of dope each. Fair. With us, Liz was happy to fire up the Bukka White and subject us to a rigmarole, two heavy dykes and two pretty bis, that had to do with demonstrating the right kind of devotion, so that The Bats at the Highwire Gallery could feel comfortable that they were not demeaning themselves there. It was useless at the house to talk to anyone but Liz. She’d look at you and make her appraisal for the evening: “Oh, it’s you guys. Alright, you both wait here and I’ll come back and show you where the gear is.” Liz, with the red, lank mop, fulfilled her quotient of the redhead’s notorious bloody-mindedness: “These two amps, set by the door for now. Don’t touch the instruments ‘til they’re packed the right way. The keyboard, Tob is going to do for herself tonight.” Might I say, with some embarrassment, that the portion of the dope we then received went right into our lungs. So that, gear lugged to a station wagon which only had to drive a yet-crucial few blocks, we all wound up at Tritone, to watch Tob and Liz go into Mick-and-Keith mode and leave John and I in the dust again. All in good fun. But the last thing I asked Tob on the Khyber upstairs dancefloor was to the point: “Are you gonna try to show this time?” Tob’s eyes rolled up to the not particularly lofty ceiling, as the song began to fade and I relaxed my grasp on her waist. She collected herself, and said “Yeah. But I have to wait for all the other stuff to settle down. And no one’s gonna rush me, either.” I told John what she said, and he laughed all over again. This time, he wouldn’t tell me why. The inscrutable bisexual brain: it is what it is. 

 Adam Fieled © 2023

Andrew Duncan (Nottingham, UK): "The Metallic Autumn"

Rain silvers the slate roofs, smoke blows through the rain.
The hawthorn hedges are a red haze.
The hills above the town are blurred by mist.
Beauty is stripped away.
Light is pierced with nostalgia, slow and lax.
Decadent season.
Water forms as a haze between light and rain.
Flowers and leaves decaying in the streams
Mix earth and water in slow dispersal.
Blur steals over visible forms,
Smoke and moulder stir in the ash of light.
The pools are sorrowful, the sips of flowers split.
I find a single apple whole after all these weeks,
Skin whole and pulp firm as sapwood.

In a slush of softness and excrescence,
Late berries languish on the tendrils,
Lush to dissolution, spoilt with juice,
Blacker than nature with a white tinge like regret.
In the shadow of the sunny fronds,
Where the dew never dries, they drink and rot.
Rain on the leaf, dew on the bine. Mites
Finger the abacus of their flesh.
Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.

Season of memory and regret.
Barrels coop up the giddy hearts for recollection.
The animals grow lazier and furrier:
Search out shelter and apathy!
The heady noon is gone, the soft inner of the blossoms
And their offer. The rarer veins are frozen in their course.
We waited for the glance of the sun.
The osier of bare birch twigs seems like smoke
Against the red glow of the Apple going down.

Rain silvers the roof-slates, smoke blows through the rain.
A swirl of leaves like heavy fire
Pours through the tamping of a world on the wane.
The darkened sky withholds the weary forms.
Crepuscle, dissolution of concepts;
Season of case-hardening ash,
Season of ferment and thorough steeping.
Fruits infringe their brinks and streams their brims
Overlapping the thick pulp of fallen things.

The principle of ice shall come to judgment
On the lusts of Nature, searching out the flaw.
Bare branches detach pure metre from an obese rhetoric.
Blue glare shall stake out the torpid mist,
Pure-axile crystals shall affirm the morass.

© Andrew Duncan 2001

Valeria Melchioretto (London, UK): "Grandmother's Cataracts"

for Oxfam

Her eyes stop her from seeing the world for what it had always been I
long before the cataracts became an issue. It is hard to say what exactly

she is looking forward to. So many fanciful visions rest at the base
of her eye sockets and words go rancid in the abyss of her throat.

If she had saved the left over umbilical cord of her many children, she
could now weave herself a shawl for cold winter nights when she talks

to her dead husband who as usual doesn’t reply. Nothing must be wasted
or else everything is for nothing. No babies thrown out with the bath water

no matter how cheap life must be. She thought of her children as the future,
now she hardly sees them. The cataracts are not to blame but her children’s

future is abroad. Every so often the kind neighbors call her over to answer
short long-distance calls. The phone wire has replaced the umbilical cord.

Those wide cheekbones have faced the indispensable as it lurked daily.
Solid corners of her face on which she hangs a sad smile to dry her tears.

Now that the house is empty she wonders how long the future will take
as time is nothing but short spells of rain, long spells of rain and restlessness.

(Orig. published in Poets for a Better Future, ed. Todd Swift, Oxfam, 2004)

John Siddique (Wigan, UK): "Tree of the World"

On nights when the sounds of the children
we should have had wake me. I sit in the yellow
of the bulb, and place my hands upon the horizon,
spin on the axis mundi which connects us,
even though at times we have no desire
to be connected. The stones on the moor,

touched by so many over the centuries,
so much so they have memories, will tell the stories
of all our confessions. If one will just stand,
and lay one’s hands and listen at the centre.

The carvings of spirals and swastikas,
concentric rings and bloodlines, added to
over millennia, will fade in eternities face.
Each year a wipe of a cloth over rough stone,
soon they’ll be polished and faceless,
soon they will be sand on the wind.

I will wait for you there, where the symbols
lose their meanings, where our attempts
at holding on are less than nothings, but still the axis,
nameless and unspeakable, is true, never out of sight.


© John Siddique 2005

Mary Walker Graham (Boston, USA): "Double"

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away…

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

originally published in Ocho #11, guest edited by Adam Fieled

© Mary Walker Graham 2007

Mark Young chapbook, Melancholy...

Mark Young chapbook, Melancholy, out from SurVision Books. 

Jeffrey Side: Remembering Marjorie Perloff. 

Andrew Lundwall's full-length, Gardening at Night.

Steve Halle's suite, second full-length, Blackbirds.

Two new and interesting portal-ways for Equations: 1 and 2. 

Tangentially, introducing The Webbers.

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "State of Grace"

for Mary Walker Graham

Grape soda bottle on the desk; wind, out of
Eleusis, shut the door. Our clothes came
off; your limbs spun like spokes. I peered
outside; it was light. New Hampshire summer
sun, four a.m. Poets to face at breakfast.
Workshops to sit through, lectures, but I
knew I’d never have you the right way
again, or any way. We’d done the thing
once we’d been meaning to do, so as I
stepped from the window, gazed at you
dozing, naked, I thought to myself, maybe
that’s what amounts to a state of grace—
you’re given something once, fully, so
that you may be satiated with it, & that’s it—

© Adam Fieled 2022

Vlad(len) Pogorelov (Rocklin, California, USA): "No. 9"

“I’ve been around the places”
So my friend says
While we are drinking wine and smoking dope
We’ve had a lot of hope
But we’ve lost it
Somewhere on the way
--Get away!
--Get away!
--Get away!
My friend Confusion
No premature conclusions
No disappointment with life
It’s only a lie
That you can get your soul drunk
Or high
She always stays sober
But she can get lost on the way
And it’s true

--My friend! How many poems have you read?
--None.
--My friend! How many poems have you done?
--None.
--My friend! How many lives have you lived?
--One.

Jimmy Page,
Johnny Cash,
Charles Bukowsky,
-ovsky, -osky,
And Karl Marx
All white but one
You know who?
Think!

My friend has moved from his chair
He is on the floor
Lying there, just lying there
Being mute,
Being deaf,
Asleep

Still, music is playing
Now, its “Fleetwood Mac”
And I’m back to the kitchen
Talking to another friend of mine.
The pigeon
The diseased bird
Who will die very soon
Maybe at night
Maybe tomorrow noon
Don’t know exactly when
Soon!

Am I multilingual?
Am I?
I can speak to the birds,
To the prostitutes,
Or even the cockroaches,
Though they never reply,
But the general rule
Always being applied:
--Baby! Get high!
--Mommy! Get high!
--Pigeons! Get high!
--Humans! Get high!
Maybe everything will be
more soft and more friendly
Maybe it will be

© Vlad(len) Pogorelov 1997

Steve Halle (Palatine, Illinois, USA): from Blackbirds

a strained female face,
beads of sweat
her concentration camp

every word spoken
aching knee on kneeler
in pillory of all
denominations are granular, if
you’ll remember

nipple peak, pique
peek sheet white, rubied

perk up shrift, elbow discomfort,
warming lubricant or mopping
up the thick aftermath

stains and burns

barely out of teens
it’s discovered.

sweat wall, cross-hatched
wicker with lipstick, grief
in darkness, a voice sounds
like half a wrinkled face

mid-mass, a bird enters
church, confused feathers
aflutter, it lingers among
rafters, while i ponder
over kneelers, among dissonant
voices of god and Other

half-memorare, naughty in uniform,
kim unfurls, reeling on dope
and nicotined, buzzing late rebuzz
rebound each mispronunciation
an obligation, a misguided
angel gilds a season with weather
severs eardrums in silence
song a frequency above, vibratto

weeping into orgasms
over risqué pages

still half-hard, a thighbite
this passion a rush
of adrenaline over impropriety

finger trace nipples in concentric
circles leaving burn
marks wanting grafts

hum, hiss, strum, click, the vic.’s
needle dum-dee-dums
beyond reach, like bedded
sins of lazy passions
Cistercian, cervical, and blossoms.

© Steve Halle 2007

Andrew Lundwall (Rockford, Illinois, USA): "All Eyes"

for Melissa

shaken with all of this we have eyes
to see ahead of us no one comes to set up
always she opened the mirror very quietly
like fate the flowers continue on throughout the day

always always remember pure unsupervised stares
our breaths that other lovers view on a screen unfurl
behold the many marvels of darkness
in front of in the face of very near

© Andrew Lundwall 2008

Susan Wallack (Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, USA): "Bridge"

I know your arms & legs are cold.
In November the river shifts

slowly, silver ghost of its body
barely stirred, ice already forming.

And today, midday, I heard you moan.
Grinding bones of a steel-strapped frame.

As if you had moved, or tried to.
As if the surging light was painful.

originally published by the Toledo Review

New full-length Otoliths, etc...

New full-length Otoliths poetry print book: Snapshots from the Ark by David Jalajel.

Also, from the man himself: Mark Young's un saut de chat.

From Letters to Dead Masters: #10, #11, #26, #31, #38, #39.

Selected portions of PICC on mp3.

The 15th anniversary of Map of the Hydrogen World by Steve Halle.

From Something Solid on Argotist Online Poetry. Same poem on PennSound.