7.04 / April 2012

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Fink.mp3″ text=”listen to these poems” dl=”0″] Her Disco [5] (she who) tightens the throat equals (she who) causes the throat to breathe equals our scorpion queen. Our meat run rampant run equals bhū–: to become, to grow equals equal. Equal equals becomes, be. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Ahn.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Nothing beats the Everglades for swallowing a body. A life. It can ruminate for centuries on secrets taken whole. It can absorb the bitterness of treason, the gallstones of deceit. It devours castoffs, bolts down indiscretion.

 

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Yancy.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Presumably, I work in an office. The space is full of office signifiers such as cubicles, coffee makers, and personal computers.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Tata.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Am tired of doin’ the same shit. Of packing up drugs an’ burying guns. Of selling coke bags an’ cleaning the twister bikes. Of watching the ravaged kids scramble like rats on roof tops, tryin’ to find something to steal, to trade for paco.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Bethard.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] She crushed the grains of salt against her body, imagining the gritty hiss they might make as they broke apart. The granules left long, puffy red streaks on her breasts and belly, as if someone, many someones, had tried to pull her apart.

Night of the Living Dead (1968) begins with a shot of a car driving through a pastoral and eerie countryside.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Zimra.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Micropsia, for one. Although, I question the syntax. It is a disorder of perception. Distance. An atmospheric swell where objects become remote, shrinking in size. Humans appear like mice, far away, scurrying. I am trapped in a glacial space, standing tall, holding the cart.

at where i work i know a girl who slurs her words the way you would-but not the way when you were drunk and loud, would sway still tall, balconied, your sentences blurred. no, not watered-slow-sinking, but laughter sure, close-confident, talking nights away in your Christmas-lit room.

DEMONSTRATIONS Weeks before the new world began, we met at an ice-breaker. I wore coral. The towers still stood. I did not have to scan the skyline for planes. We practiced on our street corner. A mild event- mounted policemen stood watch over the chanting of our muffled mass.

He called and asked if he could come over.  He’d gotten a diagnosis, and I felt sorry for him and said he could.  It had been awhile, but I was still weary of his voice and listening to the way he thought about things.

1. In the dark, my toes curl and touch the floor-length vertical blinds. I hate vertical blinds, but they are not going to change for me. It’s not my apartment, after all. My twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend wants to go down on me. I’ve done that.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Foster.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] the one with the missing and broken windows, the one with the collapsed front stoop, the one painted pink and tilted like so and surrounded by the gnarled oaks of Texas. She lives alone. And this may sound like a public service announcement, but Jana doesn’t need anyone.

YOUSAW/revolutionunderthe#cigarette[regime] + [verysoft]*photographer. #itsasnaposhot#symmetry#omg @whatareweunderwater + [ ? ] …in repose, sore. rip so peers in poise pose so. #sixthousandINYOURSIZE#forfun#forfulcrum + @shehasaname + [hooker]. @cameragirl #passiveagressive #ohmy#drugofchoice #fassbindersdead [  !  ] #cymbalangst #artisdumb #sequinsaremylife #bellabellabella. #getwhatIwant. #wifebeatersonwomen. #youhaveto#takeitinthebedroom#theoryslut.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/blazej.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] It was Mike’s birthday. We had a special budget for such matters and our department’s assistant bought a present. By the shape of the package one could easily deduct that the gift was of literary nature.

It’s always the water that goes. The visions started a year before we met.  Ashton dreams of an Earth with wide stretches of endless sand and uninterrupted sky.  He turns ponds into beds of dried seaweed.  Swimming holes into meteor craters.

People bring things here. People lose things here. They come back looking for them and they meet me. My job on paper is “receptionist”, but I also keep the lost and found. When I get questions on the lost and found, I feign ignorance to some degree.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Buscher.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] You expected me to come in last in and at all things. But alas, I’m always a man in an overlay oozing machismo to his seat. Sweet, I’m like a beautiful wedding minus leis, quail, and shantung.

I Pretend Sometimes I am in Love [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_4/Leidenthal2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Come sit on my couch. I sit in the middle so our thighs touch and you will secretly like it. I like to close the distance before there is distance like a train that never leaves the destination station.

BEARS IN THE STREETS Its share price sinking At implausible speed, Vladalisco Company refocuses on Its balance sheet. Cut the rate of growth? Cut the common stock? Sell convertible preferred To private firms? Vladalisco-has never missed A quarterly earnings target. “We don’t have an earnings problem,” Says the CEO. “We have a multiples problem.

Your Color is Not Green is Not Gold We trim late this year, girlhood tree                of clay stars and dog-bit angels, wool knotted to sheep and snowmen,                the skirt an electric train. I’d run its circuit as a child till sparks licked                wheels till the toy became a flame.