December 7th: Katie Jean Shinkle

There Are So Many People Who Want To See You While You’re Home

For mothers who need avenged, a son’s killing, this son’s
    killing a weakness of mother, dear Mother,
Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas,
    The Furies seek and destroy, do not kill anyone
including a parent
    this parent, apparent, we are backing up and down
we are backing up back back it up back back it up
and velocity, killing me, this is killing me—

Even now, the Justice, this Justice, the neighbor says
    she doesn’t want you talking to her little girl
anymore, she doesn’t know you, doesn’t know you
    the Justice the Justice. Before a court of law,

these weights and measures, a sword to the sky and scales
    so many scales, this Athenian tribe,
this impaneled jury, this hung and hung jury.

In reverse, an upheaval. Merry, Happy, Happy—
    Happy, Merry, Happy.

Katie Jean Shinkle is Assistant Poetry Editor for DIAGRAM. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Eleven Eleven Journal, American Poetry Journal, Bluestem Magazine and NANO Fiction, among others.

December 6th: Jenn McCreary

6 January


psalt.  shoes.  dates & honey.  pomegranate in hand, throatful of thistles & thorns, all celebrated with like devotion.

La Befana was approached by the magi & asked for directions to where the infant Jesus was, as they had seen his star. She provided them shelter & the magi invited her to join them on the journey to find the babe, but she declined, stating she was too busy with her housework. Later, Befana had a change of heart & tried to search out the astrologers; she was not able to find them & is still searching. She leaves all the good children toys & candy/carmelle, while the bad children get coal/carbone &  garlic.

or

La Befana was an ordinary woman, with a child whom she very greatly loved who died, & her resulting grief maddened her. Upon hearing news of Jesus being born, she set out to find him, delusional that he was her own dead son, returned to her.  She presented the infant Jesus with her child's toys, which she'd wrapped & carried on her back, & the babe was delighted, & gave Befana a gift in return: she would be the mother of every child in Italy.

& so on.

In any story, there is a Befana, who is always lost. 

There is a broomstick for sweeping & riding, a bundle carried on stooped back, & shoes to be filled with candy or coal.

There are little hats in the manner of the Romans, careful slices of treasure cake & a hidden king.

There is incense & coal in the stable, figs & hay on the altar— another sweeping epic & technicolor epiphanies, exposed. 

Jenn McCreary is the author of :ab ovo:, published by Dusie Press in the spring of 2009. She is also the author of two chapbooks: errata stigmata (Potes & Poets Press), & four o’clock pocket chiming (Beautiful Swimmer Press); the e-chapbook: Maps & Legends: (Scantily Clad Press) & a doctrine of signatures (Singing Horse Press).  She lives with her husband, the writer Chris McCreary, & their twin sons in Philadelphia, where she co-edits ixnay press with Chris, works for the Mural Arts Program, & serves on the board of the Philly Spells Writing Center.

December 5th: MC Hyland

Barely a skyline

there perhaps is a kind of loss within the hotel     but yes this is
a doorway into the river

the day rippling over brick where the ditch is a bright slash

so high in the hand tree     fronds block the coffins
faces rippling in sentient light

a few leaves left at the edge of reason     open
to a slow sunlight

sucking mouth berthed at the side so the way light moves
might be a set of tubes over all the white walls

a freakishly wincing predator    
tears at the breast     above the rain-filled street

man-up on a park bench     understand
that dress blinking in the sun    

MC Hyland’s first full-length book of poems, Neveragainland, is being released in January by Lowbrow Press. Her chapbooks include Every Night In Magic City (H_NGM_N, 2010), Residential, As In (Blue Hour Press, 2009) and (with Kate Lorenz and Friedrich Kerksieck) the hesitancies (Small Fires Press, 2006). She lives in Minneapolis, where she runs DoubleCross Press and the Pocket Lab Reading Series, and works as an administrator and occasional letterpress instructor at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

December 4th: Nicole Mauro

 

Going Rogue
(When I Heard the Song of What I See)
by Sarah Palin, Emily Dickinson, and Nicole Mauro  

Then, a trap.

The black-suited, laptop-toting condom-wearing bananas who said they began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys who eventually swung from the trees came to me with stories, stories about duplicating creatures—mammoths with horns boinging not out of fjords, but beekers. On the continent of Iceland. Right in front of Scotland and the Chinese.

My face sliding off in the sunshine. Despite, the world vision of Cashmere I confidently see… 

…the insects pass, but then they’re telling me that my pupils are small houseflies in the grass, and that these insects’ ancestors have always been trapped. In amberrock—like me. And then they’re telling me that the amberrock we’re all trapped in is from BC. And then they’re telling me that these insects in amberrock from BC are from what sprang my son Track. And you. And me. And then I said Nah, Earth’s bits of little blackness are just places where the whites of our eyes have rolled back. It’s like the condom has tightened, you see. It’s like there are two kinds of Summer’s Army—the one in California is a cluster of pansies, or scrub on the alluvial plane; the other in Fallujah is the one where bittervetch seed sticks to the buttstock of an M-16.

Same difference, I know. Both are situations—one is crunchy green, and the other a mass in Asia Minor flowergrow. 

Sing with closed lips, migrant/soldier. Whose feet know the flat earth, despite its other eye, the round world—whose   bits come in bundles, in parcels, in blow-apart batches. Lest anybody spy the blood. There are not enough traps for the houseflies. Nor houses, for that matter. 
 

Nicole Mauro’s poems and criticism have appeared in publications such as Jacket, How2, Western Humanities Review, and absent, among others. She is the author of six chapbooks, one full-length poetry collection, The Contortions (Dusie Books, 2009), and her second book, Tax-Dollar Super-Sonnet Featuring Sarah Palin as Poet, is forthcoming from Black Radish Books in 2011. She is the co-editor of an interdisciplinary book about sidewalks titled Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Space (with Marci Nelligan, ChainArts, 2008). She lives in the San Francisco bay area with her husband Patrick, and daughters Nina and Faye, where she teaches rhetoric and language at the University of San Francisco.
 

December 3rd: Kirsten Kaschock

HEARTH 

or 

YOU DON'T NEED A CHIMNEY IN GEORGIA

Without sin, I’d have no one to love--no one 

around whom to organize my love

as furniture gathers itself around a television. 

Love: the semi-circular arrangement of love-like 

feelings around an object designated for love.  

No sin means no locus for passion.  No crux.  

Sinnerless--I’d have no center in which I might be 

entertained, no soft place to sit and, like a gun, focus 

all of my terrible energy.  No site on which to 

rivet my love like love was eyes or fasten it all 

buttony—round and remote but intent 

upon the docudrama of the sinner's life

—which is sin, which I hate.

 Kirsten Kaschock's first book of poetry, Unfathoms, is available from Slope Editions.  A Beautiful Name for a Girl is upcoming from Ahsahta Press in January.  Her first novel, Sleight, is scheduled to be published by Coffee House Press in 2011.  She is currently a PhD fellow in dance at Temple University.  Kirsten will be making merry with her three sons and their father and partaking in both much egg nog and joy.

December 2nd: Melissa Severin

Your Own Personal Advent

Life attempts to unregret itself.
The sky is a sign:

Venus and Jupiter reflect a decade, a mis-
incarnation. Leaving home

backs get smaller, unfamiliar
obstacles like the river's name

you misspelled. Aggrieved,
the trains ebb out of stations,

clouds as snow from planes
above them. Both of us

have luck. Behind a steeple
the nine of cups and king of wands

intoxicatingly disregard careful
wishes. They prefer unpredictable games

to keep you near. The pleasure,
the pain sing along--

twin saws bowed with sugars and stains;
take this moment and bask in it.

These are the makings undoing
themselves. These are the best

and worst times felled in every forest.
One gone among many.

Melissa Severin lives in Chicago, IL. Her chapbook, Brute Fact, is available from dancing girl press and she sometimes writes about Liverpool FC at Empire of the Kop.

December 1st: Dana Guthrie Martin

To Eggnog
Eggnog, you are a good candidate for governor
of my mouth: You require so little of me
and give so little in return. I am excited
about the phlegm you produce in my throat;
it’s as if senility has set in, finally. Come here,
let me show you what pi means. It is like a woman,
going on and on about nothing. Pi never ends,
the way your flavor does not end. You agitate
my palate and make an informal home
of my gastrointestinal tract. The same quandary
always separates us, like this elegant expanse
of IKEA laminate. Tired of your liquidity,
I want you to harden into bone. You, tired
of my nullification, want to know why I never
pour you into the glass of your choosing.






This poem is a transliteration / homophonic translation of Catullus. 


Dana Guthrie Martin and her partner live in the Seattle area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals. Her chapbooks include The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press, 2009) and In the Space Where I Was, forthcoming from Slack Buddha Press. She writes at My Gorgeous Somewhere (http://mygorgeoussomewhere.org). For 30 days, she will be carrying her trash around with her in a clear backpack and reporting on the experience at Post/Think (http://postthink.org).

December 2010 Advent Calendar de Animals, Glittery Trinkets & World Peace!

December 2010
Advent Calendar de Animals, Glittery Trinkets & World Peace!
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
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5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31