DAY 25: ALINA GREGORIAN, FLAGS

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Day 25: Shanna Compton, One More Favor

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DAY 25: JONATHAN SKINNER, "Fin ioi me don' alegranssa"

"Fin ioi me don' alegranssa"

Fine joys my down alleges
Persecution's plush guy amen
A normal thing to a pinched answer.
Knee an egg once, pounce a man,
Car-psyche sonar's mundane.
False lousy NGOs eat trans
And their malefic nominal glare's
Ambience sounds us, tense blue gears.

Eminence front angels' finance
Leaves loud zingers, mild ease in
Come; nuns put a verse on rancid
Cobs, belts, a cord of men.
Kissed sundial tryst'll soon blend
Comely nails, whose key suspends
Squelches, else in pert saris and
Per cunning aim, gents salve eyes.

In evil, jealous mailed parlance,
No squeegies came on Tarzan.
Can you say ovens don't please me
Per talky dolls a false desire.

--Countess of Dia

Day 25: S L, The Octopus is on Television

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Day 25: Jared Joseph, SUCH A SUN

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DAY 25: Deborah Poe, Am Vladimir

DEBORAH POE

Am Vladimir

Am hard

am the heavy gut,

stomach verged at urge of television

am binary barrage of image.

Hand. Am the first song’s

fist, uninterrupted, the mainstream

love song. Am straight. Am the child

                                               my fucking became.

Am storming the familiar

sun seeks bodies to save

my kind thus struggling

& deserving.

Am broken.

Was light-crept exception just

next door, was same

like spirit-same, born of & heard.

Spoke English

as if unfortunate squirrel.

Am greedy.

Was holding wife, was angry,

misunderstood,

was ignorant and roof over head

was led to ninety ghosts telling me:

keep words forever for their aftertaste

in Vladivostok —  

of misfortune and smoke

To  groin-calling need,

was living creature.

Crave. Am struck.

Was skin & mowed lawn. Am a part.

Was bored as machine.

Was—why—for supper

and was not rented room.

Was moral & archaic,

Napolean & bush.

Am organic wanting,

was the craving man.

This poem is (heavily) after Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Am Moor.” Words italicized in the poem are from Osip Mandelstam’s poem to Anna Akhmatova, #235. “Poems from the Thirties” from The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (The New York Review of Books 1973).

DAY 24: LEE ANN RORIPAUGH, LET FREEDOM RIOT SING

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LEE ANN RORIPAUGH

let freedom sing riot

profane as wildflowers

shoving oxygen back

into the brutal

and dictatorial air

in blue-gloved airports

in locked closets

in bombed clinics

in blood-soaked schools

in the sanctuary

beneath the jaded gaze

of scopophilic saints:

wound as spectacle

wound as bloody gash

wound as commodity

bound foot’s rotten gauze

and silk unwound

crushed bones unmachined

whalebone unharpooned

ribs unlaced

jawbone unshattered

chastity belt unchaste(ned):

a box of fear

duct-taped in day-glo

slit open

oranges alert

behind the purdah

of pesticide’s sugary veil

queen bees unsealed

from collapsing tombs of wax

guitar laws unblued

into unchained melody

Andromeda unjailed

as bait to monstrous appetite

a pistol-whipped Prometheus

left as eagle carrion

unbound from barbed wire

ungash

unslit

unmuffled

chastity belt unchaste(ned):

cunt uncensored

clitoris unhooded

pussy unbarred

fist’s tight bud

diaspora’s salvo

confetti of sparks

igniting a viral riot

a chorused blaze of heat

and fire rising fierce

against the silence

DAY 23: FRANCES PRESLEY, MRS PANKHURST IN PARLIAMENT SQUARE

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DAY 22: KATE GREENSTREET, You Say Our Love is a Forest Fire

collage by Lilly Pereira
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KATE GREENSTREET


You say our love is a forest fire

half open

our burning open

page

your broken open sleeping

longer each day

hours just dreaming of the luggage

woods are burning down the words

you turned to speak

say ours

in a language I can't read

you

shoulder it

for hours

say woulds are

burning up our metaphor

in black and white

half closed

you turn

say

why is it so hot in here

you sit and sit and sit you say

our love you see it

burning far away

“You say our love is a forest fire” was made for the opening of Lilly Pereira’s art exhibit at Flying Object in June 2012, a response to her collage “Circular Ruins.”

DAY 21: DANIELLE VOGEL, from SMALL ICELANDIC NOVELS

DANIELLE VOGEL

from Small Icelandic Novels

for angela rawlings

1.

when we are at sea we are suspended

just feet below the air we watch through the wet rim

of the ocean through the green-shouldered waves

we let ourselves be turned we watch the

ways in which the light writes

upon our selves and sisters

a pod of women spines

liquidic with sleep it is our season

of crossing it is always our season

days are passing before the first of us surfaces

we swim to surface us dreaming-women

in nightgowns buoy bellies to the sky

a slow arching into under again

the first night is all nights and we are buoyant

within the bay we are swimming and

we are not swimming within the bay we are writing a pod

of oceanic women sleeping as we swim

we write we are writing

we are writing as we pass our eyes

always closed our lids twitch

with writing our faces relaxed in sleep

our mouths open tongues searching

like the soft foot of a clam

and we turn to deepen whorling

over our nightgowned backs creak where the

pages and covers of books are shingled

along growling like a fibrous exoskeleton

these books bi-valved creatures

 an elongated cone wound on its axis

withdraw all its soft parts into the mouth

 sound-calcites thinly plated upon the teeth leaf-like

crystals shingling the finger bones opalescent

light refracted the memory-tissue of the word

kelp trailed and growing

our density increases until we

are lifting out the sea our density

increases until we are washed up

shore pulling our sleeping forms across

the earth by our hands bellies to

dirt legs drug behind

our density increases until we are

invisible in the darkest parts

of the ocean we are metamorphic icicled

sedimentary blooms

we glacial the tongue

until it is always moving our surface slopes

the air weightless but woolen

our density builds through a stratum

of re-smothering we are subcellular

a slip in perspectives a deformation

of gravity we freeze over and

separate debris as we thaw

-->

DAY 20: ARIELLE GUY, EXILE

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ARIELLE GUY

Exile

But I am (but I am)
washed in forest:

in the sin of Atom;
Adam’s

post-apocalypse
we all swam in acid
toasted marshmallows by the sea
side-stepped, goose-

stepped the Majesty
of hope.

by my brilliant deductions,
our worlds should have ended
long ago
we’re still here

hold on
knuckles whitening
against stone
reddening as the rocks
rip our skin

our skin
our kin
levitators of Beauty;

all masks
All Saints
the Fallen congregate
around the Burned:;

syntax is lost
language is lost
prayer is lost
we are all dead

we are all dead
we are all dead
we are all dead

but wait! an earth-covered,
worm-tasseled hand
breaks through the boundary
of earth between life and death
and lives again;

the whole body, dirt-covered,
emerges from a rain-soaked grave
in early winter.
the snows haven’t come yet,
deep winter cold
hasn’t frozen the ground,
forbidding the dead to be buried there.

The sky doesn’t touch
pussy, justice,
Lord, God,
grave, my sodden,
my heart’s armor
of ribs; they protect like
a Claddagh ring,
like the sky,
opening to the moor,
to the outback,
to the tundra.

No one flourishes in infertile ground.
We’re same as green--salt the land and nothing grows.

 

DAY 19: CARA BENSON, HOOLIGANS

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DAY 18: MEGAN GARR, CARRIED AWAY

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DAY 17: SARAH ANNE COX & ELENI MAKKA, RE: Hope (for Pussy Riot)

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Re: Hope
(for Pussy Riot)

My mother used to say
no, I will not calm down
rinsing the roots of a coconut palm
here, frost divides the pine needles
and snowflakes aren’t special
just unrelenting
a case of conviction
sewing camp
red vestigial machines
line in sewn
in mouths
Not even
the smudged glass
centuries of appeal
to the painted lady
hot breath whispered
etched in silver
the court room box
can escape iconography

Day 16: BECKY CREMIN, HE PUT HIS FOOT IN IT

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Day 15: RODNEY KOENEKE, THE WORK THEY DO THEY DO AT NIGHT

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The Work They Do They Do At Night

They will come in great happiness

To our distributions of millet.

They will come to the millet and be glad. 

Some are blackened, some stumble, some sing.

They lap at our wine jars, the ewers still warm 

From their hands. I know a hand 

Whose stain crushed the wine

And bathing won’t remove it—

The lancet, the lancet’s begetter

Perv that turns in the bed of the lord he serves

A sweet balm broken, applied to skin

The doctor, the doctor’s assistant

New louts burning holes in the stays. 

I see pluts return from the bad world every day,

Shut fields to plebes and feed them. 

They shouldn’t bother—we pass here for others

Who turn in their sleep on the heather

After taking night’s theater, 

The theater’s owners. Who owns you, 

Purveyors of chaos? Who owns the chorus 

That brings you your tunes? We don’t

Know their names in any of the harbors. 

What keeps them making our boats?