December 27, 2012

2012 ADVENT CALENDAR

25GREGORIAN 25COMPTON 25SKINNER 25LARIVIERE 
25JOSEPH 25POE 24RORIPAUGH 23PRESLEY 
22GREENSTREET 21VOGEL 20GUY 19BENSON 18GARR 
17COX MAKKI 16CREMIN 15KOENEKE 14GARDNER 
13BUCK PALAGI 12KAMINSKI 11LORIG 10 KLAVER 
9VIRGIL 8WORKMAN 7 GUTSTEIN 6TREADWELL 
5ORMONDE 4FOX 3PESTER 2BIG FIERCE TYGAHS 
1COHEN

December 25, 2012

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


(click for audio)








Day 25: Jared Joseph, SUCH A SUN


(click image for audio)

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).


December 24, 2012

DAY 24: LEE ANN RORIPAUGH, LET FREEDOM RIOT SING



















(click for audio)

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

December 22, 2012

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


























collage by Lilly Pereira
(click image for audio)


KATE GREENSTREET


You say our love is a f
orest 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.”

December 21, 2012

Upcoming Feature! Women Publishers' Roundtable


Dorothy Parker, who knew about women,
publishing & round tables


I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be organizing a women publishers' roundtable for Delirious Hem.  The feature will include my new publishing venture, Noctuary Press, as well as several more established presses run by amazing women.  I hope you'll check it out in the new year!

Kristina Marie Darling

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
-->

December 20, 2012

DAY 20: ARIELLE GUY, EXILE





















(click image for audio)

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.