carrie etter


*

The Occupation of Iraq

Wounds under plaster or gauze are not wounds
to the beholder. These early daffodils come to bloom
and die in four days. The trick is to lose well,
which is not the same thing as losing profoundly,
not always. The swaddled wound appears already
on its way to recovery; it must, to preserve the pallor
of the bandage, have been washed clean, loose skin
trimmed. The idea was to fill the flat with buds and leave
for France. No bodily injury produces more pain
than that to the nerve, yet the eye cannot perceive it.
We left for France. The dentist overfilled
the canal, sent the sealant six millimeters into
the lingual nerve, delivered six hectares of misery.
On the first night, someone said Canadienne when I
feared Américaine, and I smiled. Winning comes with
a dictionary, all the right words without rules for syntax.
There is no exponent to relate my worst pain
to an entire country's wounds. We came back
from France, and the room was yellow with dying.
All we could see was loss.

*

this poem first appeared in Shearsman

Carrie Etter's is an American expatriate resident in England since 2001. She has two books forthcoming: The Tethers (Seren, 2009) and Divining for Starters (Shearsman, 2010). She is member of the creative writing faculty at Bath Spa University.

elisa gabbert

*

WALKS ARE USELESS II
..................After Chris Tonelli

There’s nothing to be sad about.
My sadness grows restless, nostalgic

for a better bore, the tragic bore
of yesteryear. The stink of the city

grows worse, but at the same rate
that we get used to it. ‘Tis a bore

and nothing more. Even the clouds
are bored, arrange themselves into more

and more exotic vegetables.
Where is the war? I can’t see it.

I feel incredible. What I mean is,
I feel like no one would believe me.

*

Elisa Gabbert's recent work can be found in Colorado Review, Diagram, Eleven Eleven, Meridian, Pleiades, Typo, Washington Square, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks from Kitchen Press, Thanks for Sending the Engine (2007) and My Fear of X (forthcoming). She is also co-author, with Kathleen Rooney, of Something Really Wonderful (dancing girl press, 2007) and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008).

The poem originally appear in COMBATIVES, the print offshoot of H_NGM-N.

elisabeth workman

*

ABRAMOVIC ABRAMOVICH

Pour $100,000 champagne plus a kilo
of honey over the city of Reykjavík.

Call it a yacht, a leak, a cataract of
angel juice gushing and still famished.

We were left in the scarcity terminal
with an aura strictly American.

A real killjoy depleted of Billy the Kid
reduced to cynical art timers of hunger.

Strike thousands of years of living together
you say it was like pouring everything out

in the way that rocks are documentary
Los Angeles oozing quasi-imaginary

epochs of icy blankness blinking
into being the ancestral city rim.

Beauty brain freeze the proper noun
walking barefoot over diamonds

the world rolling in ecstasy at its feet.

*

Elisabeth Workman's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in fourW, Absent, Alice Blue Review, and West Wind Review, among others. Her chapbooks include _a city_a cloud_ (Dusie 2006) and _Opolis_ (Dusie 2007). She works for a visual art museum in Minneapolis.

lara glenum

*

Normalcore


Beware the Normopath............. knocking honey
into your facegrill

Crustyflaps
will crush your teeth into smiling

Give the Normopath a flabjob
&
watch his boomstick blow & break
open your eye

Minkycore


I’m flexing my eye-pods
& feeling nasty
...........................I milk
...........................the Normopath
............& lube out into a sea of congealed pig organs





..............The woods laugh out a skin




My eye-pods break open &
A hundred other eyes
roll out

I’m filing down my hooves


I’m waiting for Mino
with a thousand open legs





*








Lara Glenum is the author of The Hounds of No (Action Books, 2005) and the about-to-be-released Maximum Gaga (Action Books), from which the above poems are taken. She is also the co-editor of Gurlesque, an anthology of contemporary women's poetry and visual art, with Arielle Greenberg (Saturnalia Books, 2009). She lives in Athens, GA.

evie shockley

*

a sonnet for stanley tookie williams (12/29/1953 -12/13/2005)


won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom?
‘cause all i ever have: redemption songs.
--bob marley

all month this country has careened toward cold
and winter’s celebrations: what a star
announced—a birth—and then a chance to fold
a year away, pull one fresh from the drawer,

if not clean, well, unworn. in just a few
months arrives the ice-hot day of the dead-
come-back-to-life—time then to ask how new
and re- beginnings differ. mary bled

for the december miracle, as some-
one must. did you imagine sacrifice
as you called the crips to life? did they come,
those youngbloods, at the crackling of your voice,

like lazarus to christ? vigilant night.
on the road to san quentin, candlelight.

December 19, 2005

this poem first appeared in, the southern review.

to see the minus

the ghost. the thing we could touch if its throbbing
absence were any more vast, any more like a molecule

of jupiter, all mass, weighing us down, but nothing
we can put a finger on. we squint to see the minus: water
take away holy, take away book, take away tree, take away

phantom limb, a connection our brains keep trying to make
with the dead and gone. minus family, minus portrait,

minus heirloom, minus hand-me-down, minus hand.
subtract the noise in the streets. subtract the streets. minus

keepsake, minus god’s sake, minus evidence of things unseen:
the ghost. the thing we could touch if our throbbing

phantom limb really connected. our brains keep trying to make
sense of it. the life’s work, the first or second generation’s
at last accumulated wealth, gone with the wind, washed clean

away in polluted water. if ever there were ample space
for faith and despair, it is here. room enough to tackle a vision.

this poem first appeared in, PMS: poemmemoirstory

*

Evie Shockley is the author of a half-red sea (2006) and two chapbooks, 31 words * prose poems (2007) and The Gorgon Goddess (2001). In 2007, she guest edited ~QUEST~, a special issue of MiPoesias featuring the work of contemporary African American poets. Currently a guest editor of jubilat, she teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

hoa nguyen


*



I LIKE BEING LUCKY

...........Stupid in-box
Time...............a shimmery
autumn backdrop

Long precise shadows.....I clutch
a powder-blue pillbox purse
and brooding eyebrows

and stepping on the undead
the suburb-surviving zombies

I spear the bloody head onto the fence post

Trumpet
..........The Flood Next Time




BIG HEART SMALL HEART

Growing a heart ............another heart
A deep cavity in the shape of an X

The eyes are hollow or covered
...........Good fix ........God ............Bad boy
Percale sheets and cooking spray


What isn’t an historic moment
crossing it out
.....................bundled

War—Mouth—Eyes
(Shiva/Horus)

..........The will to live/die
is not incompatible

*

Hoa Nguyen lives in Austin TX with the poet Dale Smith and their two sons. Together they edit the book imprint Skanky Possum and curate a reading series. Forthcoming books by Hoa include "Kiss A Bomb Tattoo" (effing) and "Hecate Lochia" (Hot Whiskey). She is an Aquarius and a Fire Horse.

stephanie strickland

*



HURACAN’S HARP 121




without knowledge to obtain the effects of knowledge
...............carpenter bee
...............cervical ganglia

heaped up wave hanging in the air for centuries
...............key conservation
...............(not a hair lost)

effected inside glial cells not volumes what is
...............storied
...............in volumes or in acid-free bits is

on (the) line constantly conversing with the blowing sheet
...............impeding
...............the bee



*


Stephanie Strickland’s fifth book of poems, Zone : Zero, just published by Ahsahta, includes two interactive poems on CD. She co-edited Electronic Literature Collection/1 and a recent issue of the Iowa Review Web. She has taught experimental poetry and hypermedia literature at many colleges and universities, most recently the University of Utah.

"Huracan’s Harp 121,” was first published in A Sing Economy, Flim Forum Press, 2008.