danielle pafunda

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On the Bearskin Rug in Front of the Fire I Construct the Following Tableau:

Down so long that down does not even look like up from below, here, a braided cell. A string rag band, a sluicing of dull old assembly of dull old limbs, fore to aft, and shin to spinet, a small electric organ, and even the variety show known as legs hooked behind back, ear to thigh, the swift crotch. A diagram in ash and jimmies says here’s to fuck it ‘til you reel again. Narrate: Whatever. Unhhhh.

On the Bearskin Rug in Front of the Fire I Construct the Following Tableau:

The undead shirk, circle, shirk in their Bondo-clogged antennae hole. Here's a bosom town on the skids. Here's a big hole in the crush rag where the undead stuff their 1994. Over here, I'm gonna pin up that tongue that used to lick me far and wide and I'm gonna apple soak it and I'm gonna go more red in the face than green. Narrate: Better. Bitters.

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Danielle Pafunda is the author of My Zorba (Bloof Books), Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press), and the forthcoming Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Books). She is co-editor of the online journal La Petite Zine, and teaches women’s studies, creative writing, and English literature at the University of Wyoming.

michelle detorie

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Michelle Detorie lives in Goleta, CA where she edits WOMB, an online journal for poetry by women, and Hex Presse. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in How2, Foursquare, Dusie, Pool, La Petite Zine, Jacket, EAOGH and elsewhere. She's also published threechapbooks: Daphnomancy (Small Chapbook Project), Bellum Letters (Dusie), and A Coincidence of Wants (Dos Press). A fourth chapbook, Ode to Industy, will be published with the Dusie Kollektiv later this year. In 2007 she was a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellow.
wombpoetry.com/ daphnomancy.com/

marcella durand



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A Tripod Construction

As the highway surrounds us so does traffic sound surround and so I am
surrounded by husband care husbanding us both me and son now sleeping so he
was a surprise and husbanded we sleep as wind carries sound surrounding us wind
carries through window and even protective gate and screen—there are three
layers to our window: screen, glass, and gate, as there are three of us, a tripod
construction of family or as my son’s history and my history say: famille. My
husband might be French or he might be German or he might be Italian or he
might be Native American or he might be Blackfoot or he might be pied noir. Not
like me, French, and not like my son, French, not like my son, Senegalese, and
not like my son or me, now New Yorker, now African American. Like all of us
New Yorker African American French Native American. Whatever we are we
will be confused and so will everyone who speaks to us and whether the traffic
sound highway wakes us up filtering and the people speaking outside and the
telephone and the beeping and honking and bicycle chain dragging and the small
indefinable noise that wakes us up as the city surrounds us as people around us as
we husbanded wake. As we enter the wake, unhusbanded, confused, unique.

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Marcella Durand is the author of two new collections, published this year: Traffic & Weather from Futurepoem Books and AREA from Belladonna Books. She lives in NYC with her husband and son.

judith roitman

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previously published in Slippage, Potes and Poets Press

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Judith Roitman was born and raised in New York City; she lived in San Francisco and Boston areas; now in Lawrence KS. Her work has appeared in various places, including First Intensity, Black Spring, Bird Dog, Locus Point (web), FO A RM... She has three chapbooks: The Stress of Meaning: Variations on a line of Susan Howe; Diamond Notebooks; Slippage, and one book, No Face.

kate greenstreet

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from The Last 4 Things


Each tone, each color, has a different vibration. Everything was getting darker, “dimensional.” A woman came here once and fell. To her knees—it was a Sunday, I’ll never forget it. In those days, I was very small. I knew my own grief to be so small, nobody could find it. In winter, just the pilings, ropes; ice in black water, “as seen.”

All these shots are locked down. I can manage when the pressure is steady—packed with dark-tent, chemical boxes and the camera, an umbrella, a lamp. We talked about colors so much. Or sometimes I feel that the LIFE is there, waiting—but I don’t have the part. I know that everything can’t be important. They let me take down the curtains. Everything is slightly hidden from me, all the time. It’s dark. Did you sleep?

Someone’s yelling out there. Have I run out of luck? It’s dark—that always takes me back. Rereading our old mail. I have to try, don’t I? When you asked me about having a secret, I thought it was just a form of greeting.


previously published in Cannibal

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Kate Greenstreet is the author of case sensitive (Ahsahta Press, 2006) and three chapbooks, Learning the Language (Etherdome Press, 2005), Rushes (above/ground press, 2007), and This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008). New work is forthcoming in jubilat, Saltgrass, Hotel Amerika, and Court Green. Her second book, The Last 4 Things, will be out from Ahsahta in September 2009.

http://www.kategreenstreet.com/
http://www.kickingwind.com/

helen white



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(click image for closer view)


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Helen White grew up in Britain and now lives in Ghent, Belgium, where she works as a translator and co-organizes the Krikri and Zaoem poetry festivals. Her visual poetry has been shown in exhibitions in Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Cyprus and Argentina, and appeared in journals including De Poëziekrant, Foursquare, Phoebe, Karagöz, The Big Ode and Womb.

www.krikri.be/helen/

suzanne nixon

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I'm going to be sexy 69 next month
I don't watch TV
so I don't see the images
nor do I read "women's" magazines

the only place I encounter
the anti-ageing business
is on the Net
they have me targeted
at yahoo
for all kinds of obviously
terribly done photoshopped
anti-wrinkle lotions potions and masks

or I see some ads at msnbc
wherein young women
in their 30's and younger
are being sales pitched
for anti-wrinkle creams
PUUUULEEEEZ!

I've taken a frank
photographic record
of some years for some years
of my ageing
it's been a fascinating learning experience for me

I haven't found the experience
of growing old
to be anything like I thought it would
biggest best surprise of my life
(along with the pleasures of birthing and raising my sons)

I am totally healthy
so the illness chronic or otherwise
aspect is not in play

I have a high energy level
I work out sporadically weight training
{my mian weight lifting is the little contest I have
when I grocery shop
to try getting everything in the house
in one trip
which frequently means 6 or 7 bags at once
easily 60 pounds}

I have had more and more varied
and with more partners sex
since I turned 55 than all the time
before that

my hair which is moonstruck silver
actually beautiful which it NEVER
was in the mouse brown stage of my life

though in the last year or so
it's started to thin
and as it is my greatest physical
vanity I'm about to try some hormonal balance
alternative medicine formulas

and my skin
this is really
the only thing about ageing that irritates me
crepey thin skin
just no restorative bounce in it

it's almost as though I have to chose
between the infamous "second belly"
of abdomonal fat

or slimmer but with crepey skin

*laughing*

it doesn't seem to matter
to the man who lives with me
who is, just for the record
(okay ___and a little boast)
a quarter century younger than I am

and in terms of my sexuality
I've never been so engaged sexually

the things you hear about and dread:
vaginal dryness reduced sex drive
atrophied sexual parts

absolutely none of that
going on here

so in some senses I am off the grid
where the horrors of ageing
are so frequently and slickly articulated
and visualized

I wonder some about how I'll Be
when I'm 80 90. . .

and yeah I do think
about my death
I've having such a splendid time
being alive
and I have stuffed
am still stuffing my head
with so much Wonder
it puzzles and pisses me
to think all "that" will just
vanish
all of it assembled from the life experience
whhich has been so enriching
it seems unseemly
for it to just vanish

but exploding super novae
probably think the same

so I forego anyone else's definition
of how a woman ages
and only go by this experience
I'm having

and I'm telling you
with the thought it might
alleviate some anxieties

being able to find positives
in anything that happens
(even the horrendous ones:
my favorite mantra at those times is
"but it'll make for good poems")
i.e., being able to say and believe
"There is no better life than this one."
will prevent you
hagging up
and you can transform instead
into
a pussy crone

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suzanne nixon:

in my soul I'm a middlewesterner
through and through
gobs of formal education:
PhD (History of Science)
post-doc (Psychology):
mainly though from
life and
reading and writing
spent my working life as a therapist (primarily border-line personality
diagnosed women)
and a planner of medical education curriculum change
I started writing poetry as soon as I learned how to write
then stopped for several decades before starting seriously
again when I was 55.