amy king





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MEN BY THE LIPS OF WOMEN


I'm in love with a man who doesn't love me
with the pages of the book he sees from.
He makes love through his syllabic ink, a salted thunder,
leaves me to my own delirium tremors.
I gouge out his eyes, break the yolk across his shoulders,
disembowel the nectar from his liver.
His toxins become a cherry blossom wine.
He sounds in the brain's eagled hollows
of a soft guitar from a Spanish café
among the mountain peaks in nightshade.
He cannot hide, no matter how many goats he scares
or biscuits he throws at the hunger.
The mother of everyone calls him.
His fright is an orb of Hold me, I'm yours,
crisp and curled with age's yellow
and the godless sunburn you love across your nose.
I am that love you light yourself with
and my gender is powerless in this.
We are metered only by our own machines,
while the book is a clock that forgets her mechanics.
Her hands can count but would rather wipe warm dew,
the pall from your lips and kiss the lids
of your eyes from sleep. Here am I, is he,
with yoke and shadow removed, she is, her in me,
apart from you, man reading men by the lips of women.

................this poem first appeared in Turntable + Blue Light

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Amy King is the author of I'm the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books. For information on the reading series Amy co-curates, please visit The Stain of Poetry: A Reading Series blog, and visit her own website for more.

Recent work
Amy's Alias

ta noonan

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Difference Engine: It is early; I am small. Everything is built to tolerance. The priest detours water to my scalp & face. His accent shortens my vowel. He is naming—and renaming—me. Mother corrects him, but I have to do it again. ( I will wait nineteen years for the opportunity. ) Brass gears crank and waver. Engine reads: Gödel, Lovelace, Derrida. Engine prints: psychopomp, mockingbird, chuck-wills-widow. This is assignment, a baptism in variables that spellcheck catches. Input/output housed in separate units. I change my name not to fool God, but to fool myself. It is a trigger. It is past my time. Speak slowly, now. Speak slowly.

first published in, "La Grande Dame est morte! Vive la Grande Dame!"

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T.A. Noonan's The Bone Folders won the 2007 Heartland Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Cracked Slab Books. She edits Flaming Giblet Press and the online journal grain short/grain long. In May 2009, she will receive her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers

Linda Russo

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Sensing

& sensing this had something to do with levity,
for sure, for we agreed we believed we were kinda shared territory.
However, if you, in these negotiations, specifically, if you knew
it wasn’t sky sky sky in fact
nor missives, nor misgivings, nor. Daunting brilliant entirely accepting smiles
To be near, anyhow, to a lovely yesterday, & another day besides.
Many its lovely falls across the sky, a history, discontinued, of
pouring our hearts out. A landmark & a blemish.
The roof over our heads, laughter, let me lead you.
Try shouting or whatnot. With levity
& surprisingly not sunk. Grown, finally. We were
on course & for generations to come & not men, only
& not women, either. Then I lay down and tried.
Did you ever, ironically? Then I lay down and tried.




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Linda Russo recently relocated in the Inland Northwest, and teaches creative writing at Washington State University. "Sensing" is the first poem of her recently-completed manuscript Simplicity Blend. Other poems appear or are forthcoming in Damn The Caesars, Fence and Bird Dog. She is the author MIRTH (Chax Press) and o going out (Potes
& Poets).

catherine daly



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Advent Calendar

...................for Susana Gardner

every day looming
..............gloaming?

doors in the narrative Black Forest
..or flaps in sentimental landscapes:
shelters made of food, not shelter, trimmed white
trees

not passion-purple candles, but

accumulating light
counting physically, toward
a special calendar, liturgical year winding:

bedew us, bestow hope, focus
on abject bird, candy cane, winter flower
within this seasonal scene, no
on the piece of cardboard below it,

used once like a puzzle, a surprise
...............(not re-gifted)
quote withing the month, pattern

night and day verging midwinter
....."slant of light"

one, two, three, touching is a door, window
open to the birth
or end

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Catherine Daly writes holiday poems alternate years. Two of her Christmas poems, and many of her other occasional poems, are in her most recent book, Vauxhall (Shearsman, 2008).

reb livingston

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Diminished Prophecy 1:4
You will transform into a gadget of nuisance and a dohickey
of satire and vacancy in all the beds where the Shepherd
once shepherded you.

Diminished Prophecy 1:5
Among those apartments you will identify no coziness, no
fortress to shield your hubris. There the Shepherd will take
four vicious kisses and the most pious of exits.

Diminished Prophecy 1:6
You will exist in constant puzzlement, blamed with jargon
and prattle both on paper and screen, all your mutant fishes
pillaged and relished by bogeywomen.

Diminished Prophecy 3:1
Be not aroused, O hollow gigolo, for the naked meadows are
emerging homely and cross. Sentiments are being warehoused;
the scarecrow and the weirdo weakly submit their princely
trinkets.

Diminished Prophecy 5:1
"The tendrils you inflict and the vainglory of your mettle
have bereaved you, you who snuffle the parts of manes, who
mingle twinkle with a metric swindle. Though you mend your
memoir infused with greeted laurel, sans knuckles, from
those lines I weed and heave," declares the Sultana.

Diminished Prophecy 5:2
My Tempest will spurn them because they have not maligned him;
they will be vagrants without fish worries.

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Reb Livingston is the author of Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books), editor of No Tell Motel and publisher of No Tell Books .

becca klaver

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TRACK 1 / 0:25

Don’t stick your body parts out else they’ll get chopped off
This summer’s sugary like Fun-Dip, like Freeze-Pops
Slinky sounds, boyoiyoi
Outside a Winter Storm on the first day of Spring
Get it right, Nat’l Weather Service
That breezy wet day in January was not called Spring Rain
Only springlike—simile and metaphor, learn the diff
Nat’l Weather Service

TRACK 8 / 0:29

Why do I love duets?
Let’s settle this once and for all.
First, because they’re usually love songs.

Second, because there’s good tension even if it’s not a love song.
Third, because I prefer extreme feelings to subtle ones.
Love will bowl you over is a pretty good summary of the feeling a duet
gives you. Duets bowl me over.
Finally, the afterparty.

TRACK 10 / 0:26

More edge than you’d expect from a title track.
They don’t make songs like this anymore.
Andy would say something about 90s lady guitar
and Liz Phair and the big scratchy metal sound.
I won’t pretend I would have come up with that on my own
but he’s right. Women don’t play guitar like that anymore.
It’s like the musical equivalent of shoulder pads.
I guess it was just too much.

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Becca Klaver was born in Milwaukee, WI, and graduated from the University of Southern California and Columbia College Chicago, where she now works and teaches. A founding editor of Switchback Books, Becca is also currently editing, with Arielle Greenberg, an anthology of poems for teenage girls. These poem-tracks are from her first chapbook, Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape, out this month from the greying ghost press.

susan briante

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Solstice

So the jet stream carries nickel light and narrow births.

Ink slows in your pen. Do not breathe too deeply.

Gravel shifts from the east to the west side of the street.

Cars park at the edge of a vacancy.

Nothing bleeds deeper than traffic lights.

Walking south on Bedford, he takes milk from a carton in sips.

No—I said— he slips a cigarette from the pack to his lips.

Lie down for me. This is no time for resurrections.

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Susan Briante’s poems have appeared in Court Green, Damn the Caesars and Mandorla. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, was recently published by Ahsahta Press. Briante teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she lives with the poet Farid Matuk.