GOLDEN eagle and a gooey pink pen
Are just the thing on a cracker.
Every salt crystal has the potential
To grip like Michelin tire tread.

Helluva dancer, that gila monster.
Looks great in a cotton bodystocking.
But talking shop with the audience, she’s as
Uptight as a scolding nannygoat.

A nanomoment’s not nearly enough
To throw a tarp on a terrapin.
In therapy, you can come to terms
With the millipede’s indifference.

The millipede looked at his watch:
Mickey says hello. He has an
It, and you have an it, and the two its’
Names are Lefty and Chick Pea.

Chick Pea wrote a dialogue:
On the Nature of the Raj.
But Butter Rabbit and Camelopard
Are flying out from O’Hare.

The airport has many hazards: impassable
Rivers and starvey wolves.
Their hunting patterns exactly match
Those of the stranded octopus.

And who is as the suckblob?
And who knoweth the interpretation of the suck?
Daddy Longlegs looked it up
In the Lithuanian textbook.

But you’re the Delphic oracle, so say
What’s shorter than nothing at all? Goat o’ God
Sawed off a shotgun, gave
The stupid part to her kid.

I know, I know, I know.
Interrupted a hundred times,
The psyche goes into crisis.
And so: ineligible is the bat.





FOX CALLED AND SANK A SHOT

FOX called and sank a shot
Into the corner pocket
Of a diamond-eyed kangaroo, who
Looked better naked.

Turkeypig wrote a rockin’ review.
You’re welcome to click on the link.
But the comment stream is fulla trolls
And trotting out o’ credentials.

Here is something new:
I’ma answer it all with silence.
With silence, exile, cunning, I
Skillfully cut up cucumbers.

And as I crouch to pet this coil
Of orange extension cord, I think
Its mile-long flexible backbone
Is liquid metallic hydrogen.

And, oh, you know me all,
A plain blunt man that love my friend. I’m
Trying to put a nail in the wall
By hitting it with a mattress.





Anthony Madrid lives in Chicago. His first book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, will be published by Canarium Books this spring.

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If an expatriate is, as I believe, someone
who never forgets for an instant
being one,
then, no.

But, if knowing that you always
tote your country around
with you, your roots,
a lump

like a soul that will never leave you
stranded in alien subsets of
yourself, or your wild
entire;

that being elsewhere packs a vertigo,
a tightrope side you cannot
pass up, another way
to show

how not to break your pretty neck
falling on skylights:
reward-laden
mirages;

then, yes. All homes are home; mirages
everywhere. Aside from
gravity, there are no
limits,

never were, nor will there ever be,
no here and there to foil
your lotus-dreaming
legend.

Stay on the planet, if you can. It isn't
all that chilly and what's more,
grows warmer by the
minute.

Dorothea Tanning (1910–2012) was a painter, sculptor, and writer.

This poem was published in Tanning’s first book, A Table of Content (2004), and in LIT. It is reprinted here by kind permission of Graywolf Press.

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            "'So, it’s come to that,' she said. 'You’re jealous of policemen.'"
                —Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

The girl detective does not date
She sits at home       eating a piece of devil’s food cake
with red frosting       She sits at home
with a pregnancy test
       Icebox light       slats the kitchenette

The girl detective rolls seamed stockings down
one at a time, slips       off her crepe de chine
and navy pumps           In dotted swiss pajamas
       she yanks out the lousy Murphy bed
flips on her hot-bulb Hawaiian lamp
       the hula dancer’s       pampas skirt sways
       hips like lava             skin like kola nut

The girl detective       sets her honey hair
in frozen orange         juice cans
                               She double-checks
her clutch purse for Sweetheart tweezers, compact, blush
then badge               and gun

       Foundation caramelizes       in her vanity mirror
                   a bullet lipstick               ricochets
across the room       The girl detective dreams
of handcuffs                             slanted grillework
lost keys and prison                 movies where the girls
        are Lana Turner blond

       All her exes broke
the law       or moved to Hollywood
in search of starlets         sunglass swimming pools
palm trees                       and palisades
       green velvet theatres sinking               into mossy film noir

The girl detective                            keeps a corkscrew handy
things always do go south              it’s best to be prepared

Sideshow Banner: The Engagement of the Fat Lady and the Pocket Man

Jacques played my love-struck contract dwarf in tents
from Brou to San-Maur-des-Fossés.
He brought me saucisson, champagne,
and Gerber daisies wrapped in cellophane;

he stroked the triple strand of pearls that ringed
my clotted custard double chin
so tenderly, I almost thought
his sawdust-kneed proposal was sincere.

The banner painter captured our romance
on canvas. There I sit, enthroned
on gilt aluminum, my teeth
bared in a fox-trap grin, my dimpled bulk

blown up to fill a wincey sideshow wall,
forever fat, just twenty-two.
The joke was that a gentleman
that small could fall for someone oversized

and listing, like an alpine île flottante,
our false long looks some mastodon mistake.
I fed him tarte tatin, marceled my hair,
and kissed his biscuit porcelain brow,

but when the tour closed, he pocketed
my Carbanado diamond ring
and caravanned to Bruges with Snake Charm Elle.
These days, although the cook-tent steams

with boudin blanc, I find it hard to put
on weight. Bereft, I slouch beneath
our faded courtship scene, my heart
a punched-in bladder on a birch-bark stick.

Hilary S. Jacqmin is an MFA student at the University of Florida. Her poem "Wedding Album” was published in Best New Poets 2011: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers, edited by D. A. Powell.

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Once in the dark cold and water-table bliss
or blue of the fractioned and visible land
Figure this
for the tiny halves of most lives
where the country and the city and the pantry all converge

For a time the slice had misshapen
the drive
                  the way it melts in the
                         tiring sun of the day the stitches
whose low deep voice made a
just entangle of the whole rotting fruit.

Goats and the milk which comes and lies
and numbering and circle sorts.
I can't receive my petition my
hesitancy because one knows
the path
is a slimy and cheap oak clock

Spanish is the reemergent fine-time and the
tight rope slither and link
The vagrancy or relevancy but
mostly it’s the dream of mothering
I make a perfect and terrible woman
when fire's in the soaring lifesuit of the pace

and like insert of an eagle is much the way
I met the man named Americo Ferrari which
surprised me sounding so much
the space and the luxe in both parts

Rebecca Kosick writes and translates in Ithaca, NY.

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Outside they’re yelling about the secret weapon.
But I can still judge the season
by the unhidden dandelions all over the front yard.

Also the tricycles, which is to say
that I face the future ludicrous & unafraid.
Once I occupied a picnic table for a whole afternoon

& people came by, asked if it was okay to sit down.
My responses varied with the color of their eyes,
which is different than yesterday at the coffee shop

where I spent all my energy trying to convince you to sit
anywhere else. Not right next to me. Not
putting your adult espionage thriller on the table

where my drink goes. Outside, they’re always yelling
about the secret weapon.
I folded my old tattersall shirt & put it in a box.

The sleeves were fraying & I was embarrassed
to part with it. We give up on worn out things
when instead we should celebrate & covet their injuries.

I shoved sadness deep into my ears to drown out
the sizzling of dinner. I spent forty minutes
stacking books on the new bookshelf & each volume

generated such an impressive floral infused gust,
I had to wonder about the previous owner. I had to wonder
about the Nate Pritts from fifteen years ago,

the one who bought a bottle of his ex-girlfriend’s perfume
just to have it in case all beauty suddenly ceased.
It did. Then it started again




Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing. He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal & small press.

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             for John and David

What is it about the certainty of snow

that makes us feel human and mortal—
the warmth and care of being inside

while winter goes about her usual business,
flakes swirling in the wind
just outside the restaurant door?

But here inside, conversation is warm,
a glowing fire, there can never be too much pleasure,
or if there were, it is already beyond our human capacity

to wonder, which is so great in itself, alone,
without our pushing it along the evening route
to far beyond us, within you, and then

here before you or beyond you too—
oh that crazy guy, that insane woman,
that saint or sinner of old—that’s all, folks.





Eugene Richie’s most recent book of poems is Psyche and Amor (Factory Hollow Press), with Rosanne Wasserman. He is the Director of Writing at Pace University in New York City.

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Red wine, the cure for common sobriety—
dizzy tea, sweet like molten meat—is just as Jewish
as any rite, any tight briar of Hebrew letter, any fetter
of Israelite slave or Yid-friar. No one should build a pyramid
with a hangover, I think it’s written, but still that Jew-gang,
tendons stretched like strings of sitars, Seder-clenched their livers
at the green pea Nile, slurped purpled red wine,
clacked bricks, and acted Exodus, the awe, optic, the carafe,
Coptic; Pharaoh punch-drunk, Hieroglyphic-fistic.
Six thousand years later, my Semitic clan unfurls,
cousin to cousin, to swat about a dozen pecks of Exodus lexis.
No taupe grape, either, for my smashed stock,
for my drunken kin who swirl the swill, fawn over Passover for
eight days, eight of their about-twenty-six thousand; six thousand
years later, the latent Seder just as filled with Jews, just as catered.
We live the Passover miracle of the ladled vine, the Passover
miracle of the fourth glass, and the greater miracle of the fifth.
My cup gripped in my Jew-paw like a bulb, ruddy filament fluming,
I truly believe Egypt was Elysian. I can hold my religion. Next to me,
unlike Aaron, Uncle Jacob, sloshed like Moses,
parts the Red Sea over and over again in his glass.





Abraham Lincoln Decides Against “Count Lincula”

        That’s just perfect, I thought, the ingredients
In order and the sketch of Lincoln for the box with one thumb up
And the other hand signing the word “Illinois” and a neon American flag bow tie.
Ready to print. The verdant bubble writing, occidental, turbo curve.
A house divided. There, the sparkling cinnamon, in the divided house.

The moments of emergency and the novelty of the name
Lincoln O’s gave him egregious heartburn for a month.
This was not the Abraham I knew. Where was the moral giant
Swaying like a uvula? The glitzy example of disease? Equipped

With mangy aphasia, Abe had bent over his apolitical writing desk
For weeks with slates of oats and four types of humours. His recipe deadline
Was in February and strict and clammy as seashell, the Cereal Bosses called
On him nightly until one died of a blood disease. Where that one fell

Four more filled the puckering void, and I could count the days since
The ample hydraulics of Abraham Lincoln had clenched
To orate. Isomer Lincoln arranged the wheat from most puce to least.
From yaw to pitch to punch.




Megan Amram is a recent graduate of Harvard University and comedy writer living in Los Angeles.

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At the microphone, suddenly—oh no—
is Sandra the Available,

in her endless yellow dress
and award-winning earrings,

about to sing Rose Dickey’s unrecorded
cakewreck of a hybrid poemsong,

“Sheep Child o’ Mine.”
Now watch her win the night

before it’s all over. She’s no loser,
with a fever but no lover.

Not like me. I live in a hotel
with no rooms, just a lobby and lifts

leading to experiences.
Time to ask another person,

someone who’s been outside
the fishbowl long enough

to wonder if there will ever again
be enough water. Rat race,

hamster wheel, dog run.
(OK, dog run’s different.

It’s not for people.)
I’m not a real people-person.

Just like reality is not really realness,
people. Just try and point out to me

what’s not fake or paste or false?
Or trick or replica

or denial or dream or drama
or simulation or re-enactment

or knockoff or artificial, a ruse,
a work of art, illusion,

a lie, a mistake, fantasy,
a misconception, missed-connection,

delusion, hallucination,
insincere, invalid or invented,

a rehearsal with no performance?
A viable world with no excuse to exist?

In my hotel the sleep is free.
In any hotel. Why shouldn’t it be?

And that old girl Sandra?
Turns out she can really sing.




The World’s Arm

A strong, pale wind on the thighs,
it was no seaspray, no A.C.,

but cold mnemotic, a breath
of spotless decision,

a kind of bulk, a true surface
thickened by foreign pears

as if winter brought its fruit
first to me for approval

before it let December
fill its basket to capacity.

I spoke too calmly for one
who didn’t believe in anything.

Mouth full of pears,
full of promises I’d no way

to speak, much less keep, I tended
to gesture toward a Universal

Field of Grass, hoping to break
as many blades as my wide self

could in one pass. One pass—
but we’re wasted with feeling,

breathing funny and stuck rough
like an IV into a paralyzed arm.

And that’s the World’s Arm
that can’t write anymore,

or sign its name, or pick
the thickness from the trees.

My fingerprints transform
into proboscis, by degrees.




Brenda Shaughnessy is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Newark. Her third collection, Our Andromeda, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2012.

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Here in Paris the wind is dragging
us through the nervousness of what
money means. Women’s clothing,
manic repositories of seasons,
Satan, expatriate Manhattan,
art!, a sculptural exile into which
The Great Bras fall. We’re coming
on & as cosmos; each phone call
gothic & frock-coated — it’s
becoming so the metaphors
are more on the mark than
we’d prefer. (A brief sub-poem
about American Ex-Boyfriends:
Can anything be done / To stop
them? / Were their apologies /
Not honestly the best in the
world? / Owen’s Oxford opens /
Like an alternate entrance. /
Sixty years from now / Even
our chests will be long gone.)
Threat of rain, see-through-shirt
Test Ban Treaty, hierarchy
of bangs since the one
in the books. Art means saying
“here we go!” a lot; money means
not carrying an umbrella
sometimes. These are the things
that will deliver us from zero.
Texture of midnight, day of
rest, pageant for the change
you wish to see in these
clothes. Paris: “I have
done something terrible” —
this weather is the last art
lesson we may ever need.
Evidence suggests beauty
looks guilty even from the moon.




Bridesmaids

Our proposals cling their
paradise to the sides of
themselves nearest Mars.
Pickup line, dive bar, the
emperor’s new, comma,
charm: “I love you like a
math solution to an
insurance problem.” We
get divorced every time.
Men are from accuracy;
women, precision — none
of those poems actually
turn out to be true.
Elliptical motion,
smattering of unfinished
children, 8-Ball-Shaking
Fellowship at the School
of Brass Rings: the newer
tenses tend to play by less
than phonological rules.
Sake-of-sleep anomaly;
drunken groped analytic:
If there’s a will there’s
a nostalgia for it. If one
must say “Marry me”
in one’s twenties
one must prepare
to hear “We’re born
not knowing language”
in return. Non-terminal
symbols, string
of dispossessed beers:
the hours that are the
answers between the
minutes & me. One must
have a stake in one’s
standards’ traits
beyond their perfection.
“I love you like a good
semantic tailspin.”
We speak now &
mostly hold our peace.




Sam Donsky is a graduate student living in Philadelphia. The poems come from his nearly finished first manuscript, Poems vs. The Volcano, a collection of 100 poems for 100 films.

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He marries her mites and the wires in her wings,
he marries her yellow glass eyes and black centers,
he marries her near-total head turn, he marries
         the curve of each of her claws, he marries
the information plaque, he marries the extinction
         of this kind of owl, he marries the owl
that she loved in life and the last thought of him
in the thick of her mind
         just one inch away from the bullet, there,
                                    he marries the moths
who make holes in the owl, who have eaten the owl
almost all away, he marries the branch of the tree
that she grips, he marries the real-looking moss
and dead leaves, he marries the smell of must
that surrounds her, he marries the strong blue
         stares of children, he marries nasty smudges
of their noses on the glass, he marries the camera
that points at the owl to make sure no one steals her,
so the camera won't object when he breaks the glass
while reciting some vows that he wrote himself,
he screams OWL instead of I'LL and then ALWAYS
LOVE HER, he screams HAVE AND TO HOLD
and takes hold of the owl and wrenches the owl
away from her branch
                  and he covers her in kisses and the owl
thinks, “More moths,” and at the final hungry kiss,
“That must have been the last big bite, there is no more
of me left to eat and thank God,” when he marries
the stuffing out of the owl and hoots as the owl flies out
under his arm, they elope into the darkness of Indiana,
Indiana he screams is their new life and WELCOME.
They live in a tree together now, and the children of
Welcome to Indiana say who even more than usual,
and the children of Welcome to Indiana they wonder
where they belong. Not in Indiana, they say to themselves,
the state of all-consuming love, we cannot belong in Indiana,
as night falls and the moths appear one by one, hungry.




The Feeling of Needing a Pen

         Really, like a urine but even more gold,
         I thought of that line and I felt it, even
between two legs I felt it, the legs I wrote
just now, a panic, a run-walk to the private
                  room with a picture of a woman
on the door, or else the line was long, too long,
I barged into the men’s, and felt stares burning
hard like reading or noon, felt them looking
me up and over, felt them looking me over
and down, and all the while just holding their
pens,
         they do it different oh no they don’t,
they do it standing up, they do it at the window,
they do it so secret in a three-hour bath, they do it
         aloud to someone else, their wife is catching
every word and every word is gold. What you eat
         is in it, blackberries for breakfast are in it,
fat atoms of Shakespeare and Hitler are in it.
The sound of water makes me need to: Atlantic,
Pacific, Caspian, Black. I feel it so much because
I am pregnant, I am pregnant with a little self,
                                         all of its self
is that spot on a dog that causes its leg to kick.
It kicked and I felt and I wrote that last line. Even
now it’s happening. I eat only asparagus like arrows,
I am famous for my aim. I get almost none on my hands,
almost. Under my feet the streets, under the streets
the pipes. Inside the pipes a babble sound.





Patricia Lockwood’s first book, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, is forthcoming from Octopus Books in summer 2012.

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