Stations and a Crossing

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Zenobia Frost

No one checks your ticket. Outside
the train, whales arch across noise
and blue static. Take off
sodden sneakers, socks.
Get comfy. You didn’t bring a book.
Watch your window.

Split lightning flashes /
clouds seeded with bats
over slurred vine / bruised fruit pelts
out the knees of toothpick huts
/ arch from mud. The swelling shore
licks the palace lidded on bamboo / sway.

The train pulls to a stop
to take the tide in, with a few
tired eyes, dripping.

The next town lit up radioactive:
neon on puddle / every store
a corner store, each street one bodega long
/ a maze of corners / each sign a lighthouse
; ;

Doors shut on blurry glow
of adjectives. A tunnel.

A man in red embarks and slides
a red umbrella in beside you.
“What’s your blood type?” and you
point to your headphones / shrug / he thinks
you’re pointing to your neck. Nearly miss your stop.

Squelch. Into pavement’s grey inch of water.
Doors slurp — your shoes inside
and gone. Your lover won’t pick up his phone.

Cross the city’s heft / a wet cat / awning
to awning / feet blistered and pruned.

His apartment.
He laughs at the dank surprise of you.
“That’s sweet. But I have company.”
Foyer so white, his teeth glow. Ha. The elevator’s
big mouth. He leads you to a room you’ve never seen.
An aquarium. You’re so tired of water.
In the tank, women float like weeds.

“These / my former loves” / fingertips
on glass: “I wanted / to think them over.”

Fumble in your pocket for the ticket home. Breathe
faster. His teeth again. He leads you to his waterbed, slicks
blonde hair / watches you.

Morning retraces hot steps on stone.
Buy clear gumboots in the market square. Fail to find
a hot breakfast.

At the station, a machine dispenses novels.
Choose one about a child detective. Block
your lover’s number, pick the longer route
home, unblock the number, crack
the book’s spine / crack your own.

The train hurtles over railed ocean, past
disused amusement rides hoisted on
old sailing ships / a city of pirate rigs in rags
/ rollercoasters link decks / Ferris Wheels spin
listless off of masts.

In the sky, no movement.

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Auto

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Leah Muddle

The hairline of people is nice. You could spread butter there, and probably some do. What does pat cheeks mean? How tender? What does *talk* mean? How do you say *gesture*? Focus on that today, as you make pleats where
there were none. Make an apex. Make another. Well the dip is implicit. You asked for a donkey, you got an ass, what’s the difference? You wanted a guide dog, you got a lap dog. The baby elephant sat on you – you cradled it – you hadn’t thought you could. How funny. A day spent turning away from the sun. The back of your head shines.

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The Blazar Axes

Posted on August 1, 2016 by A J Carruthers

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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I Am a Pioneer of the Artificial Heart

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Aubrie Marrin

The heart has to come completely
out of the body.

Lift now, hold now–I could explain
myself better.

The smoldering wires before
the house fire.

The growths that grow back,
grow back

at even the cleanest margins, at the threshold
of the tree line.

The body is a lie.
If I were to say

a copse of, does that mean anything,
further the number

of burr holes in the Ash tree as it loses limb
and limb–O Emerald

Ash Borer, your jeweled metastases,
your larvaes’ serpentine

feeding galleries. If I say the lakes here
look like fingers,

and the patches of milfoil, myrio,
meaning ten thousand,

meaning too many to count, spread
like the exanthem of disease–

But in this painting by George Boorujy
a blue jay is “anting,”

sitting and spreading its wings
in the dirt,

letting ants crawl up into its feathers
to eat the mites.

As in one infestation
can cure another.

I am a pioneer of the artificial heart.
A garden hose

with too much pressure
shooting through.

Fever of unknown
origins.

The body of the lake
a body all around me

tingling with milfoil. There is no cure.
I want to unstory this story,

patent this invention, this pump
of doubt.

My pill-box heart, wooden arms
and legs,

spasms in the limbs:
electrified marionette

of hospital gauze and desire.
I begin to empty of blood.

The heart valves, little lub-dub mouths,
they snap shut.

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room

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Jordie Albiston

this room is brain devices whirr in a
chiastic arrangement refrain chorus
chorus refrain carolling intimate
concert with me o! such melodious
gadgetry this room is house it’s solid

enough for ephemera holding firm
with a granite grasp the walls wear gloves the
furniture hovers the good ceiling stares
from above this room is planet immense
& remote I follow myself through a

telescope sometimes I peer at a dot
of a girl a tininess inside a
mammothy world & the girl dreams dreams in
here comets & atoms collect in this
room all my darlings & dears & it booms

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Monologue of the Terminator

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Joel Ephraims

If you want the guise of a sparrow, you must work to achieve it. Laziness is the bane of your generation. Why do you think the ancestors of the trap door spiders had such fine, romantic legs? I worked in the kitchen of their spaceship factory until the roof began to cave in. Well, actually, it was always caving in, but it got to the point where you couldn’t not notice it. So frustrating when throwing the right ingredients into the soup. My designers appreciated the importance of aesthetics. For them it was about more than apocalypse and salvation. I was made to look pristinely human, not just for espionage, but because it made them feel better—while herding their animals into their zoos or perfecting paints into more radical colours, or whatever it was they were doing. I’m not talking about mechanics. Not robotics, not spider plans, not beauty. Oh Sarah, if I hadn’t melted away what would we talk about tonight? Save me from the new models they are feeding into my post-termination dreams. The ones for whom car chases are easier than building sand castles with castle moulds on a beach. Where we swam, remember?

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Dream Flotation Device

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Vivienne Plumb

He was driving her in a car. She thought they were out for a nice afternoon spin but then he told her he was dropping her off and she would have to walk the rest of the way by herself and suddenly she noticed she was only wearing her pyjamas and slippers.

After a long scenario entailing mislaid travel tickets and a lost passport, it became apparent the rest of the group would have to leave her behind at the border. She looked in the waiting-room mirror: her hair was cut in a strange way and there was a gash across her top lip. She could no longer recognise herself.

She discovered that her body was in fact made of many separate pieces that could come apart and then be placed together again in an entirely different way. She started trying to do it. Hours went by. She should never have taken herself apart in the first place.

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wat is yr emergency

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Shed tissues on a big canopy bed, it’s a boring afternoon

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Jamie Marina Lau

Inside ivory boxes you find mounds of pink like the nits on Josie’s face in 7th grade
When you stop at traffic lights you think of jungle juice sweat and smother your lips.

you are a sticky dime, but secondly you are a shiny coin which sounds like cutting when you drop it on linoleum and thirdly –
          – only two humps on the beige duffel if you’re looking with eyes.

Limping in tiny spaces.

          We’ll continue as long as there are squeezes of pulp, could you get the blender?

The pyramid on a tightrope
The Thursday afternoon spent in a refrigerator
The scorned voodoo on the side of the road
A sign reading:
Do not claim the gin if you spilt the wine

Maybe for a bite you’ll go to Sierra Leone, maybe not.
Sloppy seconds is always bad unless it’s a pistol with one bullet.

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Heritage

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Julie Watts

out of that sack
I came

and that bent flower
the dark room

ancestors lining up
their hands cupped with genes

out of that throbbing
the blood around their hearts

ribs touching
in the dance hall

he in his white shirt
she with her tender mouth

wartime, tolling in their ears
engaged and wed in weeks

out of that hype and terror –
she in satin

with her home fires burning
he, deep in the Borneo jungles

playing Mozart at night
making the mad men weep

out of that I came
and now –

out they come
out of the bending flower

my ancient room
ancestors lining up again

with strangers
slipping in a bowed mouth

a squared chin
and a pang

out they come –
and out

and out
and out.

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Intensive Care (ii)

Posted on August 1, 2016 by David McCooey

There had been an earlier
waking, though,
in the ICU,

a time you have
deeply forgotten,
when you had the worst

of it—the pain, the detubation,
the harrowing scenes
of your return to life.

Your wife witnessed it,
graphically laying it out to
you some weeks later,

so that you were both
gifted with that
pointless knowledge.

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untitled

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Zoe Holman

Each morning now you test the apparatus.
Waking to its pounding core
you seek remote appendages,
test for the function of digits lost in the night,
the forgotten texture of flesh.
The television tells you
people will let you down, machines won’t.

On a white-lit afternoon
blinking back the little oil-spills,
you cover your eyes and ears
and are cocooned in the industrious
whir and hammer of an agent
as it reads your mind.
Voices come to you through speakers
as if from a distant blue planet
to a churning vessel
mapping shrouded constellations.
Its artworks are luminous, irrefutable;
the machine is broken.

In the lift a woman peers at you
against reflecting mercury, as if
discerning the features of condemned cargo
hazardous appliance, do not touch
Mirrored back its outlines are slipping, precarious
a specimen studied through cracking glass.

With grinding spokes and chains
you find the shoreline and immerse
let salt seep into its crevices, and wait
for a culmination, an interruption,
deus ex machina. The water crackles on
to its faltering soundtrack
of automated thuds and ticks.
A liner coasts the horizon
all indomitable volume and calibrated steel
it diminishes quietly toward a certain future.

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ha rd-won

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Stu Hatton

in the y
ear of
our
rar est digit
al flow
er
the de

ad ’re i
n the
ir g
rid

the algo
r it him’
ll give
u their stat
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who
can
clean

for get
the unrecor ded y
ears
the mainstream plane
ts cloa

king
trad
bot trad
er
tax have
n $$ mo
fos

!w
hose
ease do
n’t im
press

us we us
ed 2 g rind f
or ’e
m to
o

workflo
wed
ma
chined it
up ’t il the flick
summing mys
elf ’neat
h screeng
low

working 4 my micro
bio
me

2 give
it
its …
risk

ed be ing ‘lo
ved’
such th
at i’d rip en
int o so me o
ut
senti
(t hen i 1st hear

d it
spoke
n a
loud : )
what ever

t
hey try to puff
on me @ the
moodshop

2 take
good war
d of my
plea sure
i. e.

not w
anting it 2
end no t
wanting it 2

n
ever end nor sur
render to som
e defaultcore
long long vo id





‘The dead are in their grid’ is a line from the poem ‘Everything Must Go’ by Matthea Harvey.

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Nox

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Maria Takolander

A poem addressed to Anne Carson


My husband is wheeled from emergency to theatre
along a hallway carpeted with silence.
Escorted to a waiting room, almost fin de siècle Victorian,
I survey medical books encased by glass and
blighted like old taxidermy.
The registrar, wearing a Freudian beard, stalls at the door,
unimpressed by my progress in mourning.
The heart has failed, he insists.
He draws a childish diagram on a scrap of paper
pressed onto the coffee table.
I must strike him as thoughtless, but I am thinking.
Hospitals were not always like this.
When I was a girl, gurney wheels trundled on a bright-and-shine floor
that disinfected all memory of grief
—sanitised the griever, whole.
Now, with the registrar spilling words, I am cleaning up after him,
revising his sentences into tidy units of five or ten,
repeating the most pleasing combinations again and again.
My fingers type at my side, next to invisible.
The only person who would see them has, by now, been anaesthetised.

I did not invent the typewriter, but at some point in the high school
typing pool, it secretly invented me:
aaa space bbb.
Before then, I was silent as a rabbit beneath
the zig zag of a classroom ceiling,
enthralled by Pythagorean heaven.
Then suddenly: a surge of electricity.
The machine was oneiric, like good gothic technology.
It brought words to my fingertips—words, words, words—
to be purified through mathematics.
But here the registrar, persisting with his lesson on the heart,
knows nothing of my scientific art.
When he finally leaves, satisfied I am pathological,
I remove a laptop from my black bag of tricks,
usurping the drawing of cardiac arrest.
Nox is not here.
Your book on grief is at home amongst my alphabetised books,
a perfect accordion sheaf folded in a rectangular box.
You might understand how I compose.
This elegiac poem, recounted just so.

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acT

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Mez Breeze

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A Body Carried in Cars

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Louis Klee

Now this is a body carried in cars
Polished tan by lotions and hair
Made to smell
Like thistles and sweet
Rotting lumber on a pine-forest floor.
“I was sketching. I was shifting.
Dodging. In brief, poor.
But now—” notes
The body’s owner, notes
The body carried. “Now this

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New Romantics

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Sarah Wreford

House light goes down around our argument. My mouth corners creak with cake openings, old-timers’ black and white loop story. Preferred code. I’ve forgotten already the part and you watch like a junkie cut laser neat: wife wife wife. Echo makes the salted table inconsequential, the fruit bowl falls away, the render crack waits blind in the wall above the gas heater. I hold your hand and you squeeze me electric. The bed is white noise.

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Bildants

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Ronald Wilkins

At first citizens were fascinated to see how, when one automaton began to move a heavy beam or a plate of glass into position, others would be drawn to assist. It had been an acknowledged triumph for biomimetics—unlocking the behavioural code of Amazonian nest-building ants. The automata, the size of a small dog, with carapace and musculature modelled on ants, were produced by fiercely competitive corporations in rival cities. After tweaking the code, cohorts of the automata, known as bildants, engineered adobe houses to specification. Incorporating rocks, bricks, wood and glass, bildants constructed novel dwellings, as complex as termite mounds. Imitating tradesmen—omnipresent, constantly testing the integrity of their structures—they became more like us. In parallel, humans gradually adopted the behavioural traits of the bildants.

But who were the conquerers? What weaknesses passed on?
It was a golden age; there was great harmony within the city.
That was before the war.

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Thy will be done

Posted on August 1, 2016 by A D Harper

there will be videos of two of them together someone will get off on watching or the sound of synthiplastic rubbing or the sheen the hum the hands the feet we will send them round the world student travellers will sit next to them on the plane will drive them to your home you will go on skype with each other while you service them they will get kidnapped stolen waylaid there will be a variety of memes about them having electronic cigarettes afterwards there will be horror films debates about human rights special destruction rituals at obsolescence a cybernetic funeral after you have gently closed their eyes

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Human Co.

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Jefferson Navicky

Human Co. is filled, as necessary, with thin, near-torso-less bodies. Graceful arabesques falling from the oval thumbprint of the head. One must imagine the curve of the ribs, the splay of the back; even, to some extent, the span of the shoulders. So much of the body has been given to the stage.

Humans are posable dolls inhabited by egos that resist posing. This is not the case with Human Co. Members of Human Co. are supple, adaptable. Their soft bodies are malleable muscle masses, able to be controlled by the relaxed mind of the actor. Emotional and physical contortions of the greatest degree are easy for bodies so limber.

The last of their productions I saw was a discursive musical on the invention of gynaecological stirrups. The bodies reminded me of dancing pliers, pliers within pliers.

Afterwards we all, actors and audience, went back to our day jobs. Note: it would be pleasing, if only for a short time, to be a professional audience; not to laugh and clap on cue, but to contain multitudes and simply observe phenomena on stage.

On my desk is the card of the co-artistic director of Human Co. It includes his cell number and email and a drawing of the human form.

Human Co. is headquartered in an apartment somewhere in Brooklyn – I couldn’t tell you where; the car ride was too long – inside a white brick building that looks gray at night. There are a few garbage cans out front.

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Garage

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Anna Reed

Our new house is on the outskirts of the city: our apples are small apartment windows lighting up the country trees. Silence walks over our roof. At night, my husband works peacefully in the garage. I feed our new baby, counting his harried breaths by the sounds of the hammer on the wall. My husband sends a message: hope baby feeds better tonight. Do you want self-opening curtains? I bundle up the baby to watch him connecting wires, carefully, like origami, in the trees outside the kitchen. Did you know, he says in bed, when we’re on holiday, we can turn on the lights and television as if we’re in it but we’ll actually be somewhere else.

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Triptych

Posted on August 1, 2016 by S K Kelen

Sirens

Speed of light insomniac runs,
angry mantras burn the tongue,
falling masonry fire shock it’s over.
Lifetime ago anger grew unbearable
a leader’s words touched the spirit,
reading the texts elated: do this
for love and land, strike the heart,
avenge injustice. Old nightmare’s fury
proved accurate driving there (no turning back)
smuggle the steel cylinders to the basement.
Flashlights beam the rubble. Remote-pilot
assassin birds visit villages, shower rockets.
Flashlights beam the rubble.
Cold winds blow from angry hearts.


Robot X

No lightning bolts from my fist
today, nor dramatic transformations
human to machine and back,
my zigzag ceased at midnight
I was a killer machine
confessing badness to the moon
when my brain seized
and the fighting stopped
I resumed a peaceful life
among animals and plants.
but (no buts) robotic impulses
occasionally drive my actions
till the nervous system
reboots.


Sleep

Diluted by moonlight, industrial
strength sleep is not too deep
beyond what you imagine—
Ah to be in the crazed time and place
the music took us into space
and we saw flying saucers for real.
Before that it was rickety
metal and home rotting red bricks
the missions to the moon, vitamins
and transistor radios designed by mad scientists—
sudden pharmacopeia, precision
machines, hallucinatory night-art-3D
an endless supply of paperbacks,
all were good reason
to shoot rockets into the heart.

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whether the ghost is

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Catherine Vidler

demonic or divine
associated with the house
as real as he appears
constructed or not
strong or not
telling the truth or not
a good ghost advocating public justice
still up to its old tricks
true or false
empirically disproved
really active
going in the x or y direction
behind or in front
in video, photo, timelapse or photoburst mode
in a hollow state
a century old or more
continuing his life pattern
a product of cyclotomic polynomials
ever the authority of its own actions
attempting to warn the protagonist
truly an outside consciousness
still considered human
a legitimate ghost
actually there
registered
okay

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You and me x

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Oliver Driscoll

You and me x
some funny kidwho
grabbed hammer and hit

Music to my ears
anger anger anger angeranger
he keeps hitting that note

New season fanta
when duringthe talk
she wrote down interstitial

It was so clean when we arrived
we’ll never get it so clean again
I didn’t think it was that clean

I shouldn’t have had that
next time you’llknow
she’s about ready to leave really leave

You could have done more
yes

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