The End

Posted on February 1, 2016 by M C Hyland

Let me call you when I’m off work. The shirtless man sleeping on the church steps. The scar running laterally up his belly. Wanting the little spaces of freedom inside an absolute structure that flows between time and space. Your foot dragging in the river beside the boat. A little snag in thinking. How I finally learned my bra size. It’s about everything else. The oiliness of good coffee. What goodness might mean and whether it has relevance for this historical moment. Totally administrated. Rooms for thinking or for fucking in. I hold my desirability tentatively and with deep ambivalence. Fly me to the moon. Sound of something unseen being dragged outside. The way the market might want something. What you learn about your clothing once you wear it outside the home. Sweeping the rug into some state of newness. Like hands on your windpipe. Like cold hands inside you. The pride I took in my own peripherality. My stance of non-involvement in things like fame or belonging. How fast and small every movement was then. Counting the recessed lines of bricks and the cement windowsills. When my reputation might mean my paycheck. How you stood at the edge with your eyes all over everything. Kids with cameras. Wanting to be pressed down onto a couch or bed by a stranger’s nonsexual hands. Wanting to be held suspended. Even I can’t hear voices from elsewhere so well anymore. Even I fantasized walking as an approximation of freedom. Liberty always in process and never achieved. I said as a poet I am naturally shy. Archived all your bodily aches as though you might appeal to them later. As though these cast-iron buildings might have had some other fate than condos and flagship stores. Pale blue all the way upriver. Rest your head on the oil-smudged window. Wanting to be a string of small acts of care. Laughter from the street below. The eerie familiarity of the man in the coffeeshop. Language making a small despair in the middle of the day like a hole into which you might breathe. What kind of work did you think these poems would do for someone else. On the bedspread on the concrete floor I tried to make a space for something new.

Posted in THE END | Tagged

The End

Posted on February 1, 2016 by M C Hyland

We practiced wiping sweat from our necks. Every song reminds you of a person you once knew. Then the heat kicked on with much hissing and clangor. I had crafted a parasitic practice that transformed my paid labor into post-market froth. Was it a field or was it a city. I wanted to lie down at the edge. The breeze just before the train’s headlight appears. You were making yourself a foreign continent. Feeling around the blunt edges of history. But medieval women may not have been so submissive. Standing on the sidewalk surrounded by luggage. Do you worry about what happens to humor when language moves away from a body. Is this getting too repetitive I asked though I was not even halfway done. Made an argument about the congruence of Lancelots. The children. The children. The protective phone case bought a day too late. I’d promised someone today would end. But somehow we found ourselves in Queens. Falling behind in the assignments you’ve set for yourself. Preferring to repair rather than to replace. Your body is so seasonal. Jo said one was quiet and proper and one was a screaming wench. Fluffing the covers and turning on the fan. Trying a new stairwell but finding nothing nothing nothing. Here I will comment on the flexibility of the form. A model of the world or a model of the self. You were watching it all with your microscopic eye. Sometimes you slip back into 2007 for just a moment. Memory of a hotel bed & whatever the opposite of seduction might be. I was trying to get it all down into words. Movement had become a precondition for air circulation.

Posted in THE END | Tagged

Chloe Wilson Reviews Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Chloe Wilson

Hoard by Tracy Ryan
Whitmore Press, 2015

Breaking the Days by Jill Jones
Whitmore Press, 2015

These two slender and handsomely designed volumes of poetry are the result of the closely con-tested 2014 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, of which Tracy Ryan and Jill Jones were joint winners.

Continue reading →

Pages: 1 2
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged , ,

The End

Posted on February 1, 2016 by M C Hyland

Picnicked near the Don’t Insult The Witch sign. Broke the stove again. You learn a thing in one place and write it down in another. Wanting to get out into the world. Tight shoe or pregnancy. Here you are humming around the apartment and refilling various glass jars. When they enter the poem. Blurry & on the horizon. Who left these jackets by the stairwell. In the morning made of traffic and voices you sleep through hours of sunlight. Maybe this is a kind of diffuse epistolary novel. Smudge of paint on the keyboard. On deadline as a permanent state. On the wrong side of Fortuna’s wheel & brimming with dailiness. Dearest liberty having taken you. Everyone adjusting their scarves in the new season. I liked the openly boring ones best. How could you make a poem into a tiny room. Predictors included writing or thinking. The carbon monoxide monitor beeps. How the coffee seemed to move around inside you reshaping your body in tiny ways. Almost too gentle to count as an allusion. Lingered on. How can I tell you what the afternoon has done. Holding his daughter’s hand and looking into his phone. Still thinking about the problem of audience. Enthusiasm of a new friendship three drinks into the end-of-summer party. The word social indicates a certain kind of bar. To be at a certain place in life. What labor might mean to a given person. What justice might look like at fifteen or twenty or thirty or forty. How many times can I pull this one off.

Posted in THE END | Tagged

12 Poems from M C Hyland

Posted on February 1, 2016 by M C Hyland

I’ve always been interested in the question of ‘the personal’ or ‘the autobiographical’ as a category constituted by a fairly arbitrary set of boundaries — in some ways, most of the poetry I write is an attempt to think about what those boundaries entail and mean. I’ve been writing this series of short prose poems, all titled ‘THE END’, for almost three years now — I started the project a few months after moving to New York, and I suspect I’ll continue writing them as long as I continue to live here. The project started with a simple task: that of noticing things, and of writing them down as simply as possible. I’ve tried to put at least some of everything into this online chapbook, without over-determining the poems in any one direction: they’re full of what I’ve been reading, talking and hearing about, and what I’ve been feeling physically and emotionally, but as, I think, more of a core sample of ambient conditions than as an especially personal account.

M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End

M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End
M C Hyland: The End

I think of them as ‘my New York School poems,’ borrowing from that tradition’s interest in the first-person speaker. My favourite articulation of this New York School tradition is Bernadette Mayer’s idea of the ‘emotional science project’ — which might, in a way, be a good description of what I’m trying to do here. While these poems started as an attempt to find a form through which to think about all the affective challenges of living in New York and attending grad school after a long break in my educational history, they ultimately ended up taking me in a different direction — an attempt to think about the role of feeling in forming and re-forming an aesthetic and political consciousness. In these twelve poems, I’ve found myself in dialogue with a number of texts, institutions and individuals, including at least the following: Judson Church, the Delaware River, Jeff Peterson, Herbert Marcuse, Anthony Reed, Hannah Arendt, Aleijuan King, SoHo, the B train, Tara Menon, Nextdoorganics, Elizabeth Kolbert, the Center for Book Arts, “Bifo” Berardi, Lisa Gitelman, Beyoncé, Laura Brown, Ian Dreiblatt and Anna Gurton-Wachter, Sulai Sivadel, Luke Davies, Chris Kraus, Deborah Stein, (G)IRL, Citron Kelly, Naomi Extra, Fred Schmalz, Andy and Rashmi Grace, Laura and David Herlihy, Becca Klaver, S T Coleridge, Jo Livingstone, Celeste Langan, Claire Vaye Watkins, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Caolan Madden, Madeleine L’Engle, Coffee Foundry, Justin Timberlake, Ada Smailbegovic, Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, Sarah Schultz, John Milton, Nina Puro and Natalie Imbruglia.

Posted in CHAPBOOKS | Tagged

I’m with Stupid.

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Stephanie Christie

What surprises me most is being
coincidental. If we really believe
it’s the end, it doesn’t matter
how much this evangelism costs.

The economy’s shaking. His trolley holds
twenty kilos of rice, ten litres of water.
Everyone thought I was strange in Christchurch
then we got The Big One. Good luck, I said,
you’re going to need more water.

Such imperfection. It eats
what was recently purchased,
the high of salvation thin as old sheets.
Get the song between your teeth;
sound moves inside us then we move to let it.
Do it professional: put yourself to one side.
In hard times, sociopaths rise.

While you were crying you got snot in your eyes.
Her life story is her story, not her life.
The fierce stones of Greece
have gifted us democracy, so we argue
which never convinced anyone,
just made good television.

200ks per hour
gales take roofs. New all-you-can-fly ticket.
Government money for a sanctuary.
civil libertarians
my powers of apprehension
Each response to the challenge
of Self-Management falls on a continuum:
Productive to Absent.
One day, always having to be right
will be counted among the disabilities.

th end s in sight.
Thank god. The hard bit’s been knowing
I won’t be around to see how this turns out.
As one of the minor characters
(let’s face it) in this genre
I’m sure to be killed off
by a giant wave, one of those deaths
deep enough for a close-up
a snatch of fading breath, some tears.
If it’s not happening
we don’t have to do anything
and if it’s fucked we can’t do anything
we flip between these extremes.

nature vs. narrative
A tale carries the idea
to the mind through the soft body.
Talk in miracles, smoke in the car,
a tangle of weeds at the throat.
There’s no charming the oppressor.
Give up the myth of reversible power.
The lord gives and he takes.
Find other ways to be safe.

Black tattoos on a white, white face.
How beautiful the deliberate lie
they had time to work on it. Letters
stich and drop. Kiss me like a bad garden,
the lazy mural that lasts for years.
I don’t need any evidence.

At the end of the earth we learn to dance.
Your arms get tangled in your legs.
I’ve suffered a lot but then who hasn’t, he said.
Though I’ve watched since it was a dark mess
the lifting light shows a shift
when I look
look back
I can feel the click.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Dark Heart

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Ken Bolton

I look in here—this
notebook—& see
the notes for the

last review I did,
& note—that I am
about to write another.

Tho I would rather
write something else.
I whistle

bop a bit
try not to think
of the

vast tide of crap
the exhibition represents,
check

the sky: sere,
grey, pale up
one end of the street,

almost Neapolitan
at the other:
pale, but a distinct

blue,
with some dark smudged stain
drifting over it,

much closer to
than the far blue behind—
blown,
in those paintings,
from a volcano nearby—
almost like flak

in the old movies.
(Goya’s mantilla,
& parasol—

& the rumour
that nothing lasts forever)

#

It makes the sky darker too
an atmosphere
not a backdrop

#

a small figure, further down
Hindley Street
is crossing the road—I recognise

the coat
as much as the figure—
but who?

#

It is about time
I had a drink with Crab.
About time

for a lot of things. What
to do about this
art?

I whistle ‘You’re My Thrill’,
the beginning—but, whistling it,
I end up, as always,

with the ‘Perry Mason Theme’
(I think)
(it is

so long
since I have actually heard it)
Instantly recognisable

when I was a kid.
I thought I didn’t like it—now it
seems I do
or something
cousin to it.
‘You’re

My Thrill’. Then
‘Couldn’t It Be You’—
I wonder what

the connection is —
the key, the pattern,
somehow relates?

Its
calming effect
when I whistle it.
So,
resignation, ‘getting on with things’.
Hate to turn

a beautiful tune
into a tic, a
neurotic response

tho again, luckily,
it is only the first few bars
I remember this way,

the rest of the song
is safe,
unretrievable.

When I play it
I smile.
This

art then,
what to do about it?
Inflated in scale, naive,

‘done’ when its theme is recognised
— like slogans
for a moral position.

As if the viewer
should tick a
box, in approval,

& move on
perhaps ‘liking’ it
on their facebook page.

(their ‘mental’ facebook page)

Does anybody do that,
like it that much

that they could bother to register
this vote (?) their
‘shared concern’?
I doubt it.

But then
I am whistling the wrong tune.

I read in Denton Welch
(the Journals)
of some gypsies he hears

coming home from the pub
singing ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’
1946

My father used to sing that song.
I love it.
The opening notes

of the John Coltrane version.

My father
sang it often enough
for me to know the words.

Denton, near the end—

“Chopin pours over me from the wireless.
Nothing but this small picture will be left
of the day. Many years after, people may
be able to read then say, ‘He was cold; he
watched the sunset; he ate a chocolate,’ but
nothing more will be left to them.”

#

Today I worried happily,
wrote stuff, ‘asseverated’,
was alive.

It was supposed
to get cold—but it didn’t.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

A Northern Winter

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Laurie Duggan

For Ken Bolton (who found it)


1

bitter gall in afternoon light
stroboscopic beech
‘we will shortly be arriving at / Rainham’

a stationmaster
spits the whistle

Tate Modern: Delaunay (Robert) and Severini, Munch and Bonnard, Jonas Mekas’ films. Gerhard Richter.

Before me (from the members’ room), St Pauls and the Millenium Bridge. I will walk that way towards Lamb’s Conduit (via Shoe Lane, Holborn and Red Lion Streets), for Peter Riley and Peter Philpott at The Lamb.

a glass, seemingly of port, at the window of The Dolphin
(this sad enterprise of notation)

The Dolphin opposite The Enterprise.
I’d rather be fish than foul.

2

Today I sit downstairs in the office, looking out the back window to our garage and wall and, above it, the last few yellow leaves against a (rare) blue sky.

I see the sage plant beneath the window and immediately smell (purely imaginary) sage.

3

What troubles me about Jackson MacLow’s methods is the mere thought of method. It seems essential that these works enunciate their principles of construction i.e. primary text, letter selection and secondary text. But is the knowledge of this supposed to bolster our appreciation of the result? If so are we admiring it because it fills the brief or are we admiring it for what it is? The two things are not necessarily compatible. MacLow realised at a certain point that there was no such thing as the purely aleatory, that the first principles were already an aesthetic decision.

 
4 (Three musical interludes)

i

Charlie Watts, dapper in Hatchards bookshop
a South London accent that may have been worked on

ii

in my head, the
Horrie Dargie Quintet play
‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’

iii

I’d always hated Gary Shearston singing ‘I get a kick out of you’, but suddenly in the student bar, Roehampton, it all, especially the violinist, sounds good.

5

The snow from two nights back hasn’t melted. Interesting to see which plants seem to have survived – lavender, thyme, oregano – that you might have expected to wilt. Tarragon dies off naturally, the rosemary hasn’t really got going.

6

a white oblong of sun on the bedroom wall

time to get up

Tonight, a reading in London which I’m not going to. That’s three London events I’ll have missed this week. Two because of weather, one, inertia.

7

nothing in this drawer

a tangle of script

‘snowbound’

I feel less ‘at home’ here than I did a year ago. But would I feel ‘at home’ anywhere else?

 
8

If I have always envisaged work as music why do I still fear abandoning a patina of sense? The poems on the surface are ‘documentary’, but documents themselves don’t ‘last’. We don’t read the poets (for the most part) for insights into the contemporary (though they ignore the past at their own peril).

9

speckled lights from Christmas
fake chandeliers

out there it’s winter still
the bulbs in public gardens unopened

I decided today, walking through Canterbury, that what I feel now is a kind of blankness, a nothingness which seems neither bad nor good, neither exhilarating nor terrifying. It is maybe ‘despond’. I need to emerge from it to write again, or if I write again I will emerge from it. I’m not certain which of these is true.

Now, I suppose, is the moment I stop being an observant tourist and become an ignorant local. Yet at the same time Australia appears an even odder construction. I mean I love it, aspects of it at least, but from here it’s a peculiar thing. The fires that I know much about make it to the UK news, as does (as ever) ‘shark attack’.

I belong to a space that nobody here will recognise.

10

spring bitter
and bitter spring
at The Sun

shadows on a page, the rise and fall of breath
striations in an enormous fireplace

marking time
marking, re-
marking

‘Jim Thompson
never materialised
again’

 
11

The Fitzroy Tavern, Charlotte Street, last seen in, was it, 1992 or 1987? The ‘writers and artists’ bar is downstairs, but I stay up, ‘not writing’, trying to remember the name of the Italian restaurant I’m supposed to be at in half an hour.

telephones that ring like telephones

the ghost of Julian Maclaren-Ross shuffles past

‘a violent hash smoker shakes a chocolate machine’

12

teasel
the burr of the plant, dried,
a device for carding wool

leaves that jump (dead ones) with a sound like raindrops
small greenish birds
an orange butterfly (fritillary?)

now I know the yew, found in churchyards, is poison to livestock

13

and now it’s daylight saving

when will the scaffolding come down?

and what place for this scaffold
in the age of interruption?

miniature daffodils under the tarpaulin
a sign (‘The Sun’) on its side;
inside, from the rafters,
hops, still green from summer

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Holiday

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Melody Paloma

the gut of a rock catches sea murmur in my throat
with swimmer’s ear and something else
high tide brings up dark patches where
there must be colour or
maybe white like these ones
dried up on the shore

wind will change direction more than twice, heavy
giving way for morning wattle, counting colours
time to consider what might be native

at the picnic tables a group or several
with plastic glasses
seem the happiest yet, settled in dusk

camp in the scrub in the overflow
try to switch off thinking forward

consistent range spreads even with
that green I can never pin
wallaby by the desert peas
distended and legs up

we’ve driven by twice
searching for the mark

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Wall Wisdon

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Linh Dinh

Since all prices are essentially cutthroat,
I steal or beg, which is also stealing.
Paying for a short ride, I cross country.
I forge checks, credit cards and barcodes,
Swap price tags, chat, eye and flirt
With the cashier to distract her. In love,
I also steal, beg and lubricate my
Grossness with measured ejaculations.
Paying for one life, I try to live several.

No Goldman Sachs, I’m just a nickel thief,
And like George Soros, I toss back a dime
After each sweaty killing. Leash led
By providence, I embody his plan.
I’ve been imprisoned, but that’s
Because God wanted me to chill.
Sometimes it’s good to go to jail.
Poking him, I accept his spanking.

Like a monastery, jail’s a place to
Burp up and chew over your maker.
A man isn’t man until he’s cornered,
Thrashed then caged, preferably
On the most slanderous charges,
Just so he can grasp, finally, fate’s
Funkiest form of mercy. It’d be good
To have this wall wisdom, though,
Without being enclosed by walls.

It’s also good for a man to beg,
With his eyes bathetic and paws
Cupped together in supplication for
Something that will only come too late
To be more than a sick skit of desire.
Futility is the meaning of prayer.
After much praying, the fool wakes.
Locked together, like this, we rock,
Singly or in pairs, mostly singly,
Until we’re let out, also singly.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Scenic Overlook

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Michael Nardone

1.

Nardone


2.

Nardone


3.

Nardone

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Spare a Thought

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Chris Edwards

I thought it was raining. I said on the phone oh god
it’s my face and an involuntary avalanche of motion
called him and he picked up. But it fell into place.

I was shaky at the beginning. At that moment I got a text
and couldn’t cooperatively countenance my ex, understand?
I felt that he was going too deeply into dark knowledge.

I drove the route of the night thought, yes. You are right
about all things. When I make my way to the bus stop as usual
you are a doctor and I should feel and act. I swore

I would repeat that mistake. At that moment I got a text
inviting me explicitly to step behind bars. It’s last drinks
for wouldn’t you know. I spare a thought, don’t go.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Katun River

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Cassie Lewis

I.
This story wants to be told in bed. Its breathless subject
stays awake but it is darker than us both and we are frightened.
You wear your toughness like comedy.
Women love the caveats, to- fix-you sadness.

Collecting clusters of stars, they draw succor from a void.
White noise: hum loudly and you won’t hear a thing
as horror rips you and leaves rivers.
Tremendous tides coil in. My mind will not let me see: look past us.

Stare down explanations, shut out feeling. The story must happen the hard way,
without hurting anyone living.
Love is not safety: the desert keeps whispers under.
I am lifted into the arms of love and held there but know love
makes a plank bridge over the Katun river.

II.
Women love a project.
To display their stunning reel of beauty: but you know her beauty fades
because it was never hers. She staggers with this burden. Oh beauty,
what are you doing, stupid?
Piss on it to learn it.
Revoke it or trust its total waits in Heaven.

It is a mistake to teach children that the world is simple.

III.
Tomorrow I shut down.
Don’t stop me. Be sad. Breathe in.
What if we do nothing.
Feelings are not facts. I need facts. Feelings are facts.
We cannot stay here at the tipping point.
We cannot stay here at the tipping point
Undressing in stop motion.

IV.
Rushing sounds like blood inside my mind’s gates.
Everything is happening at once now that
you chose

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

pipiwai

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Vaughan Rapatahana

kua mate tetahi atu he totara kei mua e kata te ra
[another totara has died before the day laughs]


as morning pokes its sullen fingers
t h r o u g h
sentinel clouds,

we trace liminal
the scurfy scrub
whimpering to itself
like a wounded dog.

the karanga is a piano
trilling umpteen notes;
pullulating the penumbra
in acid flashback;

a cascade staircase
that climbs all over us,
before our ears can think.

inside the scabrous palings
we phalanx ourselves
through the footsore legion
who bestow us forward
like magi.

all heads defrocked & doleful,
as karakia births the dawn.


[karanga – Māori – call onto marae/ karakia – Māori – prayer.]

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Provo

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Michael Nardone

Wherefore my glorious
Template unseen
Sent before discount etymolygies
Rid there of custom
Commentary not confounded
Chloroform refers with alertness
Behold my perjury hands
Command essential domestic activity
Scattered by the price of liberty
Judgment seat such legacy fends
Faults of man reign days bask
Inundated with the concrete spasm
Resolutely twanged
Grab him by their handle
Fury cluck interpretation thereof
With what gift I admit
The time is arrived our ear
Is appointed if they say earth move
Earth makes move mountains
Rise up and fall
Upon that city it is written

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Historical Winter

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Emily Stewart

The composition of any given aura is a painterly
mix. So I’ll choose the shadow colours grey and
pixelate. However the cold comes this year I will
wear that same grey chorus and my own corona
—should I imagine—will be as rich with matter
as a furnace. Help, I’m seriously thinning. Not
in body but metaphysics. Seriously pale in the
main street and in bed—surfing a thin line—
in the blanket—heat—and thinner in the water.
At the gallery I slipped one out. All over I’ve taken.
This ability to fetish is downplayed—black behind
that sheer—and where a caption could emphasise
percentage grey in style. Trolleys,
automotive parts, the history of photography
and film, now in union throats and disclaimers plus
that famous sliced eye. This fetish travels—and has
to do with how we move—skeletal, adrenal
and related systems. The days are seriously slow
stereo—why not adding in a socket—for the old gas tube.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Camellias

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Anne Elvey

A canvas stretches beneath the colours of camellias
and rain. A child has left. The heads are petals

tucked crimson around gold—the stamens, pollen-
thick. A parent lives. Dropped from the stem

they fall intact. A spouse is sutured and well.
Each is a basket held, by those grey brackets

that hid the bud. My plans are undone. Detached
the heads rest on concrete not far from a scatter

of gumnuts and my exhalation of regret. I have
wearied of care. A wattlebird will make its home.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Getting Old

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Reihana Robinson

You make a sound as if to say—Land Ahoy
A cabin boy claiming first sight
A ship nearing the oh so distant shore
Magpie rattle in the shushing pines
Then the trill of laughing warblers
Thin bones with all the trimmings
Getting about with a stick tap taps
Another day getting short
You make a small noise like clearing
a throat or a twig cracking underfoot
Here comes the night frame
You know why children do not want
to grow up
You adjust your spectacles
You adjust your backside on the hard
wooden seat as the seagull settles
on the wooden rail enchanting or
infuriating You make a
sound to unwelcome the
gull It looks at you with perfect
eyesight and youthful pleasure
A splendid red beak and legs
Eyes oh so round
and perfectly drawn
Ignores your gruff exhalation
And you are yet to tinker with imperfection
And to leave a laden heart

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

a trainspotter-journalist’s demise

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Stu Hatton

To dedicate oneself to writing contra the daytime empire equates to working five jobs, to be rewarded only with endless grime upon your thinking, & no pay.
          Any coin that falls is not likely to be legal tender, & leads you not to the source but to a sorry luncheon in a ditch. And alongside that pollen-stinking path by the disused railway are those silos jammed with pulped weekend liftouts. While walking, you are hesitant to greet the folksy, beanie-wearing ex-husband (he may well be the one wearing a wire). You refuse his offer of raw water, noting that the flooded train carriages form linked aquariums.
          Meanwhile, in some cordoned elsewhere, an unseated mind fades a shade of greenish white. Hush money crosses the tinted room, & futures markets smart as the meeting at the bureau is drowned out by the sighs of the birds outside. The dead are contented.
          You always wanted to become a translator, or a diplomat (& what is translation, if not an act of diplomacy?) Your dreams saw you grafting markers upon the century’s over-painted array. Yours was the drab game-board of unspoken geometries, yours the sword to carve the wax atlas.
          ‘Success’ may take many forms, but this, in the end, is not one of them. The thought strikes you: may as well’ve put it all on a dartboard! What kind of ugly mosaic led you here, after all?
          Grading into obscurity, the sun shrivels against some grim awakening that seems notionally yours.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Bricks of Myrtle

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Nick Harrison

My body tears apart
Upon its peripheral side
I get to thinking

About the ghosts that knock politely
Whilst I fix my demented cereal
Brush my stockpile hair
Stare at the vicious bricks

All I can see on the red faces
Is how wondrous you always look
With your hair tied back neatly
How much I love you and
That sweet manufactured smile

And how my Hyde hands
Committed sweet suicide
Before my bloodshot eyes
Could even move in
REM

Blast love
I never feel this cold and alone
In the afternoon

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

ICE SHELF (02- Flying in cloud theory)

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Chris Holdaway

Holdaway

Any altitude not found in the set
Of altitudes of the world. A gap in the mountain as cloud
As mirage in the cold desert glittering
Pages of travel magazines. Peacetime sweep. To input correct
Errors into a twelve-&-a-half-thousand foot
Computer system of air, called data collapse. That logged
Some twenty-thousand Novembers before I
Crash directly into the paper
-white path. There was no training given for
Disintegration. Just networking. Fuselage meet skin
& white slopes of Mt Erebus & wrecking
Slopes of economic/statistical power laws. We get
A prototype for snow. Tender
Predecessor of hyperexcited
Tissue on impact. This recycling this lifecycle. No.
Just the right amount of widespread order
To keep disorder, balanced at critical;—enough
Little hourglass tumbles every so
Often to stave off the really big downward tails. So flight left
With tickets for empty seats. Business as usual. Aluminium burning
Warship on the side of a volcano in the Antarctic. The only game
In town.

It was usual for no survivors to be seen
Camping in wing wreckage—quick to assemble wind
& guywire piles of snowy sand.
The orchestrated remains are meticulous
In their record keeping;—tissue immaculately detailed no matter
What dusty vapour or drenching fire isolated it.
In the language of thermodynamics Information survives
Like cockcroaches crawl through nuclear war like static is always
Seething . . . Fuselage of human grease turns
The little water of this dry ice earth black. Meat stew
Of polar clothing, and gulls help at identifying corpses
When radar lets them down
—lowers macabre iron cargo nets to remove the human element.
Unfazed. A crash site whipped up in no time (in parentheses)
Always already prepared earlier . . . suitable for the uncertain.
The pedestal more famous than
The person—the ice as good
As ignoring all search-&-rescue efforts.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

culture afloat

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Ella O'Keefe

this torch requires an evaluation
flash of soft politician gums
hatless creampuff wearing sunglasses to the inquiry
pecuniary metric conversions
of a scout hall footage

choose 4 nights on the celebrity solstice
where a tasteful program of classic dramas
will play out as the vessel
grazes Balkan harbours
lining of the ocean
with swipe-tag aesthetics

meringue nests with the director
deposited on the helipad
ticket stubs on mimeograph paper
are post-consumer foods, junk boutiques
(commerce making do)
the dialogue continues
after the credits roll

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Coalesce

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Quinn Eades

I am already dead. Already, I am dead.
I am gone. Already, I am gone.
You are reading this when I am gone.

Dis. Integrate.

Already I am earth ash leaf caterpillar,
the tomato between your teeth.

Already I am ink on the page the bottom
of your boot tepid water from a sun
soaked tap, wood.

Dis. Integrate.

Already I am dust mote that cannot fit
inside itself, small parts flung out and
around and under, blood shiver, glass shard,
prism throwing light at the yellow kitchen walls.

Already I am dug down with a sign skewered
above me in the soft dirt my children dug out
earlier: this is the grave where I lay, where I
lie, where I am folded inside a pillow case.
I am my own terrier tucked in, dead from
the green syringe the vet brought to our house
at eleven am. My arm shaved.
Anaesthetic put in. I am the dream of dirt
and bone. I am put down. I am put under.
I am touching root systems, gravel, earthworm.

I am carried by me and my three year old
who cradles my head while I take
the weight of my body.
My eyes refuse to close.
My tongue keeps pushing out
between the loose points of my teeth.

Dis. Integrate.

I am gone. Already, I am gone.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged

Talking English

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Phillip Hall

The Gulf’s ancient tongues are hobbled
by inherited trauma, gene-crackers

sadistically scabrous and burgeoning
in the remembered fluency of wire-tipped

stockwhips and all those manhandled
civilisers of a splendid frontier’s orders.

And though munanga were not to prosper
in these mirages of pasture and surface water,

where crocs and distance preyed in circles,
a momentum remained to infest

and disturb, to see barbed-wire fencing
and scorched stations spread like gravel

where barefooted dancers once sung
a bounty pressed intimately in ochre

and law. And so sacred trees were cut
dead, bones gathered in caves and girls

stolen as pilot were hobble chained
as sex slaves in a waste land dragged

to heel by Martini-Henry carbines
that at this critical moment were talking

English.

Posted in 72: THE END | Tagged