plan(e)t

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Siwar Masannat




that is to say, cells. the small of light bouncing off one lone long hair from your cheek—that is to say
our membranes, the very
operational closure of

the system. here is a bat’s long ear and animal
skin—know that when spallanzani leaned in
to study flight, he scorched the bat’s ear.





am i your wolf, an evolution in which we taste
the tart of sumac to feel its crystal edge?

that is to say, the plan(e)t
is at once thirsty and wet—that operational
closure of the system, the small of light dying slow on one lone
arm sprouting hair—that is to say, membrane, long fracture.




as i say wolf you must
know that means kin, i will carry you.




so would you kiss those very
lonely wolves against a crucial step in early
evolution where genetic progress long shuns normative
progress ?




a system that is to say such a boundary
always has a double
function—that lone hair on your cheek in long seducing
wolf loneliness out of me against a crucial step in the internal
compartment of grief.




that is to say, we are specialized in plan(e)t
deaths, repeat in the small light oozing from our lone long hands.




beloved, know i will carry your trouble as if it is mine.




a simultaneous separation from and exchange

with the environment could be as death-ridden as a cut flower
drooping slow onto the cool windowsill.




that is to say progress, whereas the orchid refuses to sprout showy in fear of a loneliness, in
fear of a cruel singularity in this house:

long plant boundary must have been a crucial step in the openness of my tongue against your nose
hair, that is to say a wolf, a bat’s ear, that is
to hear that a bat’s fear is real, that dog’s hiss
at spallanzani’s hand—slick—reaching to show once again how
tadpoles grow a new tail.

that is to say, as easy as a mild chicken stew.




the establishment of a lone, long boundary :

the us military (that contagion) once sought to weaponize bats’

echolocation, their smooth flight.
to ‘minimize collateral’, they had said.




who is to say the orchid snubs the gardenia’s eager flowers?

there, a plan(e)t romance—as if to say nervous system as criterion for whose love.




this wrist of yours is caught in my eye
in a swift, soft flick (you are readjusting
your little watch, instrument of time)

and so i reach for the orchid’s root, its
gesture to spiral out.




a pale lone pack hacks away at something cellular

to establish long boundary, membrane—




did spallanzani’s hand tremble as he caught
a hint to progress in a small bat’s ear?

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

At the Grave of Te Mānihera, Tokaanu

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Michael Mintrom

Dawn light catches steam mist
rising through tree and bush, floating
over front lawns, vacant lots.

We wait for the ski rental place to open.
The korimako and tui make morning song.
By sailing ship, by foot

Te Mānihera, you journeyed far
before strangers placed your bones
in this church yard

under an engraved marble slab —
‘martyred in the service of Christ’.
Walking in your black suit

burning with the Holy Spirit
Kereopa at your side,
you stopped at every village, Taupō

to Turangi, reciting the Beatitudes,
keeping faith, heavy of heart, fearing death.
On Route 41, cars and trucks whoosh

up to Taumarunui, the Western Bay.
Year to year I’ve shot through here
not knowing the sins of this land.

A stagecoach appears. You step out,
teeth missing,
dried blood on your face.

We hongi, share breath.
You smell of forest, warm earth.
I feel the bones in your suit jacket.

When they axed you down,
nothing was resolved.
But, in time, ways of thinking changed.

On this crisp morning, ancestors stand
with us, life and death embrace.
We scoff meat pies, slurp coffee.

These journeys and leaps
of faith, of language, of world view
take us further than ships can sail

faster than cars flash
down the Desert Road.
Beyond the red roof

and cream walls of this wooden church,
Mount Pihanga rises, cloaked in green.
The moment fills with peace.

Te Mānihera, you believed in miracles,
saw what’s precious.
Holding you in mind

I see differently
Tokaanu, these roads,
a day skiing Whakapapa.



* Te Mānihera, a Māori Christian missionary, and a would-be peacemaker, was a chief of the Maruwharanui tribe
of Taranaki in 19th century Aotearoa New Zealand. In his final journey, Te Mānihera, accompanied by Kereopa, went
to make peace with the Tuwharetoa tribe of southern Lake Taupō. But the Tuwharetoa leaders wanted vengeance for
deaths of their people in Taranaki. On entering Turangi on 12th March 1847, Te Mānihera and Kereopa were ambushed.
Kereopa died instantly from a musket wound; a wound to Te Mānihera was non-fatal. Surrounded by those who would
shortly kill him with an axe, Te Mānihera sang his own death song (or waiata poroporoaki). Moved by the song, the
Tuwharetoa chief requested Te Mānihera sing it again so they could memorise it before finishing him off. Weeks after
the killings, the people of Tuwharetoa felt remorse, converted to Christianity, and established a teaching program
that evolved into a Christian summer camp near Tokaanu. The summer camp program survived more than a
hundred years.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

rent free

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Xiaole Zhan

I’ve been living in the atrium of somebody’s heart // there are seats here // like at the movies // my face glows from the screenlight like a thousand phones to the sky // at sunset // there are cobwebs here // rust // mothdust // insects that tick time forward in the wet dark // butterflies, butterflies // like a middle school crush // I’ve been here for a long time // the lost months smell like earth and // I’ve been hiding from the landlord // I’ve even started a garden // new trees like candlelight along the spine // leaves that will open green and starry like // dragonwings // and blossoms so stubbornly coloured that they burn red even in // the bodied dark // sometimes the room is wounded // with light // knives of white like // stars // pinning our wrists to the sky // and the voices come to me low and boomy like // an ear to somebody’s chest or // cello music // or mildewed eyes // at a nightclub // and there are chalices of liquor // ruby-coloured // like pain // and the glass from the ceiling weeps // like glitter // oh // my chapel // oh // my love dove // tell me that I am an orchid held between two hands // like a prayer // tell me that the cigarettes light us up from the inside // like lanterns // baby // tell me that the champagne will be clear and silverbeaded // tell me that the stories will be tensionless // tell me that the atlassed skies will fall into the sea in deafening applause // tell me that the libraries will be empty pillars of joy // tell me that those kids will always be running aflight up twenty flights of stairs and // their swollen lungs will always be wings too large in their warm bodies and // they will always be there on the roof with their fat black hearts // killing time // high enough for gravity to kill // baby // I’ve been here for too long // the lost moths smell like earth and // their bodies are furred // on the doorstep // of my old flat // baby // I’ve always been here // for too long // I’ve been hiding from the landlord // I’ve even started a garden // baby // let’s be ordinary people // together // baby // tell me to stay // stay // stay

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Who Is It Who Fails The Test of Suburban Propriety So Completely?

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Chris Vasantkumar

—Here
come in under the tablecloth with me,
trefoil and dandelion spur. You,
soft-bladed violet and humming sting-
less native bee, slip inside too.

Beneath this humid hum-
an penumbra
this green
is itself already anthropic: a base

Relief, a carpeted maquette,
a hillside coaster slipped
between these jotted greyscale dwellings
and nature’s marrow, one
crewcut lawn at a time, one tiled
drive, one retaining wall, one storm drain.
Until there intervenes

A single small domain
of lion’s tooth unfettered and canker-wort,
monk’s head, witch-gowan and pissenlit,
of flaxen cities crowned
on globose pinheads.
Whose is it? Who is it

Who fails the test of suburban
propriety so completely?
Here he is, tethered,
shifting from phenomen-
ology to pharmacopoiesis
on this circuit, asking

His phone what calamity
might befall the dog if he eats this this-
tle, his eyes
stretched taut across our infrastructure’s tensile skin:
flora, macadam, detritus,

skeleton pipes and orchards,
conduits, clotting lipids.
We have remade this world
even the parts
we don’t think of as ours,

We don’t stay out
of the valley
below Richmond
even if we seem to leave it to the black snakes,
the burnweed and the jacaranda.
But listen:

To the water
outwitting our sentences
one beachfront patio at a time.
To the sand in cosmic teaspoons
besetting our waterholes and gas tanks.

To the sounds
gone ahead unheard on a dead world or
one with red sky only &
small things plotting,
abiding, or departing
in the soil the sough

And sizzle of small rocks against
larger ones, no pennants
for the wind ’s teeth to comb
upon this airless hillside, how would.
You describe

This hexapod orchestra
its oboed saws and fricatives,
its grassy shawms & sighs
expelled from occluded orifices and faces
to one who never had such as ears?

Here we made the rocks that cried
and unmade them—
remember?
We are figments

Of the earth’s slow changes,
we pareidolias of the continents’ subductive
self-erasures: they shiver.
Stretch their backs
with the thought of us.
We are oil
for something’s future

And then the world,
a pit picked clean

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

7 month sleep regression

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Pip Smith

a tiredness like a concrete boulder
grinding the optic nerve. the ayes have it.
the green eyes of potatoes glowing in the dark.

outside the window: leaves move
like fingers of the dead. waving, drowning,
possums rumble in the undergrowth.

a wasp is trapped in our house. it catches
itself in floorboards glazed with yoghurt
the twins flung from their spoons and knows

we’re all under house arrest. the charge: failure
to get a unicorn before brushing spider-man’s teeth
and now he’ll never play with me again.

remember: how spider-man lifted his t-shirt
and held his baby brother’s lips to his nipple.
try to forget: how we laughed.

strange: the backs of my children’s heads;
the pink rosebud of a wiped anus; its automatic
peristalsis, like an alien mouth wanting suck.

breastfeeding makes my bones feel hollow
and I haven’t pissed in days. they say birds
are all that’s left of dinosaurs, but I know

dragons are dinosaurs who fed their young
until they lifted off this glaring earth
and flew straight for the slumber of myth

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

the coldest year of the rest of my life

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Chelsee Morris

The college class I’m closest to remembering is the one where we listened to scientists weep over a list of extinct Hawaiian birds. I don’t remember the color of the walls or the feeling of the girl whose knees touched mine under the table flinching as smog blurred the sun from our windows. When I imagine that day there is no one but me, surrounded by bleached white forests, songless, petrified, feathers stuck in my teeth.

Another memory I almost have— my professor taking us to the shore and pressing our ears to the smooth stones and bottle shards puddled there. It was beautiful, the snarling rumble of the lake half-full of fish we couldn’t eat. I don’t remember how I did that semester, or how the storms felt kinder then. I don’t remember the hope or the fear or the way the snow went up to my knees when I was a child and in the summers there were more caterpillars than the world had jars and the border between us and the soil beneath was so thin, so fine.

Here’s what I do remember.

There will be life. New life. Strange life. It will crawl out of the mud of my bones, my neighbor’s bones, the bones of every one of us who survive on melting margins; the tiny bones of island birds, the bones of rotting riverbeds, of all the tuskless elephants, of every sunken factory and our earth— our lonely giant of impossible birth— will turn long after the stars go dark.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Elegy for the World and George Floyd and All His Successors

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Ross Gillett

Time seems to be toxic. Or the times
perhaps. The sky’s no longer good for us
and staying warm and staying clothed are crimes
we’re born to. And of course the obvious
reverse applies. We’re no good for the sky
and our being born at all’s a sort of threat
to everything. The world’s allergic. My
presence and yours, my friends, are dead set
dangerous miracles. And we are death
to one another. Dare a touch of colour
and here’s a knee to put an end to breath,
a living blue one-sided fatal collar.
The times are toxic. Time’s nine parts despair
and one part anger. Time is the stopped air.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Exultations upon your absence

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Kate Arden

My god, I am so glad I did not marry you. I have never been happier to not be married to someone. To not be someone’s wife. I wake up every day singing Glory Glory Hallelujah, today I’m not your wife! I correct my students—it’s Miss! Not Mrs.—no near misses today! I turn to the empty pillow beside me and—oh hell, no I don’t! I don’t stare longingly at any spaces anymore—they’re not empty to me, Miss freedom fries and a shot of cold air! Glory be! Praise the lord! I awoke this morning unhitched! And tonight, when I go to sleep, I will dream only dreams enough for me. I mean, hot damn how unwedded am I? Is there a less married maiden than me? Unbridled nor brided, homeward and abounding! Christ almighty, hear my resounding rejoicery!

Is there a freer woman in this world than the one who kept the cat you hated?

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Valour

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Anders Villani

If he were angrier, it would be better
for them. She would like that more.
Want him in a way she can’t anymore.

They can’t be in the car anymore. Camp
in an empty lot beside a football oval off the highway
a few hours north of Melbourne.

Black cockatoos laugh at sunset.

At 4 a.m., a car whips in. Gravel fireworks, high
beams catching the apple-green tent fly. He imagines

they can see him. Silhouetted, as his toes
steal glances at her heels pumiced
smooth by seabed. The lovers—

frenzied in that focused, eloquent, ice way.
She trusted that psycho who pranks her at work
threatens him

threatens to rape his kids—
she ate his come. Lent him four grand.

And she won’t loan him? Won’t trust him? Is she going to
shit why’d they take this exit?

Boot in the door if the toilet’s locked.
Go on the ground. Go on the ground, dog.

Where’s his pipe? It’s not under the seat and if she doesn’t
find it in ten seconds. Where’s that fifty bucks?

Awake now, she holds him. He holds
the wrench from the vestibule. A man who longs to run
clean as boiled water

gums rust off the wrench head. So many addicts
roam in couples like birds, he thinks,
outside sadness, retooled for murder.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Triptych with Oranges

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Shey Marque
i
The valley cambered as much as hollowed between hills that let us come here as strangers dropping flesh around planted fields, a containment where the orchard coughed up oranges, forsaken fruit nobody picked. One by one they fell, each swollen ovary inspired from a single blossom, & rolled downhill, co-locating at the corner of the rusted steel-wire fence, like a fermenting neon arrowhead bringing our attention to that point on the river where it held the coat a leafless tree was trying to pull under.


ii
You always said neon when you meant luminescent, started painting watercolour trees on cardboard back when you were single & deep, working away in the East. You came home stung by the colour orange & exhausted ironwood jungles. Woods separated you from the street – its names, eyes, spit & fur, the cluster of man passing, playing. I remember sitting beside you at the Blackbutt table, dining on glow, blood moon crashing into the house, you licking it from the polished blade of a knife.


iii
We crossed over the main road in the suburb’s south, passing its broken tables on the verge, its row of never-opened windows. The smoke-wracked air stung even our spit as it left our mouths. You obsessed over there not being enough names for orange, how each related back to edible things – apricot, tangerine, salmon. Hear the rainwater in the gully beside the roadworks, how it sounds like the sea, I said it only to distract. You coughed, lifted a traffic cone & held it to your ear, nodding.
Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Speech patterns

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Natalie Bühler

When I open my mouth,
I speak mountains, crags tearing
at the corners of my lips.
Each sentence wraps, like twilight fog,

around Mount Rigi
missing her lakes, wondering
when we started making history
out of anything but granite.

The choices we pronounced
grew roots through soil
reaching into calcified grottos,
dripped from stalactites to stalagmites,
ran down mint-coloured rivers
and ended up as glittering stones
for sub-alpine children
to twist their tongues around.

Now, on flatter terrain, my fricatives
no longer touch the uvula,
so I cultivate wild garlic
in my glottis, glacial erratics

rolling off my alveolar ridge.
Elderflowers bloom on my tonsils
in a September spring: my name
has a new melody, I am more

than an Umlaut – stroking spruces
with my tongue, I press them
to the front between my teeth,
their obstruction producing the sound

of a Föhn storm sweeping the forest.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Dead Dad Club

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Becca Wang

The picture glints with the summer of 2008.

Paling behind us the sky, a war waged between sea and God. It doesn’t end. It won’t.

That shirt he’s wearing, the one with the navy flags on the back. Nautica—
he knew.

Persimmon juice in between my fingers as I watch him roast a whole pig, its eyes black beads
begging to be plucked and buried next to the public park.

His Nikon D500 forgets where the faces are.

What is it called when you want something but cannot fathom it?

Zuì ài (love of your life). No— ròuyù (carnal desire)?

They keep asking why I stole the money from their sock drawer, all the way to

2009, where the summer is more red than green.

Baskets on the porch with unripe mangoes and river barramundi, salt from the mud sinks to
the bottom. Line-caught, he boasts—

Jingjing, I’m so proud of you. Youre amazing. Love you! Dad.

I’m all hooks in lip, line-caught in the mouth. Choking on air and perfume.

The beach isn’t a place for children. One day, you’re sitting there hoarding water for a moat
made out of sand, and the next,

He’s a beached whale, all the way from the inland sea. Is that meant to be the punch-

line? Caught between the optics of erosion at the base of a cliff and a church, beige as the inside of a cradle.
Neither of those things are inherently violent but when he looks at me from that angle, all I can think about is
the time I waited for him to pick me up from the train station.

I sat through an entire sunset and six trains billowing smoke to learn that sometimes he
forgets.

Hey you [someone is tapping on the window]. It’s a clear day.

When he asks me why I have parked here, I tell him it’s not my car.

A slip of paper that reads the date and time and one-hundred-and-ten dollars flaps around on
the windshield like a piece of loose skin.

It’s been fifty-six days. The ground has picked up again.

After the wake, a lady in a frilly collar shoves a fifty into my palm; the plastic money smells
sweet.

She was wailing in the back row. Tā shìgè hǎorén (He was a good person) [smiling].

Xièxiè āyí (Thank you, auntie).

Debt hangs there, a wet towel on the hills hoist swaying side-to-side.

Pray tell, Good Lord. Why does your blood taste of cherries—

and mine of cyanide. Oh! I know! I haven’t repented since 2009!

Jingjing, shàngdì ài nǐ (Jingjing, God loves you) [drowning].

He stopped taking pictures of us and started taking pictures of things far away.

Dark green pastures dotted with white cotton sheep. Sleep tight, babies. Don’t bleat for no
reason.

An urn the size of a plum is somewhere in a box. Take him with you when you go overseas.

Everyone is there, in the pictures.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

in flux, rising

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Montague Cole

in a room, rising
water invades
our fear, the sky

weeps, in the home
on the carpet
at our knees.

before I go, the mother
tells her child
of this world

in which you must go on.

in time
capsules of dark
dewy rain

forests, the night
-jars sleep
in familial

warmth felt
over oceans
where fishers spit

lines in the Tagus’
mouth, a promised
sea reneged

of vow, bereft
of bacalhau
knowing even

fish slip shades
of decades –
time means nothing

when you’re on the run.

her name, rising
with the weight
of tears

like hooks
in tongues
of rivers

searching flood
-plains with a final,
salivating thirst.

come, Mother

destined as
butterflies’
flit wayward

across heating
isles, their gaudy
wings exhumed

as she sits
wet, wrung
exhausted.

how quickly water rises

levees split
like fissures
of dry

in a past
rivers
skin

how quickly water rises

to your last
gaping
breath

as jiving bull
-kelp rise,
then vanish

pencil pines
snow gums
mountain ash

rise, then vanish

to oblivion in sun
-bathers stretched
across boulevards

of beaten dunes
clawed by
memories

of the sea
shifting
in flux, rising.

not this time, Boy

for there will
always be
movement

yet, some
things remain
static, steadfast

like a mother’s
heart
inside her child

beating brazen
as an auburn
dawn, rising.

move, rise

with the water
with the world

in which you must go on.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Breach

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Jill Jones

Summer’s path is drenching me
with water from a sprinkler like a child
(I remember her with no fixed ideas
as yet despite the yes/no of rooms
as summer turned one year into another year
leaving behind severest shadow)
Above me, clouds welcome blue noise
then scatter across roads beaches reefs
the nearby gulf

My own sap wants to touch this terrain
to dig and delve in fallow clod fissure
to be this dell defile wadi vale cave
cwm gulch chamber rift cup gully
pucker abyss
I’m dribbling sand from the cunt of the world
into the light of the smiling sky
fingers of the rain

Let me be breached by moving dust
oxygen blowing on the hearts of trees
the salad and swamp of this small location

Let me live like a cloud everywhere instead of
sprouting breasts like shame on this rock
of a body whose openings hide too many
words that must be spoken
into the gaps or rescued from my mouth
even my history as it tries to close on time

I’m ready as morning’s mortal pulse
ardent and walking along summer’s path
I’m breath I’m air plant and ocean
vapour nitrogen carbon dioxide
xylem bark and pith stigma style ovary
cockle clam whelk ears of seaweed
I’m not unfaithful to the world

If there was an original language for this
it might sound like air as it moves across
the tongue teeth the lips
into all the beautiful voids

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

K A M A Y A N

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Carina So

( i.)

we eat with our h a n d s

ba na na leaf plate sp a nn ing

a table or two

how many h ands can we count covers

tropical banana (.) savannah of g lo s s y c h l o r o ph y l l,

ele phant -ic l eaves



lai d d own under:

ric e

pan- cit bi- hon

ini haw

lechon

think: ( red skin , crackling WHOLEroasted pig

“pinch the belly where lemon grass
& gar lic
Are.” )





in the city, we

think of: the word bu- kid

and smell(:) lush plant scent from

machete / i- t ak

cutting down banana hearts not exactly

bananas yet

( purple red )

still in parenthesis

br. eaK it open

see seedlings like dotted i s

o r


revert time t o let it grow

: saba

type of banana cultivar

boil it whole inside its peel t i l l charred brown and black

warm on hand

let

p(e)tals of brown black peel splay o u t

like: its canopy

as wings droop down to reveal

sweet. gelatinous. taste.





( ii.)

there are grains of rice on

the sides of my fingers

i lick it or kiss the skin to leave none wasted

it is salty from oils

sauces

mothers always say:

“every grain is a drop of sweat off a farmer’s head”

suffered abundance

in tropical humidity
my cousin’s head sweats as he slurps warm soup

my mother cleans h-
er fish bones like a cat’s tongue

colonized country taught to eat with
u ten sils

( although

spoonfuls of rice

remain more popular than forkfuls )

; hands understand

H O M E is in the texture of rice

spread out until

the. warm. steam r is es

which fingers then touch their tips for in

reconciling motion

—soft grains compact

in mouth.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Journal in March

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Petra White

Berlin, 2022


1
I write in haste, as if on the jut of the future,
the thinly veiled present stands still all around,
like a set of chessmen waiting to be knocked over.
We move dumbly, slow tractors
in a time of harvest, the sun falls on us
we don’t blossom into speech,
listen for heroes, angels. My daughter’s wild scribbles
evolve into figures and stories –
this starry canopy flailing open in her mind.


2
A man evacuated with his 10 month old husky,
dog and man, man and dog,
so this is love,
two beings in infinite fear,
one trembling at the knees of the other.


3
On Sunday we climb a hill
made of rubble from World War Two,
some bricks protrude, mostly the ground is smooth,
and a forest grows at the top,
we walk through brisk air,
delicate snowdrops that flourish, quietly.


4
What is paradise and what hell?
Is it this moment we should fondly remember?
Our home shattered only by a child’s tantrum,
when we leaned against the afternoon,
and the street was still.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Cranes

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Stuart Barnes

I made one
thousand for
you whose T

cells were done
for, dashed———or
so we, pea

pod, thought. Bun
of milk wore
my mouth, tea

of green. Un
-dyed squares bore
up, souled. The

autumns spun,
the seashore
shared blue sea

stars, the sun
-dial tore
up its ski

-nose. You, hon,
kept one oar
———two———in free

water. Fun
nurses swore
Luv ya, Swee’

Pea! but none
loved to draw
blood. High-key

legs———a ton
———reached through your
last pane, knee

bones undone
———steel streaked. Four
stars locked. Pea

-cocks furled. Kan
-reki ’s core
scorned esprit,

but in run
light your sure
cherry tree

booms. As one,
birds upsoar
———red-crowned key.


Note: ‘In Japan, the 60th year of life is called kanreki and is celebrated as a rebirth or a re-entry into childhood’, from Jessa Gardner’s ‘“Kanreki” — A Red Letter 60th Anniversary for the Garden’, seattlejapanesegarden.org, May 26, 2020

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Escalations

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Jo Langdon

The baby at my breast displays
manners of an astronaut [title
case —italics] —the poet’s face
clean in greyscale.

The baby’s face is opening
towards milk & sensation, close
reading—that is to say
resemblance budding

in the double I/eye
of those beholding—precluding
the book’s jacket & its poet.
My friend says sleep

when the baby sleeps, clean
when the baby cleans. Only
later do I think to figure
the corporal from domestic

(at least ostensibly). I’d like to cue:
‘Ladies & Gentlemen We Are
Floating in Space’. Other moments
Karen O’s expression

in song & acronym
to A— her shining face
through each slide
of voice & saline; red

profusion of mouth in the pop
and soar towards please
(stay). Say anything
inside another

word: letter to letter— Later,
the baby sleeps & I will
emote, emit enough
for everyone.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

A Fall Confession

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Georgio Russell

The autumn I tumbled down that lakeside,
flaking up a hill of lava leaves in my wake,
my uncle’s motor boat had been roped
to a sort-of stillness, the floating dock
reined and returned to the ugly umber bank,
a shame beside my remembered coast, the near-sugar
shade of copra
—I never lost my footing
when the neighbour’s labrador ghosted into view,
a black blur between the maples
so crowded their canopy allowed only portions
of Georgia’s sun upon the orange—
frightened
by the first bark, a baritone glock, I didn’t trip
just then, but turned on purpose, my towel
sloughed-off like the leaves bereaving that hill.
All these ages, my story was the suddenness
slipped me back, made me free roll down
to the sand I slandered like crazy, my limbs
and elsewhere flayed by friction, two great
herons at the mezzanine point of the slope
startled, preparing their wings and wincing.
The truth is that I aimed on instinct toward
the shoreline, then moved automatic
like the mother and son in one of Senior’s
Hurricane Stories, who saw reunion in the water
so walked to meet each other, continents
apart—
I moved myself like it was written
somewhere that danger feared the shallows,
would not follow me there where
the water wore its mossy skirt and sloshed
as I soared some metres from the ledge
into landing, toe-first into the brown beach
and the leg in question crumpling—
if it pleases
the reader, hold me there, in midair,
a pause to prep my life for limping,
the chronic knee nuisance, help me untwist
the Aboniki balm, the mutt of that moment
long since put down, pursuing me still
up each stairway, through the varied aisles
and every lawn I’ve let wild—
or rewind
my steps from fracture back to laughter
on the dock, do away with the grounding,
the moans I’d made to summon cousins
from the cabin, when, crippled, I caught
the small felt waves and let them in.
They flowed over the bone jooking out
my blood-shined shin, nudging the leaks like love.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

It rains and I’m thinking of spring, as in, sprung out of water, and there you are.

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Jack Morillo

I.

How the tree was made blue under the canopy:

in the moon’s air and water, or, painted blue.
There is no shape more tree-like than humans

thinking to shape it. The tree
hollows as bright canoes

spooned out of bark. What is the white-person
equivalent of a tree? It is a tree

so blue even in daylight,
insisting it’s been there all along

II.
We watch a movie on my phone. The headlights
too, dim and dusty, project an old film

on the road, something we hadn’t seen before.
Trees grow blue in the dark. Write me

poetry. Okay. The text balloons in the sky.
Atmosphere keeps our mouths in place

as geese-lake-water sweeps into shape: temple, then prayer.
The bayou around an iron pipe cups a great blue

heron. The wing is ink-smudged.
Fall is a place too. We sit in a cavity

playing a game where we lose all the words in hand
and win. We play a game where we grieve everything
left in the road.

III.

I want you to write me a poem instead. For me
the light in the road, thinned and moving.

I want to be the Michigan sun,
brief but possible. Before the harming and being

harmed. I know there is suffering
in the world, I know it. I know

we don’t go here often, but can I be in the mouth this time?

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Twelve Short Talks on Aspects of Origins

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Brent Kininmont

In the lottery for topics I got
obsidian—that appearance of glass
when lava cools;

at the margin of what it means
to be a rock. Good thing
I was adopted, at home

with loose connections.
This dark off-cut from our teacher
I am passing around

comes from the island-quarry
on my poster. Somebody
once sailed there to fashion by hand

a blade, a necklace maybe.
Obsidian can be traced back
with precision, the Britannica

told me, because each
hardened flow is unique.
X-rays helped to map

the Pacific migration of tools
(red on my chart)
and their peoples (green).

Local, though, is the volcanic
glass in this closeup
of a coral eye on Rapa Nui

where the statues—hands up—
face the ocean, or inland?
The way they look

fooled our teacher, too.
And it isn’t strange I cannot see
more of myself in that off-cut

now drifting along the stoic row
of parents watching.
They’re only slightly less opaque

than a bucket of water.
The mirrors, I mean,
that obsidian made. Pre-metal.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Please do not join do not join this train

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Jo Lyons

YESTERDAY WHEN I didn’t kiss
the IT guy, the whole world fell apart.
A staticky electricity
now fills the air as I wait on
a letter that might not ever arrive.
It’s been teeming down all week, windy
as hell, sideways rain. I wore leaky
boots so wet feet all day on Wednesday
and my umbrella broke on Thursday.

Footpaths are littered with abandoned
umbrellas like dead wet birds, over-
flowing bins. Trains are packed and steamy,
days are getting dark by four o’clock.
Good things do happen. A book cover
I illustrated arrives, I do
a little dance, the designer does
several, the author will dance a jig
when his copy arrives in the post.

But something else is still going on.
My All-Important Urgent Files dis-
appear. Digital mayhem ensues.
The typesetter wants the corrections
by fax or email. I try the fax;
it jams. When I try it again it
goes off like an alarm. I try turn-
ing it off and on again – and it
goes berserk. A fucking fax machine.

I give up and leave to meet my friends,
forget to take my new umbrella.
Walking from Central to the dumpling
place I keep seeing mail vans. I think
of the letter I long for and dread
that doesn’t seem on its way to me.
Of course I miss the dumpling place and
walk into a pub, walk back on out,
find the right restaurant and join my friends.

We eat dumplings and talk about how
the IT guy has a crush on me.
My friends say it’s because he wasn’t
at work today that everything went
haywire. I wonder if he’s thinking
about me, I hope he’s not thinking
about me. Is this IT madness
all bad karma for rejecting him
sent out from the ether straight to me?

I leave the restaurant and it’s raining.
I get stuck at Central for an hour
waiting for
the train on platform nine-
teen terminates here please do not join
this train the train on platform 19
terminates here the train on platform
19 terminates here please do not
join do not join this train on platform
please do not join do not join this train

At the other end I walk through rain,
I think of the train I’m trying to
get off, wondering where I’m going,
how I hope and dread there’s a letter
waiting for me at home. I hope it
says the things the IT guy told me.
I would marry you in a heartbeat.
Can we get a dog, even a cat?
Who cares what has happened in the past

what happens is
now walking the wet
night street, I think of how it will end.
There will be no letter waiting and
I’ll curl up in bed with the two cats,
I’ll think of my new painting of my
small bright candle in the other room
and its warm steady flame in the dark.
I open the letterbox.
It’s there.

I take it out and bring it inside.
I hold the letter but can’t open
it yet because everything will change.
I sit down to write. I draft this poem.
Shortly when I open it, will I
destroy it? Will I destroy this poem?
I see the stamp’s a rose that says LOVE.
A bug’s half squished on the envelope,
moving.
I know how you feel, buddy.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

Deaf Sentences

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Rita Tognini

The audiogram
maps my soundscape,
plots landslides
in high frequencies.

The audiologist tells me
I hear like the elder I hope to be
in twenty years, or more;
says my cochlear hair cells
are in disorder— dead
or distorted, their thistle tufts
too limp to excite membranes
fire-up neurons,
tune in my brain.

I am snared by fricatives
and sibilants, plosives and nasals.
I hear ‘tedious break’
for ‘Finnegans Wake’;
detect the plash of ‘water polo’
but not the clarion of ‘Apollo’;
think it’s ‘in the Bible’
when it’s ‘about survival’.

Is it in my DNA?
For centuries my tribe
lived in remote valleys,
chose wives and husbands
as they bred cattle—
from familiar stock.

Now, new hearing aids
snug behind my ears
serenade me, rustle,
make me feel
gift-wrapped in sound.

I think of Ludwig
in Heiligenstadt.
At thirty-two,
surd to distant flute
and shepherd’s song,
he melodied
his mute landscape
in ‘The Pastoral’.


Ludwig in Heiligenstadt – Beethoven had a country house in Heiligenstadt, outside Vienna. In the summer of 1802, he convalesced there to
recover from his worsening deafness and wrote a letter to his brother, expressing his despair. He also started work on the Pastoral Symphony.
The letter was never sent and was discovered in his papers after his death.

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

thinking about autumn in winter

Posted on May 15, 2023 by Maki Morita

here I listen to crisp air with cracked lips, to remember & forget
I paint my hair red, then rehearse the lines —
「うん、元気」
「26歳です」
「まだ結婚わしていません」
but the dye washes up a pale recollection
because I’m thinking about autumn in winter
and these mountains have bled dry

there used to be a toy shop here, where obaachan bought me gifts
and over there is the onsen, holding onto our sighs

the way here is simple
the path the shopping centre the moon the apartments
the path the shopping centre the moon the apartments
the path the shopping centre the moon the apartments
we’ve traced them over and over and over again
like photocopies, but if you knock they might sound hollow and
her apron still tastes of cigarettes in a dream
because I’m thinking about autumn in winter

I repeat my steps and repeat my lines —

「うん、元気」
「26歳です」
「まだ結婚わしていません」

「うん、元気」
「26歳です」
「まだ結婚わしていません」

did you know that to fold a memory into a neat circle, practice makes perfect?

now: we’re perched in containers
squinting through PVC, it feels cheap
her voice warbled like the sunsoaked plastic, frost melting
off her weird spindly branches

here, my carefully rehearsed lines answer nobody —
“Yes, I’m good”
“I’m 26 now”
“No, I’m not married”
it’s a non-scene
and translation clamps my tongue
and in 10 minutes we bring it to a close.

deflated, we retrace familiar patterns before ice claws over
the path the shopping centre the moon the apartments
when Mum remarks 「あ！紅葉の木！」
so we pause and look at the lonely tree, aflame like it wants to live forever
and I think maybe it will never grow old
and maybe we’ve both been thinking about autumn in winter all along

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged