Selected Works, Barton Smock

birthplace 8

My nose puts blood on a baseball. A bicycle,

 halfway through my brother, disappears. Keep 

moving, says distance. To the lamb in my 

deadest eye.

birthplace 9

God learns about bones for three days in a 

treehouse that we pretend is on fire. Violence 

tells our bodies where we are. I can’t love our 

children more than once.

birthplace 10

The basement animals are taking too long to

 name. Brother is throwing packs of cigarettes

into a baby pool that sister has recently filled. 

The hose is dead, still on, clothing an angel. 

Sister wants her hand to be smaller and promises 

god every anthill in hell. The animals aren’t many.

birthplace 65

How lividly agony languishes in the loud mercy of 

the lived-in lover. I want to say there are songs 

like this and I want to say hosanna. The sick

 vanished dreadful babies take pictures of how 

they’ve been portrayed and they let us call it 

heaven this place that means the pain is 

different here. I am with my father and together 

we name an animal. Mom remember.  

AWAY

We live 

as if god

could ever

be homesick.

When I’m not looking, my body

ah

fuck.

No golden 

melancholy

for the surgeon

with crushed

hands.

Death 

needs dying

to be real.

Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio. Most of his work is self-published. His newest non self-published work is 'Wasp, gasp.' (Incunabula 2023). He writes at kingsoftrain.com.

*Editor's note: These poems are excerpted from Barton Smock's latest collection of poetry: Wasp, gasp. To order you copies of Wasp, gasp - click here.

Three poems from Apophenic Epiphanies, Steve Carll

 the word is celebrate again

tufted fuzzy with foreshortened awe
a fantasized emblem for stargazing tenterhooks

open your disheveled community so
a makeshift paradigm can sleep its way to the top
5/16/2021

 

glory bee and hallelujah honey
a frontline occupancy terrifies the odalisque rep

mainstay cave-in vocalist opens nostalgic interpretation chambers
after advising salutary mobster refreshments
a pop-top fiddler-crab hermitage would envy

eckankar welcome ceremony takes note
of the western brain hemisphere
a selection of fine irrelevancies

a turnip’s alternative
poetics of gesture--or was it gestation?--
overhang the gas station of pleasure
5/17/2021
 

gallant intrusion into sacred space
the automorph weaves selfing-words

that leave attention invisibly invited
the arrangement to flower relentless

concentric rings of concentrate-forms
apply mystery to organic infrastructure
5/22/2021

Steve Carll lives with his family in Arcata, California. His third full-length poetry collection, Hypnopompic Diaries (Books One and Two) is forthcoming in 2024 from Alien Buddha Press. Earlier books include Tracheal Centrifuge (Factory School, 2006), Tao Drops, I Change (with Bill Marsh, Subpress, 2004), and several chapbooks. His work has recently appeared in SurVision, First Literary Review – East, and Reap Thrill. From 1988-1998, he edited the literary journal Antenym. Performance video of most of his poetry from 1991 to the present can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@stevecarll/videos.

Excerpt from THE DIRECTOR'S CUT, John Yamrus

he was 

drunk 

and more 

than a little bit crazy 

and 

made the mistake 

of leaving the live video feed 

on 

his computer open 

and when 

he was done reading his poems 

all that 

was left was this sad 

drunk 

old man 

and the sound 

of him walking from room to room 

trying 

to see where 

the magic had gone.

i

made

the mistake

of 

complimenting him 

on 

his poetry.

on

the strength

of 

one poem,

he wanted me

to introduce him to

my 

publisher.

when 

i refused,

when i said

i’m sorry, but

i just don’t do that,

he went crazy on me.

instantly,

i 

went from

hit 

to shit.

more

than anything

he so desperately

wanted 

his fifteen minutes

of 

fame.

well...

here you go, buddy...

here 

you go.

puke-green

was 

his favorite color.  

it 

was also 

his favorite word 

(or, 

words, if

you wanted to 

get technical about it). 

anyway, 

it was kinda sorta fitting

that he had already turned his

favorite color that Sunday morning 

when 

they found him

face down under the Penn Street Bridge.

Tony The Lip

was 

older than he looked,

was 

impressed 

by the smell of his own farts,

lied 

about everything,

never 

held a job for long,

ate 

everything,

drank 

anything,

and 

changed his shorts

no

more 

than once a week.

Tony had

3 bad marriages,

4 shack-ups,

and 

that one month he

never cared to talk about.

i 

always 

liked Tony.

you lay in bed and

there’s a train whistle somewhere

off in the distance and

it takes you back 

to a place and 

a time you 

don’t

even care to remember 

where it was or

when. 

back to a place with dirty sheets 

and dust in the corners and 

under the bed and you 

start thinking about 

why and who and 

where and 

how 

and you know it doesn’t really matter 

because there will always be trains 

and beds and sheets and the sun 

coming up as you wait 

for another day 

that’ll bring you that much closer to

whatever it is that’s out there, 

waiting to

finally 

do you 

in.

in dog obedience class…

for once, 

my little Abby

did everything right.

for 

once, 

she didn’t 

bite, jump or pull.

this time

she paid attention

and sat 

and stayed

and came

and listened…

just like all the other dogs.

i can’t tell you how much

i hated 

that.

he was 

drawn 

to this bit 

of graffiti he saw 

written in white paint

on the side of a building. 

it was 

in an alley, 

and it read: 

“fuck the world – 

and fuck you if you don’t love it.” 

later that week, 

looking to get the words just right, 

he 

went back, 

and 

when he 

got there, it was gone – 

not 

just the words

and 

the wall, 

but 

the whole 

damn building. 

torn down. 

gone. 

and, fuck you if you don’t love that.

These poems can be found in John Yamrus’ recent collection: SELECTED POEMS, THE DIRECTOR’S CUT (Concrete Mist Press, 2022), available for purchase here.

In a career spanning more than 50 years as a working writer, John Yamrus has published 35 books (29 volumes of poetry, 2 novels, 3 volumes of non-fiction and a children’s book). He has also had nearly 3,000 poems published in magazines and anthologies around the world. A book of his SELECTED POEMS was just released in Albania, translated into that language by Fadil Bajraj, who is best known for his translations of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bukowski, Ginsberg, Pound and others. 

A number of Yamrus’s books and poems are taught in college and university courses. His most recent book is SELECTED POEMS: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT (Concrete Mist Press, 542pp).

Excerpt from A Spontaneous Prayer, David Hay

Hands broken from blacksmithing the stars, Eltri took a sip of blood falling in perfect tear shaped droplets to stain Gologtha – another god another death he decanted to the young boys’ empty eyes still fascinated by the movement of leaves – he brought no suffering in his time, but his name shall map innumerable atrocities – so deep in sin has man slumped, you can’t even see his arse.

A beggar old, wizened not so much by time but his lifestyle choices – you know being poor, kissed the Messiah’s feet, with each lip touched to his holy dirt he felt his soul anointed by the everlasting spring of heaven.

He went back to his cave and took up a tree branch and in the sand he drew shapes he thought were letters and words until he described with perfection these feelings of sublimation gave him – he sat down with an ox-bladder of wine and drank until his bones were untethered from gravity –  when he woke the wind had erased all his all his transcribed wonders, he then proceeded to throw up on the section written concerning prayer, staggered forward, slipped on his own vomit, fell over, cracked his skull head on a rock he’d never noticed and died.

Down the road a priest was writing a book in a language none of the people understood, laying down in convoluted but poetically stabbed psalms, how to use god’s son to make money and molest children. Either one was desirable.

Jesus spoke to the child through the hole in the tree trunk, ‘never trust men who dress in robes and wear funny hats’ – that should be obvious but it somehow isn’t. 

*

I sprinkled holy water on my syphilitic wounds that crawled away from the light, I expected Jesus’ hand to reach through the clouds and heal my sores

but nothing happened, oh lord only a fool would think it would end differently.

*

In the night, slowly swallowed by the oak tree, a woman and a man are drunk, shouting slag at one another as they stumble from pavement to road, to pavement again. A hedgehog trapped in the shadows by the light of the moon cries and the boy in his fortress of damp wood cries with it. The couple look at each other, shut up and quietly stagger back to their house that contains three bathrooms but only one sink. 

*

You are alone, I am alone and that’s it his mother says while chopping onions. She nicks her thumb and the blood lumps out. This is all your father’s fault she snaps.

*

After much deliberations two teenagers in a friend’s living room drop acid. They look in to each others eyes far too earnestly. He sees himself wearing a wing-suit and jumps out the second floor. As he climbs out, he imagines his body cascading down mountainsides, weightless as light, his nose gently skimming rocks, before flying above a cliff side covered in pines to reveal a small Italian town. He sees another wing-suiter (?) release his parachute to glide him down to the postcard perfect grass. He appears onwards into the town to splat against a rich man’s car – a final fuck you, not to god or the world but to all the dickheads who look like they invest pork directly into their veins. His friend screams his name. The vision and real-life wobble into each other, touching in a sickening way, the kind of touch that brings back that uncle who left his hand too long upon your spine. His foot is at the wrong angle. He stares at it then everything goes black. When he wakes his dad calls him an idiot. If you think you can fly, try taking off from the ground next time. 

*

The sky is full of memories, much like clouds choiring with thunder, the past with its muscles and hammy moustache and black coffee breath forces the blue drowning days of youth to tap out and submit.

Welcome to life boy! He screams before seeing mustard all over his tiny shorts that repulse you more than bestiality. 

*

David Hay was inspired to write after discovering the Romantics, particularly Keats and Shelley, as well as the works of Woolf and Kerouac. His work has been accepted for publication in Dreich, Abridged, Acumen, The Honest Ulsterman, The Dawntreader,The Babel Tower Notice Board, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Lake, Selcouth Station, GreenInk Poetry, Dodging the Rain, Seventh Quarry and Expat-Press, among others. His debut publication is the Brexit-inspired prose-poem Doctor Lazarus published by Alien Buddha Press 2021. 

Excerpt from Blood on the Fog, Tongo Eisen-Martin

 

 

I Make Promises Before I Dream

 

No unclaimed, cremated mothers this year

 

Nor collateral white skin

 

No mothers folding clothes to a corporate park preamble

No sons singing under the bright lights of a lumber yard

 

Quantum reaganomics and the tap steps of turning on a friend

 

New York trophy parts among

the limbs of decent people

Being an enraged artist is like

entering a room and not knowing what to get high off of

 

My formative symbols/My upbringing flying to an agent’s ears

I might as well be an activist

 

Called my girlfriend and described

All the bottles segregationists had thrown at me that day

 

Described recent blues sites and soothing prosecutions

I feared for my poetry

 

You have to make art every once in a while

            While in the company of sell-outs

            Accountant books in deified bulk

            Or while waiting for a girl under a modern chandelier

                                               

Or in your last lobby as a wanderer

 

The prison foot races the museum

 

My instrument ends

 

I mean, what is a calendar to the slave?

Also, what is a crystal prism?

 

“He bought this bullet,

bought its flight,

then bought two more”

 

The Cycle of Black Mercy

 

Well I have at least fallen around love

Reading poems next to my friend with Loisaida fire escapes in their teeth

Talking about the gun I’m going to bring to the segregation

Trying to protect children with poems/protect these store-runs

Avenue nights as a hospital bard

I can’t make out the system of craft

Is this run the house dust circuit/are these abandoned houses of various rank

art here like karma-less soldiering

 

Falsifying my first solo on this stage/ on this rickety enemy-ness

Ladies and Gentlemen, here to make some warmongering of your night

these receipt paper poems

Adorning my red eyes with a self-inflicted fatherhood

Over-policed eyes

state impressionism bouncing back and forth between skin and ski mask

an emotional range or wobbly self-portrait

amongst these church giants

calcified personas present /grown man depression

scraping cotton against uptown silhouettes/see in their shadows all manner of bombs

king of the poems, baby

genuine marvel of the history of poems

welcome to the mild bourgeoise

revolution street fairs/our weariness

well-proven socialism/ the death of both your and my hip-hop, Lord

make your green back ruling class confetti/art somewhere in this

earn stripes with three hands/cut God off of your shirt

look out at the world from the inside of an ink stroke

I don’t mind the Mississippi steel, sir, but may I have a saxophone from a different city

bright lights/lethal injection routine/last words/Is My Family Here

take all disrespect as the universe in motion

I write poems today

I kill america today

 

 

five-year anniversary of my style

(swamps talking/ midsize activist files like songs sitting under the street/

Slave castles growing and growing/

keeping notebooks alive the wrong way/

human temper sitting still)

 

going to Afrika in mysterious ways

the harp that turned the hand toward the Founding of Chicago

 

you know what my trick is, grandson?

I am weak first

Before anything, I first become weak

 

Kick a hatchet down the street/ then all around a city

a grandmother’s Milwaukee

or the gods my grandmother robbed

fresh faces in the spirit house/ a spirit house we’ve put behind the sun

 

We have God’s permission to make a plan

 

Gradually, the poem becomes decently empty

 

You know, be weak

Let the ability to write slip

until only one fingertip is left on the handle

then, in a flash, return with a slave castle in a cup of change

 

“Lady’s and gentlemen:

We assure you that tonight’s entertainment is not judging you…We paid them…really well”

Free Fear

 

The boss belongs to the masses now

Got the boss’ likeness on a string like a love poem

Wild stride speeches replace memories of the boss

We got machine guns in the communist bar tonight

We are naturals in the communist bar

Our boundaries are just a little death

 

We stand outside the gates of San Francisco

listening to some good preaching

 

“Congratulations, your mercenaries hurt.

Your Money Jungle hurts. Your mouths hurt.”

 

“Merchants of frenetic white flight

Luckless and (therefore) well-armed primitivism

Reaching down into the patterns of your soul

Making for funny stories”

 

“I hope they didn’t name any schools

While they had those kids in those cages”

 

Joy returns to decent revolutionaries

Puts a hermitage in the fascism 

 

Saint Faluja thumping, your shoulder is family

                      and needed

God crawling in between the bullet heat

Yes, our grandparents’ God

 

Thought experiments in the last words of Black organizers

Let’s make a periodical of their last words, Lord

Of the remaining addresses of Black power

 

We become Angola on both sides/A humor of axes.

A foot race through public property/remilitarized

Pork improved/Celestial pork

Platinum minted pork/choose your words carefully pork

 

“the first mirror was clay…the first human was not”

 

Humanity recommencing near the weight pile

(would be nice to sound universal)

not heroin owed

heroin passing messages

heroin left laying around an empire

 

A colonized intellectual as a guest

in their own hand

 

It’s like a life’s work depends

On replicating Birmingham caravans

Or particulate Birmingham

 

One to five shells flying at the state capital

Signed, “Thank you for the resources”

 

 

big band scatting up the throat of a surrogate fascist

in love with their one eye ball

at the parade with tuxedo-colored guns

marrying the cowardice

 

A re-running white politician

Is born in a Black neighborhood (taken as a stage of history)

Born of a Black Messiah (taken as a foco-biography)

Is born Black (journey’d)

Legislates in some dimension fused to the side of loud steps

 

copper summer riots, but still some blood involved

                                                  still some necessary slums involved

rag tag armies masked in western height/ in primary emotions

Delight of cocaine both warped and not warped enough/images can be cousins

What happens when you step outside the country’s sugar gorging?

What good are you all to the world sitting in Heaven?

Who are we going to lay out books for?

Who’s going to touch the knives at night and sing to the gaps in between shadows…gaps between our love?

Who is going to teach our knives to sing Tobacco Road

Teach them that they are family

 

Picture a Black socialist in a perfected boneyard

 in a tributary boneyard

 whispering to cheek bones

dimming the wind

A Black socialist who will live for one hundred years in this graveyard to make this point/that we’re in too much pain for naming ceremonies... that ancestors need to inflict on the world our continuity...

 

A thousand good deeds decorate the 20-year police precinct janitor

A janitor (who called it)…who knee-slides, but not like you

Telling you of a half-dead humanism to pass the time

 

A math teacher and their little red book

“I used to dream of revolution… and even enjoy the dream”

Tongo Eisen-Martin is the Poet Laureate of San Francisco, California. He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017), which was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. He is also the author of someone's dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015). Blood on the Fog is his new collection of poems.

INTERMITTENTLY LIKE LOUISIANA RAIN & Other Works, Jessica Alexander & Vi Khi Nao

Selected Works, Vi Khi Nao

PAGE 25

I have decided to overlook your wife’s air conditioner and subatomic particles

 

 

PAGE 27

SATURN’S TACTITURN

 

I haven’t been alone too long

I please everyone I can

I can’t live like this anymore

I have no problems saying no

This way of ridiculing women has to be stopped

The car forgave and I enjoyed its subservient engine

He flirts just like a carton of milk

The poet no longer resists

But refuses to be a God in her own house

Someone is about to have a bowel movement

Have I been good to you?

Mr. Insincerity is blocking

I don’t know what street to cross

Desiring: I refuse to forgive

Oracle: death defenses itself

She’s a queen

Also she uses the vibrator too much

I have stopped talking to her

Have you been lazy lately?

I didn’t spell her name right. Could you smell it?

From afar it does make noises.

But have you talked to the pig?

The barnyard has transformed.

This is not the right way to love

Don’t turn the engine back on.

 

 

PAGE 29

ABDUCTION

Polygraphs and Omar the screwdriver.

In a strapless dress

Made for typhoons and artificial intelligence.

The clue is in the hue.

I take results however superficial.

Fly without a working engine.

Conical hats

Sanitized rats.

Forever so kind.

Distrust for the impossible.

Unsexy hip.

Ear glistening

Aborting strangers

 

 

PAGE 31

The poem is asleep: narrow monarch tea, red red that can’t

dismiss a dream, and swims like an antiquated  icicle.

 

 

 
aggression was a landscape
by Jessica Alexander
 
At the distance of three hundred yards from the house, on the top of a rock whose sides were steep and covered with dwarf cedars, Clara’s father had built a horrible temple. It was nothing but a dome and a stone floor. It was without seat or table. Below the temple there was a rocky channel, bounded by cornfields and an orchard. In the hamlet, where Clara was a girl, the sun was spare and splintered by the rooftop. There was a lamp, a hearth, and a clock hung on the wall. It struck a stroke so hard every sixth hour the women flinched and turned their eyes to the window. Her father would go then and kneel alone on the stone floor.

In Pittstown voices hovered over the gnarled trees, the orchards, the barns, and the splintered roof beams. If you hear them, you must not look up. If you hear one in dusk, in a clearing—let’s say you’re splitting wood or gathering something maybe mushrooms—you must bend your eyes and your being to the axe, you must exert yourself and keep it out.

In Pittstown Mary walked the gloomy streets. She wore fur and strange and stunning gowns. Clara darned socks inside the splintered light. I am drowning. Clara said to herself and the voice was not inside her head, but her stomach, like an echo deep inside a well. I am drowning. Mostly, Clara felt like this, save when she saw Mary in such strange and stunning gowns.

At midnight, when her father prayed, Clara would walk to the cold rock, toward the dead orchard and the cornfield, where the stalks poked through snow and swayed against a sky unbearable and grey. Clara would wait for Mary in the orchard, and Mary would appear in something silk and soft or fur. “Do you like it?” Mary said. She stroked the gown with  Clara’s hand, and like a deer Clara grew very still. Everything, her skin, the sky, the splintering wind became an instrument through which to perceive her friend. “Yes,” she said, “I like it.”

In Pittstown, aggression was a landscape. It was in the angle of a doorframe, the way a root broke through the cold dirt. It was too much, at times, to simply turn your eyes to something else. No one spoke of it. Clara’s uncle, Thomas Wieland looked nothing like Thomas Wieland. Mary said, “That’s not Thomas Wieland,” but, of course, no one believed her because how the fuck would she know. He looked twenty years too young to be him. He’d recently arrived, or so he said, from Austria. He was a surgeon. He was an artist. She became his apprentice. “Put on this,” he said and flung a gown at Mary’s head. His room was spare and untidy. It was without comfort. There were reams of ink stained paper, a surgeon’s kit, and a trunk stuffed with silk dresses. “Don’t touch that!” He shouted and hurled his commonplace book at Mary’s head. The first page said “The World as My Will and My Idea.” Mary stole it. Thomas was drawing her. He called these portraits the “Progress of a Woman of Pleasure.” But there was no pleasure in Pittstown. There was only Clara kneeling in the orchard. There was only Mary in her dresses. Sometimes there was laughter in the orchard, and the birds scattered, and Clara’s father looked at the sky and said, “What is that sound?”

INTERMITTENTLY LIKE LOUISIANA RAIN

 by Jessica Alexander & Vi Khi Nao

 

In Salt Lake, I walked the neighborhoods on winter nights, guided by the warm blue glow of windows and tv screens, flickering on the snow. Even this cold loneliness contained the balmy promise of a someday.

 

NOW the flamboyant neon style of Gunpowder Milkshake spatters the blank walls of our unconscious minds with sequined bowling lanes and diners & even the whites of our eyes are glittery.

 

I love this movie!

 

& our someday & Michelle Yeoh - the great martial screen artist - & look at that vest & surely these are lesbians!

Yes! Or are they baiting us, with a breathy death so easily mistaken for a bloody kiss? And if you want it bad enough, it is. It was a good movie. All the men were bad and the women, who killed them, seemed to like each other. It was a really good movie, we agreed. The bowling jacket, an homage, maybe. 

 

 

Today’s potential equity raise raised only your eyebrow. I watched you across the kitchen table as you tried to do some proprietor math. Leah has been an agent of alacrity and the university may be scared of her. I soaked mung beans in a small pot and placed our bath towel over it like Djokovic - after losing the first set and then second and eventually the last to Daniil Medvedev - placed his towel over his head. Meanwhile, we need white and green onions for the canh khoai. I also wanted to walk with you because my period is heavy and I had taken a photo of cotton or a wintery storm in the Denver light. The sun behind you and its shadows plaster themselves across your back like a Pollock. 

 

 

The air is cool and you ran through the park where they were setting up a screening of WestWorld. The street smelled incredible when you rounded the corner and a man in the narrow alley hid a spliff behind his back and you jogged past. Two girls with enormous dogs stood in the park. Earlier, at the grocery store you bought onions, chocolate, and salt. I made pork and soup and the broth turned purple. We ate spicy tofu bites packaged individually like small candy and our lips burned. The sunlight is crisp and clean & the air never shimmers with heat. Phone wires are full of birds and nostalgia. The air smells like fresh cut grass. Now that the joyless cop show is over, what will we do with our evening and our afternoon?

 

 

We walked beyond the railroad track, under the bridge, and through the tunnel with its electric graffiti headdress. You asked about Qi. You asked if your body was open and if there was a door to your life force. We walked and walked, walking past the pile of trash which soiled the elegant and clean architecture of the RiNo Art district. We walked past The Hub, the pole dancing class, the Walnut Liquor store, and the city opened her long, athletic legs to us. There were so many pathways into the future of our nomadic exploration. When we walked back to Natural Grocers, you were holding in your arms two babies: an aluminum water bottle and the Bread and Butter Cab, which you said I loved and which you got for us when we visited Farwall in Shreveport. From across the railroad track, we could see faintly the Zeppelin Station from our peripheral view. When we took the elevator to the 4th floor of our Blueground, you were holding a box of  ginger beer, ginger chocolate, one Bosc pear the color of the sepia earth before mankind ruined it with greed and capitalism. 

 

 

 

 

You hated Superman & Lois though Tyler Hoechlin’s teeth were sharp and white as a wolf’s incisors and Bitsie is the name of the actor playing Lois and this appears to be her only real misfortune. One reviewer wrote: the show brings the superhero brand back down to boring earth. But I liked the premise: would superman make a good father? Though I think a daughter may have been more interesting than two teenage boys. It failed the Bechdel test by a long shot. I don’t think two women spoke to each other in the pilot, though there were three women in it. You found the premise of a small town gone awry somewhat compelling. You enjoy small town conspiracies and small town America taking on the corporate world. But Lois “the greatest journalist in the world” was unbearably basic and lacked the ambition that made her a little dangerous in former iterations. She was a fearless journalist, who much to Superman’s chagrin, was almost always about to get killed. One review said Superman spends too much time blinking at his family in handsome concern and darting around the stratosphere that he never can anchor his family or his show. I did not know how bored you were until we switched to Nevers and the deft and dapper Victorian ladies, twirling parasols and pithy phrases, roused you from your stupor.

 

 

After showering, we walked to the grocery for bacon and a gluten free muffin. The light was both lambent and radiant, coating everything we touched or saw with a sheen of translucent warmness. Denver has such clean air. If you were in Lafayette, there would be sunlight, berated by sporadic bursts of rain and lightning. The air there is thick and muggy as if the city has been hooded by a black bag, tossed, and kidnapped into a moving, get-away van. I don’t like the idea of your natural oxygen tank being kidnapped by a city that only loves you intermittently like Louisiana rain. We woke  unexpectedly late. Though at 6 am, my eyes were wide like long windows in a high rise office in New York. I tried to close them, but my nipples were becoming electrical poles as if a wire traveled between my cunt and nipple, and birds needing to take a break from their long flights could land on it for rest and mindless repose. Our periods have made us tired. We sleep early now. We make love less. Our pads soaking in useless iron. 

 

 

Last night, you fell asleep at 9 o’clock. Tonight you’ve reserved a table at a winery with outdoor seats. You’ve been looking up galleries. We need to go to Walgreens but exhaustion overtook us. You slept while I finished blending sweet mung beans and tapioca. They do not collect the trash on Fridays or Saturdays. Though they seem to vacuum the hallways on Saturday mornings. If you look out the window long enough you’ll notice the yellow fence & the ferns that burst from behind it, the gravel lot where cars park, and the broken wooden crates that rest against aluminum siding. This is a city still being built with empty lots where trash gets tangled in the weeds, gravel lots, steel beams - and on the main strip a string of new apartment complexes sit empty as old warehouses, some breweries and wineries startle the sidewalk like an old friend in an empty airport. On Friday night a live band played at the beer garden, and the train scooped lumps of people up and dumped them on the sidewalk like scoops of icecream or that Twombly painting - they shuffled up the street pushing bikes & sipping beers from cozies. I think of the castrated photographer, pushing his bike through snow to my doorstep every night, and all the gifts he gave me that I shoved into a box inside my closet. On Saturday morning, the streets are deserted. There’s a slight breeze. The sunlight and the air is so clean the slight chill is crisp but not 51 degrees as our phones inform us, by 1 o’clock the city will inch it’s way to 90.  

VI KHI NAO is the author of six poetry collections: Fish Carcass (Black Sun Lit, 2022), A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line (11:11 Press, 2021), Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She was the Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute: https://www.vikhinao.com 

JESSICA ALEXANDER’S novella, "None of This Is an Invitation" (co-written with Katie Jean Shinkle) is forthcoming from Astrophil Press. Her story collection, Dear Enemy, was the winning manuscript in the 2016 Subito Prose Contest, as judged by Selah Saterstrom. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Fence, Black Warrior Review, PANK, Denver Quarterly, The Collagist, and DIAGRAM. She lives in Louisiana where she teaches creative writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.