Three Poems, Giorgia Pavlidou

 a necromancer’s advice to baudelaire

  

exit your corpse 

eat up your organs 

massage your coffin  

rage rage rage 

rage against the fire

inside the ocean’s sarcophagus 

commit suicide in the desert of love

listen to the sound of the end of desire

tell us about your life as a transcendental vampire

serve your tongue with an exquisite french sauce 

dance with the dead at the center of the sun

slam to punk rock music during your funeral 

paint a cross with the bile of bats

swing with deceased shamans on saturn’s ring

peel a smile from your face

twist and shout with necrophiliacs in a swirling vulva

rewrite the tibetan book of the dead

lure dead mermaids with the smell of zombie-genitals 

pray to your oldest fetal ancestor

sacrifice stillborn eunuchs 

& make love to edgar allan poe

like a beautiful dead woman

at the last zero point of eternity 

electroshock therapy for the climate

 

 

this was before the pandemic

before gastritis              constipation            heartburn      strange headaches      burning joints

 

i still masturbated back then             compulsively of course

 

that was the best part

 

this was before the 45^th president

back then my stomach tolerated german beer        zinfandel      french champagne   exquisite

belgian chocolate     

 

what a beautiful time it was

 

during this edenic era           i loafed around dharamshala     the town in india where the dalai lama lives

 

i stopped at a sidewalk café in mcleod ganj     for a drink or two

 

sipping from my margarita           i overheard two young men talking

their dark bristly eyebrows told me they must be from israel      dharma bums of some sort

 

thoughts are like clouds

they come and go

one of them said

 

they were drinking cannabis infused bhang lassi

& munched on what i imagined to be gluten free falafel

 

waiting for my third margarita        i reflected on their words

& thought to myself:

 

if this climatic metaphor holds up

may we then assume

that emotions are like rain?

if so what would the emotional equivalent be of drought?

  

 ***

 

 

the dharma bums left            & after four or five           to be honest i don’t remember how many margaritas               after all       we’re in 2020 now             this was before brain fog   glucose intolerance     high cholesterol     borderline diabetes       acid reflux            gluten allergy 

 

i still watched porn back then             compulsively of course

 

that was the best part 

 

i left my café looking for chocolate          belgian or swiss i didn’t care     as long as it was bitter & black

 

i headed towards the kalachakra temple       the blackest & most occult of buddhist sanctuaries

 

a sabziwalla there close by           sold my favorite imported pralines

 

probably because the month was june                      it so happened that on my way 

i overheard two passers-by                                           tourists perhaps from bombay or new delhi

one had a big moustache         the other was almost bald:

 

it’s the second year that the monsoon rains

may not come at all

one of them said

 

 

a masticated chunk of chocolate       was gliding down my throat    while i reflected on their words             thinking to myself:

 

 

 

if the monsoon rains are skipping years

may we then assume that seasons can run off?

 

 

 

***

 

 

2012: endoscopy

2013: colonoscopy

2014: proton pump inhibitors

2015: one gallon of water per day

2016: federal elections

2017: gluten intolerance test

2018: lost 45 pounds

2019: spent a year at a monastery

 

 

***

 

 

this was during the pandemic            after federal elections      

 

doing caca had improved                   zinfandel was a thing from the past

 

strange headaches                          had turned into normal headaches

 

i had exchanged masturbation for meditation 

 

& compulsion for compassion  

 

         but was this the best part?

 

 

during this post-edenic era              i found myself wearing a mask

 

sitting at a sidewalk café                         somewhere in hollywood

sipping from my cup of licorice tea

 

this time i overheard a voice in my head:

 

now you’re the dharma bum!

 

 

judging by how i smelled                     i think the voice was right

 

you know that thoughts are like clouds, right? the voice continued

 

reflecting on these  words        i looked up to the sky & thought to myself:

 

 

if this climatic metaphor holds up

& it’s raining less and less

may we then assume that the sky is constipated?

 

 

the next moment more questions flooded my head:

 

 

if there’s an increase of both schizophrenia &

people born in the wrong body

may we then assume that the climate is into drag?

is the climate hallucinating?

is the weather traumatized?

has the climate turned bi-polar?

are we sexually abusing the oceans?

does the weather have an existential crisis?

has the climate become sociopathic?

is drought the climatic equivalent of burnout?

 

 

feeling haunted by constipation & these questions            i ran back home as fast as i could     

 

i had to use an enema             

 

strangely it rained the exact moment i relieved myself

 

 

musing over this weird coincidence        i thought:

 

thoughts aren’t at all like clouds

they aren’t like foxes either, Ted Hughes

thoughts are like termites

they run amok inside my head

competing to swallow up not only each other

but also my pen      the hand holding the pen      my words    my sanity  

my sleep     my bowels    my muscles  my nervous system   my neurotransmitters

my tongue

this page

 

content with having finally voided my head        i cleaned up my enema          took a shower             wore clothes again

 

back in my living room       i looked outside of the window          the rain had stopped          

    

there were gorgeous cloud formations

a marvelous rainbow roofed our community                                                  

 

this definitely was the best part

“the body is not fact of nature. like gender it is produced by discourses”

-judith butler

the one true body

“let them hurl a thousand curses at me

pain finds no purchase in my heart

i belong to shiva”

-lalleshwari (1320-1392)

 

 

think of a mute body bursting into flames the moment it looks at you

a body like the one i drag on my shoulders

even in sleep

especially in sleep

at night

one particular body smiles at me

 

its head wears a worn-out hat

 

other bodies sleepwalk in my direction

bodies woven into my matrass

fondling my groin

fondling my breasts

 

(copulating with the dead truly is “out of this world”)

 

hundreds of decomposing arms

thousands of decomposing fingers

 

pointing at a brick house

at a prison

with only windows

with almost no walls

with only doors

 

dying limps programmed

by someone else’s memories

by someone else’s desires

by the memories of my dead

the memories of the excommunicated 

by those who were forced to speak a borrowed language

  

***

listen carefully 

these bodies stand firmly behind the body synthetic

behind the one true body and sing

 

hundreds of thousands corpses march-march-marching

stomp-stomp-stomp and chant

hear hear:

the stomping of marching corpses wearing swastikas

stomp-stomp-stomp-stamping on my name

 

stamping on my body

this is also your body

 this is also your name

we share this name

we share this body

we share this swastika

like a word being pulled through me

like a body being pulled through me

 

like a body pulled through another body

like a dead body pulled through my dead body

like a poem bringing news from the edge of being

like a metaphysical phone call to lalla asking her:

 

lalla, you searched for your soul inside your body, but

what did you find instead? 

Originally trained in clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, Giorgia Pavlidou is an American writer and painter intermittently living in Greece and the US. She received her MA in Urdu literature from Lucknow University, India and her MFA in Fiction from MMU Manchester, UK, (though her meetings with visionary LA poet-philosopher Will Alexander have been and still are exceedingly more impactful). Her work has recently appeared in such places as Caesura, Lotus-Eater, Zoetic Press, Maintenant Dada Journal, Puerto del Sol, Entropy. Additionally, Trainwreck Press (trainwreckpress.com) launched her chapbook inside the black hornet’s mind-tunnel in 2021. Ireland-based Strukturriss Magazine selected her as the featured visual artist of their January 2022 issue 3.1. She’s an editor of SULΦUR online literary magazine. 

HOW LONG DID THIS GO ON FOR, Stephanie Kaylor

Memory arrives as a pin to hold the tethers of compulsion. In this hemming of excess, the image is always error. I tell my therapist I came to speak the honeysuckles that muffled the different octaves of our bodies, or the pouch of glass marbles—my fascination with the multiplicity of their worlds, to be the one perched above, onlooking. To watch them roll away. Of course, this is a lie. I tell my therapist that I have always lied, that always means sometimes, that sometimes I forget, that I forget—that I always, always forget. The hour is stitched behind us, our time up already.

Stephanie Kaylor is Reviews Editor at Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She is completing her PhD at UC Santa Barbara, and curates the Sex Workers' Archival Project. She lives in Brooklyn.

Two Poems, Michael Lee Rattigan

Ways of Listening

I

                A jolt arcs the body, stuns the heart.

Events witnessed while unconscious –

                                          “too shocked to be scared.”

Living green streaming in all directions

              impossible to spell out.

II

A wave’s wash – the view shifting to a corner

                                                                  detached

                 in the space between.

Flowers on a sill vibrate across, while footsteps

                   at a distance are heard on sight.

Unbound beginnings skimming the sea-gold grain on a windless day.

A door opening inwardly through twice-spoken tears

                                                 drops

                                                           into the mind.

III

A bellow for the breath –

    two shocks short of balance.

A line sown into place.

IV

An aureole blur,

the cadence of a man’s step –

                                     “whoa buddy.”

Conversation, out of earshot about a tree never seen before.

A child fussing over the toy

                            knocks down a wall in perception.

V

Two doves outside the window peer in and pace.

                                 Restless.

                                        Fly off moments before the horn.

Enquiry 

Branch broken on the threshold,

making sense to no one else – 

a temporary gateway. 

  

Feeling breath on the face – 

a humming of the blood’s 

metallic strength.   

An elsewhere here,

where another constantly follows

calling one’s name…

A thrice-heard voice 

amid the dust from bullets,

marking life.

As near to where one stands

as the seventh heaven’s    

source of belief.

Shining in the shadows

of an exile about to end,

pushing toward earth.

Not explaining “here” and “hereafter” –   

a wave sculpting the rock 

it wears away.

Michael Lee Rattigan (Caterham, UK) has lived and taught in Mexico and Spain, and translated the first complete collection of Fernando Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro poems (Rufus Books, 2007). His first poetry collection, Liminal, was published in 2012 (Rufus Books). He contributed to the Selected Writings of César Vallejo, published in 2015 (Wesleyan Press). His latest collection, Hiraeth, was published alongside its French translation in 2016 (Black Herald Press).

Selected Works, Katrina Kaye

 Seventeen Years

In my dream you were alive.

I saw you:
a broken man with
crooked smile telling me
it’s been seventeen years.
You’ve been looking for me for
seventeen years. You’ve been
in love with me for seventeen
years.

It’s been seventeen years since
your spine cracked upon impact.
It was just one of those things
that happen, an accident.
No one’s fault; No one
to shoulder the blame.

In my dream, I look for the book
you gave me, the only thing
you ever gave me, hungry for a signature
scrawled on the first page. Your j’s look
like g’s  in fast black ink.

It has been seventeen years since we
raced the halls together. A good kid
who smiled too much. A chip of broken tile
and notes passed by girls. You never should
have become a name smeared to highway.
Never should have been anything more than
a fond memory, a high school crush, a missed
connection.

Now, you survive in the pit of my stomach,
and despite a promise of pleasant reminiscence,
the dream shifts to the crack of skeleton,

the shattering of front tooth. I can’t trade this image
for a kinder one. It haunts me.
It haunts me still.

More than anything in the world, I
want to find you, to call you,
to write you a message in my
sloppy script assuring you
some things never die. But
you are already lost to me.

This is how I wake, chasing
rabbits and following sparrows. At
a loss for what I cannot quite
reach. You were always the illusive
one. So I lay here and I endure and
it is as sweet as the Sunday morning
we never shared.

Walking Dead

Burn it down.
Salt the earth.
Don’t let darkness rise.

Six feet in hallowed soil,
a crucifix,
a blessing,
should keep him.
Yet you still feel
his grip on spine
and your face
still radiates
the heat of his hand.

Not everything dead
stays in the ground.

Earth shakes,
dirt recedes,
and light of a full moon
can illuminate his rise.
He creeps in shadow,
circles corners of room,
hides behind recycled picture frames,
lurks inside a closet
half emptied.

You still feel him.
You flinch at sharp words,
loud noises.
You leave the lights on,
wake with a start when a car speeds by.
Some nights you shiver
as through still expecting
the turn and slap of front door
and warm tequila breath
on your neck.

Let the ground be sanctified.
Keep flowers on stone,
hands wrapped in prayer,
and when he creeps near your door
don’t invite him in.
Let pictures wilt,
flowers gather dust,
turn to ash.
Stake demons in the back.
Shake the curse
like excessive water,
and move out of shadow.

Take heed. Take care.
Fire. Salt.
Renew. Repeat.
Because you know,
not everything buried stays underground,
and a bullet squeezed through temple
can’t always keep the dead,
dead.

Looking for You

Under the waves,
I burrow

down

down

down,

safe under the weight of sand.

Content here,
holding on to you.
I envelop in cool earth
next to your crumbled bones.

ignorant to the creep of sun,
pulling tide back to
reveal barren beach.

Nothing survives here.

I try to stay entombed
but I am stripped,
exposed,
forced to surface,
to wake,
gasp for air.

The afternoon sun bleaches
bones and burns flesh.

I know you remain
although you hide well
among the waves,

turning in and out
with the swing of moon.

I still dig,
separate the damp sand
with bowed palms

trying to find a soft spot
below the shallow
to cup and curl into you.

Come Back

You looked in the mirror
before you did it. You cut
off all your hair in misshapen
awkward chunks, some spots
clean to your scalp.

You didn’t leave a note, but
two days before you killed
yourself you gave me your
grandmother’s watch, told me
you never wore the dented heirloom
and it didn’t fit your slim wrists,
said, it would look better on me.
When I pointed out that it no
longer worked your shrugged and
said simply, “time is a silly thing.”

I stand at your funeral
consumed by the list of things I
didn’t know about you, overwhelmed
by the uselessness of words and the
futility of remorse, devastated by
the continuance of the ordinary.

The sun rose this morning and the
winter still chills me to the core.
The radio continues to play and I
still know all the words to one song
after the other. Amanda, we will never
sing together again. We will never
exchange excuses of why we would rather
be alone. Amanda, it has been over
one hundred days and all I can say is come back.

Crack

if the storm did come,
i fear my first
instinct would be
to walk to the apex
bold and frenzied

my streets have been
dry for too long
leaving me desperate
to stand in the rain

i would trade my sight
for the scent of distant
thunder

my taste for the prickle
of hair twirled
in every direction.

i have prayed
for destruction.

but what do i know?

my mother was never
ripped into the sky
by unruly clouds,
my house never blown
down despite the coyotes
that surround back door
i have never wakened
to shattered glass
underneath my morning feet.

why should i distress of the
wrath of weather when my
New Mexican sky is endless blue
my sun bright enough i see
only red in the darkness.

i want the storm,
the wind, the water,
i want to be ravaged by the
wrath of unkind gods.

i know this wish
may not be kind

threats of storms ravage
those who prefer to hold tight
to rock and earth
and toss bodies
like crumpled paper
hoping to cling
on to abandoned words.

i have not felt
that windfall, and
i do not seek to
inhabit the pain
of the others

but i can’t
help but to search the sky for
gathering clouds and sit pale in the
wind hoping for the sky to crack.

Katrina Kaye is a writer and educator living in Albuquerque, NM. She is seeking an audience for her ever-growing surplus of poetic meanderings. She hoards her published writing on her website: ironandsulfur.com. She is grateful to anyone who reads her work and in awe of those willing to share it. 

Selected Works, Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal

The Son of Man

After Rene Magritte

Face apple man

stood still for hours.

His self-portrait

was so surreal.

His right hand was

lighter than his left.

I wonder if

he was lefty.

He wore a blue

coat. He only

buttoned two of

the three buttons.

His left eye and

left eyebrow were

more visible

than the right eye

and right eyebrow.

I wondered if

the green apple

and five green leaves

distorted his

vision. He wore

a white shirt and

a red tie. I

wondered if he

picked out his own

tie.  Behind him

was the blue sea

and a blue sky

with clouds that were

about to turn

dark. He wore a

black hat. He stood

in front of a

small wall.  He stood

rigid-like. I

wonder what kept

the green apple

suspended in

front of his face.

If he faced a

firing squad, I

would not be at

all surprised. He

seemed to be the

kind of man that

was a little

misunderstood.

Face apple man

called himself

the son of man.

I wonder if

his father had

a green apple

or a red one

in front of his

face. I wonder

if he moved to

the left or to

the right, his face

would be seen and

the green apple

would remain where

his face used to

be. I wondered

if he took a

bite of it, would

the apple bleed.

Marbles

A marble replaced his heart,

a black shiny marble small

as an eye. His feelings were

lacking; his speeches rolled

around not making sense.

His words rolled around in a

maze and could not find their 

way out. Marbles replaced

his eyes, black shiny marbles

like coal. He could look at

the sun and not go blind. He

would look at things and not

see the beauty or the horror

in front of his marble eyes.

He could not feel love or 

empathy in his marble heart.

In The Blur

After Gerhard Richter

In the blur

of color

violence

of style and

peace make up.

Peace takes shape

in splashes

of yellow

and red/gray

and blue. Art

needs to stand

out as the

saving grace

of mankind.

Priests had their

chance. Freud and

Jung had theirs.

In the blur

of brushstrokes,

photographs,

there is life.

The Greedy People

I saw the greedy people

on TV. They had expensive

taste and drank babies’

blood. I saw them eat raw

meat without a fork, with

bloodstained hands and

manicured fingernails.

They were like sharks. They

never slept. They wiped

their behinds with goose

feathers and hundred-dollar

bills. They ate the marrow

of death itself and kept

company with the devil

and his accountant.

Close My Eyes

Every time I close my eyes

something dies.

I blink it gone,

an entire empire.

This is my power.

There is no doubt

in my heart.

Listen to me.

Keep my eyes open.

I do not want to destroy you.

I can clear out a mountain.

I can see it gone

in my mind when I close my eyes.

I am not joking as

I peer into the sun.

I can make it disappear.

I can make you disappear.

I can promise you that.

Before I Died of Thirst

The sea sailed right by me.

The ship sailed with the sea.

The sinful knocked at heaven’s gate.

The faithful were sent to hell by mistake.

The tall tree was felled for matchsticks.

The arsonists keep rubbing wet sticks.

I took a sip of water before I died of thirst.

The devil’s backbone was in need of a nurse.

Born in Mexico, Luis lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles, CA. He is the author of Before and Well After Midnight (Deadbeat Press), Make the Light Mine (Kendra Steiner Editions), The Book of Absurd Dreams (New Polish Beat), Peering into the Sun (Poet’s Democracy), Songs for Oblivion (Propaganda Press), Raw Materials (Pygmy Forest Press), and Everything is Permitted (Ten Pages Press). His latest poetry book, Make the Water Laugh, was published by Rogue Wolf Press. His poetry and art have appeared in Art: Mag, Blue Collar Review, Medusa's Kitchen, Nerve Cowboy, Unlikely Stories, and Venus in Scorpio Ezine.

Three Poems, Howie Good

Stairway to Nowhere

I was late for a class I taught at the college. When I dashed into the building where the class was held, the lobby was empty. I started up the main stairway. The stairs grew noticeably steeper the higher I climbed. By the time I reached the top, I was drenched in sweat and convinced that something was wrong with my breathing. I had arrived on the outskirts of a country one only hears about when there is a coup or an earthquake or when a virus crosses the species barrier from animals to humans. Toothless old women in babushkas crowded around me. If you must scream, one said, scream quietly. 

Pertaining to Darkness

A phone ringing in my dream wakes me. I feel like a body that has been pulled from a canal after three days in the water. Gerhard Richter says that only when he destroys a painting, scratches it out, is it fit to be seen. If I look back, I see snakes and coffins, and if I look ahead, I’m walking on corpses instead of the ground.

&

Used paper face masks litter the sidewalk. How’s that allowed? Even the crows on the wire must be wondering what the fuck. A series of incidents doesn’t necessarily add up to a plot. I want to shake this person and that person and tell them, “You can’t be lost in your own world all the time.” 

&

I was sitting up in bed reading a book called People Love Dead Jews when I came across a quote from a Jewish sonderkommando. His responsibilities at Auschwitz included disentangling the naked corpses lying in heaps in the gas chambers and carting them to the ovens for cremation. Although hair caught fire first, he noted with scientific dispassion, it was the head that took the longest to burn. 

Reign of Terror

It was the year of shadows and mists. If I had had a suicide pill, I would have taken it. The voice in my head that used to confidentially offer suggestions had turned implacable, menacing. Unlike the pharmacuetically blessed characters in TV ads for antidepressants, no medication empowered me to go skydiving or whitewater rafting or on an African photo safari. Some days I couldn’t even make it out the front door. I lived with the kind of panic that I imagine many must have felt when the Committee for Public Safety arrived in a town with a traveling guillotine. 

Howie Good, Ph.D., a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the winner of the 2019 Grey Book Press Chapbook Competition for What It Is and How to Use It, the 2017 Lorien Poetry Prize from Thoughtcrime Press for The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, and the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements. His other books include The Death Row Shuffle (Finishing Line Press), The Trouble with Being Born (Ethel Micro Press), both 2020, and Gunmetal Sky from Thirty West Publishing in 2021. His prose poetry collection Famous Long Ago is forthcoming from Laughing Ronin Press.