Selected Works, John Guzlowski

 

Kafka and Me at Starbucks

He scratches on a notepad

And I ask him what he’s writing.

Nothing, he says, just some words.

Blue, lunch, Mildred, faith, and love.

Why these words? I ask.

He looks at me and smiles and says

For a writer, you ask too many questions.

Kafka on War

Let me tell you

What you already know. 

Man is a beast.

Look at him 

standing next to you.

One minute 

He’s laughing.

The next he’s eating 

your mother’s 

Tits and belly.

All you can do

Is shoot him.

Then have some coffee

And a donut.

You’ll feel better.

Kafka Alone at Starbucks

Kafka sits at the table 

drinking coffee 

He wonders 

why it's so quiet here 

He remembers all the coffee

He ever drank

and stirs the star of words

into the cup

Kafka Pauses

Kafka waits by the door.

There’s something on the other side.

He can hear it.

A breath. A scratch. 

A foot moving back and forth

Almost as it were dancing.

He wants to open the door.

But he’s enjoying the fear too much.

If he opens the door, 

The fear will scatter like a cat.

Kafka and God

Kafka passes the temple,

Wonders what he’d do 

If he were God for a day.

He knows he would drink

More coffee and eat

A bigger piece of pie.

Kafka’s favorite song?

It was California Dreaming,

though he never heard it.  

He died before John and Michelle 

ever wrote it, even before 

they were born, but Kafka knew 

the song, the cold that wouldn’t stop, 

the church a Jew could never enter.  

The sense of a gray street 

that leads nowhere.

Over a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction.

His poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski’s poem “What My Father Believed” on his program The Writers Almanac.   

Three Poems, Dana Trick

 

Time 

Time . . . 

Why are you sand,

So much infinite in everywhere 

But always slipping through my fingers. . .? 

Life . . .  

Why are you a politician,

So fill on your majestic promises

Yet leaving behind broken things and people. . ..? 

Love . . . 

Why are you a rose,

So engraved with thorns 

But so blessed with soft beautiful petals . . .? 

Wisdom . . . 

Why you are a paradox,

So needed and desired

Yet always hated then abandoned . . .? 

Wonder . . . 

Why are you a child,

So full of joy and awe 

But constantly, always, so fragile . . .? 

Death . . . 

Why are a dream,

So full of dread and fear,

Yet so yearned for. 

Chained Girl

I'm just a chained girl

Who lives in a perfect indoctrinate life,

Limbs constantly dragged to the beat 

Of a performance that can’t see me.

I’m just a chained girl

Who can no longer feel—or believe in—

Her wings under the cold web of chains. 

I’m just a chained girl 

Whose mind and heart continue 

To dream of the freedom and happiness

That comes from being and loving myself.

I’m just a chained girl

Who can longer be satisfied with dreaming happiness

And now fights back against the chains 

That froze her wings since she was a babe.

I’m flying girl now,

My wings, scared and bruised,

Carrying me to my dreams and happiness

That are mine and mine alone.

Human-Humanity-Hypocrisy

Choose all that apply before reading the rest of the poem below: 

{Disabled, Indigenous, Asian (East, South, Southeast), Latinx, African, Mixed, Poor, LGBTQA+ Female, Immigrant, First-Generation, Refugee, Any Religion} 

Why must a {insert here} 

Have to work so hard to prove their humanity they already have

To the powerfully parasitic privileged who is so eager to take it away

By any means necessary? 

Why must a member of that {insert} 

Have to spend their entire lives navigating though 

Trapdoors, puzzle rooms, walls, cages, chains, and laws

That only preserve the institutionalized inequality of the powerfully parasitic privileged 

While they promote hard work and determination would fix everything in their lives? 

Why must a member of {insert} 

Are forced to morph their personalities, their identities, their communities

Into the monstrous majority monotony society/status quo

Of the powerfully parasitic privileged  

That always condemn, criticize, scapegoat, stereotype, harass, assault, murder them

At every chance, at every crime, at every tragedy, at every minute of them trying to live? 

Why must a member of {insert},

After surviving through the oppression obstacles, 

Have to constantly inhumanly, impossibly, infinitely

Be perfectly good and civilized 

So their communities would eventually encounter 

Less torment from the powerfully parasitic privileged? 

Why does the {insert}

Be even more tormented after their minority-hero—

So chained and crucified to the ballet burden of role model—

Is discovered to have done something wrong, immoral, evil,

Therefore giving the powerfully parasitic privileged excuses to continue

Their discrimination, scapegoating, harassment, attacks, murder, dehumanization

Till the end of time? 

Why does the powerfully parasitic privileged 

Claim that only they have humanity in the world 

Even though their actions and words are synonym of humanity

Even though everyone on this earth

Like the said historically marginalized minorities 

Has humanity from the very second they are born?

Born a first-generation Mexican-Canadian-American autistic biromantic-demisexual with ADHD, Dana Trick lives in Southern California where it is clearly foolish to wear black any day. Besides writing, she spends/wastes her day by either reading weird books; researching history because she has a history degree; drawing art and comics that she posts on deviantART under Silencedbook9; and watching cartoons, anime, and Youtube videos. Her work has been published online--Art of Autism, the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Kolkata Arts, The Writer Shed, The Writers Club, and The Ugly Writers—as well as in print anthologies: the 2018 Moorpark College Print Review; the Poets’ Choice Realm of Emotions; Other Worldly Women Press’ Behind Closed Doors; Free Spirit’s Historic Tales; Wingless Dreamer’s My Glorious Quill and The Book of Black; Dragoon Soul Press’ Organic Ink Volume 5; and The Ravens Quote Press’ Balm 2. She wishes the reader a nice day.

Three Poems, S.C. Flynn

 

ELEVEN KILOMETRES

Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean

This is where life’s journey ends, 

the deepest well of the world’s mind,

mother earth’s vagina

and darkest subconscious.

The outside pressure would crush you flat;

remember what it’s done to the creatures

we passed on the way, the world’s deformed children

that it hides away for shame, floating nightmares

of tentacles and hard flattened bodies

that stay by their mother’s side and do no harm.

But maybe you and I are the disgraces,

the ones who were born in the shallows above

and then crawled up on land and grew wild;

without the discipline of deepest water

our brains ballooned out big and empty

and now the clever wandering children

descend in technological incest.

HUNTERS OF THE LIGHT

The arctic terns will soon be gone

to seek the endless daylight in Antarctica,

passing over Cretaceous cliffs of gulls

and then, while the sun grows hotter, 

rivers of Serotonin drained from cities;

diasporas of isolated minds

locked inside, dreading arrest in the night.

On they go, away from the darkness

that covers interrogation and famine,

above the fires and record temperatures

until they reach the melting ice of Dayworld.

When the days again get shorter they return,

craving the insomniac sun,

longing to sleep but fearing to dream.

MUD SUBMARINE

Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin

Six men descended in this diving bell

while the colours in its extra thick windows

dropped an octave lower. On the riverbed

they were double-pressured, low tide pirates,

close to the surface but far from its rules.

A different, distinct sense of time

must have floated down there; uneven,

gulping down entire empty intervals.

In the impatience of their seclusion

they surely hungered for strangers’ faces

but only saw the nameless press of twilight,

lingering sediment of isolation;

fluid forming something out of chaos

then instantly discarding any shape.

S.C. Flynn was born in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His poetry has been published in many magazines, including The Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, Abridged and Orbis.

Three Poems, Mark Wilson

 

Initiation

Mug’s game

ludo-swirl

textual

reconnaissance

through the

subterrain

of ledger:

its recto 

stained verso

calibration-

dance of

de-cluttered

pagination

choreo-

graphs

breviary-snug

moveable

feast-board

slides the cuts

sideways

upcycling

found refuse

to installation-

ideograms

What method?

Don’t be too

methodical

& laboured

in welding anew

scrap metal

stamp coin

with impression’s

style Lear’s

snubbed profile

nosing grass

ant-as-centaur

boils down

grande basse

don’t take

yourself for

anything more

than mug-visaged

as you whirl

ludo-hemisphere

at Fortuna’s

tart behest

for one

final waltz

in the piazza

of burnt vanity

inhaling only

from ink-

stained digits

this amulet

of a smithereen

of ash 

Recital

Applause as life-sentence.

You’re only democratic

with the dead,

a tyrant to the living.

Recital is self-execution,

to their strained laughter

(still it will be performed).

Present in body, absent

in every other faculty.

Automated & enunciatory:

jaw-clamped , oesophagus

of sandpaper, murmuring

your sheet-music tirade

prescribed to the point

of proscription.

You are mouth, pure

unadulterated mouth.

Applause as jury-trial.

On the razor’s blade

(Occam’s or the drawn sword

of your Hari Kiri?

Who can readily discern?)

Preamble more oracular

than the composition itself.

Hardly sibylline,

your collocation

of fragments & shards.

Gists, sauced piths which are

rag-bagged, then dropped

into the goulash.

Intoned with Epicurean

indulgence, this: 

your cuisine-macaronic.

Language is an armoured 

vehicle, bringing menace

& wholesale atonement

in all its inky contrail.

Applause as solitary confinement.

Won’t someone pass me

the hemlock through this

semantic-grille?

Book Contract

Contractual in ink’s

haemoglobin legalese

masking the mutual

exploitation leases its

dead-hand clowns gadfly

signature-piece formal

overtures undercut brio

of imagination’s paradigm

traces ironia steel-serrated 

laughter excruciating

Covenant’s spilt

blood cursive’s

momentarily

pristine

Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: 'Quartet For the End of Time' (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), 'Passio' (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), 'The Angel of History' (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and 'Illuminations' (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse-drama, 'One Eucalyptus Seed', about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, ''Arden'. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.

Three Poems, Edward Tedrow

 

Open this poem 

 

From the piece of my brain  

that thinks elsewhere I want 

to flick open this poem 

like a Zippo and light 

a fire on your arm hair, 

the impetus to jump out 

of the box you confine 

your noggin in.  I want  

to flip open this poem 

to reveal the inner intentions 

the true guts of it.  I want to scatter  

the words like a deck of cards,  

a puerile shuffle, and see down  

past them the depth of which 

I am currently unaware.  I  

want to dissolve   

this poem to reveal a  

single poetic atomic 

itching awe in my mind. 

Black Spot 

 

Sitting on my sofa, something  

catches my attention 

in my peripheral. 

There is a black spot on my ceiling. 

Its shape is unclear from this distance. 

I think I have not seen it before 

but I may have seen it  

everyday, an irregular in the drywall, 

and return to reading my magazine. 

After some time I look at the spot again. 

It seems closer to me.  

It is closer to me. 

It’s a bug.   

There’s a damn bug  

in my house.   

Bastard! 

It moves toward me  

when I am not watching 

and stays still 

when I stare. 

Like death. 

Dark. 

Creeping.   

Motionless.  

Everyday. 

Every single day. 

Each time I glance up  

I hope to see it retreating 

having found nothing to  

feed on. It must have found 

something to feed on. 

I look again minutes later 

and it is closer still, 

of course. 

Soon it will be overhead, 

of course. 

Soon it will fall in my lap 

and I will cuss jump and jerk  

like I didn’t know  

it was going to happen. 

The Smell of Honey      

 

Some say my dog loves me.  Honey seems happy  

to see me but I see her as more needy than loving.   

Every day she roams the manicured back yard  

and eats dog food that I buy at a grocery.   

While her snacks vary a little the same dog food  

is out for her every day.   As she lies down she listens 

  

and wonders when again she will be petted or fed.   

When I lean down to touch  

my forehead to hers  

I smell the matted hair of 

an ancient wolf hungry, chasing  

a meal on a clumpy prairie  

 

panting panting  

missing and missing.   

On another chase  

and missing again.   

Catching the next one  

on the fuel of desperation.   

 

I smell the tearing  

of flesh and the yanking  

of meat that does not  

want to leave the bone.   

I smell the luxury of blood  

all over the sated wolf’s snout and paws.   

 

I owe it to Honey to pull  

on a rope with her.  When I lean down  

to touch my forehead to hers,  

Honey smells a man  

bewildered in a supermarket  

wondering if he’s lived his life right. 

Edward Tedrow lives in Slidell, Louisiana with his wife. 

NHC III,2; IV,2, Irene Koronas

 

1

90 percent in colop dex 3,

a protennoia in the ophite

version. 5 or at least 7

pentads doke the authentic 

flex. When segmen

hose the dentalize

and ghost the first

clinamen 

the first cog

the second tity

will alcove 55 ping pong 

tesseras.

A slant intrution

for a moment

filters notspars

inguges 

to perspective

an introx moot, 

oxic shutty 

that meta lorri

tarns the diagram

from pockanch 

the repro 

2

Dereading

discuts

and edits desponse 

to what is 177-78

derepeat 398

derefer 2 critical 

dequirements

sense or less

precise neodeduce

a statuary dehabit

the suspense trigger

that pronouns 

deincluse

3

This suppose broken

by dectifying

injunc with possible 

dedecessor the dedecessor

each ascend 

the decumference

deremains straight

a clear decupera

and an energy dereserve

from deconversion

the dialectical intricacy

alters a sharp degion 

at this point

degather and deinterpret

each expurg decall

becomes deputation

for expulsion

Irene Koronas is the author of numerous collections of xperimental writing. Her Grammaton Series includes siphonic, Volume VI (BlazeVOX, 2022), lithic cornea, Volume V (BlazeVOX, 2021), holyrit, Volume IV (BlazeVOX, 2019), declivities, Volume III (BlazeVOX, 2018), ninth iota, Volume II (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2018) and Codify, Volume I (Éditions du Cygne, 2017). Her collections include Turtle Grass (Muddy River Books, 2014)  and Pentakomo Cyprus (Červená Press, 2009). Her xperimental writing and sauvage art have been published in Alligatorzine, BlazeVOX, The Boston Globe, Buzdokuz, Cambridge Chronicles, E·ratio, Marsh Hawk Press Review, Offcourse, perspektive, slowforward, Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art and Word For/Word. She is the Publisher of Var(2x). Her website is irenekoronas.com. 

Selected Works, Daniel Y. Harris

2.223 

Zakhor, its symmetrodonta 

(reNgine for recon): this Kol 

Nidre is arkhonic—death 

urge, the archive. 

Crystallō—files:NUM/ringbuffer. 

2.224 

This archenomology—covenant

is struck with Karkinos: otobiograph

for no pasarán, 

hacks a CTF.     

 

2.225 

Shibboleth—a priori: request

a forgery (CSRF) 

attack—Šin.

3.03 

Indifférance in black oilcloth,

sprung from rumor—use

Pwndora, the massive

Ipv4 scanner. 

3.031 

Ǵhutóm in beyng, the pincer 

grip (gobfuscate 

in the SharpChisel):

in Weltjudentum, the hackney,

the cobalt strike aggressor

against the sorites paradox:

unworld. Run TorBot—axis split

the null (exonerator/condemner).

BURNALLs lingual barb (sawol). 

3.032 

The fygure—memoires d’aveugle:

CodExt (encode/decode)—overlap:

CyberChef, Ciphey, Katana,

Basecrack, Sttr. This pelvic

collateral—sauf le nom

neuts pies lesu domine dona eis

requiem. Pistil/stamen by Satanael:

co-ordinata—the radix is negative.

Qeeqbox/socialanalyzer.git.

Coda: apokálupsis/hazon:

j-eden—this traumnabel. 

3.0321 

 

Tzerufei ‘Otiyyot—the syntagm 

divinitatis symbola: (Zbase32, hex,

geohash). Viens, reconnais 

la voix qui frappe ton oreille.

The law’s contra: 

gitcide—baud.

3.04

                 

The testimony 

(naguère)—OffensiveRust,

its haplóos cirques a high

hollow: prijōs. 

Body—gerem. 

3.05 

Dimyon in the exitwunt 

(Šabbat)—its RedGaurd in a C2 

facility preflow. Exploit this hapax

legomenon (VLANPWN):

Āyīn-e Mānī in the epiphysis,

or this adyton, the combrox.

3.1 

 

CRISPR-Cas9 antiviral defense

system or negentropy/syntropy:

SillyRAT—Überlegungen

bust. The despoiler.   

Daniel Y. Harris is an extreme experimentalist. His Posthuman Series includes The Resurrection of Maximillian Pissante, Volume V (BlazeVOX, 2022), The Misprision of Agon Hack, Volume IV (BlazeVOX, 2021), The Reincarnation of Anna Phylactic, Volume III (BlazeVOX, 2019), The Tryst of Thetica Zorg, Volume II, (BlazeVOX, 2018) and The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, Volume I (BlazeVOX, 2016). His extreme experimentalism has been published in Alligatorzine, BlazeVOX, The Denver Quarterly, Dichtung Yammer, E·ratio, European Judaism, Exquisite Corpse, Marsh Hawk Press Review, The New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, perspektive, Poetry Salzburg Review and Word For/Word. He is the Publisher of Var(2x). His website is danielyharris.com.