Three Poems by Volodymyr Bilyk

1

melody folding chill;

grinning sky - flinches a freckled whale...

sparkle pounding purple:

suave circling grind,

snail pitch - overheating

...dazzling blast

roots a drowsy warp,,,

shadow feels elephant -

wrecks nil,

sizzles.

2

meaningless warble of groans.

winking from out the depths of space.

Mesmeric eyes,

Veer with every breeze about,

hooting below in the ivy.

It's Supposed to Bubble

-

B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B B-cause.

overquiet giggling flare of tepid trepidation

tilts into slumberous C major tempest 

haptic huh - chirr

Finger and thumb

palpitate with a new joy...

sigh to their memory.

3

Contortionist warp:

ginger inverse awesomeness blow

prompts

forgotten moaning reemergence...

drowsy bellyache blinking

- mistaken flammable elsewhere;

levitating damnation kangaroo sparkle:

- hipbone discharge...

disgusting pulse...

momentary reverse skyline melody

parachutes

eerie ceaseless fluctuation aroma...

wrong gurgle:

...perilous sponge shadow blushing;

morbid banana grin deliverance...

blackness kissing.

Volodymyr Bilyk is a poet from Ukraine who writes in English. So he's basically from another dimension or Parts Unknown. Long story short: he follows Ezra Pound's "Make It New" and considers Pink Dairies song "Do It" to be a quite adequate description of his artistic intentions.

The Dialogics of Will Alexander & Heller Levinson, Part 2

This installment of Dialogics segues from Part 1, which can be found here.

Heller Levinson’s book, Un--, forthcoming from Black Widow Press this March, will feature further trackings of the Dialogics. For pre-orders and more information, please visit Black Widow Press.

Dialogics:  The Dialogics are ongoing conversations between Will Alexander & Heller Levinson.  They began in 2001 in Los Angeles over beer & burgers at “The Saloon” on Pico Boulevard.  Below is a sampling of recent exchanges.

H:  Division, Discard, Disrespect, -- three D’s knotted to a planetary Distemper.  Discard in the large sense, . . . the garbage we pollute with, the discard of the Other (Alterity) twins with disrespect for the other.  This is nothing less than a Trans-Egoistic Dysfunction, the inability to get beyond ourselves, i.e., the Anthropocene.

A major reason why I rail against banal first person narrative poetry, which is so rampant these days, is that it is not what is called for.  Spilling one’s ‘issues’ out is simply another form of contamination, a linguistic pollution, as injurious to our planet as plastic.

I’ve spoken in the X-Peri interviews how I blame Commerce as a major cause of this myopic compartmentalizing.  But also our educational institutions – which are commercial ventures -- share responsibility.  Departments, refutations & counter refutations, itemization, grading, -- all are intent upon visionary stiflement rather than enlightenment.

At this precarious point in world history, the human animal needs to be pointed there, outside oneself, concerned with the eyes of the ostrich, the cantaloupe, the sea, the eel, snake, kangaroo, cloud, & Ice.

Is it not time, as the Italian poet Bigali beseeched, to chiudo le scuole! (close the schools!).

W:  True, the modern temper is analogous with ruin, with perpetual disregard of its true capacity. It is given a-priori compartments to fulfill. It is compelled to fuel auto-regulated animosity towards itself. The glance is thus dissolved by stagnation. The standard view becomes lionized contagion prone repetition and scientific cul de sac. Thus, the lowest properties are cultivated through general access. This being not unlike the barbarity of the Roman circus, it's crowds gorged on suffering and discomfort. This being  mind as a dark regressive ant hill plagiarizing it's own self- deception to such a degree, that all spiraling remains stillness, and it's habitats of official genius becomes a corridor where corpses con-gratulate themselves concerning perfection of the in-ambulatory. These are the lawyers, the doctors of learning providing us with gerunds to memorize and falsely confabulate as if they were psychic oxygen. 

Meanwhile, the lists of exo-planents lengthens with at least 40 billion of them known to populate the Milky Way as only one galactic example. Add to this a conservative number of a quarter billion galaxies with another 40 billion across this conservative quarter billion figure and our present neural circuitry should snap and leap and begin to writhe in another habitation of itself. This needs be our current possibility. Yet we graduate Magda cum laude in order to compose texts about failed love affairs and utensils to gather stuffing from slain animals. The whole example of intelligence has become a hideous affair designed to self-falsify itself via  a dismal array of accumulation. 

In the meantime we hunt for life through dismally failed aperture looking for a random field of guano on an obscure moon.

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His book, Un--, is planned for Spring publication (Black Widow Press, 2019).

Three Poems by Heath Brougher

Unconscious Bounty

Bright coma straight-

jacket,, whist-

les gaping agates

free wrist 

spilling sanguine seeds

of humanesque oil,,--

red as fully-blown applefists,,--

thick musclebound fruitmeat

feasted upon by a ruddy populace. 

Mirrors 

Do not

look into

the mirror.

Instead, look

t h r o u g h

the mirror.

A Reversal of the Land Masses

           

A sudden                                                      sea-change and

     the Continents begin                                   to reverse

          motion-wise;                               begin to move

                               in opposing directions;

in flipsided directions;                                   and this is not devolution

          for devolution does really not exist; it’s all evolution;

                        just a backward-looking mutation;

  the land turning the tide of the fault-lines inexplicably;

                the land masses moving in backstep  

                           toward what appears

to be                                                                an attempt                                                      

       to reform                                           itself as

                                     Pangea.                         

Heath Brougher is co-poetry editor of Into the Void, winner of the 2017 and 2018 Saboteur Award for Best Magazine. He was recently the recipient of the 2018 Poet of the Year Award by Taj Mahal Review and is a multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. His newest collections are "To Burn in Torturous Algorithms" (Weasel Press, 2018) and "The Ethnosphere's Duality" (Cyberwit Press, 2018). His work has also appeared in Word For/Word, Chiron Review, X-Peri, The Ibis Head Review, BlazeVOX, and elsewhere.

Dreams by James Knight

James Knight is an experimental poet and digital artist. Void Voices was published by Hesterglock Press in 2018. Website: thebirdking.com  Twitter: @badbadpoet

Three Poems by Mary Kasimor

thinking that for beethoven’s requiem

from the solid structure

from day to night

(thinking that)

I risked everything

as I slept

clearly obsessing

I missed the obvious

the memory 

lost in a jar of buttons

(and)

looked for the unattached

seeds

(and) birth

the road suffered

from ditches

babies in still moons

never moved our hours

fixing the machinery

that was an exciting time

for misunderstanding

denial because we threw away

lost reasons

the last self protects

a last minute

driving down a busy road

towards the calmness

of wheat fields

by the lawns with wild trees

for beethoven’s opening requiem

medusa repeats herself

she repaired what I wrought

repeating herself

repeating her hands

so many of them

the sun got more sarcastic

throwing itself around

you have the most grotesque selves

apart from many others

after becoming liquid

tongues i became all of them

i was ignored until the early morning

i wanted to wear red lipstick

i wanted to mouth my words

i wanted to have ideas with numbers

it controlled something--knowing the ideas

in long straight lines only getting longer

it was a hectic undertaking

among the red and orange balloons

counting flowers

perfect hybrids

i was a bumblebee cute as reality

i made the stars pressed into the ceiling

i took a bus to everywhere

it may have been in a desert with windy kisses

having felt the edges of touching i stood

in the other room the walls glorifying the pain

embolding consent among the monsters

in the tapestry where i was trapped

aching dirt

I made myself up

Because I was an orphan

Becoming even less

Becoming absolute emptiness

Filling despair the rivers return loss

Oceans balloon into broken horizons

Opening and closing the doors to prison

We are un-useable and unstable ovals

Immersed in no such greatness

I never forgot and I never remembered

Comfort was a reason

I walked away and left behind a fragrance

I was stuck in a small town

Carrying my sacrifice without excuses

Giving you my left foot

And my spine that left me crooked

Buried in the aching dirt

I also got to die

Mary Kasimor who has been writing poetry for many years, considers her work experimental. Her recent poetry collections are The Landfill Dancers (BlazeVox Books 2014), Saint Pink (Moria Books 2015), The Prometheus Collage (Locofo Press 2017), and Nature Store (Dancing Girl Press 2017). Her poetry has been published in many journals, including Word For/Word, Touch the Donkey, Posit, Human Repair Kit, Arteidolia (collaboration with Susan Lewis), and Otoliths.