Two Poems by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

To The Graduates

One’s retired already

into the police. Scratching down

what you have and have not done

according to the called-in debris

washed ashore with every

panting broadcast.

If I’m feeling fucked with

I guess that’s because I set aside

big cuts of my shadow

to trick myself into thinking those bad thoughts

I’m having don’t fit inside a body.

It would be pretty funny if it didn’t inspire

such doom.

Not that you slipped free of your shadow, either.

But enough about us.

I reckon the others are working through

a shed of phantoms—yet they rise,

catch their trains, sleep late in falling snow.

Look at me, surrounded by rocks and trash

just begging to be flung into traffic.

Day After the Election Poem

The moon’s biggest at

dusk these days, lured up

through wet smoke

from the Catalinas. I can

hear some coyotes tonight.

They like to leap the so-called walls.

Night birds sounding out against

a rattled truck’s alarm in the grocery store lot.

These sounds all singing together, howling out—crying

reduced to talking, talk spun into a bad dream.

Muttering graveled into what is called thinking.

I would like to buy a hatchet. I would

like to carry it home on my shoulder.

Follow my shadow home

But those days are over.

What’s changed, you ask from the future?

Well, someone had drawn a swastika on the door

of the toilet stall long before the election.

Carved in, perhaps, with a car key or the nubbed

point of a pen in the hot morning. Up, then out.

Over, then down. & so on.

Nobody’s written anything next to it yet.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson wrote a book called Meadow Slasher (Black Ocean 2017). He lives in Seattle.

The Deserter by hiromi suzuki

Roses in desert;

Blossoms colored in yellow, red, orange

Have thick stems such as tree trunks

Thorns like the knives hidden in a dry well

Deserter with bird cage in his hand;

There is no choice to drink something but vodka

He is dreaming of catwalk show in fireworks

New Year celebrations throughout the world

The catwalk show models are roses;

Dresses made of chiffon, silk, organza

Rotate the beauties in kaleidoscope on runways

Mirror reflects the knives cutting off the flames

Words to spill out of roses' lips;

Petals colored with lithium, barium, strontium

The deserter empties the bird cage and his

Pocket full of sand     to

Fly   away      to

Free space

hiromi suzuki is a poet, fiction writer and artist living in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Ms. cried - 77 poems by hiromi suzuki (Kisaragi Publishing, 2013), logbook (Hesterglock Press, 2018), INVISIBLE SCENERY (Low Frequency Press, 2018), Andante (AngelHousePress, 2019). Her works have been published internationally in poetry journals, literary journals and anthologies.

Web site: https://hiromisuzukimicrojournal.tumblr.com

ATLANTIS by Oriana Ivy

In the Eye of Silence by Max Ernst

We’re wreathed in robes of seaweed,

air bladders’ amber beads,

the hood of water

over the face of things.

Fish weave in rainbow veils.

Kelp sways like soundless bells.

we cannot tell one day

from a thousand years.

Here are our amulets, good-luck

crystals, diadems and crowns.

Here tilts the headless

statue of our god,

Lord of Mercy in whose name

we killed. Mudworm burrows

in the marble palaces.

Our purses fill up with silt.

We remember pine forests,

resin scent of the wind.

We remember having held

someone’s hand.

This glitter on the waves

like bent echoes,

those are our last words:

Hold hands. Hold hands.

Oriana Ivy was born in Poland, and came to this country when she was 17.  Her poems, essays, book reviews, and translations include Poetry, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, Nimrod, Spoon River Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, and many others. She’s the prize winning author of the chapbooks April Snow (Finishing Line Press) and From a New World (Paper Nautilus), and has a new one, How to Jump from a Moving Train, forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. A former journalist and community college instructor, she leads the online Poetry Salon and writes a poetry-and-culture blog.

Two Poems by John Guzlowski

On My 64^th Birthday I Think of Dostoevsky

He had no 64^th birthday, his death

put a stop to that—a late winter’s day,

a dropped pen holder he couldn’t pick up,

an argument over payment for some work,

the usual trivia triggering the blood

spilling out of his lungs, into his throat

and mouth, his wife Anna screaming,

pleading with him to stop the red tide

vomiting past his teeth and lips, but how

could he?  He knew what he knew. 

There is no cure for death.

It stopped when it was ready to stop. 

And then there was just her weeping

begging for some hope, some words

that would tell her he was still there

gaining his strength in the darkness.

At a Conference on “The Road and the City:

Mobility and Stasis in the Twentieth Century”

Somebody reads a paper about Primo Levi,

The Holocaust as just another road trip:

The dying road of the cattle cars and rail lines

That led to Auschwitz, the dead city of the 20th

Century where everything we learn about freedom

Vanishes in snow and pain and gray smoke;

And he tells us Levi’s death on the stairs

In Turin, his suicide’s hands reaching

Like the wings of a phoenix for the sky,

Pays homage as only a great artist can

To James Joyce’s dream of Dedalus’s flight

Into a world beyond the poor Mick’s world

Of bogs and lime and ice-forming crystals

On the graves of all those who don’t seek

The road that leads to the final city we dream of.

And I turn away into silence, to my own graves,

Those of my father and mother who came

With nothing and left with nothing, watched

Their roads disappear like the smoke from the bodies

Left in the roads and on the sides of the roads

By those who drove past in armored cars and tanks

Heading for the Holy City on the Hill

Where their own graves waited for them like

Children hungry for their mother’s touch

And the happy sound of their father’s voice.

John Guzlowski's writing appears in Rattle, North American Review, and other journals.  Echoes of Tattered Tongues, his memoir about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany, won the Benjamin Franklin Poetry Award and the Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Award.  He is the author of three novels and a columnist for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy. 

6.0 by Daniel Y. Harris

disallow purity with neuromodulators,

ion channels, epoxy oxygen,

genome omens, below a tedious umlaut. Interpretosis,  

with its faciality, rites lack. Half Hyksos, half Mongol, repairs

            Christ’s tunic for the nine dark calends gone.

Starve macron, breve ribs when frailty takes toll,

dispatch stibnite (Latin: lapis philosophorum). Thanks

kinescopic mesoentax. Stride out the ninth

module (which is just below the sixth).

            Ricochet the semtex (“rabot”): discomfiture’s

ebb and flow, demophobia. The convex mirror

in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding reflects a JAIL THREAT

FOR TARTCARD PHONESTERS. Defacto twerk’s 
4,Source/Original/rBot0.3.3_May2004/rBot0.3.3_May

            2004,botnet,rBot,0.3.3,unknown,cpp,

00/05/2004,x86,win32 substitutes Hamlet for Alceste.

Not a thing-in-itself, but rather as a compounded unity,

comeuppance, implanted in vitro in host mothers.

(Scholium BLT on Iliad II.27=21B32). Score pedantic points

with the Übertragung, the transferre, the crossing over, back

            and forth. Curb head. Sieg it up, Bobby Wheelock. 

Delta 87. [SL 2004 IRL] Let a₁, · · · , an be positive real numbers,

n > 1. In the crowd, tutelage agents collect refuse, build

            cairns, inhumate or aspirate on ε in the word ‘εν.

Dentition [… ] exceeds elysium, in bliss, the nominalist curve

cuts zygotic. Declare szenery, blots out pauses and upbears

insensate systems. Order = disorder; I= not-I; affirmation

            = negation: Kohanim offer the Priestly Benediction:

(Nu. 6: 24-26), the ‘anti-demonic psalm’ (Ps. 91), Lev. 26:42,

Ezek. 45:12, Deut. 11:12, Is. 62:4, Is. 45:18, Ps. 85:2, Ps. 67:2,

            Deut. 28:8. “Blurb on!”—slurp on, Anna Phylactic’s

progress from farce has its symbolacric arena, (e.g. zombie

SS super-soldiers). Here’s a usurer’s rerun in disavowal’s

Daniel Y. Harris is the author of numerous collections of xperimental writing. His individual collections include The Tryst of Thetica Zorg (BlazeVOX, 2018), Volume II of his Posthuman Series, The Rapture of Eddy Daemon (BlazeVOX, 2016), Volume I of his Posthuman Series, The Underworld of Lesser Degrees (NYQ Books, 2015) and Hyperlinks of Anxiety (Červená Barva Press, 2013). His xperimental writing and sauvage art have been published in BlazeVOX, The Denver Quarterly, European Judaism, Exquisite Corpse, The New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and Stride. He holds an M.Div from The University of Chicago and is Publisher & Editor-in-Chief of X-Peri. His website is danielyharris.com.