A Selection from Diario by Iván Argüelles

                                        xxii

                                          

                               the last photo of us together

not have the final rapprochement though we walk

streets crowded with vowels and a lack of syllables

the marmoreal entrance to thought and its dictionary

a lapse of afternoons in a summer of conjunctions

the left hand and its lesson of versifying heights

a nosebleed a shadowy walk with nuns into the nave

candles spent and incense wafting in clouds the shape

of demons or imps from the Rg Veda and if there

is a right hand still functioning as a guide to the per-

plexed to the ignominious of memory walking avenues

shaded by months of porphyry did we not have

a final epistle a trajectory beyond the daily baptism

and crucifixion something on the other side of words

a chaos of invention in sound and ink with books

of uncut pages and leaves alphabetized for their color

and formation and the eye we shared like the ear

between the two of us which heard symphonies of  utter

stone a pre-history of sand and the enormous fictions

of space with its eerie evenings without water and

what if we did say goodbye too soon and the buildings

curving around a Jerusalem of despond taking photos

with windows and reflections of a black Toltec sun

spinning its x-rays around our cinemascope brains

childhoods and childhoods we spent together like a

pair of unwanted Buddhas lying in an early spring

ditch more totem than idol more idiom than dialect

spans between thumb and index finger we aimed

our maps at the futility of language knowing full well

the birthright of platitudes and the silence of glass

crystalline dawns made static by our secret radio

oracular division of the number without quantity

what a mistake the bride was what an error the phone

and making up for a miscalculation in years we met

or so it seemed in a darkness of light outside the chance

that for the last time we would pose for the camera

of entelechy bright with the expectation of a future

grounded in the birth of our past a death beyond

reconciliation a loss of the eye and ear we shared

from the inception in snows and bitter melancholy

the famous dot dot dot of a code flashed from out

there hermeneutics and mandala of twin-speech

if we did say goodbye too soon

04/14/19

Innovative poet  Iván Argüelles is the author of numerous works, notably “That” Goddess, Hapax Legomenon, Madonna Septet, and Comedy , Divine , The (a poem structurally based on Dante’s work). Among recently published works are Fragments from a Gone World, and Cien Sonetos. Usually linked with the surrealists, his work has deep roots in the classics as well as modernists such as Pound and Joyce. 

Three Poems by Meeah Williams

Sometimes I Think Of The End

I look sideways at my body
in the mirror stealing peeks
the way I'd look at a stranger
on the subway.
What I see are things
that shouldn't be there
absences where things
ought to be

What I see is a freak
I know I shouldn't be staring at
but I find my eyes returning
like a gazelle to a watering hole
where a tiger crouches
in the weeds.

My body is a suitcase
into which someone stuffed
the real me.

Kidnapped, tied,
and gagged, I'm somehow still alive.
But for how much longer?

Sometimes I think of the end
when a coroner opens
up my body with his scalpel
to determine the cause
of my mysterious death
and rising up at last
from the bloody Y
of my corpse

is the real me still looking

for myself.

The Shower Water Humming in the Stall

Your left hand on my ass
has always navigated me
towards the somber plains.

The white mornings in these
hermetic rooms erase the dominoes
even as they fall. I wander

through a permanent miasma
wearing only last night's mascara.
I was forever at the vanguard of nothing.

I will march until the butterflies
are old, faded, & famished
forming a dying magic carpet on the floor.

The slivered moon is as good
as artificial. It is a sickle
not sharp enough to cut my throat.

There is no death, not today.

So I will write myself a blue woods
beyond the fences
& a wolf to walk beside me

now that the deck is low,
the cards dealt out & all the dawns
have already been played.

Everything Is Okay

Let the stream crash through us
the way bears dance in the kitchen
on summer nights

flammable excitement wonders
the billboard grace speaks
fountains within us

I'm a painting that hasn't dried
my inner organs not yet
defying all personal accounting

but accruing phenomenal profits
light switches dash across
the room we're war airplanes

that forgot to write home
or drop our payloads
flying over unknown waters

oblong umbrellas beach
the whales rolled under
still singing in the plankton

mountains in your eye beam
so much Africa on your plate
you despair when the closet

doors are pulled open
until you recognize it's you
who've pulled them open

resplendent as an angel
these are our salad days
while the printer keeps humming

listen to the crows the bang
of a mug upon the marble
countertop my silk robe falls open

to your spider hands
everything is okay I've faith
in the down here below

Meeah Williams is a poet and painter from Washington State. Links to some of her work available online can be found at Neutral Spaces.

Selections from Spirits In The Albino Hotel (throwing antlers) by J. Karl Bogartte

The Guardians by J. Karl Bogartte

Secrecy is the spectrum of ridiculous joy. The vertiginous scent of cursive tracks, still warm to the touch, ignited by your breath of forgery and kisses. Predatory eyes, cruelty of the mouth, breeding with flowers. Spring is an obscene dance of the intangible… That otherness coming to meet you in the darkness beneath the sun. Her bones are singing sweetly, incoherent spelling…

*

What is planted in night’s belly, a long-tailed grimoire to mink the utterings of minx, dipping underneath, the sundial of enchanted pores. Ghostly personages forced through the space of less time than it takes to either repel them, or give in to their own daylight longing. The watchtower will always remain incomplete, sirens go up in smoke, and your eyelids are flickering madly in the mirror of the aerialists.

*

By animal warmth and eyelight, shaking the heron rattle in the lightning bed, cutting night into ladders and depth of field. The entrances grow further apart, the others growing more ambiguous, raising a deeper turbulence of instinct… To mingle with fury, elasticity for the body’s aboriginal web.

*

There are beautiful engines barricading the streets, soft and liquid bestiaries, sirens of anatomical window-games. At the edge of time the elder’s lens appears without hesitation, sharing conundrum and pineal gland melodies. For a seasonal molting, to replace not the bees spinning their sheets of glass, but the Keepers dreaming that once upon a time will come, heavy with bells flourishing inside the starlight ovens. Shaping lead into fusible gifts. Replace the words with shrieks of nightingales, beneath the skin, startled, lightning shaped. Fluorite-enabled. Transparent as water. Missing in Peru…

J. Karl Bogartte is an artist/poet and involved in international surrealism.

His writing has been included in Paraphilia Magazine, The Fiend, X- Peri, Diaphanous,

Numéro Cinq (online) and Peculiar Mormyrid, Analogon 65, la vertèbre et le rossignol (in print). He has published 11 books of prose poems and Antibodies a surrealist novella. His most recent books are Auré, The Spindle’s Arc, And Still The Navigators… His newest collection Spirits In The Albino Hotel throwing antlers will be published in the summer of 2019.

Kinetics of the Invisible: In Conversation with Will Alexander

DCW: (I bring this up because if his findings are accurate, we could be looking at 1% of the population on Earth as potential, budding shamans. A small percentage, yes, though enough people to catalyze necessary healing.) Julian Silverman’s landmark study on this topic in the 1970s cemented a linkage between shamanism and acute schizophrenia. Do you see any further similarities between these two modes of being? Differences? Would you say the shaman remains a steadfast threat to the 'culture' of commerce?

WA: First of all, when you have a cultural focus pervaded by the mechanical conquest it stiffens overtime and loses its flexibility. The shaman on the other hand blazes from within magically pervaded unpredictability. He or she exists sans any traceable motion akin to observing a bat in motion near dimness at sundown. Two words come to mind eerie, ghost-like. This not an energy that can be conscripted via analytical gain or loss according to a pre-ordained propulsion towards verifiable certainty. Being outside the artificial mental scape of recto-linear projection graphs suddenly disappear with the psyche left in seeming suspension. What is left is psycho-physiology that burns as sonic vibration. It is fueled by tests accomplished on the invisible plane. So when a circumstance (such as the Occident) completely ignores the invisible the shaman exists as an apparition that can never be quantified, and spelled out according to delimited material understanding, the latter always determining it's realia according to beginnings, middles, and ends. Lucre can never correlate with the plane suffused by the kinetics of the invisible. Say, a quantity of shamans arose the system of commerce would go blank. The forces of the cosmos would begin to truly appear.

DCW: Your work appears to be driven by an undeniable life-force, an ever-resilient aliveness underlines your poems when I read them. Do you believe in the muse? Why through the lingual?

WA: As a poet I've come to fruition in an urban climate, not say, in some exotic setting say, of snowlight in the Yukon, or in the wilds that continue to suffuse old British Guyana. I am a poet who has developed via libraries on the one hand, and the magical experience of live musical performance via spirits such as Sonny Rollins and Jackie Mclean (to name just two among many I've had the honor to see perform). Since l never played an instrument or had a calling for visual art at the time, the most available conduit was language. It has (and continues) to possess for me a compelling charisma that allows me to express my deepest urges of energy. It cleanses me of the triple artifice of brilliance, ambition, and lucre which seems to be the driving force of the poetry world in many quarters. Like Bud Powell I am as desperate to write as he was to play the piano. Language in this state cleanses, to paraphrase the great trumpeter Booker Little, there are no "mistakes", only directions to be explored.

DCW: The newer poems come from the perspective of the Henbane Bird. Human beings certainly possess no monopoly on sentience. We have a unique perspective on things, to be certain; although so does the javalina, the chaffinch, the humming bird, the sycamore. How does one remain mindful of their specific point of reference, all the while expanding beyond it?

WA: As living organisms we collectively share consciousness. Everything that we experience is suffused by what I consider to be of a subsequent order. An energy that can never be dispelled by any form of cognition. Things have been littered by, blinded by the impatience of European arrogance over the past number of centuries having exhausted itself in search for its reflection of itself via recto-linear logic. It wants to master Mars and the moons of Saturn with a generic wagon train psychology. The consequence of this psychology has accorded little status to the sycamore and javilina, to chaffinch and the various hummingbirds. Since the Portuguese entry into Africa an endemic inequality was evinced that has carried over in the modern era. Nature and people of color have remained non-factors or factors to be used in service of Portugal and the northern powers. In consequence, indelible damage has been wrought upon both the Indian and African populations as well the extreme violence rendered by the Inquisition and subjugation of collectives such as the Cathars. This remains a consciousness prone to an optical prevalence by which it draws and measures things. Hence, 

Linnaeus and the racially threaded charts of European psychic mapping. The Southern world as well as nature has been subject to onslaught of disruption not only physically but most importantly mentally for all the African slaves and North American Indian survivors. It is within this understanding that the Henbane bird evokes its voice, not in terms of political or didactic reasoning pattern, but as an exfoliation of the anterior. The anterior in this case not only prior to the European spirit and its wizening but of the Earth itself and the energy that created the Earth. Each phoneme of the Henbane Bird is soaked in this anterior energy field which naturally retains its Indigenous poetic character. This bird is not an avant-garde practitioner functioning within an ersatz reflex pattern according to some politically correct instructive review. The bird simply speaks and verbally blossoms as its own simultaneity.

DCW: Do you have any plans to release either Concerning the Henbane Bird and/or The Combustion Cycle, respectively? What can the people look forward to as far as forthcoming books and/or readings? 

WA: As for The Combustion Cycle I have let the whole age not unlike wine or wood. It was written the greater part of two decades ago. Since then it has mostly sat, as I have enacted parts over time to keep it active. It seems the whole has now ripened to such an extent that it feels safe to say that it has matured and is now ready for a complete appearance. I am starting to speak with others who have the interest and the means to issue its complete appearance. As for new works, Secrets Prior to the Sun (concerning the Morisco plight in Spain circa 1570) issued by White Print Inc in Detroit, Colloquy At The Abyss (a conversation with Harold Abramowitz) and A Cannibal Explains Himself To Himself (issued from The Elephants Press in Canada). I will giving The Eliet Memorial Lecture at Cal State Dominguez Hills April 16th, and doing a reading at Portland State April 19th, as well as one at Wake Forest for a science and writing conference entitled Entanglements during the 2nd week of May. There will be other things coming but we will leave at this point for now.





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.

The Amalgam by Dave Shortt

overcast fills the earth cavity,
mountain cusps of original tooth
hold together the chewing vision still sensitive
to hot & cold,
to canine emotions & telepathic voices
on the wind

gameteless language-beings, peltless,
gnashing, clanking, yip,
cached away in chromium'd geology

a denture's baked cleverness
awaits a diphthong's ultimate lisped failure,
rain falls like breast milk
from the artifex Above,
while a nursing baby may vanish
in invisible plumes of incinerators

creatures working in the candy mines
(the outermost shells of humans)
bonded young with the noble metals,   
blessed with  scrapyard smiles
that would make them a star,
diamond drill of bollyhollyness preps
a winged persona for the fulfillment of the masses
freefalling in the space
of their closed mouths

accursed mercurial dimercurides before
accustoming to quasi-crazy hermetically-sealed smiles,
hydrargyrum easily packed into farthest reaches
of a decaying Milky Way
saves the bite of night, rooted in the firmament
above wine-stained acropolises
& lava flows engulfing tuskless elephants

glommed crowns are idolized
by white noise acing out the encephalo-realms,
degraded & pirated signals
are fedback with divested enlightenment & 'eat more tuna,'
mayonnaise-finned go-betweens between
instinctual nickels in neptunal lockdown
& cepheid dreams breaching unratiocinated information
at interface of salt-saturated solution (The Deep) &
phosphor'd breathable anesthesias of aether
soothing the abscesses of Pegasus

bobbing gigantic mammal Opuses
wallow under smithies of stars,
labials hammered out for silver tongues
liberalize the lingual lead
in line after line where benign flora
should thrive watered by saliva, vulgar spit
spun off its projectile path in disconnect
from mandala feelings (magnetized filings)

success-filled syntaxes grind down at night
in visitations of ruminant night-mares
conveying their riders into
fractal hemispherical text messages
that heat-shocked some snuff-tinned miners

'final' 'cautions':
modulates compatible frequency components
to universal precariousness of wisdom (teeth);
amplitudes of micro-nuclei
synchronize towards groupthink;
changes in cell gene structure
over play time, over memory;
presence of elementary magnetite
in anticipation of new asteroids

Dave Shortt is a longtime writer (from the USA) whose work has appeared over the years in numerous print & electronic literary-type venues, including The Ekphrastic Review.   More of his poems can be found in Uut Poetry, Molly Bloom, Poetry Salzburg Review & Blackbox Manifold