wunderkammer

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Image: tomsaint11 / Thomas via Flickr

rEduction Redux

by Elizabeth Terrazas

     awry = arrow fletching

pyramids and tunnels don’t look

   Sounds like       “so  I thought”

The next sound you hear is my horn

Calling       machinery

            industrial technology not yet

wasted       on getting more than what we has    more than

enough     for everyone   it starts to make sense, after all

a  drop  a faucet   thirst and hunger

        it starts to make sense that we are

here        we are were and was now sounds like

      they say  “way too shattered” I answer, “shuddering ice”

the nuts and bolts of it    Metal and the soldering iron

               Weld colors      bright green houses

fill the wood   at once   iridescent incandescence

immutable lexicon of love    bounce off her hips

spin those guitars    I heart you dear

one more thing, I always mention land or sea 

     Now did I wake to homes and hearth fires

foretold  yourself now

             in April we paint eggs 

No Vacancy / Vacancy

by Megan Martin

NO VACANCY

 

I will hold the room for you until morning, or until my hut explodes.

VACANCY

 

The traveler offered nothing.  Long before I heard dripping water, springtime was playing house in my bones. 

The Spider presents. . .

by Della Watson

Captured Curiosities from the Web:

The art of Japanese manhole covers

Performance poetry makes a comeback

Biography sculpture

Cowboy poetry in Wichita Falls

What do government officials and cowboy poets have in common?

The Economist: Goodbye cowboy, hello cowboy poetry.

Grover's muppet bubble poetry

Image: Benimoto / Benny Mazur via Flickr

I Just Wanted to See That Fire

by Maurice Burford

Marjorie Perloff / Jens Lekman / Eileen Miles 

Birmingham has leaves / leaves of paper draped about margins / a simple dismissive clear / not a more relaxed grammar with clear balconies like a falcon could be more relaxed perched under the relative goodness of thought / i doubt racist poodles have high drama or clear versions of American pageantry / squishy lumps of blood in a place with no air / mirrors tied across holes / i just eat what looks dead

her
homeless
mother in
a down coat
eating
tires out
of a
trench’s
ghost

and there we met him on the hills of Gloucester / its burnt canopies / only Chileans wishing for birthday gifts or their Spanish equivalent arriving late doused in cat fur but remembered / such rigid bones toted on our backs / we will make hurt new again and real

Wunderkammer

by Valyntina Grenier

Untitled

by Olivia Cronk

In miniature

in firmament

I crawl to the finger face

to unclaw it all at once.

Why if it isn’t phoenix burning

and burning and praising

in ghostly bare symmetry.

Hello de-tipped mountains.

Hello possessed corpse.

I hold its smug head

and its smug unsniffed hair.

It tells me we are swinging tongueless

to watch our jaws fished.

In firmament the brain calls to be born uncrawling.

I eat it all at once.

Mythscape

from the sketchbook of Brandon Heckman

From Here to June

by Allison Gruber

In April, a teacher friend tells me

that her students lack focus from here

to June. “Spring fever,” she says,

as though a wildness of feeling, desire

grows more insistent than weeds

when everything quits playing dead.  

Back then, blunt seasons; in spring

the fish the lake pushed ashore before freezing

thawed along with the heads of cabbage

farmers pitched into ditches before the first frost –

the fever, the rot of everything

that lived the year before.  

Now each day is knotted together

by epileptic spasms of snow and rain;

each trace of heat and flora, reticent,

but ultimately obsequious –

this year, as last.  

And the cat chatters at the window, lusting

after birds she cannot escape to kill;

she watches them briefly land, briefly leave

as nervous fingers chronically touching upon

something hot and hot again.  

And as she suffers this murderous longing,

I stroke the top of her head with two fingers --

smoke ribbons from my cigarettes to the ceiling.  

Cowboy Poetry Week: The Real Deal

Watch Cowboy Poets at folkstreams.net.