wunderkammer

Collection Week: Reminders of Water

by Megan Martin

You’d never seen an ocean.  You’d never seen anything like one.   

The first time we were on vacation. I found you down by the water on your knees where you’d stayed three days: enchanted by the empty, burning yourself out—freckles rushing your pale skin like parasites. 

Overnight your belly grew big with it.  You forgot my birthday.  When I reminded you, you said: here, a whole ocean, what a gift.  I took it anyway; blue fell through my palms: mutated, displaced. 

Back at home, an apartment eclipsed.  Ocean-photographs, ocean-books, ocean-postcards.  Ocean-soundscape blaring artificial from the phonograph like static.  Waves of ocean-projections disrupting our white walls. 

I’d find you face-down on the carpet, or face up: sunglassed, pretending so hard your nose had peeled, stingray plunged into your chest.  Nobody but you was invited.  But when you’d gasp awake in the night I was there. 

The ocean got messy; it got cruel.  Anemones and jellyfish draped over the furniture, rot-stench collecting in our paintings…seaweed-dinners…rough sponges of coral scratching open our backs…

Mermaids extended their fins to you, their offerings of waterlogged blondeness.  I was bigger, further reaching. 

I wasn’t— 

morning brought the whale-corpse, its lifeless, satisfied smile.  Everywhere else was emptiness, reminders of water.   

Nobody believed me when I said I hauled the whole bloat of it out of the window myself. 
 

Collection Week: Oyster\World\Woman

by Elizabeth Kate Switaj

she swallowed rice & popcorn seeds

          & every irritant spit at her

she gathered stones & broken glass

       as long as they weren't too big

 to lift & press down through her lips

         & one of the men who assaulted her

she didn't know why, so you don't know why

 at last threw a big enough piece of cement

 to crack her shell

                     & when she came out of it

                   in blood & bruised intestines

   there were pearls, baroque pearls

& one of use to the jeweler

                            --perhaps you're wearing it?

Collection Week: apocalypse: a poeng

by Olivia Cronk

A poeng is a sung poem. Credits: wooden man by Kevin Edwards, silhouette-ing by Philip Sorenson and Olivia Cronk, darger girl with deerhead by Andrea Rexilius.

Collection Week: Like An Old Shoe

by Valyntina Grenier

your friends say looks awful on you

has a hole in the soul where water leaks in and

is worn to match each curve something like TV

and the candidness of ands

Anaphora descending in a glass an Oban neat 

and some candied yams and girlfriends 

and a marching band and some sports fans

a black Camper from Paris we all cram into 

it was easy to pick up and the stupid machine will get it 

and it costs less too for two lovers horizontally 

along the strand at two in the morn-

ing and it's time to work the vocal chords while they're still fresh

and bam a matador dancing w/ tonsillitis and the series of 

furry balls swinging from his hat brim 

and's catenation dandy damn and an IRA under a pile of 

striped and argyle and polka dot socks two slate scarves 

and a subsequent principle of closure we'll promptly loose 

and anything w/ some crayons I hand you a paperweight 

some water paints Sharpies lead and you represent 

the broach the button and the pewter baby leg 

reflecting candlelight on the night stand and 

damn again how to make negative capably 

as all these ands stand down just seep in

you'll miss the time when notions bend or ampersand 

and this last meant to blanch an amorphous mass

evaporating at a glance a

leg reflecting cradle light

for your hand

Earlier version published in /Berkeley Poetry Review, Issue 37/

Wunderkammer Theme Week: Collection

by Della Watson

This week on Wunderkammer, we'll be exploring the idea of the collection. 

To kick off the collection theme, I decided to indulge in a bit of flarf poetry. The poem below is a collection of phrases generated by Google searches. The search terms I used were "weirdest collection in the world," "can you have too many," "killed by collection," and "put that in your wunderkammer."

Image: jlcwalker / John via Flickr

i didn’t suggest that saving the world would put any zing into your wild thing

why did you put your instrument aside and start studying Art History?

didn’t anyone ever tell you about salt mines, shallow lakes, and deep-earth,

the treatment for wasp sting, the andy warhol rug,

fishy downpours and mysterious balls of light and bleeding skies

do not be intimidated by this

[put your fingers on your closed eyelids & press gently]

if you are part of the 8% that still rock out everyday, put this in your signature:

garbage collection is known as a dangerous business when you put on your “whimsy” caps 

(who will betray the group? who gets killed?)

point of view is often as not your most reliable guide through the chaos

there will be no space for your ‘own self’ once you’ve put on the glasses

so the next time someone sniffs at your rocket-ship covered book, you can tell them

a few decades of research have made it clear that people are terrible choosers

from the man who sued god to the man who . . . 

dies in the pacific northwest and is put to sea in a burning canoe

can you imagine letting your child sit on a hyena?

OMG, why would you have a dog lick your face!

                                                                     yeesh, some teens

i’m not trying to put your friend down, just in perspective

consider this: you are setting out to create your own cabinet of curiosities

or you just see yourself in the details that make your everyday life, waking up

i am like you, i soak the art of others too. 

but i understand now that it is dangerous to put all your eggs on one spider

we can all be replaced in the big picture without so much as hiccup

and youtube has a mythical “center,” and 

it takes a lot of time just to put everything together for us to learn 

the best weapon is a flail, not a morning star

REQUEST FOR MY FIFTH BIRTHDAY

by Chad Sweeney

I want my head on the totem pole.

Just above the eagle and below the rat.

Just above the cormarant and below the clam. 

Between the abacus and the judge’s book. 

I want my effigy carved in dice or

 the old slow jaw of a yak. To be way up 

in the wind, in a nest of lightnings, 

reposed inside the dark wet wood.

Triadic Memories (M Feldman, 1981)

by Elliot Harmon

After modernism,

after bleary ambitions
of effortless grace

have sufficiently
subsided into dreams
of meager stipends,

after dinner,
a man sits at a piano.
A piano can, in narrative,

signify a private genius
or hidden depth,
associations

which complicate
depiction
of a literal pianist.

The title refers
not strictly to triads,
but to harmonic

resonances
in the piano’s
architecture,

effects that can be nearly
lost on every listener
but the one playing

though the piece’s length
and difficulty
ensure that very few

hear it that way.
I think sometimes,
he told a painter,

that you shut off
your phones
all the time

not because someone
will call but
because no one will.

I Want to Believe

by Miki Howald

I grew up in wooded and rolling hills deep in south eastern Ohio, where the treeline in places breaks for patches of farmland, only to spring up again a few miles away. In the woods behind my house I discovered caves, waterfalls, and ravines that could only be crossed by vine, and deep pools the color of everything, where one could swim in the summer—but only after throwing rocks in the water to ward off snakes. The largest state park was only a county to the east, and there were miles and miles of hiking there, shaded trails under a canopy of deciduous leaves with destinations like the Old Stone House and a couple of forgotten cemeteries from the time before the state owned the land.

Eastern Ohio strangely is both groomed, like the farmland my extended family lived off of, and wild like those dark woods. This is the place where Native American tribes from hundreds of miles around came in truce to gather flint. This is where the people before those tribes buried their dead in mounds shaped like serpents. But there could be an even older presence under those trees, something so old we’ve stopped believing in it. Eastern Ohio, where I grew up, the edge of Appalachia, is also Bigfoot country.

According to the Eastern Ohio Bigfoot Investigation Center, run by a man my father briefly worked for in the early 1980s, there have been numerous documented sightings and stories of Bigfoot going all the way back to the Delaware tribe in the mid 18^th century. The bulk of sightings occur in the three county area of Coshocton, Guernsey, and Muskingum Counties, known as the Sasquatch Triangle. Perhaps it’s because I grew up in the middle of this triangle that I became so interested in the search. Were time and money of no concern and were I able to passionately pursue anything, my dream would be to become a cryptozoologist. 

Sea Terror!

by Brandon Heckman

The Sophisticate

by Meg Barboza

It’s August in the picture where Joan Baez and Jimi Hendrix are holding hands.  

It’s 1968 in New York.  I want to name

for you what I’ve seen; fashion a suitable 

taxonomy, as in those buildings 

look like Alps & everything adorned by ghost signs.   The label scar mouths 

some indiscernible offer,  

a disassembly of giant 

lettering: it looks like a refrain 

when I read it, the sign that says, Your Father’s Mustache Your Father’s Mustache.  

I imagine exclamations. I used 

to live here and I like 

the way it smells.  

I’ll rewrite our diaries for posterity and tell you how the joke 

about the cunning linguist works.  What do you mean, the Alps?