p o e t r y




Two poems
by Luke Buckham



1. city

your fragrant hair glistening
in parking garage light
is the city that surrounds you
burning
the way I want it to.

or at least before burning
I would like to bathe
the whole cold concrete city
in its light,
like fire curling orange over a tide of cold milk
but I could not walk calmly
with your body.


2. the killing air

in one solemn shadow a noxious galaxy can sleep,
in one tangled head of hair a stranger's soul can catch fire,
in one tree a whole unborn forest can roar like a waterfall,
in one spine a stack of notes can jangle like a pile of keys,
in one spellbound instant a clashing of conversing faces can be observed,
in one second the hands placed on the bar can turn to sheets of music,
in one fetid apocalypse eternity can be made a joke,
in the swinging of lamps above a restaurant eyelids can be painted to look like moth's wings,
and idiots made to lose their sense of wonder.
at times I am too alive for this planet, and the whooshing of summer traffic
makes me cry tears of thick blood
that land on the sidewalk like melting pennies.
I hear the wood of forests gasp with brutal, inane hunger when I walk by,
and the nurse who attends me at night
comes in the shape of a polar bear.
I yearn for a music intense enough to steal my spirit
from the curve of earth, but the beat falls like a bowl
and spins on the floor with a tormented metallic noise.
I have made an effort to remain incoherent for fear of startling you

—Luke Buckham in his own words: "I am young. It is a strange time to be young. Contemplating getting older in this particular universe is a daunting prospect. It is sometimes hard to write a poem about a pigeon landing on your windowsill, or about a girl's hair, when so many forms of media are assaulting you on a daily basis. No matter. The most important function of art is to cut through the false barriers and illusions of modernday living and establish meaningful communication with other human beings, to find the things that remain true through the ages, and to make others share the same tears that you are crying, the same laughter that you are living.
"I usually enjoy art that is ridiculously pretentious and bloated with awesome inspiration. Self-importance is attractive.
"Life is awe-inspiring to me, to a very dangerous degree. Existence is so thrilling, so full of vitality and possibility, that I often quake with horror and elation at the vast terrain that is to be tread. Writers in this age have so much to cut through, so much to tackle, that anyone picking up a pen with the intention of documenting the world, much less affecting its outcome, had better pray fervently for their sanity. We are confronted by such sensory overload that clarity seems impossible.
"For example, on a recent greyhound bus trip, going to visit a girlfriend in another state, I was standing in the silver metallic bus station, watching the multitudes of people rove around with rather blank expressions, and I heard an eerie newscaster monologue that seemed to come from everywhere and sounded vaguely apocalyptic. I looked up to the row of screens, and saw an android-like face lined up in fleshly multiplication, talking with perfect, icy, pearly-toothed calm about how the Milky Way was slightly bent out of shape, that it had shifted noticably. I was stunned by the galactic implications, by the dead calm in his voice as he announced such a haunting celestial phenomenon, and as I looked around, somewhat horrified, to see if the other people in the station were having a similar reaction. None of them were stirring, or even paying the slightest attention.
"I had, at that moment, the extreme delusion of being the only human being left on the planet.
"God help us."






Intra-Venus
by Colin Momeyer

the inside of my throat is dead from the sunlight
that i swallowed once while sleeping
now i drink fields and birds

my stomach is cauterized by the moon
that i ingested once while tripping
i gnash rock and worm

and shit distilled water and butterflies

i swish clouds and cry snowflakes
bite sky and see stars

i live in the space between space
inside of the inside of the outside of the outside

i write because my tongue is a stump
that i chewed off and spit out
after once i had screamed at injustice

—Colin Momeyer lives somewhere in North America.






Four poems
by Brent Mathew Surrat


1. This is Now

learn to forget
reverse the thinking
kidnap to help
entropy convincing
give without mentioning
breaking and entering
to decorate with paintings
unlearn to return
back to the original state
destroy degrees
its on the obituary
to live, to learn, to die
embrace the cycle
by derailing the sane
the train never stops braking
so stop routines
and everyday lifestyles
move out, give up, let go
and never be complete.


2. The Great White American Dream

they said with terrorist smiles,
theater, sits alone
all these years
the multiplied fears
and shedding the coat
the American cocoon.
the Great White Empire.
realizations and truth’s upheaval
arrival and destination
tears and angry tears.
when violence and chaos
the beautiful faces.
so red so twisted.
so jolly, so full
the dead speak
their whispers flee
in our ears
thomas paine
break the chain
our American dream
lost, blinded, kill. now.
there is no flag.


3. Untitled

why expressionists?
this panting, pitiful painting
the wrinkling of cities
the infamous of mentions
it’s all between the venting
this curdling connection
dispatch dissection, the ending
swings curly red swings
that laugh lap laugh
much holding, soaking
imposing the loathing of two
release the tease
ease back to emails
the breeze is mounting up
knocking down the "us" in you
happy and lark that marks
this starts to rise like tide
end confiding, this siding
is framed and winding
and eyes never lie with eyes
these are the joining two.


4. Hawthorn

before it is too late
we wait on waiting features
and films and glare.
stare the wear of winters
and the math behind the ideas
the solitude of the here and now
we wanted something more
there was nothing for us all.
alone and aligned to reside
in the back of the shelters
the lack of the intrigues
the neighboring beliefs
shattered and scattered and killed
we were one of the best
and laugh and dance.
since the roughing of edges
since the ending of legends
look back, lean back, fall.
we have never looked so stern
the way we went about life
the way we held nothing in
the way we wanted it all
somehow fell short of our own.
reality was never much more
than a small town in missouri
and we can always ponder
and always be forever under
the rest of humanity
but the truth seemed clear
that we will never die.
(and we will never fear.)

—Brent Mathew Surrat lives in Springfield, Il and is about a year away from a bachelors degree in studio art. He has always loved writing poetry and short prose and has already lost count just how many old spiral notebooks he now has in his basement from years of writing. Brent plans to go back to school for a masters in literature. 'Art has always been a huge passion for me but creative writing has as well. Eventually, I want to publish my poetry and a novel I am currently writing.' Brent is 24 years old.






imminence
by Durdên Ysephí

I am not afraid to tell you I am not afraid.
I am not afraid to tell you I am not afraid to tell you.
I am not afraid to tell you I am not afraid of you,
but I am
afraid
of you,
of what you are,
of what you have become,
of what you are not,
of what you will never be---

Me.

—Durdên Ysephí is 'a pharmacist by day and a poet by night.'



















p r o s e




[essay]
The distance of difference
by Irene Koronas

several appointments are made in the house of distance the space where one lives and reproducts. afraid of the night day morning traffic she stays close to home, the living room of comfort, the dining room of dishes and chinaunderware. service is dusty from years of wasting. wait. is that the bedroom. is that the guilt your grandmother made. she slips into a black negligee her favorite doll-face-dream-man-lover-cadillac-hero is coming. excuse me please but i'm busy making pretty. this is my space and you're not invited even if you are a writer or pretend to be a poet, you told me to interview you. well, this is not the time, can't you see i'm trying to get bed ready

the following day the reporter thinks about the dimensions of her office, her creative apartment of sentences. is the paragraph enough to show how women live closer to the bone, shaving color scraping by on henna and ochre. color. the signifier of our destinations our past our present encounters with those of similar taste from expanse to pigmentations while in confinement to the distance of a blue gray yellow mixture. hair.

reality is a luxury for those who walk in toilet environments. where security protects their square dimension, a block of neighbors where outside enters. the watch is consistent with the red cardinal medearis. reality is relative to the person who is related to space kings, confinements of street city blocks garden clubs all meet here

may i interview you now. make it quick i have a cake to frost and my nails need to dry so hurry with the questions. are you happy. what kind of question is that, of course i'm not happy, if i was do you think i'd be living in this dump this nuclear space. you've done wonders with it. yeah. well. look do you have anything serious to talk about. sure. how old are you. none of your damn...okay. what do you think about rubbermaid. it's the best plastic made and it comes in all sizes it stores all my left overs. sorta like a man. put a lid on em and store him in a refrigerator so when your hungry you can grab what you need and it's still fresh. ya get what i mean. well. not exactly. okay my nails are dry your time is up and so is he

this is not working for me. i'm not able to relate the confinement of her situation. she seems content to be who she is in her discontent surfaces. maybe i'll try a differnt angle

—Irene Koronas is a US-based multi media artist who writes poetry and essays after hours of earning money doing something else.






[fiction]
Sam Edwine says "Hi-hi" to a bum in Foo-Chow
(Marco Polo went there, too)
by Tom Bradley

"Quit your farting."
--Chairman Mao, The Little Red Book

The commies had kicked his family out, and now they were after Sam. So he decided to take a walk, to search for a means of personal salvation. As he lumbered down Derelict Hell Road, he came upon a likely prospect.

Glistening black with filth, and naked but for a few rags that ended at the thighs and armpits, the guy looked a bit like a far-eastern version of Sam himself in his bachelor days, before his wife got hold of him and cleaned him up. Best of all, this bum was wadded in an old and ill-maintained handicap trike.

It might not be a bad idea to hunker down in front of this saint, to put elbows on the false-cripple knees and do a little fast talking. The standard slow-motion eyes rolled up and focused on Sam only after he was settled comfortably in.

Sam began: "Perhaps you could lend me some of your wisdom, for I'm in a quandary. It may sound like a Jesus complex to you--and maybe it's even a mild one compared to your own, as you sit here weeping blood--but there are several groups of people in this town vying with each other to see who can nail me first.

"Now I'm asking you, possibly the observer, victim and perpetrator of more than one crucifixion: shall I give these godless pricks the satisfaction of capturing me and deporting me after a little marketably sordid stuff in jail? Or shall I go fishing instead?

"Letting them bust me would offer the fair likelihood, or at least the fighting chance, that I could go public with the charges against me, if I survived. That would give me a crack at notoriety and financial independence.

"I'd have to recruit a ghostwriter. Like they say: two weeks in China, write a book; two months in China, write an article; two years in China, write nothing. But, you know, I'd certainly be svelte enough for the talk show circuit after a few months in the people's prison. I've got a fair start on it now, don't you think?"

Sam smoothed his hands down his sides and leered sidelong at his mute interlocutor, who moaned once absently.

"Now, the disadvantages we'll count up on your little bare black toes, like marketing piggies.

"One: They'd fly me back on a China Airlines death-trap, and I'd have take a chance on ptomaine from the Salisbury steak.

"Two: my adopted daughter, bless her dewy soul, would have to settle for being parented by an international criminal, a C.I.A.-betraying, counter-spying daddy who was thrown out of her homeland on the equivalent of a Mann Act rap. She could never return thirty years hence to witness the glorious results of the Four Modernizations and learn about her rich cultural heritage and shit like that."

The bum suddenly laughed. Had he understood, or had he made up some random funny of his own?

"On the other hand," continued Sam, "I could sneak off and go fishing in the Straits with your 'fraternal compatriots' from Taiwan, who hang around the phony show port. I know their lingo, for most of them are lucky escapees from this very town. They would allow themselves to be bribed with some nice herbal medicine or powdered pearl cream. And, like the person who hates him/herself in the morning, they would beg me to keep the ride to freedom and Big Macs a secret, so their mainland typhoon-haven privileges wouldn't be revoked. No publicity value to be had by that route.

"There are no snitches from either government among the tightly-knit, profit-bonded crews, and it would be the first time in two years that I'd be free of such ticks and fleas. And even if the Reds did find out, they would never publicize such an embarrassing method of escape. 'Look,' the world would say, 'even their foreign experts are sneaking over to Taiwan!'

"So my kid's childhood would be secure and obscure.

"But there would be disadvantages to this route as well." Sam looked up at the placid, filthy sky. "I'd have to stick around here with you, and I do mean 'stick'--" He peeled one dungareed knee off the sidewalk. "--until typhoon season got into full swing and the fishermen started showing up. And then I might die in the very storm that brought my saviors. Or I might get seasick, which is worse than death, as far as I know. What do you think?

"Also, they may be rich spies, but I've heard their boats are floating petri dishes for hepatitis A, B and C, plus tetanus, tuberculosis, dysentery, dyspepsia and dysfunctions of whatever organs you care to list, not to mention backaches from midget-sized berths.

"Besides, I'd have to get a job when I finally got home, because no publisher would believe I was telling the truth and things called novels don't sell."

At the mention of the word 'job,' anguish geysered from Sam's outsized hiatal hernia. He grabbed the bum by the crawly rags around his throat. By this point it had slipped his mind that he was kneeling in mucus and actually touching someone unwashed. And this was the self-same Sam Edwine who had given himself a rare dose of male anorexia from fear of the unclean utensils in socialist restaurants. He was either making gradual progress or deteriorating rapidly. In either case, he pushed forward and gazed into the raw face.

"What'll I do? I can't swim fast like the skinny comrades who wind up peopling the gay district in Hong Kong. And the commie-bred and -planted hammerheads would be attracted from nautical miles around by the drainage from my itched-open mosquito bites. Anyway, how could I get down to Kowloon in the first place, clear across mountains and provincial borders, with an A.P.B. hanging over my head?"

Sam eyed the bum's wheeled conveyance and added, "I do have a ruse in mind, a Yankee-style scheme, that might smuggle my bright bulk as far as the show port, where I could link up with the Guomindang."

He considered it a while. Escape seemed so bothersome. It would be much easier to acquiesce, like this rolled-over variety of lone Chinaman, and wait to be swept away like dog shit.

"You must be one of those guys my age," said Sam, "the 'lost generation' who can't do anything because the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution blew you out like light bulbs. You can't even sit up straight while you beg, but slouch flat on your back in your wheelchair, your pelvis poked forward, your head propped at a ninety degree angle--just like me most of the time, except I have a bed and a pillow and a book by Foucault to make it look legitimate.

"Back home in Utah, whenever I saw a huddled mass of your counterparts outside the Sugar House White Slum Blood Plasma Donor Center, I always went among them and asked, with sincere bewilderment, 'Why don't you guys become grad students like me? Why peddle your precious bodily fluids? I know 5000 dollars per year doesn't sound like much, but it's about 4987 dollars and fifty cents more than you dribble from your elbow crotches now. Besides, if you schedule everything carefully (pud profs in classes you take; peer evaluation in classes you teach), it works out to be about forty dollars per hour. And if you can keep little Thumbelina inside your pants during lectures, you can even get a Ph.D. Or just mail out for one from the back pages of Hustler Magazine, as you collect your fellowship stipend and rack up the federally insured student loans. Then you can become a foreign expert in some hopeless third-world shit-hole whose barbaric Deans of Humanities don't know any better, like Borneo or Sumatra or the People's Republic of China.'

"Of course, you, my grimy friend, can't do that, because you're already here, unfortunately for you, and you have no place toward which to be downwardly mobile. But you can see some parallels forming, can't you?"

Sam nudged him in the protuberant floating ribs.

"You must have some gumption under all that real estate, having avoided the police, who, like the soldiers of King Shuddhodhana, pack your unpresentable kind off to closed cities or god knows where: crematoria, perhaps, or glue factories, where nobody important like an American tourist will see you and know you exist."

No response was forthcoming, not even to this veiled compliment. Had it been expressed in too condescending a tone? Maybe the guy didn't know his own town's idiom. Sam resolved to get a rise out of him, one way or another.

He snuggled and swished, "You be Therese Defarge and I'll be Miss Pross, m'kay? Just back off, you slut! I push my saggy bosoms out at you, ooooh!" He dug his upper body into the bony, death-smelling lap.

Nothing.

"Pull yourself together, young man!" cried Sam. "You've got to make a better showing than this! Do something, and put your heart and soul into it! You've got to think big and have gumption! Don't be afraid to set out and go to new places on your own! You can tackle any adversary singlehandedly, if you'll only show me a little old-style Kipling liberalesque gumption! Come on!

"Look at me, for example." (Sam's mouth was getting tired; that last came out 'fur-zampo.') "Short of injuring my large person, there's nothing bad China can do to me. This country is impotent in terms of psychological retribution. You probably think that if I got deported I'd have to go home in shame to total ostracism and face-loss, like you're suffering right now. But face counts for less than nothing in an isolate place like America, in what your propagandist 'philosophers' used to call a social-Darwinist society. And ostracized from whom? Nobody, with a capital N, is the work unit Americans like me belong to. Even if I brought home the highest Chi-com accolades and a vita plumper than Mao's hemorrhoids, I'd wind up working a shit-job at Seven-Eleven. For I'm a mere male Anglo Saxon, and therefore have nothing to offer, of course. Lumpen intelligentsia all the way, and proud of it!

"We Americans are, in your Confucian context, sociopaths; and, though our society and culture are finished, we are the only free people on earth, for we are perfectly, sublimely faceless. We're shameless.

"That, and not all the milk and beef we gorge on, is what makes us so huge and mean and hairy. So watch your skinny, inhibited ass, Boy!

"China--all of this, the forty-year-old smog, the four-thousand-year-old street, the incredible inch-thick jam under your toenails here--it's just been a cheap, irrelevant vacation for me: a way of forestalling adulthood another couple years; a financially neutral expenditure of dead time; busywork to prepare me for the true man's labor of placing pickles and cheese on a sesame seed bun and nickels in a cash register, eight hours a day. You and your most-ancient-of-all-civilizations and your one-in every-four-faces-on-earth have been a way to kill time, nothing more.

"China, the world's biggest post-graduate school."

The bum rolled his head to one side and spat a plump yellow lunger on Sam's hand. The glistening globule nestled and quivered warmly in the web between Sam's thumb and forefinger. It was more of a response than he'd gotten in years of classroom teaching.

"Okay, fine. You have done something. I'm glad you felt comfortable enough to share with me. Let's talk about this now. It's a wise choice of activity in your case, a natural vocation, you might say. By now, of course, it is a commonplace among the educated classes that Mao Zedong-- "

The bum twitched at the name as though at a bee sting.

"--was an oral personality leading an anal nation. But I say you're all nasal types. Nasal expulsives. So please, lie there and follow your natural bent. Snort a little something back and expel it!

"But," said Sam, rising to his feet, "be the very best spitter you can be. Make yours the biggest spit on the block. Here, watch this--"

He inserted two of his more expendable left-hand fingers deep into his throat and twiddled his soot-sore uvula, waiting for the standard results. He was only sorry there was no party representative within reach. But then, in mid-gag, he thought better of it.

"Enough of that," he murmured, and withdrew his hand.

Then, feeling lighter, he stripped down to his novelty teeshirt, which read, zi jingshen wuran zhe. I am a spiritual self-polluter.

Finally, the embryonic sense of paternal responsibility long impending inside this man, who'd been expelled from his last American university post for displaying little evidence of the nurturing instinct, came to full term and was born squealing and bleeding. It was time to get back home and link up with his wife and daughter.

But before his total-immersion baptism in meconium, he wanted to have one last fling in the Shipu Harbor Reception Center. He would lounge around the diesel-redolent beach until the typhoon came, then he'd find a likely-looking trawler full of counterrevolutionaries to ease him across the Straits of Formosa.

"Your axles look a little orange, Comrade, but my big hands on the crank will wrench them loose. I think I'll blow my last few kuai on a dumped Hitachi television set and strap it to your luggage rack, a gift for the belated family reunion in Salt Lake City.

"My kid will probably have forgotten the identity of her dad in the meanwhile, but I can play with her non-stop a few days and fix things up between us, before I hit the help-wanted ads.

"So, it's settled. Goodbye, sick asshole of the east. You'll forever regret inviting this man in--and, even more, letting him slip out."

Sam laid hands on the derelict's legs, to move them gently off the trike, simultaneously elaborating a string of drool and mumbles to flap over his shoulder in the breeze for added authenticity as he rolled along. By way of disguise, he wadded the bum's linty lap-blanket under the back of his shirt to resemble a hunch.

"Come on, dead-butt. This is a legit act of requisitioning. Get your arm out of your pants and help."

He felt something sharp move up against the palm of his hand, squeaking like styrofoam as it pierced the flesh. For an instant, just before he swatted the blade and derelict away, Sam Edwine almost became mindful of the agony of this place.

—Tom Bradley's fiction is in Val Stevenson's magnificent Nthposition, CrossXConnect, Big Bridge, Killing the Buddha, Exquisite Corpse, Newtopia, 3am, Eyeshot, Oyster Boy, milk, Web Del Sol's In Posse Ethnic Anthology, and other publications far too numerous to even think of mentioning. These stories feature such gentry as a harelip with a six-figure book advance, a Palestinian abortionist, a seven-foot-tall banjoist losing his mind in the London tube, a peyote-eating teen killer, a rent-a-Frankenstein on Purple Haze, a Chinese compulsive masturbator, cannibal orgiasts in the basement of the Mormon Tabernacle, and Japanese schoolgirls conscripted to stir the vats in a poison gas factory. His no-less uplifting essays appear in Gadfly, McSweeney's, LitKit Journal, Salon.com, David Horowitz's FrontPage, Exquisite Corpse, Ralph, Newtopia, Poets & Writers Magazine, and Heresiarch, the mighty journal of anti-theology out of Belfast. Excerpts and reviews of Tom's books, links to his online publications, plus recorded readings,are posted at his website: http://www.tombradley.org