William S. Tribell & His Leary Jeremiads

Midterm

We all need places to go; real or not

Contentment in our containment

But that’s cool too

When the room has a view

For a great many

And nothing I can do

The dogs are in again

And we are pissing on the fires

 Begging the Question

The mind outside the mind

Outside the outside, sideways and slippery

Poetic logic – chance

Linear, but many and steadily unsure

The Language of Abjection

Laughing loud but longing

All the while aware and weary

Leary but driven – and so then bold

Egg

Human progress is deconstructionism

Our growth is painted death

The lumberyard, the tannery

Our industrial birth

Ancestral

Gods of power

Holding mean sticks or holding flowers

Monkeys with car keys

Chance of rain

Cocaine drain

Second hand, slightly bland

Sterilized and filtered through

Western civilization

And in triumph of the rational mind

The probabilities do not add up

They multiply

Oversexed ne'er–do–well; starving artist type with erratic sleep patterns and a penchant for travel and aimless wandering. A Pushcart Prize nominee; William has contributed to journals and magazines around the world. His favorite color is green, he thinks sushi is great, and he has done his part for Post-It art.

Connor Stratman--Son of Creeley in the Meta-Desert

Alack,

you stand for No thing

           Not even a sculpted mask:

           Lover. Marketer. Fiend.

I’ve found something I should tell you about.

Let the voice rehearse:

If a kingfisher dives and restrains, all at once,

can dark swoops grip time? Just now,

a drop of snow in a bled desert, on his way

to springing a dove:

then the blood sun’s a threat.

Escalante

The only place

of “no permission.” In the deep

of the canyon, I could

smell a death through a passage.

A wing-torn crow lay

watching the shadows

bounce off the wall. The Guide

drizzled water

near his feet.

“The wolves would have him,

Sooner or Later.”

For Robert Creeley

a bell

or like a bell

some ring

far away

and it could

have been

just about

any thing

Connor Stratman lives in Dallas, Texas. His books and chapbooks include VOLCANO (Writing Knights Press, 2011), SOME WERE AWAKE (plumberries press, 2011), and SOME WERE AWAKE (Erbacce Press, 2010). His work has appeared in such journals as Moria, Counterexample Poetics, Ditch, Otoliths, Dead Snakes, Etcetera, and many others. He is currently pursuing a PhD in English Literature at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Howie Good and a Philosopher's Argument

Snow White Punishment

The poison apple goes a long way, / to a museum of manual labor / rife in truncated limbs & torsos,  /  the seven dwarfs jammed against the wall / & subtly touched all over / by a small piece of fire, / every pure yet lifeless wish / mirroring a handmade loss, /  a shallow, dead-end space, / the insistence on  stillness & quiet, / & later an anthropologist of his own childhood,  /  safe & asleep in bed,  / hanging from a noose / his father installed.

Track 33

The train rocks from side to side as it gathers speed. Something about the small, fidgety woman sitting across the aisle from me recalls my dead mother. Philosophers used to argue that the soul is like a pair of horses, one dark and one light, harnessed to the same heavy wagon, each pulling in its own direction. My mother has been dead a full 10 years now. If you ask me, the soul is more like crushed stained-glass mixed with sleep and kitty litter and loaded on an obscure artist’s horsehair paintbrush.

‘The Heart Is Not a Metaphor’

It’s kind of hovering, like a figure on a cross,

a headless male torso, water sprouting from his nipples, 

with you in front of it, twisted into an X. 

That’s who I want to stand in front, you, not me,

waterfalls versus boxes of rat poison, 

while empty space slants precariously,

an ivory satin bridal gown where there was none.

NB: A collage based on Roberta Smith, “Reality Skewed and Skewered (Gushing, Too),”New York Times, Oct. 2, 2014

Howie Good's latest book of poetry is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014), from MadHat Press.