Friday, December 19, 2014

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.

Friday, December 12, 2014

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.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

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.