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.

Asha Gowan--Lantern-Bearer Clad in Throes

Fireflies, Flying Their Fire

Fireflies, at death’s paling, throw stars into shadows,
Torch the night, chastise its lullaby for stealing light, and away
Flying their fire, at death’s ailing, to rave at grave jars of mad glows.

I could say, have me die in my sleep, resign my life to sad woes
But my light was borne of blazing gleam, sing me back into dream the way
Fireflies, at death’s paling, throw stars into shadows.

Scar the darkness, char this living’s starkness, by burning glad blows.
Men, small lightning thieves, must dare brandish their flames into the dying gray,
Flying their fire, at death’s ailing, to rave at grave jars of mad glows.

A wicked game of smothering life does some demon child, clad in throes,
Make when twisting the lid airtight? Maybe so, but my dreams alight to follow stray
Fireflies, at death’s paling, throw stars into shadows.

Oh the pain of stolen light, and pain greater still when slow stolen! Had those
Dreams and I flew into this mortal quarantine, tied! But they glow into the gray,
Flying their fire, at death’s ailing, to rave at grave jars of mad glows.

And I, once light bearer, know the torch will wane into the night, in bad pose
Of trembling gleam but dreams, living’s darkness, yes dreams do betray --
Fireflies, at death’s paling, throw stars into shadows,
Flying their fire, at death’s ailing, to rave at grave jars of mad glows.


My name is Asha Gowan and I hail from small town Carrboro, NC. As a freshman currently attending the University of North Carolina at Asheville, my intent to major in Literature with a possible concentration in Creative Writing is evolving into a sound conviction. I have a wide range of far-reaching interests that have enriched the content of my prose and poetry. An unbounded love of truth, beauty, and wisdom motivates me to keep pushing beyond the limits of my understanding. So, I make a habit of absorbing as much as I can. I consciously observe. I mindfully pay attention. However, my life blood is verse. Ever since my solitary days spent in the school library during lunch, I befriended poets such as George Moses Horton and Li Young-Lee, then on to essayists such as Thoreau and Emerson, etc. I read vociferously. I mustered the courage to give it a try, to pretend to be an author for a day. I've been at it ever since and I've no intention to surrender the pen. Writing has been a stabilizer, a confidant, and a tutor.

Chani Zwibel: Postmodern Cassandra

WAKING

First, the needling headache behind the eyes

Allows I am awake

Sun caught in the gauzy white curtains tells

Morning and reality have merged

First, to dress oneself against the elements

Today-the cold, tomorrow, the heat

God expelled us from the Garden

To a world where we’d need

To clothe our bodies against its harshness

While Paradise bloomed in splendor the rest

Had a hard evolution –the slow birth of rocks,

The slimy ancestor crawling up from muck

The worm out of the primordial sea

To a place where our ears are beset by singing cowboys

Our culture inundated with thong panties and racecars

Until one mass-curl-crowned-wave

Curves over our heads darkly

And falls

Ocean reclaiming camera-phones, contact-lenses, favorite pets. 

WEASELS

weasels are underground, waiting.

they want skin.

weasels are snorting cocaine, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair.

weasels are fucking, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair; they want blood.

weasels are performing satanic initiation rites underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair; they want blood; they want muscle.

weasels are embezzling millions from top Fortune 500 companies, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair; they want blood; they want muscle; they want bone.

weasels are keeping toddlers in cages, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair; they want blood; they want muscle; they want bone; they want marrow.

weasels are snapping babies’ spines, underground, waiting.

they want skin; they want hair, they want blood; they want muscle; they want bone; they want marrow; they want gristle.

weasels are underground, waiting. 

Chani Zwibel spent her first 18 years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but now calls Marietta, Georgia, home.  She writes and gardens in a little red brick house. Married to Evan Butler, she and her husband are parents to a lovely blue pitbull named Loki. 

Charlie Farmer, Dangerous Young Debonair

Am I Not Lucky?

Every Thursday,

I visit the High to see the Veiled Rebecca.

Someone took a slab of marble and did that.

There are nights I don't want to sleep in my bed,

And I pack a bag of books and take a cab.

And I begin.

I carry three books--Gatsby, Meditations in an Emergency, and Jesus's Son.

Last week, a girl took me to her home and in bed as I unpacked,

She asked to read me to sleep.

Fools

We fooled them.

Dressed up, we almost belonged,

You, 19, wearing your dead mother's heels,

Bouncing checks for a two hundred dollar dress,

I borrowing a skinny tie and using your bobby pin as a tie clip,

Ordering duck confit and wine we could not pronounce.

Now we have leftovers, postcards, 

and people mistaking us for being in love, important.

Your Birthday and Apple Juice

Each morning in traffic,

I think of how you will wear your hair.

You arrange it three ways--

Straight, tucked behind your ears.

Curled, Gatsby, pure grace.

Or braided, and just so,

My favorite.

You are one year older today.

And you are going to break so many goddamned hearts.

A Capricorn since 1978, Charlie Farmer was born in Forsyth, Georgia. After years of teaching  English in Milledgeville, Georgia, he finally discovered the virtues of barsitting with a drink, pen, and stacks of cocktail napkins at hand.

Holly Holt and the Abominable Seasons

how rain laughs

has autumn rain

ever devoured them,

these pestilent halfwits,

who gaze with a city craze

across mountains

quilted in pine?

have they ever felt

a chill nibble their nerves,

ovationed by bumps

along their skin,

pale from living

in a conditioned summer?

people irritate me

whose lives coincide

with faded paper;

people irritate me

who cannot fathom

how rain laughs

ne’er-do-well thought

glitter in the mind,

ne’er-do-well thought,

saunter through a summer

pouring with petunia laments

& catch my falling conscience

in a jaded tendril of grass

between thumb and forefinger,

twisting backwards and forwards

unlike time, whose one-way-street

steals strings from my violin heart

ill-equipped on evenings

of symphonic sorrow

glitter, glitter—

my hours know only

their passing

the moon

the moon doesn’t know Hiroshima,

mushroom cloud rooted in death

and cries still vibrating

through a blueberry’s wilting core;

the moon doesn’t know poverty,

on propaganda-littered street corners

where a politician’s golden lies

fades into gutter-worn truth;

the moon only knows silence,

how celestial nothing spans eons,

while a species, longing for life,

leaves footprints for weeping stars

Since August of 2013, H. Holt has been published by various magazines and blogs. She has recently been accepted by Negative Capability Press, who will be including her in their Anthology of Georgia Poetry in 2015. She lives in the luscious mountains of North Georgia, where she spends her time helping students achieve their dreams of higher education.

Patrick Herron and The Gaping Mouths of the Godless Pilgrims

The Gaping Mouths of the Godless Pilgrims

I have a lump in the middle of my chest. I have been notified that a solid mass is growing there. We read about this sort of thing happening all of the time, but now it’s happening to me, and it’s unreal. I can’t see it. Believe me I’ve looked. Maybe you have too, you’ve checked, you’ve searched. Some say we all have it, or will get it eventually. Maybe it’s in you, only small, dormant, unnurtured, waiting for the perfect time to erupt and spread itself throughout the body.

Though I cannot see it I’ll try to explain what it now feels like, though, in the hopes of rounding what must always be lopsided and twisted, a horse with shorter legs on one side, blinded and walking endlessly in circles. Sometimes it feels as if I have some sort of second head inside my chest, its skull bones covered in a flesh carapace made entirely out of mouths. The mouths beg ceaselessly, at once chick-needy, catfish-ungainly, big fat smacking lips begging, begging for what exactly, and for what reason do they persist? Why are they so hungry?  The underwhelming unreality of a viscera-wet mouthy hollow stone.

I’ve provided you instructions for its virtual simulation and replication. I’m not sure how I know about the existence of the mass but I do sense as surely as I perceive light and heat that it is desperate and ugly and painful. Doctor, please, I beg you, it must be pried out, excised, exorcised. It hurts when I do this, or that, or anything, or nothing. Doctor, help. With a dog hump clockwork it repeatedly burps its demand for the latest in surgical resection. Want out, want out, want out. Don’t you hear it, Doc? We should agree on this, Doctor, and let’s not talk about what ends if you do remove it. Death is hardly a complication.

The answer is that a tree which falls in the woods

makes no sound. Another thing that isn’t heard

is that the earth’s chest is jolted as it hits the ground.

This lodged object is surprisingly radioactive. It is so hot it burns, it makes a grown man sick, it gums up our lymph glowing salted cobalt blue, it splits and fissures and spits deadly ions so energetic they fly through walls of concrete. Strangely, it casts the sort of light that casts shadows of itself, as if it were a solo show in its own makeshift cavern. Shadow puppets for a blind audience who never were going to attend anyway.

I imagine for a moment I can remove it. Once my son and my daughter have left the house I might grab one of their toy swords laying about, then carve open my chest with the dull plastic blade, pry the damned thing out, and beat it into a more reasonable shape. Perhaps then I can place the unruly object on a shelf, line it up on the mantle over the hearth by the family vacation photos, everyone’s faces shining in the extraordinary pink light of various setting summer suns, take photographs of the thing as it rests on that shelf and share those pictures on Facebook for all to comment upon. At home. A home, that house, anyway, whatever that is as well. Perhaps even the slightest knowledge of it being, if only for a moment, seen, may soften it.

Questions remain. Where does it belong? Where should it now reside? How exactly should it be handled?

Maybe I don't rip out and take pictures of the thing. Maybe I just head out to the local sadomasochism and bondage shop, order up for it one of those cute little verbal lashings you hear about, squeeze the lump down into utterly irrelevant smallness. Perhaps by such abuse and contortion it can be cornered and forced to swallow itself.

It is once again the 4th of July. We have arrived

at freedom once more but the date will change.

Movement ensues. Time is neither fork nor fortune.

The countersign for this pilgrimage is doubt

but you arrived at a loss for watchwords.

All ten guards of the party stood vigilant

but they were all depressed. Hidden in each man’s chest

a grim image of wandering, each taking wrong turns at every juncture.

The guards held a meeting where they revealed to one another

the very vision they shared. Upon this revelation

each fell down upon the shady lawn in sleep and, relieved, began to dream.

They dreamt of mutiny but when they awoke

they were agape upon learning they had no bosses, no one to protect.

Some say this thing is not a singular thing but one component of a system conducting a great orchestra. It is only noise and shards of decomposing dream-parts, each flying off in seemingly random directions, each projecting its light back upon us: one beach here, eight mountains there, a singular porch, eight feet on a railing, four of them old, but a pair of hands one folded on the other, warming, in the measured beats of the softest life, there it goes, there it is above us the pearl the silver in this dark, flying, fading, watching it collect dust right not here but there, not close, not forever, just passing away. All of that, you agree, and yet there’s hope for it? Get it out. Right now it damn sure aches here keenly. Please let me be a body free of this heart.

Patrick Herron is an information scientist and poet from Chapel Hill, NC, US. He is Senior Research Scientist in Media Arts + Sciences at Duke University where he also teaches in the MFA Program in Experimental and Documentary Arts. He is the author of Be Somebody (Effing Press, 2008), a book Ron Silliman described as being “difficult in the way the very best books are.” Patrick is also the author of The American Godwar Complex (Blaze VOX, 2004) as well as the chapbooks, Man Eating Rice (Blaze VOX), and Three Poems (Gateway Songbooks). His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as Exquisite Corpse, Jacket, Talisman, Oyster Boy, Fulcrum, in the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and in the anthology 100 Days (Barque Press). 

Felino Soriano: Three Poems from Of variant rhythms

night as pain or expanded musical infatuation

purpling of plurals: night, each-varied piano solo meander

                    each

voltage of montaged momentum

                              each

arrival of dancing                     diagrams              dangle

splatter (the of-beautiful-though rendition of paint-from

the artist’s intentional             abstraction of delegated remembering or fathoms

from-memory or

mnemonics’

version of grasp of ideals!)

& with every notion wrapped into the palm of these moments’ elongated functions,

                                       freedoms

expose what silence

holds hard or

what silence held in a softened irony

mentioning within modules a serial designation of moving music

what comes resembles a purpose of onward recollection

onlooking does not proceed toward what the body cannot hold

nor does its presence precede what closure contains in the context of silent holding

then, of each hand and rotating purposes

present, upon grasp and intelligent manifestations

a wholeness of warmth from palm and palm-configurations

a lending to what one needs to examine each syllable

from/of tongue and the desire to engage with momentum’s

sometimes desirous knowledge to move

           intuitive to soldered memories

against patina and diligence of time’s circumvolving

conformations

  

Of figuring into such excitement

what resuscitates proclaims

diversion from a death

-near where walking awoke

from the darkened forensics

dedicated to obtain facts or

fundamental mores into

which notion does not

mention failures or fade-in|out

predicaments; the spectral

collaboration divides as

does an hour’s arrive/abscond

narrative, whole in which the hand

holds and decides, — . . . 

 __________________________________________________________________

Felino A. Soriano is a member of The Southern Collective Experience.  He is the founding editor of the online endeavors Counterexample Poetics and Of/with; in addition, he is a contributing editor for the online journal, Sugar Mule.   His writing finds foundation in created coöccurrences, predicated on his strong connection to various idioms of jazz music.  His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology, and appears in various online and print publications, with recent poetry collections including Mathematics (Nostrovia! Poetry, 2014), Espials (Fowlpox Press, 2014), and watching what invents perception (WISH Publications, 2013).  He lives in California with his wife and family and is a director of supported living and independent living programs providing supports to adults with developmental disabilities. Links to his published and forthcoming poems, books, interviews, images, etc. can be found at www.felinoasoriano.info.

Some Quotes To Warm Us Up

“That is the essence of science:  Ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.”  Jacob Bronowski

“In mathematics you don’t understand things.  You just get used to them.”  John Von Neumann

“Americans are finally realizing that once you lose land, you can’t get it back.”  Christine Todd Whitman

“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.”  Neils Bohr

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”  Wernher Von Braun

“Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism . . . the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.”  Ezra Pound

“Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.”  Bertrand Russell

“Stars are like animals in the wild.  We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.”  Heinz R. Pagels

“We hope to explain the whole universe in a single, simple formula that you can wear on a T-shirt.”  Leon Lederman

“Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.”  Henri Poincare’

“Technology is a queer thing.  It brings you great gifts with one hand and stabs you in the back with the other.”  C.P. Snow

“It is the theory that decides what we can observe.”  Albert Einstein

“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”  Marston Bates

“When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all of the works of some great writer had perished.”  Theodore Roosevelt

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”  Michael Faraday

“If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”  T.H. Huxley

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right.  When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”  Arthur C. Clarke

“How inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.”  Arthur C. Clarke

“All problems are finally scientific problems.”  George Bernard Shaw

“In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”  Carl Sagan

“I see no reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone.”  Charles Darwin

“A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms.”  George Wald

“Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”  Democritus

“A scientist can discover a new star, but he cannot make one.  He would have to ask an engineer to do that.”  Gordon L. Glegg

“Physics, beware of metaphysics.”  Isaac Newton

“Nature has no goal in view, and final causes are only human imaginings.”  Baruch Spinoza

“It is the fact that the electrons cannot all get on top of each other that makes tables and everything else solid.”  Richard Feynman

“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”  Adam Smith

“It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.” 

Alfred North Whitehead

A Brief Intro

I would like to welcome you all to RASPUTIN: A Poetry Thread. I look forward to showcasing exciting pieces of poetry here and providing a minimalist consortium of compelling work from a variety of poets.