Michael Prihoda And A Whole Lotta Love On Shot-Gunned Stationary And An Ocean Muffled By Sawdust

whole lotta love

i. 
whatever

ii.
not today

iii. 
i thought we agreed
cruise ships
were
for sissies
&
the point
of Nasa
is the same as SSRIs
for those
unwilling
to notice

iv.
the sound
of
the garage door
opening
made auto
by wiring
i do not
understand

v.
are you going or coming?

vi. 
will you pick up some milk
on
the way
home?

vii.
just because
the seven
names
for children
i created survived
& we
lost
yours truly,

viii.
i thought we agreed

ix.
agreed

x. 
we

xi. 
i

 
everybody knows this is nowhere

the dog
ripples

his tongue
over teeth & lips

as a stream
across random stones.

a moment is only
as brief

as our disengagement
from imprinting

allows.
are we alone?

no, i am
looking at it.

are we
alone?


 
Proposal (a pineapple thrown into the Seine)

the meaning
of events

saving us
from a riot.

look to the hefted
mountains

in this thistled
spring

of showers
of malady &

the elegance
of just trying

to tell another
person they matter.

the day is ending.
the day is almost over.

i’m wide awake,
ready to introduce

a dragon
to these lands

of shot-gunned
stationary.
 
Proposal 6

of former
thoughts

in other
lives.

a mug cupped
to ear

sounds of
an Atlantic

muffled
by sawdust.

a taxonomic
defense

for haha,
the openness

in being
mortified

& feeling
alright

with the treatment
of animals.

you act in service
of a Byzantine panoply,

a simulacra
of gods.

our creations
tail us

through
dimensions,

invite a worry, a sorrow,
a cork

in bottles
untrapped by messages,

floating, briefly,
on the front porch.

dereliction hiding
rusted cutlery

& an insufficiency
of bandages


Michael Prihoda is a poet, editor, and teacher living in central Indiana. He is the editor of After the Pause, an experimental literary magazine and small press. In addition, he is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent of which is The First Breath You Take After You Give Up (Weasel Press, 2016).

John Dorsey Returns Speaking of Stars Covered In Rust, Woody Guthrie, And A Heroin Needle Sun

Highway D 



here the sun is a hot spike

a needle in the arm

of some lonely field

grown over with stars

covered in rust



your stomach is always half full

& the car never starts 

before your first cup of coffee

it wouldn’t dare.





California Blood Money 

for david smith 

 

woody guthrie tasted its soil 

dancing in starlight 

he winked at the skyline 



what is it like   

to run your hands 

through so much regret?




John Dorsey lived for several years in Toledo, Ohio. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Press, 2017). He is the current Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com. 

Patrick Herron And The Hollow That Is The Only Part That Does Not Hurt

Wednesday from Light
for Booker

apples and onions        and violins and         pesticides                and when viewed from a bridge the horizon is only half-constructed                the knife an ape selects for gorging is the blade choosing its hand                various timbres of icy water sing across the bowed fibers of our skulls                and the smell of sewaged seaspray fogs as the roaches as we are now called        we the worthless        are swept down into               falling off       our legs now running upon the air between the steel and the water                and someone's just learning how to count us        the forty-seven percent        the ninety nine                who is it who counts              my beautiful boy he is learning as he goes        please don't push him off                the helicopters need trust between them before they can make music                and so if he is to fall        at least let his curls hear the quartet                       how about our sweet beginnings and chopped vegetable tears plucked from soil to lighten the load                the roman road                yes it's a load we load to unload and unload to load                it's a logic                and we share it with our peelings                        the lacrimal bone is absent from amphibians                or                maybe it's just tardy or       wants nothing to do with tears at all        maybe it's trying to get out of the water        or        maybe any more would be an unsophisticated superfluity                and you are similarly disinclined to travel beyond       the elegant sufficiency yet you made it this far       and so                let's exchange gratitudes        they sure scissor paper platitudes and stony attitudes                               what there is to say here that is never desired to say is that                it's not the bullet that kills        it's the hole        it swallows every moment before it              and when I say        I love you        I mean that I desire the chance to elaborate        and that is to say        that I wished you would never have to learn              that the hollow is the only part that doesn't hurt                        to cross the event line is a cold release from time              so I wonder is emptiness employed or unemployed       how are we to count that                so I wonder is love conflation or expansion                how are we to feel the sound as we count our way through the choppers to forge our horizons

"you're taut like a thriller, but how are you organized?" the rock asks the river


Patrick Herron is Senior Research Scientist and Lecturing Fellow at Duke University, Durham, NC, US. As a poet, Herron was an early adopter of copyleft for literary publishing, an inventor of retrieval-based poetics in the 1990s (later and more widely known as Flarf), and is also the author of several volumes of poetry, including Be Somebody (Effing 2008). Herron's poems and essays have appeared in a number of journals including Fulcrum, Jacket and Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse. Herron is the creator of  His 1999 new media art project, p r o x i m a t e . o r g (http://classic.rhizome.org/artbase/artwork/2219/), was the first poetics website added to the permanent collection of the New Museum, New York City, US. At Duke Herron has recently created the Text Mining Laboratory and is a member of the faculties of Information Science + Studies (ISS), Computational Media Arts & Culture (CMAC) and the Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFA|EDA).