Felino A. Soriano Achieves Momentum in Morning Expanse Littered with Postcard Sketches Syllabled with Erased Cliches for a Tranquilized Anthem

Of this Momentum Song (thirty-two)

    I see what the wonder
                          is
   —is the wonder what
     sees in the wander
    of the watching… we
                      again
  have been here before,
 the same tree swayed
   toward we in the
  hour’s music—
               strong
    hold the rhythm
  was, and is… the
      silence explains
   what absence is—
        heavy, a worded
    need the bark’s rough
  -ness feels like the hand
     of my leaving—
                 absent
  stress the confines
 of it, the break
   from hope noted
     of it… on return
                   a
morning expanse
 finds in movement
the truth of it,
   a death perceives
 movement
          as
  cultural sleek
 forward engage
   -ment, a slur
              when
 light is the clarity
of intrinsic trust,
  posture of this
 light imbues the
               absence
 waiting within
 the body and
   branding it
           alive




    alive as more fractured
   than more so fraction
      of what we eventually
    inherit,
          a
 comatose sleep lures
   and indents this
 music’s longhand
                drawn
    hour… positioned
  near where we go
     in toward, a faucet
   turns on
           announcing

     motive and the dance of it
   leaves the body

bare
                    but unbroken—

      sustained devotion to life’s
   qualitative

                            understanding




Of this Momentum Song (thirty-three)
                        _______________
                        Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how                               one remembers it in order to recount it.
                                                          —Gabriel García Márquez
 
                         

    Postcard sketches: land
   -scape theme, myriad
      sameness toward
                       a
  moment-capture sequence,
   an artistic hand
  -eye collaboration, theory—
                          bene
                                              -ficial scale the
                                             early morning trumpet
                                                 expands and
                                                              awakens—
                                              theme is totality, is
                                             theme of language or
                                                function of the mind’s
                                                                   small
exploratory figments—
     experimental forays
  the body twists to
 adhere in the swell
                  -ing
                                            of removing past
                                           participation, to envelop
                                              what is new in these
                                                                rhythms
  and acute paces
 hands play in the
   purge horns
              throw
  through the tunnel
 of which light
   pulses in the caus
  -ational pause re
 -begin pleasure
                 the
     body finds in nearing
    age of determined
                   splayed
                        circular
  inheritance of the civilized
 permission… we’ve walked
    here and found what
   here shows our
     tired posture
               …the
 timid cycles
  readying our
upward anthems,
              voices
  play the “cling”
 and stays—

         

           relevant




Of this Momentum Song (thirty-four)

 We wait in our walking,
 walk into what
wears this hour’s waiting
                noise,
   concurrences
 of sound.
        Syllabled
               knowing,
  with sound as knowing
 an echo is resultant
   stone-ripple
            harmony.
     Privilege.  Alive
 is the announcement
  each morning
             assembles
 among tongue and
                proof
the hour rotates
 within choired
hands Song
          rotates,
 spins into splayed
ornaments this
  flame
      evokes
            and
understands as
   foundational
              mirror
 inversion looks
  to impulse,
to interact
        with




entering.  Why the
 oval resonates
on itself and
  selves’ versions
 the numerical
              comprehend—
     we’ve needed rest,
   examine the good
       honoring what has
                     held
  us.  The way
 these colors
   exist in opposite
 blends from the eyes
     erasing clichés,
                 a
 downtown voice
  pulses to live     away
from what
        finds
    connection to bone—
 a pivot exterior
   to night’s
           x-rayed

                            prose and
 decomposing sections

    of
               reinterpreted

        diametric

philosophies




Of this Momentum Song (thirty-five)

Blow with doing
  so
    as does the
 trumpet’s
         variants
                below
  premise:        called
 in all listeners,
    mobile meeting     (we keep moving)
  textured talk the
               language
 rotates atop our
decisive tongues, petrichor,
              comfort
  finds our lyric, we
 devote the body to
    speaking certainties,
  sporadic thinking
                  underlines
 what our horns
  compose, provide.
                 This
   is the catapult
  function we’ve
    known about.
               The
exterior stride hands
 contain, lyrical mobility
we always confirmed.  We
  can piano here, should.
                   Praise
 be to the whole of what
  we’re going into, to-
   ward; and thus
to splay is to behave
  inward to the
 space needing
   no more optics
               than
fade or asterisk
  performs in
 how the hands
             hold
     our language-
 s.  Tomorrow we
    can envelop a
 tranquilized anthem,
   the mode of it steers
 how the eye outlines,
    understands.
               Nothing
 is neither whole nor
fractioned, the foray
  to become is to hold
 tacit reinventions
                  when
the body only
 sees within
           the
              spectrum
                       of
  its organic
           insinuations.




Of this Momentum Song (thirty-six)

   Tumult, we
  praise around it, as is said
    what we call
  music the crow
   renames water—
                 extract
  in the pleasure
   sequences each
 mouth searches to-
  ward, in the
            hiring
   of body to blend
 hanker with
     warmth of
 finding surfaces.
              Offered
  what finds us (renaming)
 what searches to offer
   in the meaning
  of it.  Song
    knows us, knows
 of us; we’ve a buried
      harp in the way
  voices color the air’s between
   gold, gold as does
  the hand give into
    affection’s role
                   to
 invite.  Sway, the
  mission adheres
to the tongue of
   what holds us…
                  from
when we begin, from mothers
 holding the small
of cries, the smallness
  reveals then too,
 the deliberate need
to thread what is human
                       what
   human holds to ident-
 ify each portion of bone
     naming our
                momentum’s
   intuitive meander.
    The unsayable
 says what died in voice.  Paused
  invention.  The water
      from
          where the crow
                         names
 its premise, we’ve pulled
  the harp from where
our hands need flamed
                     succession,
    we continue, we
perform courage into
      what calls to
  praise in the hearing
                    of

         the halo awaiting—
 

    our Song is our going home…
home as where the body

             never bends to a

    dissipating
                        motive




Felino A. Soriano’s poetry appears in CHURN, BlazeVOX, 3:AM Magazine, The National Poetry Review, Small Po[r]tions, and elsewhere.  His books of poetry include Vocal Apparitions: New & Selected Poems: 2012 – 2016 (2016), sparse anatomies of single antecedents (2015), Of isolated limning (2014), Pathos|particular invocation (2013), Of language|s| the rain speaks (2012), Intentions of Aligned Demarcations (2011), In Praise of Absolute Interpretation (2010), Construed Implications (2009), and Among the Interrogated (2008).  His collaborative collection Quintet Dialogues: translating introspection, which features visual art from David Allen Reed is forthcoming from Howling Dog Press.

He publishes the online journal Of/with, and is Multimedia Editor for Unlikely Stories Mark V, and is a contributing editor at Sugar Mule. 

Visit Of the poetry this jazz portends for more information.  

A.S. Coomer Reverberates, Looping the Eavesdropped Barstool Amidst Dew-Soaked Heatherdowns

Hootie’s Cave

There’s a cave

just up the road

from the house

where I grew up.

I used to go there

with my family

when I was a kid.

There are rocks

the size of cars

partially blocking

its entrance.

Rocks hard enough

to break yourself against.

Rocks beaten, slowly,

by time and wind and rain

into little grains that mushed

under the soles

of my dirty shoes.

I used to climb over the rocks,

drop just inside the opening

of the cave

and call out.

It didn’t matter what.

Not words or names or commands.

Just noise. Just the sound of being.

Just something to send out and hear echo

back a fraction of a second later,

already in the past, already over.

These days I’m sure I’m still stuck

just inside the mouth of a neighbor’s rockhouse,

spinning circles, splashing off spraypainted walls,

--in motion but trapped--

in that time loop reverberation.

Another Three Lonely Ones

“I don’t have a problem, Chelsea.”

I overheard him from across the nearly empty,

noontime bar. Sun, weak as stale tea,

filtered in hazily through cracked blinds & dusty windows.

The summer crowd had ceased thinning out

over a month ago. It had stopped entirely now.

“You said you did last night,” she persisted. “You said so yourself.”

A stool creaked in their direction.

“I was drunk when I said that.”

An awkward pause stretched out like the endless horizon of pale blue

--Lake Michigan not a stone’s throw from where I sat.

I could almost feel the little stings of pelting sand

off Sleeping Bear Dunes & the hanging mist

of the great lake’s spit haloed like a bad reputation not readily dealt with.

The barkeep--quite suddenly--found something that required

his immediate attention in the dark recesses of what I assumed was the kitchen.

The batwing doors beat an off-rhythm, doubling with each swing

as the rusty hinge screamed and squawked,

piercing the stagnant air like a quietus keen,

stabbing it, shooting it through like the period, a black hole slashing all,

serving as the end of sentence of whatever relationship had just ended.

I took a long pull from the bottle of beer. Ice beneath my fingers

slipped down the label and pooled on the waxed & shining wood,

the only thing aside from the beer that looked well kept in the place.

I peeled a corner of the label off the bottle & watched the little icebergs

flow south as gravity steered us towards our eventual endings,

collective and a part, together but alone, always alone really.

“You know what?” her voice was triumphant

in her bitter disappointment & resentment now.

“You are the problem, Josh.”

I heard the door shut behind her,

the beaten bells clanging their discordant knell,

a beck & call as much for the barkeep as for us all.

as I finished what was going to be my last beer of the afternoon.

The barkeep reemerged from the kitchen with a glass and a rag.

He took a quick glance in the direction of The Problem Josh

then set down the glass in front of me.

It was chipped & battered. There’d been a logo on it some years ago

but it was indecipherable now. A cryptic, vaguely female eye peeking out

of a wash of faded colors & jangled letters.

“Thought you might like a glass.”

We both looked down at my empty bottle & waited.

Oh, the weight of the wait.

I hadn’t asked for a glass with any of the four previous beers

nor had one been offered.

I smiled and slid another three lonely ones across the bar

just as the door closed a second time.

Little Platte Lake

There’s a thousand lives to live out here.

A thousand means of finding meaning.

I’ve stumbled onto one of them, I think.

Pine needles, knots of twining vine,

a vegetation nearly Northern Pacific in feeling;

the rain pattering sound on the dew-soaked heatherdowns

like gently muted toms or nearly forgotten, rustic spells.

Incantations of what you’ve lost but strive to find

but what can you retrieve from so much lost time?

I saw a mother and two cubs scamper across Saffron Road

in the post-rain haze of a late September day.

I’ve given myself over to substance use today:

intoxicated by a story I never lived, I translated it to music,

spent the time after in a pot-filled gauze,

a claustrophobic morning of clouds and sky and lake,

losing sense of where the reflection ended and the real began,

later a double IPA daze, watching the changing

leaves in the passing car’s suspended breeze

dance and twirl like the uncurling furls of the locks of your sanguine curls.

You get a sense that the land here is waiting, patiently biding its time,

the time just before the big white hands of winter sus out the sun,

wrap the heavy blanketed cloak around the starving pines,

granting everything under

only

the chance to hide & wait & sleep.

A.S. Coomer is a native Kentuckian serving out a purgatorial existence somewhere in the Midwest. His work has appeared in over thirty publications. He’s got a handful of novels that need good homes. You can find him at www.ascoomer.wordpress.com. He also runs a “record label” for poetry: www.lostlonggoneforgottenrecords.wordpress.com. 

Steven Porter Would Rather Be A Dinosauric Iconoclast Amongst Blasphemies of An Anti-Theists

"I'd Rather Be"

I'd rather be a scarecrow on a farm, licking crows'
wounds, inhabited by a murdered farmer's ghost,
than lick the Italian leather asshole of a college
graduate with an overpriced sheet of paper
firing an inflamed hubris into his ear.

I'd rather be a spider in the Amazon rainforest
weaving a gossamer trap in a moist, hollow log,
brawling with my fellow Arachnid neighbors than
be a flighless bird staring into the sun and weeping
because the sky disowned me eons ago.

I'd rather be the mouse than the snake.

I'd rather be the scorpion than the shoe.

I'd rather be smudged makeup on a woman's face.

I'd rather be sweat dripping off a man's earlobe than be a man.

I'd rather be the poem than the poet.

I'd rather be a cigarette butt, than a brand
new cigarette, because then at least it's all over.

I guess I'd rather be dark matter, pushing
the universe further and further away
from the human species.



"Pride of the Serpent"

My stomach growls, I haven't eaten
since the last Solar Eclipse.
I killed a rattlesnake today.
I shot it in the head with a
pistol I stole from a friend.
He lies on my table, decapitated,
stripped of his flesh and pride that
came with deceiving Adam and Eve.
I put his head in a jar with formaldehyde
borrowed from work.
Its expression captured in
a final moment of defense,
like photographs of American
Soldiers storming Iwo Jima,
planting the flag as bullets whizzed
past them and explosives detonated.
(He may have been a part of Medusa?)
A folic-token thwarting warriors with two fangs.
What I can't finish, I wrap in cellophane
and store in my refrigerator; this
miniature-morgue, now a grave
for a dinosauric iconoclast.



"Birthday at 95-Years"

Today is the 95th-birthday for
a tribe's eldest member.

An empty chair at the head of the table
creaks as hurried guests pass by to take
their own seats. A birthday cake awaits.

A birthday cake laden with candles is
like a coffin built from cheap wood...
each has trouble carrying the weight of
nearly a century of suppressed despair.

The guest of honor takes his seat and hesitates to
blow out the burning candles, wax inundates the cake.
A hearse waits outside honking its horn.



"Confessions of an Anti-Theist"

This dream...snakes temporarily grow
arms, pluck out nuns' eyes and
tear their pious cemetery
garments from their flesh and
twist their areolas until they
screamed for God to come down
with lotion to lather their breasts.

Adam and Eve finger fuck in a cathedral
and pour holy water on each other's
genitals to wash off blood of the lamb.
Eve takes Adam's rib and deepthroats it.
Adam's petty, botanic cock can't do the job.

A whale nips Jonah's ass, but Jonah confesses
that he's already in a relationship with a plesiosaur
who promised to write his story and make it a Number
One bestseller on the Stars and Stripes Cro-Magnon hit list.

As Abraham leads his son Isaac to Moriah,
God descends with Satan and says "See, man,
I told you I could get him to murder his son."
"Alright, alright. I guess I owe you that 50 bucks
and the Southern Hemisphere?" responds Satan.
Abraham looks up at God and Satan and shouts,
"Hey! I didn't bring him here because you told me too,
I did it because that little bastard drank my last jug of wine!"

Steven Allan Porter was born February 5, 1992 in Coral Springs, FL to a Jewish mother and a German father. His influences include: Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Bob Kaufman, Steven Jesse Bernstein, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Simic, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine. His work has appeared in Red Fez, Degenerate Literature, Wildflower Muse, Dead Snakes, UFO Gigolo, Dali's LoveChild, Blue Mountain Review, Beatnik Cowboy, Rasputin: A Poetry Thread, Peeking Cat Poetry, Horror, Sleaze and Trash, The Basil O' Flaherty, Saudade Magazine, and Syzygy Poetry Journal. He currently resides in Chino, CA.

Marianne Szlyk and the Battle Ground From the Basement to the Womb and the Twins Haunting Cities of Possible Parallel Lives

For My Ex-Husband’s Twin Sons (2)

Winter 1996/1997

That winter I stopped in Boston
on my way back to Indiana.
A friend told me my ex-husband,
your father,
had been all but evicted,
not packing until the last day
of his last month in our apartment
of several years.  But he wasn’t
homeless, she reassured me.

In retrospect, I am surprised that
he wasn’t living in her basement,
the place I had planned to be,
if I were still living in that city.

My friend was too old to be your mother.
Some other woman bore you.
She raised you both,
her last chance to have a child.
Fierce in red, her strong core
hiding her bump, she traveled down
the winter sidewalks alone.

Come summer,
she would push a borrowed stroller
past empty storefronts and dying trees.
She would push past my ex-husband
who, talking to himself, wouldn’t know
his own children or even her.

For My Ex-Husband’s Twin Sons (3)

Summer 1997

The next summer I believed in nothing.
Windows open, drinking icy Pepsi, with the fan off,
I lay awake upstairs, not reading Clarissa
while my friend the atheist slept
in the basement to escape the heat
while the man I liked slept
back in the city I’d left.

As I listened to the oldies from Battle Ground,
I thought nothing would change.   I had
been listening to these songs for years.
Levi Stubbs would always plead to Bernadette.
Dusty would always offer advice I’d never take.
Alone in bed, I would be reading
these thick books forever,
my life captured in small print
and amber-colored soda
drunk in some college town.
Like Clarissa, this life would continue
as long as I chose to turn the page.

This was the summer you two could have
been born, perhaps to a stringy-haired woman
who had traipsed in and out of our apartment,
perhaps to a fierce woman in red.
For her, whether or not she kept you,
whoever she once was,
everything would have changed.

I guess.  I’ll never know.


For My Ex-Husband’s Twin Sons (4)

Summer 2016


Somewhere else you exist with my own son
and the daughter my husband and I
adopted from Ethiopia before I died.
The two of you sit or don’t sit in class.
You roam the hallway, pace the aisles,
perch on bookshelves, listen to heavy metal
or rap or garage rock from the 60s.
You chatter constantly about video games.
You don’t know your father or mother.
To you, they are ghosts.

Like Emily Dickinson, each of you
dwell in possibility.  Unlike her,
you write nothing down.
You do not evolve
the way she did
over two thousand poems
written on the back of envelopes.

I see you in glimpses,
standing around Harvard Square
and the upscale mall it’s become,
as children riding the Orange Line
with your mother,
the fierce, stout woman
in red.  Now she has forgotten
your father’s name
but not his face.
She may even be friends
with the woman
who would have been my landlady
if I’d stayed in this city.
Maybe you have left it as well.

I must imagine what this life is like
for you who do not exist
in the real world
without children.

Marianne Szlyk is the editor of The Song Is... , an associate poetry editor at Potomac Review, and a professor of English at Montgomery College. She and her husband live with two cats, too many books and CDs, and no cars.  Her second chapbook, I Dream of Empathy, was published by Flutter Press.  Her poems have appeared in a variety of online and print venues, including Silver Birch Press, Cactifur, Of/with, bird's thumb, Truck, and Yellow Chair Review.  Her first chapbook is available through Kind of a Hurricane Press.  She hopes that you will consider sending work to her magazine. For more information about it, see this link: http://thesongis.blogspot.com/

David P. Kozinski Amidst the Overwhelming Crescendo of Glistening Naiad Flesh, Pulsing Angry Lorries, and an Abattoir Sermon

The Giggling of  Naiads at the Check-out Counter on a Hot July Day

They laugh about the party
they’ve been shopping for while
I watch light shimmer from them,
rippling along bare legs and bellies;
sparks from the hair of their arms
in the bluish, cooled Acme air.

On the conveyor my petulant boxes of berries,
jar of olives, jar of capers, wedge of cheese
are plunked down, mute and inert.
I imagine a six pack of Rheingold
flowing along.

They bag their goodies
as a team, hands picking
and arms rotating above orbiting hips,
little pearls flicking from curves of shoulders
as they joke about showers,
about wedding nights; intimacies flipped
back and forth like hot
Red Bliss potatoes

and I’m remembering walks along the Brandywine;
honeybees abundant and deliberate,
a snake slipping into the water and whipping upstream;
the fever of early autumn leaves
that crept under my skin and overheated my brain;
stepping across hard, metallic white ice,
the trickle of water underneath a crescendo
that overwhelmed birdsongs
and the whistling, wayward breeze.

I’m still lining up tins and bottles
from my cart in regiments
as they pay, scoot for the door and the parking lot,
decades rolling out
ahead of them in waves.



As Promised, the Fire

In the heat I saw colors
no one else could or cared about.

In the fire we lost most
of the things I cared about.
The wills, birth certificates, passports
were lodged at the bank. The art
became smoke,
then a charcoal smudge.

In the fire I smelled apple and azalea,
cedar and hemlock,
mother and father;
what they worked for.

Far from any city
stars burned holes in the skin
of my dream time. Laughter, sirens
spun rings around the world.

I was offered in the fire
the hope of revolution and stasis.

I lost people I loved during the years
of occupation. Not dead, they were misplaced,
stuck away in cupboards, hidden
in lockers, in paperwork. I sought
and could not find them again.

I heard much in the darkness
you brought with you. Most
of the captured images came clear.

You lost people too.
You prayed for them.
They died, their lights went out
and others could be seen.
Everything burned, even things
you wouldn’t expect; rivers and harbors,
identities, principles many
boasted they’d die for.


I saw the colors of ideas, some
for just a moment, while others burned
into my palette. The more profound,
the duller the hues – matte-finished gun metal,
hospital green – while funny little concepts
rose like globes from a soap bubble pipe
and popped right out of existence.

From where we huddled
dying stars sounded
like the shrieks of toads when they jump
from embankment to water, gone in the ripples.

Even the thick doors of perception
shut bank-vault tight, tall
as cathedral spires, went up.
At the end, geysers erected
steam towers to sustain the sky,
to hold it back.
   
Some authorities told me about cold fire
that cuts through the hardest hearts,
arteries pulsing with angry lorries
and crazy cabs. I reminded them
the avenues and boulevards are also strolled
by hand-in-hand youth,
by skeptics as well as cynics.

There’s no shame in sweat, I told them,
even the kind that poisons
the very ground when flicked
over a garden wall.

I asked these magi for references
that might unlock my box of promises
where the bedeviling of man
is kept down, churning in mushroom dark.

I read to them as they lay in blindness,
fallen into adult beds with linen
as dirty as any hospital could make it,
infirmity our timekeeper.



Tripping Over Memorial Day, 1974

I never die in this dream.
I’ll be there in the morning
to greet the ass.

There is yet another story of a soldier’s
sacrifice and a botched
cover up by the brass.

Someone plucks at guitar strings
that elongate to the bathroom sink
while an oboe outlines the curves

of nostrils in the mirror, man.
The exposé is sometimes titled
“Ten Little Indians In Eighty Days”

and isn’t over when I return
to my seat in the bunker.
Resurrected by paperwork

the boy with a hook
in his sleeve spouts gratitude
misplaced as his shroud,

Old Glory pulled from the box
and refolded until the day
nightmares close his book.

It was swampy as Delaware
gets – dark, rubbery snakes
along the embankment, the river

backing up like a clogged drain,
birds restless in the dead air
under clouds that wouldn’t rain –
a sermon proper for an abattoir.



David P. Kozinski won the Delaware Literary Connection’s 2015 spring poetry contest, judged by B.J. Ward. He received the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, which included publication of his chapbook, Loopholes. Publications include Apiary, Cheat River Review, Confrontation, Fox Chase Review, glimmertrain.com, Philadelphia Stories, Poetry Repairs, Margie, The Rathalla Review and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Kozinski was one of ten poets selected by Robert Bly for a workshop sponsored by the American Poetry Review. He is a board member of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference and of the Manayunk-Roxborough Art Center, where he has conducted a poetry workshop and read from his work on numerous occasions. Kozinski is Arts Editor of Schuylkill Valley Journal Online (www.svjlit.com). He has conducted poetry workshops for teens at the Montgomery County (PA) Youth Center, for Expressive Path, a non-profit organization that encourages youth participation in the arts. He has been a member of the Mad Poets Society for about twenty years. Still mad.

Bart Solarczyk Waiting For the Man, Passing the Five Day Intervals, and the Detritus of Stars

Some Saturday Haiku

Parked in the Target lot
sixty years old
waiting for the weed man

                *

Puffs of morning green
the fog lifts
my path now clear

                *

Fish thaw in fountain pool
dog & I
watch through thin ice

                *

Roxy runs with half a whiffle ball
then drops it
to sniff a neighbor's ass



Another Five Days Gone

Shuffling through the weekend
he knows love
a woman feeds him

he drinks beer
& walks the dog
& talks back to his TV

a puff of smoke
a poem or two
a stone in his soft chair

another five days gone
done is done
let's not talk about it.



Why Ask Why

when we both know
dust to dust
etcetera

once stars
now this

accept it.


Bart Solarczyk lives in Pittsburgh, PA. His newest chapbook, Right Direction, is scheduled for release this fall courtesy of Lilliput Review's Modest Proposal series. He is the author of eight previous chapbooks.

John Sweet Is Lying On The Ocean Floor Figuring Where To Drive Home The Knife As A Stranger In A Stranger's Wilderness

inwards


says this says we
are in god’s field and holds
out her hands to feel the
falling snow but i’m
not so sure

i have seen the tire ruts
fill with blood

i have heard the crippled preach
have heard them claim there
is no bravery in slaying ghosts

have listened to the mothers of
weeping daughters as they
explained my failures

found myself
agreeing with them

found myself in this field
middle of december
storm approaching
and she says the trick is to
never go straight for the eyes

she says the trick is
to come up from behind

kisses the spot where the
knife would be driven home



man crawling on the ocean floor


sick of myself at 4 in the afternoon

ice on the shadowed sides
of sleeping factories

weeds

no news from god since
before i was born
and then the death of his only son
played out for cheap entertainment

this is the world you inherit
and then it becomes
the one you pass down

these are the dreams you dream
after your lover leaves

daughter was only three years old
was filled with cancer
and the sunlight was a lie

the moment approached and
then it passed and
the fear is what remains

nothing is revealed

nothing is given away

listen

in the moment of truth
there is only silence

in silence
there is only the sound of rain

all distance matters until you
cross it and finally know
yourself to be lost


lullaby, for beth


or here in the wilderness where
the houses turn themselves inside out to
reveal animals fucking children on
                     garbage-strewn floors

where the sky has no color

where the roofs collapse and the
basements fill with water

a stranger’s house and so you
sleep in a stranger’s bed
and dream of escape

spend your money on poison

drive away finally on the coldest day of
                               the year and
when your car breaks down like
you knew it would you
continue into the west on foot naked and
                   blindfolded until you feel the
                    sun begin to warm your skin

pray
if it makes you feel better

sing if it
keeps the past from rising up
to devour the future

call me when you finally grow
tired of christ’s neverending pain

John Sweet sends greeting from the rural wastelands of upstate New York.  He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the need to continuously search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest collections are A NATION OF ASSHOLES W/ GUNS (2015 Scars Publications) and  APPROXIMATE WILDERNESS (2016 Flutter Press).