c o n v e r g e n c e:
an online journal of poetry & art


SPRING 2010 ISSUE


TRAVELOGUE
by Richard Luftig

USA Today: January,1: Alaska was the No. 1 magnet in state migration—the percentage of moves into a state as opposed to outbound moves—with 70% inbound. North Dakota had the most outbound moves (73.1%) for the third year in a row.

There is no room here, only space
with wind that backs up to the north,
clouds that look like snow capped
mountains pressed on winter wheat.

These towns so sparse they’re named
for folks: Ray, Hanks, Russell and Ross.
Where the young return just to bury
their dead or auction the family farm.

And nothing much to catch the tourist
crowd except perhaps the largest buffalo
or biggest turtle made out of tractor
tires near Bottineau, hard down the road

from Rugby (whose claim to fame
is the exact geographical middle
of the country). But tonight and the next
and the months that wither like ironweed

in a drought, when the Ryder trucks
that have hummed and sun-flashed
on the interstate come to full
stop in front of their down- chain motels,

the emigrants will lie in the dark
in Minot, Grand Forks, Seattle, LA, staring
up at a plaster moon trying to recall just when
it was in Rugby that their centers slipped away.



Shoot the Freak by Elahzar Rao

Shoot the Freak by Elahzar Rao



RETROSPECTICOPE
by Sasha Geffen
I am giving you a nostalgia factory,
           a tunnel into the miasma of 1994,
a cracked camera lens on the dumpsters
           of the East Village. I am giving you
the acid wildfire of 1977, I am sticking
           my fingers into your spinal fluid
and injecting extract of Mike Kelley.
           I am serving up fake plastic eyes.
They say I am peeling back the brainskins
           of the iPod generation. The kids
are always troubled. They are burning
           their edges.They are building new
worlds. They are smashing their idols
           on the curb.

I have distilled your daughter's
           uncleaned floor; I am putting spray paint
into pills that explode in your stomach. I am
           cutting your ecstasy with apple juice.
I am burning your childhoods with liquor
           and Zippos. They call me the urban herald.
Come into my private theater and hold
           your eyes open. Look down
my neon tubes. I have prepared
           retrospecticopes just for you.



A COMPLEX MECHANISM
by Sasha Geffen
Your teenage-days were not
by any means your best. It’s just that
remembering them that way
makes your now-days sweeter.
Such is memory’s engine. Still,

you sit with clogged fingertips
listening to songs loved
too many times, like an arm
caressed too long. You spin
in your chair until your headphone cord

mummifies you. Ennui is the mind’s
malaise. Like homosexuality,
it’s a bourgeois affliction. No one
knows if you’ve become smarter
or more pretentious since attending

that college your mother talks
so much about. Vomiting
while brushing your teeth in the morning
turns out to be a zero-sum game. At least
you are recycling the empty bottles

of Tanqueray you generate. You aren’t
your father’s son,
nor do I think you could be.
When the light turns green
you go.






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