NIGHT ROADS by Paul McMillan WHEN YOU LEAVE, by Joyce Odam take all the comfort— all the vague insistences for love with its slow failure. Shadows: where, and nowhere. Old words of finding. Useless now. Where you go is forever. Stay there. Take your heart and your broken truth— your anger as weapon. It is useless. The year is only the numbers and their arrangement. It is always there. Maybe it is winter, the coldest symbol. But how am I to know. All time blends into now— and now is where everything begins and ends: Every tale of woe, and every bliss. They are all in the book of experience that you keep reading as though it makes sense. LITTORAL by Robert Lietz We wanted it this way — counting to stop ourselves before we made adventures public — studies in mercy once — in the bookmarked / drawn-on and deep extravagance. Meaning the ratchets played no part. And meaning a hired bed absorbed the one and entourage / the colors meant to round off inhibitions — a mercy as long as infinite — catching on as light / in the wee time afterward. Something we'd thought to joke about. Something we'd thought about — as confused in surfacing — as if there were other starting points — as asked along and stripped as we went on in our compliance — desiring the shocks and flashing tides — centrally frayed — you’d say — pursuing the tides the ways we'd find them — multiplied and sized — burning away in fracts — along the edge of fine enough /burning away in signatures — settling to terms / to game-weathers — setting the next and brightest travel in expressions — abstracted naturally — put to the tack / the ruddering — the tact to seem excited and seem shared — seem frayed and overfond — and having seen about the prices — casting particles — casting the brick and wood and sheer as understudies — even as the branchings formed / as hierarchies comforted completing an idea — for all the immersions asked — the fabulous / upswung and natural ablutions — reasoning away the mystery — filtering the poetry through beach-crowds — the expectations pieced — the samplers fixed / said — in the loose / redrawn and sub-staining literature. 
COLUMN by Brenda Yamen FIGURING THE MIX 1 by Robert Lietz Trying to get one world fixed — he sets the rivals down — assumes — and must — another year’s apprenticings — the dullards and raves alike — declining the applause — or kissing up or hiding out — chasing after storms that threw the bricks down on canals — threw the cherubs down on the museum boulevards. Always he thinks this dangerous distinguishing consent. And — always — in extreme — the choragos simmering — or the deacon working plates — knowing the looks of pleasure taking pleasure in rotations / in the faces kissing up and hideous. But — try as he might — chords rattle and the meshed gears snap — leaving a man this gracelessness — these shapes out loud and their commodious apartments — attractions the programs fail to sort — the feel of July say — brightening — at the height of middle winter — subverting the silks and moods / the aftermoods that all along had kept them honest — raised up on spines of oxygen — their hands — like hands wedged into pockets half a season — and their sentence lengthening — having gazed through snows — in hopes of sighting el dorados. |
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