Gauguin From the outside looking in, the ground is a splotched fingerprint in blood and the curved bar of women bent like Zs is the windowsill you look through into a room that bursts with shining things. You see beyond a land of black and white to a place where the cost of color will […]
Poetry 80
Mathias Svalina: The Walrus Dance
(for 3 or more players) One child is the Walrus. One child is the Trainer. The other children sit in the sun fanning their programs to cool their sun-flushed faces. A circle is drawn in chalk on the asphalt & the Walrus lies facedown inside a circle. The Trainer commands the Walrus to turn over, […]
Mathias Svalina: Frog in the Sea
(for 6 or more players) One child is the Frog. He sits cross-legged in a circle about 3 feet in diameter. The other children tease him by calling: Frog in the Sea Can’t catch me They step in & out of the circle, teasing & poking the Frog. They poke him with sticks & they […]
Tomaz Salamun: Letters
I Love, spinning like geometry, where are you? Should I really believe in myself, as—you say—you do, you, the tree with tenants, soil with hoops, earth with rain? I am not that perfect, also animals, copulating, are not. The dragon with the dragon, the sheep with the sheep, the light with shadow. And after all, […]
Charles O’Hay: Junk
All night the city had spent turning itself to licorice: red black, the streets and buildings getting loose, trying on masks. At the bar, Nola’s on stage stripped down to show how gypsy hair can fall across a body not yet gone to hell from junk. A guy with a wedding ring tells me she’s […]
Kerrin McCadden: Say Sing
This is my one life. Say you know. Say this means many things, say snowy owl, say three feet of snow, say kestrel. My one life is here at the table, next to me. Say you know, say fine night for soup, glad to have you, how was your drive. Say there is only one […]