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Lube, Ars Poetica

The room is aching the way I wanted to sail with super-silk on our silica -ed secret an everywhere slip into the nightgown of you the failure of form only the mouth can make so much to glide upon I detest my need of you the failure of my body to produce anything but ink useless time and again against my tongue you taste awful I know you can’t save me you are the location where I save myself when I am out of my body you cull me back with a glissade foamed with impatience frothed with an imagination I detest how easy I thought it was to know myself to continuously learn I only know the failures of us together, you could never satisfy me you are the only thing I know how to ride when everything else fell away you brought me back to show me how easy it is to fall or at least that is what I told myself to keep myself satisfied amidst the failures of friction how I lose you each time I insist on perfection my body could never be what I demand of you

— Lan Lesmeister

Ginebra

For my uncle, a drink must be extravagant pleasurable but not sentimental. There must be a love for the gurgle of the bottle, a sound for the click of neck & lip which sleeps for years in the canals of his ears. There must be fire down his throat. The tumbler must have nerve despite the pain in his backbone, despite the leg that goes off. As a child when he first learned to form questions did the answers light up the bottle pocketed in his father’s jacket. On winter holidays when he got so lit my father drove him home & most likely put him to bed. I always knew he would come like this, outdrinking everyone & no one lifting a finger to stop what then meant nothing now means every lick of it. I love to see the lines of his eyes curve when he savors juniper berries like a good monk in a monastery. I love to hear him say, you gat dat right, when he speaks of my dead father. It is possible to make a phrase sound so beautiful there’s a rhythm to it. From my uncle I’ve learned so much I’ve got nothing on his father. I could paint the notes for you, the madder & amber color of a bottle in a Rembrandt painting. Such a non sequitur, I must exaggerate to be exact. All my lousy life I have fallen for it, this dark brew personified. I can tell the answers by the way the gin rises in a burst out of his throat. I mean it like a clenching mourner, I’ve carried a flask.

— William Archila

Precious

Copper keeps life from my womb; aluminum fills my pores, silver my teeth. My blood won’t hold iron, so I take it daily. Food brings a sickness I can’t measure under my tongue, only on my waning waist. Some metal

belongs in the body. The day a grate raised my skirt on the street, I noticed only one rush of air between ore and whore. The boy who learns to caress his face with a blade will grow into a man I’ll pay to slice my skin with steel. Beauty

is no alchemy: it merely means making space for more things that shine. Like the ancient statues men scrapped for daggers. Like powder packed into bullets, their touch so intimate it kills. Like any body in this millennium, I’ll survive

in silicon chips after death. Until then, lead me somewhere precious. Guide me with ungloved hands.

— Kira Tucker

Mercury

Maybe it ruins the story to say at the start that no one was hurt the day Scotty Forester swung open the door of the family car, climbed up, put one hand on the wheel and, then, while pushing and pulling on buttons and knobs, he found and released

the brake, and it started, the silver-blue Mercury, to roll down Robin Street, best street in the neighborhood for sledding, for coasting on a bike with arms waving above your head, Scotty gaining speed on the long sweep of that block, heading

toward the intersection, then into it, then speeding through, the car beginning to slow as the street leveled out, although, toward the end, Scotty going fast enough to jump the curb before stopping, three feet from a gas pump.

Maybe knowing the ending ruins this story, but sometimes we need a break from dread. We need to know that the car did not crash, the child did not die. We need to briefly forget that we live in a world where a car is gaining speed, and

no one seems to be at the wheel. We need to be more like the dog Scotty drives past, who barks, and runs in circles as he barks some more, driven by some circuitry we have lost for loving this dangerous life, living it.

— Suzanne Cleary

To the Sea

My mother took the bag from its box— home to my father’s ashes for thirteen years— and poured its heft into a form she made on the potter’s wheel—a vase, damp and unfired. She pinched the rotating lip, and sealed the clay perfectly shut, a technique I haven’t yet mastered.

We planned to launch it like a football at low tide, but when we arrived, the beach was lined with people, and there was no subtle way for my brother to toss it out past the children kneeling in the surf, the surfers awaiting the break.

To carry my father out, arm above my head, heavy with him— or hold him against my chest, side-stroking with one hand while the clay disintegrated into the water— I wasn’t dressed for it.

Instead, we dropped him in the water by the docks by the old Shrimp Shack, all 6’4” of him, and I watched the vessel slowly descend, a few bubbles emerging as if the last breath left in a dying lung.

— Tracey Knapp

rrondo

yama-bato

Surreal Desert House Minimalist Blue Door with Tree Shadow in Pink Sunset Glow.

by Ramy Hefny

nevver

And soon the darkness, Adrian Cox

nevver

Where there’s a will, Michael Eastman

Hence some of the pitfalls of writing on the Internet, highly visible in e-mail, blogs, and responses to blogs. The mechanical ease and immediacy of electronic communication are deceptive. People write hurriedly, don't reread what they wrote, misread and are misread, get into quarrels, hurl insults, and use flame-throwers because they expect their writing to be understood as if they were talking.

It's childish to assume people will understand unexpressed meanings. It's dangerous to confuse self-expression with communication.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

nevver

Drain the pool, Andrés Gallardo Albajar

Afterwards

He closed the door.

January bit through the walls.

The bed kept the warmth

seventeen minutes, then none.

No witness but the sheets.

I thought I stayed.

I inventoried the fridge.

The cream had turned.

I was late to the news of myself.

I didn’t starve.

I just never came back to the table.

Even hunger

has standards.

I left later,

quiet enough that air forgot me.

I went the way women go

who survive too long.

Afterward

I moved through rooms without arriving.

I lived like a light you forget to turn off.

The cream soured.

And I was elsewhere

long before I knew it

— Eva Candelaria Sosa

Do You Know What Today Is?

unfortunately, or blessed, it could have been hours, or years, but it was hours we disappeared into, touch i shouldn’t savor, not this day, not while missing you, not this deep in love, but a year ago, or was it days, we said i do which under it laid dozens more commitments, one being our commitment to pleasure, to touch, to the touch of others, so i do but also i will continue to do it, that it, with people that are not you—love, believe it, or not, lives in that promise too, i love the sounds others pull from you, i love your ecstasy even if i’m not around to engineer it, and here i am, on the other side of the promise, on the other side of the world, underneath this person who i have promised nothing but my attention and effort until it’s done, and it was, done under the moon until the rain started and, then, done under the rain, i am ashamed to say it, but i must say it: i would have asked them to stay, to do it again, to touch me forever had i not, and thank God i did, placed my forever in you, but amor, amor, you should have seen it, us: beneath the rain, a storm, under the promise, my loaned breath.

— Danez Smith

Künstlerroman

In a number of rooms in a number of states I began then abandoned notebooks. Pages long and blank. Sparse fragments in the margins: eager for otherwise a second infancy Inside me, bones inflating, kites crowding a florid dome. In answer to a question, the poet said I write to return opacity to the glassbright world. Line after line slackened. My benedictions darkened like lack into night’s eventual black. The dead artist said for a painting to move us, it must become, not remind us of life. I stood vainly for many months, watching snow sink to the bottom of my mirror. For protection, I studied the contours of a deeper sorrow than the kind I grew. I thought I thought best with my hands in my hair, sweeping fears off my face. My nothing was novel—my desire for a different ending is a failure of imagination. All my life it’s been there, dormant knell ringing my neck. I was a finch, a feathered bellwether. Or I am an organ wringing, then wrung.

— Sarah Ghazal Ali

xanaxfarts

‘Teabag Cyanotypes’ (2021) by: Rachel Rector

Keep My Poems

My father taught me how to write: على قد لحافك، مد رجليك. Extend your legs as far as your blanket. When I find parts of my poems exposed, I amputate them. I keep them tucked in light or night, away from those hunting for lines that don’t fit their blankets not realizing poetry lies in a poet’s satisfaction with their blanket. In my pursuit of tender lines, I’ve become a butcher, committing crimes against myself for the sake of beauty.

— Yahya Ashour

Of Hog Summers

for David Lieberman

Every summer my neighbor with a hard hat, heart, and hide trundles out his hippo Harley to go hissing out on a fat hot breeze He doesn’t know it (or does he?) but that is how pain wheels itself out seasonal

It is real It is recurrent It is a reminder of the flaw built into the machine to preserve perfection If we could delve into the granular caves of the asphalt his wheels wheeze on we might see in the crepuscular cracks a twisty little thing we call sorrow stretching its centimal length knowing it owns the world

— Ralph Nazareth

redlipstickresurrected

Richard Estes (American, b. 1932, Kewanee, IL, USA, based between New York City and ME, USA) - People's Flowers, c. 1971, Paintings: Oil on Canvas

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