fruita pulp: a poetry journal

obey the emerging form

[fruitapulp-blog]

ANTARCTICA

by Sarah Bartlett

We finally find each other my body an elevator down In the center an axis stirs Morning skates across our faces If I had a rope ladder or a bridge If I weren’t so scared to reach out with gloves off I’d touch your face Good-bye has a special flavor peppermint and blood This is what tongues are made of Keep them inside words a permanent fixture in the dark Love a nonsensical addition a serial killer indiscriminate as snow

[fruitapulp-blog]

Being From Here

by Sarah Bartlett

Are we really afraid of the dog buried under the shed reaching out its bones for a touch Being alone isn’t a final gesture What I really want is the resurrection of everyone I ever loved I would put them in a room and never go inside Death the eternal flapping veil what we’ve been given instead of wings Names don’t matter it’s a palpable thing running between trees memorizing the way we scream The beautiful crux of it unwraps light in the morning and scatters the scraps Eyes are explosives their coned miracle so finite you can feel them dimming in front of the mirror I am a reflection of you being a reflection of her being a reflection of her father being a reflection of you

[poetsorg]

I am not interested in the line as much as where it breaks. I am interested in drama.

Dana Levin on the poetic line (via poetsorg)

[fruitapulp-blog]

Fruita Pulp: Issue #10 July/August 2015

[fruitapulp-blog]

Fruita Pulp: Issue #9 May/June

[uutpoetry]

a pictorial of perfection

conversinginmetaphors

In a perfect world I would travel by pneumatic tubes to the Darkside of metadiscourse but it was just a framework of fanatical pronouns

I want to Google goulash recipes and read obscure manuals in a pop-up camper

Follow that jalopy in a rainstorm of self rationalization while blowing virtuoso police, learn on tables without a gazebo

This poem is a Virtual Realization of Collective Arbitrariness. The gifts (above) were bestowed by uutpoetry​ and her-holy-inebriation

[uutpoetry]

Withered on our bodies are the deaths done unto us Like flowers of the field withered on a hill of sand.

Nelly Sachs, “Chorus of the Dead” (via uutpoetry)

[fruitapulp-blog]

On My Attempts To Be Tough

by Aleph Altman-Mills

Sometimes I think I want to be highway-toothed and make people angry

but in the end, the free hugs sign wasn’t an offer but a plea.

[fruitapulp-blog]

          M.K. Brake is a spell-maker and poetic anarchist. She glorifies the sovereignty of white space and the architecture of the word on the page, and will never forsak…

[fruitapulp-blog]

Ghost Deer

by Travis Davis

Speed drunk rushing through atmosphere combusting northward on highway yellow lines pounding by in night lonely with Queens of the Stone Age this scene is an absent daydream standing next to a hallucination of itself it feels that I’m walking /waking / hunting for a ledge to peer off to look from to fall off & shadow movements of creatures living in the black grass eyes snapping back light beams bodies that freeze & look back a magic paranoia I love in a sickness I never want to sleep only shove on deeper into the bass hits of a drugged buddha on the road with no one else no other machines but this one the whole fucked up world to myself.

[fruitapulp-blog]

March/February 2015

[fruitapulp-blog]

boys love protein shakes

by Alexandra Wuest

disenchantment comes prepackaged these days more convenient than ever

it’s nice to wear a uniform

except when that uniform is

saying someone does something a lot which isn’t the same as saying someone is good at doing something

[fruitapulp-blog]

to jules

by Zooey Ghostly

we laid on the sloping roof & I clung to you & whispered to the 15 cent hibiscus on your chest.

when it snowed I waited at the gate & we held ourselves across the courtyard & the lightbulbs recited peach-yellow prayers to the window panes.

we didn’t speak as we removed the socks & coats of the wet city & faced eachother in the doorway.

we didn’t speak as we disassembled our costumes & placed each piece below the unwoken windowsill.

we listened to coma cinema for the last time & went quiet.

[fruitapulp-blog]

bodies

by Zooey Ghostly

& the meat of this thing, rusted teeth & leaving your apartment, spitting at the imaginary sidewalks of new york.

& it was unwrapped in denver, dusted in the crook of a mountain turned theater bedroom.

& I think you liked the shape of it because you told me so & I wore everything you told me to—

there is a jellyfish swimming in my chest &

there is a ringing in this skin please take it please take as much as you can carry.

[fruitapulp-blog]

Hard Things

by David Mason

 Hard things still happen on this earth, where men and boys with guns will kill before they think. Hard things. Merely for praying the wrong way

a body ends up landfill in a desert, young women scream at acid thrown in the face or end up hanged when they have just been raped.

Hard things the dead are capable of doing to the not yet dead who would prefer to read and laugh and tell their stories over tea.

Down by the sea where life is born to die and in its dying offers up more life there’s nothing like the cruelty of men.

Hard things are done, but the sea is never cruel. Only human beings are capable of that.

[fruitapulp-blog]

Your Arm Is by Dalton Day

after Nick Sturm

Your arm is shaking  Like a planet A head  A house married to a body of water  Your arm makes me feel different  I should talk on the phone more I should stop using the word should I should stop using the world  Like an arm  A color Unbelievable enough to make me a liar I’m building something quiet  With a refrigerator inside Winter will tell me what I’m missing Maybe it’s swimming Maybe it’s you

[fruitapulp-blog]

A poem is organic in the sense that it is alive—a living machine. I do not speak—it speaks. I can die and “my” poem will continue to speak in precisely the same way it spoke when I was alive. The relationship of the poet to the poem is complicated. The poet is alive—a living body, living machine.

An Interview with Joe Wenderoth