Category: Poetry

Side A Poetry: “The Strategy of Tension” by Christopher Blackman

The Strategy of Tension At a bar, lobsters millin the corner claw machine,waiting to be pulledfrom their situation,from brine into boilfilling the room with the smellof displaced sea, pluckedfrom bedrooms to be usedin amusements, consumedby men in cargo shorts.Not to quote Dostoevsky,but this might be our greatest sin:destroying and betraying ourselvesfor nothing. Friends,I don’t need…
Poetry for Side A: “Militia Lands Hunger” by Jonathan Memmert

Militia Lands Hunger they’re out there— they wait for the likes of youliberal likes they so dislikelikes so unlike them they meet train drill exercisein quasi synchronized precisionas onslaught takeover practices fantasize they dress in para uniform camouflage guisesbare tattooed ideology from under their skinstand sentry cocked and locked as white rise political voices sound…
Some Lines of Poetry from the Notebooks of bpNichol

Some Lines of Poetry gathers excerpts from bpNichol’s journals across the 1980s to give a unique perspective on craft, process, and a writer’s life. Featuring works in progress, insight into Nichol’s thinking, previously unpublished prose and lyric, visual, and sound poems, Some Lines of Poetry documents Nichol’s “apprenticeship to language” and his playful daily exploration of the limits…
Side A Poem: “Glow” by Never Angeline North

Glow “Gardening. No hope for the future.” —Franz Kafka, from his diaries In the second part of my life, I am living in a graveyard made of the first part of my life. In the first part of my life, I did things. In the second part of my life I do not. In between…
Poetry Excerpt: From Words in Danger of Falling Out of the Vocabulary by Eric Lindley & Joe Milazzo

Freightv.1. To inscribe, write or otherwise make marks that are to be read (more properly, read back) in non-linear fashion. To write a text that is both an Eulerian trail and a magic square.2. To mumble from the heart.3. To tabernacle under the umbels. To retire to the weeds to mildew the saccharine and honey…
Poetry from the Future: “Today Is New and Plastic” by Steve Roberts

I tuck my bubblegum under my tongueso I can drink water from my plastic cup.I need to feel both the sour tangand the deep, wet relief of being hydratedboth at once; I cannot wait for oneor the other. I put on my suit of “I don’t remember.”My suit of “The past is just a form…
Side A Poem: “Soup of the Day” by Sarah Peecher

Soup of the Day Suddenly, you find your crisp mid-April self digging through the closet for anything lightweight enough that’s not wrinkled but your summer wardrobe is an old friend you’re just warming up to and nothing seems to match the same way Saturday will be eighty degrees and sunny and Sunday will be thirty-five…
Side A Poem: “Prodigal” by Michael Juliani

Prodigal My phone rings all hoursof the night with my grandmother wanting her mother, her sister,her husband, anyone dead who still walks the housein her mind. I repeat a script my mother taught meto soothe her back to sleep, then try it on myself,ears open to the screech owls and red-crowned parrotscommingled in the blue…
Side A: Two Poems by Wes Civilz

Bullet List of Shame-Based Issues ● The stunning fact of shame’s preeminence In all I say and do and make and think ● Blue gloomy penis: an impediment ● The lazy way I use my blood as ink ● Eating my food so fast I hate myself ● Wolfing down burgers easily, I’m busily Constructing…