Wednesday, October 21, 2009

1 poem by Ben Lundquist

Indiana, 2006

He studied Bible at Wheaton College
He wants you to know that, son
piglips chewing cud
eyes blearing left, little girl on bicycle
studied Bible at Wheaton College,
just like your pops

Check wife like congress for right to war
right denied
smile and nod like military maneuver

Boat lilts too quick
Drag lake with a look, expecting ghosts
to pull him in
but his eyes keep blearing left
like he could turn pebbles to marbles,
send the bike skidding into algae

He hears you’re studying English
He clicks his tongue:
Son, what will my daughter live on?
beer-cooler-iced-hand kneading temples
eyes locked left, little girl in lake-ready bikini
studying English . . . say, son,
I love summer

Winks like handing over enemy papers
keep face blank
signal dead, no translator in headphones

Chicken urine gas hangs
Tyson plant chortles five miles away,
relishes juvenilia
but its floor manager is not amused
his wink has set his face into a pirate squint
his beer-cooler-iced-hand freezes to the oar

Sunday, October 18, 2009

4 poems by Felino A. Soriano

"Painters’ Exhalations 623
—after Beo Nguyen’s The Philosopher"



He
isolates in delineated function,
the naked from geometric abstraction

talking to summary of intelligent salvation. Answer

answer

the tongue’s cohesive hankering.

Said to himself

“I do not understand the language of my neighbor,
but understand the vertical veracity
my hand-held yoyo
posits into a realm of
personal separation from time,
time.


"Painters’ Exhalations 624
—after Mike Massengale’s Out of the Darkness"



Her strumming harmony
attacks
with winged liberation
ground-summary
erases
upon
uttered failed deconstruction.
Her
instrument
vocalizes seismic
comprehension
sliding the blonde hair
of Autumn’s nearing-end.

Listen,
her
construct
the personal concept
imagination
struggles
until
life within horizontal
movement

ignites first words
into summarizing
most-inner
contours.


"Painters’ Exhalations 625
—after Sue Duda’s Crazy Fingers"



With elaboration
the birthed is often
subliminal.

We’ll anticipate
vertical curves’
concrete expansion

we’ll analyze

pound
pound
pound echoes
humming
remorse for inexact narration
tongue
misquotes with adequate ease.

Fingers, the curled
tone of constant reverberating hail,
admit
to the watching fortune



jazz
is the constant mirage
glazing the eye with unobstructed

rapture.


"Painters’ Exhalations 626
—after Donald Maier’s Backyard and Birdhouses"



Because quiet
is the best suited body
to sit within embrace of white,
plastic
outdoor chairs, and the roaming beneath
feet with cataract sight
can roam within glare of green’s slanted grass,
sectioning rooms
of the yard’s most elegant,
dilapidated region.



Felino A. Soriano (b. 1974, California), is a case manager and
advocate for developmentally and physically disabled adults. He has
authored 15 collections of poetry, including “Altered Aesthetics”
(ungovernable press, 2009), “Construed Implications” (erbacce-press,
2009), “Compositions of Integrated Commonalities” (Recycled Karma
Press, 2009), and “Various Angles of the Interpretation Paradigm”
(Shadow Archer Press, 2009). He edits & publishes Counterexample
Poetics, www.counterexamplepoetics.com, an online journal of
experimental artistry, and Differentia Press,
www.differentiapress.com, dedicated to publishing e-chapbooks of
experimental poetry. He is also a contributing editor for Sugar Mule,
www.sugarmule.com, and contributing editor for Post: A Journal of
Thought and Feeling, www.postjournalofthoughtandfeeling.com.
Philosophical studies collocated with his love of classic and
avant-garde jazz explains motivation for poetic occurrences. His
website explains further: www.felinoasoriano.info/.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

2 poems by Janie Gleason

"Fillevox"

Does it frighten you when I speak? Intricacy
in the shape of leaf-skeletons, the dry skin on
my lips, the pitch of my voice so high above
yours-- does it make you shiver to hear me?

My voice is sweet like a D.H. Lawrence fig,
it is round with the promise of my womb,
it is downswung like a child on a swing as I

make empty promises, laugh at you from
behind my hair. The calendar marks off days
the size of an eggcup; I fill them quickly with
the langour in my limbs, the way I can't make up
my mind. I talk to you in riddles: a peach, a pomegranate,
a meddler, a service tree.

And I am milk and you are cereal.
And I am bread; I am salt; I am
a paper you write on. We are
like all things that come in pairs--
we stir into each other at times like tea.
We query each other in furious stage-whispers.
Your hand looks knobby and awkward
next to mine.

Do you look down suddenly when you hear
my honey-mustard throating? What red-throated
hummingbirds know as they duck their needle-mouths
into the pitchers of flowers is what you still
have left to learn. There is not another like me
across five continents.

"Sun & Juniper Girl"

You're stuck in my eyes with a blanket
of gingham sky, locust leaves. You're stuck
in my hands with dandelion clocks, deer-berry
clearings, birch trees, sunlight.

You're stuck in my eyes; gears spin in the gasoline
heat but I'm on foot, trudging past the milk-bottled town.
The locals lean out of their porches to watch me pass.
I am ducking behind trees, spinning spiderwebs sky-green,
I am picking poplar leaves and smelling their yellowy green,
I am breaking up inside like an iceberg, melting
into the sweet sea-green of summer. I'm leaning
on the gate to the summer, hands in pockets
full of old smells.

You're stuck in my eyes.
The maple leaves of your soul lay
one-over-the-other like fish scales,
wrapping up the sap of my skin. I walk
barefoot on the stones that line the back-roads
of your heaviness. I swim underwater in the
lake that kicks back the pictures of the sky.
The clouds are cotton and the grass is
stinging, lingering like ants on our skin--
eventually I'll understand.

Janie Gleason writes from Bradford, Ontario with a cup of tea in one hand and dark brown French braids in her hair.