Issue 23

Selections from
FROM A WINTER NOTEBOOK

In an aphyllous April of the mind, it seemed
you wanted me to stretch your time, for my curt hands
to talk about your English hips, and that my tongue
would wet the cracks left on your lips by winter’s mist.
The only way to live — to get away from life
I always wanted. Made a living, almost lived,
a match going out in the wind before it lights,
or just a poor position toward the summer breeze.
Nothing was perfect, the world being what it is —
lazy at doing, and doing well too trying.
An April mind in August yields of scant harvests —
Now wine rules after dark the way owls question night,
blights the day that follows. A squirrel stirs leaves, some fall;
the jay is shrill, the acorn fills its beak. Split wood,
ready yourself with thatch, with wool, with grain and seed.
Now in the window green dulls deeper, dense, and time
has stretched to breaking as a wave eats at the sand
till slowly brown dunes give. You are without my hands,
not needed touch, and on your lips now — ocean’s dust,
your hips now winnowed plains where shadow’s banned to grass.
Out the green box from under bed, junk memories,
hard tack. Gravel speaks in footsteps — now it’s silent.
Fog gathers in the folds; the ash of last year’s moths
where soon cruel winter’s troops will crush the window’s pane.

BY MATVEI YANKELEVICH

This last enjoyment, though I don’t deserve it,
in days of endings coming after endings
I enjoy as words, and as words only —
wine, notebook, cigarette. There there is ashtray —
this we did get right, but little else, despite
our books, our telescopes, our beakers bubbling,
computations quicker than the questions,
our compasses, and fearsome expeditions.
Here, finally, we are, come to long impasse —
no library holds answers better than
this crust of bread, this final rind sucked dry.
Not shaped for summer in this breathing world,
how did I lose it before gaining any
more words to roll around the mouth till sunset?
What word rolls better off the block than head?
How’s mouth without us to mouth it, tongue without
its slips? Lists, dictionaries of doing
better, adrift in sloth, in infinite
undoing. I’d look at anything too long
if granted sight again (even the horror
of my fingers losing grip of glass), write
letters poste restante if there were stamps enough
and carriers, cry tears if there were music
in the sense I mean and knew, as old men
cry now and then to songs their parents danced.
Who is this last display consoling, what mind
will know to make of this a form, this mess
of expiration? And what is breath for now
if not to aspirate words’ ends, like death?
Under last breath: my name, the way you’d said it
in war-wreathed winters of our discontent.

BY MATVEI YANKELEVICH

Last night the words were few and dull, then dream: in British accents
walking barefoot over strong stones and crying for their beauty
as much as for sharp pain of walking on their backs. Woke sobbing
for the birthday that you wouldn’t call, how difficult it comes,
how little may be left for what is on the desk, books opened
barely or untouched, how little air in tires for the trip
of being late to where I’d rather not at all be going.
How many autumn afternoons, how many solid inhales,
how many steps, the brittle snails burst underfoot, and faces
to forget before it’s best not to notice pleasing faces,
to live defending form when form is changing, defenses fall,
the composition changes, and everything is not the same?
Some hesitation to hold on to in late September sun,
September breeze in sandy childhood’s cape, in sand arenas,
glare in the corner of my glasses — a cycle I have seen
gone unremarked, full moon unrecommended, haunting youth.
Not by convenience nor desire of attention — this love
remaining as country keepsakes’ clutter wears out memory.
Days I leave more unreplied. My creaking back, my changing smell
would irk you sooner than daily promises to change my ways
the same as always, the space between us hanging low as pears
weigh on their branches, in the breaking news come after paper,
foreshortened breakfast on the desk the color of sparse commas
and chickadees flitting from cedar to barbecue to sky.
Starlings startle like coffee over toothpaste. We move our chairs
to follow the sun as it sets between summer and winter.

BY MATVEI YANKELEVICH

Start at the starting point. The lawn relies on longing
where everything is wrong, gone appetite for apples.
The stipple in the stipulation, in tracts of land
and will. Who moves in sound is ringed by his surroundings.
Penned in an address, a day to unwind wound me up,
minding circles, turning on an axis of hedgerows.
Now I’m missing the for in the form: was it offered
to be consumed like an apple in her hand? Gestures
of analogy, series of fragments: Coffee shops
blown to pieces one Algerian winter noon.

Pale guilt of private drives, red lines of letter boxes,
and savings in their safes. Kept doormen raising safety’s
paycheck to broad double-breasted chests, green signs of peace.
One needs the money, one breaks the law, one takes a job.
What cleverness will rule to rule out merit? Commute
the sentence or to work that’s better done by robots
never late or drinking, nor beating off in bathrooms,
beating wives at night, nor into baseball. Mercy me,
they sing, driving the freeway, crusaders on the march.
The ignorant of bliss will inherit winter’s earth.

Gabriel’s trombone at subdivision gates alarms.
Birth is the crime, life is the sentence, and only love
remembers the humiliation of forgetting.
Bleak snail of fragile shell moves sand, time glistens on it,
listens for years, for you as for others. Moths move in
despite the cedar and the bay: Mssrs. Teste and Plume.
These elements I didn’t choose, nor moral coding,
this lemon for that seaweed on my skin. Hair of chores
in my eyes. Hay in my throat. What’s speech without a form,
without quotation? The magpie hunts the winter’s lawn.

BY MATVEI YANKELEVICH

Will this notebook keep my secrets well
above all others. No paper seems secure
for ink so acrid. Complaints: I have some:
the desk is overcrowded with such things
that never will be finished. All I can ask:
bonfires nearer to the end. The aches —
already I feel stiffness in the morning,
eyes fading, never light enough. The wind:
it will not stop its angry play. Soon even
taste will be forgotten, simple pleasures,
yet yours stay with me on mind’s tongue.
Content grows around me, empty gestures
to lost reality of ciphers. The voice abruptly
halts and then I wait: it may come back.
Did I offend it? Doom’d is the sentence
that draws me to it, pens me in the way —
the same way — that you draw me in, as
reruns on the screen of late night eyes:
the light of that pale winter morning.

BY MATVEI YANKELEVICH

Bumblebees Part 2
FORMATIVE PERIOD

Left with contemplative surplus, supposed tricky finger,
proposed rafters might look into pattern settled, for now,
as law, saw there graphic tables, indices: loose riddle,
double entendre worked out puzzle of existence if lawn
cells click before the Learned were learning, before
mentored gaze, conversed at lunch, a gift of attentive time.
Then erased files stand in for your old car in relation
to empty streets, provisional cave, not entirely unmarked
drank deeply, nay quaffed to slake it for Time,
its relation to travel, language, cure, far away from
darker side of persistence, crazed Obstinate in moral
frame descending, claw let loose from errantry’s
perimeter, spinning child, once vacated trained dancer,
scrap trailing on string, scrap elevating with centrifugal
force, growth invites ice core centuries, lack, appointment
system, dismay at reversal, left with Led Zep memory-worm,
driven shoulder to hip way, chord compression mastered
in basement with someone’s brother, perfected arrow
analogy, audible practicum for tiny expanse covered phrase
at a time, then Monday. Phosphorescent watch face
discharged nighttime location, second sweep tending hand
on a move to fold another plane ever-green, ever-commercial
if you discount nonlinear space where we live most of the
time. Initial it done to another done not fair, love or peace
thumbs up or down ranked vote for middling talent tally-ho
damage, equine progress granted an enviable future, musky,
expensive, flat as proverbial flatness, and yet chip wafer
thinness aside there might be much less to pack onto one
pack mule in service, cast in dream as unlikely passerby
recognition shamed to a still, then big laugh flopped scene
over — we’re here back together again faded green glow
where we import history pre-fabricated, each square an
eighth of the height-length of the whole, architecture
promised uplift from mud furrowed lives that keep us going
year after year, chromo-sky at university library, structure
or more feeling for structure? Animal movement observed
as holy day regularity, procession, turned by line’s end when
not enjambed shoulder to knuckle ratio, thus turned in season
pass for entry to everything from International Klein Blue to
Vanta Black and back, each migration, self-consoling Simone
Forti bear-movement, variation on scheme floored a zoo, pose
as duration, drafted from angles sort out temporal terms,
takes a long time to produce one, several studies, four to a page,
say, stylized cut-outs, an all-seeing eye, visible scene on another
plane just behind improvised so-called plan, free waters
replaced by stolen, precarious piece joined to shelter piece,
crate, calendric technology, governance of bodies, free-standing
lollipops, wall work in crates, lines wrapped with lines, a sort of
language of architectural plans corroded by overwritten
horizons, draft elevations, open space, Frederic Rzewski’s
minimal piano plinked falling rain, entangled farmed or
farmer, famed fungal spores, antidote to theories of sublime
experience, dangerous heights, soaring ego-capped mount,
yet down at the base we mailed draft essays, exuberant voice
came across, lift up, made artists the talk to have, between
continents and time, mystery of how distant tip communicates
vitality, danger, light across distance, filament mycelia, one
face swapped for another, at war with language antonym,
metric synonym, nighttime cameras surveil deer, smuggler,
pack animals, border theme, perforate two fabrics to join
distich by hand, yet actuated by ear, we enter the picture,
its craggy mountains, huts for those with walking sticks,
hard to take time for half-life of uranium, artist-made
photograms with pieces of it, no sunlight: here’s a plant that
draws out contamination, heals damage, O Tree! Awoke
from default mode to wonder brain, all gets set aside, all is
here, as ever, how did we miss guitars? Gate for you to be,
help from amateur cultivators, milkweed, bandaged help,
bundled from harm, emptiness, wait-jumper right here, light
having traveled so far from extinction. Clay armature, clay
collapse, willow fuzz floats backlit in breeze, but shelling
continues over there; Los Angeles postcards Sandow Birk
made during closures, dystopic elements in old time
chromolithograph, pinkish at first promotional glance, our
palm trees’ promise, further out from war ruins kids played
among is Phyllida Barlow, birds return through effort,
monarchs, too, effort at coral health, rehabilitated human
posture, mint, green onions, budding place modifier, nothing
to say but vocalize just to feel vibratory life attach to
skein of star life.

BY DEBORAH MEADOWS

Bumblebees Part 3
NARROW LEADS

Monitor, an obedient relative, please listen: our
dreaded fresh stills, grain blockade, wage theft
tech giant anti-maneuver inflected it with fear,
outnumbered mavens shush new person’s item
worked figures, stung tough, stoical to the end.
I was hurt. You were hurt. We were hurt.
Why hate? There’s love right beside you.
Our journey begins where gondola lifts end
shuddered transfer of momentum stoppages
rugged range calls come closer, see around
sight itself, triangular pool of light ajar, not
what suffragists suffered jail for you to have
squandered, taken away, re-districted. Unmade
works, we slipped past rock hard renunciation
as an improbable mode, basic right delineated
text found in Wayback machine, vertical curse
on desperate theft, we crave connection, selfies
at demonstrations, sound very “theatre,” broad
caste, near the bottom, dogs hide from lightning,
sponges from solitude, druids from end times
situated henge with non-henge, pitiable topos
collected cast-offs curbside, tactical plot,
beautiful answer, wit, global friction, stricture
abolition, rallied rights, separate yet find our
way back to a practice, pick up guitar and knit.

BY DEBORAH MEADOWS

SNAPSHOT

1.

mirror between 
thighs like an apple

mishandled, a cheap prop collapses

bite down and feel the image snap
fragments of me in you              anti-portrait
horizontal capture of a vertical subject

when I desire I become a pair 
of scribbling hands

a finger wet from the throat 
can see this, though anyone can like it

2.

lit from below like Guernica
a sung fog to ruin the aperture

our shame’s substance is the same, 
differently bottled

the ocean’s undead, radiant 
with leaked light

a snare to catch the ghost beat

a lucidity, taut

3.

leak beneath the pot after watering

a vibrance of pigment gone muddy on canvas

ashtray in the dishwater                a fascist tattoo tongued

in thigh-crease then apprehended

rose in formaldehyde and Hallelujah streaming

BY MACK GREGG

GOVERNESS OF FLOODS

It is normal for a woman to cry. This should be no surprise.
It is known that at a woman’s center is a churning estuary.
The moon is not a sun. It is not alive with flame.
The moon, with its scythe, harvests nothing on earth but blood and salt.

A woman will well up over anything.
This should not be shocking. Because, of course, there is almost always something wrong.
Even in the center of a carefully made bed, there is something wrong.
Even Titania, in her honey-drowned circle of blossoms,
is poised to storm, is on constant guard should her hard-won boy be taken.

Oh, don’t cry, she might hear someone say. But it is normal for a woman to cry.
The sea must regurgitate its salt. Over and over it does so
with no choice— perpetual slave to the moon’s evaporated shore.

A woman will grow hysterical from her tears. She will eat them like fish eggs,
transparent in their sustenance. They will come again and again until, finally, the last drop is dust.
Forgive me for speaking here in absolutes. She is the only woman I have ever been.

BY MEGAN DUFFY

SHELTER IN THE SYSTEM

On the Q a sleeping man,
shoeless and maskless,
draws in breath
like a drink,
automatically
knowing how to pull it
down from the air.
He is feeding on his sleep,
rodent teeth
exposed with every inhale.
The woman next
to him sails her screen,
nesting it in her gloved
palm as if it were
something newly born.
Her thumb sweeps —
a mechanical softness,
as if wiping milk from
a sleeping mouth.
Outside darkness
has come pressing
against the windows
like a lonely child.
Stripped branches
gnarl the sky above
Flatbush. The last
of the sodium lamps
draw mica from concrete.
No, tonight that must be frost.
All of us riders were once
newborn, equipped
with the ability to breathe
and dream. Sometimes, still,
this is all we really know.

BY MEGAN DUFFY

The excerpt below is taken from a long poem within an even longer poem.

The only name we can call it now is not its only name.

Girls, this is my last resume 
Subject: experience from humana





When I was 19 I lived with a homeless man for a year. I turned 20 when I lived with a homeless man. I took him in, with bark, I 1 1 I apartment1I, with the toilet running. I fed yogurt. With this hidden language. I fed him. Yaourt is the hardest word for an English language carrier 
to learn to say in French, and lost saliva, mulch, to pay our rent, root vegetable, under the farmer owner, from English to 
French, French to English, English to, even though then
another woman was paying for me to live up, to breathe up, then I lived, I lived with a homeless man for a year. When I was 19.





Lucille Ball, a coproducer of the hit classic I Love Lucy, of which she was obviously also the titular star, was forced to accept the word “expecting” instead of pregnant. She was pregnant and they wrote it into the script, I’ve written your life into my script
and your ardor, your name is the name 
of my titular star.


Now don’t quote me on the middle name
I have a secret middle name


That is to say I hid my middle name
From even those closest to me or who
Depend on me





Homeless man played instruments
I sang 
Many of them
Homeless man wrote songs
I covered one
And sang backup 
Vocals for several others
Homeless man a health nut went back to Jupiter








With the sound of messenger cells 
Germifying through the mobile walls
Flora of yogurt engendering
Wake up calls
In a gentle dogwatcher’s living car
Women aged as they should
Rustic middle fingers
When traveling'd bruise the cargo
Well I was gentlest though whereabouts we traveled 
And
When I was gentlest we traveled
Latest or the last
Through the tape of a home unpacked, I unpacked it little though 
Like rice cakes 
Little 
By earth little
Over an earthworm helpless 
Before burials and some dancing
My birth, the birth of this great nation








With a wad of toilet paper
Maybe ancestral
The dog eventually fell back asleep
With at least two middle names
One of them marked out
By health
One of them having taken itself 
In a traveling case
With us back to the States
And where was it going
A faun
To an 
Environmental drone





The gentle dogwatcher was a part time
Music maker
Telling time
Trying to invent devices
For the sick
To go unpatented for the sick
All you had to do was
Walk up to the mobile window and
You could be dispersed 
One drop, like that
Helpless

Unpatented but not polite to
Not pay





The old woman who was barren
And the other old woman who was her mother
Who was not barren lived on a hill
In Cincinnati they leak-
Proofed this home
With newspaper wads and laid out
Sheets of it too

The older woman mother
Never got ill though
Due to her age never locked
The bathroom door
Under instructions from the barren one
The daughter
Who fell once the left side completely 
Numb in her bath towel
While getting some daily news







 
She has the kind of middle name of a kind
Of chrysanthemum or 
Mulberry in Chinese
Last or the lasting these
Go into the song lyrics
Which she sings as they perform arrest





In physical comedy
In the magic trick
Act now I will make her muse
Premature menopause
A drawstring devices from mouth
On the dare half of the game
Looks medical the virgin
Vinegar cleansing them into
Manageable dissertations
Now this time without protection
She who can long again now





I would like my money back, bank
I can play instruments with my voice 
With my lips outside of the bank, I 
Have always played
On a detective instrument
With my voice with my lips but never charged 
A price for it
She said, no
No, not bliss
Ardor
Then she said something else
Where every item 
Is a hole 
Is felt where
Every perforation is kissed
Outside the teleporting bank
I don’t know I guess
That first poem





The gentle dogwatcher
Was a full time dogwatcher
I wanted to be the one to make them laugh
But instead they watched me cry
As my illness leaked out from me inside
And I gave it to the dog instead





The gentle dogwatcher
Was a full time dogwatcher
Earthling when I left I began re-singing
Part time
I took no boat
I took the non-environmental drone
The gentle dogwatcher
Was a full time dogwatcher
When the girl had no where to go
And though I was the girl was 
The toxic one
Or so they said
Through even the fingertips
Though not toxic like fertilized mulch
Or a dog that has been
Consuming too much bark
The Chinese girl is crying gently
The Chinese girl does not scare the dog
The dog approaches the Chinese girl crying
The dog is gentler with the defective
Two of them look very American
The rest of them just look French








The tree had worms
The dog had worms
The mulch had worms
The girl got these worms





The girl got this idea
To maybe stop counting already
That maybe the gentle part timer
Let their dog touch her
Only because
Even though she was clearly sick
In the head and in the body both being transmissible
By the stick covered in wet globs of newspaper
Maybe she was about to be giving birth
To a pair of extracting birth tweezers
It would be something to witness
Quietly drinking coffee before bed
As anonymous gangster does
As the mutilation was crowned





And after all 
The place was practically leakproof
People came here to leak
Anonymous from all over
No there wasn’t proper bedding 
Proper for the sick
But it was practically mortuary 
In one cleansing sense





Once again you are counting
Of course the tree never stops
Growing this is all an illusion
To people who are stuck in the counting
Phase in triple time
Extracting the bean water
From the coffee beans





Stop sharing your pillow
With a sick dog 
Girl
Can I get this in writing
Sick one
Sick one
Teach me something today
I am better today
Allayed tabernacle 
From controlled leaking
Teach me something
In lieu of
What is normally our watching





You keep counting so
You’ll never be fixed
Not the way you fix a dog
The way you fix a clock
The year of the earth dog 
When I am a snake
The year of the earth dog
Will be my benedictine 
And what is benedictine good for
According to the monks
For dipping the pits
Wrapping gifts without enough saliva
Around the bells
And
Around a hemorrhaging head










She made her own wound mud
From a ground female ginseng 
She couldn’t escape from Adam and Eve
Though these monks decidedly weren’t Christian
When they found her
She was putting mud over the dog’s putrefying wounds
The smell makes you think of some toxic waste 
But it is only ever purifying
This girl she’d never laid 
With a man her own race she was raised
By the monks to believe this
Was incest
The night she commits what she thinks is incest
A tattooed man in Hunan
On their busiest night 
Market street
Sings a cover of Pink Floyd
Here
Where her middle name
Is her first name

BY VALERIE HSIUNG

Selections from
NON-DOMINANT

OUR BURROW

The burrow’s night or 
the hourless place or
the unplaced hour
or indirection 
or out of place and in time with 
or whenever holed up with B 
in B’s home, B’s, B’s Plaint, or

I’m worried about B 
who hasn’t been seen 
above ground in far too long
and the last time B 
did show did come through 
the familiar forest pathway 
I made things, I fear, worse 
with my attempts to converse 
and to follow unintending 
to pursue lest seeming I feared 
to be signaling some threat 
or untoward action vis-à-vis B

BY JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

B AND B’S BURROW

B’s dwelling occupies much thought 
much planning an all expense 
of energy save for the momentary 
stillness, though inexorably 
broken by its own deception 
by its owning description.

Now B is growing old is getting 
on in years not as strong as most 
of the others, those others in 
particular who are all 
enemy are countless 
save for the tiny ones 
insignificant pips 
whose work B benefits 
from in slender ways 
that devour just enough 
and no more

The motto, or better, B’s mantra
Omnia contra omnis

But B demands of B’s self
upon sensing and a moment’s notice 
that B risk it so often, that is 
to leave off construction contending with those with whom B not infrequently contends to leave if ever possible in the total consummation of burrowing—B’s own home

BY JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

FEARING WORDS

                      But as B 
well knows and as B has 
recounted to me so often and to P
the others are not only but just 
outside or also those whose element is 
B’s very homestead just as much 
as B’s and B’s fear being equally
theirs more or less than ours 
or anybody else’s others

                      For this then is 
what most needs describing
already from the first word 
fearing as words fear  
casting out letters here
there lest all be lost which 
is not already lost or 
worth the loss of losing

BY JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

THE MAKING OF US

On reflection and in sleep
B’s limbs loosening B feels 
for those poor wanderers 
who we once were, B P and me
so beings being excepted 
from them having become
the we except then became 
an us a B and a P and a me
along the forest paths 
along the farther roadways 
and in the woods deep 
within our woods describing not
those others or saving the elses
that wood wandering them
who must crawl into piles of leaves 
for relief from the cold or who 
pile up with bands of comrades
there yet unawares delivered up 
all the perils and threatening 
forms from within and without
in concert more symbiotically waiting.
          This is what P 
will describe in the most exquisite 
detail when next we meet and I
will record for B incising while 
next and when forcing the lines 
along which and not which

BY JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

THE PLATFORM

It’s no resignation 
not the approach 
of passively enduring
power over us but we 
reserve what withholds itself 
from any instantaneous 
knowing or cipher—our reserve

Excursus: Pollution is kin to spitting, at least etymologically so. Pythian, I spit you there. Spt-Sptu-Ptuo, a pile of spit, who and what one needs to bribe handsomely with meats, lots of it. A threadbare chicken and in return empty enigmas.

I’d rather not accompany 
B on certain days on certain 
paths and withdraw my conditions 
pastwards the loss
                      For only
the lost can replace it	
only blank pages the blank 
pages even when or only 
when being passed over like
that distraction I’m sitting on 
B’s knee or B on mine
like that and not like all 
the others but like nothing
all too something so we bury 
the other half to let rot there

And there another decision 
more postponed than before
experimenting with short spells
to collate our observations tending 
toward that inverted folding hetero
geneous figuring—more this 
more that without landing on
any method any approach 
to outside without fail or
inside without failing

BY JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

THE LIBRARY;
OR, YES THE ENTRANCE AND YES THE EXIT

Spoiled by such company B 
resolves then unresolves us
by seeing so much & so many
B fails in summoning us to 
descend for what would happen
would be happening behind 
our backs behind the door 
after it would be fastened?
                      Meanwhile
we three take advantage 
of the stormy nights we 
bundle in our spoils just below 
but has it come off well? 
                      What
could only be known after 
our descent will be known 
but not by B or P or me 
or yes by B & P & me 
but too late.
                      In that 
it risks itself to summon it
our space inside shaped 
by those outside by 
that presumption of 
non-internal non-external 
menaces & their allies ever
multiplying Oh how
to fill the crack
to gap the cleft between rims
& furrows how recuperate
innermost still & empty? 
Nope. 
Not possible.

If it weren’t for above
inside would be 
that from which our
outside is separated.

But for the fucking 
doorway who shouts
risk touts all perils to our 
unforeseeable & unmanageable 
exposure if only to be not above
an insider solely there not here.
But no. 
                       With each transition
we would risk complete 
dispossession of words & 
ruination leaving above 
meagre remains of maybe moss

BY JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

EXPERIMENTAL BURROW

B digs one. 
Obviously far from the real one’s entrance. 
B digs it B size P & I observe that B seems to be diggings our own graves quietly giggling snug as a bug in a bed lined & sealed of course with moss just like the real one is. 
Creeping in to close it covering it completely B sleeps under B’s mossy blanket. 
After B waits with patience patiently over B’s private vigilance long & short spells at every & any hour of day & night. 
We have seen this move in the past. 
We wait nonetheless with great excitement for the instant, that moment when B flings off the moss & rises from B’s experimental hole. 
It never disappoints. 
No, never. 

When B shares the observations from the experiment: they are mixed, both good & bad. 
So we debate, we weigh, we elaborate, we iterate, we play out different scenes, games & dramas with which form, fits, matters, moorings, anchors & landings. 
All our rotting & obliging matters. In their magnetism & elasticity it’s very exciting. 
When B looks with inattentiveness at the phrases we all three find ourselves susceptible. Ungovernably fucked & happy. 
B pants, puffs, bustles about. 
We ignore what we can’t contest. 
B’s observations from the burrow experiment always beyond a yes or a no. Akin to our game of plus & minus, bidding starts with an ask of or for, a bid as appeal. The game’s evanescent, literally not possible or just literal play for the hidden parts. 
Today we call our game: The Impasses. 
Here the pluses & minuses correlate nicely. 
Here the winner loses to win also nicely. 
Also known as our game of exceptions to imaginary problems & their solutions. 

What a fellowship of anomalous fellows we are, sitting around our experimental burrow, dot connecting like a discipline for living, from so and so to so and so, where noting is thankfully self-explanatory, where compulsive naming meets at a bull’s eye resisting determination, a shadow of an explanation oscillating with wind-tossed moss & marginal details with the dust of worlds.

BY JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

EMIGRANT B SCREWING US ALL

That former life—sans comforts & sans security—is what B runs to sans P sans me. 
In that former life, marked & unmarked, the endless procession of perils, mixed up & lacking any order or propriety. In that former life B would emigrate to, no one particular danger could be prevented, because all perils in that former life pose indiscrimination. Threatening from all sides in glumps & jumbles. We compare that former life to which B would run with our ordinary abode, the burrow B’s secured for B, P & me. 

Rather than emigrate to that former life, in just a step or two we would be there, inside, securely safe. But just but one but step. All against all, bodies left to rot in confused migrations. Neither B, nor P & certainly not me does the entrance receive. Instead we watch B who rushes past it so fast only to fling every part into a thorn bush on purpose it seems as punishment deliberately punishing all three. 

Now B perpetually obsessed by B’s own fungibility no longer appears even to be seemingly avoiding B’s very own hole. Hobbyist prowler, it is almost as if B were our enemies, spying out that suitable ruse for breaking into us all, B, P, & me. If only, B would.

BY JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

TALKING WALLS

As these talking walls hold the deadliest
secrets
from the internal infernal of desperation
delivering no ratiocinated reason
of ravenous information of the gut
These Walls never recognize
The revulsion of limited
domestic fights of communications
Sending soulful smoke signals of lust
Taming the heart
These walls told me to hold it all in
and explode with the intention
of desired trust
that’s never revealed
As the wall flowers grow monochromatically
with blue roses and black daffodils
resignates as sad and deadly
Like I 2 you
Condemning the brain into silence
These Walls are where all the answers LIE
If you don’t understand it
Then why should I

BY NEEDRA ANDERSON

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE

it’s wilted leaves 
on collard greens
gone bad but still
boiled
with five-day-old
cornbread too stale to taste
but too valuable to waste
for a family that planned
for months to have this meal
and their savings have went
to where the eviction notice came from

it's a bird with a broken
beak
who can't chew the worm
that has crept into its nest
that's now feeding on it's structure

it tastes like evaporated milk
from a cow that no longer exists

it's reincarnated raindrops
pooled and discarded seaweed
from an ocean too angry to laugh
brushing up against the shoreline
licking its wounded boundaries
slick with oil and filmy profits
now poured out as waste

it looks like a book
opened 
in the middle of a chapter 
that reads
"Go No Further"

it's a widow 
crying into unwrapped cellophane
encasing peppermints
she will no longer afford to hand
out to children in Sunday School
because there’s a problem with her pension

it's holding
a prism
in the dark
and wondering what it is for

it’s when the electricity 
goes out and you have just received
meat for the first time from
a food pantry

it's the way amputated fingers
feel
as a fist tightly formed to hold
apparitions of nothing
that shape pigs in a blanket
made of turkey

it's pigtails and ponytails
to a young girl with alopecia
that will never feel barrettes
against her scalp

it's a faded 
rainbow
lopsided in its promise
that never reaches 
to the other side

it's a tree sapling
confined to a flower pot
unable to grow roots
deep enough
to achieve its expected height

it’s the smell of caught fish frying
to a starving cat kept in a basement
to trap mice but is not yet
familiar with a litter box

it's what Shaken Baby Syndrome 
looks like for a barren woman
who daydreams about motherhood

it's a can of gasoline
a stone's throw from a fireplace
and the owner has run out of gas
going to get more
trapped on the side of the road realizing

it's what naked trembling
hairs look like
to a beaten and tortured woman
submitting
to her captors in order to survive
long enough to fathom escape

it's tassels,
podiums,
graduation gowns,
and the audience applause
to someone who obtained a GED

it’s cursive writing no longer
taught in school
to aspiring Graffiti Artists

it's the sound of music
on borrowed earbuds
the owner has no use for
but wants them back —
NOW

it's your big brother
asking you every Saturday
for the past five years
when are you coming home?

it's the smell of lilac candles
trying to mask
the tar soap you now use
to get "clean enough"

it’s reading your Bible
the day after your father commits suicide
and still believing
God has a plan
and a purpose for everyone

it's baby's breath
lingering above an infant's casket

it takes your tongue 
and makes octagon shapes
as you try and speak in iambic 
pentameter

it's a penpal 
that stops writing
after ten years of dedicated
responses
but Alzheimer's won't let them
remember
you're still waiting for a reply

BY DINISHA THOMSPON