Geoffrey Gatza, Jill Chan, Nate McCay

Six impossible things before breakfast

by Geoffrey Gatza

We live in a 'this kind of world'

I don't write

Class photo nightmare poems I wear scarves.

Utter tyre hub yew tree jasmine strangling,

Neck breezes in the herb garden.

Is it true? A sharp knife.

A clay body stands with a broken horse.

I have yet to comprehend a word you have said.

I bought more candy.

Reputations and secrets revealed.

Forty years fretting, polite reasonable.

Laugh lines fight scars.

Obsession fulfilled desires.

Foul sex at eleven thirty.

Sculptures abuse our security.

I have a gallon of semen I would like to give you,

a little bit at a time over several months. Say yes.

Red postal box flags are flying.

Three children are moving in after the divorce.

I am a locksmith.

Trust is a wine bottle.

Thrashed threats throats tongues.

I always misspell the word tongue.

Freud tastes like pee smells.

Dehydrated at the summer house.

Half of the village thinks I killed her.

I don't mean it, red brocade cables.

Why discuss realism? Why in this poem?

Imagine a child seeing a dead body for the first time.

The open door that led to the bedroom where her body lay.

Believe!

even Tinkerbell can revive.

Art appreciation for convicted felons

// or \\ Fundamentals are for chronic masturbators

Two sentimental mountains stand in the place nature left them.

I play with words when I should be writing poetry.

Beauty is the grotesque beard hanging on a fool's head.

She is lying to make me happy again.

Nothing ever happens here.

It's a matter of time before doom. It will break at some point.

all things are temporal; friends, chairs, dinner, masterpieces.

I will help you win, even if it will make me cry at another time.

I hate capitalism, but I want to fuck santa claus

German colors rings of blood

coffee drips down the wall

artwork hangs in the notebook

poetry rings red wine stains

writing this after death

human whorls of mockery

in my sunset years

watching TV

listening

breathing

breathing

watching you

writing

eating what you think I am

open to that at all jive on posters

all faces are your face

a human

a vegetarian

a poem

a Buddha

a TV

a good writer writing bad ideas

the poem on the wall

a bowlful of marijuana

happy squiggle faces smile sideways

sad numbers spray painted on a wall

dead yet your eyes look frightened

at a funeral

at a poetry reading. I heard you cry

a fascist nailed to a door

a marxist in a phone booth

a lion twists open the ketchup lid

and nothing pours out onto his fries.

What To Believe

by Jill Chan

There is You, and there is

something behind all of us—

the wars that couldn't,

the scars only none

but belief could see through.

The rest are sad consistencies

to hang onto like wounds,

now merely a startle or a dream

out of which

comes the deep—

the two willing,

the one stealing the other as the other,

neither ever given

as You were shunned

by those who think

and think to arrive

as surface, as silk,

but never with faith.

*

We wait until there is

no time to do what is right.

Perhaps, everything

that remains here

will eventually

matter,

like a family matters less

than the ways we belong—

wrong for a place

to be bought into—

wrong in each expanse

of folding into unease

if description

has a colour

to be alive in,

much to our surprise.

Yet, we could be wrong

in everything we right.

*

What might be here, in place

of being, in place of might?

In my eyes, there is nothing.

In my eyes, there is

but a sense of other seeing,

perhaps about how,

in withholding some hour,

we become strong

without power

or strength,

a cross between a mind

that is ours,

neither helping

nor hurting,

and one that thinks

of You

almost to be heart,

to be placed.

*

We are dangerous.

Even when we are not.

Somewhere, a peaceful mind

seeking peace

as towards a subject,

anything to hold like a moment

before it decides to stand an hour,

then an eternity to lose

the edges like weapons,

the cousin of danger,

even when we are not dangerous

like a heart is to an understanding of a heart.

Outside, the labourers work

while we build nothing

but another house to replace the one

that lives in us—

not cruel or beautiful

or even about us.

*

A friend wrote to say

he's sorry he couldn't visit me.

He's not responsible anymore

for the city where I live.

I think about the city

where I live,

how apt to be in it,

to be visited

like land

by a sky endless

though itself moving as land

at times when it has worn out

its infinite responsibility

to be always hovering

like a father never done with work.

The work, it seems,

now holy to a dream,

to a responsibility.

*

A relative once said

Why don't you write

about tenderness,

the way we use it

sometimes for gaining,

not a heart, but a manageable life—

how something might be full

of the way we are lacking in tenderness,

even in absolutes—

how wind is seen as swaying

even by the spirit

though we stand in its path

to be at once swayed and standing.

I've never managed to be tender

and mean it.

We, who are awkward or beautiful,

have lost too much

to ever mean it.

*

We are relieved.

We are laughing once again.

My body seems to go about its business

of finding it where we want it.

Here, out of the way

of complicated thinking.

Being simple like this,

knowing a thing is done by doing.

We leave what we reached after

before we could be

left alone with our wanting,

now still only ours, will be ours

until we have

lived and lived

in our loneliness

nothing could die

but some dark

we never caught.

*

We realize now we've been lying

by believing what was told to us.

Believing is a kind

of reckless lie.

We wake to a further dream—

landscape—

and sleep in its map,

our ears its mouth.

Assenting, we become mute

as the realisation:

Ears cannot be covered

but the words that reach us

are truths that turn the moment

against our complacency.

What sleeping earth,

waking to the sound of morning,

has ever thought

about beginning?

*

You remind me of someone

I used to know.

I was as cruel then

as I am now to people

who regard me,

take time

and never forgive

the meanings in it.

A minute spent in caring

or mistaking love

with what it gives:

I'll learn it again

I'm sure

whenever I refuse to learn,

stubborn as the best

of our pledges—

the ones only we, in our awkward

unreliability, can stop.

*

You are everyone.

The people who regard You

as more than Your presence,

not as the world

but as the Love

You will complete,

taking away the dark

and the terrible,

taking away all the terrible

with the Light that will show beauty

not so much as truth,

but a reminder of that truth.

For now, in our fierce

and high independence,

in our daily disobedience,

beauty is the utterance,

truth, the Word

it forgets to say.

*

It is easy to be like this,

looking as toward surviving

as one survives

even on an ordinary day,

though lately,

even daylight

is a surprise,

almost a welcome.

Everyone around you is elsewhere

doing everything else—

reaching for themselves

as if they could reach

without desire

(the beauty in that)

at once dying or looking

to where there's no living or dying,

the way and everywhere here,

just the life in you.

*

Someone told me once to talk more positively,

to stop using 'not.'

I wonder what it is about

those of us who are

sure of who we are,

where we belong

as this afternoon is unsure of the weather,

and the weather cannot be contained for all its trying.

Those of us still sure of anything but wonder,

those who are past anything but belonging—

What is not lacking in that?

The paradoxical way

language reveals the personality—

how this afternoon is as quiet

as the morning it replaces,

and we are sitting restlessly,

not quite us,

not quite ourselves.

*

It is beautiful to be

like this moment,

filled with possibility

that continues to become

as moments disappear

into a past

then collect

into some present.

Suddenly, you are here

not just anywhere.

Suddenness makes time

of the present,

pulls a body

into a place

to be body, to be place,

as one makes something

not out of desire,

but out of a moment.

*

It is rare to be moved

like this.

By eloquence.

There's nothing it does not manage.

Even the language it arranges—

your language—

you, as in all good

and wont presences,

the kind where we expect

then think,

What are we to become

after this

instance longer than a moment

but not enough to be longer though it is.

We are eloquent in it,

dumb as you are eloquent,

our quotient to some

mathematical uncertainty.

*

There's nothing but belief.

Even in saying this,

we are trying as something—

two hands, a door, a mind—

whatever still dares to try.

I am restful, you are bold.

Outside, the morning seems

to move as we are,

independent of place

though minding where we were,

not believing in something.

Outside our bodies,

the noise of hurry,

the banging of incompletion,

perhaps industry,

work that never dies even with progress,

even as love

in its own progress.

*

I remember a relative

went missing

for what seemed

like moments

(not hers but ours)

frantic with our love

yet more than anything

but ours now.

We were as lost

as we were wandering,

as lost as she

was missed.

And we found and found the parts of us

that know and know yet don't.

For what could we have

understood of anything,

ourselves missing,

ourselves lost in her.

*

It's sad to see you like that—

jealous of the consequences

of beauty.

You've been an admirer

of other beauties

but never this impatiently.

You are a lover, a husband—

all names and effects.

Now, as beauty yearns

to be someone else

not pleased

with your yearning

though you are handsome,

though you are both

learning to be cause

and consequence―

jealousy becomes you,

faith comes to lie with your truth.

*

What to believe

when we could be so conscious

of others, of how others, like us,

are after the same things

though they are far,

though we are near,

like that brightness

our dark seems to be saying:

how we steal

the most empty places

just to be sure

of our honesty,

our delight

at being told nothing,

understanding

that someone

said something,

and we didn't.

A Suspended Hour

by Nate McCay

Within a suspended hour, I found myself amidst

an interim life, animated by the burning marrow

journeying from horizon to horizon. There I laid,

held by your gaze as it wove its way into the cascading tides:

Consumed by a moment that could no more be contained

than the sea can chain the morning lights, we were blinded

by a delusion of cresting shadows bound to the periphery

and slowly fading behind a specter mistaken for an angel.

Nevertheless, you were like the wind carrying a song

whispering through the summer stained leaves.

Floating along the coastline, we realized ourselves within

that vacuum of desire. It was there that you blushed the skies

with an erubescent vibrancy, as the sun collapsed into night.