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.