geri allen/Sean Burn

dark angels   the breaking

        ov breath   the labouring

        ov loves blue daybreak

jailbreak stories & & &

    dream gathering dark angels

That Head Again/Ivars Balkits

Thinking grows as a fresh grass below concentric moons. From one grows a real cranium! masking a face on the recipient...

Below in the tumult small tuning fork of the customer, sprouting a scalp horseshoe...

hair a brain wool... mouth a cork in itself, empties a downpour of bangs from a central follicle... emptying a book of hair, hairlines for its sentences.

--

Feeding on the full ammo of summer, cloning a fistful of surprises, that hair of concertina wire... head

head, alternative head, mouth where the rest of the face should be... full of questions but only decoratively, eyes tasseled with shadow...

--

Many are the heads all of one portrait... three-quarter views to profiles and accessories: the extension of the internal into the background,

bound tight by the tethers of contradiction... counting down to the interim... the dark colonial hair escaping, iron bristle rasping a flint chin...

--

Head tangled in its spine. Head with stitches for railroad tracks...

Stammering Blazers/Thomas Fink and Maya D. Mason

ache through a lunatic’s

loss. Most of the stupor   

implicates an insect hero.

Dare to daze:

sipping the gym ambiance

out of a syphilis glass.

He keeps ‘em in cotton—

goddamned humanitarian.

two creamy stars/Daniel J. Flore III

I saw a girl in her twenties
peeling at flower petals
and all I could do was stare
at how lovely they fell
from her pretty white hands
(which were two creamy stars)
girls like that have a way of hanging around you
when all else is silent
she walks up to you from behind
puts those hands over your eyes
and says "it's me silly"
and even though she's a stranger
you're ready to talk for hours

After Apples, Listening/Tom Sheehan

They have all gone now,

the fire engine-red Macintosh,

under batter with cinnamon,

gone to day school

on yellow buses

with brown-baggers,

or bruised to a freckled

taupe and plowed under

for ransom and ritual.

Some have had the life

crushed out of them

for Thanksgiving cup.

Standing on the stiff lawn

downwind of winter,

I drop the first cold

moon of November

into a fractured wheel

of apple limbs

and hear the bark

beg away.

A pine ridge,

thicker than a catcher’s mitt,

grabs half the wind

riding off Monadnock

and squeezes out

wrenching cries that hang,

like wounded pendants,

on necks

of far, thin stars.

Deep in the Earth,

in a thermal tube

of its own making,

an earthworm grows

toward a rainbow trout

sleeping under ice

and waiting to be heard,

or the last of an apple’s pips

still this side of the grass.

Henry James v. American Motors Corporation/Glenn R Frantz

at a pedestrian crossing,

pedestrians are aliens

the ghost chapter of a sidewalk novel

with plastic margins

an island in popularity

the Magic Ambassador was republished

as a vehicle's hairstyle

with an overdose of genre clothing

in the Romantic era's taillights

an enormous best-selling look

Aha! Pronoun trouble.

authors without hooks,

assorted protective flavors

named the gum novella

a strawberry Dickens

Micawber pouring inventions from his beak

in the workings of avant-garde appliances

2 Poems/A. J. Huffman

I Am Blood

of blood in Olympic

swimming pool.  Diluted,
I am dissolving, drifting
into nothing.  Still, attracting
feral beasts.  Sharks can smell
me a mile away.  I can feel
them circling, but remain
helpless, waiting for anonymous
teeth.

Midnight Monorail

Metallic mole, burrowing beneath bustling

streets.  High-speed hydraulics
clicking, shifting, zooming through neon-
bright tubes.  Passengers milling like fleas.
You scratch, dropping them
at designated destinations.  Intervals and
intersections of pseudo-humanity, you do not
linger in their light for long.