Morse 1923/Daniel Y. Harris

His unsub name is Acute Coryza or Peter Precog.

Pick the pepper, the pickled pepper of hey diddle

diddle I feel you looking away from your research.

No one dies the voice of the age: no one nor when

scrappers roamed to pick up our rusted hvac trail. 

The imitators invent. My longueur to invent, say

in a while, dons a spodik. Eddy can’t stop staring

at the shrug. His work is neither closed by snips

nor casket lengths. Why did vexes come so easy?

The pharmatog cure is gritty with the grey scraps

of metal. Is Eddy’s blue guitar tuned 1923 yellow?

Is it tuned to West Rogers Park? He imps Y-ris

as the shtetl light in three golems of wiring skin.

new poem 4.12/Peter Ganick

please do not complicate what is

simpler than dropping a coin onto a charm.

it’s already there—

that which in affect becomes additive.

cold cutlery arranged in rows & columns—

& why?

[...motor skills of a moron collect atrophization

when rolling to barter with slaves...]

‘can you hear me knocking?’ sings an old pop song.

we are already waiting.

entertain any notion voluntarily—

as the crosswise dauphin reflects

while engaging chicken-proof-wired contractors

to phrase a contemporary additive

on what’s international & paisley.

not impressed—

are words collecting ashes in the corridor.

we are too early to lift baggage.

no one washes midstream anymore,

it being too dangerously appetizing.

this has been called ‘a stray mind’—

get used to it!.

Crossing the Border Divide/Michael Lee Johnson

Crossing that Canadian line on a visitor pass,

that stretch across the border divide,

that makes a torn war wound, torn man free.

It made my feet new away from red cinder land on fresh grass.

Back home the sirens of war keep sounding off,

like common masturbation from one decade to another.

All us wearing new/old bloodstains,

poetry images of erections coming up, WW2, a real war.

My dirty hands, on your hands, our memories shared red, white and blue justified, hell.

Who does not have memories, bad cinder charcoal smoke screen in the dark flame?

September comes early in Canada-October in the USA.

Leaves fall early swirling in touchdowns both sides of the border.

September north, but at least the bullets cease.

Cast a poem South, you likely die in Vietnam or come back wounded.

Cast a poem North, you likely suffers mental illness but come back on pills.

Here comes again, thunder, in the rain, stroke by lightening,

war bore crossing a border divide.

baptized in sweet tea marinated in piss/billy cancel

     baptized in sweet tea marinated in piss    
bad teeth no reason     to laugh less     a gap
in the score for     specific waste     though
a candle consumes as     much air as
a man     ain’t no average candle     get bits of
lemon for the progress i make     with
these capers     rather
than furiously biting     man & horse alike         mosquito hawk
     caught up in the sickly stuff fancies     himself upon a rose
tinged cloud     reeling through space & though     i am liable
to similar episodes this     disregard overture starts
out with a scheme of progression goes     on
to its logical end         the leech moves by
     affixing its rear sucker to
a surface stretching
forward then affixing its
front sucker & dragging
up its rear to begin the
process again don’t that
knock ya ?

From LETTERS/Jonathan Minton

This letter begins with a blinded god, his golden mask.

Someone is drowning in the dark. Someone is speaking as a ghost.

When the language is private, I recover an image: wet rock, a red canyon.

When spoken, you appear as the girl with her bare, white shoulders.

This letter begins as a sound from a king's mouth or globe.

You stand before the cave of its origin where a heart

of string hangs from a map on the wall.

It marks the spot where you will leave. It marks this new kingdom.

This letter begins with locusts and wild honey.

It feeds the mouth of the hermit. He is clothed

in a thousand little words like this. It is a murmur. It is a state.

But it will fade as you fade. It is not the same as pain.

This letter begins as something once held as belief

like water or the fossilized bones of a fish.

This letter begins not as a fathom but a gate that swings open or shut.

There was never a horse, its head bending low to drink.