Paula Cisewski

CHANCE OPERATIONS

What about the luxury

of generosity

of certain music

of lightning sprawl

and of making work?

What about how a day is always

never what we expected,

exactly, it to be,         

and so each arrives,

solely in its own

way, predictably.

In the disintegrating radiance,

the newlyweds couldn’t choose what

to do next. In every direction,

toward or away from every rally,

lives someone else to love and

someone else to loathe.

They just climbed into

their car and drove.

Paula Cisewski's second book, Ghost Fargo, was selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize and released in 2010. She is also the author of Upon Arrival (Black Ocean) and three chapbooks: How Birds Work, Or Else What Asked the Flame w/Mathias Svalina, and Two Museums. Poems of hers have most recently appeared in failbetter; Poetry City, USA; REVOLUTIONesque; and BOMBlog. She lives in Minneapolis.

Sandra Simonds

No Sonnet

No Civil War Sonnet. No sex reassignment surgery sonnet.

No Black sonnet. No climate change sonnet.

No.

No crossed out Unitarian Universalist sonnet.

No African American sonnet. No girly sonnet.

No boyish lip gloss sonnet.

No crime spree sonnet. No egret sonnet.

No machete sonnet. No.

No adorable sonnet. No iron-on patch sonnet.

No Crimean War memorabilia sonnet.

No Greek laurels sonnet.

No.

No consignment store sonnet.

No global diamond store sonnet.

---

Into the House of Florida

You are my ounce, my octagon, my omen, ornate

      as palm leaf shadow curing the chlorinated waters

of the nuclear family’s backyard swimming pool. 

They own the world, do they not?  You are my zero sum game,

      my tribe, sailboat catching its cloth lip on the torn horizon. 

You are my minus sign, my time line, mathematic as water stored

      in a cube of antimatter. You open the cube

and poof—the genie, wearing a powdered wig, is out.

       You weigh organism. You weigh organ. You oscillate.

You climb into an oasis and come out as-is. As is always.

       You dream of Nazi-werewolves. I don’t listen. You drive to Orlando.

      To Tampa.        It is night. The bats’ sonar systems

            pulsate below our ozone, our little homeostatic zones

               like blood or home.

Sandra Simonds is the author of three books of poetry: Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Press, 2012), and a book of sonnets tentatively called House of Ions (Bloof Books, forthcoming, 2014). She is assistant professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. You can visit her at Sandrasimonds.com.

Aaron Belz

Naming Flowers

Naming flowers might be a poet’s trick,

but the rose bushes across the street,

green now in the shade of a green ash

and surrounded by overgrown crossvine,

the rose bushes hanging partly out

over the gravelly roadside, flowerless,

don’t remind me of us, or you, or how

you once empowered me with your anger,

nor do they remind me of myself, now,

depleted in your absence, because

aside from the occasional full breeze

that ruffles them, and though their leaves

are spiderwebbed, beetle-eaten, they

seem at peace with who they are.

No, we were more like flame azaleas

growing wild in a highway ditch,

like gentian, blood root, foam flower,

we were solomon’s seal, blazing star

mown down by jumpsuited inmates,

stalks and bright petals scattered among

rain-mucky fescue, fallen among clumps

of sweetgrass that grow in marshier

places, and that is not to say our love

was ephemeral but that it was maybe too

bright and mistaken for weeds, viable only

among hippies and children who pick

and assemble them into bouquets,

place them on domestic coffee tables

as if they had value other than the value

that is immediately apparent, maybe

some brightness for a day, a poet’s trick.

Aaron Belz is a poet and essayist who has published across a wide range of venues, from Wired to Christian History to Boston Review. He currently serves as a contributing editor for Capital Commentary, the weekly current-affairs publication of the Center for Public Justice in Washington, D.C., and writes regularly for The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Books & Culture, and other periodicals. He has published two books of poetry, TheBird Hoverer (2007) and Lovely,Raspberry (2010); a third, Glitter Bomb, is forthcoming from Persea Books.

Matt Rasmussen

AND GOD SAID,

turn the sky into water.

All the animals gathered

and decided if the sky

were water they would

be drowned. So they cried  

until the oceans formed.

You have not turned

the sky into water,

said God. But we

have made a sky of water

in which fish swim

as birds fly. It is only

a matter of perspective,

said one of the animals.

God, who was trapped

in the sky, needed a way out.

When he looked down

on the ocean he could only see

his wide blue reflection.

This irritated him.

The mountains

which once caressed

now ground against him.

And God said,

Tear down the mountains

and build me some fields.

The animals gathered

and having cried enough

would never again.

God knew he had

asked too much.

He threw himself

into the sun and burnt

into white ash. It fell

from the sky and covered

the mountains. The animal

who named everything

called it snow.

Matt Rasmussen’s poetry has been published in Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, H_NGM_N, New York Quarterly, Paper Darts, and at Poets.org. He’s received awards, grants, and residencies from The Bush Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arst, The Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN, and The Corporation of Yaddo. He is a 2012 McKnight Artist Fellow, a former Peace Corps Volunteer, and teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College. His first book, Black Aperture, won the 2012 Walt Whitman Award and will be published in 2013 by LSU Press. He’s a founding editor of Birds, LLC, a small, independent poetry press.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman

NOW THAT I CAN DANCE

Instead of watching

a woman repeatedly

dropping her glasses

on the floor of the subway

and two people

sitting near her

reaching to help

when she drops her glasses

and each time

they bump heads

and say sorry

and laugh about it.

Instead of Major Dad

why not

just watch

these commercials.

Your love

was going to take us higher

into space

and get us

into “Spanish”

and get rowdy

after the fact

when it was silent

after the rest of

the vitamins were chewed.

Our mechanism

for removing

our drawers

is the only thing going

so far as          

tomorrow is concerned

with baited breath

someone

has to know

where they think they

can rent a van

and cop a feel.

Your dream

is necessarily

someone else’s idea

of good fun               

and

moreover

useful

in several phrases

of the jaw

and some of

the time before

we get to the station

during which

much is revealed

about a troubadour

who’d been standing

in the background

the whole time

pulling the woman’s glasses

with a string.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is the author of two books of poems, 19 Names For Our Band Fence, 2008) and James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011). His art and writing projects, spanning photography, video, performance and poetry, have been exhibited and performed at MoMA/PS1, Mt. Tremper Arts and Southern Exposure, among others. He was recently a Workspace Artist-in-Residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York. Educated at Bard College and Brown University, he lives and works in Los Angeles where he is an MFA candidate in studio art at the University of Southern California.