magdalena spinola, always and forever

like dogs in
the kingdom of rain , like the
disappeared or the dying,

we are lost here
 

we are weeping on the

bloodstained steps of the
catholic church

 

we are walking down

rust-streaked valleys of

corrugated steel, and do you believe

in the burial grounds that exist

beneath these abandoned parking lots?
 

have your children

begun to hate you as much as

you hated your own father?
 

picture a dead letter office

filled with their prayers
 

picture your heroes grown

old and irrelevant

 

accept christ all you want but

don’t think that fucker

will ever have time for you

 

it isn’t who you kill but

what you believe

 

it’s never what your reasons are

but how good you look on

the cover of a magazine
 

gotta smile up into the dying sun

 

gotta let all that pain

flow straight through you

 

won’t ever feel any better than you

do at the moment of release

stereoscopic distortions

some experimentalish work, poetry for multiple voices:

LOOK HERE

Toni Grote

lost

this sound you make

like breaking glass

 

these walls you

pull tight around you

 

that turn to dust or

burst into flames and

the fact that who you are is me

 

midnight and sitting

in a room i don't recognize

 

driving in the emptiness

between two towns i don't know

 

in bed at some point and

my wife next to me crying

 

my hands finding each other

in the dim glow of the streetlights

and this idea of oceans

 

of escape or drowning

 

the money gone but the

age of salvation approaching

 

the possibility of hope

almost

worth considering

 

this

and nothing more

Pilate in the age of oblivion

something obvious then

like the number of people who've

said they hate me

 

the speed at which a man

might fall

from the 98th floor

 

or maybe that you knew him

 

maybe that you slept with his wife

in a house

neither one of you called home

 

there are worse things

of course

but pain is pain

 

nothing grows in its shadow

and no one needs to breathe

 

no one tries to speak

 

it's enough to drive

the nails through the flesh

without hesitation

Toyen

Bridget Bate Tichenor

remedios varo

THE ANGEL URIEL

the other enemy

or something as mindless as

allegiance to a flag in

a world bloated on genocide and starvation

something as fundamentally
fucking imbecilic as the idea of leaders,
elected or otherwise


always some asshole’s foot
coming down to grind your face into
the shit and the filth

untitled

 

ROBERT F ALLEN #2

ROBERT F ALLEN

Mockingbird Prayer

My father is lost in the desert. Is lost in the shadow of Christ. Is lying in a pool of his own piss on the men’s room floor in the bar at the bottom of the hill, and of course he blames me. Blames my sister, blames my mother, and the woman sits up next to me in bed, small breasts naked in the streetlight, says Holy shit – you’re thirty three years old! Your father is dead! Give it a rest, and I listen to the sound of traffic outside my second story window.


And I drive to my sister’s house on Easter Sunday, past the weeping of small children, through valleys of cold sunlight. A friend of mine has just been diagnosed with cancer. The lawns are just turning green, are already filling with weeds, and the hills are still grey, the fields all faded brown. I am not as hopeful for any of us as I used to be.


And I drive home later the same day, firm in my belief that there is no God. I pass the house of the starving dog, and the chain is still there, tied to the same tree in the front yard. The house itself is deserted, shrunken, windows broken and gravel driveway littered with stained mattresses and worn tires, old appliances, and I knew the kid who owned the dog. Knew his sister. Used to fuck her in an old cabin the woods way out behind the house, and then one day it burned down and that was the end of that. She got pregnant a few months later, moved into a trailer park out on Town Line Road, then just disappeared from my stories.


And this friend of mine, his name is Michael, and he lives on the other side of the country, and he says he’s not really sure how he feels about the cancer. Says he’s told his wife, but not his children. Says he’ll hear from the doctors later this week about how far along things have progressed. About treatments. About time lines. And he emails me and says Shit, at least it’ll give you something to write about, and I guess it will.


And he’s three thousand miles away on the day my father dies, and I don’t even know him at this point. I have no children and a job I don’t want. I have an apartment near the river, and the woman I’ve been seeing says we have to stop. Says she loves her husband, and then four years later she says it again. Sits up in bed, tells me she should go, and her breasts are small and pale in the afternoon sunlight. I pull her back down next to me, kiss her nipples, run my hand up between her legs, and she moans. Says Slower. Says nothing at all, and what it sounds like is the truth.

the bleeding horse, confronted

wanted to give you the beauty
of tower lights against a midnight sky,
and i wanted to give you
silence

wanted to explain why i’d hurt you,
but i had no words

just sat there fifteen years too late
with empty hands and
the darkness spread out around me

LOVE OF LIFE

WHITE LIGHT

gethsemane

shaping the future with broken hands

quiet again in the
room of empty chairs
except for maybe
the sound of dust

maybe the absence of
your boyfriend
or the memory of his fists

the way that
drawing blood can be
called love

the names of
your children

their small
perfect mouths filled
with broken glass