My soul is a contract unbacked by images. A merger or a fold, part flat beaux-arts roof, part second floor
gothic home be low a
glow(er)ing cloud pregnant sleeveless
heaving. Trashed erstwhile white rectangle of light from which film grew. E ternal storm frowning into paradise’s E E E mergency Room.
Seascape
Courbet’s wave to the left of a real wave outside mid-crest
winter’s this peeling trompe l’oeil in the corner, reverse side
of framed painting i stand before blinking
snow-dumb and psyched a line that was i or firm
ament’s eccentric’r part spinning snowlike over hot sidewalk
grate i melt between the declining wave and the one that stays
Grow a Simple Soul
made from a substance un diminished by subtraction.
its less neither less nor
delinquent eerie vertical
iridescent white square of sky moves
cold over memore
on
this horizontal boulevard in New Jersey. a film strip
modulates energy. in the end, nothing but sea
deleting what sea seizes.
35 mm
i see you at the edge of a rinsed beam
of street then never again ever ever
dot in snow-fuzzed dis tance trance- inducing but THE BEAM OF LIGHT UNMODULATED FOR AN INSTANT is placeless cuts my words as they whirl breakneck into the white bright beam towards you
Emmalea Russo'smost recent book of
poetry is Confetti (Hyperidean, 2022).Her next, Magenta, is forthcoming later this year.
George
Elliott Clarke :
“Orphée Noir,” “N— Inventory” and “The Song of Solomon”
Acclaimed
for his narrative lyric suites (Whylah Falls and Execution Poems),
his lyric “colouring books” (Blue, Black, Red, and Gold),
his selected poems (Blues and Bliss), his opera libretti and plays (Beatrice
Chancy and Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path), George Elliott Clarke now presents us with his epic-in-progress, Canticles, a work that
views History as a web of imperialism, enslavement, and insurrection. A native
Africadian, Canada’s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate ranges the atlas and
ransacks the library to ink lines unflinching before Atrocity and unquiet
before Oppression.
John
M. Bennett :
“JOHNNY WAKES UP”
John M. Bennett
has published over 400 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. He
has published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of
publications and venues.He was editor
and publisher of LOST AND FOUND TIMES (1975-2005), and is Founding
Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University
Libraries.Richard Kostelanetz has
called him “the seminal American poet of my generation”.His work, publications, and papers are
collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St.
Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and
other major libraries.His PhD (UCLA
1970) is in Latin American Literature.His latest books are Select Poems, Poetry Hotel Press/Luna
Bisonte Prods, 2016; The World of Burning, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2017;
Poemas visuales, con movimientos con ruidos con combinaciones (with Osvaldo
Cibils), Deep White Sound, 2017;Olas
Cursis, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2018, Sesos Extremos, Luna Bisonte
Prods, 2018; Dropped in the Dark Box, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2019; Leg
Mist, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2019; OJIJETE, Luna Bisonte Prods, 2020,
and Having Been Named: De-Reading Popol Vuh, Luna Bisonte Prods,
2021He is co-editor, with Geoffrey D.
Smith, of two works by William S. Burroughs: Everything Lost: The Latin
American Notebook of William S. Burroughs; and William S. Burroughs'
“The Revised Boy Scout Manual”: An Electronic Revolution; both published by
The Ohio State University Press.
Jay
Heins :
“Baldwin Cemetery,” “(im)mortal” and “night”
Jay
Heinswas born and raised in the Ottawa Valley. book of hours, his first
collection poetry and photography, explores love of place, family, the body,
aging, grief, and loss. Jay holds a BFA from University of Ottawa and does art
direction/production with the OER Project. He lives in Ottawa with Tanya and
Samuel.
Emmalea
Russo :
Two poems from G (Futurepoem, 2018) and one new poem “Confetti”
Emmalea Russo
is the author of G (2018), Wave Archive (2019). Recent writing
has appeared in Artforum, American Chordata, BOMB, The
Brooklyn Rail, Granta, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review
of Books, and elsewhere. A new chapbook, Great Mineral Silence
(2020) is out from Sputnik & Fizzle. She lives at the Jersey shore.
Valerie
Witte :
Excerpt from the manuscript "hold short bravo"
Valerie
Witte
is the author of The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (Operating
System, 2019), co-written with Sarah Rosenthal; and a game of correspondence
(Black Radish, 2015). Her latest chapbooks are Listening Through the Body:
An Exercise in Sustained Coordination (above/ground press, 2021) and It’s
been a long time since I’ve dreamt of someone (Dancing Girl Press, 2018).
Her work has also appeared in VOLT, Diagram, Dusie, Alice
Blue, Interim, and elsewhere. More at valeriewitte.com
A past fastens onto metal mouths and the sky tilts as a raccoon runs across the road which my friend lovingly points out before departing for a longstanding appointment with our dealer. My hair dyed propitiously blonde. Atmospheric chemical glint under cardboard stars. We speak into machinic dream.
+
Timed metallic hiss of buses near cluster of orange trees. Lukewarm coffee and floating eye divulge partially this thin
glimmer
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For G when G is for God’s left hand Gertrude Stein Picasso Paris
Prismatic penned tears I blink into tangerine nails and sunset gate searching for the miraculous.
Hello?
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Between sun and rise, entered the droplet.
A ruptured crustacean leaps from saltwater drips brine into its remainder.
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Dora Maar’s silver processes. Scratched halo arched hallway seashell with mannequin hand.
I find a wisp of grass unclasped between Pennsylvania wind and handkerchief in France where starved moon is a head whose temple beats against the bottom of the parking lot light the moth knocks over.
There and here.
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Glitter milk tears, I fly over the sea in fragmented search for miraculous technology oblong bodies of painted air silver Dora Maar vision miniature chair.
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On the train to Bordeaux I recall my winter spent stretching and priming canvasses with thick gesso in the freezing studio as my lover worked twice as fast and better.
I sit beside a skinny stranger and move through a report on the progression of Guernica photographs taken by Dora Maar three point five sets of eyes on dirt scratched mirror negatives and silver grain reversed and eventually, says Maar, it’s like you can only breathe the poisonous air of Picasso’s studio.
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I staplegun the canvas. Eyeshadow mountain me and air inspissate chemical smell and pearl eye I roll across the floor.
Steel train shakes last night’s lozenge stuck to mirrored bedside table near the muscular slab of paint and small change on the linoleum floor.
My hands and the hands of my lover prime canvases for the art students.
Here come the metal birds. Their plastic eyes their dirt.
+
Inside the silver airplane, the man next to me speaks to the woman
next to him in order to avoid thinking about our great height. Air paint milk
glue metal tape, can’t name the country beneath us. His burning cigarette makes
a cloud lined with paint I once caked.
+
Indecipherable photo negative.
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Under Pennsylvania blue light, I’m lopsided and young as compared to the mill. I address him near the furnaces invisible debris of smelting ore settling clemently for decades as summer skunks prowl Mechanic Street.
Blast furnace and buttery runoffs. Photo of him in white shirt with silver saw slid into a crack I cannot from here see.
+
That’s not a road, it’s many silver sequins. That’s not a steel mill, it’s silver salt suspended in gelatin.
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On a bare blue mattress we found in the trash near the unclasped gate. A chemistry student paints five of his fingernails silver so when he plays guitar five moons move.
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A poet and a chemist and us. Gloss damask mattress. Neighbor invites me into his bedroom’s velvet curtain with sewn stars.
+
I’ve
lost the address book. She’s painting now. Get dressed at twilight. Mannequin with a star on her head.
+
Departure.
+
Silver tears in your eyes you say: I think there is a window.
Again you speak: framing that certain time of day.
You continue:
Emmalea Russo is the author of G
(2018), Wave Archive (2019). Recent writing has appeared in Artforum,
American Chordata, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Granta,
Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. A new
chapbook, Great Mineral Silence (2020) is out from Sputnik & Fizzle.
She lives at the Jersey shore and edits Asphalte Magazine.
