About Current Issue: New writing from
Stephen Ellis' Opulence; poems by kari edwards; poems by Jim
McCrary; poems by Steve Tills; poems by Brent Bechtel; poems by Catherine
Daly; poems by Chris Murray; poems by Layne Russell. Upcoming Spring Issue: Poetry, Reviews, Essays, Writing for UPCOMING
LAWRENCE Issue
being accepted now.
Stephen Ellis
from Opulence
Amherst, Massachusetts
HYMN
You can think in the 90s about listening
in the 80s to the Stones
in the 70s singing songs from the 60s in response to life
in
the 50s until your limbs go numb, and they will, as common
sentience runs the gamut, snow up to the windowsill one minute,
grass grown over your head the next to accompany the silent
increments of mortality separating one by one, fiber from
fiber, drowning in an absence gone too slow to notice but
for
an increasuing tightness in the torso, the selfsame insult
to the brain
splintering into the flower of the first light remembered
now
forever casting shards of shadow inwardly like little arrows
drawn out on the map of one's being to show a way neither
forward nor back, right nor left, up nor down but more to
a kind of
pollen of mourning spilled from within, bright and all too
brief,
that follows no consciously set pattern, adheres to no belief
Chester, Vermont
THE SCULPTED AIR OF SELF POSSESSION
for
Carol Thompson
Whose name's attached to the face of
common feeling, specifically said, like a study, Carol, dim. Caroline, fem. of Charles, freeman,
or man of the common people,
who is the Hay Wain Ursa Majoris, wagon driven by
the "residue" or dwarf left
of feeling deeply, the whole enterprise kept in motion entropically
as a whirlpool
no one can get to the bottom of, but for performing the three
perfecting steps of
sequential understanding toward which no single instance or
divine pair can lead
but for beginning at the beginning, where one is,
in this life, however disproportionate
these first blurts be, or how (mis)understood, the Freudian
anal, oral, genital stages
nesting in the daily guts, heart and head
of belief, thought and action that
take place
analogically as the completing comprehension of the triadic
underworld, earth and heaven in their turn, so that only the leap from
hesitation into feeling made clear as
the actuality of the wagon itself, once you're in
it, will do to complete the girdling of
life's substance by expanding the heart's core that rises
to the beautiful crown of brains
that closes the circuit, putting you in your own path as yourself,
coming the other way
Blue Creek, Ohio
THE BLUE VEINED MURALS OF EMBODIED LEVITY
Having fire, man
was able to live wherever he found subsistence, appropriating
new environments to his use, becoming a member of new
ecosystems, and beginning to alter them.
- Carl Sauer, Man's Dominance by Use of Fire
Space - the basis of
everything enduring - time - the basis of everything changeable.
Space is the schema - time the concept - the action (genesis)
of this schema. For every moment my thinking must add
a moment before and after.
- Novalis, Philosophical Writings
Criticism must attack
the form, never the content of your ideas, of your language.
Settle it among yourselves.
- Lautreamont, Poesies
Church house, Gin house
Schoolhouse, Outhouse
On Highway number 19
People keep the city clean
- Tina Turner, Nut Bush City Limits
As long as the world has content and
humans have bodies, I've got money
to burn, which is to say I have a self writhing
between dream and somatic
life, torn apart in the pull between the desire and reason
expressed in the
ancillary proportion of the relationship of Saturn to Jupiter
turned constantly
inside out, each borne of the other in ways mutable enough
that there's never
a Switzerland safe-haven Side of the Fuck, but only a humidity
coming over
the left shoulder and up the neck, discharged in a downward
strike that
momently reveals a pointillist genital wet, the dewdrops at
one's eye,
flood of content that constitutes the literal health
that is a very real ethoi
resulting of pure theology, a human response to the fact that
we are all
animated by each our imagination of the organic,
the blackness of being inside the self, who knows therein the literal colors
of the samadhi end of
receiving the lightning of being instructed by the simple
brightnesse of the
Atmospheric Character of one's Electrical Pinball sense of
Efficacious Truth
Chauncey, Ohio
HELEN AIN'T COMING HOME
Beginning with a wound gone far past
the point of no return are voices
out of Mars broadcast through the present to the end of establishing
just
such theoretical colonies rising from the elemental heat of
low and sexual
things to Bronze Age dark Parvati Ava Gardner's ethical reciprocity
settled
into a widening empire of dictatorial hedonism, against which
image
there's only a pair of blue and white striped pyjamas high
in the treetops
masquerading as a Vietcong sniper in 1971, speaking in turn
through
the mouthpiece of a ravaged daughter of Metacom out of indian
maiden
Yassir Arafat Algonquin girlhood bringing forth the hematoma
to the
head from a 90 mph Bobby Parent beanball thrown in 1963 that
put blood
completely around the edge of every treeleaf in the county,
to the two eyes
looking down the past through a stereoscopic viewfinder to
discover how
the body that is love and its image made of armor are interlocked
to define
the mark at the forebrain seen with forever yet never completely
seen