Looking for some new avenues to take in your reading selection? Check out these titles at your local library or book store.

Fiction:

• Scott Bradfield, The History of Luminous Motion
• Paul Auster, City of Glass
• Jose Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon
• Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
• Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Non-Fiction

• John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places
• Carlos Castaneda, The Teaching of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
• Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great
• Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
• Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina Christoher Hitchens, God is not Great
• James Scully, Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice

Poetry

• Jules Boykoff, Once Upon a Neoliberal Rocket Badge
• Juliana Spahr, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs
• Éireann Lorsung, Music for Landing Planes By
• Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

I’ve been smoked like a cig. I’ve been treated like a pig. I’ve been Newtoned like a fig, oh Lord. Oh, Lordy Lord, oh Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord.
Feels like I’m gonna snap like a twig.

I’ve been brought up way too high. And dragged down far too low. I guess that’s just the way things go. Oh, Lordy Lord, oh Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord.
But mere man shouldn’t try to disturb this river’s flow.

I’ve been dragged on through the mire. And tainted with false desire. I’ve been wrangled and tangled just like a wire. Oh, Lordy Lord, oh Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord.
But this war won’t stomp out these good soldiers’ fires.
No this rain it won’t Stamp out our American fire.

I sit on the roof, outside my window
on the second floor of my house
smoking hookah and watching the Bunge
plunge into the sunset.

The smoke ring sits gently with the parked
letters
of the spray can’s spark,
flutter me an antidote

“A T T A K T H E G L O B E”

Why not take the globe and push it a little
down a hill, maybe give it a kiss with a few toes
and a nimble hello with the passing stones.
Maybe we could wash it with sweet liquor
and watch as the little mountains grow sicker
and soak with the languid moats surrounding.
Is this kid kicking with him the middle
of the street or is it just his feet
with him?
It’s so easy to just give it a rinse and then
be done with it. It’s so easy to just rise and say that
the sun isn’t part of it anymore.

It’s so easy to fall from here.

The shingles frail the windows unraveled
the cringe of the bugs scatter the sound
of the Boards of Canada under my window
out of the nostalgia without the mouth
the crawl and the incandescent light bulb.

It’s an everything!
And for that many people don’t reside well within it
for that many people reside well in certain tides
of mildew, others soft linen, and others the whip of the
arid cries of locusts to the stalk
the locust to the stalk
the locust to the stalk is not a certain anything
it is an everything
that’s what makes the stalk rot.

What’s wrong with gutting the children for their mother’s milk?
What’s wrong with curdling the skin that doesn’t fit in
with the smoke stacks, or the mercury harbor, the uranium river,
what’s wrong with curdling the skin?

Arbusto thrusted in ‘77’s, scented oils in-laden
anointed little ones—
scurry critters, scurry with the weather
or the withered,
just some ordinary demon, with a skillful part
and a wispy grin.

Many kill
to profit
patient
excess
suffer.

What’s wrong with gutting the children for their mother’s milk?
What’s wrong with curdling the skin that doesn’t fit in
with strictly business, strictly existence, strictly the insistence
that we all are the,
We are the locust!
and all we’ll ever be
Arbusto, we are the energy.
Arbusto, indefinitely [.]

“War is the health of the state”
- Randolph Bourne

Remember sitting in AP Government
Remember the New York Times
Remember the cover
of the
cover of the
cover of the New York Times
splayed with ideas
on 1% doctrines
where it’s ok when one feels the slightest bit threatened

to plow homes with sweet
depleted uranium?

Unaccounted—does a child scream
when nothing is around to listen
except for the dust settling under
the once-terrace, now splayed heap
of arms and feet and vaporized concrete?

Eugene Debs went to jail
under accusation
of obstructing the World War

“The master class has
always
declared the wars;
the subject class has
always
fought the battles”

but what does that mean?
Obstructing
War
Where did it stall?
On the banks of the Somme?
Or in the recruiting office, after the truth?

What scares them most is
That NOTHING HAPPENS!
They are ready
For DISTURBANCES.
They have machine guns
And soldiers,
But this SMILING SILENCE
Is uncanny.
- Anise

I want to talk against this police state
a little bit
while the onslaught by the L.A.P.D.
on immigrant rights protestors
are still swollen
and red from the welts
of the rubber bullets flying in crowds of women
and children
and the elderly
and reporters
in an act of aggression
towards those redressing their grievances

it was not always this way.

In 1919, a General Strike Committee
set the city of Seattle on a stand-still
urging laborers to go out and protest
their grievances
for a better a wage, and a comfortable
way of life.

I want to speak of the peace that came with their strike
I want to speak of the crime rates falling
I want to speak of the peace
of Seattle, shut down.
I want to speak of the peace
while the L.A.P.D. tramples
families off of their feet.

Minn. — If you’re from the Midwest and it doesn’t matter where, say shh. Say shh. If you can drink tap water and breath the air, say shh. Say shh …Roam if you must, but come home when you’ve seen enough. Holla Minnesnowtans. That salutation took a while; please forgive me. Oh, and you probably wanna go on a month-long walk with me to D.C. With this whole war going on, it’s surely a month that will go down in history. Why not write the history – live the history. If you wanna come, meet me at Northrop Mall on June 4th. After a handshake from a few friends of mine and yours’, we’ll walk down Uni to the Capitol to meet yet more friends, and then we’ll head south to Red Wing for the evening, ya know, yada, yada yada. A Madtown stop is certainly in order, as well as a visit to that toddling town of Chicago. A stop in Lima, perhaps? Ohio, not Peru, ya friggin’ idiot. And what venture from the land where we walk on water would be complete without the breathtaking Gateway to the Piedmont: the Cumberland Gap. Pull up your bootstraps, Johnny Appleseed, we’re on an expedition. No cutting down cherry trees, though. If we get there early – before the Fourth of Ju-lye – I guess we’ll hang out across the Potomac on Alexandria or Arlington – or even Pentagon City, gasp – for a bit. Maybe sleep in Arlington National Cemetery. Or dig up George Washington’s skeleton a short jaunt south at Mount Vernon. Who knows what may, but we’ll probably shut down the Interstates heading into our fare Capital, considering how popular this idea has/will have become come this here Ju-lye, as Sinatra might have said. We will carry on, as a herd of buffalo soldiers here in the heartland of America heading to the densely packed, scary East; land of the crooked politician and fast-paced, fascist greed. Just a bunch of bitches and a big fucking Dick – several. This is sadly, not a joke. Yes. I am crazy. But it’s the Summer of 07 goddamnit and it’s time to believe in something. And it’s long past time to bring the troops home, before Vietnam II kills ANY MORE and makes those henchmen any richer.

The last time I rode a bicycle before today, I remember,
this was a summer ago, as I remember it,
a summer ago as I remember, I rode a bicycle through photographs
in the Northrop Mall, as I remember it,
riding through photographs on Northrop Mall
posing motion for brochure catalogues, as I remember it,
while I ride, as I remember the contrasts
of the overcast today to the picaresque under the Boynton Clock Tower
to the skin grafts beside the Stone Arch
and the mad dash to the Alumni Center
for fake graduation gowns
for that final cap to the ad; this photograph,
today, as I remember it,
as I remember the helicopter skim above,
as I remember it, stalled on Hennepin over
What do we want? “Peace!”
When do we want it?
“Now!” as I remember it,

the snap of the drum beat,
it was now,
that not my voice was taken, not then, not my voice, not our voice
that was taken, as I remember it
on my bicycle, as I remember the exit
from Loring Park, as I remember it,
we left Loring Park through a split curtain of trees,
as I remember it, passing a pedestrian, as I remember it,
behind my friend, as I remember that
even she, the pedestrian, picked up her camera then,
as he passed and, as I remember
just passing, the aperture snap,
as I remember it, just the miniscule snap
of her aperture, as I remember it,
just a brief
snap.

Concerning String Cheese
Sweat has made my hair coarse and wiry. The ink-stained 100% cotton t-shirt feels like a burlap sack on my exhausted body. I just returned from a day working at an industrial screen printing factory. Between stacking empty bottles inside boxes and resisting the thought that, through a horrible series of events, this could end up being my life, my entire being is tired. I need to take a shower, but I don’t have the energy. Instead I shamble over to the couch and shift my weight so that I fall into what I hope will be a comfortable position.
I consider the string cheese log, which I hope will provide the necessary energy to move to the bathroom. As it lies on my chest, I think about peeling it into its namesake shape before deciding that’s too much effort. I bite the end off. It tastes different, worse, like the filaments are actually bonded together by essence of nasty. Only pulling the fibers apart can destroy these bonds.
This teaches me a valuable lesson. Apart we shall fall, but together we will stand because we taste gross.

The Salad Conspiracy
There is no workable definition for what a salad is. No unifying ingredient or principle provides a boundary between salads and non-salads. Nothing could conceivably pass in potato salad, garden salad, jell-o salad and fruit salad. Only a lack of specific arrangement unites those salads, but not all foods considered salad share that trait. My parents are adamant that a plate of alternating tomatoes and cheese arranged in a circle counts as a salad.
Because of a lack of any criterion that needs to be met for a food item to qualify as a salad, every edible substance is a salad. Hamburgers are a bun and ground beef patty salad; cereal is a salad specially suited for the demands of breakfast. When asked “soup or salad?” the question really is “salad or salad with an excessive amount of dressing?”

Want Salt With That Orange?
It is halftime at a youth soccer match. Winonan tradition dictates that players are furnished with oranges at halftime. I devour them. The orange quarter is positioned in my mouth so that I cleave the flesh from peel in one bite then smile revealing the rind covering my teeth, a citrus mouth guard.
The orange juice coats my hand. Children like me are the reason for the invention of the trough bib. Being their normal state, the sticky condition of my hands doesn’t faze me.
The time to rally ourselves to victory with a hands-in-the-center cheer arrives. One of my teammates tells me “Don’t touch me your hands are icky!”
I will never eat halftime oranges again.

Disappearing a Culture – With Only a Sppon
Nostalgic for the middle school days when I would read all the writing on juice boxes for the amusement of my easily amused tablemates, I turn the tapered skunk-trapping tube around. It is vanilla yogurt. I cannot stand the fruit flavored yogurts because of the wads of frozen matter suspended in them. Yoplait claims that they are fruit—lies.
Near the bottom I find a proclamation that the yogurt is a living and active culture. Thinking about the organism in my mouth I chew it unnecessarily. As my teeth crush it, I think of the yogurt begging for mercy. Request denied, on the grounds of deliciousness.
The amorphous nature of yogurt helps it survive my jaws. But it won’t survive the vat of acid that is my stomach.

Take my hand and
Walk under the archways
That lead to the shadiest part
Of the east-cityscape.
Where the dryness
Is not so bad as before
When you met up with me
Near your broken door.
Since you have slept
On the floor in the sand
That covers us all, I thought
I would help you stand.
So, now once more
I introduce you here
Where the sun does not
Sink in or sit so near.

As I brush past
This elegant hall
I ask that you take it in
And absorb it all.
There are a few
People waiting for you
To see what is coming
And to see if its true.
But, I digress, take
Your time, linger now
Before the time must come
When acrid sun bows.
Sit here before the
Fountain-well where
Some have seen wonders
And others just stare.

Withdraw before a
Passing guard, holding
Watch and feigning charge
Over a city molding.
Calmly hold your
Vagrant guise before
The passing guard sees
Something more.
Sunlight bounces
Off a carried metal
I see you blinded, cry
“where is this petal?”

And there before
Your awestruck eyes
Is the last link to life
We here prize.
Off the subtle
Slanted bough
Lies the last leaf
Of a broken vow.
So now you
See the city heart
And now, I think,
You should start.
Moving hardly
To make no show
Hold vigils secret to let
No one know.

Pause

Past the moment
When you called God
I swear I heard trumpets
As a ‘signal nod.’
Crippled though
You were when last
The temples fell and burned
It all has passed.
No arm of man
No heart of sin
Could break that love
That soul within.

And waited all
For life and return
From viewing anew;
Time, it turns.