The Wake

It takes the theme
that point in space where all thoughts suspend
their oscillating temper.
And the realization just ruptures the crease
like biting sunlight
through pulsating destruction.
Like that pressure when the red and yellow
meet, then perish in the white.
When breath is noticed
the rippling crinkle hits
the walls.
Seeing the bearded man coming down
the assembly line…
Do I exist for it?
Or does it exist for me?
They speak of:
“Follow the forgotten leaves,
Forget about downtrodden trees.”Ambiguous space,Define something
before me now.So this is it?
The preconceptions dip below the surface
and we just forget
what it was,
the streaming heaviness of hue.
So this is what I slip into?
Tumultuous desperation
and the glass doesn’t reflect as it used to.
Check off the quintessential
then, relax in graying …

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Obsidian:
A marble sheen covers the stone –
Menacing, the towers stand harrowing down
to the bystanders. The tips grapple the shafts of sun
pouring between the caverns of clouds,
feeding obsidian from the turn of the first degree
to the final beats of overcast reflections.A form lost in forms. A paper crane,
its wings fixed to the point opposite –
a steady wind washes upon the
throbbing blades of green.
A paper crane stands true to the typing
among the folds.On street corners, children walk,
their eyes fixated on the laces which
tie each together.
A stone, a crack,
soft earth frosted over …

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The distance began with a tone;
a decision to set my steps forward
with reason—I began in a crescent of concrete and stone,
whose center bears the lines
under a tired wooden pole.
They skated from rooftop to rooftop
to the circuits of the stores lining the streets.I took the alley with scattered gravel
and the signs of a beginner’s tags
over business stone
covered black and re-tagged again—
The scars of the garbage truck’s
teeth kick into my sandals,
scrape my feet.The burden of the bridge
as I crossed over the tracks of commerce,
whose engines snarled slowly as they pass—
I could feel the waves of their distance bounce
from the steel, to the wood,
to the roots of my toes,
wrangling my hips as they walk.And to my left, I saw eyes …

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In the Porcupine Mountains
in the upper peninsula of Michigan
the autumn air is already seeping
into the leaves.
I see Hoffmaster,
the pioneer of this place, pressing his palm
against the cool rock at my feet.
He slowly washes his eyes
with the sunlight coming off
Lake of the Clouds.
The trees shudder in the wind and
I see him
drift over the cliff
crumbling into the jagged bluffs below.

I bear your likeness, it’s been said
Lorelei swimming the liquor of my eyes
The press of your cheek against the blue mirror sheen
Shivers
You’re dying to glean a glance
At us. At what the mirror’s reflecting.Though I’ve tried to dissect
To split the coat of scales
Splay the sleek spine
Beneath a rusty constellation of pins
Not even that sepchural skeleton can say
Where mother ends and daughter beginsMy fingers in a stiff, merciless display
How they scratch and pluck
How they wring and wrench your silk slick limbs
Tearing you to tangles
Your broken angles a pile in the corner
Haunt my reflection no moreIn the morn lonely
The mirror reflects
Eyes vacant
Eyes full of holes
There aren’t enough fingers
To plug those holes
To keep those eyes afloatI sigh and …

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In an era of question marks surrounding the United States’ involvement in international affairs, it is refreshing to acquire a viewpoint such as that from Juliana Spahr. Her latest work, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs offers to her readers an opportunity to reflect on the flow of the current tumultuous global narrative through her viewpoint, as a citizen, starting with the attacks of 9/11 through the onset of the Iraq war. A collection of two poems, “Poem Written after September 11, 2001” and “Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003” Spahr offers her readers a chance to reflect on the silencing of the protests against the war in a world interconnected by an age of information, whether via internet, television, radio or newspaper. This failure on such a …

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Does anyone else feel as helpless as I do? Are there any other lost souls out there lighting matches into the wind and wondering what the fuck we are doing here? Does anyone else feel as if happy hour is actually the least happy hour of the day? Or am I the only one left?Sometimes, late at night I open all the windows in my room and let the ice and air wash over me, to create a balance between the outer and inner, some lukewarm equilibrium of feelings.I have dreams these days where awful things happen and I am framed for them, sneered at like Mussolini, and then thrown in some dank and dingy cell in some subterranean dungeon of my own choosing. They are my dreams, so what does that say about me? …

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who: Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus, two award winning poets.
what: Reading
when: 09/22 at 7:30 p.m
where: Opposable Thumbs Bookswho: Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine
what: Reading
when: 09/27 at 7:30 p.m
where: Frederick R. Weisman Art Museumwho: The Wake
what: Open mic reading
when: 09/29 at 7:00 p.m
where: Manhattan Loftwho: David Treuer, from the University of Minnesota
what: Reading from his new novel
when: 09/29 at 7:30 p.m
where: The Fitzgerald Theaterwho: Naomi Shibab Nye
what: Reading
when: 09/30
where: The Loftwho: Thomas Glave
what: Reading
when:10/27
where: The Loftwho: Isabel Allende
what: Reading from Ines of My Soul
when: 11/17
where: The Fitzgerald Theater

Here I am, lukewarm coffee sprinkled with a meager ration of cigarettes in the luminous hour before the sun burns the air and gives rise to that wholly industrial mood of the day. The ka-chunk and the whirring of engines as they pass by on the road.Dazed glances, frantic-paced people waiting for Arby’s or Quiznos, some semi-coherent homeless man stumbles by from one place to another, heat shimmers off the sidewalk, people wait for the bus in front of Burger King, and garbage flutters down the street.There’s no romance to daily life in the city: it’s too selfconscious, too purposeful.Right now, none of that exists. It’s quiet here, and the coffee still has that hint of warmth that makes it drinkable. Cold coffee is like death, it vaguely resembles what it was, but there’s nothing …

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“Hey man, can you help me out? I’ve just got—Well, I’m a buck short; need to catch the bus. The 94, it’s two fifty man, can’t you help me out?”His voice a murmur rising above the traffic, it became a very loud demand. I didn’t answer him, only looked up along his patchwork beard. He had calm imposing eyes.“Shit. I’m tired. I want to go home. I only need a few dollars. I have no place to go. Can’t you help me, you got money, I know it?” he paused.The Midway held us together – its gutters, exhaust, parking lots. The vicissitudes of cars and lights and neon schedules gripping on levers like the controls to a ship at night in the middle of a sea. “You got a home. Where are you going? I …

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Red rock, huge red clay soap stones cleave apart at the encircling asphalt’s end: a place in the earth from which something has sprouted, the way old cedars and bristlecone pines push out through their scattered exterior – dark red and dark brown. The white-grey building that ruptures the unadulterated blue is a cross, a cross like a cedar or bristlecone pine. A cross like old world Catholicism and the Virgin of Guadalupe, a cross like a cactus, like a juniper, a plant. Canned music comes from the pews. Tinny hymnals from cheap speakers from beneath the seats give a background noise, ‘worship, worship to the pulpit.’ A noise for the silence like in Fritz Lang films. The pantomime becomes comic or tragic to the twist of the soundtrack. Reverential awe bleats out of a …

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When Keats states this epic line in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” he is demonstrating the power of literature; something that is taken for granted in our society. In this quote, Keats is announcing the ability of the image-poem-lie to speak a truth more powerful than the truth itself. The writer of today looks upon poetry as a way to “vent”, as if its greatest power lies in the personal. All the memoirs and self indulgent poetry take up the majority of our literature. Why? Is it because people are now incapable of thinking about what they are reading or is it because writers are incapable of writing universal truths? Writers are lazy. They (and by they I mean we) don’t take the time anymore to learn the art. No one writes in form anymore; …

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I Started To Write Poetry Again
By Molly WickOne bored night in a hot sticky flat
On a small, strange island
Between reality and a dream
Between Africa and a immense expanse of nothing but wind and water
Underneath a cosmic ceiling of pinhole stars and shooting boots
I started to write poetry again
Because here there is nothing else but
Beach and sun and salty air and salty water
And also the people with their coffee skin and ebony hair
Husky bon soir’s on the street and crow’s-feet eyes with a twinkle
Women in stunning colors of gold and red and turquoise dressed for the market
One carrying her basket and gathering folds of wispy fabric at her belly
As she flip-flops down the broken concrete streets
Not …

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For the Copilot
by Travis HetmanI wish I had a passenger seat on my bicycle
No handle bars for you but a view
Just the same to be shared like an icicle
On the ground with the rest of the dewGoggles and pilot caps to wear on head
No bandanas but we’d have style
Just the same to be shared like bread
On jam, in the spring, meanwhileWe will race the wind
But before it can beginWith welding and hammer, pails and nails
In a dirty garage filled with a mess
I’ll build you the box car hoping it sails
For happiness and nothing less

Crimson
By Benjamin FaltesekCarelessly caring, mindlessly sharing,
I went through meetings never meant to meet
While, through capillators thoughtless bearing,
Our minds bead on anti-absorbent sheets.How now brown cow? too true blue moo she said
To you and I as we lay fitful dying.
His throat and wrists ran crimson as he bled,
Departed, and never thought of crying.Trying to put conjecture into verse
Goes easier with a little liquor,
But the headache next morning makes it worse
And shows better goes not always quicker.Quicker to go by gas, they told him blithely,
Shut their doors and argued when to snicker
Just enough and when one’s soul grows lively.
At last I turned away and let them bicker.