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 thoughts.
Repetition(repetition) makes fact
therefore; the pragmatic axiom.

Watch your stride as you cross
that high bridge with spires like a crown.

Forget me as consistency turns to specks

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 with oil slicks.
To the right, the unseen fly grasps
the entrails of a decaying finch.
Unnoticed. Unwanted.

In shop windows sit sets of eyelids,
unblinking, unwavering, their glare
ripping halos and pitchforks into able-minded forms.

In great halls, the shadow falls down on the crowd;
The basking in antiphon –
only broken alleys with shards of glass
that mirror so many broken synapses.
Stand true to the forms that block
the sunlight.

Obsidian:
The tool that began
an edge that cut the carcass of knowledge.

For billions of years, the shadow has walked
with the meticulous clock-work of the
ancient stars, graced the sides of monuments
of man and towered over the unseen.

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 hang from above,
as the sounds of the afternoon faded to a buzz.
Dusk neared, and behind one tree
beyond the window of the old music building
a light appeared
and shimmered
and dimmed
while fingers dragged along the panes of glass.

To the west, a walking bridge
extending out
from the old Mineral Resources building,
with tiny gifts of history
never seen.
Uncovered by machine,
the tombs of tools lie open
in bunches underneath the back of the building
for eyes once attracted to the rusted,
ragged den of a man in his 50’s,
who slept under the canopy
of the old loading dock
for semi-trucks,
because he had everywhere else to go.

Then on to Riverview Apartments,
where tennis courts gleam
next door to the highway
where one may witness the traffic,
the city,
the land used for old steel and garbage,
and a river too polluted,
so you can only ‘view’.

I felt my way down to the river,
following the path along the banks of stone,
keeping my distance from the geese
whose protective eyes caught mine,
resisting my approach to their home of a coast.

And I found, in the distance,
a barge bound for the locks to the north—
My shoulder’s a bridge
to the ship
carrying its load.
I wanted to swim to its rusted personality,
as it drew ripples from the shore,
to its sores,
and back to the shore.

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 begins

My 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 more

In 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 afloat

I sigh and let fall the secret sore
For watery myths, their likeness lost

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 global scale to mobilize against such an evil influence is explored through saturating details of conflict from various points across the globe.

Spahr begins by first setting a commonality between all people of the world; the movement of cells, the division of cells, to the very air we breathe. By doing so, she links every human being to a very important equation: the human condition, and our effects on a global scale. This interconnectivity, from the minutest of cells that form our structure to the barrage of information from our media resources, presents the complexity of the issue and our desire to solve it. This barrage of information arrives in various forms, from the NASA shuttle launches, to the melting of glaciers world-wide, to the existence of pop-culture icons like Fatboy Slim, Ben and J-Lo, to Renée Zellweger and Richard Gere in Chicago, to the existence of cell phones and the existence of tunnel vision – we as a people are caught up in too much to achieve a focused goal.

By writing from an intimate perspective, she juxtaposes the relationship we have between the comfort of our beds to the way we ignore a similar love we share on a global scale, “Beloveds, we do not know how to live our lives with any agency outside of our bed”. She emphasizes this notion with images of our silence to the news of North Korea and their nuclear weapons program, to the mobilization of troops to boarders around the world, to the deployment of warships and Patriot antimissile batteries. She then brings the readers back to bed, a place where comfort can be found – and silence, “we do not speak of it and instead press up against one anothers / reveling in the pleasure of being back together.”

By naming the atrocities that continue globally, Spahr offers comparisons of the viewpoints of beauty, from the eyes of the most sinister, to hers, “On this dark earth, some say the thing most lovely is the thirty / thousand assault troops from Britain today joining the sixty-two / thousand from the US mobilized in the past ten days and a further / sixty thousand from the US on their way.”

“But I say it’s whatever you love best. / I say it is the persons you love.”

Juliana Spahr lyrically pleads to her readers to focus, speak out and assert the ethics which we, the people, demand: to coexist in peace, not use bloodshed as peace. Juliana says it best, “We get up in the morning and the words, ‘Patriot missile systems,’ / ‘the Avengers,’ and ‘the US infantry weapons’ tumble out of our / mouths before breakfast.” It is time for change.

Juliana Spahr will be reading at the Weisman Art Museum with Claudia Rankine on September 27 at 7:30 pm. Be prepared, read the book, reclaim your voice.

Further Reading:
Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You
Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity Response, winner of the National Poetry Series Award.

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? When I wake up from these little cognitive adventures I dress and then ever so often muster up the courage to go to class. I used to think that I was a unique and soulful character, that my melancholy was one of a kind. But that is what everyone wants to think. We all believe our lives to either be some brooding tragedy or the greatest epic of all time, or both. I walk from one lecture to the next shuffling between hordes of unhappy or ignorantly blissful students and I wonder whether or not they remember how to whistle, or if they know the feeling of heavy fishing net sliding between their fingers. The tiny perfections of the world are what peak my curiosity. Without them I would be a mollusk just waiting to be boiled down and gutted. But we can still pretend, we can still bask in the idea that our lives are big and epic and wonderful however dishonest it may be. Perhaps this is the key.

Flash Number 1: In which things are brought to the table and first shimmering introductions are made.

She had me on the floor in St. Petersburg on Thursday evening. Jesus-heaven I was awful that night. The musky smell of whiskey and boredom hanging off me like stale deodorant. The feeling of buttermilk between my fingers on everything I touched. Gracie is fastened around me, her legs wrapped into mine like some flesh pretzel one half baked the other still soft. Her breast has fallen out of the top of her nightgown or maybe we had left it that way. Who’s to say? My cigarettes lay with the rest of my life scattered about on top of that awful hotel carpetingcheckered pattern smelling of baking soda and adultery. They neutralize each other nowadays. Who would have known? Perhaps Arm and Hammer will sit in my back pockets now, fairy dust of the 21st century.

I tried to remember how Gracie had ended up in my hotel room.

I tried to remember why I still had a hotel room two days after my flight was scheduled to return to the Midwest.

Why was I still in St. Petersburg?

I realized this wasn’t my hotel room.

Suddenly my mind wakes up a little bit more and more pressing issues are brought to the forefront.

Who the fuck is Gracie?

Where in the hell is Laura?

My feet are dirty as sin. Snow is falling heavily again. Gracie shifts in her sleep and I make my move.

Put on pants.

Button shirt.

Stuff tie into pocket.

Flush socks down toilet.

Socks clog toilet with condom and cigarette butts.

Pace quickens.

GRAB KEYS

GRAB JACKET

slip shoe after shoe onto filthy stems.

Look at scotch bottle.

Recognize its antihero reputation.

Look at scotch bottle

Become secretly impressed.

Take scotch bottle.

Close Curtain.

Intermission.

who: Joshua Poteat and Allison Titus, two award winning poets.
what: Reading
when: 09/22 at 7:30 p.m
where: Opposable Thumbs Books

who: Juliana Spahr and Claudia Rankine
what: Reading
when: 09/27 at 7:30 p.m
where: Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum

who: The Wake
what: Open mic reading
when: 09/29 at 7:00 p.m
where: Manhattan Loft

who: David Treuer, from the University of Minnesota
what: Reading from his new novel
when: 09/29 at 7:30 p.m
where: The Fitzgerald Theater

who: Naomi Shibab Nye
what: Reading
when: 09/30
where: The Loft

who: Thomas Glave
what: Reading
when:10/27
where: The Loft

who: 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 pleasurable about it.

Strangely, I’m reminded of Jackie Kennedy in her postassassination years, quietly letting the oceans of Vodka wash over her broken memories.

I wonder, someone of her breeding, what would have been her brand of choice? Was she disposed to any brand loyalties, or did she just desperately guzzle whatever was within her arm’s reach? Did she have anyone send for the firewater, or did she go there herself? Did she bring the bottle up to the register, hiding behind her trademark over-sized sunglasses?

I almost picture her in that pink dress that she wore on the day that is so firmly etched in our minds, Zapruder, sitting alone at some nondescript linoleum table, her puffy eyes focused downward. The open bottle would stand there; the foil would have been peeled away desperately. Uncorked, contents half-gone.

Imagine it, an abusive, alcoholic and philandering father. Husband hooked on methamphetamine and a philanderer himself. Husband shot and killed next to her, blood everywhere. An expectant public that could not stop molesting the deepest recesses of her life. Yet, that stoicism: gritting her teeth in some elegant smile, and drowning the screams down in the hazy depths of drink. For all, nothing but a mirror was she. Tabula Rasa.

Here, the iridescent blue of the predawn light is a moment in this morning that will soon pass; the birds are starting to chirp. For those who are left living to ponder the better part of what could have been is the only hope they’ll ever know. For those that died, perhaps they’ve found some peace. Jackie’s vodka bottle may, yet, still sit on some eternal table, where she contemplates her woozy loneliness.

Already the light has grown more than I like, and the sky has taken on that gray color of morning.

“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 can’t go with you, give me something.”

The dollar passed between us. Somewhere coastal surf trafficked beaches by the grain, and a dog ate grass outside a house that throbbed from the reverberations of good old Muddy Waters.

He said, “You know what it’s like on the streets?”

I liked his rotting teeth, his jeans, the putrid breath like Karkov’s and eggs.

I grinned, “Tell me all about the streets.”

“I’m fighting all the time with people I fought yesterday. I’m 42 years old. You ride around on these buses, then the transit police pick you up. I got no place to go, and sometimes you have to fight.

I could see him moving in to kick and jab, screaming and breathing heavy in the darkness and wind. His shoulders rose above me, heaving. His eyes were quiet but shone dull like he was working up to something mean. Despite the abuse his body suffered, the decay, the acne and the thrift store rejects, he was big enough for me to believe him.

He had black hair. His great stomach and shoulders, disheveled but gaunt and massive, an intimation to former grace; they belied his Asian hair. I knew him as a wild rice cultivator and Buffalo hunter. In the alleys of Frogtown he’d learned how to panhandle and intimidate, how to unseat the world with a dollar into a spiral of pine needles and gasoline. He’d shivered beneath bridges and ate the rain. He’d rubbed his face with broken glass in the margin between nothing and a car window on razor tipped wheels.

Someone passed between us, trotting along beneath the white-needle clock two floors above the earth, encased by green tile, a brand on the firmament reading PROPERTY OF, The City, St. Paul.

He left me and I threw myself into the iridescent blue-white interior of the 21A. I heard him last talking to someone else, ‘Hey, help me out. I’m short for the 94—”

I imagined him running into someone further along the Midway who’d tell him just to think of the glory awaiting him after death. This man would calm him, tell him to stick it out and act right so he could get the eternal ecstasy of tears in the beyond. The big Indian would probably suck this down like Karkov’s and sleepily wait out time for the effects. I’d have given him a gun and told him to bite the metal or kill the mayor.