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 straining choir in high notes. The eczematous pink faces in white, white robes suppress everything but a note, and through scratchy black screens they douse the church in their constrictions.

There is no flourishing between the rocks, no cactus, no pine. There is a church as a tree’s facsimile in Sedona, on a hill of big houses.

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; it seems most people couldn’t pick out blank verse from free verse.

Poetry is hard; when I think of the amount of sugar and caffeine it took for me to get through a sonnet I want to vomit. But the struggle is necessary. We as writers cannot expect to write universal truths greater or equal to our predecessors if we don’t understand where art has already been and where it can go.

On the topic of placing the talent of the poet, T.S. Eliot wrote, “You cannot value him (the poet) alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” (Tradition… 1919). No one can become a great poet without reading the great poetry of the past and learning from it.

I’m sorry to all you “experimentalists” out there but, being different doesn’t mean you’re writing anything worthwhile. I’m sick of this “looking in on a personal entry” poetry. You’re writing for other people! It should make sense to others, or at least hold enough power and relation to the world that makes the reader react in some emotional/intellectual way.

I heard a fellow student in my writing class say that poetry is dry, that everything has already been written about. Poetry has been around for hundreds of years, and now, in 2006 poetry is dead? Think about it, poetry can’t dry up as long as people exist and continue changing. That’s the problem with personal poetry; writing has to find a place in society to grow.

Free expression is the basis of all the arts, but an unfocused, self-indulgent, journal entry doesn’t teach anyone anything worth remembering. It is in connection with society and the relation to the past that we learn. So please, if you’re going to write for others, spare us your break-up story unless we can learn something about suffering or sadness or whatever. Poetry is too influential and penetrating to waste on anything less than beauty and truth.

I Started To Write Poetry Again
By Molly Wick

One 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 to mention the miles and miles of a single plant
A single row of sugarcane that jaunts across the island
Pauses for a square peach home with white gingerbread-house icing
And again it goes lazily following ruddy ditches and neighbor rows
I started to write poetry again pondering what life means to this person
Who can’t live a day without
The almost sacred heart-racing forehead sweating mouth burning piment
With enough baguettes to cover the island just for lunch
I started to write poetry again doubting I could ever capture
The exhausting water and salt I’ve breathed for three months
The cool sweet brew of amber foam glistening under twinkling torches
At an al fresco bar with bamboo bar stools, a wooden barbeque hut and gravel ground
I started writing poetry again thinking of the Southern Cross
Hanging over an island so far from earth
Stars curling in an arc as the night slides past
Glossy and silent with frogs croaking in the lawn
I started writing poetry again one lonely night in Mauritius
The country falling asleep outside
Pondering the people, at home in their beds
Green coils glowing in the corner to kill mosquitoes
Buzzing through the night towards the light
Searching, ever hunting for the one sweet red liquor that means life can continue
While ocean waves lap at the edges of not just an island but an entire society
Caught between reality and a dream
Caught between tradition and wealth
Dangling from both but securing neither
I started to write poetry again to describe what I have seen and sensed
But I realized it is an island of feelings, sensations, and mannerisms
An aura created from hints, notions, ironies, and premonitions
An island of quirks and whims
So, I gave up on poetry.

For the Copilot
by Travis Hetman

I 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 dew

Goggles 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, meanwhile

We will race the wind
But before it can begin

With 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 Faltesek

Carelessly 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.

A young man was on the phone and engaged in a heated fight with his girlfriend outside in the stairwell. Obscenities were screamed, curses were muttered, under-the breath-threats were offered and countered. And then…a faint beep. A meep really, to tell the truth. The hormonal young man had hung up on the words of the offending female. For the eavesdropper in the next room, this climax of the young lovers’ angst was terribly anti-climactic. The second meep through the wall indicated the temperamental young man to be equally unsatisfied as he pushed buttons in anger. But instead of inspiring images of the wronged lover fed up and taking his vengeance, were instead images of baby chicks. As the unsatisfied young man stormed down the stairs, one could not wonder whether the inability to offer a resounding click would finally be the end of the cell phone.

Where was the slamming of the phone into the receiver? The picking it up and slamming it down again—harder? Heck, where was the throwing of the base against the wall? Apparently, these images seem to be stuck somewhere back in the twentieth century, around the same time as leg warmers and heavy rock. The size of the phone has gotten increasingly smaller while its effectiveness in breaking-up couples has diminished exponentially. Convenience seems to have trumped the need for satisfactory fits of rage.

And what about the equally angry partner on the other end? Was she devastated by the gentle beep in her ear? Did she even know she had been hung up on? More likely she kept talking, while checking her reception bars. Only when they did not light up did it dawn on her that she had been the victim of the phone-slam. And then, did she offer up a silent prayer that he would call her back? More likely she attempted text-messaging her friends, but finding the tiny buttons unforgiving to her livid thumbs, she pushed the more convenient re-dial button instead. On the other end, he heard his phone ring, not the angry, sharp ring of old, but the peppy ring of Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” He beeps his phone again. She snaps her tastefully slim Nokia shut. They both sit, stare, and feel strangely un-vindicated.

But it is not the result of immediate melancholy or lustful thoughts. No, each lover is feeling unfulfilled by the transaction. The lack of something concrete to slam, the absence of a sharp click in the ear, and the clumsy execution (for when slamming a phone, one can hang up immediately; when cell-slamming one must remove the phone from the ear and look at it in order to locate the red button before hanging up and, alas, by this time, the point may in fact, be moot) are frankly against the very nature of the angry breakup. They separately contemplate throwing the itty bitty phone/calculator/camera/palm pilot/casino they hold in their sweaty hands, but are held back by the knowledge that they do not have sufficient funds to replace the broken life-line. No, for these star-crossed lovers drama does not come cheap.

As they realize this, perhaps they look down at their color-coded cellie and realize all the work it will be to re-program their rings, numbers, and pager numbers in order to de-program their former-flame out of their life. And perhaps at this moment, she gets into her SUV and he into his Benz, and they drive to the nearest Target. In the deserted and dusty phone-aisle as they both reach for the same rotary model, their eyes meet. He places the phone into her basket, grabs the one remaining phone for himself, and they walk off to the check-out. Determined, as young lovers are, that they will never fight again, but if they do, they will at least be able to execute it properly and with sufficient drama.

Alas, old fashioned lovers’ spats have triumphed over modern technology.

Dear Wake,
I am please publish these. if you dont then I’ll will fail in school studentry. I would prefer to remain annonymous if that’s ok
-Justin Bailey
Englash Major

And then she falls
My love
Inside
My soul
(It’s all all right)
This distance between us
Entropic void
Cannot be filled
A valley,
Once flowing,
The river of our love,
Our souls once bound
Now dry,
Mountainous,
[Cavernous.]
Breathing salty, I exhale myself into you.
Whrursh.
I am inside
with you
It’s all all right.

She stands astride, begging me to pass through
To come inside, to show me the truth
Her lust is her mind, everything she ever knew
With guttural moans she invites, begs me to do (,what,)
While on her back she lies, prepares for me to

She fluffs, I stuff, we flex and stretch.
Rough and tough.
Our love is a battlefield.
I get pushed out, she screams out
Next.

I feel my pain
Like a needle in the soul.
Prinks and points in my being.
I feel my pain
As death creeps into my bed
Where we lay, mourning
Our broken relationship
That was dashed to pieces
When you cut me your words.

I feel my pain
At the bottom of a bottle.
I drank it at dawn on the subway
As I rode away from you.
The pain is so overwhelming
I can to cry in public
But I can’t because I am a man
And I should not even be writing
Poetry because if anyone found out
I would be called gay.
Maybe that’s what
My pain is really about?
If only I had a vagina.

I put out my cigarette on the bus door, spewing my own poison out, and inhaling the toxic fumes outside, and think of the pollution now filling my lungs. I chastize corporate America internally, silently: Crying, “Swine, give me a chance to taste my own life. My love. My essence.” Digressing, my foot swings me up onto the bus.

I thought of her when I saw him. Coughing, stinking, fidgeting. I want to hold him as I held her, but I do not want to make the same mistake again. Ambiguity aside, I sit across from him, watching his moves.

He speaks in tongues; the Heavenly words I sought to hear from her so often. She would not even perform this simple act for me—she said she was blessed once, by me, by the gift of my mere presence. Her lies lie encrypted in her tongues. I, her interpreter, am a reflection and reminder of her falsities.

The man’s face reflects in the darkened midnight glass, a public mirror for passersby to see him and wonder, “Is his face mine? Am I him?” I can see him, also, but I see him from my seat, and I can smell him, his scent wafting into my nostrils. The smell is reminiscent of her—fish mixed with cigarettes and intimacy: My security. Blood rushes to my cheeks and I slide myself towards the edge of my seat, hoping to put a hand on his shoulder and slide my finger down, playing back his tune like a needle on a turntable.

He pulls away, though. Chanting his noble tune, he pushes the red lever by the window, shoves the glass, and rolls onto the street with a quiet thud. I will not miss him, now. He did exactly what she did, what she was always good at: Abandoning.