From diode

thicket

I am all butter cream and lace when
we abandon this house for another
with a picket fence and a tiny door.
Clandestine, destined
to have too many holes we can’t fill.
Despite the flurry of hands, we are drowsy,
playing cards and fucking in the afternoon.
Holding our nostalgia like a cake knife.

Soon, we abandon this car for another
with a blue lush interior that smells like Winstons.
I make a flip book out of our indiscretions’
misspellings. Finger the upholstery
while we play roulette with beer bottles.
Kiss me, kiss me not.
My hope all parade floats and dancing bears
until I split the infinitives,
spill the milk, slit the window screens.
Go for the jugular.

My sleep is still white, all paper and milk.
Counting the cracks in the ceiling,
dividing three and three and three.
Outside the amaryllis is ridiculous,
all lewdly red and unruly.
I am counting spiders in the eves as you leave.
One and one and one.

© Kristy Bowen 2010

From Ekleksographia

SOMETHING MAYBE

The curve of my spine bent,
along subway lines. The only thing
that makes sense is to lie down
on the sidewalk right now,
beer can crushed & tossed across
the street. We're not going to make it.
For an entire summer my life's
solution was to not leave
my bed. A thousand miles later
& I still want something else,
shifty and shifting away from the center.
It's clear now: we were never
going to make it. The darkness creeps
over, smears in the rain. The end
of the night means leaving the bar,
myself keeping myself in check.
Sometimes I want to go back
& do things differently,
but this is one fuck-up I can't take
back. Pink Moon. Pink Moon. Pink Moon. Pink Moon.
Hit play again. Lying in bed, feeling
the darkness creep over.
Let the weird back in. Find a point
in the distance, fast and furious,
something worth racing off to.
I'm looking for something new,
something catchy, something
to fall asleep to.

© Gina Myers 2009

Tammy Armstrong (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada): "Calamari and Ink"

We needed a memory
for a meal no one could finish.
Hooked index fingers into bowls of black—
cursive graffiti
along the dining room table.

Not contained on sponge pads,
cover charge bar stamps
the ink pooled cabaret make-up.
Not all offerings from the ocean are grand.

Squid like a boxed ear
swollen, cut
re-shaped into a gift,
an adjustable ring from a small town carnival
from a lover who doesn’t know me well.
I’d marry if asked.

But these rings bloat the rice indigo
marring late night calligraphy
when we can’t see how
we’ve outstayed another welcome.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006

Adam Fieled (Henniker, New Hampshire): from Beams: "eye eye eye"

for Maggie Mangual

nile-wide, eye eye eye.
a sylph, bee low my buzz.
it wants, to do, at mouth.
no. not every one. can end,
dare-a-licked, like is. or:
put it, porn again. dew wit
like its done, on, cyber.
space, opened, bee twain. no,
went in sight. tight tight.

© Adam Fieled 2006

Beams rides again on Blazevox

More from No Tell Motel

SOUND WAVES, LASER BEAMS, IMPULSES, AND SIGNALS

I feel like a mother when I wear some
one else's shoes, when I tie someone else's
laces into rabbits' feet in darkness
on the front stairs at dawn, waiting
for the mailman to come and rub
my heels together til we're home, I feel
like a mother talking loudly around
young boys and their fragrant tufts
of armpit hair on the subway, I feel like
a mother revving my engine on the highway,
in the yard, and when I am not behind
the wheel making
horn noises with my
nose and mouth, I feel like a mother
who has forgotten how to breathe water,
insisting that everyone
ought to be breathing
air by now, I feel like a mother when
my mother is dead although it hasn't happened
yet that I feel like a motherless child, I
feel like a mother when I make a list of names
that calls all my enemies out and I post the list
on a grocery store bulletin board, the T's
all crossed as ugly moustaches, I feel like a mother
when I shave my beard and all my children tiptoe
around the kitchen sink giggling
and swinging from their blades,
I feel like a mother when I am offered
glasses of wine without pieces of bread
soaking in them, when I transmit my own
signals from antennas from a jar
in the earth to a cage full of animals
in the living room, I feel like a mother
for cooking those books
for you, but that wasn't love,
it was history.

© Jen Tynes 2008

from No Tell Motel

HORN OF PLENTY

The boy is a girl with a strap-on,
the girl is a boy with hips and a hole.
Are you ready to play your role?

Love came and now is gone
like an intimate disease.
Get your hands up. Freeze!

Love came and went.
The bee, the lips of tulips, how fragrant.
He was a motherfucker. Or a mother,

and nothing's as nowhere as another,
Mother's climax fantasy in flagrante.
So let's have a party in my panties;

we'll grab the horn of plenty
and climb the greasy pole.
Are you ready to play your role?

© Molly Arden 2008

from Borrowed House

FLIRTATIONS

Drunk beside the pond, we play
with ultimatums...

:if you cannot fathom this thick mud.

:if you cannot pull the legs from this daddy-long.

:if you cannot stew this prepubescent carrot
in your own blood.

:if you cannot hitch the butterfly with your sugared thumb.

:if you cannot look me in the eye
when you recite

the filthiest passage in the grassiest language.

© Brooklyn Copeland 2008