From Eyewear

AMARYLLIS CANADIAN TIRE

Near the return and exchange desk
the sink drain blare of Cash 11, Manager to Cash 11,
bulb-split amraryllises,
petals halogen rusted, garden bulimic,
stand sturdy in clay cups
while the mats at the automatic door grow streamy
with boot tracked snow, slush.

Ski coats shift sibilation,
each down-plump body
maneuvering the card table,
careful not to catch a leaf
above sparkle-glue bijouteries,
outsized flanges and piano hinges.

Amaryllis—
dismissed amid vulcanized rubber
boxing day sale perfume—
an ostentatious widow
price shopping at the discount tire.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006

From Siren's Silence (Volume 2 Number 3)

GIRL IN A BOX

I’m a girl in a box, yup, that’s me, here I sit seven hours a day, five days week in a chemical fog, peering out of the windows of my glass box, my 12-by-12 crystal cage, a caged girl with a painted porcelain face contorted in a Revlon death mask I sculpt daily from cosmetics I shoplifted from Rite-Aid, under my cleopatra sex goddess wig that glints glossy and unreal under the neon lights where I turn and burn into crystal, into a glass mummy who rots the minutes and hours away in the girlie zoo, wrapped in swaddling lacy underthings, moon drunk from the bee-stings that cover my arms, sometimes nodding but mostly awake staring at myself with mascara eyes that smolder in the mirror and day-dreaming under the glare of the red bulb that illuminates my cell, imprisoned by the 24-hour stare of the crimson sun that never sets and follows each orgasm I fake, a sun that mocks me as I pose in the window where I watch each anonymous man tread the wax floors munching on candy bars or smoking cigarettes as they gawk, all of us good girl animals of Al’s Triple XXX theater who smirk and tap on the windows with fat knuckles begging choose me! choose me! Not me. I wait, the queen bee with my dope-sick patience, well-trained, house broken, my mirror me watching, freezing into a wicked wicked witch baby, a white-trash ice-queen, eyeing Dee-dee, the fake redhead cokehead in the booth across from me with basilick eyes as she strikes her syphilitic supermodel pose from better and younger days, beckoning with her yen sigh and spacey eyes, her rolls of fat becoming lazy, voluptuous as she wraps her boa around herself taut like a telephone wire, communicating something nobody will ever hear.
SLAM! the metal door bangs shut on the other side of my box, Italian shoes scuffling on the floor of my crypt, knocking on the window. He chose me. I hear him cursing, fiddling in frustration with the money box in the darkened chamber, shoving a deuce up the slot of the little black box on the other side of the confessional, this little black electronic box that bleeps SESSION and devours the dollars of the hard-working American men, the harvest of truckers and mobsters and lawyers, swallows up all the capitalist secrets and lies of the young white punks, the middle-aged black guys with their SSI checks, the ancient Asian men who tremble when they cum, the cool-ass, cracked Latino men, and your occasional slobbering drunken yuppie couple, in one greedy, democratic gulp, because this is America, dammit, and we’re all free to exploit ourselves as long as we don’t step on somebody else’s turf, but the shutter is sliding up and so much for politics because there he is, standing there, middle-aged causcoid knight with thinning hair, big nose and pervert glasses that hide his x-ray eyes that burn through the glass wall that separates us, his hands stuffed in a green L.L. Bean jacket that his wife probably got him last christmas, trying to smile but obviously scared shitless of me, the whore, flicking my smoke and dropping dirty glitter on the palace floor and believe it or not I’m actually feeling a little sorry for this poor schmuck, this burn-out insurance salesman type who stands there looking a little dumb and a little fat at me, his slum queen, slumming it up at Al’s on this beautiful sunny afternoon.

© Jeanine Campbell 1998

P.F.S.: Symbolists and Hallucinogenics (Part 1)

Nineties heritage, as it could start from State College, works under the aegis of what was being imbibed by the kiddiesnot uppers or downers (that much), but hallucinogenics. Many nights in the mid-to-late Nineties, the Nineties revolution in State College was a revolution-in-consciousness around skewered perspectives, visionary trances, and painterly firmaments. State College was and is serviced, in this respective, by something beneath the surface which illuminates the entirety of Happy Valley, and central Pennsylvaniaa mystique emanating from Mother Nature herself, around a sense of earth magic resonating from the greener areas in and around State College. Nature breathes there. Hallucinogens heighten the sense of ecstasy and fulsomeness bestowed by greenery on the place.

No joke that, on the syllabus for true Nineties State College hipsters, a place was made for the French Symbolist poets of the nineteenth centuryRimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine. Hipsterism, in an era of turmoil, balanced imperatives other than just popular music and partiesreading culture in State College wasn't nothing. Other than the philosophy texts I was studying, up to and including Kant and over to the Deconstructionists (philosophy was my major at PSU, and my philosophy credits did transfer over to Penn), the heaviest lit in my brain were the Symbolists, who took all of our sense of being on trips and navigating mind-scapes and articulated what we couldn't, yet.

So, the lot of us had not just a sense of a soundtrack for our adventureswe had texts which meant something to us, which were also conduits to our personal (and collective) revolutions. The poem from Something Solid, Season in Hell: White Candle takes, and places this set of circumstances on the table for all to see. Rimbaud, in his masterwork, enacts an interior process in text of complete personal revision and revolution of self. My poem takes what was already transformative and makes it do double-time, enumerating not only a personal revolution but a revolution pertaining to the rigors of early marriage. Marriage and Rimbaud are not naturally simpatico; but the Nineties sense of unlikely juxtapositions (including State College's game of class-confounding) take, and make the contingencies which serve the poem resonate to a Symbolistic frequency. Such is one pertinent manifestation of Nineties-ism. Other, similar early work, like Room 510 Atherton Hilton, The dawn broke over our bodies, and Song for Maria, takes Symbolist impulses and radically eroticizes them, working along a vibe axis of enchantment/damnation, searching for a potent voice still youthful, still casual (if passionate), in heaven/hell. If something or someone was supposed to be inhibiting our creativity, they failed.  

.....................................................................................................

On a more practical note: State College in the 90s was very strange. It should've been that, being an artist and coming from a background steeped in the arts, I would feel uncomfortable and disoriented there. After all, the public associate State College and Penn State with football, Joe Paterno, and little else. Granted, PSU State College is a high-ranking school with several outstanding departments (including continental philosophy, which was my major), but its image or "face to the world" is all about athletics. It's just that I didn't find State College that limiting. There was an active underground scene in the arts in the 90s, which included inspired participants, and which gave the place some real vitality.

I moved to State College in '94 without formalizing any plans to do theater or anything theater related. I had spent the summer of '92 at Carnegie Mellon doing pre-college for acting, but it hadn't led anywhere. What theater at PSU had going that I was intrigued with was a weekly series of plays, written by students and graduate students and produced by them too: Outlaw Playwrights. By the spring of '95, I was actively writing plays, because the outlet to have them produced was there. By the the spring of '99 (I had left a script in late '98 once I'd moved to NYC), I'd had four one-acts produced.

State College had an active indie rock scene, too. Summer in State College in the 90s can't have been that much different than Athens, Georgia in the early 80s. The whole town was slowed down. Everyone involved in State College Indie lived in a room in a house and there were house parties all the time. What State College needed, but never got, was an R.E.M., to be a flagship bearer from State College to the world. There were candidates; the best and most popular candidate was a band of which every member was a local icon. They were musically great and very muscular (and as classicist about musical quality as early R.E.M.) but no one in the band could sing. If this band had had a Michael Stipe, the whole movement in State College would've come to the surface much faster.

People were fucking. To the extent that some arts scenes in America have problems with this, State College didn't. The sexual mores were pretty blase about faithfulness and seriousness, too. This extended even to life on campus; North Halls was considered the "artsy" set of dorms, and I lived there for a long time. The idea of doing pick-up routines, hanging around playing music and smoking pot, and grooving on what you were going to do in the arts when you "grew up" was de rigueur. What was important was that you could live on campus if you were an artist and still not starve to death spiritually. We all absorbed the 90s ethos, which amounted to a more tortured and world-weary version of the 60s. And most of us listened to the same music. Nirvana weren't too big in State College: Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Guided by Voices, the Flaming Lips were all massive. I got into Nick Drake and Big Star on the side. Brit-Pop, particularly Blur, was around.

How did we relate to the football shenanigans? We didn't. We simply acted as if they weren't happening. In North Halls, on South Atherton Street, on West College, you could get away from that crap, and really do it, and mean it. Although visiting East Halls was always a fun education on what it meant to live on the dark side of things.

I enjoyed my philosophy classes, and did well in them. They were a handful of other courses I liked. If I often flaked out on Gen Ed requirements, it's because I was a flake in many ways in those days. Philosophy engaged me; other than that, my mind was possessed by the arts. Or  intoxicants. By 1997, they were coffeeshops in State College where, if you knew the right people, you could buy gooballs over the counter. Or smoke a joint openly sitting out in the cafe. Bohemia, and the scandals in it. Bohemia styled, also, in a down-home mode for central Pa.  

The last six months I spent in State College in '98 were the happiest. It was a bacchanal to match anything in Philly, Chicago, NYC or DC. And if no one in the wider world knew or cared that it was happening, we were too young to notice or fret that this was the case. We'd get to that later.

From Seven Corners Poetry (ed. Steve Halle)

A VILLANELLE

I have undone our bent decision laughing sadly.
Between wind and wound, the day pitches down.
We are a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

with hoes, tropes, and our mass machinery
with licensed language but without listening we drone.
I have undone our bent decision laughing sadly

as though to speck electric and forgo our power medley.
We divine to be verbs but end up as proper nouns.
We are a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

trying through the days’ languor to talk avidly
of words settling among sheets slipped facedown,
the stillness undone, our bent decision laughing sadly.

An embryonic engineering; an abracadabra of absently
searching the haphazard circuitry of words. Yes, this brown
field is a replicating setting devoid of greenery,

a discord of clouds at our throats, a soured creamery
left hastily for the rush of law, of light, of renown.
Still moving with our bent decision laughing sadly,
we replicate settings devoid of greenery.

© William Allegrezza and Simone Muench 2009

From Seven Corners Poetry

LIKE THE DEVIL

He holds on to life with his teeth,
dangles it by the nape.
Tastes with the fury of cayenne
and says hush-hush-hush
with his hands as he drinks
wine from me like an open spoon.
He can tell magenta from maroon.
He grins like the devil,
all jump-start and red bell
pepper. Stitches me together
as if my cunt is a wound,
his tongue, copacetic.
I mend, sprout wings,
and scream things.
A firebird possessed
of the power to fly,
he shuts his eyes,
and wills it so.
Off he goes.
Grunt and scruff, this
spitfire. This hellcat.
A scrapper who turns the screws
of my truss rod, straightens
my back. Names the stars
of my knees with one eye
closed, opens my gates,
faces the bull.
Olé! He’s muy caliente.
Itch, bitch, and boil,
he celebrates supine
and sublime. Pins
the tail on the donkey
every time, this toreador.
A necromantic lynx who
swallows whole but plays
legato, in tune.
He follows me out of rooms.
Hush-hush-hush.
It will be all right.
He who holds on to life with his teeth
will never go hungry.
Faster, pussycat.
Kill! Kill!

© Brandi Homan 2006

Adam Fieled (State College, Pennsylvania, USA): "Song for Maria"

My scarlet letter let you in
     We rallied on our separate beds
         The way to blue was flushed with ice
              Your tongue possesses everything

(lighten my,
watch my,
  blow my)

                        In any case the case is closed
                  We walk the streets, a trackless train
              My verdant prayer is your own skin
         I can't believe I'm free again

Relax—

Ice yr drink—

Think—

Pursue a purpose, lost in flame
     Become the scum you dote on, crab
          The sky, the ground, the square you are
                The realm of flesh is one lone purge...

mercy        mercy      mercy
     mercy                mercy

© Adam Fieled 1998

Chris McCabe (Montreal, Quebec/Dagenham, London, UK): "Fragment (undated)"

Debating the relative merits of Orchestral Manoeuvres in The Dark
or Tears for Fears, while April ice melts slowly in Westmount Park.

Now appears to be less world-shaking than when, Misha G., we both
could be smartly vehement about Richard Rorty, Boy George, Truth,

Logic & being spanked by Marianopolis twins known to us as Ruth.
Not that we were L. Cohen’s heirs, but rather a pair of young pioneers

gazing into the future with our smoking jackets for uniforms, sayers
of sooth but more often faux-decadent imbibers of lascivious perfumes,

who often drank tea (before it was Pennyroyal) on mornings as Winter
Dripped away as surely as Youth does— as children, crushed on looms.

If such industrial imagery seems a tad stark, consider the Reagan Years
were also ours in Montreal. We danced: slim Japanese New Wavers,

The Cure & The Smiths our aural neighbours if not allies; felt Time’s
Axis turn, as early eloquence (our praxis) dried up in Age’s Summer.

© Chris McCabe (?)

Tammy Armstrong (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada): "Affair with my Partner after Spring Haircut/Shave"

This begins my affair:
this new face in our bed.

Fastidiousness spatchcocked
into shiftless lust
in a basement tavern
where the base boys
dance with undergrads
and we drink with blind date enthusiasm.

Treat me proverbial,
chalky with wine and newness,
bringing it all to bed
while he’s away on a road trip.

This perennial hook-up
leaves alarm clocks,
toothbrush rituals in the margins.
Back story:
a much younger you,
a .12 gauge, a chipmunk.
The words don’t matter at last call.

Take me home in the van—
a box of finishing nails
chattering
in the back,
a weeks worth of Globe and Mails
nested on the passenger seat.

If they ask, tell them.
Yes, we left the Chevron,
near the Tannery
around three—
a new pack of smokes
paid for from an ambitious wallet.
Clearly, single before tonight.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006