Steve Halle (Illinois, USA): "yao"

dear Jackson Pollock's memory,

oh well i tend to agree with the crying/passion/exhaustion argument but
you've put me in a tough spot yet again. living with the enemy of our
undefined yet common belief sys. don't worry abt being defensive and btw
it's molehills but n e ways. what r u signing my year book or something?
and this faculty meeting day makes me want to quit my job idealistically like
student in Updike short story "A&P" and are we going to just become
vagrants? & is that all of "what's left" to do? and and and listen to Brahms
4th like I kno what tha fuck he means? and listen to jazz like I kno wtf? and
read like I no wtf? and write things so obscure even me the transparent
eyeballed creator doesn't know wtf it all means? I guess the point was
I'm tired right now tired like not go to sleep tired but tired in other ways
and ways I can't defend or argue abt but it might just be time to lay low &
there are no readily avail. times on any foreseen horizons for such lazy
nonsensical endeavors. On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer. I'm
better at buying books than reading them but they don't and I don't
understand why not they don't pay you for that more likely the opp. and i
know what's-his-name sd steal this book and all that but i don't feel like
being cooped up ether. I mn either. an epic struggle between man and
material might unfold. lots of luck, honey.

love, not chaos,
s

This poem originally appeared in issue 11 of the print journal Ocho, guest edited by Adam Fieled, in 2007.

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): from Equations: Thesis: #45

Growing up with Emma, who had been in my class at CHS, wasn’t like growing up with Roberta. It wasn’t like anything. Emma, a lanky blonde with long, lank blonde hair, a chiseled, cat-like face, and long limbs, looked like a stunt double for Trish, and had been merely an acquaintance. She was quiet, and kept to herself. Her friends were among the geeks of the class. Why and how Emma knew to show up now, in the midst of all this turbulence with Trish, I have no idea, but she did. I laughed because she so resembled Trish, but I was also aroused. I liked the idea, past N and Roberta, of a real hook-up within my class, even ten years after the fact. She was there, at the Last Drop, on a succession of key summer days, in a sleeveless white blouse. After all these years, her cat-face grew on me as enchanting, compelling, suggestive of something her whole presence insinuated— she identified heavily with Trish, and had a female impulse to demarcate turf which could also be hers. Whether she’d been stalking us or just heard what was happening with us from the suburbs, I still don’t know. I knew she was commuting to Center City from somewhere. What she wanted was just one night with me, I later concluded. When, on the one late afternoon I made my way with her back to Logan Square, we were ensconced, she took out a bottle of Robitussin as though it were an aperitif, and she were Trixie Belle. She wanted, as she said, a Robo-trip. It was part of the magic of that night that Emma wound up encapsulating for me so many different partners at once, including partners merely being anticipated. I found it easy to begin making love to her, because she made it easy. Her equation was interesting, about female levels of awareness— everything about her physiology screamed, you always wanted me the most, but you just didn’t know it. You’re a man— you don’t know these things. I have delivered myself to you because you need me now, and I need you. Now you may begin to learn who you are. And we made love with great fluidity and rapidity, and then we made love again. Her fluidity was like Heather’s would be, and the sense of being lulled into a trance of perpetual, high-intensity intercourse, on the bed, then on the living room floor, on the couch in the living room, from the front, from the back, was like Jena. We each gave the other a show-stopping performance, manifesting (as was odd, and as I was not too dumb and callow to notice) an inversion of our years of starving for each other. The absolute ecstasy of several mutual orgasms was the tactile insignia, as it might’ve been with Roberta and N, of an eternity of denial overcome. This, even as what was built into us both had been noticed only by her. Why, in sex equations, women usually hold the cards: women are receptive to sensory data on a deeper level than men, and have a primordial understanding of physiology, of bodies and more bodies, which men do not. When bodies speak, women listen more. Emma and I shared a home, but only she registered what our bodies shared, what was in them. When Trish showed up, it was a red flag from nature that it would be Emma’s time to show up too. Even if it proved to be the cosmic design that after one night, I would never see Emma again. 

 © Adam Fieled 2023

Vlad Pogorelov (Rocklin, California, USA): "No. 105"

I wanted to kill myself for years
But I always lived on the first floor
And the gun shops won't sell a gun
To a foreigner with a criminal background
It's not that there are no other ways to do it
I dreamt of drinking myself to death
But after hours of puking
I discovered that life is O.K.
As long as you don't have to punch
Somebody's time-clock
Or when you're drunk but are still
Able to drive
And the classical music
Or a beautiful woman,
Or a decent typewriter,
Or a good friend,
Who is not asking you for some
Cash until Friday, every other day

At the moment,
I am still alive
We made love 3 times last night
It's 2:20 p.m.
I had two cups of tea,
Three cigarettes,
Plus some beer for breakfast
My woman is in the shower
She lives on the third floor
(Too low to jump
and I don't want to be crippled)

P.S.: She came out of the shower.
Looked at the first line. Put her hands
On my shoulders and said firmly:
"If you're gonna kill yourself, I'm gonna
Kill you, son of a bitch. Besides,
I don't need blood in my apartment."

© 1997

Rodrigo Toscano (New York, USA): "The Promise"

I've listened to a good number of subaltern aesthetic movements.

I've mini-mighted my feet in the direction of their promise.

Godzilla, in his dark green coarse coat, "a city— all mine! well, sorta."

My emotional walls are thin as paper; the walls are collapsing, one onto the other; sharpest pencil to run-of-the-millest pulp; charms, alarms.

My molar.

You, you don't speak, you won't speak, even though your young family's behind the waterfall screaming in ecstasy.

Spalding Gray was found floating in my neighborhood polluted river-front.

I nurture (quite literally) no one thing; it's the blanks I venture.

Look at that speck of light, hear Mayakovsky's imprint, At These Four Strokes.

Two negations, one tucked inside the other.

I'm cued up to be a social infant "in the middle of my path" (in the dog days of my ways).

I'm cued up to speak— after you.

I've glistened too long in the sun without sympathetic, beluga-like realities, popping up for air.

I've maxi-minded my manners with the most uninsurrectional crowd I've ever encountered.

I hear a thousand fifes in the distance— fuck, I know that's bad.

My spongy sack o' cum.

"I"— ain't a problem at all, it's the "You" that's the thicket.

Spalding Gray left his loft early in the morning; it was 11 degrees that day.

What a chilly thing to say, "You, you don't speak, you won't speak, even though your young family's behind the waterfall screaming in ecstasy."

I fracture (quite literally) everything; it's the particles I assume.

Listen to assemblages of flesh, hear Artaud At These Four Strokes 

Two suppositions, one slipped-knotted into the other.

I've been roped into being a representationalist "in the midst of a dark forest" (in the Aurora Borealis of the now) 

I've been tugged hard to speak— after you.

©  Rodrigo Toscano 2009