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
someone else's shoes, tie someone else's
laces into rabbits' feet in darkness
on the front stairs at dawn, wait
for the mailman to come & rub
my heels together til we're home. I feel
like a mother talking loudly around
young boys & their fragrant tufts
of armpit hair on the subway, & I rev my
engine on the highway, & when I’m not behind
the wheel making horn noises with my
nose & 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 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 & I post the list
on a grocery store bulletin board (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
& swinging from their blades,
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
cooking those books for you, but that
isn't love, that’s 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

Tammy Armstrong (Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada): "Reparations"

We dressed too early for the funeral:
at the card table, third pot of coffee
killing time
with button talk,
how stitches never match eyelets
and you as small boy
taught in French how to repair a torn knee . . .

thick fingered, you thread a needle
tighten each button on the suit jacket
tailored in Thailand
asking if the weave
is worn too shiny
from months in your backpack.

Hours from now I’ll gather the suit
from the kitchen tiles—
stripped as though in flames.
I’ll smooth the shoulder pads
to the wooden hanger,
align the buttons
while you stand, near naked,
in the living room,
Standard Muffler sign
our only light.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006