the keys to everything

I no longer want to write the Great American Novel,
or the pretty good Canadian essay,
or the tolerable Norwegian short short story,
or the shitty haiku of unknown nationality.

from Troy Jollimere’s Upgrades

what he said

the Impotence of Proofreading

Has this ever happened to you?

You work very horde on a paper for English clash

And then get a very glow raid (like a D or even a D=)

and all because you are the word1s liverwurst spoiler.

Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence.

This is a problem that affects manly, manly students.

I myself was such a bed spiller once upon a term

that my English teacher in my sophomoric year,

Mrs. Myth, said I would never get into a good colleague.

And that1s all I wanted, just to get into a good colleague.

Not just anal community colleague,

because I wouldn1t be happy at anal community colleague.

I needed a place that would offer me intellectual simulation,

I really need to be challenged, challenged dentally.

I know this makes me sound like a stereo,

but I really wanted to go to an ivory legal collegue.

So I needed to improvement

or gone would be my dream of going to Harvard, Jail, or Prison

(in Prison, New Jersey).

So I got myself a spell checker

and figured I was on Sleazy Street.

But there are several missed aches

that a spell chukker can1t can1t catch catch.

For instant, if you accidentally leave a word

your spell exchequer won1t put it in you.

And God for billing purposes only

you should have serial problems with Tori Spelling

your spell Chekhov might replace a word

with one you had absolutely no detention of using.

Because what do you want it to douch?

It only does what you tell it to douche.

You1re the one with your hand on the mouth going clit, clit, clit.

It just goes to show you how embargo

one careless clit of the mouth can be.

Which reminds me of this one time during my Junior Mint.

The teacher read my entire paper on A Sale of Two Titties

out loud to all of my assmates.

I1m not joking, I1m totally cereal.

It was the most humidifying experience of my life,

being laughed at pubically.

So do yourself a flavor and follow these two Pisces of advice:

One: There is no prostitute for careful editing.

And three: When it comes to proofreading,

the red penis your friend.

©2017 Taylor Mali

(Selfy-Portrait)

And the Women Said

“And the Women Said” by Kelly Grace Thomas | Rattle: Poetry
http://www.rattle.com/wp-content/themes/reddle/js/html5.js

Kelly Grace Thomas

AND THE WOMEN SAID

And the women said watch as men call us lottery tickets

watch as they cash register us into gamble into played

out combinations of sweaty bills and pocket want

watch as they lick their lips for that better life

watch as they pout, when we don’t pay out.

When the bling of our breasts don’t make them

Cheshire cat the same. When we got our own debts

that gotta be paid, to mirrors, to mammas, to the way our hearts

traffic light in the closet after we sold ourselves

whole.

And the women said feel the way we became campfire

how we ghost storied into this dangerous beauty.

How them men can’t scrub out our smoke, how our blue learned

to burn slow, standstill like the moment between beggin and maybe.

Feel the way we soil into shovel, how we let ourselves be held even

after a matchbox tongue misspoke of our flames, even after we told flint,

you don’t live here no more. The women said feel how we are not open

fields waiting for their strike. They cannot not bury us

deep, call us things of war and be surprised

when we land mine.

—from Rattle #51, Spring 2016
Tribute to Feminist Poets
2017 Neil Postman Award Winner

Ligatures

If words are our best weapon, then Denise Miller’s Ligatures is a full frontal assault on the nation’s apathy. You cannot read this elegiac chronicle of the indifferent, haphazard yet legal murder of black people without knowing in the veins of your conscience that we are all bloodstained. Miller cites and channels: victim and cop, reporter and spectator, medical examiner and mother. And because she is a great soldier of words, we follow Denise Miller straight into battle. We feel “born brown then broken, born brown then bent—born brown then esophagus-threaded through handcuff born brown then bracketed by [hashtag & period].” We see what we have tried so hard not to see—“those people”—the “black and brown bodies that have been named from auction blocks to blogs” who are not us . . . except they are. Ligatures binds us viscerally in an unconscionable, incongruous place where we cannot “scroll past as if this story isn’t ours.” So read it.   – Leeanne Seaver

Ligatures

 

omission statement

I want to be a farmer of words…strictly organic…knowing each word I’ve planted will produce something sustainable.  I want to master the husbandry of words…know what it takes for them to grow strong and viable, to see words sprouting in a field that I have made ready…to know which to cull and which to feed.  I would rain on them from porch swings or Paris, fertilize them with prayer and presence.

I want to be a mad scientist of words…an anthropologist of words…and spend some time as alphabet-sous chef to William Least Heat Moon.

I want to put on a little lace camisole, a short ruffly skirt and some well-worn cowboy boots and go out dancing with words…in the French Quarter to a Doobie’s cover band…I want to taste Jack & Coke on the mouth of words…words against my neck…words that have a houseboat right on the river, not far from here…words in rivulets…

I want to be a field surgeon of words…the triage of words…able to keep somebody alive with words alone.

I want to debate words at Oxford and win.

But I will remain a recluse in a cabin on the Lesser Slave Lake of words…to be found a few months after I’ve died…to be posthumously unpublished, famously unknown.

Leeanne’s Fish

A fish there is

That swims across the canvas

Right to left

Bull-shit free

and bold

Beautiful and bereft

Of nothing

 

An admirably plain-speaking fish

This was a fish when time was

Famous in the Catacombs

When the Christ was spoken of

Only in whispers

 

It wears its glory lightly

Down at the mouth, yes,

But don’t be fooled

Leeanne’s fish glows contented

In its own shimmering skin

It’s candid iridescence

Eases without ego

 

The dull water in which it swims

Into the background.

 

 

~ my friend, the musician and writer
Andrew Roddy, Gortehark, Donegal
Ireland on 17 September 2016 was inspired to
write this lovely little piece about my attempt
to paint a fish.

I love it entirely.

full of no words

of what I can’t say

that would sound soft

soft like

soft rain

soft sun

soft stars

soft touch

soft  soft  soft

soft mountain or

one toe in sand that I

also can’t move . . .

the wordless words

of my heart holding

so brittle still

 

 

(~ Marc died last night . . . too young)

“With No Language but a Cry”

The Coyotes surely understand it.

Their primal sound

melding death and birth, pain and passion.

Our Scottie dog surely understood it,

howling with all the agony of Scotland.

The mother cows

bleating their grief when their calves are taken…

The deer

stomping their hooves and rubbing their foreheads

in an expression of emotion

that leaves me gaping in wonder.

The parents wailing in a playground in Pakistan . . .

My friends waiting for six year old Sophi to finish yet another round

of chemo . . .

Pieces of ourselves flying off our bodies, flying off our faces . . .

Emitting no words . . . not even organized cries, only high-pitched gasps,

trying to knit ourselves, our faces, our children, our planet

back together.

~ Barbara Jalon Hiles Mesle © 3/16

hall of mirrors

every facet contains a face

each one real but none quite true

not turned nor carved but cut like glass

and I have prism’d just like that

slanting time to make it last or

close my eyes until it passes

morning moon and nighttime noon

a sun note rising from the tomb

where I was once then once again

the face of now that’s now the past

unwrapped from time’s slow tourniquet

a flawless light imperfectly cast in

every face behind the glass

~ Liana Seaver 12/14

Note:

Last night, Denise Miller rocked it at FIRE and I hung around her too close a bit longer than necessary so something of her could rub off on me. That’s when I noticed a thing on the wall behind her–held up with thumbtacks. I scooched in to see it better. It was a poem I’d written last year; must have left it behind from my show in March. It didn’t get pitched. No name, but me…not thrown away. Perfectly anonymous. Whatev. I started to leave. Got to the door.

Then I turned around, borrowed Denise’s pen and signed the damn thing. This is my poem.