Chip Livingston

Manifesto.Mercury Direct read by Chip Livingston

I was actually looking forward
to this coming Mercury retrograde.
I wanted things to go back
to their normal miscommunications. I played

my country music records backwards,
wrote a How To Remove Anger spell,
I even went to the seventh plane of existence to
release our soul fragments and wrote an old-fashioned letter to tell

you how sorry I was for
ever letting this grand misunderstanding
stalemate into something that grew against
all sense of reason. But I also couldn’t see defending

the man I thought you knew so well
from all the lies you threw
in your responding email. I thought it was unhealthy
to itemize each error and prove what each of us already knew

to be untrue, to let those things lie,
as they say, awhile longer. But how long
and how come and why does the fact
that I find the rights among the wrongs

you catalog among my given rights
in being human, a man, and not to mention your exboyfriend
bother me? Though you were right to list the responsibilities
you required from me as your friend

despite omitting all that I had been
already, for now I knew what I had not been living
up to in your eyes and what I’d have to be
like, “human,” for you to see me in that kind of light again. I’m not giving

up, or giving in, but only giving
you the space I’ve needed when you
need it now. Language is a barrier that takes
relationships for granted, and yes, it’s true

I thought nothing would ever come
of us, but nor between us, until your perjury
became testimony you believed, leaving
me with the effects of the directness of Mercury.
 

 
Chip Livingston is the author of two collections of poetry, CROW-BLUE , CROW-BLACK and MUSEUM OF FALSE STARTS, and a collection of short stories, NAMING CEREMONY, forthcoming in Spring 2014. He has received awards from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Chip joins the low-rez MFA faculty at Institute of American Indian Arts in 2014.

“Livingston consistently develops a poem for love, relationships, and lust. He has the knack for creating a mood to present any part of love, such as he does in this apologetic epistle, “MANIFEST-MERCURY DIRECT.” He has overcome the barrier of language, presenting us with romance, broken hearts, and the sudden bulge in a man’s pants.” — Jerry Brunoe

Next issue features Jon Stone.

April Walker

702_0057

No marker. Only triangular plot of grass strewn
with warm bodies leaking scents of urine from their pores.

This is “Martyrs Park” – place where River once met
bank. Three times I drive past before getting a clean

picture. At first I overshoot: Dallas County jail
is in the background. Another attempt brings me closer,

capturing the Bail Bonds, neighboring liquor stores.
Timing must be perfect before I am able to freeze

the name of trees so short they should be shrubs covering
homeless bodies resting atop remains of those long dead.
 

 
April Sojourner Truth Walker is a second year MFA candidate at Hollins University. She is currently working on a manuscript that interweaves the narrative of three slaves lynched in Dallas, Tx as the result of an 1860 fire, and how this piece of African American history has been preserved and disseminated in present day Dallas. Her work is forthcoming in The New Sound: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Art and Literature, the Cave Canem Anthology XIII: Poems 2012-2013, and Kalyani Magazine.

“This poem comes from Walker’s current creative project, which interweaves the narratives of three slaves lynched in Dallas, TX as a result of an 1860 fire. In particular, Walker’s poetry explores the preservation and dissemination of African American historical events. What’s more, her poetic approach explicitly takes up the unwieldiness of documentary poetics, which includes the trauma of remembering and the anxieties related to bequeathing and inheriting a local legacy of racialized violence. She uses the sources at hand—archives, family stories, &c.—to paint a present-day landscape of Dallas that is littered and ignited by the horrors of the past.” — Geffrey Davis

Next issue features Chip Livingston.

Hafizah Geter

The first time I saw my father with no teeth

Was I 16? Was I
afraid?

Between Sensodyne & gums
he looked

so ashamed.
How do you save anyone?

-

By the sink, his teeth look like stars
pounded together.

Sunset pinks the Carolina sky.

-

I’m not worried

about money or what men do
in the dark. Like a moth frantic
at dusk, my body
is changing. Like my father
I look

in the mirror so long,
it gets hard
to hang up my clothes.
 

 
Hafizah Geter received her BA in English and Economics from Clemson University, and her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She is a South Carolina native currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Hafizah is a Cave Canem Fellow and was a semi-finalist for the 2010 “Discovery” / Boston Review Contest. Her poem “paula” received an Honorable Mention in RHINO’s 2011 Editors’ Prize. The recipient of a 2012 Amy Award from Poets & Writers, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in BOXCAR Poetry Review, RHINO, Drunken Boat, Columbia Poetry Review, New Delta Review, Memorious, Vinyl, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Hot Street, and Linebreak.

“I read the title of this poem and hear Roberta Flack’s warm, rapturous soprano crooning “the first time…ever I saw…” While the lyrics of the song go on to be cloyingly sentimental, Hafizah’s poem, albeit looking at a totally different kind of love, is emotionally complex and poignant, an emotional depth the song reaches via Flack’s iconic vocalization and interpretation, and a beautifully understated bass guitar. Artists venture down the road in a work and tend to veer either toward the trite or the cynical. It is difficult to stay the course and be so conscious of how we feel about how feel that we are able to come up with a line like this ‘How do you save anyone?’” — Makalani Bandele

Next issue features April Walker.

Anthony DiMatteo

dimatteo happiness wears no clothes

Beauty wears no clothes
and no offense meant to the statue
but liberty wears no clothes.

Imagine a large naked woman
welcoming people to New York.
How kind and trusting, how free.

But no ferry tours happiness
or death. If one knew in advance,
who’d buy a round trip ticket?

Neither one’s a style or an industry,
friend or enemy, more defections
than states. A state of non-being

exists only in math. Infections from
laughter or disease accidentally arise
from the perfection of things,

collateral damage but not
as in what warfare doles out.
Cancer cells don’t drink vodka,

launching drones from Florida.
Words don’t suffer on their way
to the period though letters look

like sardines packed into cans.
Dark humor afflicts only the living
because the butt of the joke can’t grin.

How crowded and full of crows
the shores of the dead, sea-glass
for eyes and see-through clothes.

Happiness too sits naked
on the beach. No sooner noticed
than gone, to put a towel on.
 

 
Anthony DiMatteo is the author of many essays, reviews and poems as well as of the first English translation of Shakespeare’s mythographer Natale Conti. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, his poetry has been seen roaming recent pages of Avatar Review, Front Porch, Smartish Pace, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. Articles and reviews can be found in Connotations, Early Modern Literary Studies, Notes and Queries, Renaissance Quarterly, Spenser Studies, and elsewhere. A reviewer for Choice and an associate editor of College Literature, DiMatteo stubbornly teaches the naked mysteries of art, literature and writing at the New York Institute of Technology. An avid solo-hiker and somewhat incompetent sailor, he happily lives on Long Island with his wife, the designer and pianist Kathleen O’Sullivan, and nine-year old son Michael, two dogs and a canary. His poem “Happiness Wears No Clothes” is from a manuscript Beautiful Problems to be published by David Robert Books later this year.

“Often turning to natural imagery, as well as surprising relations, DiMatteo uses the poetic space to gently (though boldly) scare out the emotional deceptions and intellectual inconsistencies that we sometimes live by, often seemingly not by choice. He does so, at first, to let what we already ought to know hang in the air—“Things don’t exist this way”—in effect, forcing his poems (and us along with them) to consider what must come next. While what DiMatteo does poetically after such disarming confrontations can differ, both in terms of his technique and his contemplations, his understanding of the stakes remains consistent: to carve out for us “an utter silence of understanding.” — Geffrey Davis

Next issue features Hafizah Geter.

Next issue features

Jim Pascual Agustin

Parable of the Stupid Man by Jim Pascual Agustin 2(1)

I drew a monster out of a well
thinking it would fit in a bucket
of water and stay there.

As it saw moonlight it clung
to the rope, hauled itself out
onto the ground, dappled by shadows
of branches and leaves.

It stared at me, eyes round
as coins in a sweaty palm.

I should never have given it a name.
Now it calls only for me.
 

 
Jim Pascual Agustin writes in Filipino and English. He grew up in Manila, the Philippines during the years of the Marcos dictatorship. He moved to Cape Town, South Africa in 1994. His early books are Beneath an Angry Star (Anvil, Manila 1992) and Salimbayan (Publikasyong Sipat, Manila 1994). In 2011, the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in Manila simultaneously released two of his books, Baha-bahagdang Karupukan (poetry in Filipino, shortlisted for the 2012 National Book Awards in the Philippines) and Alien to Any Skin (poetry in English). Agustin’s poetry has been published in anthologies, publications or e-zines in the US and the Philippines. Sound Before Water is to be published alongside his new poetry collection in Filipino, Kalmot ng Pusa sa Tagiliran, also by UST Publishing House.

“More often than not, Agustin’s poems reflect our troubled times. His poetry–how could it be otherwise–is often covertly (and sometimes overtly) political, razor sharp, often lyrical. Most of his poems seem to be positioned outside our every-day experience, our comfort zone. Agustin’s work takes me into alien territory only to show me that I was there all along.” – Rose Mary Boehm

Casandra Lopez

What Body Can Bear_CLopez(1)

Because Cousin calls you Brother, she drove–
Arizona to California, through fogged night and rain.

Highway is grey-eye shock. She found us

in hospital waiting room, our mouths numb.
Brother in ICU, chest split down
                          center, your children tattooed above

your heart. Cousin said her goodbyes. Now there is something
growing within her. She tells me it’s the lymph nodes,

such heavy cells, multiply–body might break
                          her. I taste the thick of her words

and think of your name
                          stretched across her back, in rays

of light and clouds. Cousin’s inked flesh is a pain
she can bear. What can I bear?

I ask: Do you remember

Baja summers, hot salt beaches, our sanded
hair, or Tahoe’s green mountains, that quick stream,
                          the rush nearly carrying Brother

away? Cousin, says she remembers it all, each summer,
                          a cell, budding through tumor.

 

 
Casandra Lopez is a Chicana, Cahuilla, Luiseño and Tongva writer raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire. She has been selected for residencies with the Santa Fe Art Institute and the School of Advanced Research where she was the Indigenous writer in residence for 2013. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in various literary journals such as Potomac Review, Hobart, Acentos Review, Weber, CURA, McNeese Review, and Unmanned Press. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and is a founding editor of As/Us: A Space For Women Of The World.

“Lopez often writes without the use of articles in her sentence structure. She uses this approach to emphasize a traumatic or emotional experience, as though she has returned to a time and group of people in her life, where the English language is spoken in pidgin which is very common in Indigenous and colonized peoples throughout the world.” — Jerry Brunoe

Next issue features Jim Pascual Agustin.

Lizz Huerta

littlesonghuerta

I am Pavlov’s dog, lifting my leg whenever you enter the room,
your hands are perfect clichés on the symmetry you praise,

my place, it seems, is beneath you, coitus interruptus thrice daily for ten,
diminishing returns each time, we are willing acolytes to clarity.

clavicles against the broken bed we tied together with shoelaces, we greet
another morning, my hat off to the patron saint of tailors, sewed as I am to your intentions;

disputing the spiritual hierarchy of brown people, your silly followers,
my urban tribal girls back home light candles, urging me to exploit it.

I dig how you portray our future as former strangers, though now
you would have me reduced to a mouth, a pair of dirty feet in your bed, a sleep thief

eager for another invented language of what we don’t say-
the dirty photographs that could make us famous.

tell me how it is when you feed your animals, do they lean against your thigh as I?
in one of my mother’s religions I could have marked your feet as you slept,

made you my goose, but I am not young enough to want that kind of devotion.
if I were a romantic I wouldn’t enjoy dismantling satisfaction but

not so long ago I was done so hard that when I stood up all of the romance
fell out of my body. because of the blood, I never noticed.

still, there is something luminous in our given moments; it is perhaps because
we are human and brilliant in our inconsistencies that I have found you irresistible.
 

 
Lizz Huerta is a poet and fiction writer living in San Diego Her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA and The Latent Print,Toe Good Poetry, and The Portland Review. She is currently working on a fantasy novel.

“Huerta begins this poem with a tendency leaning on erotica, but ends with a confession: terrible things have happened to us, but we have moments, beautiful moments together.” — Jerry Brunoe

Next issue features Casandra Lopez.

Nicole Higgins

higgins_anacrusis

I take my place among the cut, gilded guilted and gutted in the pickup. It’s a kind of down payment, this ever-answerable saying toward inevitable sunrise. Old 18th Street eye rub and I wonder if the stomachache’s really mine, second-guess the long labor of pursed lips. Everybody knows if you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn but my throat is full of blue, so Lord, let me be birdlike—build me a nest of yes.
 

Nicole Higgins teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and serves as Poetry Editor for Hyphenate. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Georgia and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops fellow, she has poems appearing or forthcoming in Natural Bridge, Passages North, Vinyl and elsewhere.

“Ok, I confess, I am guilty of loving the prose poem. It is so much effort put forth in breaking line (maybe just a contemporary condition), and effort is a poor use of energy in art-making. I feel Anacrusis pulsating. It packs so many ideas and petite musics in such a compact space. I hardly know what it is about, but I am surprised by its moves, delighted by its rhetorical verve, and captivated by its prospects. What a strange little poem caught red-handed doing its own strange little thing.” — Makalani Bandele

Next issue features Lizz Huerta.

Frances Badgett

negative_space
 

This is not the flash of light against the ink black sky. This is not

the key perfect for its lock, nor the chair in the window, sun through the slats.

You did not find the one word that meant that solar storms

bring us auroras, you did not say that we were veins buried in the leaves.

There was no sigh between us as heavy as the first heaving of the wave

slicking our feet with foam and salt. You did not say tears or pain. You

touched

gently, this hand. The clash of gulls overhead, suspended.

The dry house, scrubbed, feels us enter, the air shifts. You do not break.

You spread such long, capable fingers on the keys and played the echo,

long and slow, but not the song.
 

 
Frances Badgett is the fiction editor of Contrary Magazine (www.contrarymagazine.com). She lives in Bellingham, Washington with her husband and daughter. She has just completed her first novel, Pale Mother.

“Badgett’s writing in part investigates what she calls elsewhere “the accident of perfection.” This enigmatic goal seems all the more difficult and yet all the more alluring when it involves making connections with another. This poem, however, deftly demonstrates how such unions sometimes require trading out idyllic affirmations and choosing instead to feel along our absences, especially those absences shaped by and reverberating with desire.” — Geffrey Davis

Next issue features Nicole Higgins.

Andrew McMillan

smokes_1

a nun holds a woman while she weeps on a bench

riot police                  men against a wall

pastries                      the hot   still day

pool                            body cutting water

and the journey in the lift with the boy who curved

out of trunks             not looking at his chest

his stomach               watching the numbers go down

the floor                      kids practising drums outside

unseen except their heads and so the evening is their sound

and their sticks

the warmth of bodies share a pulse that comes from sharing oxygen

music                                the floor is shaking like a truck

unknown track               leaving       too dark to see

streets                               full of orange blossom

directing the groom to his wedding

apples                                the size of five apples

broken language             getting by on basics

pointing                            not naming

I recognise your choice of song by the key change

in the air’s vibration

people walking to the beach as though called back to water

heat of two suns             light of moon      conversation

roof                                    my face on the street somewhere

cablecar sun                     long drags through the streets

dogs who look exhausted with the dusty length of days

my face                              watching the sky where it’s laid

my face                              a thousand drunk expressions of surprise

my face                              in stranger’s hands

the boy said his friend’s snoring was a plane taking off

the dusk’s soft landing
 

 
Andrew McMillan was born in South Yorkshire in 1988. His poetry is collected in three pamphlets, most recently the moon is a supporting player (Red Squirrel Press, 2011) and protest of the physical (Red Squirrel Press, November 2013). A selection of his work can also be found in the Salt Book of Younger Poets and his poetry has been featured on Radio 4′s Today Programme. He lectures in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University

“McMillan writes from, and through, a deeply sensuous, physical poetic. Influenced by Kenneth Patchem and the later poetry of Thom Gunn, McMillan’s work makes a virtue of openness and a modified, far-from-naive romanticism.” — John Clegg

Next issue features Frances Badgett.