Simon Perchik

*

Ankle deep and these stars
expect you to come by
stomp out their flames

the way each sky
keeps its place in line
-even before there was rain

you needed streams
and slowly through your legs
the heart you have left

lets go these footsteps
shining in water
as if here is the fire

still beating as nights
as hair and lips
and overflowing.



*

Bone dry and the wall
pulls this frame closer
held up, evidence

the glass that's missing
once was water -proof
the sea that hid this shell

is just now reaching you
as emptiness, the kind
you can still find in a room

circling the Earth for moonlight
for a place that's safe
though your jaws stay open

make room for a single cliff
gaining on the others
without salt or shoreline.

Jon Conley


Report from a Hammock, with a Peach, Outside of the Library


I saw a floating sheep and there you were       nestled in mohair

peeking out at some sky                               some cake-filled sky

cut from the muscles                                    of a woman


Drive Thru


with the starter fluid sucked out and the explosions

we tweak while            we wait

you put the car in drive

and I hull

full foot force forward



into James Drive with its perverts and explosions

sails out and whales    

when from underneath the sea

the baby cries and breaks

into a rash

j/j hastain


From Luci: a Forbidden Soteriology

2.

It is a poetic skill to be able to say and do what you mean at the same time. Is a poetic sense dominantly human or angelic? I am not meaning to put these two at odds, I just wonder. I know that angels don’t move by strictly human skill (or by human skin for that matter) but move instead by indelible passion: devotional extremes. I am devoted to and by embrasure, coordinates: a conjuring that conveys by amplifying or dimming brightness.

Trust the image as you see it. Trust the image, please. An image is a beneficial repertoire of fragments.