Oil production shrinks, corporations only secure / cash flows in downstream oil. A downward spiral / The fat red balloon has burst / The pink scoop of strawberry ice cream has fallen / out of the cone and melted on boiling hot asphalt
Ousia
Two poems by Sevda Akyüz
armies clash by night
peace is only ever an interbellum blink
a mere footnote in the battleground
especially in these parts, armies clash by night
no amorous remedy for that, master arnold
when refugee babies are washed ashore
or the indignity of a naked dead body dragged through mud
a desperate person in self-immolation
a tearing cow on her way...
Three poems by Ümit Güçlü
GENERAL MOTORS
gm 2010 annual revenue: 6.172 billion usd,
wikipedia
you got yourself a new motorbike
although you didn’t need it.
you have no money.
no worries we’ll loan it to you.
what should you be for the rest of your life
if not our slave
promise we’ll help you if you can’t pay us back
and then if...
Scheggia by Alexander Booth
The story begins like this. No. It does not. There is no story. Or, they shoveled a load of speed and shuddered toward the coast. Saltpans. Sparse groupings of pine. Dust. A bar at the side of the road. A woman beneath a tattered palm of tarpaulin, cigarette and sunburnt fingers. Vegetables, assorted fruit in plastic buckets. Flies.
He sat with the body for almost ten...
Excerpt from “The Communicating Vessels” by Friederike Mayröcker
Translated by Alexander Booth
And now we’re standing, and I noticed that even with great attention and inasmuch as I had turned to my reading with great attention, that is, took up every word, every phrase, with the greatest devotion, I could not stop unexpected images from arising in my head and changing into other new images, that is, the images...
Three Poems by Richard Peabody
Nimrod builds a higher tower
this incarnation.
Bigger. Better. Badder.
Crows bring trinkets.
Suits shake hands.
At the Roy Chalk building
in Georgetown a staircase
circles down and around
into the belly of the beast.
Two Poems by Jackie Braje
A belated witness
tells what they saw, what they didn’t—
see the verses all lined up
and shot, out back, one by one;
how they fell into the lake which
was there for claiming them.
And the dog...
Three Poems by Sarah Kain Gutowski
Perhaps you are like the rabbit
outside the fence, trembling in place,
having just escaped the hound’s
frustrated advances. You blend
Four Poems by Len Lawson
We live on a graveyard arrowhead
where the Gullah battle haints and hags
and spirits of indigenous tribes
hover to claim what is theirs.
Four poems by Terese Svoboda
The old comedienne moves her mouth, she does her stretches, her deadpan- without-so-much-as-a-twitch, and she times it. [It’s all about timing]. Old means she’s timed a lot [she may have timed out]. She always wakes early with perfectly useable patter that doesn’t have a story behind it. An existential joke, tailless they call it in the business.
Four poems by Kathrin Bach
I wake up at five in the morning /
because there is a rope moving up my neck /
an eel that swims up to my father and back again /
in the bathroom mirror my eyes are his /
Four poems by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
TILT
TV anchors gab about binge-
watching, riots, and tattoos.
The machine has a boo boo.
We are in some deep doo doo.
Blue jays peck red berries,
91 degrees and I am a sap.
Jupiter’s ma pushes old news:
It’s more fun with someone.
Okay, steeple chaser, let’s see
your stuff. Here’s a hot ticket
for the...