and up, sends his crown
through the crystal ceiling.

like the clouds are liquidating
their almost angels. blood and water.

brings down the sky, shower
of teeth. an unexpected gomorrah.

garrett dawson

Just got a job,
but still broke as before
but now with less time.
I need to do more wrong things
since the wrong plans are the
only plans which ever work out.
People walk away when I speak
so I might as well shout,
towns are made for cars now
so these legs are unsure of themselves.
It takes so long to get anywhere -
might as well lie down
and let hunger eat itself.

(let hunger eat my legs
let hunger eat my arms
let hunger eat my head
and the skull inside
the brain the eyes the jaw the lips
hunger will eat my body
and when this body is gone
hunger will eat my bed
hunger will eat my room
hunger will never stop
until a baby cries
then it might stop)

I woke up in a hospital
I thought I saw animals all around me
bears, giraffes, transparent but alive.
I blinked and heard gunfire downstairs.
Then you found me and fed me some water,
it is good you never called me back -

I don’t mean to bring you down,
but I probably will anyway.
Hanging out by the water fountain
watching ants pour out of the sidewalk
I look up and all of a sudden
I can see into the sun and
I see particles of light
not yet exposed to
our contagious darkness
down here.

christopher bullock

you—in that dirty, yellow tank top,
the once white fabric holding in
the bronzed body caked in grit and dust.

And was it her—that lovely skinny thing—
who kissed your neck, her flowing brown hair
falling down around her? (And how she’d look

when it was raining—hands in pockets,
looking up to God for it was spring
and indeed time for resurrection.)

And what about those times when
she threw off all her clothes and danced
naked and wild and howling?

Do you remember how together you’d lie at night
in the back of a pick-up
parked exactly half-way between here and

Pueblo? And what of that one particular instant
when she looked at you
as if she wanted to scream, but she

swallowed and held it in and you swallowed
and asked nothing and so
nothing was said until dawn?

This—this existence of too much sun
and not enough drugs, food, sex
(what was it that was lacking?)—

this existence of the suntanned pauper king
and his 6 string pawn shop guitar,
this existence spent dwelling,

understanding the notion of sharing bodies—
it was not enough for any of us
and so we packed cardboard boxes,

dreamt of other horizons,
and dared to believe that what we didn’t need
we would leave behind.

christopher poore

garrett dawson

separate and ghostly perditions,
hallways of image and vastness-
both bright and terrible.

yours and mine own biological artifice
sees son-cast shadows that
eat imagination by the measure,
grind-and-tumble rapturous laughter,
jumps, so bacchic for the
crackling spaces in between.

robert cole-sackett

robert cole-sackett

a brother’s name,
exumed from foreign soil.
their numbered years next-

a sloppy list
on a cold sidewalk
that lines the border
between private enterprise
and public agony

i don’t see anyone praying

these lightly chalked epitaphs.
the snow will bury them
again tonight, the cold
will separate powder from cement,
offering up dust
to reverberating emptiness

melt water has never learned of letters,
will carry these names
into a deeper gutter

garrett dawson

robert cole-sackett

And as I rooted deep
in mediation,
shadows grew and shadow’d figures on the wall
became my distant, grudging host and legion,
eating at my hearts desire.
The curse that ate the later coming body
came the same as that which ate at
Lazarus’ flesh, and at the tomb’s gate swallowed up
the child that rested in the mother’s softening womb.
When these eyes bright-flashed at omens,
simple and unbending, telling of a passing life,
the child in ceremony sang
and bowed before the movement of the tepid knife.

Up in the hills
(precluding mounds of death and mountain),
parching for the swallowed crest,
the whorish sang of sex and Babylon,
and songs that sang of tasted lust passed by, in pace,
and carried on, so that the pious
gave me meaning,
there I lingered on.

And as the sage’s rustlling tampered,
beaten by the snow’s-bed falling,
the window filled became the saddened calling
for the green to go about its dying
and to fall about our paths.

robert cole-sackett

of your mother’s life.
segue from her mother
into you, mother

seems an endlessly repeating
field of vision.
snow on a television

what can you pull
from those drifts of emptiness

garrett dawson

unfolded fingers let loosen stoplights on a slow blink
a necklace of yellow teeth pulled from a meth head’s mouth
i was desparate for a dollar but forgot to check her bra
i folded fingers back up again, and lifted a sidewalk tile
shined a cellphone flashlight on worms and beetles.
(had to click the buttons to keep the screen lit,
heard a voice and said nothing until they hung up)

you can check the accuracy of a number by the phonebooks i have stacked in the bathroom,
the letter z is a hidden compartment hollowed out and glued solid.
a wedding ring shook around inside, bent at impossible angles
i switched it out with some wire and unlucky broken mirror parts
flushed the toilet, pulled up my pants, accidentally locked the door behind me

i held the ring in my sweaty hands and closed my eyes and let it guide me
walked in random directions until i found her, choking on peanut butter
McDonalds wasnt open yet, so she was doing what she needed to do -
i dropped the ring into her hand and said it was a great painkiller
(she said she didn’t take pills but i didn’t believe her
i could tell because i saw ghosts between the trees, spying on her flesh
since the dead want to take her over an experience weak life again)

somebodys alarm clock went crazy with loud talk radio
i stepped aside to let the sounds pass by
but a bus went by instead, the one i wanted to catch,
and i wondered if she would mind if i stayed there for an hour

(my mumbling facade, my blow dryed hair
i was getting wet again with sweat, giggling to myself once in while
over an old joke that doesn’t make much sense nowadays)

chris bullock

the family tree
from a water rotten acorn

it sows the blind ambiguity
of a man growing
out of something not completely whole

out of ground salted
with visions of god
with the goatish television

that tree be tangled
the branches hang
in empty space
isolated, apart, and forgetting…

grudgingly dropping their rotten fruit
at winter wind’s undeniable claim

the identical seed
a blackened forest of identical trees

garrett dawson

Oh well, I saw an old bird chewing on
a roadkill of macabre colors.
Oh well, I saw a little girl
sewing something on the swingset,
while the barbeque flirtations went inside
for uncomfortable sex in the pale bedrooms -
mattresses inflated on the floor.
A book about dinosaurs lay open
and the wind turned the pages.
When the wind was done reading
it just blew the book into the wall.

Footprints on homework:
that’s how I felt at that age,
or was I ever that age?
I don’t remember it.

The sun turned around and mooned us,
that’s how I knew it was night.
We covered our eyes and hoped
a vision of the holy ghost in our head
would light up the hallway with its gospel,
but I just saw my own fingers over my eyes
but I just saw the microscopic geometry
of my own breath, spreading out, evaporating.

She buried her flowers in the backyard,
made a grave and everything -
named each one twice, different names,
in case the first name was taken already.
The pots became storage for bubble gum wrappers
always useful for licking the old taste off later,
The evening is a parade of grownups
they hope they’ll enjoy the day before it ends -
the fragrance of fingerprints rising from
the kitchen counter where several small bugs
were born.

chris bullock

ginsberg, how many times
do you revise your stuff

poets, how many

paz, you prolly revise
your poems too. did

rimbaud, rock and roll
i think, and gay

you too lorca, got blasted

how would you poets write
beneath cellular bombardment?! New Radio

garrett dawson

garrett dawson

garrett dawson

slowly so slowly,
laconic AND lexicon

sipping at the migratory
world through
(wearing eyeglasses)
(that are just fucking superb)
eyes and ears

poets writing to saw >>>
what IMA saying… instead
of writing to MOVE. because

capatalization| |we, as policy,
is a scream| |are polite
now, this day| |to the rabble

writing tinder rags

garrett dawson

it’s a strange thing to have a hero, or plural hero
and stranger to see idol glossed or gleamed or maybe gutted
by the world… ‘cept i (I) would never have known
of my heroes if their guts weren’t strewn all about

i’m down to see this

one fast move or i’m gone: kerouac’s big sur

One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, takes the viewer back to Ferlinghetti’s cabin and to the Beat haunts of San Francisco and New York City for an unflinching, cinematic look at the compelling events the book is based on. The story unfolds in several synchronous ways: through the narrative arc of Kerouac’s prose, told in voice-over by actor and Kerouac interpreter, John
Ventimiglia (of HBO’s The Sopranos)

america’s arterial blood, sponged off the hollywood/everywhere asphalt

time! with your words and think
them. instruction from god
and his bone dust and the brick

made of mud and straw
superhuman or anti-human, syllabus
of souls. the rod, the vertebrae
stacked blocks of memory
the forcible forgetting

garrett dawson

sarah avant