4.1. Matthew Porubsky: 3 poems, video

The Molting Series

I.

The old form:
a fading camouflage
ungripping in slow folds.
It lingers as a gray shadow
surrounding each inch,
itching the sketched newness beneath.


II.

Pieces are prepared to fall.
This shrugged progression glances
the graft of worn and known demeanor,
casting off the familiar
feathers, hair, skin, and scales
issuing a lilting glint of the shifting.


III.

Severance levies a toll:
scales rip like a tooth from gums,
skin has a hint of rot,
hair wads in rolls from licks,
feathers silently serrate away.
These slides of pain proof the completion.


IV.

Bludgeons are the strongest coercion
to ply away the surface layer.
Stones and scratching house the relief,
abetting tears and flaking.
Each hard rub and grit scrapes
the escape held contained.


V.

Skims of the peeling image startle:
An aura of flaking mange,
a shroud of decaying linen,
a field ashed black after burning.
All patches unthread uniquely
grotesque, revealing the cycle of revival.


VI.

Shucked husks of the past
pile pallid in an abandoned vision.
The forged physique, inside out at last,
splendors smooth with shine and strength,
seasoned through paths and phases
staged body-tight to creased to sleeved to shed.

A Quiet Drink

I keep your brain in a glass jar.
It's what you wanted; you and I together.

I always loved your mind.
After every week of composing in your den
we would come here for a drink.
You would hum your new tunes,
keeping time with your hands,
as we sat at our table.
Your excitement was contagious
and you revealed the mazes of your mind
to me in music and I was awestruck-silent.
Your music became mine.
I was all yours. I am all yours.

Before I leave the house,
I spray your jar with your cologne
and polish the glass invisible and smooth.
Your records play softly from the den.
I dress in the dress you loved,
the dress that one night compelled you
to lean across the table and pull me close to kiss.
The one that makes us both feel alive.
I place your brain jar on your side of the table.
I sit across from you still
lost in the mazes of your mind,
humming your songs to myself,
watching the sweat bead
on your glass of whisky on the rocks.
I finish my drink first and fast
then savor each watered sip of yours
as we both float softly surrounded in liquid,
wrinkled and waiting in our current states.

With the last sip of your drink
you reach a glow in the bar lights,
glistening with the beauty of life
like the choruses and refrains,
codas and crescendos of what you composed.
I hear our music and I am yours.

This is what you always wanted.
I lean across the table and pull you close.

John Wilkes Booth

This grace of
murder renders
me immortal
and as a spectre
I’ll rise from
this scene shining
with red speckles
on my white,
white hands.

About Matthew Porubsky:

I was awarded the Henry and Jessie Jacobs Prize in Poetry from the University of Kansas in 2002, and my first book of poetry, voyeur poems, published by Coal City Press, was the winner of the Kansas Authors Club Nelson Poetry Book Award in 2006. My poetry has been published or is forthcoming in poetry journals including Coal City Review, freefall, The Journal, Little Balkins Review and Flint Hills Review. My documentary film work was awarded a major grant from the Kansas Humanities Council and the Topeka Capital-Journal nominated me Notable Kansan of the Year in Arts and Entertainment in 2009. I live in Topeka where I work as a writer/photographer for an arts and entertainment monthly, seveneightfive magazine, and as a freight conductor for the Union Pacific Railroad.

issue 3: all things good and lovely

abhimanyu kumar singh

howie good

susan sonnen

ruth webb

simone martel

travis mcdonald

Issue #3 is a sprawling tapestry. Upon reviewing, we find few mutual markers. Is that the editors job, we wonder, to construct a frame to contain so much diversity? If this is the case then we're in for some failure here. We're not quite sure what an editor actually does, other than being the one guilty of selecting stuff that expresses a particular taste stirred by fluctuations of mood and appetite.

On one hand there's the pull of aesthetic consistency, on the other the push of sleepy-headed conformity. That ghastly concept of brand-building, how to stand out, find your 'niche', to contain and preserve something that by its design is quite flighty. How did the turtle break his own shell?

Poetry, in particular, we like to think, continually attempts to test the boundries, in their instance, the boundaries of language. A pursuit of some objectivity, however unlikely, simply by refusing to let the dust settle, by complicating our understanding rather than purifying it, by stubbornly moving ahead, shedding its skin, building up and tearing down.

Compare the tired rhetoric of politics or it's pink-hued brother advertising. Eventually the dust comes to settle in your lungs.

In this issue 5 poets and 1 prose/story/flash writer whose contribution, we think anyway, borders in its plotlessness on the poetical, round in shape rather than linear, continually rearranging its departure.

Abhimanyu Kumar Singh's poems strikes us with the bounding tempo of beatnik with its tendency toward stark and personal sincerity while meditating on and coloring in ancient subject matter (see the first poem, "a minor") without falling to reverence. We suppose a lineage of sorts can be traced from Whitman to Lorca to Ginsberg and beyond.

Howie Good's poems is a different kind of strange. The imagery is dense, populated, within which the "I" (the writer's various extensions) is found hiding out ("I hide behind a bush"), a passive observer and victim of his own unpausing imagination. Everything is concentrated, and comes at you in ultra-rapid. We sense an influence here from cinema, a director framing his shots, mysterious in their lack of context and conclusion, as if left on the editing board. It is both comical and at times, unnerving.

Susan Sonnen's first poem "All Things Good and Lovely" is a most devestating account made all the more so by the narrator's telling, recalling a news reader whose objectivity relies on her perfect posture, turning from camera 1 to camera 2 as she moves with appropriate pause from a story of a dead child to a hot dog eating contest. Of course, this is not a news story, however, but a poem, each line break falling like a thud. The following poems become increasingly personal.

We like Ruth Webb's one poem, similarly, taking aim, seemingly, at a personal close-at-hand experience. It makes us wonder to what extent "beauty" holds poetry hostage as a form of expression. How do we write about the ugly things, or even things quite mundane, or feelings that border on self-indulgence or the sentimental. By refining them, 'transcending' them, into something quiet, startling, beautiful? Perhaps, but we think that this process also have an impulse to dehumanize its subject, intellectualize it, or in other words, make it into an object, another thing in the world.

We (nothing against our other poets) are quite enamoured with Simone Martel's two pieces. We find them absolutely gutting, in part, we think, by their seeming simple makeup. The first, a list of 15 birthday's, sparsely but distinctly detailed. A life and relations that could easily fill a novel are here instead revealed in a couple of swift brush-strokes. The second story picks up, in a way, where the list ends, and goes about describing with equal brevity the relation between a mother and a son, a daughter and a father, uncensored, and unadorned.

The issue ends with a more uplifting series of poems by Travis McDonald. They recall to some degree Howie Good's ultra-rapid and peculiar imagery. Snap-shots, if you will, the absurdist and his palette of concrete. The I-eye of each poem is continually confronted with some trivial revelation or other. He's unaware, rejected, ignored and ultimately beaten up by an ape.

And hiding behind a mime doesn't help much.

It never really does.

Yes, such, we think, is the predicament of any aspiring poet.

Thanks to Rose Carson, Jennifer Tomaloff, Mary Oswald and Poets Cornered for providing artwork for this issue. We're quite short on art, photography, etc. so any submission of this kind is greatly appreciated.

3.6. Travis Macdonald: 5 poems

If Coleridge Could See Us Now

Later in the night, not long
after the clowns left

offended, we were
all talking

about the albatross
of our avant-garde

but you kept going
on and on about Kubla Kahn…



Dialogue is Difficult

"Tennis without rackets
looks kinda like catch.

She told me twice over
green martinis. And I agreed again

not because she was right
but because my beer was

warm or empty or
maybe it was scotch..."



The Circus

Knowing that if
it came to fisticuffs

the ape could take me
apart like cardboard

I ran and hid behind the mime
whose so-called wall

didn't help
much.



The Bachelor

I had a dream I held
the World

Record for single longest
nipple hair.

Everyone wanted me
for their parties and bar mitzvahs.

Everyone
but you.



Hormones in Milk Make Life Hard for Pedophiles

She says she wants me
to love her

like they do
in the movies

and for a moment
I think she means

I should pretend, but then
she brings out the cock-ring.

Travis Macdonald's first book, The O Mission Repo, is available from Fact-Simile Editions (www.fact-simile.com) and his second collection, N7ostradamus was released by BlazeVox books in late 2010. Basho's Phonebook, an e-chap of experimental translations is available at E-ratio. He currently lives, writes and looks for work in Philadelphia.

and introducing...

More poets cornered can be found here.