Body Voices- Kevin Reid

'Body Voices' by Kevin Reid is available to purchase here

Antony Hitchin

Mindgasm!

Consumer consume me!
helmet tasty standing
desolate
navel
stiff
wet drill of pomegranate slit
AK47  splattersplurge lightning spastic gleaming kiss
I shill for capitalists!

bomb spew enema gusts of mama
we hyena nude got green gamma
glitterati semensparkle mindgasm!
cockomnipotency decided
cuntliqourcream
let us dream 
celestial fires deep magma steam

Hybrid

the unequal past 
  refashioned
becoming abstraction
- hybrids -
physical impulses
 textual bodies' innerouter improvisations...

cat whisker caresses
perpetual
     movement
             a continuum

stress swollen mammalian quick gesticulations 
     philosophic truth of a howl cry unwritten...

 hot urgent tongues
secret language sparkling intimacy

the shapeless articulation of discarded harlequin memories.  

Scarab

forlorn
fingertips
embalmed
- miasmic -
liquor
nipple
sucked
dark
narcissist
scribbling
scarab!
 fingering
vermillion
moist
prayer
petals
bleeding
curious
alien
nectar
silk
pure
land
puckered
relish
buttered
drunk
musk
pantheon
tongue
margherita 
belly-f
            l
           o
           p
slick
primus

Guerrilla [cut-up]

postmodern

avant-garde?

currency and prices white collar police media malaria

mutate birth word

transmute /slash/ touch

blue rictus

war seeded in your committed persona non grata

know dada?

bonuses

fridge magnets

constabulary corrosive

slogan furred excrement

corporate uniforms email /text

merchandise merc semtex sex

social shit golden shower

militia - we guerrilla arbiters!

corpses cloning
manufactured middle-class larval revisionists
conservative suits vultures boys club enema carbonate fizz

your koi carp is dead


Chemical Research Department of Human Behaviour [cut-up]

is capitalism he before history or colour of his nuclear family western straight-hold a memory of predictable patterns in cum-waves his cock stronger your electrifying body this system craving defeat agents with memory or heart sticky glossed primitive sheep-dog can his arm political-control your entry?! of come terminal eyes lips mouth pleasure see you

not good you see his needs their love despair besotted by brains business fuck worship of him drown in your vaginal secretions odour his victims' erratic eyes random all out chemical research department of human behaviour

equals intuition? morning cock-head despotism? damn! you're always of hearts parasite? literal and incorporeal sound barriers announcing explorer of the pentagon

the pleasure of her elasticity full

A. D. Hitchin is a somewhat heretical purveyor of poetry and prose. His work utilising the cut-up method has been of particular note, with his cut-up poetry being discussed in the academic text 'Shift Linguals: Cut-Up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present (Postmodern Studies)', as well as the Textual Revolutions Conference at the University of Stirling in 2009. Numerous websites and magazines have also showcased his poetry and short fiction, including 3AM,  BlazeVox and ditch. Hitchin's debut 'Messages to Central Control' was published by Paraphilia books in 2011. You can find him at: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6542961.A_D_Hitchin 

Matthew Pfaff

Anxiety

half-crescent lens: a cinematic device. we could say it recreates

the phenomenology of vision. the idea of a heart

in my chest, like an automaton or mollusk. 

There is a second paradox

behind the first; anxiety is the drive

to master the automatism 

of the body; that is the first paradox.

The second is much like the first: behind anxiety’s horror

at its powerlessness to control the heart

Is the further horror

it recognizes in its own compulsions as

unwilled: Gazing longingly 

at its own grotesque 

reflection.

 

COLUMN

Piercing charred, tooth

Barrel gun-black – stutt-

Erring bullets braced for

Tongue, staggered, re-

Leased: tongue to teeth

To lips to breathe: word

Centered, ground-work,

Corner-stone sound of:

Ringing through throngs 

Of bleach-black building,

Cemetaries of molten g-

Ray, sun decay, dust-ache

Dirt-bark, sound: these

Leaves of breath break O

Ver me, this branch (syn-

Tax) this song (dip-thong)

This beam (morpheme):

A gray arch of particles a

Particular wave of sound:

Decays, decay: the curv-

Ing line of stone horizon,

The bulbous dome of me

tronome: a clock is struck

inside a truss: a plastic fa

ce erased in space.

 

The Ghost in the Machine

Tangerines, take three. action—

 

i.

 

inside the shroud

of ribmeat beating

tight with chest

and sheets, the sweat

between the breast and heart

that bleeds aloud

in sleep:

 

inside the central

meadow, ringed by archaic

towers:

 

inside the blue-white

rage of the temple’s

core, the nuclear

pulse of cosmic

fire, the heat

of invisible

iron:

 

sleep, sweet fire:

                           holy and echo.

 

ii.

rage-white petals tight

in a stamen-drum:

             inside an ear-arch beating in time

with fire:

  

my shapely body-

hearts, my love that bleeds

on the carpet – my shush-

white whirrings

of clutter, my odd hat-

like eloquence destroyed

by the fact

of the mutter:

 

word-shaped and

invisible, you smash apart

an apartment.

 

iii.

 

gurgle-turn to the center

of nerves to the pop

of pleasure and the synaesthetic

number:

 

nine times nine, a time

and times and a half

times Time:

 

clutch-stutter strapped

to a lemon, a fur-

 

shaped petal

of longing: tooth material, 

                    spirit.         

 

a hard white bone of

animal substance:

 

iv.

 

anxiety-

chested heart stem, stamen-

ripe furnace

of blood:

 

you open me

with fullness, you peel me apart

with the rain.

 

v.

 

there is a darkness

that knows

no lips

 

passages of sand, ache-white

gurgles of prose. 

 

vi.

 

dark hole, darling soul, into which

we flutter:

 

vii.

 

these shards of

lines that stick

in me, these pieces

of the page (and

 

all we

are is

creatures

 

of a day)

 

viii.

 

your skin-and-bones

is all alone

 

your skin-and-

bones is

all

ix.

if my whisper could rush out

to you, and return, a ghost,

to me (like the shuttle whirs

through threads, or the tiny finger

through the machine)

or if i, from within this mouth

of fire, from between these blood-

bright electrons of

teeth, or through this lattice-

work of ribs and 

meat, could reach—but no: 

this body, dark, too

dark to ever

breach.

x.

cut

waiting for rain

i’m waiting for a white hot bright 

that carves apart, or for a gun like 

violent cherries to burst apart my, 

snowflakes in the. snowflakes in the. 

my in the angel of my . 

again again again again again again:

a burst of rain settles on my head where a lot of stuff is breaking apart in the waters where the city waits and sleeps like a giant cow. a giant water sings in the rivers and waits in the giant lake where .

my desiring-machines want candy. “that was a 

moses to my

mother,” said the

man with socks to

oprah. 

ok then finally go to sleep already.

i’m waiting again for the .

always i am waiting.

will you ever finally come to me?

or will you leave me here with nothing?

when i break apart for you,

when i flutter apart in spheres, through milky light,

and through the petals of your dew, 

when i come to the black, pitch place where space waits,

when i at the edge stare down at you,

and palpitate in the doorway – 

then will you rise up / in me, a testimony of fire? 

then will you give me a rock that no one knows? 

then will you finally write my name?

there is something terrible

in your presence. there is an awful

tic in the throat, the hands a nest of pinions,

my ribs a cardboard canister. 

when i burst in you will your fire

explode in the tenseness of space? 

in this bright-white place where time

is tangled around my fingers?

i stretch them out but they snap back /.

will you explode in an emptiness of /

black dew where a heavy rain

is up, and up, and away?

when i condense in a striated black and purple marble,

when my entire being is a blossom of flame,

where time waits,

tangled in my fingers?

when my fingers are a fan of purple fires,

and my face a spark of amber,

when the tenseness is finally

an exploding purple ladder

and the monotony of 

Being hiccups in a bright-white, a spherical slash of ice

and the ashes crash apart my mouth in waves of violet

sunshine, then will your / 

lovely / then will your  

lovely radiance cut me? then will your

fire, a face of rain? –

will your face is a / burst of/ ?

will then your, / lovely –?

will then your

a bright white burst of =  

M. Pfaff is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature, currently completing a thesis on “postmodernist classicism” in innovative verse, titled “Strange New Canons: Classical Reception at the Margins in 20th Century Poetics.” His translations of Greek lyric poetry received the Platsis Prize for Work on the Greek Legacy in 2009, and his poems and translations are beginning to appear in publications such as RHINO, Prick of the Spindle, Counterexample Poetics, Otoliths, and indefinite space.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Auden in the mirror – after The Fall of Rome

Pummeled by waves, the piers are
the field; in a lonely rain
trains lash. Abandoned ones
fill the mountain caves. Outlaws

grow fantastic gowns. The evening
pursues agents of the Fisc
through defaulters absconding with tax
of provincial towns. The sewers

send magic of private rites
to sleep; the temple prostitutes
keep literati, all the
friends imaginery.

May Cato, cerebrontic
ancient, extol the disciplines;
Marines are muscle bound, but
pay for food and mutiny.

Warm bed holds Caesar’s double,
a clerk unimportant to
work, like my writes. I do not
form officially on pink

pity with wealth, or unendowed
legs with little scarlet birds
eggs sitting on their speckled
city; flu-infected, each eye

elsewhere, vast, together,
moves across herds of reindeer
golden moss of miles and miles
very fast and silently.


worshipping pan                                

half-lit by firelight
you reach for wine
as flames flick and fog writhes
along the river, while above
stars hum in a clear dark sky
serene as background overture –
your face like a warm stone on my thighs
here beside the river running honey,
spring flowers crowned around your head;
snowdrops and jonquils, sickle-moon-reaped
from a cottage garden a century gone, planted
even then for your hair, tonight
and the salty scent of you woven
with their perfume seeks me
through mint-weed and wood smoke;
beyond life, past birth-blood and
laying out you reach me – your eyes
along the length of my body
capture mine
and I fall
always again
for the first time.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman graduated from IIML Victoria University Wellington New Zealand with her MA in Creative Writing in 2011. Her work has appeared online (Danse Macabre, Black Mail Press, Turbine, 4th Floor, Swamp, Reconfigurations, The Electronic Bridge, Bone Orchard Poetry, poetryrepairs, Connotations, and eBook After the Danse) and in print (Mana magazine, Poets to the People; Poetry from Lembas Cafe 2009, The Readstrange Collection 2010, and two books, Numeralla Dreaming and Food 4 Thought 2012 ). She lives on the Kapiti Coast, is Editor/Pacific for Danse Macabre. Some more poems here: poetrysansfrontieres.weebly.com

Anthony Seidman

Book of Venom

Y no hallé cosa en qué poner los ojos

que no fuese recuerdo de la muerte.

--Quevedo

(And I could not set my eyes on anything

That was not a reminder of death)

Eat the poem from the spit.  Fat still splissing on coals and fragrant smoke.  Tear into the instant, your white teeth flashing.  Think of the captive Gorilla who can gesture signs for Hunger, Sadness, Kitty, but refuses to mate; or the dendrobatid frog—sapphire-blue and fatal to the touch—now trapped within a Plexiglas cage.  Bereft of such prey as centipedes, mites, beetles, the frog no longer distills the chemicals for its venom. A boy could catch it in cupped palms, and crush. 

                                                            **

Fitting that jellyfish in Spanish is medusa: tresses of the Gorgon sister like those tentacles adrift.  Attic women spoke lies as they labored at the loom: men whom she stalked, forced to gaze into her eyes and carbonized instantly, and villages burdened with widows and orphans.   Moon medusa, box-shaped medusa, Pacific Sea Nettle or Flower Hat Jelly, your red and purple afterimage is what I witness in my sleep…venomous carnations of the sea.  Fishermen and adventurers see the fabled sister arise from the slow drift, and they keep this secret. The sister is too beautiful to behold and not possess; men have begged for one night in the torch-lit grotto, even if ecstasy means necrosis.

                                                            **

Brown Recluse, crepuscular spider with dark violin shape on thorax, your leap and retreat unleash agile pizzicatos.  Obsidian-glisten of six eyes as you sear puss-rose into my sole…creature whose necrotic music vibrates from a strand of gossamer!

                                                            **

This crackling is not the neon flickering vermilion against my motel ceiling and walls.  This steam doesn’t rise from the drawn bath, nor is thinned with a couple aspirins and scald of tequila.  I know the source and ash…this is heat rising, while red fingers of the Santa Ana Winds flip pages, my book of venom.

                                                            **

Engine churning, I navigate this asphalt steppe.  Big rigs, straining with their hoard of flattened cars for the Pick Your Part.  Sedans for the ambitious to buy on exorbitant interest.  Strips from blow-outs…smoke on the horizon.  Puddles of phosphorescent oil and engine coolant.  Myself, in a Chevrolet, inhaling an artificial temperature of 70 degrees, breathing the toxins of a lifetime.  Lady Venom, is this another strain of your serotonins?

                                                            **

In Zapotec villages, Bidxáa sorceress transforms into fawn, heifer, filly…this is the cocoon stage.  Each month she then blossoms: woman with wide hips, breasts pendant and moonshine hair.  She bathes at midnight, her scent overpowering and narcotic like cinnamon, mezcal, fields after rain. River water glistens on her limbs while her skin simmers the thirst of adolescent boys. 

                                                            **

Lead-poisoning lit Caravaggio’s sword-blustering and madness.  Like Van Gogh, he ate colors, and his gaze crackling over the corpse of a Virgin prostitute also flickered as crow-shadows crossing the wheat-fields of Arles.

                                                            **

Your fangs, Lady Venom, in my jugular, yet you tease.  You inflict dry bite; no terminal dusk courses through my veins.  Only wrinkles…tedium of thinning hair…salve of liquor and pleasure in unbuckling my belt after steak.  But the bite immaculate is being honed,  curved scythe-bite.  When my breath rattles, will jaws of earth grind on my bones forever? Or will I return spawned from something neither water, fire, stone or air?

                                                            **

North American male lives to the age of 78; he gluts on fats, oils and sweets. By 21, he commences a career in charring his liver with ethanol.  Average height: five feet, nine inches.  Average of 144 orgasms per year.  Two children per household.  Blood-sugar spikes by the time he is fifty, and he peaks. 

Brazilian Wandering Spider’s lifespan: two years.  Hunger distilled, it hunts nocturnal, bent on envenomating grasshopper, mouse, lizard.  Unlike the stray bullets or disastrous atom bomb of man, spider need only inject a milligram into human flesh in order for victim to experience loss of muscle control, edema, death by asphyxiation. 

                                                            **

Our protagonist awakes at 6:00 a.m. and showers.  Mirror fogged, he wipes it and shaves, avoiding the gaze of his own eyes. Slaps aftershave on his neck and cheeks, winces from the astringent’s sting.  In the kitchen, he peels an orange and sips bitter coffee.  An innocuous ache at the base of his spine.  Dressed in suit and tie, he boards a trolley car and stares out the moving window: school boys dragging satchels, proprietors opening cafés and kiosks, the pointed breasts and heels of a young woman clicking hurriedly across the Reforma.  Once at his desk, he looks over the documents awaiting him, signs off on funds for used textbooks to be distributed to rural schools.  Yawning, he hears the clacking of typewriters.  Doors slam or dryly shut.  He opens the top desk drawer, takes out a file and, with red pencil, makes corrections…crosses out an entire page…chuckles…it’s the first time he has emitted a sound this morning.  He inserts crisp sheet of paper in his Underwood, and his thoughts glow, catching fire. The ache subsiding, he works from 8:52 until noon: hendecasyllables, glistening clarity of water.  Working title:  Death Without End. 

                                                            **

Unable to fall asleep, I study Blake’s Ghost of a Flea which shone before him: stalwart and strutting, eye-balls peeled, black tongue like rattlesnake’s sniffing heat. Hours later, I awaken drenched in nightmare; this phantom flea which hosted Y. pestis and gluttonous Death will curse the viewer across ten generations.

Encroaching on our fondest purlieus, a medieval dusk spreads.  Fleas swarm our sofa and carpeted dens where children drool Looney Tunes.  Florence, Cologne, Los Angeles…emaciated corpses outside are piled and torched.  The pathogen is ravenous; the fever has yet to peak.

                                                            **

Fitting that serotonin is produced in the gastrointestinal tract: strict pleasure derived from sopping up onion gravy and steak with a tortilla; a mug of dark beer, drops running down the glass, and the sudden tingle when drunkenness commences.  Serotonin also impels man to leave the dinner table.  Delectable sleep after making love and the brine-like odor a woman leaves on the pillow. Snake and insect venoms contain the chemical, and without medical treatment, a high dosage leads to lack of muscle control and death.  Such a teetering between one extreme and the other…like the pause, distinguishing what freezes from what scalds.

                                                            **

Infestation of cimicidae, every blanket sown with needles.  Braille of rashes on a boy’s chest, constellation of scabs.  Lovely creature, hematophagous bud, you outwitted the pesticides and now the tenants are jettisoning their linens. Like making love, drunkenness, childbirth and bread, this is something we share with the ancients: scripture of scabby phonemes pocking our skin.  

                                                            **

Andre Masson’s lightning: blackness crackling on white fire, whirlpools and raptors, arteries hemorrhaging, ant-swarms bursting into flowers and barracudas; an automatic topography of thirst, meat puppets peering from gapping hyena jaws, sharks, prowling wolf packs and spiders.  Ivy spreading at velocity of lust. Venom.

                                                            **

Less is more; venom of ctenidae spiders induce excruciating marathon erections.  Neurotoxins causing such extreme priapism can be refined, aid those suffering erectile dysfunction.

                                                            **

No glory.  Crackle of loose asphalt under my soles. No fame. Horizon of brushfires from the foothills.  Am done with the Homeric clichés. I need ash on my lips, texture of meat torn by my teeth.  Then She visits me when thirsty.  Her skin sizzles when touched.  No tenderness, yet the pleasure She delivers cuts genuine.  She leaves when sated, no vows, no promises.  Only the sharpness of her teeth.

Poem’s a wet-bite, a pustule.

**

Sweet Lady Venom, this asbestos tunnel where you entrap me after the gas station,      laundry and dark bottle of beer.  Then a fitful dozing on my bed: a plateau where weeds sap soil.  Murky rills I dream, and miles of tar, smokestacks.  No fangs jut from ceiling, no legs open, no descent from self-shat thread.  Only the rustle of your urticating hairs wafting upon me as I snore…a slow rain of barbed follicles…and I inhale our pact of mesothelioma….