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Saturday, 12 April 2014

Wanda Morrow Clevenger


3) 

We were captured, my brother
Wiley Littlehead and me,
by other tribal members
who took us to Mounds
and gave us to the custody of
deputy Faught of Sapulpa where
we waited for a hearing before
Commissioner Jennings
on the charge of murder
of Cany Squire.

The Checotah Enquirer printed
in detail: the revolting
Christmas crime

of when
the two full blood Euchee
Indians were together
with a number of others
of the tribe in joining
a drunken carouse,
when for no cause
as yet apparent, the boys
decided Cany Squire
should be killed.

The Littleheads immediately
started to execute the thought
and with clubs beat their victim
to death by inches.

After life was extinct
the two fiends, so they called us,
absolutely skinned him
as they would a deer
and hung Cany Squire on a wire fence.

I died
2 months after incarceration
of TB one report said
of syphilis another said.


– Prisoner 3891
Willie Littlehead

--

 5)

On a Tuesday morning I came up town
to Wilburton to tell
I believed my child was dead.

I admitted I whipped Bessie Williams,
what had been living with me, but
would not confess to mutilating the body
or inflicting the torture they say
was found.

Deputy Fortune lodged me and Joshua Harvey
––who’s been living with me for a length––
in the jail
charged with murder.

When seeing for himself the girl being
dead several hours,
the deputy vouched to what he called
a horrible crime perpetrated on 8 year old
Bessie, starting weeks ago when
the neighbors appealed to officers to stop
the unmerciful beating of the child.

Last night doctors held a post mortem
with Deputy Fortune present.  A bruised place
on the head was thought sufficient
to cause death.

Stripes and gashes were all over the body.
The child was cut to pieces with switches.
But the demon did not stop here, Fortune said.

There was burned marks and holes on the flesh
where a hot iron had been applied
and found too some instrument was used to point
at criminal assault––
but medical skill was not baffled.

Joshua Harvey said he knows nothing of the crime.
A white woman residing nearby attested she saw
the negro man Harvey take bloody clothes from the house
and hide them.  The clothes was found
where she said.


Prisoner Dora Wright


Wanda Morrow Clevenger, author of This Same Small Town in Each of Us
 



Amazon Reviews: https://www.amazon.com/author/wandaclevenger



Thursday, 10 April 2014

Reuben Woolley


echometry

there is distance
between me and me
I can't see my shadow
the echo
stares back silent
unblinking
I don't measure
reflections · shapes
of light unlit
ghosts of words
undead


--

prometheus gambles

I didn't escape today
I witnessed lines
walking in disorder
unbleeding in grief
no blame there
but I am staked out
against the light 
and the rocks
liver beaked

--

 theft

they took meaning from us · all
these words are just
empty hieroglyphs
to play with · I hear you
so sound exists · no song
the music stutters
but cannot end
repetition does not hold
our attention is on
burlesque dancers
who forgot to can
can

Christine Murray


Post-Interlude


‘Once
 
I heard him
he was washing the world,
unseen, nightlong, real.
 
One and infinite,
annihilated,
ied.
 
Light was. Salvation.’

-- Paul Celan
 
 
a gift of Bataille's poems
cock balls spurt penis-eye
 
rubbing up
a / vulva
 
his great brass bell ringin'
as he attempts to tongue
woman(s) soul/ at her hole
 
his own (...)

a transference of
the empty eye/ I
 
of
penis
into the i
of ied,
 
and cold through.
 
to arise
skin-to-skin
maybe,
 
but there is no more
blood - cock it !

--

Scene I : sphinx
 
cat properly addressed as riddle is a sphinx,
toothed warm fur claw (ed)
 
nobly in-dreaming he (of heads?)
or of mice maybe (and not silently)
 
lover not properly addressed
too dreams (elsewhere from here)
 
he dreams gold or red heads (emanant)
emanant: for their reddish auras are tumbrelled
he fingers red…
 
yes.
 
sphinx cat lies on my egyptian cottons,
I find the heads.
 
& my lover’s red
is a wish-tree

--
 

Scene 2 : the goldberg variations

 
that indestructible piano!
the undestroyed Goldbergs are playing (again)
 
wending their tones above a skatepark of bullet-glass
the melodies play, yes
 

I see that :

the romans had left their life-size eggs and urns below the city
my stitches pull and sting on the underside of my elbow (pain)
 
softening the blow here and here you tell me that
 
there is no stitching (as again) there was no magician -
he is always the hanged man (stasis)
 
or as you (may have) whispered, mercury -
 
 
 



Aad de Gids

acryl lacquer lost in the forest

'acryl lacquer lost in the forest' by Aad de Gids is available from Bone Orchard Press, here

Monday, 7 April 2014

Anthony Seidman


Saying Goodbye To Carthage

I must go now.

I snip this cord of acetylene,
I mount the horse of sulfur and hydrogen,
dispatch telegrams of frost-crusted roses to the desert,
sink in a goblet of sky, braid
hair of the wind, dabble
with explosives that taste like tamarind
and vomit the elasticity of milk &
pour the blue syrup of siesta.

I will pack my bags and wait at the platform
for the train that roars through the fireplace,
and sleep the long journey to
the attic where
lyres are tuned and all dogs happy.

My skein of blood unravels through another border.
Goodbye to the skins of wine I kissed,
goodbye to the hot grottos adrift in smoke,
goodbye to the women who never wrote me, the stars
that leapt under my skin, the shadows
rustling like silk when each door I opened
revealed breasts and cunt
turned into a pillar of iodine.
Once I felt the moon jump in my veins,
(I wrote a haiku about this but it got lost),
once I saw balloons released in a plaza
braided with the steam of meat and vendors,
once the water pipes clanked in the boarding house
while the city lit fireworks, and adulterers &
young lovers undressed in rooms jagged with crimson light,
(joy can easily fit in a bed with clean sheets).

But goodbye to your green and white taxi cabs,
I must depart.
Goodbye to your markets where trays
of meat stink the canned burn of menstruation, goodbye
to your produce of severed love, your beauty
like slit foreskins on a pushcart at noon, wasps churring,
goodbye to your recesses of marble & gold faucet bathrooms.

The desert gains another inch,
and there is no hay to harvest.  Hard skies portend
blue edge of nightmare will cut your dreams,
botch your autopsies,
and toss an appendix in the almoner’s cup.
Because I deny your watermelons and dust,
(I couldn’t care less),
I cut all strings never attached, and say
goodbye to your gymnasiums and diner,
I foreclose this scrap of light,
crumble your cathedral with a pinch of salt.
Not a peso will be
sweat on interest accrued.

(I must leave now).

The assassin is hungry. 

--

On De Kooning’s Woman I

Woman smeared in grease, brush-strokes of red,
Blue of uncooked meat, saffron, the black
of fingernails after an afternoon of changing car oil,
all scooped out and scribbled on canvas
edges.  He painted your skin all the luster
of lard, spat rouge only on your nose,
no nipples on your breasts, plastic bags
once filled with soda water now sucked dry.
But through that mess you smile—
five fangs chiseled dull as horse teeth—
you flaunt your overbite, saying:
what if you stick your tongue at me,
I’ll bite!  And your eyes, the mud basins
of the Mississippi, yet wide open, glaring
at the one who had the nerve to paint you.
Leather shining on a General’s
boots would not make you blink.
With a shopping bag in your right hand,
clothes iron in the sinister, you’re armed lethal,
ready to wrestle all of Manhattan’s taxis.  Fueled
with combustive mezcal, you look me
in the eye the instant before you open
the crystal door to Saks Fifth Avenue.
And you’re ready for a bargain, you’re thrilled
to live on credit.  Your feet, goat-hooves,
click in midair.


Tuesday, 1 April 2014

Lee Kwo


A FASCIST MODE OF THINKING DESIRE

Phallic razor visceral engines/the madness of secular adultery/
Self-mutilation of desire felt in every crevasse of neural fields/
Until intensity inside the belly of the universe reach extinction/
Not to precede from days of chaos to nights drigged horizon /
Double Agents at the Piano Bar she isn’t dead but sleeping/
The irony of hollow understanding network of stoppages
The desexd right to alterity the virgin to be broken up and shared
amongst the crowds/The sacred instinct has no story but violence/
The Wife to be beaten the Slut destined to be desired as object
of everyone’s lust/No jouissance here/Acid in the face/
Love is a vacant lot of weeds /Male Cults rule the streets/  

The debris of recent lies suggests crude moral rigidity/
Invisible Page fills in the blank spaces of post human state/
Machinic evolution the noise of a dreams silence/Dream Rebels/
Enter her wounds into Forest of Rusting Iron pockmarked moon
A cellular provocation a celibate perversion of visual identity/
To execute the empty stillness a sense of loss/The evil are elected/
Of violence/self-damage limit of matter on narcotic skyline/
Strange attractor BoyDebris created out of nothing but dust/
Wreckage of shitmess coldness coding his deceits stalking desire/
Masculine economy/The Phallic XX dominates life as a simple
aesthetic pleasure/To activate partially eroded neural networks
to reconstitute disruptive dread is insanity/Chance is invincible/
Outside the flesh/a limit/eroticism a crisis of technique/
An excess transgression from galaxy to galaxy deletes velocity /
What about before the noise of ruptures resistance to exposure?/
The cowardice of abandonment dread robs us of speech/
Self-deception and ignorance?/there is nothing to hold on to/
Life would be unbearable if we were conscious of it/
Going back there in breakdown of past tense to that hysterical
wild girl the woman refuses to understand/Drig stupor of pop tones/

With the drunken torment/wreckages sunk self-esteem the
intoxication of Invisible Pages youth becomes an ideal of sorrow/
Her prognostic situation reverses to her forgotten past dispose of
the prosthetic Absolute Icon as it passes by in flight/
Continually at Front Lines after drought and smell of damp paper/
to search for the original pain that reaches past futility
first slap that rape the eroticism abstract machine fetish/
Dimensionally away from strangulated male dominated intellect
head fuker logic/These are not simple matters of probability/
She needs volt of confidence to illuminate her strides no
remnants of the ego cult/Look serious act subversive/

Rust feeds on the nakid steel Ungestalt scales the wall of paranoia/
He told her of obscure depths the stone of her nakidness fell/
Invisible Pages heavy with fear and vulnerability/
Reveal what you did in cavity of years/All is illusion/ nothing lies/
More than a few streaks of genius filled in/Collision of electron/
Polluted by terror and the hidden line of escape/
The puzzle resolved or dissolved into the precise restrictions
of female convexity/The obsessive passion clings to screens of past/
Addiction forms of depression and anger rush to embrace
Invisible Pages epochal shift/migraine images of autopsy
Painful moments of senseless reality/
The Bachelors severed eroticism/
Her absolution in the pool of cosmologic energy/this is the hope
of her resurrection?/Gasping vulva of the passionate airman/
Invisible Pages sense of closure her freed rhizomic pleasures powers/
The stars of ecstasy drop from the skies harmonic gravity/ 
Attached to the estranged neural rush/protected against an easy
conceived access code/Fascist chemical intervention/
By that Mother sometimes caring for indefinite periods and then
deserting the role for her drigs?/Oh how she loves that high/
The Father urban warrior rides suicide cock essentially estranged/
This sordid inventory reeks its own havoc on the medium
of self-abuse and mutilation the Family the Fascist addiction/
How BoyDebris hated his dependence suspicious and suspicion/ 
Shuffling thru the garbage of personal shrapnel the abrasions
the wounds/The ethics of fatal disappearance/
Now he hit the trajectory of sharp edged bladed cults an
accelerating obsolescence/
Chemically adjusted weirdness bound down and struggling
knife at the throat the best orgasm I had she said/
Listen to your soaring eloquence yr ideology yr intentional
trans sexual orgasms/Junk apparatus encodes porno script
Those were the days that ignorance and decrepit self-esteem
denied you a clitoris/Just fuk me you said/I get no pleasure/
Its not my style says Invisible Page/Prelude to a tragic rape/
As yet she exhibit resistance to the male pump action/
Allocation of space to a normalized difference of
Self-understanding of her fatality/

The ancient knowledge stammering negative the last word
has been spoken/She loves death and life with a vengeance
that remains within justifiable counter culture margins /
A justice of personal values that moves inexorably away from
Western values/She has become a political activist a terrorist/
Not yet reconciled differences conflicts Middle East the public
burning flags appalling massacres inflames her Fascist innocence/
Tanks in the alleys fighting the Military/Syrian starvation and
genocide/Vanity of flesh and blood scratching in the dust/
Not this agnostic iconoclast this anchorite of negative dialectics
Still refusing to drop the mask of futility code psychotic
corrosion she abdicates her dreams of heterogeneity/

Oblique speculations hunting tracks of the androgynous
in her dream of the eternity of chance/
She has plunged into the wake of the Protocol of data Trash/
Weightless murmur the intricate web of nothing/
A barren place where strange attractors hit metal bondage/
Diminished on the metal which senses its invisibility/
By remaining anonymous you reserve yr rights to change
sides as many times as you like/The silent jargon of fascism/
A vicious cycle of vengeful massacres ethics of fatal
rhetoric/The fragments of a journal in hell/

the gathered bones--Michael Mc Aloran

the gathered bones

the gathered bones, (originally published by Calliope Nerve Media-2010), has been reissued and is available here