Drinking wine all day some
drinkers said was sacrilege
for an Irishman.
Plus there was a pool table
with red felt instead of green
which was always amazing
drunk or sober
as if all the grass on earth
had turned scarlet too.
Old men watched MTV
with the same sense of wonder.
The Man of Wine
had an Ivy League degree
but his old man told him
booking horses and sports
was more secure
than Wall Street,
besides he was the only son left.
A photo of the true heir
an elder brother killed
at the Battle of Anzio shared
a spot over the cigarette machine
with Jack and Bobby
and William Butler Yeats.
There was a curvy blonde regular
with a kinky reputation.
Often when the TV music grabbed
her, she’d kick off her shoes, jump up
on the pool table and dance never
upsetting a ball.
There were wagers on how long
before her damp footprints
would evaporate.
The Man of Wine was known
to gulp a tumbler of port after one
of her performances then sadly
lament he’d be on the other
side of the bar had his big
brother moved like her.

        “Only in the summery middle of the nineteenth century, only
under its sun, can one conceive of [this] fantasy materialized.”
                -Walther Benjamin, Die Passagenwerk

i.
Economist Charles Fourier postulated that
After however many years of peaceable anarchist communes
Bunched into phalanxes the planet would enter into a new
And confusing epoch of fantastic fucking beauty.

Animals would learn to sing music and stars would wheel
Around the sky copulating flicking their cosmic sweat
Down on earth, where, meanwhile

We all would have evolved third “harmony arms” with eyes on the
        ends
And moved past the trivial need for food and sleep.

Everyone would be having sex with everyone.

It would be ok. No, argues Fourier, It would be more than ok.

All of this is true.

“There are an infinite number of parallel universes
varying in subtle or enormous degrees, all locked off
by some curtain or caul or horrific blank wall,”
writes the experimental physicist in the suicide note
addressed to his autistic daughter,
“and many of them are better than this.”

All of which is completely baffling to the modern reader.

None of which is true.
I am eating and sleeping on Earth.

ii.
There is a village outside Paris where all the clothes
Button up the back. To get up and get dressed
Is to put yourself at the service of another,
To turn your naked body and say
Help me with this for a second.
The small white horn buttons and even whiter
Loops of silk are ideas, are a suggestion made
By the fingers of any other citizen working something
Into something else, working slow
But with a heavy tenderness.
Like a lover, I’d almost say, but let’s not
Get melodramatic.

They wear masks and cardboard signs
Advertising their likes and dislikes.
They are strangers but they like it this way.
They love all of their strange faceless neighbors.
Their buttons are perfect.

Meanwhile in the next room my girlfriend
Vomits into a toilet while I think and go hmm
And replace “carried away” with “melodramatic”.

Sometimes we think the guy downstairs is hitting his wife
But who knows and who can be bothered to know.
If you turn up the radio you can barely hear it anyway.
Sometimes my fly will be down for hours and oh well.

I am eating and sleeping on earth.
None of this is true.

iii.
William Dorrell was impervious to pain
Until beaten to death by unbelievers.

America’s first vegans were, like so many to come,
Frantic millenarians. My favorites own “New Harmony”
Which in Indiana closed for good in 1827,
Leaving 20,000 acres of earthly paradise empty,
And now broods in Philadelphia making mock-General Tso’s.

And anyway I lied when I said he was beaten to death.
After the first punch to the chin he rose
With blood on his white collar
And only after a half-dozen more blows,
Pinned to the chapel’s rough floor,
Did he relent, three teeth knocked into
The mouth’s flooded cathedral,
Did he say, yes,

I feel it.

The Dorrellites, they believed
That in the new garden of eden no flesh
Would be harmed. They settled in Vermont.
In my earlier drafts rose-water flowed
From their skeptical wounds.

William Dorrell ate and slept on earth.
He lied when he said “I feel it.”

CHRIS SCHAEFFER is a biographical blurb designed to break all of your hearts.

St. John says that understanding
Is a deliberate lifting up of one’s self
And comes by slow and steady effort,
As if you are climbing a tall ladder
Ring by rung, hand over hand and
Step by step, where ascent is a
Vertical exercise of beating down vice
And stepping on them, one by one,
To raise yourself up.

In his cell, a lone penitent kneels
Head bowed deep in prayer,
As virtues move beneath his garment
And fly like white and tan pigeons,
A rapid flurry of wings flapping
Against the fabric of his hair shirt
As they escape, one by one,
To the window ledge and out
To the open air.

For me, insight comes all at once
Like a multi-vehicle crash on the interstate
Where cars pile up on each other,
One by one, at high speed
To the bang of metal on metal,
The boom of exploding airbags,
As red brake lights silently pulse
On and off bleeding out all my wrong
And mistaken notions.

What I remember are the losses that were given to me
after they had been scrutinized for their furious depth.
What I remember is the way I tried to look at them
first by holding my hands in front of my face
and then by sinking to my knees
and pretending that everyone else was striking out
for a new territory that I wouldn’t be able to name.
What I remember are the losses that should have had ribbons on
        them
or maybe little bells that I was able to tune
when I came back from a long needed vacation;
when I came back from seeking justice for the people
into whose eyes I peered at the push of my lightning
and at the plebian cost of the metal I named
for the discrepancy- of the ages that died in my heart.

LEE STERN lives in Los Angeles. Not much to brag about. Likes dogs. Maybe about 130 published poems. Many on the internet. Tries to write one a day. Adores the music of G. F. Handel.

Night fingers the sky, purple and red
ribboning the blue. The world tilts.

Thoughts no longer wedge beneath busy-ness.
Outside my door crickets scour the night,

an owl screaks. Inside all is quiet.
Clocks stopped, mirrors shrouded.

Darkness crawls closer. The street light
buzzes and pops on. Fog pearls the windows,

erases the moon.

KB BALLENTINE has attended writing academies in both America and Britain. Published in Bent Pin, MO: Writings from the River, Apocalypse, Touchstone, and others, she shares her work in various poetry groups. A finalist for the 2007 Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry and the 2006 Joy Harjo Poetry Award, she was awarded monies from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund in 2006 and 2007. In February 2008, Celtic Cat Publishing debuted KB’s first collection of poetry Gathering Stones and in 2009 released her second collection Fragments of Light.

i.
Orpheus, on widowed wings,
careens wildly through blank air.
He is kiting toward retrograde orbits.
They are all named Eurydice.
There he finds amorphous blights in his solar plexus.
Once this was love, now the place is named lost.
they evolve, these masks, jumbling:

Icarus, (also winged)
        a desire to fly which bred only a fall—
Faust
        who can love only science
Persephone
whose hunger pangs sealed her fate
Delved into hell, all of them.
Xeroxed zodiacs cannot foresee what’s really in the stars.
Copies are always flawed because they’re copied.
Violent quaking, which gets hollower
spasm by spasm: a cast of the doomed,
lost yes’s spiking underneath

ii.
My face, a collection of oblique curvatures,
masks, behind which to hide, with knitted tornadoes
in places where there should be only eyes.
Rectilinear forms thrown like awkward potteries.
I call this my expression.
Jaundice is not natural; nor the fleet duplicities
turning the corners of my lips upward.
To achieve this is to lasso a zephyr.
I am quietly vigilant in these endeavors.

A maze of identities to choose from,
all gaseous. They float, weightless,
Yawns can all be defined by the chasms
they hide. Even in the canyons flowers twist
to see the sun. They grow in picture jasper.
In common speech, heliotropes of both varieties are called
        bloodstones.
I wear them in my choker and that artless ceramic I call my face

iii.
…which hearkens to Cassandra’s window.
mesmerized by the centrifugal motion of ketamine typhoons,
I try on all the masks of mythology, history, mystery, and lore.
You cannot know yourself unless you fully experiment with the
        possibilities.
I’ve not only seen you become a widower, love,
I’ve also seen you torn to bits by whores. I’ve seen
your head singing downstream. I’ve seen the vampire quintet finish
        you off,
and your golden throat ripped out. That’s my hell.
(It’s like zymurgy, the way it bubbles and ferments upon itself.)
I know, without eyes, what the stars foretell.
I know it without the stars.
Underneath masks with tornado eyes,
and thyphooning synergies: myth and truth,
all these figures are simply gradations of me.

I know this like x-rays know there are bones beneath

ALLIE MARINI first started kicking ass in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. She is a 2001 alumna of New College of Florida, which means she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has appeared in Goulash! (1996), Pan’ Ku (1999), New CollAge (2001), Scratch (2008), Penumbra (2009), Crash (2010), Shaking Like A Mountain (2010), Multi-Culti Mixerations (2010), A Daughter’s Story Anthology, (2010) and Eyrie, (2010). She has lived all over Florida and Washington State. She calls Tallahassee home and is a hairdresser when she isn’t writing. She will start her MFA degree in 2010 and is waiting to see where life will take her.

Northeast wind. Smoke from distant domes.
A few stars break their tangled arch of sky.
Dark wings are moving near me, calling out
to others, drifting offshore. They answer back.

Dreaming of early sun and desert wind
I sleep through these harsh days. The night is mine.
Walking the tidal riverbank, rip-rap
settles beneath my feet. Its salt flows in.

She’s somewhere south of here. I know those wings
will settle near her marshes, on their way
to Roanoke or Amazonia.
Dense willows cage Orion in their twigs:

birdsong from cages can’t remake her voice.
These waves reflect a withered crust of moon.
Nights become hers. I speak to shadow. Tides
heap our floating wreckage back to shore.

I can’t follow those voices, pulling south.
Lashed stars pursue the order of their rounds.
I lean back west. Stone burns in leveled cold.
Smoke from distant domes. Northeast wind.

W.F. LANTRY works inside the Beltway, but drives every night to the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River where his wife sometimes makes him take his five year old to Mass: “Victimae Paschali Laudes” actually happened exactly as described. During the present academic year his poems have been published in 11 separate and unique countries, including Texas, both in print and online. He currently serves as the Director of Academic Technology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

Now terrorists can blow up airplanes with regular-size deodorant, shaving cream, and toothpaste, which requires a crawl through a
        traffic jam
of deluxe-cab pick-ups to the local big-box store for travel-size
        ones.
In the parking lot a black Lincoln is in the way, waiting for
a handicapped spot occupied by a yellow Volkswagen convertible. Lincoln thinks Volkswagen is backing out, but the top just goes up and down, up and down. Dixie horns toot.
Middle fingers salute from rolled-down windows.
Inside, rednecks and Baptists all over. The sheriff’s wife,
her wig crooked, abandons her cart and purse in the aisle to read moisturizer labels. “Bless your heart,” she says.
Girls cutting school flip through Hannah Montana posters.
Prefer Miley’s Aunt Dolly myself.
At the self checkout I push the Spanish button, for fun.
A big & jiggly jellyroll man wearing a greasy trucker cap coasts his
        electric
cart to a stop. He says I should learn English or get
the hell out of the country. His sweat pants and flannel shirt
haven’t been off him in days. You have no idea how much I hate dirty white socks and fat ankles. I tell him to piss off in German.

STEPHEN ROGER POWERS was born in Madison, WI, and now
lives in Georgia, where he enjoys the beaches of Tybee Island. Every year he goes to Dolly Parton’s annual parade in Pigeon Forge, but he had to miss it this year because he was in India instead. The Follower’s Tale, his first book, was published by Salmon Poetry last year.

        Adieu guitar hero summer nights when one-way streets lined with chopper
Harley bikers in leather carousing for blondes detonated the city
        with muffler noise roaring through Kennedy Plaza to steps of City Hall
where they’d line up gleaming polished chrome from all over the state,
        beefy arms in sleeveless leather vests with gang logos.
Cheeseburgers and fries from the silver shoebox on wheels, Haven Brothers Diner
        A Providence Tradition Since 1888 in red on its side.
On the steps of City Hall leafy-brained twerps from South County burbs
        would buy weed and cocaine, convinced nothing would change
their lives far from where rivers reeked like lethal epoxy fumes.
        Mayor Buddy C had his conniptions, claiming no such doings ever went on.
No, Mayor, you were wrong. It was all more sordid than any of us remember.

What speaks of time?
        Wood, brick, the body, and oral traditions. Leveling of old barrooms.
Shifting organs, dissolving marrow. Urban renewal projects, pyramid schemes,
        condo conversions, franchises, one-sided public conversations.
Cherry and Webb, The Outlet, Shepherd’s Department Store with a tea room
        on its first floor trying to be like Harrods of London.
Hip to be like the English. French girls that came each summer to stay with relatives.
        Never see such girls anymore. I listen to neighbors blather on about time.
I get it. I understand their fear and urgency. The heart attack is always waiting.
        Our battered faces aren’t the only chime sounding a lurid past.

I look back on days wasted dreaming of a house by the sea,
        wanting to know the fat men on the hill, an invitation to their bright parties…
Time hasn’t done me in. Time has carried me to love the knife and gun,
        hasn’t slain me yet to obstruct the perfect march of ugliness in my features.
I slice and swerve along through hopeful radiant awakenings.
        I’ll tell my children the struggle with time, if it is a struggle, made me common.
If I don’t no one will, since time doesn’t talk. Time deters and forgets,
        and promises there are comforts on hand, the sound of laughter
heard while walking through a park, a stranger’s eyes full of light
        and cheer, a smirk in return from one jaded survivor to another.

JOHN FLYNN’s newest poetry chapbook, “Wave And Metronome” is now available from Pudding House, www.puddinghouse.com. John’s work has appeared recently, or is forthcoming in Paterson Review, Hot Metal Bridge, Stones Throw, The MacGuffin, and others. His novel, Heaven Is A City Where Your Language Isn’t Spoken is due out in 2010 from Cervena Barva Press. You can download free samples of his published work here.

1
                                                                                Bear Up

        If flames carved yards, if locals, out at dusk,
drag rakes
        through ash, dusk, steamy and smoky dusk,
and what becomes of it,

        then bear up the kids, bear up, center their hunger
and belief,
        rescue and refuge yes, and enter promotions
the next half-century

        will see to. Bear up the kids, bear up, snowed over
and on,
        as even these side roads seem to be, in barnyards
begun and done,

        in these woods where barnyards were
and may have been,
        tracked by this deepest tread, signalling, I think,
another

        round of Christmasses, of skating the pond’s
black disk
        some winter, colder than our own,
must
        proof for children.

2
                                                                                At the Gates

        No joke, I think. No poem, except
the longest,
        darkest evening of the season, whatever
action’s
        been, the pleas, plea bargaining, these
        close-mouthed,
close-minded keepers at the gates, and
the walls
        run up against, where the children break,
kaleidoscopically,
        from children, colorfully, seasonally
break,
        crying their thanks for precedents, for
the ruinous
        maps and misdirections, the surveillance
videos,
        everywhere in progress, promising
a good deal more
        than an administration’s fictions, than
these
        salves served up, and sunsets
worked through,
        than these savored, blog
-spot
        epistemologies.

3
                                                                                Taffy

        Enough then, of the xenophobic rattlings.
Enough of the forces
        bleeding officers, of the national interest
intent to limit meds

        and schooling, to pamper our school-phobic
own, at this snow’s expense,
        leaving the newcomers to marvel themselves
another Friday,

        at the brushed green, salt-water taffy look
of fields, and
        the white covered wheat, like a mood
whispered over and along,

        where working farms mean land too far
removed
        from village projects, and this
early

        start the shortest day
this
        Christmas

500 of ROBERT LIETZ’s poems have appeared in more than one hundred journals in the U.S. and Canada, in Sweden and U.K, including Agni Review, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, The Ontario Review, Poetry, and Shenandoah. Seven collections of poems have been published, including Running in Place (L’Epervier Press,). At Park and East Division ( L’Epervier Press,) The Lindbergh Half-century (L’Epervier Press,) The Inheritance (Sandhills Press,) and Storm Service (Basfal Books). Basfal also published After Business in the West: New and Selected Poems.