Thursday, August 8, 2024

GAS Featured Poet: Mark DuCharme


Mark DuCharme’s sixth full-length book of poetry, Here, Which Is Also a Place, was published in 2022 by Unlikely Books.  That same year, his chapbook Scorpion Letters was published by Ethel.  Other recent publications include his work of poet’s theater, We, the Monstrous: Script for an Unrealizable Filmpublished by The Operating System. His poetry has appeared widely in such venues as BlazeVOX, Blazing Stadium, Caliban Online, Colorado Review, Eratio, First Intensity, Indefinite Space, New American Writing, Noon, Otoliths, Shiny, Spinozablue, Talisman, Unlikely Stories, Word/ for Word, The Writing Disorder, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary.  A recipient of the Neodata Endowment in Literature and the Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.


Report

                                for Nik Arnoldi



The report isn’t worth songbirds

Who line the nude amphitheater

Whenever field mice play

The zither with a maddening tongue

That can only be attributed to frog populations in

Upper-Lower Tennessee

Where we once snorkeled

In love with the field mice there

Who scoffed at our youthful schadenfreude

At the pleasure that we took in being near the sea

Where death is a birth hostel

& It’s known that bats enliven plants

By thrifty locution

Of which these psalms are just one more

Deteriorating example


So begins the urtext of a quiet walk on the beach

Where hummingbirds balk at zesty consiglieri

Thrust out of windows at important motels

Stealing lemons with a spiffy rejoinder

That none of our grandfathers ever even sang

O lemon box, lemon box, lemon box!

It’s true, I eat dungarees

& Paint the wind blue

But still, you shouldn’t follow me to that icy motel

Unto which I’ll soon heave

Buckets of shovels & jewels

For the dereliction of the newly homed


Call me Jimbo

My dissertation is on mass murder in post-American speech

In a Memphis you’ve already heard

Declare birth frozen

A clarion call of rusted eggshells

That you fire up in mea culpa speech, grinding down

Like laminated wasps

Until I eat paper

Or swell, an inspector general on the lam

Yes, I believe I can get you some

Just don’t call again

Until you weep

At guns’ savage paint






Of What Fence Is This Nuance?



Land vast like life

A frog misprision

Expletive unknown distance

Out of date once, stoppered plenty

A plenary ash to false zero

In the hurt brought to wrong here


Hymns of plenty

Awake vacant fuel

Like a list of bugs

The birth of an oddball for sure


In breath of riverine sentences

Who decide what you feel

By crowd’s distant memory

Of a thing you wore a dozen times before


Sing, in tangible mention

What you don’t offer, you also don’t reveal

Sing, like something’s very wrong

In a tune of birth sugar


Of thirst, until you wear

The time with flowers printed


Who cranked up the breakaway dancers?

Songs are a wind of paint

Behold the hump-fisted businessman

Magically consoled

In song’s winnowing haste


Thank you for the cares we’ve flamed

Like a signal or furtive calm

A rally of every

Love ever made






Forsythia with Bird Attached



Do songs make breath illegal

In the hilt of the fire of the door?

As a child, I befriended an ostrich

With kind eyes. The moon slumped knowingly.

Other agents blustered at the doldrums. It was noon in

Cincinnati, & I coughed pert dictums,

Monkey psalms in breath of splay. Inelegant sidewinder addenda.

The feral puzzler chinked as we all grieved.

Birds rustled far away. If you make time for the glint of

Angular days, what strangled mention

Does wildness keen? What variance

Is suggested by the newels of your jugged hems?

Are we vested with the commonplace which only silence understands?

Awake tune in a birth riddle.

Bury love at striking. Once, you held

Linnets at a fledge of distance that rocks could not command.

Lonely as a fragrance, a trace:

Skein, mask, paper. The color of the the chapbook’s cover

Seeming to invite wine to be spilled on it. A husk of jewels

Standing in a cask of yo-yo agreement. The lamp is down, to unearth these letters

Cold moons will not divide.


If the moon is strung in sentences,

Would you feel denatured? Perhaps, as geophysical boundaries

Are also parts of grief.

& I, who are next to you, as coffins & profiles

Through which we hint at darker matter, swerving.

We have decided to render thought anew, for example,

In its thick, natural raveling

Which, like birth, holds no hint of plot,

A scheme of numbers & variables that no one seems to want to hide.


By the way, I don’t mean to backtrack, but

Gramaryes hold the thought of winter in the death of sunless trees,

At horizons where death’s outweighed by the speed of numbers & bees

That I don’t dare repeat with the lights on.

Had I known you, I would have phoned

In fritillary homes that were not bombed recently.

Think of death as a variable. Evade

Plant guardians who rarely phone,

Though like you, I crave broken recitals—

The stuff of ear & bone.






An Autodidact Goes to the Riverbank for Tea



Samples in the breath trouble

Reveal your intimate name to geese, who look on, disinterestedly,

Stoking the season’s terrible pants.

“Whom have I come to fulfill, then, & what

Denials should I issue them?” Whether falling down in paint

Or a filmed state of rushing, notice

Portents in the breath I found. The eye

Is unverified. It’s having ‘film trouble’

In the glossy trees. When you dabble

In a lore of forlorn saints, be wise, be free,

Brutish as a primitive archivist housewife

With great burnt-out trucks. The devil smiles here,


At an instant of cloud memory, for he knows

There are no chickens, but that hide

In lustrous shadows

Awaiting moon’s instruction. A critical mass of bolt theory

Fails to enliven the hovel of your smile. Grace notes of the miserly, libertine

Zealots draw out the penances of fool

Hummers, twice removed,

Who sell breath like a song they made.


The corporate handler smiles, in gentle lockdown.

“Let’s do lunch like an urn of grapes,” he purrs.

Plastic is the keynote of the speech of haunted men

Who hold no ladders while the moon hides

Woefully, behind her cloud. This is not to say that speech

Isn’t performative, at times, if you’re still looked after

With only seconds left

To hide.






Ode



If I am a vehicle,

Where’s your mouth? Who sells fruit in winter?

Was Rimbaud frightened of his own speech?

Need we be frightened too

In an era of already normalized stifling?


The heat-birds are shifting to nowhere

Normal like the birth the sun implodes,

Like yesterday’s blue paint landfills,

A hem where the sun doesn’t cry out, or try.

If you try to be drenched, be landfills of once before.


Consult bird voices

In guns’ savage paint

Then awaken a euphony heap of throngs or ukuleles

Toward whom the best kisses haven’t even begun

In an era of calm rosaries


& Chalk-painted consultants

Lest we swoon, or starve

Under cold boardwalks, with noon’s violence grazing

That the moon would still not grace, or glance

With a kiss, except for other lovers, now defiled.


But I wake to you, in your lost sense of time’s elegance

At least until your sense of birth comes free

As what we thought was truth— a lucky try

Now, at breath’s elegance. Knowledge is friable,

Kissed by checked-out rock stars (are there any rock stars left?).


Then all is paper?

Or the stuff of paper-ish houses, in the holy birth city’s

Glass factories? Obey your dumbness.

What else is left, but ashcans in the triggered

Birth of fading houses, with breath no longer free?




Thursday, August 1, 2024

GAS Featured Poet: Sanjeev Sethi



 Sanjeev Sethi has authored seven books of poetry. His latest is Wrappings in Bespoke (Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK, 2022). He has been published in over thirty-five countries. His poems have found a home in more than 500 journals, anthologies, and online literary venues. He edited Dreich Planet #1, an anthology for Hybriddreich, Scotland, in 2022. He is the joint winner of the Full Fat Collection Competition-Deux, organized by Hedgehog Poetry Press, UK.  He was conferred the 2023 Setu Award for Excellence. Highly commended in the erbacce-prize 2024 for poetry with over 9000 submissions worldwide, Sethi lives in Mumbai, India. 



Preparedness
 
When all else fails, seek fulfillment  
in excess. The salvific syntax forms
on its own. Sometimes, it is the gap
between engines or another gig.
 
Sometimes, emotional stability obliges,
as sagging intuitiveness strops.
It is as if sierra of deep thought drops;
and margins extend to the subjacent.
 
In most cases, it isn’t onerous once
you’re fit and fain. Costive energy
rarely helps the gaunt processes.
Gabbiness lights up the crawlways.




A Cappella

You heard my hush. Full-throated entreaties sometimes
arrive nowhere. Fulfillment of a velleity is a sweetener
from the karmic store. In telephone calls, I am usually
the last one to disconnect. Hard-fisted partners scrimp
on feelings. Excitement has a way of evaporating. Atrophy
of the love gene stumps the emotional impresario. When
the voyage wraps up, they cast aside their dazzle or dimness.
It is upon us to single out which side we want to varnish.




Verset after Verset
 
The lapidary verse requires no backstory.
 
Tyros are usually the most intransigent:
Episodes of ache fan open-mindedness.
 
Why, in the subaltern areas, you rarely
chance upon settlers with spectacles?
 
Volitant etchings chirp
in tune with the warble
of wheelchairs.
 
When there is an itch to inquire,
do you love me?  The answer
without an answer is crystal-clear.
 
The hydra-infused phase
is like a lacerated thigh,
as one lesion deadens
another demands attention.



Thursday, July 25, 2024

GAS Featured Poet: Petra F. Bagnardi

 


Petra F. Bagnardi is a screenwriter and a poet. She was short-listed in the Enfield Poets' Twentieth Anniversary Poetry Competition, and her work was featured in several literary journals including, Masque & Spectacle Literary Journal, Punk Noir Magazine, Poetica Review, Drawn to the Light Press, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Redrosethorns Journal, Quail Bell Magazine, Ginosko Literary Journal.


Dimming lives

She deserves a different rite of passage.
She walks along the obsidian roads of the eternal city.
The facades of the buildings brim with arranged forms –
pure, sparkly and legendary.
The walls bear the names of all the women who got killed,
or raped, or both, that year.
She reads the story of the rivalry between Bernini and Borromini;
it produced a fountain of rivers and a temple for ivory prayers.
She knows about the violence against women in time of war.
She wonders about the silent battle endangering her gender –
so close, so factual, so unsentimental.
She trembles, even as her gaze lingers upon the feeble fires,
written on the masks of the marble masterpieces.
She deserves a new kind of coming of age story.



Writing a world

I am writing a world –
where the trenches are not made of thorny fire,
and the barricades are not ablaze with iron.
I'm writing a world of gentle walls of rain,
and silent flowery edges;
so that I can cross the emerald and cerulean distance,
which separates us –
easily, lovingly –
in a whisper of footsteps.
Regarding you, my words would not taste like poison.
We could hold one another without dirty guilt,
and the perception of dark judgement around us.
I'm writing this land, 
for the reality we inhabit declares us enemies;
and weapons rest at our doorsteps –
to be used against one another.




What I have learned

Perhaps it's the catastrophic world exploding around us –
it breeds spite, unkindness, violence.
We absorb and then reflect all the evil about.
We see a weakness and we soon use it against the unguarded.
Then questions shadow our every step –
Am I vulnerable?
Could I become a target?
I opened my heart too wide,
I gave too much and too easily.
I shroud my being in armor of caution and doubt;
I stop loving and giving and trusting –
even as bombs ravage my lemon and orange orchard.
It feels erroneous,
and I perceive the unfairness.
I have to study the pathway to avoid the landmines;
and still find a way to love my fellow souls –
without my heart getting crushed along the road.





Thursday, July 18, 2024

GAS Featured Poet: Bruce McRae


Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his poems have been broadcast and performed globally.


Looking Back



Objects in the mirror

are closer than they appear.


Objects may appear to be subjective.


Objects in the mirror

travel at the speed of light.


Objects in the mirror

may appear or not appear.

Prone to mood swings,

they appear to be dispassionate

but only want what's best for you.

They've suffered greatly in your stead.


Objects in the mirror

may appear to be drunk

or on heavy medication.

They make foulmouthed and fiery execrations.


Objects in the mirror

reject their status and protest

the viewers's overarching reflections.


Objects in the mirror

stand for the human drive towards acquisition.

The mirror represents introspection.

The mirror manufactures distances.

That which is conceived creates conception.


Objects in the mirror

appear more handsome than they are.

They may appear sullen and jaded as well,

depending on your latitude and inclination.


Objects in the mirror don't exist.

There is no mirror.

Abandon your ego.

Keep looking ahead.

Drive faster.




        



 Sentence



This sentence will be short

and straight to the point.


This sentence will wander about,

a lamb loosed from its pasture,

curious, but shy, hungry, yet cautious.


This sentence doesn't know what

it's talking about and will throw in

a mention of the honeyguide bird

because no one is expecting it.


And this sentence is part of the whole.


Another sentence will follow it blindly,

hoping to make sense of itself,

attempting to fathom its purposes,

inevitably failing the collective.


And why is this sentence

in the form of a question?


The penultimate sentence feigns a reply.


The last sentence, always enigmatic,

turns toward the bottom of the page

and refuses to tell you the truth,

the whole truth, and nothing like the truth.






                                   The Last Christmas


                                    It's Christmas morning

and the wind has stopped

its constant jabbering,

the sea lying in late

after a year of god-looking

and revving the planet.

Children have freed themselves

from the webbing of their beds

and are quietly screaming

(you mustn't wake the dead).

Outside, the back end of darkness

shudders in its long coat.

You can smell the blizzards in its hair.

A mouthful tastes of old Decembers.


Christmas morning and a single star

is all that remains

of the ruckus in heaven.

The angel at the top of the tree

is unaware that she's been raptured

and continues sleeping.

Somewhere they're ringing bells

and lighting scented candles,

but here, in the forest of the heart,

the trees are huddled with snowfall.

Aching for summer they number the winds

on their various journeys.

A cathedral, a colosseum,

the forest is waiting for a second god

to shake the world out of its slumber.


Christmas morning and its quiet

as a Jesuit graveyard in a snowstorm.

I have given you the gifts

of salt and cellars, meadows of seagrass,

a sullen winter.

And I have given you the gifts

of kismet, librettos, animals.

I have carefully wrapped and bowed

a box containing other boxes

You asked for a labyrinth and mazes.

You wanted a world that's peace-riven

and a balm for your spectral longing.

A dime store Santa, all I've given you

is your mother's voice

and the glow of celestial kitchens.