The following is a collaborative poem written at the Spontaneuous Writing Booth during the Share the Word event hosted at the Central Library in Madison, WI on Friday, May 5. I was not one of the spontaneous poets but I gave them the first two lines that propelled the poem to the final 5 lines that Dana Maya graciously contributed.

-Hanz Olson

Railstrick and force umbrella

Made up for the lost art of

Nothingness–who knows where

The time goes & we’ll be with you now.

Shut the umbrella–drops have stopped,

Step out from under–your face alight

Your face all right, nothing “lite,”

But heavy as the night, dark turning white

The skeleton-in-a-skirt is an

Umbrella, its ribcage extended, proud

Upward, small dome, cathedral for

One small prayer: may I walk safe

Under this sky.

Composed by Molly Wesling, Ted Highsmith, Susan Podebrasky, Dana Maya and myself.

We see we did not arrive through the crocheting of sand through ancient footprints. Hyphenation is an earthquake of small caesuras; the exponential of the frozen caterpillar curling into its transitional zero; the object spinning its rocky-albatross atoll across wavelet gyres abounding Anthropocene oceans.

Can the glandless and paradoxical contingencies of electronics—the box whose contents are vouchsafed without direct observation—see past the eyepiece leather of a time before cameras? Its ring stretches into the translucency of overlapping feathers—the othering of silken tongued glossolalia, like cabinets of dark fish swimming through bodies disenfranchised from the moorings of their own inherent curiosities.

Who is the shepherd and who is the stone? Sticks are for leaning on things, even when it is understood that they will ineluctably confirm their mortality by gradual erosion into powder. We then are the large rooms and wooden shoes of self-submerged pylons, comprising the dock slats that open the cage of the sky, even if only for momentary contact with the ozone, breathing its own air for that slouching of compressed archives alluding to pointillist theories, tickling peripheral nebula that conceal the origins of space.

Physics is the secondary-gas created by the movements of the eloquent judo of gravity, sucking the marrow of its remembered mistakes; the impish mountain that transcends, reflects and surpasses itself as a kind of escape velocity. This, because we are only capable of seeing ourselves in mirrors, like aureoles of insubstantial arrows twisting into the wind’s shadow—opaque derailments of banana and poppy redolent ethers, their fermenting skype-tones dieting on a subtlety of facial expressions and shamanic divinations of the craft beer renaissance of television’s gradual disappearance into coded waves of refractory micro-chip numerologies.

An anticipated yearly fad of tenured worms, enchanted by good tether, bound like moons in archipelagos painted into small columns of exponential rotation. The cordon, the condor, the cardinal; its acquiescence to the watery nature of the moment, displaced by nostrils emerging through the pudding-skin of small cherry-pit irises, clarifying discrete recollections overlaid with the fat from their own overcoats; an extrasensory somnambulance—the externalities which flood washed out highways of politics: a book rack for the moss-tufted gaps between each letter comprising the parsed and bowdlerized parrot beak of the unsaid.

-J Zackary Rothstein 4/26/2017

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

 

An Ode to Water

In winter

it is a drink that

I disdain

unless it steeps

my tea—

give me instead

the taste

of fermented grape—

or a shot

taken straight—

the first

for its afterglow of

contentment—

the latter whenever

I require an

immediate blast of

furnace heat

 

In summer

such abstention is

rescinded—in

cup glass or dipper—

bring me

the well’s depths—

aged nectar

from ancient clouds—

with a tang of

iron for seasoning—

something so

elementally simple

that the sun’s

furnace is nullified

by the shock

of its ambrosia’s

aching chill

 

Breaking Something

This deep in winter, with everything

frozen solid,

I feel like breaking something,

be it a window

encased in frost, the monotony,

my dormant heart,

anything to contradict the sound of

ice thickening,

that wind crystalizing the season.

 

Instead, by the fire, I escape into

a book’s babble,

reading until a river of lines blurs

and hardens,

silencing the words’ cacophony.

Held captive in

the arms of a chair’s rigid frame,

logs now embers,

I find the chill has stiffened me, too.

______________________________

Robert Koehler is a Madison poet and his blog, Robert Up At Dawn, can be found at https://robertupatdawn.wordpress.com

 

A sun dipped in gold

Melting on purple mountains

Citrus-painted sky

*

Speckled in the sky

Stars twirling with milky wings

A picture of night 

*

One bloodthirsty sun

Leaking its veins into blue

Soaking the sky red

 

Scarlet capes of leaves

Bronze dancers in the crisp breeze

A fall melody

*

You and I embrace

As the logs consumed by flames

Crack apart and die

 Whispers from the wind

A ribbon of pink petals

Carried into dance

*

She keeps to herself

As the lotus closes in

Bursts of fine color

Photo courtesy Hillary Jones

 

The Huntress

 

We set her free

 

an outdoor spirit

 

never to be tamed

 

We watched her roam

 

around the gardens

 

searching for random game

 

“Huntress,” they called her

 

devourer of souls

 

born from the coaly earth below

 

soft as stardust

 

dark as the night

 

quiet as the whispering willow blows

 

Be careful, we warned them

 

don’t look in vain

 

at fleeing for your life

 

Our huntress will come

 

and take you away

 

with claws as slick as a knife

 

atop the hills

 

beneath the hedge

 

within the baby ferns below

 

around the house

 

balancing a plank

 

as a hellish pirate’s prisoner goes

 

The day is now done

 

she returns to us from

 

her jungle world outside

 

The rabbits sleep

 

the birds nestle in

 

the little ones run and hide

 

And I now sleep

 

with the huntress tonight

 

a cat purring on my bed

 

who could’ve stayed out

 

to delight in more hunting

 

but chose my company instead

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

 

Ample Shed

 

Everything is shark when pulled back into the wrestled yard,

into the strong stance of a microphone. Ma Jolie and a photo

in the bus yard,  in some old warehouse in a Denver built up

around Nintendo songs, built up around what is forward,

what is poetry scribbled in the margins of a second round,

scribbled in a crack of fire aboard a paper boat. Here we are

blue ghosts sliding down the drain of some enormous space,

here we are leopard-bound quarters in the urinal, a National

Association of Letter Carriers, fried eggplant and a bowl

of white rice. I died within the origin of harmless apps,

and all of the virtual flowers vied for conxtion, for a pair

of low tides on the snowy path, for an arc of rust over the world’s

capitols. The evolution of experimental psychology picks up leaves

pulled in around your shattered frame just as you insert your impurity

next to mine.

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

Divided Hearts Call for Arms

Categorization—where do we draw the line?

Between the haves and the have-nots,

those with the loud mouths

and those with the loud ears.

Or perhaps we’ll draw the line between

two specks of sand in a field somewhere.

We’ll draw it and call it the state.

In the waiting room for a drug testing center

we’ll hear stories about broken windows

and about all the restraining orders.

So very many restraining orders.

And I, with my shotgun heart, on about the peoples.

They’ve got their cars and their mobile phones.

They’ve got all of their isms.

And then the man with the tobacco lips will shout.

He’ll say: “You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

Yes!  You’re damn right I do!

My nervous system’s got the best of me.

Oh, how all this index has got the best of me.

And how I hope to collect myself, to regain myself.

What my hope’s for is slow thrills.

So I’ll spend two weeks with the anarchists.

And now I can scream even louder.

But that’s the prevailing theme of normalcy,

that we love to catalog so dearly.

We want to talk about it.  We want to identify with it.

So here’s to the ones in teal sweaters

who just can’t quite put a finger on it.

They’ve got their books and their inquisitive eyes.

They’ve got all their isms.

Just don’t dare call them elusive.

Artwork courtesy Tex Fontanella and John M. Bennett

He Will Only Be Image

When he’s gone,

over the couch will hover

one spear of light.

I’ll become

what the spear isn’t.

Without body, the weapon

is just some combination

where light hit one thing and spilled.

 

Prairie Tower

Pine bells knock

where structure erases

and batters to remind.

 

Longings octopus.

Rage drops a cheek by the puddle.

 

Giant spheres stain monoliths with light.

The slabs stare back

and wind swears at their edges.