photo courtesy David Olson
This first installment of poems is home to thoughts inspired by watching movies with the intention of writing a poem at the same time. To quote from Rimbaud’s “Genie,” let us find in these poems “fatal qualities” and “new misfortunes” under lamplight and rifle. The poems emerge out of an existing fabric and are put into a new one. Bruce Andrews writes in Film Noir, “For an orphan a place is always a refuge, / For myself a place a refuge a refusal.” Let us considers ourselves orphans seeking refuge in film and poetry, the two mediums being greater for what they refuse. Title or no title, they should be between 17 and 30 lines, but we can push this boundary some. Send them to dimcitylit[at]gmail[dot]com with “Installment One” in the subject line. I will continue to post more poems as they come in, and so it will grow out of how it has started.
Hanz Olson
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The Poem Is Material Made of Letters Held at Arm’s Length – Bevin Moeller
Police are Creepy – Daniel Neeman
Under the Bombs – J. Zachary Rothstein
Lyricism – Hanz Olson
Cannes – Bevin Moeller
Discount Braids – Daniel Neeman
An Excuse for Sex – Brett Moe
Tarkosky – J. Zachary Rothstein
He Will Be Only Image and Prairie Tower – Bevin Moeller
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The Poem Is Material Made of Letters Held at Arm’s Length
The poem’s an arm away letter air cloth
Unthere above where I understand cement
In the organs around my hips. Treeless,
The locked door clothes my arms with slate.
My mother’s hair, her peach moon chin
Like two letters as one question
The size of one person repeat themselves.
Tree the alert my actress friend learned, I’m linoleum.
People forget they could be rounded up to all pubes.
My father, a lavender flag, wants to curl.
Justin’s paper mirrors decorate the space between the moon and the earth.
I’m crude oil if a tulip melts.
No one thinks the four of us are family still.
Events make the triangles of their shadows
If they were construction paper in a sheaf.
These things follow me into the room –
Billboards for cloth they advertise in the dark.
My spine is part tree, part giraffe’s spine.
Heavier than pounds, I move like a tree if it dragged a tree.
The world is the size of a pearl,
Continents the ornamental geography of velcro.
I stop looking in the mirror temporarily.
Each letter I read flickers its hue
So night’s fan chews the felt quilt,
A machine doing guilt for me with its sound.
Clothes in their colors core days’ identities
And I have been wearing what flags do for countries.
Does the naked body have to be sexual
Because we are the animal whose hair halos
Cannot excuse the unlaugh of pubes
Or how small the penis really is when he walks nude,
His brain stuffed with hair, air his halo body of fear?
Night invaded the bathroom.
I ask to move out of the purple and black flag.
Instead of night cool it’s cloth after skin
With prescription follow up slaps.
Thread hangs from my dress instead of a spider.
Even facts sew protective ten point stars
On flags that would otherwise be the crashing into ten pillows
Against a wall if pillows were children’s stardust,
The girl’s French braids lifting the animal from her translucence.
She closes her eyes and laughs.
I have been living in a world
Where the imaginary and the real are clothes in a dance without people.
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Police are Creepy
It might benefit me to
unlearn two dozen spectacles
where people touch screens
and some watch them
from a distance while
I belong to them.
But that’s our similarity:
that we’ve spent our entire lives
wandering aimlessly, thinking
that you would find your place.
And neither did I. So I took
Thursday off to play with stars.
Oh, wonderful sick day,
you have a special Something
that the weekend does not.
Sick days don’t touch screens–
they belong to them.
I don’t need anybody to
worship my wardrobe.
I need people in attics to
be digging through old crates
and they are whistling an
unidentified melody. It’s what
the birds were singing about.
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Under the Bombs
These ruptures, these discontinuities; I breathe with your lungs; I shit with your bowels the recrudescent tombs of languages whose tongues worm like a single breath uttered in words of phosphorescent video-footage: bullets of narrative-shattering explosions; ripened fissures of concrete; the horror of haphazardly draped and broken bodies. The barriers, impenetrable, recondite; an unwitting exteriority; oiling deep-fracked and steaming injection wells of Anglo-incredulity into cinematic Dakotas of dry parch and sand; a paradoxical dispersal or urban Arabs, now extrapolated from private dream fantasies clouding the Orientalized rooms of mythic childhood wallpapers, deconstructed and napalmed out of their flowering extrusions like the cordite blasting of silent stars in songs of incomprehensible space.
An endless Daliesque array of domicile corpses, foundations decayed with torrents of bloodlessly exposed metallic wire, out-stretched like beggars hands in half-articulated parables; reflections without overdub, poured like spice emporiums from the deep echoes of Fairuz emoting through Lebaneze bistros–a foreign suffering but easy to understand; nonetheless, I am made to feel complicit in history’s over-pouring of unresolved and displaced grudges and hatreds.
Are all countries as beautiful as this, even when they awaken with welts of a violated and despairing slumber? And who inflicted these elliptical commentaries, these half-spoken utterances, these bombs of incendiary jellies and transistorized- detonations, caught midstream like groggy surfers rocked into somnolence by sudden and crushing waves.
Is it an indulgence of false humility to insert oneself, even for the detached bramble of a single-second, into the body of another, to feel their veins and twitching muscles, the ambivalent molecular rumble of their transient anxieties, like fault lines subsumed beneath the slippery overbite of encroaching continental plates; knowing full-well that one remains unscathed; the action diffused through a placental curtain called television–cinema as an armature, a chain mail, groping the incomprehensible argot and feined combat exercises of obligatory empathy? Such long and perambulating questions often mimic obsequious groupies, waiting at the train depot for the inevitable rendezvous of cliche with empty platitudes. A universalized morphing: they are me, and I them; the one body like a disheveled word scrawled in dramatic typeset on a billboard torn from the comic strip roadmap of a consciousness contravened and then sieved through the sprawling Beirut tenements or raw sentiment.
Each of us within discrete borders, the boundary lines like glass taxi partitions; destinations rendered inaudible and meaningless. Museum authenticity; worlds transpired through the convex mirror of a single undated photograph.
The film is real; the sufferings genuine; an atavism has been perpetrated here, but I can never reach the hands that shape the magma of its felsic rage, nor the froth at its bubbling source. Time stretches out in parralax like an obscure equation enumerated through the occluded integers of movements frozen at the event horizon of anticipation; the cold lips of an eternal similitude, reproducing itself to infinity without definitive form.
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Lyricism
Grasped the coffee table
the notepad I’ll never use
the Old Mill Cinema
What doesn’t sound good
or nervous or buggy
Rental storage lockers
behind the hidden tower
constantly scanning
every fiber traded upon
every click I too can see
What is street photography
without the will to collect
to make one’s living as a shadow
as an unusual person
Steel stacks supporting a sagging floor
fold in the window
The box and the edge of a frame
tie the flower around a rabbit’s ear
Here the cords of a show shore up
at their unknown
and I pace behind the leaves
putting on the armor’s need to feel
What merits the shadow of a microphone
never emerges as an insensate jig
I ask myself if this is real
achieving what I always have
this humming I dare say is beautiful
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Discount Braids
Some things were meant to
be written on a napkin.
Grocery lists, desires,
and also a sneeze
from all of the pollen.
Scissors and grass blades alike
had run through my hair.
I held it in the park
and it flew into the wind–
it was the biggest give up
that I had ever seen.
And so two parts of me
had left in this moment
the hair, then this notion
that all of those things
that I had once felt with such zeal
hadn’t belonged to me at all.
That my hair and a napkin
might just be there together
in some parking lot.
Being felt by people
that I didn’t even know.
And they felt in the same way,
asking all of the same things
that I scribbled on napkins.
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Cannes
Genes too small to feed to coin purses hollow the spoken glints of them,
The holes dug for money’s final death. Sonar intercepts a message
About whales, whose light crashes or is the rays of God’s best departure.
Dwarf pansies riot the flower burrows nearest the painted walls.
I barely remember being donated to research forever.
The unacceptable cooks broken eggs. She loves her foreign flag dress.
Tonight: the weathering of stone and a statue celebrates women.
A man in the arts asks himself again, “How do you?” apologize.
This time I am not trying to sleep on two metal millimeters.
I am child in the king’s lumber, the planet is a celeriac heart.
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An Excuse for Sex
Stay in my bed
No touching me
Except for the lamp
No touching anything
But in another world
I could be your girl
You fit with me
Like the coffin and the grave
Skeletons can see me
You fit with me
Life is short
Soon we’ll be dead
There’s still no touching in her bed
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Tarkovsky
Stalks panoptic desire in tendrils of abbreviated gasps, clasping glass tuba pipes of brassified air, while channeling water into leaky condoms of smaller and smaller utterances that glide across puddles of temporal confinement like gratuitous residues of unsubmitting flatulence produced by tiny animals.
Ascendant migrations of calcified dust–obstinate and granular; voided apertures clinging to the particularities of their own confirmation, like transfigured bells reprised in persistence of ossified and peripheral railroad tracks; sandbagged obelisks of scattered hope; even the residue of badly played anthems of mildewed nationalism on damp floors covering decayed rinds of obsolete political intransigencies. . .
Misfits washed-up onto beaches of aluminum, glass and asbestos; floating tides of seaweed and the unopened mail of retrogressive cole-slaw leavings, transformed into fragrant moldings of elephant sinus; the unfixed birch-bark and ivory music of impenetrably clear water sprung like nucleotides bouncing along rims of diminutive cellular incoherence, stitched into echoing themes from infant orchestras of pain and reprieve, now reconstituted in gelatinous rooms of repetitive and opaque tinyness; stirrups and stamens of corn-rib architecture, ramified and echoed into a thistle-bed promontory of dry ears; the flux and mating of cramped birds, squawking through steamed nocturnes of thatched choimney smoke, articulated in sorts of cabbage rinds and densely narrowed historical sorrows. . .
Filters corduroy through vague intonations played across heaving woodwinds consumed by Caspian breathes punctuating global climatic shifts–anxious and languid tenors transmogrify energy into melody; now articulated as a table, a workroom, a bubble, into which suctioned dreams reveal the deep mussel-shell crystallization of their lapidary hardness; molting interiorities which speak in detuned hyperbole, like soft dentures of edible scaffoldings. . .
Touches depths of pigmented recollections; memento mori, eel-hides of old gelatin prints, all subsumed beneath their own intertwining as an uroboros-coil of implacable remnants; knotted, enigmatic, graffiti’d cuneiforms of burlap-pillowed landscapes, evaporating through solid air amidst an Ascension of numinous quarks; each particle expelling its own mirror image, like Cane-toads bound in the gyrations of summer amplexus, sweat shellacking onto the dithered bodies of incorrigible doubts and enigmas. . .
Refractory protagonists urinate warily on Procrustean beds of hypothetical re-enchantments and apocalypse, residing intimate proximities to phantom dogs unleashing imponderable backdrops of post-industrial reflux; fleeting unconjurabilities re-enact allegorical premonitions, resurrected now as organic props and hauntingly bland constrictions of inert wire-mesh–fate reduced to a single orifice or room; magic and entombment as the barbarism of endemic procedure, prolonged and stretched, then re-initiated and perplexed, into bizarre contortions of bureaucratic obsolescence. . .
Accumulating ice-jades of fallen stars, shoals of melted stone and parched papyrus confabulation; now enshrined like inconclusive architectures–lacking completeness, without the punctuation of spectral density; and swimming in the contingent yolk-nipples aureoles of collective memory, bestriding fragrant closets of desiccated ghouls. . .
Rinses ambiguity in an inscrutable buoyancy, and gravitationally intensifies cosmic contractions into the single word, the vowel, the elevated diphthong, now squeezed into a bonus of condensed and paradoxical expansion; a tapering distillation of acetates; a conjoining of stories never to be completed. . .
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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.
Innumerable Stumble 