Winter 2011 An online Journal of Voice BlazeVOX [books] Buffalo, NY BlazeVOX11 Winter 2011 Copyright © 2011 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition BlazeVOX [books] 76 Inwood Place Buffalo, NY 14209 [email protected] publisher of weird little books BlazeVOX [ books ] blazevox.org 2 4 6 8 0 9 7 5 3 1 B l a z e V O X Table of Contents Poetry Sean Borodale Abigale Louise LeCavalier Alison Lyons Ambrielle Army Andrew Baron Avery Zaduk bruno neiva Changming Yuan Charles Wilkinson Curt Hopkins Simon Perchik Dave Migman Aviva Englander Cristy Deanna Rusek David McAleavey Matt Higdon Terry van Vliet Don Cozzette Dennis Etzel Jr. Emily Ho Ed Makowski Gonzalo Salesky Enola Mirao Iain Britton Dave Migman Jacqueline L. Jiang Chieu Ivan Jenson Jen Besemer Heller Levinson Julie Kovacs Jim Bennett Karlanna Lewis Julie Ellinger Hunt Kristi Nimmo Sarah Kosch Michael Kerszewsky minko terez Mattia Marino Margot Block Marcia Chicca Marthe Reed Purdey M. Kreiden Nils Norelius rob mclennan Pattabi Seshadri SPLV Richard Fox Shinwell Johnson Richard Cronshey W. M. Rivera Thomas Cochran Robin F. Brox Adam Fagin Matthew Walz Fiction: Philip Kobylarz Fishing for Television Michael Quinlan October 31, 2003 Michael C. Thompson Shadowless Jim Meirose Friendship Dolan Morgan A Spider’s Faith in Webs Anthony Johnson Outlast Abbi Nguyen The Foreign Dream Acta Biographia Winter 2011 Author Bios IntroductionIntroduction Occupy BlazeVOX Welcome to Winter! The snow is falling, finally, now in Buffalo. It is a beautiful scene of December. And so with the late date of publishing this issue, we are titling our Late Fall issue the more apt, Winter 2011. It has been a wonderful year and so to cap it off, it is with great honor and pleasure we present great selections from writers from around America and the world. As the snow falls we writers persist, keep on working our poetry and our stories and continue to read our poems and it is all rather exciting. There is a lot of work out there for poetry and in this issue we present a glimmering sliver of that shining potential. So get ready we have 60 authors from around the globe, including fifty-three poets and seven prose pieces. So hurray! Get Reading Also in BlazeVOX [books] news: On November 10th 2011 we held an extravagant BlazeVOX [books] event at a new large art gallery in Buffalo, The Burchfield Penny. We were unable to record the reading, so we decided to put together a small packet that captured the fun of the whole event. Featuring the work of Michael Basinski, Wade Stevenson, Robin Brox, Geoffrey Gatza and Michael Kelleher. Portrait Drawings by artist Peter Fowler, Self Portraits of Poets and Book People (As a fund raising idea, we asked local and international poets and book people to send us a self-portrait) We received work from all around North America, including National Book Award winner Keith Waldrop and the first Canadian Poet Laureate, George Bowering. In total we received 30 pieces of artwork, and we sold a great deal of it at the show. We also have an online shop where we will have for sale, the remaining pieces. So if you want to help out the press while taking home a self-portrait of a favorite poet, here is your chance! Again, thank you for all of your kind support and allowing BlazeVOX [books] to continue on! Also, this years Thanksgiving Menu-Poem, a book length poetry dinner, now in it's tenth year, celebrates Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop. Do stop on by the page to share in a moment of poetry. BlazeVOX @ Burchfield Penney 2011 http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/journal/blazevox-@-burchfield-penney/ Thanksgiving Menu Poem http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/thanksgiving-poems/ Self Portraits of Poets Fundraiser – online shop! http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/self-portraits-of-poets-fundraiser/ Rockets, Geoffrey Geoffrey Gatza Editor & Publisher ------------------------------------- BlazeVOX [ books ] Publisher of weird little books -------------------------------------- [email protected] http://www.blazevox.org Winter 2011 An online Journal of Voice Winter 2011 W.M. Rivera Song bubbles in the universe “You said: ‘I’ll go to some other place, some other sea,’” C.P. Caváfy Yes, Caváfy, I’m indebted to you; you say the ruined life in one place stays ruined elsewhere. It’s true. I’ve gone other places and this morning’s silence gnaws no different… other seas, other indefinites, lemniscate wanderings; in the scratch of blackboard sentences much is erased, forgotten, ruined. But the dictum’s limited. Life’s beyond I or me or any other wastrel. Life wastes life… place after place, greed, hate. Meanwhile Sun sings; song bubbles in the universe; slow sounds explode. Space filters down; even now dust settles pound by soft accumulating pound. Triolet Men call it mystery the origin’s opening: Courbet conceives the face as covered All else nude. For Rodin Iris goes flying Headless, the messenger spread-eagle, daring to show all, the thing itself, gaping, hairless, no deception; nothing covered. Known, yet unknown, desire’s opening. Men call it mystery even uncovered. Sweat for tears I am tired of nature. Not the one outside, the one in poem after poem, Sun, rain. Seems emotions run to meet seasonal recyclings after rot, buds and hungry deer observed, poet-roads untraveled yet happy if images fit to catch the eye, seeing waters flow and earth spins on until the well runs dry and crickets sing. Who knows the truth of time’s next step? Where is that crystal-gaze, that sage who turns the truth into a wisp of wind or into storms to make word-makers weep. But must it be nature’s note again?—wet outdoors to replicate the sweat for tears. Preparing There was a beginning I remember vaguely, the mouth moving demanding drops of liquid bliss and then the standing, on my own the broomstick a stud rider, wind for sails, the moment’s miracle. And now habitually I prepare for the next minute, problem, day, event, month, next-to-nothing-left is the feeling. The future floats face down, a dead world peaceful, puffy. I prepare to follow who’s next in time, who is no longer waiting, who lined up dutifully, now done performing the mature thing, next in time whose vanishment is the end for each who walks from anteroom into the final next. Where were we then, some ask, before this present, before that birth: before dirt, flame and water’s depth? Prepared or not, the only hope dear Lucretius, as you counseled, is no dread. Only that Let’s be clear; nobody cares; your struggle, gloom, glory, once written down what matters is only that it should be beautiful. Trumpeter, truth teller, music minstrel, the best-dressed mogul, the man in tatters hardly differ in depicting struggle. Whether at hand are history and form, allegories that launch ancient answers, the clue is that it should be beautiful. The work’s value, its radical alarm, its fight to right wrongs, spread joy, tell terrors, depends on how one sees the struggle. Or maybe craft is paramount, the charm the author radiates, clever features-- just as long as it should be beautiful. The trick is to strike deep, avoid lukewarm keep uppermost sage words of teachers, the issue is not to end the struggle, only that it should be beautiful. Incorporates the idea of the various ways of looking at a poem: as a historical entity, as declaration of purpose, and as method and theory. Winter 2011 Thomas Cochran 12. He could have had my head on a spit with a word. I knew his father, saw him on the side of a canyon beneath an influential exhibition of 94-foot blue-whale models. You will recall, all these years later, a street in late morning, the three of us, arms extended, urging our horses up stairways and across balconies, the old routine. Where is he when I think of this now? Always, of course, the goatherd appears to remind him that he did not act. 13. In a recent survey conducted for release on St. Patrick’s Day, the Irish countryside was named by 14 percent of all respondents as their ideal dramatic locale. That being said, who knew the cost of doing business with a herd of cows? The motorized assemblage of androids rotating under a tie-dyed blanket proved less acrobatic than expected. Perhaps the great finish made clear the necessity of appreciating dusk— or at least the distinction of peat fires. Winter 2011 Terry van Vliet EUCHARIST poets’ words why from where who knows or expects them to come unbidden thunder lightning when they come confront from nowhere to shake me shock me waken me make me see grasp real presence mystery welcome embrace the jolt slice of light that bursts rolls away the stone that undoes reverses consecrates the every day confects bestows communion tangible food blessed sacrament poetry 5 RUE DE VERNUEIL when I’m in Paris I always go to 5 rue de Vernueil to see Serge Gainsbourg’s house because I like it as well as the Louvre or the Pompidou and anyone can touch its great graffiti that’s as good as a Franz Kline in Technicolor and his house is Paris full of surprises like the rusting faucet on the rue Visconti that’s been transformed into a penis with mossy pubic hair that’s dripped on the paving stones for at least forty years iron fine hard-on Giacometti might have wrought and last Friday Tosh said he’d give anything to get inside that house Charlotte closed for good in 1991 where the cheese in the fridge has ripened for over twenty