Kathryn Mockler

THIS IS NOT A SEXY DREAM

Last night I had a dream where there was a man, a
woman, and an old man. The man pointed a gun at the
woman and the old man and told them to fuck. They
had to fuck everywhere and try not to get caught: on
the street, in a car, in a barn. The fucking was not
sexual; it was kind of like running or walking, but
it just happened to be fucking. In the dream,
sometimes I was the woman and sometimes I was
the old man, but I was never the man with the gun.

Kathryn Mockler's third poetry collection, The Purpose Pitch, was published in April 2015 by Mansfield Press, "a stuart ross book." Her writing can also be found on The Butter, Vol. 1. Brooklyn, and Geist. She's the Toronto editor of Joyland and publisher of The Rusty Toque.

Alex Porco

TWO AMERICAN SONNETS

I. Hands Up!

Mythos is derived from mu, the
Inarticulate low
Of a fugitive cow at large
From Anderson Custom Pack Processing Plant,
Pocatello, Idaho.
On a moon-less (January-less) January night,
The tickled pink
Farola fernandinas of Freedom
Light this queen beeve up, rapping her behind
Down Main St., Stock Footage, USA,
Like a cocktail shaker
With a dream of sunset served
On ice: forage, forbs, umbrella drinks.

Local cops shot her right in the brisket.


II. Astrophel and Stella, Palindrome and Homophone

I say, Omaha meat.
You say, Yellow-blue vase.
To preserve something
Of love free
From referential verification;
To interfere
With data miners who subject
The expression of desire
To a string metric, predictive analytics, foreplay.
You say, Yellow-blue vase.
I say, Omaha meat.
Then, we go to sleep,
Our private
Meaning bugged, buggered between our privates.
 


Alex Porco is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is the editor of Jerrold Levy and Richard Negro’s Poems by Gerard Legro, forthcoming from BookThug’s “Department of Reissue” series in Fall 2015.

Nelson Ball

CATHERINE VISITS

For Catherine Stevenson

Catherine
likes to visit this place

where I live
mostly in silence

she says
it is peaceful

compared to life
with her students

and her children
here she will

speak words
onto the still air

where
they breathe

and we
look at them



Nelson Ball’s most recent poetry books are In This Thin Rain and Some Mornings (Mansfield Press, 2012 and 2014). An online chapbook of his poems, A Rattle of Spring Frogs, appears on the website of Hamilton Arts & Letters. Chapbooks are forthcoming this year from Apt. 9 Press, Laurel Reed Books and Stone The Crows! Press. Nelson and his late wife and soulmate, artist and writer Barbara Caruso, are the subjects of Nelson Ball & Barbara Caruso / Home Project / A Photo Documentary, a video created by his friend Catherine Stevenson, who is the subject of this poem. The video can be viewed on YouTube.

Jacqueline Valencia

THE CLIMB

We were climbing the mountain
and arrived at the peak
to float in high altitudes. You
chose to dance with the galaxies
above us like an obscure
narration of a moment forgotten.

I stood and observed.

Glaciers around us
at attention constructing
a circle of resonance
and the village lights below
were nothing compared to
the lamps of your eyes
fuelled by naphthalene
and anger.
But there we stood
monstrous illusions to the
heavens
tracked by the planets’
celestial dust, busted snowshoes,
dull hammers, ice picks,
our wedding rings
sucking in the starlight
as if we mattered
to anything outside of us.

It’s unbelievable what
you can find
when you are not looking:
the falsity of the sun dog,
the incoming meteor, the silver
of the moon, a rolling
thunder, and the love I
still felt for you at the start
of your departure.
 


Jacqueline Valencia is a Toronto-based writer and critic. Her work has appeared in various publications across Canada, and she is currently working on her first novel. Check out Jacqueline’s work and poetry experiments at jacquelinevalencia.com.

OK, this time I'm serious

TWSITV REALLY WILL BE BACK

I know I said last November that this weekly poetry blog was going to return in January. So my credibility is low. But really: it's on the verge of becoming active again. You'll see.

Stuart Ross

The Week Shall Inherit The Verse returns

I'LL BE BACK

As a result of a health emergency in my family in June 2013, I decided to suspend this blog. That emergency stretched into many months, into the following year. And then I had many months of catch-up and an enormously heavy workload to contend with. I'm thinking that by 2015, I'll be ready to get The Week Shall Inherit The Verse going again. Look for the first new issue the week of January 5.

Stuart Ross

Greg Evason

ARTAUD AND SONTAG AND ME

Sontag said
Artaud
was not
to be
taken
seriously
whereas
I sometimes say
the only one
who
should be
taken
seriously
is our toe



Greg Evason's poems and drawings and collages and paintings and short stories and plays have appeared in many online and offline magazines around the world. He has has had at least ten chapbooks published and recently his book PLOWING DOWN THE CUT was published by Luna Bisonte Prods. He is an autodidact from way back. His work has been collected by the Sackner Archive and archived by the Ohio State University Library. He has written many novels which he has recently started to submit to publishers. He is not a cynic. In fact, he has high hopes for the future of mankind which he sees lying in wait for us as long as we commit fully to travel in and cultivation of space. First, all religious dogma needs to be tossed into the trash bin of history. Greg lives in Toronto.