AC Evans, VESPULA VANISHES

Vespula Dreaming, image by AC Evans 

VESPULA VANISHES

Unto the darkness

Through the light she came;

Out of the light she came;

The light flaring white, across the grass

Where blind statues stand, indifferent to worldly cares.

So, the Lady Vespula was born from nowhere,

Bathed in light and pain,

Her hair was black, her eyes were blue,

Her velvet robe was emerald green, laced with gold,

And, standing there, as the light faded into mist,

It was as though she could not speak.

The Lady Vespula looked at the dancing fountains,

She looked at the deserted lawns, the well-tended shrubs,

The tall, elegant trees reaching up into a cloudless sky;

It was as though she could not speak.

Through the light she came;

Out of the light she came;

But the light was no more, the world ignored her pain,

Seeming distant, alien and estranged from all desire.

So the Lady Vespula longed for the night,

She longed to bathe in darkness and pure sensation.

Black was her hair, as black as the night,

Blue were her eyes, as deep as the fathomless sea,

And, standing there, as day faded to dusk;

It was as though she could not speak.

Into the twilight she glided;

Towards the darkness she glided;

Yes, the light was no more, yes the world ignored her pain,

And another life was possible, evoked by her gaze.

So, Lady Vespula, immaculate daughter of light

Hurried towards the darkness, her darkness, unfolding.

Black was her hair, as black as this darkness,

Dark blue were her eyes, as blue as the empty sky, and

Striding towards the darkness, she entered the darkness,

A ghostly shape of desire dissolving into the night.

—AC Evans

Michael Mc Aloran, 4 prose poetics

untitled, image by Michael Mc Aloran,

acrylic on unprimed canvas, 102 x 155 cm.

4 prose poetics

…it ends as it does not wish to have ever had/ commences then out or not what matter/ dries eyed spurious metals a vibrant bloody welt asking of some none till follow long shadow fallen/ it says yet lacks all sound/ rent flesh in scum divisive edge guttered night abort of fragrant none of it about/ or else what else not a trace to be seem/ seen/ strips bare nothing no no matter if/ in-lacerate of/ dried blood nothing drag of irrepent a drag of spinal affluence some solace climb to dream of exigent given to taste/ what wind/ make it nothing less than brutal/ not/ scarce rot/ drag of lights permeating skin in a drift pierce as one locks baited silence hovering in within not taken for less or more taste of saturate attrition/ lock in/ vibrating what stone said yes/ eye abacus/ brute flesh carving out into endless night what matter/ absence of/ strips shut down/ collision purpose scattered remnants nothing of/ till bite what ask/ prayers from depth departed sunk dead sudden/ collapse unto thine ashes/ a lung/ fibrous oxidate climbing transparent space elective drain what stun lack trace abortive none of lack displaced exile/ in seek sun lights broken valves of having sought through laughter long given to expire/ skeletal/ traceless of eye what matter closed fingers fist shattered glass impenetrable sudden reject of/ biting down upon bared knuckles echo-echo senseless acclimatized/ bedamned/ there has been/ nothing crimson pace effortless alongside till vacant light marks accord what spasm senseless sense/ trace of non-percept/ glimmer-deep/ in deep/ what well of liquid night of endless blood/ in-dream spits shards of glass into/ fissure semblant what/ it asks what spun till colourless demise/ as if to say in murmur desert hyenic minced no solace it/ cold close till return of laughter from some black origin unfounded/ lapse climb reductive/ speaks of dead cold harrow priceless/ aches just a/ not one/ forgotten dream pageant nothing no it closure/ as if to say that in/ closure fist not a mark to remain/ settles to fall/ peels away skinned lights broken aspirate not a trace of/ broke stone laugh there is/ expels breath as of shit bile vomit no breath for tomorrow/ (I/ eye laughterling)/ conjoined silences/ devouring words what frenzy to become…

…lungs outstretched some bitter barb a stripped eye basking in sun lights/ alone is to best respite taken from onset’s winds/ nothing that cannot be outstretched wings till die what once/ ragged jaw out of some out-pulse regardless fathom never spoken till clad stone break reflect cascade/ it-eye-what no more till barricade stripped bare in spurious silences/ spat out some final tongue into dissipating gait left trace of not a nor of in if no matter nothing says finalize it/ night’s fissure scarlet taste a diseased sky endless to touch beyond/ working bone against bone as if to say that nothing left demarcated stripped of tangents dry ice colours blending with tears given to unto some effortless demise/ it or other/ it what/ nothing more/ having burned all winds/ these burning winds deduced bone from out of faculty headless desire a given trace of some beyond forget it/ as one passes through another nothing there as if to/ broke stone fingers trace benign absence a dissipating smoke/ as if to/ having been no not for wastage not a/ clamour of dead light stripping the carcass of final tears lap them up for/ saken/ for no not a trace of there it all lies in pit tryst skull-depth snap-snap it is a lie/ mercury eyelids covering sight(less)/ here what collide what spun hilt dread laughter long as hollow/ not a/ strips violent teeth a mockery of being nothing beckoning in nothing’s claim/ it-spun/ eyes roll back in opiate lights/ not a trace of sky when sky is mind alone yet not a trace/ spoken of yet better departures given when lock is steel what driven else forget/ it is I-lie/ distances flung out into foreign realms/ no trace to touch/ what of/ none of it throughout/ a downward spiral staircase of diseased longing smeared with bloody excrement/ reek/ no end in sight taken from above/ no light by which to guide/ atrophic words cascading from fleshed devourment/ nowhere left some nothing left to run aground/ where vocal chalice mocked by nothing claims what dim I-lack/ sunk white/ lights out…

…ever of still-chase broke-spun lack until of measure/ gifting of eye what purpose flesh a wrang of meat a colossus breath still-born edges/ as of/ forget-me-knots shackled nonchalant skull deep what water winter water’s edge/ steps to blood measurement distance haven cleft one singular purpose not a/ it still distillation breaking forth relapse of climb none from out of which to parry disclosed all night disclosed/ crack what stone effigies detritus wastage of bone steel laughter prevaricate/ fucked frozen eye reclaimed stillness from which to escapade writ in lines cast by a windless full of blood/ it I-lie never once of trace desire nothing captured given unto causality driven terse/ etc./ eye-lack sudden to expire given of reject of purpose nothing left to trace where nothing was or if abounding/ ragged then in terse closed doorway in or out of/ nothing ventured nothing eye alone roving in said dark what dark/ blind arc ice to follow on from given unto gesture/ dead all what some circus apathy/ dressage what will some stench of sickness given from retreat/ onward no/ flails off lack of purpose of desire/ it we fallen/ drag/ yes another drag another bone/ another broke stone nothing amber-lighted/ shadows shed across echoing out no nothing into which given to having forgotten from the outset of what if or/ dead we along/ scattered what longing gild of appetite an outstretched palm/ scum pageantry/ isolate in terse/ with we what if collective no nothing to obtruse skin of toothen walls no sense for tomorrow/ it is/ what is/ out of or other than/ dense die what collapse in cracked eye promise/ I-cannot/ what is of or in not a trace given to lack in dream sarcophagus collapse/ expired endless/ given to/ accord/ what sense then under-sensed beneath/ callous under-climate parasite/ blood-shot in bite of recollect/ deduced from bones what given traces/ it of/ what of/ not a/ in-dreaming posit of some lack what given violence/ aspen/ cold bait that once/ twice/ thrice/ echo-dim falling to earthen what spine no solace never to/ return…

…cease lest less fathom of/ in eye’s disclosure given to fathom no not an instance/ so seeks the glad tide flowing blood-like roomed and yet leaving no trace of tomorrow’s pageant/ still yet/ given to from promise spectral/ broke stone dim clad what from given taste fallen ocular forgive it cannot forgive/ lung all hours of the sun’s diameter unshod/ bones raking up the dead leaves/ we solace climb what of it nowhere left yet never hanging in visceral of oak-bound lack/ what is known and unknowable/ traceless again as if to passage not a/ spoken of less/ broiling in the waters of/ flightless soundless waste/ arcing spectrally as if to utter no nothing forage no/ alone/ eye spit loggerheaded cracking the skyline/ this what once/ whatever if none speech what be in drought’s abandon/ rooms gouged out carcasses/ some rot/ steel perhaps unburnished/ none from which to gather these bankrupt hours/ ever breathless ever faltering in shadowings/ given to be unspeaking rhetoric/ I-lung/ as once was/ lightless/ darkles/ an empty falter given to expire/ all doors slamming shut all forget-me-nots/ scattered shrapnel/ and the empty disclosure of final unknown/ in rat din air’s collision splice of some unmade mark what have you/ excised by colour me this/ haven of the unsensed dispersal blind-white ocular roving in utter nothing left unto/stretched from catascope one foot then the utterance onward claiming back-shadow allwhile dense acclimatized bleeding out/ as if to echo/ not a/ if then of of splendor thankless to reclaim where none is the given pulse and X. is the shadow’s teeth grazing upon time’s useless pummeling/ thankless from outset’s climate/ churn of dead space how the laughter died/ yet still yet/ as of yet/ not a trace/not a hope/ not a fucking chance from the outset/ glimmering yes yet what of it some wreckage solace prism head devoured in moon-struck light/ sheets as of crumpled swans cast unto evacuated rooms/  not a trace of desire/ blood stains/ not a… 

—Michael Mc Aloran

Michael Mc Aloran was Belfast born, (1976). He grew up in Co. Clare. He is the author of a number of collections of poetry, prose poetry, poetic aphorisms and prose, most notably Attributes, (Desperanto, NY, 2011), The Non Herein & Of Dead Silences (Lapwing Publications, 2011/ 2013), Of the Nothing Of, The Zero Eye, The Bled Sun, In Damage Seasons, (Oneiros Books (U.K)--2013/ 14); Code #4 Texts, a collaboration with the Dutch poet, Aad de Gids, was also published in 2014 by Oneiros. He was also the editor/ creator of the Bone Orchard Poetry zine, & edited for Oneiros Books (U.K 2013/ 2014). A further collection, Un-Sight/ Un-Sound (delirium X.), was published by gnOme books (NY, 2014); and EchoNone & Of Dissipating Traces were also released 2015 by Oneiros Books. breath(en) flux, a chapbook, was released in 2016 by Hesterglock Press. Black Editions Press also published in absentia & In Arena Night in 2016. 

Nathan Spoon & Sammantha Prychodko & Fusiform Gyrus & Jamie Thurman & Alex Lundy, Spoon’s Collaboratives

Metalepsis of the Red Mask, image by Irene Koronas

Spoon’s Collaboratives

It makes a goblin of the sun (@ 80 bpm)

Camelia aches.

So what about the rocking chair?

She is bruised in every moment of her body.

I know, of course:

Her stomach churns.

everything comes down to seeing.

She casts her eyes upward;

I know, of course:

field stretches, somewhere in her periphery.

people who scratch out imperfections are unhappy forever.

She is enveloped in white-blue, unending sky.

I know, of course:

She imagines the breaking of the largest sea you’ve ever seen.

no person was ever born without desire - to be happy forever.

To see the ocean is to know the vastness of the earth.

Call it the sinoatrial node.

She has been in this town for an eternity.

It’s the heart’s pacemaker.

She longs, sometimes, to leave.

A human heart is 8 ounces in its chest.

The vast expanse of the ocean calls her to go;

Every day human hearts beat 115,000 times.

to float out, crash along in a boat,

I know, of course:

to lean over the side of the vessel and be met with only the cold,

my heart is like a seed;

unlit blackness of the sea.

no, I know my heart is a seed.

So much lies beneath to send a shiver over her -

My friend laughed when I took her to see my favorite lake;

a sheen of pain through her bones.

she is not looking with my heart.

The skin on her neck creeps coldly down, until it quivers off her back.

It is only sometimes my body and not me that aches.

—Sammantha Prychodko & Nathan Spoon

I’ll write coward across your face

Oulanem fabricates death rings         

makes heaven a plaything for

his calculations tongues of fire

stream forth voluptuous lips          bright

conscience-blazing brain worms for    KETTLE

clock-hands whirling in sequence                   DOXX

to a god-fist sermon working

flattery’s loins as if a puppet a blind fear

presentient mingling waiting for its cue          cut

to the man rolling up or unrolling a

length of fence and wearing a hat my

hand is on the wheel and holding

the cosmos in order even as you refuse

to blink so don’t look at the bird zinging

headlong into a decomposed mound of                     KETTLE

whatever we’re simultaneously outta here      DOXX

anyway somebody just announced

we          should all go and ring jesus off        cue

wrathful philistine trumpet                             you

cannot insert a file into human bark

for       the esoteric academy is dead!

—Fusiform Gyrus & Nathan Spoon

April dots the sombre thorn

A fiery searcher beetle sorts its wings

                                                                       Seriously.

          on the flat warmth of limestone.

                                                                       A river is a toad.

                          The clay colors the bank

                                                                       Also, drink the black milk

                           in brick red, hot as hell.

                                                                       when writing. If you do,

                               The beetle is a dragon

                                                                       your poetry will instantly

                          flaming near the cooling

                                                                       become flarf and real tweeters’

                                    Cumberland River.

                                                                       heads will become milkweed pods.

                                                  Disappears.

—Jamie Thurman & Nathan Spoon

I’ll have tofu for dinner

I think.

Agedashi / bright cube

I google ‘Achilles’ and click on the Wikipedia entry.

this body glistening like Achilleus

            under scrutiny of tiger mom Thetis

            on the illuminated campo:

A poem flows, as if by itself.

Ma, don’t you know Zen? You know,

that practice from over sunrises? You know,

the one that starts “Shush your mouth!”  Hmmm…

Now I am stirring

      Fistfuls, of worries                        a   s u n   d e r.

personal memories in along

Won’t he…

last / the day                ?                      nope

with stronger flavors from

            Were we young, too, did we learn…

the  E a s t.

save one prayer, this gong & thrash, yours weeping

among the bushes,

            crawl back out on all threes, stopper

your leg.

I am becoming

      A final shiver / crisping all over

what I am already eating.

—Alex Lundy & Nathan Spoon

Anne Tardos, The Enigma of Being Jewish

Good Morning #1, image by Anne Tardos 

The Enigma of Being Jewish

1

One throws one’s trembling body forward.

Using gestures, one inscribes what one is saying.

Gender neutral, one is free to speak the unspeakable.

One doesn’t speak.

Secretly, deep down inside, one musters up confidence, plunging into the

arena of contradiction, where pleasure and reality embrace.

One assumes that one’s therapist can unveil which sort of neurosis one is

related to.

After that, one joins the fight against injustice and poverty—as one must.

2

We count as far as we can count, yearning for infinity, eternity.

We deliver the mail, grow orchids, grow weary, grow old, keep track of

history, consider space-time to be a substance rather than a

direction.

We contemplate time-reversal invariants, such as the shattered glass

            cinematically reassembling itself, landing on the table intact—the

            impossibility of which is somehow related to thermodynamics.

We find things to say, we clarify, codify and spotify, we establish a

discourse, we break up, we destroy, we foresee the unforeseeable, 

we come to our senses.

We are amazed, we search for knowledge, we prolong, we hang on to

pleasures, we are afraid, we feel strange desires stirring inside us, 

we make trouble.

We produce texts. Think about what to write. We implement and follow

diversity policies.

What more can I say?

We are moved by childlike innocence.

3

Never mind the titles. They can be anything you like.

Bernadette once offered a long, witty list of possible titles.

A list.

A title.

A sheet of paper.

Clarice said that living doesn’t take courage, but knowing that one is

living, does.

I wonder how this is true.

4

I am standing in front of the closed doors of the future.

I am the outsider. 

Forever forbidden.

The future is spreading through my limbs.

I overflow.

I am ashamed. I am afraid.

I tremble, I redden, I bleed.

The more I am afraid, the more I am hunted.

I’d be crazy not to go crazy.

5

Making small gestures, leaving traces.

Thrown into language, the Algerian Jew discovers that writing takes

physical effort.

Could be Derrida, could be Cixous.

Not interchangeable, but like-minded.

Not substitutable, but compatible.

Not alike, but attuned.

The sunshine of Oran.

The French context.

The German family.

Displaced dispersed exiled.

—Anne Tardos

New York, 2016-2017 

Fusiform Gyrus, Excerpts from Posthuman Spam Psycle

Jimmy the Chatbot is Hungry for Gossip, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

Excerpts from Posthuman Spam Psycle

Gloomy Poem Movie: After Kerouac’s Sax

SCENE ONE

Doctor Sax hostage to the neoplasm lambasts the strange homunculi he sees writhing black tendrils from cark’s neck tethering him like a supranational power plug burnt and bit-rotten any excuse to fight reason fuck this I’m going for smokes.

SCENE TWO

Acid blue palm fronds wave ripple tease the space between dust particles floating by in humid night high lick splash symbol Sax exits the bodega with a brown paper bag tight in fist plagued by a high-pitched ringing in his ears crumbling to genuflection before a violent sky.

SCENE THREE

Sax wakes to a Promethean chorus of seething polyps and arthritic fingers crooked sphincteric cramp alone in a storm-drain with leaves and other forms of stilted life hypnogogic residue whirring to a stop oxen ocean gathering dispersing buckets of waste buckets of food edging temerity of a burning bush Sax’s growing propensity for new sincerities.

White Animal Saviors

Patchwork                   of

taxidermy                    sick

sustainable                  cute

seal                             death

native                          fear

in (uk)                         human

bio                               diverse            

emotive                       pruning

normcore                     atmophobes

man                             capricious

stop-tap                       protectionist

diatribe                        gleaming

cyan                             teeth

transmitting                 hemispheric

migraine                      duodenum

duo-dee                       numb-do

wad-numb                   duo-demon

Soviet                          instrument

Morrissey                    fuelling

Post                             colonial                       

kettling.

Oresteia: After Bataille

Oresteia’s severed cock throated from either end by clytaemnestra and the dried maw of agamemnon’s corpse a gagging last supper of blush pink vomit and seed a strained kiss as the blood begins to drain and the member deflates impotent in his revenge oresteia kisses his mother goodnight his cock still lodged deep in her throat ad speculum he tongues his father’s unstitched mouth and sits back to leak black life out his cloying numb hole molding his masque-mortuaire clawing hallucinating a life of arcadian laughter rattling discordances a bag pipe of death sounding gaseous surrender and as oresteia’s work-worn soul shuffles away head bowed in shame clytaemnestra regurgitates the slimy morsel and priggishly chews before taking it back with a triumphant gulp.

Soma

Zoffany’s closed fist blooms glint of

evil signals the beginning of the end              there

nestled in the clammy creases four tiny                      seeds

two on the line of my tongue an alien

vessel landing in an aqueduct on

a pink planet swallow high concentration

chemicals swarming instantly through my mind

a tinny distant voice says I got them from

a local chemawawin boy on the river of

forgetting where becoming and ending flow

reciprocally like kissing tongues everything

slows bows shifts down to a single hum.

Rimus Remedium Or How sick Poets Console Themselves: After Nietzsche

Glory to a prostitute a different kind of adonis grappling dismaying and overcoming with vitality to the endstrom wrought and fecund with decay glory to a prolapsed anus a different kind of honesty perspectival in its hanging reluctance to platitudes and growing with each unclean fist glory to a politician flayed a different kind of austerity glory to a depraved moralist a different kind of justice convinced of higher legitimation a truthfully selfish saint glory to a leper apocather a different kind of apotheosis glory to a mythopoet so sick with syphilis autochthon to sisyphus a different kind of genus.

Futurity   

O’ tiny circuit what is your destiny will you become

part of a particle reactor helping create

an ecological energy source giving free clean power to

the world or will you sit in a lab

mass-producing dichloroacetate stabilizing the molecules

needed to rid the world of cancer or

will you float gallantsly free as a satellite circumspect

poised among the stars so scientists

can monitor solar eruptions and radiation to stave off apocalypse

no replies another component on the board

we are to be used in one of those little security key calculators

for internet banking that make people

feel secure with technology with our kind progress then

no matter how long it takes utopia will come.

Unnamed

Trapeze rapist stuck on

the same wrong password

loop

prosciutto parachute

solar cunt cake proto-human

spam limbic dirt jar

c-section for the 21st century

genome reflex

big head

mute vicious dog music

less saxophonist blowing snapping

new rhythm.


—Fusiform Gyrus