May 21, 2015

#finalpoems / [?]

I Remain

These are the cries of a thousand dying breeds
The genocidal construct of a thousand shattered dreams
Cesspools of echoed nightmares torturing the sane
What will this world come to when only I remain?

Joseph Bouthiette Jr. is co-editor of Carrion Blue 555. He eats poop and poops food.

#finalpoems / [?]

In the end, all I could really do
is stay half-floating
in my neighbor’s pool,
with all these bobbing leaves
like armrests, these makeshift
cushions formed from all
those ugly suits your neighbors
left behind. But it goes further,
this final day, as you’re here, too
—and between us, even as
too many planes litter
the sky and cars screech
in their get-away flights,
you and I keep coping,
as we see how incredible
a world can be
when all the sharp things
fall into momentary silence.

Christopher Morgan is the Chapbook Editor for Nostrovia! Poetry, an Editor for tNY Press, and the Editor at Large for Arroyo Literary Review, growing up in Michigan, Georgia, and California.

#finalpoems / [?]

Don’t worry, darling
“final” is not a real word
Like “begin”, it has no cause or effect

Don’t worry, darling
All this time, without knowing,
we’ve been practicing for this moment

I see you
Love, we’re all here

Carolyn Zaikowski is the author of the novel A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as The Rumpus, Sententia, Nebula: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship, Everyday Genius, Denver Quarterly, Eleven Eleven Journal, Pank, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Naropa University. Find her at http://liferoar.wordpress.com/.

#finalpoems / [?]

When the crystal form emerges from the ash, the miner rejoices and drops his pickaxe unceremoniously to free his hands for barely restrained excavation – clawing, wiping, fingernail-cracking rock picking – until the rare earth is but soft loam underfoot and the gem is worked free to be cradled in sooty palms aloft to capture the halogen lamplight and refract the fricative photons across the subterranean tunnel in an array so beautiful all miners in any semblance of proximity hold their breaths and contracted forms in place for a moment to gaze upon the magic that sustains them.

When the first hour of night passes and the moon begins its baleful rise over the seas, the women tremble in the depths with a collective moan and release – oral folds quivering, golden clovers contracting, tentacles curling at the tips – and the ovum sink from the hundreds of bells, sashaying with the current until the one in many meets the white cat hair left behind by a solitary man now leagues away who pauses his swooping rhythm through his aqueous realm with a faint notion, a twinge of communication through the depths that his seed has found a home, and planted inside, the ova enveloping its mate, begins the pain of brooding into the humblest hydroid who knows nothing but to follow its mimetic instructions, adding reproduction upon reproduction until it is not one form in the vast emptiness of motion, but a colony of selves, branching outward, blearily making sense of light and sustenance until the tips of its thin arms grow heavy with thought and, in the second truly catastrophic pain of its awareness, the points snap off and swim freely away, the hydromedusae.

D.S. Chun is a writer and filmmaker in Los Angeles exploring memory, chaos, and social equality.

#finalpoems / [?]

Boom

Here am I
boots digging a terrain of drought
eyes fixed beyond the pigeon-peppered sky,
the cumuli, toxicants,
adagios of passenger jets transporting disease and pregnancies worldwide,
              (no different than argosies, rum-oozing mustaches,
hens and mules peeing beneath the deck,
and laughter around the galley table,
pricks burning from forays into Tortuga´s stews),
staring past the blicking and splurry of satellites and stratospheric wreckage,
my gaze flung beyond the argent fields of moon now
cluttered with flag, footprints,
looking past the dust-storms on Mars,
the forest of radiation flowers, specks of helium, dust,
my eyeballs roll across one
rubble of iron, carbonaceous gulches, boulders of nickel, black
ice, silicon,
rocky steppes with microscope scripture, fossilized bacterium,
fields with flour-fine soil, buried
virus from eons ago, thawing;
I see the asteroid hurtling towards Earth,
how I ask,
lift up my arms to the smog,
how I beg, plea,
fall on us,
carbonize this stump of a life-post,
fall on us,
splutter of star, spit-flicker of grace,
fall on us,
C-type cosmic boulder the girth of Utah,
fall on us
with your slush surface valleys of carbonate clay,
your shape of mosquito needle parried for feeding,
fall on us
with water vapor tresses flowing behind you,
your smoking buttes that crumble and smash
smithereens of orbiting rubble,
fall on us
onrush of rabble and stone teeth, crystal nails,
guts of gust and grit furrowing through oceans,
fall on us
downpour of oil and magma squeezed from the red-inflamed teat of heavens,
spray me, douse me, smoke
me and hiss
for thy lover comes!
 
                                          **
 
              The asteroid will come
caked in regolith, carbonaceous, oil-black,
visible for days,
then combusting, fire-rain of rubble as
it approaches our globe,
bloodshot, veined with lightning,
bluehot corolla, yellowish afterimage and contrail whiter than vapor
from a vat on the stovetop,
and it too shall beautiful
like Sodom carbonized, smoke across the plains, vapor
as from the opened door of kiln,
and the statue:
              svelte reunion of
              corrosive salt, crystalloids,
              acetate, chiseled
              into a petrified scream.
 
Mushroom-clouds, tidal waves, fire hurricane
and shockwave
              global.
 
                                          **
 
I am that virus,
hived in meteorite,
rubble of a proto-planet
which collided with an errant
globe a million years ago;

a virus,
propelled via
cosmic hunger,
and the curvature of gravity,
my origin
 
now a swarm
of rocks hurtling thru
interplanetary vacancies
where specks of helium
and dust feed my crystallized
dreams with promised
proteins and plasmas hot
as tides heaving
beneath the sulfur dioxide crust on the outer moons,
I exist in a semi-dormant state,
venomous & poised,
which terrestrial mammals
and insects cannot emulate;
hens and mules peeing beneath the deck,
 
a virus,
jagged & pronged,
elementary & ancient,
ravenous,
I resist the radiation,
the broil & freeze of deep space,
which only serve to hone
my parasitic claws,
as I thaw
or freeze crystal-shaped;
 
a virus,
pure hunger,
fangs chiseled for human DNA
or microbial life
seething beneath the burnt-
sienna lineae crisscrossing
the ice-smooth surface of Europa;
 
a virus
encased in this rock
that might crackle & splitter thru
a tenuous atmosphere plunging
into the salty water
on one of Jupiter’s moon
and ravage the life cycle
of black smokers clinging
to deep oceanic
hydrothermal belts where
no light feeds them,
nor is needed,
only the scald and
extreme pressure,
that would implode the bones
and boil the marrow
of those beings who believe
in simple physics,
the conjugation of verbs
which only propagate the oracle
of linear time & determinism,
 
or to plummet into
sulfur plumes blasting and
snaking past the gravitational
escape velocity of a moon
forever facing the bloody hurricane on Jupiter,
and then burn
hundreds of miles
above the volcanoes
Prometheus, Tvashtar,
which spew & purge
the brimstone phantom & howl
of Io,
a moon of cataclysmic & ghostly gnashing;
 
a virus
obeying only velocity
and gravity,
hurtling across the jagged
fields of the Kuiper belt,
where spheres of methane & nitrogen
combust and smash
without a sound into
metallic meteoroids,
bastions of amino acids,
to populate Martian siroccos,
or pollute watery globes
with carbon-based thirst & life cycles,
 
or to hunker into the non-carbon chemistries
on biospheres eons
beyond the edge of solar wind,
and colonize silicon-based
microscopic entities,
destroying them,
inside-out, littering a
myriad husks across a terrain
blue as propane, under a twin-
solar sky where the air is red;
 
a virus,
whose trajectory thru space
is subject to gravitational tugs,
the texture,
the granules,
the light-absorbent hue
of balsat fragment which once
might have formed into a planet
with reptilian life squirming
thru porous rocks heated by hot springs &
a thick, wet atmosphere,
legg’d serpents & red toads
I would burn
and colonize;
 
a virus
seething
in a rock
that might spin for billions of years
until it explodes into the atmosphere
of a globe awash in blue ether,
spluttering into fragments,
a myriad of us,
a locust-swarm of viral sparks,
peopling dunes, forests and mud
with our blind hunger, our
itch & dig into
a new jungle of helixes,
in order to latch on
to proteins and reproduce,
annihilate, destroy
the host, and then
 
hibernate
when there are no bloodstreams
left in which to incubate
our fire & fury,
more vivid than
the flame-tinctured wings of seraphim.

Anthony Seidman’s poetry and translations have recently been published, or are forthcoming, in Huizache, Modern Poetry In Translation, Chiron Review, World Literature Today, The Bitter Oleander, among others.  Eyewear Publishing of London will published his latest collection of poetry, Cosmic Weather, & Other Climates, later this year.

#finalpoems / [?]

The Bluest Blue

“God ain’t in the silence, child. God is the silence. And there just aren’t no words for that. There’s only sensation. It’s like love or beauty. Ain’t no words for none of that neither. There’s just the stillness that comes with experiencing God or love or beauty. And God’s right there in that silence. Waiting. He’s not hiding. Ain’t no mystery about it.” Makeda stared down into her coffee like she was seeing those small miracles that only blind women ever saw. “Saying that name of God, like God just a word, destroys God. Erases Him. You just filling what you think is an emptiness with a sound. And you only doing that to comfort your own fool self, so you don’t feel so alone. It’s cause you can’t trust, Johnny.” Makeda gently rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes, trying to wipe away all those years of looking, those years her eyes seemed to be doing things she could not control. “A man ain’t no man if he can’t trust silence. He just ain’t.” She shook her head. “Words. They nothing but the drug of an impatient man.”

Doug Rice is the author of Between Appear and Disappear, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist and other books of fiction, memoir and photographs.