Marsh Hawk Review, Fall/Winter 2009-10
edited by Daniel Morris
Chris Alexander
Steve Fellner
Norman Finkelstein
Barry Goldensohn
Lorrie Goldensohn
Francisco Guevara
Jamey Hecht
Paolo Javier
Daniel Morris
Karin Randolph
Michael Rerick
Daniel R. Schwarz
Eileen R. Tabios
Rosalynde Vas Dias
Harriet Zinnes
An Interview with Jaap Van Der Bent
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Chris Alexander
Cheerleader death has local impact suddenly KER-BLAM everyone updates...
x.x 1. Go here. 2. Pass it on. blam, blam, blam that's poetry shot out for you
then blam, OMG the suckiness "BLAM! BOOM!!!" after every mention of a bomb,
just to make sure we understood that they were BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
BLAM! BLAM! This is followed by a bunch of crashing sounds
I turned around & saw him checkin his nose out
"Wait. There's something in your eye... MY PENIS!" BLAM
but that didn't meant I expected those horns to blam around my dome all day and
blam me for things that andrew does, what he does, i'll let you on in a secret,
he has his own brain, I creep toward my prospect,
I sniff, & then blam! aye am the hunchback of notre dame RAHH
--
Looking nice & right as opposed to freakish deformities
a big head or deformity lifting a huge hunted game, moving a rock, etc.
If we evolved, then when we die we just go back into the earth
But to just say we evolved from monkeys
Here are the skeletons to prove it
fails to answer questions like "Where do monkeys come from?"
Head boy 1 makes with the information
takes big baby from the President's arms
a horrifying mutant combination of ball & boy
spewing freedom into Norman Rockwell's Juicyfruit
Xmas-Eve-Post-Kissing Santa Hangdog Sausage Ace
Ordinary folks are the sinews of our land.
One day they evolve & eat us humans
then we evolve into animals, die,
then insects, die & then bacteria
and die & then we are just spirit
Somewhere, Jesus is shaking his head in dismay
why he got stuck with all the jokers on his team
--
What's your favourite band? Iron Butterfly or ABBA
All the ding-dong day i have wasted on the interior
prosthetic synthesis with butterfly sealed up
liberator pillows toss pillows stereo speaker pillow blocks butterfly
pillows bean bag pillows free butterfly cross stitch pattern lamb's ears &
butterfly bush on steroids
just flexing their social butterfly/used car salesman
Submariner: Yes indeed I fucking hate stupid people! Wanna know why????
Because they are fucking STUPID! Like, why hasn't nature
taken its toll & killed them off by now? Honestly. ARGH!!!!!
I Am A Cheeseburger, true nature of fine art
that have confined you & with no exclamation, your eyes are enticed to pursue
Bring out the pom-pom girls, set off fireworks, stun the zombies, let's get retarded
OoOoOo Miss Butterfly
That is so awesome!!!!
That has to be an awesome moment that many of you
have already experienced no matter what size you
Its so awesome the stuff that people did in the past, stuff they got away with was so awesome,
like drive a cracked up plane down a dirt road, or live on their own at 17,
or live in France for the war
There were some professions of faith, which was awesome.
Most of us are aware of the existence of endorphins,
those happy hormones that make us feel good.
In 3 words: pizza hut awesome!
Awesome summer. I just need help with gas money
I too am proud to be awesome
She screams so loud it scared the fuck out of us
We're waiting for the butterfly crew, their shrink
overtakes me with a butterfly net around my head
I try to scream but my jaw can't move in the cage
My use of "expansion" is based on Donne's incredibly famous poem "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" = "take on me" none Abba "waterloo" phil glanville AC/DC weapon Orbital mind control lasers Giant tumble dryer Army of mind zombies The entire Abba Butterfly Cofferlait Blade Test Don Iguana finds the butterfly table tennis paddle to be a dickens of a blade
As virtuous men pass mildly away
And whisper to their souls to go
like, zombies scare you? More than death itself. ZOMBIES!?! HOLY FREAKING CRAP!
They inject themselves with this spiritual embalming fluid
valediction forbidding zombies, butterfly bushes that were blooming & attacking huge old butterflies in the general awesomeness of a great faith, nature & endorphins,
zombie safety puppet show
Steve Fellner
From you, I need numbers, a few
simple guidelines. Numbers that tell me
how many men I need to be with
to claim I am a slut, a person
with insatiable curiosity
for everyone around me. Don’t deny me
the ability to say I no longer need
one more. Look there’s one
who I saw looking back at me
in the airport terminal. Or take
the one who was so beautiful
I had no idea why
he would spend his time in the aisles
of a library following homely men
like myself. I should stop
there. But there’s always one more
even when you’ve drawn
a limit. Or a caricature
of yourself full, bloated
with something as tasteless
as desire, a word only
the selective should use.
The desperate need to stay
away from powerless
vocabulary. Unless
we’re trying to reach the unreachable,
necessary quotas.
Norman Finkelstein
Once I Was a Cabin Boy and Went To Sea
Once I was a cabin boy and went to sea.
Once I heard something—overheard something
—but I don’t want to talk about it. I blame
myself. Now it’s nothing but melodrama,
the folds in the curtains, crimson velvet
of course, and dancers in black gowns.
Was this on the ship? A different ship,
a different era, stewards, a jazz
orchestra. Escape and pleasure, the
pleasure of escape. The stateroom. I looked
through the keyhole, looked out the porthole
—but I don’t want to remember. I don’t
want to remember the flesh, the silk, lost
days, lost nights. I was a boy but now
I’m a woman, grown up, taking what
lovers I may choose. Maybe I’ll go to
pornographer. The best things happen when
you’re near the end.
*******
I wish I could tell you the names of the instruments.
I wish I could tell you the names of the instruments.
I wish I could tell you the names of the heroes,
and of the villains too. I wish it were otherwise.
It’s not a matter of passwords, of classified
documents or sealed files. The memories are
vivid, the colors bright, the sky a cloudless
blue. Right now, the reports are still coming in;
right now, the scans are almost complete. You’re
clean, or so it would appear. Nevertheless,
there are traces, there are indications, there are
different levels of intensity. Need I say more?
This is about connections, conjunctions,
transitions and the terms which effect them.
The order is an illusion, as is the disorder
and all the gadgets used to measure them.
Once upon a time the landscape was nothing
but landscape, for which there was no name.
Once upon a time once upon a time remained
to be formulated. Right now, the reports
indicate that narratives are holding steady.
Lyrics plunged today at the news that
otherness continues to drain from gaps
in the atmosphere, which, FYI, has become
all the more poisonous. Taken together,
the signs point to miraculous events.
The monsters of
and we shall rejoice in the words of their
master. The bridges shall be restored, and
new ones built. There shall be no more
secrets.
___________________________________________
The secrets are in a book.
Barry Goldensohn
Late Quartet
The second violin is a beautiful woman, Korean,
in a skin tight black dress, whose entire
body expresses every note she plays
but the real action, alas, is in the square
suit named Pigeon, the first violin.
The passion that pours from him leaves
him looking unmoved, untouched. His thin
face is pinched into a dead smile while she heaves
and lunges through her dull repeats, repeats.
How contained this storm is, in its little crock.
But this crock contains, however, seven oceans
and all the continents except ice-locked
Antarctica, with its penguins, its fabulous narwhal,
its dull walrus, all deplorably unmusical.
********
At the Frick
His eyes are narrowed not to miss a cue
for what to say that Henry wants to hear—
the ingratiating, serviceable face,
the richly furred language of the body
open and welcoming—Thomas Cromwell
by Holbein. Then Holbein’s Thomas More
with a steady, penetrating glance, mouth
set in a skeptical turn, all wariness,
having a self to possess, possessing it.
Both men painted from life, alive
in the same room again, in New York:
More resisting the King, Cromwell saying
(no euphemisms, no disguises)
just what the King wants: Kill More.
Lorrie Goldensohn
Animals too come clothed
although unlike us
they never take their furs
or feathers off, or need
to buff their nails or noses
until death
when the flayed
bloody thing on the roadbed
or wrynecked and dangling
or crushed and stilled
insults
what they truly are
how could they so let themselves
be seen
At night ahead of us
in the yellow headlights
that form a moving stage
the fox steps on then off
forepaws and hind paws
floating the magnificent
burden of his brush
into the brush
a deer crosses
while just
at the lower edge of sight
the velvety woodchuck
lifts his head, even
as his eyes look away
never meeting ours:
hostage to what remembers him
The heart still happy to think of it.
You and your man, both young,
dragging the wooden bedstead
out to the apple trees:
the bed beneath the stars, nighttime
darkness receding higher and higher,
and under you in cool suspension
the grasses of the field.
For three weeks it didn’t rain,
except for the dew soaking
the bedclothes in the morning;
while one of you waited for sunrise
to dry them, the other one
ran to the farmhouse kitchen to make coffee
and bring back two steaming cups.
Sunset, moonrise, moonset.
All the summer constellations
seeming to wink unsteadily,
then slowly dawn.
Two heads far back, the eyes
drinking from the big dipper,
in those days probably smoking,
although this was long before pot.
For forty years I’ve been jealous:
the two of you close, tiny,
warm in your own heat,
wide open to that black largesse—
from its bright perforations the unknown
worlds leaking through.
Francisco Guevara
Triage
The scar of prayer between the half-
glass on the cup
hold-
er(r) while driving through concrete.
on the side-
walk on the wild page
left intentionally blank & the consistency of
risk is the system caught in a quest-
ion—here,
and there the sky parting
above the apocryphal gathering. Red,
the new red, is to black
as Monday is to the 11th hour. Look up
“who can play the organs
when we consume” with your archival ink
*******
Happy Birthday
Day by day by day a sundial calls it
a day until a daylight's in need
of saving, or in need of a stranded shadow.
Let's call an effigy's muffled lilt
a sustainable suit. You &
a mined for parable. Let's call my career
a XXth century, which is to say a syndrome
careening to a palsy. “Rust
your missed indiscretions for once,”
she said to a voice-over as a subtitle
bleeds the white of a foreign scene on a half-second
delay. Let's call it a hostage on retail. A sound of sun
last season from a projector-light as a textbook
day. An anthology of a leaf
left with a life jacket & canned laughter.
Resuscitated line in each butterfly stroke spoken for.
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