m58

[m58]

new work from David Wolf

Yielder 

Yardage forgotten, solstitial fade, as I reimagine that old severing song leading me to polka right out of ballroom dance class. Ginsberg offered a spontaneous revision to one of my haiku. Sure. 

Got a postcard from the Sandhills. Turned it into a found poem: “Everything’s fine and dandy. / Bought myself a mobile home. / Two bedrooms, living room, the works. / All worn out from digging a ditch / 5 feet by 25. / Fell into it last night in the dark. / Shit. / Write soon. / B.” To be clear, America is not my favorite summer movie (things passing in and out of the mind, mind passing in and out of things). Unfair work— that is, the empire—stretched right on through evensong. 

With my in-laws, looking for their ancestors in an English graveyard, watching a young family load into their car, I thought of an idea for a short story. The title: “Writing is a Form of Discovery.” A man discovers he is not the moon, possessing, as he always has, a bad sense of chronology, a scratchy faith in kismet, an indifference to Keats’s “Bright Star,” and, like most, a pedestrian sense of oneness.  

Again a general cry: the past eight hours! Thanksgivings (oh please!)! And lately? Just hanging at Cap d’Ail. Year’s end, more Googlism, mileage, meaning, lonely, lonely. Hey! The sublime’s fogging to blue, a distillation of roses, knowledge in review, grand allusions filling the French triptych smeared with tankas in drippy translation. 

To wit, t’ tweet, to whom it may concern. Sing it. Bah, oui. Creative nonfiction followed me from Savannah to Charleston. Welcome (better late than . . .). On the cab ride to the Camelback Inn Resort and Spa, I spun for the cabbie my now forgotten Killarney Trilogy. 

Words listing, I tried to remain upright, riffing another intro, a morning in May exercising fragments, good interpretations, a memoir of one autumn and its remembrance of faux horse sense. Please pass the cookies. Marvelous. And the vin ordinaire. 

Echovox stew: meaning matters, before and after and back at you doling out Benjamins like comparisons trumping loosey-goosey, still projecting memories of the latest shooting in sonnet form, cutting across the OK panhandle in the paisley seashore rain, proverbs glowing red and gold in spring’s promising air. Must be the beans. Or Dad’s favorite golf balls bouncing around the interior of the old noodle. Pick up the pen and call it a poem, not an institutional rubric, filler like success, a testamental ambience, a selfie earnest as any treasury of emptiness, variation in the wind yapping. Zurpreeze! 

A gathering erasure of firsts strewn along Hackney Pass. How to know precisely how the memo’s useless distraction fouls the pin’s fall into the bin. Tuppence for your thoughts? Well, just the sorry boom of ye olde avant-garde, a shouldering of pesky trite tropes. 

Yarner 

Turn out the artifacts of your imagination. Tea? illspreoogud. ; ; ature. Hark! Back to some steaming order? Crawling from my solarium to my data turret, I went in search of the nightmare’s measurable outcomes. train whistle blowing in thick fog, echoing up the river valley a third-tone higher, muted I read the critical introduction explaining what is going on in the work. I annotated the sunrise slipping across the page. I may be addressing you soon, fair thoughts for the fair, procedural sludge for the decimators. Feeling mixed, a bit of alachrymosity as I count the embedded chimes springing through June foliage. Waiting for that singular narrative to emerge, endlessly revisable, worthy of memory’s revisitation, I framed the present. Gathered some lavender and white phlox . . . and now on my sox I’ve got burrs that clingle-tangle-stingle. Cool it. Going nowhere. Like the apple that rolled a promising distance from the pear tree. Like the toss that sent it further, into the chaparral. Why the tire swing doubt? I’ll trust the pattern in the rope, the weave, the braid, the tale. Nascence tells me something is still quaking in the lost meadow on the cutting room floor. Eternity, I apologize for all the cuckoo figuration. Hastening to find some peace of mind, I’m up. Understandably sweaty. Maybe I’ll return to the fading climate of wonder. I watch the haze hang. Dry winter endurance, forgotten scratch. Imitation’s theatrics yawn. tree-trunk shadow—drooling a squirrel

Fabler At The Lucky Duck gastropub we see no duck on the menu but of course that’s why they call it The Lucky Duck—cheers! A fly lands on the page I am typing up, less obtrusive than my remembered cat. It will only take a wave of my hand to send the fly on its way. The shoe that was on the other foot has now dropped—after some effort. Brushed a croissant flake from my trouser leg— before a butter stain could set in. The sparkling lights of Nice at night across the bay have given way to the sparkling morning sea— as Black Sabbath’s “Hole in the Sky” plays in my head. Idling, we encounter the road ahead: three signals: red, yellow, flashing yellow: two directions down to one lane: no green. And now a motorbike speeding past that sounds like a weed whacker. through the canicular haze: snow-streaked Alps Got a jolly reprimand—got a real cheerful. Sapped of light and patience for the itch to resolve, we caught the coast lining through the haze and stupefying heat. The level sea, pine, palm, tourterelle, gull’s bark, diesel, rampart ruin— the tableau of morning offers a fine napkin to wipe away the dirt of ardor. “How are you today?” “Fine, can’t complain, no use complaining anyway, I mean, no one’s listening.” “Did you say something?” “I said—.” “Yes, I heard you. Just a little joke.” “Yes, a little one.” “Have a nice day.” “Another joke. ‘Nice day.’ You’re a funny one.” 

Teller Love made me want to cry like a ladle dripping acid fog. Cold as . . . mice. Dead, test-rattled mice. Cat-rattled? No. Keep it human. Though once true at heart, the youthful enthusiasms felt now like distant fictions, delusions. Any gleam off the fossil, artificial. I begged the lily to shadow me through the highlands. The narrows of attachment proved easily cast. Harrowed to the last. I stand supplanted in the clearing, in the heraldry of sun and stone, a shiftless relic eked from aught. Guessing as always, I follow the lost eclogue balancing before nebulous ease. Rail, yaw, as we must. As the monuments rot in the pale rushes, the drafts of indolence dim the turn to inward solace. Supple revelry. Supplicatory. Applicable. Billable neglect. Needlework. The air bluffs composure, fleet as honey. The jewel found in the knapsack shines its naysayer’s music. Open, peony bud, we cannot help thinking. Quarried. Time upstages a whiff of Xanadu. What a wind. What a zeal-zoned moment. Late summer afternoon—an owl hooting— on the lookout for an early bird special? All leeward these leanings, roughing up the dimming afterglow, shed, deciduous as sanity. Levity enrages. Almost dawn. Time scuffs the overwrought you in youth. Apropos, out to pasture, no pie dish in the sky pooling rain either. Care insinuates an aperture, a tithing of effortless chirping. Comfort, oscillating most frivolously, outraged rhetoric’s tambourine. Zoning optics neutralized effervescence. What to expect. A dry field, mole mounds, stone cross stretched in pale grass, keep your eyes on your path, your way across, look out for dog shit. Do a little quickstep, quirkstep, quiet as the stardust in the blade, as sunlight on skin. It’s not a lack of this but of that that’s causing it. A lack of that but this. While this. You are busier than you think, which is why you forgot to finish reading that must-read. Must be it, must be the reason, you tell yourself as if you were two. In the flow of it. Dreams free of recent hauntings. Ghosts in the old family home just up the hill. Why did you buy a place so close? You weren’t thinking? Live for the swim beneath the cliffs, the trees. Live for many reasons. Now you are thinking.  

We still have plenty of cereal for breakfast. No need to thaw the muffins just yet. If the manual says to hold the button for three seconds, that means three seconds, not a quick count of three. Evasive answers return in several layers of erasure. Unintended meaning of something you said occurring. Power just went out. It’s back. What was I saying? Hardy mums. The word. Took a chance, showered during the thunderstorm, had to. Made it quick. As fern thorns snagged an opening drape. 

Closer Open up, said the season. In exchange for the word, I was sent on maneuvers with a love letter from Michigan in my pocket. After the great quarrel, abiding, wincing at the figure “damaged goods,” I penned a poem, an aubade of sorts. What could be done against it all?

Sunday overslept. Meanwhile legend after legend frayed like all the great love poems do, mid-August every year as we put off unpacking, thunderheads thirty miles east. Poems fizzled, frizzled then fizzled. Random gales delivered more origins to the sodden brain. “Indian Summer”?  

Golly, hear that report? That’s not dialogue. You and your bear claw were such a sight. So much a live poem, and who needs to write it down, just take it in. Sure I get bored. What’s up tonight? We could start earlier to avoid the question. “Vinny, Vinny, Vinny,” I said, “no solution will redevelop lost spring trees in early leaf or my old Olivetti.” It’s like a hometown layover, a snapshot too brief to consider going home, coming back. A holiday beckoned, the glint of momentum missing from my morning inventory. Poems, some aphorisms, Venice—the lists can be endless. If you regard tourists as fantasizing emperor moths, you may gain some insight into the landfill of “civilization.” Lakeshore love song, glacial teardrop, help move us along to rest down by the river of sapience. Again we were foiled, which prompted me to say, losing all patience, “I ask you, is that your banana on the counter or is it the intersection of Hope and Wisdom, a lost zone demanding lidless ignorance?” 

David Wolf is the author of six collections of poetry, Open Season, The Moment Forever, Sablier I, Sablier II, Visions (with artist David Richmond), and Weir (a micro-chapbook from Origami Poems Project). His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and journals, including BlazeVOX, Cleaver Magazine, dadakuku, decomp, E·ratio, Indefinite Space, Lotus-eater Magazine, New York Quarterly, Otoliths, and River Styx Magazine. He is a professor emeritus of English at Simpson College and serves as the literary editor for Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts. 

#poetry #m58

[m58]

Four from Joshua Martin (click to expand)

Joshua Martin is a Philadelphia based writer and filmmaker, who currently works in a library. He is member of C22, an experimental writing collective. He is the author most recently of the books [Ruptured] >> Schematic <<  MAZES (Sweat Drenched Press), destructive paradox slips on banana peel (Cajun Mutt Press), and Dance of Resistance Brainwaves (C22 Press). He has had numerous pieces published in various journals including Otoliths, M58, Synapse, Version (9), Don’t Submit!, BlazeVOX, RASPUTIN, Ink Pantry, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and experiential-experimental-literature. You can find links to his published work at joshuamartinwriting.blogspot.com

[m58]

three from Rupert Loydell

IMPENDING DOOM

Tea or perhaps go buy a kite and stand for weeks until my body eats itself so that I am light enough to be. Need fizz and sugar, alcohol, to supplement my learning, instead eat brown banana, draw anatomical pictures, pretend that I don't wish to be elsewhere. Maybe I will go someplace and start a murderous cult. Is your day sunny and running away from you? My world is ending but I am not surrendering to anyone, just holding the handle of self-control, reading a poem about me I did not know you wrote.

FOUND AND ENABLED

She likes the fact her emails end up in my poems, sense disrupted, words disordered, taken out of context; likes that all the poets she knows take their coffee black, aren't intellectual, but happy to help dissect reality and pay the bill. It's easy to underestimate how comedy and satire remain enmeshed in the controversy of our endlessly awkward lives. Irony was hardly an invention of the postmodern though; most informal investigations are consummately poetical. Because of patient dissection we now know it is as likely that our work will be met with boos as with cheers and wild applause

and that duration alone produces a distinctly physical experience. Even in a clean room full of quiet you cannot escape from yourself.

BLOSSOM HIBBERT IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

Could she be a 21st century Selima Hill? I certainly hope not, one is enough. As invasive as Japanese knotweed, as knotty as a peacekeeping mission she is a bright sounding sustained note. Blossom Hibbert is not your friend but she might be Charlie Baylis, Martin Stannard or Alan at Leafe Press; a fig marmalade of their imagination, each busy in multiple dimensions.

If you swap O’Hara’s coke for a bathtub you end up with a clean stomach. If you seek a puerile thrill in silliness, strange pictures of seagulls, toilets and washing machines, she's your girl. Blossom Hibbert is not your friend. Her profound sense of tenderness, jumbled together with the excitement of being in in the modern world comes with accompanying scribbles. "It is too late for yesterday to begin."

Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in the School of Writing and Journalism at Falmouth University, the editor of Stride magazine, and contributing editor to International Times. He is a widely published poet, and has written for academic journals such as Punk & Post-Punk (which he is on the editorial board of), New Writing, Revenant, The Journal of Visual Art Practice, Text, Axon, Musicology Research, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, and contributed chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Listen to the Sounds! (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).

#poetry #art #m58 #Loydell #Blossomhibbert #Rupertloydell

[m58]

Four found poems from Mark Valentine. Clockwise, 'Bakelite Roses', 'Colourful Yarn', 'Trouser Pockets' and 'Smokeless Powder'.

Mark Valentine is originally from the radical shoemaking town of Northampton, but now lives in Yorkshire near the Leeds-Liverpool canal. He writes ghost stories and essays on old odd books. His visual poetry has appeared in M58, 3:AM Magazine, Coven, Pamenar, Abridged and elsewhere.

#poetry #vispo #art #m58

[m58]

New work by Volodymyr Bilyk 

Volodymyr Bilyk is a poet from Ukraine. He's doing art stuff when not going back and forth to the bomb shelter. Second edition of his book Roadrage is available at Zimzalla. Gerry Ha Ha is available at Timglaset, Detournement Crusade is available at Redfoxpress.

#vispo #art #m58 #poetry

[m58]

A cento poem by Courtenay Schembri Gray

A Cento for Atomic Sad Girls

Under my feet, I am green vomit spooring in psychedelic space. In Spanish summers, I throw her zoo in the garbage.

The most important square dips her pen in moon ink.  Red ghosts die of excess candy floss. 

A cigar lands in the palm of my hands, flowering like poisoned mice.  The rocket in my salad drinks pink champagne.

Vandals make me scrambled eggs from the sunlight in your hair. My tongue eyeballs a raspberry lost on the ocean path.

The promise of hypnotic beauty tries not to take sadness too seriously but the felt tips she circles stem from your addiction to atomic sad girls. 

Source: a fondness for the colour green by Charlie Baylis (Broken Sleep Books)

Courtenay Schembri Gray is the author of four poetry collections, the latest being THE MAGGOT ON MAPLE STREET (Anxiety Press). Her work has appeared in journals such as The Bolton Review and CAROUSEL. She resides in the North of England. Keep up with her on Twitter (@courtenaywrites).

#poetry #poet #m58

[m58]

three from Stephen Bett

Tom Pickard: Oop norf, fook sake

bulimia oblivia

     I

[h] ate

    it

bulimia oblivia―Tom Pickard (w/ nods to Basil Bunting, the Newcastle poets, Liverpool “beat”                                                                                                                                   poets, George Harrison, bp Nichol)                                                                                                                                                                                                  bulimia oblivia

don’t woof yr cookies (Newcastle Brown Ale)

purge yourself, sunflower

say somebody’s lil’ bunting

     I

here’s I me mine in yr eye

oop norf, fook sake, you bet

Yorks Bete beat the Pool

[h] ate

not to get all cocky

h’8 no ’aitch 4 bp concrete

viz, getting all visual

    it

ate me (’arf-time) so don’t be

telling porkies, pie-head

magpie caught in a barcode

Jeremy Prynne: Paratactic Procedures

Here I saw… telescopic to the field inside the mouth

where speech parts of separation had been swallowed

in foreground… fricative was the advice and

to palate by adhesion said to be forward

Kazoo Dreamboats―Jeremy Prynne (with a nod to Gerald Bruns)

Here I saw… telescopic to the field inside the mouth

chokeberries on the line rotten beyond description

chomp by field ate down to baby letter shivers, bottle

our mal du doute upchuck trick, there’s a good chap

where speech parts of separation had been swallowed

by black holes, do not interrupt his moment of disconnect

at all / anyway / whatever / even so / rubbish

goes down whoosh it’s got some teeth in it

in foreground… fricative was the advice and

couple disjunct blimeys in a row pick & prune a’miss

near scurvy them ballsy labiodental f’n fearsome

feckful avant swine, dey do dis da joint

to palate by adhesion said to be forward

by outward tastes like collage glued on the tongue

you can only “be” in the moment, just out Near/Miss

meets Gordon Lish meets Lewis Black, well done old son

Tom Raworth: gifted

a present

that

fits me

to a t

Ace ― Tom Raworth (with a nod to old Stones… & stoners)

a present

gifted, & at arms (rah-rah)

shabby old cardigan, slippers, &c.

― the real raw deal!

that

’s worth a lotta r…

She corrects    /    x-ray

muse in my devices

fits me

sting or other wrays

Rae-worth, Raw-worth let’s call

the whole thing off ?

to a t

Om boy… pleased to meet’cha

full steam a head

top speed, them ol’ rollers

Jack Spicer: No One Listens to Poetry

No one listens to poetry.   The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to.   A drop

               •               •               •

It pounds the shore.   White and aimless signals.   No

One listens to poetry.

Language―Jack Spicer (with nods to Robin Blaser)

No one listens to poetry.   The ocean

rolls over us    ― these coastal people

nothing’s out beyond this last gasp edge

serial decoder of breakers

Does not mean to be listened to.   A drop

drip drip on little green transceivers, whatever

comes in from that darkness around us

you were the real outsider, honest angel

It pounds the shore.   White and aimless signals.   No

jolts or jive, so okay dictate something, anything…

Nothing, you said, Deserves to live

& I heard that, crystal clear

One listens to poetry.

It’s difficult to get the news

No one listens to radio anymore,

not even Martians

Stephen Bett is a widely and internationally published Canadian poet with 25 books in print (from BlazeVOX, Chax, Spuyten Duyvil, & others), his most recent being Broken Glosa, from Chax Press. His personal papers are archived in the “Contemporary Literature Collection” at Simon Fraser University. His website is StephenBett.com

[m58]

two from Alex Keramidas

Two Hesitations (after Seferis)

Blossoms on the rocks facing the sea,

blossoms on the rocks made an appearance

came when no-one was speaking,

and they spoke to me.

They let me touch them

after the silence

inside the pine tree the laurel the cypress.

This place is closed.

All is left are these mountains

and the low sky as shelter, day and night.

We don’t have rivers,

we don’t have groundwater.

Only the dry fountains are left

that we listen to, and worship.

It’s old like the world (after Dante’s Inferno)

I would begin by

asking the poet

to gladly speak to those two

that are going together.

In the wind

they appear to

be light and bright.

Yet ever since the subject,

your softer silence

insisting

that we move

beyond the breakwater.

A boat of variations

carried in the stream

by felled trees.

Each branch

will bow

and be simple.

It was impossible

to know this as

distinct history.

Alex Keramidas is a poet based in South East London. English is her fourth language. Her pamphlet VESTIBULAR TRAINING is forthcoming with Bored Wolves in January 24.

Find her on Instagram: alexandrakera

#poetry #M58 #poets #poets on tumblr #poem #poems and poetry

[m58]

two from Ralph Hawkins

standing stones

road traffic, those trails of stone stretched landscape mottled or speckled birds the bridge gone in a burst of sunlight the heckling flags irate beloved if you, obliterate and a tear a gulley filling with water a flutter of lost belongings cattle crossing the traffic and one stares, oval a drizzle across the eyes at the neolithic landscape and a horse backside to the wind beans, smelt, hay

legacy obsession

legacy obsession rules in desk drawer picture of Napoleon wedding dress made in China que sera que sera the same old drivel (Clint Eastwood, the mule on the tip of the tongue) the apical t d and s acres of pain the state in pennants, birthright bespoke suit of armour, comfort chic who has faith air miles, missile strike more to follow

Ralph Hawkins had two publications in 2022. Trumpets Stuffed With Cloth from Crater Press and A Fancy Breeze Gets Up from Shearsman. He continues to write poetry.

[m58]

six by Peter Dent

ESTABLISHING ROOTS

I thought I’d done for the day – obviously a mistake – because I was called for and quizzed till I was near faint. There was a void now in our previous happy home – impostors being an example of syndromes too difficult to eradicate and which can be passed from hand to hand like a baton. If I knew any of the answers it was by accident. Was I known to the au- thorities; was I fundamental to any of a range of proscribed parties; had I attempted on occasions to deliberately misread the accepted ciphers? I wanted to sleep – that I did know. My name must have come up on their ‘Attend to Next’ list – I had fallen into a trap of their making. The world wasn’t as I was. The unadopted road and those who travel it create a problem. Quite why this should be I have no idea. I may come to investigate it on completion of my correction to the theory that germs are totally responsible for a given disease. Isn’t there always something hairy waiting around the corner?

HANG ONTO YOUR IDEAS

Insiders were keen to experiment in areas forbidden to them. There were quite enough allusions and crooked miles to be travelled before then I thought. Getting a provenance for devices these days gets progressively more painful – some participants in the race to get somewhere are thought to be using underhand practices. I want to get off the train soon as I can and get the kind of air I breathed as a young man. The arts have made huge strides since then and the ground has been so worn down you need to walk outside the white lines if you want to be accepted. We used to drive the har- vester when nobody was looking. We cut a terrific swathe.

PREMATURE DISCLOSURE

Coming in to land in a cross-wind no-one can say grace with any conviction.    I procured copies of Aviation Hazards  and dished them out to passengers and crew alike.     As you can imagine they were no more than a dozen pages in when we touched down!    An irresponsible thing to do some might argue but I really hope it took their minds off it.    Next time I’ll try some other ploy!    Remember: for any airport getting fog-bound there’ll be extra motivation for opticians and the rest will have more time to flush out their varifocals.    It all comes down to two questions: what is your gut feeling and how on earth will the obituary read in society columns?    I hear sighs of disenchantment.    I hear the slap of high fives

SEASONAL CHARGE

Sooty shearwaters sing as if they’re thinking about something but can’t quite explain what – they fumble about like an old person searching his pockets fruitlessly.   Amongst much else my day is not much clearer.    Unreality calls says John – which is as revealing as it simultaneously denies it.    At certain times and in certain conditions something inside lights up with a mind of its own.    Autumn and Winter are done with; we’re a week or two over the official worst.    I’m not as yet inspired to sing about good times ahead but something in what I say seems to implicate love and a healthy dose of sand and sun I can start working on.    Some birds rehash melodies from the past and trust they’ll get an audience – do my pocket bulge?

SNUG

I’ll invigorate the present if you do the past – two ends for anything you find on the shelves.    Breweries exist to play a part but only a part.   I exist at a point midway between things known and things unknown.   The ferry flew colours not so easy to make out.    Conditions better described as ‘wanting’.   ‘Half-light’ could be a friendlier way to put it? If only one could state – in the very moment of living it –   quite how it came to be and which in a string of theories sufficed to contain it.    As it is one’s likelier to explode in the process than serve anyone well.    Scales tilt according to one or more ‘extra’ factors.    These may have played a part in my shifting from EPA to Skippers Fine and Dandy. Both satisfy equations I’m used to but they refuse to mix.

THE HOLIEST OF HANGOUTS

Being a force for good is a hard act to put into practice – by 4 a.m. you begin to flag. There is only so much emphasis you can distribute across 16 lines of text. When she thinks of me it’s only to check on my whereabouts and what I’m up to. If I tell myself or the man at the bus stop that running up unpay- able bills can be a thing of the past he’ll only ask what’s the catch. Being sensitive and more often than not insufferable I go the extra yard not to exaggerate my good points. These days awards are so few in number and mean so little to the av- erage punter I keep the planchette tarot cards and tumblers well away from the table we usually sit around and slip effort- lessly from good English into ‘pure gutter’ and doom-telling. It’s taken years but I feel she’s now better at topping people up? Past dawn the subject turns to ‘exploratory touch’ inart- iculate thrashings of Determinism and bellowing for the key! Making it (come what may) leads only to breaking your bank.

[m58]

four from Mike Ferguson

Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK. His most recent poetry publication is Drinking Watermelon Whiskey (Red Ceilings Press, 2023)

#poetry #vispo #art

[m58]

three from Rupert Loydell

AFTER TWO QUOTES FROM JOHN ASHBERY

'Look, this is what I am, what I'm made of' – John Ashbery, 'Girls on the Run'

This is what I am and, looking back, what I have always been. I remember asking my school friend if he noticed anything new in my room; the smallest thing on my chest of drawers. He didn't.

Tonight, beats and seductive vocals merge with flute and oboe on the radio, a blur of stations and genres. Intense, accidental, it's a marvellous mash-up, airways crossing paths before entering

the building. Something close to music, near to how I feel, adrift in the world where noise and words crowd in. It is absolute chaos, a welcome distraction, it is recycled language, disrupted song,

chance inspired tunes that I seek out late night to keep me awake, send me to sleep. World is infinitesimally layered, overlaid and piled up high. 'We never live long enough to know what today is like.' *

*'We never live…' is from John Ashbery's 'The Improvement'

OTHER SENTENCES

for David Miller

              Understanding

is the key to also

              thinking,

a way to make amends.

              If you

decide to beg to differ

              we will

agree to disagree.

What does language mean

              to you?

I'd love to hear about

              what you think,

want you to cross

              collapsing borders

claim a world without

              boundaries.

              I have

other plans for sentences,

              want to

resist emotional extremities.

              The voice

can only articulate so much,

              the mind

only think what it can speak.

 

ENDLESS PROSPECTS

              every thing

  &          no thing

          drifting music

                                    drifting

              every            where

     &       no            where

              every time I say goodbye

                         I cry a little

                          just a little

               not a lot

nothing happens       as it happens

              every one   is where

                    they are

                         or might be

     sound rolls out of

              every night

                         or might

           or could

that voice again

   that voice

              every            where

      &      no            where

   nothing happens    

                              as it happens

                 because

                                  it happens

              every time

Rupert Loydell is the editor of Stride and a contributing editor to International Times. He has many books of poetry in print, including The Age of Destruction and Lies,Dear Mary, The Return of the Man Who Has Everything, Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone, all published by Shearsman. He has co-authored many collaborative works, and edited anthologies for Knives Forks & Spoons Press, Shearsman, and Salt. He also writes about post-punk music, pedagogy, poetry and film for academic journals and books.

[m58]

Four by nicky [nick-e] melville 

L-R top (click to enlarge) 'Disconnect Level 1', 'Disconnect Level 2' L-R bottom (click to enlarge) 'Disconnect Level 3' Disconnect Level 4'

Note from the author: In November 2022 I received an email from my letting agent with the subject heading ‘Preparing for Power Cuts or Planned Black Outs.’ News to me! (And to the staff of the letting agency I found out later.) The tone of the email presented this as an actuality rather than a possibility. The email then proceeded to give advice on what to do both before and after the looming black outs. Following this, I found HM Government’s contingency planning for an energy emergency, titled ‘Electricity Supply Emergency Code,’ which showed planning for national grid shutdowns over eighteen stages to complete blackout—societal breakdown in other words. The ‘Code’ dates from 2019, well before the current energy crisis so-called. ‘Power Cuts’ is a series of abstract representations of the planned pattern of national shutdown contained in the government’s plans. 

Bio:

nicky [nick-e] melville is a poet, creative writing teacher, curator, editor, musician and occasional artist, whose work takes aim at and interrogates the imperatives of capitalism, politics and ideology. He has been grafting on and in the margins for over twenty years developing a range of publications in a variety of forms and genres: found poetry and erasures, visual poetry, lyric experiment, conceptual and post-conceptual writing. A Selected poems, Decade of Cu ts, was published by Blue Diode in 2021 and his 400-page anti-poem-novel hybrid, THE IMPERATIVE COMMANDS, his PhD project, has just been published with Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Earlier books include selections and dissections (Otoliths Press, 2010), a collection of visual poetry, and his ABBODIES series (Sad Press) which explore the neoliberal and fascist elements of Brexit through the lens of ABBA songs, aliens and James Bond. He makes music as Fuck This: https://fuckthis1.bandcamp.com  

[m58]

two from Frederick Pollack

The Clouds

Not angels, philosophers hover over the chair you fall asleep in. Tonight a new one, chafing at the constraints – attitudinal, ontological – imposed by the Department (itself defunded and exiguous), has come to tell you no possible ethic applies to you, that what you do is good though futile and you might as well sleep, that sleep is the wisdom of gladiators.

Nature Center

It was the way it raised its head from the leaves and moss and bits of what might have been food, and tasted the air, and stared from behind its glass. That gaze stilled a third of the busful of kids that had suddenly descended. “Why doesn’t he have feet?” – one broke, eventually, the spell. But their teacher was engaged with the noisy others, and I said, “They evolved from a lizard that burrowed underground. Limbs got in the way. And his eyes have a shield that nothing can scratch. Actually, they evolved many times in many places.” But now the teacher was approaching, smiling, uncertain how to react: I wasn’t official, just a visitor who knew things, and thought it best to leave. There’s a rule: keep it brief. Avoid eye contact.

Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press. Two collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS, (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). Pollack has appeared in Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology (Ireland), Magma (UK), Bateau, Fulcrum, Chiron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, etc. Online, poems have appeared in Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, BlazeVox, The New Hampshire Review, Mudlark, Rat’s Ass Review, Faircloth Review, Triggerfish, etc.

[m58]

a visual work by Rob Stuart.

Note: This was produced completely by accident with a faulty photocopier at the college where I work. The machinery picked out points of colour in the apparently uniform black text and somehow converted them into this rather pleasing pattern of abstract stripes. The fact that the source article is a review of a show by Grayson Perry, a visual artist, is a further happy coincidence. 

Rob Stuart’s poems and short stories have been published in magazines, newspapers and webzines all over the world including Asses of Parnassus, Diagram, Ink Sweat and Tears, Light, Lighten Up Online, M58, Magma, New Statesman, The Oldie, Otoliths, Popshot, The Projectionist’s Playground, Snakeskin, The Spectator and The Washington Post. He has also written the screenplays for several award-winning and internationally exhibited short films. His website is www.robstuart.co.uk. 

[m58]

four from Vik Shirley

Vik Shirley is a poet, writer, editor and academic from Bristol now living in Edinburgh. Her collection, The Continued Closure of the Blue Door (HVTN), her pamphlets, Corpses (Sublunary Editions), Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (Beir Bua) and Poets (The Red Ceilings Press), and her book of photo-poetry Disrupted Blue and other poems on Polaroid (Hesterglock) were all published 2020-2022. Her chthonic sequel to Corpses, Notes from the Underworld, is forthcoming from Sublunary Editions and will feature illustrations by Joshua Rothes. Her work has appeared in such places as Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, 3am Magazine, Tentacular, Perverse and Tears in the Fence. A Poetry School tutor, teaching on the Surreal Narrative and the Grotesque in Poetry, she has a PhD in Dark Humour and the Surreal from the University of Birmingham. Vik is Associate Editor of Sublunary Editions and Co-Editor of Surreal-Absurd for Mercurius magazine. Follow her @VikShirley.

[m58]

three from J.D. Nelson

the mental friend disguised as a bird

we are in the sky in a new jet

we live in a building made of cake I made a beeline to the coins

the thermal ice the parting shards

it’s too snowy for us to reach america I am the raisin of the planet

the night of the peeled fork

I was on the smiling island I was brushing the fiddle

a little paper for lunch and a crayfish

I was in the water in the winter

the letter red eating the dragon

in the light of the lake I found a friend in the dusk

I’m in the sink writing a letter to the sun

the painting hand

sign a burgh now in corners

old elves among us

slipper shock shoe

J. D. Nelson (b. 1971) experiments with words in his subterranean laboratory. His poems have appeared in many small press publications, worldwide, since 2002. He is the author of ten print chapbooks and e-books of poetry, including Cinderella City (The Red Ceilings Press, 2012). Nelson’s first full-length collection is in ghostly onehead, published by Post-Asemic Press in December 2022. Visit MadVerse.com for more information and links to his published work. His haiku blog is at JDNelson.net. Nelson lives in Colorado, USA.