Urban Consolations, Altars & subalterns: flash anthology no. 3

[The other day I invited friends on facebook to write poems called Gloria for a napowrimo prompt ... and they did. I am planning to continue doing occasional flash anthologies this way and posting them here. The second was Hereditament and this is start of the third, Urban Consolation as well as the extra third, Altars & subalterns. More to come as they do. Scroll down for the latest.]





Sonnet for Boston
by Noelle Kocot

A flower in the window, these latitudes, iridescent.
I only wanted to touch your sleeve as you went by,
Foggy and lovely, flaking off the residue of night.
Atmosphere thickening, keep on going in the locked

City, pressed maybe against a store's glass. The
Randomly delicate windows, somewhere, there is
Certain calm, an interior recognizable on these empty
Streets. What reaches something in you, what gives

Its moments unto us. In the hotel, people move about,
Clouds in motion, whatever is dealt to you, accept it,
But not necessarily quietly. My orange quavering, circa
1990, my insoluble bond thereafter, I know you are rumpled

Into the olden sense that does not erode. Building,
Brick-edged, the shadows and whiteness are nearly whole.

*

To the Q
by Sarah Sarai

Tattooed or pimply,
briefcased, suitcased,
stinky plastic bag encased,
fists tight on pillowy
breasts or slack arms,
head atilt, aftersmiles
flickering like flickers
flick as it all streams
open and by unto us,
river, estuary, ocean
limp as a quilt on our
beach ball home and
the sun, the sun sparkling
from, glinting in, flattering
even briefcased wolfish
suits growling to steal
hearts and devour but
first we all (all) inside
the car look for marvels
(marvels) racing past.

*

13/4/13 morningpoem
by Elizabeth Treadwell

*

Urban Consolation : Altar : Subaltern
by Michelle Detorie

*

Altars and subalterns
by Sarah Anne Cox

a garland for Artemis
From virgin meadow from virgin greenery
Hippolytus places reverent
from his pure soul
As much as he hates Aphrodite, she hates him
as much
her altar bare
but scripting death
the lopsided stage
as much as children make one
impure
the night’s labors
her catastrophe a secondary consideration

*

Midwestern Altars & Offerings
(If mine was a family/culture that practiced ancestor worship)
by Nicole Stefanko-Fuentes

Black soil and peonies
a passing shadow in the chrome
a sunfish slipped back into the water

Recitations of the periodic tables
voices in the gravel
by the cars
on the porch at
the cottage at Linden Lake

Horseradish, dill
Crown Royal &
cucumber seedlings under a storm window
cleared of snow

Detroit Tigers & Lions
borscht bright roses
& rosaries
for the grandchildren

Old names & young mothers
Alexo & Stella
elemental again

*



yerba buena
by Elizabeth Treadwell

over in the copse-place, on this royal oak day
by the lake-oak, beneath the temple
send your altar’d consolations,
yo to line this threadbare mecca
with motion y contraption gracias

*


[I blew up a bed]
by Becca Klaver

*

URBAN / CONSOLATION
by Taylor Brady

floating up rooting
complexity of the nude
has no unicorn today
is also spring the rumpled
caterpillar and advice re: tasers

and the test shots cops
fired off last night because they could

an epic poem only 50
copies an amazing London
performance in June should I

fade before horizon comes the whole
picture comes to grief comes to gray comes
in at the window and ignoring it my nose
roots in at the base of your neck

at everyone growing up
in the immediate all-girl
Egyptian heavy metal
talk of poetry and a glass
of wine with you storms out
in honor of the farm

whose “ideology of child-murder”

is this but ours machines
and images of cats
a voiceover gig standing
still before the fountain
which often goes on lockdown

ten years proposed as more or less
enough to forget the mass massing

snow falls not here stop this
lawman at the grocery store
been going mad be safe be over
soon about as empty as it gets the blast
is classed as either public or as

private as the face you share with anyone

/

skin comes to
tend to where
your touch lifts
off and there's
the world that
comes to hurt

*

GOTHAM
by Shanna Compton


The word grotesque
comes hidden
in a small cave.

Its meaning restricted
to an extravagant style.

Copied in factual rooms,
in the unfinished palaces
singed in the unceasing Great Fires.

It is overgrown and buried,
until broken.

It spreads
to other languages.

Long used
for decorative curving,
it sprouts foliage elements.

Generally adjective—
strange, fantastic, ugly,
incongruous, unpleasant,
disgusting—we arrive at
weird shapes In art.

Here is an audience
uncomfortable in their
collective pity.
This is a gargoyle—he is
an immense hybridity,
a fundamental grotesque.

*

for Urban Consolations/Altars/Subalterns
by Ash Smith

*

wifthing two
a (sub)urban consolation for Elizabeth Treadwell et al
by Pattie McCarthy

suburban recompense he
says fundamental grotesque & a large
latte to go bring me the paper
work bring me double-knotted
gnawed on thumbnails bring me
stims bring me my big girl bed
volvo full of ornamental grasses
I'll be on the 2.34 I have
soft pretzels we might even have a gap
coupon for 30% off privacy
winter fall spring l'ete great now
can you say that all in English
what do you mean
a pastoral a paradise & me
without my umbrella at chaos baseball
find my body here & that praxis

*


Faerie Drill
by Melissa Eleftherion Carr

*

the future as it was seen then
by kathryn l. pringle

a tree folds over the falling
ignorance a reckoning of vision

a sign
the stilling veins

an open someone
forgets environment
forgets or becomes

a forensic seer

rounding opposition
salivating orders

remembering so
owns vocalization
a tale sprung and bated
a grandiose schemata
tilling each chord
mining each synapse

what we forget is blood carries everything through us

13/4/13

morningpoem


all the years I've spent and spend
on the hills below the temple
the brunette caterpillars like buffalo
across their petite fields

Hereditament: flash anthology no. 2

The other day I invited friends on facebook to write poems called Gloria for a napowrimo prompt ... and they did! I am planning to continue doing occasional flash anthologies this way and posting them here.

& so this is the next one, Hereditament, from a quote put up on FB by Susana Gardner:

"Sir, having no disease, nor any taint
Nor old hereditament of sin or shame."
Sidney Lanier; Poems of Sidney Lanier; 1916




Thanks to the poets! All flash anthologies remain in progress so do let me know if you have something to add. xo.

*

Hereditament
by Michelle Detorie

*


Hereditament
by Melissa Eleftherion Carr

*

Taint
by Carmen Gimenez Smith

*

Hereditament
by Arielle Guy


*

The Opposite of Crow
by Lisa McElroy

*

Hereditament
by Hassen Saker

*

The three perfumes
by Elizabeth Treadwell


*

hereditament@secretmint.com
by Katy Bohinc

Oh you asked me about heraditament, we were just talking about this, about the square root of negative i. about how nothing works without it but we can’t see it. I can show you a table, I can show you 1, I can show you all the counting numbers up to the number of poets in a room, but I cannot touch you the square root of negative i or i for that matter. It’s like a body that has no sense of itself, what do they say, a vegetable, and I say identity is the cause of warts and nothing works without it.
We were drunk of course and drunk again and drunk and drunk and drunk on something I could never show you but then that’s me but you could never see it either but we did and we were and we and pronouns! How insane and irrational pronouns! But they are! And nothing works without them.
Like I don’t know if this’ a poem but nothing works without it.

*

4/11
Hereditament
by Sarah Anne Cox

"Sir, having no disease, nor any taint

Nor old hereditament of sin or shame."

Sidney Lanier; Poems of Sidney Lanier; 1916


The birds have been washed of tar oil
dishwashing liquid rinsed clean
no taint
the nested hatchlings chirp a bitter song
no yellow feathered birds left
consanguinous
clothes horse
secret illness borne to bear
arousal hedgerow
a tiny blood stain
the manifold of disease
a beggars almanac
in the ship’s window
a flea and louse
a tripod burns whale oil
then sugar
then sexual appetite

*

Hereditament
by Carrie Hunter

In the ballad of the bread.
To marry with a limp.
Dross, the invasions tradition.
Frothy dale veiled estate.
In the lows. Everyone is a fraud,
forked-tongued.
The only truth in pantomime.
Copiously.

The Real Presence's absence.
With teeth through saddened
textiles. The softened saying.
Spectre flower. Legal formula, speech act.
Our unconquerable, untranslatable name disappears.
The truth is here but faded. The first of the vine.
He is dead. He is drunk. He is the first to be drunk.
Fabulous bird we never see, always reconstructing itself.
We shade the meaning into the words.
We consecrate yesterday to the future.

I always wished I was a Thursday child.
Kerouac's hero's molars ancient from the grave.
We don't remember what burns,
we remember what moistens.
We have to take supplements for this.
Everything red crossing the uncrossable.
I could change the form.
Where salmon go to die.
Having survived the flood.
Let's practice love-feasts.
Confusion, the second stage, feeling the abyss.
Dismally bundled. That precise buzzing.
Gullible like gulping like uh oh where is that fishing line, theta.

*


A response to a lie (lit) (lie)
in two parts.
For JH, but then, not at all.

by Brooke Lynn McGowan

Part I: taking

Give me chattel
give me the hard thrust
the chains weighing body to the earth,
or chains to chair or chair that bitter undercarriage
of a rombus. It has no wheels, no house, no philosophy.
As peripatetic as a vector.

Have we thought of this my love?
You say you cannot leave, you have gone,
I go.

True, as verring air, constant in your faithless flight.
You say come.
I go.

And seek another, as she said, as I sought you first.

You say you cannot leave,
you cannot, you will not leave, you with the strength of a vector,
the f, the x, the y, values unerring.

You say come.

Be done both with your philosophy, your fixtures
--there is no open air. Only the breath gone out of beauty,
and this house.

Give me chattel
give me the hard thrust
the chains weighing body to the earth,
The slap of flesh, the blood
The stink of skin.

The curdling cry.

Have you thought of this my love?
The loneliness of the parallel line…

Give me angles and contrary strife.
The not-never-meeting of complement and correlation: give me crocked. I am not your likeness, your match, your kin or kindred, similarity or twin.

Do not ask that I look in the same direction:
the blind dereliction of abstract ambition. The landscape will rot before you reach it.

No hooks no hands no waists no vistas no horizons now:
I will cross you.

Give me chattel.
And of your body: owner.
And of your body: slave.

Chained already to the earth

~ ~ ~

Part II: Leaving.

To seek you again as I you sought me first
.
Death is not an easement.

I go.




*

Hereditament
by Kathleen Ossip

Hereditament

A large plane crashes into a residential neighborhood.

In Africa—no big deal.
In China—yeah so?
In Australia—aww that's too bad.
In England—oh really, is the queen OK?
In the US—oh god, this is just terrible, oh the humanity,
everyone a hero, and right here the captain hero
of the Fire Department, and the 911 operator hero.

—Sir, what were you doing before you became a hero?

Sometimes I think fantasy is the opposite of poetry
and sometimes I think they’re the same
and sometimes I think poetry is to fantasy
as blood is to a laugh
and sometimes I think we’re a patch of lilies
glazed with rainwater
on a wet black bough.


*

Beyond the Reach of Taint
by Sarah Sarai

When the wave recedes across
terrified fathoms and
walk-on sand is swept by
oceans' untouchables moonly moved
on mother globe (our sprawl)

When sun stains thighs (or love) and
we are mounted by kelp and esoterica,
by minerals of swampy seas a harvest

When barnacles tattoo buttocks with
pleasure forfeiting fear as if
in a trance as if Earth enmass were
dervish like angels spinning on the
beloved enchanted to be
itself (Earth) a mother a mother itself
of living and the dead, sexing and
the leaping, of tears

When moonly a mother moaning
‘gainst terror's high pitch to
waken in sweat and serenity (surprise)

While our axial planet's being (like
a lollipop) stupefies stupids: there’s
one mother only and only one womb

That we are one in rotation and
we are beautiful (yes) until finally
tossed into memory where dreams live
wild with confidence they cannot be
explored like jungle or reef

When mother, woman, any who opt, live
out our lives, our private infinities




*

Hereditament
by Nicole Stefanko-Fuentes

She wrings the necks of songbirds

that made the little one cry & upon seeing the field littered with dead birds

who croaked

not a song

he can not be consoled, so she cuts down the branches of all the nearby trees so songbirds could not nest there

and she pierces the flanks of the spotted fawns too soft and too far out of his reach to touch

(Salvaging arrows he was proud to have made himself, before he killed the first bird and changed.)

She shutters the windows against nights without stars and tears her at her breast and curses when he continues to feel and continues to grow. Lilacs call to him about the smell of girls. A nag is for riding away.

These are figures living in tapestries and friezes

that muffle all sound but the conflict they stumble toward

whose thousands of stitches and etchings cannot fathom a whole. Drama queens to cut one's teeth on.

Not the kind of people who small talk at the counter and in waiting rooms

whose own losses don't tear their private sky from their frames, whose counter intuitions don't wrench the world off its axis, stripping the screws.

People whose eyes can still see and reflect both inward and out. I see. Not all or nothing but something. Positive space.

Not without sin or disease but with outcomes unknown. It was nice talking with you today.

Gloria: flash anthology no. 1

The other day I invited friends on facebook to write poems called Gloria for a napowrimo prompt ... and they did! I am planning to continue doing occasional flash anthologies this way and posting them here. Thanks to the poets!




Gloria
by Shanna Compton

Gloria
by Michelle Detorie

Gloria
by Carmen Gimenez Smith

Gloria
by Arielle Guy

Gloria
by Becca Klaver

Gloria
by Hassen Saker

*

Gloria
by Sarah Anne Cox

The cow bell pressed down
the timber of the guirra
my lady of Puerto Rico the most
self certain mother of Caparra
Swim Team mother of one
Ricky, a good swimmer, her low arid voice
the certain banter with my mom
her dark short curls
the brow shaped to a focused arch
turning on occasion
to clarify a phrase my six year old brain
lost keys in hand sunglasses on
a busy sitter
or was that my own mother
in bleachers
waiting for the big kids
the little ones in tow

Gloria
no nonsense cheerleader of
the untamed wifery of child into college
of love and practicality
a guttural laugh
All hail Gloria


*

Gloria
by Melissa Eleftherion Carr

To you in the highest
Comestible sunset
A celestial body outlaw
Close enough to dump material
on that other star

Mad math of the prism
Mother of light
Helios – mouth of the annelid
Of invertebrate starts
Maw of the under beyond
Pineal subways, circulatory systems, sudden moon phases
Pumping vessels flowering ganglia

Gloria, fair
Gloria, olive
Gloria, midnight
Ejecting plasma

*


Gloria
by Nicole Stefanko-Fuentes

We miss you
& you are still here
Your slippery hair
and some of us still always
entangling in familiar tethers
Forget it. No Paycheck Fairness Act,
no ERA
the India, Stubenville, Egypt
Then India
Maybe it's the labored last failing grasp
of a falling empire
or
how to teach a girl to run with her long
handled knife concealed
They think when it's men it's a war
and when it's us
it's hunting
On the train a schoolgirl draws hearts
on a boy's cheeks
with a ballpoint pen
One under his earlobe
like a hickey
Gloria, I will carve a heart on the lobe
that grows this predatory madness


*

Orpha

Orpha

creatures dripping in light
of stone & city, their ink-filled
eyes & songs, their darks
& earthling limbs, rootings
& dwellings & dreams


for Juliette Guilbert

Wilda

Wilda

the iterations of the sea, sweet betty
the earth flown through by tiny lacies
flooding the sea muse and the sky muse
and the dear thick earth, we love you brightly
in any sun, each star and trestle how the mighty mini
made things such as towns of clay and sand in spurts and flutters,
the foamy blankets of the shores the gently unknowns
and the winds, sweet betty, the iterations of the sea


for Sarah Schubart, in memory, on her 45th birthday

Dovie

Dovie

and so is joy
in folds and folds of time
jewelled singly or in groups
cherished trees
moons and stitches






for Arielle Guy