RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture

* * * VOLUME FIVE (2011): DISAPPEARANCE * * *

2011-12-28T13:14:00.005-07:00

Editors, “For Elsewhere: Shaping Disappearance”

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RECONFIGURATIONS:

A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture

http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/

ISSN: 1938-3592

VOLUME FIVE (2011):

Disappearance

For Elsewhere: Shaping Disappearance

L’autre appelle à venir et cela n’arrive qu’à plusieurs voix.

—Jacques Derrida

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances; you disappear from your morning self and reappear as your afternoon self; you disappear from feeling good and reappear feeling bad. And people, even face to face and clasped in each other's arms, disappear from each other.

—Russell Hoban

steps between / some passages / O make me / of joy / for a different message

—Susan Howe

Reconfigurations 5 is packed with dialogue & figuration, craft & critique, difference & innovation, song & vision. Forty-five poems (eight of which are image/texts), two fictions, one portfolio of thirty-three drawings, five articles/essays, and one wiki-conversation (with contributions from twenty-five writers/scholars). All submissions and works accepted for publication were reviewed by the editorial board and/or by other external reviewers.

Reconfigurations is an open-access, annual, independently managed, peer-reviewed journal for poetics and poetry & literature and culture that aims to build bridges among different communities.

Our work here turns upon generative contradictions. We are both outside of established institutional hierarchies of process and production (we are online in the form of a blog) and we are the epitome of such systems (we are peer-reviewed). We seek to gather and present both creative and scholarly texts—a judiciously selected diversity of genres/modes and forms of discourse. We exist as a dynamic space for readers and writers invested in tradition and innovation. Such dedication to both/and, such inclusion of opposition, is required by our project of reconfiguration.

Works are accepted for editorial review, April through August. Reconfigurations launches/publishes during the months of November & December.

Reconfigurations is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. For permissions beyond the scope of that license, please contact the Editor and Publisher, showard@du.edu.

We welcome your participation. Comments may be submitted via the post-a-comment link at the bottom of each document page.

—The Editors, November, 2011 - January, 2012

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

* * * FIGURATION * * *

2011-12-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

John Bennett, Two Poems

2011-12-28T12:55:00.014-07:00

John Bennett

FasT or H

PopocA

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John M. Bennett’s most recent books include SUMO MI TOSIS (White Sky Books), THE GNAT'S WINDOW (Luna Bisonte Prods), CORRESPONDENCE 1979-1983 (with Davi Det Hompson; Luna Bisonte Prods), EL HUMO LETRADO (White Sky Books), RESPIROPATIAS (with Juan Angel Italiano; Edicionesdelcementerio), FIVE PERFORMANCE SCORES (Fluxpress), TORPEZA CON TORPEZA (Sechisland), NITLATOA (Luna Bisonte Prods), LAS CABEZAS MAYAS (Luna Bisonte Prods), and TEXTIS GLOBBOLALICUS, vols 1, 2, 3 (mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press).
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Mark DuCharme, "The Unfinished"

2011-12-28T12:54:00.018-07:00

Mark DuCharme

The Unfinished

The ghost-buildings are still here

We don’t know a way to address them

They stare at us yes really stare

They will never go away

To go away, at the onset of speech

To stare with ghost-window-eyes

To be truly naked in the telling

Or speak, at the onset of being dreamed

If you dream. If you speak. If you

Enter ghost-space (language is a ghost)

The space of the story that you weave

To enter or depart

Depart in hunger of words apparitionally

In economies of having been seen

Depart in violent day-rhythm lurking

While mislaying the proportions of the shadows of the bees

The Unfinished

The scar is what we imagine it

To be. The light goes scarcely

Through wind. When you sear

Or scare, you can disappear

Into wind in a parallel

Motion to its

Trace. The plan is to seed

In bloom of thought

Embedded. That’s not true; you are

Embodied, &

The thought is you. Appear then

In necessities of sight, &

Move as love, into darkening light.

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Mark DuCharme’s newest book of poetry is Answer (BlazeVOX, 2011). His previous print books include The Sensory Cabinet (BlazeVOX, 2007), Infinity Subsections (Meeting Eyes Bindery, 2004) and Cosmopolitan Tremble (Pavement Saw, 2002). The Found Titles Project was published electronically in 2009 by Ahadada (www.ahadadabooks.com). The latest of his many chapbooks is The Crowd Poems (Potato Clock Editions, 2007). In 2008 he began a writing project called The Unfinished, parts of which have appeared in Blue & Yellow Dog, Colorado Review, Eleven Eleven, Eratio, New American Writing, Poets for Living Waters, Or, Otoliths, Pinstripe Fedora, Raft and Word for/Word. He lives, works in and teaches near Boulder, Colorado, and has recently launched a Web site: http://mark-ducharme.com/

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Vernon Frazer, Three Poems

2011-12-28T12:53:00.022-07:00

Vernon Frazer

Bearing the Barely Spoken at Length

Happy Campers at Work on Play

Meaning Baskets in Heat

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Vernon Frazer: “Listening to and playing Jazz has influenced my work as much as studying literature. A musical as well as linguistic sensibility guides me when I place words and shapes on the page. Improvisation employs a different method of exposition from conventional writing, so ‘meanings’ emerge through methods [quite] different from those used in writing an essay. When in doubt, follow the music.”

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Dan Thomas-Glass, “Dunkalectics”

2011-12-28T12:52:00.010-07:00

Dan Thomas-Glass

Dunkalectics

crunch-time hurts samples
going head 4 ball

playoff games mysteriously disappear from Chinese television

Paul worked

clock leaped

field dished

Jack

paint nailed exploded

Superman disappear

haul jumper

crunch years shots

superstar doubles superstars

better

ol’ broken ditched man

marks crunch

Score guy

depth disappears

crunch

pass Imagine passive

Manhood kicked

line idea

seldom slightly-above-average

yeah

guy ball blatantly

shoot hard

mildly better

slow win

break system

owners line muscle mirrors

terrible illusions

looking destroying working feeling recurring

Magic disappears

Dunkalectics

penned suit

quote Profit

score money delusion money

buy

money crunch

choke Russell

crying

accept accept accept

darn

inspire video zone radio TV

drunk

wrist Bonner

competition performed

peek constant hands gasping

Sometimes quoted Love

scoring fears ineptitude

hard pressure shove

Lewis disappear

come constitutional instinct

stat maddening deal

flowery rhymes

story Dominate swore tape

written stacks MVP

clincher

crying beat girth

flexed giant forever

mighty ignored

stretching Spectator green game machine

liar age

Whopper Stories promise antsy

first silent tape

intentions attitude contract

writes trouble

fouls disguise

superior stint attack

doubled poor-scoring

overcome flow

Meltdown Disappear

bigger outside-in bench

wings sacrificing shooting compared minutes stuff assists

singled detriment super-scorer touches Bulls

tempo pass/shoot kick-outs gym penetrate

muscled positioned improvisation

cameras loss heated verbal jawing

stop stop stopping

funny guys express doing team scream

doing laugh action

endless intrigue made-for-Hollywood

Paul soft marginal rest

stunning imprint

minded injured

to not disappear

now swollen injured suckered glistening

knocking minutes literally

leading built beauty air

winning time

injure hiding seriously

blowing liability

hurting damage

feels line

deal greatness pain

things played

cry letters

slow anybody

younger critics

three victory shot heads

How to Disappear Completely

performance victory size

control Center must best-of-seven

best-of-seven backs forward

push breathtaking flirted run

stretch victory

taut blowout

dished thuggery

happy staff

Bad-footed stubborn sweaty followers

investigate disappearance

perplexed going sag

come

looked guided

first happier watches growth

might disappear

passion phenomenal

Bob blowing player

pulled crazy night

cool

franchise desperately Brawl

Company map

love restrained handshakes

dirty cheap expletives

ejected dirty caught ejected throat Bulls

struggling ropes

jaw have must have stupid

lose hummingbirds

blown suffered record fail back

guys body capable

capable bipolar pretty

final cruise scored positive

loss wrap show blueprint

teams Heat way silly times

home creaky jacked

hard

do tricky

bring walk return

confronted

flash seed run snuffed frustrated seed eliminated seeds

sides rallied

staged marketing

aired lambaste

shots side shots Nothing

staff nowhere nowhere chip

Boy grips Thunder

night Heat Potential

then

Heat

victory idle

Disappear?

New open Arena News flared

shelved condition

shelved shut

insisted burnish grit-and-spit limitations

leap recriminations

faithful witness

class tattoo irony

Morning debacle

alpha-male closed buts

road home

Center heartbreak heart pounding paying splinter

situations images

hard Patty choice

forget play hit pick

talking clock personnel

the disappearance of

team Phil Tyrone challenge

assistant average trips

occasions toughest shooters

system hand contract

guys guy

turnaround huddle

behind facing hands drained Parker

banks bigger not feel

pull illusions

came felt gave Commercial

hurts

vanquishing franchise

stunned celebrating movie

Gary Europe beyond clear

Curly ball

play chance

frothing Heaven Herald ‘breakfast’

dessert

unduly presumptuous sumptuously good breakfast

energy bit

tough lunch

defeat following survivor

Beating define doubt

worth loss

meaningless

identical

honestly growth hope Band-Aid

compete cynicism

grow positions

fabulous Rod doing guys

guys waste floor Heat

aging pin key

well ball tied

load ball

ball nice

ultimate gun ball wealth

Grew beanstalk crunchtime

uh-oh

beat moves ladder

opened squeezably

one-handers two back exhilaration

pulled down

blessed young early grow

flickered nice

fewer greatness

better best charge face

might beat inspiration

spark bloated beat annihilated column

immensely firmly fold

flip-flopper

keen long material

old makeup

heading doesn’t-get-it-ness paid glory

[blame]

much Johnson stunk humiliation

anybody inconveniences change

respond career stature rules

principles model thing

ads Godzilla tired

worse beloved enigmatic heroic okey-doke

swore limp Paul

Closing drive anew

crutch killer

trail flat unfiltered

oft-complacent

leap grown pivotal physical hard

in ground our off glorious wish

court snowflakes sock-‘em

able intangibles battle end

franchise-record fast-break stops

run back critical

insists tonight

lines resemble staircase

point hinges view defining sorry

myself legs asserted done

guards silky sexy youth

‘chubby’

pitted schooling pile

death elders beauty peek

bull-rush not himself

fight push uncertain move

close owns members businesses

finances built plan appears

owners permission Honda

question Anaheim

disappear today.

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Dan Thomas-Glass is, unfortunately, a Warriors fan. His work has recently appeared in Little Red Leaves, Volt, Armed Cell, Try, and as part of the Poetic Labor Project. His third chapbook Kate & Sonia (in the months before our second daughter's birth) is forthcoming in early 2012 from the Little Red Leaves Textile Series. He edits With + Stand in the East San Francisco Bay Area.

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Jeff Harrison, “Breaking”

2011-12-28T12:51:00.007-07:00

Jeff Harrison

Breaking

quickly glad,
the tiny here sickness
in wind out ripple many years

eye real in
green to breaking too
twofold and challenged to disappear

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Jeff Harrison has publications from Writers Forum, MAG Press, Persistencia Press, White Sky Books, and Furniture Press. He has e-books from Blazevox, xPress(ed), Argotist Ebooks, and Chalk Editions. His poetry has appeared in An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), The Hay(na)ku Anthology Vol. II (Meritage Press), The Chained Hay(na)ku Project (Meritage Press), Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics, Otoliths, Xerography, Moria, NOON: journal of the short poem, Dusie, MiPOesias, Big Bridge, and elsewhere.

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Joan Harvey, “Sound of Machinery”

2011-12-28T12:50:00.013-07:00

Joan Harvey

The Sound of Machinery Stopping

Her name is Delia. She is 43, part Chippewa, on her way to an ex-lover’s cabin. Not strong enough for the journey really. She plays piano, has been a social person, had had a beautiful daughter who died. Is a past tense. Delia waits for what will come through.

A strange biting in her hands. A noose over her tongue. The cabin where she is headed is a site of guilt. Years before Delia had betrayed its owner with another man.

A mark that speaks of death links her to all others afflicted. In the world of the body new tracings, new tracks of purple and red, holes into the skin, difficulties breathing. No longer can Delia take this landscape of the self for granted. Something else has come to grow there.

The illness which comes out of her or is joined to her transfigures, so she doesn’t know what is her, what is this other that remakes her body, redefines her energy fields?

On the other hand, Delia fits the cabin perfectly. Couchwise, but also fragrantly. Mingled odors of must, decay, old sunshine, blend and suit perfectly.

Delia loses one red shoe. And wonders what was she doing wearing such bright sneakers?

Rodents overrun the place, steal her food, leave their shit. Delia thinks to trap them, put them in a bag and place them in the freezer. In case of famine.

A mountain made of grayness and light.

Each morning Delia looks not for solace, but for signs. The phone rings – a wrong number. Delia is alone in a room. Her heart may or may not beat in the right place. The refrigerator is due for a cleaning. For lunch, toffee and broccoli.

Everything now comes in waves in differing forms - sometimes just sensation. Occasionally Delia lets herself open, falling into something deep and regular, great expansiveness. If only this could be maintained.

Degeneration into porno fantasies, her in the middle. Two men, not altogether straight. Hours and hours. And wants from the past – some child pleasure thing. It makes sense to just let go. Piling up the pillows, the head that cannot support itself. Weakness. As soon as she allows herself sleep, she cannot.

Breathe against anguish, against anxiety, breathe into the warmth where she shuts herself.

More, not to be said or imagined, but disgorged. The important thing is to make few plans and leave herself plenty of time. Work on the reassurance technique. Rid herself of the old nerve boxes. Don't get lazy, but be understanding. Don't waste time on advice.

Delia wants to lose her identity, bury it in the mud by the side of a sleep river, but as she covers it, Delia worries that it will be stolen and then she’ll have nothing. Delia digs it up again and carries it muddily on.

There is a pillow she pretends to talk to, but basically Delia thinks Delia is insane. Delia should be locked up. She can't bear this thought. She’ll die or scream. The screams have holes in them where moths and bugs fly through. Her teeth possibly rotting. And the ex-boyfriend of the cabin and his teeth. If he were here. Delia sits up in her sleep and says "Cherries, strawberries, and limes."

The mice are involved. When each drama is overturned, the noise of scurrying underneath. The articulation of each phrase is somehow unpleasant. She wishes for a return to muffles.

Washing her white night dress.

Delia is baffled, filled with pain sent down.

Wild geese hit the sky.

Seeds of death carried inside like her eggs.

Little hooks under the blood.

Press on past. Precipice. Until the only thing.

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Joan Harvey’s fiction, poems, and translations have appeared in numerous journals including recently Web Conjunctions, Drunken Boat, Smokelong Quarterly, Otoliths, and Danse Macabre. She thinks disappearance can be a practice, a fantasy, a necessity, or an art.

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Eric Hoffman, Five Poems

2011-12-28T12:49:00.006-07:00

Eric Hoffman

Sick at first. The sea was rough.

Assembled Lycidas from memory

Like Isis Osiris’ broken body.

Once the storm eased, spent

Long hours on deck, learning

To use the sextant, lamenting

My poor knowledge of the sea,

Of geometry and astronomy,

Drawing conclusions from everything,

The voyage at sea metaphor for life,

Rich with sentiment and symbol.

Freedom. Inside, terrible freedom.

Outside, thousands of laws,

Of physics and of men.

But inside, that temptation

Overruns us, rendering the soul

A plaything for vice,

Tarnishing the white walls

Of our reputation.

My ministry in tatters, and

My Ellen now so sadly altered.

And where I encounter a chilling fear

She expected serenity

Even when her every breath

Offered her distress. And now

The invisible multitude of all

Breathing things becomes

A silent choir.

My eye is American.

Like a chemist assembling substances

I bring myself to sea

In search of affinities –

The bubble –

By its birthright – expands

And my American eye

Is like a child’s again

I write empty sentences

In my journal. In death,

Words become poor company,

Expecting of them more

Than they have to offer.

We search this desolate home

Looking for healing and peace

As if they are mis-placed objects.

‘Teach me I am forgotten by the dead

And the dead is by herself forgot.’

Retreat into reading:

Plotinus. The Bible.

Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John exist?

When all else fell to ruin

Their lonely words

Cried out faith

In the wilderness

Crying out.

Why must I travel across the sea?

Under the lee of the spencer sheet

I found a solitary thoughtful hour –

The vast envelope of sky

Lit by the same light that illuminates

Distant shores, painted canvases,

Carved marbles, renowned towns,

These places and names

From childhood

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Eric Hoffman is the author of six collections of poems, of which The American Eye (Dos Madres Press, 2011) and Everything Is Actual (Lone Willow Press, 2011) are the most recent. His poetry and prose have appeared in Talisman, Rain Taxi, Smartish Pace, Cultural Society, Poetry Flash and Jacket. In 2009 he edited a George Oppen festschrift, All This Strangeness, for Big Bridge.

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Mark Jacobs, “The Castle Stands”

2011-12-28T12:48:00.012-07:00

Mark Jacobs

The Castle Stands

Not long ago my children decided to have me killed.

There you have it, as bald and blunt as the temper of the times demands it be. Of course I despise the temper of the times. Prefaces, I was raised to understand, were a mannerly necessity. Omitting a preface was like buttonholing a stranger in the common way to breathe garlic-scented improprieties in his face. In short, for the man I am, an unthinkable aberration. Under the circumstances I take the liberty of presuming you will overlook the lapse from form.

When the time came for Eva and me to leave, I was taken aback to observe the ease with which my mate readied the horses and handled the landau, as though she were the coachman’s daughter and had grown up slogging through dung. At this pass I do not mind admitting how useless I was. I did not assist my wife in the slightest to make our escape. I was impedimenta with a pulse, shocked at what was happening, and still more so at the treatment that had led us to flee the place where the bones of our forbears replenish the living season.

The landau is a handsome equipage. It came from England on the Doughty, a vessel whose name delighted me when I learned its etymology. It was built by a Mr. Leicester, official purveyor of wheeled conveyances to the Sovereign to whom he owes allegiance. In a world less flawed, the good Mr. Leicester would owe not mere allegiance but true fealty, sworn and signed.

There she sits on the box now, my Eva. Eyes steady on the road ahead, which is treacherous, she clucks to the bay, she cajoles the warmblood. The whip she brandishes, which boasts a hammered silver handle, ought some day to figure in the family history. It was given by my father to the head groom of his time, whose son pried it lovingly from his hand at the poor man’s death. Who will write the history, who will protect the story, now that I am gone?

Change, my children all but screamed. As soon ask the sun to alter his antediluvian circuit. Ask the stone to become a river, the river to become a head of cabbage. Like these, I simply say ‘I am.’

The castle stands. When news of the first incursion was brought me, that certainty provided comfort. Many of the stories told me by the Pater began just that way: The castle stands. They are the same stories that I, as Paterfamilias, told my own children when they were young and had ears.

Now, under the duress of flight, I am tempted to judge my own actions harshly, from the moment news of that damnable assault reached me. The dogs, especially; especially the dogs. It is a temptation to be resisted.

In their haste, my children have forgotten something, or else I was a worse teacher than I knew. When I say the castle, the word embraces both a literal and a figurative meaning. I fault myself for having failed sufficiently to develop the children’s understanding. They say the castle and picture the buff stone walls, the community the walls enclose, the tower that rises from its midst. They see the gardens within, the woods without. They recall the slightly mysterious well in the cobbled square to which the governess dragged them in spring twilight on some dubious pretext or other in order to consummate her tryst with the groom. They call up images, these children of mine, of foxes in our woods, and rainy afternoons in the game room, of dusty sessions in the library with sweet biscuits hidden behind the Ovid. And this, they tell themselves, this is the castle.

I thought, as I watched them grow, that it would be unwise to draw distinctions between the literal and the figurative senses of the castle. Let their consciousness remain Edenic, I told their mother; undivided. She agreed. We hoped by so doing to foster strength of feeling even if it came at the expense of critical clarity. Perhaps other parents in other places and circumstances have erred similarly. I concede that the depth of experience I have enjoyed in the castle may have come at the cost of a certain breadth. It will not surprise you to learn that we were bred to eschew such breadth as coarse and common, a sop for those who did not have the good fortune of living in the castle.

My children, alas, are entirely unable to imagine their father’s early years. Is it too much to wish that they expend a bit of effort to see me retrospectively? They might then be moved by the vision of a sturdy lad of twelve sent into the woods with a single arrow and the injunction to await the one essential shot, bringing down a buck with his foreshortened bow. How that lad’s heart beat in modest pride, how his limbs trembled with their separate consciousness of the buck’s sacrifice, how the late afternoon sun furbished in sublimity the trunks of the trees, the sere leaves, the very air! Whether they would then rethink their death edict is another matter.

The isolation in which I was confined certainly played havoc with my emotions, which I have been accustomed, as Pater, to hold in check. Even now, lurching in the laundau over this execrable road, shielded, as it were, by Eva’s exertions, I would speak simple words to my children and have them understood.

I will not forgive them for keeping me, for so long, from more than the most limited contact with their mother. Like mothers the world around, Eva was always quick to assume the role of mediator. Her own generous spirit was grounded in the practical. She knew how to draw the children out when their infant spirits clotted in confusion, unerringly interpreting their most oblique utterances. Of late she had stretched herself, body and soul, across the yawning gulf that divided me from my children. Why then should I be baffled that they saw her as one of them from the moment this ugliness began? I, only I, was their enemy.

How intensely I looked forward to the ten or fifteen minutes they allowed Eva to be with me each day. Wisely, it seemed to me, she decided she would not intercede on my behalf. Nor did I wish her to. Intercession were unseemly. She sought, rather, to nurture a space of peace inside which I could draw a breath that did not stutter. We reminisced, and my feelings were let out, one might say, for their daily airing.

Eva often brought gifts I was too wrought up properly to treasure. Yesterday she came into my sitting room, kissed my lips briskly, and presented a wooden box. Inside the box were layers of waxed paper, into each of which was pressed a leaf. She included one from each species of deciduous tree to be found in our woods: oak and maple, larch and birch, elm and cherry and so many others. Fall has arrived, a season that reinforces the noxious illusion of change. From the tower windows I watched the woods flame as they flamed for the first Paterfamilias so many years ago.

Prattle, that is what I thought my wife was doing when she chid me for not appreciating her gift. How foolish I was, and how fortunate finally to understand.

I was about to beg your indulgence but was prevented from doing so by a remark I recalled our eldest daughter’s having made not long ago. The begging of indulgence, Rachel told her mother and me in a pedantic tone that grated, is a linguistic anachronism, the vestige of a social arrangement based on subservience. The usage, she continued peremptorily, must be eliminated. Thus so. I stand corrected (again). Nevertheless, I remain the person I was brought up to be and see no harm in ushering in my anecdote with a customary courtesy.

At any rate, the tower in which I passed my days of captivity possesses large double windows set rather high in each wall. Below the south windows sits a brocaded chaise lounge in which I frequently read or took my notes. I was fond of the piece; legend has it that my great-grandfather conceived the idea of writing the family history while resting on it. Of course the chaise lounge was not then in the tower, it occupied a place of honor in his private quarters. Well, two mornings ago I happened to stand and stretch and look through those windows just as my son Herbert, who fancies himself a ringleader of sorts, passed below with his young son Chadrick. Chadrick, you must know, is also the name I have borne these sixty years.

You must know too that Herbert resembles me to an uncanny degree, and that our acquaintances marvel to observe the same squarish features, the same imperious manner, the same vigorous temperament make their third consecutive appearance in little Chadrick, who will some day realize -- one hopes with pride -- just what it means to carry the weight of his grandfather’s name.

Little Chadrick is scarcely two years old, still young enough to put foreign objects in his mouth because the world is still his and him in a way it must later cease to be. I watched Herbert patiently bend and extract a small round object from his son’s mouth, gently reprimanding the boy at the same time. Bully for you, I wanted to applaud my own son: You are doing your duty, teaching the child one of the many things you know, many of which you learned from me. The body of knowledge you cannot help wanting to impart is what we call tradition. Tradition protects us. It keeps dangerous objects from our vulnerable mouths. But bitterness burned the encomium before it became words. Herbert and his siblings have their own ideas about tradition. I do not share their ideas.

What would you do if you stepped through the castle gate on a glorious morning in late August and found the walls that enclosed your world befouled by crude pictures and ignorant ranting words? And if by great good fortune you saw the perpetrators of that graphic assault disappearing into the same woods through which you looked forward to taking your morning constitutional? And if you had a peremptory temperament, and the kennels lay close to where you stood watching the vandals’ retreating backs? Just so. One acts, if for no other reason than because failure to act is the first symptom of degeneration. The unexamined life is not worth living. Agreed. But examination must not lead to paralysis.

Herbert and Rachel, twins and the eldest of our brood of seven, let me know in unminced words that in their opinion I had overreacted. I despise the verb. One reacts or he doesn’t. The shading suggested by the prefix is a corruption. Corrupt the language and you corrupt the minds of those who employ the language. My children, I regret to say, may overreact. Their father? Never.

I confess I was not prepared for the speed with which the second incursion followed the first. I immediately ordered the walls expunged of the filth scrawled on them, as you may well imagine. At the same time I sent a messenger with a black armband and a sack containing a generous sum to the house in the village in which lives the family whose boy was torn apart by the dogs. His fellow vandals survived, shaken but, I am confident, having learned a profound lesson. And that was that.

Except that it wasn’t. Two mornings after the incident of the walls, one of the gardeners found the bloody head of a gamecock nailed to the gate, along with a pamphlet the incendiary level of whose rhetoric was matched only by the wretchedness of its grammar. Another instance, this, of my aforementioned point about the corruption of language. There are actions in the real world – the moral and political world, if you will – that proceed from and at the same time behave as the functional equivalent of a dangling modifier, a non-sequitur, inappropriate hyperbole.

I did not intend to rave here. I had hoped, rather, to explain why things fell out as they have fallen. Politics I leave to the partisans. They are equally welcome to the slogans, those verbal bludgeons with which fools and zealots would beat me into submission. But I will not submit. The castle, I say again, embodies more than the literal construct.

When the pamphlet and the bloody head were brought to me I responded with measured calm. I was offended to the quick at the sight but convened my children to a family council in the drawing room. Family councils are traditionally held in the drawing room, which boasts French doors that open out onto the wide, high lawn on which the children used to delight in watching rabbits gather at nightfall. They awarded pet names to each animal and invented fantastic life stories for them, imagining a complete and curiously satisfying world. Eva and I encouraged the game, assuming it was bound to intensify their attachment to the castle. Generations of children have been fascinated by generations of rabbits on that green expanse.

A sense of my progeny’s attachment to the castle was not the predominant impression I gained as we sat around the table, myself at the head, their mother ensconced in her own favorite chair near the doors, which were open to catch the breeze, should Nature so favor us. I have no interest in reproducing the unpleasant discussion that followed. Times had changed, my children assured me; they were changing still. The family and the castle had to change along with the times.

How can one sustain a rational discussion if the premise with which it is inaugurated is not only specious but an abomination? Herbert and Rachel, having arrogated the role of spokesman for their generation, were positively disrespectful. Their voices were raised to a register guaranteed to produce more heat than light. In the end, a painful terminus, their intransigence obliged me to exert my prerogative as Pater. I laid down the law: There were people in the village who found it in their own best interest to cooperate with us. Their services would be called upon. The author of the scurrilous pamphlet would be found and punished. That was the end of it.

It wasn’t, of course. But do not labor under the impression that I see what happened as in any way arbitrary, that if I had responded differently the issue of events would be different now. Truth is no more malleable than good grammar. I did what the Pater was obliged to do. My blunder lay in failing accurately to gauge the hostility of my children.

The man who had written the pamphlet was identified. He was not so young a person as I had presumed. Therefore he was doubly guilty, having failed to profit in wisdom from his forty seven years under our tutelage. Making an example of him will make a martyr, Herbert told me, but I have always found an architectural charm in making the punishment fit the crime. I drew a purring sort of satisfaction from listening to the cur recite the verses he had been obliged to compose in our honor. The whole village, everyone from the castle, everyone in our modest sphere of influence turned out for what was, after all, a command performance.

The family of the boy killed by the dogs were among those in attendance. I was gratified to see the ardor with which they applauded the writer’s humble paean, which evinced a rough talent I would have been happy, in other circumstances, to cultivate. When the event was concluded, I made it a point to stop before getting into my carriage. I shook the father’s hand. Whether there was anything occult in the charcoal eyes with which he returned my gaze I leave for another person to speculate. Speculation is like brandy, best taken in small quantities.

Several days of peace and signally fine weather followed as the season gathered force. Mornings the air was bracing, and the thinnest skin of ice formed on the green ponds. The leaves reacted to the cold with their traditional shock, which translated itself into the jumble of color I later admired from my lonely outpost. Little Chadrick, my namesake, began to speak in complete imperative sentences. Rachel announced that she was pregnant, and I sent a congratulatory gift to my son-in-law Rolf, a beautifully bound edition of the family history compiled by my great-grandfather. It was my intention some day to update and republish that history.

Our serenity, but not the clear weather, was broken by a series of incursions that followed one upon the heels of the next so quickly we scarcely had time to reflect. The warehouse was broken into and the hams carted off. The landau was damaged, though not seriously, when a thin man who had disguised his face targeted it with some sort of explosive device. More noxious slogans sprouted on the castle’s walls. A lovely, gentle woman who works in the kitchen was accosted on the road into the village by a band of thugs who threatened violence against anyone who continued in service to the family. (I would give a good deal to have witnessed their reaction to the defiant epithet she reportedly flung in the faces of those brutes.)

A complete register of our tribulations and the indignities to which we were submitted is not necessary. You will understand that we were driven, all of us, to distraction. The people from the village on whom we had traditionally relied began to fail us. One morning we woke to find the golden carp in the ornamental pond had been poisoned, which led us to assume that we had acquired enemies within the walls. Anywhere one looked he was likely to encounter the grisly spectacle of the head of a gamecock or some equally gruesome token of rebellion.

When several of the younger grandchildren, out playing as children must play, came upon one of those bloody heads impaled on a post they came running into the castle in a screaming, terrified bunch. And their parents began, as one might put it, to overreact.

I was spending my every waking hour overseeing the investigation and prosecution of the miscreants who had banded together, seemingly, to no other end than causing my family pain and suffering and humiliation. And I was having some success, thanks to the efficiency and dedication of the chief constable, a stalwart man whom I myself had appointed to his position when he was a hopeful individual of five and twenty with substantial mustaches and highly developed arm muscles. Culprits were identified, judged, and swiftly punished. Yet our efforts did not satisfy my children, not after they watched their precious chicks tear home in a panic.

I don’t know whether it was Rachel or Herbert who convened the family council, a breach I am less likely to forgive than almost any of the others committed against me. The Paterfamilias convenes the council. No exception to the rule exists. Nevertheless I attended the meeting, thinking I would use the occasion to bring them to their senses. I was not given the chance to do so, however. Evidently the children had been plotting before the council began, and the decision to appease had already been made. My role in what I don’t know whether to call a travesty or a charade was to bless their plan of appeasement.

You must know me well enough by now to picture my rejoinder to their demand. We do not appease, I pointed out. We give, but only when our hearts are moved by the spirit of generosity to give. Our hearts, at that time, were not so moved.

I was ordered to keep silent. I sensed rather than saw Eva flinch in her chair, where she was working on a piece of embroidery for one of the daughters-in-law. She did not protest. Protesting would have drawn attention to the intolerable insult done me. But she could not help reacting, for which fineness of feeling I loved her more passionately, more deeply, than I think I have ever loved her.

The particulars of my children’s plan exercise an eerie hold on my imagination. I would just as soon forget, but I find myself dwelling on them: the community council they proposed to establish “in order to improve the flow of communications.” An increase in the daily wage, an increase in the per capita allotment for schooling, an increase in the number of hours the leech doctor would attend to people. If it wasn’t an increase, it was a decrease: a decrease in the number of hours worked each day, a decrease in the percentage of time devoted to studying family history in the public school. I saw them as hills and valleys, those increases and decreases, as nausea-inducing ups and downs like the roads on which my redoubtable wife has chosen to make our escape.

Those who live in the castle do not appease.

One venerable saw has it that the man who does not bend will ultimately break. In my case the axiom does not hold. I will not bend, nor will I be broken. Had I consented to their plan, had I allowed myself to be drawn into putting it into practice, I would have betrayed not just myself and Eva, not just the castle and all who live in its sanctum, all those who ever lived there, but my children themselves, and my children’s children. It would have been tantamount to saying to them something like this: ‘I have lately discovered that the castle is, after all, nothing more than a good idea, nothing more than a noble ideal to which frail, sublunary creatures like ourselves cannot hope to aspire.’ I like to think I would not consent to such treachery even under torture, but certainly I was not about to consent merely to rid myself of the generalized opprobrium that came my way.

The other day Eva brought to our daily assignation the bit of embroidery she had been working on to show me that it was finished.

“Damn the child it’s meant for,” I told her, “and the child’s parents, too.”

I think and hope that Eva forgave me the declension, which was momentary.

I gather that the decision to confine me in the tower – a decision, effectively, to strip me of the Paterfamilias title – was unanimous. I don’t really care. If there were doubters, their inaction and their misgivings amounted, in the end, to support for those who betrayed and dishonored me, the twins chief among them.

Eva kept me apprised of developments. She had a way of transmitting what was difficult to convey in ways that did not wound. She did so indirectly, in the gentlest asides in the intimate conversation we embarked upon the day we first met, here in the castle, so many years ago, and which has never ceased. In any event, I find no solace in having been proven right. Appeasement did not effect the miracle it was meant to effect. If anything, our people became still more resentful, and hence bolder and more demanding, than they were before this nightmare began. Their actions, their attitudes, were absolutely brazen.

There is a certain elegance of shape to be found in my children’s decision to have me murdered. If one pushes the concept of appeasement far enough he winds up at the notion of a sacrifice. And what better sacrifice to appease people’s hunger than the sacrifice of the father, the protector himself? They have discovered, these recalcitrant children of ours, the practical virtues in ritual, in an adherence to forms. If the Paterfamilias did not exist, whom indeed would they offer up in the name of fluid communication between the classes, in the name of rosy red progress?

How it must have cost Eva to convey to me the singular news that I was to be murdered by the fruit, the very issue, of my loins.

Well. The box of leaves. Late last night I stood admiring in lamplight the waxed collection Eva had put together for me, her prattle from the day before coursing idly through my mind. You don’t care enough for the presents I bring you, she had reproved me; you don’t pay them sufficient attention. And finally it struck me, dunce that I was. I turned the box upside down on the low table next to the chaise. I found the hidden door, unlatched it and withdrew the key she had secreted there. I was out of the tower before dawn, when I knew she would be waiting for me.

Thus, improbable though it be, I am unhoused. There sits Eva on the box of the landau, inside which I ride like luggage. Although she has never driven a carriage, my wife appears to enjoy a degree of native skill, negotiating turns with the confidence of a master coachman. Our privacy as we travel is the most splendid gift, an unanticipated state of grace. I realize that I am exhausted, I am quite undone. Up and down, up and down goes the road, and I must bite my tongue not to complain at the same time that the urge to complain shames me. The woods on either side of the road are not notably dark, but they are hostile.

Once, gaining the crest of a hill, Eva stopped to let the horses breathe. She turned around and looked at me. “Don’t look back, Chadrick.”

“Why not?” I responded peevishly.

“The castle,” she said quietly.

Tender in adversity, my wife knew I could not bear the sight of what was no longer mine. The castle stands. Yes! And as she skillfully guided the horses down the corduroy road I understood with a sickening certainty that a vinegar sea lay below us, and in its bitter waters I was soon to drown.

_____

Mark Jacobs has published more than 80 stories in magazines including The Atlantic and The Iowa Review. His fifth book, a novel set in Turkey called Forty Wolves, was published in 2010 by Talisman House.

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Andrew Jones, Six Poems

2011-12-28T12:47:00.006-07:00

Andrew Jones

~

here is

no where

there fore

I am

now here

Praia Grande

Not every person who has ever lived can be accounted for.

Not everyone can be found. I come here every day.

I watch the waves pulverize the cliffs.

Suppose, on a red flag day, I went swimming.

After Listening To Recordings Of A Poet
Who Died Yesterday

when I returned

nothing was

in its place

not even the cat

was still black

th’ ‘’rth m’v’’s gr’vit’

t’k’s h’ld ‘f ‘v’r’th’g

s’l’r m’x’m’m

t’rns th’ p’l’s

w’ ‘ll d’’

now's then

because then's

was will be

then's now's then

and we're

sometimes

more but

most times

now

then of course

then

then in due course

nothing

Rome Again

time constantly begins

to decay we go there

we see the ruins

and they’re just that

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Mary Kasimor, Three Poems

2011-12-28T12:46:00.017-07:00

Mary Kasimor

the cat’s spoons

fill the thermos full of

breath bright

delusion beheaded

the roses a waxen

sigh of dawn

to do

lower the bodies collect

the cats

spoons of the working class

press the star

into sugar light this

is the fall the work

as outline in

the manual of food

herbal outposts

for loan

the monster shuffles another

minute a broken

sequence of undivided

attention claiming

the skin the monikers

of choice mark

the steps of diesels way

with escape & passage

the fungi bones

fall from the sky in cardboard

prices

the same today from

jealous exits

faults at 5:00 am

& hazards the

standards of blase

when midnight wailed

inversion

micro-chip the brain

bad hair answers justice

seeping out another justification

for computers

the principle

matters nothing else

either

you are for it or

it doesn’t

exist of itself it

offers itself

as the lamb

of god the crimson

river flows this

binary movement

justified

the invasion the

trees

paralyzed & crowded into cattle

cars timing each

death or escape

when it happens they are surprised

the momentum

of cotton so they

divided the freedom

each received

5% on the keyboard

thus inflating

the cost of sleep

they

are sleepless

civilization absorbing each

new

gama

ray

she stopped for coffee

& failed at her specially trained

breathing function leaves

the flaming

lungs behind neon

signs the android

operates in

unison flows down

the drain drive

thru opens for

the new

species a parade

transfers the stillness

& from sardonic tales

posted early

is a

perfect match

_____

Mary Kasimor: “I have been writing poetry for what seems like many years. However, whenever I sit down to write, and that is almost every day, I feel as though I am completely lost and beginning over. With determination, I always get something onto the page, and then I revise it and revise it again and again. I am almost always surprised at what I finally consider the finished poem. It is also my hope that I am finding some truth in my poetry, although I believe that each truth is based on the perception created by the words. Writing poetry is a wondrous process.”

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Scott Keeney, Three Poems

2011-12-28T12:45:00.004-07:00

Scott Keeney

Quatrains to the Sun

Sleeping Together

Sunset

_____

Scott Keeney is the author of Sappho Does Hay(na)ku (Sephyrus 2008). His work can be found in recent issues of Juked, Mad Hatters Review Blog, Mudlark, Otoliths and TINGE.

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

rob mclennan, “Subject”

2011-12-28T12:44:00.007-07:00

rob mclennan

Subject;

it's not that he died

it's that he won't stop

Jon Woodward, Rain

rounding vowels; a vanishing eye,

voicing; perpendicular lines,

sleep the vast plains,

a temporal musk,

my own to speak; a means

of other means,

the heart pays close attention

to the frame,

thin, roping twist,

is guaranteed,

to love, love, love,

the great endings,

right or wrong,

what is to know,

a recent hurricane; introduced

a discourse,

this crucial fact, ideas

what we face

are simply doors,

shivered; ordinary,

forged with molecules,

enacting, heedless,

citing attribution,

a question, sugar-formed

fighting an anachronism,

a social promise

etched in language,

, this season

of floods,

can hear

the starlings swerve,

some words I know:

rotation

of white space,

apace,

a spate of address,

now addressing,

knowing,

sentence

someone else,

stories placed so,

so; a garden,

fenceline,

to start is somewhere

of a certain mind,

an ocean,

contain, or thus,

continue,

aware of light,

or like

a canvas would not sing,

murmur, weakly, widely,

silence ever

just takes place,

encroaching air

extends, how far,

at once,

spring cleaning:

you must write this

, you must leave home

behind her own voice,

icicle; forgets the body

, mouth a tarnished wheel

sling of prophecies, forget

courtship, comprehension,

dark stain on a lung,

inky print,

frames

in biological time

, great distances

is next-door sweet,

is perfume,

wave a point, a reference,

, admonishments

a dislocated finger,

index: phantom aesthetic,

do you think there's such a thing

rhythm, rhythm, song

, this flood

textures of a vice,

a human voice: reluctant,

contour narratives,

a mouse-tongue,

soft, and sweet

an earthen twist,

death is matter, matter, not

the moments,

speculative use,

what do we know,

we lose,

one thing, another

words: we overflow,

_____

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collections A (short) history of l. (BuschekBooks, 2011) and Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above / ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), The Garneau Review (http://www.ottawater.com/garneaureview/), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (http://www.ottawater.com/seventeenseconds/) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (http://www.ottawater.com/). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.com/

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Philip Meersman, “Tableau Vivant III”

2011-12-28T12:41:00.005-07:00

Philip Meersman

Tableau Vivant III (Reading the rain)

Downpour

leftover letters of Shakespearian sonnets

I stare

– shades of grey crumble the pallet of the painter –

how colours sink into the landscape

how random characters write history in the wrinkles of the seam

how we miss the beginning of a beautiful friendship

how a bus pulls itself through the temporary river of the street

I forecast

I join the brethren

Holy Warriors

– suicide groupies merged into a pool –

Predictor of Life

_____

Philip Meersman ♂ °1971 // Writes in NL, EN, FR, DE, ES & multilingual forms // Creates impro, sound & poetry installations & performances using current affairs, socio-political & environmental issues in BE, NL, FR, IT, AT, BG, MK, RO, IL, AR, EE… // Translated in AR, BG, EE, EN, ES, FR, HU, IT, IW, JP, MK, RO & RU // Published internationally in magazines, (festival) anthologies, & on the www // Co-founder of DAstrugistenDA, artiestencollectief JA!, BruSlam & TnXR-productions // Teaching poetry & performance + consultant & scout for poetry programming // Words are weapons & images of a(n un) certain meaning // More? Ctrl+F the www “spooninmybrain”

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Rich Murphy, “Complacency Report”

2011-12-28T12:36:00.006-07:00

Rich Murphy

Complacency Report

Hearts and minds find shelter in denial.

Ministers and Samaritans

rescue conscience from the street

and rationalization herds the flock

toward the holes in the sand.

The social services staff

and marketing execs donate cushions

that envelop pea or poverty

and from mother via the kitchen

piping excuses remembered from childhood.

The “Do Not Disturb” signs

point in all directions without an owner

or an ounce involved in the trouble.

Alibi, forgery, and “not me” finger the culprits

convinced that innocence fills shoes

from the neighborhood all around.

Willed-ignorance tints objects beyond noses:

Om sweet ohm.

Blame rains on the homeless if need be.

In other states, Libya or Myanmar,

mandatory amnesia and blinders

focus the population on freedom.

If a sense of self exists in the dogs

that populate domestic terror,

then lasers burn holes in propaganda,

ignite rebellion at any opportunity.

The couched position-statements

that fall from the malls and grocers

around democratic postures

escape an adult sovereignty.

The P.R. campaigns threaten

with discomfort food

self-served in a refrigerator box.

The false dichotomy economy plumes

larger than suburban life in the leaflets.

_____

Rich Murphy’s credits include books, The Apple in the Monkey Tree (Codhill Press) and Voyeur (Gival Press); chapbooks, Great Grandfather (Pudding House Press), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Books), Rescue Lines (Right Hand Pointing), and Phoems for Mobile Vices (BlazeVox). Rich lives in Marblehead, MA.

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Sheila Murphy, “American Ghazals”

2011-12-28T12:34:00.008-07:00

Sheila Murphy

—from American Ghazals

One Hundred Seventeenth

Rastafarian vespers clone egress,
The monk-numb falsehood of loaves and fishes.

Sanitation workers arrive in teams
To prevail where other trends have failed.

In zeal one finds no shred of pink.
Drapes fall in deference to gravity.

Silken premises need not be professed,
Merely appear in print with tony graphics.

Ten-ten AM radio features
Group recitation of the rosary at six.

One Hundred Eighteenth

I like saying more than seeing tuberous begonia.
Just as Rachel Maddow loves pronouncing Whitey Bulger.

Infractions have a way of polishing the punishing
Draft copy of the final product (El Producto, signature cigar).

Children seen equal children heard, unless they’re yours.
The TA before our class described tachometer.

Notice lack of restraint when the vote count
Is thirty-three to twenty nine in favor.

June brought us Mary Ellen, and we’re feeling
Bountiful, yes, graced, to know she’s in the Southwest, too.

One Hundred Nineteeth

Soapy little head bent over the stainless
Steel sink, the water an electric river.

Household of coffee, happy windows frame eternity.
This blouse as light as see-through, only trans-brown patterned.

Earth makes noise; pavement, a place for tires to grind
A nano-particle at a time.

One of the many benefits is who is not here now.
The know-it-all who answers what we have not asked.

I fall for everything you put out.
For example, your calling me your scenery.

One Hundred Twentieth

Camisole reduces friction on her soft skin, with silk
To interfere with artifice as epidermis.

Seashine includes salt granules fine to face seemingly incessant
Light that shimmers, light that graces, thereby forming fragile glaze.

Our correspondence failed to notice barricades invented
To reduce our sense of touch, we circumvented nature thus.

Birds together just outside my window transpose one another's
Melody, threaded, splayed and newly threaded into three dimensions.

To story is to wield the under-surfaces of world
We talk about as being held in common, although differently.

_____

Sheila E. Murphy's most recent book is a collaboration with Lewis LaCook, Beyond the Bother of Sunlight (BlazeVox, 2011). The University of Alberta Press is bringing out the second volume of Continuations (with Douglas Barbour) in 2012, following the 2006 release of the first. Murphy’s American Ghazals will appear from Otoliths (Qld, Australia) in 2012, as well. Her home is in Phoenix. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Francis Raven, “My Stuff Without Me”

2011-12-28T12:33:00.004-07:00

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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Sarah Sarai, Three Poems

2011-12-28T12:31:00.003-07:00

Sarah Sarai

In the Bakery

Out the gleaming window,

cynical scraps of gray snow prevail.

In the room, milk steams bitter coffee,

another comfort of metamorphosis.

Taxis beneath a flock of birds

fly by on wheels turning street to gravel,

gravel to air, turning.

You lived one life as a green blade of grass

whistling chlorophyll ecstasies

in your wide flat leaf.

O Cristo Redentor, overseeing Rio’s
blue uncertainty, extravagant instability,

our sibylline fears.

Loneliness is a fertile amphitheater

of consciousness,

a Pandora’s Box of the oracular.

“Fauna of the night” [Freud] are

informants weary as a prophet

and free as a martyr.

Here by the warm sugar, nothing is

unyielding. Out the gleaming window,

taxis fly by on wheels turning street

to gravel, gravel to air.

Wild Egress

The door is the shape of a bell.

No knob, no hinges, you kick

to get in.

A run of smashing

your sneaker on wood and
you can say, “I’ve done it.”

The bell is the shape of

a paragraph supporting tones

steady as plainchant.

Notes dangle on the rough wool

of devotion.

Our song is the shape

of a proposition.

Its lyric of pleasure is

open to elements like
earth water fire air fury.

After the Plague Years

Narrow waist, soft rise

of a dimple, hips like

river banks sweet grass and

marsh, chiseled ivory dusted.

She sighs into her bed,

eager for the feel of

her husband’s clever muscles,

a home she’s always known,

for that catch in his eye as if

memory were sinister.

His foot cracks a bowl

the slave neglected.

Cursing, Oedipus

encircles Jocasta’s heat.

Torches are dark.

Something is at the door.

_____

Sarah Sarai’s poems are in reviews including Boston Review, Gargoyle, POOL; in her collection from BlazeVOX, The Future Is Happy; in Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown (Whirlwind Press). Her fiction is in ragazine.cc, Fairy Tale Review, Tampa Review, The Writing Disorder, Storyglossia and others.
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Samuel Day Wharton, Three Poems

2011-12-28T12:30:00.005-07:00

Samuel Day Wharton

Subject: Last Events & Consequences

We’ll save what we can. The world’s best

savants are working on sequences to keep us safe.

Until then, keep your gaudy sequins on & keep

your bloody hands to yourself. The only way to know

it’s over is to see it end, so keep your faculties

about you until this evening at least.

We’ll have a party. We’ll save a hearty laugh

for your appearance on the dais. We’ll smile

with greater frequency. The day will dim as usual.

Until then, heap your plate with chicken & herbs

& have a glass of wine. Light up a cheroot

to chase it all away. Watch the trees burn on the horizon.

Soon we’ll be at the farewell party, with our party-

hats & gloves. Soon we'll have the furled banner hung

between the doorframes, proclaiming. The savants

have been up all day, working on the font,

the colors & the spacing, the drapery & molding,

the timber frame & the drywall, the spackling.

Subject: & the Merchant Could Not Resist

The tissue samples arrived on Friday. The pressure

was overwhelming. The merchant shouldn’t have

to best his own intentions just to make it

to the weekend. A fine condition to be in, banked

in the fog of another morning awakening to strange

deliveries. Out of the fridge & into the freezer.

His issue, not mine, but still I empathize. When

the economy tanked, the merchant had too many houses

to visit & none of them were occupied, so he burned

them down. Thereafter, there was this fissure

running through the middle of town, merchants

on one side, vendors on the other, shouting pitches

back & forth. There was nothing I could do about it,

except fill it in with trees. That shut everyone up.

Subject: Beauty Puts His Mind At Rest Immediately

& immediately he begins to resist. His hands,

inutile, fumble for controls, remote or otherwise.

His duty – to fight the blind interest in beauty

the world over – fails to compel him. Curled over,

bound & veiled, the exact shape of the resisting

lost under an orange afghan, he tells himself

the freedom of the world requires occasional

tears. Occasionally he rises, draws up the blinds,

bares himself like a joke he never remembers

he doesn't remember until the telling.

Then his neighbors call the cops.

_____

Samuel Day Wharton's poems have appeared in journals such as Burner, Spiral Orb, Versal, & New Plains Review. These poems are from a manuscript titled Subject Lines.

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Laura E. Wright, Three Poems

2011-12-28T12:29:00.015-07:00

Laura E. Wright

Irretrievably Broken

Find: Gone

Gone, all of us

gone

I think you should know

this is not for you (as it is in real life); I've seen

how we would still have these metal teeth

how he would still be painfully obvious

how he would still lean toward subtraction

I think you should know

how to claw your way back out; I've seen

how possibility pushes back

in this dance in which I have not yet moved

how he would still leave a hole

how he would still leave

how he would still

be still

I think you should know

the arctic possibilities

this little sliver of the world that is all that I can see

be still

you will not be rewarded

I think you should know

this is not for you

this view has been framed for one hundred fifteen years

and nothing has changed

I think you should know

how I do not say

this is not true

being cold is real

and while the view has changed,

the frame has not

_____

Laura E. Wright is a librarian and erstwhile volunteer firefighter, the co-editor, with Anne Waldman, of Beats at Naropa (Coffee House Press 2009), and a firm believer in the Oxford comma.
_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

Mark Young, Two Poems

2011-12-28T12:28:00.004-07:00

Mark Young

A line from Arthur Cravan

I'm back in the city for

the Pride parade; &

even though I despise

the bar scene I enjoy

the sense of provocation

that comes through

flaunting my—recourse

to resource—Hermès

three-chamber bag with

its open compartments

& a small organizer.

Flag this as inappro-

priate but choosing a

site filled with irony is

only one way to win

a Jason Jessee prize pack—

there are other forums,

especially if you're a

sock puppet with many

different pseudonyms.

A line from Weldon Kees

Political news coverage

which is rich in plant

& nut oils has 50% less

sugar than sports cars

or prize-winning spaniels.

Was why the only sound-

track to his older brother's

puppet porn site was a

light dusting of chamber

music punctuated by the

snap of rubber gloves. Bee-

keeping isn't for everyone.

_____

Mark Young has been publishing poetry for over fifty years. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. He is the author of more than twenty books, primarily poetry but also including speculative fiction & art history. He is the editor of the ezine Otoliths & lives on the Tropic of Capricorn in Australia.

_____

RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

* * * CRITIQUE * * *

2011-12-28T12:25:00.001-07:00