by Ilya Kaminsky

To live, as the great book commands,
is to love.  Such love is not enough ! —

the heart needs a little foolishness !
So I fold the newspaper, make a hat.

I pretend to Sonya that I am the greatest poet
and she pretends to believe it —

my Sonya, her stories and her beautiful legs
her stories and legs that open other stories !

And I say: a human being
understands the universe: its music

makes us foolish.  I see my future: a yellow raincoat,
a sandwich, a piece of tomato between my teeth,

I raise my infant daughter to the sky —
I am singing as she pisses

(Old fool, my wife laughs)
on my forehead and my shoulders !

by George Quasha

The space between me and what I touch breathes freer today.
It’s possible now to say what keeps saying itself.
Ask my hand, it knows the other way home.

Things talk in the dark.
I say what I hear.
Fear fails to fill the gap.

Grief forgets to be a boat floating on its happiness.
No one tells need but it needs to tell.
Cut loose, the trail is following.

Take it personally like everything.
Speak only to yourself as everyone hears trees.
Any angle opens the world from the beginning.

by George Quasha

1                                  on the pale trail of the pores on fire

Speaking with chilies in your mouth produces gustatory sweating. Think wild of
stones.

The poem finds itself resisting reading.
Heat back.  Return to the sensible center’s facing the flame.

If there’s one sure thing it’s imbalance in denial.
Reading suffers the ledge to tone down silence.

2                                                      optimizing the inaccessible

Suck on her braid to abrade the tongue.
She teaches me to sit in landslide glory.

Lift your lips off the words and they run straight to me, she said. Maxims magnify
unsayable into optimal minimal.

And if the long – sought free point can’t access beyond ?
The hand writing races the line to end before bending back.

3                                  as one sense dulled the heart grew wider

Surfing surfaces like licking lips backtrack to tell their tale.
There’s no reading the same line twice.

Turning tables torque like facing faces.
Relax, there’s not much danger of a counterfeit free point.

Swallowing between words may yet sweat out the endorphins. Delphine
hormones predict the titillated tissue.

4                                                      fire burns where it is

Look, the edgy boulder is contemplating its swivel.
And rolling stones release their tones.

The same line differs from itself to protect you from your mind, Pray for
spontaneous opinion combustion.

Her focusing mouth speaks hereunder steaming up the gaze. Dolphins, words, the
hot thought hearing the clearing cracks.

by Edward Sanders

Dylan heard
Dave Van Ronk’s version
of “House of the Rising Sun”

& recorded
it for his first album

then asked for Dave’s okay
Dave replied he’d rather he didn’t

Dylan said, “Uh oh.”