by Daphne Marlatt

can you ham it, a serve a
slice of, wry it
gives your ears a breath, er
worrier
space it    oh hear it
however it

beep’s mind’s
melody    st’/ing    

     ing   ing   ing

by Clayton Eshleman

Being here as an enraptured trap, an entrapture.

Nothingness pregnant with the isolational reality of one’s being.

In Francis Bacon’s portraits, there is dark matter digesting in
     John Edward’s shadow the simian borders.
Rouged New Guineaed eyes opened as if by skillet heat.
Hewn rock heads with slicked – back riverine blood – tinted hair.
The head as a dream meal, including knife cuts, fork stabs and
     sirloin chewings.
Car crashes babooning in Henrietta Morae’s tusk – thrusty laughter.

Milking a man out of a fornicate, whistling udder fist: fission gist.

And what exactly are these black discs set into some Bacon heads ?
Are they the immobile, uncanny, unlightable lakes in humankind ?

James Hillman: “This would be the ultimate task of soul–making and its beauty:
the incorporation of destruction into the flesh and skin, embalmed in life, the visible transfigured
by the invisibility of Hades’ kingdom, anointing the psyche by the killing experience of its personal mortality.”

Or are they black holes ?

Do they indicate that we are in the final stage of our species’ history
That, like certain stars, we can no longer produce “expansive force,”
which, on a hominid level, might be translated as “imaginative
     transformation” ?

by Clayton Eshleman

        “The rite at the hunting site, given to the souls of the animal
        killed, was thus basic, in the sense that it was addressed to its
        soul – essence and the general fertility of the species.”

This is Weston LaBarre in The Ghost Dance, 1972,    I keep
driving by these run – over squirrels, and the distance between the rite LaBarre
cites
and our feel for dead animals today, especially the ones we kill — they are glassy
red blood flesh black hair,    organs mashed, stripes of animal, no animal,
just mash, driven over again and again —

Those sleeping along the sides of roads throughout America
The sleeping squirrels, the sleeping chipmunks, the fat crushed woodchucks

My own demise is singular.  These are Whitmanian multitudes.

The duck eyes, the rodent smells, the crane winks, all the animals
now waiting for the Rapture when we will cease to run them over

We have lost the great omentum,    the nutrient sac of
     compassion, renewal,
     guilt for having killed,
                                             (GIs killing Afghanis “for the hell of it”
in the news)
                     but the squirrel the squirrel we do not need the squirrel
          so we flatten “it,”  drive over “it”

I’m enraged by something deeper than I can grasp —
That prayer for renewal has been turned into disregard

                SO WHAT
                                   Get to the cleaners on time.

by Maxine Chernoff

Under the music, a baby cries in the audience. A police siren
meets a thunderclap meets quantum theory.

Under the music you are falling into a sleep so calm that your face becomes
architecture, your head and arms a latitude. Knees bend, and you breathe an
intelligence heard in the room’s soft air.

It is May here, the third month of spring. Already flowers die and new ones
approach life, prodigious in their powers. Tendrils reach from under fences.
Hands touch.

We build fences and sandbag rivers. We launch drones that fly crookedly toward
their targets, launched by boys one might have taught beadwork at scout camp.

You stand there, lovely in your harmlessness, gazing at a neighbor’s fence, where
a Stellar jay rips at a tissue. New jasmine twines over older vines. Nothing can
stop it, not even your concern for its reaching.