by Dan Murphy

They laid out the body of Lincoln
who had dreamt thus
lying prone ten days before
next to a loveless wife

his Lexington duchess
who slept stiff on her back
with arms folded in an X

dreamless and severe
There was no place
on the bed for Abraham
overwhelmed with 4 a.m. Melancholy

no side where waves
of nausea could not reach
a man so longing for sleep

in the long wait for dawn
as Emily Dickinson
300 miles North
stuffed poems in a sidedrawer

her chamber rattling
with spirits and elongated hyphens
agitating a raincloud

to rustle its skirts across
a Presbyterian meadow
then meander in 4 or 5 years
800 poems

in the time of war
over American soil
cut with blade and brick wall

and farmland littered
with bone and shell
and unburied corpses
poem after poem

her daily devotions
of capitalization and awe
our sexless mother

wrote her life
picking shadow from glare
from speckled window
like a small bird

wreaking havoc with little blessings
an ascetic protest of verse
hidden or held back

tapping under the skull in dream
a great passage over water
in boat or Union jacket
the skirt billowing out

as limbs shiver and cramp
that night sleep pierced the back
of our saint president’s head

resting on an overturned pillow
and he saw the mourner’s slow
tears roll and the second line
of drum, fiddle and fife

marching single file
up Pennsylvania Avenue
and someone a beardless doctor

leaning over Saint Abraham
touched the eyes
sometime in April
to close them for sleep

Dan Murphy

In high school Math, we studied imaginary numbers,
searched for imaginary solutions
to problems without real answers.
We chain–smoked Camels out a dorm window fan
in New England winter, asking what it meant

under blacklight to feel alive. In Cosmology
we had to identify stars and myths, many already burnt out.
In Religious Philosophy, every author we read was dead,
and they’d written about it, but before, when they were alive.
After I had found you, dead, hanging with questions

you and I could not answer, they told me you’d listened
in another room to Cathedrals — a song we loved together —
on repeat. Then your sneakers tip–toed. Then your mouth
quieted with foam. You became an image, then, no longer
yourself,
but a brief residue of light that holds moments

as in an old photograph or a textbook of History
that is both true and false, like the light of a star
no one else has seen or named. I return
to that song Cathedrals now and again, as if I’m mapping
the notes that spoke to you. As though I’m listening

to my own death, each word a star to which I draw
my own myth. I found out, after, that imaginary numbers serve
a purpose: when used to manipulate sound, they can decompose
space and time, such that one whisper can be heard,
alone, among a whole chapel of wailing.

by Douglas Blazek

Playing keeps pleading
its arrogant instrument
to liberate the key
locked in a learning
metaphysically heard.

Language practices
practical tactics
for impractical ways
to daily play.

Natural speech
is no masterpiece, just
a fundamental drum
mentalling assumption’s
common ensemble
scoring its noise
as void’s oratorio

a maestro’s kairos
in air–raid air
keeping time a theory
eerie to the ear
no siren can bare.

Voluminous above
the usual truths,
algorhythmic music
out–pitches cargo’s
Parachutes
Verse–by–verse
slowly decoding note’s
stowaway universe.

by Douglas Blazek

Contesting never–perfected effort,
poetics, pivoting
affinity’s prescience,
quibbles its riveting
scribble of shifting rifts.
How worthwild this writing
customizing cliches
with a knife’s original lips!
How such flourish
zeals the plush read of petulance
to pet the real!
Yet words, far avant
their curriculum vitae,
alter us not from ape to starlight
but to a seethed pastiche
pitching its ingredients
as god’s hot topics.
And so this force,
sovereign in its gnosis, corrosive
to our thesis, keeps
phallusing a pregnant ghost
birthing our mouth’s
impersonation of the world
openly buried in a spoken grave.