by Carl Watson

If she was strong enough to get down the stairs
We would go for a walk around the block,
Maybe buy the 2-dollar Chinese dinners
That went on sale after 8 pm.

It was the 4th of July: I wanted her to see
The fireworks, not knowing it would be the last time.
The river was too far off,
So we stopped at Clinton and Houston.

There’s a Section 8 building on the corner
With some brick guard walls she could sit on.
And we watched the display, or some percent of it
Half of a plume here, a quarter fire spiral there,

A partial rain of sparkling birds and butterflies
Falling between the buildings while
“Oohs” and “Aahs” and “Motherfuckers”
Punctuated the explosions.

It was all the typical arguing of 4th of July
Merrymaking, and when it ended too early
(I wanted it to last forever
So I could watch her face smile in that fire)

We crossed in the aftermath to the benches
On the Houston Street traffic island
Opened up our styrofoam trays
As the holiday traffic drove past

And ate our egg rolls in the drifting smoke
Left over from the celebration
Of our nation’s birth throes
In genocide and violence—

At least that’s how she would have described it

by Niall McDevitt

1
head and neck cleft, consciousness a black sol
fizzing out its life via mass observation,
talking nonsense at the end, confessing
sweet nothings to an emotional public.
call me a narcissist.  my face is not over yet,
a shop souvenir on display at City’s exit,
eyes and lips stock-still as a Billingsgate fish,
a face set in its ways now, inflexible.
but my afterlife comes with new skill-sets:
mute spokesperson for an espionage state
I am suavely shrill.  also, the phantom limbs
below my locked jaw dance pavans and voltas
as entertainingly as the Earl of Leicester.
it is raining applause.
I can stick it

2
the ready supply of heads depends now
on me, but it’s not liberality that donates
this beef globe to the general eye
as a totem object.  it is state theatre.
(my own eyes hang on as costume jewels
compacted with plans, dulled glitter.)
the viewing figures behold me less
as nuanced actor than bloody prop
but throng to espy the ghostly chrism
in my par-boiled and tarred aura, ogling
as I deliquesce in Elizabethan weather,
a dinner-host to sycophants, the murders
of crows, though saving a just desserts smile
for my only friend
the Keeper of Heads

3
Falstaffian blubber traded in for flagpole
I stand erect on drawing-bridge turrets
among the most upright of Majesty’s subjects
bobbing in gusts, the fresh and/or gone off.
there’s nothing much to do here but deter
you from doing the things you really want to,
posture clenched, philosophy Hobbsean,
my idea of eternity portcullised.
exalted above the mortal? or toffee-apple?
England drags itself on Thames’s hurdle
by the irritable bowels!  lord chancellor,
your law screws my head onto a stick, because
it does not think as I do, in numbers or rhymes.
I wouldn’t pole-axe myself
into pure and impure

4
fourfold man, cut to the chine, quarters touring
suburbia, coming to a gibbet near you.
here at Traitor’s Gate my head feels no burden
but a tickle at the bottom of the throat.
pendant eyes fix not on William the Bastard vistas
but on the indelible image of the last thing seen:
the afforcing blade’s triangle of silver,
vatic, pointing out everything I’ve done wrong.
caesarean death, now I understand power
as I understand the inner life of a hog
hung for the blood to slow and stop.  nothing
pleasures me on the rod.  unconsciousness
at the climax of the ceremony—pain’s apex—
launched me into Elysium
like a cannonball

by Anna Halberstadt

That secret
and sacred place
on your left shoulder
is my retreat from the world
a shelter—
from the brimstone and fire
water turned into blood
dead fish and live frogs
mosquitoes, scorpions and locusts.
Lyme disease and sick rabbits
dirty towels, deceitful lovers
fiery hail and sickening betrayals.
This sacred place is my oasis
shade under a luxurious palm tree
a sip of crystal water
a baby camel’s velvet neck
a stone on a lonely beach
to sit on, looking at the water.
It will protect me
from reptiles and predatory snakes
wild animals and biting insects
it will protect me
from loneliness and pain
and first of all,
in Egypt
from that total, darkness.
A darkness, as Lord had said to Moses,
that can be felt.

by Anna Halberstadt

When I hear words love, God and prayer in one stanza
I feel like shooting myself
or the poetess
with her Long Island diner
chick-lit pale version
of sex-in-the city verve.
The next reader read poems about Rimbaud and Derrida
from a papyrus-like scroll
while twirling locks of her long hair
and making graceful gestures
with her white hands.
Then a French girl whispered her text
accompanied by two jazz players
on piano and a tuba.
It went like tree tree in the wind wind blowing
blowing blowing
but since she whispered in a low voice
in her soft French accent
and you could not get
at least 50 percent of the words
I thought it may have been language poetry
and it may have been beautiful
but evasive like a faint scent
of a peony in the spring.
The man with an intelligent face
delivered a long poem
about his father’s painful withering
and dying in the hospital
in great excruciating detail.
However, a diary of suffering
does not necessarily make
for great art
unless it’s been digested
and regurgitated like a worm
In a bird’s stomach
to feed its young.
The Russian reader
a stocky young man
who moonlights
playing Russian gangsters
in TV soap operas
blew me away with his low voice
and surrealist images
like his wife slaughtering a sheep
on the balcony of his apartment
on Avenue X in Brooklyn
so that Russians dancing to Hava Nagilla
at their son’s bar mitzvah
at a Brighton Beach night club
Rasputin
stopped in their tracks horrified
and the strip dancer
with a G-string
decorated by a gold leather Mogen Dovid
fell off the stage
killing the great-grandfather
of the bar mitzvah boy
with sixteen shiny
World War Two medals
on his double-breasted
blue pin-striped suit
made in Odessa atelier
in 1961, the year,
when he traveled to Moscow
to visit the VDNKh
Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy.