Online Exclusives

Etymology of undulate, circle and cloud. We sign our letters in undulating skies. [...]

O moon my pin-up,
how I wish I were a woman frescoed

in a loose dress, pulled by the hair
to heaven. Or Titian’s voluptuous Virgin

rising above everyone who tries to touch her. [...]

My neighbors convened a kangaroo court. The charge against me was stealing newspapers. I contended that after 9:00 am they were artifacts not news and were therefore fair game under international archaeological conventions. [...]

Like you were always
waiting in line for something
just vaguely wanted. What makes us

more human than waiting. [...]

Shapeshift at quonset in a military theater by the sea
west coast bildungsroman scrub data field salt flat doubt drains
the projectionist’s daughter popping in and out of the frame [...]

Cycles of sleep and waking. Birds migrating from cold region to warm. The rate of polar ice melting. Or the beat of iambs or the subtler pulse of prose. [...]

Let me say this one thing, that the meteor is a woman of varying biologies and the crocuses are rising up. In only three words I can convey a schism: x, y, z. Insert here for pleasure. [...]

Here is Pitkin Plaza, three boys
sharing a cigarette, antibodies
bound to platelets that fuzzed-out guitars
in headphones eliminate. [...]

Once upon a night, she landed
On an airstrip of impotence     Whoosh! [...]

There where the night broke an arm
on the lamp at the end of the houses
I explain silence [...]

this body I can’t find

is just a crow my eye was following until it slipped
through sky’s white crease [...]

That is the true philosophical paradox: not how you can travel from point A to point B without first traversing a spatial infinity, bridging all the subdivisible points between them; but rather, how you can travel from mind A to mind B without first traversing a psychological infinity. Leaving the apartment in one frame of mind, how could you ever arrive at a new one? [...]

Something about the building of the Tower of Babel, he thought; yes, it seemed likely, in that instant, that the foundations laid for the Tower of Babel had been the subject of the sentence he’d started and then abandoned, but when he looked down at his lecture notes he could not find the words “Tower” or “Babel” written anywhere in them. [...]

Time after time, I saw overlapping images everywhere. Even when I looked at my children, I didn’t see two of them, but six of them. Only when I looked at my wife, I saw just one image. As for the neighbors, they became a large flock of countless things. [...]

He ties a bell to her ankle, but she removes it in her sleep. He ties one of her wrists to the bed frame with twine, but she loosens the knot with the other hand and slips out. That night she wakes upside down, slung over his shoulder. [...]

A dancer dragging her arms across the stage, slapping feet through a watery pool
            panting from a bent body [...]

One: he must leave at night. Two: he must come back the next day immediately after dark. And three: he couldn’t tell anyone where he worked, couldn’t discuss what happened in the prison at all. [...]

Big bovine heads float over the destroyed city
Laser beams of mean girl miffed fury zing
Down from their eyes the rubble smokes [...]

The body is an object that orients vision. As much as I want to, I can’t stop looking. All the people getting on the subway—strangers. And yet I look at them, hopefully, vacantly. I stare. [...]

In the palace of music, a gathering of the mute:
this became the body. [...]

Coiled in the mother’s womb in the birth sac is a small creature with a large head and flat puckered face, tight-shut eyes, tiny clenched fists, that could be mistaken for a purely human fetus, or, from another angle, a chimpanzee baby with somewhat human features. [...]

By measured stages seduction, sexual relations, impregnation. And if impregnation, gestation.
     Birth, and beyond birth. [...]

Under cover,
the ground seems
legless. [...]

All day all I think is I’m tired and typing, ticker. Am I talking too much or for. And why a girlish void person of emotional scaffolding a demon, a deadness. A depth, nonromantic. As though. The real deadness front-paged and swallowed. [...]

a few acorns forgotten
under the national soot

so much wonderland
a can of borscht in the larder [...]

He was looking out a window
in a room he had agreed to. “What then,”
he said, “let a few more in?” [...]

Little is known about the pre-Socratic philosopher Polycyathus, and that little unlikeable: he was born at Dodona, and was old when Socrates was young (Plato reports that Socrates once tried to question Polycyathus, but that the latter quickly “succumbed to wine-sleep”); he taught the doctrine that “nothing is good”; he believed that, of all the forms of governance, tyranny was best, because “it breeds monuments.” [...]

mirrored      clouds                now
virtual                  glitter         their
idyll                      the first person [...]

We’d been there too long. Portia’s red slip bleached pink on the line, Mr. B getting to know the local girls by name. [...]

I was struck
By your brevity
Can you speak further
About honing that
Particular skill [...]

Overall, The Inconceivable believes itself of clear mind and conscience, and as such, a model of elegant comportment. [...]

The surrealist universe is unabashedly sexed and eagerly embraces nature’s infinitely mutable manifestations. [...]

Damp-squib grammar of pretty things and wild mignonette.
Quercitron bark. Old Fustic’s persistently pissy stamen,
the peony-stained wallpaper. [...]

The money was from a corporation, if that makes any difference to you, and not enough to buy everything we wanted. [...]

Pan speaking panisms at the church
of Christ, Pantokrater, in place
of the usual docent, breast of sportscoat
bulging with his pipes. [...]