A Dios

The Practice by Aaron Shurin

They mistook me for illumination — a revenant in walking shoes — so I gathered significance and spread text… stood beneath the seven cardinal points with arms upraised — practical telepathy — in a white paper suit like a flag of surrender, thunder at my back… I was an open man of the open streets — a burnished sieve of common purpose — scrawled on walls, thrashed cans and blasted caps for equivalence. I wasn’t alone — the boulevards teemed with wiggly kids and mooing parents slow as boulders. In the Plaza Palabra on a green iron bench a grand senora suffered the odes of schoolboys and thugs — smiled behind an opal fan while they searched for words to match their tumultuous nights — and all words fit… In July — volubility — I hoarded cherries, catalogued their juices — were they Rainier, Blood Nut, Royal Ann, Squirrel Heart, Rosebud or Bing? —then swallowed them one by one like detonations…initiations…In a fever of taxonomy I followed a squadron of dragonflies right to the vanishing point…Incarnation is a provisional state, but stretches outward like noon. For practice, I wallowed and stretched…

The Tenth Try by Jim Carroll

I owe a lot to someone
I’ve watched her tear
fall like an icarus
it was like a star
which is the sun
who is me.

it won’t be long
that I will look up
and feel the sounds again
that I pretend sometimes
that they are gone forever.

the steps are simple
to walk in this universe
you must feel each one distinct
as if someone had died
their faces designating each constellation.

you realize
what connects that time you spent
lying on the lawn you remember
is not so long before
and, say, the beauty of the statue
you saw last monday an angel there
her lips hung over the garden, the stone garden.

that connection
is not so easy finding it
in one’s mind
and yet the solution
is but a clue…the garden, the stone garden…

to all you have meant to me
and why this is so.

Song After Sadness by Katie Ford

Despair is still servant
to the violet and wild ongoings
of bone. You, remember, are 
that which must be made 
servant only to salt, only 
to the watery acre that is the body
of the beloved, only to the child
leaning forward into 
the exhibit of birches 
the forest has made of bronze light
and snow. Even as the day kneels 
forward, the oceans and strung garnets, too,
kneel, they are all kneeling, 
the city, the goat, the lime tree
and mother, the fearful doctor,
kneeling. Don’t say it’s the beautiful 
I praise. I praise the human, 
gutted and rising.

INSTANT CLASSIC: a[tone]meant [I.] by Erica Kaufman

  “the bitter memory / Of what he was, what is, and what must be” 

                (Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Four)
                ”we continually explore for the invisible power structure 
                     behind the visible kings” 
                                (Buckminster Fuller)

I.

don’t be sick anymore don’t sit 
silent    recliner mute to the suit 
that earns me political return look 
through that window only slightly 
mutter verbs like persuade, probe, 
phrenology, fellow, transgress against 
that diaphragmatic urge to be again 
“that girl” time marked by shoe sizes, 
length of hair   instead propose a practice 
a fishbowl where the eye a woman 
and the rain really does help 
        us avoid the boat the impulse 
to just move some chairs around 
say “jigsaw   my framing device” 
and no longer thirst for genuine 
saltwater connection epic armor
i knew i was naked i got off the ark