.:ELECTRIC VELOCIPEDE:. Poetry

I remember when my father had the author tree planted:
   Literature is best experienced fresh, he would say,
But I could only think about the writer he’d selected,
   An angry little man, rumpled and stinking of whiskey,
Led around to the back of our house by the bookdealers
   As they gabbled in their mysterious cant to each other.

My father wouldn’t let me watch the planting in the garden.

The bookdealers told us it might take many years before
   The tree bore any fruit, except perhaps for short stories
No more filling than blackberries, for all their sweet flavor.
   But that April the tree bloomed, red flowers reeking of salt
That by October gave way to reveal its first novels,
   Heavy tomes in black covers without even a title.

Later editions will doubtless have cover art, said Father.

He reached up into the branches and picked a single copy
   He took a long heavy knife and split open the cover
Each side falling open neat as you please, then carefully slit
   The bundles of pages apart, leaving ragged edges.
With a smile he handed it to me, and I held it close
   Breathing in the scents of ink, of language, and of story.

And for weeks afterwards I slept as if part of our garden
in dreams

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

Why People Disliked Art, Circa 2005 by Marly Youmans

. . . the rumblings of a new movement to bring those shifts
into earshot, diagramming their overlap as a corporeal sphere
of listening . . . an oft-referenced vertex in sound art’s
expanding scaffold.

Another way of accounting for this overall emptiness or lack
that the painting bespeaks is that the Female Child enclosed
within this geometric or ideological box is also trapped in an
ideological box: the lack of the father’s E, his penis,

Can you compare this lunacy
To an ordinary thing?
Imagine, say, an animal
That pads into a ring

Of bones to sleep. A bit afraid,
You think to creep on by,
Not wishing to arouse a beast
And meet a lustrous eye

Or hear a crinkle of the wings
Or tightening of thighs—
This is a spot of mystery,
This is the Vale of Sighs

Not far from Thebes. If you’re a man,
You’ll have pictured the breasts
And dreamed the passion of a kiss.
The Sphinx’s face arrests

All who pass near. The Theban gods
May make you glad or vex
Your life with trial: you are bones
Or Oedipus, the Rex.

And all this means so much to you;
It mattered from the start
If that chorus of olive trees
Were accident or art,

Whether your flesh and seed would root
Inside your mother’s womb,
If you were born to kill your dad,
Blood crying from the tomb.

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

When Demons Ruled, by Marly Youmans

This world became impossibly complex.
The people fattened but were small as toys
Inside—lazy and sour, as though a hex

Had taken hold. A woman’s outer poise
Disguised an inner cowering of nerve,
And often sons remained forever boys.

I watched my daughters flower, only to swerve
Toward superstition, lies, and games of chance—
In other days our kind had vied to serve.

Then they—you know—condemned me for a glance.
A devil locked me in their fortressed towers,
But when they saw me try to sing and dance,

Tower changed to thimble, and life to hours,
Song to shriek in the Ministry of Powers.
BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Crone Meets Her Son (on a battlefield) by KJ Bishop

The revolution, this time, was ‘to actualise the marvellous’.
   The gunslinger
enlisted, far from sure of his part, for his weapons shot only
   common lead,
not multicoloured lights or waves of kundalini. But he had,
   in his dreams,
dived to the bottom of the ocean and seen the carcass of a whale,
   with hagfish
at it all around like mad sperm around a dead egg, devouring
   the infertile germ,
and felt his private share of responsibility, like a new organ in his body,
   a harmonica,
maybe. He had always been around the edges, among the listeners,
   tapping a foot,
but if he really was a boar leaping out of the sea, he wanted to know
   that furious joy.
There was no commander as such to give orders, so he found
   a place on the left flank,
with the giraffes, and an old woman who had a tray of buttons
   and a thermos
of black coffee, infinitely replenishing, which she shared around like
   a suave host.
With gratitude he drank the unsweet brew in the tin cup and remembered
   how, as a boy,
he’d loved the tubes of buttons in the haberdasher’s shop,
   like lasting candy,
kaleidoscopes, or magic money for buying magic things
   from magicians.
Perhaps, he mused, that was where his trademark love of finery
   budded in tulip-stripes.
Looking back, said the woman, it is all ravines and tempests. You are cold,
   have my coat,
he said, stripping down to waistcoat and watch-chain. It’s bulletproof,
   and keeps the rain out.
Well, I like rain, but thank you, and here, choose some buttons,
   son. The pearl is smart,
but please yourself. Thank you, ma’am, and in the yellow dawn he chose plastic
   sections of Jupiter
and brass wafers for the charity of the poor, and pearl for the whale
   and the egg,
and fake tortoiseshell for the giraffes, and fuchsia velvet domes
   for sex and love
and loaded them in his old shotgun, and grinned like a fox sucking
   shit through a sieve
because that’s how it’s done, and he followed the old woman, who followed
   no one,
cocking her leg at every pillar, eating out of garbage cans, sniffing bums
   in trousers,
her jubilant howl assuring him that this was not desertion at all.

BACK TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Paper Trail by Mikal Trimm

We followed the Word
Through Egypt—where
It left Its image
As an indecipherable squiggle
On a papyrus describing
A routine trade
Agreement.

In China we found
Traces of Its spoor
On silk sheets, only
To realize we’d been
Misled; backtracking, we deciphered
Its true heading in the margins of a sheet of T’sai Ko-Shi

The Word evaded us
A million times in Japan,
Flitting through the dharani
From pagoda to pagoda,
Until we managed to
Chase it from
The last prayer.

On to Samarkand, then,
Where the Word morphed
Quicker than we could translate—
Chinese to Arabic and back again
Until it finally slipped into
A Moor’s pocket and
Vanished.

Spain, Portugal—
The Word spread itself thin
Across Europe, and we thought
We had it trapped on parchment—
It tattooed Itself across flocks
Of skins, growing more precious
And less important
By the day.

If it weren’t
For that bastard Gutenburg,
We’d have caught
The Word
Before it learned
To multiply...