In the seven woods, what wood
could serve the campfire’s cough?
A word?
Docile, are they not?
Would truly miss
a new language...
At the ballpark not watching the game
but the lumber swung like axes through the air
topples each in turn.
Oh most powerful connective!
Lubrication unleashing
a tool that intensifies
the body’s unbuttoned belief systems—
used to dress so very neatly.
But now they are undone, secreting
the understanding of oceansides.
Another corner torn from the log cabin bedsheets
we longed to build by bleating mortar.
Great horrors and traumas,
a tremble in the incorrect place:
a face where once a mirror was.
They say: “the language!”
A way to face the other citadel that a mirror could not provoke.
To vote for bricks and mean bricks
not buildings. Polis not politics.
A notary by profession.
A policy by sensation.
A common that is coming by
clarifying cliches.
Carrying the caches of your browse,
that deaf and mineral stare
coming from the corners.
Travis Macdonald is a poet, copywriter, editor and book-maker living in Philadelphia. His most recent released work includes: Title Bout (Shadow Mountain Press 2011), BAR/koans (Erg Arts 2011), Hoop Cores (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Sight & Sigh (Beard of Bees 2011), N7ostradamus (BlazeVox Books 2010), Basho's Phonebook (E-ratio 2009) and The O Mission Repo [vol. 1] (Fact-Simile Editions 2008)
Michelle Taransky is the author of Sorry Was In The Woods (Omnidawn 2013) and Barn Burned, Then (Omnidawn 2009), selected by Marjorie Welish for the 2008 Omnidawn Poetry Prize. Taransky teaches writing at Penn, works as reviews editor for Jacket2 and co-curates the reading series Whenever We Feel Like it.
Joseph Cooper is currently writing and teaching in Princeton, WV. He is the author of the full-length books TOUCH ME (BlazeVox 2009) and Autobiography of a Stutterer (BlazeVox 2007), as well as the chapbooks Here Come the Groovies, co-authored with Andrew K. Peterson (Livestock Editions 2010), Memory/Incision (Dusie 2007), from Autobiography of a Stutterer (Big Game Books 2007), and Insuring the Wicker Man Shadow Created Delusion, co-authored with Jared Hayes (Hot Whiskey 2005).
j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones Press), the trans-genre book i>libertine monk (Scrambler Press) and the anti-memoir a vigorous (Black Coffee Press/ Eight Ball Press (forthcoming)). j/j has poetry, prose, reviews, articles, mini-essays and mixed genre work published in many places online and in print.