You painted Las Vegas before it ever existed. I bet you never thought anyone would take abstract expressionism so literally. Such gaudy fantasies taken to impossible extremes by no taste and money. It’s your kind of town. Why else would your self-portrait end up in The Guggenheim Gallery located just off the reception lobby of […]
Poetry
Arshile Gorky in Las Vegas
Willy
by Elizabeth Switaj
this dangerous habitual criminal, I fingered soles & pounded leather, shaping shoes by smell as much as by the shapes my hands rested in when their force reached the limit set by material resistance my resistance was never material in June, if soap -y smell of new flowers doesn’t lie, I said my absent eyes that […]
Erich
by Elizabeth Switaj
I heard my hands were yellow, and in the lines I could feel deeper, like tea I never knew what any of that means if colors have smells then yellow lingered in front of my face when I held up my sweet tobacco-scented hands against the heat —a waste, I burned anyway I was already […]
On Being St. Catherine (1857)
by Anna Leahy
“I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself into an image.” —Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes I imagined myself on the way to have my body stretched over the wheel, not later, when the angels came with lightning that sent spikes and splinters into the air. […]
On Laudanum
by Anna Leahy
Tincture of opium: a suffusing saturating permeating flood. Over the counter from the grocer, the barber, the baker. A painkiller, a cordial for irritable babies and bedwetting toddlers, to alleviate cough, gout, menopause, rheumatism, ulcers, cramps, bruises. Nothing anyone suffered could not be cured. Hard to know whether sadness is cause or effect, whether jealousy […]
Remembering Ophelia (1852)
by Anna Leahy
I made a pretty painting, secured a reputation with Ophelia. The secret is laudanum—the floaty-floaty feeling— and the shiver-chill when the fire went out under the tub and left my teeth to clatter; that’s what created my pallor, gave the brush its worthy goal. I held my quiet pose, always anxious for verbal intercourse, though not […]
January 31 Aubade
by Richard Cecil
The revelers have stumbled home to bed, leaving crushed beer cans and plastic cups for joggers and dog walkers to avoid as they hustle past my house in icy silence. It’s too cold to talk or bark—too cold for birds who shiver on bare branches to tweet warnings that overhead a hungry hawk is circling […]
Superbowl Sunday Prayer
by Richard Cecil
Where does God go when He/She gets bored with the same old, same old Universe created fourteen or so billion years ago? For God all travel has to be Domestic. No getaway from Everywhere exists unless you count the uncreated Chaos from which all things were made but to which nothing can return, not even […]
To an Old Man
by Richard Cecil
Let’s say that you love life so much that you outlive your spouse and friends and enemies, your taste and hearing, but not your income or your brain. “102 and sharp as a pin!” Though your gold retirement watch has stopped, you’re still delighted, when you wake, that you don’t have to go to work, […]
Proem
by James Capozzi
the end is the end we hate it but for different reasons a shadow moves over California’s open edge its valley full of people but you compare the others to this one filled to the brim with fog and people I see their fires the trash slumbers a blithe slumber, eerie vibe of the beach […]
