Andrew Lundwall

Andrew Lundwall lives in NYC. Recent poems have appeared in La Petite Zine, RealPoetik, Action, Yes, Robot Melon, & Tight. He has released three chapbooks, klang, honorable mention, and funtime, a collaboration with Adam Fieled.

From A Saving Place

centipede signal at the skin bursts. the growth white with easter plunged in. a despairing sword in a crocodile. such haunts slant hard bounced checks of confusion. sympathy kneels near childhood piles like these. lightning misconceptions that time whips on.

there is useless fat connecting on. returning in garden beauty. its autopsy smile. a cloudlike spoil of tumultuous buds. imagine this feeling. come blues thrice. glans knot whirlwinds cruelly. elaborate. sanity frowns try to translate. impossible as if any self-despising specimen. lidless nights. the pieces. can only signal. the species. throbbing accumulations. death yellow swings the vomiting corridors of answer. painer brows have stained some watching awful. burden & heat. realize nearer about poses violent. smoking details tread tremulous.

Brian Mornar

Brian Mornar is the author of Repatterning (Punch Press) and Three American Letters (LRL). He teaches at Columbia College.

AUTOPSY

                                    (for Andrew Lundwall’s A Saving Place)

Your Autopsy

*

is mine.  The voice a many thing.

I’ve a round-about in the old ways of speaking.  Acreage & appendage.  Sweet, and in the soft vein, but the shores and the body so narrow that what laps in there, your neighbor’s engine.

Sanity has a sound here, a coda your fingers.  The air is air.  We can say from here.  The ‘unreal’ cities older than we think, before founding.  In the poem, there must be an ‘external referent,’ as to any crime.  What we held onto to so.  The fact of we possible, not the possible, but only a thee that make bodies in overhead lights.

At once mourning and joy.  But here the pores that are opened after the end rebuilds the stage.  Defamiliarization and familiarization simultaneous in the autoptic text-body

*

The body as it was, as were remembered it, before the loss:  in Beloit, Wisconsin, men and women manned the lathe.  The loss of our hands and still the scapel.  Bestill the chapel and then fled.  There are factories by the river.  Men and women sit at tables and in aprons assemble plastics.  We still play cards and night and think we can steer our lives as if driving, or piloting a lost seat boat.  The old hands lore read through acres of sentences.  Acreage left ashore.  Did we ever flee?  Is what we wondered in Wisconsin, though surely we did once. 

The autopsy opens.  Released into the world.  We assumed it would be terrible.  And, as a surface, it is.  But don’t lament the desertion.  Freedom is to be leaned away from.

“Fugitive amusements”

Learn to: Yield the loss to the real.  Our bodies eked.  If only we could remember how they were growing, and doing so is dead.  Unfettered for something else.  Gesture does.

That “sympathy kneels near childhood piles like these.  Lighting misconceptions that time whips on.”  Debasing the gravity of the body.  He takes as the object of his work.  In childhood, we push past the boundaries in perpetual flight.  We know our corpus as that which will be.  (When ‘be’ meant ‘air’).  And so this is a terrible, the body defined.  And the poet, his freedom to perform an autopsy, a window between one body and another:

“…autopsy smile…”

These autoptic bodies of text—these prose poems—do not reach for knowledge as power, knowledge as the naming of the unknown (the body, the first colonial object).  They are a venting in the old sense of the word: not reducing, but transferring population from one body of text to another.  One’s a lea and one’s a prison.  But without flags or names, just plots.  Bloodletting.  The body of one’s life, how to measure a thing.  Such as.

Composition as skin.  Composition on skin.  Writing unsheathes the body of the text, the first glimmer at the base of the spine.  Why constellations.

*

Surrealism as having-become-mere-habit.  We still want to make new, but for the sake of the body, as the poet has here refined it—remembering the word, page, screen, other’s body as we last saw it.  That moment ago.  Torn from.  What warm mass is left human here.  Spicer’s dictation but his alcohol the warmth.

As we having done this.  As our tenses remain, does static the body.  The voice escaped out and took with it the book.  Splayed as a preposition, before the(e).  Thee to me, you were, before this visible act.  Once lost the farm resprings true.  But it is real.   We know this, having been there our eyes.  Labor is a tense.  We’ve been between the word here, to labor a sentence, how a row.  ‘Tis more more than language.

*

Labor and summer indolence, a tense, or chore waiting.  The agrarians in other shapes persist, this loss yearly.  But the poet’s is a world in recovery.  To thee.  Act is amending.

Louisiana Lightsey

Louisiana Lightsey is a young poet and translator living in Barcelona,
Spain. Her work has appeared in Capgun, Word For/Word, Muthafucka, and
other places. She doesn't have an MFA. She has a website.
www.louisianalightsey.com



Placenta

/////

Of heaven, rather than field.

I don't know what that means exactly but

it IS what I mean.

After the poetry reading sucked

we went to a bar, THE bar, everyone was there.

I'm pretty sure we spent all his money.

All I remember is the leather nest in front of us,

I rested my heels on the bar bar-stool bar.

The leather nest was full of peanuts.

I said the word penis, over and over again.

Exactly, heaven, rather than pub,

when I met him I had said "wow you look cool!"

Later on, we found the floor and made out,

made up the violent names of our children.

We liked Viola, Sid and Cid.

It was crazy; how I love squid

and you held one

so high above your head.




Heliotropism

/////

Both master and concubine unpetaled the heliotrope.

It was like a long time ago in Asia or wherever they have concubines

so it was ok.

They wanted to ascertain the difference in the hair.

They felt like it was really important.

Do you ever feel that way?

The pollen was virgin and suddenly dyed by the light.

It’s probably by that light that many Nobel Prize Winners

have discovered without hair and with a bald mind

what will be taught to sallow children as cardinal.

Seriously,

if one elder pulls aside the ferns to show and tell the heliotrope

it’s only because long ago he was broken by the light.

Can you even blame him?

When younger, the master had dissected the cardinal,

the concubine bending over and blocking the light,

he was like:

“GET OUT of my light.”

But she wouldn’t move, she wanted to be an alpha female

AND also to see the veins untangling in his scalpel like heliotropes.

She bent so low, to sniff, to touch, to meet the open body with her hair.

Later they came together and opened through their legs fiery cardinals.

I mean THEY FUCKED.

They also shared glances of icy blue,

heated and re-heated the shocks of barreling light

as their minds grew apart and re-netted

like a bird finding at last its final nest

in the hate of the heliotrope. 




It Has To Make Something Doesn't It?

/////

Even if it’s gross it passes in the movies.
The super Loenstein.
Even the shift key will accept Judaism eventually.

Even eggplant parmesan has special effects.
Biangular, sensate, super-soft fry particle,
let me love you.

Under the hand you show up soft and saying,
don’t worry, frying is normal,
this will somehow make a super-cute person appear.

Recipeing together makes America happy.
Ingredients support the environment.
Love makes oil, I don't think it gives a fuck.