In The Mist
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Alan Catlin- Three Poems
The CHUD's
(Cannibalistic Humanoid
Underground Dwellers)
They only appear at
night
wearing dark clothes,
exposed
pale-as-death skin covered
by
face paints, resins living
things
stuck to as they made their
way
down deserted platforms,
under
turnstiles, past token
seller/change
maker booths fire bombed for
effect, ALL YE WHO ENTER
HERE....
spray painted on the white
tile
walls in bloodred coloring,
graffiti
artist murals scene after
scene from
an urban Inferno/Hell
depicting alien
creatures much like those
making
their way slowly,
deliberately as
mollusks in trench coats,
human slugs
trained in a silent ninja art
of sudden
death inflicted by common
household
items: church key bottle and
can openers,
meat thermometers and rolling
pins,
wires from antique egg
slicers honed
to points as artery cutters,
blood vessels
punctured so fast, death is
almost instant,
almost painless, the
aftermath grim
and disgusting, their cook
fires sweet
and subdued confined to oil
barrels
and trash cans well
underground,
so far removed from human
habitation,
no one dares track
them.
Radio Kaos
Everyone on the
island
she ended up on
knew
her as the radio
woman
dressed in
multi-layers
all summer long as a
walking clothes tree
all
the fabrics turned
inside
out to preserve
what
remained of
original
prints, designs,
logos,
perhaps as part of
a
hidden agenda or a
search
for sponsors of her
personal
walking, talking one
woman
news show she broadcast
in perfectly
enunciated
disc jockey speak all
of
the special events as
they
were happening Live
for
everyone's
enjoyment,
ready or not. Cynics
suggested: what
would
happen if her
transmission
frequencies changed
and
she became a
receiver
of conversations from
another wavelength
or
if the format changed
from
all news, all the time
to
hard rock, CxW,
classical
music?
Wireless
Transmissions
Somehow mother had
confused
her father's position as
an
early executive with
AT&T
with Marconi's intent
to
make wireless
transmissions
across the Atlantic extend
to
the dead so that
whenever
she picked up a
telephone,
the expectation was
that,
somehow, the person to
whom
she was connected, their
existence
was in another life beyond
this one, that is,
officially
listed among the white
pages
of the no longer
living
and that by calling someone
in the book, automatically
reversed the charges and sent
valuable negative existence
ions into her world; the
longer
you talked, the closer to
death
you came, resulting in
some
strange, one-sided
conversations,
though, in retrospect, not
brief
enough.
John Pursch- Three Poems
Faustian Fleas
Lipids zip along a panned diversion,
cashing humpback heels for coronary carpet torque,
stringing shoeless buckles skyward.
Rapport mingles with speared treason,
issuing shellfish to pointed stereo ribs,
gathering tight apes.
Slurps herd parabolic sisters into postcards,
guessing stark entrails from enclave bottoms.
Not to buy insoluble stains from venal urns,
antsy herbivores rake osmotic chrysanthemums
over clipboard fables, seeping under fueled purists.
Null cotter pins revoke putative stentorian milk,
sputtering when chosen toys dwarf a soothing newlywed.
Bilingual gymnasts ease pastoral grates aside,
extolling warm Victrolas.
Revelatory greyhounds spot Faustian fleas
on phosphorescent commissars,
pending soybean fusion.
Cookie
Sand crawls beneath
a soldered cookie’s
scribbled thong,
dueling gravy to a
statutory standstill
in moonshine facial
trickle stump’s
concubinal
virulence.
Her slacks
hang pouting
in diametrically
crepuscular
twine agreement’s
peninsular trimester,
foisted foibles leading
strange luminaries from
watershed synecdoche
partitions of Velcro vermin
to voluminous v-neck petters.
Wedged wayward
Jell-O boats flutter,
staffed with equestrian
daredevils piercing
soothing scythes
for chandelier
accompaniment
with menthol sword
profusion’s coyly
prefigured grind.
Sixteen Doubts
Sixteen doubts caress a cerebellar sampling shunt
with bailing coven wristwatch twinge serration myths,
locating the duly muffled sire of sworn dimples
in the pure pubescent smile of android stoolie crows
on necrophilic daytime creamery diffusion spokes
near hub town pardon scurrying nests of blown knee
Punic territory ale.
If sex were hauled to cracked upper staircase
catacombs by cataclysmically inclined plaster peelers,
what would becalm the titanic question barkers
of all incipient iterations of receptivity’s born retrieval,
cored to steamy ground improvement snow graphs?
Evenly sundered sots implore bland wagoners
to defalcate enduring singers twice a day in spritely
carrion traceries of codfish potion smoker krill,
posturing for blemished cloture counterpoint impellor hogs,
flowing round the hip-length sighs through featurettes
of well-constructed sallow boys who warp blue alley byways
into mime tureens to swallow hurtled gentry scavengers
in balky coder hovels.
John
Pursch lives in Tucson, Arizona. His work has been nominated for Best of
the Net and has appeared in many literary journals. A collection of his
poetry, Intunesia, is available at http://www.lulu.com/
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Alan Catlin- Three Poems
The End
I should have been receiving
food stamps
from Mars that's what she had
written
on her:"Let's fly to the
moon" itinerary
that included places in the
Bronx no white
woman would dare to go:"The
Bronx Zoo
holds animals that don't
exist. Seeing them
makes you go blind. You are allowing
your children to become
agents of an
infernal being. This
conversation is being
monitored by an unfriendly
God."
She said things like that
with a straight face
as we looked at African
Beasts she claimed
came from two thousand years
ago:
"They were reptiles when I
took you
to the Natural History
Museum. We could
go back there and learn about
the past.
They flew beings that had no
wings then,
they still do but no one will
admit it."
They sure as hell flew things
through her mind.
I woke up in a strange dream
of New York City
in which there were street
things neither man
nor beast would admit to knowing crawling
on my skin, she would say, "I had acquired
a disease in the Bronx."
"What kind of a disease?" I
would ask,
" A New York disease, New
York is a
special place. The God we recognize as divine,
died here. I have proof. The Bible tells us
there is another finer world. Our skin diseases
no longer exist there." She was singing another
life story through my lips and all I could
feel was the end, a strange place that would
look like a Subway Station in Upper Manhattan
but would be somewhere else
that felt
like Manhattan in another
life.
The Woman Who Came from
Nowhere
They only poems she believed
in
came from a white giant’s
thigh,
trailed sea weeds like the
green
hair of drowned women,
mirror
images of the self anyone
could
witness as she did, though
glass
bottomed boats scratched and
marred
by coral wreathes that held
the scriptures
she read the holy words from,
reciting
them in cadence the way nuns
did
in cloisters at the end of a
diseased
mind. All the stories she wrote
down
bore that taints of dried
blood, self-
inflicted wounds sealed by an
open flame
from hearth fires in a
strange, afflicted
place she referred to as
“where she was born.”
Annotated maps showed
portals, called
stops, describing the way from one place
of an evolving plain of
existence she
traveled on, the links of
which were
a colored lined grid for easy
reading
underground where the
artificial light
she read with was muted like
the trumpets
of the
fallen-from-grace-angels she
claimed were her consorts
though no one
could see who she meant.
Where she was now could be
described
as, lost in transition, or so
she would say
when asked to explain what
she scribbled
in between lines of the large
print books
in a dead language of her own
invention;
said it was a place like
nowhere,
only closer to
home.
Alien
Thoughts
They say the body I came with
doesn't fit me anymore.
How can that be?
Nothing has changed since the
hour
of my birth-19-it says on
the calendar of my life.
The big hand and the little
hand
are pointing toward the place
of no return just over the
sunset
where the darkest places are.
When I arrive, someone will
teach me how to smoke and
all ten of my fingers will be
blessed with fire.
The voice inside my throat
will be happy then and will
stop eating both the house
and
the home we have been living
in.
Maybe then my body will
remember
who I am and come back to me
so we can get together and be
who we really are together,
not this person wearing these
clothes, pretending to be me
in the mirror,
behind the safety glass
where all the real secrets
are stored.
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