“When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city.” —Italo Calvino Desires, according to Calvino, are already memories. This is a way of saying that language is a fist of snakes, that it is too late for remorse if you are watching another invisible city burn. My throat is a thing of contradiction: too many unoiled syllables collecting into sharpness. The autumn of my birth, my mother tells me, You must know this— your name means harvest. And so another city is …
whitening the water till everything began to glow a scattering of pearls and pieces of beauty crunching between molars studded on the table of their broken dreams and voice of utter solitude flashed from the reddened teeth of their dying home where every jot and tittle of pain has turned into sorrow and wrath as the last gusts of sinking air drifted through the hole-punched painkiller pill mill sifting, hand-milled scarlet dust over the ravine of the wild crystal stair David …
bring me sleep in builders’ buckets used for wet cement- pour it over my bed, my back. bring me sleep on a measuring spoon, a gleaming elixir tipped & drooled into my mouth, my ears. bring sleep in sheets of foil wrapped around my feet like two plucked birds prepared for roasting. bring me sleep in the first birthday card you ever wrote me; its brash expletives of love making an abuse of me. bring sleep from under your car hood. funnel its fume in one long gauze of grey gas. bring …
a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath As vacant as ambitions or wholesome words I have no right to solace here in this bitter universe. I am vain and despairing and beyond addled and my disintegrated heart is jealous of all good men who are at peace. I know my life can’t be sweet and I envy the stars— those too golden poems. Time must be gentle up there. Process from the artist: These poems are part of a collection of Sylvia Plath found poems focused on the bipolar …
is there a ghost did you incur any loss did you improve (melancholy horn solo) did you forgive did you take did someone else receive Emily Pinkerton lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, and her writing has previously appeared in ZYZZYVA, Juked, BlazeVOX, Foglifter, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Emily is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016), Bloom (Alley Cat Press, 2018) …
They’ve taken the temperature of our city and rubbed its feverish veins. Sweat starts to rise from the open sidewalks. Blinds drawn, screens opened, faces lit from below. Our thoughts begin to throb. Soon the waxing and waning of clothes. You have learned how to process noise, how to read it, the feeling one should take from certain words, like machine-gun or Glendale. The kind of noise that endures— the flashlights that refuse to fall from the sky, the millions of radio waves washing …