A Poem by Jim Behrle

I Go Forth Blurbless
America needs more
mosques & less fear
“The post office freaks
her out” / I kissed
a boy and it tasted
like the New York Jets
I eat phonies & crap
out copies of Catcher
in the Rye
Put yourself in debt
forever to write like
the poets you like
Turns out I didn’t need
a therapist, I needed
an exorcist
I want to fail worse
I still don’t have
health insurance
You can get along just
fine on boredom &
despair
“Hold me closer, tiny
gangster” / I’ll never
win a Pulitzer unless I
get cancer Stealing your best lines

“The poem / does not lie to us. We lie under / its law”–John Wieners, “A poem for vipers”

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Jim Behrle’s latest chapbook, IT SERVES ME RIGHT TO SUFFER, is due out soon

Three Days Left to Submit!

Once again we are pleased to announce that we are accepting manuscripts for our inaugural Editors’ Prize in Poetry

-The winner will receive a $1,000 honorarium and publication with Augury Books as well as 10 complimentary copies of the book. Additional copies can be purchased at a discounted price.

-This contest is open to anyone, except personal friends, colleagues or former students of the editors.

-Multiple submissions are accepted as long as each manuscript is submitted individually with separate reading fees.

-All entries will be considered for publication.

Submit up 40-75 pages of poetry and an acknowledgments page. Please do not include a bio.

-Entry Fee: $20

-Deadline: May 15, 2011

We are accepting submissions online through Submishmash at http://augurybooks.submishmash.com/Submit.

All money received will go directly towards the title and the maintenance of our catalog.

Everything Changes Now by Melinda Wilson

There is a knotted ghost
sucking at your wrist; it is a tick,
a numb, fuzzy mass,
an underground straw,
a snake in the gas tank.
You live in an evaporated swamp,
blown up like a bull frog.
Everywhere and everywhere
little pieces of your skin.
Everything changes now.
You woke up repeating and heard
everything changes now.
Like below frost level,
a toad in a mud hole,
your heart rate deliberate and slow.
Detached, it’s clear:
everything changes now.
Frogs buried and sleeping.
No peeking,
no stirring, or peeking.
Bulging eyes or empty
sockets of fish
formerly packed
in the ice of the markets.
Silver dollar scales shed in the wind,
in the black of everything.
Every little thing
you’ve been thinking,
everything changes now.

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Melinda’s poems have appeared in Arsenic Lobster, Diner, The Agriculture Reader, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Her chapbook Amplexus was published by Dancing Girl Press in winter 2010. She is Managing Editor for Coldfront Magazine www.coldfrontmag.com and VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts www.vidaweb.org. She lives and teaches in New York City.

Thanks, Hafez by Diana Arterian

after Ted Berrigan

I made the trip with the help
of the bird of Solomon.
Taste some healing water – kiss nothing
except the sweetheart’s lip
and the cup of wine.
Now I am biting my own lip,
Solomon’s magnificence, his horse of wind,
his grasp of bird language – at least at this moment.
The bells sound, their tongues
continue to strike. Nothing is sweeter.
I find I am crying in this foreign place
lifted by the wings and feathers of glory.
The grieving chest finds honey –
abandon the scene in motion, sit in the Garden.

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Diana Arterian recently earned her MFA in poetry at the California Institute of the Arts, where she was a Beutner Fellow. In the fall she will begin her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing as a Merit Fellow at USC. She is a founding member of Gold Line Press, a chapbook publisher, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in River Styx, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Iron Horse Literary Review. She lives in Los Angeles.