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
Augury wants to thank everyone who submitted and/or helped get the news out about our first-ever Editors’ Prize. The response was overwhelmingly positive! Thank you for trusting us with your work. We will keep you all updated as things progress.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of all the animals, chipmunks are the least trustworthy.
Squirrels are the most. You can tell
by the stripes. Skunks too but skunks
have all their own problems.
Do not burn them. They will not burn well
they will burn like the rest of us. Not well at all.
Cracked lipped and melting overcooked sugar
bubbling like bran added to milk heated over a soft flame
licking the bottom like it’s in love or something.
Like it knows what that is, even. That’s how they burn.
People are the same. Those of us that have ribbons
down our backs are not to be trusted. But you have to
get us naked first to be able to tell. You have to
fuck us to be able to tell you have to
want to fuck us before you can tell
if we’re squirrels or not.
I know,
I know.
No one said it was fair.
923. How to make Hydraulic Cement
Our hands are stiff with paste
tired from kneading and
kneading. Rolling the balls
we have boiled the paste in oil and will
form it into something useful. We say we
will form it into something useful, but
our hands will stick together
if we hold for too long.
Parts of your fingers are wet,
parts have already dried over caked
white and solid like we are building a new skin for your
like if we cover every inch of you
you will be safe. If we coat you in paste and harden it over
nothing will get in.
Even me, I ask.
Even you, you say.
B.C. Edwards lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He is the author of the forthcoming novella ‘knucklebone’ and is the editor of Pax Americana. He received his MFA from The New School. He is a regular contributor to BOMBlog and the Brooklyn Review. His most recent work can be found in Red Line Blues, LyreLyre, The Sink Review, Food-i-corp as well as Hobart which nominated him for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. He is also a Literary Death Match champion and has the medal to prove it.
of glass and steel, my reflection in every window.
Even if the body is its own preparation
for failure, who knew it would be this
catastrophic? Or this fun? The streets are a mess
with the debris of a thousand failed Wednesdays
and my chest is ringing.
It’s the foreman. Again.
I can see from my perch at the end of this girder
that tests the air with its rust-colored tongue
that the foreman wears a yellow hardhat and favorite
flannel, a cell glued to his ear. He’s such a nice man.
Down on the street, they’re inflating a lung
of bright plastic. That’s probably my secretary
on the curb. A knot of uniforms is trying to herd her
and a number of other people across the street.
The foreman reminds me I doesn’t have to do this.
I shout back, “the temporary respite
that insanity offers is still on the table,
licking itself.”
And while I scratch myself in places
that are inappropriate, I promise I’m in no danger.
Even if this brain is a malfunctioning bumper car,
and I am a forgotten grammar without cases,
the trees are peeling with an arboreal mange,
and I hold in his hand the dried-out hearts
of every mouse who ever chewed insulation,
I can say I’m fairly comfortable
trusting the lime green paradox of the mojito.
Listen to these electric hymns to mosquitos,
all the symmetries evolution gave up on
when it put us together.
Now watch me disappear.
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Eric Smith’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Five Points,
Greensboro Review, Measure, Pleiades, and Smartish Pace. He is an
editor for Cellpoems and teaches at Marshall University.
We are pleased to announce our inaugural Editors’ Prize in Poetry.
Our reading period will be from March 15-May 15, 2011.
-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.
In my house, I remember
like a woman goes into her reason.
NINE LIVES: I pass in and out.
THE BOOKS: They pass in and out of me.
WANT: I went in.
FRIENDS IN A SEASON: This season
enacts a change in itself.
We get along
with and for each other.
THE SEQUELS: One cannot live alone.
THE IMPOSSIBLE: But one wants to.
ONE: I can’t live
without being
without and don’t.
Party
In it, the bird and his anti-bird
remained calm, it being the air.
CLOSE-UP: I’m dull,
but so is fog.
ARCH: You have to enter your own.
THE STARS: That we are eyes is a thing
as is that we eat corpses in the sea.
TRANQUIL PIGEON: I’m winking at you
to indicate collusion
and that the elliptical fire will augment its intensity
to become what all light will become.
ONE DAY: There it is.
GUILLAUME: Guillaume,
let’s get to know each other one day.
COGNITION: Parts can make a whole person
or thousands of them.
Stick out your tongue,
and hand me that little dog,
so I can describe to you
what they made of those cities with rivers in which they who are sensitive to the cold or not live.
THE SOUND OF THEIR FOOTSTEPS: Draw near
and do it this way.
ALGAE GIANT: An island is a tower.
1,000 WHITE TRIBES: To invent a language, one must tell someone one has done so.
GUILLAUME AGAIN: People put me together
by myself
like a tower
huddled up from the human effort.
TIME: The gods are trespassing in it.
WIDE AVENUE: The past is rising up.
NOTHING: I won’t exist again
because everything does that
to itself.
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Paul Legault’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Awl, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and others. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010) and The Other Poems, which is forthcoming this fall from Fence Books. He co-edits the translation press Telephone Books and works at the Academy of American Poets.
An insect gentle accepts
a verbal repellant, to which
I turn a cheek. No red.
Oh yes, confidence!
A stroll in December. A skip to July.
Rosehip tea for guests in wool socks.
A rest by fire, as the city mocks me
with voices and sirens.
I see-saw for hours
by myself
unable to unplug the sounds.
Crossing
All it takes
is a little
smoke on
the Staten Island Ferry.
The seagull stops
circling. The wind
doesn’t know where
to add force but up, up, up!
Fifteen minutes from Manhattan
a noiseless stir of water:
a wake. The clouds
compose above
the bridges. Steam irons the night.
How I wish
we had a light
and that bottle we almost brought
with us. Instead we drink
his cozy lies–
A harbor of warm
baths and masts.
