Divine T-Shirts by E.T. Parker

Issue 11

Take It Easy
Nothing Is Easy
Don’t Let It Reign
We Are All on a Search for Perfection

Whatever
Busy Doing Nothing

Life Is Perfect
You Go Girl
Hike the World
If Not Now When?
I Just Can’t Today
You Don’t Know until You Go

Where to Next? Travel the Life
Nantucket Is Always a Good Idea
Luck Has Nothing to Do with It

Make Time for the Things that Make You Happy
Good Times!
Enjoy the Little Things
Enjoy Every Moment of your Life

Save Yourself
Look Hot / Be Cool / Be Crazy
Be Kind to Someone Today
More Love

Still Hating

 

Source & Method: Taking Inspirational Quotations from T-shirts as Divine Messages while I Travel around Europe in 2017, the First Year of the Tumbleweed Presidency

E.T. Parker was born and raised in California, was educated at Fresno State, and currently teaches in the English department at The University of Alabama.

 

Fire Work by David Owen Miller

Issue 11

for Jeni

Jasmine, jawbreakers, jewsharps—things I have not put in my mouth
Jeni, nono, Jenifer—daughter, mother, artist

Knowledge is power, PET scans are not

Last night, no pottery, just marionberries

Mammary, marriage, maternity, masturbation
Mom, are you drunk again!

Nowadays, I remember everything: the t.v., my paintings, my polyurethane statues,
how Xavier’s hands felt on our wedding night
Nowadays I see that little job I had one October, I painted flats for Halloween Horror
Nights—it was the best job ever

October has cold hands

Pain scares me, but painkillers I don’t mind
PET scan—the gray of morning with a sun rising from the center

Quilts on my legs, tubes in my nose and arm, hard mash potatoes with white gravy
Quiet is that thing they give you when you only wanna talk

Red Poppy: This flower grows up my neck/it blossoms in back of my head/a symbol
of life, of  blood, of those we lose/in transit like quarters or laundry tickets/Someday
soon I will become/a field of wild poppies and you will lie/in my fragrance, dozy
and content/the best time you ever had with me.
Remember Universal Studios?  David’s brother and the smell of paint.  He said even
coats, Jeni.  Even coats. I had headaches.  Xavier brought me beer and mezcal.

Send it to my daughter: the poem about the red poppies.
So much time now for pottery, to feel clay turning in my hands, to hold it steady and
give it form, to pare away dried clay from under my fingers

Toxic on the stereo, rhombuses of light on a parkay floor, Xavier and I dancing, our first kiss
Tell Xavier he can have his anal now

Using me for poetry?

Vanish like my breasts
Vibrate as the world vibrates

Who will take my daughter to get her prom dress?

Xanax and a bottle of Zinfandel

You wrote me several times, David: are you coming to my funeral?
You wrote me several times, David; you wanted to meet me several times, just not with your
wife or kids, always at coffeehouses or the Farmer Brothers in Rubidoux

Zinfandel and a bottle of Xanax

Again, Xavier wants anal
All the things you put inside yourself

Both of them, my nipples, gone cuz, Gawd, I hate asymmetry

Canvas? I’m working with polyurethane now
Can you please not use my name in your poetry?

Death, I don’t mind; this shit hurts.
Destroy my paintings, burn my canvases, smash my pots
Did you send the poem about the poppies?  Send it to my daughter.

Erasure is what I look for; I could be erased, and Xavier still wouldn’t realize I was gone
Every day, every goddamned day, Xavier stays at home, but the dogs freakin visit

Fashioning Halloween costumes for Shelly and her date: we argued before the pic
From dinner on, I had this pain, it hurt my stomach, I kept walking sideways down
the pier and Shelly, you remember Shelly? She’s like Mom, drunk again?

Gawd, I hate asymmetry

Hot, still in the hand, gradually warming, gradually cool, put away

Indigo is the color of sky before sunlight, the color I always wanted my eyes to be
Is this how you see me, David?

Source: Facebook posts and Messages 2010-2015

Method: One night, I am working on another set of poems, when I receive an IM from Jeni telling me that she has cancer.  It has been six months since we last communicated.  I had a poem which I had IMed her, one she wanted me to publish called “Red Poppies.” I was uncertain about the poem.  Over the next few months, we reconnect because I suffer from insomnia and her pains keep her up most nights.  This poem is an abecedarian, stitched together like a cento from bits, pieces, words and phrases exchanged during both those and earlier conversations via IM.  Then, I rearranged the lines that I started with J and ended with I.  The format seemed to work best.

David Owen Miller is a Latin teacher in South Los Angeles.  He has an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from LMU.  He has published work in Rattle, Crack The Spine, Dodging The Rain, Cold Coffee Stand, Rise Up Review and other journals.  He loves teaching and hanging out with his daughters and of course, writing poetry.

 

Some Days by Luigi Coppola

Issue 11

I’m afraid
that I am the only
one in the universe and
everything

/everybody
is just part of
my imagination.

Other days
I’m afraid
that everybody is
not
my imagination
and are
in fact
real.

I’m not sure
which is more
frightening.

 

Source: Message board comment on the io9 website by user ‘B’.

Luigi Coppola teaches and writes in London, England. He has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize twice and poems have appeared in various publications including Acumen, The Frogmore Papers, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Iota, Magma, Orbis, Pennine Platform, Poetry Digest, The Rialto, THE SHOp and Snakeskin.

Kiss it Goodbye by Ross McCleary

Issue 11

On a dark desert highway, there you stand.
There’s talk and it sounds so familiar:

He was a hard-headed man on the street,
She came from Providence with cool wind in her hair.

“Well baby.”

“Hey there, how are you?”

What kind of love have you got
When you’re out there on your own?

Source & Method: The poem is constructed from the opening lines from each song on the Eagles’ album ‘Hotel California’ and then mashed them together a little. I actually wrote the first draft of this 3 years ago, sent it to a friend, who liked it, and then did a grand total of nothing with it. I then rediscovered it today, had a tinker with it, and settled on its final structure.

Ross McCleary is from Edinburgh and is a poet, fiction writer, and podcaster. His work has recently appeared in Pop To, Structo, and Pushing Out The Boat. He co-edits podcast journal Lies, Dreaming as part of the Poetry as F*ck collective.

Sapir and Whorf by Melissa Mesku

Issue 11

speakers of different languages
think differently
even inner speech
geniuses throughout history
thought outside the grooves
learning a new language
learning new modes of thought
adjust to the new lens
switch between thought-modes
Sapir
and
Whorf
gave the idea of linguistic relativity
leavened
cosmovisionary musings
from
dramatically different conceptual worlds
by
languages like Nootka, Shawnee, and Hopi.
fieldwork
Hopi reservation
Arizona
on this
Whorf declared
“the Hopi language contains no reference to “time,” either explicit or implicit.”
imputing
a concept of “eventuating”
roughly comparable to
“hoping”
used for mental projections of the future.
lamentably
leaving you sensing
there is some tantalizing alternative cosmology out there
beyond your grasp
a
hallucinatory feeling
there may well exist a completely different
internally coherent
physical universe
down to the base ontologies of space and time.

Source: A chapter in Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us, by Nicholas Evans (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)
Method: Each new line represents a break in the text where erasure occurred. Punctuation and capitalization are faithful to the source.
Melissa Mesku is a writer and editor in New York.