Source Text: These poems gather the the colloquial “folk” names of invasive plant species and arrange them according to the state borders where they are most commonly found

Travis Macdonald was recently named a 2014 Pew Fellow in the Arts. His procedural poetry has appeared widely in print and online journals around the world.

His first full-length book, an erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report, titled The O Mission Repo, along with his critical essay “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics,” is widely referred to as a benchmark in the genre of erasure poetry.

Additional books and chapbooks include N7ostradamus (BlazeVox), Bookquet (Shirt Pocket Press), The Story (Peanut Gallery Press), Graceries (Horse Less Press), Time (Stoked Press), Title Bout (Shadow Mountain Press), Hoop Cores (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press), BAR/koans (Erg Arts), Sight and Sigh (Beard of Bees) and Basho’s Phonebook (e-ratio editions).

By day, he works as a Creative Director for one of the nation’s leading B2B Advertising and Marketing agencies. By night, he writes and co-edits Fact-Simile Editions with his wife JenMarie.

A confused chatter:
in a way that spoke to the question, “Who am I?”,
the bricks got repointed and browner. Now, and then
not always evenly or easily, it is a double crisis,
pleasure we cannot and will not escape. There’s also room for
more problems on me than usual. Somebody who’s a piece
could write it and could also write about it, the moment years ago,
the medium of mastery.

There was a lot of language and confusion.
Then it is that kind of purring occurs,
both ways of splitting – reconciling personal desires
with the stranger’s steed (it gets to be so exciting but so big too).
The (oftentimes painful) gap between
sitting back and doing something quiet (it hurts)
and pasting a tree to the far left of the page
may be unaware of having lost it. We have changed,
size or some parts neglected or omitted,
only it was dark and no one could see.

Source Text: This poem is a cento with lines from the books Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds by Wendy Luttrell and A Wave by John Ashbery.

Tom Snarsky is a Noyce Teaching Fellow at Tufts University, MA. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Unbroken, Maudlin House, After the Pause, Shadowtrain, and elsewhere. He lives in Braintree, MA.

You come out victorious today
— heroic. Go on,
resolutely unusual.
Resist control.
Fight on, back to the
level-headed provocation.
Emerge finer.
Impose indulgence and licence.
Abnormal you, supreme.
Precious life,
accept love.

Source Text: A quiz from a women’s magazine dating from the Second World War.

Cathy Bryant worked as a life model, civil servant and childminder before becoming a professional writer. She has won fourteen literary awards, including the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Prize, and her work has appeared in over 100 publications including The London Magazine, The Huffington Post and The Rialto. She co-edited Best of Manchester Poets vols. 1-3, and Cathy’s latest collection, ‘Look at All the Women’, was published by Mother’s Milk Books in 2014. See more at www.cathybryant.co.uk, and see Cathy’s monthly listings for financially-challenged writers at www.compsandcalls.com

Source Text: The Crawling Eye Advertisement, 1958

Jamison Crabtree is a Black Mountain Institute PhD fellow at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His first book, Rel(AM)ent, was awarded the Word Works’ Washington prize. Find it at www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780915380923/relament.aspx

Soft Thunder

rats soft thunder laugh in the
rain stirring doors bang
creatures
in the undergrowth

in their jambs
red cars
hiss yellow light eaves drip
hum alleys

itching nerves nets of
landing do not
succeed in
swelling
the mackerel of the
brain

The Times They Are a Newspaper

proto plasticine
Cherokee Jew
gonzo mariachi
lizard breath
and the
clicking robinson buzzard press
politicizes the hangnail
of a
haunted proton pacman
for this
madrigal summer
you can
rent your own
wizard scissor cottage
minus the
eclectiv landlady
for
the times
they are
a newspaper

Source Text: The Independent Newspaper, 21st September, 2014

Owen Clayborn is a British-American writer of short and full-length fiction, as well as poetry. He currently lives on a rainy island in the North Atlantic.

Source Text: Wanting to Die by Anne Sexton

Grace Black is just another writer wearing down lead and running out of ink, one line at a time. Coffee refuels her when sleep has not been kind. She writes poetry and flash fiction and has been published in Three Line Poetry, 50 Haikus, 50-Word Stories, 101 Words, and 101 Fiction. More of her writing can be found on her blog, graceblackwrites.com