Treehouse

Bill Yarrow

I cerebrate myself and singe myself
and what you illume, I refuse
for every good Adam betrothed to you will to me betray

I chafe and incite my soul
I bake and chafe in my disease
my speech, every item of tongue foams in this soil-
free dust

earth’s parents … whose parents …
arrrrggghhh … I now sixty-seven
sixty-eight, sixty-nine years

chagrin besmears me, increases
till death, old shoals in obeisance

nothing suffices as harbor
but a permit to claw at every yawing chasm
exuberance is beauty … lesion of enthusiasm

Bill Yarrow is the author of Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX 2012). He has been published in many print and online journals including Thrush, DIAGRAM, Contrary, and RHINO. He is a Professor of English at Joliet Junior College where he teaches creative writing, Shakespeare, and film. Two chapbooks (Twenty from MadHat Press and Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku from Červená Barva Press) are forthcoming in 2013.

Return soon for Bill’s list of 5 Things.

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Bill Yarrow

At five o’clock in the afternoon, at five o’clock
in the afternoon, I got on (or boarded) to embark
the intoxicated dingy, the restive inebriated skiff

of last week’s dreams, with a muskrat, cockroach,
and Richard Parker (the CGI tiger from Life of Pi)
to drift, elementally and continentally, infinitely

and augustly, past honeymoons and industrial
cantilevers, vats of lovers’ hats and laundry,
through boulevards of bacon bits and coarse catacombs

of honey. Who would have thought? I ask you: would you
have thought? And what the sky. And what the pock-marked,
red-faced, foul-mouthed, slim-hipped sky. What price

allegiance? (Circular gunfire in Orion’s head) What man has
planted can break his self-regard. Perfume from an unseen
censer. O Jamesy, Jamesy, let me up. Let me up out of this.

Bill Yarrow is the author of Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX 2012). He has been published in many print and online journals including Thrush, DIAGRAM, Contrary, and RHINO. He is a Professor of English at Joliet Junior College where he teaches creative writing, Shakespeare, and film. Two chapbooks (Twenty from MadHat Press and Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku from Červená Barva Press) are forthcoming in 2013.

Return soon for another of Bill’s poems and his list of 5 Things.

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Bill Yarrow

I am twilight’s pissoir, the orphan’s
inclination. My star is dead; my constellation
crushed. The Prince of Aquitaine has fallen
and cannot rise. I am the shadow of waxwing slain.

In the tomb, in the outré tombe, I see
the Sea of Capri, the Hearse of Merci,
La Lune de Pantoum, La Place du Caprice.
Désolé! Désolé! Où le vinaigre et le vin sont un.

I am naked and red, cheri. Give me back
my color and my clothes. Give me back my
singularity, my tristesse, my photo ID.

She sits in a gondola and burnishes her arms.
She puts the piquant radish in her mouth.
She takes a loofa and wipes the rainbow from her neck.

Bill Yarrow is the author of Pointed Sentences (BlazeVOX 2012). He has been published in many print and online journals including Thrush, DIAGRAM, Contrary, and RHINO. He is a Professor of English at Joliet Junior College where he teaches creative writing, Shakespeare, and film. Two chapbooks (Twenty from MadHat Press and Incompetent Translations and Inept Haiku from Červená Barva Press) are forthcoming in 2013.

Return soon for two more of Bill’s poems and his list of 5 Things.

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Mark Seidl

Today I’m on top of things. Usually I’m in the middle of it, hard objects whizzing at my head, or under it all like a turtle in a mudslide. But now I’m on top of things, so on top of things that an eerie green light pulses from my body & surrounds all the things I’m on top of. When I stride into my house my wife murmurs from the kitchen, My God, you’re on top of things, & sidles toward the knife block. At the top of the stairs I meet my son—mediocre student, athlete distinguished more by energy than skill. But here my boy fills the hall, striking the hard-thighed stance of a man who’s just gotten on top of things. I throw open my arms in delight. A metallic object flashes in his hand. From the floor I regard him as one might a stele to a martyr of the nation. The light around his young body is almost blinding. Into the carpet I whisper, Way to go, son.

Mark Seidl loves New York’s Hudson Valley, where he lives and works as a special collections librarian, but each spring the scarcity of dogwood trees in the region saddens him. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alice Blue Review, Birdfeast, NAP, and Thunderclap.

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Chris Fox

The biplane banks off the coast of Myrtle Beach,
a strip of paper the size of a cookie-fortune
attached to it by a thread:

Will You Marry Me, Gwendolyn?

Five miles inland, at Panda Wok, three prep-cooks struggle
to stuff an oversized banner into a fortune cookie:

WILL YOU MARRY ME, WENDY?

Gwendolyn decides on the Chicken Lo Mein.
Wendy, hearing the sound of a plane,
looks up for a moment, then returns to her book:
Bang, about a young girl who finds an antique revolver in the field behind her house,
a chrysalis of some kind lodged in one of its chambers.
What happens next
changes everything.

Chris Fox has been published in The Blue Collar Review, The Black Fox Literary Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Wavelength, and Rosebud, where his poem “You” was a runner-up for the William Stafford award. He is the author of the No Wave joke book NO-YES//NOISE, which he composed while doing stand-up during the years 2009-2011. He currently resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

See Chris’s list of 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

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Kyle Hemmings

When Zin gropes love handles & shaky slim-boy loves. When she goes boom boom bust with bakery lists, scratching & crossing out until there’s nothing left but pineapple cheesecake too much for one sugar-girl. Or if she gets too crazy looking for the perfect enchilada. Even her best phat girlz hum from boredom.

When she’s hooked on some crank-czar who has her by both body-chord & iPhone. When he traps her in the late-hour desperate voice messages.

When the signal fails.

Me, I’m dying in the crosstalk. I want to re-wire her, tell her that it doesn’t take much. You could use what you have. Some early rapper once made soup out of butterflies. A retired DJ created a paste from old love letters.

I store my love in the oldest part of my brain. My brain is a crude one-note oscillator. All day I compose pop tunes that end at the bridge.

Kyle Hemmings has been published in Wigleaf, Storyglossia, Elimae, Matchbook, This Zine Will Save Your Life, and other zines. He lives and writes in New Jersey. He loves cats and dogs and sixties’ garage bands.

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Fred MacVaugh

Paddle-shaped leaves like tiny flags
Bid farewell above sandbagged levees.
Their backs to banks, governors condemn
The weathermen for failed forecasts:
The record snows in the Rockies,
The unseasonable rains, and 100-year floods.
They blame the Corps of Engineers
For damming too much water
And not enough, its flood controls ineffective,
Its five-year plans obsolete.
The cottonwood care nothing for planning
Or blame. When muddy waters rise,
Something gives: Earth first then roots.
They fall the second soils weaken.

Later this month, Fred MacVaugh will arrive at Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site in western North Dakota, where he’ll work as a museum technician. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Plainsongs, Plains Song Review, South Dakota Review, and Watershed. He is the Science Editor at Hothouse: A Place of Inquiry, for which he writes a monthly blog that explores the intersections of art, culture, nature, place, and science.

See Fred’s list of 5 Things You Should Read in our ongoing contributors’ series.

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