by Beatriz Terrazas Words used to come easily to me. Words to speak, words to write. But now they do not come – or will not come – when I want them. When I reach for them, they move into the quiet corners of my mind, their architecture hugging the walls of thought so that I struggle to discern them, to peel them … Continue reading In the Absence of Words
Writing Time One word after another my mother filled these books now neatly boxed, headed to the attic. The writing was what she did daily, like pin-curling permed hair or smoking outside. I didn’t see what she was really doing until she was gone. I fan her pages like a flip-book. Her ball-point characters crowd each margin, disobeying the pre-printed dates. After an … Continue reading Poetry by Caroline Maun
Almost as soon as I arrive, we’re working on the rhubarb. Between grandpa’s front door and the road is a full-sized tennis court surrounded by about an acre of grass, flowerbeds, and garden. By the time I get there, the rhubarb is profligate, aggressively filling several long rows beyond the furthest corner of the tennis court. If you leave rhubarb too long it’ll bolt—the … Continue reading Hollowing the Stalks
by Michael D. Snediker Those who do not know that to say so is this. Please pay pray and relieve which is might and butter with it ordered as before near a station a station can be known as a depot it can be known as a fruit and a fruiterer it can be known as for and before and before and for before. I … Continue reading Lucy Church, Amiably
NO CHEESE [Monday. Common area: television, on. Music in background.] Act One: 10 a.m. My mommy’s having a baby! A baby, a baby, a baby! Gloria & Pat sit on the sofa. Pat’s eyes dark, deep, her face white as powder. Gloria has her head on Pat’s right shoulder. Look! Two babies. Twins! The babies, the babies, the babies! “I can’t hear a word you’re … Continue reading Two Poems by Susan M. Schultz
Created by Dr. Fred London and Gary Glazner the founder of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, on Thursday, December 1st, 2011. By asking Fred a series of questions exploring poetry through his senses we created this Ars Poetica. His answers form the lines of the poem and are in the order given with light editing. Before creating this poem we performed model poems using a “call … Continue reading Poetry by Dr. Frederick London and Gary Glazner
Please say something about how you got involved with The Trebus project and how this work relates to your earlier life as a sculptor. The Trebus Project grew directly out of the work I was already doing as a sculptor. The Trebus Project is just a name I gave to the work I do as an artist. Sometimes it involves commissioning or collaborating with other … Continue reading Interview with David Clegg of the Trebus Project
Gregory Laynor: What’s your favorite color? Lonely Christopher: My favorite color is red. Gregory Laynor: I want to ask you about a few of my favorite things, like the clichés in your story “Burning Church”: “Always look on the bright side. It’s always the darkest before dawn. Every cloud has a silver lining. Pink sky in the morning, sailors take warning. Why buy the cow … Continue reading This can be it or the starting point: Lonely Christopher in conversation with Gregory Laynor
These five poems are from Lonely Christopher’s Crush Dream, forthcoming from Radioactive Moat. An interview with Lonely Christopher appears in EOAGH. A Tiny Fluffy Puppy I must dedicate this much of my brain to being socially/ economically frustrated or else there’s no way I could, you know, make art; a tiny fluffy puppy barks at and challenges a piece of broccoli lying on the floor. … Continue reading Five Poems by Lonely Christopher
Watching Amélie For the Umpteenth Time I am watching Amélie for the umpteenth time it makes me think of a small French village where I would live if I had to do it all over again I would have a folder named “personas” and the folder would contain only the French content two of these many anonymous personas would speak only … Continue reading Two Poems by Angela Genusa
Editorial Statement for “If I didn’t write it down, it’s shhhhh”: On Writing Dementia By Susan M. Schultz Homeward directly, I wish –Patricia Rose Straub, “Anastrophe” This notion that home can operate as a foundation of identity allows that identity (since we seem to need it) might function as some kind of “soul,” part of the baggage we can’t leave (behind, or somewhere else) … Continue reading Home (Un)founded: Introduction
from The Trebus Project by David Clegg Edited by Susan M. Schultz from a rough transcript Frances / Room 21 I can remember 3 or 4, when I was 3 or 4. I stayed in a home with a lot of other children… my mother had a… so much… too much… of my sister. She couldn’t cope. I came too soon… too … Continue reading “Frances” (from The Trebus Project)
In Her 91st Year, Transcribed by her son, Stephen Vincent January January will open the horrible threat. February will break off a few of the wicked. March the winds will blow and frighten everybody. April will break my heart. May will come whisking through. June is hard to decipher. July will never stop to say hello. August is jolly and happy for people … Continue reading Seven Poems by Barbara Moore Vincent
very small pink clump few things are sadder than the sight of a thin gold anklet trapped beneath a suntan-colored nylon. the people in the morning clutch their warm cups. they have water bottles and sensible shoes, earbuds, catalogs, and weary faces. the world pulses with violence. a garbage car slithers into a frightening maw, a particularly mysterious and frightening vagina embroidered on … Continue reading Two Poems by Nada Gordon
Separations What is becoming of me in my—ours, (yours) when I run this and hesitate to show window panes around the white molding. May- be I can’t feel anything any- more in the cracks. When (and if) I am wrong to hold some ones for you, so to speak. To say, that I can’t show you every- some anymore … Continue reading A Poem by Nash Tomey
Editorial Statment by Sueyeun Juliette Lee: This selection comes from a short manuscript of Jane Wong’s, titled Impossible Map. Wong’s poems speak to me with a dark urgency. They remind me that the world is in slow collapse about us. This patient devastation is mirrored internally, as well. Our memories may one day pepper our psychological landscapes with the same strangeness and beauty that … Continue reading Six Poems by Jane Wong
Slipstream If you still have charm you have been underutilized; but tell us, which do you love more, your dagger or the moon? Now withdraw the question and the dagger both from the eye of the beholder and return to the symposium being held on a rock somewhere in the sea. Do not allow the dark impending shapes to obscure the presentations completely, … Continue reading Three Poems by Tony Towle
by Gary Sloboda I first encountered Will Alexander’s poetry after enduring (almost willingly) a six-year lapse in my own writing. To a recovering non-writer, the amplitude of Alexander’s poetry exploded and reinvigorated what had degenerated into the shorn lingual sphere I had come to inhabit. Since reading Alexander’s works, such as Asia & Haiti, Above the Human Nerve Domain, and The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, his … Continue reading The Practice of Worlds: Will Alexander’s “Compression and Purity”
by Chris Tysh I don’t fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future –Patti Smith [1] ● “One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway” (3) ● Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita[2] mi ritrovai per una selva obsura for the straight way was lost ● A sea of stories[3]: in the endless night I ride below … Continue reading Alice Notley: Sheets of Time in Contemporary Lyric Practice
After Baudelaire The day is gray but with bells A pile of boxes under the roses And like a phantom that needs glasses I go, bumping into things Prosaist, enemy of waking Friend of sleepwalking (you said) and Polaroid Photographer of lightless intersections The day is gray but with bells An overdeveloped negative The paranoid hits the nail on the head No matter … Continue reading Three Poems by Sam Lohmann