From Small Sargasso Mountains (3 & 4) 
by Antonio Ochoa

(3)

Intuition is a form of knowledge. It took me a long time to unlearn the academic modes of reading. I live closer to the way Kafka describes it: the blows of the ax that open spaces to flow in and out of. Intuition is different from instinct, although they are close. Intuition implies imagination and a certain type of reasoning. Instinct does not. In an intuitive spiral reading, opacity is endured with the primordial impulses of a work and its interconnections with others, because what drives it is not only intellectual understanding. A spiral reading flows openly. It irradiates: a galaxy in sustained expansion. In a spiral reading, there is no usefulness. Usefulness reduces a text to information. And there’s a solid link between information and control. For me the point is the encounter: transient, open-ended assemblages made by individual and concrete things: Nicanor Parra, Aunt Hester’s Scream, the neighbor’s hands working on her garden. 

(4)

January 4th, 2024 

I dreamed that I was falling backwards naked on my bed. The mattress was very soft, but it was wrapped in a coarse burlap cloth. I sank into it and couldn’t get up. A huge nocturnal butterfly floated above me. In its bulbous black eyes, I saw the reflection of my own panic. Bit by bit, my eyes relaxed, my forehead unwrinkled, and my lips formed a little smile. Its wings didn’t beat. When I looked at them closer, I realized that the scales of its wings were hundreds of thousands of miniscule human skulls rotating in different directions at dizzying speeds. When it finally beat its wings, it went up through the ceiling and disappeared. As it passed through, skulls fell like dust all over me. As they landed on my skin, they kept spinning, each skull finding a pore through which to enter to merge with the marrow of my bones. 

Alligator Fight
by Arielle Hebert

We were the kind of girls 
that brought a bat to prom, 
smoked cigarettes in the parking lot,
sequined party dresses cut 
above the knee, trim calves bursting 
from black heels, curls falling
flat in the humidity,
the kind of girls that shotgunned beers,
belched reapplying our lipstick,
popped in a peppermint to walk 
past the chaperones and into the disco lights,
hungry for music, to move our bodies
on a dark dance floor until we felt 
something, anything, less alone.
Maybe it was the heat that made us 
crazy, girls with sharp tongues,
skin thick as dragon scales,
and though I don’t remember ever starting a fight,
we sure as hell finished a few of them,
at an afterparty, in someone’s backyard,
some wild thing coming at us with the broken neck
of a beer bottle, painted lips open, hissing 
about territory or cheating girlfriends.
Or the blackout rage of some dude pissing 
where he shouldn’t, and putting his hands up,
bowing out of the scene, only after one of us flashed 
a blade and a smile like we meant it.
We were some kind of royalty, girls
who held court in the open, trial 
by combat. It didn’t always matter 
who was right, only who won, 
even if it was our own
blood streaked on the grass,
a few teeth in the mud.

Common Cause
by Bob Hicok

You go to work. People rub against you 
like fleece or wood rasps. You rub against people 
like nails or a cloud. You come home softer, 
bleeding. You do this a hundred years or so 
then retire. You're like everyone else 
in how different you are from everyone else. 
How alike. Your love of comforters and klezmer. 
Your fear of dying and living too long.
Your breath visits and leaves, visits and leaves. 
You're all it wants and too much to take. 
The tide understands. The moon. Other things 
that must go to stay. The mind understands,  
the soul. If lucky, you fall in love 
with the intangible shadows of a glance. 
The manner in which a man pets a cat. 
How a woman says hello as if opening a door. 
And always not knowing what you want 
but wanting it anyway. The haunting of desire.
To be held for years in the arms of a favorite shirt. 
To row a boat to an island in a dream. 
To be saved by a crow who lets you fix its broken wing.
To hear the machinery of the universe at work 
in the click of a spoon you set on the counter 
after a bite of something cool and clear, starlight 
or frozen yogurt. The opposite of love isn't hate 
but entropy, the going and going and going 
to sleep. And language exists 
so we can express the feeling 
that we've been here before 
to people who share our doubts 
that any of this is real.

Everything Is Free
by George Elliott Clarke

Wipe away tears,
Set free your fears:
Everything is free.
Only the lonely
Need much money:
Everything is free.
Don’t try to bind
The love you find:
Everyone is free.
Your lover’s yours —
Surrender force:
Everyone is free.
The sun melts down,
Spreads gold around:
Everything is free.
The rain is spent
Lending flowers scent:
Everything is free.
The love you live,
The life you give:
Everything is free.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,   
The only moving thing   
Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II
I was of three minds,   
Like a tree   
In which there are three blackbirds.   

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   
It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV
A man and a woman   
Are one.   
A man and a woman and a blackbird   
Are one.   

V
I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
The blackbird whistling   
Or just after.   

VI
Icicles filled the long window   
With barbaric glass.   
The shadow of the blackbird   
Crossed it, to and fro.   
The mood   
Traced in the shadow   
An indecipherable cause.   

VII
O thin men of Haddam,   
Why do you imagine golden birds?   
Do you not see how the blackbird   
Walks around the feet   
Of the women about you?   

VIII
I know noble accents   
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   
But I know, too,   
That the blackbird is involved   
In what I know.   

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,   
It marked the edge   
Of one of many circles.   

X
At the sight of blackbirds   
Flying in a green light,   
Even the bawds of euphony   
Would cry out sharply.   

XI
He rode over Connecticut   
In a glass coach.   
Once, a fear pierced him,   
In that he mistook   
The shadow of his equipage   
For blackbirds.   

XII
The river is moving.   
The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.   
It was snowing   
And it was going to snow.   
The blackbird sat   
In the cedar-limbs.

RITA DOVE
Postlude

Stay by the hearth, little cricket.
—Cendrillon

You prefer me invisible, no more than
a crisp salute far away from
your silks and firewood and woolens.
 
Out of sight, I’m merely an annoyance,
one slim, obstinate wrinkle in night’s
deepening trance. When sleep fails,
 
you wish me shushed and back in my hole.
As usual, you’re not listening: time stops
only if you stop long enough to hear it
 
passing. This is my business:
I’ve got ten weeks left to croon through.
What you hear is a lifetime of song.

ANTONIO OCHOA
from Small Sargasso Mountains

(1)

Big head. Small head. Pinhead. The head of a needle in the forehead of one of the circus performers. Madame Blavatsky’s reenactor had been trying to stitch on him a third eye of blue and green velvet. But he ran away before finishing, purple thread flapping, almost horizontal. “One of us, we accept you,” he yelled after him. At the entrance of the dining tent a man with a flag in each hand was rhythmically moving his arms. With a smile, he clarified as we entered, “today we are serving alphabet soup in the skulls of flying squirrels. You will be left hungry as only conjunctions fit in there. But don’t underestimate conjunctions,” he concluded, yelling. Still trying to carefully remove the needle from his forehead, the performer mumbled as he walked by, “or prepositions.” Blavatsky said that as children, when they used to cut the head off a flying squirrel while it was eating nuts on the branch of a tree, ten sprouted up. But in the after-dinner ruckus I couldn’t hear if it was ten walnuts or ten heads or ten branches. 


(2)

I never thought of dissecting one of the heads, but, advanced in years, I came to understand the need. And what I saw is that there’s not just stone inside the stone. Multiple mineral minds in metamorphosis melting. And they sing. The primordial power of the stone heads is the song of erosion. Rain. Wind. Sun. Rainwater digs holes of different sizes. The wind’s action is threefold: it smooths the stone’s surface; it sands microscopic spirals in each hole; and it sings. In the narrower, shallower openings, the songs of anguish take shape. In the deeper, wider ones: happiness. Sunlight reminds the stone that it’s the sun’s sister. 

DUNYA MIKHAIL
The End of the World

For Lori, who says “everything is happening now”

Everything is telling me
it’s the end of the world:
the astrologers,
the deadly new viruses,
the ozone layer,
the ant cavorting with the grasshopper,
the wars,
and his message, cold and curt.
But other things change my mind:
the clouds that always know their way,
the seashell that hasn’t quite disclosed all,
the wishes tossed with coins in the fountain,
and the flower, waiting to happen.

Believer
by Andy Chen

Weathervane of infinite angels, smoke sharpens the air. Below you, I’m supposed to be home. Slate shingles, flagstone. Flag that tells a country its folklore. Long ago songs blooming in gusts. Gutter giving space for a nest. Greenery crown, moss as soft as it looks. Moths—Hairstreak, Antler, Pale Grass Blue—I relish your applause. Weathervane winged. Light on bronze, arrow survived. Sometimes I blink and can’t believe it. A new web, sparked with dew. Horizon: I love how you withhold. Surface: how the pebble breaks you. Cicadas: the parting in your song. Stars: that your light leaves the night unseen.

KIM ADDONIZIO
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
I'm Over the Moon

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do.
Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient
date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon,

I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to
swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,
the world’s worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.
But you disappear for nights on end

with all my erotic mysteries
and my entire unconscious mind.

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I’m going to write hard
and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand.
You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.
That’s not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch
sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.
Stars have those.

What do you have? You’re a tool, moon.
Now, noon. There’s a hero.

The obvious sun, no bullshit, the enemy
of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures.

But my lovers have never been able to read
my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct.

It’s hard to learn that, hard to do.
The sun is worth ten of you.

You don’t hold a candle
to that complexity, that solid craze.

Like an animal carcass on the road at night,
picked at by crows,

taunting walkers and drivers. Your face
regularly sliced up by the moving

frames of car windows. Your light is drawn,
quartered, your dreams are stolen.

You change shape and turn away,
letting night solve all night’s problems alone.

Sometimes I tell a man I’m undecided about children 
to seem more like someone 
he would have children with.
I’ve never been one of those women, I say, 
shrugging in the dim heat of the platform. 
Then the train arrives, rearranging our hair with a wet sigh, 
the tail of the thought its own internal weather. 
The thing is, I want him to imagine me a mother, 
a reluctant one, surprised 
at the moon of my belly. 
Have you ever had a man tell you, I want to put a baby in you? 
Have you felt the ripple of his mouth 
giving you what he thought you wanted? 
These days, I’m trying to be more like water. 
Water isn’t afraid. It doesn’t hesitate. It carries 
anything. But all I know of love is that distance 
is kind. And all I know of mothering 
I learned from my mother, 
just like anyone else. 

See here on the ultrasound,
that thing that looks like a comma?
It will separate the elements
in a series. I can't believe we're even
having this conversation to begin with. 

The womb's a fine and private place,
or am I thinking of a doughnut?
You ask me, the hippies still have
a lot to answer for. But no one
ever asks me. I smell pasta.

I was a nurse during the war. 
The soldiers in their dying pleaded,
"Can you get one of the other nurses?"
I know what no duck knows. 
Tomorrow is Thursday. 

Come, Lord Jesus,
let us not bandy words. 
I too have followed the Dead.
I saw you and the devil talking. 
Tell me, bluntly, what he said.
Weren't you just a little tempted?

Nothing ever comes back. Not
the wave to the sea.
Not the syrup to the seashell.
But there’s nothing wrong with
a blue exploding star becoming the mind drifting
off through the description
of someone else’s surgery only to wake
with a new speculum sewn inside, impalas
in the pantry and a votive flicker
for a best friend. Poetry often affects a reader in
odd ways. If you watch a bee
close enough you might see it singing to
itself with no intention whatsoever of
suicide. But things happen.
They wouldn’t be things if they didn’t.
And not always fluffy floaty things.
Just because there’s no right answer doesn’t
mean you’re not wrong.
The sharpness of any knife is mostly
inclination. Wild hypnagogic berries grow
by the shore where desolate angels
may pour foundations, and demons design
the curriculum, and anyone who doesn’t know
they’re at the beck of strange mighty forces isn’t
eating in the same restaurants I am.
Watch yourself. This ain’t the shallow end.

Do you know about the blanket octopus? If we met while I had cancer, I made you watch the video. Among us somewhere in the galactic black. First, pale in the cruel beam of the submersible, her head glows bulbous, like blown glass—then wings swoop out to drop the shimmering mantle: falling silk, slow-motion arabesque in spectral pastel—can you believe this?—like a hex cast, or a chant sung through the gloom. Trailing yards of filmy gossamer, a bubble’s swirling membrane. Wielding, as weapons, as whips, tentacles ripped from a Portuguese Man O’ War. Think of that. Hovering like a Venusian spacecraft. How can I begin to say what it meant to me? That I had gone so long without knowing. That she was not washed ashore somewhere, deflated, gelatinous, a wet plastic bag—not this one—but soaring, a living aurora. And here on Earth, where I slept and vomited. That childhood’s magic rippled, rare and luminous, through that footage. Lighting my cadaverous face. This morning, in remission, I woke from the vision I had memorized, then forgotten, knowing I might choose it, if I could, as my last: actual alien, actual angel, the color of sunrise, of morphine, dream worlds, melting absinthe, orchids, lip gloss, innards, gumdrops, moonstones, oil slicks: this nebula warping through the infinite underworld—a kind of breathing, a kind of weeping—flung untouchable satin, seraphic, labial, ethereal. Just to live to see you, 
O phantom, O weird mysterium—it’s enough.

Compose yourself with a cat in your lap like 
a stopped escalator. The cat’s there
for connection to the living creatures of this planet, the 
simile connection to everything else,
the very thing your mother warned you about
but you’re going to have to do most of the heavy lifting yourself

and in that way it is like falling in love
and other maladies. Reports vary but everyone
is squished by at least 800,000 kilos of earthly burden like the 
squinched face at the bottom of the totem pole
when what you want is to be on top, wings 
coming from your forehead, upright worm 
that you are, quite a view.
A drink never hurt, the more flammable the 
better, a vocabulary of flames often comes 
in handy. Holy sword raised up,
acid reflux, too long in the sun. I 
believe it is time we stand up.
Orthostatic hypotension is the phrase for when you black out,
Hypotaxis for how modifiers wander off,
Ectoplasmic, wall-eyed, veering to the left.

You may have to take yourself apart. Really 
get some dirt in your nose.
Now stork-like lift one foot.
Balance. Let the mind assert its blank. Don’t 
quit. Now lift the other.

He’s supposed to call his doctor, but for now he’s the May King with his own maypole.
He’s hallelujah. He’s glory hole. The world has more women than he can shake a stick
at. The world is his brickbat, no conscience to prick at, all of us Germans he can ich
liebe dich at. He’s Dick and Jane. He’s Citizen Kane. He’s Bob Dole.
He’s Peter the Great. He’s a tsar. He’s a clown car with an extra car.
Funiculì, Funiculà. He’s an organ donor. He works pro boner. He’s folderol.
He’s fiddlesticks. He’s the light left on at Motel 6. He’s free-for-alls.
He’s Viagra Falls. He’s bangers and mash. He’s balderdash. He’s a wanker.
He’s got his own anchor. He’s whack-a-doodle. King Canoodle. He’s a pirate, Long John
Silver, walking his own plank. He has science to thank. He’s in like Flynn. He’s Gunga Din,
holding his breath, cock of the walk through the valley of the shadow of death. He’s Icarus,
hickory dickerous, the mouse run up the clock. He’s shock and awe. He’s Arkansas.
He’s the package, the deal, the Good Housekeeping Seal. He’s Johnson & Johnson.
He’s a god now, the talk of the town. He’s got no place to go but down.

tell them just because they can’t hear the moon 
doesn’t mean it’s not screaming.
Tell them it’s just like being attacked
by a murderous lunatic in your own bathroom mirror or by 
your own jewelry or toothbrush or taco
or panthers, entirely in-the-mind panthers.
It’s like being handed a key
and it drops right through your open palm. Every 
30 seconds another wing goes missing. Every 10 
a breathing machine’s turned off.
Anyone who’s tried to write a poem gets exposed to 
some mighty whichway winds.
Everything is made of jumps. 
The sentence is always Life,
crepuscular hatchling fallen into the hand 
like one of your own organs,
weird stuff coming in the mail,
creepy bouncy eyeball, Neptunian quartz, once a 
broken cobwebby crypt-smelling music box from 
the unknown.
Maybe the unknown still loves me. Maybe 
it wants me dead.
A horse comes halfway out. 
The ballerina has no legs. 
Most of what we’re made of 
comes from outer space and 
wants to get back there.
A banana is a berry, a loofah
a gourd, the strongest glue on earth
is made by a whelk. Just try to introvert the 
ambulance. Try to get some nerve. Spiders, 
scientists tell us, could eat
the entire human race in less than a week, should 
they ever get in the mood.
Yellow mood of Van Gogh’s poison. 
Numbered mood of a tax return.
Here, I made a list. A neon larva
twists itself into a pupa from a single silken mood.
The soul is fletched. The soul is dashed 
across the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Is 
reality just a failure of the imagination? 
That’s not what the dandelion thinks 
breaking through the asphalt. Not what the 
sprinkles on your cupcake signal.
Sometimes pressure creates electricity but 
we always risk dust
in the confetti factory of the ant farm of consciousness.
People always try to turn me off
whenever I mention the Ant Farm of Consciousness, 
capitalized or not, but if my mother
couldn’t find that switch, good luck. Ecstasy 
is willingness.
I dare you to find a river any other way. I 
dare you to breathe.
Some cries never reach us even 
though they’re our own. The 
best endings are abrupt.

Why after all this one and not the rest?
Why this specific self, not in a nest,
but a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?
Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face?
Why on earth now, on Tuesday of all days,
and why on earth, pinned down by this star’s pin?
In spite of years of my not being here?
In spite of seas of all these dates and fates,
these cells, celestials and coelenterates?
What is it really that made me appear
neither an inch nor half a globe too far,
neither a minute nor aeons too early?
What made me fill myself with me so squarely?
Why am I staring now into the dark
and muttering this unending monologue
just like the growling thing we call a dog?

The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees.
 
When I tell you the day is a poem
I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening.
 
The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful
as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds
of the wind that whips up the seawall.
 
If you want the poem to take on everything,
walk into a hackberry tree,
then walk out beyond the seawall.
 
I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh
was a patient—his head on a pillow hearing
the mistral careen off the seawall,
 
hearing the fauvist leaves pelt
the sarcophagi. Here and now
 
the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw
and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me
 
for a second, before the wind
broke branches and guttered into the river.
 
What questions can I ask you?
How will the sky answer the wind?
 
The dawn isn’t heartbreaking.
The world isn’t full of love.