Month: December 2013
New Work by J. J. Regan
Bio: John Regan is from Glasgow, Scotland. He currently works as a research fellow at the University of Cambridge.
Poetic statement: These poems only exist if they’re read aloud.
Tracing Papers by A. M. Soteria
Tracing Papers
by
A. M. Soteria
Bio/Poetic Statement: I am a poet/writer/editor. I was born and educated in the northeastern states, but ran away to California some 7 years ago. I now live in the Santa Cruz Mountains with my girlfriend and our two dogs. I am an active member of Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley. I fill a variety of roles for the press—from bookkeeper to promoter to production editor.
In his H.D. Book, Robert Duncan describes the poetic process he observes in H.D.: “as the artist works to achieve form, he finds himself the creature of the form he thought at first to achieve.” For me, that quote is apt, and serves as a homing beacon. I am sensitive to form, but I find form to be organic, dynamic, and always on the verge of transformation. To continue to be attuned to it, I must submit to being altered by it. For that reason, my poetics won’t sit still.
On Being an Angel by Stephanie Kaylor
On Being An Angel
by
Stephanie Kaylor
“Be wary.” Your fears I read like braille, goose bump code on a body I knew long before I first reached yours. Even the endless may have a beginning, a split second we will never understand. Where then would you hide?
Where are the black crows tonight, the broken glass, the omens? I blink once to clear my eyes.
Thermoluminescence dating, the determination of the time elapsed since a material last saw the sun; how I know I love you, the moonlight bather who will not pose as savior in my battle scene or his own.
(though I had the dream again last night, the house was burning brightly, the dinner party uninterrupted as the butler fanned the flames. I was the only one who ran out and you held me back as I stood naked on the warehouse roof, from a salted sea breeze beckoning me to fly).
He said there would be something else, some whiskey-breathed revelation. I like him like this, when he doesn’t say a word and I can fall into the soft-lipped void, and I fall proudly in the new fragility he has helped me craft to help me break.
The 2:58 am clawing of a telephone like a strangers back, like complacency when the double speaks to herself and I, the total I, the unsure shape shifter. My inner lives crave completion: my searching a transfixation; my avoidance, divination. I know why the telephone does not ring.
I will borrow his utensils. The teeth, the feet, the words collected like medallions. They will be dirtied by my touch but I shall cleanse them with the same.
(was I ever in your words? Was I a ghost, a spool of yarn unraveled, a baby’s skull?)
I am not frightened of the things you say but the things that shrivel before they reach your tongue, how they coexist.
ALTPOETICS 