Benjamin Biesek workshopped with the poet Christopher Soto in 2018 and resides in coastal California.
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My Sense of Self Floods the System
Hushed in the rift, the fountainhead of the codices
Obliterated; & generation is kept sideways as if dreamt.
As if imagination could ever manifest daylight, remnants
Of blight linger in complicated days, coma of
Those who asphyxiate: who await time between summers,
Muted chaos, all their violence. The intricate practices & means;
The edges of days, the tumult & unsighted faith in our registers,
Our automobiles, those who tell life wise & sideways
Glances approve-of. In the source ciphers,
In relics caged, some alternative way, try confidence
& Blind yourself with avarice, this day.
My sense of self deluges the system. I consider it,
The barren page or the child who swam away,
To surface the Moon, paint it brilliant in hue,
Enough of this masquerade, this…
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Poverty created the moon as a place for loss to process God.
It helps to have no one.
Ohio sexuality:
A private pencil erasing nobodies from a blue past. A way for fish to keep passwords from God. A toy car from the world’s saddest drive thru and sirens in silent movies overlooked.
A pink light. How it cared for snow.
Meteorites
poems, S. Brook Corfman
Doublecross Press, 2018
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Perhaps I feared they would vanish, the poems in S. Brook Corfman’s Meteorites. Or that I would remember them incorrectly. Or even maybe I feared that I would pretend to lose my memory so as to read them for the first time again, only to misplace the book and be left with my forgetting. All of the above is also none. As in, I fail to pinpoint. As in, location is a failure of becoming. Here is what I half-know: reading these poems will stand you up, and rereading these poems will walk you to where they baptize gravity with birdthings. As one who is so briefly present, and often late to insomnia, I am grateful for the alien commonalities of Corman’s verse as they survive earthly inquiry and require that one be either awake to humanness or be at…
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Nude Male with Echo
poems, Darren C Demaree
8th House Publishing, 2019
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When I am mirrored,
I touch the mirror; that is my problem. #55
These entries of retraceable paucity, as they exist in Darren C. Demaree’s Nude Male with Echo, are funny, critical, and curious and may add years to a past life that’s revised its timeline to longer crowd-surf the silent audience. Both a broken actuality and a puzzled baring, the work is a triumph of constant brevity and a sanctuary of purpose for any person who’s closed a circle while knowing their loneliness is up for renewal.
Could it be I am
an apple in the river
& I will never be
eaten? #181
Being naked is not something one can practice, not something one can perfect, but Demaree is a tenderly invisible journalist whose reportage records equally the shy swallowing in a museum…
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Ohio children pine equally for ice and for cigarette. They have hated the holy spirit for dying and have loved it for tracking blood loss in those with longer shadows. I don’t think we’ll ever be young. Even the fires you set are shy.
Sea Above, Sun Below
George Salis
River Boat Books, 2019
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In prose that avoids borrowing by way of returning, author George Salis summons verse from those revivals held by the plotless dead and places flowers on the shared grave of gimmick and novelty while shading the pallbearer’s hushed reverence for those beings who pray on land to those on earth. This work, however, is not niche nor is it pastiche, is not fragment nor is it patchwork, is not replacement nor is it erasure. Says our narrator and says his, to herself: If she is invisible, then none will know her only trick is to disappear. As such, whether allowing influence to create a trapdoor so that said trapdoor can be moved, or allowing beauty to jump rope in a dream might it forget itself as the encoder of sickness, this making of myth as Salis has it clayed…
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As grief swallows those insects made of repetition and As god locks herself in the bathroom built for her father and As I mimic choking on the cord that wants to belong to the phone that reads your mind and As the beekeeper befriends for reasons known to homesickness the owner of a gun
that was used
Rebecca Kokitus, Velvet Offering (APEP Publications):
https://www.apeppublications.com/product/velvet-offering/
work at {isacoustic*}:
http://isacoustic.com/2018/07/10/person-rebecca-kokitus-one-poem/
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Darren C Demaree, Nude Male With Echo (8th House Publishing):
http://www.8thhousepublishing.com/8thHouseStore/poetry/nude-male-with-echo-by-darren-c-demaree.html
work at {isacoustic*}:
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David Spicer, Tribe of Two (Seven Circle Press):
https://www.sevencirclepress.com/books
work at {isacoustic*}:
http://isacoustic.com/2019/08/15/person-david-spicer-two-poems/
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Mela Blust, Skeleton Parade (APEP Publications):
https://www.apeppublications.com/product/skeleton-parade/
work at {isacoustic*}:
http://isacoustic.com/2018/10/11/person-mela-blust-one-poem/
~
George Salis, Sea Above, Sun Below (River Boat Books):
https://store11170962.ecwid.com/Sea-Above-Sun-Below-p156052359
work at {isacoustic*}:
http://isacoustic.com/2019/02/21/person-george-salis-one-poem/
~
When it gets cold, we tell each other it’s okay to use a photograph instead of soap. It is not common for language to keep its word. If you’re poor enough, snow takes the pulse of the moon. We don’t believe in the soul. But ate something to bring it back.
kingsoftrain 