December 2016

Oracle

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

On this / The last morning I’d wake up / With my original body / I put on all my plastic jewelry / I stood by the window / I ate a banana covered in peanut butter / I bled through two pairs of underwear and into my jeans / I texted six people / Begging each of them to fuck me / While I still had / This body / When I started to move / I passed many filthy / Children alone / I received no texts back / I was racing though the Town / I was trying to incite / I was trying to provoke / The same way I repeat / Over and over / The actions that make me sick / I have dug down into myself and found / Nothing / I have lurched my way across this Town to the water and found / Nothing / I stopped eating / I stopped drinking / I wore a steel breastplate / How quickly I became intolerable / Even to myself / I was not permitted to have / The remains of the fetus / Scraped out of me / I was told to pass it / Naturally / I will leave this old body behind / I will reach the Oracle / I will not ask for a prediction / I will ask to perform an exchange / My old body for a new body / A new body poreless / Impermeable / Unetched / By even / The mark of its maker / I have behaved grossly / I cannot wait to die / Yes I know this will be / No real death / From miles away still / The Oracle says / Keep moving / You have seen my face / Before / It has made as little impression on you / As the face of the woman you pay for stamps / The face of the woman you pay for magazines / The face of the woman / To whom you hand a parking receipt / The face of the deaf woman / Who roams the library / Asking you to buy / Her homemade greeting cards / I am panting / I am climbing / The mountain at the center of the Town / The Oracle will be found at its summit / My mouth is full of my own dust / Lines from my own poems / Rise unbidden in my mind / Humiliating me / Making me laugh too / Neon roadside flowers / Tiny stars of chamomile / Moving faster now / Rocks in my sandals / Dust on my contact lenses / Circled by deerflies / Thus far unbitten / The hate I harbor / In my limbs / My organs / The hate I harbor / In my eyes / My mouth / The hope of women / Is murder / One man is following me / Could be coincidence / Two men are following me / Oink oink / They say / I move through the fair / Wind coming over / Rain coming down / Day of radiance / Beep beep! / Says a tourist in a white duck hat / Moving past me / I recall / The food processor at my restaurant job / Feeding peeled carrots into it / Whole / And finally / When I pass a woman vomiting on the trail / I do not wait for the other pilgrims / To recognize her as the Oracle / And plant a thicket of crutches around her / I pause and cup her tattooed skull / I brush the pollen from her shoulders / I pick a caterpillar off her neck / I scatter the coins of my eyes at her feet

Sara Peters

Attic Poem

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

I love attics because it’s the closest you can get
to being backstage in your own life.
The change of air between the mortal world and this:

I love the stuffy attic and the cool.
I would rather take a tour of attics than a holiday.
O vinyl, boardgames, war chests, sepia;

O trauma, obsolescence, broken things.
Standing in the wings I look for some
foreshadowing of you: a photograph of us

before we met on opposite sides of a park;
your initials in two lost Scrabble tiles.
If you dream of an attic it means there is an afterlife;

if you dream of a basement, there is not.
Where does that go after a loft conversion?
We experience over seven million thoughts a day.

My neighbour is a ballet dancer who maintains
he can always tell when someone has a secret:
the brain is visibly, manifestly overstuffed.

They have a 4th bedroom and en suite.
Where do you put everything
you simply don’t know what to do with?

Luke Kennard

Prince of the Blood

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

What storm is it
that keeps me listening —
molecular, mythic
unintelligibly dear?*

*Never an answer from
the stubborn dead.

I wish that for one moment I could:

1. relax, weep, be myself

2. forgive, know better, win, undo

3. love properly, keep secrets

4. stop the bleeding

5. forget or overcome

how to go on
knowing nothing
of what will happen

If I buried you in the fields
I know best, starred with grasses,
they would yield no rest.

You are loud and sweet-pithed
setting meadows afire,
too angry to be dead as such.

Chloe Stopa-Hunt

Paternoster

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

that night a wreck a face her teeth
beneath a wheel her dress your grief

that night a field for deer a breath
the sound of bells a child to grieve

a name a womb to fill with glass
and dye its knots to test our grief

has mass will bloom will burn like gas
will smoke a harbour bright with grief

tonight a show for bricks a tithe
of brass and dirt a spine to grieve

to run each street to church a raft
of ash raise high the beams for grief

R.A. Villanueva

Poem in Which All the Questions Are Answered

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

Next time, the last time really will be the last time.
The astrology column is written by a computer program in Stoke.
‘Out of the mouths of babes’ doesn’t mean what people think it means.
Where there’s a will, there’s a dead body and a guilty-looking capybara.

For these questions: ellipsis, Smithsonian, South American dish.
If you wait long enough, everything will come back at the same time.
Where there’s smoke, there’s an ex-smoker bumming other people’s cigarettes.
Nothing is made in Middlesbrough but baked beans and disappointment.

‘Tit for tat’ doesn’t mean what some people think it means.
Where there’s hope, there’s a poet with an unpublished memoir.
Acid-wash denim is actually washed in spinsters’ tears and chlorine.
Never underestimate the speed of a hungry walrus.

You can’t hurry love (except at closing time in Doncaster).
Chipping Norton, crêpe paper, 57% of adult men.
Organized religion was invented as a stand-in for hot dogs.
When it’s over, you can pretend you never cared about it anyway.

Jane Yeh

No Mono No Aware, I Mean Bitch Better Have My Money

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

What a gorgeous day!
I haven’t even left
the house—I just know!
Call it feminine telepathy.
Call it specialesqueish.
Speaking of, check out the inner
red folds of my robe…I know!
Right?! I’s fucking gorgeous today!
Ask the cat. My hair’s yoked
with importantly difficult to-dos
like that pearl-decked turban
from I Love Lucy that was six feet tall
and weighed 5000 pounds.

Hold your head up, Lucy!
A queen bees starts the size
of a worker! What does she do
to grow a body big enough
to populate a world? Does she take
lots of pictures of her own face and SHARE them?
Does she LIKE her own face?
What song does she sing in the video?
Is it about the hive—a Versailles
of golden chambers—or
herself? What words does she

memorize? “My car eats oats.
My mascara is not made of
murdered elephants
and neither are my brats.
I deserve the air of others.
My natural beauty’s mirrored
in the sticky tips of pine needles
and scales of all the salmon.”

That’s deep! Oh, dangit—

it’s raining. I must call
the credit card company.
Yes, they’ll put me on hold,
but I’ll put them on speaker!
I’ll be gorgeous in the in-between time—
rage filling in all the sharp
edges of my bones!

Jennifer L. Knox

THOMAS DALLAM – A TRAGICOMEDY OF ORIGINAL SPELLING IN THREE ACTS

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

Act 1, Scene 1 – Gravesend

[It is 1599. Enter the celebrated Renaissance organ builder THOMAS DALLAM, downcast & sighing. He is preparing to leave for the Levant to deliver a pipe organ, a gift from QUEEN ELIZABETH I, to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.]

DALLAM: For my voyage into Turkie I have no frend to advise me in
any thinge. . .

[Enter QUEEN ELIZABETH I with items for Dallam’s voyage.]

QUEEN: Item one sute of sackcloth.

DALLAM (sighing): another sute.

QUEEN: Item three shirtes.

DALLAM (sighing): three shirtes more.

QUEEN: a pare of virginals.

DALLAM: a pare of virginals!

[He places the virginals on board HMS Hector. Exit QUEEN. Enter the CAPTAINE OF THE SHIPPE who is also bound by Sixteenth Century orthography.]

CAPTAINE: Anker is wayed!

[Exit the CAPTAINE OF THE SHIPPE.]

DALLAM (sighing): I forgot my fustion britches.

[Exit DALLAM]

Scene 2 – In the English Channel

[Sodonly a marvalus storme. Enter DALLAM.]

DALLAM: (sodon) We did not only louse our pinis we lost our selves.

[finding themselves again.]

We found our selves than we founde our pinis!

[Trumpet sounds. Enter the CAPTAINE OF THE SHIPPE.]

CAPTAINE: No, only our pinis.

DALLAM: We could spare the pinis.

[Enter MEN OF WAR.]

CAPTAINE (assaying the MEN OF WAR): Com the more bouldly upon us.

MEN OF WAR (ignoring him): Com under our Lee side.

CAPTAINE: See the stoutnes of our ship.

MEN OF WAR: Flye away!

[The CAPTAINE gives chase.]

MEN OF WAR: We have almost loste sighte of our pinis.

CAPTAINE: Com into my cabbin.

MEN OF WAR (unwillingly): We woll, we woll (by their speech, Dutchmen)

We are all Amberalls, rear Amberalls & wise Amberalls.

CAPTAINE: You speake good Inglishe.

MEN OF WAR: Let our shippes go. We are nothinge but men.

CAPTAINE (striding upon the spar deck): You are all a goner.

[Drawing his sword he kills the MEN OF WAR.]

I am becalmed.

DALLAM: Onwards to Barberie!

[Exit DALLAM & THE CAPTAINE OF THE SHIPPE.]

Scene 3 – Reaching Algiers

[Enter DALLAM and his new fainthearted friend MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER.]

DALLAM: It Lyethe close to the seae.

MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER: They have a great store of hens & chickins.

DALLAM: Great store of partridgis & quales.

MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER: Great store of corne & frute.

DALLAM: Great store of hote houses.

MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER: Greate store of Camels.

DALLAM: & som dromedaries.

MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER: Thar be a greate number of Turks.

DALLAM: Both wylde & tame.

MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER: & verrie relidgus.

DALLAM: The weomen goo with there facis covered & have no souls.

MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER (seeing a snake in a tree): A great Ader. He is even Reddie to leape upon us!

[MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER runs into a thicket of briars.]

DALLAM (turning to the audience): A number of other suche smale matters I will omitte.

[Exit DALLAM.]

Act 2, Scene 1 – Entering the Dardanelles

[Enter DALLAM.]

DALLAM: The Dardanelles. And look, the wals of Troye.

[HMS Hector is met by the Turkish navy.]

DALLAM: Ha Ha their sailes are made of cotton woll!

[The Turkish navy fires its guns.]

And so neare the wals of Troy! The eckco. The eckco.

[Exit DALLAM carrying off a marble pillar from the Trojan ruins which he takes to The British Museum.]

Scene 2

[After many months at sea, HMS Hector weighs anchor in Constantinople. Enter DALLAM who must now attend to the serious business of constructing his organ.]

DALLAM: Open our chestes.

[Enter unexpectedly the exiled KING OF FEZ whose country has been annexed by the Emperor of Morocco. The situation is complex.]

THE KING OF FEZ (looking into the first opened chest): All the glewinge worke is clene Decayed!

DALLAM (looking into another chest): My mettle pipes are brused and broken!

THE KING OF FEZ: It is not worth iid.

Scene 3

[Enter DALLAM who has much work to do restoring his organ after the months at sea. Thirty days later it is ready to present to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire or, as he is known in 1599, THE GRAND SINYOR.]

[Enter first the ENGLISH AMBASSADOR.]

AMBASSADOR: Yow are come hether wythe a presente from our gratious Quene?

DALLAM: I am.

AMBASSADOR: The monarch is an infidell (meaning the Grand Sinyor, not the Quene).

He is a myghtie monarch of the world and you must kiss his kne or hanginge sleve.

DALLAM: ffs.

AMBASSADOR: If your organ doo not please him at the first sighte and perform not those thinges which it is Toulde him that it can Dow he will cause it to be puled downe that he may trample it under his feete.

[pause]

Hee strangled all his brotheres.

[pause]

DALLAM: OK I will come with my mate Harvie. He is an ingineer.

[Exit DALLAM & the ENGLISH AMBASSADOR. Enter DALLAM an hour or two later…]

I have sett my worke in good order. Here is the Grand Sinyor cominge upon the water.

Act 3, Scene 1

[Enter THE GRAND SINYOR in his golden caique & THE SULTANA his mother, in like manner.]

THE SULTANA: I doe not speake, being but a raisine.

[She is anyway thinking of the visit to her garden earlier that day by the English Ambassador’s dreamy secretary Paule Pinder.]

THE GRAND SINYOR: Silence!

[The organ plays. It is equipped with a clock which strikes twenty-two. Then a bell chimes sixteen times and it plays a four part song.]

It is good.

[Two clockwork trumpeters on each corner sound a tantarara after which the organ plays a five part song twice over.]

I wonder at its divers motions.

[The whole edifice is topped by a holly bush full of blackbirds & thrushes which at the end of the music sing and shake their wings.]

Will it goo at any time?

DALLAM: It will goo at any time if you tuche this pin with your finger.

[long pause]

THE GRAND SINYOR: Lett me se you playe on the orgon.

DALLAM: I have a wyfe and Childrin in Inglande. Do not cut of my heade.

THE GRAND SINYOR: I wil give you fourtie five peecis of gould and tow wyfes either of my Concubines or els tow virgins.

[He shows him his CONCUBINES through a grate in the wall.]

CONCUBINES: Wee doe not speake, being but concubines.

DALLAM: At first sighte of them I thought they had bene yonge men and verrie prettie ones in deede.

THE GRAND SINYOR: They are weomen.

DALLAM: Yes & the hare of their heads hange doone on their backs. . .

THE GRAND SINYOR: in deede.

DALLAM: . . .a juell hanging on each breast. . .

THE GRAND SINYOR: . . .& juels in their ears. . .

DALLAM: In deede.

THE GRAND SINYOR: They are wearing britches of fine coton clothe. . .

DALLAM (thinking wistfully of his own pair in London): . . .as fine as muslin & whyte as snow. . .

THE GRAND SINYOR: In deede.

DALLAM: I can disorne the skin of their thies through it. . .

(looking long on them) . . . som of their leges are naked. . .

THE GRAND SINYOR (stamping his feet): My kindnes begins to be verrie anger. Give over looking!

Dallam: I am loth to give over the sighte does please me wondrous well. . .

[page missing]

EDWARD SAID: Run for your life!

DALLAM (putting on new shoues)

[page missing]

MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER: They have hewed me all in peecis!

[page missing]

Scene 3 – Dover

[Enter DALLAM, MY MATE HARVIE, MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER & THE MEN OF KENT.]

DALLAM: I am verrie glad we are once againe upon Inglishe ground.

MY MATE HARVIE: Sound the trompetes!

MYGHELL WATSON THE JOINER (limping): Make our selves as merrie as we can.

THE MEN OF KENT: Post horse to Canterburrie.

MY MATE HARVIE: And thenc to Rochester.

DALLAM: And the nexte day to London (he is thinking only of his fustian, a type of cloth believed to have originated in 2nd Century AD Egypt).

THE END.

Jeff Hilson

Wrap Dress

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

Dinner of kidney and oranges.
She is now, as before, in a geometric wrap dress.
The garden is a patch with a rake in it. Tell him that
you’re pregnant. Don’t you know anything?
Let the man finish his dinner in peace.
Let him complete his warm beer. Later,
secure a black veil, kneel before
the lit throat of a candle. Beg forgiveness
for the thing you haven’t done yet. Say it
in the tongue your mother might’ve taught.
Who are you this time? – with the flower
opening like a door in your cheek, a bouquet
of horsewhips full-blooming in your right hand.

Rachel Long

Poem in which the twenty words most common in heavy metal lyrics are used

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

Though we’re aware there are moments when the form sorrow takes will mean a reduction in our awareness of things, it is in those moments that our awareness perhaps becomes insufficient for us to counteract the effect our sorrow will have on how aware we are. My sleepy demon tells me he doesn’t mind stumping up for the pizzas, but insists we’re gonna go halves on the beer. The television plays quietly; the candles on my cake burn low.

It’s been a wet afternoon so my sleepy demon suggests a game of scream-like-you-mean-it and though, after the visit from the police has made me feel I could reasonably claim victory, my sleepy demon keeps at it until the budgie is breathing audibly, and the air smells like rusty cutlery, and the tv channels are flipping between a difficult quiz show and championship ping-pong. I get a hunch there’s something gunky in his veins. There’s a box of tissues in the kitchen, but when he cries he doesn’t use them. I’ve a hunch there’s something silty in his soul. Between us we’ve practically completed the crossword.

My sleepy demon shows me a photo of a bunch of younger demons, leaning against a wooden door in their baggy yellow sweaters. He smokes, and taps the ashes into a lemonade can. The more he stares at the candle flames, the more they appear to splutter. The notes that I told my therapist were an account of my dreams are, in reality, just some paragraphs I copied from a sci-fi novel.

My sleepy demon hands me a page from a spiral-bound notebook on which he has written ‘a mood of resignation reigns’. The takeaway menus and till receipts are already in shreds, but now we tear up our coffee-shop loyalty cards, the tv-licence renewal notice, a club-night flyer, a jiffy bag, the amaretti wrappers, the street map, some pages from his notebook and my hospital appointment letter. Sometimes when I’m queuing for coffee or picking up the phone or getting onto a train, I like to pray there’s somebody somewhere getting all this on camera.

My sleepy demon reckons I’m confusing the idea of eternity with the idea of the passage of time, and while, he says, what I’m anticipating is the continuing rotation of winters/summers, morning/evening, weekdays/weekends, what I’ve got coming is an unbudging moment sometime early in March where across the town the drizzle is consistently thickening and in the kitchen the strip lights seem particularly yellow. A small sleepy beast crawls in through the cat flap, and my sleepy demon offers it the pizza crusts and the complimentary tub of hummus.

In the goodbye note he pins to my door, my sleepy demon expresses an ethical objection to metaphor. There are, he hints, particular gods whose brief it is to make things easy for us so that when the gods whose brief is to test our resolve get on the case the test will be sterner and the results will give a truer picture. In the evening I’ll sit in the kitchen with my yo-yo and a new box of ping-pong balls, and I’ll barely even have to breathe before the candles blow out.

Matthew Welton

(The source of the data for the 20 heavy metal words can be found here).

The Town Buries Its Mayor

Posted on December 27, 2016 by sumptuousnearmoments

Things our former mayor liked: 1. Laws. 2. Butter. 3. Composting. 4. Small doses of fentanyl. 5. Kindness. 6. Her grandfather’s suits. She had been a good and fair mayor; she was a creature of curious depth and strangeness and endless strength. She would bend her ear to anyone who needed it; she broke her back for her neighbors on moving day. She created laws that helped the old, the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable, unlike the Town doctor who had run from her responsibilities, unlike the Town mystic who had embarrassed us with her fervor. She had come to the Town from far away, from a place we derided as polluted and primitive, and she often remarked on how the air here was almost too fine and rich for her lungs; she felt she was breathing in stolen gold and emeralds that she had no right to possess. See: she was charmingly modest!

She had been told the truth of our Town’s policy with female mayors – that they were allowed to rule, perfectly or imperfectly, for five years, and then they were broken down and brought to the burial cairn on the neighboring island. She had agreed to these terms but when her time comes we are disappointed to find her weeping in the barnyard amidst her scattered papers. A billowing red mist appears to be emerging from her heart. The goats are nibbling her bowed head. We place our hands upon her, we pick her up using all the gentleness at our disposal, and we pass her over our heads, toward the water. Had the moment been less solemn she would have realized the pleasures of crowd surfing! We move her toward the shore, where the strongest of us are waiting, with the boat.

For the mayor’s sake we had hoped for grey skies but instead the day is driving its sunlight down our throats. We pile into the boat, and power it with eight people per side. Our mayor is laid out on the bottom. She is dressed in a suit and one of her mother’s brooches – this one a small arrow piercing a ruby. We are not sure of the condition of her face; it is wrapped in a scarf. Her body has, by and large, maintained its integrity. The mayor makes no sounds.

Haltingly, we move in the water, splitting a path through the ice. The lake is a series of white, silver, and opal striations. The cold roots in our chests and blooms, spreading to the filaments of each lung. The dark fuzz of fir trees seems so far away. These are always the very worst moments, with our mayors. What can we say? What comfort can we offer? We cannot guarantee that she will be treated gently.

Sara Peters