New Poetry with Audio!

Donald Revell
Stephen Burt
Paul Hoover
Jonah Winter
Cathy Wagner
Reginald Shepherd
Nin Andrews
Sophia Kartsonis
Sandra Miller
Joshua Harmon
Devin Johnston
Chuck Zerby
Sara Henning
Ognjen Smiljanic
Lance Phillips
Peter Drake
Kathleen Byrne
Ernest Hilbert
Garth Greenwell
Marc McKee

Criticism

Brian Henry on Kinsella
Gabriel Welsch on Northrop
Gabriel Welsch on Smith
Cecily Iddings on Ruefle
Christopher McDermott on Wenderoth

Chris Edwards lives in Sydney and is the author of utensils in a landscape (Vagabond Press, 2001). A Fluke: a Mistranslation of Stéphane Mallarmé's 'Un coup de dés' will be published by Monogene in 2003.

Said to be a ministry

Just a few blocks from my catarrh-spangled

crotch area, unseen bushes and pitch-black brambles

poke at the big guys scrambling about

their lives in a crowd of engrossed

hands rammed down the innocent throats

of porn movie houses. ‘Carousing’ I guess

you might call it, or ‘spouse of many hallways.’

You entered via some rickety stairs about

eight o’clock one evening. I was

dark inside and it took me a while

to connect to the strange grasping sounds

intended as a clamour of heartbeats indicating

excess skin around the head. Bent on processing

these revelations, I parked myself in what was said

to be a ministry. ‘Tired of being a novelty item

shaking your skinny hips? Tired of lips

that don’t match? Tired of naturally

argumentative department store detectives

catching on to what you’re hot for? Give me

a tongue-bath,’ he commanded, forgetting

that I was a dizzy blond grown men

looked up to, noticing the dazzle.

‘Companions in understanding

are like a contagion,’ he mumbled,

stumbling about, kneading buttocks

till his eyes bulged and tumbled into

the appended human, lived-in,

discontinued, overtaken

by raw data.

Sources

ABC Radio, Memoirs of Baghdad

Find11 website, “Homosexuality, Adultery & Other Sexual Sins”

Boyd McDonald, ed., Juice

Zan Ross, B-Grade

Garry Wotherspoon, City of the Plain