Book Announcement

Here's the link to a little congratulatory note about the new book on the Dream Horse Press website!

Four New Poems by Andy Stallings

To Nico Alvarado

It isn't like

you find your

way in rooms

your friends have

left still cresting

with their laughter

years ago it

isn't like in a

backyard filled

with mint &

children you

think you see

(someone has

died) what you

might still call

god or a ghost

or illusion but

it isn't

like you can

ever understand

what fills your

willing arms

outside of money

with no regret

& outside there's

rain so it isn't

like you see

through trees

dark & close the

girl's face

in the train

window passing

lit & looking

out it isn't like

that not now

but anyhow

again you flood

with longing

with love you

always will lifting

from the garden

a radish from its

coil the hose

from its mirror

the radiant

night & all

the melancholy

songs you sing

to your

children hush

Cecilia your son's

alright it isn't like

there's nothing

pure as death to

give repair & we

fall to sleep the

sound of rain &

radio decay grown

clear around

the edges of our

lives it's not

repair though

you know I

think it's there

we acquire

music

To Zoë Clements

Last night

together with

you I

rode an open trolley

between the wharves &

worn-out strip malls of

some foreign distant

city

you described

the golden rooms

& mint groves of

Tennessee I heard

music in it &

anymore there isn't

a thing to mourn for

not an absent

hand not a name

withdrawn

everyone sees

the sky sliced up

before us

the more I am

distracted mid-

sentence by this dream

the more I drift

past storybook Eiffel

Towers into the day

the more I

meet you on this hopeless

tarmac in steady rain

& call where we stand death

& speak openly of

the dead &

weep

today's the white

tunnel through a furled

flower's stem & outside

the moon &

inside the moon

&

here's the brilliant

hairdo brilliantly

clean &

here's your

asking of the city

whatever it will not give

in this case

forever

there's a passenger

across the aisle as quickly

gone you

want them back

more than you want

your index finger

say –

hey

Zoë the children

are sleeping still

& it's Christmas

morning generous

dust-lovely Budapest must

feel so fresh

today the decent

cafes occupied

by good-looking

middle-aged women

learning chess &

I have named

this tarmac death &

somehow really do

believe in ghosts

& leave the doors

unlocked

& sing to

keep them near a

song though

Zoë it can't

hold us all

home around me

sings an elegant

boundary & here

with the children I

take ordinary

walks full of

language

outside the wide

reflectivity

of night

To Hunter Deely

What consoles me

what causes me

even now

to be hopeful

is the image

of Earth's final

enduring silence:

the reddening

planet

mostly metallic

floes in magma

quiet & flush

with speed as it is

absorbed by

the chromosphere

first ablation

of the crust

then the mantle

vaporized then

a last push

to the heart

of the world

& all music

& all weather

& all love I

harbor &

distribute at last

will have been

properly

without meaning

at most

a brief expansion

of light from

a dying star

& yet

among all of

you

to have been

without meaning

To Jay Thompson

I've just set down

The Astonished Man

& come inside

where I feel

less alive

& can write

my shadow

out there soared

over the lawn &

the driveway

out to the sea

the sea already

darkening in

late sun &

it will rain

tonight

my shadow soared

tremendously

I had to give up

reading

things like that

always turn me

around

distortions

recognitions

gestures &

things once

meant

to be seen &

to know

the story

as soon as I've

seen a tugboat

roll its engines &

speed ahead

of an oil tanker

on the river

while a sailor

walks like it's

nothing across

the deck it's

enough

for me

I don't need

to watch him

haul up the ropes

or shut the hatches

to know

the shape of his work

sometimes

it's as though the

dream of open

ocean is

more perfect than

open ocean

it's not

a story can

make it feel

that way

but even when

you come to

The Astonished

Man I'd rather

sit silently with

Manolo Secco at

some desolate

Brazilian filling

station than read

about it in prose

I'd rather read

a diary than

a book of poems

I'd rather take

a walk with you

than either

we won't have to

go far to feel

the good air all

around us crashing

blossoms fooled by

false spring who

cares how

brief I'd give

anything to get

fooled for awhile

like that

to poke an anthill

with a branch the

last storm dropped

watch a kite

in the rain

& not to stand

for even a minute

in place

it is the character

of thought to share

when you find you are

stopped & looking out

at the sea it's time

to move on

to say hello I'm

walking here

to the distant

ships sliding ahead

to never look

aside or

behind because

what was

with you is

with you always

& requires no

amplification it

simply moves

the danger is

thinking too

clearly or

too long

Jennifer showed me

how to pronounce

profond aujourd'hui

Abi explained

what it meant

Melissa & I

stood in the kitchen

& I wanted only

to stand in

the kitchen an

hour longer not

quite understanding

or able to say

knowing the

language just

keeps it from you

right?

living is living

& no one

ever needs to

plot it out?

there's a story

about a man who

arrives by boat it's

not a small town

it's a city but

one impressed by

news of itself

so that anything

heard on one street

echoes everywhere

secretively but

fast the man

must be some

kind of marvel

a minor king of

business entirely

modern or maybe

he works in movies

it's said he'll

stay a week &

there are others

traveling behind

his trunks his

cameras his people

he walks into the city

carrying nothing

he's looking for

some secret some

essential truth

of the city the way

it regards itself

when men like him

aren't around with

the promise of

movies reflecting

back a face as blank

as the one it gives

to strangers

but the city is not

so closed he discovers

though its smile as well

may be a kind of guard

when he gets that far

the man sits down

for lunch

& for days the city

thinks only of

his lunches

at first he orders

only the local foods

anemones shellfish snails

hot broths & oyster

sauces alcohols

but soon he asks

for spitted wrens

roasted turtle different

African brush fowl

the proprietor

orders each & each

is delivered by lunch

next day at exorbitant

expense but the man

pays for everything

in advance there's

nothing he will not

order nothing he

will not eat

it gets so

the schoolboys

walk past

the bistro as soon

as they're let out

each day

they lean across

the low iron fence

to ask what he's

ordered & remain

nearby to learn

how he eats the thing

the lawyers stroll past

twice a day leaving

for & returning

from siesta even

the judges & council

members pass that

way & turn as they

pass to watch the

man in movies

take his lunch

only the port workers

maintain their distance

either they know

there have been delays

or that there could

never have been

delays & that either

way the man will

stay on alone

what could they say

at this time

that would alter

the story

is there more

anyhow

that I need

to tell of course

he meets an

important woman she's

married to the mayor

or runs a gambling

den she'll do

anything he asks &

he knows how to

handle that

no one knows

where they sleep

or if they sleep they

couldn't possibly sleep

just as the city

begins to lose itself

to enter once &

for all the script

writing itself

a woman arrives by

sea in the dead

of night few people

see her but it's

said she's an

African queen or the

heiress to

an oil or tobacco

fortune in the

States she

finds him in

the bistro or on

the outskirts it

doesn't matter which

he leaves with her

maybe before

he leaves he

says to someone

“you do

what the moment

requires but

the moment &

what it requires

is never the same”

& that's that

there's no more

the schoolboys go

back to their lessons

the mayor's wife

returns to her home

the proprietor of

the bistro sits down

with his cronies again

to play dominoes

maybe one day

a boat arrives &

unloads some trunks

& a camera nobody

comes to claim

the dock workers

tuck them away

in a warehouse

& the city that is

nothing but motion

continues to move

Andy Stallings lives in New Orleans, but will soon move to Deerfield, MA. His first book of poems, To the Heart of the World, will come out with Rescue Press in the fall. These poems are from that book.

Three New Poems by Matt Mauch

What you won't see here is Orion, for it's neither winter nor night.

A Uruguayan you couldn't see the Southern Cross

A phenomenon one can shake off

like a fly on the hand

if considered in terms of its thermodynamics, but if considered

in terms of an animal nature

being present in one, not the other,

the fact that the temperature of the air above the asphalt

is palpably warmer than the temperature of the air

above the grass

if you feel it with your vulnerable parts

feels like the asphalt exhaling—think wide, wide, wide open mouth—

and can lead one to scratch one’s calf absentmindedly

and in my case led to dragging a fingernail across a burn still healing.

In the asphalt’s mouth, I waited for a telegram

that said I would henceforth be a snake

with a one-lunged, transparent-eyelided way of seeing things.

The me that was didn’t slither but walked to the middle of a bridge

where the shadows of the trees and the shadow of me

were like giants who couldn’t shake hands.

One kept trying. You could see him leaning, reaching

out to the left, to the right.

The reacher had the smallest shadow.

The bridge was over a river, not a road.

The water was as black as night in the country

and got blacker the more that I stared.

It took staring to see

that the river had a removable heart.

It took a rekindling of my old belief in the tone

that tells me when to turn the page

to see that it had, perhaps, two or three of them.

That it was agile enough to swallow things you wouldn’t’ve bet it could

didn’t stop me from making the constellation

man with more arms and legs than most

reaching both out and down. I was thinking

I’m a net, and I can save you from your death

if you’re falling here and now.

A Winter Wind storm lead-pipes and cheap shots the wind chime,

like wind isn't a thing but things acting in the fashion of a mob,

a gang that’s decided beautiful random notes in a minor key

are something to be beaten up.

I hung the chime on a horizontal branch in spring. I looked for the tree’s ears.

The tree conceived of as one end of a teeter-totter,

it’s the Boeing 727s and whatnot overhead

that weigh the opposite end down.

I was trying to make the contest fair.

A tree without discernible ears probably doesn’t contain the sensory capacity

to miss the wind chime,

and a small old garage doing double duty as a shed

probably will not be in awe of the wind chime’s potential

soundlessly hanging inside it.

Hoping that each of them might do so

is a disposition that in large part explains

why my to-do list is so long.

My thumbs get cold fast. My gloves are torn at the opposable seams.

Replacing them is on the list.

Moving the chime isn’t, it’s me following my guts,

trying to get through many volumes of lists.

I would never beat up anything making beautiful random notes in a minor key.

One night I went to the Howard Johnson’s bar

because we all thought that watching the antics of the divorced

picking up the divorced

would be a hoot.

The HoJo’s it isn’t there anymore.

I can’t go back to do proper restitution, hugging the divorcees with my eyes.

I hug that way more I do with my hands.

The brain in the body in the house whose owner

you curse, call a lazy piece of shit

It reads some Proust while quieting the stomach

with what billboards along the esophagus say is a cousin

of the oatmeal Gallway eats alone, is lumpish and willing

to disintegrate, is incantatory. The brain would prefer

Proust’s epidermis of light

to its own, in-need-of-lotion skin,

a no-brainer of an upgrade that forces the mouth to flog

the self with Who wouldn’t?, when out of the nowhere

that the brain knows is really a somewhere unnamed

the memory of a newspaper and a bloody mary and hashbrowns

from when you could smoke in bars and read

about the serial killer next door, about whom the best thing

any of the neighbors say worth capturing

verbatim is, I never saw it coming—who knew?,

and smartass that the brain is, it thinks, I bet his victims did,

albeit late in the game, and next the brain realizes

another way for it to be late in game,

if the game is one’s engagement

with the real, is renaming the black cat using a boot for a pillow

Marcel, renaming the brown cat on the sill

Kinnell, which is like dress-up, which prompts

the groin to send up images

and the wrists to hunker and steel

in preparation for handcuffs

until the brain in a Memo: To Everyone

says chill, which feels like waking from a dream,

and this is still just a transcript of eating breakfast alone

slowly as a way to avoid civic responsibility, delaying

the clearing of last night’s snow from the walk

which has to be done to avoid the fine

which ultimately is why the brain stops thinking

about the shovel and allows the arms to wield it.

After the snow’s cleared, is what the brain promises

the stomach and its child’s attention span,

you will have earned a sandwich made with leftover turkey

a voice in the bowels says on record

needs to be eaten today or thrown.

Matt Mauch is the author of If You’re Lucky Is a Theory of Mine (Trio House Press), Prayer Book (Lowbrow Press), and the chapbook The Brilliance of the Sparrow (Mondo Bummer). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Salt Hill, H_NGM_N, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs, The Los Angeles Review, Sonora Review, Water~Stone Review, and on the Poetry Daily and Verse Daily websites. He hosts the annual Great Twin Cities Poetry Read, and also the Maeve’s Sessions readings, and edits the anthology Poetry City, USA, an annual collection of poetry and prose on poetry. A Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant recipient, Mauch teaches in the AFA program at Normandale Community College, and lives in Minneapolis.