Tuesday poem #347 : Lucy Dawkins : FALLING STAR

A falling star is a raging, fatal assailant.

It is a flailing griffin,

tilting its nails.

Its gallant snarl is lifting air.

Its tail is rattling rain.

A falling star is astral graffiti

in glaring satins.

Its altar is in transit.

I sit in its glinting flint.

(‘Falling Star’ is a beau présent lipogram that uses only the

letters of its title.)

Lucy Dawkins is a British-American model and poetess. Her first collection, Stars Are Falling is forthcoming from Penteract Press in March 2020. She occasionally tweets poetry @lucykdawkins.

The Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #346 : Dale Tracy : Epithalamion

Name what would speak for you

before you, hanging left by your side.

Lists of swords’ names split fiction

from myth. No one knows them

in person, only in story so old

it’s evergreen.

I call my ring Ovoid. O oval void.

A solid surface curves at the cut

infinity prism of conflict-free rock.

My foil swerves from gold to sword

to word.

I’m the finger puppet; this token makes

its point with no help of mine.

Remember, I’m the leather scabbard

and it’s always drawn, its true edge

raised, long throated. The only way

to bear it is to wear it.

Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbook Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018), the four-poem chapoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). A further chapbook, The Mystery of Ornament, is imminently-forthcoming with above/ground press. She teaches in the Department of English, Culture, and Communication and is currently the associate chair of the Writing Centre at the Royal Military College of Canada.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #345 : Franco Cortese : måkëššéncē

Self: What elsse. A tourist truth. Essence’s excuse. Every being really a becoming and every thee secretly a three in disguise like dikes undone and water unwalled yet skyborne and salted besides, and what’s more becoming before my verity eyes in an unseemly light awash in night behind every blink and witless inner wink and hints of skyfire flints fine enough to seem and sign besides. A gape a ghasp a gash begutted anyou into n’ aplueu to stitch the carnvas of self, chaste with stain and taint of tinted time left unchecked to rot anew and duly undo while Zeus says refuse, Promethean chaingangs notwithstanding, deliberating the shape of our shoreless shadows in the wings while Icarus is already in flight, suddenly ablush at crimson beginnings just beyond the rim and ashamed that he can’t remember the start, so fuck the state of prior art, the blessed prime blunder and fatherless falter, the initial initials no numbers to follow, a tribute to overturned overtured ovaries overeasy around the ashes of firebirds that failed to fly at last, aghast but for a second, as though that makes a differance. Self an else an orbit round itself like bits or mits or cyclic hips, a weirdly wired weary sphere mirrored inside and sumhow alight at night in sightmareish sun and sign sublime. A slick usurpant spillinter of itself. A thing so ghast as to think. A thing of dawns in the dark and liquilight fire within its vairy hone hinner retire. A makeshift echo and righteous deluge of beautiful clash upon the watery night inside and out, for form is font two, meaning a matter of letters as well. Redsalt cleave of dawn, the sun, a fothers ghost offcenter, offenter, offender, themother, who sent her, wherehamhigh, meatcrest crux deluxe, esse luxus relictus. We are each our own fathers from the second second on, tinkled pink through time, forned intwo form from dark heartless drums and the forking of our mums, from roads and handled tools, the foregotten fools of our faltered fathers, like godless good or some old dogs tricks and sacred stolen sticks. Essence cursed again, and in cursive too.

Franco Cortese is an experimental poet living in Thorold, Ontario with his son, Maverick, and wife, Brittany May. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, filling Station, ditch, and others. His recent chapbooks include aeiou (No Press, 2018), uoiea (above/ground press, 2019) and teksker (Simulacrum Press, forthcoming). He also has leaflets, booklets and nanopamphlets published or forthcoming through The Blasted Tree, Penteract Press, and Spacecraft Press. His work has been published both within Canada and internationally, most recently in the anthology Concrete and Constraint (Penteract Press 2018).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan

Tuesday poem #344 : Kimberly Campanello and Léonce Lupette : from [COR]

tu cuerpo es la fruta cuyo fin no es

otro que vergüenza por su poderosidad

la chair de faute

the faulty flesh

no good lives in there

but that good we have to salvage or to savage

no matter what the cost I look best in jewel

tones and holy medals gathering roots

and mouldy staples where did they

put me those supercheries? nary a chapel!

you have me? super cherry trees don’t

do so well in bathtubs root bound

in an instant so super charry

rising we have a pope chéri or rather

me in your garden wall cover me

in ghee make me make you strong

si nous vivons nous vivons pour

si nous mourons nous mourons pour

axxaxxinx

in-mergées dans la mort

   pour que périsse le corps

       pour it:

rex-pon

rex-ponti

rex-ponden

rex-ponx-abil-in-habilidad

envés en vez d’autre choses

colosses

birds are feral flyers shitting out orange trees          colosses

neighbourly co-loss of 7 rosemary bushes     colosses

touch doorway touch head touch bell touch co-loss

a weave-off a rack telepathic torture pang     co-loss

does femicide make sense to you in your body        co-loss

have you one touching

Kimberly Campanello’s recent project, MOTHERBABYHOME, a 796-page book of conceptual and visual poetry on the St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Ireland, was published in April 2019 by zimZalla Avant Objects. Also in April, above/ground press released running commentary along the bottom of the tapestry. A dual Irish and American citizen, she lives in York, UK. She is Programme Leader for Creative Writing and a member of the Poetry Centre in the School of English at the University of Leeds.

Léonce W. Lupette is a Franco-German multilingual writer and translator. He currently lives in Buenos Aires. His latest works include the poetry book Äkste & Änkste denxte (Fadel&Fadel, 2017), and the translation and edition of Hölderlin's latest poetry: Poesía última (with M.G. Burello, El hilo de Ariadna, 2016).

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan