You stuffed a pipe with salvia
and I smoked and you
multiplied into a galaxy
of twinkling frowns.
We floated through the trees.

Now Shave

Now she wants me smooth for her
luminous lips. Now I slice my face
alone. Now she holds me tight
in her eyes. Now she wants
my heart to grow back.

Bio: D.C. Porder studies poetry at the New School. His writing appears in Word Riot, Zygote in My Coffee, Thieves Jargon, Monkeybicyle, decomP, Otoliths and elsewhere. He posts fragments and works-in-progress at www.dcporder.blogspot.com.

I’ve experienced your swelled vein grip
On my heart

Loss of breath as I catch a ride on the train
Please remain

Smooth sticky honey for my Queen Bee
Bitter pills melt
And mingle with a memory

Never met you,
But I know your taste

You’ll come to me with colors of obsession
Promising pleasures
Open doors
Floors

Offer comfort for crawling
Clawing

At shadows of an insect empire
Perpetual dawn offered to a liar

Cradle me in the cold arms of the universe
Reach the blackness
Only to find more

Disillusioned boundaries
Of the dark whore

Feeling familiar to a few
Feeling the presence…

Of a long dead you

Liquor Reflection’s Augury

I’m feeling bellicose at the bar.
Bile rising as I reflect on violent acts
in an intrepid, drunken state staring faithlessly
into a liquor reflection’s augury.
I can’t take heed of my pituitary.
My chakras are twisted, folded, flipped
in a kind of cosmic anarchy.
I’m a masticated mass a liberal might look upon with
sympathy.
She held me once, naivety between the sheets.
Winter sparked in midnight’s comforting delusions.
We had to work in the morning, every morning.
The hive needed honey, and we needed money.
Big Brother’s eye passed from wallet to unsated
wallet;
keeping tabs on our limitless greed.
She left before the holidays,
and I got to know the god Lexapro.
He held my hand as we walked through the land
of prostitutes, pimps, and parasites.
My heart skipped cocaine beats
in a hotel named after the the mother of Christ, or
his wife….
I’ll have to qualify that with a gnostic.
I finally fell in slumber filled with benzo-klepto
dreams;
where everything I stole was blue,
a melancholy hue, that always seems to be my theme.
Eventually, I robbed a pharmacy;
thought justified by my hijacked psyche.
Now, I’m in Montana fleeing the law
and feeling bellicose at the bar.
Bile rising as I reflect on violent acts
in an intrepid drunken state….

Sparrows Know

Knowing there is no love here
And being alone
Is a gift
Is a sentence
For the few who’ve broken
The laws of conventional abomination

Pretenders promise reliance
Delivered with coddled hands
Submerged in waters of ulterior motives
Playing codependent games of leeches
Sucking each others’ essence ’till the horizon
Of their lives bleed red with the sparrows’
Swift departure

Only to rise again in the golden East
With alacrity
In need of touch

But some find cold cribs for crying
As mother turns away
And it’s a long road to find
The gift

Never Sleep

A faint sound as skin capitulates to steel
An amber injection to virgin vein
A reaching breath to catch a train

While dream time men hurl boomerangs
At dead inventions conjured to quell our brains

In a dirty room of silence
I dilate my eyes
And draw the blinds….

A dried up river of liberation
Is no hope for a burning bush
I’m perched up on a toilet lid with Huxley
Revisiting Brave New World
And orange kush

While a climbing Krishna
With a home made hookah
Brings two worlds into one

Divorcing reality and surfing
The waves of an exploding sun

Isis in the sky has spoken
An ancient smile as our spell is broken

She whispers, “Never sleep”

Kiss The Particle Eve

Silver and Gold enter the prism
Of mankind’s priorities
Betraying the intended nature
Of our early being

The Helix cracks, shifts
Mutating quantum theory
For Mithra’s purpose-
Revenge

I kiss the particle Eve
Earth scented mother of man
How I love to watch her cry
For our dilapidated ghetto existence

But it’s OK
Adam’s standing in the doorway
With a dollar bill to wipe her eyes

Love was never welcomed
Through the gate

Pure is the green
Emanating from my birth
Invaded by savage fluorescent technology

Cold, sterile floor at the entrance
Cold, sterile floor at the exit
Cold, sterile infinity in the void
Promising a warm smile when we reach the end

The helix cracks , shifts
Mutating quantum theory
Welcoming mankind’s return

Maybe this time
We’ll get it right

BIO: Allen Masterson is originally from St. Louis, MO. He currently lives and performs spoken word poetry in Southern Indiana. He has had work published in Shoots and Vines, the online zine edited by Crystal Folz, and Full of Crow, the online zine edited by Lynn Alexander. He began writing while doing time in the Indiana Prison System for robbing pharmacies. Much of the content of his work is inspired by true events.

Chase Her

The storm came
last night like
old pain. I cannot
remember the last
time it rained
and I stood out
in an open field
and waited for it.
The quiet fans
spun empty
in the wind and I
could smell the dead
fire black in
its pit. I waited
while the sky
turned gray.
I could smell
her in the trees,
and where lightning
struck earth
I saw her standing
there, her hair,
the dark blue
of her tattoo
in the foaming
sky. I waited
hours. I waited
but the rain
never came.
I could feel
the heat
blowing away,
the cold
front turning
hot green leaves
white. I saw her
rings in the coil
of a vine. I
waited but it did
not rain, not a
drop. The storm
came and went
like old pain.

The eyes shed tears and the heart is grieved but we will not say anything

Bodies are in disarray.
Limbs jumbled in wreckage.
We must sort them
and it must be right.

The body must be washed
and washed again and buried
before the sun goes down.
We touch every inch of every body.

Chant prayers and make small circles
of suds with a cloth on the still back.
First with soap, then with cedar.
No one cries at the final bath.

Dust her feet, knees
palms, forehead
with camphor as if
she has risen from prayer.

Wrap her in white linen
and cover her with earth.
A seed planted in eternity.
The street is quiet today.

We wash every inch of every body
Wash down stained cobbles.
The many stones.
Bleaching in the quick sun.

Like a forked tongue
sniffing out body heat.
The bloom of a car exploding.
Red wires duct taped to a belt.

We must bury the bodies fast.
They must be clean.
Counted when the smoke clears.
Sundown is closing like a dry dark mouth.

Some Things Stick With Me

Dad sits across from me.
His bruised hands shaking.
He says, You fall apart when you get old.

If I try hard I can make my voice
sound just like his.
Like I will sound
in thirty or forty years.

Before the tremors
his fingers manipulated pocketknives
and chewing gum wrappers
and drywall tape and mud.

But he has performed this
operation so many times,
his hands are as deft as a surgeon’s.

We are in a restaurant booth waiting for ribs.
He prepares a syringe and then the insulin.
Rolls the bottle between his hands to warm it.
Plunges the needle into his stomach.
So quick and practiced
I was the only one who saw.

It’s bearable because he remains
calm as it happens,
and we laugh at his frailty.

It’s out of our minds
as plates of meat arrive.

Even though we are falling apart.
It is happening to us all the time.

As if cremated

Burial, returning to the Earth, is traditional
but so is surviving the farm.
To leave it and return
plump and well-scrubbed by success.
To recall it as a little house
on a perfect plastic hill
in a cloudy snow globe
losing water to the years.

We leave pieces of ourselves wherever we go.
Sloughed cells, psychic residues.
Grandpa sawed a finger off
the hand that flagged down Norma.
She left a gob of flesh
up by the corn auger,
nearly gave an arm to the tourniquet
her sleeve became.
Leon damn near lost his mind.

Jeffrey will never leave, never tell
in old age how much it hurt
but how he shook it off,
went back to work, laugh lines
squeezing out a skosh of regret.

Those who saw his body in the field
were branded for an age with that look,
while the pale evening air scattered
bit by bit what remained
till even the red stain disappeared
tumbling up into trapped atmosphere.

Murder at the Big Pond

There is something falling to the ground.
In the woods.
The earth beneath it is a crime scene.
The screaming witness of cicadas
points to the frogs, who croak:
Two killed.
First the cricket
then the fish.
A flash of steel.
A hook
torn out with pliers.
Then the knife and the remains
thrown into a ravine.
It was good, they said.
The fishing was good.

BIO:
Tony Brewer is firmly based in Bloomington, Indiana, but has been writing and performing all over since the end of the last century.

He is a regular guest on WFIU’s The Poets Weave, which archives programs at http://wfiu.org/poetsweave/tag/tony-brewer.

In 2007 he received a fellowship from the Jason Shepard Greer and Lucy Kim Greer Foundation and the Bloomington Area Arts Council. His work has appeared in Flying Island, fiore, Red River Review, dcomP,and Poetry Midwest. In 2008 he won the Mounds State Park nature poetry award.

His book,The Great American Scapegoat, is available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders. He is seeking a publisher for a new chapbook manuscript.

In March – May 2009, Tony is touring Indiana with 3 other Hoosier poets, under the collective name “Reservoir Dogwoods.” Tour schedule and booking info is available at http://www.IndianaPoetryTour.com.