Does man love Art? Man visits Art, but squirms.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages–

- The Chicago Picasso, written by Gwendolyn Brooks
for the unveiling of the statue, August 15, 1967

Poetry needs to find its public again, and address it.

- American Poetry in the New Century, written by John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation, for Poetry magazine, September 2006

The Canter & the Transverse Gallop

a dank hunk meets a damp hump and
jubilant they schmooze, warp apart, artfully
outstrip any gleaning eyes only to reconnoiter
via adroit canticles, groping each others crops
gamboling off, adducing across the sluices
a soppy course of reciprocal limb action

while elsewhere a route-spurned racking horse 
urgently performs its willed wiliness, totters at half
stride in a quicksilver instant of cliffside bafflement
favors the shored forefoot to hook its course
though consequent hoovefallings find
the poles of another felt hunger hunkering in

amidst the peat-sweating eskers of bog ash
it takes a couple diggers, skids its tracks, tries
not to be fearless but recognizably seared
nicked up and yet still leaning forward, as if
sensation were volition itself and imagination
not for the stinting, but sprinting rather

until into panting speed, it oftens the thinking
underlain and most swollen within her
a hot minion of still belching waters
a lateral spread, a surfeit of seeing’s clinamen
its subjects already and inevitably exceeded
even as in the process of being constituted
overlapping one another as a dog laps
slurping the agitated waters

galloping loose, solid as nothing and nothing solid
as even through the shell of a chambered nautilus
oozing occurs, an unintegrable overflow
a mayhap slapped upon the apparent ‘round’
following in turn and at a canter the contoured ground
til it jackknifes, a mal-at-ease leanness compressed
all the way to heavy breathing wrestling 
all the way to open struggle

Emily Abendroth
(57, left)

what's broke

Diane di Prima
(11, left)

everyone’s head is a new language

coins make music

under the

street

“the rats

used to be

with the

d i n o s a u r s

the rats

used to be

with the

d i n o s a u r s

and in the future

there’ll still be rats

still be”

tall

buildings steal

sky

walkwalkwalkwalk

look up

the woman

dancing

in line at the post office smells like piss

take care

have a good day

you could be the owner

Jennifer Karmin
(13, forward)

girl on the platform meditating

you wore the smog-filtered sun
as robes for contemplation

shoulders pressed into concrete
in dark perfect smiles your drawn lids

your squat body hummed
like the oncoming train

blurring past you slicked
briefcases, coffee in steel mugs

sweat-stained newsprint
all the reckless chatter of that kind

you subdued the sound of them
with each subsonic breath

you in your New York black
you with the turn-down cap

oh, heliolotrix
blessing each passenger

Phayvanh Luekhamhan
(31, left)

SideWalk

Everyone must step on the concrete. [In opposition to a Greek island?] Everyone must stand on their own feet. Feet. Fete. Fate. She discarded the chart and lost the schema. Sir Isaac Newton was hit on the head by one. William Tell(me no secrets I’ll tell you no) shot another from the skull of his child. Think of these things as you eat an apple walking down the street. Toss the core in the gutter. See the trajectory in the air, a yellow dash cartoon line. See the lines for hopscotch, the yellow bands of a basketball court, stenciled on the asphalt of a church parking lot to your left. Glance back – always Lot’s wife – at the core: black and yellow striped hornets have landed. Turn and face the

Put your fingers through the wires. Rock back and forth. Rattle. Rat tail. If rats can’t feed, rats can’t breed. The city’s propaganda shows a black silhouette in red crosshairs. Feel the laser target on the base of your neck. At every step. Step on a crack and break your mother’s. Miss Mary Mac Mac Mac //hypertext portion//

(Your Mama) Don’t wear no drawers – I was there when she took them off – She put them on the tracks – The train jumped ten miles back.

Back in my old neighborhood I’d walk after midnight, sometimes, once or twice, infected by my intrinsic solitude, a condition so pronounced that it becomes an independent entity. My shadow, my shade, my Siamese twin. My stunt double. Double your pleasure, double your fun. It generally wasn’t much fun. Funny girl. This is my present to you: stuff and nonsense, neologism and free association. I construct magic spells that conjure nothing. A tale told by an idiot. I am the city’s Myshkin. Lake Michigan. On a clear day, you can see forever, or Gary. Skyline at your back. Buildings entirely indifferent to who you are.

Erika Mikkalo
(71, backwards)

Meditation on Frank O’Hara

It’s March 16, 1999
and I’m walking down Washington
and the clock on the Leumi Bank
tells me it’s 10:25 in Hebrew
whereas time has stopped altogether
in Mayor Ogden Plaza,
the arms of the motorized Vito Acconci
tied at twelve
granite numbers relegated
to pedestrian benches
and I’m passing through Daley Plaza
noticing for the first time the Joan Mirò
across from the Picasso
the scale of a hunched over elderly woman
resting at the sculpture’s stone base
and I see Icarus, not on the Rue Montparnasse
as in Jack Greene’s poem
a feather on the grate
but at the entrance of La Salle bank
across from which city hall celebrates the holiday
by spraying water the color of artificial shamrocks
from the plaza fountain,
St. Patrick’s Day years ago
when I was sullen and anemic
a girl in public school
too stubborn to wear green
the option of getting punched or kissed
still one and the same
and I walk to the Cultural Center
where a woman asks to see my id when I apply for a job
and I haven’t yet committed to living in Chicago
as my driver’s license reflects,
grown accustomed to a city
where big shoulders refers to meat packers
instead of shoulder pads or beautiful men
and outside in the plaza
children slide down the face of the Picasso

Shin Yu Pai
(71, left)

Welfare Street

Gore Avenue – track of an old skid
Surveyor General of British Columbia
ran from a True Lagoon
to a place between first and second narrows
the Spanish said people called Sasamat
– no translation –
teals, widgeons, shovelers, buffleheads,
scoters, redheads, golden-eyes
blue herons and the Branta canadensis
lagooned at Ka wah usks – Two Points Opposite
sawmills, sewage, shacktown
till the railways paved it over.

A skid from . . .
Chart-man Richards called it False – not a true creek
the Northwest Passage to Burrard Inlet
for his Plumper. To pierce or wound
run through with a word-spear GARrrrr

Gore Avenue and Keefer Street
iron palings
of Chau Luen tower. Boulders –
hogsize – scraped up from an ice age
Sit here.
Ice in the butt, face in the sun
till the shadow of Fan Towers South
slides across the page.
Steady foot traffic – east side of Gore – gaunt
black-leather-jacket longhairs –
down the skid to Hastings Street – lumbering swaggering
stuffing things in their jeans – gnarled man waving his fist
in, out, round and round his forearm – walking down
to Lower Town

West Side. New Chong Lung Sea Foods
Crowds of shoppers. Shouts of the market men.
A jade vendor and the lady who crochets hats
tucked in doorways/ cracks between buildings
their wares
People have lived here 10,000 years –

Plump! a dozen fans open – brooms beating rugs
Tai chi brush knee –
Cloud-ears pile up a wall – black and curly.
Sacks of dried mushrooms, dried fish and shrimp.
Red roasted seeds. Durian. Prickly fruit.
Barbecue duck and pork. Tanks of crabs, shell-fish.
A shiny fungus you see ledged out from trees
that clouds hear . . .

Round the corner to the wide Hastings Street
Captain Raymur’s mill. Before that Stamp’s.
“What is the meaning of this
aggregation of filth” –
barns of the mill, hodgepodge of lumber sheds,
slag-heaped bark, steam donkeys’ rusted carcasses
scrapped blades and rubber belting – sawdust spit clogging the sea –
the mill-workers’ dogs, chickens, shithouses, shacks –
Gassy Jack’s saloon and hookers,
Civilization’s broken axes, saws, crockery,
junked bottles, tins boots, shoes.
“DEATH to ’Merican freedom,” Raymur said,
“I’ll not permit a running sore to fasten itself . . .”

Brought the workers books, a place to learn.
Maybe even poetry or Dickens. Started Gastown’s first school.
But named the mill for Rear-Admiral George Fowler H . . . ,
commander-in-chief of the vessel Zealous.

Round the corner to the wide Hastings Street
Battle of 1066 –
Men lugging grubby rucksacks.
P U B (as in p, u, b). ATM Liquid Cash.
Drink your money. Here.
Mud-splattered windows and prison bars of the drug store –
before the Weald, a grab-bag of English infantry
destitute of armour but for long-handled Danish axes –
the Normans on Telham Hill with central phalanx and two wings,
archers, infantry, cavalry.
Hastings and Main. The Royal Bank. Pillars, bell-tower, of Carnegie Library.
People up and down the steps to the public toilets.

Hastings and Main. Four Corners. Fair lady works shuttles –
tripartite facade of the Ford Building –
marble balustrades at its light-wells
above Owl Drugs.
And the Four Corners Community Savings
for welfare people, or what passes for wellness and fare.

Meredith Quartermain
(56, left)

Stairmaster Goes out Walking after Midnight (with Patsy Cline)

From Stairmaster Yeats: An Epic

Some women take
to nightwalking through strange cities.
Cities asleep, buried under
the weight of soggy covers
holding the moist breath of children drugged by summer's heat
slouching mothers smoking in doorways to catch a breath of air
snoring fathers still listening to the ballgame.
She had ferried across the lake
sailed all the way to Byzantium to meet Stairmaster.
A friend had told her they might get along.
Like her, he was a nightwalker
plus he had a thing for crazy women.
She smelled the dense steam of swampy farmlands just
beyond the city limits where deer grazed behind gas stations
if they weren't lying dead by the roadside
and a blood moon broke the surface of distant pines.
A guy who appreciated a crazed girl climbing, falling.
He whispered her name, "Patsy--be the singing master of my soul"
had kissed her right there on the street in the rain.
Yet she was hiding amid the cargo of a steamship
her knee-cap broken, falling to pieces.
Her little gum-chewing boy lost
she still had his picture, little things, but not him.
So she walked, nightwalked
across towns to the water's edge
sometimes jumping the barges and ferries
just to cross the empty sound.
A woman won or a woman lost--it amounted to the same thing.
Those families tucked in and sweating
under the strain of love frightened her.
She knew the violence upon the road: violence of horses.
Their steaming nostrils pulsing the cold air
beat her heart. Her skin melted and the warm
wet place between her legs ached.
The nightwalks she took with Stairmaster
improvising her music, climbing and falling
filled her. How could she fall to pieces
when walls, ceiling, baseboards and banisters
all leaned on those broken knee caps which still held up
as she scrambled eggs mornings after her furious midnight
strolls?
This was something he could never understand.
Once on her wanderings she'd found
a used bookstore still open.
Patsy had a knack for finding old volumes
with titles like Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
still jacketed by a mint green and red sketch of a trés moderne
woman. Nobody read those books with the block lettering
back then and she would never read it either
but for a quarter she could put it on her shelf
pretend to chilled martinis, gay affairs and smooth detective
work.
All this felt new
though really she remembered it from years back
dry humping in the backseats of parked cars. She knew
Stairmaster could never deliver.
He wanted her broken, falling to pieces.
She just had to move on.

Paula Rabinowitz
(23, backwards)

Detour

you in the detour’s
doppelganger

alphabet.
letters have an

ominous corner.
radio static, dark

with wrong.

you blur,
wake up

shadow, in the dimwit,
in the echo.

even the smallest
alternate route,

rustling
with dense turns.

Jenny Roberts
(51, left)

Signed with the family

Name no one knew how to spell
This plan for figuring
Each body with not
The measure those certain
Fits of revision
Only

Face echo of later

Occasion for following
Sentences will

Steal edge and corner
Overstate the work

Michelle Taransky
(34, left)