Exquiste Corpse poems 4/27/11

Written by R.C. Davis, Russell Jaffe, Eric Roalson, and Justine Retz at Sanctuary Pub. Punctuation has been added because, well, some lines were punctuated and some weren't that needed to be...
Special thanks to Ravel's Bolero and special apologies to Justine Retz for cutting the street corner on which the pool hall in the second poem appears, and which was beyond legible.
-Russell Jaffe


How the stones are thrown like musical notes
Geography becomes a landscape orchestra
of horns and horns alone. The way you
blow yours turns me on.
The sockets beneath your eyes
are ripe for fishing
as were your simple stockings, a condition.
It was the run that disturbed me,
it was the song that exhilarated me
but the tempo moved me
like a tree. The river. The branches and the way
I was incapable of reading the prior line.
My laundry calls me instead
of the pretty boy next door
whose windowed body was the silhouette of my god.



A candle burns my ass.
The heat is well contained,
but the frigid air is uncontrolled.
I count myself among the unthawed kind
dripping only on warm days.
The harvest is waiting in line
but Fall will come soon enough
when your laces are untied. Remember:
It's a lack of short term memory
the elephant dances down the lane
a soft so exact thump
so microtonal, so hold your keyboard hands
but I have no keyboard hands. You must
lend me yours in case I
lose my pearls at the pool hall.



Here's my life story I'm ready to admit:
I wouldn't admit too much.
The borders between two worlds
are sewn by invisible thread
made visible. It tells the truth by day but
in the oncoming dusk it will lie.
The purple reproduction machine
is Prince singing "Kiss" in falsetto?
Well? Are you afraid to count the lines on the face
face of time and be
the portrait of obtuse fantasy in the
mind of Asimov, whirling
computer chip dust. Feel the grain of
my dog, do you feel the imperfections?
I pant with a tongue of compassion.




Fire flickers, in dim candles
I pull spark plugs from my rustic imposition
and they light up the morning sky.
The eyes of the chipmunks
daft black in furry furtiveness
ye squirrels:
In their language it is "hear ye."
My eyes cannot perceive the subtitles
but my heart speaks many languages
but I can't translate any. Hello? I'll tell you why:
please do, so I can turn a deaf ear
on a dime to the rhyme with
the Miami sound machine blasting
a kind of youth. You're sweat. I'm
dry like a horned lizard in the sun.

Every issue of Poetry magazine...ever.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/archive

Ars Poeticas

Marianne Moore
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15654


Mark Strand
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20448

EXQUISITED CORPSES

Written by R.C. Davis, Chris Eck, Russell Jaffe, Justine Retz, and Amanda Strzalka, 12/13/10.

Cold runs through her body.
She finds strangely comforting
the tiny charge of static unleashed.
My hair rises reaching for
electric stars like moth ash in streetlamps,
attracted to what kills it.
It moves toward its demise
and finds what it seeks:
open, blossoming like a creamy, pink sea amoeba.
This is a feeling I butter my toast with:
warmth that can feel cold,
cousin of hate who can feel love
at a family picnic with ants.



Speeding don the road
a.m. radio crackles, coffee drips
but still my brain pounds.
I add salt and sugar to dilute this type of cake
until I can't taste it anymore.
Satisfying dissipation.
Sedated and spread across the toasted crust
the roe still refuses to give in
but the youth therein are empty
for they don't believe
but could if the just wanted to,
just like Santa only brings peppermint if you believe.
And are naughty.
(sort of twisted Christmas theme...-Russell)


The doorway in my hip, the one I heard your bell from
across the alps. Cows on parade
are glass in Chicago's dark, wet teeth tonight.
The city sleeps, but I don't.
I want to walk the dark streets
but it's daytime. What can we do?
But co-mingle in our natural habitat...
a spider web of cans tied to a rented limo; A
car filled with nothing but hopes and dreams
transcends the guard rail, airborne.
The air is thin and rushes past, but pockets envelop, you float
on currents gliding between the clouds and metallic
tongues of upturned faces--we now from here glide.


Pam Grier mixed steroids into her hot cocoa.
That's how I know she can act like a bulging
rambunctious Amazon woman.
Run through the streets
echo doorway shell, avoiding traffic/
The snail meanders glittery rainbow arcs
but not the animal kind--the kind more or less like
a person, the kind you love to hate.
The guilt of judgment invades your mind.
Surrender now, hot not to internalize, how
to fall eyes and arms wide
into embracing this dark majesty, this
fear that runs our lives.

No Teeth

Hey class members,
I think this is a great starter journal to submit to!
http://litlist.net/noteeth

This. Is. Awe. Some.

Look at this, everyone. It's great! I joined. I advocate that you all join, too!
http://litlist.net/

The Fine Art of Surfacing

Great idea, Russell. I have perused and piqued my own interest in several journals. Most of my publishing experience is from the late 1990's, so tonight I dug through "the drawer," finding some evidence for my lack of proliferation in that time. I thought I'd take a few lines to honor some defunct publications from that bygone era of internet innocence. Almost every organization that ever published a poem of mine is dead. I'm pretty sure I didn't kill them, though. I do get a kick out of their magazine titles:

24:7 Magazine, Bunkum, Conspire, Gravity, Ink e-zine, Leticia Dahling!, 191919, Croyden Online, Orbital Revolution, Radio Free Topeka, New Improved Mushrooms, Indigo Pig, Papyrus, Aabye's Baby, Savoy, Thunder Sandwich, The Poet's Cut, Green Tricycle, Sky Blue Water, et al....

Of course, I'll be turning this list itself, in unabridged format, into a poem.

A few of my old haunts still exist, though! Check out A Little Poetry at http://www.alittlepoetry.com/ - they still seem to get it on (as of 2009) and you'll find some terrible examples of what the 90's did to me in their 1998 "ancient archives" section. Another great past-blast in the lit zine Children, Churches & Daddies http://scars.tv/perl/ccd.htm and yet another in The Alembic from Providence college at http://www.providence.edu/English/Alembic/ .

Interesting, the old e-zine Shadow Voices seems to have evolved into a mental illness support services center. Convenient, poetry isn't always the most effective therapy.

Cheers, see you all Tuesday.

Christopher