POETRY:

• Reb Livingston
  • Lament for Origin
  • Spell for Lunching After the Death
  • Spell for Sipping Elixir and Not Being Learnt by Sunwurst

From muddled clay where this Book was founded, O Sultana, the vainglum peasants who huddle your ankles, bring their flippers for your spatula, whooshing like damseled whorls before you. May the foreskinned tribes cast better wishes, make curtsy pies and cabbaged kowtow soup. In your meadow slashed to stubby-love, may this lament dwindle to your pheasant-licked toes. Like a golden pricked massage may you not be spiritless, may this mud become your broth.

O Sunwurst who defined a moonmoan, O Sunwurst who sleeps rainbows, may you deem worth within the argued and past wooed, may those who are heartsick pardon your slack and paw, may the Netherwurst receive you when Damsel enters stage bereft in Apron to blank your weakish wishes in the torsos to the flinching bleats.

O Spoonswirl of Sunwurst, I am wrought with snot, for I am bombswell from which the GOURD was sowed. I will be neither learnt nor scored, for I am Prophetess, eldest of the GOURD for who all the covegrunt trembles with her EYE on Tabershrillville; I am the traversed clairvoblunt when Damsel is lost in hoopskirt, my name will carry furlong and a big wick.

Reb Livingston is author of Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books) and Pterodactyls Soar Again (Whole Coconut Chapbook Series), co-author of Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books) and co-editor of The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel anthology series. She also edits No Tell Motel and publishes No Tell Books.

POETRY:

• Adrian Matejka
  • Gang Related in ‘87
  • Synth Composite Basketball: No More Court

At Black Expo, we locked
in the determination of high
school needs. Names exchanged,
sweaty mitts gripped
in the sweat of mitts. A peck
or two roughed hastily
by the phone booths.
Would-be mack daddies eyeing
my style from the walls
like welfare kids sweating
the Swanson’s truck.
Then I saw her right leg:
S-A-N-C-H-O etched
into skin below the knee.
The same place a tube sock
stripe would be. Sancho,
thugging in 2-5, the most
feared gang in Indianapolis.
She told me: I used a nail
file. The next time I ran
into her, I was home visiting.
I almost recognized her face,
but the leg inscription
tipped me off. The letters
were a little uneven because
she’d lost weight, but they
still spelled the same
dude’s name in English.

My first basketball court was old skool
before anyone used the “k,” like reverse
pivots or box outs. When some kid
got paralyzed after M&M jammed

a broken bottle into his back, HUD paved
over the free throw lane. They built
a clubhouse with big windows
and pay foosball because a good clubhouse

with games can make HUD housing
look less HUD. The new romper room
didn’t change the explanations blind Pearl’s
daughter had for her already inflating belly:

Yeah, this M&M’s kid. Girl, he don’t
melt in the hand. He melt someplace else.

Adrian Matejka’s first collection of poems, The Devil’s Garden, was published by Alice James Books, and his second, Mixology, was recently selected for the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and Pluck!, among other journals.