An excerpt

from a novella i'm working on:

Beautiful

Clouds marble the grey night.
The electricity crackles through a wind-blown chink in the curtain.
The sky looks like the interior of a massive brain, spider lightning creating instant connections between swollen neurons. The earth is thinking.
You awake suddenly and turn to me, your eyes wide open. You look at me as if you have never seen me before.
“Do you know that you’re beautiful?” you ask me.
I stare blankly. Soon your head sinks down onto the pillow and plunges back into sleep. And I feel a sense of longing.

a poem by tom trudgeon and james meetze

potatoes- jayinee

Where does that bottle end and my hand begin
Shapes fuse.
That is why I
Drink.

You in my maroon flannel shirt turn into a boat
I sink my head
In your cupped
Hands, you drink.

Me in your ripped dress shirt leaning over the ledge
To feel the purple
Of the beveled hills
Touch my cheek.

I do not sense you standing there, fingering a pack
Why are you
So bright
It hurts to look.

Before we speak to anyone they are layered objects
Everyone is beautiful
I shake my head no
Don’t say that.

We can never find a real painting to live happily for
Just eat this cold
Dinner of cherry soda
And fingerling potatoes.

Constriction Poems

Notes on the Rules of Time Travel as Put Forth by Emmy Lennevald
By Jayinee Basu


Causality

Gloss the gangster, seconds don’t spiral
Keep the glossy gangster, not the spiraling seconds
The glossy seconds drip into the gangster-lined spiral
Gloss the second spiral, ye gangster!
Glosses drip spiral, seconds till the gangster
Glosses the spiral gangsters second.

Gangsters who gloss while the seconds spiral
Through gangster-lined glossy spiraling seconds
Gangsters count seconds while the glossy lines spiral
Gangsters throw seconds into the spiraling gloss.
The lone gangster spirals, glossing the seconds
The lone gangster spirals towards a second gloss.

Seconds spin spiraling, a glossy gangster weeps
Seconds spiral weeping toward a gangster of gloss
Second the gangster, who spiraling glossy
Seconds the gangster whose glosses spiral.
Seconds gloss toward a deep gangster spiral
Seconds gloss toward a spiraling gangster.

Spiral the glossy gangster in seconds
Spiral the glossy second-gangster dream
Spiral the gangster whose glossy dream seconds
The spiral of gangster-lined seconds. (g)loss
Spiral the second glossy gangster
Spiral the second gangster of gloss.


And Then

After a storm comes, so shall you reap.
Better die with honor: he begins to die.
Blood is thicker but who loves a lover,
Crime is the better part of valor.

Don’t cut off your nose, wear out your welcome
Early experience is the mother.
Fear of death where angels fear to tread,
Love while the sun shines.

He plants posterity
He hesitates policy
He doubts nothing
He is better than beauty.

Laughter is a sleeping dog,
Laughter is a bowl of cherries.
Like mother, like medicine.
Like father, like a tango.

The female of the species skins a cat,
The grass is more deadly than the male.
Marriages: death and taxes.
Remember to look after everything.


Gangster Summer: An Epithalamium
(for Sebastian Mouse and January Winterson,
married under the burning Brazilian sun)

I.

To be a sin
Bastian, a ban on best
So be a mat
So be a sabot
To mast a nasty bus.

A tousled mess
A man? A beast?
Nab a motion
To a sea.

Mist tiny stems
It sees tin meat
Nations seem about sin.

O Sebastian Mouse!
My sun-baste man!



II.

Not just any winter
Tinny new jitters
To a weary January.

Written in June, nay
Terse wry nose
A sonnet in rose.

Winston, see ‘er son?
Rye so winsome
A new Jenny ewe.

A note rain-taint
Rest now Janey
You are not a saint.

III.

Witty mousy January
Must be a bait
Bees swarm rainy
To a Bastian mate.

Arouse my reason
Winterous treason
In misty jabs
At sea a man waits.

Stain ye rosy beam
Wean yer awesome teen
Nest our timorous boat
In a sinuous moat.

See Sebastian
Sway sweet
In January sweat.

From Threads

This is a poem from a chapbook I made over the summer. The formatting got screwed up so the spacing is not like the original.
-Jayinee

Beleghata

I lived in a house
where the flowers bloomed
like chinese characters
outside the window.
Nightly,
the branches snuck in, scratched my cheek
while I slept they fondled my hair through
and through the bars there was rainwater
dripping lightly into the cool airy room.

I lived in a house
where the whapwhap of cotton
yards beaten against wet ground
woke me to the window
in the gleaming morning
where the
dappled
powdery
sunlight
flickered on the acid burning
brightly on the red cement.

I lived in a house
where autism blossomed
in pairs of awkward joints
they were all knees and elbows,
those boys,
their mother with her teeth
and her widow's thin white than
knotted about her swelling knuckles.
when they died the room was quiet
like the crazy chained to the window.

I lived in a house
where wives and daughters
with green eyes meowed at
the one daughter whose madness
was to love
and be loved
without clothes
with screams
so they kept her locked away
until one day, she up and died.

I lived in a house
where the crumbling stone wall
bore peeling manifestos
of Marxist-Leninist sentiments:
INQUILAB ZINDABAD!
The revolution lives on through fists
pumping, teeth
breaking
blood trickling slowly from his head
like the steady dissolution of memory.

I lived in a house
where a woman with black plum skin
lined my white little feet
in red red ink from a green glass jar
pulled out a bamboo mat
rough and dyed
the fan in a lazy whir
lulling me to sleep on the floor in the depths
of a dog howling in pain or love.

Poem with a segment of a gil gentile comic

-tom

excerpt from "pieces of memory"

one of many parts of a short story i wrote, now in finery 5.

*

Vivian dreams.

…

..

.

I’m

a thousand ways of repeating the same apology,

doing the same thing

an infinite loop of regret

with feathers

bursting from my shoulder blades

sharp and delicate fragments of white

disintegrate as though made of ash

the gray ends of gold-red sex

as I fall

into my grandmother’s garden, the

uneven hills of dirt hiding cabbage, narcissus, peonies, orchids,

oranges, snakes with glittering eyes –

My grandmother strokes my hair, and

she smells like the plums that hang heavy in the air, deep purple like organs in the sunlight

their insides golden and wet.
She has both her arms, the left arm amputated during the war hanging whole and unblemished

the skin as white as milk.
I wonder if we’re both dead.

She smiles, revealing even gold teeth, and says,

Don’t run.

Everything turns dark, and I’m breathing

alone.

….

..

.

Vivian wakes up gasping.

The room smells like plums.

-CVN