BRIAN RICHARDS: 3 POEMS

Brian Richards lives in a small cabin, sans electricity or phone, on a ridge overlooking the Ohio River Valley. He is the sole proprietor of Bloody Twin Press, a letterpress operation which has published books by Tom Clark, Ted Enslin, Skip Fox, Howard McCord, Christy Sanford, Anne Waldman and many others. He has published a number of books of poetry, most recently Enridged from the University of New Orleans Press.

She is free-

                     climbing a monolith thirty feet or so above a brushy slope

            its angle of ascent maybe thirty feet the wrong side of vertical

Sunny day behind and below but just her hair

            the anterior surface of her upper left arm

            her left thigh muscle, the outside of her left knee

            the top of her left calf are splashed with light

 The toes of her left foot are lost in a divot

            heel in space, left calf almost horizontal against the rock face

            sinews strained to hold the weight striated with light

            as are the leaders above the knee

            thigh angled down almost forty-five degrees off plumb

Her right thigh a sliver of light along its top locked to the curve of the rock

            knee almost out of sight, lower leg in space

            triangle between her thighs and the rock close to equilateral

            but for the bulge of her pubes shading into the dark crack between her cheeks

            their compression spring holding her lower body in place

Her torso is parallel to the face a foot away

            her left arm horizontal shoulder to elbow

            forearm vertical to the knuckles lifting her small breast

            erect nipple almost in touch, fingers in a crack

            face-to-the-face profile utterly focused

Her long loose light hair provides a plumbline that preserves the thirty-degree angle to her back

            just her right forearm visible above her head

            hand a foot higher than the left clamping a narrow crack

            and almost to the top of the frame

How far she has to climb is impossible to say

            but she is apparently unconcerned with ceilings

Wergild

                  'With you

my value is immense without you

I'm worth about' a crewcut buck in chemicals

though with bottled water above

a dollar a pint any body might be swapped for

a six-pack of budlite

                                     The inwards offer

the best chance to move if marketed by

the piece designated choice considering precedent

there is little to be made from selling organs used

to abuse as they have been made more

the leaky dehumidifier left behind

the Goodwill

                         The voice cannot be

transferred regardless of price only the eye

holds undevalued over a half century since

his orchids dropped the same

feral glee while in her

release a plea for succor

final offer to close the cry

the chance to ride him home for keeps

Chipmunk a peripheral imposition

afterimage headed into the den beneath

one of the treated six-by-six sills that found

the outhouse

                       the eye never catches

up but plots a path to satisfy

that indiscrete stroke traversing

the tangential kiss of what I can say I saw

BUNDLE FROM ANDRE SPEARS

Greetings,

I’m attaching the short text “Friendship,” written by Maurice Blanchot on the occasion of George Bataille’s death (1962), as a sort of “ancillary bundle” to accompany leek soup.

In a nutshell, what I think I’ve gleaned from my recent reading, in retracing the bond that links Bataille to friend Blanchot to friend Derrida to friend J-L Nancy—across the intertextual field delimited by Bataille’s Friendship (first half of Guilty), Blanchot’s “Friendship” and The Unavowable Community, Nancy’s The Inoperative Community and Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship—goes something like this: the “plasma of friendship” is Death, in the same way that the “plasma of community” is the Death of my Friend.

This line of inquiry into issues of friendship and community begins with Bataille and, like much of Bataille’s major work, emerges from the very heart of Nazi-occupied France (not to say Europe).

So, I guess the question for me is whether we can take Olson’s notion of “polis”  as another word for “community.”

See you round the campfire.

a’

ALBERT GLOVER: CLOUDBURST BUNDLE ITEM ONE

Sons of the Mothers, Daughters

of the Father

  will provoke a change

now that sex is thoroughly (utterly) re

                 versed

psychology (the horse sacred to

Poseidon) “evolved” materialism was also

a stone in a stream, a step, a foot

to kick with (hermetic studies) still

forever will be and now the empty tomb

       (womb) attests

our (listen: outward is

a comprehension, once spoken of as down

and up, Euclidean Dante geometry as of

this morning any higher ups (further

           outs) no one is anything more or less

                     than

the extent of content, theology

of neighborhood, i.e. everyone who lives

by intersection with