buffalojournal

[buffalojournal]

SPECIAL CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Monostich

In addition to reading regular submissions for volume three of Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, I'm adding a special call for monostiches (I'm blaming the equinox).

A monostich is a poem composed of a single line. John Ashbery wrote some pretty good ones.

Please submit up to three (3) previously unpublished monostiches in a Word file to buffaloplus8 (at) gmail (dot) com. In the subject line of your email, write MONOSTICH.

This will not count toward a regular submission for volume three, so please feel free to submit to this special call, our regular submissions, or both! Submissions for this special call will close alongside regular submissions in May 2024.

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Morgan L. Ventura

A Brief Synesthetic History

When I look around it could be said we are living in dark times, the walls & skies & sea & clouds & spaces within me, obsidian smoke, pitch tar, pooled oil. It tastes of ash & petrol & mould & the edge of a boiled knife & I hear the whooshing whooping of distant stars – black holes – ebony arias bending, twisting vibrations. What’s true is I want brighter times, amber & magenta times, spirals of smiling roses & giddy peonies, & detonations of laughing citrine. Times that carry the blush of wisteria, caramel popcorn, earnest eucalyptus. I was born in green times – aventurine smiles & verdant yards blooming viridian jewels, emerald & jade hanging from low branches, wistful and content. The 80s rainforest transmutes blue. Periwinkle times, the 90s breathed cornflower winds and bluebell gales, husked sapphire on metal plates, glimmering robin eggs on cedar porch chirping an unearthly jingle piercing aquamarine eyes of my father who knew only sadness. The sky only spoke rain, it was falling sea, shredded wave, lacerated labradorite, cascades of troubled cerulean. Shocked like glaciers arguing, raging because all’s spilled into red. A time of crimson, furls of fuchsia in the tide of blood after flames across New York, after strikes in Chicago, after death in the family. The 2000s were carnelian, lay the bead beneath my tongue, the rubies on my eyes, enshrine me in magma, encrust me in this livid tomb. Vitrine of vermillion, what is a body but stained glass, medieval sun never modern. The next era’s violet, arched, mutilated candy blossoming from irises in the back. In the evening light it all shivers purple, bruised lilacs yammer & portend a luminous love. Amethyst troves in the attic squirm & emit warmth, simmering with snapdragon & grapes, pisco vineyard from a decade ago, time punctured by lazy lost lagoons. Take me now into what seems like blank times, off-shades of pale peeling into crystal pears & glass shards as we wait, & the iridescent soul in the body of the future, the cloud high above spitting quartz & splitting mirrors, declares these are rainbow times, & I have to tell you, I love all the colours, I want all the colours. World, let me bathe in your prisms & drink your light. This marbled soil, this striated sky. I’d be no one & nowhere without.

 Internal Monologue of an Anthropologist in Paris

i.

My mother said if I fail on my new adventure I can live in her closet.

My French roommate has shit in my bed after having a midlife crisis at 29.

On television I look like an idiot. Even smart, floral blazers from the 10th Arrondissement make me look like a cartoon character because I’m very small.

They want to hire me as a curatorial fellow at the Musée du Quai Branly but then I have to stay here and oh, how I know the Parisians suffer.

Every Thursday there is a voracious vacuuming in the flat above me at 6am and I am suddenly murderous. I strike the ceiling with my broom and the ceiling strikes back.

ii.

My life is an Antonioni film. At the Sorbonne, I’m asked to describe my unwritten doctoral thesis in front of four medieval historians and a self-proclaimed spiritualist who spends most of his time at Père Lachaise by the grave of some important figure whose name I can’t remember. I whirl around in my seat and quip, “It is about nothing with precision.”

iii.

The community in Oaxaca wants me to ask the Mexican government to return the collection it stole but I’m merely an anthropologist, when did we ever hold power?

Margaret Mead was barely 5’0” and carried a walking stick taller than herself, which she’d use to intimidate men. That’s power.

I’m invited by the History Channel to appear on Ancient Aliens after my undergraduate advisor, a certain Mayanist, declines and thinks it would be hilarious to give them my personal email. “We will pay you $300,” they tell me. I think seriously about it.

Pseudoscience is absurd but my life is absurd. My next-door neighbour smokes cigarettes naked while his parrot shits on the patio. A colleague informs me they irrationally hate my surname.

“Would you like a career in anthropology?” my PhD advisor asks me after I tell him about the invite. This, coming from a man whose faculty headshot features him sacrificing a chicken.

Anthropologists don’t deserve careers, I think. But I sure enjoy all the grant and fellowship money, society’s conviction that we are worth something because “we are scientists.”

I don’t want a career, I conclude.

iv.

Over lunch in the EHESS cafeteria, my friend says everyone here complains too much and that the Parisians are insane and create their own chaos.

My brother texts me because my mother is in jail. She should stay there.

I go for coffee with an artist in Le Marais. The owner comes out to scream at all of us who dare to use their laptops and take up too much time – or space.

Claude Lévi-Strauss helped found UNESCO. Franz Boas died in his arms. Claude’s a structuralist and I despise structure. Will I die in the arms of anyone?

When Bronislaw Malinowski died, we all found out that he was a pervert. His field notebooks were festooned with scribbles of his interlocutor’s boobs.

“Anthropologists are very interesting, no?” asks the barista I’ve befriended at perhaps the most hipster café I could find.

I don’t know, are we?

Am I?

[buffalojournal]

Dark Sonnets

i

The strain persists Like motors on a backpack A grand clock On a grand building Situations determine circumstance They say Like a weathervane Occurring north to south And then south to north As a wolf moves across the tops of trees Even the sun still rises And moms watch the trains roll by Astride a stroller Thinking it might be worth it

ii

Exposition asks only for your hand It leads and parts of you follow An old tree that dies Must be dismantled in stages First the limbs Then the uppermost trunk Then the middle Finally the stump Though best practice Advises leaving it In the ground Until it dies completely And you don’t have to labor Against the resistance of its roots

iii

What does one survive if not themselves Transportation leads to false epiphanies Like jumping jacks at 6am Humping lackluster through another day In the soft times we can bisect the patterns Concatenating pieces that need But the thinnest thread A tiny effort During the shortest time My place among strangers in a dark tunnel I feel most myself in this liminal place The swaying and careening Every white noise The inherent purpose the gathering holds

iv

I want to be more like ground cherries which grow with a thin covering like paper surrounding their fruit and while ultimately doesn't protect it against its vulnerability at least visibly communicates its delicate nature as if to say, I can’t prevent you from injuring me but I can take care to communicate how best I should be handled to anyone who might be paying attention It is impossible to follow a raindrop forever Or separately pool the excess

v.

I don’t know what is important anymore As we wait as we weather Movement is literal and figurative As I mishear, mis-sing if we all have wings We all have nothing in common Other than the plainest facts A 28 hour bus ride from the nearest airport A photo ripped out of a western magazine If I inadvertently look like I belong to one train as opposed to another That I belong to this language in these moments That otherwise belonging is something else A wet shoe in the grass A rubber band which gathers the baby’s hair A voyage through catalogs of photographs

vi.

At a certain point I stopped listening The space between the pauses shorter The similes less like similes No metaphors or only metaphors Only imaginary jet streams of borrowed stories It’s easy to die off that which loves No water no sun Maquettes a common shortcuts Empty and institutional A short cut for what I was meaning to say I don’t want to watch the buildings fall I don’t want to read about the probability Even as I continue to grow larger and more round I am determined to appear take up less space so I have someone else to blame

vii. It isn’t quite as bleak So the path leads into itself So the morning noises are limited The sound of a garbage can rolled down the driveway The bin in the park where people put their dog waste It’s a lot to expect unconditional love all the time A discounted emotion that cites the lost year as its source Is it a matter of question If it’s a matter of question How was, you say, you want more without saying you want more Since the saying betrays a truth that mustn’t ever be revealed At this distance you can see your stupid little life for what it was A bell jar surrounded by wetlands that have no choice But to flood to get your attention

viii.

I want to give you this rock It isn’t a heavy rock You can cup it in the palm of one hand This rock won’t actually do anything It won’t transform your life Allaying your regrets Your remorse for time past It is a common rock One you might find strewn among The rubble aside train tracks I want to give this to you Because even though this rock is nothing special It was given to specifically to you And that’s something

ix. if I don’t journal if I don’t speak if I don’t do the things that I have said I will do if I don’t feel joy if I don’t feel pleasure if I only continue to use this space for what I have learned to use this space for if I never make any bones about it if I don’t think toward you with an old love if I don’t believe that it will be any different if I don’t in fact believe in change or really if I don’t believe in your change if I don’t carefully separate out the contractions if I don’t remember it without the shortcuts if I don’t ascribe meaning to this particular union any longer

🦬 Jackie Clark

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Jessie Lynn McMains

Secret

is I stabbed summer      watched it twitch and spurt, dark, arterial        crunched the husks of late cicadas esoteric as the leaves                 we use to cross our sacred wounds            mystic is her lemonlips         the fuzz soft above        them charcoal smudge of shadow                   over her clavicle I wanna wake up in       November with a sprig       of verbena planted        in the pocket of my leather jacket       her fingers fuzzing on the stubble of my                  brooding clouds crisp wind rustle in        the oaktrees how sweet how soft she                 sing to me

At the Denny’s in Michigan City, Indiana, at 2 a.m. in Mid-October

everyone’s loonier than a junebug in a Canadian goose- feathered bed. One middle-aged fella in a Van Halen t-shirt with the sleeves torn off stuffs his mouth fulla straws and whistles “Dusty Crabapple Pie.” The old-timers in the back booth play poker for packets of non-dairy creamer and Sweet n’ Low, sling stories of glory days hunting Mud Mermaids and Wild Men. There’s a drunk lady who’s 30 or 45 or maybe 67, she doesn’t need anybody but she wants somebody to love. She stumbles from table to table, asks every man and half the women if they want to go neck in the bathroom. Her hair is the color of motor oil puddled on the floor of Moore’s Auto Repair, and if she’s especially fond of ya she’ll pull her shorts down and give you a flash of her star-freckled ass— but she’ll smack ya if you try to trace the constellations.

At the Denny’s in Michigan City, Indiana, at 2 a.m. in mid-October they have a secret menu. Sure, you can get the Grand Slam Slugger or the Moons Over My Hammy, but you should ask about the house specialities. Like Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammo, where they cut the flapjacks into crosses and arrange the bacon in the shape of a gun, and the eggs are boiled hard as bullets. Or Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving—a deep-fried turkey leg stuck through with lit sparklers. Sometimes, if the fishing was good that day, they have fillet of Mud Mermaid. Once in a blue moon you can get The Elvis Platter.

At the Denny’s in Michigan City, Indiana, at 2 a.m. in mid-October they only play one song, which is a mashup of songs by the most famous Hoosier musicians. It’s called “Hurts So Good Runnin’ With the Devil Billie Jean in Paradise City.” It would be obnoxious if you could hear it over the din of spoons and trash talk, if you weren’t so tired you’d pass out facedown in your flapjacks if you didn’t have to get back on the road to Michigan.

At the Denny’s in Michigan City, Indiana, at 2 a.m. in mid-October the night manager—who’s also the host—is the spitting ghost- twin of latter-day Elvis. Fat and bedazzled with a queasy quaalude smile. When you arrive, he greets you with a ‘hunka-hunka-burnin’ love,’ and when you leave he says: “It’s so good to see ya, darlin’. I haven’t seen ya ‘round here in years.” When you tell him you’ve never been to that Denny’s, or to Michigan City, before in your life, he says: “Of course ya have. I knew ya when you were knee-high to a soybean. We’d go down to the Town of Pines and boogie with the Wild Men. We’d go up to the state park and have hotdog-eating contests on the sand dunes. Don’t ya remember?”

At the Denny’s in Michigan City, Indiana, at 2 a.m. in mid-October you say no, you don’t remember, that wasn’t you, he must have mistaken you for someone else. “Not possible,” Elvis says. “Not possible.” And at the Denny’s in Michigan City, Indiana, at 2 a.m. in mid-October when you’re goose-tired and fulla greased hash and headed for Kalamazoo you never know. Darlin’, you just never know.

🦬 Jessie Lynn McMains

[buffalojournal]

Three Poems by Lauren Ireland

Small Sin

Now I am not young but the flesh of gods does not tarnish.

Have you considered sacrifice. The dying fir, crushed, just a small sin.

There are many things you can burn to placate them.

The memory of linden blossoms. The knotty rhizomes of devotion. Two and a half inches of hair.

The wheel of time has many hands.

Now you know every time is the last time.

Eurydice

for Linda Gregg

Madness is just the slow loosening of many small knots. True divinity is untying each bond yourself. True divinity is a little death, not quite enough. True divinity is being half-devoured by the snake that eats unnecessary things. It is a fire that burns away the threads, then it is a lit match in a closed drawer.

Released, I radiate a flyblown desire in a space between. Now I am a saint. I am the saint of terrible things, naked and angry, terrifying in my wild loneness. I fill a room. I fill a whole hell of rooms. You will need to make a new hell. I will not make myself small. I will not unmake myself.

Things scream and scream. It is frightened rabbits running through the forest in one of the many hells we have made. There was no backwards look. You did not turn to see my face, shivering and distant as though beheld through disturbed waters. The myth of love is a mirror. The myth of love made me. I followed you down, not out.

How You Could

Actually, I burn for you. It is not beautiful, this knowing, many-layered as the old rose that whispers when I touch it. It is the relentless dial tone of my heart at night. How I make myself a torch how I blaze so you can find me. It is a terrible fire. Here are all the ways I tried to stop it.

🦬 Lauren Ireland

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Sydney Smith

r/cumshot

perky / amateur / facial // after labor day party   /   wife  gets   /    everywhere   // dumpster / neck / on counter / sexy little /   business trip   //   blossoms   /   begs / impregnable / texture // cleans up / daily /  virtual  /  anus  //  receives  /  influx   // downloads / repairman / and much more

now is a time for healing

my  /  email newsletter  /  psychic healer / sends / red onions and  /  garlic  /  over voicemail  //  sliding scale rituals  for  /  all  digital  platforms  /  protection from  / instagram   /   revenge porn   //   we meet  /  in a club penguin chat room / a holy place /  untouched by / the metaverse  /  she  tells  me  //  sleep  with your thighs wrapped tight  /  around this bottle  /  there’s  nothing inside  /  but it will help you keep  /  your  legs  closed

🦬 Sydney Smith

[buffalojournal]

Despondent, and You?

Do you know where I can buy a little buoyancy? Any old Tuesday            can shake you up. See, when I looked up, the sky was bordered with pestilence. Something            was eating the children but our shopping carts were empty so it was hard to care. Fluorescent lighting            flickered above what we were told was our lives. I thought what I needed was a change in perspective, to flip fast            enough through blood-rush I could steady in on my center. What are we orbiting? Can it be enough            for one moment to touch the root of us to the world, to feel it press back? Look at yourself,            serious as a cover letter. Decadence won’t solve it, but I volunteer to keep trying.            New windstorm, old safety. No quinoa, all caviar. Try some funny business for a change.            Hang from the trees by your feet, clean out the mind’s garage. Surely there’s something more            comfortable you might slip into.

🦬 Caroline Stevens

[buffalojournal]

Three Poems by John Leo

Ninkasi’s Song

for Allycen

Some say civilization began with the first batch of beer, honey-dazed monks awaiting the arrival of their itinerant God. Lie with me. Let us dwell on the buzzing of fat bees amid zinnias. The haze and splendor of July. I like to think the monks would smile on us, and doubly marvel at the wealth of meads and brandys arraigned on the shelf at Handy Time Liquors.

I like to think civilization is still spinning up. Still in the early stages of a great party, the first jester working up the first knock-knock joke, a bearded abbott dominating the first game of flip-cup. Every song a new feeling. Every sin a curiosity, a party-foul, to be etched in a later era by a hungover scribe with the first and best-intentioned chisel.

MKULTRA

For some, prophecy is a banana republic. Lingerie in the tumble dryer. A gorilla in a trenchcoat. Today I am going to tell a secret. About the government. About control. I want to say goodbye before I blow my whistle. Just as we are about to kiss, I disappear over the hotel balcony.

At first I am sad to see you go. Suddenly I am passing many open windows. A nude woman washing her hands. A maid with her back to me, vacuuming, humming the theme from Dallas. Two G-men sipping Tecate, their Hawaiian shirts ripe, watching like bored stargazers, content to sling skipping rocks along the hazy surface of a future.

The Touch

after Kelly Reichardt’s “Old Joy”

The feeling shudders out a gasping thing, breaching, Kurt’s face a twist of thicket in firelight. When he says he is alright now, just being crazy, feeling a lot better, what he means is he has chosen the slow death.

Wooden tubs. Boiled water. The long chute pouring. Kurt’s hands. Mark’s hands slackening, his shoulders slackening as the hands press into the water and the water forgets just for a moment to mirror the past.

🦬 John Leo

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Réka Nyitrai

What only paint can do

To escape boredom, I doodle a baby horse. After a while I notice that it has grown so much that it no longer fits on the paper. Its ears and tail already occupy the table and a significant part of the couch. If it continues to grow at this rate, it will soon be too big for the apartment. I start to sketch a stable, only to notice that a hand that it is not mine is populating it with more horses. They look like my brothers.

Triangulation

My imaginary lover lives in London. We keep in touch through letters exchanged via homing pigeons. We talk openly about anything: my sex life, his sex life and the weather. We are in an open relationship, but even so, it’s hard not to be jealous. When I become too jealous, I remind myself that I can always cheat on him with my husband, and all of a sudden, I calm down.

🦬 Réka Nyitrai

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Caleb Bouchard

Last night you told me: “I wear the fat…

Last night you told me: “I wear the fat ass in this family.” Friday nights are like a candle I never want to blow out. You sing. I dance. We paint each other’s nails. Jekyll, here we come.

Before another cup of coffee…

Before another cup of coffee I want to know what’s going on with the roller skates behind the shed behind leasing and if they are up for grabs and if I can get them in red.

🦬 Caleb Bouchard

[buffalojournal]

That time on my back porch laughing

I have a video of you on my cell phone trying to do an impression of me and my bad dating habits. There’s a bleached towel wrapped around your shoulders like an anvil; like you are the wolf attempting to become the sheep. We were dyeing your hair blue. The video is really funny. The last poem I write you will be the most beautiful.

🦬 Elissa Fertig

[buffalojournal]

Two Poems by Rosemary Royston

Evening News

The taste of purple grapes, corduroy fish swimming on the gold couch. Chapped lips,

scarred lung The kettle with its ashes, waiting.

Dry puzzle pieces of red clay on the floor. Dark roots

and blue suitcases. The box flickers.

Secretarial Pool

You can’t swim in it. There’s no water. It’s thick with thighs & breasts & unruly pubes. Every hour, boys push girls under. Some drown. There are no repercussions --  another woman always pops up. The lifeguard’s stand is vacant, year-round. Even though it’s a pool, you’ll not find any children. Yet, the women raise & discipline in non-secretarial hours. They are encouraged to cook, clean, suck cock. The oiled men laugh & say the pool is a thing of the past while they hand out half-day vacations & gift cards to Chick Fil A. Look, over there. A head, bobbing. No water, no lifeguards. Just bodies with breasts & thighs & unruly pubes, dying to get out.

🦬 Rosemary Royston

[buffalojournal]

cringebeast

let it be known that these pages grow larger than the sun and stretch out their palms as no one waits as bells ring at all hours as frogs are turned to glass

and as the dust collects on the years and grass howls in the wind the bellies of gods dissolve open and we come back here again and doors swing from their hinges and frog shards collect the sun.

🦬 Allen Seward

[buffalojournal]

You Had Time

I still love this.

Doesn’t this just make you want to breathe differently?

There was a time when I understood this song better than anyone should.

I wish this song wouldn’t end.

I don’t know what it is, but I can listen to this song on repeat for 5,231,255 years.

...

Source: comments on a video of Ani DiFranco’s song “You Had Time” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz2tChEEZn8 accessed July 2019)

🦬 Jessy Randall

[buffalojournal]

Times I think I was happy

The day FG and I walked from West Philly to Spruce Street Harbor and had ice cream floats / the Sunday I spent the whole day in bed with my cat / as a little girl floating face down in the Long Island Sound and pretending I drowned only to save myself by flipping over to take a big breath, and the sun dazzled my eyes in prism bursts while the water held me up / my 18th birthday before I started drinking and my friends and I had corn chips and sodas / the morning Kelly and I were recovering from a hangover and we watched the Great British Baking Show / when Shawn asked me to be his best man / my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party, reading their cake that had a paragraph written in frosting on the top mimicking their original vows / the night my friends and I smoked a bowl out of a hollowed out apple near a bonfire pit in Ocean Beach and fireworks went off right near us / the night I spent in the Smoky Mountains and felt entirely alone / discovering the word slubberdegullion / after I was released from the hospital and my neighbors left a vase filled with daffodils and a note that said “we’re here for you”/ the first time I fed a dog pizza crust / the night returning from Spruce Street Harbor with FG, when we watched movies until it turned to dawn / and when we finally fell asleep, we were holding hands.

🦬 Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

[buffalojournal]

An Index of Fears

A glass.

A trotting collie.

A hellish colleague.

A plastic antidepressant coating the earth’s single rib.

A static of hums growing from the moon’s encompassing lagoon.

A turquoise bottle revealing the interior space behind a thrumming vocal cavity.

An entropic mass coming over my I like a jellyfish cloud.

Cavities left in the detritus of a flailing mustang.

Cobalt outcrops covered in burlap pennants.

Mastic resin manifest as rustic mansions.

My dream that I am a crocodile, razor-toothed and spinning through the flesh of my prey.

My eye’s ribbon as I dove through fermenting fruit. A host of apricots, peaches, pears.

Shoe polish and the brown stain of its open contagion.

The buoyant rocks of a shallow river.

The crisis of a collapsing apsis.

The lessons I never learned from my immersions in ink.

The patter of collapsed teeth within the echo chamber of a lost book.

The radiant orchid.

The space of an O as it enacts the suspension of a raincloud.

The threads of your alien bubble.

The way a ruffled novel emits ribbons of hope and disease.

The way clauses visibly string from the corners of your mouth and puddle into a new solstice.

The way rooftops recede from the eye until they become a singular spine.

Your small yawn, a facsimile of pages from the absent book.

🦬 Connor Fisher

[buffalojournal]

When I Met Alice

More of your bones fall into the canyon. All the parts of you we made that night in Texas at the farewell dinner are lost. You promised never to lose those parts, but there they are in the dross with my lungs.

🦬 William Erickson