new from above/ground press: NOISE, by Jordan Davis

NOISE
Jordan Davis
$5

SHOOTING FOR THE LAST DAYS IN MAY
(2ND TAKE)

Selfsame trawling the wholecloth expense
barging for the too-long roiling quick
documentary’s earned orchestral maundy
song or something somehow this furnished
azure attitude destroyed untotally
by miracle of overhearing chamomile
to soothe the interest and witch
a tan upon my friends so gifted
at having friends, o lug me
into your cherry-dawdled spanking
as a wish wants to be a person but is a wish.
It wants to be female DNA
having lived long enough
as geometric proofs of the identity
of my fear of thought
which produces litter (aye!
Undo your hearing aid) out
of love again, a speedy amaryllis.


AFTERWORD

Reading Noise, I kept wanting to ask something facile like “Is this what it would be like if Frank O’Hara raised kids?,” but that might only be because I know its author has: they don’t have unmistakable walk-on roles in many of these poems, though I might not be looking hard enough. What I mean is, roughly: what becomes of the (mostly) urban flaneur when the project of self-creation comes under pressure from what an earlier bohemia might have viewed as the mundane imposition of commitments to care? Even that makes it sounds like I think O’Hara didn’t care about his family of choice, which is another reason the thought is facile. I don’t know that Jordan Davis thinks of his poems in these terms at all: asking, after all, isn’t the done thing. But I have my suspicions: one commends procreation to the beloved. But even that poem, persuasive and apparently plainspoken, is called “Periphrase,” and it’s no accident that “steganography,” which I had to look up, appears elsewhere. Whether a given poem foregrounds a readily legible mise en scene (“The Coke Machine at the Time Share”) or the play of image, aphorism, and knockabout sonics (“The mime and the gnome trade memes”), something here – or someone, and not necessarily the poet – needs and deserves protection. Either way, this noise is mostly signal.    --Franklin Bruno

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2023
as part of above/ground press’ thirtieth anniversary
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Jordan Davis’s second collection, Shell Game, was published by Edge Books in 2018; his third book, Yeah, No, will be published by MadHat in 2023. Recent work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, The Canary, and American Poetry Review. He lives in Brooklyn and works in the financial services industry.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS IN YOUR MOUTH, by Franklin Bruno

ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS IN YOUR MOUTH
Franklin Bruno
$5

SOFT CRACK STAGE


215˚F

Dripping through a bed of gypsum,
the halo on the Cave of Antiparos
gives information, not equivalence.
We commonly speak of all sorts of things
as being harder or softer than others:
a servantless house, the busiest friends,
tinted coconut, a cursor fitted
with a screw lock.  A scissors dipped
in butter determines the force
at which the tip destroys the couverture,
the "Z"-shaped dab atop the opera cream.
After hours of exertion I found myself
gloved to the elbows in brown, sticky goo.

I blamed it on the fact that I couldn't read French.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
September 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Franklin Bruno is the author of The Accordion Repertoire (poetry, Edge Books), the chapbooks MF/MA (Seeing Eye) and Policy Instrument (Lame House), and Armed Forces (criticism, in Continuum/Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series). He has released 20 albums of original songs as one-third of Nothing Painted Blue, under his own name, and (currently) as frontman of The Human Hearts. Raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire, he now lives and writes in Jackson Heights, Queens.

This is Bruno’s second chapbook with above/ground press, after Clinging & Grasping (2021).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

new from above/ground press: Clinging & Grasping, by Franklin Bruno

Clinging & Grasping
Franklin Bruno
$5

Anamorphic Table

I crossed the room and the room stayed self-
Identical, although it had changed.

I went outside, though only briefly,
And found it pleasant, also only briefly.

Dusk, still air. What we need’s a Shazam
For plant life. My father was afraid of fog.

So was mine. I think about his colleague
In a sanatorium, wonder how to contact

His daughter who cares for a schoolmate
Who fell off a mountain. “I am not feeling

Myself today.” But how would you know?
It’s a trick: a room is not an entity.

Dice connect two fields of mathematics:
Solid geometry and probability. Each face

Must be equally likely to come up
And this constrains their design.

The regular polyhedra, of which there are five,
Are elegant traditional solutions.

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
April 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Franklin Bruno is the author of The Accordion Repertoire (poetry, Edge Books), the chapbooks MF/MA (Seeing Eye) and Policy Instrument (Lame House), and Armed Forces (criticism, in Continuum/Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series). He has released 20 albums of original songs as one-third of Nothing Painted Blue, under his own name, and (currently) as frontman of The Human Hearts. Raised in Southern California’s Inland Empire, he now lives and writes in Jackson Heights, Queens. A second chapbook through above/ground press is forthcoming.

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com