Red fish and honk

I Ain't Gonna Fight in a Rich Man's War

Hans Richter - Inflation (1928)

Network - Mad as hell

MAYBE...WE'RE DAMN CUTE?
WORDSMAYBEMUSIC
MAY 7
8PM
BLACK ROCK BAR
DETAILS IN POST BELOW

korean baby singing hey jude


...or this maybe...





DETAILED ANNOUNCEMENT BELOW

wordsmaybemusic: we don't know

A reminder to everyone:
I'm no graphic design artist but...

free for all
a super line-up of readers/performers
plus a special guest performer, maybe,

Jim---I heard him rapping on the El

and asked him, "please?"

he said "maybe"

May 7
8pm
Black Rock Bar
(they have food too!)
Reconstruction Room
(damen & addison)
wordsmaybemusic
curated by
beverly (please me) nelson

Free Flo Rapper: Jim (maybe)

and
Justin Cabrillos
Allison Gruber
A D Jameson
Meredith Clark
Karen Faith
Michelle Tupko
Gwenyth Anderson
Alex Jovanovich
Beverly Nelson
Devin King
Ira Murfin
Jeffrey Ediger
Jennifer Sporcich

not necessarily in this order
colors may vary

Come(oh yes come)join us in a game of intellectual leap-frogging or watch us fail in a state of drunken debauchery.
Either way, we will cause your brain to itch beneath your skull
and send you running out to buy a pair of tap shoes.
Undergrads be warned: we have no answer to your question:
Why get an MFA in writing?

(this is a poem, oh yes, by beverly nelson)
Please don't steal it. Okay?

nest,
beverly

--
"when the hermit [hummingbird] starts to build she must work wholly on the wing"

Notes: Thursday, 3/27/2008 The Lastmaker Performance
Goat Island at the MCA, Chicago

3/27/08 notes: taken at the performance
by beverly nelson
––––––––––

pivotal

maneuvering from inside a womb

parting while halved
a series of splits
pairs that lose then find
each other

a chorus of ten
black shoes squealing
a magpie gallops with
a neighing horse-ghost
jazz begins to play
start a metronome
www.rhythmtempo
syndromic syndrome
germs to avoid
flu-like symptoms of wrongness
I said in fact: metrodome

a faceless clock
doesn't tell its kept time
but five hearts beating
drip sweat

halved and halved again
you make canyons and rainbows
middling halving leaning bending
stirring you rise nesting round a globe
closing the distance of my sight
mapping the spotlights
then falling to embrace
the earth beneath the floor
scratches of leaps and slides

the wall isn't moved
falling half weak half in a fit
left to right left to right
rolling climbing struck contorted shifting
restless

chiasmic flight
running to the border
landing in the gutter
invoking fits
frenzied patriots
strike the pose
salute the walls
rally us to laugh to hope
to wear what doesn't fit

what are you carrying? chasing?
are you waving hello? or goodbye?
are you dying or living?
are you between earth and moon
at the same time risen and fallen?
are these the thoughts I should think?

And your black shoes on and on
stamping pivoting
then lie laced and footless
joined at the tongue

circular phases
the time it takes to remember
stories you built in me
the time it takes for one
tear to get swallowed in a laugh

sing to me

now

softly

clasp me like that
tight and shut in your palms
teach me a voiceless opera
to inhale the wind
with you our air we

imparting departing
parting no not one
but one cannot hold tight
or shut between
or breathe another's air
faceless timeless
not yet not yet

are we? so much? so little?

yes

I'm splitting apart

Cold
by beverly nelson

Sunday...Mostly sunny. Blustery. Very cold. Highs 4 to 8 above. Wind chills as low as 20 below to 30 below zero. Northwest winds 15 to 25 mph. Gusts up to 40 mph until late afternoon decreasing to 30 mph late in the afternoon.

Sounds like a post-post-modern translation of Shakespeare's King Lear purged of
rants and divine intervention. Language about weather, unlike the weather itself, settles calmly on the page like fallen crumbs underneath the table. Mindlessly we shuffle the words and numbers from day to day like herding the same cows back and forth from barn to pasture. It takes longer to get dressed. We stand in front of the closet trying to guess which side of the high rise at work the thermostat will favor today. It can't be expected to keep the entire 27 floors at an even temperature, it tips, the numbers tumble all to one side or the other like people on the Titanic. So you layer, beginning with a tank top and ending up with a wool turtleneck. Then you move on to the exterior, scarves, headband, hat, gloves, and finally a coat. This will get you safely to the car where you'll have to shovel and scrape before getting in, but once safe inside you'll begin to unlayer knowing that it will be at least an hour and forty minutes before you'll be out in the cold again with the way traffic is on the commute there. For an hour and forty minutes, your body and mind will relax, safe within the cozy manipulated environ of your personal automobile, music of choice cranked up, bumper to bumper,reality kept safely on the other side of the glass and steel, reality never reaching your skin.

I play with the announcements, apply literary theories of interpretation, reader/audience, and the like, mainly out of bitterness over class distinction, the haves and the have-nots at my disposal on the page in ways that prevent me in real life. Can I create an effect that will cause readers to never read the weather reports the same way again? Is it possible for me to shake their comfort a little the next time they sit warmly cocooned in their cars, driving on freeways expunged of the less fortunate? They'll see no homeless beggars on that path, no group of elderly and children waiting thirty minutes for their bus, no one toting a backpack to hike the ten blocks to get to work because there are no buses on that route.

4 to 8 degrees and 20 to 30 below zero. The continents have drifted, slid on this ball like silk on a thigh, moved with abandon like adolescent sex. Someone carelessly overlooks our existence like ants mixed in with the crumbs when the tablecloth gets shaken, we're deemed insignificant by a plan so vast we can't see it. Outside our universe someone decides it's time to blink, and our world shifts into the arctic zone, my world shifts into unmanageable fears hidden from the driver peeling off his jacket in his car careful not to spill his coffee in the holder,while the radio announces: "4 to 8 degrees outside, with a wind chill factor bringing us down to 20 to 30 below..."

The Cryonic Chants

Untitled
by beverly nelson

for The Last Performance


next myself after fall time opens
a twin tongue onward heights
for nextward we walk clouding
stack ruins
winsome filament
brittle twice till five or seven.
a quota I say but you
barking trains side down
each doglegged try unleaves sunset
ruses dimly kissed and still
sound your stringed instrument
your somber gourds with lilacs
run fingers plucking eyebrows
a quota says more than this
lift my skirts to find the
second wife's dream lost doubling
game two again.