inter/linear

10.24.05

Clayton A. Couch
OFFSPRING

1. On to a second wind, which is what fire consumes in its maw of
blue. Territories burned in the process, scribbled across lame-brain
attempts at oneiromancy.

2. In between buildings, cigarette smoke clouds any sense of fried, or
freed, weather. All the eyes are turned off.

3. Can you weaken a middle class? When words get lost in mumbles,
there are hidden recorders waiting to clarify the situation.

4. A poem hopes for a day when such devices are disabled or
eliminated, when the cranes and bulldozers no longer start. At this
hour, there are no legs at home.

5. I think he glued that phone to his ear in order to call in sick for
the rest of life's pursuit. The white lilies overwhelm noses into sneezing
fits and starts.

6. What speech could be so vital that it requires the Secretary of
Defense to deliver it? "Our country doesn't go to another country
because they want to take it over. And that message gets out;
eventually that message gets out."

7. Life of dark places, and pines bend for the waves. How to soothe
what cannot be comforted?

8. Acting! Let me write you a check, amount to be announced later.
This paper bandages any cuts and scrapes which may have accumulated
under the culture. Dana Gioia in a suit on PBS.

9. Shortness of breath and hypertension. The hours when everything was
potential have been labeled "For Emergency Use Only" by expert
witnesses, and they're not giving in to apprentices who go by smell.

10. Demographics have consigned our fate to one part in 500 million,
or 8 to 9 billion, depending upon how masochistic you like your world
in the morning. Can I still fly my flag?

11. Don't. Don't make me do it. Or if you cannot keep the bridge from
buckling, at least let the sleep hide out by the rocks. There the
steam prevents statistical analysis, and dragonflies mate by the
dozens.

12. Newspapers, and a report against working for free.

13. Every morning, something's slightly off. Kitchen overhead light
blinks. Ice on the floor. You're licking and meowing for more.

14. Where day starts. Where day starts.

15. Make a career out of opening other people's mail, reading love
letters from an earlier century or claiming the balance on someone's
student loan.

16. Like they say, guard your angels. United and unsteady, the truce
was something of a farce, as truces go.

17. Wrong zip code. What is to do, to do? Somewhere in the middle of
speech, I quit thinking and started quivering.

18. Puzzles broken and swept up in the mood.

19. The channels switch with no agency, and nature — the freak —
disappoints with its endless supply of stormclouds. About face.

20. Evening, sir. They're trying to convince you that everything's
cool, that your heart isn't starving. I know better.

21. The rush to. To get at blue, even the expense of banning books.
Severe, in sensing that the complex is enamored of its own comfort.

22. Where have all the birds gone? Turning over, over. New ways to
say, to question why the low pressures deflect. These reasons dig
holes in waterlogged ground, itching forth to seize unseen tunnels
carved out by voles.

23. Portrayal tends to escape through the hairs on his head. The job
rubs joints the wrong way, and can't stand to see the boss so close.
Maybe at home.

24. Dodder. My friends, this train blows chlorine. Clouds poison
electoral college, which stinks of its own juices.

25. What we can retrieve are the bones. On the sea floor, along the
gliding rays.

26. News of what you've become. The party starts when we drive into
town: we expect the celebratory. There is no other logic to keep us
close.

27. Quick, it's gone.

28. When we know it's illusion, rhythms imitate dark. In the back of
the brain, dreams are received, speaking science, out of creation.

29. Yonder wane. Collective lust of cities in revolt, and black hair
brushes against. As it's spoken.

A SONNET FOR THE MATHEMATICALLY CHALLENGED

Write to the null set. They jiggle in indeterminate postures,
arrow pursuit and fortune. Preset on sphere of lightning,
comedy of gun-toting anger management refugees
whistle robots' feeding time. A few behavioral modifications;
desertion of techno-progress Protestant project: what is not
a mere sliver of afterlife generates an attack of indigestion.
If the wilderness weren't doubled over, we'd claim cavity.
The cute jabber holy drama; these cares only matter to fools.
There sleeps an exhausted poseur for the old tribal evidence,
a curious all-you-can-eat spiritual buffet, one that does
little to solve the perpetual problems of appetite and desire.
Rather, confront the trick of mystery. Stay loose in certitude,
raw wound. Weather plays a part in the encircling suspicion.

MOST WANTED

Mustard gas thought pattern
scrawled on the bedrock wall.
Scanner collects intellect proper,
and pepper spray turns emotions
inside out. Fugitive poetics.

One turns two to sawdust.
Wait, sting waist. Wasting. Say
postal development. Rush
stamps. Placed envelopes;
crumbled wing, a country full.

Legal characters, critic
writes a journal for the next
physics. For you, window gaze —
office games I can't work.
Ignorance is a cancelled

preacher. Urban liberal excites.
Back on the bigot, edited
microbiology rushes, deters
surplus. The tax structure
predetermines economic
slash and burn implosion.
Advisor to Central Intelligence
inhales molecular acid
for breakfast. Psychology
observer says, "No dice."

10.07.05

Camille Martin
double yous

one’s body imagines all the adjectives
for an empty name to be of use,
creates a cold candidate’s hunger

to observe shell-pink sparrows
lost in a world of refracted objects. wind,
earthquake have come to this: opening

the mouth then forgetting one in their mundane
lament. the shape of a window fills the frame
beyond which dumb skies in a scherzo,

a situation to be expected with a word only
within red. unhappy eyes contain rain
outside oneself. to see exactly is a map

where one reaches a path in which to be
blank, one’s glance becoming and becoming, no
details as if light and one lived in one

plural shadow: metaphors to revive the extinct.
currents wrench upward, and in a dream
bunches of wet violets recently of the world

rhyme with icy weight. tainted echoes
await ocean or country, so to decipher
packages, files, and summaries, musics

begin, each shifting the ground
where one necessarily sleeps
paralyzed and alert, each morning

deriving one moon’s color from under the skin.
the self means wearing it inside one’s eyes.
one doubles oneself gazing at tree tops,

a superb distance from which to forestall
the slipping away of a broken consort
as one speaks for the first time.

seas

the witness is a brute of cold proportions. certain spots,
much smaller than syllable, than pollen, break apart
in the chill and become one’s name, burdened with one

dying in the occasioned gap. now simplicity begins
with a receptacle of light. salt simple. now a stamped
property made of paper and sound, instant memories

of little use. one dances parts together and new habits
bubble up from one little complex, wobbly place
to another. now one believes in what happens

near the soil, a nuisance of delayed flecks, flower
and patterns of flower, in dust. afterimage, unintentional
embers in limbo. all one’s matter contains one with mock

carelessness, unwisely staying in, coming in from
the cold, spinning all directions in standard weather.
pollen that in one that happens that at the center

that not centered, wide open in one another’s clarity,
worth stains and stiffness. strange things full of facts,
like one’s desperate stories, hold it up

to the holding it up to tell over and over what one believes
one knows, reinventing the harsh light into itself, into one’s
watery name and untrained stories. illustrated version:

a blue-green architecture glimpsed through muddy windows,
a dialogue between dying seconds and wild particulars,
a forgotten scheme, corrupted in the first and impossible act

of vital organs. if one loved one knew not what with exotic
premonitions, if touching the always unfamiliar face
of another, if reinventing the consciousness of one and another’s

places as floating masses, if planets on a boat whispered just in time
to halt departing thoughts, if camouflaged in arbitrary echoes.
one holds to the drama of the dead. one might even allow

for weather one has already met far from home at the bottom
of steps. if no one’s home to know fire all over again, the same
every time though other to itself, though sealed as a breath.

i see bridge

being a viewer, one experiences a failure
to outthink in the street in the hollow air
even one visible egg. a legible edge goes farther

without defect into “twine” or “mice” or “dark lake”
to begin one’s disintegrating possession from glass
to dirt. how can falling apart possibly go wrong

when one lucid point calms the water. one owns
one’s named stars with antiseptic currency,
wearing them out, naming the hovering

in the asylum whirlpool in order to sing oneself
blind, zeroing in on one’s eyes, unprepared
to jettison vacancy. reform starlight nothing. one

can’t decide or say, incurable speech too late to embrace
context. one leaves the study of floor variations
to bare feet without a thought, elbows on breezes,

breath tracing a song’s fragments from shape
to shape, to flex the monotone, being comfortable
with loss, tearing the seals in advance of an image.

chatter like numberless rice grains scatters
in the notorious but radiant gap in the dark, waiting
for a rough appearance to pause in space long enough

to become burdened with a fool’s event. who’d
want it anyway during a flood of present light. already
a thing like a lark against an open field

terrifies one’s intentions, and aberrations rush in
to rescue effortless dialogues. one
would want, just in case, to recreate the velocity

of retreating objects, the branch in every corner,
the soothing banners. one would want to be coaxed,
like one’s blind twin, in from the pretend rain.

why home

i make a map to the place i want to move back to,
an alarming amnesty scheduling the picturesque
and forming chains around the insistence of my memory

on a soft, dirty sky, a game of killing language to settle
what’s to be in place, of standing for a framework
even as that framework pries chunks from the pavement

because the words, formerly unknown, can’t separate
rapidly enough to drift around a planet of junk. my nostalgia
for endless water on the continent flickers, knowing nothing

of the original. tools bloom and the eye blots and records less
a figurative parade than images of ruin.
i’d like to play capture somewhere in a dream

of languorous gardens with the smell of iron precision
and decayed houses on a dull afternoon, to wave life process
like a banner, this one and that one becoming a church,

a system of flowers, a prison of holes. something legible’s
never satisfied, a code of generosity in its armature,
infinitesimal colors and hands coaxed into vowels alive

against a ground faded and cracked, breathing
a necessarily surgical sky, tracing rags by dint
of a practiced highway. beasts at least have

velocity, collectively swaying, evanescent in their nests,
while nocturnal gambles eat away at greenbelts, persuading
place to be only the wind disturbing the commas

of old hills in a mythological future and rehearsed
butterflies laden with historic folly, a contagion of multiple
breezes through which birds of trafficality slacken

in the dusk, changing shatter to unshatter and back again,
living on the cusp. on the road, one bird more or less
glides across my windshield, a vacant buffer

against being there already.

cues

he shatters even running who
in his mind of continually imagined
error lives close to a brailled geography

groping through gusts of interpretations
cannot be diminished given
that his scruples have narrowed his footing

with or without conspiracy to stagger
air. his ethics is / is not rhythmically
its gratitude and dislocation as an unfilled

mixture energizing congeries of actions mis-
placed is certainly what our awareness player
in the face of every such hypothesis

and not speaking in current days
of the assembled identity rather
to loop a spot in the lowest ordinary

place steadily supporting his inscribed
nakedness—excluding his belief
a certainty voluntarily continues.

in his individual judgment
of common tasks surviving
to propose an isolated and silent

degradation at so fruitfully
materializing yet not agape
could reach to his last fragile

aloneness in the scuffle.
using pulleys and whistles
to survive where an artificial covenant

of thirst before time’s redundant
collapse he can’t decide or wants
to be given in detail if only the plot

melting into his moves. he who
like a ghost expands a secession
of larks at the edge of a slanted old

country and bending before his returning
footsteps glance upon its waters
in constant coincidence

with the way his hands and feet
at the bottom of a new question
uncovered a little past the break of day

reflecting the many-faceted atmosphere,
a shiny new country into which
his developing bird species are loosed.

a bee’s eyes

a “heavenly harp” weaves a combining spell,
is golden, absent, free of ashes
but no longer attached, a city ringing

with pale flowers in the familiar air, where
has never existed the instant of sleep
that tears a fabled way filled with sounds

somewhat known, merging coincidentally into
experience that might have been, moment
to moment, something like an alphabetic bird,

uncalled for, released into the gust,
a solemn happening spreading its storm
and barely tellable in the stylized atomosphere.

the same branches that bear beads
of belief in spring for lovers, bear
inherently disappointing imaginary

keys by which the marsh maples, flaming
in the sun, unify the unique but forgotten spell
of the violently emerging subject. above one

the substance of death flutters
at the upper surface, wishing for solid stones of
otherness, for completion with no name, for restless

depths where it can move as far as
the spells and the spills, the affairs
of a flimsy animal robbed of winter. if one

can’t look, one blinks, running away
from the painted message that continually falls
away so that one might replace it

with lightning or confusion, a historical
randomness is all, keeping shorelines shredded
in the pendulous spring, whatever makes

one’s words finally ordinary, walkable,
spelling their blunt swoons, oblivious
in the voluntary climate.

09.09.05

rob mclennan

shrapnel

for derek beaulieu

                                the body, gives
                                out
                                        : twinkle

a star a

wash

oh baby

                        the cut
                                        : of jibness
                        glib
                                in the act

tailor delays
the free-fall

/ hardest cut

complaint

a tree-trunk

axe

laden, heavy

gives

& takes away:

a tear

blood work done to sort the cells

an imitation of pleasure
of text on his/her lover’s abdomen

would we write this ?

conscript the lines

the draft, close the door
to incoming

against their own will

to testify against the fact

hard-ball is played

a tether on a stick

a limitless purse:

the day we entered, the two towers
of light

full-blossoming, & strange

a cut the artery

moreover & whatnot

a convict’s pleasure, hands
waving

the soundtrack of a city
Chicago

                                                : poems
                                                : band
                                                : musical

is, where

he wanted to go

                                        the figure, full
                cut
                        an extension

identifying marks

a skin
a bone

these things edify our selves

a cold brutality

pen is less sharp
pencil

fatherless muse, bastard
eggs on the drive

out the bay
of windows

bone

things go

madness

jihad

on overdrive

slice the heart

thin

skin

outdoor

mayonnaise

into

the noise of Bluebeard
when you’re the one

would that be, a

chance at

in belonging,

would

not like anything left
reduced

panoptic

her medals in the glass case

same weight as a cookbook

03.12.05

Interview with Meredith Quartermain
(conducted by e-mail from July 2003 to December 2004)

Meredith Quartermain’s books and chapbooks include Terms of Sale (Meow, 1996),
Spatial Relations (Diaeresis, 2001), Inland Passage (housepress, 2001), A Thousand
Mornings (Nomados, 2002), The Eye-Shift of Surface (greenboathouse books, 2003)
and Vancouver Walking (to be published by NeWest Press in spring 2005). With
Robin Blaser, she recently completed a series of poems, entitled Wanders (Nomados,
2002). A long poem Matter is forthcoming from Chax, and her collection of four
long poems “Highway 99” appeared as STANZAS #35 (above/ground press, 2003).
Her work has also appeared in Matrix, Canadian Literature, Prism International,
ecopoetics, Queen Street Quarterly, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Raddle
Moon, Chain, Sulfur, Jacket, and other magazines. She is co-editor with Jacqueline
Turner of The News at www.interchange.ubc.ca/quarterm/TheNews.htm, and
founder, with husband Peter, of the small press Nomados.

rob mclennan: Your publishing over the years seems to have been furtive, almost
secretive; a broadsheet here, a chapbook there, almost as though you are
cultivating an absence. With the recent collaborative Wanders (with Robin Blaser),
and A Thousand Mornings, both published by your Nomados, you seem to be placing
yourself deliberately, à la jwcurry or Maxine Gadd, as someone whose work is
difficult to find unless you know the author. How deliberate is this?

Meredith Quartermain: It might be a good idea to clarify what my "publishing
over the years" has been. In 1996 Meow Press in Buffalo (buffalo meow, as
Lawrence Upton joked, introducing me in London) published my first chapbook of
poems, Terms of Sale. This book is still available through SPD as far as I know. In
1997, I started a long project which is still unfolding, called The Book of Words. In
1998, Keefer Street brought out 100 copies of the first section, Abstract Relations.
Then Diaeresis in Florida brought out the second section, Spatial Relations (2001 —
still available, by ordering on-line) and Chax is set to bring out the third section,
Matter. It is quite difficult in Canada (especially if you live far from Toronto or
Montreal) to publish writing that explores new formalities. I self-published Abstract
Relations and more recently A Thousand Mornings — both are prose poems —
mainly because I simply did not know of any Canadian publisher who would take
such work. However, it is getting somewhat easier. housepress brought out Inland
Passage in 2001 and greenboathouse published The Eye-Shift of Surface in 2003.
And now above/ground is doing Highway 99. So I'm beginning to find Canadian
connections.

[ more . . . ]

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