where is the river :: a poetry experiment

Hannah Rodabaugh :: Some poems Manahil Bandukwala :: Four poems Amanda Earl :: Three poems from Syn Jamie Sharpe :: Four poems Aaron Tucker:: "O/Ô"

Greater Short-tailed Bat, 1965 There is only one photograph of you that we Know of in existence—            it's 1965—            grimy—a biologist Holds you—            your wings distorted behind you—            a kill of Stamina folded out of you—            that you Lived as bats did Before that moment—              where in the Glare of the camera flash—            you are Weakened—              that it drained you of any life you Knew up until that moment— Where you look delicate and broken— Already extinct. I Need You to Build a Tomb for 3.5 Billio...

this body, desire antidote to fretting. bliss that colours the sun. pain has a reputation for beauty. turquoise is a sure sign of a bruise: nerve endings, amethyst in the blood imperial. to be intimate is mystical: intricate designs in the dream cortex in red coral. notoriously subjective. an ecstasy of shirred silk over bone. reeks. an old soul with an infinite life span caged in mortal bone disguise: skin, hair, pink lips. uncorked from dark glass ideals. each drop is pointed light behind the knee,   on the right shoulder, on the left, on the nape of the neck. I want to touch you but you don’t know who I am. you insist on belonging and I will never. Sleep isn’t encre de Chine lamp-black and still in the small hours. I’d love to say it’s a peaceful garden where flowers of the night are velour and jasmine-scented. I’d like to believe that sleep does no harm. In the formless dark, a lurid magisterium of fears and despair undermines the day’s achie...

All Leech Diet New, fat-free, addiction. After death life isn’t matter. What Vicodin fiend craves ice-cream? Hunger for acclaim, paychecks, publishing in The Walrus . Tusks stick me. I’m eager to staff underpaid interns baring Kraft Dinner for breakfast. Sushi schmutz on fat whiskers. Eskimo kisses leave their mark. Bloody genius, dimes in your hand spring dollars but they’re spent. Pall Got good at getting society’s creature comforts without participating. Damned if I can fill the TD1 Personal Tax Credits Return . It’s clammy here under this communal blanket. Semaphored Hello To the Ivory Lighthouse Given endless expression you matter in aggregate, served on uniform sheets. These rocks are comfortable. Flash me a gangplank and I’ll find my waterbed. This is the signal for heavy, freezing spray . I want to say I’m lost in this fog but I’m lost in this fog. While Coach Plays the Back Nine at Pebble Springs Cheerleaders, blin...

The earliest reasonably successful computer translators of language were trained on the Canadian parliamentary Hansard. Because Canada is an officially bilingual country, the Hansard is in both French and English and so computer programmers used the texts as a sort of Rosetta Stone to train their machine translators. This project uses the Google translate camera function to translate the French and English Hansard proceedings for the day that O Canada/Ô Canada was officially adopted as the Canadian national anthem. Still thinking through the theory of this, as concrete poetry, as photographs, as computer layering, language layering, as it relates to national identity, the languages not spoken or translated as well. Aaron Tucker is the author of two books of poetry,  irresponsible mediums  (BookThug, 2017) and  punchlines  (Mansfield Press, 2015), as well as the forthing coming novel  Y  (Coach House Books, 2018). He has also written tw...

Simulus | You sit in a box but leave your room to walk down to the grocery store | You pick up three cans of mead and a chocolate bar | Our boxes collide outside on the street | We talk till the midafternoon sun rises tomorrow and make plans to collide again | One night you take me into your box | I take off my shirt and you see a series of lines and codes | I am constructed entirely out of numbers and you kiss ones and zeroes all over my back | You turn me around just in time to see me glitch then disappear | My last words echo through your box - 01101001  00100000  01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101  00100000  01111001 01101111 01110101 Rainymood Hot shower where you just stand there as water scalds your back, massage prickly legs with aloe vera, thick socks with a hole in the left toe, fleecelined pants, no bra, turtleneck shirt to hold you...