Journal 3: Bruce Bond - "White" Improv

Look at her, strawberry
blonde eyeing a distance measured
in the shapes emptiness takes
between now and here.

The hung-low lip of a cloud
mutters a prayer for rain &
her wet shirt will bear it,
delicate as they are, as she
knows i am.

Got a light?
i'll linger a little.

Journal 3: Bruce Bond - "Diet of Angels" Improv

Caught in the endless turn
of triages, a climate of steel
reminding me of hot rum, the medication
that flowed from thought to thought
to pain from thought. The nurses,
lulling me into a thread of beds like
good spiders do, do not know
the shape i'm in, the wreath i am
the twisted sum of thorazine.

Journal 3: Corey Marks - "Little Bird" Improv

Kat flips on the breathing machine,
struggles to know peace. Trembling comes
to her in this nightly ritual, this thing
the doctor ordered her. Smoking, she's more
still, calm; the things we call ourselves at
our best when we're not the ones dying,
collapsing into what lungs were before
they were lungs.

Happiness is a hummingbird, tricked to the
nectar in a plastic flower by the porch door. In the end
all that moves is the creak of the puzzle table,
the whip of a straightened Sunday paper, and a disapproving
cough returns my grandmother to me.

Journal 3: Corey Marks - "The Empty Theater" Improv

Karen doesn't know how to drink wine.
Frailty, to her, is a disposition a dis-ease, not
the intended nuance of holding a glass stem.
No, wine isn't poured in her mouth it's
guzzled, sucked; flung back like a brick
she holds a bottle of Yellowtail like
she holds a dick she strangles it.

Journal 3: Corey Marks - "Loss" Improv

Sex comes like train horns
                  and a knotful throat. Fuck, I

think: my old god is watching, videotaping
                  every insurrection I've had and

quickly forgotten. Sex today is like larping,
                  some stupid toy for this generation's

too-clean hands--their dainty infant claws
                  open, yes, but flat like the story

behind their stories. Poetry today? A shuddering
                  tryhard chaos of aesthetics, reminders

of my illiteracy. Sex, then, I guess, is lost on
                  hipsters, those empty venti cups like

fuckless orgies.

Improv - Heather McHugh, "Language Lesson 1976"

oh,
see
Dee?
she
loves
me
death dying destruction dis
ease
me
to
sleepin in
raw power
no place left
too hid
den of lions
i speak
in tongues
licking palettes
in smokestack mouths 

Improv - Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "Canticle with Sea Worm"

i can't hear the hymn so well
a hastening of death clots it
like the minced bone bits,
sleeping on the ocean.

mom, what's happened?
you've taken to resting
a wiggling babe on your chest
did i too struggle for the slow crawl
of freedom? or was i just the

bare rawness of asthma & infection.
I'm still smoking,
your boy touched by an angel
and tapped on the spine by a needle
bigger than me
bigger than god.