Two Poems by Cathy Park Hong
Engines within the Throne
We once worked as clerks
scanning moth-balled pages
into the cloud, all memories
outsourced except the fuzzy
childhood bits when
I was an undersized girl with a tic,
they numbed me with botox.
I was a skinsuit
of dumb expression, just fingerprints
over my shamed
all I wanted was snow
to snuff the sun blades to shadow spokes,
muffle the drum of freeways, erase
the old realism
but this smart snow erases
nothing, seeps everywhere,
the search engine is inside us,
the world is our display
and now every industry
has dumped cubicles, desktops,
fax machines into developing
worlds where they stack
them as walls against
what disputed territory
we asked the old spy who drank
with Russians to gather information
the old-fashioned way,
now we have snow sensors,
so you can go spelunking
in anyone’s minds,
let me borrow your child
thoughts, it’s benign surveillance,
I can burrow inside, find a cave
pool with rock colored flounder,
and find you, half-transparent
with depression.
A Wreath of Hummingbirds
I suffer a different kind of loneliness.
From the antique ringtones of singing
wrens, crying babies, and ballad medleys,
my ears have turned
to brass.
They resurrect a thousand extinct birds,
Emus, dodos, and shelducks, though some,
like the cerulean glaucous macaw,
could not survive the snow. How heavily
they roost on trees in raw twilight.
I will not admire those birds,
not when my dull head throbs, I am plagued
by sorrow, a green hummingbird eats me alive
with its stinging needle beak.
Then I meet you. Our courtship is fierce
in a prudish city that scorns our love,
as if the ancient laws of miscegenation
are still in place. I am afraid
I will infect you
after a virus clogs the gift economy:
booming ...
Robot Literature by Angelo Plessas

Angelo Plessas, from Untitled Portrait Gallery, 2009
Double Faced
For those who Know Best their mirror,
a Conspiracy revolves around.
Silence from behind devours a relic from the past.
Life is usually attached to lengths of magnetic fields.
You might be Emerging as something else.
I might Switch Back. All I wish is that when I start up,
my life will be OkaY
Around us
Keep, Art was Stolen By a Masked man in thong.
I thank Obama because he\’s black,
he said We love Colors.
You are feeling suicidal now please stop.
Apocalyptic, I contemplate the Universe around us.
elated quilt
elated quilt establishes despairingly
victorious coma becomes elatedly
thoughtful income clips deprecatively
beautiful sidewalk checks long-windedly
combative pie cracks giddily
crowded haircut buzzes dazzlingly
quaint answer enhances garishly
A TYPICAL DAY OF DALI AND GALA
DALI, materialized in a apartment. Many persons in a single body. It was the
sixth game of attention. Behaving scarcely angered, DALI punched a ninja star,
but this certainly didn't encourage DALI deciding what to do in smart way. Out of
nowhere, DALI hoped that DALI's marginal fidelity is to be perpetually positive,
because hatred is born out of fear. Unconsciously DALI emailed GALA, DALI's
neighbor/accomplice 'Free yourself from common sense', said DALI. DALI must
have seen GALA for 20 hours in Tahrir square during the Revolution some of
them were modest diabolical and empirical inspirations. GALA was a nobody.
Many persons outside a single body. Between the line of black and white. GALA
was outgoing more or less... pestering. DALI called GALA 'Somebody has to
listen to me' he said. 'These are the symptoms of the liberal-democratic affluent
society', said DALI.
GALA hypnotized by lazy DALI. 'Why and for whom does philosophy work today
?' , said GALA. GALA ...
Two Poems by Christine Kelly

Christine Kelly, Apple 1 is an apple. Apple 2 is the idea of an apple, 2011
One or More Occasions
If the diviner,
when he wakes up to the sound
of his own trumpet,
or presents the
MUST-HAVE
in moonlight, the wrong kind of bottle
we belong in the monosyllabic new
the diviner won’t embarrass
on fear of exits (this and an absence of such
fear are both aphrodisiacs)
stone cold absence
then the diviner becomes crooked
a bendy-neck swan totem stands in for
subjectivity
and
a subjective everything
features:
feature: handle
features:
feature: permanent hat
and guess what
this is a timeslot
a clutter among others
at which we marvel occasionally
sink
into clean and empty
sing about the full
about means around
or in proximity to
timespace designations. Hey,
take it like a spittoon.
sink
into the bloated order of cause and effect—
cranial piping is how I arrived
at permanent hat, actually
resembling a column of smoke
puff
puff
puff
puff
coming out of the diviner’s hat
I Baroque It
“DOES sport imply sanctity?” was a sporting question, which through no extension
other than the yawny, tragic phonetiks surrounding someone’s (I bet) snowmobile accident…
…less likely than a skiing accident,
more likely than a competitive taffy pull filling the interior of a milk hood shared by two school chums
with vacuum trident
tongues
hitchedup.
Early incidence of dual ownership can create loquaciousness so drippy that it requires a dish.
OBLITERATE WET GENEROSITY
-----towel towels-----
Shan’t discuss human sexual attraction in this one, but know, just know, know what you know,
when you hear those angels trumpeting: oxygen. 100% oxygen hands slip in from behind.
$527 Cobra Quiz [win again and again]
Cobra the yogic asana.
Cobra the health insurance for poor sods.
Cobra ...
"Two Days Diary" by Lisa Oppenheim

Alexandra Gorczynski, Bathroom in the Dark, 2011
March 23rd, 2011
Early mornings were never my thing. I mean, it’s not that artists are lazy. Or out drinking late most nights. Or not out last night, a Tuesday. Hungover. I go out with the dog. It’s still basically dark. A kind of dark blue fog, super cold and grey. A couple are out early, two middle aged men bundled up and both smoking with thick leather gloves. They are sitting on a bench in front of the takeout place on the corner. It’s way too cold to be sitting outside. I hear one say to the other as I pass them, “do you want the thing or the other thing.” And I think, this is true partnership, to have thoughts coalesce around the same object. Not a shared thought, but a coming together. The muffin or the bagel. Privileging someone else’s desires for a subjectless thing. Generosity. Just as likely the better looking half of an egg and cheese sandwich. I go in the store and order one for myself. Salt and grease.
Today in 1923 Tennessee became the first state to outlaw the teaching of evolution. Today in 1933 the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, granting Hitler total power. Fittingly, today is miserable. Still basically dark, hail. The never ending domino fall of winter storms.
March 29th, 2011
I live in America’s most bug infested city. There are bug infested mattresses all around my neighborhood this evening. It’s trash night and everyone has put the big stuff on the curb. Not just bug-ridden mattresses, also rugs, rotting Ikea cushions from a few seasons back, clothes of all kinds. I drop off my sheets at the laundry across the street and six o ...
"Excerpt from my Novel Screenburn" by Lance Wakeling

I start by looking for images of parking lots. I’m thinking about finding the perfect image, or making one. I have to see an image of a parking lot with over-layed text that reads “Social Network.”
Then I move on to looking at images under the term crash. There are cartoon characters, crash dummies, airplanes in pieces, bodies, stills from the movie, cymbals, explosions. I open a new tab: Wikipedia – Crash. I’m redirected to collision.
A collision is an isolated event in which two or more moving bodies exert relatively strong forces on each other for a relatively short time. ¶ Collisions can be elastic, meaning they conserve energy and momentum, inelastic, meaning they conserve momentum but not energy, or totally inelastic (or plastic), meaning they conserve momentum and the two objects stick together.
It’s this last type of collision that interests me most, the totally inelastic one—when the two colliding objects merge into one and conserve momentum.
While cruising through the images I’m collecting, I think of Jean Baudrillard and then J.G. Ballard, retracing steps that I took three years ago, all in perfect recall. I make a new folder called parking-lots and drop in images with filenames like 5781586-aerial-view-of-an-empty-parking-lot, grantham-parking-lot-0951, Lot, Tel_Aviv_parking_lot, and zoo_lot2-750149.
It’s getting dark outside and my terminal is bathing this corner of the room and the front side of my knuckles in bluish light. My fingernails dimly reflect the screen. All the tiny parallel ridges reflect light in opposing directions, causing the reflection to appear matte.
I get up from my desk, look out the window, decide not to close the drapes, turn around and glance at the cat, then sit back down. My fingernails are long and hit the keys before the pads of my fingers. I ...
Shu Lea Cheang on Brandon
Letter from the Poetry Editor
Letter from the Poetry Editor
1) Several people have asked me about submitting videos of readings, or video works where words appear as images. The Wordworks series is mainly about writing, rather than performance, video, or other mediums. Any submission should have a core of text that people don't have to press "play" to read. I welcome the inclusion of diverse media objects in submissions as complements to text, but not as replacements of it.
2) Submissions should be able to fit in a Rhizome blog post, without requiring readers to go to another site to read it. I'm aware of the strong traditions of electronic literature, hypertext, interactive fiction, etc., where writers make use of the entire browser window, from the background color to the forward and back buttons. I read and enjoy works like that, but for Wordworks I'm looking for writing that does not exceed the format of the post. This is just an arbitrary decision that I have made in order to maintain continuity throughout the series.
Thanks for reading and responding!