From The Brownstone Review

THE STRANGER

Consider life's billion anxious
gulps of oxygen, smog porridge
sucked ad nauseam. If a wily

Camus invites us to agree
that Sisyphus is happy, I'm
satisfied to dream Camus'

Algeria: super-heated sands
hemming the Mediterranean,
and a raucous newborn

gleaming with slime, a just-plucked
shell held high into the sun. Her
nomad-father's rutted palms

obliterate all light, his desert-
dimmed eyes squinting to find
stripes, moles, stigma, signs—

imperfections to justify
a drowning. No surprise. Just too few
dried figs, no gods or fires

driving them forward, into the sea,
ancient terrors, shallow waters
heaving salt, fish, history.

© Susan Wallack 1995

More from Columbia Poetry Review

DEAR GR

dear gr

etchen. hellos. i was
just now mentioning
to Pietyr of Left
Bank fame, you
know; it is 12:46 &
                            the play re
                            sumed with Lolita
                            in the role of Carl
                            Orf sans the uncome
                            ly goatee & it
is seven of march ninetee
n ninety-six is 12:47 or so
Europeans write; i am
so sorry I didn’t call yr
 
dance di
tracted me, desdom
ona shrt of brth in blue tights & fal
setto applause to thine own self. hellos. de
ar gretchen it is t
ime for a       new style this
                                                   one is tight!
                                                   at the cuffs yr
                                                   mother agrees w
                                                   ith me & the last act of “
                                                   Carmen but Pietyr
dear Gretchen: pietyr dis
sents he          says to thine o
wn self is a but much Oh
                                   the dress-ups! the autumn black ties bowing
                                   over the varnisht parquee & fire-
                                   flies wilde! on the hem & mown lawn, ja! an
                                   ev’nin tea; it
                                   is 12:57 mail
                                   will come at noo
                                   n or one
                                   p.m., wearing a leather jerkin, &
                                   the letter will read:
dear gretchen & dear not unkindly, vast, holy. hellos. i will b
e at the Concessions where Milly of La Rue St. Jean sells cig
arettes/ bubble gums/ ta
piocca pies & she loves me! & I love her! we h
ave never met ‘formal’ but the wedding’s in June Oh
spangld garlnd or bougainvillea, orchid, the padre presides
: will you, sin
cerely, the ai
sle dance/ with a skit of blue orchids, yr beautiful two-step fire-
fly thine-own-Self? dear  
 

© Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum 1999

for Mary Walker Graham

I.
“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air. Yet
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.

II.
As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.

© Adam Fieled 2017-2025

From Tears in the Fence 60

MISTER RIGHT

I do my bit with ruffled peonies,
water them right, their pink Asian tumbles,
thinking of you Bill and your deepening
into compassion, distinctly London
picked up experience, capital affairs

pulled from the West End's generic corral
of edge-walkers, what you called sensitives,
same-sex attracted, non-scene, soft movers
who came by you, we meet the ones we need,
by accident in 12 million stressed lives

surfacing out the tube atlas each day.
I never knew you get character wrong
in terms of seeing hurt as signature
to being special, like shyness rewrites
a hidden kindness, and these spilled peonies

get coaxed into pink focus by the sun.
To me, first meeting, you were Mister Right,
the city in you like an investment
in transitioning decades, earlier
we'd have been lovers, later we were friends

who loved each other, optimized shared time
through every illness driven in your cells
as undercover guerilla attack,
pushing sympathies forward— what was it
a favorite oatmeal jumper you wished back?

© Jeremy Reed 2014

From X-Peri

IF, AS HEIDEGGER SAYS,

Language is the house of being, where
do we put the mimes and their
dime store plastic flowers? What do we do
with the single-syllable words that are too small
to move into? Remember last week when
the mouse fell asleep in the backyard clover,
and the poet-composer warped the same thought
into seven kinds of flight? We climbed the ladder
of an ancient syntax and discovered
that the cathedral we were birthing had no
windows. Who will open the cages we’ve built
around ourselves? How will we capture
the slippery accents of home on someone
else’s tongue? If language is the house of being,
then being is the house of a little talking dove,
and the little talking dove is the house of a secret,
and the secret is the house of silence, and silence
is the house of dime store plastic flowers
and the two-story mouths that carry them.

© Melissa Studdard 2020

From Columbia Poetry Review 13

UNEURYDICE

jan
uary 13teenth and then "hook'd
up" on jan

uary 2wenty2econd, then i
guess we were dating & he says
i guess we're "dating" and i got roses and i
gave him head and he

w
as stretched out on the seat of his Thunde
rbird he says we're "not dating" that w
as

jan
uary 2wenty5ifth it w
as wetsnowing I gu

ess i lost my virginity "like
when you say your n
ame over

and over and it's not
about you anym
ore on jan

uary 2wenty6ixth i kiss'd
him and i w
as

drunk i guess i
pass'd out and woke up after i had
a dream a

bout red tigers and gentle Arab reeds he
held my head and with b
oth hands it

was so sweet but both hands were w
et i was als
o wet on jan

uary
2wenty9inth i thought of him on january 3irti 0eth i got roses and i
stretched out on the seat of his Cavel

ier my red hair was w
etsnow and he says i guess it's "you" and
then "no" i sh

ake my red hair "no" by
then it was febr
uary 1irst

© Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum 2001

From Otoliths

STREET, VASE, TIDE

The vase with peonies was struggling on the edge of the table
eyed by a cat and surrounded by words percolating in hands
and in the exhausted mind of the lady collapsed on the couch.
Burgundy with swirls, cotton— the feel of the space not captured where
again— she heard her sharecropper mum— stay strong, hold on,
for the streets are not friendly and the flowers fade.

The hideous statue opposite hers is now falling— dust on too many ashes.
Her vision lands and falls, bobbing on light waves alone
as the toppled colonizer bobs on waves of protests
and voices sprayed on country walls as time.
As the flowers resign, those 20 shots ricochet in her
ear memory like sinuous tides stretched inland.

© William Allegrezza-Serena Piccoli 2020

From Poetry

NO WHERE, NO ONE

When I found my voice, it was so quiet
no one listened. No one. That was my best love.

And when I came up from the river muck
I found my face; that was like smiling.

The snake does not care, nor the white egret—
and whole flocks of geese, white and Canadian,

settle on the boat landing. Rubbish.
Rubbish and weeds. It was not so quiet

when I screamed; with my face in the water,
not a whisper. Drowned or owned,

I’m now here. My face breaks with a bit of blue—
a bit of bruise and some rawness in the rushes.

© Mary Walker Graham 2005

P.F.S. : Three Definitions

First things first: the unavoidable, primordial question must arise: what is Neo-Romanticism? What Romanticism is tends to emphasize the personal, and the idea of the autonomous artist who does things, creates, for him or herself. Or, say creation ensues to fulfill a personal wish, or power drive. It is implicit in the personal nature of Romanticism that the personal is buttressed by a sense of passion or conviction, which is also personal: the individual finds themselves seized by a passionate conviction as to the validity of personal expression. This is usually pursuant to the revelation of a personal, individualized gift, a unique talent. To make a long, cumbersome story short: the Romantic artist is supposed to, as the saying goes, mean it. The backbone of personal conviction and personal sincerity equips the Romantic artist to “mean it” with as much passionate intensity as can seize an individual human being. So, again to compress a long, cumbersome story, “Neo” along with “Romanticism” simply means a new group of artists who express themselves out of passionate, individualized sincerity, and with personal, individually gifted equipment. This, against the backdrop of a post-modern aesthetic landscape that demeans the individual, and, to be quizzical, “doesn’t mean it.” Post-modernity frowns on the gifted individual, and on individual conviction. Neo-Ro takes for granted that post-modern irony, impersonality, effete half-assed-ness, and auto-destruction of the history of art has grown stale, over-circumscribed, and parochial. Perhaps a bunch of gifted individuals could put some sparkle back on America’s cultural surface. That’s the presupposition.

The Creatrix, as a definable character in art, has now developed out of Neo-Romanticism. The Creatrix is a female artist who embodies the self-determination, autonomy, and complex sense of individuality which tends to manifest in Neo-Ro, and Neo-Ro creations. I am taking for granted that the Creatrix, as a definable art-character, does begin with Abby Heller-Burnham, Mary Evelyn Harju, and Jenny Kanzler. What distinguishes the Creatrix from post-modern female, and feminist, archetypes, is a sense of Eros, or the erotic, developed itself to an extreme pitch of intensity. This, even in Kanzler, where this development is stunted or warped into mutant form. The sense of the erotic is grasped, felt, and registered with emotions consonant with an integration not found in post-modernity: straightforward passion, straightforward longing, straightforward physical need, conveyed in a fashion which does not need to abuse the viewer with the dull, dispossessed ironies which have now become a post-modern tradition. Why Eros in American art can be made new now, especially with Heller-Burnham’s immersion in queer life, is that Eros in American art has never had formal parameters imposed on it, by painters who are not merely servants, but masters, of formality, on a level with classicist Europe. This is not to say that the Creatrix has to be a painter. But, if we are to start with Heller-Burnham, Harju, and Kanzler as initial archetypes, these are some reference points which might be of service to us, in an effort not to be strained by an atmosphere in which narratives of form, and narratives of passion, are disavowed.

At the beginning of the Aughts in Philadelphia, I attempted to found an artist’s co-op, to stage multi-media art events around Philadelphia. I called the first co-op This Charming Lab. It met with limited success. By the middle of the Aughts, the situation had ripened. I now had the man power and venues to stage the events I wanted to stage, which would involve multi-media, around ideas and interpretations of Artaud, the Theater of Cruelty, and what could be made of Artaudian spectacle with the resources at hand. My essential partnership in the initial-model Philly Free School was with three fellow artists: Mike Land, Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, and Nick Gruberg. Matthew Stevenson and Hannah Miller also proved to be invaluable. Abby Heller-Burnham, Mary Evelyn Harju, and Jenny Kanzler all contributed as tangent artists. As of the early Teens, I began to use Philly Free School as a moniker employed to cover my entire cultural life in Aughts Philadelphia. This created a context for Abby, Mary, and Jenny to be representatively Free School artists, as well. Not to mention, those who had participated in Free School events in Chicago and New York, and everyone who had been published in Philly Free School Post (P.F.S. Post). Why Philly Free School acts as a correlative to Neo-Romanticism and the Creatrix is that it is, to be obvious, based in Philadelphia. On a less obvious note, “Free” and “School” together are meant to imply a group of artists on a vision quest, past the confines of post-modernity, multi-culturalism, and academic feminism, to learn what keys will turn what locks where so as to establish a maximum sense of residency in the most spacious, loft-like socio-aesthetic, socio-sexual, and generally socio-cultural rooms; to know, if it will be known, the boundless. Then, to begin to define the formal parameters of boundlessness in art, if they can or will be defined. And not bypass the imperative to understand what might be boundless in human life and thought, too.

More from P.F.S. Post

GENIUS LOCI

West Philly swung, night by night, around all of us.
I couldn’t not notice— Diana was delicately gorgeous.
She spent lots of time in the room next door.
One night, deep into the wee hours, & as
the entire house tripped (taken off, it
seemed, into distant universes, sucked into
black holes, or even flipped the switch into
primordial ooze & chaos), I swung dumbly
into Kevin’s open door, found Diana tripping
on the bed, in tee & panties. As I sat down
on the bed, all that occurred to me was to
follow my instincts. The genius loci of that
place & time was all about nothing else, &
the sense that Diana, whose elegant lashes

& sculpted cheekbones belied her wildness,
existed as an archetype I came to worship
at the shrine of, even as music roared from
down the wood-floored hall, Mary & Abby
slept on the other side. I ascertained, later,
Diana, who I hadn’t known before, had changed
her name, to stake a claim, against missing other ladies’
fun. She would become an arriviste for me, later,
also, once the two stalwarts were out of the way.
Hopefully, foggy memories would make me hesitant
to claim knowledge, more than stunted, of her
bellicose, venom-bordered insides, of a stunted child,
Lolita as painted by Goya. Lolita painted by Goya,
however, is still Lolita. Nothing child-like in that wildness.

© Adam Fieled 2025