This is the second episode but in many ways it's the first. I thought when starting Idiolect that I would be doing about 20 minutes of audio, providing electronic music for whichever poets and writers wanted their works read to it; I got carried away, the current episode is an hour and a quarter, give or take. My deepest thanks to the poets who sent in work. Idiolect is an odd, if simple idea: what if a literary magazine were a kind of podcast/radio show, where the work of various poets was read to musical backing, preferably experimental electronics. In this episode I provide all of the music, but am open to submissions of music to pair with poems. And as always, I'm open to poems! If you would like your work featured on Idiolect, send a submission to lewis@lewislacook.org, include submission in the subject, and I'll get back to you, I promise. Tentatively the next episode should appear on the Autumn Equinox, around late October. bliss Lewis SHEILA E. MURPHY Rain, the Sloppiest Evidence of No Containment On the verge of sugarcoating the yard These spittery baby blades invade Lacy spokes of green and greener still Filling the space with up-facing pokey tops I'm amazed I've only just now after years Found a way to cushion my little self From the away game rain representing Meaning stay inside with nowhere to bolt During infectious jolts of thunder lightning Bales of liquid everyone I know says Isn't it nice for a change sun overstays Its welcome and I almost violently Disagree believing too hard in this Reliably promiscuous sunlight LEWIS LACOOK Our Backyard Prints Deer All Night In the outside a shout folds up to here shutting up venison at a vein’s crest wreckage drafts my body’s ashes edges of snow smoking with tears But at night crossroads are lonely just when love evens oval gas you don’t want a minute in halves stray cat that tolls slippery coins papering over your lips with a pang of moonlight in houses where deer hatch from thickets hinges of a balding moan Inside the output gray trains weep gabbing force-fed monsters in the background I faded into last night I could be your ghost if you’re still the color of the walls here is always singing your smile flaking off to dust the floor PETER CICCRAIELLO Once beings could quite easily transform into other beings, A snake to a woman, a turtle to a frog, a man to an empty glass bottle Just back and forth, as you please. I know from my own empirical experience this is true I have personally shifted to a number of rare and unexplainably exotic forms. How can this be you say? Life is stronger than metal and just as fragrant as orchids I am told by beings that know. Just look at this cold rain falling from the sky, The way moonbeams travel to this distant window, I myself am not the same fool I was this morning. Do you need more proof than that? SHEILA E. MURPHY Meticulous the Sky I don't think the elevator rises High enough but I get in and try Elephantine mammals dry our eyes Maybe hotter than wilderness There is a sly buoyancy about The prospect of integrating what Shy of haste we misericord Together with requisite others Impaled on the notion taste equips Us with enough fetters of course to get by Wry to the taste the embers de-lure us Apart from each look then to the east And parlay the yield of some gumshoe Better paid naturally than you LEWIS LACOOK Judas At Akeldama You need to befriend the pain he says as you walk its perimeter gauging heats slinking along your love-parched pores all open singing liquid songs of disquiet You need to gorge on its beautiful shadow crawling with music ululant with monsters dappled with useless sunshine like bright winter To gouge hearts into water that convenes in your eyes blind to its tenancy believe your insistence that crossroads lead out of here don’t turn on themselves as you do when midnight welcomes ghosts whose faces have all been dear to you before You need to forget what sugar far springtime scatters underfoot to remind you who’s arm it is around your shoulder pulling you close now Greet your old friend with a stained glass smile PETER CICCRAIELLO Let’s drive faster Let’s buy more rolls of plastic Let’s wrap the plastic inside of other plastic Let’s buy another car, train, aeroplane Let’s fly all over the world And buy another TV, VCR, cellphone OMG clothes, let’s buy more clothes Let’s build closets, new rooms, houses Let’s buy everything we see And take it home And put it inside Our closets, new rooms, new houses And look at it Because now we own it Let’s kill everything and then let’s put it Inside of other plastic that is inside of other plastic That is inside other plastic Let’s buy more guns Lots and lots of guns Let’s hang them on the walls With other things Let’s have them in every room In schools and in churches Let’s have them in bathrooms and malls Let’s have little guns that fit inside of bigger guns Let’s have a god that is a gun Or a gun that is a god Let’s all be a bullet that shoots Forever after Omnipresent, all knowing, pervasive Let’s drive faster And faster Forever after LEWIS LACOOK Persephone’s Favorite Fruit Finally alone the monad peels a lotus in a blue room every petal a language dying in the deep as light bleeds from its panting verbs pangs of suffix in the shallows enough to read Now at the end when she dreams he meets her at the door where black ice smiles back steals her voice abrading it she catches the crossroads as it foams over trees following her eyes down the yellow line dropping blue petals that smoke in viscous dark Finally alone a breath pours out on the dining room table where her face luminous in the fruit bowl of overhead light spills her shadow across the floor washes the rug with a tangle of her smile Her husband on the other side holds out his hand as dawn birds the sky PETER CICCRAIELLO Its raining acorns wanted to let you know But your phone had no signal And you are no longer in my contacts But thought you might understand SHEILA E. MURPHY Makeshift Undertaking You know the old rope trick made to make you Look over here and there suddenly is change Rattling in the pocket of a strained person Unduly sure of the self (lower case s) Stretched to veer toward the improbable Particle waves discrete prompting a duel Carried out in public and in private Seizing attention like sheriffs arriving At the home now just a house about to be Nixed from personal history A lagging indicator of privation Summed up in the middle line of haiku Skinny still plenary indulgent Just when you thought no volta could come true
