Unlikely 2.0


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Editors' Notes

Maria Damon and Michelle Greenblatt
Jim Leftwich and Michelle Greenblatt
Sheila E. Murphy and Michelle Greenblatt

A Visual Conversation on Michelle Greenblatt's ASHES AND SEEDS with Stephen Harrison, Monika Mori | MOO, Jonathan Penton and Michelle Greenblatt

Letters for Michelle: with work by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Jeffrey Side, Larry Goodell, mark hartenbach, Charles J. Butler, Alexandria Bryan and Brian Kovich

Visual Poetry by Reed Altemus
Poetry by Glen Armstrong
Poetry by Lana Bella
A Eulogic Poem by John M. Bennett
Elegic Poetry by John M. Bennett
Poetry by Wendy Taylor Carlisle
A Eulogy by Vincent A. Cellucci
Poetry by Vincent A. Cellucci
Poetry by Joel Chace
A Spoken Word Poem and Visual Art by K.R. Copeland
A Eulogy by Alan Fyfe
Poetry by Win Harms
Poetry by Carolyn Hembree
Poetry by Cindy Hochman
A Eulogy by Steffen Horstmann
A Eulogic Poem by Dylan Krieger
An Elegic Poem by Dylan Krieger
Visual Art by Donna Kuhn
Poetry by Louise Landes Levi
Poetry by Jim Lineberger
Poetry by Dennis Mahagin
Poetry by Peter Marra
A Eulogy by Frankie Metro
A Song by Alexis Moon and Jonathan Penton
Poetry by Jay Passer
A Eulogy by Jonathan Penton
Visual Poetry by Anne Elezabeth Pluto and Bryson Dean-Gauthier
Visual Art by Marthe Reed
A Eulogy by Gabriel Ricard
Poetry by Alison Ross
A Short Movie by Bernd Sauermann
Poetry by Christopher Shipman
A Spoken Word Poem by Larissa Shmailo
A Eulogic Poem by Jay Sizemore
Elegic Poetry by Jay Sizemore
Poetry by Felino A. Soriano
Visual Art by Jamie Stoneman
Poetry by Ray Succre
Poetry by Yuriy Tarnawsky
A Song by Marc Vincenz


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Three E-Mails to Damniso Lopez
by Duane Locke

E-Mail to Damniso Lopez 6

Before I answer your questions about
Linda, Jackie, Greer, and the Seventeen year old
Whose name you do not know
And I cannot remember-but she went back
To her home in Ireland
And married an Old Catholic
Who was a closet Atheist,
I almost forgot you asked about
The quasi-Japanese who
Use to own a bar in Seattle,
But came to Tampa to be a massagist
And rubbed men until they had a mystic vision.

Damniso, you know how I aspired
To become a Jaques Lacan.
I have been psychoanalyzing this woman
Who is one of the beautiful women
I have ever seen. I was studying
Her face the other evening as we shared
Wine, a Peterson's Shirez.
The contours of her face are enchanting,
They are shaped like a sculpture
Of Lucca Della Robbia. The way
Her face curves under her eye
Down to beginning of her cheek
Is aesthetically exciting. It is a delicate
Beauty. As I look at her, I want to kiss
Every inch of her flesh, but I have
To control myself and not let
This intense love of her destroy
My objective psychoanalysis.
I am not on this earth to be happy
And have love, I am only here
To psychoanalyze. I seek eternal truth,
Not my personal happiness.

Well, Damniso, I discovered
That this woman has lived a life
That everyone should struggle not to live.
She is an example
Of living a type of life
That should be avoided.
Her type of life will only lead to insanity,
And she with her hallucinations
And beliefs borders on insanity now.
She is insane, this woman believes in God.

But she has survived a background
Of having a husband
Who came from old religions and the old days
When gays were persecuted and condemned.
Her husband
would not face the fact he was gay,
Tried to prove he was not
By having sex six times a day.
He related to her through logic
And logically caressing.
This impoverished woman
Has never known the touch
Of a man's hand who really loved her.

You know, Damniso, when I think of her,
I think of Maud Gonne and Yeats.

Her husband treated her as an object
And his marriage was a mask.
It resembled the typical American marriage
When the woman is reduced to an object,
And is not to a figural being, an allegory, a symbol.
She is not a vision
As when a willow becomes a green wind
That wrinkles away the epidexis
Of the river's fixed surface
And becomes an epiphany,
And this is the way love should be.

In her existence,
The simulated ordinary
Defamiliarized
The extraordinariness
Of the ordinary.

Her life became like a soldier dead
On a busy street corner with
A vandal-destroyed mail box
In the whore section of Iraq.
She was given a medal post humorously
For serving a vague and indeterminate cause
Of having children, grandchildren,
Great grand grandchildren
And talking all the nonsense and lies
That all the respectable citizens
Of America talk.
Now she is only an uniform
Covered with medals and honors,
Only an uniform with no flesh inside.

I was with her
When for a moment, she refused the stability
Of comfortable past habits,
Of comfortable false beliefs,
And succumbed
To true and radical form
Of skeptical behavior,
Became intoxicated
With supreme happiness,
The tepid and false underpinnings
Of her fraudulent existence
Were transformed. She was freed from a few moments
From the stabilizing role
Of her acted
And her pinned butterfly life.
She flew,
Flapped her wings, fluttered.

But her ascent into the beyond,
The real, crumbled
When among her grandchildren
And great grandchildren.
She immediately became a norm, a nun;
Once again she was a cipher.

The last time I saw her,
She said to me
And then hurried away,
"Frost's poetry allegorizes concepts
Of Heideggerian phenomenology."




E-Mail to Damniso Lopez 20

I have been contemplating, the intimacy of her giving
And what is refused in the donation.
There is always in this gain a loss
And a blockage to the opening towards
The realization of the potential of temporary
Exaltation and a rapture
That bring the mirage of totality
And completeness for a moment.


As I study our relationship, the hugs, the kisses,
I am very much concerned
With the genesis of disclosure,
And disclosure's inevitable withdrawal.
What is the remainder, what is the remnant.
The only sense of anything is its nonsense.

The true home, the place of a body's dwelling,
Its habitation ultimately slips into being a mirage,
An abstract verbalization that resonates
Forever in our inseparable corporeality
And its function, spirituality
Because life is basically homeless and nomadic.

Damniso, I based the above discourse
On relationship
With some other woman
Than the woman
You definitely asked about.
I know you asked about Linda
And my thoughts on her house by the river,
Her BMW,
But thoughts of my relationship
With another moment leaped into my mind.
Hope you are proceeding well
With the writing of my biography.




E-Mail to Damniso Lopez 21

It seem self evident.   I believed
It self evident;
I believed ardently it was self-evident.

Therefore I was stymied, the self-evident
Blocked
My progression, truncated
By axioms and aphorisms the approximations
That were my existence,

Then an epiphany, Doubt.
This divine manifestation, Doubt,
Appeared in my neural system
When at a marsh I saw a moorhen
Trying to spin a discarded
Old bicycle wheel sunk
In black shiny mud.
I felt paralyzed, numb as if stung
By a stingray.
I was in a state of aporia,
And felt euphoric,
This euphoria came from my
Now doubting everything.
Never before had I had
Such a feeling of happiness.
It was like a state of beatification.
I felt the douceur de vivre.

I felt as if I had broken out
Of the imprisonment
Of organizing my existence arboreally
And was now rhizomatic.
I no longer thought of my life
As being a fixed point trying
To find a straight line to a fixed point.
The points had disappeared,
Vanished into oblivion.
There were no points
And I sought a line that was not straight,
But one that swerved like a flying tree swallow,
Or fluttered like a butterfly over a flower,
And was invisible as the paths
Of a swallow or butterfly.
It was a line that could not be known,
Its beginning, its end could not be known.

Life was Cyrenaicism, an expansion
Of eudaemonism, but then
I thought of her with
The long, straight, white-gold, blonde hair.
She thinks that some things are self-evident,
And my joie de vivre was diminished for a moment.

Damniso, I will try to comment
On my relationship with Jackie, the one
With the dark hair, streaked slightly grey,
The women you asked about in my next E Mail.
I am sorry
I overlooked her in this communication.


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