6×6 #19: Bite Off The Head

6x6 Poets

PERIODICAL, POETRY  | $5

October 2009
Read an excerpt

From 6×6 #19:

bit off the head

Everyone I Knew in High School Is Dead

to make that pa-tew-wee sound
we all like
when you spit it out again
there isn’t much you can hold in your mouth
for long
crystalline structures draw
me in
sometimes I’m too cold to get
out of bed & shut
the window I passed on my shiver
like a yawn
I move my tongue up
& down in my empty mouth &
pretend to toss a baby shark around
try to feel the slippery weight
someone whispers to me
shark attack shark attack shark

—Julia Cohen

Poems by Emily Carr, Julia Cohen, Natalie Lyalin, Lee Norton, Dan Rosenberg, and G.C. Waldrep.

This issue of 6×6 was designed by Garth Graeper. Cover offset printed by Polyprint & Design in NYC and letterpress printed at UDP.

About the Author

6×6 magazine included 6 poets in each issue.

6×6 was supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

ISSN: 1553-9459

Praise

Dan Rosenberg in 6×6 #19 presents prosy poetry in which syntactic connections are ambiguous, as in this opening stanza to “sight cracks open my shell tight flesh sloughs off”:

overripe I’m a white peach placed next to

the refrigerator humming unkind

odes to splitting open I have felt this

rippling in the colors inside me

have bled hot through the breached walls helplessly

The placement of words here is muscular, spreading energy through the text.

Vincent Katz

Publication Details

Chapbook
Rubber Band Binding. 52 pp, 7 x 7 in
Publication Date: October 01 2009
Distribution: Direct Only
Series: 6x6 #19