PLAN B PRESS Issue BardFest99: Erika Stanley, Jessica White and Vincent Balistrieri From Bardfest99, the first anthology from the first 30-day poetry festival in the United States presented as part of National Poetry Month. I have selected three of the youngest poets in the anthology, all either in college or High School at the time this anthology appeared.   Erika Stanley OH MY LOVE homage to Meryn Cadell, for A. you are the fun house mirror the obsession with innumberable distortions and you are worth your weight in quicksand the futility of the whirlwind throwing up the dust screen filling the lungs with a vacuum of screams (oh my love) you are the deep heat surfacing with the swishscratch of heavy-bargain-priced-polyester-straight-leg- slacks and you are the dank slippery recesses of the fault-line splitting your heart into un-nameable land forms of fine ash and embers, of purposeful destruction you are the dark excess of a scattered mind and nobody knows you like I do (oh my love) you are all torn away layers like heavy drawing paper, smeared, erased and in full opposition to the outstretched offering— ......................................................................................a clean sheet.   Jessica White THE INCONSOLABLE There are some things you can’t touch. Fires flame and cool waters ripple under the soft, wispy hair of a precious girl’s hand You see them sparkle and glisten over her brown eyes. You watch them spill over and trickle down, .........................the tears an understatement of the pain beneath. You want to scream, “I know how it feels!” Does she know that your feet are stuck in the same rut of life as hers? You want to smooth the gash her sobs tear in her heart. You want to scream, .........................“I know how it feels!” But there are some fires inside a soul That you cannot cool with a loving kiss on the cheek. There are some violent waters That you cannot still by wrapping your arms around her delicate, vulnerable shoulders. There are some things you can’t touch. Vincent Balistrieri NEP TUNE SLIP I found myself up and down these herded tooth marked staircases and to get storage cupboard space place, remembering ....myselfing ....in slip into a chair there, ne-hey saw you, and a bright eyed pudding tab of white rounded face child. (at one point I think he was about to nurse, and his mother angled her head, saw me seeing her, like seeing her ownself in a disaster glass of half and half.) the three smelled cream colored kitchens and fabric softener. And ahead the poet stood up, his vest with many colored rectangles looking in the dark window of a used book store. And hissstory and nothing but hissssstory. The right now then, the forever motion of his hands making arches in the invisible now invokes not licking envelopes, but licking us folks with one unused microphone and one unused amplifier and one incalculable usage. His hands making arches from his inevitable brow. His mouth forms the shape of liquid cadenzas, the shapes of an e x o t i c ..................................ripe ...........................................blade He breathes: ...................Bus crash! ...................Plane ride! ...................Sperminside! ...................and ...................Dynamite—all wrapped in the married golds of his mother ................... ...................bosom ...................shorn gas skin of neptune under his fingernails ...................and his commands these things from a five pointed hand! .........And I found myself remembering asking myself about those hopscotchers neptune and pluto in a glass of thick milk. And those chairs creeking this poet bleeding (ancient books from soft palms.) pitterpitter HOP-SCOTCH pitterpitter UNI-VERSE pitterpitter DAN-CES ient-ient arrant. pitterpoffed unpetrified he pulses that child twitches and aaahhhs from all these folks in milk. IN milk ...................In memor-martyr-andom ...................In nothing all around ...................eating peppers from a brass crown ............................of that starky starry condiment, ............................translated for transience, ............................in that all inevitable nothing now. His hand making hopscotch that perpetual bleat. And I found myself asking myself to remember myself wanting to bleat from this wooden seat, to make the sound of neptune passing round pluto the utterance of nothingness that utter transcendence from now to then to then again— become something else, ...................noncommutative ......................................compulsory .........................................................and pregrant ............................................................................pomegranate ..................................................................................................................Poem.       Erika Stanley is a bastardbakerphotographmaker transplant from 215 to 503, who now writes, reads and performs as Mr. E. She writes she is currently "building a life I want, in a home that's wonky, and a city that's totally weird. Looking for stimulating conversation with other wordmonger perverts—theory meets poetry meets photo. Interested in expanding languages' capacities to help us articulate the private and the personal and making images that correspond." Jessica White is a graduate of Temple University, and is pursuing an advanced degree at Boston University. Vincent Balistrieri Strijkan is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and Temple University's Tyler School of Art. He lives in Philadelphia and is a working artist.   Published in Volume 11, Number 3, Summer 2010.