s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

Everyone is Spinning Around
Stan Gaz & John Greiner

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Waiting for Aphrodite’s Rise

Let’s ride
the societal decline,
bright boys
waiting
for Aphrodite’s rise
during the pure crime.
Let’s burn out
on her breasts.
The asphyxiation
fixation
an acknowledgment
of the joy
of not swimming
anymore.

On a Sunday

Everyone is spinning around
with flight plans
and a Christopher
Columbus rage at the clouds,
seeing seas
beyond Christ.
I was jumping about
until the conquistadors
told me to sit down
and sleep for however
many millennium I thought fit.
They are an accommodating lot.
I told them I wanted to be ready
for the precise
second of the Coming,
but in the meantime I needed
to swing with a one eyed Venus
in spring fashionable
oyster shell bikini.

My mother read me fairytales
about today when I was a kid,
so I know what tomorrow is going to bring.
I’d always start to cry
when she finished
and then run after her
as she made her way
to the kitchen
to prepare dinner,
so dinner was put
aside.
Me and my old man would always
have to wait
for breakfast
to finally get a good meal
and then he’d be off to the desert
to see what carps he could pull in
on his line.
He never knew what tomorrow
would bring,
so naturally a day came when he
never returned.
We lived on a different street back then,
on a corner that Jesus would never come to,
no matter how daring his henchmen
made him out to be.
When he comes, he’ll have knishes
for all the children.
That will be on a Sunday
that will not begin another week.

Memories of the Monk’s Austin

Meet me at the monk’s Austin
that drove him
to the place he marked in the history

books.

No thing is what is known
no matter what winners
want to write.
Thousands of eternal flames
burn around the world

forgotten

by all but the passers by

Poetry: John Greiner. Photography: Stan Gaz.

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John Greiner is a writer and visual artist living in New York City. He was educated at the New School for Social Research. Greiner’s work has appeared in Antiphon, Sand Journal, Sein und Werden, Empty Mirror, Sensitive Skin, Unarmed, Street Value and numerous other magazines. His books of poetry include Circuit (Whiskey City Press), Turnstile Burlesque (Crisis Chronicles Press) and  (Good Cop/Bad Cop Press). His collaborative work with photographer Carrie Crow has appeared at the Tate Liverpool, the Queens Museum and in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Venice, Paris, Berlin and Hamburg.

The work of Stan Gaz explores themes of loss, memory and transformation. The imagery in his work is allegorized by the actions and effects of the hunter and the hunted. Gaz finds these roles to be oddly interchangeable, where neither is ever free of the other’s influence, but nevertheless transformation still takes place.