—first line from a poem by W.H. Auden
The deadly sins
can be bought in tins
with instructions on the label.
And the first such bin
heaped over its rim
was the Tower of Babel.
Could a can of beer
contain all that fear,
as Cain did meet his Abel?
But virtue's its own mess
and I just must confess
I like sin's fun Augean Stable.
And all those scars,
angry thunderbolts from Mars,
had Nimrod cowering in his cradle.
What ambitious kings
will do for little tins
or a snifter of immortal fable.
Marc Vincenz is Swiss-British, was born in Hong Kong, and divides his time between Zurich, Reykjavik and Boston. His poetry collections are: Gods of a Ransacked Century, Mao's Mole, Behind the Wall at the Sugar Works, Additional Breathing Exercises, Beautiful Rush and This Wasted Land and its Chymical Illuminations (with Tom Bradley). Marc is Executive Editor of Mad Hatters' Review, MadHat Press, Coeditor-in-Chief of Fulcrum: an anthology of poetry and aesthetics, and a director of Evolution Arts, Inc.
Larissa Shmailo's newest collection of poetry is #specialcharacters. Larissa is the editor of the anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and founder of The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses. She translated Victory over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's landmark restaging of the multimedia opera and has been a Russian translator for the American Bible Society. Her other books of poetry are In Paran (BlazeVOX]), A Cure for Suicide (Červená Barva Press), and the e-book, Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks); her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew), for which she received the New Century Best Spoken Word Album award.
Born in Moscow and raised in Russia and Moldova, Philip Nikolayev is the son of a linguist. He grew up speaking both English and Russian and immigrated to the United States in 1990. Nikolayev earned a BA and an MA at Harvard University and a PhD at Boston University. His poetry collections include Dusk Raga (1998), Monkey Time (2003), which won a Verse prize, and Letters from Aldenderry (2006). Nikolayev is one of the founding editors of Fulcrum: an anthology of poetry and aesthetics, and his work has been featured in 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (2005). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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