Movie Review: Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story
The actor plays himself, the film unborn,
Stuck in the womb, unable to perform,
His fake proboscis forever out of joint –
A man of many parts but no real point.
Movie Review: Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story
The actor plays himself, the film unborn,
Stuck in the womb, unable to perform,
His fake proboscis forever out of joint –
A man of many parts but no real point.
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I'm Dave Bonta, a poet and literary magazine editor from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.

Order from the press or Contact me for a signed copy or to barter for your own book. Central PA residents can buy it at Webster's.
A random selection of greatest hits. Reload the page to see more.
Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit
Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded
Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond
The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning
Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop"
Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems
Spoil, an online collection of my older poems
(For a complete listing, see my Google profile)
Pharyngula
Everything is fluid. Biology isn't about fixed and rigidly invariant processes — it's about squishy, dynamic, and interactive stuff making do.
Fragments from Floyd
Today, 92% of new American homes are air-conditioned, and most of the electricity to produce our cool air comes at the expense of Appalachian mountaintop coal, hence the paradox: greater indoor climate control contributes to an outdoor climate out of control.
Coyote Crossing
Worship isn't love. It's more like hatred. People worship you, they expect things in return for that worship. Handholding.
The Storialist
You are cautious
on your off day, creeping up to examine
your own moves and motives. Better to
hang back, wary, a dog sniffing at a stranger.
small change
I wish our hearts came equipped with their own larynx.
A boom box for the murmur of the eddy-riddled river.
The Rag and Bone Shop
There are people of river and
grass, and there are people of
concrete and glass.
Rosefire Rising
There is a memory of having been a mountain, complete with irony and the assumption of youthful arrogance, a sense of wholeness we did not recognize until it was lost. Once we are broken, it opens so many perspectives...
Dick Jones' Patteran Pages
But what can I tell you
about time that I would
have you know so soon?
Paula's House of Toast
I confess. I love the outer darkness.
Connaissances
My family were now alone in the cathedral as she sang to us, her lovely singing filling the vast echoey space. Her impromptu performance consisted of devotional songs which she had learnt this year before going on a choir tour in Belgium. The sound took on an immense physicality as it bounded out into the great amplifying chamber and reverberated back at varying intervals from the different enclaves of the church.
All content by Dave Bonta at Via Negativa is available for reprint and remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

What a delightfully creepy picture. Is that a milkweed pod shot from above?
Your milkweed patch is really working. I’ve never noticed so many migrating Monarchs as I have this last week.
Lorianne – Yup. It’s Last Call at the Milkweed Saloon, and the milkweed bugs are crowding in for one more drink.
Bill – We’re seeing a ton of migratory monarchs here, too. Of course, in PA they tend to follow the ridges, and our field is a sea of goldenrod, so even on off years, we still see a few.
I don’t know how they have the fuel for all that flapping. They seem spread evenly though the landscape, flapping through the forest, above the forest and across fields at various heights. I’m smashing and buffeting them as I go to town and they come traipsing singly and in twos and threes. They are refueling at flowers I can’t name, hanging and resting momentarily. As soon as one is gone another appears.
It’s a mind-boggling phenomenon, no doubt about it. I’d love to see the monarchs at their wintering grounds in Mexico sometime. We’ve gotten a small taste of what that might be like here, on a few occasions: on late afternoons, cool temperatures can trigger hundreds of monarchs to clump together on tree branches for the night.
Wow. They are grand and uplifting. Takes me out of my own concerns to seem them chancing inexorably accross four lanes of highway. Then I think of the next interstate 100 miles to the south and the vast extent of their pressing risk. Last week they were working into a headwind. Perhaps on such days they choose to fly low and thread through the thickets of forest, which they do so easily, like smoke.
I have three new photos of monarchs up at my Flickr site: here, here and here.
What smart suits and helmets!
Whoa. What are you doing ‘way back here in my archives? It’s the wrong time of day for insomnia!