Anselm Berrigan

Zero Star Hotel [Smith and Jones]

At the Smith and Jones Factory I get my Gear, don't smoke Don't vote, dry off With Madonna towel It's a field night For the roachies Smoked too many Crumbs, too much Genre manipulation

looks like nothing ever happened except everything's wet, singed cork rubbeth face, pay concierge/owner in red-checked pjs for Ross' 8 nights decapitate writer head and sacrifice to gods of buried vocals

 

Ange Mlinko

 

The Men Like that lion on the stamp of the New York Public Library! Is it Astor, Lenox and Tilden in composite? Like an ascot blending with swept-back locks away from the arch of the half-closed eye! In the fact of a whole head in its halo of motto, like a coin, is it the final pursuit of such men to stock a library with rare books on a marble avenue, with an exhibit this go-round of “utopias”, an inevitable speculation with the bums & the rich brothers in desultoriness studying Jefferson’s handwriting in a fair copy of the Declaration of Independence? Ice grips the steps of stopped hands. Violin wood of the reading room, violet snow in the window. You said you loved a photocopied book like a keeper of mysteries, like a visitor to libraries, under the hieroglyph of light rays                    or the trompe l’oeil skylight of perpetual sunset (or dawn?)                                        It zipped along the wool blanket with flashes lighting up the dark. They gathered into a tooth that nipped when I reached out of a repetitive dream.                              “Come to bed,” I said. “No, why don’t you sit up with me awhile? The mountebank insomnia has me.” You called me to the window to see a man hail a cab. Had a hand in the writing of the Russian constitution.         A gratuity, and aren’t I a connoisseur? Cloud-To-Cloud Correspondence Mr. If-Then, you have 10 minutes to make out with this painting. Roman numerals like “Aryballos in the Form of a Hedgehog” round off. What kind of day is it out there? It’s “Concerto for Half a Piano” and right half of the brain. “Put suet in a dead Christmas tree, and draw the birds.” But what is it supposed to be? Many of us have discovered a kind or species of day and lacked a registry: “Today downgrades the Minotaur to Bullwinkle!” or the sort of day actuaries interview you about defenestrated busts. All kinds of days. Unlike the tedium of the tyranny I used to live under:                                        “No twin dove for you til grown up, we let you love.” Later, when I want to be a great painting, I must ask what shall I be of.

Ange Mlinko

Boston Flower Market

Transformation vs. Encryption — a browning banana is aging the flowers in the vase, a transformation of five bucks into dying daisies (I’ll be the rose, you be the pansy).

Mnemosyne vs. Treasury — beyond the marble balustrade of the Bourse (stained glass with scenes of the stations of the exchange) a vault where gold in the form of ink is stored in books of metaphors, which exponentially increases the value of the gold (you be poesy, I’ll be the proxy).

Loiterer vs. Flaneur — ‘Miss, this train must be goin somewhere a young lady like you must want to go / I see you sittin here each day like it takes you farther than your bike.’ ‘I go downtown / walk around / then I return.’ ‘Girl / viz. Ms. // you don’t just reject, you contravene a kiss!’

Ornament vs. Accident — Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that writing is an unnecessary luxury trade like goldsmithing. The goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini never wrote about nature and solitude — he didn’t have the luxury.

‘Miss this train / scenes of the station / increases the value
Solitude he didn’t have / five bucks / treasury beyond the / May day’

As even collage has an organizing principle to skirt, it’s Sanity vs. Ambition, a psychological thriller. Or, if you prefer, it’s a May day, 80 degrees, an unusually early summer. You be eros, I’ll be pensée.

Ange Mlinko

 

Keys & Scales 

Back when maps were dangerous it was seditious
To give one to a foreigner; feeling so perfectly calligraphic that,
Implying the limp like an iamb superseded what was said of one
By the words themselves, one slyly wrote across the desert,

Allaying the panic took a device to craft a presence.
To say, in search of a role, that a double bend in the river
Was a perimeter of reparation,
We tried that of believers, like quoted back to itself

The wilderness took shape; the stars were of where
Two had met, in honeydew shadow, and made maps praise.

Ange Mlinko

 

Kouign Amann

I went to make kouign amann. It sounded Irish
and/or Maghrebi. But it’s Breton, as I can swear
by the blue hydrangea like a cloudy iris
 
I photographed near Finistère.
And now I’m here in Croton-on-Hudson
trying to remember what was sinister
 
about the asymmetrical cruets,
swan and cygnet, I thought I heard
—listening under a sweet duvet—
 
duet. (But do swans vocalize?
Strengthening the pair-bond
while their two pasts together caramelize
 
the present?) Sinister like Croton’s
name, derived either from a Kitchawanc chief
or Calabria, source of stonemasons
 
for the dam. The former translates as
“Big Wind,” the second is known
as the birthplace of the school of Pythagoras.
 
Sinister not knowing if silent esoterics filter
down to our little dam, dreamt of under
sweet sweet down duvets. Bretagne’s off-kilter
 
menhirs call to our bric-a-brac rock
like names orphaned after the glaciers’ retreat
from Briquebec to Wequetequock.

Ange Mlinko

 

Bees in Cider

It was a bouffant bee, almost as big as the rose it lit on –
and that’s the point: so late in the season was it, that
‘remontant’ – reblooming through the summer –
any blossom now was a shrunken simulacrum. So I lit on
the issue of all this sunshine leading to overproduction:
the roses I had counted in their furibund overproduction
showing diminishing returns. Something was out of joint
about the whole project, the projection of éclat
out of proportion to the product, which the bee imbibes,
the bouffant bee, with its understated point,
and those waxen wings that soften like a Roman tablet –
those waxen wings dissolving in light – whereas in Sumer
it was wet clay with its right-to-left writing,
and Greece, stone with its left-to-right writing
(like characters driving to or back from the sea), on lit,
depending on the home ground of farflung scribes
deriving a style or stylus or maillot or mallet –
but now it is late for a bee to be supping at the last ember
of an evening somersaulting from sepia to auburn
and the rose to be remontant as rain makes a sweep
(water tutoring me, or tutoyant, as they say in Dieppe:
on intimate terms), so late in the day that lodgers
leaving their rentals shrink to traces in beermakers’ ledgers.

Amy Gerstler

Saints

Miracle mongers. Bedwetters. Hair-shirted wonder workers. Shirkers of the
soggy soggy earth. A bit touched, or wholly untouched living among us?
They shrug their bodies off and waft with clouds of celestial perfume. No
smooching for this crew, except for hems, and pictures of their mothers…
their lips trespass only the very edges of succor. Swarms of pious bees precede
her. One young girl wakes up with a ring on her finger and a hole in her
throat. Another bled milk when her white thigh was punctured. All over the
world, a few humans are born each decade with a great talent for suffering.
They have gifts that enable them to sleep through their mistreatment: the
sleep of the uncomplaining just, the sleep of the incomplete. Our
relationship to them is the same as our relationship to the trees: what they
exhale, we breathe.

Lee Ann Brown

Bodies Can Move This Way

Very fast like a car or waterfall 
Absence gap for stored-up music 
Evidence for the stolen nonce 
Your trick is all to the good

Our planetary hour
takes jumps 
Drop it doesn't mean stop

The fixed will fly perpetually 
in the blue hour some light reading

Silk nets are strongest 
Morning glories grow best in poor soil 
Music maker Fire tender

Photos stones 
The air sign to burn
Time your desire and circumstance

 

Lee Ann Brown

 

Joe Acrostics

Just
Over       Bunches of
Easy       Rain
               And
               Indigo
               Noises,
               Androgynous
               Roses
               Do it again

               +

Jinxy Beautiful Features, an Alphabet
Oracular
Ebony to

Bring risky fixtures to my
Reading, my
Alternator brow, a go in-between, an
Inner uninterrupted error or
Night sodden blue velvet
Apt to break over
Rare gray fealty in
Discs of what permission slips