Ange Mlinko

 It Was a Bichon Frisé's Life . . .

Louisiana skies paddle north nodding hello to some exiles 

displaced by floodwaters so we all putter in the bisque 

in fretted dresses, alleviated by a fan. But we have nothing on 

"Le Matin," in whose rococo frame a curtain sweeps to bare 

a boudoir, a Bichon Frisé worrying something between paws, 

begging the dulcet glance of the mistress whose push-up, 

cupless corset and up-drawn stocking border what they 

fall short of, per the stern frame rippling like a cloud! 

Even the candle angles to get a look in the mirror 

engloving the scene. Why it is her slipper the bitch clutches!   

The gentleman's reverie is elsewhere . . . Loitering 

Louisiana stops to admire this engraving by "N. Lavreinee." 

What a chevalier! It makes the smeariest sunset think 

it's in a Restoration Comedy, in such humidity 

chefs defer meringues. "Ksar Rouge," "Taos Adobe," 

"Gulf Shrimp"—a thousand names of softboiled 

lipsticks fritter English as if it were French, meaning 

meeting no resistance from the flesh.

Joe Brainard

Little-Known Facts about People

          Did you know that Kenneth Koch's wife Janice used to be

an airplane pilot? Once she had to make an emergency landing

on a highway.

          When Kenward Elmslie was a kid he wanted to be a tap

dancer. Did you know that Kenward's grandfather was Joseph

Pulitzer?

         Kenward once told me that Jane Russell is a dyke.

         Andy Warhol wanted to be a tap dancer when he was a

kid too.

         D. D. Ryan wanted to be a ballerina.           

         Did you know that Pat Padgett was Ted Berrigan's girlfriend

for years before she married Ron?

         Ron Padgett and I were in the same 1st grade class together

in school in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

         Ron's father, Wayne, was a notorious bootlegger in Tulsa

until Oklahoma went wet.

          A few years ago Ron's father got divorced and married a

beautiful Las Vegas showgirl younger than Ron's wife Pat.

          Did you know that Bill Berkson was once bat boy for the

Yankees?

          Ted Berrigan married his wife Sandy after having only

known her for five days.

          Did you know that the first poems John Ashbery ever had

published were published in Poetry magazine under the name of

Joel Symington?

          Did you know that Bill Berkson was on the "1oo Best

Dressed Men" list of 1967?

          Rudy Burckhardt once dated Miss Vermont of 1938.

          Donald Droll is in some way related to Daniel Boone.

          Frank O'Hara once told me that what he really wanted to

be was a concert pianist.

          Did you know that Harry Mathews started out to be a com-

poser? He studied at the Juilliard School of Music.

          Edwin Denby was born in China.

          Anne Waldman's father wrote a book called Rapid Reading 

Made Simple.

          Tom Veitch's father writes Christmas card verse.

           When I was a kid I wanted to be a fashion designer, a

minister, and an artist.

            Peter Schjeldahl's father is very famous in the plastic area.

He discovered the new lightweight plastic used in Bufferin bottles.

Soon he hopes to open a contraceptive factory in Red China.

           Did you know that Bill Berkson was once on I Remember

Mama?

           D. D. Ryan went to see The Boys in the Band with Jackie

Kennedy just a week before she married Onassis.

          John Ashbery was a quiz kid.

         Kenneth Koch once won the Glasscock Award.

         Did you know that Ron Padgett has blebs on his lung

which may explode at any moment? They have exploded twice

already.

         Tina Louise once sang "I'm in the Mood for Love" to Bill

Berkson over London broils at P. J. Clarke's.

         Did you know that Ted Berrigan did his thesis at Tulsa

University on George Bernard Shaw?

         Did you know that the Katz Tumor is named after Ada

Katz who discovered it?

         Edwin Denby once performed in Berlin's "Wintergarten"

billed as "Der Amerikanische Grotesktaenzer Dumby."

         Yvonne Burckhardt was the backstroke swimming cham-

pion of Connecticut for one week.

         When I lived in Boston I used to panhandle on the street

where all of the art galleries were, and I got my cigarette butts

from the urns in front of the Museum of Fine Arts.

         Did you know that Ted Berrigan's first book of poems, A 

Lily for My Love, was published by the Lenox Bar in Providence,

Rd. Island?

         Greta Garbo once called Bill Berkson her ice cream man.

         I once went to a "come as your favorite person" party as

Marilyn Monroe.

         Did you know that John Ashbery once worked in a cherry

canning factory?

 

Joe Brainard

Photograph by Peter Hujar

Sex (written in 1969)
.
I like sex best when it’s fast and fun. Or slow and beautiful. Beautiful, of course can be fun too. And fun, beautiful. I like warm necks. And the smalls of backs. I’m not sure if that’s the right word: small. What I mean is the part of the back that goes in the most. Just before your bottom comes out. I like navels. I like under-arms. I don’t care for feet especially, or legs. I like faces. Eyes and lips and ears. I think that what I like most about sex is just touching. Skin is so alive. I like cold clean sheets. I like breasts and nipples. What I’m a sucker for most is a round full bottom. I really don’t like that word bottom. I think underwear is sexy. I like hair on heads, but hair on the body I can take it or leave it. Skinny builds don’t turn me on as much as normal builds. Probably because I’m skinny myself. I have a weak spot for blonds. I like to fuck sometimes but I don’t like to be fucked. What I really like is just a good plain blow-job. It’s rhythm that makes me come the best. I don’t think that, in bed, I take a masculine role or a feminine role. I guess I must be somewhere in between, or both. Sex-wise I’m not very adventurous. I am sure that there are a lot of things I like that I don’t know I like yet. I hope so. So—now you have some idea of what I like in bed.

Amy Gerstler

Fruit Cocktail In Light Syrup

Rocket-shaped popsicles that dyed your lips blue 
were popular when I was a kid. That era got labeled 
"the space age" in honor of some longed-for, 
supersonic, utopian future. Another food of my 
youth was candy corn, mostly seen on Halloween. 
With its striped triangular "kernels" made 
of sugar, wax and corn syrup, candy corn 
was a nostalgic treat, harkening back to days 
when humans grew, rather than manufactured, 
food. But what was fruit cocktail's secret 
meaning? It glistened as though varnished. 
Faint of taste and watery, it contained anemic 
grapes, wrinkled and pale. Also deflated 
maraschino cherries. Fan-shaped pineapple 
chunks, and squares of bleached peach 
and pear completed the scene. Fruit cocktail's 
colorlessness, its lack of connection to anything 
living, (like tree, seed or leaf) seemed 
cautionary, sad. A bowl of soupy, faded, funeral 
fruit. No more nourishing than a child's 
finger painting, masquerading as happy 
appetizer, fruit cocktail insisted on pretending 
everything was ok. Eating it meant you embraced 
tastelessness. It meant you were easily fooled. 
It meant you'd pretend semblances, 
no matter how pathetic, were real, and that 
when things got dicey, you'd spurn the truth. 
Eating fruit cocktail meant you might deny 
that ghosts whirled throughout the house 
and got sucked up the chimney on nights 
Dad wadded old newspapers, warned you 
away from the hearth, and finally lit a fire.

Dan Beachy-Quick

Responses to ----

                                        for Stewart Breck

What is it damns the eye?—. Asymmetry
In ecological dynamics?—. What dams
The eye?—. Trends of the autumnal trees’
Later colorings, and on delay, migrations,
Or migrations, as the robins in November
Clamor in the Russian Olive, forgotten?—.
And who while crying out remembers
No one, not angels, not animals, no one
Hears that cry?—. Even the one crying
Doesn’t hear?—. A lever of infinite
Length can lift an infinite weight, or am I
Lying?—. A bee could land on a bloom and lift
The world up?—. Or a butterfly?—. Beauty
Reckons terror?—. O, bees—. O, butterfly—.

Zach Savich

 

If the dead have preferences they must prefer the future tense

Will you be sitting by a window in this year
As though asking affirms

What wouldn’t they affirm
Shirt hung for a curtain

Having washed it in the sink each night
My ship will be the turning one

Its sail is shining rain

Zach Savich

with Claudia Keelan

A HAPPY BOOK, OR: ORB MADE OF MANY PENNIES AND INVISIBLE TAPE

My poetics is simple: I think we should employ the full capacity (or a limited capacity, fully) of both language and the world, like a walk with a smart friend does. There's a house that looks like driftwood, a dog hitched to a clothesline. Doggy runs, so some loose plastic pins slide along the cord, like beads down an abacus. I mishear my friend: "abacus" becomes "platypus." This is all very interesting, which is the whole of my process: I try to be very interested. I have feelings and write them down. I go for walks, drink coffee, talk to friends. My experience of the world/language is not trite or nonchalant or impenetrable or random so why should my poems be? I get stuck on this: if the full capacity is possible, how can we bear anything else? I guess capacity rhymes with catastrophe, so maybe my book should be called Full Capacity Living. Of course, Full Living Capacity would be better: poetics as the revelation of sensibility via the sensations we honestly know by such instincts/ears.

Poetics: Last night watching football while we wrote unpublishable poems in the style of Basho and Sora, reading to each other from the selected poems of Merrill Gilfillan and the journals of Lewis and Clark, a friend and I invented collective nouns (a Song of Solomon of Pork Tacos, a Tolerance of Stars), looking up when we heard the hits. The color commentator seemed to be having problems at home—"Why bother going for the field goal? They'll still need another touchdown." At one point, action on the field cut him off. All he said was, "You'd need a laser." Call me: Man Narrating Football Accidentally But Revealingly Speaks of Lasers or Homelife.

I read the proofs of my book at Dunkin Donuts. I was surprised by how happy the poems seemed. I had thought they held only panic, desperation, folly. I had no idea I had written a happy book.

A teacher said: you need to decide if you think the world is meaningful or not. And then, whether it is or not, if art can be. And if art can be, shouldn't it?

Poetry as cosmology, as echolocation, as what you want to read when you are sick of TV (I can only read Shakespeare when I am sick of TV). As faith in empiricism; because we experience language, even the best abstractions are empirical. Not can poetry matter but poetry is matter.

Because maybe we've been wrong about it all—how wonderful! I write now with apples outside, dusk. I want to say I am looking through the peel of a hollowed apple. I think of an orb made of pennies stuck together with invisible tape. I want to write books that will thrill you in a used book store in ten years.

Zach Savich

 

Serenade

In the painting by Degas, the dancer is not
on a cell phone, but holding her head. I left the museum.
Ann was sick. There were shoes all along the bridge,
and the senseless branching of ambulance sirens: one going west
on Henderson, another east. Technicolor weather. A man
in white coveralls was carrying a traffic cone
over his head, he was an Elmer's glue tube.
In the painting of terns on rigging,
when you remove the terns from the rigging, there is
only canvas behind, not sky. Ann vomited
off the bridge, the way a single page can slide
from its binding. It became harder for me to read on
in the biography, knowing there is no part of the body
a bullet hasn't pierced. Piercework. I worked in a chowder house
and got to bring home all the innards we extracted
from bread bowls. I had a friend who was a trumpet player
who'd come home from a show and, sleepless, play more.
His apartment was so small, his trumpet
stuck into the alley. Ann slept for two or three months.
Snow like tissue after tissue pulled from a box.
I drove Ann to the hospital. On the first day of spring I saw
the Elmer's man standing on the traffic cone point
of his head at a rave. Trees blossomed outside the hospital
the way champagne bottles christen ships. I wheeled Ann
to the museum and we watched the Indian out front
raise his arms to weather. I talked about the Caravaggios
facing each other in Santa Maria del Popolo, the pose
of Paul, receiving, so close to the pose of Peter,
received; saints open their arms. Pieced through.
My friend the trumpet player emptied his spit valve onto pigeons.
He watched a woman climb onto her fire escape, nude,
her husband cursing from the window. I gave up on
the biography. I left the rave. Ann held her head.
The ambulances were just roaming, moving things around.
I put on some shoes I found on the bridge, then left the bridge.
Ann bruised. Her mom showed up. It was July.