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The Argotist Online |
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MICHELLE GREENBLATT Michelle Greenblatt is a student at Florida Atlantic University and is the new co-poetry editor of "mprsnd". Her first book brain:storm, will go to press at the beginning of December (Anabasis Press). She has been published or will be published in these magazines this year: AUGHT, Zafusy, BlazeVOX, X-stream, Word for/ Word, Admit Two, Haggard & Halloo, elimae, The Anemone Sidecar, LitVision, Generator Press, Unlikely Stories, Big Bridge, and Frank's Home. Her third chapbook (X-press(ed)) will appear in December as well. Michelle will be spotlighted in the February/March 2006 issue of 63 Channels.
TAKEN WITH THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EYE taken with the photographic eye of electric light in the house while none other than my body paints along the bare bedroom walls—can be decoded? when the electronic mind wraps itself around the desiccated wall and its gentle acres with women in half-broken jars clumped with loam and split-open rock knobbed acres of angel-shaped semen-scars falter in spat blood; she calculates each sun, dry clicks of the metronome count each second. in her dark creature-headed room a person followed by blind babies with twigs for thighs makes a noose my face cloaked in sour clouds while my desire moves across the water lilies which move across the sand and through a sluice of rain, hungry, hungry, my little sister; how naked you must have been…
SOMNOLENCE somnolent morning stalks the people who rise with the landscape meant for climbing we meet at the oblique road where the two-tone sun (which died after the horizons fell) upraised at sulfurous lunarscapes. dream-twisted apparitions ring orange-heads at Eden’s point where the new moon curves pristine-smoothly palpable as our origin, obdurate as the wind-clouds toughened by suffering; preserved on a set course and briskly devoured after obeying orders, torpid warning s machine gun silences appalling witness’ lips green and martyred ready to hone their edges stemless fulcrum empties its face into the jouncing mirror sister, my mind runs with you, liquid down a drain, I can taste the tin of the lid we lick though nobody looks up or bothers to answer me—it is no lake to drown in! my silver sister, sliver of the sunset/ twisting toward a metal city/ easily picked up by a loose flap of eyelid, just as we say every chance circumstance is caused by accident, the honey pours knocked loose by a jerking elbow, arms flailing in the sky for balance making circles in the nighttime air surging out to the center—given that I remember rhyme on this too white sheet where I throw my luggage at the only intact tree, shrunk to abnormal size, and open -mouthed flickering towards exclamation no more garden no more south way up towards capped white hair the new myth of origins swollen claws that murder the death sentence smooth and curved as a comma the words are pure of the forest no sentence find its knot single and exact slabs of moonbeams but madtalk is madtalk says the roof and crumbles into a ball of stone. non-measurement is key. begin with puddles full of children. stand between two musicians. operate on history. (no answer?) find three tight human nature streams with interposing eyes. and take them back to the telling of it: wars, etcetera (someone is always saying) stop turning the impossible around image is no longer seen symmetrically or as halves of wholes, a well-known definition of poetry is taken and eaten with pennies a festive statement (madtalk is madtalk) made with Plexiglas hinges larvae tied to the teeth one can barely discern the poem from the adjectives curved as commas smooth as dreams naked as eyeballs he says his brain registers the money that drops in with the magnifying glass come close or run away; I’ll wash the dirt. I fear you and I am cold. I will give you back your ring. I will eject myself from my eyes in the matrixed nothingness which pours forth, stringy, from
your four fingers.
HUMAN INERTIA human inertia over field of replacement nature, during examination, finding they lack manpower
learn replacements of both fruit and trees—black coal revolver circle opener water lotus seventh man
going forward going at early ending of winter dangerous to leave the eyes [wet] which have been written about watch carefully and erase. stagnate the earth. keep writing. keep writing. I will pull you by your stems underwater. I will bury you by your hair.
THROUGH ELEGANT HOUSES
through elegant houses wild roses stalk ardent cherries gasoline covers me/ medication covers me, psyche-not fractures the ratio of the snarled thicket’s total sacrifice. a gutted mirror hurls its heart at (“she was careful walking) the sweet stench of air (“but she froze) when his head slipped—and though he was full of sun, it seemed (and the flux was quite insistent”) he had sung her that curdy melody which jutted her thighs round jagged cliffs—this against the onslaught of stories with each shudder, breath, each reddrench, the yielding ripeness of human fruit (and she says “yes” and she says “i do”)— even when they discussed a certain saint in the sullen light still lays all ways to waste
SURE CURE FOR BRIGHTNESS
don’t muffle my please don’t break it sounds for now just feather the half-full hole with strokes for a blue woman knocking on my document just down that hot alley where it was a sure cure for brightness; by the gate the bronze snake lies with blade inert as stagnant lake, zinc-white eyeballs singing prayers, singing prayers, and pliable still as far as eggshells are concerned, knifelike, he flings glass and laughs at the moon-like shadows twisting on the treeline flopping the ciliated rhythm on its belly and grinning something shiveringly delicious; when we stood and thought about the nothings that light felt up at sunrise…maybe the world, building a building beginning at the singular smile at the slit corner of your left eye, that is: winter approaches: it was in every winter, always, that hideous answer (which I could not engrave for the prison ward’s slippery company and the inmates’ lovely songs. circling around the reckless duty was the fat voice whispering loud applause and soothing moans.
copyright © Michelle Greenblatt |