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Deborah Meadows

Deborah Meadows teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her works include: involutia (Shearsman Press, UK, 2007), Representing Absence (Green Integer, 2004), Itinerant Men (Krupskaya, 2004), and two chapbooks, Growing Still (Tinfish Press, 2005) and 'The 60’s and 70’s: from The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick' (Tinfish Press, 2003). Another volume of poetry Thin Gloves is forthcoming from Green Integer Press.

From the sequence Goodbye Tissues

“… to assert a normal hum

until, that is, the

great big cork tag

of the jury’s verdict

rows of boxes

watching many famous figures”

(from Eternal Sections by Tom Raworth)

The pilgrim had a moment of truth. Had

of winter, could dispatch both models

make double atomic diagrams clear

to retro-seraphim in humility,

drafted “About torture” and we behold

of written word near material for

allegorical cistern drawn down, or

shifted from spirit to flesh with onset

& copy, yank the derivative land,

yet metaphorical: see, cherubim

wait for whatever as lovely poems are

proto-truths held in common; authority,

comedy. They wept. For bread and meat, our

new lows, a literary spoof falls free.

* * *

The secretary assigned a machine

precarious sentences. The body

pays off ratcheting down from syntactic

bolts, each a left-handed thread of Charles River

in that machine. So’s I tell ya’: four-eyed

to copy down organic political

vines torn from poverty. No gentle

criminality, its features. Myself

-like role recoded the novelist’s long,

fully aware of coercion, not

system-assured one pair of sovereignty. Forced

analogies, pity the subversive!

Persuasion swallows these abstractions. More

am nation. Bar dubious election.

* * *

Freud compiled stories of long influence;

subjectivities are wracking private

broad human consequence. But more, this call

for your set, the specific nature of

new widows, former residents of burned

long days fashioned by five untenable

testings now disallowed by another

space of stairway, swoop of analyses.

For mediums, rehearsed fantasies, puppet

capitalists bear returns occluding

cities. If the uncanny may reserve

attitudes – of fear, what more can be said?

Nation, our item today during these

shells beyond infantile sensation shall not.