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The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.
The author wishes to thank the editors of the following publications, in which these poems first appeared: Agni, Black Bread, lift, New American Writing, Grand Street, Lingo, The World, Talisman, Mass. Ave., Shiny, The Hat, Combo, and Gain.
"Cafe Algiers," "The North End," "Christina Dreaming in the Next Room," "Salute," "Patricia & Chris's Annual Summer Solstice Party," and "Immediate Orgy & Audit," also appeared in Immediate Orgy & Audit, a chapbook published by lift books, 1996.
This book would not be possible without the inspiration and friendship of the poets in the Boston area, especially William Corbett, Michael Franco, and Joseph Torra.
The financial assistance of The Fund for Poetry is also gratefully acknowledged.
Chapter One
Matinée
They placed me backstage in the dark for so long
after such a short part to wait for the bow
gingerly among the splinters and props
lost between curtains of black burlap
I finally found my way quietly into some light
a fine aerosol like night in a movie
that I parted a slit and came into day
in the middle of a city
where some worked and some didn't
and in the back of a Portuguese market
a boy strummed basement songs to the junkies
and others laid off by sleep and asides
from paradise came stumbling in
cracker shelves, chorizo boats,
grotesque rosaries on ceiling hooks
I had to stay if only to inventory
ceramic cow, boy and girl saltpepper
made in Brazil, tremulously haunting
in the semidark, insect dust and shelfpaper
the old men are sitting around blabbing
and day divines our weird agog
his paladin pallor, who plays guitar....
The fans gently work their faces side to side
and going back to their docent sleep
all things electric slide their cords in coil round
the early summer night distantly trafficked
and blundering color by color through blushes
like curtains on windows I told him
"You have interfered with me at my invitation."
The bars slowly woke along the river topaz
Swish of 93 and the pink light of Schrafft's
among antique co-ops and rock band practice spaces
where if you were ever to run into someone
you once knew, here's where you would come
but look for no personal effects; he died young
Café Algiers
You drink from the window the liquor's transparent
I don't take exception to a garbage truck on garbage day
Just tell me how I should pay you
to slide in, to funnel up, to light the torch
or ring the bell among the clockworks
Drink your tea & don't get high like an organ
Yes I finish the pot
because each successive cup's steeped deeper
lest I pour myself out
my reincarnation at age 25 will not be replete
with all the wisdom available to be troubled
None of the passersby am I or are me
while a fragrant steak cooks in my presence
all marriages dissolved today by decree
--a lion's rage at slow entropy.
Bigtime Printing
He has a business, but does he give pleasure or strength
by what he sells
and do you climb over/under girders and follow canals
catching distracting bits of Chinatown jazz
like first hitting wood on a bridge, then metal mesh
waterlogged pilings' industrial incense
comes up through and hits the nostrils of a city girl
who compartmentalizes her serenity, exacts her wits
from a mental Gillette and steps down hard.
Bigtime printing, graphics, and photo developing
bevelled chiselled 3-D logos with rainbows
for signs and here and there arrows to clothes
on tables in church basements whose scaffolding
of alley brick and fire escape's chainlinked
to charity loading dock, after five locked
courtyard's sainted polychrome statues parked
in modes and tableaux of aggrandized obeisance.
Twice by the turnpike weeds and tunnels mike
the sound out either side as she looks and looks
for this operation; with the sun having covered
the distance she might've spent working at computer
it is setting. Can't laze in its last rays
soon it'll be dark on the wrong side of Symphony
tae kwon do one upper window plus hope
of being equally at liberty tomorrow
The North End
True to the harbor surrounded by lookouts
You peed I deigned to be a pier till you found me
In the mistness no rust hulk ducked
near, we hurried off held hands
Hockey game crowd let out we swam
counter, the only open liquor store
on our way's clerk turbaned & fingers wrapped
under the register had a gun we imagined
Pair making out in pockmarked car curbside security
guard in bright light at front desk dozing
The night really swung because after the wine
we unscrewed the Jim Beam
under overpass over canal past pedestrian bridge
tombstones rowhomes stairs to light
& squares, to be free as car doors
valuables open to, we weren't scared
Wet Book
Byways of late low-watt October, torrential, on a steep hill washing
Down a dead squirrel (tiny male genital) slowly through the
afternoon.
Man with numerous plastic bags comes through the double
Doors of the library, puts them politely behind the desk,
(Girl there not even looking up) he goes takes a paper cup
Fills it twice with the gray tap water in the room temperature
cooler,
Second time melts the cup. Bare light bulbs in each alcove model
yellow shadows
On his face, on ends and spines of shelved-haphazard books
And iron railings ricketing up to a low-ceilinged second story
Grime stacks stuffed with folios, solicitous odors in the damp.
Stentorian hulk of darkstained oak with brass handles to tiny
drawers
Holds the card catalogue, cards in it going back to penmanship,
Later manual type engraving the paper with force of the keystroke
and recently
The mysterious removable ink of the electric typewriter,
Everywhere ramrod margins measured to uniform millimeters,
Precise dewey decimal numbers promising one-to-one
correspondence with books
Back in the maze where none but librarians, custodians, go--
stairways
Obstructed with boxes and mops of dry rag rope
Such as plaster the fronts of tugboats moored, off-duty, by the
hurricane barrier's
Power plant's three blinking stacks, high lines and transformers a
balletic grid
Hitting the plexus of an occasional heron zeroed in on en route to
the bay.
Donated, hastily disposed of in taped bags of embarrassment,
books no one wants,
Tatterdemalion paperbacks fetching lone dollars and quarters
under the doric columns
Of concrete urns of withered autumn offertories, into the coffers of
such a book sale,
Upkeep of the mausoleum, purchase of further volumes, pensions,
rain loud in
The hollow lavatory in a recess of the north corner when
A well-heeled retiree returns a pre- 1940s hardcover potboiler
Ruined from the walk over, man in the clammy reading room
Whose bags always left against the chipped radiator's fitted wire
cover
From a.m. to closing sleeps in the amber elderly light gleams on
armchair vinyl.
World News Tonight
1.
There are all these architectural novelties amidst the hollies
in Providence
where streets slant in the direction of the underworld & hellcats
know
the canal goes there; runners plunge into the tunnel with
"Devil" on their headbands & come out by strip bars,
the wood on houses rot in the fierce gush of thaw, and
ramshackle I continue to live at the top of whatever dive
persists in the shadow of mayoral privilege on the overlooking
ledge
where painters overthrow their art for their eyesight any day,
so at the top of the church where the band will play the
winter stars can't suction out the cultish students
selecting what heavenly host they want to attend
their self-christening in each other's eyes and notebooks,
the ancestral statue's benison over convention center's
the picture of political brittleness, pains nothing
but electricity's expenditure to create that cavernous
night of geometric lights the town elites can see
from their picture windows leaves me in the subterranean
cold unable to leap, being at the bottom, from which
even prices could climb higher, faster, til you as author
could not afford the special edition on their shelf!
The special swelling feeling instead, of goodwill in your chest
that cries out for delight given the sun and runnels
in sewers churning up diamonds and your own
gorgeousness veers into heaven like a plane crash.
Careful those footfalls overheard overhead aren't
stressing the stanchions of such luck! On which
the graffiti you write is used to try you for
using public space for private grace.
2. Providence/Lambskinned
Through softball dugouts to halfsuspended ferric & defunct
railroad bridge, entry knifed through fencing
behind supermarket like finding a jeweled shoe
in a thatch of chives you follow the sewer to
plainclothes cops bust liaisons in weeds & glass
thus not around when Hope High's boys smash bottles
out of cars on Doyle leaving comelike spatter for skaters' knees
next day
& all of summer; a vacated jacket cats sleeve through
hunting for flukes, as if the broken bumper
had much to do with the nosebleed, perhaps brought on
by someone's impending going
making even stars seem nearer than the peaks we attempt:
a gutter glitters by roughened wooden newel
of balcony on porchroof, my floor runs into a neighbor's floor
into second story headshop & gallery
I ask for the tree that hangs out its wings to activate valentines
"Somewhere I'll go so I can long for this place
Somewhere I'll return from & long for in return"
Someone steals your ad for a roommate at the AA hangout
& pickup spot, yoga/massage cards' multicolored thumbtacks stand out
& of all things sitting drinking coffee watching
cleancut men & expensive girlfriends
perpetrate leisure's dichotomies:
Careful, danger's spiritual!
Sawgrass of inlet, sawhorse on sand with sailboats on cinderblocks
You get off the train to walk into town
Lilacs spread north when the city's are gone
Copyright © 1999 Ange Mlinko. All rights reserved.
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