September 2005


Sailor Moon

Happy, newly cold here & I have the thrill of two amazing recent publications: (Four) Factorial, edited by Sawako Nakayasu, & John Coletti’s new book from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Here’s Coletti’s “Only Half Moon”

but crazy half

under double bent

button sewn stitch flowers

tinsel strung

in brachial maples

bowties sprinkled

filled with air

cuffing a line of tiny bells

rubbing clear calamine

into my eyes

golden triangles

half-undressed.

Amazing how the suddenness of each successive phrase both eclipses & enhances the little sliver of moon evoked in the title, the poem somehow having it flash in the mind as a presence then dissipate into the poems physical contents, a little moonlight inculcated in each word. This book has a wildly accurate title: “Physcal Kind” & it hits “like a quilt truck”.

The work I’m initially crazy for in the new Factorial is a four-section excerpt from Brenda Iijima & Stacy Szymaszek’s “Sailor Porn”. It too has a serious, funny tenderness. The salient details of sex farce opening into genuine valentine:

I stand exclamatory
at the end of a pier
a human greeter
a seamark
did I ever thank you
for the drawing
of the big-eyed fish
marvelous as a sun
setting through pollution
I read “momentum hips”
because I watch too much porn
going the way “wherein there is no ecstasy”
and coming out ecstatic
about women and men
just think there are four of us
two upon the dying water
two who have taken up
qigong as the time passes

Nice, right?

The Adjacent Stairwell 3

New Yipes #! (I mean, #1)

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