by Jeni Olin
Author's Links
And if I feel like a woman looming over Lautrec
with water weight & panties and murderous fuschia underfoot
those dying balloons on Job's Lane sag around like saline breast implants
and pineal sunbeams sneak through my hair
dirty but focused as screwy detectives or plexiglass
I go to pieces in my adolescent pine
amid blackheads, seltzer, a cold front
falling into a decline
like ladies on the prairies used to
in the kleig-lit house with the deodorant cakes in the upstairs johns
and the foam core ass on "Bad Secretary" in the living room
and the foam core bird paintings in the kleig-lit kitchen
warm & endangered as an Orca whale float,
pollen & Coronas, in the foggy autumn
and the thin nude branches all snow-furred
like an X-ray of infant bronchitis. Wrist-slitting stuff.
My honey chapstick stinks of piss & menstrual sharkfear
but like the alpha male in brownie troops ankled in mud
I sit tight, coping, & spit. The Mormons taught me
to have fortitude when I am in the right & right now
I stand stalwart as lung-colored support hose
in a French sex & deather for readers under twelve
My indian name is "Little Hard-Core" I yank on a blue collar
since we have so many blue collar holidays
salute myself for alpinism--just being high really
& degrees of cousinage even misty like this
Don't Let Me Eat Dinner
Smoking & juvenile obesity are not uncommon in unhappy people
Especially in ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE
(her kids do but that's a different story)
The sky low-slung & beer-colored with curling tufts of dry ice smoke
Amid Alaskan, if not "Alaskan," snow & billboard shots
Of Kate Moss in those jean ads when she was, like, age two
I'm not eating again until I am that thin
I subsist on squab filets, "turn toward purple colas" (diet) & upset them
As in a poem that springs a chubby when the lights go on
Ask me what these days & nights are like, Tits!
Like a blast of cold fir green air around human irises.
My nerves, my nerves! Mama take this pepper spray from me--
I can't defame the minions tonight
On this isle we have with the statue of liberation
I am not a mature audience, possess the sexual mores
Of estrous chinchillas in the remote & humorless
Hinterlands of Jersey City but neuters are never happy either
Oh my life is a string of meaningless affairs I can never go back
Whatever becomes of me, I shall never use this lavatory again.
I am so drunk.
WAR! || BROKEN NEWS || CRITIQUES & REVIEWS || CYBER BAG || EC CHAIR || FICCIONES
THE FOREIGN DESK || GALLERY || LETTERS || POESY || SERIALS || STAGE & SCREEN || ZOUNDS
©1999-2002
Exquisite Corpse - If you experience difficulties with this site, please
contact the webmistress.