Poetry
excerpt: Color by Numbers (The Landscape Set)
Rural Scene
The deer droppings are here and the rooster’s
memory of its birth is here too.
They glisten, pink, as if they are adescribed
in a dumb kid’s science report or a poem.
In the corner, the moon removes
its glow in the dark condom.
Cowboys make the best presidents,
the billboard declares. Not being a ghost myself,
I believe it when I hear the color orange contains
the chewed gum of only the happiest children
Suburban Scene
Two toddlers lick powdered candy by the aqua
painted swimming pool. I wish I was one of those
purple bikini ladies who read magazines
about difficult sex positions while their children
smash into each other in the wading pool.
Instead, I am the number three around the white
unpainted space above the head of the tall
teenager who lingers on the ladder to the high dive.
She’s thinking again about how
it’s possible to think about not thinking.
This blue may as well be the final arbiter of summer.
You’d have to be a virgin to care where it ends.
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of two books of poems: Freud in Brooklyn (Hanging Loose 2000), and Ugh Ugh Ocean (forthcoming, spring 2003). She is the Monday night readings coordinator for the Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church.
Contributor
Joanna Fuhrman
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Paul Thek: Interior / Landscape
By Katy Diamond HamerSEPT 2021 | ArtSeen
Some of the work on view in the Watermill Center’s two-floor exhibition was previously on display at the Whitney, but many of his most important pieces are being shown for the first time. Paul Thek: Interior / Landscape shines a light on the fact that Thek was an avid draftsman.
from the she said dialogues: flesh memory
By Akilah OliverFEB 2021 | Poetry
Akilah Oliver (1961–2011) was born in St. Louis and grew up in Los Angeles. She was the author of two books of poetry: A Toast in the House of Friends (2009) and the she said dialogues: flesh memory (1999), which received a PEN Beyond Margins award. Her chapbooks include A Collection of Objects (2010), a(A)ugust (2007), The Putterer’s Notebook (2006) and An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet (2004). Oliver was an influential teacher and a notable performer. She collaborated with a range of artists and musicians and co-founded the experimental, feminist performance collective Sacred Naked Nature Girls in 1994. She was also a member of the Belladonna* feminist avant-garde collaborative and a graduate student in Philosophy, Art and Social Thought at the European Graduate School. Oliver lived for many years in Boulder, Colorado and taught at the Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In addition, she taught at Pratt Institute and at The New School in New York City, where she lived at the time of her death.
Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory
By Nolan KellyAPRIL 2021 | Books
This sense of bewilderment, of a past that is both accessible and impossible to decipher, is the real subject of Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale. Its ostensible subject is her own genealogy, going back through four generations of Russian Jews, which is presented to the reader like a cadaver on a table—all parts intricately connected and covered in film, both sticky and slippery to the touch. Stepanova is less interested in holding these parts up to the light than she is in recording her horror at the death of her history, its inability to speak for itself, and the plethora of morbidities which could inform its cause of death.
Rachel Eulena Williams: Tracing Memory
By Dan CameronFEB 2021 | ArtSeen
Williams’s exhibition, titled Tracing Memory, builds on the tradition of apostate picture-makers with such confidence that the fact that this is also her debut exhibition at a commercial art gallery in New York City comes as a surprise. Many of the works on view lack any support structure at all, preferring instead to migrate across the wall with a breezy randomness that belies their precise deployment of shape, color, and materials.
