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Poetry

Five

I grow frustrated with Mia Farrow when she takes the length of a feature film to realize she is bearing the child of satan



Five potatoes whistle on the pan,
it’s red, now. It’s nitwits, now, Oakland grown
ochre in the time there is to spend thinking things out.

Mia, for god’s sakes it’s satan in there. John
Cassavetes doesn’t love you,
he made you eat a cup of drugged pudding-- cue psychosequential
dream. On that noiseless leather sofa I grow more impatient,

Why won’t she realize?
Frank responds that he likes her haircut. But what’s
taking so long? I keep asking him and asking
him. He reclines &lets his arm fall to scratch the chihuahua.
Just watch the movie, he says.






Oder?



On all the bronze and pale day it rains, or
a fire hydrant, a half liquor it beams, or
the icon “M”--
Müller, Mayer, Mayer-isch, Mayer-Mahmoud, or
prickle-clad figlike globes. Or figs. Or those that
Germans harvest not.

Or every pair of shoes unattractive-- not a one! Or
weird coincidences; scarcely a word in this houndstoothed
language, what with its terrible blue glow, or the one boy
in the booth adjacent.

We are by proxy prior knowledge, or
what we’ll suppose, continually. They, actually, are ever extending
that other hand, paddling through reams of options; or, or, or?






Sculpture Hall



What for convenience we call Hatshepsut and not
Hatshepsut, who’s been petrified in reliefs, pried from pairs,
since pairs aren’t real, busts from a pair, another statue from dynasty eighteen-- Goldrush on N E 2nd avenue is not not like that and I can’t not not like that,
I can’t not not look.

Face from a composite face, lips from a derivative lip, scrolls
from derivative scroll-- unhinge my head and lay it here for some relief,
not to say historicize, not to say preserve, but cradle and put air.

Permission to us unwittingly given-- remember you said
people are places and I said no the other way around. And wish
I could help? To construct things from nothing, but you’re busy
snapping at the cat, who is dumb, while leaning on this thing
to support the stone plinths, god.

Did I think it good? In their chambers seeds quake,
here you come from so many tremors-- you my golden river beam,
you my botanizing priest.

Did you think it good? The strategic posture of plants?
There are going to be so many people, there authenticating
everything. And wholesome, really. There waits Cleopatra in the same sun,
one titty out, reclining in chair.

With her small bad year she went, evilly and new--
A trill of departure, a departure small as theirs. And loooong times
she combed the seats of the auditorium for bejeweled pill boxes
and pocket mirrors but all she came up with was him. A head
of barbarous hair, so many turtlenecks sewn together-- a mane of them, imagine!





Contributor

Connie Mae Oliver

Connie Mae Oliver is a venezuelan poet and artist, and founding editor of FEELINGS. her second book of poems, science fiction fiction, is being published this year by Spuyten Duyvil Press.

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The Brooklyn Rail

FEB 2013

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