exerpt from "Infected Elegy," Selah, Joshua Corey

ah the moment before letters form
burns heaven behind your eyes
to empurple enroyal blood-temper
though I parted your book not in order
think skin a place for the pulse
to kneel or clutch your knees or bemoan
meeting and missing in the orchard
the hopeless equivalence of systems
what we were a blind pair of throats
who teaches me hot to find God
on the volume and verse of being
on the pale printed page of your bed
we had no recourse but discoursing
look love the light's better here

"57=12=3," from The Dik-dik's Solitude by Anne Tardos

Prostitution candy wrap gallivanting sweetie
Blues donkey, Jew's monkey, everlasting news junkie

Lavender elephant
Piggly Wiggly evidence

Grange wool simulacrum eigen perseverance.
Gangliated fitz-koh macafee connection, matz-koh.
Eagan again.

A baby gorilla mistook his hat for his gingiva. No shame, Sir. Your
hair is not my hair. No shame. Semiramis hubbub and a charivari
collarbone.

Fuck you, Semiramis. Macafee fromage desiration frock-coat.
I gladly form English sentences.

Iffy nanny incantations.
Five and seven make twelve.

The law says it all.
Maybe.

Steadfast kitchen drainage erosion darling.
V-neck validation negligenty critical.

What's my story?
Fifty-seven people were killed in the 1994 earthquake in Lost Angeles.

Words no longer pronouncing the letter l are walk, talk, folk,
yolk, palm, salmon, half, calm, almond, and a few others.

Vaccination metaphysics Iris Murdoch never mind.
Episodic nifty ginger.

Slide 57 shows an example of Acne Vulgaris. Ingenuity.
Fast Fifty Seven - Synovial Carcinoma.
Primitive simplicity.

Election enigma academic epidemic.
Maphtalene gossamer bioremediation.

The Male

Epilogue

Rituals are like ducks in pink water, says the Male. Like everything else he says this is from out of the blue. In the background Baudelaire imitates an orator, "If I am not decorated for having my duty, I will cease to do it..." Words come to the Male. They are not willed into being. There is a sinking feeling at the end of any utterance. The last word may be accident use up the potential of all the others. Then the pitch downward will be into the eternity of the Male's mind, his endless spontaneity and lack of preference. When I drink pink water out of the bowl shaped from his head, he looks at my throat. Bolus, says the Male. This seems to cover up some kind of disparity. The desire to be touched is overwhelming. But who's desire is it? This relates back to our initial conversation, where one word could be taken to the land of many.

-Carla Harryman

There is no first or last discourse, and dialogical context knows no limits...At every moment of the dialogue, there are immense and unlimited masses of forgotten meanings, but, in some subsequent moments, as the dialogue moves forward they will return to memory and live in renewed form...Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will celebrate its rebirth.

Mikhail Bakhtin, last written words, 1974

from The Cold of Poetry - Lyn Hejinian

The Person

I love the weather
The scene in nervous snapping
Rocks rise in a rain bearing bridges, chairs
The emotions follow...watchful
My desire is dragging direction to say this
The pen is a nag
The bulb crackles
The sky was never a chipped ceramic
Bulk is brightened by collapse

On my skin are a million lozenges
And outside are stalks of dirt upon inspection
Dimension and longevity--they raise ridges of
description
Here are Rock-drop and Asylum, almost alone
Poem, or ragged prose
The pulse is not an omen of rhythm to come
Pedagogic love
Learning is like poetry-an uncalm practice
It makes the promise of unlikeness and discipline
I love a trilling bird with extended dawn
vocabulary

LH