In the Spleen of the City
The bad witness and the activist meet for coffee at he center of
the city.
She is wearing a dress the color of a liar’s tears. He is wearing a frog
mask that resembles a dirty ghost.
They chat about their childhoods in the opposite-coast suburbias.
In both towns, their bedrooms smelled like paperbacks and
imitation vanilla.
They each had a friend who used to prick herself with beaded safety
pins. Different young girls. Different colored pins.
Who is the activist? Who is the bad witness? Neither can remember.
If they kiss, their tongues will split into lightning forks and broken
flutes.
*
When the bad witness was an activist, she used to chain herself to her
sister—or was it a doll?
She often forgets that she never had a sister.
At the playground, she would go up to babies and yell, “You’re not
my sister.”
As an activist, she believes in the reality of the world.
*
The bad witness gets a job as a poet-in-residence at a tattoo parlor,
but all of her poems are just one word, stop. It’s an improvement
on her pre-amnesia poems, and small enough to fit on most bodies
without unbearable pain.
*
Across town, classrooms are being used to stockpile invisible guns.
The frogs who sleep in the desks clamor for air, while the android
teacher thinks her memory of her past life as a science-fiction
action star is only a dream.
*
Years pass, and the coffee shop starts serving moonshine right into
people’s mouths. No cup needed. It’s the only way to deal with the
constant lying.
As the activist and the bad witness chat, one of their bodies is replaced
with a metal cage.
Now he (or she?) is only an iron structure, an enclosure of air with a
dumb whale heart, beating inside.
Neither notices the missing flesh—the almost empty construction
where a chest used to be.
Search Engine Overlord
The dystopian surface
with the one-thousand-percent cotton
lining is not enough to satiate
the present, to unmake
the water buffalo
of the past. No thumbs
needed to call off
an impractical joke.
No roof parade. No
uncomfortable topiary
helmet to ruin your
dismissive eyebrow slant.
Frenemy happy hour
for all. (Yum!)
Freedom zucchini fires
on the half shell. Yes to the toe jam.
Maybe to the hot sauce-prayer-
closet electioneering headache
medicine plus one. I’m trying
to be more perfect, but instead
I’m in-between and frog-ready,
Mama-proof post-industrial
complex. Play that fruitful music
lost girl et al. Some days
all of my favorite plotlines end
with a woman walking into
a roof. Freedom for all, even
you, squeaking your way back
into the corset narrative you
thought had been transformed.
Nope! Just signposts here:
the activist who lights himself
on fire becomes a favorite
art-house icon and then a parody
on the Simpsons only .0003
percent of an audience
“gets.” Our fingers hurt
from dialing other people’s
senators. Wake up, canary face!
Time for your solo.
Wrap It in a Beehive
All I want to do is stay
home, flirt with my baby
sister’s babysitter, admire
my reflection in my
mother’s butcher knife
and stuff my chowhole
with sweet potato fries,
but then there’s that ho
again, throwing down
that flaxen mane from
her window in the sky,
throwing around an
aromatic daffodil-shaped
cloud of amorous vapor
which envelops the world
and makes me forget
my true bro-ness. I know
they say her heart is made
of steel, but her lips taste
like stone fruit trifle
and her armpits smell
like paces I don’t admit
to her I’ve been. (Cue
the flutes.) So when
I hear the sound of her
braids swaying in the wind,
and the squeaky rattle
of her chained-up thighs,
like old-fashioned birdsongs
wooing me with their noisy
charms, my limbs start
to scale her hair, until
my palms are rough
and my fingers are fire-
engine red, and I don’t
even mind the blisters.
Listen to What I Am Saying, Not What I Say
Try to fold your memories as if you were handling
your mother’s underwear
or as if the memories were the creases
in her face, your face.
Look at your destiny. It’s over
there, the pink dress
pedaling the tricycle—a spirit
on wheels, doing a religious wheelie
like all the other false gods who
haunt your pungent suburb.
If you are sleeping, where is
your necklace of drool?
If you are awake, why does your headache
keep sticking its tongue on the frozen pole?
If anyone is a fan of the way the past
twists its tendrils around all the knobs,
let her be the first to throw our
hosiery over the glass wall.
How long can you hold on to
a mummified cat
when the building is
already burning?
Sometimes I just want to use
my own hands.
Listen to What You Cannot Hear
At six a.m., the planet craters inward
like a teenage girl, half-afraid
of a full-length mirror, and the trees
stop shaking for a millisecond,
the clams and mussels open
their shells to the passing clouds
as if to say hi, how are you and mean it.
Is this why the security guards
at the museum hide themselves under
the sculptures so it’s difficult to tell
what’s art and what’s human,
what’s cow-spotted mountain and
what’s mountain-spotted cow?
Perhaps this is why all the babies
are throwing their mashed-up carrots
in the air, why the social worker claims
she’d rather be a pre-sliced mango than a flag.
The bad witness and the activist meet for coffee at he center of
the city.
She is wearing a dress the color of a liar’s tears. He is wearing a frog
mask that resembles a dirty ghost.
They chat about their childhoods in the opposite-coast suburbias.
In both towns, their bedrooms smelled like paperbacks and
imitation vanilla.
They each had a friend who used to prick herself with beaded safety
pins. Different young girls. Different colored pins.
Who is the activist? Who is the bad witness? Neither can remember.
If they kiss, their tongues will split into lightning forks and broken
flutes.
*
When the bad witness was an activist, she used to chain herself to her
sister—or was it a doll?
She often forgets that she never had a sister.
At the playground, she would go up to babies and yell, “You’re not
my sister.”
As an activist, she believes in the reality of the world.
*
The bad witness gets a job as a poet-in-residence at a tattoo parlor,
but all of her poems are just one word, stop. It’s an improvement
on her pre-amnesia poems, and small enough to fit on most bodies
without unbearable pain.
*
Across town, classrooms are being used to stockpile invisible guns.
The frogs who sleep in the desks clamor for air, while the android
teacher thinks her memory of her past life as a science-fiction
action star is only a dream.
*
Years pass, and the coffee shop starts serving moonshine right into
people’s mouths. No cup needed. It’s the only way to deal with the
constant lying.
As the activist and the bad witness chat, one of their bodies is replaced
with a metal cage.
Now he (or she?) is only an iron structure, an enclosure of air with a
dumb whale heart, beating inside.
Neither notices the missing flesh—the almost empty construction
where a chest used to be.
Search Engine Overlord
The dystopian surface
with the one-thousand-percent cotton
lining is not enough to satiate
the present, to unmake
the water buffalo
of the past. No thumbs
needed to call off
an impractical joke.
No roof parade. No
uncomfortable topiary
helmet to ruin your
dismissive eyebrow slant.
Frenemy happy hour
for all. (Yum!)
Freedom zucchini fires
on the half shell. Yes to the toe jam.
Maybe to the hot sauce-prayer-
closet electioneering headache
medicine plus one. I’m trying
to be more perfect, but instead
I’m in-between and frog-ready,
Mama-proof post-industrial
complex. Play that fruitful music
lost girl et al. Some days
all of my favorite plotlines end
with a woman walking into
a roof. Freedom for all, even
you, squeaking your way back
into the corset narrative you
thought had been transformed.
Nope! Just signposts here:
the activist who lights himself
on fire becomes a favorite
art-house icon and then a parody
on the Simpsons only .0003
percent of an audience
“gets.” Our fingers hurt
from dialing other people’s
senators. Wake up, canary face!
Time for your solo.
Wrap It in a Beehive
All I want to do is stay
home, flirt with my baby
sister’s babysitter, admire
my reflection in my
mother’s butcher knife
and stuff my chowhole
with sweet potato fries,
but then there’s that ho
again, throwing down
that flaxen mane from
her window in the sky,
throwing around an
aromatic daffodil-shaped
cloud of amorous vapor
which envelops the world
and makes me forget
my true bro-ness. I know
they say her heart is made
of steel, but her lips taste
like stone fruit trifle
and her armpits smell
like paces I don’t admit
to her I’ve been. (Cue
the flutes.) So when
I hear the sound of her
braids swaying in the wind,
and the squeaky rattle
of her chained-up thighs,
like old-fashioned birdsongs
wooing me with their noisy
charms, my limbs start
to scale her hair, until
my palms are rough
and my fingers are fire-
engine red, and I don’t
even mind the blisters.
Listen to What I Am Saying, Not What I Say
Try to fold your memories as if you were handling
your mother’s underwear
or as if the memories were the creases
in her face, your face.
Look at your destiny. It’s over
there, the pink dress
pedaling the tricycle—a spirit
on wheels, doing a religious wheelie
like all the other false gods who
haunt your pungent suburb.
If you are sleeping, where is
your necklace of drool?
If you are awake, why does your headache
keep sticking its tongue on the frozen pole?
If anyone is a fan of the way the past
twists its tendrils around all the knobs,
let her be the first to throw our
hosiery over the glass wall.
How long can you hold on to
a mummified cat
when the building is
already burning?
Sometimes I just want to use
my own hands.
Listen to What You Cannot Hear
At six a.m., the planet craters inward
like a teenage girl, half-afraid
of a full-length mirror, and the trees
stop shaking for a millisecond,
the clams and mussels open
their shells to the passing clouds
as if to say hi, how are you and mean it.
Is this why the security guards
at the museum hide themselves under
the sculptures so it’s difficult to tell
what’s art and what’s human,
what’s cow-spotted mountain and
what’s mountain-spotted cow?
Perhaps this is why all the babies
are throwing their mashed-up carrots
in the air, why the social worker claims
she’d rather be a pre-sliced mango than a flag.
To read a review of TO A NEW ERA by Joanna Fuhrman, via Entropy Magazine, see here.
To purchase copies of TO A NEW ERA by Joanna Fuhrman, please see here.
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