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Jason Schneiderman
Schneiderman
Would you take this name if you loved me,
keep it in your mouth for the answer to “last
name?”,
spell it over and over and over again
for every clerk in every hotel, spell it on every form,
every name tag, every credit card application?
What if you knew it wouldn’t fit, that you’d be
“Schneiderm” on the SATs,
“Schneiderma”
at school, and “Senidernam” in your yearbook? What
if
you were a neurologist, and your patients
could never remember a three syllable name?
What if you consulted a numerologist, and
“Schneiderman”
plus your first name added up to “early death”
or “wasting disease?” What if your first name
were “Schneiderman” as part of an odd family
tradition
and you would end up as “Schneiderman
Schneiderman.”
What if you hadn’t been born yet? What if
the angels in heaven showed you some possible lives
and you had to pick your family before Elijah placed his
finger
on your lips and made you forget? Would you
make the same decision, to journey down that birth canal,
to slip headfirst into “Schneiderman,” heavy as
Poland,
monstrous as love?
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Dean Young
Yellow Sports Car
The closing of the doll hospital
doesn’t mean dolls are no longer
being maimed and trampled, broken of eye.
I am not ready to extrapolate beyond that.
Everything isn’t about you.
The heart is tressed with golden barbed wire.
We are way past hair painted on the forehead,
affecting a squeak in response to pressure.
Now there’s a got-to-sleep, got-to-cry chip.
Now you have to hold your hand way up
into outer space if you want help
at the intersection. Here,
my report breaks off.
They’re too far off to hear anyway,
the black shapes under black sail.
I’m thankful for the clouds though,
the best of all screen savers.
Currently, an empty circle has appeared
where months ago a snowman collapsed.
Its infrastructure-too sad to continue.
Yet there is much to learn from a dissolving
humanoid form. All flesh is made of tears for instance
and a portion of grit. Other lessons
may be gleaned from the self-cleaning oven.
Only spoor remains. A yellow sports car
inside the thorny resistant body.
It’s not real, you know.
Very little is.
Maybe dragonflies.
Maybe bathroom wallpaper.
the junk left behind at the Vietnam War Memorial.
Your unrepairable eye.
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Jason Zuzga
The presidents
All this shall be ours.
Cream sherry sipped,
shirt arms torn off. Oof.
We will come calling
in the small of the cul-de-sac
our arms slendering into your mind
quick burrows, chipmunks.
This time its personal this time
on the bus it’s a cold bag of snacks
frozen capri-sun to your dented forehead
my slender sicky, my turtle in a bowl.
We walk along the ocean, the derricks jumping slow
and we eat our hot dogs,
extrusions of succulence, smoked meat gel
that inserts into mouths like candy car keys.
The door opens and there we are
wrestling in the hotel room on the mountain tip,
serum is swishing within,
four kidneys together in bed, no punching,
waterslide tubules, the signals turn
and the bladders fill with goldenthrush color.
They rise and float us over the land
like egyptian suns. Men o’ war.
We row yolked and jazzed,
kontikied and bowtied, through the great lakes,
kissing lampreys and imagining
delicatessens where all the girls are holding guns
and the boys are planting beans in
styrofoam franchises. We leap into
the falls and grab any new beverage—don’t
let go of my hand.
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Tony Tost
The Mid-to-Late Nineties
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Satisfaction was imposed upon
every American. Sunday morning was a nail to the temple. They
built a forest in the Oval Office and I lost my virginity in the
shadows. The big fish was reeled in on Main Street. We threw it
up. My dad fell off the wagon and all I got was this lousy
T-shirt. Trail of the century. The true umbrella was lost. There
was nothing behind the curtain except some great tits and a few
thousand skulls. My mom held a snake before my window and I drew
the picture. There was the comedian’s ass, the letter-sea.
Dad had a black rag for a lung. One evening before nightfall the
cameramen stepped before their cameras. Each told one true story.
Only the magazines remembered this (we could not remember a
thing). It was a new universe every week. Astral suburbs. My
parents and I took turns singing ourselves to sleep. We got
better insulation for the house, a bigger fridge. We left our
knives at the water’s edge. Dad kept an extra knife at
home. My neighbor got married in a torn skirt and the newspapers
grew dark with wisdom. Two out of three Americans believed they
were the eighth wonder of the world. The press did not fear God,
only the necessity of one. I was afraid of the shirt my mother
wanted me to wear. Yoko forgave us, we forgave her. It was our
White Album: a long lazy sip as the new guard finds the
switch. |
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Dana Levin
White Dog
Jingling,
and the padding of feet, the sniffing
between the door and your floor—
and they’re in.
The dark one leaping up on the left, the white one
jumping up on the right
as you lay asleep in your bed.
But you’re awake.
Can’t get up now, dreamer.
It’s a delight the way they nose you,
wagging their black and white tails—
until the dark one retreats.
Little pug with its saucer eyes, looking tremblingly
at you—
and the white one suddenly cool. The white one
lifting its leg—
Can’t get up.
The musk streams down.
And the white dog turns its moon head, looks steadily
at you—
White light.
White light.
Marking you, saying
You’re mine.
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Sarah Manguso
A Poet’s Life
A poet’s life begins on the day he
awakens from the dream of being born.
Only a few years later we may find him gallivanting in the
foam.
Later he will break the ribbon of the typewriter with some
frequency
and black tea will affect him as a disease.
He will become sexually excited by a few narratives,
which he will recite continually for fear of misremembering
them.
A poet cannot have too many climaxes in his life
and after each one he types a couple of lines.
It seems that he erases more than he writes
also that he drinks more tea than he writes.
The fire escapes seem to gleam to him
next to their column of sky
and beckon crookedly down the edifice
and produce gray birds to no discernible end.
Sometimes the escape dangles a little length of wire
pathetically
in the wind, or casts toothy and coquettish shadows.
The poet knows it is no longer fashionable to prefer
the shadow to the railing, but the shadow is faint.
He can’t remember which he prefers.
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