ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Three Poems
by Christopher Schmidt



Host Body

At the side of the garden, an appendix of rhubarb, mysterious, perennial. She hums with the organ. Of the mucosal stomach lining, wines disabuse his folly. The minister hands his tissues over. That article, my bible. Scissoring legs punctuate the caucus. Sundays, she remembers broken palms on the boulevard. “They ran their hands right over.” Ream empty, it takes a pillage. Evangelists envied the tyrant’s blank stage. Others decried. As I did, Ed died.

Callas Benched

She held court at the Met, but we couldn’t figure out which one. Missed her. Damned her. Professor suggests we convene seminar there in tardy vigil. Yet can’t catch the echo of her high E-flat—too many earphones, art phones, chatty cicerones who wish they’d studied law. Grandeur, Ebay sells your carcass with lipstick traces on the pipe mouth. Legal? No. Platonic? Learning is a dialectic with isotopic synthesis. The more cavalier the teaching, the more I learn. To be cavalier. On Klavier. Class dismissed.

By the Sea

What kind of sauce is by the sea?
Sticky dog-eared pages by the sea. Merman man.

Peters town. Lansbury.
Vocalise memorial in “By the Sea.”

Stein to Alice:“Baby, let’s be regular.”
Finding bottom nature by the sea.

Sweet sweat pages. Shore ode’s
genius perspiration by the sea.

Marie betrothed from Austria:
I’ve been to paradise but never by the sea.

EuroDisney draws out the incontinent.
Mickey leaks on Goofy by the sea.

“Pat prefers beaches and mountains.”
Darling no such thing as by the sea.