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EDITORIAL

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LAGNIAPPE

MAST

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Two Poems
by Daniel Borzutzky



Love in the Time of Poetry

We listened to the poetry of infestation, and from above a giant appendage dug out
the pestilence from between my toes, and the fungal poets scampered into the
finger nail of a well versed critic, and the verses swarmed and reproduced
around any old mouth that belched or wept or driveled.

I recited Baudelaire on the gurney, and as the professor dug his nail into my back
the miniscule poets crawled across my body, and as meaning spat through his
fluids into my fluids, I heard a critic detailing my flaws: my mature cells were not
being released from the fatty tissue in the inside of my bones; my veins were too
fragile; waste products and fluids were building up at dangerous levels. In short,
my organism could not achieve stability through adaptation or change; the
miniscule poets in my skin repelled the miniscule poets in his skin. I felt pain
where there was no pain, feeling where there was no feeling.

He offered me a canto, a rispetto, a serventessio.

I begged my molecules to link together.

I said: do you not have a drug that can make my muscles contract?

Meantime, in the salons: gun shots and explosions; cats in heat howling in a three-
story tower of trash. The poets in the trash, imploding, and glass blowing out of
store front windows, and in the rubble the origin of a stanza: the putrefaction of a
silent word, a believer pre-empting God with the decision to write, to read, to fill a
space with echoes.

The echoes were trapped; the animal technology sterilized.

The organism raised its hand over the poet's mouth, but shit dribbled through
my fingers.

I'm a poor little canker, said the professor, as he scooted down the hog hose
of politics and into the esotericism of rhythm.

Brussels, Vienna, Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, Buenos
Aires: yesterday'ss lyricism was groaning like a dead man praying to the horse
who flung him off his back and stomped him to bile. The rider-less horse galloped
through the dirt trails of the flesh tunnel. A haggard sense of meaning: a
transcendent son of a bitch is like that.

A leper; the unsayable syllable: love. Hallelujah shouted the poet-beasts who
swallowed their own hearts as if they were stir-fried giblets.

And in the pile of slush, the only one left was the critic. He stood on a mound of
entrails, barfed into his blog, and said:

If you piss for me, if you relieve me of the responsibility of having to piss for
the rest of my life, I'll fill your sonnet with stocks and bonds.

When he emptied his bladder, he emptied my bladder, and in so doing I felt the
dissolution of the means of production:

The earth dissolved into text. The text dissolved into station.

Small Woman, Big Man

Not to be devoured is the most perfect feeling
—Clarice Lispector

She scratched herself where no one scratches, and was deported for illegally
crossing the border to make contact with the even more miniscule woman who
lived in the village beyond. Arrested in her twelve-inch home, she thanked the
authorities for not stepping on her. Placed in a jar with air holes, she awaited her
trial in a state of religious bliss.

_He scratched his anus in the aisle of an airplane, and was held in solitary
confinement in a third world country that did not acknowledge international
law. Deprived of greasy hamburgers and Cheez Whiz, he flopped fish-like in his
cell until the floor cracked beneath his weight. A prison guard filmed this new
dance and sent it around the internet; and within a few days the enormous man
unwittingly reached a notable level of cyber-fame. With time he lost enough
weight to reach over his belly and comfortably wag his penis. This too was taped
by the guards, but out of respect for moral values, the film was kept from the
public.