ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Four Poems
by Gordon Massman


1428

Today he awoke with apples for eyeballs, bright red jonath-
ans misshaping facial bones, two roasted pig heads on verti-
cal platters, black swollen eyes lids cannot fold over, stems
upward like rope fuses, big dappled bulging apples, vision-
less, pulpy, fresh but growing rotten and ripe for fruit flies,
he would be a nest, and these things braided to the optic ner-
ve like weird lanyards, love-transformations, hands into spat-
ulas, knees into spuds, and orbital apples, she resembles the
apple, rotund, globular, cupped, a round bumpy ball prying
his sockets, they're all one apple--cores, hearts, achilles
heels, mahogany seeds, appetites and rejections, coquetry
and refusals, the sweetest little hooves--too many bushels,
his face aches from gratitude; to a man a billion women
flown together with compressive force into a mass resemble
the apple crammed into his sockets at three AM, hard crisp
ones squinching his face with powers of destruction, ever-
y molecule burgeoning with droplet of cider, he adores, he
applies no discrimination, the disconnected molecules catch
between his sockets rushing to his heart, this morning he a-
woke moaning with sweetness, big three-dimensional sweet-
ness large as softballs, door knobs, hip replacement joints,
he swayed, he knocked over candles, he stubbed right knee
blind with significant brutalizing gorgeous orchard pieces.

1452

Mine cuticles ragged and fingernails craggy, mine toenails
yes, bitten, mineself limber to stick toes in mouth, mine an-
us clean as polished copper, mine foreskin bathed, mine
bald pate buffed like Oxford upper, mine incisors flossed
with climbers rope, mine nostril and ear mustachios clip-
ped, mine heart boiled in hot mop water, mine brain bare
footsole black with floorfilth, mine immortal soul floats
in alcohol--dead alien--I Brasso-ed candelabra morality,
eight glinty flutes: adultery, lies, laziness, vanity, gluttony,
hatred, jealousy, aggression, a wick atop each eaten by
flame, mine appetite sponged down like a chopping
block enslaved to ribs, lambshank, breastbones, fishspine,
mine own infant boy, babyfat and babyloin, mine veal-
sweet female preadolescent cleaved across grain cracked
and salted; mine dignity mimics narcissism stretched like
gum, adore, seduce, worship mineself, fifty-four year
long metastasized thread eternal-seeming self-regenera-
ting with each threatening interference; mine optimism
stands like a pristine single rainbow white tooth in a col-
umn of rotten gums, mine sunshine envelopes, mine eyes
gaze high, mine spring trees ratify mine natural constitu-
tion; I wipe mine empathy in cool vinegar bath, feverish,
overflushed, beating out like a wild rabbit's nose unwel-
come terror, unrelenting fear, unwarranted exhaustion,
unceasing flight, cold vinegar rag, for she must die with-
out mine in a hot helpless bed and I must perish sick a-
midst indifferent rocks reptile transversed, and all wrap
fleshless fingers round the ripe Asian pear pimple rusty
yellow bursting juice wounded papery brown bursting
juice. Film over. Crowd the aisles. File out. Adjourn-
ment music. Tonight oblivions of mutual burials, for
thine is the power and the glory forever and ever, amen

1457

I have shorn and given to you delilah my hair, old squirrel, dog
carcass, my might, my potency like a dead cabbagehead, I loved
you like a spec the vacuuming suction, you pulled me back into
the cigarette, the paper unburnt, virginal, after blowing me out in
clouds, in rings, you silver gowned sophisticate, single malt, ice,
was it Barnard? Bryn Mawr? cultural anthropology? academia's
daiquiri cold, Alaskan moonchip planted inside neck skin, per-
manently, dear, human males rarely control sexual politics, yes,
I know, but still, kneecaps resemble monkey skulls, elbows the
cartilaginous nose, sampson hair tongue nodes i've shaved,
sprinkled over you, dish babe slut love desperate for, my shoul-
der blades shriveled doric pillars, chicken wings, your sandal's
big as cincinatti, brassiere cup guadalajara, ten thousand feet
above tree line mountaineer i stand in fanny pack like an idiot,
i've doffed toupee to your rhino, girly girl i'm broke on the
wheel, tatter windmill sails in low hung trees like medieval
battle aftermath, you egg beast, man predator, industrial milk-
er, in the barn fucked my lizard father, giggled, checked the
navy bean soup with a finger like an infant's fever, afterward,
nonchalant, insouciant, i unable to wring your neck, fingers bur-
nt candlewicks, i suppliant worship you, asian armored you,
my thrusting bony hips like a mechanized macabre skeleton
rattling themselves on massive sheets, dead desert cow, one'd
think it incontestable and necessary to my and clan dignity:
ditch the bitch for one of the innumerable available obedient
alternative chicks but hairless, prostrate I'm whipped whipped.

1434

My ideal mate craves overlapping litters, she wants in-
finite babies, to birth a nation, a race to march through
her like soldiers through muck, lily roots, and rot, she
gods fertility, ovaries, fallopians, umbilici, womb, en-
ough years do not exist to deliver masters and slaves,
shopkeepers and kings, taxpayers and governments,
window washer with his lunatic squeegee cleaning the
eyes of idiots, SWM demands insatiable thighs spread
like carps' mouths sucking down thick lightning, clot-
ted hollandaise teeming with chives, no hair color pre-
ference nor economic stream just the insanity to deliv-
er offspring through canal, trachea, anus, and heels,
desperately, oceanic, unfathomable, bottomless, fuck
feminism, the whole goddam petrified substratum, S-
WM wants sorghum field, sugar cane field, soggy rice
acreage to propagate a race on a hot birthing bed near
buckets and rags, slop if it be, consider Harleys super-
fluous as hikes in dead leaves, I want dirty toes, stick-
y chlorophyl, phosphorescent gel like heavy wet lan-
terns produced through coarse hair, procreativity like
a potter's lathe placed in my trust, you: bony, fat,
thrust, gigantic, petite, blunt fingered, pulled glass,
salt manikin, laughs at anything, mustachioed or eye-
browless, pedigree irrelevant; me: lobster man, per-
ambulate clicking, bubble brine, arched calcium car-
bonate spine. broad, muscular, curving forehead into
your sex like a gyrating metal band, unrelenting, sed-
entary or athletic, blonde/blue, auburn/green, pedicure
irrelevant so long as the soles of your feet face heaven.