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CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

FIVE PIECES
by Tina Brown Celona

Sunday Morning Cunt Poem

I wrote a book of contiguous poems then mixed them up so they were out of order. They were poems about my cunt, language, Nature, war, and all of them had a marked sense of drama.

With the cunt poems I could have orgasms during sex. I had long, luxurious hair, which I wrapped around my throat like a scarf. You could say I was "released from my prison." My therapist was no longer busy.

We started a business called "Ethical Donuts." It was actually a kind of juice bar where you could go and read poems or listen to someone reading poems. If nobody felt like reading poems we would turn on a tape of someone reading poems, usually one of our friends, but sometimes a big star of poetry. Of course, we sold donuts.

In my dream we were hitchhiking to Iowa City, but later when I looked at myself my cheeks were pink and so were my labia. Like a bird I discovered I had wings. I flew higher and higher, but when I got near the sun the wax melted and I fell into a poem by Auden. It was then that I wrote the poem "The Enormous Cock."

For awhile I hushed. Then I started up again about my cunt. Some said it was a vicious swipe at feminism. Others said it was a vicious feminist swipe. It was the only word I knew.



Mystery Cover

The upside-down tornadoes with lobster-claw heads gathered around the beautiful Japanese woman protruding from the casserole. This is pitiful, I said. I was trying to think, and it just wasn't working. I closed my eyes, screwed up my arm, and threw. Nothing bounced off of nothing, calling in an outrageous falsetto, Yoo-hoo, boys! We all linked arms. Reality was so boring, compared to art. The ornate Victorian flocked wallpaper reminded me of my mother, the drug addict. I knew that from that day forth I would take no more sedatives, I would be disciplined, even if it meant going back to the pink bed with the pink blankets and door with a little square window.



Experimental Poem

I have forgotten how to write one.
The indecipherable
Eludes me like a mouse.

My paw pats around in its house.



Thriller, 2002

In Thriller, 2002, the girl's frozen expression of anticipation as the older man's hand lingers on the door to her room follows a classic cinematic suspense strategy, but the contrast of this fear with her subsequent run through the forest also conveys her initiation into self-awareness.

It's a picture of a girl with black (red) lips. She's lying on a bed (Finnish) in a log cabin and you can see her tits under her sweater. Now we are looking through the girl's eyes and a doorknob is turning. The doorknob and the girl's mouth are at the same level. Now the door is opening . . .

Now we are looking through the girl's eyes, the window is around us, then it's behind us, we're running and knocking over small trees. Our foot comes down on a house crushing all the people and furniture inside. The cows come to life and start mooing.

Then something happens to the sound. The cows look like they're mooing but no sound is coming out of them, everything is silent, the birds, the twinkling stars, and suddenly the only thing you can hear is the pounding of your own heart.



Metaphors

She is hiding the poem under the bed. It is dark under the bed and it smells like cat. It is raining out. Fortunately for poetry it is raining.

My heart is a box lined with tears. They sparkle like diamonds. They sparkle for you.

He is in Nice attending a conference. The astronomers are acting like monkeys. They hotly debate the Anthropic Principle while holding on by their tails. They are learned and fearful and they joke as they twist their tails and beam.

There is a string of bees in the box.

She reads about Paul Klee in the hope that it will interest him but she herself is not interested and so she desists after 1902. In 1902 Paul Klee became more interested in God than in his wife.

I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than real ones.

There is a glow-in-the-dark owl in the box.

You are sleeping. Dreams glide through your brain: stars collapsing, universes expanding, numbers assembling. I dream of losing a pair of red shoes.