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My thighs r so stacked
Steep steep steep
Fkn ziggurats
4 u
• • •
IT IS A SUCKLING LOVE
It is a suckling love but
Large a stripling life
Touchless car
Wash and yet it and yet
And yet it makes
You glow n calluses
On yr fingers now
Rasping wordlessly thru me
• • •
CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS
The doves that cried
The cormorant who came
The bird alighting on Bernie’s lectern
The birds on the record teaching Oe’s boy
To speak I’m in love with a boy
I’m in love with a girl and arising
In poesy the sun is shining upon the world
• • •
DEMOCRACY NOW
A ratlike rodent went extinct today
I can’t think
My thighs r so stacked
Fkn ziggurats
Soy no soy
Peanut no peanut
Very deep dimples
Hot cellulite light
Bleeding hard thru
Its panties 4 u
• • •
RAPES EONS FISHERIES
Rapes eons fisheries
Whipped waters lashes
Upon the back staved muscles
Starved engrovelated bones the fuck
Alloys the clams n oysters
The fucking shoals stripped
Bare of their muscles I do
Want you does that mean
I have to marry both coasts
All the veins in my arms stand
Up hard n blue little fingers
All over my screen little cells
Sighing little cells dying
• • •
YOUR POEM
Did I see the word LOVETINES
Or was that LOVELINESS
Furred ear of sleep, finches
At their labors, dragonfly
Purpose undisclosed to me
At the temple the tombeau
Of Paul Valery
• • •
SITTING THERE LYKE A LADYE
Sitting there lyke a ladye
In a stained glass windo
Pretty cut on me thumb
Color of a rip’ning plum
“Crying” comes all into
My ears & marrying
One coast to the other
Really does take all
Day
• • •
I CAN’T EAT YOU CAN’T SLEEP
Consumed with voluptuous privacy
My boat she sailed upon the surge
Fat bees come around me to suck
The flowers I cross my legs
Tight n hold in my nectar neither
Known nor seen do I want to be
Not even touched by none
But you but out the corner
Of my better eye I suppose I do
See shimmering the singed edges
Of my mortality the leaves of even
This book a breeze shall blow
Open the sun upon my shoulder
Where I cannot see it grazing
My secret forge the single
Yolk of an egg only the mouth
Of one poet
• • •
WHO AREN’T WE
It is a suckling life but large
Tho it b only suckling it b large
Memory the rasp within me iron tongs
Old andirons New England things
A taste of ash an old prosthetic
Limb unmourned soldiers from even
Older wars a thong still battening
Down the font at my navel to ye
Olde center of the Earth the haggard pits
Of presence & absence the selfsame
Dichotomy of the ages, eons of poetry
Descending on me now as simple froth
Like the brief career of that girl’s latte
Art I mean where haven’t I been who
Aren’t I I mean where haven’t we
Been who aren’t we
Ariana Reines’s books of poetry include The Cow (2006), Coeur de Lion (2007) and most recently Mercury (2011). Her first play, Telephone (2009) was performed at the Cherry Lane Theater and received two Obie Awards. Her translations include a version of Baudelaire’s My Heart Laid Bare (2009), Jean-Luc Hennig’s The Little Black Book of Grisélidis Réal: Days and Nights of an Anarchist Whore (2009), and Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young-Girl (2012).
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