Monday, February 06, 2006

Amy King

The Evolution Will Be Syndicated

Remember, I'm a member & the smile
and shake of your head doll do
all the things you ply them to
wilting in wait, the wallflower broke
my pace running home with a plastic excuse
I had planted in this tiny wine bottle
journey of red then maudlin vignettes
against an apotheosis of genius, not
entropy truffles. Who was the address?
That statement could be called
a marginal border or a boarder
you never intended to let in. Said
barbarism is in the zone of encounter:
hello wayward Samaritan, lost lamb
of the high plains or lowest of Eve's
witch-like daughters, something
that homogenizes in favor
of the ones who holed up on hills
around the second world war or
others to come and hide amongst
the living. We wait, we hold, we pass
the breathing on, the nukes, the sturdy
details that retain a landscape, the satellite
feeds contingently related to how we see,
as in more generally, it belongs
to the conquest of the age in exploration
of enlightenment of exploitation even
of this enthusiasm for annals of a planet-
on-pause, minus book-length installments.
You should herald who you esteem
or idol as in a bipedal construct
for change, which belies a holier
need to excise this energy towards
muted investment more costly than
the attention deficit span our moment's
milieu provides and markets for, thus
the principle edit would be to slide
the knob off while the remaining
message gets halfway truncated.


The Importance of Omission

& me, grateful for a cracking
creaking stool, holding
a woman's back
a chair away in tight black
shirt, her waist, a simple sweep
of question angle,
aromatic slant one
can almost fondle.

In this room, it is the female
form that people worship & wish
to be blessed with.
The shapes of a warm bread loaf,
garden cucumber, and cup
of absinthe sketched
together become a human
draped arm with shading.

How long have I known
within an elbow's bend, the
kernel of her name would warm
with heavy suggestion?
My arm remains by my side.


Amy King lives in New York. She is the author of Antidotes for an alibi (Blazevox) and the forthcoming chapbook Gertrude for girls (Coconut chapbooks).