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Poetry

Five Poems

Five Poems

Love found me twice, at once

Love found me twice, at once. If it never
happens again I’ll still be luckier

than the moon. Breathing, typing these lines,
texting a friend, checking the time,

thinking it wouldn’t always be like this,
but still, sometimes, it was.    It is.

“There is a life here”

“There is a life here”

On Bernadette Mayer (1945–2022)

I had arrived at the all too probably named Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute past its ostensible heyday. Founded in 1974 by Waldman and her “spiritual husband” Allen Ginsberg, the school had the reputation of a mountain retreat for the Beat Poets, and their friends in the New York School, and their friends in the Black Mountain school, and their friends in the New Narrative school.

Two Poems

Two Poems

The Organization likes / to hit them where they’re sleeping

If it was too cold you called on Satan.
Satan also had pre-rolled cigarettes;
no one had tobacco in Europe yet
for like 400 years, but Satan did

These people didn’t know my father

These people didn’t know my father

one of them said / you girls are always hauling heavy stuff

it’s possible all women make up a secret organization working under the guise of an oppressed class

the women coerced into prostitution they’re the suicide bombers of our terrorist organization
sacrificing themselves for the life of all women and the murder of all
men
a nice romantic image is coming together here
I think I’m one of these women
one of the ones engaged in the struggle against all men for all women

but I know it’s not true
AIDS exists but the struggle doesn’t