Jill Jones, "Bone"

I set up the shot yesterday
but fell into the hole
in my mouth
yes, where the stories leak
to my throat
or fling to air breathy
busking my walk.

This is the wide city
it has accumulated me
along each stage
the clarinet, the needle
and abraded bone.

Lola Velasco, from "La cometa o las manos sobre el papel"

I. The Hands Speak

This is how your albino hauteur
dangles,
so bright it is perverse.

***

Free of wrinkles,
with a dazzling
insolence of forms
you rush your dream
to the crest,
escorted
by golden rays.

You flirt almost always
in profile,
and the sun
tosses you missiles
of yellow lust,
alters your color,
trying to confine you
to its dome.


***

And the other acrobats,
stupid paper ballerinas,
clear away their final pirouettes
so you can show off
your lone, aerial
luxury in flight.

***

But night will come.
There’s little time left.
And your sophisticated,
cynical beauty will pour down
false gold.
And you will fall to me,
artlessly.

Jenna Cardinale, "Flaws"

The applause for the dahlias only stings my ears when it seems short.

The puppeteers promised to never pause their pruning and I would often resort to believing them.

I cannot sort the saws from the shears.

I just watch the engineers abort the garden, then twist themselves in gauze.

I cannot court these laws. I feel as my right hand disappears.

Nada Gordon, "Nugatory Wax Milk Goats"

for Kasey


It is human nature to stand in the nucleus with a disfigured wax forehead,
mewling and praying in our goathair suits. Meanwhile, Paxil
passes into the breast milk, rending law and opinion nugatory.

Glyph, gnarl, gnash, gnaws, gnome, goads:
the magenta waxworks seraphim stick like rapacious leeches,
milking a he-goat into a frenzy.

Nudities, nugatory, nuisance, numbness, numbness, days are numbered:
the children are emanations of their parents, and dependent on milk emanations.
The milk emanations are dependent on the pulsation of caprice.

The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx, inconsequential and unconducive.
A steadied wolf-fish takes out the acrimonious goats’ milk with a slouched shamrock pea,
soft as butter, soft as down, soft as silk, yielding as wax, and tender as chicken.

The crusted wax bean varies the disqualified ball-peen hammer with a leggy hobble skirt.
A nudist’s nudities trek the nugatory flashing discount viagra, and fade breathlessly
while taking another gobble of the randy-cake.

The man raises his head and looks at me with yellow goat eyes:
"you work in the bad old fashioned way of modeling wax dolls – singularly superfluous
with proudleduck contours."

Glass, wax, silk, wool, hair, feathers, and even wood – each with an emerald
turkey foot at the top, like the milk of our superlative loveliness.

This nugatory acidophilus milk ferret wants out, emitting catcalls in the unerect carnuba wax.
The hyoid Fermi also warbles with dispersive suffixation -- comb, trash and dead bees strained out.

I have been digressing for all that. Let us return to our goats – their treacle and their infomotions. Gluten, albumen, milk, cream, protein; treacle; gum, size, glue; wax:

the little capricorns, vascular soothsayers, shoot off their sprouts.