Behind Perfume, Only Solitude
Ink will come. Lamp lung
breathes light at the edge
of an idea. The edge
an idea, also the door
of the room
that silence opens.
The pen sighs, a lens
for the shut-in light.
Breathe me light,
have the idea to have me.
by Liz Waldner
Liz Waldner’s A Point Is That Which Has No Part won the 1999 Iowa Poetry and 2000 Academy of American Poets Laughlin prizes; Self and Simulacra won the 2001 Alice James Books’ Beatrice Hawler Prize; Dark Would (The Missing Person) won the U. of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series; and Etym (bi)ology will be published by Omnidawn in 2002. She’ll appear at Bookfest, Beard Stage, 4-5 p.m. Sun., Oct. 21.
Forgive Me, Father
for I have sinned
trying to have an affair with my
audience.
Before you roll your eyes
or make any moral judgment, hear
me out.
I am a poet with a long red nose,
bleeding heart and mind
that digresses from a straight line.
Like most of my dreams, e.g., winning a Pulitzer,
getting pecked on the cheek by
Ashbery
or developing a shrewd eye for
lettuce,
my audience is fairly unattainable:
using newspaper comics for a face,
too busy fondling its limbs to say
hello.
Truth be told, Father: half the six
has simply stepped in out of the rain,
the other half are heterosexual
friends
and the publisher of my book
who’s heard me read thirty times before.
Good news is the affair’s safe
elsewhere:
when I try to level the lectern with my nipples
it suddenly turns up a Gideon Bible
& Jeezus No lika’ Raizzuns
carved in block letters. Even camera man
refuses to engage: freezing his
audiovisuals
when I flicker couplets off my tongue.
Others, sensing my vibes early on,
leave messages on the answering
machine
that they can’t make my reading
because
they flunked their one & only poetry class,
they don’t “get” John Shakespeare
or they prefer to keep distance from strangers.
But Father, The Sin:
like every audience, however
unattainable,
my heart flutters when I stand
before it
hoping for a fleeting connection,
that it will hear the beating of
my iambic pentameter over quarters
clattering in its pockets, eager to
make
a move on the hot dog vendor.
by Amy Bonomi
Amy Bonomi is the author of In the Coming of the World (Wood Works, 2001). A grim social commentary on how we’ve derailed, her debut collection converges on the theme of our complicity in a world gone tasteless and flat. She’s also a research scientist at Group Health Cooperative and is currently working on her doctorate in public health at the University of Washington. She appears at Bookfest with John Haines. Beard Stage, 1-2:15 p.m. Sat., Oct. 20.
