Scantily Clad Press, 2008
The Thing That The Sun Revolves Around A dead balloon. Of dirty nectarine coloring. Occipital and code-chomping. Picket fencing. Parallelogrammed. A lightening-pooped steak piece. A gateway drug. To the daisy ripped fields. Made by mad mouth disease.
Dinosaurs In The Garden of Eden inspired by a visit to The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky One Biblical interpretation of paleontology. Places dinosaurs in the flickering tiers. Of inner-city Eden. Monster-fin-nery. In the pools of the name-giving garden. The skillet-prone, the clue-fully roaring. The mammal-backed by mammals backed. By a sun half of a hundred hours old. Adam fed the stegosauruses lobotomizing. Apples or oranges. Eve gloved the pterodactyls. In the finest of snakeskin. And when the firmament shook redly. With boils. The couple rode out into. The thorns and thistles on the base. Of the neck of their favorite. Apatosaurus.
Hotel Obelisk mash-ups, grace-plated and mercy-lipped. Shiver and lunge and tripled down under the weight of uncouth dipped special just for you. Discombobulating in hyper peach/pink. Gobo projections. Love me on a fun day. Ribbon rack,
nurture nook – crapshoot mafias. Braying purposely pariah-like.
January
I. They built citadels underneath my hairline to be guarded by bees and panic attacks.
II. Sheet after sheet of dirty blue tinfoil. Of decametric song. Dot. Dot. Dashing through the show.
III. This corner of intensely hued bazaar. Filled with creatures of a polydactyl and peacock-plumed nature.
IV. Marked with the three signs of terrible memory. Winter exponentialized.
Creation Myth A god from the East and/or above and/or far far away took to the notion to plant a fetal-curled seed by the banks of a body of water. Four hundred thousand years of deityinduced rain and sunshine caused the stone to sprout into a city’s worth of architecture, gold-leafed astronomies, and smiling, single-headed cows. The women’s eyes housed nine-pointed ceruleans and children were taught at an early age the value of aneroidical breathing. Monsters lived the whole of their lives in glass coffins, surrounded by orange safety cones. Old men would spend days on their backs, watching clouds take the shape of semi-sapien eyeballs. Peopled by swallowers of burning tea leaves, the inhabitors of this land lacked the mouth mechanisms to make hissing sounds. Whenever they felt angry or threatened, they had to resort to humming.
Your Your celebrity suicide clock tocking off the scandalous reflexes of the tragically shiny beautiful. And your magazine’s three hundred ways of lying down uncomfortably available. Your self-conscious drunked out dialing of every name you can still pronounce regretfully. Your actress’ inability to not fire a gun once it appears outlined in neon pink prescription form. Your heart habits molded up like a velvet coin purse left too long in the bottom of a birdbath. Your post-adolescent perfunctory baubles. A proclivity towards
labial cacophony. Dripping maudlin.
Mode The people started looking up at the moon and crying out (!), “You are pockmarked and gelid and way too orange.� The moon responded ungently. Ripped herself off the sky. A conscientious object (!!), passionately bulletproof. All that undrinkable/thinkable arithmetic gone to waste. Trembling waves (!!!) of sound. With or without recycled effect.
Post-Love Charm The preliminary rituals of swanning. Double-helixed compromise. Don’t touch me unless you love me. The rectangular slits of our tooth gaps. Our tongues: makeshift autoclaves. Alchemized; Babel-ified; siren-scarred. We lie/lay in the bed un-made during the days of the color of diurnal cupidity. Our anti-moon pose: Throats partially barred by the loose translations of black market smoke. Though, really, you should never send the eyes to do the mouth’s job… Eyes pleading, Give me more space aliens, more pseudo-lighthouses. Anything to desiccate the twelvefinned hourglass that’s set up shop in our ever clogging kitchen sink.
Expatriate Painter You moved your brushes to the left. To the west. To the land undercut by green fleshery and canary-haloedness. Long-lined and corn-syrup syringed. The uneasily acceptable breathed out old man into the face of your long ago lauded eye for color. Sitting trucker-like in the windshield view. Surrounded by replicas of relics from the old country. Coveting to loathing the happily gunned cowboys. Complaining that the type of scale needed to measure your sacrifice is still shimmery conceptual-staged wish-wash. Hands half-corpsed and heteroclite, holding a child who won’t grow up to be as beautiful or as meaningful as the cost of its un-hip needing habit. A child that started out as a joke; a silly stick figure you doodled under your wife’s bellybutton that despite you, to spite you, grew up into a garish, pulling mural with gold pavement thought processes.
De-Mannequining The red bones. Of positive tension. Crackling under. My arms. Stippled snowstorm expanding. To fit my chest. Length-wise. The brain tying itself into beautiful. Boy Scout knot. Eyes fuzzed and pre-flowerstaged. Fiberglass iris split.
Daniela Olszewska was born in Wroclaw, Poland and raised in the area known as Chicagoland. Poetry-related activities include serving on the editorial board of Columbia Poetry Review (volumes 19 and 20) and acting as Deputy-at-Large for Switchback Books. Her chapbook is called The Partial Autobiography of Jane Doe (dancing girl press, 2008). She blogs at http://bloodyicecream84.blogspot.com/