DeKooning's Woman, Woman, and Woman, Sag Harbor
Junk Man Larry
Crossing a bridge
What Is Made in the Upper Peninsula
Meditation: Sweater-ish, Broken Suburu Fan
DeKooning’s Woman, Woman, and Woman, Sag Harbor
1. Woman
I am orange hair,
two arms in the air,
a beige-y nude.
I am high-heeled
boots, gray of a wall
showing through,
my mouth
so many messy
brushstrokes, three
thin, drippy fangs.
One eye is green
like a healing bruise,
the other a blue phosphate-
choked pool. Splat of red
is not my cunt.
2. Woman
Head an orange allosaur,
breasts nipple-less elbows
in a gust like Barbie,
backside twisted
to front. Legs
in thigh-highs.
3. Woman, Sag Harbor
I’m the pink lady
with skeleton teeth,
fluorescent orange pigtails.
I’m energetic with messy
yellow flanking, amorphous
chest, splotchy heart.
He has shot me
in the groin; I am menstrual,
umbilical, tethered
to what I’ve given
birth to (him? me?).
This isn’t perversion,
right? Violence? Misogyny?
My big green spectacle:
What you have done to me.
pulls up
in his white Ford truck
Otis the dachshund/beagle
spilling out to greet
our hissy-fit tabby
loads a dozen years of scrap
into his bed
cob-webbed bricks
paint cans
bags of cement
life’s detritus
making its way
somewhere south
we’re not supposed
to know about
how long does it take
a microwave to rot?
No that’s not
a koan but an honest
to God look it up
Metal’ll sit there
for centuries
like Revolutionary War bullets
useable
like 2,000-year-old glass
toward a sulfur flower
explosion like the yolk
my little brother smashed
against a tree Yolk
on the oak! Yolk on the oak!
yellow laughter
little brother
in my back pocket
texting Thunderation
What Is Made in the Upper Peninsula
If you look online it shares how 1,100-degree aluminum
is squeezed through an orifice, fashioned into park benches,
stadium bleachers; it will reveal that Dollar Bay’s
where they manufacture the floors for the Final Four,
but all quiet about the Plexiglas sculpture of Russell Prather.
It is not a Boss snowplow, nor does it involve concrete screeding,
but it has a way with the blister packaging of smart phones,
Blu-Rays, USB cords. This sculpture is not made
of special materials, hastelloy or stellite, cannot be packaged
like a Sony with damage-proof sturdy casing if it wished
to be hung at a show in Sydney, but it does involve
miniature silhouettes of humans enclosed in packaging
doing yoga, but it does evoke a mood of whimsy as we struggle
to free the tablet from its plastic cocoon. If we bury ourselves
in silk-lined mahogany coffins, we, too, cannot be recycled,
is what Russell’s sculpture shouts in my ear. Surgical technology
can save a life, and it’s good to aspire toward having the longest
reaches, highest lifts, infrared modeling, heat management
analysis, creating a visual representation of consumer culture,
but packaging stripped of its gadgets calls attention to the hollow
in the middle of the no-longer-holding holder, to the hollow
human perusing a gallery, holding close his personal device.
Do our possessions possess us? Block access to introspection?
Up here in the UP, where hunting blinds are manufactured,
most of the world’s charcoal, where we check a small screen
for breaking news, for texts, long emoji strings, upwards
of 47 times a day, sealed up in our gadgets, working hard
to alleviate hard-to-conquer aggregate problems.
Meditation: Sweater-ish Draping, Broken Suburu Fan
1.
Spent day contemplating strange sweatery thingeries worn by women of a certain age. I who have reached that age of certainty yet unwed to web-like structures, drawn to certain-aged ripped jeans/singed hoody ensemble. I, who do not understand the scarf, who cannot grasp amorphous. Fan blowing; lack of heat.
2.
Clad seems appropriate, akin to arachnid. Wedded to webbing. Half expect fingerless gloves, the better to grasp the beer stein, though not to imply these ladies resemble Fagin. I tend away from spider-like shells. Son thanks me when I‘ve combed my hair, exchanged my slippers for Nike Frees. When I think scarf, I think Isadora Dunkin. Once you have it around your neck, what else but strangulation? Yet another unexpected trip to mechanic; fan steadfastly unfixed.
3.
Did not accomplish, did not win, yet can check from list exasperation over loose draperies: nexus of unstructured structures. Clad because arachnid. A webbed wedding. Woolishness wooed. Spellbound by spider-like spindles. Did I mention Isadora Dunkin/strangulation? Fourth trip. Fourth. Still no heat. Just me, or does he think it’s not his job to fix? Gertrude Stein: Listen to me, I am a spider, you must not mistake me for the sky.
Martha Silano is the author of What the Truth Tastes Like (Two Sylvias Press, 2015), Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books, 2014), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (Saturnalia Books, 2011), Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books, 2006), and, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-by-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, AGNI, and Best American Poetry, among others. She edits the Seattle-based journal Crab Creek Review and teaches at Bellevue College.
