and i think the journey did her well

Two Poems by Loren Goodman:

Yeast

I am Yeast, a great poet
I live in Ireland
Some say I am the greatest
Poet ever

My poetry makes bread grow
All over Ireland and the world
In glens and valleys, bread rising
In huts, clover paths, and fire wood

There will always be critics
Who deny Yeast
But you can see
The effect of my poetry
Through the potato fields
And the swell of the Liffey.
The amber coins and foaming black ale

Poem for the Government

I'm writing some poems for the government
but I can't talk about them now.
I can't talk at all. The writing has been going
well, on schedule, and all expenses have been taken
care of. I'm not at liberty to discuss
the secretive nature of my work
which demands that I write
in silence and disgust and under
an assumed name. My work for the government
is not only confidential, it is gross, exquisite
many lives hang in the balance. I'm also writing some poems
that aren't for the government, but now those seem
about nothing at all. I don't know where or how my poems
will be used, but I want them to be fool-
ish and deadly.

That I write in silence
and seclusion and under
this parasol, for the government
my tiny son at my feet, makes me
extremely poetic. I think
of splashes and hear the poems
I am writing in this paradise, one
of which is really for you
I include it in the government batch
perhaps to better include you in our lives.

Goodman provided the Top Ten list in the current issue of Artforum, and in it wrote that Joe Brainard's I Remember "is so good I can hardly describe it. Uniquely wholesome, it has the same thick, physical feeling of life as his Prell-bottle sculpture, admiration for Nancy, and repeated desire to start all over again. And why not? Call it honesty —pie, sun-filled arms, Oklahoma, or things as they are. A relaxed grace: something like reclining in the soft, huge upholstery of the world, of winning Wimbledon with lobs."

Spell
-- by Frank Stanford

I aimed to get some of my blood
back from the Snow Lake mosquitoes
my belly was full of lemonade
and my hair had Wild Root on it
I took to the thicket at dawn
not knowing where I was from in the man in the moon
there were trees with so much shade
you shivered
like someone chiseling the year in a graveyard
the shadows seeped thick as smoke
when you touched them
even breathing drew blood from the wood
it was dark
as a swarm
they smelled like olives
and feet in a garden
when you bowed and kissed them