secondary painters
stars in their own light


Carol Bove, Strawberries Need Rain (After Dark Photo Collage), 2003

What There Is
-- Kenneth Patchen

In this my green world
Flowers birds are hands
They hold me
I am loved all day

All this pleases me

I am amused
I have to laugh from crying
Trees mountains are arms
I am loved all day

Children grass are tears

I cry
I am loved all day
Everything
Pompous makes me laugh
I am amused often enough
In this
My beautiful green world

There's love all day


Culture
-- Assata Shakur

i must confess that waltzes
do not move me.
i have no sympathy
for symphonies

i guess i hummed the Blues
too early,
and spent to many midnights
out wailing to the rain


A Driving Student Adjusts the Seat
-- Arlene Ang

When she enters
she has to adjust the seat to her size.
She thinks this is how it feels
to drive a stolen car.
She leans against the wheel to change
the recline angle and smells
what she's learned to call
the starvation of damp-palmed girls.
The wipers go off. Like chemistry class,
that boy in the skeleton closet
rubbing vapor from his glasses.
For a whole year, he made room for her
in his homework, his tree house.
She is different now.
She is taller. She uses a sharper blade
to shave between the legs.
When her elbows push
against her breasts, she knows
she's come too near.
She slides back. And forth.
Then back again. Her movements
are arrhythmic, spurred, ose .
The driving instructor predicts a good day
for doing curves. His hands
around the stress ball open. Close.


Blues for Dante Alighieri
-- by Kim Addonizio

....without hope we live on in desire....
INFERNO, IV

Our room was too small, the sheets scratchy and hot—
Our room was a kind of hell, we thought,
and killed a half-liter of Drambuie we'd bought.

We walked over the Arno and back across.
We walked all day, and in the evening, lost,
argued and wandered in circles. At last

we found our hotel. The next day we left for Rome.
We found the Intercontinental, and a church full of bones,
and ate takeout Chinese in our suite, alone.

It wasn't a great journey, only a side trip.
It wasn't love for eternity, or any such crap;
it was just something that happened....

We packed suitcases, returned the rental car.
We packed souvenirs, and repaired to the airport bar
and talked about pornography, and movie stars.