I'm the only motherfucker in the whole wide world
that can make Linda Lovelace gag


Garry Winogrand, Peace Demonstation NYC, 1970


Bad Language
-- by Dan Albergotti

We fear to speak, and silence coats the night air.
So we are dumb, as quiet as the kitchen pans
hanging on their cabinet hooks. What words
do we even have? The root of fuck is as much
to strike as to copulate. And sometimes ravish
is to rape. But when you’re ravishing, you’re
beautiful. Strikingly beautiful. Other tongues
do not help. Try saying “kiss me” on the streets
of Paris. God does not help. The Bible is full
of prohibition. Thou shalt not, saith the lord.
No sounds like know. To know is to understand.
In the Bible to know is to fuck. What do you mean
when you say no? I think I know. I want to know.
Understand me. You’re ravishing. I want to know
you. Strike me. Don’t leave me alone with self-
knowledge and these rich, fruitless, unspoken words.


In the Era of the Sentence Fragment
-- by Dan Albergotti

Lines of incompletion. All those words
that can be gathered. But not enough
for shoring. Not against ruins. Fragments
of sentences, of dreams, of the boys’ school
in Hiroshima. Looking for raw material
in the dust. Finding nothing. Having nothing
inside. Unable to do the police in different voices.
No more voices. No more makers, better
or worse. Only weak echoes. And irony.
And the dim blue sunrise of the television screen.
And the wish finally to die, like Shelley,
mid-sentence. Writing the triumph of life.


Dust
-- by Brian Simoneau

Before I’d ever read a poem
I traced my name in dust
wherever it settled, traced
it over and over—in pollen
on a windowsill, grime
on dad’s workbench—letters
overlapping, tangled knots
of naming. Lost in the loop
of language, I’d imagine
myself walking the roads
I’d laid down, canyon walls
of dust looming above me.
In an Oregon classroom
it sprawled across the table
like the early pages of a poem.
Books with cracked spines
rested on cluttered shelves, walls
pasted over with faded flyers.
I’d shake off raindrops and take
my place. We grew to know
each other’s imperfections
as our own, young poets
with sheaves of empty paper
we felt the need to fill. Later
I’d hold my poems close
to my body and emerge
into sinking sunlight.
Every shaft filtered the dust
that descends and settles
in every crevice of this life,
innumerable comets of grief
to be ciphered into new
existences, every line worked
into knowable shapes until
something like a soul stretches
across every turning day.