the nights of my professional life


Lee Krasner, Summer Play, 1965

The Art of Simulated Poetry
-- Paul Fericano

the creative process here
is both difficult and challenging
but also highly rewarding

this being the task:
the poem
correctly analyzed and programmed
into an extremely effective
poem model
creating the perfect operative
poem image
eventually validating
the poem itself
and thereby completing the cycle
within the created environment
but without the continuation
of reality
to achieve aesthetic results

of course
the easy part is getting the grant.


Learning How to Make Love
-- Denise Duhamel

This couple couldn't figure it out.
The man licked his wife's genitals while she stared straight ahead.
The woman poked her husband's testicles with her nose.
The man put his toe in the folds of the woman's vulva.
The woman took the man's penis under her armpit.
Neither one of them wanted to be the first to admit
something was off. So it went on --
the man put his finger in his wife's navel.
The woman batted her eyelashes against the arch of her husband's foot.
They pinched each other's earlobes. They bit each other's rear ends.
To perpetrate the lie, they ended each encounter with a deep sigh.
Then one day while the husband was hunting,
a man stopped by the igloo and said to the wife:
I hear you have been having trouble.
I can show you how to make love.
He took her to bed and left before the husband came home.
Then the wife showed her husband,
careful to make it seem like the idea sprang
from both. After all these years of rubbing one's face against the other's belly
or stroking a male elbow behind a female knee,
this couple had a lot of catching up to do. They couldn't stop to eat or sleep
and grew so skinny they died. No one found them for a long time.
And by then, their two skeletons were fused into one.