Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  The bearded man takes me to a rodeo and says, “This is how it’s done.” The big animals are fucking and the females are screaming—they aren’t bulls or cows, but something fiercer and weird-looking. I say to the man, “You are my nightmare.” Then the same man is buying me ice cream and we’re friends, maybe even married. My real husband never comes to get me which probably has nothing to do with the real-life him, but instead has everything to do with my anxiety. It may even be a basic lesson how I have to save myself. Or a primitive fantasy that I want to be taken, no matter how brutal.

  In a hallway I meet up with two women who have been scorned, and we storm into a man’s apartment. I’m going to help them do what—kill him? We are dressed like Charlie’s Angels and the man is the same man who raped me, who then bought me ice cream. He is watching some kind of pornography—women with snakes. We toss the TV on top of him. His feet curl up, a la the Wicked Witch, while the TV smokes and our clothes evaporate. Then we are, all three of us, transformed into women with big round butts and tiny waists. We prance around wearing only gossamer wings, the height of desire on a 19th century sepia gentleman’s postcard.

  (2001)

  CHRISTOPHER EDGAR (1961–)

  In C

  Loosen focus, trees move. A weekend becomes a fortnight. Aspects of leaves float supine, assume the horizontal positions of pirogues and barques skirting air. Greasy plaits and tiny shoulders form the outline of a young girl. Reverse perspective and the basic facts become memoirs of an amnesiac lost among nuns. These exercises are clear from the verandahs of the modest bungalows dotting the peninsula. Natives dream in bergamot and bougainvillaea. And why not? Let it slide. The life of forms in art is short, pathological then normal, the distance between which the eye abolishes. An awareness of surface covers the dirty dog which is in fact curved, and we are all oriented toward a single point, skating harpy-like down a rivulet of pond scum to a spiral jetty in a giant ravine. Here the placid lake lay, until discovered upside-down in the 1840s by a group of brown studies. Some years later, Dirk “Poussin” Bouts halted discourse and the vanishing-axis rode off into the sunset. Evidence of cause and effect was ample, a staircase the foreshortened River Jordan must climb. Painterly waves converged into a plastic and solid mountain of water that in fact framed him. Enraged, he created a doctrine reflecting optical unity. Man-mountains became mountain men, and “water mountains” became bodies in space, “space boxes” tied together for better or worse, richer or poorer, with scotch tape. The necessary verso of the entire plane became largesse, weather more clement, a hollow body made of felt, mutatis mutandis, as with an uncertain decisiveness he shimmered forth toward the flat bank, behind which she disappeared on a funicular.

  (1999)

  CAMPBELL McGRATH (1962–)

  The Prose Poem

  On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard, though driving past you would hardly notice it, this boundary line or ragged margin, a shallow swale that cups a simple trickle of water, less rill than rivulet, more gully than dell, a tangled ditch grown up throughout with a fearsome assortment of wildflowers and bracken. There is no fence, though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim, strands of fallen wire taken by the dust. To the left a cornfield carries into the distance, dips and rises to the blue sky, a rolling plain of green and healthy plants aligned in close order, row upon row upon row. To the right, a field of wheat, a field of hay, young grasses breaking the soil, filling their allotted land with the rich, slow-waving spectacle of their grain. As for the farmers, they are, for the most part, indistinguishable: here the tractor is red, there yellow; here a pair of dirty hands, there a pair of dirty hands. They are cultivators of the soil. They grow crops by pattern, by acre, by foresight, by habit. What corn is to one, wheat is to the other, and though to some eyes the similarities outweigh the differences it would be as unthinkable for the second to commence planting corn as for the first to switch over to wheat. What happens in the gully between them is no concern of theirs, they say, so long as the plough stays out, the weeds stay in the ditch where they belong, though anyone would notice the windsewn cornstalks poking up their shaggy ears like young lovers run off into the bushes, and the kinship of these wild grasses with those the farmer cultivates is too obvious to mention, sage and dun-colored stalks hanging their noble heads, hoarding exotic burrs and seeds, and yet it is neither corn nor wheat that truly flourishes there, nor some jackalopian hybrid of the two. What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected, even in winter, when the wind hangs icicles from the skeletons of briars and small tracks cross the snow in search of forgotten grain; in the spring the little trickle of water swells to welcome frogs and minnows, a muskrat, a family of turtles, nesting doves in the verdant grass; in summer it is a thoroughfare for raccoons and opossums, field mice, swallows and black birds, migrating egrets, a passing fox; in autumn the geese avoid its abundance, seeking out windrows of toppled stalks, fatter grain more quickly discerned, more easily digested. Of those that travel the local road, few pay that fertile hollow any mind, even those with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk’s descent from the lightning-struck tree. You’ve passed this way yourself many times, and can tell me, if you would, do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?

  (1999)

  LINH DINH (1963–)

  Fish Eyes

  My son won’t eat anything but fish eyes. At the fishmonger’s, if my wife wants to buy a sturgeon that has already lost its set of eyes, she would also have to ask for two eyes plucked from a catfish, or even an eel, just so my son will have his fish eyes that evening. At home, these eyes are inserted into their new sockets.

  If a boy who eats chicken legs all the time will most likely turn into a drunkard, and a boy who eats chicken wings will become a poet, what will become of my son, who never eats anything but fish eyes?

  (1999)

  The Most Beautiful Word

  I think “vesicle” is the most beautiful word in the English language. He was lying face down, his shirt burnt off, back steaming. I myself was bleeding. There was a harvest of vesicles on his back. His body wept. “Yaw” may be the ugliest. Don’t say, “The bullet yawed inside the body.” Say, “The bullet danced inside the body.” Say, “The bullet tumbled forward and upward.” Light slanted down. All the lesser muscles in my face twitched. I flipped my man over gently, like an impatient lover, careful not to fracture his C-spine. Dominoes clanked under crusty skin: Clack! Clack! A collapsed face stared up. There was a pink spray in the air, then a brief rainbow. The mandible was stitched with blue threads to the soul. I extracted a tooth from the tongue. He had swallowed the rest.

  (2000)

  CLAUDIA RANKINE (1963–)

  Intermission in Four Acts

  THE THING IN PLAY (ACT I)

  A world outside this plot prevents our intermission from being uninvolved—a present, its past in the queue outside the toilet, in each drink dulling the room. Hence our overwhelming desire to forgive some, forget others. Even so, we are here and, as yet, I cannot release us to here, cannot know and still go on as if all the world were staged. Who believes, “Not a big mess but rather an unfortunate accident arrived us here.” Our plot assumes presence. It stays awkward, clumping in the mouth: I shall so want. And this is necessary time. Only now do we respect (or is it forget) the depths of our mistakes. There often rises from the fatigue of the surface a great affection for order. Plot, its grammar, is the linen no one disgorges into. Excuse me. From that which is systemic we try to detach ourselves; we cling to, cellophane ourselves into man-made regulations, so neatly educated, so nearly laid: He maketh me to die down. But some of us have drowned and coughed ourselves up. The deep morning lifts its swollen legs high upon the stage. Some wanting amnesia float personified abstractions. Some wash ashore, but n
ot into the audience, not able to look on. Help me if who you are now helps you to know the world differently, if who you are wants not to live life so.

  STILL IN PLAY (ACT II)

  On the street where children now reside, the speed limit is 25. Green owns the season and will be God. A rain, that was, put a chill in every leaf, every blade of grass. The red brick, the asphalt, cold, cold. The front step, the doorknob, the banister, the knife, the fork. A faucet opens and the woman, Liv, arrives as debris formed in the sea’s intestine, floating in to be washed ashore and perfumed. In time she opens her mouth and out rushes, “Why is the feeling this? Am I offal? Has an unfortunate accident arrived me here? Does anyone whisper Stay awhile, or the blasphemous Resemble me, resemble me?” Those watching say with their silence, That is Liv, she has styes on her eyes, or she needs to forget the why of some moment. She doesn’t look right. She is pulling the red plastic handle toward her, checking around her. She’s washing, then watching hands, feet and shouting Assemble me. Assemble me. She is wearing shoes and avoiding electrical wires, others, steep drops, forgotten luggage. Those are her dangers. She cannot regret. A hook out of its eye, she’s the underside of a turtle shell. Riveted, and riven, the others stare, contemplating the proximity of prison to person before realizing the quickest route away from is to wave her on. They are waving her on. Liv is waved on. Everything remains but the shouting. A cake is cooling on a rack. Someone is squeezing out excess water. Another is seasoning with salt. The blacker cat is in heat. A man sucks the mint in his mouth. The minutes are letting go. A hose is invisible on the darkened lawn.

  MUSICAL INTERLUDE (ACT III)

  A certain type of life is plot-driven. A certain slant in life. A man sucking his mint lozenge. He is waiting for the other foot to drop: his own, mind you. In a wide second he will be center stage.

  His song will be the congregation of hope. He will drain his voice to let Liv know she cannot move toward birth without trespassing on here: To succumb to life is to be gummed to the reverberating scum seemingly arrested.

  Erland knows Liv is as if in a sling, broken in the disappeared essence, the spirit perhaps: catfoot in a moist soil, at the lowest altitude or simply streamside, though seeming fine.

  He knows he too, sometimes, is as if below, pained, non-circulatory, in an interval, the spirit perhaps in an interval. But then frictionized, rubbed hard—

  sweet-life-everlasting, he is singing softly beneath his meaning in the sediment of connotation where everyone’s nervously missing, so missed. His melody is vertical, surrendering suddenly to outcome, affording a heart,

  recalling, after all, another sort of knowing because some remainder, some ladder leftover, is biddy-bop, biddy-bop, and again. His voice catches. It feels like tenderness beckoning and it is into her voice, rejoicing.

  IN MORTAL THEATER (ACT IV)

  blessedly the absolute miscarries

  and in its release this birth pulls me toward that which is without comparison. in the still water. of green pasture. Lord and Lamb and Shepherd in all circumstances. daylight in increase. always the floating clouds. ceaseless the bustling leaves. we exist as if conceived by our whole lives—the upsurge. its insides. in all our yesterdays. moreover

  asking and borne into residence. the life that fills fills in a world without synonym. I labor. this is the applause. This—mercy grown within complexity. and in truth these lies cannot be separated out: I see as deep as the deep flows. I am as willing as is recognized.

  I am.

  am almost to be touching

  (2001)

  GABRIEL GUDDING (1966–)

  A Defense of Poetry

  The test of such poetry is that it discomfits.

  —Charles Bernstein

  1. The lake trout is not a furious animal, for which I apologize that you have the mental capacity of the Anchovy.

  2. Yes the greatest of your sister’s facial pimples did outweigh a Turkey.

  3. I was eating Vulture Beast Cream, I was eating Lippy Dung Corn, and I said “Your ugly dog is very ugly,” for he is.

  4. And that is when I turned and a snowflake banged into my eye like a rusty barge and I killed your gloomy dog with a mitten.

  5. For I have bombed your cat and stabbed it. For I am the ambassador of this wheelbarrow and you are the janitor of a dandelion. Indeed, you are a teacher of great chickens, for you are from the town of Fat Blastoroma, O tawdry realtor. For I have clapped your dillywong in a sizeable door.

  6. You have an achy knee which is where I clubbed your achy and pompous knee. I shoot your buffalo, may you be hanged by the upper lip and somehow burned in a canoe.

  7. Is your butt driving through traffic

  that it should toot so at the world? I am averse to urine, yet I shake your hand upon occasion;

  8. I have made a whiskey of your tears—and Joe-Bob made a fluliqueur of your night-mucus;

  9. That some of your gas has been banging around the market like a small soldier carrying a table. God booby.1

  10. I overlook your titties. Your sneeze erased the blackboard and your cough knocked a dog into loneliness;

  11. For you remind me of a dog hurled over a roof—yapping to no effect. And furthermore the habitual peristalsis in your bowels sounds like a barfight in a whale. In addition, that as a boy you lassoed storks with a petty friend named Jerry.

  12. And just as you swallowed a cherry’s stone and produced a tree, you recently ate a burger and found a bull honking among your feces.

  13. For I would more expect a Pigeon to tote a rifle

  14. than a wise syllable issue from your cheesepipe.

  15. And as your nose is packed with Error I advise you to pick it often.

  16. For you are a buttock.

  Indeed you are the balls of the bullock and the calls of the peacock; you are the pony in the paddock near the bullock and the peacock; you are the futtock on the keel and the fetlock (or the heel) of the pony in the paddock:

  17. Indeed you are the burdock on the fetlock and the beetle on the burdock and the mite on the beetle on the burdock on the fetlock of the pony in the paddock and the padlock of the gate of the paddock of the bullock and the peacock.

  18. Thus with you I am fed-up. For you are Prufrock and I am Wild Bill Hickok at a roadblock with the wind in my forelock and a bullet in my flintlock. You are Watson I am Sherlock.

  19. For you are the hillock and I am the hill; I am Hitchcock, O Buttock. You—are Cecil B. De Mille.

  20. Yes he hath thrown a squirrel at me which came flapping through the air like a disjointed hairbrush.

  21. The fact that the sequins on your dress caused you to look like the instrument panel of an airliner during a three-engine flame-out did not escape anyone’s attention;

  22. That your heart is a colostomy bag2 and your brain is the Peanut of Abomination.3 And that the cake frosting you just ate is actually earwax.

  23. And since suing you would be like suing a squirrel, and since I would rather eat a mixture of powdered mummy and water than talk with you again4, I will try to punch your head hard enough5 so that you will not dare chase me, but not so hard that others will hunt me.

  24. For you have killed my family6 and I have killed your dog, your bird, and the mouse of your daughter;

  25. Your cousins Rosie, Yolanda, Amelia, Harriet, Johanna, and Carol have all been decapitated.

  26. But we pushed Judy over a cliff.7

  * * *

  1. Just as the fog is shackled to the dirty valley stream and cannot go out loosely to join the loopy clouds who contain hollering eagles and whooshing falcons but must stand low and bound and suffer the scratch of a bush and the round poop of deer and the odd black spoor of the American black bear or the bump of a car on a road or the sick crashes of paintings thrown from a rural porch, so also is your mind bound to the low reach of trash and the wet wan game of worms and the dripping dick of a torpid dog—and unlike the clouds above you you do not feel swell but clammy and pokey and sweaty
: a leaf-smell follows you, odd breezes juke your brook-chaff, lambs and rachel-bugs go up and forth in you, and when a car passes through you, windows down, the car-pillows in that car get puffy, absorbing water in the air, and those pillows become bosoms, gaseous moving bosoms, and that is the nearest you come to bosoms.

  2. For these reasons and more, Dolores rightly asked as you walked by, “What is that smell that smells so much it is audible, is it a spoor?” I said it is the smell of a dillywong slammed in a door.

  3. Or the Dingleberry of Reason.

  4. Some have called your mouth Bippy-Swingset, and someone who seemed to resemble your physician called the orifice in question the birth-hole of a Raven, whereas it is common knowledge all Ravens are born in burning forests, for the beast is a charred contraption, being well-cooked and near dead. Some say that Crows are born out of a sail’s white leeward wall, others that thun Crow is as an millet-corporal to the Raven’s brook-colonel, that a pelican has goiter and that a Crow is in truth the silhouette of a gull knocked loose from that gull, which can happen in the case of an Sudden Explosion, where, in the afterclap and initial desolation, gulls will breach the sky with such celerity their silhouettes break free and fall like dark packs to the ground, which is why the crow is a kind of angry bird, being now without grace and having a charred voice. Some insist the crow is in fact a drunk, though at which saloon he find his beer or how he should pay for it, or whether he have beer, port, or an highball, these “poets” will not aver: either way he follows not the Doctrine of Christ and is a derisive and condemnable bird and ought therefore to be avoided and never frighten a gull. Another annoying beast can be the Squirrel. For he is midget blowhard.