POETRY | ISSUE SIX
Logorama
♦
By ADAM FITZGERALD | Fall 2015
Charles O'Rear | c. 1975
Often we feel it in the sidelong aches of starting again.
In long aisles of department stores
that no longer operate
where plastic forsythia fears not denuded day.
Rubbery fixtures cotton off onto you, in shadows
or shallows of parking lot equipment set into the lobby
for the weekend. Some guy used to work here with a t-shirt
that said Vampire Empire on it, I think.
In a little while it’ll be fifty years or so.
Perhaps the race of tartar sauce ended with fish & chips.
Perhaps Spartan “broom removal” spelt fate.
On baby-talcum registers, there’s pristine markings:
scanning labels that officiated his prized bread pudding;
of looking up from dairy smudges to download sun spots.
You bought grapefruit; were rewarded with Alzheimer’s.
Apoplexy chastely massages matte-finished headlines,
the junk company that lived circa the 22nd century or so
when the Ohio Valley determined the workflow of penury
and Jason was a household name tucked in Douglas firs.
Operators take to boom mic
and flirt round lofty hedges near the skate park.
Pregnant fruits are driven to flower.
So much happens between dinner and jogging these days
until drunk tiles, of a crematory sky no less, erect tongs.
First, the blocks are built into assembled monuments of
mass appeal. Then they are disbanded in elastic collapse.
Scattered, they become rash plazas of generic iterations.
In the future, a helmet is healthy.
Pylons and room-temperature plugs militate arousal,
acoustic incontinence, sperm deposits for tusks.
I slide into a velvet sedan-like sofa,
whiten my approach, my teeth, tending to the generations
of jigsaw mammy-glands that are flapped
by the bedside of woodchuck grain tonalities.
Vaseline messengers start out icy, get hot
but there’s charm in a scheming teddy if you don’t mind
the occasional go-fuck-yourself beneath bunting.
Our corporate derby is where we roll over on prongs
in wooden file, then slowly a drawbridge cabinet opens.
A hernia-like goddess is released from the menu bar
of asthmatic insulation tubing from the ceiling conductor.
Fans pearl up; dragons interchange coffee grinds;
local numbers detonate slyly in fizzing cubbyholes.
You find her in a meeting, remark on her
resemblance to a scarf-set in the vicinity of Candy Apple
or Cadmium Yellow. Your cameo is mediation training
like a textbook company that asks participants
the difference between a mastodon in heat and one traditional.
Visual glibber means something to the dead officers
but the tackboards oscillate to Hawaiian string guitar.
It probably means the family got the message. The
header font coming on, comes on. And strongly.
Chubby barn owls make a mess of skin flicks--
in Burberry, cancerous, by Tide and Glade refills.
I once dated an otter.
|
Adam Fitzgerald is the author of The Late Parade (2013), his debut collection of poems from W. W. Norton / Liveright. He is poetry editor for Literary Hub as well as founding editor of the online poetry journal Maggy. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Granta and elsewhere. An adjunct professor in creative writing at Rutgers University and NYU, he also directs The Home School. His next book of poems, George Washington, is forthcoming. |
Nat. Brut Issue Six
Issue Six is our second in print, and features work by Cristina de Middel, Afabwaje Kurian, Chitra Ganesh, Jayson Musson, and more! Issue Six also comes with limited edition supplements: All of Them Witches, a 32-page risograph-printed comic re-interpreting 1950s Harvey Horror comics, plus volume four of our comics section, Early Edition!
