|
|
|
Yale
To psyche himself for the
injection,
Justin imagines a herd of deflated basketballs
moping on black cement, and a hundred yellow jackets
shooting through chain links, onto the court.
Each bug claims a ball, pushes its stinger
through the pump-hole and clenches its abdomen.
The balls tremble in startlement, cough
like cluttered french horns and swell to life.
The jackets, in unison, flap their wings
and wiggle their asses free of the orbs,
who, like balled vapor rushing to a pot's top,
shoot, shoot, shoot. Stacy sticks Justin
in the arm and he jumps, and his heart jumps,
for twenty seconds; then he falls, slackens
and becomes a gas. She straddles his hips,
kisses his eye and asks him what he feels.
In six years, she'll be passing the Bar,
leasing German cars and mixing pink daiquiris
in her SoHo loft, while he sucks dirty dicks
and sleeps under Miami's bridges; but now,
as she awaits his words, he stares through her
and through the ceiling, and through heaven.
Poem
© Kemel Zaldivar 2004. All rights reserved.
|
|
Kemel
Zaldivar writes lots and lots of poetry but can't remember where
he's published it. Was there something in Drunken Boat,
Shampoo, Melic Review, Naked Poetry or can we have our
ball back? Did he, two years ago, using the names of various
pre-Renaissance dragons (e.g. Fafnir) as noms de plume, and 1600
Pennsylvania Ave as his return address, appear prolifically in
several obscure Canadian, Australian and/or Nicaraguan literary
venues? He's just not sure. He seems to remember a dream in
which he published a strikingly pornographic sonnet on a large
bay window that was bolted to his nape, with his medulla as a
backdrop. Whatever the case, he is firm that his poetry has
helped him get laid a little but not too much, that his belly
button is four-dimensional and coated with red velvet, his
saliva is a powerful hallucinogen and that he's immune to the
venom of black widow spiders, a fact that makes him talk a lot
of shit. When he does not create, he destroys and at the moment
he's really keen on Hal Incandenza's book called The Man Who
Began to Suspect He Was Made of Glass.
|
Portrait
of Kemel Zaldivar © Henry Denander 2004. All rights reserved.
|
|
Poetry
Michael Rothenberg
Diane Thiel
Nick Carbo
Mia Leonin
Michael Hettich
Campbell McGrath
Kelle Groom
Steve Kronen
Kemel Zaldivar
Pris Campbell
Michael-Earle Carlton
George Murphy
Howard Camner
Geoffrey Philp
Terri Carrion
Nancy Knutson
Jonathan Rose
Barbra Nightingale
Ian Krieger
James Brock
Amy Serrano Zorrilla
Denise Duhamel
Virgil Suarez
Micro-Fiction & Shorts
Terri Carrion
Diane Thiel
Artists
Artist Intro
Ivonne Bess
Diego Quiros
John Canning
Jeff Filipski
Arlene Magloire
Cassandra Gordon-Harris
Holly Picano
TRES
Mia Leonin
Terri Carrion
Richard Blanco
Interviews
Campbell
McGrath
Previous Volume
Volume 16
MastHead ~
Submit
South Florida Reads
PUERTA
|
