MiPOesias Magazine

Bill Berkson's recent books include Fugue State, Gloria (with etchings by Alex Katz) and an extensive epistolary collaboration with Bernadette Mayer, What's Your Idea of a Good Time?: Letters & Interviews 1977-1985. A collection of his criticism, The Sweet Singer of Modernism & Other Art Writings, appeared in 2004. He lives in San Francisco and New York and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Bright Soul

How about a can of Coke?
Yes and no.
Kenneth Koch.

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Damages

Number 53, dejected,
mitt in hand
pressed tight against hipbone –

how I gave you away
to those two I no more
care for than

the ball
in zippily fashioned grass
deep right center

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She Hung Up
for Carlos Villa

Shadows fall from bricks
In the line of fire without a song
You do the math
People talk and carry on

In the line of fire without a song
An escalator cannot divide
People talk and carry on
Esperanto etudes at Weather Wall

An escalator cannot divide
Many pink petals in a vortex of Oreos
Esperanto etudes at Weather Wall
What gravity is, knowing how the light

Many pink petals in a vortex of Oreos
Earth tones escape the citrus ouch
What gravity is, knowing how the light
Like Russian theft comes minimal, minimized

Earth tones escape the citrus. “Ouch,
Love is a loading dock
Like Russian theft” comes minimal, minimized
In/ out, in/ out, in/ out – but only somewhat slightly

Love is a loading dock
She hung up
In/ out, in/ out, in/ out – but only somewhat slightly
A bouquet of crates

She hung up
They were flint chippers in high school
A bouquet of crates
Quel drÙle de vie of Green Card agapanthus

They were flint chippers in high school
Your tentative liabilities awesome as a news hour
Quel drÙle de vie of Green Card agapanthus
Let the sunniness of Classicism shine

Your tentative liabilities awesome as a news hour
Shadows fall from bricks
Let the sunniness of Classicism shine
You do the math

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Salad Spinner
after Francis Picabia

You must grab time by the hair,
couple subconscious helixes
in the space of a secret.

You must tickle the improbable
and believe in the impossibility
of crossroads.

You must learn to suspend
ten grams of white, five grams of black
in hopes of true scarlet.

You must know how to fall from below
to favor the zenith
of mornings to the manner born.

You must love the four mouths
floating around the silky doubt
of dead assumptions.

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Goods and Services

Are you a 15th-century Italian monk of present-day ill repute?
No, I am not Savonarola.

Whenever anyone steals something it is Prometheus
But theft is ascribed to Hermes.

Word went out that the missing husband had been found
Behind his house, washing his pants in the well.

My class notes are illegible and commonplace.
Code word: “Clemency.”