Rebecca Black’s first book, Cottonlandia, (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), won a Juniper Prize. The book’s title poem, first published in Poetry, is anthologized in From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great (Persea Books, 2009). Recipient of Wallace Stegner and NEA fellowships, Black has been a Stanford artist-in-residence […]
You’re the girl who does know better but. Getting so smart no man will call, sister made of clay like me. Confession: I picked the lock on your diary. You slept for seven years, so I wrote this in bubble script on the tissued pages: My horse comes when called “Amnesia.” Avenger of the plagiarist […]
And the other selves deployed: my pretty crime tightens the straps on her filched shoes. The decoy sent downriver returns riddled. Terrorista, bomb taped to her heart. My roaring girl, smoking gun. You’re inviolable, cut- purse, my specialist with a butter knife. This colony stocked with ivory, blackest of all black inks, any adjective I […]
In the appaloosa’s ear my Thumbelina directs hooves by remote. Cartoon angel formed from clouds altered by auto emissions. Thus I commit to omit all engines, to the colony via horsepower! Feted by horse- flies, bicycle rides, jerked beef & blink, nasturtiums in the salad. Tagalong, have you unpacked? I’ve ironed seventy-two appellations for you, […]
Wearing your waxed raincoat, blonde wig, I followed you through Eastern capitals, through tickertape avenues, confetti spiralling like DNA until we shared a Pepsi under a blue umbrella in Brno. Which once was Austria, where pea- vines grew wild in the garden of Father Mendel. (Only a celibate was patient enough to cross and hybridize […]
My daimon accompanied me to the Gallery Contempo— tug & trireme, exotic flora of blown glass displayed. Slump and fuse, slump and fuse—the best technique for blowing sand into art. If pressed, Mephista, I’ll tell you—as taxis progressed, as prisms cross- pollenated—I was exquisite liquid then a hard crush under your […]
The horse makes its little leap of nothing. Also called the Ravishing. I won’t deny what happened. I took from your side the eternal. My right. My pleasure. Who believes in you? Knots make this tapestry pretty—on the wooden floor the tangle of your under-things. You shave your legs til —is this— before or after? […]
At approximately 2 a.m. after Miss B. exited the realm of antiquity, passing through the caves of Academe, she abandoned this draft, termed Exhibit B: From the burned Anatolian city, you brought back a coral rug where mistakes were made by hand, the pattern’s lament. Then a premonition—archaic raiment— Mother, you’ve brought a burning […]