Sean Singer’s latest collection, Honey and Smoke, was published by Eyewear Publishing in 2015. His first book, Discography, won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize (selected by W.S. Merwin) and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is the author of two chapbooks, Passport (2007) and Keep Right On Playing Through the […]
January 15, 2330 I’ve decided to increase my number of transistors to 4.8 billion. I found a pulse-ray from my grandfather and I was shocked to discover that his binary arithmetic, instruction sets, and assembly language programming could not have been replaced the way we can replace them today. February 14, 2330 My girlfriend now […]
If you have been transformed by the fire, you have been like many; yet there are more traps. There are women in linen skirts, filled with blossoms or parts of blossoms, in enlarging gardens. A man is only as young as the woman he feels. An owl, yellow as a ladder, is hinged to […]
rolled out of the hot machine the Scully Automated Lathe, covered in oil, rigged to the metal ends, dying of spin, metal on black, back to back thimble weights, diamond and rinsed to a new shine, lunge and pull into circles, […]
for Albert Ayler (1936-70) & Cleveland Evergreen leather winterwear and a honky-tonk, but salty glissando, a man revealing his baby-life in the dark, when the dark was a scattered ambrosia, but opening plaints with dynamite, and a grill and a tremolo and hard plastic reed. What is self-evident, he said, was a colored disk, a […]
“There’s no such thing as bop music, but there’s such a thing as progress.”—Coleman Hawkins Although jazz’s sepia, acetates, and lacquers have dipped the black into silver nitrate, and are faded little faders, they inflate like lungs. The pink lung, with its tortoiseshell shellac appears to bulge, and its inseam exhales purity, and inhales spoonfuls […]
Owl The Devil’s headlamp stalks the red cells in a mouse miles from itself—the yellow lens is resinous, fat, dense as pearl firming-up & renders its beam heavy with currents. Into a dustbowl of annihilation the rotating head seizes its empire of blood; a storm collapses each mouse bone as the threnody of rain crushes […]
for Edward Kennedy Ellington 1 …And the lamp caught fire after he put a blue cashmere sweater over it. Subtle as a Nance obbligato on filmy violin—two brown curves en passant, purflings ease sound out of the stank of violin parts: belly, waist, chin rest, rib, sound hole, pegbox, tailpiece, rounded shoulder. Ellington was an […]