SMILE AND NOD
by Marina Blitshteyn
what else has the consistency
of a learned bobble-head
which placed itself too high on some professor’s mantle?
Nodding in affirmation
to everything as esoteric
as a Ronald McDonald reference,
about the man, the myth,
the McGriddles in the morning…
perhaps genius is in the digressions.
An extravagant mind has no place for limits,
logic is the dashboard that holds a figure but it never goes anywhere.
Neither does the bobble-head
that assumes the position of scholar sausage and educated eggs.
You can feed it as much shit as you can sizzle
in a vat of freedom fries and the representation of freedom in
a frozen bag of potato daggers,
the deconstruction of a sandwich
in a mouth, in a word,
out of your ass.
They always concede, like polite cashiers,
breaking their necks in desperation to avoid the deep philosophical question
of most English majors:
paper or plastic.
Perhaps if they are agreeable enough
for the politics of managing professional discourse
they won’t find themselves managing the local McDonalds.
Perhaps if their dense little orbs assume a depth of intellect
their higher education could lead to thoughts higher than being plastered or tied down
or getting high in a parking lot watching a hula dancer wiggle under a paper bag.
And don’t you think there’s something in the vibration of a student’s head that echoes a sort of
Freudian mask in which the
hooded figure is empowered
by a hidden sexual attraction to his father?
Yes, indeed, I suppose you would;
by the end of it nothing tastes better than a question.
The Se(e)(a)r’s Poem
by Jason Bocko
Skin unfolds as fabric
Offering new visages of bone.
Weave it back and forth in time
(N)either blood (n)or pain
New arrangements of dark on darker
Alongside our pale on white.
More to see th(e)(a)n saw it off in this sudden(ly) s(c)e(e)n(e).
The meaning won’t remain.
A poem (i)(o)n flesh or palimpsest
Tapestries were string;
The fates with their single eye
See it all the same
The burning of a cigarette
Pressed (a)gains(t) the arm
No glamour of the gilded gods
our truth is much more tame
But still in time and time again
Beauty plays with truth,
Written with a sodden ink
