Am I the pretty one? by Drew Burk

 

 
 
Spork's Poetry
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Am I the pretty one? by Drew Burk

03/03/2011

you on the floor & ass cold on my shin, this time it’s me in pieces
for you & all out of concert & had I known it was going to be that
kind of night I wouldn’t have had those last five drinks, those few
more hits in the studio, in the hall, in the bar & the girl saying
You’re an asshole but she won’t tell us her name & we keep asking
her what it was & her not telling. she alliterates, she says. she says
she alliterates & that’s all she’ll say. not worth it & we don’t care
& now she wants to tell us but we’re on our way out the door
& people keep saying my name & she just wishes they would stop.
the teacher on the street in San Francisco gone bass & stomping; two
minutes previous them pooling cash, arms out to hold the cab & me
saying No I don’t want to fuck her, everyone saying Someone’s got
to fuck her & why it’s me I don’t know: what, am I the pretty one?&
do they hate me?& I’m not the one with my mouth full of wax, that
wasn’t me drinking the candles, not that night & anyway that was half
an hour before pooling the cash & five minutes after the candles we’re out
back in the 10x10 with the ladder & the teacher’s the only one with a chair
(when I said bass I meant fish) holding court, my cigarettes her scepters
for twelve minute tyrannies & we keep saying Don’t encourage her she’s
just a self-important sad little loser girl minus discernment & she’ll
take the attention from where it comes but they encourage her & I say
again No I don’t want to fuck her; say a word: decompose. [her stupid
fantasy unwritten & pull back & up & shoot from above & she at x0,y0
when 0 is top right; me rolling away x-5,y-5 straight & the others
they drip, drip off but unbound & we’re all riding together but no one
is going the same way. & the teacher alone, decomposed, unbound] no;
here: a musical no music unscripted but sudden for a second the three
of us know our moves and we dance away from her. the girl who calls
me asshole makes me think all this. I want you
(in that one thing brings up another)                to refer to nothing.

c. then

& you demonic in your drive. you the smartest girl, phasing state
& out. misaligned: you mad ellipse & I call you Halley but Halley
Trunk, as in truncate as in shorter as in reference to periodicity on
a much smaller scale as in you’re here again & O my god thank you.

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Drew Burk is the fiction editor at Spork (along with Andrew Shuta), and Jamison and Jake and Richard are the poetry editors and Jamison's down in Bisbee in a trailer at the Shady Dell celebrating his birthday. And yeah, I'm a little jealous, since that place is super cool. The place has no internet, no signal, no nothing, so he can't do the update. Why, then, can't Richard or Jake do the update? Well, it goes a little something like this: Jake and Richard refuse to learn how to use the software to do the updating, and yeah, we're working on getting a more modern content management system in place, but there's all sorts of things that we have to figure out before we can migrate to the new system. So in the interest of having an update up on the site at the time we do our normal updates I've gone and found a poem thing I wrote (did I mention I'm fiction?) a while ago while trying to get a reluctant poet to get the hell to work on his poetry. I wrote a poem a day and sent it to him, the question attached to each: Is it really so hard? Look, I wrote another poem. And another. And another. This is one of them. There's lots of things I do in here, on purpose things intended to annoy poets. I hope, in some small way, I achieve my purpose. The ampersands annoy even me.

Happy Holidays.