Other People’s Poetry

 
Untitled
 
by Luciano Iacobelli
 
 
I was a child with little to say
 
my thoughts and words added nothing
to a world already complete

but in grade school
I ate a piece of chocolate given to me by a kid
who laughed when I swallowed it
ha ha he said
I gave you poison
and you’re gonna die

I believed him
despite assurances from others
that the boy had played a trick

I trembled and waited for my blood to freeze
and even though it never did
I feared the death inside me
was delayed
a lazy snake
sleeping in the shade of my organs

and so a little piece of candy reversed me
drew my eyes in towards my own workings
made me wordy and thoughtful
with a longwinded hunt
for a scaly darkness
that might
at any moment
strike
 
 

This poem was published as part of Luciano Iacobelli’s collection, Painting Circles (Quattro Books, 2012).  
 

Pressure

 
Valves, clamps, tubes, washers.
At night especially,
I can feel them knocking
under my fingers. They are tender
and immediate as their burden,
their weaknesses are slight enough
to be disastrous: an incidental
whisper, the brush of brick
or bone; how many secrets
would come flooding forth?

 
Rocco de Giacomo

 
As appeared in Existere, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2011.
 

Other People’s Poetry

 
Excepts from Complete Thought I – XXV

by Barrett Watten

 
I

The world is complete.
Books demand limits.

 

VIII

Worn-out words are invented.
We read daylight in books.

 

XII

False notes on a staircase.
The hammer is as large as the sun.

 
XIX

Nothing touches the surface.
The arbitrary is meant to be sensed.

 

XXIV

Thought remains in the animal.
Each island steals teeth.

 
 

Other People’s Poetry

 
Letter to Her Brother

 

In the tombs orgies go on by themselves
if the white images are alone,
I with
my parenthesis that was not supposed to last
the notebooks
of my minds wrapped up in your winter coat
exploitation
at its peak: to you I send
these brief charges, no
explanation can make you keep your time
if the dance tune is this extinguished crater.

*

I do not want
to write in the far away mountain
anything but works about me:

come with me and I’ll map hell for you.

 
 
Amelia Rosselli (1930 – 1996)