Like a Bildungsroman at the center of a pile
of Warsaw war snow
beating like uncle wound
or the coo coo clock’s beak’s
scheduled meeting with o’clock,
one wing of the bird was left for me. That the animal, eats, shits
and dies free.
Oh to be like Dutch painter X in the honeydew
light of March flanked by three golden retrievers,
rot iron pots and pans, or to be somewhat quartz / somewhat syrup
on florida’s one-hundred and one degrees
in cocktails and jazz.
She wades in a pool of serum and amoebas where the oil-slick
is a speech act that is duct taped over the ear syllable by sound.
And where is the snow, Warsaw?
The zero’s blank corpse sounds over crops erotic as gas
and the asbestos that tang the lungs into submission tumors, into blue trees—
(you’re a tame dog) but they are not ze-
ro, Romeo,
they are not know-
ing.
Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Creative Writing at U.C.L.A and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, where she received a poetry fellowship. She also holds a PhD in Literature from Florida State University where she teaches Creative Nonfiction and Poetry workshops and where she is working on a second full-length collection of poems called Talk of Revolution or Used White Wife or Perpetual Alps. She can't decide. She is the author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2008)( http://bloofbooks.com/), which was a finalist for numerous prizes including the National Poetry Series; she is also the author of several chapbooks including Used White Wife (Grey Book Press, 2009) and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea (Cy Gist, 2006). Her poems are forthcoming in Poetry, the Believer and Copper Nickle and have been published previously in many literary journals including the Colorado Review, Fence, the Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Volt, the New Orleans Review and Lana Turner. Her Creative Nonfiction has been published in Post Road and other literary journals. She currently lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband and young son and two dogs.
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