Category: Entertainment
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Dens of our Grandfathers
Holy colors — deep autumn orange and yellows and reds. I can imagine strapping a crown of twigs to my head, and a mask for my face, and dancing the round dances through fields pregnant with corn and soybeans, until I collapse roadside in spent, orgasmic satiation. A dance of submission, of humble, beseeching desperation…
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OBIE COASTER DOODLELOO
Each time the voice says, like echoing from a godly tin can: ‘THERE is a TRAIN APPROACHING the LOCAL track’, I feel the urge to jump. I have lived in NYC for five months and have never done it, but I still leap back from the line, yellow and bumpy like candy buttons, just…
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Hope
I think of the deadening grass, brown. Full of November. How it lays thick and straight as a thatched roof arching down toward the creek. The sort of roof I marveled over in a book that showed cutaways of castles and homes people lived in centuries ago, when everything was handmade and at least as…
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Moonlight
Phase 8 You had seen better days, that was for sure–nose bent, eyes bore bruises and you had forgotten how to smile. Wrinkled hands clasped a wrinkled heart as faded eyes gave your face a sickly presence. I asked your faded eyes again, “Remember? Don’t you remember?” Remember the good memories…at our favorite place to…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 3.5: Tikhov in Awkward Rhyme
Shallow oceans for the sailing Temperatures benign at best Through the telescope tube’s lens? Venus! She invited tropical whaling Old Tikhov sketched what the probes would find with a quick & chary math He predicted a nursemaid covered in plants Waggish blue stolons on clear flushing lobes Later, people laughed at those precepts…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 3: Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov
The Belarusian used chromatic aberration to decidedly advantage an unfeathering of spectrographs for the surface sobbed ruffles of the mirth with which he would flirt He ascended in a gelatin balloon to watch meteors with his friends from the Sorbonne Sternly clutched by the puffs he was, as the blue-gas-flame sibilated girlishly for buoyancy…
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Freud Considering the Eel
And this is the truth of it: we still don’t know precisely where freshwater eels come from. For 2,500 years scholars had zero luck because eels apparently lacked reproductive organs. Aristotle tried to figure it out. Italian scientists in the 1700s made it a point of national honor. In the late 19th century a graduate…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 2: Yuriy Vasilievich Kondratyuk
A dishy dark-pupiled Ukrainian Олександр Гнатович Шаргей His mother married his pater in January and Yuri infiltrated the world that June She taught French in Kiev; a social activist, thus, she was declared insane His great-grandfather had battled Napoleon His father loved physics. Yuri read his books. While fighting on WWI’s Caucasian Front,…
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Soviet Rocket Scientists Canto 1: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Scarlet fever infected the man as a boy in Izhevskoye taking most of his hearing / He turned to books & spherical trigonometry Before too long, he had carefully worked out Tsiolkovsky’s Formula – an elegant dynamite whooosh! of math for prosecuting stelae up – Next, he penned more to calculate the…
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Pfeilstorchs
Migration was difficult to know. It’s not surprising. Who could say why birds leave for a time, where they go? Aristotle thought that birds just transmuted into a different species when the weather changed. Later, it was assumed that birds hibernated. Charles Morton believed they flew to the moon. Even in the 19th century naturalists…
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Blueblack of the Liar’s Sea
watercolor tapestries of ocean ghosts to breach a dream blurred the foggy mythos of blueback of the Liar’s Sea ancestors of whale-men fought the yellow tentacle devils afire in dark orange boulders a scenic vista of hell sulfuric grey vermilion cavern suddenly seems pale empty of midnight stardrifts, pink nebulas fair but one being,…
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Atlantic
The dark rock was rugged and would scrape bare feet if they ever dared to dance on its surface. In the creases and caverns of the rock, the seawater pooled, and over time grew algae and kelp. It sprouted glutinous leaves and slick bushels. There were places where barnacles exploded from the land, their fungal…