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A collagist tagged the sky

by Anne Gorrick


The sagas break like a new moon covered in tickets
Hammer camp wow, auto parts and her ankle rehab
True stick death, slow seasons, sunswim lyric
A slender man in the slipper room near a slanted door
Heartgold, Mister Seed’s Good Deals
Tin pant liquidator, trauma model, wig twins
Twirls and twigs, Twirlmania, twirl a squirrel
When was Jesus really born?
When was the internet invented?
Was it before cakes, figurines, and painted furniture?
Couture diddles spice, bras stamped with pets
The thesaurus dies with our thirst mechanism
Mozart mutts, ghostly other people do the killing
Impossible bad things in French and you were someone else
A moth sailboat that looks like a bee in your ear
A hummingbird problem in my closet
Her Sundays were outfitted with Prednisone
She invented a myth to explain that gym in Las Vegas
An infestation of orchids and pictures
Identification traps, bridal dresses cut into years
Your ticket has been escalated, a diet without a permit
Herpes bags, a constructivist method of parenting
My twitching eye married the blue sky
Dogs eat grass in Whyville
Why is wisdom personified as a woman in Illinois jokes?
Why won’t her teeth bloom?
Why does the washing machine get out of balance?
Why wash meat?
Why wash off the mosquito repellant?
Wishbones are charms, in monochrome 10 bridges burning
Wishmaster envelopes willed with prayers
Mint and rue, Swansboro garment songs
Wood mushrooms hymn under wings to an incense that smells like jeans
The compassion in sewing tape
Of the Month clubs for Siberians
Miracle Tiber on the corner of Bitter and Sweet
Little shadows, lithotripsy, hollowing tools: the ultimate rarities in her heart
My life is stupid, sexist, horrible, terrible, like soccer
Is shyness a sin or a sign of love?
The shyness in Japanese bedrooms, small packages in smoky places
Smackdown dental with green stars smocking
The snow is falling
Love cake topper, blue blazer style, gifts, blessings, boyfriends
Crocodile sayings, black curtains, pure imagination
Andromeda written on a chart of measures
Horse games for girls
And then Tango made three
The valley shook and none walked through
There were fewer bands, the Mysterians’ greater use for love was like a lotion
The outside of the house was covered in moonflowers, moth wings
They lived one day like it was orange
Softshelled under a billboard moon
Magic scoop best price
 
An unfinished husband, you are an oasis in collapse
Islands strung like chapter summaries, an idle stroll
Sometimes her flesh lived in the fun lane
 
                                   A god
                                   A check
                                   A man
                                   A grant
                                   A Chevrolet
 
The forbidden fortunes in Western wear
 
You have been closed
You were selected but not displayed
You became the formalist portal of god
You contained validation errors
You were a French overture or a city
You were mostly usable to plants
You were a business letter, a sonnet, a large glass window
You were a series of anatomy or haiku
You were witchcraft or an affidavit
You were godliness, ownership, government
You were an address, also autism and art
You were an exact equation of anemia in Mediterranean women
Elegy, ellipse, essay
Your eyes were layered in old anesthetic, in ecological sequences
Your membranes were empathetic, benevolent and helpful
Your elegant dentistry never forgot
Your biography is an ontological argument
Your shirred, your shirt says costume
What value is deanimation to a microbe?
You protect the world from destruction with unspecified powers
Your inventoried uncertainty
Open a pecan with a knife in an orange porch cartoon
You both worship and ignore dreams
Your colorized Christmases were canceled, then your white Christmas was colorized
Your whiskies were invented in churches, used as the fluid in magnetic compasses

Anne Gorrick

Anne Gorrick's works inhabit a space embodying both place and machine, and is informed by living near New York's Hudson River his whole life. He is also captivated by all kinds of mechanical gardens - trains and their tracks, cars, tools, senseless metals. He is currently working on a series of poems that are experiments with translation engines, creating sense into nonsense back into sense again. He is hostage to the accident, the fragment, the unexpected. The experience of putting language through a mechanical process makes words more into things and then somehow more malleable, more surprising.

His work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in: Anthem, Big Bridge, Blackbox Manifold, Cordite, decomP, Drunken Boat, eratio, Foundry, Galatea Resurrects, Glitterpony, indefinite space, kadar koli, La Vague, Leveler, Literary Orphans, Litter, Map Literary, Marsh Hawk Review, New World Writing, Otoliths, Peep/Show, Plath Profiles, Poetry Wales, Shadowtrain, Shearsman Magazine, Sugar Mule, Tears in the Fence, Upstairs at Duroc, Wag’s Revue, West Wind Review, White Whale Review, Word For/Word, and Yew.

His full-length books of poetry include: An Absence so Great and Spontaneous it is Evidence of Light (forthcoming from the Operating System, 2018); The Olfactions: Poems on Perfume (BlazeVOX Books, 2017); A’s Visuality (BlazeVOX, 2015); I-Formation (Book 2) (Shearsman Books, 2012); I-Formation (Book 1) (Shearsman, 2010); and Kyotologic (Shearsman, 2008).

He has co-edited with poet Sam Truitt an anthology of innovative poetry from New York’s Hudson Valley called In/Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from New York’s Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, 2016).