Sunday, May 1, 2022

Andrew Gorin : Two poems

 

 

 

Mapquest

Looking back before directions, I saw how to make
In the beginning, you’d think we basically won
Whatever he said. The way that way leads us on

It is necessary to be absolutely  
Ping of ecstasy drowning a studded beach

Way not to declare that beautiful
Breadfruit, sites of passage into

Before you made bread with your hands
There was a conference for us to go to

Eleven hundred enthusiasts converging
On the last known copy

It seemed a paltry fee compared to
What we paid for the crystal in our teeth

Fingers should be boiling over in minerals
A nod to them, to you

Like I ever existed without extras
If there’s no disco ‘neath the glacial ice it means

We get to invent the music
If there’s disco, I’m going

Which will be hot or cold depending on your
Inner thigh. The babysitter

Ordered pizza with an unused air of expectation
Normal shorts, blood diamonds

I thought were a particular kind of diamond
We had it once and we lost it and now

We have it again, as if that’s any consolation
I don’t attach moss to reference of any kind

It’s too perfect and I’m too busy
Silting the sports bar with day-glo looks

Towards eternity, which is beer for my friends
I could go on singing arias to the

Trees are men, a perfect leisure on TV
But the avenue of displaced shame

It is no longer difficult, driving in New York
You see a lot of aggression directed toward

Doctors, lawyers,
Estranged from their machines, the heart

Goes on wanting architecture but it is not enough
To disrupt

Seeming with seeming

  

 

Back Home

He arrived she a bath
She a shower I knocked on her door
He came downstairs I breakfast

I woke up the sun shine
Tom the meal the phone rang

The boss arrived she a letter
He shave he cut himself

She the dishes the telephone rang
They watched t.v. I on the computer

He arrived I the plants
She cry I got home

It began to rain I home
We saw the accident we wait for the bus

I a magazine she turned off the lamp
I woke up the baby cry

Carol and Linda drive home they saw a UFO
The bomb exploded I talk on the phone

 


 

 

Andrew Gorin is a poet and scholar based in Brooklyn. His creative and critical writings appear in Chicago Review, Urban Omnibus, The Boston Review, and Criticism, among other publications. He’s currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU and an editor for the Organism for Poetic Research (organismforpoeticresearch.org) and The Distance Plan (thedistanceplan.org).

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