5 poems by Larry Sawyer

BUT MOST BEAUTIFUL OF ALL

the browning edges of the photograph are the outskirts of a map, in which

may be found the beasts and drooping trees living green in the memory

and we inhabit those regions, completely forgotten until once again

we glance into that other world and return to that day that

haunts us at the edge of a table, which pretends to go unnoticed

but now we are aware, and this awareness is an elevator that

carries us upward in our minds

what we resemble most upon realizing these invented scents

at the cliff’s edge is that a photograph is a scalpel

performing the most delicate operation.

GLOTTAL DIAMOND

At the core of couches

your white radish thought alive with plentiful

owls. In the flaming crotch

of chance

the hot kinetic speech monkey

newly fused and erotic

yes, you heard right

chews the winged ethical conundrum

called alive

You’ve tormented

seizures, doused

confusion,

especially, with

paradisal poems

Not scrying, or sitting in

a sound bath, listening to the magnetic plumage’s

stony ligature

sucking an incandescent virginity

you failed our czarist tarantula

protested invalidated simulations

electronic kitten pots

buried hyperactive bonfires

and so we wait.

BEE MACHINE

machine for making disdain

machine for making love

machine for making meadow grass

machine for making gardens

machine for making rock

machine for making music

machine for making bees

machine for making obviousness

machine for making night

machine for making god

machine for making excavations

machine for making judgment

machine for making Chicken Kiev

machine for making distances

machine for making pink

machine for making sleep

machine for making dreams

machine for making light.

SLEEPING WITH HISTORY

I have given up sleep and now

continuously walk waking up

keeping me awake these tired lines

which prop my gargantuan eyes

Once a woman called to me

sleep, sleep, but I said unequivocally

I must witness the whole of life this waking

dream, after she ignored me.

BLOWTORCH

contradictions of

frozen strawberries here

walking along Michigan avenue

which moves like a Mozart sonata

not No. 16 in C major too familiar

for this rarity of

December air

its frosty fidelity as I think about

putting a suit and tie

on my loneliness and going out

but stay inside with

a cup of yesterday's razor sharp worries but now

I'm walking again and nothing

seems transcendent it all seems dull

but I remember now, too this reification

while walking through this

poem that now has such tired eyes

I'm hungry for comfort.

Apollinaire wrote of the gamy

meatballs

of memory, and I think of Chicago's lost coyotes

and listen to frozen

bells sparkling through the streets mothering

my shivering words

shouting at posterity.

Larry Sawyer/ poetry and literary reviews have appeared in publications including Action Yes, The Argotist (UK), The Chicago Tribune, Coconut, Court Green, Esque, Exquisite Corpse, Hunger, Jacket (Australia), The Miami Sun Post, MiPoesias, The National Poetry Review, Outlaw (UK), The Prague Literary Review (Czech Republic), Rain Taxi, Shampoo, Skanky Possum, Tabacaria (Portugal), Van Gogh's Ear (France), Vanitas, VLAK (Czech Republic), Ygdrasil, and elsewhere. His work appeared in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (anthology, Cracked Slab Books, 2007). Convulsive Editions will soon publish a poem as a broadside with visual art by Allyssa Wolf. He’s curated the Myopic Books Poetry Reading Series in Wicker Park, Chicago since 2005, and has hosted readings there nearly every weekend that have included poets such as Eileen Myles, Ron Silliman, Cole Swensen, and Bernadette Mayer, as well as many Chicago-area poets. His debut collection, Unable to Fully California (cover art by Krista Franklin), is available on Otoliths Press (Australia). An ebook, Werewolf Weather (cover art by Gary Sullivan), recently appeared as an Argotist ebook. Sawyer also edits milk magazine (since 1998) with Lina ramona Vitkauskas and has published work by a wide variety of international poets and artists including Charles Bernstein, Jerome Rothenberg, Bill Berkson, Pierre Joris, and Wanda Coleman. Larry coordinated an online installation of the work of Japanese surrealist Yamamoto Kansuke for milk: the only online magazine granted permission to do so by the artist’s estate. Larry has read his work at venues such as the BONK! Reading and Performance Series in Racine, Wisconsin; the Chicago Printer's Row Lit Fest; Columbia College Chicago; The Hideout in Chicago; Myopic Books in Chicago; The Poetry Center of Chicago; Quimby's Bookstore in Chicago; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.