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Also in this issue, Joni Wallace’sthicket with swan and blue fist: a video poem

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Joni Wallace’s most recent work is also online at West Branch Wired www.bucknell.edu/westbranch

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Contributor Notes




Joni Wallace

Joni Wallace




 

 

Water tower # 5 with money and show

 

Inside the water tower’s a 4D Invisible Dog.  Ersatz viscera behind plastic peepholewindow.  Studded collar, a leash,the catch-me shoes.  Its speakerbox stutter-bark talk. to. me.  What’sto say?  Everything’s as we leftit.   Cutters circling, comeoverherecoins.

Voice, I say, remove dipthong. 

A little alcohol, a woolpack.                  

Vox, I say, look at your features:

tinny rin tin.  Gloss-glint of empty.

It comes hard right at me with a ring back so naughty, take ofyour ____.

So ever the game.  Alittle Bombay in the bomb bay.  Itspluvial text.

An I undressing, a red dress, a lung.

 

 

 

 

Water tower # 7 (after Meret Oppenheim)

How mercurial, the sound room.

Does not know its kind.

Animal charge as stammer-out, tedium drone.

I raise my hand, hind in the hippodrome. 

Perfect, I think, though never chosen. 

Deer sincere, I say into the notebook.

It hears me too kind.

I’ll make a sorry-ticket.

Mer to murit purrs.

Look, the ghost dictionary:

my white glove, ventricular boughs.

 

 

 

 

Thicket with sorrow machine, a ready-made

 

 

Please is a bittern heard crying.

And strung up and hung ‘round a hyacinth tree,

 

trouble scuffling there:

a scratch, a slip, a mouse, mouse, mouse-cry.

 

And top to top it fell, mortar too,

cracked and thuds across the dirty floor

 

you foot-to-foot. Says linoleum linocut. 

Other egg names: cackle.  After-scrap.

 

How sharp, how splinter the ready-made.

A bird-cradled cage. 

 

And you in there, darkdamp. 

a motherfucking mole.

 

Be quiet, don’t say one word.

 

Things broken arrange a hole.

The sun is.

You would have.

Worn it.