Books burning 3:39 a.m.
Chapter 6, Don Quixote.
Touch-me-nots
Wilting-in-progress.
Aspire à la Ashbery
Devote to the Impossible.
Darling, did you dry-
Clean my martini?
Proceed with caution:
Grief under repair.
R. Zamora Linmark’s new poetry collection is Pop Verite. He lives in Manila.
NICOLE COOLEY
The incinerator smoke an incision in the sky. / My daughter no longer small yet still I want to swallow her back into my body. / Sky a scalding. / My daughter asks me to stop saying, I wish this wasn’t the world you have to live in. / In my dream my girl is the size of a thumb I catch between my teeth. / Sky all smoke.
CIGAN VALENTINE
We ask you where you had gone, / And you say you became blue / From when the sky had swallowed you, / And spat you back up. / For you are the worst type of unbeliever. / You only believe in love. / You do not believe in forgiveness. / Before eating,
/ We recite your list of those who have wronged you.
ANZHELINA POLONSKAYA
Snow, listen up. Your eyes are dead. / We know full well we’re being led / like hostages of universal blindness. / Who are we, then? Unknown and homeless. // We push ahead, there’s howling all around. / And far away we see a burning bush. / The birds that flew off south / will not return. Our Rome is smashed.
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