Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

than the proprietor down the road
who called that first of several popular
while-you-wait tailoring shops
Jack the Ripper.
Meet Reena the Butcher.
Fresh bear meat for this girl hunter.
The braided rug's circumference is enlarged
by blood-spray
into an alien dahlia of blood
that is just right. •
1
The Culture of Mr. Wonderful
First there's innocence as professed
by his profession: selling boatloads of flowers
that out of his hands become adornment, snacks,
overtures that profit this dealer of vegetable matter,
some petals displayed around the flower head
like a hand of cards: the gamble in anything.
Then one must look more closely at that hand
the flower's been dealt as it becomes what
Mr. Wonderful's been dealt: the family
business, not lucrative all the time; he's not
in it for the money, but for the pure pleasure,
since there's often nothing else, of ferrying flowers.
Many tulips close up on him at twilight as if they hold small empty
eggs: elegant voids - or maybe some inner peace that probably
would be rounded, but not a ticket or passport to anything
outside the garden; pollen drops from what sky there is inside
onto impersonation of a velvet floc
and would be at home in an hourglass: the who
night spent as gist of what I thought came 01
of successful tonsillectom
At water's edge: a battalion of white peacocks,
the feathers the most elegant spines
blown back like umbrellas blown back
and contorted like supposedly double-jointed girls
in a circus desperate to be spectacular
but also like, as if the double-jointed were not enough,
partial jellyfish; that is: jellyfish that result
froin 10botoIny, the ragged half brain of tentacular nerves
or more decorative radar dish
to spy on celestial activity out of the ordinary,
to eavesdrop just as the plane trees just beyond
the startling white peacocks, even their eyes,
are doing: bare branches in the blown-back position
of the peacocks' feathery array
with which the plane trees collaborate, each
translating the other and transmitting mutual praise.
Mr. Wonderful is a captain completely unaware that I know of him.
His expansion that he knows of is a little Mr. Wonderful
whose resemblance extends to a smaller boat
on the other side of the lake.
Some of his petals, the ones most like daggers,
excusing the softness, are dipped in poison
because some poisons make the most beautiful ink
and are necessary to write the name of his lover
on the active surface of this lake, the water under his boat