Art

Ordinary Parlor – Emmalea Russo

LANDSCAPE WITH BRIGHT RED

Leave me to my deficiency.

My desirous my dense nauseous

mess. Ignited tourmaline sky

around my hands and head. Read John

Donne, Marguerite Porete, the rest

settling as day yearns downward

rotting into red.

When lifted-lowered to the spot

where action happens: scribbles

of hot red which cannot be re

called collected

                         after

                         and after

I re

       call collect land

scapes untired and dense.

Delirious decorous

this late scrapes the DELI sign

hung so luminous low outside

my window flickering venetian

red into my cooling corrupting down bowed head.

THE WORLD OF CULTURED PEOPLE

Heating         in the white light 

Remain

Motionless 

I remain here 

where dark rings pool

        an image

Tooling around at speed

Nauseating and equivalent

You were tall 

Sick and lovely

Sobs along the side 

Of my 

Self-

Abandoned 

Body

Slice the light 

Grew

I’m asking you laxly laxly

Air stuck

Epileptic-like 

Inarticulate wardrobe

Jerking thusly so

Is body prison?

         pissoir?

What?

Days or frames go

by this murmuring spot

You're insane man

Maybe not

But these regions are

Acrid heart

Breaking and bright

Colors on this chateau 

Warm from scab-colored shot

Into this ordinary parlor I was brought

A flashlight 

I could not distinguish anything 

Alongside rooms without numbers 

Gunshot

Dumbstruck and star-shaped 

Were your brusquer features

Fabricated 

Does God show 

Your or our or my 

Aching eyes 

A world composed of lightning?

Waiting on zinc roof

Obstinately for you

This will go

Toward

Dawn’s most leprous part

That carriage-drawn direction

I wanted to reach but 

Could not for

I’d left the world of cultured people behind

For incandescence and whatnot

Your astral stern and cranial vault 

I’m bouncing back to infinity through

Though 

Although 

Suffer 

We do

Thicket

Sanitarium

Guillotine

Opening 

at the summit 

where

Images coincide 

with movements 

Eyes dunked in red 

Seemingly                 moving 

       they move

Where gestures without carrying power

Go, this

Is the size and shape

Of light dangling 

From a hand

Laxly

ARTFORM

I longed to be a philosopher

But fell long

In love with words of images

Or images

O words and towards

Towards the world forms I from

Fell low to the luminous recall

Lit slice of pie I tossed

Into his mouth across a long

Hall of light (no film plays 

At the end of this night)

I search his image as it spins spins

Spun eternal yet moveable

So stringy dispensable

Disheveled was my line of poetry

Whose sun was a gob vanishing

In the darkroom

Of his mouth then gut-

Or sky-    ward here is a line

and here here is the sun

It fell from

Some inspired knowledge

Distant object o

Hiccups!

OK

Philosophical contemplation

I wanted to sit in

But could not as win

ter split down the middle

Distracted de-distanced

Rinsed and wrung

Got shoved shoved

Here is the eye which is the start

Of love

Here is the mouth

Its end

Both blue

Both red

Let the stick of butter melt

Let its image spin

Begin again