Ordinary Parlor – Emmalea Russo
December 31, 2022
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