Noos

My poem "A Whipsaw Takes Two Men" is up today on Verse Daily! It appears in the current issue of Copper Nickel, which you should check out; I especially enjoyed the portfolio of Krista Franklin's collages.

Coming This Summer, from Bad Fingering Press

Here is a picture of Elegant Choice performing soulfully upon a Trumpet when he was a child:

Reader, are you a Nipster? Are you a Nipster who has written a book? Rejoice and be glad--your search for cover art ends here.

Homework

I have two poems online at Witness, go read them! While you're at it, also read Eduardo's poem, here, and when you're done with all that, read Michelle Disler's "The James Bond Alphabet."

This One's Gonna Win Prizes, I Can Feel It

Is it time for another issue of Articulated Animal Bonez, the journal where every poem depicts an animal having sex with the title and an animal giving birth to the last line?

A Comparison Is a Law; Watch Its Sausage Being Made

Let's talk about cover letters! You guys, I am so tired of writing the phrase "have appeared or are forthcoming in." It clunks like a...

CUT TO MY INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

Like a polio shoe!

Like a polio shoe? That's definitely not okay to say.

Ever? What if there's no one in the shoe? What if it were, like, dropped on the floor by a doctor?

It still doesn't sound okay.

Now I feel bad, and I'm sorry for thinking it! I wonder why it's okay to talk about iron lungs but not okay to talk about polio shoes.

Because I'm pretty sure there are six or seven poets alive right now who would actually die if they weren't allowed to use iron lungs as a metaphor for, like, society.

Do I even know what a polio shoe looks like?

Whoa, that's certainly not what I was picturing. I was thinking of something clunky and black, like what Herman Munster wears, or Tom Cruise.

Wait a minute--no one else is calling it a polio shoe. Is that something I made up?

I should probably donate to a polio charity at this point.

If I took a twenty dollar bill and wrote, "FOR POLIO" on it, that money would be "for polio," but it wouldn't be a donation. God that is meta. But maybe it would raise awareness.

Then more people would understand that it isn't okay to compare things to polio shoes.

CUT AWAY FROM MY INTERIOR MONOLOGUE

...like a polio shoe. From this moment forth, I'm going to write, "my poems have gonna appeared," instead. Who's with me???

I Always Knew "The Waste Land" Was Hilarious

From Wikipedia:

One evening Eliot read from the poem to the Royal Family during WWII. Years later, the Queen Mother recalled the evening: "We had this rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem... I think it was called The Desert. And first the girls [Elizabeth and Margaret] got the giggles and then I did and then even the King."

This Man Is in Charge of a Newspaper

"What is buffalo mozzarella?" my husband asked me. Neither of us knew exactly. I confessed that I thought it was mozzarella named after a city. He confessed that he thought it was just "really big mozzarella." "You know, buffalo," he said. "It's slang for really big." I was silent. "Is...isn't it?" he ventured. "It is not," I said. We stared at each other uneasily. Neither of us had considered the possibility that it might be mozzarella from a buffalo. "Let's ask the True Answers Website," I said, and the True Answers Website showed us a picture of big cheeses being milked out of a water buffalo's breasts. What is this gross feeling? I asked myself. It was disbelief. "I didn't know water buffaloes were still real," I said in a small voice. "I thought they were like mastodons. I thought they were all dead, except for maybe one that got sent to the future and is waiting for us to catch up with it." He popped a huge piece of mozzarella into his mouth. "No wonder it tastes so fresh," he said, and burst into tears.