EW Wilder answers Edgar Lee Masters.
1.
Liquid Sunday, anima
of the underground
party scene of Orchard
Tech, glitter-bound, noö-
spheric, nylon headdress
blessing the dankcharged
purple air! Bless our
passage, our tress-
passing upon the gracious
vacancy of your bones.
2.
Akadocious and Mr. Crosius,
they were the crisis—
together, apart—the
desire at the fo'csle,
they tire athwart. They
were the party, the two,
inched distant only
by the "s" and the "z," the
lie between Lemnos
and GB, the oiled, stark
hills and the wooded study,
Havana-fumed; united,
the tangled knot of baffled
grammar, the rug forever
stained.
3.
Bandy Nancy tribs tracks thru
the sidewalk talking constantly
inured, denuded butterfly landing
on the butterfly inked in the well-
worn sorrow, the sundress-glowing
bicep.
4.
Parker Pushback, auntie-
hero of the gelded set,
dress-maker of particular
assuasions, markup artist
with the push-pin teeth, you
occluded all the Zoom
calls with da-glo e-
fficiencies. No one wove
nylon like you, bound
as they were into the stark
marks of having been
chosen.
5.
4Chan Sam,
bearded and beery, a shot-
gun meringue between cos-
play nylon and natural fibers,
a sub from highschool football
to tangerine-cherry Juul; a
bookcase devoted only to magick
gathered in lurid pinkred
on the spines and blackground
back.
6.
Bighorse Branson
was neither, but "Branson" was
his name, the last-of-the-clan beggar
on a bigger stage than could hold him:
as the turntable, tangled in cords, yawed
off its stand, and, alone among the throng,
Bighorse finally fell: though the concrete
blocked his body, he kept falling.
7.
Mums Malone -
there is no spring here, no green,
no dear buds on bare
branches, no bulbs un-
furling. Mummers is all
fall, dusty gloss and auburn
bun, the ashen eyes leveling,
hips raked angrily away:
a judgment, a selection.
8.
Facelyft Porquenoyse,
we loved even her screamed caprices,
her fear-faced apologies for the sad party's
end, stretched over overweening years,
gobbed off on curt, cute, poesies, pert
and firm where she could have
exaggerated, begirdled below, still
a convenient landing spot for our sweat-
steamed hands while dancing.
9.
The Antic Cousins:
We didn't see them, as energy
can't be seen but through its effects:
a flower arrangement left
in the sanctuary, the dishes
done and stacked in the drying rack,
the carpet Hoovered into perfect
scallops. And then they were
a memory, lite like lightning.
10.
Supine Launchbot,
le bot femme, the quint-
essentialist, sci-fi ordination,
an illustration from all our cons,
she-de-lighting up at the notion
of crème fraîche, Æon Flux, the lonely
profile of Simon Le Bon. Abed
we forgave her for all her staged
inconstancies.
11.
Powerband Kumquat,
(She was one of the Kumquat sisters. The sporty one.)
could we have literally loved here?
Her hair, salty and short, her jersey
stained at the pits and the vee of her
back, she was a snack of a porter-
house steak. There was power
there that we hoped would rub off on
us. We hoped that, made up and classic,
she'd deign to come in from the field
for a moment's rest: the rest is motion.
12.
Quarterdrive Jones:
Stature is a metaphor, as is all
normal, often used against us.
He talked big in the small
word of the shop floor, of the
brewery back-room, how doom
would come, light-filled
and welcome, one tooth-
turn at a time.
13.
Farley Fuckoff, with his barrel-
shaped ass, he blacked out the sum;
defined, now, by decrepitude, he once
floundered, flustered, then mustered
the tongue raise the tresses of a hay-barn,
alone, in that raw sun of high August.
And we asked, when we came back
from lunch, why he hadn't just waited,
and Farley Fuckoff said, "Because
then it would have been after lunch
and still not done."
14.
Charlie Junkwad: no tin was without
his reach, no breach too small into
which to fit a mass of castoff pins.
And such a collection of nuts!
Rusted in buckets in the yard,
scattered across a basement's bench,
the stench of the death of industry
upon them. Thereby the grace
of all our ancient and cracking plastic.
EastWesterly Review 