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ALEXANDRIA by Theodore Worozbyt

July 1, 2011 Contributed By: Theodore Worozbyt

Your request for a renewal has been denied. All analecta must be returned to the Gorgon. Please walk on either lip of the systolic topos. So the signs read, as I took floor numbers from the occupants and pressed square lights the artificial color of forgetting. A caretaker or building engineer wheezed in a mushroom buff jumpsuit. He said: “Insecticide.” I tried to commiserate, though I don’t use it. The others, a couple, seemed to giggle. I smelled hydraulic fluid but the bitter almond smell came through. I wanted to smoke again. They seemed to be giggling. I fleetingly suffered an edge in my left lat. Now my cage is blue. My lips crackled and bled in one lower corner but I abjure, as you claim you do, public gestures, and stood with my lost vellums quietly. Sometimes it takes many tries before the book decides to open. And then the pages aren’t cut and one must return materials in identical condition or face the loss of privileges. It’s dark green in the basement. There is, at the lesson’s end, no tour. Take as exhibit catalogue a rope of onions in your aftereyes. Dr. Egypt, the search you undertake is unforgivable.

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 4 Summer 2011

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2011

Further Reading

IDBABY by Jessica Neiweem

Lewd In The Graveyard. An Audience Of Fantastics. Mandy’s a writer. Or Hart is. Doesn’t matter. Someone’s scribbling in a hardcover notebook with a Sharpie, and it fucking stinks. Short things. Half-thoughts. Hart and Mandy aren’t big on follow-through. They are big on slurpees from the Kum-N-Go, or the 7-11, whatever the crapass convenience store […]

How Do You Celebrate Passover at a Time Like This
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    years of immersion have taught me: there is nothing more  jewish than to commemorate great suffering in a new era    of great suffering / eating globs of horseradish as ritual  so there’s a new and exciting reason / to break down in tears   why is this night different from all other […]

Weeds
by Barbara Schwartz

I think I am my savior’s thoughts, the stubborn beautiful ones / who refuse to go. It’s a temple in here / though I do not know // the prayers.

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