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Two Poems |
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by Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert
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2:25 |
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Abercrombie Addresses Fitch
Caught in the cross-hairs, we are at cross-purposes.
I've heard that love is a dangerous game. Well,
I'm wearing my Kevlar vest & know the best defense
against Cupid & other Valentines-y symbols is
faux-Army surplus, old chap. This crap is golden
like oldies, like golden rectangles, when it comes
tangled in ratios & marketing plans. Put your hand
in the hand of someone whose spending power
is in service to the dowager empress. What am I
talking about? I'm talking about tweens, & evil
beings known as guerilla marketers. Take this sock
& make it into a puppet of the Faerie Queen,
then recite Spenser. What do you mean, you don't
like games? That's like saying you don't like
T-shirts with offensive sayings. Fitch, don't bitch
when I wear the "B IS FOR BEEYOTCH" number.
Your own mom wears "Blondes are adored, brunettes
are"—wait, your mom? Who cares?? Her affairs
scare me. She's an unholy combo of martyr/satyr
so she's one-quarter horse. Of course I'm no
expert in husbandry, but teens today are animals;
they wear flannel pants w/ graphics right on
the crotch. Our new Watch Yer Crotch line
can actually help you learn to tell time. Digital
or standard. Each pair comes w/ a lanyard
because society needs its whistle-blowers.
In this world, Fitch, there are doers & knowers;
also those who know & those who know they know.
You, w/ your antique service revolver & your
other fine excursion goods—I could catalogue
how little dialogue these have w/ our demographic
target these days. Close one eye & aim that thing
higher. A little to the left. When you fire,
fire hard & loud. That's what it takes to get thru
the rockhard washboard abs of the indolent crowd.
A Message from the National Institute of Standards & Technology
Tick tock, waiting sucks cock, please do something to me w/ this hand blender. To locate a specific Fannie Mae lender click here. A demon sent to punish humans for their moral shortcomings would really kick things up a notch. If you could disappear anyone, who would you pick? If you could pick anyone's nose & turn it into a hood ornament, that would be weird. If I invented a leer-deflector, would you wear it in the pitch-dark, b/c it doesn't work that way. Let's assume minutes are horses; the horses have slowed to a weak trot. Learning to drive as we drive is more efficient—we haven't got much time! Shut up & fish: words to live by. Fish around in your purse—I want to make a wish w/ my coin-operated mind.
Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert Elisa Gabbert holds degrees from Rice University and Emerson College . She is a reader for Ploughshares and an editor of Absent. Recent work appears or will appear in journals including Pleiades, LIT, No Tell Motel, Kulture Vulture, RealPoetik, H_NGM_N, and Redivider, as well as the forthcoming anthologies The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel – Second Floor and Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. A chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine was recently published by Kitchen Press.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press and the author of Reading With Oprah (University of Arkansas Press, 2005) and Live Nude Girl (Arkansas, 2009). She has poems forthcoming in Court Green, Suptropics, The Pinch, and The Cincinnati Review and essays forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Southern Humanities Review and Another Chicago Magazine.
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