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Bio: Michael Basinski
Michael Basinski is the Curator of The Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. Among his many books of poetry are Of Venus 93, All My Eggs Are Broken, Heka, Strange Things Begin to Happen When a Meteor Crashes in the Arizona Desert, The Idyllic Book, and more.
Men
We’re buying pornography in Iowa on Sunday,
paying good money to watch something live
in the eyes and the face of the woman bent toward us,
slow-motion in strobe light, mouthing dollars
from our mouths and foreheads and fist.
Not one of us asks what her real name is.
We’re getting ill in the men’s room, washing
on hand towels to go and watch more. We’re watching
her mimic what she won’t do with us, seeing
what exactly the law lets her show: positions
on the pole shining like sudden rainfall
for her to rise on and hang from, high heels and all.
We’ve all driven distances.
We’re all drinking substances.
We’re all us men clothed.
It’s winter in America, sheet ice over Iowa.
She wears tape on her nipples, tattoo on one hip:
woman’s name. Some of us think it’s her own.
The Way of the Wicked He Turneth
Hand-standing Anstett grandstands
upside down at length about the finer
view this vantage and the massive
upper body strength and lung capacity
it takes, eye-level with the gathering
audience’s knees, his expanding,
contracting mouth expounding
ad lib ad hoc nonstop, out of context
above nostrils, beseeching
all of you to listen, flipped,
legs in the air like insect’s feelers, bodies
inversely vertical on throbbing palms.
Bio: Aaron Anstett
Aaron Anstett’s collections, in order of minuscule to tiny sales, are Sustenance, No Accident, and Each Place the Body’s. He lives in Colorado with his wife and children. Despite himself, he was recently selected to be the first Pikes Peak Poet Laureate.
Copyright the author(s) ©2007–2010