Gillian Conoley
Three poems from The Plot Genie
Melodrama
Try to imagine a long steady hand steering the ocean liners
I am hit on, with good letterhead
by someone’s parents
coming to see the baby for the first time
and the walls chat,
Miss Jane Sloan seen walking before long umbilical mirrors in
corridors of hotels
The prairies go for miles out here
Floors have inkjets
Miss Jane Sloan
is a very well-dressed man and the cold air is whipping her legs
She has no corset for the page
the pages seething
Romance
disparate red stars satellites over a line of taxis
(extend your hand, extend your hand, bring me elms full
of locusts dormant ((someone has to take over))
like the two drinking their alcohol in the apartment
two sleeping it off
later one rolling over calm as a ballast—slow glissando of a
muscle group caught under
sheets porch swing in wind in didn’t we need
the rain–– the swing in–– rain
forcing the earth to smell the earth, the dung of the two
sleeping in
in what anyone will do next, springing tiger
To blaze a way for civilization
Spoon scraping the bowl clangs a little too violently
Tail of a mule
Who knows? Who knows?
A dolphin sits. Sea child craves
how the colors feel.
Pull down your jeans
dark rush the corner opens
when one takes the turn
and there
the coin in my hand
turned out to be
worn in the bosom, a grand duke
at lawn tennis, full
of tact and bashfulness,
the corner opens
and there we nest and turn in Lazy Susans
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