Jacket 33 - July 2007 - Marc Nasdor: Five poems

This piece is about 4 printed pages long.
It is copyright © Marc Nasdor and Jacket magazine 2007.

Sonnetailia; 1/12

calling business, greeting credit, these methods worked
well but that was before the lab techs blew their own
nuts off, brune or Bruin figure as we knew it, appearance
upon its approach, rifled through our bags, jumped sixty
stories north and landed on the roof, not so unamazing
if you ever met the guy/gal/beast/circuit, just how many
geniuses can one city put up with, not enough towers
and an air traffic controller for every seven bottles
of bitch-slap, at night in the bluish privacy of their powder
rooms, saturnine wood nymphs and goat boys prayed to
should they deign to reanimate and spring from the wall-
paper, and then to consider the following query, insect
of insects though it be, is there anything I could execute
to make your life simpler, “double nay and triple nyet,”
last year I got torn to shreds,
                                                    this year I’m absorbent
as tissue, next year I dissolve to base elements

Sonnetailia; 1/13

gastrointestinal peripherals in a spring-loaded self-
collapsing chassis, looking around as in front to back,
in the second instance to a watery grave but not
this way, listening meaning brain-pharynx-mouth-space-
canal-drum-hammer-anvil-stirrup-fluid-brain, balked
before Judgment call, regarding house, regarding
lawn, beholders of tic fits gyrating off the hoods
of their jeeps, and the medium at the Table of Good
Looks playing lawyer for the rest of the hearing, these
and others I invited into my bed in the worst manner
possible, glassy-eyed freshman undertakers petrified
before blank slabs first day on the job, no sirens
or theme music for presentation of work, nor simple
gesture of graceful scalpel against dead meat, blended
with a huge fuss
                             of questions to the partner,
having been driven away;

Sonnetailia; 1/14

red pig white pig fatty blue pig, three engaged
in somersault activity bearing Statue of Liberty
complexions to boot, what is being explained across
the diameter of this proofprint, tight-assed and
cracked of tooth, seemingly malfeasable at ground
level and tied to the trellis, at once concentric
and askew, bludgeoned by their hatpins, drenched
sticky in his own verisimilitude, painted sloppily about
the inside of his shower stall which looks something
like the inside of his head, is that who it was sitting
next to him with the vise-grip, the shell of his
erstwhile muscular foot, the spot where he turns on
his monitor and pulls in a tidal wave, intersection
of the cosines between home number and work
number at least
                           a quarter length up the alley
and smack into security gate;

Sonnetailia; 1/15

reflexes ticktock off sundials manufactured in medias res
apocalypse-scare, consecutive summer blisterprints, no
twelve-tone perseverance junkies climbing all over
the hedge, where have all the nippers gone, once again so,
embezzled and extorted and giving it all back in order
that it will have been forgotten by the conclusion of this
episode, or the last six pairs of headache and bodyache
prepared and delivered at the tongue-lashing, yet out
in the neighborhoods the labor of shock troops affixed
to accumulate, nonplussed or entangled in great promise
of peace, ours meaning everybody’s, heavy ankles of a
predatory public squashed into corpse-plugged fields,
and later on a last layer of dust protected from the wind,
smeared across bony insteps of the twang-throated
skeletons, nervous not in the least
                                                               and accelerated
through the sleeves of their overcoats;

Sonnetailia; 1/16

bass-reflex, four million years of human prehistory
to produce this, never in my life have I had to put up
with my own ilk until the moment before, signs and sounds
factory-sealed in envelopes and dispatched to the tropics,
where is such a place as where beauty has prolonged
itself for the maiden voyage previously missed, qualified
maybe as would yield the Supreme Being each first
of the month, not the man’s punching fist in the garbage
instead of lifting the lid, but children and spouses landing
on the shore in great elliptical sailboards of strung-
together bones and piranha-chewed husbands to begin life
as smooth-skinned crocodiles, now and forever on the beach
and up the mountain, pounding away at a rock, ramming
a trapdoor back to civilization, everything here including
computers and tractor-trailers
                                                      and poisonous bunny rabbits
hopping on the Electric Chair

Marc Nasdor is a poet, musician and world music DJ. He has been writing since the late 1970s, and has performed in France, Germany, Denmark and Hungary. A number of his poems have been published in translation in Hungarian, German and Spanish. His first manuscript, Treni in Partenza, was published in 1988 (Temblor 7). Sonnetalia is its sequel. He has also directed international arts organizations including the Committee for International Poetry, in the 1980s and 1990s, a group focusing on multilingual literary activity in New York, and is currently a director of Alma On Dobbin, a Central European and American arts exchange. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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