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This piece is about 2 printed pages long. It is copyright © Roger Van Voorhees and Jacket magazine 2008.
The Internet address of this page is http://jacketmagazine.com/35/van-voorhees-red-rolodex.shtml
The Red Rolodex
These are some of the locations
we went to
before we turned on our heels
and headed back
to the primal establishment.
Lake Victoria, The Water Gong, Red Grains,
Gun in Havana, Milk of Origin,
A Baseball Just as We Found It.
We retain them to mark off
points of intersection
between one and one.
We’ve got a rotation going.
The connection between past and future
is an abused doll face scratched off.
This being America
the cards are just a way to liberate the characters
from the foreground. It’s all onscreen.
The cards are sand-
colored, spill out of the deck.
No particulars are brought to our attention.
It’s raining, draping the township
strings of it. Wipers swish
as we drive along you turn to me
and say, “I start with you
each time, whom I find
quite foreign, and continue
into the grooves of the world.”
I am fairly unhinged again.
We come to the next town,
with its tattered buttock-like buildings.
Hems of time. We’re tattered too
which makes us laugh.
Then the sun slaughters the storm-clouds.
We park in some slippery pink place.
I shuffle along beside you
to the drugstore, the theater, the park.
“We oughta kiss sometime,” you say
but I’m not such a straight shooter.
Anyway, if we’re both figments
of each other’s imaginations
we can be glad of that.
Roger Van Voorhees
Roger Van Voorhees is a poet in New York who lives with a young cat named Lillith. Lillith has taught him that the world is a fiction. You can e-mail Roger at oisiclette[ât]yahoo.com