(I'm unprepared.) Thank you, Michele. The bird is now reciting passages from a self-help book he picked up on the way down from New England. Something about anger management. What exactly did you do to him? With the two poems below, I send the Poetry Parrot even deeper into the North American wilderness to JJ Fantastic Heldman, whose new Midwestern surroundings require some sort of Sinister christening. It might as well be the bird. JJ, you listening? The first poem is by Marilyn Hacker. The second is by Sharon Olds. - - - - - - - Five-thirty, little one, already light outside. From Spanish Harlem, sun spills through the seamless windows of my Gauloise blue bedroom, where you're sleeping, with what freight of dreams. Blue boat, blue boat, I'll navigate and pilot, this dawn-watch. There's someone who is dying, darling, and that's always true though skin on skin we would obliterate the fact, and mouth on mouth alive have come to something like the equilibrium of a light skiff on not-quite-tidal waves. And aren't we, when we are on dry land (with shaky sea legs) walking hand in hand (often enough) reading the lines on graves? - - - - - - - It Sometimes we fit together like the creamy speckled three-section body of the banana, that joke fruit, as sex was a joke when we were kids, and sometimes it is like a jagged blue comb of glass across my skin, and sometimes you have me bent over as thick paper can be folded, on the rug in the center of the room far from the soft bed, my knuckles pressed against the grit in the grain of the rug's braiding where they laid the rags tight and sewed them together, my ass in the air like a lily with a wound on it and I feel you going down into me as if my own tongue is your cock sticking out of my mouth like a stamen, the making and breaking of the world at the same moment, and sometimes it is sweet as the children we had thought were dead being brought to the shore in the narrow boats, boatload after boatload. Always I am stunned to remember it, as if I have been to Saturn or the bottom of a trench in the sea floor, I sit on my bed the next day with my mouth open and think of it. - - - - - - - Damon . +----------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the reborn Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail "sinister@majordomo.net". To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to "majordomo@majordomo.net". WWW: http://www.majordomo.net/sinister +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "tech-heads and students" +-+ +-+ "the cardie wearing biscuit nibbling belle & sebastian list" +-+ +-+ "jelly-filled danishes" +-+ +----------------------------------------------------------------------+