Sara Mumolo

TELEGRAM FROM SIAM River, take me once air raids dismember from time & leave me arsoned to epic.   How restraint paroles a fence, continues another: Ammunition, a kind of experience bipolar for a body to resign into. Earthquakes miscarry power as do verbs with you in them. Fog that fences to our design—looker.   praise the lord and pass the experience.   Matter ambushed between knees, we sift hair, knuckles over skulls, a post we contact to reveal utility— — I am only a conduit for rules.          Maybe enjoyment, our new utility.   Water I fall here for: weren’t we building something here, preoccupied with skills…   First person to send a telegram                       —I’ll marry.           NOT A MASK OF IMMODESTY In the company of finches I mail monuments to your       expired home.   What I cup when we become victim to our elevation:   awkwardness of our violence, its bunk rescue from truancy.        — I wore a socialist        & you dub-step— Eternally at attention, cowards.   The neighbor’s dog still howls itself to sleep.   Let’s get out in the street share some hypocrisy with one another. Each time I aim to scrawl your image birds—not monuments—rear. To miss sounds of pencils scratching. Tremble into a school. Each error learns it out. And of rooms— at the address I just sing so voice has something to listen to.           IN REGARDS                                     for Nik DeDominic Trying to avoid a billions- of-people type perspective. Open mouth. When an index finger slides along a throat. O. Little blanks. Bent-orchard type perspective I can’t afford the chardonnay California makes. It is popular for me as a man to introduce himself as a woman in this feeling. When my fingers make an L figure: a gun on a temple. Flies issue brief beats, stomachs taut & iridescent. On the porch people compare homeless stories about public shits. You decide how to palm our change. Listen Chekhov was a woman. Wings pause —flies with their invisible conductors— then they all tantrum up again, at once. Bouquets of buildings, so what if the city wilts around us. Conversations in and out black-eyed waves. By now one of us is angry. This will want to break the blank will fail to deposit any widening rings. Nature-has-come-to-her-senses type. Last glass of champagne before your lie. An empire’s ebbing hours, to ensure we are outside the predicate-act inform our porch of its impertinence. Birds curse each other. Impotence put us in the fear perspective where I take our blank attitude & finger-draw a heart no an apple over your forehead. A reasonable people in this situation. Obligatory baiting. In regards to your wish to trap a world we are not here, not dead.       - - - - - -

Sara Mumolo works at Studio One Arts Center and co-curates the Studio One Reading Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Article Journal, 1913: a journal of forms, Shampoo, Action Yes and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others.