Mark Wallace
from the unpublished poem series The End of America, Book 8
Showstopper
Insurance companies bloated with cash
nothing moving
“accusing you of the thing I’ve done”
just want my seat in the corner
close to the flood
and fire statistics
We have ways of making you like it
fast serve, cold serve
anti-depressant TV
Time to turn up a transcendent
view: military
cargo ship bright in the harbor
or men playing powerball
with undergraduate voting rights
so much undetected
sadness recorded
on the funding unit clipboard
feel the draft
through the closing door?
America, I don’t know
anything of those you leave
picturing themselves to you
in the waning bankroll night
I’ll wander down
to the ocean and sit
on the wall beside
the concrete
causeway, dreaming
of my own arm in some
other arm, the last
and best noble lie
gritting my teeth
Seeking a little
restrained horror
with a noirish Southern California
real estate scam
context
suitable for reframing a private
crumbling vision
Community Resource Center
in a drop down
last chance menu
before the highway goes double
wide right through the breastbone
in-bred sonic isolation
that roars good when it catches
your dreams with their pants
down around your neighbor’s ankles
How badly do you want
to live
to feel your skin pressed against
the vanishing surfaces
big fog
pushing in over the empty
rebuilt beach front
mansions and three-room condos
could be metaphor
the aging body
without ever saying
how each is caught
up in the other
“alone” another form of connection
that regulation attempts
to label in an ownership
maneuver,
“my” breath, “your” eyes,
tidy quiet suburban afternoon
inside a swath cut
by carefully organized
death;
Take a little cancer sample
your tongue’s underside
officially permitted
replacement for a learning moment
about anything going on
down at the speedway, bets are placed
Exxon in five, no mojo for Kabul
Up on the hill, grasses blow
until they’re kindling-dry
and some thirsty boy
dizzy
lights them like he thinks he’s the universe
Mark Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism. Most recently he has published a novel, The Quarry and The Lot (2011), and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion (2008). He teaches at California State University San Marcos.
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