Juliet, torn and pasted paper collage by Joseph F. Keppler
excerpt from Suicide by Language
a flash-fiction novel by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino
The thing about the Mermaid Parade is everybody looks so bad
and yet if you ask them they’ll tell you they feel fabulous.
In 1987 she wrote, all the pilots drive Lincolns and have
pink skin. The stewardesses fuck like
bunnies. After Cixous, the envelope is
sealed with a kiss, is this poetic justice? Write for rules and detailed information.
She wrote, Last night
we made love like two retards. And
then the doodle of the Wonder Wheel.
Poetics. Lather. Rinse.
Repeat.
The monster rises from the pit. The lovers turn. She screams.
He fires. Roll credits.
We practiced pulling up and jumping out and hurrying into
the buildings.
The poet’s mechanicity.
Fabulosity.
Sex and Poetry.
This episode: “Sex and the Collage Poem.”
Or you could say poetry is like sex, in which case you want
to ask yourself: If this poem is sex, do I want to have sex with it? Well, if it’s a collage poem you don’t know
where that poetry’s been, and the poet who wrote it really doesn’t want you to
know; or maybe that poet will tell you, but then that’s like that poem saying, Yes,
I want you to have sex with me, but just not with me exactly, I mean with these
other poems.
Forks and Knives
An anthology of poetry by women who have had episiotomies.
Introduction.
Part One: The Midline.
Part Two: The Mediolateral.
Part Three: Forks and Knives.
There’s a whole belt of avant-gardist territory where to
criticize them is like telling the Fat Lady at the freak show to lose weight.
This movie was shot on cell-phone video. It’s the footage of the head of Jacques
Derrida on the body of the Bigfoot.
The poet’s mechanicity. The poet as ironist. Where he fails is in that his irony fails to
rise above the rank of sarcasm.
In a previous life I was a chorus girl and I died very young
and with a broken heart.
This is the part of the asylum where they let you go ’round
naked. Robert Lowell is here. And so is Anne Sexton.
Manners. Recoverable
at will.
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino’s most recent volume of poetry
is The Valise (Dead Academics Press,
2012). He is founding editor of the online
poetry journal, Eratio. For more from
the novel, Suicide by Language, visit suicidebylanguage.blogspot.com.
