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We have a number of things going on with Pavement Saw Press, thought we should start sharing a few of them. We have five new titles arriving from the printers in the next two months (by Maj Ragain, Garin Cycholl, Julie Otten, Steve Davenport, and a second printing of One Wish Left by Tony Gloeggler) & are starting with this e-mail to post material that is exclusive to the national list such as interviews, diatribes, consumer recalls of our more dangerous products, advertising new Pavement Saw loungewear and so on.
Here is an interview with Sheila E. Murphy featuring her
new Pavement Saw book _Incessant Seeds_
http://jacketmagazine.com/28/fink-murphy.html
On this website link below, many of our authors were interviewed, such as F.J. Bergmann, former winner of the Pavement Saw Chapbook Award, George Kalamaras, Sophia Starnes, Alan Catlin, Simon Perchik and others
http://herecomeseverybody.blogspot.com
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Below is an exclusive interview with Gordon Massman about his book "The Numbers" from some years back. We hope this will give you'all something to ponder or delete and in someway might solve the mystery of Mr. Massman who over the years has disappeared. Any info appreciated, here we go:
--------------
Gordon Massman: The Numbers
--Twenty years in the making & worth the wait--
96 pages, 2-color heavy waterproof cover
Super wide size for heavy poetry: Eight by Nine
Special to listmembers, $12 including postage
for US destinations, $13 for Canada, $15 for any & all others
Paperback: ISBN 1-886350-88-4
Also available:
Library Cloth Cover: ISBN 1-886350-89-2
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___________________
David Baratier: Why is a wide poem preferable to a thin prose piece? (note: many of Massman's poems are too wide to fit this format)
Gordon Massman: Wide, thin, middle-length mean nothing to me. I'll say it unambiguously: no interesting distinction exists between prose and poetry. Literature is not an intellectual game, an acrostic puzzle, a brain teaser, it is communication on a high order, like the rarified oxygen of mountain peaks. The best poetry of our epoch floods through Elias Canetti's Auto Da Fe; Jose Saramago's Blindness; George Konrad's, A Feast in the Garden, The Case Worker, The Loser; Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian; Jean Giono's Song of the World; Kobo Abe's Woman in the Dunes; Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry.
Indeed the skill and magnitude of great novelists is capable of tearing the stuffing out most poets, fragile and terrified as they are. Who can doubt that Victor Hugo produced page after page of excruciating literature, thousands of pages any fifty of which most writers would yank their eye teeth for. Was Shakespeare a poet or playwright? Was Borges a novelist or poet? Into what rigid category does Nabakov fall? Anne Sexton, Robinson Jeffers, Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Derek Walcott dive or dove into the bloody ocean fearlessly and without reserve and came up beautiful as writers, not at genres. It's as writers to which writers aspire-- not representatives of a classification, phyla, or genus. If I can touch the nerve bundle of another person with my letterss, syllables, phrases, and sentences, then I care not what sort of writer I am labeled by the academic theorists and historians. Frankly I am not impressed with "poetic devices" per se; a clever rhyme leaves me cold; a tec
hnical meter numbs me; a soldered form makes me laugh. Give me a idiot with courage and I'll show you greatness; give me a slayer of demons and I'll show you a god.
Give me the squeamish brainhead suffering over the architecture of a clinical cube and I'll show you a charlatan in velvet robes, a decaying lion.
Thin or thick depends on the caged soul, the imprisoned heart, and the glutted mind. I want to approximate physically on paper what my psyche looks like; my private utterances are enjambed, unstructured, tortured, visual, crowded, incessant, and desperate. Hence obsessive lines breaking under each other at the last syllable like individual strata that make up the solid wall of a cliff face. My mind is jammed, so is my writing. My heart is uncensored, so is my writing. My soul obeys no imposed and inhuman law, neither does my writing. Therefore, my "poems" resemble bricks. So does my body engorged with data.
The argument that poetry is special, rarified utterance dictated by time-sculpted rules, precious and inviolable is balderdash! The vilanelle, the sestina, the sonnet had their place among the precocious, especially among those who lived in times of suffocating repression, anality, and intolerance, But such devices employed contemporaneously remind me of empty crab shell or dead cars half buried in sand, pieces of useless architecture adopted by the squeamish and insecure to "distinguish" themselves from whom they think contemptible. They usually alienate themselves from the public, their art from a readership, and through their fixation on formality betray emptiness. Not always, but often.Successful writing, for me, is writing borne of courageous plunging into and through the facades of pride, civilities, and appearances even though such digging may drive to madness. For surely once man strips off the lies and lunacies which pass for civilization, he enters the mansions of i
nstability. It is in these mansions that I believe beauty exists, the kind of beauty which makes powerful writing. Everything else is pastel. The country is full of writers-pastel, some of the major figures of the day tenured at the nation's top citadels in whose presence worshipers internally bow in awe.
No. No. No. Sad the direction poetry has taken. Nobody reads it. Nobody
cares. Nobody is listening. It is a dead art. If this sounds pretentious and curmudgeonly I apologize. I certainly haven't the genius to turn back apocryphal tides. We'll have to await the grace of the next Whitman to walk among us, the next Baudelaire to blaze the way. The adage "Poetry is a big house with many rooms," reverberates my brain from some ancient personal experience, yet I cannot help but collapse inside from its sickening tolerance. The big house of poetry has managed to swallow itself like a starving gullet leaving the hungry readership little venison for its ocean of digestive juices. In the facelessness of the mass I too await, offering my feeble long lined contributions.
DB: Could you go into detail about the whole NUMBERS series, in size, scope and breadth? The amount of time it took you to compose the series, the length, and any other important details?
GM: I once heard a wise man say the best map of a territory would be one as large as the territory being mapped and which lays atop it edge-to-edge. "The Numbers" set in motion decades ago is now over eleven hundred fifty pieces wide, approximating that voluminous map mentioned above but upon my psyche, my life. It is one cloth of writing--novel, poem, autobiography, play, call it what you will--continuous and seamless, without stanza or pause, like a seam in a field one follows with one's eyes as it leads to fields, meadows, mountains, plains, cities, fornications in bedrooms, oceans, murders, and marriages. It is a project as immense as a man, infinitely larger than his physical boundaries. It is repetitive, boring, profound, lunatic, godly, lovable, scary, infuriating, exasperating, obsessive, and divine, as all human beings are. "The Numbers" attempts in its own pitiful and limited fashion to gouge and unearth the subterranean immortality of one man's world. It includes t
he panoply of fantasies in splendor--megalomania, self-loathing, inhumanity, grotesquerie, babel, rage, and gorgeousness. I regret that I wasted formative years on "Poetry" before giving way finally to the instinct to write. Please understand, I am weary, not terribly talented, and delusional. I imagine my project great--a monument or tower--but know otherwise through experience. It all grinds one down to the vapor of a dream, a greenish cloud drifting through the eyes. I cannot image that it's all worth it, the energy drain, the deflection, the financial sacrifice, the accusation. Still, I do it as a kind of race into whose middle I'm thrust I want to say involuntarily but know otherwise.
____________________
370
If I could stick my tongue through the fat portion
of my palm, completely through so that it waggles on
the other side, like a worm or a soft sword; there
I would find God: an ordinary tongue, an ordinary
hand, but an extraordinary moment--a tongue penetrating
the soft lips of a hand which water-close around it
when withdrawn. God would be there--I am certain--
where the flesh gave way to the wetness, where the
little opening parted for the rooting tip, magically.
This fertile garden in the palm of a hand is where
the true sanctuaries on earth reside; where priest,
deity, and prayer converge in one act of privacy. The
tongue is sweet, like an apricot; the hand salty,
like a sea; and the tissue and blood within the hand
are thick, sticky and pushing, like a wall. I think
of joists and hinges, bolts and headnuts, but here
there is no grinding, gouging, nor dust of saw. It
is almost sex. There are sacred places--grottoes--
where self collides with self sans robes and hymnals--
where the red mouth of a dog breathes in dusk, and
the jewel of a wildcat's eye flares. Try it in your
tattered clothes, in your destitution-cell, with ash
smeared on elbows, and love gone mad. If I could
stick my tongue through the fat of my hand--there's
a blue crab clamped to my heart, a blue crab is
clamped to my heart, something leapt on me at birth
which was blue and hard and it clamped to my heart,
my heart wears the lid of a blue crab shell, the
first three beings I laid eyes on were my mother, my
father, and a broad blue crab--if I could stick my
tongue through the fat of my hand, like a sun-
slash through sky, without anyone noticing, in the
solitude of my room, God would appear, like a sea
floor after the moon draws up the gown into its
globe. There's a knife and there's the robe and
there's the secret soon beneath the robe. The hand
splits and the palm becomes lips, eye, vagina, and
the entering tongue self-love flooding. We all
crumble a little inside. If I--if you--could pass
material through itself, your fists might unrage,
letting milk pour in. Raise your hand to your lips,
finesse your tongue, in your mind slide it through.
Copyright © 2000 Pavement Saw Press
_____________________________
DB: There is a wide variance in the ideologies of the magazines and LITERARY JOURNALS, in that exact capitalized sense, where your poems have appeared. Could you explain your submission process and thought process that underlies it?
GM: A few years ago stealthily I stole out in the heart of night with paper and tape, affixing anonymously copies of these numbered poems to Main St. telephone poles, plexiglass bus stop walls, kiosks, sides of buildings--a spiderman litterer. The next day they were mysteriously gone leaving only tape-ghosts. Point is I could be a literary whorre if not for minimal prejudices. I believe literature should be visible, hang the big shots sitting in their highrises dreaming of profits, awards, and promotions (I was once one of these). If a gatekeeper wants my work they may have it. I've published severally in Libido alongside photographs of stiff penises and spread vulvas. I've been in the Harvard Review. Frankly I do not distinguish between the two ice caps. Libido had the better work. A wily friend once bet me ten he could land a pebble on the top of a piling sticking up thirty feet away from shore. You're on I said. Whereupon he scooped up two handfuls of sand and grit and hur
led them outward. Several landed on the flattop.
DB: Do you find yourself with particular allegiances in the US writing community?
GM: I love the beats and the confessionalists of the sixties, but not independent of each other. The beats knew how to breathe but not to plunge, the confessionalists to plunge but not to breathe. If there existed a movement of breathing plungers then I'm a member. Some of my favorite 20th Century writers are Anne Sexton, Ted Hughes, Alan Dugan, Robinson Jeffers, Nicanora Parra. But I sleep with Whitman. I hackle in the presence of James Merrill, Richard Howard, J.D. McClatchy, Jorie Graham. I'm just not smart enough. Really, I get my inspiration from certain novelists with many of whom I feel an affinity.
_____________________________
610
for A. G.
I wish I could have been there for my funeral, shaken hands,
thank you'd, drunk it in for the event it was: literary, social,
historical, the funeral of a poet. Dying was almost thrilling,
like falling asleep the eve before waking to Christmas glitter. I
almost believed I would rise from death, and feared it not. Unlike
others, my coronary, I felt, would be pseudo-fatal, my shutting eyes
a co-conspiratorial wink at God. That I did not awake, I'm in
disbelief. Already I am stiff, embalmed, and decomposing; my
jaw bones--those plowshares--have relaxed. But, oh, if I could
have been there to see my body in repose, my carefully arranged
waxen hands, and with my friends joined the procession and
the wake, heard the eulogies, shaken my head, chimed "what a
shame," and then gone home and lain with my lover hard-cocked
and exuberant, my body flaming into ashes on the other side
of town while I fucked him to Rachmaninoff. I always loved
crullers in the morning, and would have eaten one the day after
dying. Instead I'm learning the taste of my bones--my skull, my
tibias and fibulas, my shank, my pelvic bowl, my ribs and leg
bones all contorted and shoved into my mouth in the form
of ash at the bottom of an urn. Do they embalm the cremated?--
I taste an acrid chemical. I wish I could have stood among the
mourners
and heard the panegyrics, the pulsing of my poems on the tongues
of grievers, felt the skins of drums throbbing with my lover's
hand in mine, warm, yeasty. I was loved like a god; I loved myself,
and wince at my self-abandonment, my onanistic bursting. Alive,
I jacked-off daily into the toilet or a towel to feel the power of
existence, the elasticity of living; an icing pulsed out that, were
it not for squeamishness, I would have eaten. Dismaying to be
a honey-hill on which ants teem, feed, and disperse, which is
a funeral. They will carry me to my favorite view and scatter me
to the wind. Already air erodes my consciousness, blowing
through me like radio static or gaps in the fuel; my gills feel like
they're melting and my opticals like their sprouting wings. Mother,
Mother, am I coming? Is this me upon the air? Is light shooting
through my mind? Am I an emulsion melting? I'm stuck on the
bony lobe of a cow, papery, wanting to blow, in the bowl of a butter-
cup, on surging waves, on dung, on a bumblebee soaring, on a thorn,
on glare, on a human lip, I'm over there holding the edge of myself,
flipping, all my greatness. They wept and hugged, it was in the
papers--essayists, novelists, reporters, old loves, consoled and let
go among furniture, incense, candle smoke, objects, all my books
propped against wreaths, open to sutras, odes, and villanelles,
and I was dead in my coronary, smaller than a child, wanting to
be held, a beautiful white gown surrounding me, like a bell,
fragrant, feet dangling, unbreathing, adored. Had I but this attended.
Copyright © 2000 Pavement Saw Press
___________________________
DB: We have had a number of talks regarding your struggles in finding a publisher could you detail some of these experiences with our audience?
What is your opinion of contests?
GM: There are too many of us. Too much talent. Too much competition. Too much loneliness. Too much alienation. Too many crammed into too little space. Too much money-worship. Too much capitalism hammering home the dream. Too many bodies squirming in the vat. I feel others slithering. I smell their breath. I hear their sound chambers pulsing to my nerves. I see their moles, their facial hair, their blemishes, their scars. We will die standing up. "Thank you for sending your work. It is not right for us. We regret that we cannot make personal comments but we receive forty thousand submission a year. If your SASE had insufficient postage to return it, we've recycled the paper. Good luck in finding a suitable publisher."
DB: Nam June Paik, a visual artist, has often suggested that we need to make boring art in order to combat how exciting our culture is in terms of media coverage and other extant stimulation. Why have you chosen to head in the opposite direction, into a exposing and explosive poetics?
GM: Many have taken Nam June Paik's advice. They have won major literary prizes and are heralded by establishment presses. They read their work in public arenas, teach at prestigious institutions of learning, and enjoy the warmth of national recognition. I think of Donald Hall, Louise Gluck, Nicholas Christopher, Edward Hirch, Mark Strand, Peter Davisdon, Mark Halpern, and W.S. Merwin, to name a few, the myriad of overeducated virtual indistinguishables who give new meaning to the term boring. It seems they are in love with the concept of being poets and apply their prodigious equipment to the task. This dubious enterprise born of astronomical IQs created for the liquid fire of language usually results in the production of high powered but irrelevant brain pretzels, power plays, and displays of emptiness. They infuriate and daunt, ultimately destroying the art but for elites with time on their hands. Reading them one dies for Sex and the City, Fraser, Allie McBeal, profession
al ice hockey, or reruns of Lucy. Perhaps this unforgiving attitude reflects my paucity of imagination, that writers with little to say or with Nikons cameras implanted in their brain are treasures and centerpieces of a serious art. Perhaps literature really is a forum for vacuous virtuosity, the stuff of balanced and privileged individuals in the service of balanced and privileged individuals living in a balanced and privilege world. Literature as entertainment, pastime, and curiosity.
Regarding how exciting our culture is in terms of media coverage, I must confess cable does not flow to my home. I am severed from the visual media after 51 years of addiction. I finally "shot my TV." I recently moved to the side of a mountain outside a Coloradan town with a full time population of 1500. I live with a red fox, innumerable mice, a thousand flies, free ranging cattle, and a lifelong partner. My world is not enlivened by the media, nor was it ever, though I must admit a morbid fascination with brighter-louder-and-more-vivid-than life television images. I'm compelled to contradict Nam June Paik by asserting that if nothing else art must strive to counterbalance the empty calories injected by the media into the platelets of people. In some I suppose very perverse and curmudgeonly way I see some of our most celebrated poets as embodiments of this injection of malnutrition.
DB: As one might guess, I have recieved a number of surface comments on The Numbers, including books mailed back with nasty notes stating how I should be set aflame as a publisher for setting its tide upon an unsuspecting readership, specifically for including the book as the freebie for the Pavement Saw Press Transcontinental Contest. What is your reaction? Are you surprised?
GM: My initial response to hearing of isolated tantrums over my writings was stolid indifference. "How lovely," I mused, "to nibble at the bottom-flesh of people's sensibilities, to cause discomfort in sanity domes. Would Georges Bataille or Beaudelaire or The Marquis De Sade, giants that they were, be derailed by public sentiment. Can you imagine Baudelaire, for instance, turning his heart to pastoralism because Dame LaRothchild in her poodle encrusted cabriolet took offense at his written execrables? The heart is an irresistible engine committed to its mission regardless who or what fragile protoplasm attempts to intervene. "So." I thought, "how exhilarating to receive the tang of a few rotten tomatoes splashed against my gaping wall. I can eat you and he and she detractors like flavored air. Who are you anyway--hot house flowers bred on the arbitrary confections of decency, nose held high against the putrid inclinations of your own ssoul?" Contempt is what I show for psycho
logical weaklings too precious to wade in their own filth which, by God, soaks them to the tits." I laughed at such effrontery. Here is a house splattered with insipid paintings: horse in sundrenched apple field with barn; waves lapping golden shore; glade with wildflowers, cabin, and family of deer; a Sampler: "God Bless Our Home." Here is a house with clock and pristine refrigerator. Here the gallery of family photographs. Here the prized easy chair. All buoyed at the floor by the hand of God. The house floats and glows. There are those I do not wish to touch. There are those who are better off ignoring the scurry beneath the floor, the shiny teeth, the scratching claws. There are those who should endure by themselves their ultimate and inevitable implosion.
My considered response has not budged an iota but includes the wisdom of time's refinements. That is, when I was thirty-five God visited heaven upon me in the guise of hell, or I should say, I visited these geographies upon myself. I saw in it no heaven, though heaven lay in the deeper regions, but only hell in the form of a psychotic break precipitated by the instantaneous tidal realization that my parents are human monsters and that, as such, I had unwittingly drawn about me the living tapestry of destruction which resembled normal life: wife, child, home, career, education, taste, gentility. As defenses crumbled I discovered within a seemingly bottomless ocean of rage, megalomania, fantasy-violence, defensiveness, animosity. Sleepless for months, I beat bruises onto myself at night. I clawed bloodrows onto my bald head. I dragged my mattress hither and yon, finally into the dank concrete basement where I took up permanent residence moaning through floorboards to my terrifi
ed wife. I squeezed out blood instead of excrement vainly trying to cleanse myself. I married the affective-disorder OCD. I underwent psychoanalysis, strictly Freudian. I romanced the clawed monster in my breast, produced it by a handful of mane. I saw its face. I was divorced. My wife moved away. Our son is now a brilliant crack addict in Athens, Georgia.
_________________________
827
I strip the raised vein out my forearm by lifting it
whole with the blade of a knife and with it make a
ball of yarn I call my son. Like spaghetti spun on
a fork, thick and high and standing on its own wide
base, I give him eyes, a name. Allan I say, Allan.
The ball glistens red like tomato sauce. Say "Daddy,"
I command and feed him apricots. Say "Master."
The wrapped vein self-perpetuates and renews
by squirting and sucking in a ceaseless repetition of
sleep and food. Say, "I am your nemesis or life dup-
licate. I am your acolyte fashioned to echo your
productivity. I will assume the presidency." I
do not miss the vein that became my son though
it left a tunnel in my flesh for he is me watery and
splashing my stupendous trail. God love him.
God give him meat. Give him feet to incinerate.
I spin my child like a plate of vermicelli and he
quivers, smiles, accumulates--but then he hates,
the procedure awry, me, the plate, the fork, the
sea contained within the vein like a stiff steel pipe
of hell, he digs, he spits, he smolders, he flies, and
eyes two slit exposures of spite attempts to die.
Copyright © 2000 Pavement Saw Press
_____________________
GM: The point is this: I am sorry my poems offend. I am sorry to be a depression in surfaces. I don't know much about Baudelaire, The Marquis De Sade, or Bataille, but I do know it is lousy to suffer in the psyche and to endure the almost continuous monologue of rage. It drowns out the music of love, beauty, and exuberance which also persist in the complexity of the tortured. I do not enjoy the dark hallways which result in self absorption, anger, obsession, insatiability. I sicken of my preoccupations, even with writing. I feel ground down by the blades of the living Quisinar which I am. It hurts me sometimes to be me in the functioning world. I often grow tired of myself. I am told my eyes sparkle. I am told I am enjoyable company. I am told I am warm, kind. I am told I am compassionate, empathic. I am told my countenance contradicts my personal mythology. I have friends and acquaintances. My daughter appears to like me. Writing demands above all honesty, and in the service
of that exalted ambition my verses take on the color of happiness consumed in acid. I must write my life at the bottom of the core, no matter how distressing to me or others. It is distressing, but the stringency of the art requires it. I feel badly and severely limited that my writing cannot be more expansive and forgiving, more playful and outgoing, but that is who I am at the moment. It is gravely disappointing that some have returned my book with nasty notes for it means that I have been seen and returned. I'm disappointed but understand. Sometimes I'm tempted to write a nasty note upon my forehead and mail myself to back oblivion--but for an overriding streak of self love.
*****
I wonder if I could assert that the only credible and scintillating redemption is the one underpinned by suffering. Suffering is the mortar that supports the towering structure of beauty, or more accurately, if suffering and beauty do not continuously grind the soul of the writer, then the writer must fail. This may appear to be pure solipsism, self serving in the extreme, but I find it impossible to endure the utterings of writers who offer no evidence of having waged visceral, life-threatening battles within. Their words, no matter how wowing, resemble deserts.
Another thought: Three decades ago when I believed Poetry was defined by the English Romantics and their turn-of-century American counterparts-- when I was a freshman undergraduate, that is-- I refused to walk across a grassy median at my university to acknowledge thee existence of Gary Snyder who happened to be visiting campus that day. I believed his poetry undisciplined, easy, slack, sacrilegious. Years later I played the fool, standing in awe of his sensibility, vision, power, and immensity.
Might it be that those who vilify my work today might be ardent admirers tomorrow?
DB: In Denver, Colorado you will give a reading at the Tattered Cover bookstore. What is like reading these poems in front of a live audience?
GM: I haven't yet read at the Tattered Cover but I have read to local audiences to the experience of concealing my shame and reading with confidence. I ask my friends not to attend, and refrain from reading the most offensive.
DB: Comparisons have also been made to the french notions of the grotesque brought out in Baudelaire, Lautremont, Poe (through translation), Rimbaud and others. What is your notion of the grotesque? Of its abilities? Does a grotesquery still have the impact of say a Rabelais or these others mentioned?
GM: I am honored to be mentioned in the same breath as Baudelaire, Poe, and Rimbaud. The last fifteen years of numbered poems, collectively titled, "The Numbers" when I finish revising them next year will be a 600-700 page manuscript which I would love to stand beside Evil Flowers or Illuminations. As a writer I would consider my project and my career complete. Regarding notions of the grotesque, I do not think a grotesquerie manufactured by sanity can fly. An ingenuine grotesquerie is a TB vaccine which will not take and leaves no trace upon the ankle or arm. A serious inoculation of grotesquerie comes at the needlepoint of true madness marshaled by the discipline of relentless vision.
________________________
635
She hacks the base of his arm, hacks and hacks with her
gleaming cleaver, pieces of flesh fly, like wood-chips, blood
pudding forms, but the arm, all muscle and will, proves
stubborn and thick, nothing like what she thought it would
be, a simple cut-through with a heavy blade to be done with
it. She was never a butcher, just a cold repressor. This
chopping off of limbs is much harder than stuffing
unpleasant feelings, they being non-corporeal. She raises
high her red-streaked blade and slams it down upon his
meat; muscle writhes, worm-like, contracts and gives, still
alive; no bone yet, that calcium shaft, just shoulder meat,
bull thick, endless, wearing her out as she hacks and hacks,
the hatchet extending her crooked arm overhead and flinging
cadmiums: clumps and strings on its downward path. Sweat
drips from her pits, her blouse is wet, stains spread, but
she is intent, even while wrist-cramping and panting
and uttering hellish vituperations, "fucker," "shit," "mine,"
"usurper," "violator," "penetrator," "male," curses hauled
from some unexamined pain-pool, and she being so pretty;
lily and sweet. The boy oblivious in his crib sings
tunes, mobile overhead, an ABC Play Station affixed;
the boy giggles, as, in another room, she strives to dis-
member the father's reach from him, her treasure-trove,
her bud-lipped. Persistence widens the inexpert, inevitable
V--remember diagrams in the girl scout book?--forming
in his shoulder; it groaned, a slit-throat sound, grave-like.
Not understanding, not drugged either, a complicitor, he
doesn't resist, the pain dull as she strikes bone, as if
vibrating a tooth's root to his shins, and not a handful of
shoulder. It takes two fools to ruin beauty. Amazed his
bone is rainbow color, amazing its opalescence, and
amazing to watch good-naturedly her grizzly chopping,
indeed, somnambulistically, to assist. Why not stop her?
Why not grab the boy and bolt? Why not seize her jugular,
this little lethal shrew, his wife? He ceased loving her,
anyway, the instant she delivered, yes. Now one blow
snaps the last underside bone-sliver, his arm hangs invertedly
and she saws with some new serrated instrument the triceps
through, and comes orgiastically--mutters, "daddy," "yours,"
"nobody," "mum," as from the shoulder his arm plops
against the floor, like a naked branch, comes, indeed,
in fact, vagina lolling and rippling ecstasy through
blood and brain, as, from her life and son, this betrothed
one, subterfuging killer, finally acknowledging her dominance
and his mutilated, dead limb on the floor, runs.
Copyright © 2000 Pavement Saw Press
__________________
"Gordon Massman's poetry graphically speaks of love and passion, alienation and connection, the father-son relationship, the demons that haunt the human soul, and the spirit which at all costs overcomes the power of emotional honesty--with all the gifts of an award-winning author. Simply stated, The Numbers is one of the finest collections of poems I have ccome across in many years." -- Charles Rowell, editor of
Calalloo
Includes poems which first appeared in: Another Chicago Magazine, Antioch Review, Artful Dodge, Atom Mind, Black Dirt, Confrontation, Connecticut Poetry Review, Contemporary Voice 2 (Canada), Cortland Review, The Fiddlehead (Canada), 5 AM, Flyway, The Georgia Review, Green Mountains Review, Greensboro Review, The Harvard Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Iron (UK), Karamu, Many Mountains Moving, Membrane, Men's Council Journal, The New York Quarterly, Left Curve, Libido, Lingo, The Literary Review, Old Crow Review, Paperplates (Canada), Pavement Saw, Penny Dreadful, Pleiades, Prairie Journal (Canada), Prism International (Canada), Quarter After Eight, Rattle, Response, Third Coast, Willow Springs, The Windless Orchard, Windsor Review (Canada), and Yellow Silk.
Be well
David Baratier, Editor
Pavement Saw Press
PO Box 6291
Columbus OH 43206
USA
http://pavementsaw.org
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