City
anger flubs wire-ribboned brain’s race-cart
before barrels of love raining like silent (class-bound) letters
comes the foretold day of tactless superstar beliefs
dying like decrepit Abraham in holocene-tarp, mood swingers
engaged in happenstance statistical talk
fire and the tall spires of mania rue Monday morning
grief among well-endowed partners at ex parte balance of money
hidden in open pits of marshmallow bones
infertile rental babies
jasmine justifications peddled in pain on paper pavements
killed, I in juvenile skirt, by carbolic cops
lovely meter-maid
my post-operative blues, brutal bandaged wrists
nice enough for your slick carotid veins?
opposite the sinewy glass cathedral a ticker bomb
pale as the noon hour, pacified bullet,
questions dead sixtieth-floor chiefs
rattling like rats on the hammock of desire
singing corporate anthems
talking sushi-raw Whitman
under burping sky
values voters married to theftless expensive purses
woo their mothers, grinding the points of sex-killing six-inch heels
explaining, as though through quantum fatigue, old money itself
yes, in the mood of tar and failure of Pynchon’s V.
zero for talk, zero for the talkative cancerous breast
Anis Shivani’s debut book of poetry is My Tranquil War and Other Poems (May 2012). His other books are The Fifth Lash and Other Stories (2012), Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies (2011), and Anatolia and Other Stories (2009). His work appears in Georgia Review, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, Boston Review, Iowa Review, Antioch Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
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