Eros of Heroines

Sunset backlights some pine to ... a caped sponge

and though I throw my gasp after a monarch there is no hitch,

no hitching either to its serape or the echoing orange

drawing a rope, horizon’s doubledutch.

Mina Loy + Arthur Cravan

As blood hits the air & goes red, so I burst outside exhilarated.

He has thrown a tippet on the double-bass, which rests on its end-pin

the way a singer rests on a glittering stiletto

while the other foot slips on a banan—piano. The strings

are not the electrified wires of a prison camp, but she’s the instrument

of his escape, leaving me to educate my feelings,

subtracting the red from night til a winebottle dawns green.

Leonora Carrington + Max Ernst

I saw the chessplayers over their griddles, all the furor of thinking

swallowed like a song in a furred flute; so it must seem

when a small daughter disappears with a wife,

morning reabsorbed into a lambent priori.

Jacqueline Lamba + Andr

Source: Poetry (February 2007)