THE POUND-ELIOT EXCHANGE
Poem by Matia Guardabascio
Critique by Stacey Balkun
“Problems with Authority”
Poetry is pointless
Like pursuing a love that belongs
                   to someone else.
Don’t lie to me. I know you do
Not understand.
This is the age of broken souls;
No poetry beats here,
No love pulsates in these veins.
I belong to the generation of the youthful
Sinewy races
And None the rest on us depend,[i]
Unwanted as we are…
And yet here we are; here
We are thrust into a world
That does not want us.
Fuck you and your authority.
I am me
And I don’t want you either.
This poem works through example to list …

She Hears A Fire In The Night
With the slit wrists and forefeet of a modern messiah
A self-inflicted wound ignores the death of a married man
Every duckling is an ugly duckling, my Dear
Says the old widow to her glass eye
Then plugs her ears with fire hydrants

Variations, No. 100103
Does he ever think of the hole waiting for himself?
They say you do when you shiver in the sun.
Mamma poor mamma.  And little Oliver.
No more meat.  Was there no?
And how much of it?
Grandparents dying in our absence.
Into?
I am different than I was ever before.
I am different now than I was ever before.
But does he ever think of the hole
waiting for himself?
They say, when you shiver
at midday
                          in the bright sun…
Little Oliver!
No more meat.  Once more again no
No more meat.
                               Was there a no?
And how much of it?
And how much of …

Center of The World
I never saw you
until we stood across the river
from the center of the world
and clouds like new bruises
tried to hide among common smoke

Today I make lists to make sense
of this week, I wash clean sheets
just to smell fabric softener,
go to the grocery to pick fresh greens
and collects the confidence
that comes from checking off a list.

Sweet life, family business, career I was born into. Itself
the occupation of its many padding days.
                                                                            Monday,
we give our weight aloud to bits of bread, moving water and then
some winding city by-way to the sea.

Just Before a Dream
No one can take your place
beside the radiator
or share the time
just before a
dream
but it’s much harder
to wash you out
of my sheets
without the punctuation
of a Cigarette
now you’re somewhere
out in the snow
and I am left alone
looking for a sign of grace
with a bull’s-eye

1 Hiking
We stop for a break
at a cusp where the river
and the rocky bed are the same
both in grayness and stillness. We
settle on that muddled border. You kneel
down, close as if to wash your face,
sink your hands into the river
but bring up a palmful of stones—

forgotten creatures you call them—
they fall too slowly
from your grasp; not wanting, of
course, because want is something
bigger than themselves.
You brush your hands
down-up against your thighs
and continue down the trail.
2 The difficulty of making fire
The real way, you say, knees in mud,
bowed over fallen shrub,
piles …

From the poetic series The Human Fundamentals Anthology
The Fairweather Migrant
Birthed into walls and roofs thinner than the useless and unused eyelids,
ushered in by digit-missing deviants, the tension begins.
Eyes and thoughts reach upwards, outwards, backwards,
but there are no words. Not yet.
Bare foot and fresh, the toggle begins.
Rust has engulfed the spoon in his hand;
Greed-driven aficiandos of pity shuffle up the decrepit stairs.
The rust dilutes into the thin broth on the spoon, as expected,
and the filthied nutrition makes its way down his throat.
Eye contact avoided by everyone in the room,
they all …

The rain was persistent, not devastating.