DEBORAH POE
Am Vladimir
Am hard
am the heavy gut,
stomach verged at urge of television
am binary barrage of image.
Hand. Am the first song’s
fist, uninterrupted, the mainstream
love song. Am straight. Am the child
Am storming the familiar
sun seeks bodies to save
my kind thus struggling
& deserving.
Am broken.
Was light-crept exception just
next door, was same
like spirit-same, born of & heard.
Spoke English
as if unfortunate squirrel.
Am greedy.
Was holding wife, was angry,
misunderstood,
was ignorant and roof over head
was led to ninety ghosts telling me:
keep words forever for their aftertaste
in Vladivostok —
of misfortune and smoke
To groin-calling need,
was living creature.
Crave. Am struck.
Was skin & mowed lawn. Am a part.
Was bored as machine.
Was—why—for supper
and was not rented room.
Was moral & archaic,
Napolean & bush.
Am organic wanting,
was the craving man.
This poem is (heavily) after Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Am Moor.” Words italicized in the poem are from Osip Mandelstam’s poem to Anna Akhmatova, #235. “Poems from the Thirties” from The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (The New York Review of Books 1973).
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