The Poetry Section: Angelo Nikolopoulos

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

This week, two new poems from Angelo Nikolopoulos.

GOING GARBO

In the talkies
I’m more holistic than duplicitous:

Garbo talks, Garbo laughs,
Garbo works in a jam factory-

all the houses look alike
on this joyless street.

And if someone asks you,
Iris Storm, how to get

to the end of the cul-de-sac,
tell them flank pain

and renal failure,
metallic taste in the mouth.

I’m less Mata Hari these days
and more eating-dress,

divine velour of solitude.
Black eye of the day.

To be let alone,
an espionage of pores,

in the down comforter of light
where I am lovely

and singularly Swedish.
Not bedridden

but boudoir-bound-
there’s a difference-

to peel back the skin
to become all tulle. Chalk puff.

But don’t get it twisted-
I like you, mon monde,

my talking heads.
It’s only partially disgusting

that I prefer my own self instead.
But let’s switch onuses,

you carry the burden
for a change. Stage left:

my penny-loafered starlet,
how would you lift it-

my heartthrob,
your own blonde dread?

HOT INTERRACIAL, HARD FUCK, BIG BLACK COOK
-Xtube video title

And why not-
when it’s a scrambling, isn’t it?

Kidney shuffle, blowing one’s beans,
overture of parts,

dry to wet, mouth-whisked
and body-beaten to barmy foam.

Though this cook’s no regard
for precise ratios:

2 parts meat : 1 part yolk, and so forth.
It’s soulful improvisation,

a dash of this, fistful of that,
a finger in every pink-teemed pot,

since math makes no good art.
Not typo then-

unforgivable swap of nouns-
but something Freudian,

a slip into the bread and butter
of relations,

simple reduction:
how we lump our parts together

willy-nilly and sweat-streaked-
a sloppy alchemy-

and hope for the best:
profligate limbs on the mealy sheets

left to rise leavened and browned-
in the morning

we’ll depart wholesome again.

Angelo Nikolopoulos is a graduate from NYU’s creative writing program. His work has appeared in Boxcar Poetry Review, Gay and Lesbian Review and Los Angeles Review. He hosts The White Swallow, a reading series in Manhattan.

You may contact the editor of The Poetry Section at [email protected].

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