A Poem By Gurtrude And

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Pantagruel

I will not think about tripe. I will not
think about tripe and its opulent crate
of brown sponge. I will not think about
tripe because I don’t want tripe to be
a thought of me stored in my dimpled
entrails. I don’t want to be tripe boiled
and thought about or fattened with
grotesque drippings of phrene from head
bending like tripe and its deep tube
of encyclopedic justice. If tripe plumps
I don’t want to eat just the fleshy leaves
of cabbage growth. I don’t want your
vegetable and arborescent creed to
halve the pomegrantian blisters filled
with red tropes and white homeomeries
of advancement. When I think about tripe
I think about a theater of breakfast meats
but, I will not think about tripe because
when I think about tripe the hormone
of my thought sizzles and melts the chords
of gray aerodelusions and rhetorical
greed which must be contrary to my
purpose in this truer disaster. If, like tripe
a curtain of tripe, if tripe shimmered
like the tripe of certain equidistant panels
of immaculate men, if. Some tripe, in this
way, is the perfect satisfaction. I don’t
want the mushroom of tripe to document
its own gills in the sequining flutter
of the minor organs of reason or swerve
in the shuttering sound of its huge pipes
like massive bodies falling on the keys
at once or Sade’s clinamen of sudden
perspectives to be formed like a trunk.
That tripe, I don’t want. I don’t want to
swing from it. I don’t want tripe to
birth its yellow rubber from my little
scented wound of law or fecund slathering
with its human mess of convictions. If, like
men, tripe tasted like the pineapple custard
of Enlightenment, even then, I wouldn’t
know how to not gag. I don’t want
tripe. I don’t want any more tripe. I don’t
even want to think about it. No more tripe.
No tripe.

Gurtrude And’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Review, The Claudius App, Lemon Hound and The Volta.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at [email protected].