A Poem by Gurtrude And

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Trash Talk

Your mother could pull a fresh squid from a lumberjack.

Your mother took a train to Milpitas.

Your mother is so dumb she unearthed Spinoza’s glass joke box instead of Spinoza.

Your mother took a whole hour to run blue veins in a vinegar wash.

Your mother folded the liver of a sparrow.

Your mother couldn’t help me find Orion.

Your mother has a burnt-out black-light in her mouth.

Your mother came from the north where the geese run wild.

Your mother is not a stranger to me.

Your mother could have slit solar guts out of an alpaca.

No one’s ever seen your mother.

Your mother turns around when she walks.

Your mother moves into a ghostly embrace.

Your mother uses the internet.

Your mother makes a relish pound cake.

Your mother is the mylonite whisperer.

Your mother goes to a graphite specialist instead of a dentist.

Your mother has psychosomatic syndrome X.

Your mother cuts the mascarpone.

Your mother took an online course in glass and driftwood sculpture and actually found it quite
interesting.

Your mother seems to move through her day like a day without absolute properties.

Your mother sleeps in a trapezoid.

Your mother is so fat.

Your mother lost so much of her memory, her thoughts are like surround sound on silent.

Your mother read Flaubert on Friday, Bergson on Saturday, and Virginia Woolf on Sunday.

Your mother’s head is so small, she thinks reading is bowling.

Your mother can peel the silver fat from a pork tenderloin with the back side of her hand,
blindfolded.

Your mother keeps scraps of wool and metal shavings in her left pocket.

Your mother’s mouth is so open, when she speaks, there is no one in particular.

Your mother is so empty, you could fit a child inside of her.

Your mother is not a poet.

Your mother is so porous, her hips have turned into cinderblocks.

Your mother once traveled over South America, then came right back.

Your mother can’t grow, die, or touch holy water.

Your mother takes the crusts off your sandwich.

Your mother is so lost, she knocks on her own door.

Your mother is a minute in the ticking bomb of phantasmagoria.

Your mother shouldn’t carry on the way she does.

Your mother is the image in the toaster.

Your mother doesn’t correspond to any form of experience.

Your mother tore a tendon from the back of the neighborhood through her eye socket.

Your mother found a beautiful blue leaf in the grass; it was rare, very unique, nothing she’s ever
seen.

Your mother has a locked place for deciphering.

Your mother is my opulent sex splice.

Your mother provokes my internal struggles with myself and with the world just by existing.

Your mother is on the back porch.

Your mother is a back porch.

Your mother is my father.

Your mother is reckless with her anthems.

Your mother is an American without missiles.

Your mother wears red garland when she votes.

Your mother’s skin is made of the skin of dominant monads.

Your mother is so baroque, she dreams underwater.

Your mother, in most ways, floats, facedown, with a sail made out of heavy silk and another out of
muslin.

Your mother is wrapped in a concept of motion.

Your mother is Leibniz’s entelechy.

Your mother is the eternal gaze of rabbit and of venison.

Your mother is in a chemical den.

Your mother is a celestial carcass of her own environment.

Gurtrude And’s work has appeared in Chicago Review, The Claudius App, Lemon Hound and The Volta. Her first full length book collection entitled

Last Year’s Schizo is forthcoming next year from Trembling Pillow Press.

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