Painted Bride Quarterly

Poetry 71

Giant Traumatism: After Guillaume Apollinaire

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The carpet fades from red to green From bottom to top in the invisible metropolis Dignitaries whistle their pitiless speeches Surgery’s massive reductions Paul sweeping leaves from his side of the driveway There is a message to be written on the changing of the season From carriage to pumpkin, Cinderella had her fun Small contaminant […]

Jason Schneidermann: SUBLIMATION POINT for M.B.

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The answer is entropy?how smell works? little bits of everything?always spinning off from where they were?flying off at random into the world?which is to say into air. There are other ways of solid to gas? they’re substance specific, like iodine, or dry ice?how I felt when I saw you? straight to a new state without […]

Jason Schneidermann: THE MONTREAL    STEAK HOUSE (ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA)

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The dogs were barking, I was trying to get home a new way, and I really had to pee. I stopped into a happening steak house, and asked where the bathroom was. “Miss,” I said, “where is the bathroom?” She told me the way to get there, and two guys asked me if I was […]

John Pursley: Alma Natura

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The reflections of coniferous trees patterning & unpatterning themselves Like consummate intermediaries caught in the pastiche Of something other. The highway hums Its mournful tunes. TV towers buzz & blink red eyes And the river— blinks back. A man on the radio says nature is getting smarter—has learned to fashion itself differently. Things have changed, […]

Ricardo Pau-Llosa: WALKING PAST    A NEW FIVE-STORY PARKING GARAGE

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Clean as meat cut by a cleaver, the concrete edifice sponges up the halogen beams. The polite lamps hide in beds of river-washed stones and beneath the flowering shrubs. Pinned-tie neat and scrubbed, the building is too new to be noticed, though it could hangar a couple of Parthenons or that Roman shell ablaze in […]