Three Poems from Mount Carmel & the Blood of Parnassus
By Anaïs Duplan - Aug 2, 2017
I wanted you to cry with me. Whenever I cry, you cry.
Once you cried and I wanted you to stop. I wanted
you to cry into me. You waste everyone’s time with
your back and forth. You go to the shopping mall
of your delights and horrors, purchasing yourself in
droves. You run out of money and are filthy though
you bathe. You bathe for this reason, countless times.
It has nothing to do with the font that you’re us-
ing. Some say work for honesty and others say craft.
Still others are monarchs or blue whales. Others have
stars on their shoulders. Others invite each other to
dances where they, as per each other’s expectation,
dance with each other. You collect everything, all the
dead waste of his life, and create a wreath.
________________________________________
A single butterfly landed on De’Shawn’s back at the
barbecue. OK, now put that image out of your head.
Next image, you a pauper in the desert. You, pushing
spit from your mouth into your eyes and nostrils, hair
and nostrils, dog-spit mouth, hair and nostrils, towel
naked shower window, in radio, in afternoon with
Ryan, it rains in his truck.
about this and we can talk about this endlessly. That
is because Ryan is a good man with a good sense of
the sentence. I told Ryan at the barbecue, “And so
on and that’s how it is.” I said, “You’ve always got to
keep on going until you’re dead. And when you die
some folks will give a hoot and some others will give
great hoots. Still others will fall somewhere in the
middle. You will possess no great works. Where does
something fall when it falls in the middle? It falls all
around us, at night, in strides. I had a feeling in the
fingers the other day. They weren’t my fingers. I told
Dr. Addleson about it. I told him for the second or
even the third time. I felt so dejected, I fell into a
hole. At the bottom of the hole, my mother was there.
She was peeling carrots. She was married to Rebecca,
who had given her many great children.”
***
Anaïs Duplan is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016). Their poems and essays have appeared in Hyperallergic, PBS News Hour, the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Fence, Boston Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. Duplan is also an artist and curator who has organized exhibitions at the Distillery Gallery, elastic Arts, Disjecta, the radical Abacus, Public space one, and at Mengi in reykjavík, Iceland. Their visual works have appeared or are forthcoming in group exhibitions at Flux Factory, Thomas Robertello Gallery, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in LA.
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