Steve Gilmartin


from Trilce: Mistranslations of Vallejo


34

      Pack up whatever’s outside, with whomever, slow down
the night, sink beneath the talking and talking.
Your whomever won’t be guarding me,
displaying my ears, the good one and the bad.

      Pack up the slow hot reddening;
your big go-under and your clamor; the chitchat
that your mother doesn’t know how to pack
while our animal patterns slowly lean into us.

      Pack it up right to the end of time: the vacancies
obey you like fish, your manner
of saying dear me isn’t going to set me on fire.

      And pack up what’s small, because
my majority has fallen into endless sadness,
and our newness will be breech birthed causeless.


72

      Slowly the salon curls up, the family so uneasy,
asking questions you’ve already answered,
they look like hands waiting to wash you.

      One still keeps accounts even when dead,
cases filled with monopoly and contraband.
The greens have been crèched. Labor barely works,
sparrows triumph all over the ground.
And the messy middle curries favor
with the acceleration into nothingness.

      Salon of four entrances but without an exit,
whoever has thrown up rich mulberry colors can speak
of the intestines’s six dialects.
Yeah, his anti-violent art is my sick seas
bringing the null; uh huh, no salts sweetie
nine millimetering to the other portal.

      July established the fresh tone. Love
counts off sounding impartial. And the dull sky
god is about fresh mortality, demise and rapid transport.



Steve Gilmartin’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Double Room, 14 Hills, 3rd bed, Mad Hatters’ Review, Poemeleon, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, elimae, Cannot Exist, and Blazevox. He works as a freelance editor and lives in Berkeley, California.
 
 
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