Connor Stratman


Persuasion

“Art goes to sleep” – Tristan Tzara

Off to meet poets with no talent:
the boardroom of spits and shine.
This matter is pressing, black eggs
of pristine stack—gulfed in borders
along toothpicks. Perform here, signature
and dot. Give us something to work with.



Halfway to Intelligence

               It came as adjustment, an aspiration, the clocks of the joints crumbling under the weight of the meadow. There a shadow came, formed a body and left it empty, waiting for someone to come drag it away. The spaces became comfort. There was no father.

               The officer ingests the air. I light my pipe. The air is wet with melted wax.

               The line is drawn on a volcano. It melts and dines on the brain. The shock of no organs, the spit of the kidney. We draw and draw more. We are landscapists.


Connor Stratman is the author of a chapbook, Invisible Entrances (erbacce press, 2010), and a full-length book of poems, An Early Scratch (erbacce, 2011), which won the 2010 Erbacce Press Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared in journals such as Pinstripe Fedora, Leaf Garden, The Toronto Quarterly, Scythe, and Askew, among others. He is currently editor-in-chief of The Balloon, an online poetry blog. He currently lives in Chicago, where he is teaching and working on his Masters thesis.
 
 
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