Anne Gorrick



from Conceit


The Being

Trailers of nothing in 1983
Boeing aircrafts stream in plank time finale
Bigdic(k)tionary.com
Dashboard dining room
Eve bedding in the Bing fields
The ghostship challenge, girl and always
We are a party of humanity, integration
Please sign the Bring Back James Bond Bill
I kidnapped your knowing
your negative big noise
your Africa pink light, your existence
phantom pictures, your quiet
your Bling Waycross
The Bering Strait separates our two continents
You are my bang predictor
my undetermined narcissist, my yolk
Hotdog, there are weird quotes that hover around that married Scorpio man
When x = suffering
Created significance, you are your own general contractor
What are the hours of operation again in this poem, this zoo?


The Creek

Valleys filled with locusts and round rocks
with white settlement golfcourse hard labor
with their boutique churchcasinos
Meaning doesn’t rise and drink out of the cradle
Fill out this employment application
Facebook is the new frontier
a form of hunting in Idyllwild, except without firearms
while home is a summary of kissbait and hours
Say “meadow” or “rock” or “brook” in actual Creek language
There are Smartevents in Singapore, in Spartanburg, SC
But the real question is
how many tears fell in the 1830s?
Sing the up-the-stairs song
Use up the underflow
Make a church made out of these vineyards


The Dawn

Your enemy is an English hillside
You appear covered with butterflies
and Bible students
This dreamtale might drift over Pakistan
An early light appears on a statue
its feathers, its testament in horses
its creepypasta adult swim hijack
Is this a correction to all of this industrial rage?
Spacecraft, their whiteness eventually purples


The Day

was a movie that could really happen
She was a summary of pills
before she came to rest
The exact day Christ died is classified
The day described in Act III is rainy
the one Einstein feared most, its disco
when fingerpickers took over the world
and God took your poem home
Sing a cantata of crowns and horoscopes
Heaven cried
when a boa named JFK ate the laundry
Khrushchev panicked when Kansas became a state
and her ass went psycho
Pigs die like newpapers
What is the basic meaning of jackals and falcons?
It was a day in quotes
when Wyoming almost lost all of its Detroits
Recklessly, we met on a frozen pond and held our breath
This is a keepsake karaoke


The Dead

and their pelican linger
Full episodes of weather
downloaded, seascrolled
buried like a summary of Cambodia
We are damned conscious of nothing
except our sonically reduced daisies
Distract yourself with caste and age
The days will not improve in the Dog Saloon
Dubliners don’t die
Let’s end this hayride with our eyes open
like dishonored eels, with safe keys, engines
These files are fake, we must cancel them
Torrential girls and their judgements
Horse shanty, horse cantina, horse theory
in vaulted arches
The Dead Kennedys know nothing of scripture
Roadmaps linger against marshes filled with milkmen
Nothing to do next door, no novels
Quotations never truly leave us
Let me explain winter to you
its pools full of movies and pale pigeons
There will be gangs of rabbits
Terrorists will toss in its waves
undead in valleys of vinyl
The weather will treat you like a primary number
This could be a modern story of Jamaica
or entire episodes filmed in a dead yellow


The Dream

in the center, at the speedway of history
Picasso begins
arrested in pros and cons
Let’s cry together at a church in Atlanta
where the downtown is a dictionary of duffle bags
We are the daughters of discography in this dirt race
Equestrian engines in a falsetto factory
Who will be your golf course girlfriend in 2014?
Give, in summary
Let’s sing some meatpacker hater songs
in a hotel in downtown Miami
Sometimes we’re alive and filled with movies
Let’s spend a real weekend in Cincinnati, in Santa Cruz
Will you make a juniper’s promise to me?
Morpheus keeper, kill the lights
download some lovemoney
I will wrestle a machine
I will take the mining company quiz
Each will be the other’s net worth
The common language of Gerontius is alive in Portland
in red chambers
Purple kiss me into unknown songs
Unfold me
Wake me
We sweat in syndicates, in team systems
Xtreme Elk Grove car racing
Your body, your Yamaha, your girl
Redeem and zip this sharebeast


The Ice

This poem is a fairytale hotel made out of storms
History is coming to Texas
Please
remove the virus from my cyber crime centers
Ice cube trays don’t really care about us
Let’s exchange sugar futures
There is an empire of data in Kissimmee
a house made of grapevines in Quebec
This poem is getting thinner under us
Inside your soul, this poem smells funny
is melting is nice and chichi, is peachy
Sounds like the king’s secret voice to me
It’s Japan 2013, or a lounge at the Sagamore
Networks figure skate around this neopet lookup
What are the true opinions of owls
in their palaces, their cherry groves?
We skate on this magic, this chaos, this knitting underneath us


The Living

Language is an actively international
aquarium, an air purifier
When you are not at home
the Barbies work hard on their balance sheets
To paraphrase, the Church of God is the only printable cookbook
Desert daylights, desert wild lights, palm tree TV shows, Christmas lights
What are your answers to this singular environment?
Can Lynn Behrendt make a single fabric of the world?
A “Brooklyn gallery” comes before “gun”
which comes before “god”
which comes before a “garden”
which comes before the “Great Lakes”
This poem is a human document
before it is a headless chicken
before it is a human curiosity sideshow
in infinite review
Her Ken doll is in the kitchen farm and dairy
writing a memoir of a mummy and the moon
He said, “Wear this Youtube nativity New Deal necklace
I made it just for you”
The ocean is filled with textbooks, oracles
The organisms in
this secret world, this habitat, this proof institute, this shark tank
are called what?
Maybe force-love-way-pledge-plate-tribunal-treasure-furnace or seed-soil-essay-poster
The universe and its unicorn circus
A vocabulary of comfort:
this zig zag




Anne Gorrick writes: ""Conceit" began as a little project where I took various poetic clichés, and found new poems (abcedariums more or less) around these words by searching and manipulating the text. "Poetic Cliché" became "Poetic Conceit" which simply became "Conceit." At one point, I got stuck and put out a call on Facebook for poets to supply me with more clichés, and the project grew. Writing these poems became an exercise in revisiting the poetry of the past, by smashing it up against the present."
 
 
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