SurVision Magazine
An international online magazine
that publishes Surrealist poetry in English.
Issue Fifteen
ANTHONY SEIDMAN
Kerotakis
Now the Verb reaches me via conduits and commixtures: fruit of silence breaking flower into scarlet, cartilage and nerve, tamarind, lemon, sulfur, the opened triptych of thighs whose center panel sweats midnight. In this velvet one can't distinguish camembert from cabernet. Is that grease coagulating on the fields, redolent of garlic and mashed cilantro, or the blackest earth, indistinguishable from blood clotting, bull on hilltop, vinegar pouring on the valley? You Oh Verb rise from the tar. Heaven bubbles with stars and comets. I have levitated, float out the window among black roses, towards the hotel named after your toes. I am reading your hair and sniffing your accent of feverish fans and machetes. Rose of panties scrubbed with soap and left in the shower's stall. Rose of haunted mansions torched centuries ago. Rose of expired postage stamps and kite caught in oak branches. Rose of Rosa, whose name rhymes with everything molten and mortgaged, like atoms, train station, molasses, ivory. Bells, clanging?
Border Psycho
My wristwatch fills with rain. A sarcophagus and tsunami walk together holding hands. Sometimes a fern can grow from the toilet, or a Verb can plunge into the gutter and then reach the sea. I never tasted honey until I was fifteen, and by then I thought cinnamon was poison. With engineering so faulty, I will never know the exact hour. So I have decided to pump gasoline into my heart and ingest a lit match. That means I will reach you within an instant. The black dog with a blue leash tied to a street-lamp will run around it, run and run around it, until the leash gets entangled or snaps. Obscure are the currents that reach my ears after midnight. I am drowning but breathe with the ease of a dream gargling murder.
Anthony Seidman is a poet and translator from Los Angeles, who has lived for extended periods in the Northern Border Region of Mexico. His full-length translations include Contra Natura (Cardboard House Press) by the Peruvian poet Rodolfo Hinostroza; his most recent collection of poetry is That Beast in the Mirror (Black Herald Press).
