SurVision Magazine
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An
international online magazine that
publishes Surrealist poetry
in English.
Issue Three
GEORGE KALAMARAS
Of Course
Where is
my aggression if not inside the flake of red pepper?
If you removed my hands, what color would your mouth be?
I kept a pet mouse named Indian braided rug.
All I'd have to do was call him Henry, and he'd ignore me.
The burners of the gas range are excellent mouse tunnels.
I have come to the end of my weakness and am strange.
Give me a cigarette, sexily crushed with your stiletto heel.
Smoke it for me afterwards, or caress my thoughts while we lie listening to the couple
in the next room begin to massage fruit and vegetables for dinner through the thin
pleading of the wall.
I know you might not want to discuss the profit of selling a finger.
Point the way. Of course I will find the bathroom and flush twice.
The Friction of Your Speak
Caught by a line of depth, we fought the mighty word of our bodies.
You asked if my name in French meant sophisticated carnivore.
I must confess—I rarely eat apples.
I am reminded of the garden and how my nakedness feels both ways at once.
Harness-in the thought, as you might consider an obscure baseball statistic to prevent
the premature release of your breath's breath.
I'm here to tell you it doesn't work—that my thoughts scatter like tiny burrows of lice
larvae into the friction of your speak.
My life appeared to be a sum cosmetically equal to 1.56 British pounds, thirty-three
Indian rupees, and sixty million years of Tasmanian salt.
If you called me a specimen, I'd interrogate your food.
A piece of work? You consider me something made, difficult to reach?
There is a mole track beneath my word, passing into darkness without my feet. When you
lowered your lip onto mine, it was revealed.
That Moment of Wept
What I know is a kind of brief reflex.
What I know is an enactment of leopard blood, sunspots shot across the dark hour.
I realize that the waves hold my broken, that the other end of thunder is a sad disposition.
That the notebook's spiral that connects each page reminds me of the introduction of salt
into each of the lower three ribs.
You confiscate my mouth, try to force my singing sideways so the pain won't slip.
You say your heart is protected, that you enjoy having it live in a cage, that feeling
anything is good, even if only the wrong side of a coin.
When the Cossacks danced their brotherly let-me-kiss-you dance, one by one they told us
what we had most feared.
This loneliness. That moment of wept.
I am done with vodka slosh, done with tricking myself into a Russian Orthodox spire,
with caring for a kind confessional cast as a coffee klatch or exhausted rain.
I hunt the umbrella head of mushrooms and find the exclusionary oil that might take me
to intimate foreign places inside where I suddenly become an adept conversationalist.
If you removed my hands, what color would your mouth be?
I kept a pet mouse named Indian braided rug.
All I'd have to do was call him Henry, and he'd ignore me.
The burners of the gas range are excellent mouse tunnels.
I have come to the end of my weakness and am strange.
Give me a cigarette, sexily crushed with your stiletto heel.
Smoke it for me afterwards, or caress my thoughts while we lie listening to the couple
in the next room begin to massage fruit and vegetables for dinner through the thin
pleading of the wall.
I know you might not want to discuss the profit of selling a finger.
Point the way. Of course I will find the bathroom and flush twice.
The Friction of Your Speak
Caught by a line of depth, we fought the mighty word of our bodies.
You asked if my name in French meant sophisticated carnivore.
I must confess—I rarely eat apples.
I am reminded of the garden and how my nakedness feels both ways at once.
Harness-in the thought, as you might consider an obscure baseball statistic to prevent
the premature release of your breath's breath.
I'm here to tell you it doesn't work—that my thoughts scatter like tiny burrows of lice
larvae into the friction of your speak.
My life appeared to be a sum cosmetically equal to 1.56 British pounds, thirty-three
Indian rupees, and sixty million years of Tasmanian salt.
If you called me a specimen, I'd interrogate your food.
A piece of work? You consider me something made, difficult to reach?
There is a mole track beneath my word, passing into darkness without my feet. When you
lowered your lip onto mine, it was revealed.
That Moment of Wept
What I know is a kind of brief reflex.
What I know is an enactment of leopard blood, sunspots shot across the dark hour.
I realize that the waves hold my broken, that the other end of thunder is a sad disposition.
That the notebook's spiral that connects each page reminds me of the introduction of salt
into each of the lower three ribs.
You confiscate my mouth, try to force my singing sideways so the pain won't slip.
You say your heart is protected, that you enjoy having it live in a cage, that feeling
anything is good, even if only the wrong side of a coin.
When the Cossacks danced their brotherly let-me-kiss-you dance, one by one they told us
what we had most feared.
This loneliness. That moment of wept.
I am done with vodka slosh, done with tricking myself into a Russian Orthodox spire,
with caring for a kind confessional cast as a coffee klatch or exhausted rain.
I hunt the umbrella head of mushrooms and find the exclusionary oil that might take me
to intimate foreign places inside where I suddenly become an adept conversationalist.
George Kalamaras, a former Poet Laureate of Indiana (2014-2016), is the author of fifteen books of poetry, eight of which are full-length, including Kingdom of Throat-Stuck Luck, winner of the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011), and The Theory and Function of Mangoes (2000), winner of the Four Way Books Intro Series. He is Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught since 1990.
