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Carly Salzberg Jan 2012
Kiss my cheek,
Again. Tell me
I’m pretty. Whisper
to me, again
the parting of
your lips
they crack
so wicked ****.
Move my hips
they stand still
for most of the day
Let them know
Its o.k to hulahoop
A love tale. Go Ahead,
wisk by me,
Temptation works best
In brushstrokes
And dial tones.
Just don’t shun
falling tears,
they soak your face
and make it brighter
before morning coffee.
Carly Salzberg Oct 2011
I can feel it seizing understanding
beating against words fleeting through space
as I run up this slippery staircase
I know so well, the one,
with the black tape to gripe my fall,
despite the rise, I feel,
I am landing every time -
each foot, an undulation of fear
to let go, is to stand
still fixed in emotions once heard and said,
said fairly obtuse, so I say
love does not exist.
Love is existing
like it exists between my thighs
stroke nothing too long though because
violence is en-vitiable
as is love
projecting the desire for the absolute
insatiable. insatiable. I need. I want. I feel
helpless in your devotion to me, in your separation from me
from me to you, to you I'm in a -
and there you have it.
Carly Salzberg Oct 2011
Cold and naked like iron church bells
I rang thoughts each more hollow than the next.
Through my mind I skulled over tomorrow,
my bare-mattress weight stuck to my twenty-one-year-old
bones hesitating with the heat.

July tastes all moonshine and sunshine
until your alone without company and the fruit
of adventure decays romance from it candy sweet
fragrance leaving like a raspberry bruise,
a penalty scared on your mommas red lips:
How ya gonna make a living sweetheart?

Eh, I’ll grab a buoy and drink wine until
my teeth rot and ill say **** tomorrow,
Ill **** drunks and scribble my tin sorrows
in ***** yellow journals. I’ll bear my chest
to strangers with ******* hard against the moon.

Because I know
when I find routine,
I’ll be skin-laced and bored,
undertowed and unseen.
Carly Salzberg Aug 2011
Brett Jones has a book called
White and Society.
How funny he is,
What a subversive rebel man.
Can he sing the songs that make him sound so plastic,
and break them over again like the glass humor he embodies?
White and Society is a trace title.
It should live up to its apparent suspicions.
How lovely to think of it as a pop up book,
Imposing constructions before your eyes.
Carly Salzberg Aug 2011
His hands speak louder
than his large black lips,
its ironic signing that gives him
a swift slick reflection,
like he’s grabbing you by the face
calling you baby I barely know you,
but you smoke faster than you click
and so if you just eye me steady,
id let you cry a thousand and one times faster than Jesus, baby listen,
you wrote my luxury when you walked in with that cherry smile
gleaming apple wishes in dimple mirrors – ****
I’m so glad there was never a split fragment between our lifelines,
crossing blue drapery like the high clothes hanging in ***** New York alley ways.
So you just realize everything brings color when you remind yourself,
you're young and if I could hear the sound of youth, I would
for the rest of my water-balloon life.
Carly Salzberg Aug 2011
Days sometimes blind me like hotel rooms-
all stuffy air heating over zesty grey radiators,
I want to lift the blinds; I already see the light shading through.
That’s not enough; I want to feel orange again,
play with the sunning glow as it re-imagines beauty in skins devilish pores.
I want August’s comfort in afternoon naked towel naps
dreaming that cable dishes are just fish carcasses in the wind,
imagine its possible to watch nails grow,
bed them in earth’s soil, and let it remind me of ***
and the unevenness of intimacy strewn oddly when ***** sweaty limbs
can not keep up with eyes that dart faster than the sway, stay of pendulum pressure.
I want to remind myself that everything exists in contexts
casting emotion on stripped layers, crusts of being.
So I invite my nearest tempest, maybe that moon soft roof
to captain ships of candy shoppe imagination over my starving anxiety  
and chalk them out on cemented buildings. I talk to myself loudly.
I tell myself, isn’t it funny when words become tools of composition?
But its ironic because I weigh them with as much suspicion as a glass of milk –
I hesitate to think I ever really have to question anything,
when really, quite possibly, anything is possible
in a sentence pure and ending.
Carly Salzberg Apr 2011
We are manufactured landscapes,
constructed through naming nouns –
we celebrate difference.
We are compelled into being one or the other,
like a nail or a hammer.

We reference nature through motherhood,
voluptuous in her national pride narrative,
her lips red pucker supple metaphors like her fertile ground,
her belly always pregnant
ready to plant desire in discourse.

We forget her industrial miscarriages,
her toxic tar-sulfur consumption,
her global half-bred garbage in words left unsaid,
her ***** laundry in patriarchal hands.

We forget her midwives,
her toiling underpaid workers
who support generations of waste
who spit up truth in plastic mouthfuls,
who regurgitate material narratives
to celebrate flesh in mythic wholeness.

When will the nation, earth and world step from its subject of motherly pedestal and name its androgynous existence, its forgotten lifelines?
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