2 poems by Phoebe Ambrosini Brown

in vocation / 22

She said writing was like sex in that the goal is to keep doing it. Margery Kempe,

speaking her book said He lay before me the snare of lechery but all my fleshy

lust had been quenched. To devote her bodily eyes onwards, intercourse became

worse than consuming oozing slime in the gutter. Véronique streams for selfsame

Weronika, her epiphany tangled in his puppeteer hands, pulling the strings of her

weeping. When we go out it’s chic quarter zip, 90’s r&b hoops and me,

splayed in nun’s habit. She said she learned everything she knew about language

from sex. I learned everything I know about language from the dog

whimpering to be held.

UPON INSTRUCTION

It is 8am on a Wednesday I'm on my way

to work and soon I’ll feel just like

a New York school poet jamming lines

into my shift finding clever intersection

in overstimulation. Except I’ll be nothing

like the NY school poets for one I won’t be a

bleeding man and two I’m not in New York. I can’t

even afford center city. Plus this isn’t the 60’s or

70’s anymore, we’ve gone digital. I wear

a shirt which is one shirt sewn to look like two

it seems so many problems have been solved

for me by modernity. Well, except for the big

ones like a country edging fascism it’s an odd

time to be alive. Almost passed out in a cvs

steaming woozy and exposed, they lay me

down in the backroom and my mind melted

uncomplicated as fluorescent overhead. I was

not writing I was watching everything without

syllables. It’s always me spinning and not the world

that’s what keeps me from vertigo. I stayed in bed

and my head hurt. Never mind that now, I must

attend my station as a worker of America, commence

dreaming of Guadalajara, or perhaps Galicia, or even

the skylight in Mitchell’s new apartment’s bathroom

which made us feel like we were pissing in a cathedral.

______________________

Phoebe Ambrosini Brown is from Providence, RI and lives in West Philly. She has been previously published by Moonstone Arts Center, Hog River Press and in Impossible Task with Another New Calligraphy.