Scantily Clad Press, 2008

The Th in g T ha t T he Su n Re vo lve s Ar ou nd

A dead balloon.
Of dirty nectarine coloring.
Occipital and code-chomping.

Picket fencing.
Parallelogrammed.
A lightening-pooped steak piece.

A gateway drug.
To the daisy ripped fields.
Made by mad mouth disease.
Di no sau rs In T he Gar de n of Ede n
inspired by a visit to The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky

One Biblical interpretation of paleontology.

Places dinosaurs in the flickering tiers.

Of inner-city Eden. Monster-fin-nery.

In the pools of the name-giving garden.

The skillet-prone, the clue-fully roaring.

The mammal-backed by mammals backed.

By a sun half of a hundred hours old.

Adam fed the stegosauruses lobotomizing.

Apples or oranges. Eve gloved the pterodactyls.

In the finest of snakeskin.

And when the firmament shook redly.

With boils. The couple rode out into.

The thorns and thistles on the base.

Of the neck of their favorite. Apatosaurus.

Ho te l

Obelisk mash-ups,

grace-plated

and mercy-lipped.

Shiver and lunge

and tripled down

under the weight

of uncouth dipped

special just for you.

Discombobulating

in hyper peach/pink.

Gobo projections.

Love me

on a fun day.

Ribbon rack,
nurture nook –

crapshoot mafias.

Braying purposely

pariah-like.
Jan uar y

I.

They built citadels underneath

my hairline to be guarded

by bees and panic attacks.

II.

Sheet after sheet of dirty blue

tinfoil. Of decametric song.

Dot. Dot. Dashing through the show.

III.

This corner of intensely hued bazaar.

Filled with creatures of a polydactyl

and peacock-plumed nature.

IV.

Marked with the three signs

of terrible memory.

Winter exponentialized.
Cr ea ti on My th

A god from the East and/or above and/or far far away
took to the notion to plant a fetal-curled seed by the banks
of a body of water. Four hundred thousand years of deity-
induced rain and sunshine caused the stone to sprout
into a city’s worth of architecture, gold-leafed astronomies,
and smiling, single-headed cows.
The women’s eyes housed nine-pointed ceruleans
and children were taught at an early age the value
of aneroidical breathing.
Monsters lived the whole of their lives in glass coffins,
surrounded by orange safety cones.
Old men would spend days on their backs,
watching clouds take the shape of semi-sapien eyeballs.
Peopled by swallowers of burning tea leaves,
the inhabitors of this land lacked the mouth
mechanisms to make hissing sounds.
Whenever they felt angry or threatened,
they had to resort to humming.
You r

Your celebrity suicide clock

tocking off the scandalous
reflexes of the tragically
shiny beautiful.

And your magazine’s three

hundred ways of lying
down uncomfortably
available.

Your self-conscious drunked

out dialing of every name
you can still pronounce
regretfully.

Your actress’ inability to not

fire a gun once it appears
outlined in neon pink
prescription form.

Your heart habits molded up

like a velvet coin purse left
too long in the bottom
of a birdbath.

Your post-adolescent perfunctory

baubles. A proclivity towards
labial cacophony. Dripping
maudlin.
Mod e

The people started looking

up at the moon and crying
out (!), “You are pockmarked
and gelid and way too orange.”

The moon responded ungently.

Ripped herself off the sky.
A conscientious object (!!),
passionately bulletproof.

All that undrinkable/thinkable

arithmetic gone to waste.
Trembling waves (!!!) of sound.
With or without recycled effect.
Pos t- Lo ve Ch ar m

The preliminary rituals of swanning.

Double-helixed compromise.
Don’t touch me unless you love me.
The rectangular slits of our tooth gaps.
Our tongues: makeshift autoclaves.
Alchemized; Babel-ified; siren-scarred.
We lie/lay in the bed un-made
during the days of the color
of diurnal cupidity. Our anti-moon pose:
Throats partially barred by the loose
translations of black market smoke.
Though, really, you should never
send the eyes to do the mouth’s job…
Eyes pleading, Give me more space
aliens, more pseudo-lighthouses.
Anything to desiccate the twelve-
finned hourglass that’s set up shop
in our ever clogging kitchen sink.
Exp at ri at e P ai nt er

You moved your brushes to the left.

To the west. To the land undercut by green
fleshery and canary-haloedness.
Long-lined and corn-syrup syringed.
The uneasily acceptable breathed out
old man into the face of your long ago
lauded eye for color.
Sitting trucker-like in the windshield view.
Surrounded by replicas of relics from
the old country. Coveting to loathing
the happily gunned cowboys.
Complaining that the type of scale needed
to measure your sacrifice is still
shimmery conceptual-staged wish-wash.
Hands half-corpsed and heteroclite,
holding a child who won’t grow up
to be as beautiful or as meaningful
as the cost of its un-hip needing habit.
A child that started out as a joke;
a silly stick figure you doodled under
your wife’s bellybutton that despite you,
to spite you, grew up into a garish,
pulling mural with gold pavement
thought processes.
De -M an neq ui ni ng

The red bones.

Of positive tension.

Crackling under.

My arms.

Stippled snowstorm expanding.

To fit my chest.

Length-wise.

The brain tying itself into beautiful.

Boy Scout knot.

Eyes fuzzed and pre-flowerstaged.

Fiberglass iris split.

 Da ni el a Ols ze ws ka was born in
Wroclaw, Poland and raised in the area
known as Chicagoland. Poetry-related
activities include serving on the editorial
board of Columbia Poetry Review (volumes
19 and 20) and acting as Deputy-at-Large
for Switchback Books. Her chapbook is
called The Partial Autobiography of Jane
Doe (dancing girl press, 2008).
She blogs at
http://bloodyicecream84.blogspot.com/