ADAM STRAUSS


Adam Strauss lives in las Vegas, Nevada. He has poems out
in the current Drunken Boat, as well as forthcoming in Fence.






Charming Very Charming

A bench makes peachy
As a cold eats
Pieces of pie


Explains why I like
A spring day
Dining an October night.


The pie is dense
Not flaky. The truth is
Spectacularly unstable.


Butter and eggs
Not rotted porridge and
Chopped stallions no scallions.


I like it when
My lover
Slowly undresses me.


The cold is shortly cured
By a hot swallow;
One flits down from a rafter


While fine carriage
In finely cured hide
Walks by too quickly.






Lust

Blood thinks.
Streams sings.
Rubies' regal reddenings.


Logicians think.
Singers sing.
Painters paint ravishing reddenings.


Glasses clink in an act of relief.
A philosopher falls in love with a painter's way with paint.
Blood sauce more warming than sable regals.


Writing heightens sensation presently.
We shouldn't necessarily all be writing.
It is fun doing a bad job it's good to be doing fun.


Running a sentence on extends its sense or I'm wrong.
It is a big deal but not now.
Something else is present I'll love it later.


I've long been doing in love so I'm interested in doing lust.
I want lust to wake up at dawn and place a rose on my chest.
I hope he smells like bacon and cinnamon singing country music.






Gay

I want to the point of need to
Write a little gay book little queer book
In which gay queer letters go and so and ah love so
A one a many can go on living inscribing a
Space isn't free of tension welcomes
As wide as any jenny Lin and Jenny Colon
Grin in their lines elegantly lolloping
The lines of Octavio Paz's tribute to Joseph Cornell
Put on for a party will be full of gays
Who will fawn over her more than her stud
Which means we must talk to him in case he
Would brighten at the gesture yes I'm guilty of a double
Standard but it ain't me sayin' I'm not shallow
And I am sayin' shallow encompasses
Part of my ethics yes let's be acknowledging
Shallowness when we're shallow so deeps deeper with brightness.






Salon

She skins herself in a fur is
Tender-leather-lined of the warmth
Baby birds' blood makes reaching out
To answer what a feather is which means
Dust lifted hence a piece of the pie more likely
Sliced especially for her in honor how she honed
Housekeeping to the point of helping without the help.
I am not versed in the prosody of Charms and
Rounds so don't wish hungry Monitors on
The scene earlier established bur darling admit
Baby birds' blood is a bit much to think about
Unless we're talking roasted chicken which I don't think we are.
A man ought to enter—at least be
Entertained for a moment—who takes off his
Feather by its band and a point on the brim
Brimming in the bravado of performing
Some right somewhere where it's hard to do wrong.



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