Friday, February 14, 2014

re-post



The Journal of Cell Death

one imagines, would be unlikely to turn up
draped across a glossy copy of Barns of New England
on someone’s blond wood coffee table in a fussy
fan of recent Architectural Digest’s and Town and Country. 

Rather, it strikes me as a publication given
to lurking about on the metal desk of the warden

or laying naked on a porcelain slab down
at the morgue, the medical examiner poking through
the somber pages at lunch, carelessly smearing
grape jelly on the funereal cover.  The Morbidity and Mortality

Weekly Report will be there to keep it company, just
the two of them talking deep into the night, long, rambling

existential bull sessions that could put the dead to sleep.
I wonder how many of them passed reading Colonial Waterbirds?
A final exhalation, then a peaceful paddle over to the other side.
This beats, hands down, The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies

whose deceased readership is forever doomed to walk
the earth in search of their souls.  How tempting it would be

to ride the subway behind a copy of the Hoodoo and Conjure
Quarterly, keeping tabs on your fellow commuters through two
perfectly round peep holes.  Probably not as much fun as reading
the latest issue of Fire!! in a crowded movie theater or BOMB

on an overnight flight to Amsterdam.  Next time you visit
your doctor, pass on the well-thumbed Time, skip the sticky

Highlights.  Ask the nurse for Contagion: Journal of Violence,
Mimesis and Culture, but be discreet.  My internist is running
late this morning, but I’m perfectly content to flip through
back issues of Bird Banding and The Florida Buggist. 



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