Poem of the Week: Brandon Brown

Poem of the Week: Brandon Brown

by Ben Fama on September 14, 2012

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in Poems of the Week

MY SOLIDARITY

We meet in a reflective trench and you are skeptical
but then you begin to feel my solidarity
like a short-haired snake between your legs.
The snake starts to hustle, overweening
the lip of pants. Let’s you and I
never be cops to each other. Because we study
elephant lore, and in all the annals of elephant
adventures, there was only one cop. And he
was shit. Elephant stories are like pop songs,
one of the earliest forms of experiential autonomy.
Yes their appearance is in the form of money,
but they go into our mouths and we sing them beautifully
and when our lives are ruined we sing them again
at karaoke. And karaoke is one of the world’s
greatest displays of total solidarity. Almond waves
come out of my phone. Marzipan
insurrection not just televised but broadcast.
If you want to know the status of my solidarity,
look down at the lips on your nipples. We’ll be safe,
or at least in solidarity, reading Bhanudatta’s Bouquet of Rasa
and its comrade in literature, The River of Rasa.
_________________________________________________
Brandon Brown’s first two books were published in 2011, The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced Press) and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya.) Poems and prose have recently appeared in Sprung Formal, Postmodern Culture, BPM, Model Homes, and Art Practical. In 2012, his debut play Charles Baudelaire the Vampire Slayer was staged at Small Press Traffic’s Poet’s Theater. His third book, Flowering Mall, is forthcoming from Roof in the fall of 2012.

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