AI SAID

by Rochelle Owens

 

AI-generated graphic by NightCafé for The New Verse News.

 

Damon Runyon had a bunion   
AI said eat half an onion the other half
is for the bunion

Edgar Allen Poe herpes blister
on the toe AI said Mister Poe you did
the nasty with a hoe herpes blister
on the toe

Percy Bysshe Shelley bite marks
on the belly AI said to be or not be
smelly Shelley bite marks
on the belly

John Keats tits or teats
thinner or fatter what does it matter
AI said poetry is alive John Keats
is dead at twenty-five

 

 

Rochelle Owens was part of the 1950s Beat scene in Greenwich Village as well as the early ethnopoetics movement,and eventually became involved with the start of the St. Marks Poetry Project and Deux Megot reading series. Known as one of the pioneers of experimental off-off-Broadway theater, Owens has written several plays that have been cited for their imagination, innovative language, and controversial themes. In 1969, her first play Futz was made into a film, and her plays have been presented worldwide. A recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle, Owens has published over a dozen books of poetry and received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio Center), among others.   

POSTHUMOUS EXISTENCE

by John Hodgen

Were we not paying attention, attention-deficited even then,
even before the term was wheeled in on some gurney
with a wobbly wheel? Brooklyn Hospital, so overrun,
where Fauci was born, where Whitman volunteered,
his beard as face mask, tending Union soldiers,
bringing peaches, poems, writing letters for them,
urging them to believe that a woman back home
would still marry them when they came home,
marching Johnnies through the rye,
missing a leg or an arm or an eye?

And Keats, quarantined in the harbor in Naples,
not nearly the quaranta giorni, the full forty days,
on the Maria Crowther, six weeks out from Gravesend,
typhus all around, bobbing like rhythm, like synaesthesia
in the bay. Keats, mortality weighing “heavily” on him,
“like unwilling sleep,” Keats half alive,
“half in love with easeful Death.”

Did we not see it, fully take it in,
poets and plagues interwoven, the world caving in,
the burst of tubercular blood in Keats’s handkerchief,
Whitman’s soldiers (“warriors,” T***p says) who survived,
stood, hobbled and grim, and married just as he told them
they would, writing back years later to tell Old Walt,
fierce believer in grasses, sheaves and hymns,
that they had named their children after him.

Or is it simply that we have lived too long
to have seen it again?

And who moves quickly now, masked, from bed to bed,
giving succor, solace, taking selfies with the nearly dead
to share with the families prevented from being there,
with Poe’s masquers, red death, double ventilated with dread?
What nurses, doctors, poets glide among us again,
like shepherds, pastorals, like trashbagged antibodies,
nearly invisible, shining with novel, singular grace?

John Hodgen is the Writer-in-Residence at Assumption College in Worcester, MA. Hodgen won the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry for Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His fourth book of poetry Heaven & Earth Holding Company is out from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and his first book In My Father's House has been reprinted from Lynx House/University of Washington Press. Hodgen’s fifth book The Lord of Everywhere is just out, also from Lynx House/University of Washington Press.