BARE FLOOR, WITH COAT HANGER

by Francesco Levato

Author’s Note: This piece dealing with Texas Senate Bill 8 is from a series I’m working on titled SCARLET, a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of Jack London’s post-apocalyptic novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life to reflect the state of a pandemic self in forced confinement.

Francesco Levato is a poet, a literary translator, and a new media artist. Recent books include Arsenal/Sin Documentos; Endless, Beautiful, Exact; Elegy for Dead Languages; War Rug; Creaturing (as translator); and the chapbooks A Continuum of Force and jettison/collapse. He has collaborated and performed with various composers, including Philip Glass, and his cinépoetry has been exhibited in galleries and featured at film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry, a PhD in English Studies, and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature & Writing Studies at California State University San Marcos.

OSCAR POSTS ON FACEBOOK

by Earl J Wilcox

What a night! I was hugged, fondled,
stroked, laughed at, cried upon, nestled
in the arms of a dude who encouraged
every weird person to stay weird,
molded into chocolate and stuck under
Oprah’s seat, then found myself staring
at this chick who had no panties on,
plus getting too close to a very mature
Doogie Howser who paraded his package
in tighty-whities. But the highlight
of the evening for this Oscar came
when old J. K. finally grasped me,
waved and yelled to everyone
about calling their parents. Dang
if that Oscar After-Party didn’t go
on all night while I sat on tables,
on leather limo seats, on toilet seats,
and on one cute little table during a one-
night stand between you’ll never guess
who, but I am not telling, though I will
say this: not everything is a theory anymore.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.