Archive
Or When the Police Come
With the new world cornered, we can
better appreciate the laxity
of the Sabbath. Here the drummer
who sits on the drum does not play
for you.
But the women—turbans twisted on
in the required colors—
dance until the streets
are black.
Jenna Cardinale is the author of Journals, a chapbook from Coconut. She lives in New York, where she often writes poems about New Orleans.
Museum’s Aftermath
The silk shuddered, coughed
& collapsed upon the vinyl.
Amidst the costumed dragons,
I look for bones and party
favors— The origami map
is crestfallen. Lounging
terribly amidst signature
tattoos, the faded hearts
and hula girl
bleed into their alluring
landscape—a synecdoche—
formed and torn and built
over, shinier than skyscrapers,
pliant as candy. Trails
of fingerprints meander
over discarded spikes,
twisting into cursive
along the nape, tres-
passing’s elaborate script.
by Jenna Cardinale and Bruce Covey
For process notes, see “Cling.”
Cling
Discovered a concrete way to buy clothes?
A way to wear an abstraction—
A way to paint beneath the skin—
But cotton inoculates us
against this attempt,
100%, crisscrossed, & mercerized
horizon to prophylactic horizon.
Across each tight stitch, each
carbonated step
presses its sheet & fancies
a speck of latent illustration.
Bowing to the appeal of pleats,
the frayed & loose pattern
soft petals off of its graph,
an occasional pocket
holding a spring
sets its self off.
by Jenna Cardinale and Bruce Covey
Process notes
We decided to write a series of poems in which collaborative shifts occurred in cross-current from the poem’s couplet structure. One of us began with a single line; the other completed the couplet then began a new couplet. In each case the titles came last.
qarrtsiluni 