Baseball's Cruel Lexicon
Nicholas Mainieri
We’re speaking of salvation, god damn it,
And only the incurious break slumps.
We’re speaking of salvation, god damn it,
And only the incurious break slumps.
Tommy “Teebs” Pico was a Queer/Art/Mentors inaugural fellow, 2013 Lambda Literary fellow in poetry, and has poems in BOMB, Guernica, and [PANK]. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Brooklyn and curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker. @heyteebs
These Austrian cows
lying down vaguely chewing
grass what are they think
But I have a million lights
I have two million actually
A whole billboard
Are the woods still there? The woods were still almost there.
The heavy moon’s already almost halved itself, the month’s almost passed. I saw
a cat huddled, early this morning, by a
I wear glasses now, Luis,
you wouldn’t even recognize me.
We sat many a Saturday
on the bank of The Han River,
in Seoul. Drinking makkoli,
looking at Basquiats, talking
about what it means to be Jewish,
when we danced at Susie Q's to
"Changes"
I.
When I was a kid I believed
in good old-fashioned animistic
souls coming out of the grass
and the sky and the rocks.
I loved walking
in Las Rocas de Santo Domingo
and seeing
I Have
I have a
wet mouth
in this pink
apartment.
I still have that.
Boy—
you think we’re in love?
Don’t you
roughhouse
with me.
You’re trying.
But at this
Ask her to aim her index fingers.
at you. Aim yours.
Standing in the pieces of a broken guitar
I screamed at the summer for sleeping around
breaking my heart with the rising
in those days I drank wine from the bottle
stranded
I remember
the first time
I saw a foreign
cherry. I blushed
a little armpit.
I saw how a cherry,
in it's candied boredom,
could stain.
The other not truth.
Thus
I had the milk from a dandelion all over my hands once in the sun and in the cracks of my palms and it was getting on my lunch, I kept thinking.
Once my mother painted my fingernails
feeling in pain
both emotional and physical
I head into the light.
In the park
wholesome children play
their healthiness
throwing
last night's
relative sordidness
into sharp
The barista is so pretty
my girlfriend would be
disappointed if I didn't
cheat with her.
Modern Conveniences 2012 - 2014
There were moments when I forgot about the dog
Whining and shivering, like a toddler in its playpen
Her instinctual nature, A visceral outward cry
I
Is this new relationship self-sabotage in disguise, or is it the cure?
Garielle's longest, most peculiar, most particularized book. A sure-to-be collector's item. Not be be missed!