Volume 17:1, Winter 2016
Some Of Us Press Issue
Getting Ready to Be Frightened
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all over you
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little cold streams
I’m
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eat themselves
eat each other
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a box
with a lid
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wife
eggshells
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i’m hurrying
hurrying again
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good,
blood
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her ears
I’m shouting
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smoke
ladder
down
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too fast
to be blessed
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accept
except
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selling the books
taking my father
off my back
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we both know it
we both hate it
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spooning out the bird
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film
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it’s me,
I miss
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white
white
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able to read,
nothing else
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ministration
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gender
end
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mustard womb
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eating the glass
with the gravy
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think of my parents
thinking of my parents
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lungless prayers
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fear’s blue
ear rope
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uncolored breast
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melting down
the poetry magazine
to make a fence
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shaking my milk
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a flag make out of nails
and you wave it
*
*
bucket of creek –
wash twig
the clay bears a pod
take everything all in-
side
my father even
ole half price tinplate
and shuts down
wet wet open
it’s like a furnace
memory
have I made a good lasso ?
*
Bruce Andrews and Michael Lally in New York City, c. 1976
*
Jacob’s pillow.Four more wars.18 mg. “tar”,
19 mg. “tar”.Red or Longhorn.Ultraviolet.
Stunting leather straps.Tibia sniff you.
Opus Dei.Firmly-seated cork.Devil-may-care.
Methadone en route.Mule token.Rubber ever.
Sine die.“Foo foo feminine things.” Now
Paar.Throw the reins over their necks.
Minor hand-me-downs and razor-edged carp.
Applauds.Spiral.Bug Tussle, Okla.Head
stocking one more time.A wise old owl and a
child.Feeble ducks.Story spinner and to
be torpedoed.Well-oiled ping.Blacklist
airs the linen.Drunken looks good if it’s
jackers and clamps.So long, sympathy.
Plenty of legs defrogged.Test sit.Baffles.
Polyethylene.Swear by.Goodbye.Roach
Brown.
Bruce Andrews (1948 - ) is one of the key figures of the Language Poets. Together with Charles Bernstein he edited the influential journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E from 1978 to 1981. Those thirteen issues were later compiled into an anthology, The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). Andrews was born in Chicago and studied international relations at Johns Hopkins University and political science at Harvard. He taught political science at Fordham University from 1975 through 2013. Andrews’s first book of poems, Edge, was published by Some Of Us Press in 1973. He has since gone on to publish over forty other books of poems, including Swoon Noir (Chax Press, 2006), Tizzy Boost (The Figures, 1993), Executive Summary (Potes & Poets, 1991), and Film Noir (Burning Deck, 1974).