TEAM
EFFORT
Everyone at the same time if everyone
at the same time
looked up from coffee looked up from crotch
looked up
if everyone at night at dawn at lunch looked
up
at the black at the blue morsel sky at
the congress
of clouds of stars looked up from needle
from packets
of buzzing from the wedding of dollars
if everyone
in Queens in Wembley if everyone in my
head if everyone
looked up from electroshock from drift
if everyone
threw back the appetite of the eyes threw
back the village
of the head the persistence of the skull
if everyone thought
I am the vanishing point I am the frontal
lobe of wind
if everyone stood and raised their wings
and tuned
their orchestra if the census stood the
tens of
stood the billions of stood the Earth would
move
the circle would move the spinning would
move if everyone
at the same time opened their mouth let
the wolf
of their uvula go the rivers would stare
at us
again would return to our faces the expressions
they carried away to the ocean to bury
in the ocean
to save in case we ever came back.
--Bob Hicok
Copyright © 2006 by Oberlin College. May
not be reproduced without permission.
THE READING
Bat braked against the window-screen
and stayed there, body balled
like a black fistful of hair.
It hissed and spread indecently, its frail
bone graphs tuning
to the frequencies of history
and turning its tiny degrees.
The underside of its wings
were strings, taut and pink with feeling.
They pressed against the screen,
and my pink hand,
and read the world by touch.
The touch of a thousand hairs.
No direction, no true
frequency, just a fist of hair,
a stranger stuck to screens
of words, a stranger's
body opening.
--Stephanie Taylor
Copyright © 2006 by Oberlin College.
May not be reproduced without permission.
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