By Adrian Matejka
- Selected for the 2008 nationwide Poetry sequence by means of Kevin Young
- Finalist for the 2010 NAACP snapshot Award for awesome Literature -- Poetry
The poems in Adrian Matejka's moment assortment, Mixology, shapeshift during the myriad meanings of "mixing" to discover and explode rules of race, dermis politics, appropriation, and cultural id. no matter if the focal point of the person poems is musical, electronic, or ancient, the otherness implicit in being of a couple of racial history courses Matejka's paintings to the inevitable end that each one things-no subject how disparate-are components of the whole.
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Extra info for Mixology (National Poetry Series)
No matter if you performed the pimp and lied for your lower, thank you. no matter if you watered up like a toddler as the guy requested you to play “The Stars and Stripes perpetually. ” thanks for chords so magnanimous, they step all up and down like an asthmatic hoodoo. Lip Syncing in Texas THE ATTIC There’s no god to be stumbled on up in the following. in simple terms gangly bugs mid-migration, utilizing my position as a leisure cease at the approach out of Texas. wooden panel hinged to patchwork carpet like Cameros to sideburns. Hell-bent spiders at the creep: the softest shoe of eight-legged double-talk. Loose-limbed beetles, bo-jangling moths masked as dirt fronds on brown partitions. those useless insects marionette within the webs’ captivity, belly-doubling like banjo avid gamers for the meals chain’s higher-ups. those hors d’oeuvres can’t aid me locate The Cantos, stashed in a field with the remainder of my collage books. Siguiriya of man-sized insects, libations for homies who fell in the course of the lengthy trek up my attic stairs. those spiders, sacrificing no matter what spiders do in a dust-blessed house choked with a language they attempted to fail to remember. in this morning while creek and gulf handshake sky, my attic is absent of verse with the exception of the ping of roof water, the caesura of relocating presents nonetheless of their unique plastic. TOMMY JOHNSON (C. 1896-1956) There’s jake leg blues during this field. There’s carnal scribbling: a constellation of computer virus prints in a gypsy’s biography—loose-leaf, crayon etchings and the solar shining on my again door a few day. Tommy Johnson, ignore air. forget about the wind, shimmying with seeds and hair. yet take a nail and a seed and I’ll whittle a twelve-string that simply performs cranial propositions. A six-string is difficulty, however the twelve is the main hoodoo’d mess in nature—the noise in adverbs making spiders develop at unnatural speeds. The pop and settle of this attic because it a while with arthritic grace. Orthography of dialect, jawboning within the mixture of half-notes, shoe polish strained via bread in a tumbler, and the torso of guitar topography. give some thought to Prohibition-bound Tommy Johnson, waking up within the morning, intestine splayed in stomach: Mama, mama, mama, canned warmth is killing me. MIGRATION My attic is smoked with gentle, nonsensical like warning tape for Cyclops. Brazos Exterminators! William S. Burroughs ! listen what I’m announcing. I can’t locate The Cantos anyplace within the brazen of palmetto skulls and misplaced limbs, airborne dirt and dust reconstituting itself among wooden panel and drywall. A window air-conditioner beats, whirs: exhalation of not-so-conditioned air and the insects and the insects’ former skins don’t brain one bit. And with that, William S. Burroughs turned an exterminator: And there has been an apple on her head and he did shoot with a revolver and he did omit, William Telling her face first, within the Mexican mouth Texas was a crown for. stuck absolutely within the useless crest of her sleeve, he did flip tail and head North, out of Mexico, out of Texas. It was once a shake down. Mist hangs at the Rio Grande, cringe of employees who nonetheless persist with William S. from one wild to a different, scrub brush and dirt in bucketfuls ready at the different aspect.