other words

Chris Stroffolino,
usa

Chris Stroffolino is the author of several books of poetry including Speculative Primitive (2004), Scratch Vocals (2003),
Stealer's Wheel (1999), Light As A Fetter (1997), Cusps (1995), and Oops (1994). He's also published Spin Cycle (2001),
a book of essays on mostly contemporary poets and co-edited a Cliffnotes Edition of Shakespeare's 12th Night (2000).
A recipient of a 2001 NYFA Grant and a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary's College from 2001-2004,
Stroffolino's poetry has been translated into Bengali, Dutch and Spanish. He is currently the lead singer/songwriter with
Continuous Peasant, whose second album Intentional Grounding is just out on Good Forks Records.

Land Lines

I tried to call back the number you called from
But it must’ve been a payphone
One could say fuck the payphone
But then I feel it’s endangered
Like public drinking fountains—perhaps
Not quite as much because you still have
To pay and no one’s invented public pay
Water fountains yet that would bug me
As much as Evian (though less Dasani
If Coke gives me an endorsement deal
Pays for the line, lands me a job. I’d
Change my tone, the biggest purists
Do, and many know not!)

But if I celebrate the pay phone as I celebrate
Her public square and the rally against privates
In order to prevent or slow the allegedly
Inevitable passing of true public space not
Spherical, then must I celebrate the missed call
And the fear we won’t connect if I should choose
To go out in the sun, without a cell to overtake
The locked door, as if I want, or even need,
To miss you. I don’t (which I thought had been
Implied, if not inferred, long ago) but can’t wait
In the stuffy room while you’re out and about
And must put faith that spontaneity will work
Out like wet somehow networked somehow nerved

Address

The nameless natives could know the night
Better than your brother if you had one
But giving them a name would not
Give them a family, or an orphan
To measure themselves against
And measures are unavoidable
However unnamed, unmanned even
By the twirling 3/4 sea,
A waltz of walls, so easy and quick
In the taking it might have been years
In the making or marring
Or carving up the beast
With his brothers or such soul
Folk music, fork music, silence
Of cardboard, silence of stones
In the beginning the begging
Word was god or gold or hold
Holes became wholes, parts parties
And parties people, and everyone
Can be taken at least two ways,
Taken out depending on how you’re razed
To hear what is here with eyes
Which close to be close, and know
Only the No of the night in which
The day may dress or be addressed
As two, or I won the lost one too.