Susan Gevirtz lives in San Francisco. Her books include Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang, 1996), PROSTHESIS : : CAESAREA (Potes and Poets, 1994), Taken Place (Reality Street, 1993), Linen minus (Avenue B, 1992), and Domino: point of entry (Leave Books, 1992). Black Box Cutaway is just out from Kelsey Street Press.
Working Notes
The films Rope, Compulsion, and Swoon all hover in the vicinity of this poem. All three films are versions of the Leopold and Loeb story. H. L. Mencken was their lawyer—his transcripts of the trial also hover. What is the nature of the unthinkable? Of crime? Sacrifice, still the most erotic act and still never enough. To say anything is to say too much. To do anything too. To write anything too. Murder and everything standing in for something else.
Fibula Fabula Fable
"My parents never gave me anything," he said.
"That's not true," replied the fairy God Mother and
handed him a jeweled ashtray with ashes in it.
whose heads and hands are covered in dark socks
left at an intersection
in a stroller
(in a nest -- one falls
through the firescape)
directions:
return secretly
walk them every day
as if one person is the whole audience sentence
then sudden music stoppage
stampede silence
bellowing cattle
clattering hooves
fists landing grunting breathing
in stealth or suspense
an absolute musical lapse
the page of screen turns
walk the letters across the screen -- pull them
or you can leave all the cards where they have fallen -- littering the
new year -- leave them there and let them melt rot
He took the lens out of his mouth
take the glass off your tongue
and put it on the finger of his him
betroth
downshore a horselike head was finally surfacing from the marsh.
I saw the stripes that show what hope is like
and so my actions inaudible to me
1 May Dream: having agreed to a carefully planned and plotted
murder-
means: she will have a child.
-- From The Dreambook of the Teflon Twins
Tableau
Put a sheet of film in the Underwood
close ups type:
FINAL WORD OF WARNING
I'M NOT A JEW
I'll kidnap my brother and collect ransom from my father
--My kind of incest: Our progeny --child body
Type:
I AM LITTLE
MY HEART IS SAD
Recite: