GEORGE KALAMARAS

Hall of the Imperial Silkworm

Okay. Command me a panoramic torch I could place in sand a woman or two deep.
Place my wrist into a basket so that I might understand history from the perspective
     of the socially cut-off.

The agony of not having coffee was over.
The Zavalas had gathered nearly three kilos of sugar.

We ate pumpkins, boiled fragments of sky that fell as star-sand and clutch, and
     proclaimed our dry spell over.
We danced on the naked chest of a sea urchin, transparent as a round bead.

Someone reminded us of the Hall of the Imperial Silkworm.
In 1696, the Kungxi emperor inscribed lines of poetry very tenderly inside the
     labia of his favorite courtesan.

Among every fold of our complicated body scar, we extend from the soles of our
     burning feet in sand to the Nine Heavens somehow mysteriously below us in
     another swirl.
To reinforce celestial patronage, we fell from the falling of grace and ascended
     tone by tone.

Little gorgeous sound in the simple of our throat becoming that much more loud.
I would love you as I have loved no other.

My little infant brain must have gotten exposed too early in life to the thrashing of
     others, to the not-quite-invisible why and cry of approaching divorce.
Even my beagle sleeps with one eye wide.

I command all the panoramas of pain to leave me. Once and for—please.
I place my most anguished arousal, what from me is thickest and most stiff—as
     poetry—into the halls of possibility, the vulva of the unknown.