Epistemology of the Phone Booth by Gregory Pardlo

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 5, 2014   Epistemology of the Phone Booth   Gregory Pardlo

I found the scrap of City Paper classified, the 1-900 number and photos like candidates there, in love’s voting machine. Discomfort station. No pissoir. Hothouse maybe for a fourteenth-year sprig: me. Light box to slideshow the introvert            cloaked in a prepaid identity discreet as a shirttail in the fly.                                                            Ma Bell’s shelter was brutal & snug. I’d heard the ram’s horn hum. A hymn. Just like prayer I thought. No answer. Clack’d the splendid tongue                                                        and bloom! Salutations rose like pollen, prepped me for                the inverse of police sketch artists, the one who would evoke so I could render, in my mind, the enigma of the wanted; one to source               the vacuum wrenching stutters like rivets off my tongue.                Plink. Into the sewer of the mouthpiece. Then the universal ballad of the waiting room. Casiotone.                                                       Hold (me) music.                                         No orgone closet. More like that other-lonely doom—the body encapsulated, its inventory ever unknown.      Dantean vestibule. Anti-chat room.                             When the genderless voice beyond began to lavish I grew ears all over,                                                                 inner ears swiveling from one tepid libretto to the next tuning for some satin frequency the culture promised until, I repent (forgive me father), the card went bust.            Copyright © 2014 by Gregory Pardlo. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Eve Sedgewick’s Epistemology of the Closet inspired me to look for another symbolic medium of sexual consciousness, and I found myself writing an allegory of awakening using the ancient vehicle of the phone booth. I see the kid in the poem as a kind of Baudelairean Quixote coursing electric distances in search of love.” –Gregory Pardlo   Gregory Pardlo is the author of Digest (Four Way Books, 2014).   He serves as visiting writer for the MFA program at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. Most Recent Book by Pardlo   Digest (Four Way Books, 2014) "Part of Eve's Discussion" by Marie Howe "The Problem of Hands" by Louise Mathias "Photographs of the Interiors of Dictators’ Houses" by Albert Goldbarth Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038