Sara Mumolo

from Money On It

I can’t hide you—the rock cried out.

mmm

mmm

Because the mechanism of surrealism is an activity

mmm

not an image—I find the embrace in description.

mmm

Where staging of hours counts closer stars

mmm

and fails capitalism

mmm

—so we may conjoin where air does not—

mmm

in San Francisco’s parks

mmm

fog confetti

mmm

and we unfasten

mmm

lids to open brief eyes

mmm

across lawns, this is where we ask:

mmm

What’s the matter with you rock!?

mmm

We mouth: P o w e r!

mmm

And pigeons, ducks beak away their feathers.

mmm

Their plume—in limbo—insults clouds

mmm

under this state: how we bankrupt

mmm

each other one after another. In lieu of

mmm

burning cigarettes through Kant’s money,

mmm

breath cleaves your peering through these holes

mmm

when every tree suddenly

mmm

scents of cultivation,

mmm

parks boil,

mmm

stars blink.

mmm

Variety is the plastic industry we make invisible

mmm

industry is everything even gardenias.

I liked the pomp and circumstance of this.

mmm

Even gardenias strip along poles

mmm

in our demiworld of currency—

mmm

cystic eyes shut— a soot stage

mmm

where militaristic chants desensitize

mmm

(the men). It’s a broadcast

mmm

of ching-chings we imagine

mmm

buoys troops through hybrid-stages. They do not

mmm

make uniforms that fit us

mmm

so we fashion our own

mmm

audiences—feel compelled to enchant—

mmm

Our outlines inseam

mmm

and tailor our attractive suffering:

mmm

The safety pin you pierce through your nipple

mmm

and I thought you were brave—

mmm

ching-ching.

mmm

Its shock, a sign’s art

I shop for the edge of constructs.

mmm

Where all my actions are.

—a tractor, beer, radio-politic

whose public ticker reaches back

to fetch moments off a tight-rope.

Progress, our invention—likely to commercially succeed

real-time grows conceited (extinct)—can we forgo

advancement in favor of shapeliness,

in favor of fields flexing beyond pixilation…

When a horse falls it foams from its mouth

& it is useless: someone shoots it

& its parts concoct into glue. This

glue then gets put into bottles and kids use this

glue to glue things onto cards.

White gets over the kids hands and these kids

eat this glue. This circus

we pick up and drop wherever

a blank moment and Kant’s money

have yet to breed.  Our portmanteau definition

is a method of narratology, a split-screen moral:

our plastic Midwest

we hate appearing in the dream of–

SARA MUMOLO curates the Studio One Reading Series in Oakland, CA . She edits CALAVERAS with Alisa Heinzman. Previous projects include editing MARY Magazine and co-editing Sorry IV Snake . Find her poems forthcoming in Coconut, Typo, Letterbox, Dusie & Cannibal. Read some now in Shampoo, Barnaby Jones 2, Hoboeye, Article Journal & Berkeley Poetry Review.