Week of June 15, 1998 - June 21, 1998

Sara Ulinskas and Dominic Le Fave

BECOME A POET OF THE WEEK
by e-mailing a few of your shorter pieces or one long piece to me
ALONG WITH a bio of any reasonable length. (Include what city you live in)
It's fun, it's easy, it's free. Impress your friends. Impress your mother.


Send to: POTW@PoetrySuperHighway.com

Sara Ulinskas
piscesgrl@hotmail.com
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9162

Bio(auto)

Sara Ulinskas is a 21 year old self described poetic junkie. She lives for listening to poetry and drinking lots and lots coffee at the same time. She attends open mikes, slams and featured readings in Connecticut almost every week and once in a while she actually reads a poem or two at them. One of her poems, "In the Morning" was recently published by Grandpa Joe is Crazy Productions in the anthology "Blue Plate Special".

Sara also enjoys creating and experiencing art. She travels to galleries and museums from Boston to New York every chance she gets. Some of her artwork has been published in the anthology "Blowtorch Songs", an anthology of Connecticut Poets from Ye Old Font Shoppe.

When she's not out and about enjoy poetry and art, Sara can be found in her home in Terryville, CT, typing out HTML codes until her fingers get numb for her website, Pisces Underwater. Pisces Underwater is a virtual open mike page where all kinds of poets, writers and artists can share the talents.

The following work is Copyright © 1998, and owned by Sara Ulinskas and may not be distributed or reprinted in any formwhatsover without written permission from the author.

In The Morning

When I tiptoe out of the shower
and wrap soft towel
around still moist skin,

I miss your touch,

healing and warm
like the terry cloth
around damp arms and breasts.

And I miss

your form,
the perfect fit to mine,
clinging to the parts of me
I now keep covered
with laundered whites.

And oh how I remember you!

Your awakening caress,
your gentle lips pressed
against mine.

But I dress and move on with the day.
Trade the memories for
number crunching
and carpal tunnel pains.

Until the next daybreak
and the next daily ritual,
where once more I will be

Early morning missing you.

Dirty Mattress

We sit on a dirty mattress in your garage
One that never found its way to the curb
Our bodies are close, our shoulders touch
But our eyes wander and
Our minds are a million miles away...
Dusty pink flamingos perch besides the old bed
And a velvet Elvis watches over us
I wonder when that painting last hung inside the house
Was it back when your mother was a free lovin' hippy?
Was it when Elvis was still king?
He still is...
King of some remote island in the South Pacific
Yeh, I read it in the Star
So like your gramma used to say
"It must be the truth if it's in black and white"
I wouldn't think it was true unless it was in red
Written in your blood and sealed with a kiss
And still I wonder, was that kiss golden?
The one you just gave me as we sit
Talking about your ex girlfriend
And what a bitch she is
For wanting her freedom.
Was it really what you wanted?
Or did you do it just to stop your lips
From spilling out more painful truth?
I shiver as you cover me with that
blanket of deception and
dream of a warmer climate
where the flamingos are always live
and well dusted
and I never have to worry about
trusting motives
trusting you
trusting me
never to cross that line again
from comforting friend to
convenient lover
like we did just then
like we did as we kissed
on that old
dirty
mattress

Dominic Le Fave
lefave@english.umass.edu

Bio(auto)

Dominic Le Fave is a religious thinker living deep in the woods of New England (Montague, MA). His poems have appeared in the Exquisite Corpse, Southwestern Review, Watershed, and other places.

The following work is Copyright © 1998, and owned by Dominic Le Fave and may not be distributed or reprinted in any formwhatsover without written permission from the author.

Ode to a Banana Tree

After the deluge.
The damp globules
engorged with paleolithic menstrum
give up their latecapitalist lead.

The swollen tubers sink deeper
into the progenerative ooze.

Nine months earlier,
the phallic mother ingests nine snakes.
Their gray excrement replaces her spinal fluid.
Her daughter looks aside.

Before that,
the coroner slices the patriarch's gonads.
Maggots have replaced his semen:
the origin of death.

Now a dog vomits beneath.
Rodents lick the rotten fruit and its slurry.
A long gestation has yielded the sweetest fruit.
Don't eat it.

The Sludge

Black bile of late capitalism
putrefying in the innocence of material,
it calls out to me:

"This is what is left of the cargo from the ancestors."
"You must bear it to the market!"

It is not enough that the ancestors are corpses.
They must shit in our paths,
and populate our lives with mothers.

O, woe to us if we cannot scrape
the patriarchal scum from our patriarchal shoes.

War Poem

Behold the rosefingered afternoon.
Once again the day tarries with the corpse.
Once again the armies march.

Remove your entrails brothers and sisters.
Replace them with the heads of chickens,
Their beaks removed,
Their eyes glazed over,
Their spirit saturating their feathers.

Refuse all food that the beakless chickens do not eat.
Do not recover the blood reddening their wattles.

Wrap your money in black and bury it in the bananas.
Offer all your broad beans to the poor.
Say nothing to them of their origin.
Soon the rosefingered afternoon will extricate you.