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Anne Gorrick :: Three poems


The River

is a mirage of casinos, highways
Turn on Radio Albany
and listen to your chapters, Euphrates, your end time
There is free piano sheet music in your pantries
wide palms, jeweled suites, these dragons
lofts of tobacco, movies
There will be no return to doubt
I am the Queen of Braille in poker rooms
Who is the Springsteen of Greek mythology?
Salon, Styx, Thames, their showtimes
Urgently Upstate
ankle deep in the gauntlets of wild locations
just try to schedule the Yangtze


The Stars

My destination is striped
Sheet music forevers
against a confederate flag on ebay
Her fists are bound with clocks
Come out, go down, go blue
The stars are on a diet of the blackest tears
David Bowie, his glory, playfully eats moonlight
Existence soars before it sleeps peacefully
before phrases align in a Hollywood of meaning
in hair studios, in Aruba
There’s a scorpion in her heart
It ties things together like Orion
Just blink for us, Jukebox Ghost
Call my name as if I was on the Kansas City Chiefs
The dust looks down, leans in to kiss you
It’s 1939
We’re in Mayalsia
The Big Dipper was last seen over Nags Head
a country of frozen faith
Beatlemania or our Lady of Guadalupe?
Poems are printable activities
He was a star quality grinder made of celestial glitter
His past was real
He wore bright clothing at night
The moon was in Florence laughing over Sam’s dice
Appraise Vija Celmins like a virus in the Vista Mall
What we see is already dead
We’ll fall and lead ourselves out of the riddle
Falling is remembering


Stupid Love Coupon Monkey Games
(based on the poem “Craze, Novel, Pink” – as suggested by Google)

Nail lacquer, not just coffee, nobody wonder girls
Pigman Pharmaceuticals, pinkblack, pinballs
Black dice slip like champagne or carnations
Pinterest, eye symptoms, cake box
Whole New Mind: a princess boutique in calming colors
A chance to miss your cracks of sunlight
Or a carpenter is building a rectangular room
Or a Carpathian nightmare poem
Carpenter bees, even a sentence can be an invasive species
Speak to me in bathtub Latin
It’s chilly in the Kelvin Hotel
Slush Fahrenheit, zip cochise appaloosa
Days fade into his hearing aids
Vocaloid shimmer, an instinct toward language leaf shower, a leather bed
or an absence of grass
It’s a pronunciation polka
Invert property shark, vernacular dissent
On the conjunctivitis express
Her skin paved in gold songs and indifference
Chocolate, cobblestone, cement
In corn, the trait for tall
A November filled with holes, a novena to sit still
Documentary on Nerval’s apocryphal lobster
Smells like a nervous magician
An arranged marriage of hypertrophic scars
Make a drink out of this imperfect world: an ice merchant’s dream
Never poke your uncle with a fork
Never polka with a porcupine
Polkadot cadaver, prank an anarchist
An archive of feelings, Japan at dawn
Antler velvet, a hot tub full of sheet music must be destroyed
Keep your hands to yourself – knitting is half the battle
Played his digeridoo in an illuminated Singapore
And possibly I like the thrill of pony shows
What do you do when you are bored at a royal wedding?
What is the volume of a cylinder? The value of my car?
What did we invent?  What did we wear?  What did we eat?
Lack of sleep, empathy, color, vitamin d, thereof
Inkheart, ink my whole body
She nicknames her pancakes and then eats them
Disappointment is free of invisible prepositions
When is the snowager asleep in her jelly world?  Her soup kitchen hole?
What causes neon tetra disease?
Pine embryo, her veins’ poppies, dresses
Mapping the thorax, an empress in golden woodlands, her printing palace
Czar pimp, his mouth stuffed with pronouns and promise
She is a portrait of devices
Her anxiety Yeats and my grammar
Radio heart with a roof that doesn’t leak
Junk milk, she’s got a sunburn for living
Sorrow formed by a river, she wore Youtube around her neck
Her neck scissors and swans in its simplest form
A period of consequences and organizing
Shell broken, pain plus dogs, logic gate
An opaque object like a war or a heart
An opal hearted country like a shell, shale wound
Moonesque, Pisces, pillow, pill addict
A penguin with depression who is dead
She calculates her love in shoes
Regret trimmings
With a pocket full of shells, a pinch of salt and a
pistol in his hands
With a permit you can drive with passion and pair of steel toed boots
A perfectly balanced roulette wheel and a pearl earring
Pentatonic world voices like moths
A pen warmed up in hell, a pen in the dryer
Which erases writing, which writes in space, which removes scratches from cars
The white ink where lambs are born
When the novacaine wears off and Nova Scotia lobster season is over
A plastic ark for sale
Mothballs, lemmings, juicy fruit gum
Buffalo hump black mark back bow
With a bottle of jack before I brush my teeth
An apparent intention in the fate of an individual
Voidchorus, clowns that caper in sawdust rings
At the Clovis three dollar theatre
A retarded horse rustled my jimmies
Rabbit dynamite rhymes, that rug tied the room together
In heaven, no skin, no shoes and her voice is no longer full of money
Her velvet vase, her very eyes, glitter in her veins
Red dust all showing


Anne Gorrick [photo credit: Franco Vogt] is a poet and visual artist.
She is the author of seven books of poetry including most recently: My Beauty is an Occupiable Space/An Exorcism (footnoted) (a collaboration with John Bloomberg-Rissman, forthcoming in 2018 from Paloma Press); An Absence So Great and Spontaneous it is Evidence of Light (forthcoming in 2018 from the Operating System); and The Olfactions: Poems on Perfume (BlazeVOX Books, 2017). She collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book, “Swans, the ice,” she said, funded by the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She also co-edited (with poet Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Writing from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016).
With poet Melanie Klein, she curates the reading series Process to Text, which focuses on innovative writing from in and around New York’s Hudson Valley.  She previously curated the reading series Cadmium Text from 2006 - 2014 in Kingston, NY.
She is President of the Board of Trustees at Century House Historical Society, home of the Widow Jane Mine, an all-volunteer organization (www.century house.org) devoted to the historic preservation and investigation through the arts of the now defunct cement industry in Rosendale, NY. 
Anne Gorrick lives in West Park, New York.

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submissions :: where is the river

Up to six poems in a single .doc file with author biography and photo to kieferjdlogan@gmail.com All rights revert to the author/s upon publication.

issue twenty-seven :: January/February 2022

  Christopher Patton :: Glitch Apple Howie Good :: Three poems Kenneth M Cale :: Three visual poems Christian Ward :: Three poems Matthew Walsh :: POACHED EGGS Jeremy Scott :: Five poems

about :: where is the river

where is the river :: a poetry experiment is a bi-monthly poetry journal open to a variety of aesthetics, forms and experiences, with a preference towards showcasing work by emerging writers. There is no single path, nor any single way. Founded in September 2017. Edited by Kiefer JD Logan.