C S   G I S C O M B E
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FOUR POEMS FROM PRAIRIE STYLE

 

 

Republican National Convention, 2000

 

Fearsome old camp songs on television! Erotic certainty might be a way to the border. (A white actor playing me, shouting; but for now what's the word between us, brother?)

The convention makes much of wild cards, love's face turning up like evil at the window, like evil looking in. On cable: naked black girls in ancient Rome, naked as the white girls in the same movie though not as numerous. If skin's inevitable so is ash. The convention is seamless—tones passing for a zenith of human understanding—but it's just faces to me, the viewer in Indianapolis.

You can carry pleasure too, prosaic or opaque as that may have to be.

 

 

 

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