City Bird

Selected Poems
(1991 - 2009)

by Millie Niss
edited by Martha Deed

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

City Bird: Selected Poems (1991 - 2009) Copyright 2010 by Martha Deed Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Martha Deed Cover Photo Oxford Bicycles by Millie Niss First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-008-8 Library of Congress Control Number 2010934402 BlazeVOX [books] 303 Bedford Ave Buffalo, NY 14216 Editor@blazevox.org

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Outline of a Novel by the Storyteller Laureate of Hazlahan I can feel the axe on my neck as they read me my contract before the fatal swing: The Storyteller Laureate of Hazlahan must produce one major literary work a year and a story or poem each month or else face execution I thought it was a great honor to be appointed to the position I had written a book a year for six years that no one had actually read (small presses dont market very well, you know) The Storyteller Laureate publishes under the Imperial seal of Hazlahan and his works are read in all the Universities and papers are assigned to schoolchildren about each and every minor little poem and it is extremely rare to get rejected because the Storyteller Laureate is the head rejecter of all of Hazlahan he is the ultimate arbiter if someone wants to fight a rejection slip they can request an audience with the Storyteller Laureate to have justice done but if it is dreck the Storyteller Laureate can recommend execution of the author in severe cases or a total ban on submissions and publications if the offense to good taste is less egregious it is a dangerous thing to appeal to the Storyteller Laureate but the Storyteller Laureate rarely rejects himself and as the Emperor of Hazlahan is illiterate he does not often exercise his Imperial Veto power on the Storytellers publications oh what a nice thing to be Storyteller Laureate but I have violated my contract it is the end of December and by January first I must produce a major work I am prohibited from working on any holidays and December 19th is the Emperors Birthday traditionally the work is presented to him then all bound and covered with positive blurbs from various Imperial officials and official literary lights Its not that I dont feel a novel coming on I can feel it coming out of me fully formed jam-packed with action and pungency

but every time I try to write it down it sneaks back inside in out in out in out in out it hurts to strain so much it strikes me that if the novel could be made less solid more fluid, more stream of consciousness and ghostly in its narration less intense it might slide out of me more easily the last Storyteller Laureate was blessed with the gift of logorrhea he had only to sit down and novels and plays and poetry collections came shooting out of him in a spray of mediocrity with tiny lumps of quality mixed in when they appointed me they wanted somebody a bit more controlled more regular less diarrhoic in my prose and for several years I fit the bill nicely but now I have constipation of the imagination it could be because my last book was too visionary and when I was interviewed about the wonderful symbolism in it I said, what symbolism? there really is a purple two-headed weasel living inside each and every person feeding on intestinal content and directing our souls. My weasel talks to me all the time, and so I know how to behave so as to be saved in the final Apocalypse the key to life is learning to hear the weasel within seeing the weasel is yet another step towards salvation if you are fully mindful you will see the weasel whenever you look in the mirror and summon it your skin will become transparent and you will see the outline of your intestines with the two-headed weasel swimming inside that is the goal of life after this my daily orange juice started tasting funny and I was no longer certain about the existence of the weasel within I spied around the palace one day and discovered that the Court Physician had ordered a philtre of Haldol to be added to my breakfast each day and I couldnt protest 2

because disobeying the Court Physician is grounds for execution as is poking into the Physicians activities he is allowed to operate totally without the patients knowledge to avoid false cures caused by false hopes or reactions of a sick mind against the Physic which will make it better however I had heard that Haldol slows down the movements of the mind as of the intestine killing the weasel and my novel in one fell swoop it could be that this was deliberate as I have heard rumors that the Court Physician would like to become Storyteller Laureate and my execution would serve his nefarious purposes so each morning I poured my orange juice down the gullet of the Court Cat and watched it get stiff and sluggish as my novel wrote itself down as quickly as I could type saved. . . and my intestines also have begun to produce fine output for the Imperial Compost Pile for which I get paid extra by the bushel basket isnt life sweet! 3

Minutes from the New Zealand Flat-Earth Society Between the picture and the picturesque There lies the real take for example sheep: Theyre picturesque when grazing on the front Of a pamphlet from the New Zealand Tourist Board, But when you meet them on the mountainside, Theyre greasy, dirty, and not really white And have an annoying tendency to stay put When several thousand of them are blocking your way. Of course if this is New Zealand, the situation is complicated By the fact that you and the sheep are both upside-down, Or so my illustrious uncle was convinced Despite all attempts to teach him the contrary. He was grateful to the end of his days (Which ended very late at 92) That he had the good fortune to be born On the unique spot New York where things Are the right way up. Perhaps it is we who are upside-down That would explain why change keeps falling out Of pockets into gutters and other oozy places Where you wouldnt want to reach in to get it. Being inverted may have an effect Upon the intellect, excusing us From all the stupid things we do and say. We will have to convene a committee of experts To determine which way the earth should tilt Meanwhile, donations from schoolchildren are amassing For a campaign to twist the earth our way.

Lapland Someday Ill go to Lapland, Said the father whenever he was miffed. Ill commune with the seals. Nancy inopportunely laughed, imagining Her husband among the pinnipeds. How he would try to make them say, Thank you Each time he threw them a fish. Hed be home in a week, she knew But somehow it never came to that. There are Laplanders in Lapland, Piped up 11-year old Sally Because in Social Studies They had done a three-week unit On places colder than Buffalo. They dress in furs and have sleds. I could avoid them, said the father. Surely there arent that many. And the father returned to his mashed potatoes Clearly inhabiting a world consisting only of Himself, his fork, and the potatoes. For all the help he was to her, He might as well have been in Lapland, thought Nancy. Can I go to Lapland, too? said Billy Trying to get out of clearing the table. His fathers musings had convinced him That in Lapland when you grill fish Over an open fire There are no dishes to think about. This seemed a big advantage. We are in BUFFALO, NOT LAPLAND, Intoned Nancy, and in Buffalo, people do chores.

Chitchat at the Chancellors Tea seventeen tarantulas however? Bicentennial bash borders heretofore squeamishly, Wouldnt you? hereditary green part-time arachnophobia visits Sweden chortling slowly yesterday I can kangaroo, too slowly quoth he charmingly, in arpeggios. logging circumscribed chartreuse philosophically in absentia summarily squats have another ghost minces Marcella although clam etiquette bursts, I intuit instead potatoes, purchase impresarios on the dole, of course convincingly underhanded among byzantine grapes blue leave-taking with supposedly cement Wunderbar!

The Carmelites sell souvenirs near the entrance of Auschwitz slowly or faster if they choose an apple tree creates a shadow and the crosses are like lenses focusing the light conveying immanence losing consciousness between sleep and waking keeping silence cinematically not as in a Chinese garden random apples pose hard questions about the light long since dissolved into space the trees are a ceiling holding silence and the blossoms hide memories of distant cries

The Roachs Tale a very educated roach on the Upper West Side was crawling up a bus shelter reading the signs advertising rooms to rent because he had just been evicted that happens to roaches a lot and they dont even get 30 days notice this roach was way too smart for Roach Motels and he wouldnt go near any kind of bait but the lady had sprayed his home which was a cozy little place with his extended family underneath the fridge it had a homey vibration and just the right temperature and humidity and the roach never came out during the day to bother the woman he minded his own business and he even ate her garbage for her! she should have been happy but she was prejudiced, a real racist and she went around claiming to be a liberal she didnt give a damn about his personality or their common interests he even read her Village Voice after she was done with it! and you cant imagine what a laborious task reading a newspaper is for an insect that is only about the size of the word the but anyway, this roach was homeless, and it was January and he was looking for a new apartment the Columbia students usually have good garbage he was partial to Chinese food containers left on the floor for three days that way they acquire a special tang that humans dont seem to like for some reason so he was reading the signs on the bus stop at 116th street and his little roachy heart stopped when he saw an announcement for a weekly Roach Colloquium in the Department of Entomology he decided to go and it turned out to be full of the weirdest looking humans hed ever seen

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they gathered in the department lounge before the talk and discussed the roaches they had seen in their travels to the Amazon and the favelas of Brazil and the bayous of Louisiana and some of them even carried small containers which the roach soon realized were insect carrying cases he smelled strange pheromones they called to him he had never been in love though he had at last calculation 27,247,566 children most of whom of course would not survive pupacy when the presentation began he saw the source of the love vibes he had been sensing they came from the star of the show, an enormous, bright yellow, Peruvian stink-bug at least 500 times his size he wondered how to declare his love would she be interested in a mere . . . roach roaches in her native land were huge, majestic, reptilians capable of shaking the earth with their footfalls or so it seemed to a common New York City pinky-fingernail-sized housepest he vowed to write her a sonnet declaring his suit or perhaps a ghazal? or maybe something modern in the style of Lorca or Neruda given her nationality would she be into magical realism? then the presentation started it began with some obviously loving (on the part of the researcher) descriptions of the stink bugs rarity and beauty but then the lecturer said of course it is among the dumbest animals known to man according to some measures, for instance certain tests of harm avoidance the single celled amoeba is brighter the roach blanched (at least metaphorically) he wasnt interested in dating a bozo even a very pretty one sadly, he left his rare but stupid cousins and went off to find a plain but street smart New York cockroachmaiden to marry and have several million children with

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Its a Whitman Morning! The homeless woman on the corner calls out in a language she alone speaks. Her words bounce off the curb, fall into the Hudson, and penetrate the oceanic depths. Their saltiness is my saltiness. . . the words that come ashore on the jagged rocks of Marazion have the salt of my sweat in them. You, too, are a part of the anthem Do you recognize your voice? Whimsical, awkward, arrogant, coy. . . America tests its newly deepened voice: The clack-boink of basketballs in the courtyard of my building is a part of it. The tinkling of an ice-cream truck pulling the desires of youth through the city streets like an unmatching thread used to mend the pocket of a beloved coat The crash of a florists iron curtain sealing off dahlias and daylilies from the lustful night The salsa music flowing from the foot of Samuel Tildens statue The creak of windows exhaling essence of bacon fat and coffee into the morning air The boom of a door slamming on a former lover; He will never shave here again. The whine of an ambulance carrying an expectant mother of twins The braying of the Staten Island Ferry as it disgorges its load of commuters on a hot August evening All these are a part of the song but they are not the song. No scholars glosses, no learned lexicons can amplify this melody. I bathe in it and embrace the limpid swell. I draw it close to me and with a lovers soothing words appease the waves.

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