Bernadette Mayer

Twenty black and white photo-booth shots of Bernadette Mayer in various poses, arranged in four rows of five. She is unsmiling in all of them.

After Catullus and Horace

only the manners of centuries ago can teach me
how to address you my lover as who you are
O Sestius, how could you put up with my children
thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror it doesn't matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery

or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke I wouldn't sleep with you or any man if you paid me
and most of you poets don't have the cash anyway
so please rejoin your fraternal books forever

while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn who might've been induced to digitalize a part of you
were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness
it's good to live without a refrigerator! why bother

to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter?
and of the lonesome Sappho. let's have it warm for now.

John Ashbery

  The New Spirit (excerpt) I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave a...