JON RICCIO
Ventriloquy Soliloquy
Adze to oak, I am a carpentry sprezzatura,
dolls talking in a diction maples from my Mississippian.
Growing up, the left lung neither punctured or developed—
care-taking the retired mimes,
I’d curate the steamer trunk museum
asking where the top hats went.
I sand the voice box, plane the glottis:
Shari Lewis lingua knuckle
Willie Tyler trachea franca
and Wayland Flowers,
the puppetry your life was
under the confirmed aegis of bachelor maquette.
Flexible as an alpha text,
focal as a decent antacid,
in jowls I hasten to aspen.
May the uvula forgive,
the ventricle rarely supersedes.
The Vanna
(a poetry form omitting R, S, T, L, N, & E)
I am a Kokomo yo-yo,
Yakima mummy dogma,
moody fop, hag wig, dyad god.
Hood a PhD (doom ivy),
bump a mug, quick, a bid boom had.
Wood vim, bug quo,
cuppa yucca mocha,
gay app, good cab coda.
Pam who?
Gum abaci, Ammo, Ohio,
hazy a paid himbo, my zoo-hammock fog.
Yuma gouda, mogwai cad,
damp hay ado a pompom ho-hum body bag.
Jig pad, pig zap, paid fad,
hook baby by cook gad.
Ovum ab, why him?
The River Chorus
Based on accounts of the Pascagoula tribe’s mass suicide by drowning: tales of singing water at the river bearing their name.
The tone of a fen is a dirge imposed.
A keener’s leverage lionizes a marsh,
aquifer folklore
enslaved or submerged.
I’ve never scored a pool, let alone a swamp.
It deadens,
it legends,
the thicket’s glissade transcending a magnolia.
A rivulet curates the delta’s coloratura;
crease a phenomenon and you bend its hum—
ethnography ingests.
I’m blending,
I’m biding.
You can float on context by shared margins
just so much.
Melody the meniscus,
it’s what you reap that wades.
Jailbird
Ten thousand hours is the magic number to greatness – Malcom Gladwell
You’re allowed so many sins, they told us in CCD, Mondays at 3:30,
′84 through ′85. GI Jedediah, the cartoon a religion interrupts.
What’s the worst I’ll confess? Have I ever wanted anyone dead
or de-licensed (besides the gastroenterologist)? No.
My sixth-grade depantser imprisoned, despite the pillared life
he leads? Yes. Have I compensated the costume store manager’s
time searching for “Jailbird,” an orange jumpsuit, surfer wig,
and cuffs? There are salt numbs in my lifeline, my brother’s
palm encoded. Neither of us sixth sensed, we dial a psychic
at our barber father’s behest. Two powers I’d have,
should he remake a mutant of me: 1) the ability to detect
medical waste. Band-Aids, swabs, serum et ceteras.
Phobia, the Batman to my Robin of bodily fluids.
2) a photographic memory that augments my auto-
biographical recall, the minutia granted a Kodak state.
Two things artists should remember:
1) the person who introduced them to Joy
Division—thank you Brent Price, your tape deck
and shotgun seat. 2) Greatness’s wayside, hours
one through 9,999. Imagine how you’d track them,
sitting there, Mississippi wet-haired, the slow movement
of a Prokofiev piano concerto playing, humid the constable
breaching your nape. I have a novel on my mother’s laptop,
given to her the month I thought my brother would murder me—
there was an outbreak of olders chasing youngers with lead pipes
that August. The novel has three writers working behind a FedEx
counter, each a former wunderscribe, though you don’t prodigy
in the writing world, no Mozart of the villanelle.
Three writers and their sequitur of non-streams: Wunder One
recollects his first Communion, the pre-wafer confession
he was Sunday-schooled into making. He’d broken another boy’s
miniature sleigh planed from a peanut shell. Hours repented
for totem sodium replaced with a toboggan almond.
Wunder Two narrates on bondage with a chamois
and the violist of a big-fish string quartet. Dinner bagels burnt,
a fastening thereafter. Next, he gives an analysis of singer
Martha Wash, a Weather Girl and member of Sylvester’s
(1947-1988) lung battalion. The rounds she made outing
C + C Music Factory’s sonic puppetry of the televisionest
order. Wunder Three stresses over a poem’s acceptance
contingent on the spelling of acknowledgment, worries
about the degree of disclosure to which he’s mentally ill—
hours glossing a stigma, two Ohios in. Like his support
group told the cowboy with OCD, keep it under chaps,
every level Clevelander reaching their valence cavalcade.
Less than a thousandth of greatness, the lengths I imprisoned
in the obsessive-compulsory tense, infirmity outmagicking.
You’re allowed so many stints, I told myself about OCD,
2000 through 2012, a month of bedroom recovered
on wellness literature and shame chiasmus alone.
It was a bildungsickness, ten thousand hours measured
in fumes. Neatness, the worst I’ll confess.
Regional Glossolalia
Neither carpet crew nor maintenance man hard of hearing
who asks if I collect NASCAR miniatures, but the plumber
looking at pipes in the burst concrete. BURST CONCRETE.
Listen for the toothquartz of those Ts, their glottal station
in this mouthfeel life. Listen for the neighbor pacer’s
insomnia plank, the pendular story his eye-bags make,
the highway noise to which he falls asleep. What is it
about cycles, the psychics who see a crude lacquer
when they change my C-note for a fate? Most people
anniversary their admissions, I’ve been in postponement
since 2005, the year lit-land belonged to Elizabeth Kostova.
Now, I recommend The Historian to a student who pronounces
it “ee-vhil.” The towhead with vinyl binder bears a likeness
to fallen Vietnam combatant Roy Wheat, memorialized
in the Hattiesburg Post Office’s perma-display. I gave up
on a synonym for sacrifice. The corporal a photograph will take.
How did I become a man who buys his bestie a leopard-print
Snuggie? She’s a Scorpio, like my niece, her father with
the retractable affluence among friends joke-maligning
the LGIABQT, and by virtue of my logo for tolerance, me.
I failed a poetry challenge: draft these quintains minus
those letters, see how far your psyche goes. Did alphabet
decanting make a better poet of me? In Arizona, I was too
OCD to ride the streetcar with Richard Siken verses plastered
above the signal cord. Tucson, where I overcame an illness,
narrative last. Ears first. My downfall is micro-imagery:
I’ll give you the snowflake’s papilloma, but not the snow.
I scrape pepper off a salmon’s pre-ketchup quadrant, the capers
mini-Death Stars, French fries a lightsaber duel’s length. I’ve
insured my GI tract, plus the foot that phantom clubs to this day.
The brain tells my Achilles to straighten out, chunnel some
self-belief via tiaraed cerebellum. This poem could’ve been
shaped like the Poison Control Man’s fate when my germaphobia
drove home maintenance. Successive re-approximation, the ten-
dollar way of saying I out-quelled my qualms, each week a cadre
opaque. Waitress, my watercress, the neologisms I fake.
“Have you tried a thesaurus,” I ask the undergrad in Vaderwear
featuring an AT-AT tank top ragged around the force, the future
running on beard-ready sexts, half my schooling spent shaving
sans crème. I had manorexia. Saw my neck explode in a stall,
mid-BM. The act and the degree. We string players, our years
of viola and chin, my time at bay onstage; quasi-intimacy,
the pianist who trafficked in weekend crystallomancy.
He’d lie on top of me, bathrobe inlaid. His foot powder,
Timberland boots, and Deutsche books. I wonder
what he derived beyond Glenn Gould and a shoulder
blade. Fingers self-fulfilling like the Georgia Guidestones,
he’d commence cigarettemageddon mit ein groß pipe,
his favorite recording artist Sir Alfred Brendel who toured
this way and back. We made boarding-school jokes about
plumbing, called our friend’s roommate Smiley because
of his embouchure, his wall postered with The Canadian
Brass, Mario Andretti ruling the cinder that remained.
Smiley, the first whose suspicions made my stomach quease.
Orientation. Accusation. Neither I’ve appeased. Listen,
crystal blades was twenty-three years ago. The psychics
reached as far as the phone cord could. Maybe shoulder-
fucking isn’t for you, but this is dichotomy mixing with
my hard-of-hearing ear, where Southern men come to strip
the vinyl of its heaped-upon oneiric, the window Venetianed
with statistics, the carpet skewered of its speech. What good
is a diphthong to a jackhammer, spokesnoun amid two Hs,
the jargon-slab’s unease? -Mancy to -macy, the former settled
my qualms to the nth degree. May your skin-mancer wear
a Steinway-colored tuft of hair across their face. I can’t say
the practice gave me my nova, that it crested me to lexography,
each polyglot riding out the horoscopes, that Cather novel
adapted for Hallmark TV. Not an insomnia goes by without
some phobia killing a bit of me. Cleaner, the mind composes.
Survivorabilia, a region’s vocalise. These stalagmites I outspeak.
Their ventriloquy concrete.