 |
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||
 |
|
|
Valve Works
by Rob Sherman & Sarah Ogilvie Read the full text below, or download the PDF here. 
Hypothalamus p.4 Heart p.5 Hallux p.6 Lungs p.7 Eyes p.8 Liver p.9 Hands p.10 Stomach p.11 Spleen p.12 Kidney p.13 Teeth p.14
All poems © Rob Sherman Artwork by Sarah Ogilvie
The part of the brain that controls hunger, thirst, and body temperature. The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
You may hang, My Holy Greek, In the amniote, like a stalactite breathing An alloy of me, dripping it Erotically Down the Escher stairway That my ribs make. Your juice enters my heart, Makes it a heaving, overclocked engine That loosely relates to that afternoon I chased ducks and she disapproved. You may hang, a bud, a nipple, A pear, a cave painting, a tongue. You may hang however you please. For I can feel you if I push against The beams of my mouth My pilot, featureless as a knee, Suspended like a sinner. My crippled, Bacchal organiser That stimulates my growth.
A hollow, pump-like organ of blood circulation. The Random House Dictionary
You look like a dog's head, panting, repeating noise, The doctors stroke your muzzle and your ears prick at my voice.
The first or innermost digit of the foot; The Great Toe. The Random House Dictionary
In which the poet constructs a malediction against his own hallux, which, in the end, has caused him nothing but grief.
You grow in, you burrow, you mole You Pinochet, you skunk, you troll, You fat twin pig, gout-sponged, you spread Take your real estate from the less fortunate. You bloat, you block, you foul menstruate.
May an ill-advised Andean climb in poor health, Make you peel and crisp and eat yourself. May a spindled fish, with teeth and intent, Rip you from your prehensile indent.
I would tumble forth four hundred times to see you gone and burned.
A sack-like organ of respiration. Stedman's Medical Dictionary
If I think of you at all, I think of you as kindly, Insubstantial, clean and chambered, A great treasury of exchange.
Your gold is hidden from all thieves By the virtue of invisibility.
The vertebrate organ of sight. The American Heritage Science Dictionary
A scoop of rain black some ice cream in a drain black a bird a house a shovel that grits painfully against the road black black black The back of itself the encircling pink the light through the lid the hinged scaffolding and early to bed This is what it sees but all through water, just water and skin water and skin to see where it's been
The bile-secreting organ of an animal. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
A reworking of Shakespeare's sonnet No. XXXI.
TO. THE .ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF.
Your bosom is my noddled bed, And underneath the skin, My ear plugs into some godhead And I begin to hear the din, Of trapped hates and past loves Bad beers and the nervous tread As the wide orchards of the hepatic groves Python-stretch them dead. The plug-hole sponges closed again, The flow's directed down, They roost in piles like ordered hens Amongst the crenellated brown. Their images I loved, but your great comatic mole Has synthesised their acids to a heaving, wasteful whole.
Hands The terminal, prehensile part of the upper limb. Random House Dictionary
People never really touch, a static field surrounds them. They settle into it, like backs against the skein of tents. But with a balloon's lens they are covered. Cover me, O field, O electric field! And let me breathe free inside the nothing-bag of me.
A sac-like enlargement of the alimentary canal. Random House Dictionary
The greatest democracy curls beneath my lungs. It greets the heavy politics of bread And the haemorrhaged logic of satsuma Equally and with aplomb. The cardia opens like a crab's jaw And the forum within bubbles and shifts To the offbeat of burp and spew. Debate is done amongst hydrogen And then, at the Pyloric door The terraces of dark, the country, the scent of glue. 
A ductless organ... serving... in the destruction of worn-out red blood cells. Random House Dictionary
Eight months before I was born I felt you sicked up, I think, From a genesis gut no longer than a fingernail, A sleepy forge, an oven for destruction, the blood torch.
An old book calls you the organ of laughter And I believe you giggle bile, that funny food, into me So that I can chew and not choke, and the bones and spokes
Of the bicycles chicken skeletons make, the ribs of pigs. Are broken in your Etna core, your magma that digests.
But most I see a line of bumping, clumsy blood, quaking and true. Past their use, rejected and obtuse, marching to their death in you.
A pair of bean-shaped organs... that secrete urine. Random House Dictionary
A conversation. I think you are the poorer brother, of us two. I agree, brother. You curl less like a Joey and more like a bean. I agree, brother. It was your fault that the incident happened, at that party, years ago, when he was about to score. I agree, brother. Your cortex is patchy, like an old bug net. You are right, brother. I think they should take you; you'll feel at home, with The pensioner heart, the veteran dick, the witchdoctor brain. I will go, brother. The hard bodies... attached in a row to each jaw, serving the mastication of food and weapons of attack. Random House Dictionary
You are a display case of flint tools and iron arrowheads, A doddery, crooked, Easter Island of relics, Some with use, sharp and the ship-wrecked splinters of dogs Others, the cleverest, pushed to the back, To grumble, shift, die and go black.
  |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
| Site Map |