Image by Vasily Kandinsky via Art Institute of Chicago

on Sunday after church I took a walk
so I could discuss your nipples
with the friendly woodpecker
who visits the birch tree
to turn its bark into torn paper

but now the woodpecker fails to pull its conversational weight
earlier this morning the woodpecker was helpful
describing the swan’s superimpositions
the eschatological underwear

laugh tracks served as euphoria-inducing punctuation
de Chirico waxing Calder
in the metaphorical washroom
near the not yet bloomed orange roses

we advanced the discussion to Dr. Kildare
licking little glassine squares and affixing
collected stamps to their mausoleum book
as if I were the obstetrician and not the undisciplined annotator

Wayne Koestenbaum
Wayne Koestenbaum — poet, critic, fiction writer, artist — has published twenty-two books, including Ultramarine, The Cheerful Scapegoat, Figure It Out, Camp Marmalade, My 1980s & Other Essays, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Circus, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award). In 2020 he received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his literary archive in 2019. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.