Anne Gorrick

This is a poem, you dumbass

 

This is a poem about what to do if you find yourself in a Fairy Tale

It’s about restlessness and freaks

It’s a machine made of words

This is a poem that heals fish

It’s sometimes about palindromes like: “A dog! A panic in a pagoda!” or “Ah,

          Satan sees Natasha”

 

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This is a poem about cutting and being predestined for fame

This is a poem that Follows the Rules.

It’s about the dangers of rewards

It reinforces the sense of trembling on the brink of some obscure revelation

This is a poem that’s got enormous mouth-joy, one that can be used to describe

          any character, setting, idea or concept found in literature

 

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This is a poem that starts out sounding like a nice poem about nature and maybe

           love, and then it becomes about how God views sex

This is a poem called a pyramid and as you can see it's set out in the shape of a

           pyramid

It asks isotopes to remain still

and because it’s a poem, for once, I don't have to be rigorously accurate.

This is a poem for my boyfriend (well, kinda about him), and how we’d spend the

          perfect Christmas Eve

 

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This is a poem I wrote about a stalker and stalking. Please enjoy!

This is a poem that is consistently placed in literary anthologies

I recently wrote this poem, what do you think?

This is a poem-writing orchard.  There are missing details.  It is also self-

          referential

This is a poem about girls who like boys who like cats and wear glasses— the

          boys, not the cats. This is a poem about girls

This is a poem hedged with razor wire

 

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This is a poem about a man leaving his wife

This is a poem that knows how to make use of nothing

This is a poem, not a song

This is a poem, not by me

It can fit neatly into the most hectic of schedules, one that you could leave

         around the house in absolute confidence

 

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When you submit a poem for publication: Here are a few classic poems that don't

get accepted: Parochial, I've-got-no-money 'bed-wetter' poems; self-consciously poetic this-is-a-poem poems; poems that describe Bishop's periodic visits to Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital where Pound was institutionalized

This is a poem that George wrote in his frustration about the regulations forced

            on the shrimp industry

This is a poem about drinking scotch

It’s not a bedtime story

This is a poem without you in it

 

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This is a poem I made around a Japanese myth about a bird-faced child

It’s also about my obsession with a Hollywood celebrity

This is a poem about fruit and sin and forgiveness

It’s also about duplicity

It could even be about a pair of Patagonian penguins.

 

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This is a poem I wrote about overcoming addiction

It’s about the itch, not the scratch

It’s about plum flowers, petals falling everywhere too fast

It’s about notation

This is a poem created by appropriating the appropriator

This is a poem for people who find life excessively vivid

 

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This is a poem for a small and skeptical audience

It’s about vajazzling AND Paul Celan

and how forbidden things become attractive

It’s also about memory and history and what survives, what escapes, what 

          fails

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written, and how they fall

           to the ground as ash