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"

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

***

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.

***

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

***

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

Anne Gorrick is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of I-Formation (Book 2) (Shearsman Books, Bristol, UK, 2012), I-Formation (Book 1) (Shearsman, 2010), and Kyotologic (Shearsman, 2008). She has collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists' book, "Swans, the ice," she said, funded by the Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also done extensive collaborations with artist and architect Scott Helmes and poet John Bloomberg-Rissman. She is co-editing with Sam Truitt an anthology of adventurous poetry from New York's Hudson Valley called: In|Filtration: A Hudson Valley Salt Line (Station Hill, Barrytown, NY, 2014).

She curates the reading series Cadmium Text, which focuses on innovative writing from in and around New York's Hudson Valley (www.cadmiumtextseries.blogspot.com), and she co-curates the electronic poetry journal Peep/Show with poet Lynn Behrendt (www.peepshowpoetry.blogspot.com), a "taxonomic exercise in textual and visual seriality."

Images of her visual art can be found here: http://theropedanceraccompaniesherself.blogspot.com/

Anne Gorrick lives in West Park, New York.