Issue > Poetry
Maxe Crandall

Maxe Crandall

Maxe Crandall is the author of the chapbooks Together Men Make Paradigms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) and Emoji for Cher Heart (belladonna* chaplet). Together Men Make Paradigms premiered at Dixon Place with an all poet and activist cast and was a finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award. Maxe is the recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship and the Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship.

Hands On Deck

                         —for DC

Yesterday while
you were swilling me
I remembered how
bowled over I felt
my first time to Mars
robots blazing
Cold War turn-ons

For mine
you roll
blue and red
arias over
in your mouth
jib to the bow
all hands on deck

At BAM's Billy Budd
men sing about sleeping
& we view the stage
through nautical keyhole

Finally, an illusion I can trust:
it's what artifice is on
the inside that counts

My dermatologist is
herself
a series of rhymes
(dépêche mode in uniform)
severe lighting and spannung
long fingers tracing my lines

She snaps over my machine
and decrees diagnostic:
     "Your affliction
responds to all advertising
featuring Sharon Stone

We must continue the injections"

I zip up and walk
out onto the ice

A foreign object
     in my face
pulsates at the thought
     of your channel

I bend hard sex toward you
as if
starring
in a beach commercial
for my paradise of leaning

Querelle
has always been
the way you incline
toward me
but I,
wanting to be
the breath
I see in the cold,
shove playbills
(a double
then a couple of triples)
into our communal vacuum
for safe keeping
for warm coming

Yesterday and today
my most whistled libretto
is as recognizable
as you:

     The inside of my heart is a Levittown—
       and you are a
       giant leap for humankind—
     whose lips are floral—
     and whose grip,
     a handful of hair -

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