Tony Trigilio

Aristotle Thrills the Fissure Step

Aristotle thrills the fissure step, chasing great caribou
inside the pretend delicatessen. Southward, hoard
of the modern uprising: an aesthete whose sacrosanct
observance prickles the highest vanes of clamor can be

explained to thousands. My maladjustment chalked up
to workstations and candelabra. But the desperado inside
my Outlook calendar is an ecumenical etching, a summer-
intern muckraker, an elongated schoolmaster gradually

broadened to make the ingénue fall through the sofa
laughing. The first budgets of the twenty-first century:
the poke, the nub, their neo-liberalism. Palindrome and
seabird. The dominant social group exhausts itself.

“Spontaneity” replaced by “constraint” in ever less
disguised and indirect forms, in outright police measures.

We Should’ve Known Swindlers Can Pose as Subterraneans

But we persist, calling it a veranda.
In Europe, bicycles grow from the flutter.
Irrational bankers soften the fun
surrounded by shinier lightning.
This traditional, popular conception
of the world is unimaginatively
called “instinct,” though it is a primitive
and elementary historical acquisition.
Frugal parents from Soviet Florida
bicker in fumy saloons assumed
venomous because of their fused anthers.
We should’ve known swindlers can pose
as subterraneans. Our single-genital
arbiters grossly oversimplified it for us.

The Seat, the Charlatan, the #Latergram

The seat, the charlatan, the #latergram:
curator dolls sink reasonably well.
Can you blame us for wanting to gull
the great money—the only orthodoxy
was the newspaper, which at the moment
revealed itself inept. This never became
the platform for new organic policy.
We learned to entertain ourselves with

our thrills. The fairground must be a nut-
house of umbrellas to get what we want.
Reapers, mutation, internets: it takes a few
journalists to make good melodrama happen.
Love is the fence we build around someone
who arouses the pest we spend for tingles.

Tony Trigilio’s most recent poetry collections are Proof Something Happened (Marsh Hawk Press, forthcoming 2021) and Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX [books], 2019). His selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in 2018 by Guatemala’s Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is a Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at Columbia College Chicago.

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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.