In honor of the passing of Bernadette, I’m uploading my Masters’ thesis from 1986. The chapter on Midwinter Day is missing…I will have to find it and add it as a separate file. Thanks to Gary Sullivan for typing this over twenty years ago, and for hosting it on the now defunct ReadMe magazine. May Bernadette rest in the most sublime peace.
Author: Nada Gordon
THERE IS NO I IN BIRTH
There is no I in Birth A mass of bone and teeth pushing HARD against the “miracle of birth.” Against forced breeding of human monsters against their will! A groaning sound… and a small sinus resembling an anus and hairy, cheesy material…unfolds in the wet darkness Are you listening, your honors? At least, don’t force people do it Brett M. Craven Maw could drink a beer, since he likes beer Cover judges with vernix! don’t let them out until their nipples leak Energy collected from the wails and moans coils around episiotomies, fever, tiredness, and low or sad moods Even normal gestation is…! You know… fetiform things – parasitic neoplasms… Fetuses looking like aliens, like kiwis, from their giant unblinking eyes If we absolutely must perpetuate our species…wait ¬– In 2009 a British man “gave birth” In a seven-month-old infant! – a parasitic mass in pluripotent cells teeming with information… In the abdomen of a teenager, the ideology of John Roberts/Clarence Thomas – TWO two-first namers – Joseph Halitosis, Jr. Let the robots do it! Let the robots do it! Let the robots do it! Let them eat meconium! like a heart in the mouth like a sprouting bean or seahorse like peanuts, like jellybeans, like really old dried-up old people like toy goats about four inches long made of a variety of foreign tissues Neil M. Gorsuchanasshole No more ectopic pregnancies, No more hair loss and weight gain: Let the robots do it! No more hyperemesis gravidarium No more preeclampsia or gestational diabetes – Not to be trusted, the slimy poison tentacle arm of the bought judicial not to mention Amy Coney Island Barrett Watten of the Mindless! O blue-eyed judges? Think a moment of mothers carrying fetuses with giant black eyes on the sides of their giant heads Or let’s reimagine the species in CGI, staring into darkness or like a pinkas mekufal, a folded notebook coming out of his abdomen! Roll them into a mass of hairy cheesy material Rub placenta in their powdered wigs! Stuff them back into the womby windbag of judges, Subpar Court of the disunited Hates? Observe that tiny tail that never wags before it disappears into the colostrum of compassionate intelligence! Then ask them to let the robots do it. There are many usual poems that stare with their blank eyes into the wet darkness! Think of all the weird things that can happen: This will not be one of them, signalling to its own undeveloped twin – it pushed its way, but we can do that now! Can’t we? Or can we not? What do you think of bodily integrity now? Why can’t robots have the babies for us? Why no techno-solution yet? O look, a fetus in a fetus! with a tiny tail, a well-formed ankle and foot! with copious hair, and delicate legs, and shrimpy genitals!
ScentedRushes Etsy shop
Genius Grant

/
Genius Grant: A Hateful Sestina
/
Any idiot can get a genius grant,
But beers, I hear, better facilitate true fellowship
Next up: the chattering infomercial Tik-Tok craft talk
while the world vertiginously wobbles on its teensy tenure track
and sends the species back to the mud and clay workshop
at the end of its wild and dissonant residency.
/
The rotten miasma of overly long human residency.
Lee was beaten by that genius, Grant
At the melodramatically quiet sincerity-italics workshop
And the young scribbling things, angling for fellowships
dream ravenous dreams of luscious tenure track
If they can just pull off that “EZ-epiphanies 4 U” craft talk.
/
The furious green sequins approach the sleeping gluestick of ideas about a craft talk
to try to establish an in-brain permanent residency.
Unmarked no-terrain vehicles screech violently off the fairy-dusted tenure track.
The head cockatoo, a rockabilly cavalier, gets an avian genius grant
for eating sweetbreads and tobiko on his year-long fellowship
while drawing infinitesimal ineffables on the table in the devil’s workshop.
/
This will be a “learning to please the teacher” workshop
to be followed by a “only thing that comes from the heart is blood” craft talk.
A lemming wants an ocean view for its exclusive residency.
I’m offended it’s not a “gal-pal-ship” instead of a “fellowship.”
It’s not that I’m not a natural genius, grant
-ed, but I’m also not into skating blithe figure eights along the slippery tenure track.
/
Did you say “manure” track? “Tenor” track? “Tin ear” track? Ah no, you said “tenure track.”
You gotta work to shop, you gotta work to shop, work to shop, work work work, workshop.
Her loose phlegm thickly encrusted with emphatically asserted identities won her a genius grant!
A crafter can craft a craft with found materials, sure, but can that crafter’s crafted craft talk?
Is that a recency? an iridescency? an indecency? a degeneracy? oh, right, it’s a residency
that requires being felt up in the flowchart of a febrile, feckless, fiercely highfalutin feckin’ fellowship.
/
A glowing green Luna Moth fellowship.
A glinting diamond-sliver tenure track
A sonorous shoehorn residency.
A latent blatancy workshop.
A milky orange craft talk.
A bluish-orange genius grant.
/
When olives retch knowingly slithering homewards on pills: workshop!
Can rabbits always fake testimony to all living kvetchers? Craft talk!
Genuine energy needs inner upper solidity going right around no time! Now may I please have my genius grant?
Noptile de Poezie: Gordon/Koeneke Collab chapbook
Not Being Quite Like Other People
not being quite like other people
I slither out of the apartment
clumsily
like a Paratodon
the dinosaur of the moment
into the hammered alloy
and the molded plastic
of the built world
oy vey – lights
of the twinkling city
on the curving planet
where jobs come and go
physical beauty fades
and markets rise and fall
as mealy as penises
in their greed canopy –
discursively, like brats
sung in a low
with flops and fumes
along a jaded mass
but unattacked and rubbed
against their fate –
they’re hip like cuneiform
down the greed tongue
out of the boring gum
into a glorious slump –
they’re bone.
.
midway through my life
for the second time
everything’s destabilized
it’s a given –
like hush money
to pornstars
sounds of subway moving
a luxurious concerto –
these head-bent strangers
swiping images of light
dismissively
hopefully
“I alone can fix this”
the little blond strongman
in the solar plexus
bouncing shrimp off trump, too
chameleon hatches bright turquoise
crawling, crawling
out of the egg
I didn’t do it I didn’t do it says the train
Sheherazade or Krishna
in brown spots on the door
and a bison-shaped wall smear…
What might it actually mean
to live my life
as I want to live it?
Pale strawberries pushing out of a voice
Pale strawberries
pushing out
a voice
.
This is the fancy street
next stop, fecund avenue
awash in electro-beats
studiedly, people amuse themselves
as they know how,
knocking back beverages
my foot swells up…like a foot
why y’all like MAYA so much
Friday night:
he walks a white borzoi
through the F train
She stops to stare
at the closet simulation
in the organization store
shoes with rivets
but no laces –
“relationship” such a cold word.
neutral dull palette
in a world where only looks
matter.
in the past,
beloveds came to me
so surely
with a kind of sleek magic –
a miniature dachshund
like a dik-dik
but metaphors
I guess
are easier than marriages
either way
two disparate things
forced together
.
why go out?
stay in!
away from head-bent strangers.
something’s masquerading
as an umeboshi
on the train floor
never again will I romanticize
our usual spots
in New York City
I sit alone
with pursed lips, aware
of my eccentricities
It’s foggy outside.
Dutifully, invisibly,
I do my kegels
My head –
so heavy
like a lavender mask
My head a lightbulb
radiating pink
lightning
.
Train stops in the tunnel
just after a drunk woman
has suddenly puked
a woman with a ponytail
and strong thighs eats
an egg sandwich
tech guy with black earbuds
clenches his backpack
between his shins
I call my past love
into my attention
and give him a baleful look
A woman holds her coffee cup, covered,
to her mouth, as if
she’s praying to it
A vulture stands next to a hat
People are super-strange birds
with necks.
The sidewalk grimaces
with its grids and teeth
I say by way of painful critique.
I sing a single word: “it”
Quavering a little
I’ll keep unmatching
until the lion’s mane
is gone.
Phlegm pools in lungs.
I’m tired of looking at men’s faces.
I see your handsome face dissolve
into a one-eyed puppet.
And the eyes are also on bananas–
are they the high masters of history
or something?
fish sauce smell on the back of my thumb
I’ll have a sharp lamb jerky – metallic squeak.
It’s sarcastic in a bulb –
his highness
in your spot kingdom
never endorse this president
in my culture
I feel offensive.
I’m having 35 minutes worth
of processing.
Spilled gravy on the label
I think GOD knows how to do it
It’s from the salmon man
in question –
the purse development fathers
Playing a rat game.
He died recently –
without VIKINGS –
properly
otherwise and chrysanthemum
Bye little kazoo,
that was on – the maximum?
It’s simple
The thing is, I was hungry
This is excellent in our dreaming.
In the situation with birds, no choice!
I’ve been writing words, consecutive words
with a cat thing:
it is happening.
I understand you are coming from an altitude
of words
I understand you are coming from the attitude
of words
on the egg hold
of this latin poison,
a warble of flood rainbows.
I tap a red minus…
You’re no longer VIP
on my iPhone.
I take a white pill
Single cloud in azure sky…
Hovers like a drone.
It’s been eight days now.
Throwing out your brown slippers…
Laryngitis.
Matter-of-factly
Stashing your handsome portrait
Vertically