DEEP RED

Deep red • the submarine blips on the cold surface
in Antarctica • as Mariner’s ship draws near •
frothy surface on the blue wave •
Life is still • so catch as catch can • still evanescent, still

Red, an oar touches the water’s rim • muscular arm buff as
Meryl Streep’s in The River Wild • in Antarctica •
frothy surface on the blue wave • life is still • “I don’t have
many T cells left, but I used to have 8” • “now I have 9”

Under the gristle, vein, under the vein, deep red •
the blood of my pal • deeper and deeper this tiny wave, blue
on the surface, • alone on the surface •
if you were one-dimensional what would you see?
a one celled mammal swimming for dear life •
to a shore strewn with protozoa bracken • still life
“now I have six”

the flotsam and • jetsam of living • high
and deep • this is the curve that
will kill you • pal
I’m living in • your disgrace
deep • red hatchet • cells
a doll with hands • scuttles across the face •
of the sea for you
come and get these • memories

TENEBRAE

      The poetry was in the gore, but in the American version the gore was cut out. Flat. How could these wet souls not love seeing through the specular glass? The blood, spattered over the kitchen cabinets.

      Daria Nicolodi, a woman with a flip and a face as long as California, her raincoat flapping in the dark wind. Blue and magenta shadows bleed like what’s not there. What happened?

      Red stiletto heel in the raw mouth of the youth. The beach becomes a book, becomes a murder. I want to write a poem as long as California. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” Her body hurls through the plate glass, shards of undoing, dark pulsion glinting, the body unwound. A thousand holes like seeds, here in the seedy part of Rome. She takes a dagger in a darkroom, O heart of mine.

      Revision. Victims emerge from the bath, unsane. I can’t see their faces, but their sharp chemical beauty evaporates in the red air.

(with Dodie Bellamy)

SUSPIRIA

I know when he began to dance with me
cranberries started to burn in pocket—
I smelled red smoke of sugar under
my feet, sugarfoot, a boy worth burning for—

and into his pants I’d push my white hands,
deeper into the sweeter red currant
in a darkened cell until he was done;
then into a lit cell, where I was king

if music played we sat down fast, out, down
into the red fruit mashed in my lap like
Turkey. Musical chairs with the pilgrims
who came here on the rock to fuck him good

Oh Bill, if you were living at this hour
I’d put little socks on your two bare feet
and spoon this dressing into your wet throat
till you choked and spat all over my bib

I’d give you such a gift of red white meat
you wouldn’t be able to sit for a week
unless to eat at the mantelpiece with clock,
bawling pilgrims thrusting your ass with fire

ferret teeth in the breast of a red bird

I would call it to your memory now

that a phantasmal fog of love had enthralled me to you

then, but not only then, in these my words
the tear in the fabric, now, the drop of blood.

THE FLOWERING FACE

He read all his poems twice, thinking,

“they did not hear them the first time.”

They hired a team of gay men who do this

gardening gig to do it for them.

If his body rots in the mouth of maggots

let’s go to Zuni

Down his throat

poured a river of beer and rum

In the coercive moonlight of Diamond Heights

his red hair, gold

He’d like the symbolism

and of course the spring flowers

He was subtle, always said, “Hello my friend,”

as though he knew us better than indeed he did

If the words I wrote, and throw up into the sky, in his direction

mean what I think they do

Then deep into the black earth a post I dig, that says

retention must be paid

I found out who he really was

through the name on the bracelet, pink and white beads

A couple of guys from Ireland

passing through town and one says, “Die faggots”

If there was no poetry there would be no

toy, face, torment, healing, gladiola, prix fixe, heaven

TODAY IT’S ME … TOMORROW YOU
(OGGI A ME … DOMANI A TE!)

Gothic set-up for a dollar climax,
money comes into the room,
the candle disappears.
I’m AIDS’ed out, pockets turned back to front,
inside out, flapping like whitefish
in my white pajamas
We can be like they are …
Curse its gilded milkteeth! Dedicate the
grave to Nothing! In the camera’s eye
my body moults from feathers
to a tough tensile steel,
reenacting the bird bath of another agent.
Romeo and Juliet
another 40,000 every day come
up the subway steps to New York
Tall gray buildings hot with light
and long rows of the hospital dead
There’s a place I know
where we can go and have some coffee
nor do the wind, the sun and the rain
His tots cry around the relict
gorgeous music for a shapely eunuch
his tots now orphans, the ceiling
of paternity lifted off and swept to the
dark sky

Sucked clean, eh.

Out of the night, and just when the plink of sleep
falls out of the dollar
100 percent down coverlet so cozy
white as fluorescence

A low roar, mounting, the mind alone.

“Seasons don’t fear the reaper,
nor do the wind, the sun, and the rain,
we can be like they are.”

it was an older man showed me
the steps of the dance
I can’t forget
tall man whose shoes I
stepped on when
I was trying

to write
before AIDS catastrophe
made writing inequitable
the mind, alone, a corsage
of pink crinkles rather
like the asshole of Tommy
which when

I touched it with my thumb
wet
shivered alive, alert
in Port Jefferson

above a harbor ringed with boats
on the bed a web of his
wet clothes
that’s me
thinking

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Argento Series is available now from Pilot Press. You can order a copy here.

Kevin Killian (1952-2019) was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include Fascination: Memoirs and the poetry collections Tony Greene Era and Tweaky Village. He is the co-author of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance, the first biography of the important US poet. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977–1997. He died in 2019. 

Pilot Press is the imprint of artist Richard Porter. It was started in 2017 to help retrieve a philosophy of publishing lost to AIDS and capitalism. Twitter: @pilotpressldn