3 poems by Alexis Quinlan

You’re alone in a room you have nothing

for (and by) Vito Acconci

When I started out as a poet
didn’t want abstraction
abstraction used
by religion
politics
didn’t want any of that.

The worst thing art
and architecture do is
abstraction I still think people
should find things out
themselves.

Then the poems began.

Cognition

So that you, being another broad spirit
sealed tight into this carnal envelope

must eventually reach the site you came
to see. Rocky Oregon coast from the off-

white Lincoln Paul rented the summer
he couldn’t stop driving. Tarnished silver

waves acrobatic against cragged cliffs,
volcanic rock refusing erosion. The dozen

Polaroids Dewey-cataloguing
how far you’d gone. (Come?)

Unless the vision came later, stumbled upon
at the mall after you’d (supposedly) separated.

Your Principled Façade

The color is tomorrow. The meeting is triangular. The chef is not interested. The beginning is a popular movie, the one from this year. The philosopher is Mick Jagger. The title is yellow. The piss is red. The sorrow is a lantern, battery-operated. The joy is a tightrope walker viewed from below. The handwriting is cursive. The connection is frayed. The minister is interested but unable to appear. The rules are Bauhaus. The museum is empty. The street is potholed. Actually the rules are jazz. The jazz is late. The drugs are cut. The cut is deep. The middle is more lonely, like neon. The datebook is sporadic. The passage of days is a song you don’t admit to belting in the car, alone. The way in is alphabetical. The ending remains in the town you left, but no one told you. I’m telling you.