Martha Silano
Poetically, when I hear the word disobedience I think of rule breaking—choosing subjects foreign to poetry, playing with formal restrictions. Also, shirking off the pull of the chain that drags poets down trodden, untroublesome trails. I was an obedient child; perhaps that’s why I admire and emulate rebellious poets.
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Dear Alice Notley,
What can you teach me
about Paris, about a raft
in rapids, about ribs and ruins,
the sadness of rivers? Oh Alice,
I will never be you, but that’s okay—
I am not dinged like a cafeteria tray
and I like your unexpected turns:
failure, socializing with poets, garbage
on fire, a desert rose. You have the best
titles! “Dante’s Ass a Nobel Prize,” "Lana Turner
at Versailles,” “Sun Is Very Hot and Buttockslike.”
Buttockslike! What can be done except summon
the fairy of apples? All the while saying
‘fuck ‘em to Bradstreet and Joyce. And yet
a hunger remains, and yet I’m not yet able
to separate wind from unwinding, fool from foil,
waves from woes, my lacking like peeling
shellac. Alice, if I were you I’d never mistake
an alder for an aspen, never question which
is ash, which is Indian plum. Seems, is, because, physics,
bank account, bloody butterflies, hormones, Christ:
it could be doughnuts or plumbing, this loose
gathering of sticks and string, this bushtit nest;
pick up and fly, poem, to a floating garbage
island, lexiconical effluvia raft, lingua franca
flotilla. You’re a misogyny sniffer-outer, poetess
of the making naked, working at the level
of the particle, where nothing’s symmetrical
as my son points out, though you’d contend
no one’s ever naked, which must be some kind
of paradox I work on like a project. It’s likely
you’re right: dreams maintain the world’s art,
and you’re the only naked person in the world,
which must feel great! Something about a seamstress,
our ass-based worth. It’s addictive, like Johnny Cash
or Cheetos. I know you think we’re idiots; that’s because
your brain’s an anti-missionary swarm. Why I fawn,
demure, decanter; why, engrossed in your non-alignment,
death sits obedient at the latched screen door.
Do Not Touch the Art

Don’t sip the structure.
Don’t suck the slab.
With the wind do not embrace.
Do not kinetically sway.
Brushstroke by brushstroke, do not broaden.
Do not partake.
Don’t grope the Gorky.
Don’t bear upon the blurring.
Don’t diminish with your contribution.
Don’t woo the welded.
Don’t probe the pastiche of longing and loss.
Butt off the furniture, buddy.
Do not tap the totemic.
Do not lick the verbal.
Do not fall in love.
Don’t ucky the upward.
Don’t fog the relief.
Do not scuff the drama.
Don’t thumb the untransformed.
Don’t denude the negation.
Get your oils away from these oils.
Don’t paw, outsider!
Suppress your arouse.
Stick your increase in a bucket with the snuffed out cigs.
My Hour with Jorie Graham
1
I was supposed to buy her lunch.
All she wanted: the juice
of apples.
2
Too-ripe fruit
slit with a Henckels.
Moths surrounding
the runoff.
3
Her mouth at a bottle shaped like an apple
(my mouth mute as an apple)
4
My poem my pomegranate my brand new outfit
(The poem asking whose poem is it?
The poem unsure)
5
Hadn’t I read Keats
Hadn’t I heard of the objective correlative
6
Let the siskins and the artichokes speak for themselves!
98,000.2
God I hate this
(God in my mind of no mind God in the (swollen) sea & me without oars)
Just-butterfly—the wet & vulnerable hour
Butterfly shirking the worm’s pedestrian hunger . . . 
all those layers
so many folds of gauzy black
I never did find where the fabric ended
(the fabric the thing concealing, the feeling untoward)
Draped like the partial torso of Iris
((((((of being wrong altogether, of her being altogether right))))))
what it must’ve been for Helen . . .
(war of the seeking not to estrange, war of the coveted
apple)
We paused on the sidewalk
talked course loads, needy students, summers in Wyoming
I asked did she still find time to write
(in this ivy rancor in these halls washed free of sepulchral leisure)
She smiled the smile of transcendence
13
Goddess of tossed back hair & dirt-smudged pumps
Pulse’s impulse
Some first-year’s wettest dream
Damned if I’d consciously take your advice
Damn if I still don’t find the finest powder
where I brushed against your wings
"Do Not Touch the Art" first published in Thrush.
"My Hour with Jorie Graham" first published in Green Mountains Review.
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Photo by Langdon CookMartha Silano has authored four books of poetry, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, and Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books 2014). She also co-edited, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press 2013). Martha’s poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and North American Review, where she received the 2014 James Hearst Poetry Prize, as well as in many anthologies, including American Poetry: The Next Generation and The Best American Poetry 2009. Martha edits Crab Creek Review, curates Beacon Bards, a monthly poetry reading series in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and teaches at Bellevue College.