My notion of art is very maximalist and souped up; I love spectacle, overload, magic materials, magic words, incantation and litany, incarnation and possession, spilling and wounds. Art as a sacred event.
Joyelle McSweeney
Your Cool Whip
by Joyelle McSweeney
Inside the plump tub, we find the whiteness
Wears a peculiar swirl. You guess a motherly pump
Nuzzled the young surface, left this umbilical mark
Of the factory, that vague, prenatal hum
And glide, the kissing valves and shutes
Pouring little vessels full. Our talk does not
Long linger there, in those maternal corridors;
In desire there is only the present. Our prurient fingers,
Divoting the swell, are surprised not to sink
Infinitely deep. They butt against the plastic tub;
The sheer stiff molds around them, takes their heat:
Stasis the death of what is less than love.
We do what’s left to do. We eat.
Tea-Strainer
by Joyelle McSweeney
Fourteen Lines 