by: Noah Eli Gordon
Surreal self-help poetry? Aphorisms that question rather than teach? Epigrams that remind us to look in the mirror and out the window? All that and more can be found in Noah Eli Gordon’s 24 mind-expanding miniatures. This work is the medicine we didn’t know we needed.
Ars Poetica
No more verse
All chorus
Prospectus
If you don’t pick a side
you’re picking the sidecar
Debit or Credit
The clock doesn’t care
What time it is
Online Dating
The cake only holds
So many candles
Against Imagery
Is where one can place
Purposefully one’s feelings
Past tense
To call it today the jitters
Rejects authentically being moved
Bottomless cup
If I think of it as abundance
I’ve already had all I can handle
Birdsong
Has nothing to do with
Our ideas about singing
Clear History
As its peel darkens
Its fruit becomes sweeter
Judicious Aesthete
I don’t want to like you more
I want more yous to like me
Keep Right Except to Pass
To accept governance one needn’t do anything
Save whatever one’s refusal continued undoing
For Every Death a Bicycle
That abstraction gets one nowhere
Is the problem this abstraction locates
Victim Impact Statement
Each time I count the rungs in that ladder
They never seem to go up
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
The weirdest thing my daughter has
Yet to call me: Noah
Against Community
One doesn’t need chairs to place
On the table the perfect centerpiece
On the Art World
You can get away with stupid shit
If you’re smart in how you talk about it
Revision
Is wasted
On the young
A Boy Named Cake
Broke the swing set I had as a kid
Just by sitting on it
B-Movie
It requires a modicum of taste
To admit one has none
Pregaming
To love at dusk the certainty of dawn
And to love at dawn dusk’s coming on
The Longer
You stay away the better
I am at wanting you back
A Poem with Brake Lights
And farther along you may know more
And be certain of less
The Cloud
That it sits there and there and there
Like a book about two trains colliding
Ode to Capital
If you can monetize what brings you joy
What brings you joy will smell like money
Noah Eli Gordon’s most recent book is The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom (Brooklyn Arts Press). He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado–Boulder, where he currently directs Subito Press.
