a poem by matthew hittinger

Crush

was the name of her hit single. Critics
panned her performance, complained
her voice had echo, too much reverb,
too much feedback. She went straight
to number one. When she showed
at Virgin to sign copies, a rush of teens
trampled white flower petals scattered
at her bequest on a pink carpet. Squeals
echoed down mall corridors, around
street corners, the same scene at each
stop until a bootlegged demo surfaced
on the web, showed her shadow voice
lip-synched a digitally-altered, vocodered
track of Narcissus singing come to me.


"Crush" originally appeared in Narcissus Resists (Goss183/MiPOesias, 2009).


Matthew Hittinger is the author of the chapbooks Narcissus Resists, Platos de Sal, and Pear Slip, which won the Spire 2006 Chapbook Award . You can read more of his work and follow his blog at www.matthewhittinger.com.

shoutouts

Good poems:

Peter Balakian: Warhol / Blue Jackie

Kimberly Grey: Modern Sentences

Matthew Hittinger: Blue Gotham

James Hoch: Dust

Rickey Laurentiis: Black Iris & What I Hear in Your Eyes

Dan Rosenberg: What's Owed

Natalie Shapero: Halloween at 21

Bridget Talone: In the Soak

Charles Harper Webb: Winter Song

I also want to check out Lily Brown's new collection Rust or Go Missing.

o my darlin

It's was really exciting to edit the latest edition of Clementine (an online journal of poetry and photography) with Becca. I love and admire all of the poets represented.

The issue features five previously unpublished poems by Tim Dlugos, whose collected poems, A Fast Life (edited by David Trinidad) is due from Nightboat Books in 2011. There are also three previously unpublished poems by Karl Tierney. A poet whose work I discovered in the excellent anthology Persistent Voices: An Anthology of Poets Lost to AIDS.

As always, we tried to represent many different voices. There are two great poems inspired by Curtis Mayfield by Rio Cortez. A Showgirls sestina by Jeffery Conway. Persona poems concerning Amy Winehouse by Kerri French. The subjects of the poems range from Vladmir Putin to video games.

All of the poems--by Jerome Murphy, Sarah Stickney, Charles Jensen, Matthew Hittinger, Jeffrey Allen, Michael Comstock, William Wright, Jenn Blair, Joe Eldridge, Nathan Vulgamott and Steve Westbrook--are smart and refreshing.

I am crazy about the Barbie photos of Russ Pedro and Brian Brown's evocative shots of rural Georgia.

Clementine is interested primarily in the idea of the persona, but we are rather loose with what we consider a "persona poem." Some in the issue are more literal about this than others. Becca and I are proud of what we put together and so happy to share the work of these artists.

poems by matthew hittinger

Codex Gigas


My many doppelgangers :
I raise my sword By the Power of
Grayskull! pinch my earlobe Synergy!
Hail my team I am Phoenix!
These clues keys secret identities

The me always receding
Hear me: who gave you permission to
Rearrange me like Lavoisier’s
Experiment that Muriatic
Acid wash that rearranged
The atoms red rose turned white.
End this. Begin this. Say my
Name. Does its presence make me shape me?

What to do with those who want to say
I have a different name?
Tangled alphabet, illuminate.


--


PopeMobile :


as in the vehicle in which the Pope
rides as in the day the Pope came to town

he rode down Fifth in his PopeMobile four
helicopters formed not a cross a check

mark in the sky as if to say here here
sits the Pope in his mobile while one blue

and white NYPD the fifth if you
are keeping count runs the course of Fifth up

and back cantilevering over Sheep's
Meadow where T-shirts bearing this new Pope's

face glitter in red and gold and papal
flags flutter yellow in the April sun


--

One Day HoMo


appeared the beige plaster
flaked off the wall where the gray

marker amended the black spray
paint Mo there for months

a pre-teen’s tag the Ho added
overnight greeting or threat

or the games of the adolescent
my bedroom window view





-Matthew Hittinger