Find and share the perfect poems.
1
Money is talking
to itself again
in this season’s
bondage
and safari look,
its closeout camouflage.
Hit the refresh button
and this is what you get,
money pretending
that its hands are tied.
2
On a billboard by the 880,
money admonishes,
“Shut up and play.”
“Money Talks” from Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015. © 2016 by Rae Armantrout. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.
Dressed all in plastic,
which means oil,
we’re bright-eyed, scrambling
for the colored cubes
spilled
on the rug’s polymer.
Inside each
is a tiny car.
When we can’t unscrew the tops
we cry for help.
1
We encountered a problem
sending
a command
to the program.
Did I say that
aloud?
I’ve broken out
in imps.
*
To be a blip
in a circuit
and to know it,
to relish
this knowledge
in your private
moments
as all moments
are gated
and switched.
2
When I mentioned hatred
I was not thinking
of you,
but you’d best not break
our momentum,
Reading, we are allowed to follow someone else’s train of thought as it starts off for an imaginary place. This train has been produced for us—or rather materialized and extended until it is almost nothing like the ephemeral realizations with which we’re familiar. To see words pulled one by one into existence is to intrude on a privacy of sorts. But we are familiar with the contract between spectator and performer. Now the text isn’t a train but an actress/model who takes off her school uniform piece by piece alone with the cameraman.