Angelo Monaco across Issues 1 and 2
Angelo Monaco appears in the first two issues with three poems preserved in full. “Animal Soup” and “The Cat Show” turn clinics, cages, animals, medicine, appetite, beauty, and death into compact scenes of comic unease. “Use” moves through shoes, damage, pins, worms, homes, containers, and the strange instability of definition.
The poems share a fascination with objects and bodies that refuse to stay within their expected meanings. A cat doctor carries a bandaged head; a lion mops in red rubber gloves; a show animal becomes beautiful enough to make death briefly celestial; a shoe turns into roof, bird, home, and argument.
ANIMAL SOUP
The cat doctor, his eye bulging full of pin worms,
is dizzy
from carrying around a bandaged head.
Two red kittens are crossed out by a cloud of ether.
Two others chase a green goo.
In the adjoining room,
a hippo with ink eyes welling mumbles into her chest.
A lion, with red rubber gloves and galoshes, looks sour and farts.
There is no clock in the room. He continues to mop.
In the hallway, a rooster shakes his head asleep.
Someone prints POLTRI on his T-shirt. (Meds are prescribed.)
Tiny plastic doors swing closed.
It’s feeding time.
The cat show
So much attention paid
to the fine dress of a killer.
The hairs of his back
striped with a soft sheen.
The hairs of his head and paws
laced with French ribbons.
He trails his movements
around Proust’s chair, speckled
like a fresh-laid robin’s egg,
languorous, made mortal by appetite alone.
Flash bars relumine
the cage in love’s persuasive twilight shimmer.
Everyone wants to pet him.
And for one shining
moment, the killer in the cage
looks beautiful, and Death
like a son of heaven.
Use
Damage is often thought of as ugly,
unless it comes formed like a shoe;
or especially, a pair of shoes.
Now please, the shoe pair is only one
of all damages: a shoe (or set) can seem
like a roof floating in a shallow
Or, a pitch bird lifting its head above
an iron of wing span, carrying the charge
of a domain of water.
All the world lives outside its container:
what circumscribes the pin eye and point
is everything not in the pin.
The pin is not a worm. The worm not a body.
The shoe not a gesture of disgust or fright.
The home not a shoe. The shoe not a bible of the soul.
The surviving record
Issues 1 and 2 preserve Angelo Monaco’s name and these three poems. The surviving publication record does not provide further biographical detail that can be stated with confidence.