Cynthia Sailers – 2 Poems


Cynthia Sailers

2 Poems

Teaching Laura Mulvey


in contact with the proper ladies
to seduce them with our thoughts
so that they may waver in their
underlying narrative—–their condition
to perform with reality
to believe in science: the innocence of design
running between the picture and the calmy sleep
pretending to be older than oppression
if the self is before our very eyes
an authenticity where else multiplied,
where else swimming to be plural
whether or not we find comfort in models
wanting to eat, not eating, then eating a lot
or find the false accusation of race
or absence of race
so that you may “call me a buttress of reason,”
a subject reading then pulling back
to wards the want of my own 19th c hysteria
call me a cynic, but something is there
in the yellow wallpaper and she would want
to write a narrative to say
her dystopia was fixed, gripping the wind,
the small towns torn out of books
or an accidental hideout away from view
to find the others so same and different
but not to modernize the other—–sky

something a constructivist can’t spoil
something empowered by the exercise
of Emily Dickinson
something none of us could bother
to implement a fascism a revolution
an official prize claim
to be an indigenous woman
to be identical to the others
to have all your bees in your bonnet
also called phantasma
or the better half
we were not yet formed, we were an
awful eyesore in some abstract place
& “we continue to make things worse”

with pulpy novels of lesbians
trying to get at material we can’t live
without——————–visual images
of savoir faire fall back
into the pristine, back to readme
borne collateral for Hollywood cinema
like being deified like being incredibly gorgeous
so that he is currently stupefied
so that he is psychologically romanced
so that you have to define desire as a pronouncement
like virgin mule hair
to give my dignity some space to wander
the hallways, value the faculty that encompass us
up into an obsolete



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with a line from Juliana Spahr, “we continue to make things worse”


Notable American Women Meet The Remains of the Bodies of Ladies

there are casualties: a globe, a bust of Ingres
for your average majority to embalm
the mind of someone famous and loud
given these clear and distinct skies
writing paranoid postcards to Christine de Pisan
wanting the audio tour
a complex form of ordinary, how many days
how many Debbies and Denises one might hold up
to the Golden Age of Love Songs
and wantonly place too many stamps
of Mancini on the envelope, but why pick apart
the cinematic image, the vestige or purloined images
or scandalous themes and cameo appearances,
rustic and provocative landscapes
to have options to explore the urbane
what happened when I noticed the title
the impracticalities of our eyes fixated on their
rebellious youth——-just then an animal
or morality, analytically skimming
the remembered, rendered a crowd of my project
the way she was feminist by her exasperation
the problem is the boyfriend
the paper trail of pancho villas
the camile paglias “inhabited by knowing birds”
that is you may find these devotions honorable–history & hyper-
tranquility: shapes of Sonoma in the near future,
cinema verite of the physical moment
with backseat betties being an anatomy of women,
notable women, feminist and fluctuate women
our fingers following the lines of these personals,
that certitude of dreaming——-the typical names
for flightless birds such as emu or pelican
form an indefinable think tank in a biography of vistas



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title derived from Ben Marcus’s book, Notable American Women and Elizabeth Treadwell’s
poem, “The Remains of the Bodies of Ladies.”

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