my kid’s latest affection is rubbing his bum on your leg. correction: my leg. entire little poems emanating from his solar arsenal, our bodies spiralling to a dance of his enjoyment & my distaste turned over to curiosity & the concept of an entire empire in the bunghole (‘derriere’ / ‘tush’) of this little big poem. he calls to me the poetess the cloacina the parent (‘old woman’) who tends to it the emanator the shit stirrer either when preferred or when i’m the only one on duty. another affection of his is watching scooby-doo, most of the episodes are spooky so i slip in a ‘spooky-poo’ on my way to the kitchen to elicit a smile so he knows i care but it goes nowhere. it is important to care about poo in the company of five year olds & then to be reassured by the excrementalist tendencies of the poets, there are many too many to name one is anne boyer there is permission there deep in her fable (not hers) that the world is shit, that when adam & eve ate the forbidden fruit they needed a toilet & so they fell to earth & the earth has forever since been the toilet. i try to introduce place contextualise the poet angry brigadier anna mendelssohn’s ‘scoopydoo sounds’ gleaned from an abstract i find about her 2020 collected poems & it goes nowhere. it doesn’t land. ‘oh my’ / ‘oy’ / ‘oy gevalt’ / as velma dinkley used to say now she just says / ‘jinkies’. it doesn’t land it dissipates on an air like where are you? & i’m working here.

a friend relates the writing process to the feeding of the scoby the mother bacterium the symbiotic culture the symbiotic task of weaving the poem towards its final destination but there is none. there is the absurdity of going to mendelssohn’s own absurd / poetplace each morning / the unfathomability of an assured arrival at a prescribed location where poetizing might neatly commence & conclude each day ¹ / but no, writing poetry is like shitting like shitting on your iphone notes, there is no routine there are only gestures & exigencies lewd & lurid sometimes lyric like when it just slides out of you & it is beautiful.

my grandfather antoni’s cleopatra was poland his other love was this speaker’s grandmother her nanna & she boarded the boat where the former did not & what is the sound of the boat that leaves the land behind? one pro-long-ed blast. i hear a foghorn a grief spiel a yearning detaching a slow bellows acoustic moan that dresses the polluted air / audible like overt pleasure how it comes. over the years her name followed a trail of a’s from alina to alicia to anna evolutions acquitting place to a life of migration to a possible restless attempt to belong, to find the title the outfit that fits the form & the speaker’s strongest most cherished memory is of her dressed in her matching blue tracksuit making kluski in her ground floor kitchen sometimes drying in the garden. to belong not only to earth but to story / the theatre of the overstory / & to author it & in the process abstract the author. take the philosopher günther anders / hannah arendt’s first husband second cousin of walter benjamin / who changed his surname / slur! / from stern to anders (german for ‘other’) / an anonymous name, without genealogy, or rather whose only genealogy is otherness.² we feel shifty on our feet on our names we feel shifty attaching to lands stolen settled seasick borders seasick names also dredged remnants of the base names are sediments benthic rising. her maiden her midden a heap of language resounding a shell pounding & a mound / izydorkiewicz / & it was lost when she married in the displaced persons camp / twice displaced twice found / & the story is the newly authored tri bi nomial & the poem is the organism to attest it. ‘wicz’ an epithet for a lady dressed in black magic? but no pronounced ‘vitch’ a suffix & it dredges from belarus from the peripheral eastern territories across the green border in the former plc (‘lithuania’ / ‘belarus’ / ‘ukraine’) a suffix sneaking its way in before the terms are fenced. wicz also patronymic ‘son of’ not ‘daughter of’ means i am beginning to see all daughters & sons as sons of differently but similarly to how andrea long chu says that all men are females but females not women. ³ the speaker of this poem has a vision of themself in the leading motif of anna / son of izydor derivative of greek isidore (‘gift of isis’) / ania walwicz son of wal diminutive walenty (‘valentine’) / david wajnarowicz son of wojna (‘warrior’) fighting the tendency of a polanised german wagner / the way we try & shake the title as to gender to shake it off to shake it all off.

ania diminutive (‘nickname’ / ‘baby talk’ / ‘endearment’) of polish also russian anna crawls down to its roots in hebrew hannah (‘favour’ / ‘grace’) also chana, greek ania meaning ‘trouble’ / angry little brigadier / perhaps referring to the difficult placement / on the floor where we crawl / of the genus in a classification when first described (its lack) of a family of terrestrial orchids, eight species characterised by their pseudobulbs ranging from northeast india to the philippines & new guinea / crossing the pseudo force the coriolis the bulbous at the centre point of a vast fiction / described as glabrous some glorious gracious smooth thing hair down free (lacking) chiefly of the skin or leaf. when first described / the anima / carl jung’s term for the inner part of the personality the female component derivative of latin masc. animus / remove ‘im’ and you are left with the anus / rational mental power intelligence is newly vital principle soul / the small non-lethal pseudo bomb that anna mendelssohn (‘grace lake’) is alleged to have planted with her friends / sensationalist news headline reads: girl slept with bedside arsenal / against targets such as miss world pageant & others / i glamoured her i gloried her ⁴ / & they land her the sentence & her lines outpace the page / la gloire la gloire la gloire ⁵ / sentenced to ten years served five in holloway women’s prison one of four convicted of the stoke newington eight a genus of libertarian communists (5 /10, 1 of 4 / 8) the ring leader of which self describes himself as ‘angry’ the others he says were just ‘slightly cross’.

the leading tender of a name / a coppice for the forest / ‘an’ indefinite article used before words that begin with a vowel sound including words that start with a silent ‘h’, also a prefix denoting negation as in ‘anarchist’ ‘antithesis’ ‘anulado’ (spanish ‘canceled’) ‘anarchive’ or ‘anarchitecture’ / archist with no ‘an’ refers to a religious group that worships godlike ai & when placed into a human made phrase / vital principle soul / can find a pleasing alliteration in ‘an angry archist’. colorised and ai upscaled image of karina in 1967 is a caption, appears beneath a colour image of the actress on wikipedia. a genus of annas might be veronika angela nana natacha marianne paula odile & the ‘new wave bride’ a star, the star odile with the soft skin her soft skin as when the narrator says it & he is name dropping the title of a francois truffaut film. the civilisation of one epoch becomes the manure of the next ⁶ / duplicado anulado duplicado anulado by e.m. de melo e castro (1966).

the first animated hannah-barbera tv series to use a laugh track on a saturday morning was scooby-doo, where are you! somewhere between 1969 & 1978 the same years that mum was in california painting their animation frames for a dime & a laugh, getting married on a hill with flares flowers & tequila. they were not sovereign on that hill but they were free or so they thought & how strange for the feeling of free love / flowers & all that all their power / to culminate in being wed to the state. she never married again.

to annex to anneal to anoint. to anon anonymous to anyone? anyone does anyone announce and yet another does a nimbus does a ning-nong & where the cows go bong! & does anyone & where are you? veronika angela nana natacha marianne paula odile anna anna grace ania nanna david vera scooby, where are you & where are you going? & are you on tasha hill somewhere in provincetown? / which is very rustic which means wet wood & hobit houses & goats & horses & roaming dogs & chipmunks but like really chilly & the internet wasn’t working ⁷ / & all of this searching for where are you is a way of saying i’m working here & i’m working to remember you & you’re never really gone & what’s in a name if not the theatre of the canopy the overstory & finding ways to get back to it to the weather the climate / the name is the climate we live in / it’s a fog it lifts it shrouds pounds surrounds us it slaps us into ventifacts up on our various hills / the mistral tramontane chinook santa ana san andreas fault anaheim fault line southerly buster southerly roaring forties.