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White-Looking Countryside

By Tristan Tzara
Poetry•Vol. XXX No. 2 (Summer 2017)

for maya chrusecz

the ten o’clock gold crushed death
burnt the clay and gold window
dividing good from water in leather squares
and fixing the alert fish in place with a pin

cooking golden insect eyes
I am what buzzes bad in the heat in
the beating of my striated heart

the bones too are spoons for your soul
but we want to reconstruct
green sound beneath porcelain
all asleep in the skull

and chase down those little men in their vowels
cut them off riding the train alongside their sonority
and chase down those little men in their vowels little
fire in the chalice
and chase down those little men in their vowels
chase down those little those little men in their vowels

Tristan Tzara was a Romanian poet and one of the founders of Dadaism. His Dada manifestos were key to the development and dissemination of the movement. Tzara's tumultuous relation with Andre Breton led to Breton breaking from Dadaism and founding Surrealism. Tzara would later write the long poem "Approximate Man" and assist the French Resistance during World War II. Andrew S. Nicholson is an Assistant Professor-in-Residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the author of A Lamp Brighter than Foxfire (Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University 2015). His poetry has appeared in magazines and journals including Colorado Review, Bitter Oleander, and Eleven Eleven and has been anthologized in New Poetry from the Midwest 2014 (New American Press).

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