Embedded Files
Hummingbird Hearsay
I love my ordinary ashes —the mortality of Kidney
Autumn, ambitious Kleenex self-esteem, paper smiles
of carnival clowns. Alongside the blimp flies a riser
with an inkling to wink.
This year, will a mummy take home an autoharp of
far-cry orchestrations? No portion of this speech may
be reproduced in a musty melange furnishing my martyr
with an asking price of double the original spindle.
City or what — the nomad froze in the limbs of Liza
—hypnotic was her Svengali of Aloof. Call me a hazy
woodchipper low-key worry-wombat as I battle
the itchy outsider in the fissures and the fields and the
canyons mandating a furnace of burnt toast to roast
best friends in a fibula rattle.
Once the sun decides to cry her daily dose of contrasts,
the Peter Max effect restores the eye to fiber-rich
camaraderie. Long-bow mojo, new take-out and fried
is our restaurant destiny. Convince me to flinch in the pinch
of serrated knives. We deserve our daily quotient of quiche.
Just as our engines live for the throttle, shouldn’t we
nix nonchalance in favor of passion’s cryptic cry?
Truths from the mouth of babes efface the churning
clippety-clop of bobblehead blues. A flood of egg-white
noodles has hit the shelves…funny how they stole
the yolk and fed it to the po' folk.
Give me lemon-yellow, a belief in wheatstraw
hummingbird hearsay. Nylon’s still Number One in
the Arts of Stretch. I’m warm to the earth’s purposes,
a peachy pieful of light-and-airy stereograms in supple
and staccato notes—at the merge of grace and guile.
Gaining raindrops of fame, the Nebraska Plains echo
holy horizons of chaff and the wavy wealth of wheat.
I see our hoops coach kvetching on the sidelines of
basketball beer-love. His twelve hunks chug a hungerful
of classic Hamms suds, marching in as Meet-the-Captain
missionaries from the dairy fields of Kansas.
She’s integer, I’m anomaly. Deep is the mark of dark
and haughty primitives. In the much that there is, fizz
has run its route in the soda chute. Ye fond maidens
—be most fair in the lair of the lion. A further murmuring
slips aslant…this survivor of Polanski’s Knife in the Water.
Jailed by my own charred remains, I’m claimed by this
waking fog of a Bach cantata: a chorale of allowances,
a sprouting of dangling dittos. This city ranks high
along the banks of sha-la-la and la-da-dee — nearing
a raw revisionist astringency.
Last one in becomes inoculated in song-and-dance
maneuvers zigzagging this mystery meadow. Heads
you win — tails I lose patience, as sister whips up a plan
to retrace and case the place. Secret willow-leaves foster
the windy soundplay of Hart Crane’s shivering shade.
A sheen spreads morning fog over Silver Lake as Zen
articulates a token truce, juices flowing, a lagoon of gurgles
astride furtive fortunes. Witness Delilah nearing countless
tears her pillow’s shed for Alex, battling the little child
within the coddled rooms of her own recapture.
Awardee of the NY Foundation for the Arts and producer of Poetry Thin Air Cable Show (1989-present), Mitch Corber has read throughout NYC. He founded the Thin Air Video Poetry DVD Archives (1988), videotaping Ginsberg, Corso, Ashbery, Di Prima, Ferlinghetti, Cage, 20 Beat poets, seven Memorial tributes and 21 interviews – 500 poets in all.
Corber is recipient of the prestigious NYC Kathy Acker Career Award in Poetry Video in 2020. His poems have appeared in Blackbox Manifold 4, Brief Wilderness, BlazeVOX, spinozablue, Gas Journal, Vanitas, Mirage, Columbia Poetry Review, Arteidolia, E-ratio, Sensitive Skin, First Literary Review-East, and La Piccioletta Barca. His published poetry books, Quinine (2009, Thin Air Media) and Weather's Feather (2014, Fly By Night Press/A Gathering of the Tribes), were both praised for their creative musicality.
Copyright © 2025 by Mitch Corber, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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