Issue 33: Mitch Corber

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.