Tonight I hear the gone in Oregon

or a gun, a loaded, heavy thing. It's cold. Grey. Drizzly. And there should be some tea steeped in terra cotta. This is no night for the warm red clay. The sky's at it again: stony looks and where's the thunder, anyway? Whatever put the no in November, take this dose of Jeni Olin's poems which are sizzling yeses.
Vanishing Point
Depressed like cabin air & passing out
peach-tinted hygiene manuals
on westside highway I lead men on
like the Virgil of the garment district:

Now this lovely structure on your right
is baby’s jeans & a struggling pyramid of girls & oh
well I understand his orphans with my gun like cinema verité

shot through with lower-functioning inmates –
with the “inkings of Scandinavian malaise” & whatnot
I go see art & feel priceless but to be a good sport you have to lose
& lose value like junk bonds he likes to “sit back & watch ‘em grow . . .”

The Met stuffed with alabaster tits I left alone, sexy & mightily unDutch

Mastered, set fire to a batik picture
of Mother Chelsea the Pitiless who wasn’t sickle-
cell white & incontinent & Dia-funded

I stood in his cloud shirt by myself

cursed to stalk the night through all eternity & original so on
through the small ballet company of stocking runs & upset

nuns down Sixth Avenue, John Wieners,
the Americas breaking apart so I can feel this sinuous & partial wind
like lyme disease with a drip in the arm & the sky is falling.