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TRAVIS MACDONALD
A Note on the Process: Despite the potentially deceptive titles, the following poems are the so-called “original” work of the poet Travis Macdonald. They were composed by rearranging the words of others into entirely new orders, meanings and forms. The poem from which each is adapted, and the book where it can be found, is footnoted for reference.
BLOW/TOSS
by Natalie Lyalin*
The terrible heart of the flower
flowers outside: heads suspended in a window
Out stepped my weird meaty neighbor
The world wore away
the closed curtains
that surrounded
his undulated tongue
But not the tusks!
They remained
Saturday stopped by early
with a swiped necklace
I sat by the water
smoking up some ribs
Things bloomed in wisps
to resemble it more
I did
*from Blood Makes Me Faint But I Go For It, “Saturday”
shredder, be mine
by Bruce Covey*
Whenever I want to feel about something I go full monumental and then:
Sometimes I travel up through a theme to reach a form and there’s the great programming
fingertips of clouds…
Sometimes the substanceless cliff is too close and arctangent and the water is wet but it
works…
Sometimes minigolfing without a ball can put a pirate like myself on par to water many
greens…
Sometimes I’m talking and the feel of infinite uninterrupted failing seems to run the
world…
Sometimes that running tunnel has repetition entropy and my moments’ strands are a
course in what I was before…
Sometimes the sentences crest during a syntax crash and those sounds are ends near here
that I need…
*from Change Machine, “Arctangent”
Travis Macdonald was recently named a 2014 Pew Fellow in the Arts. He is the author of two full-length books – The O Mission Repo [vol.1] (Fact-Simile Editions) and N7ostradamus (BlazeVox Books) – as well as several chapbooks, including: Basho’s Phonebook (E-ratio), BAR/koans (Erg Arts), Sight & Sigh (Beard of Bees), Time (Stoked Press) and Hoop Cores (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). He is a Don Draper impersonator by day. By night he co-edits Fact-Simile Editions near Philadelphia with his wife JenMarie.