Anthony Seidman (Los Angeles, 1973) is a poet and translator who has lived for significant stretches of time in Ciudad Juarez and Mexicali. His most recent collection of poetry is Cosmic Weather (Spuyten Duyvil). His translations include For Love of the Dollar: A Portrait of the Artist as an Undocumented Immigrant (Unnamed Press) by Mexican “Gonzo-journalist” J.M. Servin; A Stab in the Dark (LARB Classics) by Facundo Bernal, and Smooth-Talking Dog: Poems by Roberto Castillo Udiarte (Phoneme Media). Later this year, Cardboard House Press will publish his translation of Rodolfo Hinostroza’s Contra Natura. Seidman was a contributing editor for Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies like New American Writing, Latin American Literature Today, World Literature Today, Poetry International, Huizache, Rattle, The Black Herald, Nimrod, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and in Latin American journals like Critica (University of Puebla), Generacion Alternativa (Mexico City), and Aerea (Chile).

Liner Notes to Forgotten Classic Rock LP
that winter we slept on the dark side
of the sun where it’s always blustery,
we fed the fireplace remaining wood
then we burned encyclopedias
and Christmas sweaters even dreidels,
wolves licked the windows and peered
their red-coal gaze into our coterie
of astronomers who believed in alchemy
and astrologists who believed in gravity
and when someone
(the Ghost of Insomnia?),
(the Ghoul of Gastroenteritis ?),
knocked on the door,
we hushed one another in our cabin…
pines tumbled further
and further away until we could hear only the black
clouds knitting an impending blizzard,
then Balding Bob: the Specialist in Titan’s organic compounds,
or Pundit Paula: the Cheerleader for Anthropocene Disco,
would crack open another brewski and
belch: où sont les neiges d’antan?
The Victrola was cranked and
Sheik of Araby crackled and Betsy Bo, the Limber
Lady dating from the 1930’s would hop and
ditty and dolly whilst dragging her clubfoot,
and it was then I knew
I had better search for my namesake and leave
that snowy latitude on the sun,
and so I trudged across permafrost,
I fell into ditches of slush revealing plenty of bones,
mastodons rose over the hills, slowly,
such thunder in their strain,
twice,
twice,
I was almost mauled by smiling Polar Bears
but they stepped on thinning ice-patches,
and plunged into the frigid depths where the magnetic
gaze of sharks are known to suck the strength from iron,
until I descended into a scalding valley,
(sands siroccos camels merchants and date groves etc)
and reached the place I had sought ,
and it was as you may say satisfactory,
my brother all sandals and beard exited from his hut,
and said he had waited a lifetime hibernating
inside a vial of olive oil,
and so he placed his hands on my burning hair,
and everything smelled of burning coal,
dogs commenced barking,
a woman bathed in a tub of beer,
and I felt the ground beneath my soles combust,
turn to liquid fire
and lo-and-behold
Imagination returned to surfing the Solar Cowabonga,
so full of pepper
over there where
bullets melt in your mouth,
but not sweeter than Jane for
she’s the one,
she’s the one who
melts in your hands.
Down at Café Bleak-Water
There’s a parrot in an open cage
the parrot knows only two words in a Creole long extinct
thus they must rhyme or prove a binary and the patrons bet
on Love / Hate or Birth / Death or Rollings / Beatles or
Ice / Tar or Knife / Gurney or Tin-Can / Pencil and
none of this will be solved and cash grabbed by winning hands
(nor should it!)
until a philologist or long-haired eater of bovine cud
enter the Café Bleak-Water and ask
about carrion or raincoats or the wild boys who sleep on the shore
In enters Anabelle and she’s hung-over
asks for a glass of red wine and an aspirin
and today the café teeters between a small town in Normandie
or a derelict side-street in Malibu
so the beach-bums and plumbers and Good Ol’ Silver-Tooth
along with a Hip-Hop accountant yclept Vendetta
drink beer or milk or shots of absinthe to escape
the sun-crush or drizzle outside
and everything hums like
Frigidaire at midnight in kitchen awash with Elvis portraits
and the clientele know they have sunk
into the interstice
between fetus and disco or
woman and tiger or Poetry and postcards
in such moments a gun-slinger would come
in handy
either that or a hammer and better menu
one with less Buffalo Wings and more vultures
Anabelle opens her purse
unleashes four silver coins each the size of a monarch butterfly
she flicks them inside the Juke
punches a number
and there thunders the first guitar chord pulsing with pumas
what those words in Creole mean no longer matter
what matters is that Chord that lightning:
Definitely D Major
or C
or F#
Babies Born Screaming
Anything’s better than these hornets
some call planned obsolescence or microwaveable protein,
but there always resides in the air, in the black soil,
the car keys to a red Mustang,
remains of faulty scaffolds or
feathers stuck to glue,
the countdown to the number-one- dance-song,
all, as ambivalent to the withering rose as
bacteria in a cow’s still-warm milk.
In the future some
will say There are no beautiful ones at this feast,
For my money, I would have requested a high caliber of Testosterone,
but they never heard the mucus
rising from fear to esophagus to the
doe leaping from brush-fires,
or the trembling breasts
of the moon while she nourished dust
once deemed sterile
regolith
retrograde.
As always
newborns are delivered far from the shore but
they taste the salt and hear the blind
howling at the eclipse.
Salt and deprived hearth lick at their hearts.
Best be to fill the finest goblet or clay cup
with a syrup many call tears,
hold up the liquid and
observe
river doesn’t leap bank, clouds don’t
rain sulfur or rain,
what’s revealed…
only the pair of sandals for slender feet,
the stone path,
the enticements of the pomegranate,
and the dark smoke-webbed gates.
Double Concerto for Lovesickness and Dewlap
Beauty claimed once she had slept on a divan
in the basement of the moon
but her foot chained to the radiator
nights when rain scrubs the smog
and the bare-naked-starlight resuscitates
the suicide victims who regurgitate razors and chewing gum
stuck under diner counters or
caked to loafer soles black after the long stroll
via circuitous routes from Pharmacy Love
to the ladles of gravy boredom,
but she won’t pour you the final shot
no mezcal when cash dissolves like
soap bubbles or when the Beast of Convention
and Terminal Tax Codes
grabs you by the lapels and shouts
Never use the Subjunctive when speaking about Ash!
Because in the end
there are only the clouds,
(the clouds! the clouds! the syphilitic Dandy howled!),
but on Titan they’re stitched from nitrogen,
with a precipitation of methane,
and the surface temperature of -290F
is no plot for hothouse flowers,
and summer vacations were always slated for something azure,
and love should offer large eyes and sickly daisies,
not a box locked shut for it contains a chunk of Saturn’s atmospheric pressures,
and her hair,
(those undulant, vast, moonward-bending tresses),
curl down to your sleep with the malignancy
of virus or oil spill
and only then you must learn
to hug your un-hatched eggs and echoes
from dance floors and confetti glee,
as the guidebook eternal has been discarded
and Beauty’s father was caught
at the murder-scene red-handed,
and in the mugshot photo
his dewlap jiggled and blurred some astronomical glimpse
into non-carbon strains of coitus.
Some Sniveling in the Supermarket of Complacency
Okay
okay neither desert nor ghetto
not even a resort with sauna and decent blackjack
but someone somehow
left a jeroboam containing pink toxic aspic,
and now the pine-tree no longer sweetens aspirin,
and the white iris
has turned basketball sneakers into Beauty
so that the gnarled black toes of Taste
may be shod and cushioned,
and if this were a French film from the 70’s,
the couple would be smoking in bed,
while arrondissments in the distance
carbonize beneath some Marxist Upper-Volta Cadenza,
but it’s not,
it’s useless a snowball chucked into pan of sizzling lard,
so just try to forget about the switchblade
in the rear pocket of well-worn blue jeans,
the leer and delicious delay
before the motorcyclist declares free love,
while the mediocre majority
melt beneath the spitfire precipitation
of coupon bingo,
and the plunging
parachutes of spermatozoa
ejected from clouds who had once flirted with
the gentle crush of candy,
copper,
or arsenic rose-bloom.
Anthony Seidman