I blogged about Joyce Mansour

But not here. At the Best American Poetry blog.

Here's another poem though, from Phallus & Mommies (1969), also included in the Black Widow volume I cite over there. I just can't stop swooning.

WILD GLEE FROM ELSEWHERE

Hard calloused dreams
Burst palefully
Through the seams of tasteless
Yesterday
Don't whine for help
Lie bleeding
Life is a perpetual sneeze
Listen to the screech of iron in the rocky
Vacuum
Of an eyeless
Socket
To the mouthless prayer of ambiguous men
Stretched out in anguish and surgical green
Listen
Sharpen your tongue on the soft white womb
Nestling in formol*
Then all shouting done
Watch brittle sperm rain down like cheese
Collect the bubbles
Hustle sour winds up the sidewalk
Suck the fresh flesh of the ruby
Leave it screaming
No matter
Strange shallow dreams eat at random
And shrink not with age
Soundless laughter like the midnight sea
Will toil back to slumber
And there will the bodiless breaker unroll its metal
Dip thunder and vanish
In a thousand grim echoes
Far beyond the bloody swelling of a mother's breast
"Pardon me," she said dressed in small town bereavement
And Humpty Dumpty closed a huge savage eye

That's a photograph of Mansour with Chilean painter Roberto Matta, 1975. I don't know what they are doing, but yes, it seems to involve her nipples. The two collaborated on a series of his etchings/her poems called Les Damnations, published by Editions Georges Visat in Paris in 1966.

*formaldehyde