Room with a Potential View

Pour $100,000 champagne plus a kilo
of honey over the city of Reykjavík.

Call it a yacht, a leak, a cataract of
angel juice gushing and still famished.

We were left in the scarcity terminal
with an aura strictly American.

A real killjoy depleted of Billy the Kid
reduced to cynical art timers of hunger.

Strike thousands of years of living together
you say it was like pouring everything out

in the way that rocks are documentary
Los Angeles oozing quasi-imaginary

epochs of icy blankness blinking
into being the ancestral city rim.

Beauty brain freeze the proper noun
walking barefoot over diamonds

the world rolling in ecstasy at its feet.

Zam Zam

                        —for Farhad Moshiri

What we do is secret. Zam Zam. Paper appears
reappears airplane.  It’s as if the viewer gives

some direction to the work. I have no idea. I can’t
generalize. I can only cluster my briefcase void

with crystals at the door of your next honeymoon.
Far ahead wilts radioactive halflight—
 
the market and the art-making process
enter adroit hype, post-operative

twilight. There’s no appropriate space
right now, re: the reproductive rights

of roses, of prescription percocet.
Golden Shower Maharishi Fete, price tbd. 

Ford Tuff Enlightenment Yahweh, 25 billion.
From afar radars make right shiny robot love.

Zam Zam in Farsi coincidently reads “p-i-p-i”
for Europeans, pronounced “pee pee” in English.

Yes, we will assemble a vast fleet of offspring theories,
a public impossible hairdo farm, a flower field writhing

with featherweight wrestlers, and enamel retro rhyme
toys. OK, it’s alright, we can just say we did

but sorrow is a lot you can do with glitter.
Hi, poetry ad. Welcome, foaming pithy adore.  

Elisabeth Workman’s poems have appeared in Absent, Alice Blue Review, The Black Economy, fourW, and West Wind Review, among others. Her chapbooks include a city_a cloud and Opolis (Dusie 2006, 2007). A 2009 recipient of the Jerome/SASE Award for Emerging Writers, she is currently working on a full-length collection (of which these poems are part) that might be called A Brief History of Shooting from the Hip. She works for a visual art museum in Minneapolis.