PAUL GIAMATTI IN SIDEWAYS VOICE

Drunken fever in Dostoevsky
I began to hear music again
To tolerate the beauty of the Carter Family

When the poems were bad

I made life better
Which is easier anyway because all it costs is money
Picked up some fennel
Cleaned
Checked out movie times
A murder musical from 1965 starring 8 French luminaries
Of stage and screen
Why not

When the poems are bad
When you have to face life without them
The country songs remind us the black train is coming
Tell that beautiful woman first
Out of spite
How God comes in the form of a man who kills you
Extinction doesn’t care
Extinction never gave a fuck
Still the circle is unbroken
Music rolling back
It’s a song about a train
But not really
Jealousy begets loneliness
And I am the straight girl who goes everywhere alone

The child forced to share isn’t sharing
For him the song is purely about the train
It claims to be about
His train
Not death
His train has a conductor
Is always red

Write poem
Think like you mean it but
They aren’t paying me
It’s not fun

Does the ear of wheat fold back in the sun for you
For you is it yellow in the rafter
In the aft
In the sailor’s mouth
When it happens for you
Where does it happen
In an equation from the top of the stairs
Came the problem hand on bannister
Solutions taken out back
Dealt with

Language makes me want to either die now or live forever
Hail hitting the window never did that
Hail never made me feel
There are no dogs at the edge of the universe
This is just something I am absolutely sure of

PAUL GIAMATTI IN SIDEWAYS VOICE

Across all epics the second canto is the canto of weakness
Making a choice to be strong, someone crying
I am not Paul, I am not Aeneas
And Aeneas told the winged bats or goddess
He wasn’t someone else
This side of the cliff is still on fire
We know nothing but his name

But inside every man lives the little onlooker
I’m not Lorca with the answer
When you wrote a poem what
Did it want you to do with it
In the elegies
Lost in water
Cliff charring away leaking smoke into the eye
And the skyline is like skin
Of a drum Leonard Cohen could never mend
He’s not Paul, he’s not Aeneas

Drunk people frame their faces like angels
when the camera flash goes off in the bar
Hold their chin with two hands
Flip their lashes in the blue gleam of the afterlife
They’re touching it
An orb appears in one of the prints
Just above the seafood tower
When I was lost in water
I understood but won’t tell you

The little onlooker sent this message
I don’t know why I exist
But I get to be the witness
To never warn or help you
I’m like your dead brother
I’m parallel
And I eat tears back into your eyes so they don’t come out

My wives treated me poorly
I felt like one of Milton’s beautiful daughters
Waiting for news of their cruel father’s death
Milton’s daughters
Like I in relation to my wives
Didn’t ask to be born
Sky light
Is the blueprint
But we love them all

Love as we step into the brightness
Of Party City where my cousin bought the sour candy
Her pregnancy made her crave
Sprayable and luminous
She doused her tongue in the aisles and her son at three
Recognized the opening notes of Getaway Car
I didn’t know they were playing the best music ever
He called to me down the wig lined avenue
Dianne Selwyn, Dorothy
These are my baby teeth
Sexy Anime Woman, Dark Fairy
But I saw in the child’s hand was a tin of barnacles
I am so much more interested in things that have been made by people
Than things which exist in nature
But I’m here walking in the woods just the same
Where no one can see me

In a movie everyone looks beautiful
In a movie I look beautiful
Because that’s how they were
That’s how I was
when you weren’t there

PAUL GIAMATTI IN SIDEWAYS VOICE

I’m a lot like you now
We are numbers and our numbers have numbers
Chickens lay eggs
Single men crack jokes
Natures roll by and I don’t notice their ultra-simplicity
The conspiracy of distraction wins
The preschool kids on the train make only
some of us happy and also, by the way,
as Jupiter on Juno smiles
I don’t care what we did

Women are aimless in movies
Men are aimless in real life
I sang the song that kills you if you sing it
But here I am still
A man lifts his mouth to call out from the driver’s side
High waters with the Crocs
I feel love

Walter Winchell
Women on stairs
These drawings reflect the artist’s compassion
For children and her interest in how they are affected
By family, class, or education
Welcome to the golden age of short stops
Taking turns with the music is the music

In McCarren Park a little girl’s toy horse
On a floral picnic blanket surrounded by Legos
And trash sprinkled carelessly around
Looked exactly like the unicorn tapestry
I am a kind of pulsing light
But I didn’t like it when you said
We’re just large click beetles and reality isn’t real
I’m a person and it is

It took so long to cross the street with you
Your little hand
Orange cone where a car had not driven in years
Why is material innovation only talking to itself
Same reason I am, if I had to guess

Because the underside of everything belongs to the dead
Bottom of the coffee mug
Small surfaces where the table legs rest on the floor
Bottom of my shoes
Bottom of the sea
I’d just rather pulse than click

Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from Mississippi. She is the author of the poetry collections Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022), I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023), A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025) and The Lamb With The Talking Scroll (forthcoming, b l u s h lit, 2025).

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