$10.00
by Rob Cook
After a subtly disturbing, two-month illness of fatigue, depression, creepy psychological states, psychotic rage, and tickles of low-grade nausea, I woke up the morning after Thanksgiving, 2013, with an itchy chest and abdomen. My immediate, pre-conscious reaction: liver is hurt, dead in six months.
Praise for Rob Cook's Other Work:
Eschewing neat closures, Cook creates poems that arguably compose one long gesture, the sections open to and echoing each other, all held together by the pain of a unblinking awareness as well as by a ubiquitous freshness in the writing—if Cook sees a worn linguistic or perceptual path in front of him, he always veers off in a new direction that challenges both himself and his reader. Fueled by a deep dismay, the poetry goes beyond Surrealism, for Breton's 'astonish me' is no longer sufficient; the many contemporary outrages of Cook's 'always lurking, indefinable country' require instead a poetic that can register the shock of 'castrated hymns' and 'the statues of sharks inside our mouths.'
—Philip Dacey
Cook writes admirably rhythmic poems, For instance, "After the Psalms Have Gone": there is a door /and a book of gold/and a road made of light/and mountains blowing/among the windy fallen stars. The beat of the line mirrors the revelations that are the subject of the poem and his easy and unembarrassed contemplation of the spiritual is refreshing. His tying of the intimacies of personal experience into a larger cosmic picture gives his work a profundity that might not be apparent at first glance. You have the admirable clarity of "The Book of Iowa” I climb out of bed, listen/to you digging a cold space/under the crows and cities of corn. One has overall an impression of a poetry fuelled by melancholy and dismay, which disdains easy conclusions and simple joy. The vigour of his language and the startling freshness of his imagery are undeniable, as is his talent.
—Gareth Spark
Rob Cook lives in New York City’s East Village. He is the author of six collections, including Blueprints for a Genocide (Spuyten Duyvil, 2012) and Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013). Work has appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Caliban, Fence, A cappella Zoo, Zoland Poetry, Tampa Review, Minnesota Review, Aufgabe, Caketrain, Many Mountains Moving, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Colorado Review, Bomb (online), Sugar House Review, Mudfish, Pleiades, Versal, Weave, Wisconsin Review, Ur Vox, Heavy Feather Review, Phantom Drift, Osiris, etc.
by Rob Cook
2014
I dragged my body to the end of my street
and there was no new year.
I watched the cinder blocks
growing legs and fur.
They had no place to sleep
or stay warm. And no,
they were not cats.
I saw a diseased liver on the sidewalk.
Nothing stopped to sniff
or taste it. But it smelled
like a pouch of rancid diamonds.
In one house a phone vibrated
until it fell to the floor.
In another the children were forcing
shoes to eat each other.
Or maybe one child was simply
chewing his lips.
The houses—and no one knew
who left them there—were dark
and absorbed none of the afternoon light.
And on the smallest known world—
two men—father and son—waited
to hear the name of the thing
plundering their insides.
I thought I heard a flock of geese—
I turned around, twice,
but it was just a radio chirping
inside a car parked at the wrong
wind coordinate,
and above us, by a storm deviation or less,
one uninterrupted cloud mass
like the lid of a garbage can
cemented to the sky where nothing moved.
I lured my body to the end of my street
but it was a lie all along—
there was no new year.
Washing Away the Permanent Color Yellow
I took my liver from its swollen house
and washed it carefully with a cloth
made from my troubled yellow silence.
I washed my liver until it licked my hand.
I washed my liver and it leaked
a poisonous ocean breeze.
I let my liver play with all the other livers
I freed from that fatty ditch in my side.
I watched them squirm like sponges on the bed.
But then their squirming stopped, and I felt the nausea
of a hermit crab when the livers froze into a fatal
moonlight, scavenging the tiredness for their shells.
Blackness over Motel Country
In the dead solar systems of my sleep
I can see through the sky’s lit windows,
bites left by liver-scarred spiders
who’ve snuck into bed with me,
their deep fatigue mined
from the hospital north of Mechanicsville.
I’m frightened because I think I see God’s hair bleeding
behind one of the windows.
In another a man scribbles
with a No. 2 pencil the word RAIN all over his walls.
And in the closest one a woman tucks a can opener
into a dark shawl, though I can’t be sure,
perhaps it’s a brown medicine bottle; the woman’s mouth moves,
I know she sings the color of sadness,
the parable of my terrors buried all over the sky
by the dragons that created us.
But when the manager of the Marion Motel
says: “You know where to come for the best possible sleep”
and the way his voice eliminates everything,
as if it’s already purchased the nightmare coordinates of my coal-black planet,
it’s difficult to tell if the tunnels between bathrooms
have dried into dead rivers
or if he knows the mattress where Aaron Tosh
and his unmarked trails to Chicago
were buried with a cocktail of bullets
and transplanted telephone confessions.
Maybe the woman who nursed my advanced
jaundice can still see my yellow eyes
moving through the winter of room number six.
“I got sick without once leaving my childhood,” I tell her.
“The pine needles will not hurt you from there,”
the woman says through her conduit of ash tray static.
It is not my own voice, the despair of the television
that doesn’t end. “I am always watching from
the livers that came before you,” she says
when the sleep creatures pass like a blur of doctors
and their searchlights of mist. Maybe she discusses
my elevated comet count with the man selling
the letters left in the vacancy sign, a blinking between
voids where one interferon raven roosts.
Maybe I hear the bird remnants of her father praying
to some unforgiven meteor in the ceiling’s camera stains.
I’m always close to a strength that doesn’t belong anywhere
because when the manager washes the sky’s curtains, I can see
to the end of the universe, the same woman sitting
by a lemon-colored house with all of my pills purring in her lap.
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