Taking the human body as its theme, Valve Works combines Rob Sherman's biting and original poetry with Sarah Ogilvie's striking, surreal artwork.
Hypothalamus
The part of the brain that controls hunger, thirst, and body temperature.
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
You may hang,
My Holy Greek,
In the amniote, like a stalactite breathing
An alloy of me, dripping it
Erotically
Down the Escher stairway
That my ribs make.
Your juice enters my heart,
Makes it a heaving, overclocked engine
That loosely relates to that afternoon
I chased ducks and she disapproved.
You may hang, a bud, a nipple,
A pear, a cave painting, a tongue.
You may hang however you please.
For I can feel you if I push against
The beams of my mouth
My pilot, featureless as a knee,
Suspended like a sinner.
My crippled, Bacchal organiser
That stimulates my growth.
Hallux
The first or innermost digit of the foot; The Great Toe.
In which the poet constructs a malediction against his own hallux,
which, in the end, has caused him nothing but grief.
You grow in, you burrow, you mole
You Pinochet, you skunk, you troll,
You fat twin pig, gout-sponged, you spread
Take your real estate from the less fortunate.
You bloat, you block, you foul menstruate.
May an ill-advised Andean climb in poor health,
Make you peel and crisp and eat yourself.
May a spindled fish, with teeth and intent,
Rip you from your prehensile indent.
Even if I fall, great balancer, the equilibrium of birds,
I would tumble forth four hundred times to see you gone and
burned.
Eyes
The vertebrate organ of sight.
The American Heritage Science Dictionary
A scoop of rain black some ice cream in a drain black a bird a
house a shovel that grits painfully
against the road black black black
The back of itself the encircling pink the light through the lid
the hinged scaffolding and early to bed
This is what it sees but all through water, just water and skin
water and skin to see where it's been