March 1923

Sommaire

• The poet assassinated

  The glory of Croniamantal is today universal. One hundred and twenty-three towns in seven countries on four continents dispute the honor of this notable hero's birth. I shall attempt, further on, to elucidate this important question.

  par Guillaume Apollinaire
• La Rumba Cubana

  They have painted me rose pink lilac
  Naked yellowness and ebony of shoulders
  Thick red lips
  My dress hangs loose and thin impudence of light fabric
  Such a dress as African women wore to the missionary door
  And squatted out of into nakedness
  Of huge and shimmering leaves
  The jungle
  Whence sweaty slaves huddled into galleons.

  par Charles Galwey
• Portrait by Leyendecker

  At 7 : 30 exactly he is awakened by a battery of alarm clocks. A Big Ben 7 in. tall with 4%-in. dial. A Baby Ben 3% in. overall. A Jack o'Lantern, so named for its luminous dial. Half a dozen other clocks of assorted shapes, with black or radium-painted numerals; steady or intermittent, top, back or interior alarms.

  par Malcolm Cowley
• A Lady

  Her lips are roses
  rotting in water.
  Her eyelids two shrivelled
  violets.
  Her eyes are puddles.
  Her voice is of a bird being strangled.
  Her youth in passing
  lingers in her hands.
  They flutter, hovering
  like two butterflies
  over the corpse of her flesh.

  par Emanuel Carnevali
• Portrait

  Withdraw your hair from the simulated
  Interest of the moon;
  Take every tenuous shadow
  From the aimless tongues of these trees
  And darken your speech until it attains
  A fickle and fantastic

  par Maxwell Bodenheim
• The discovery of the Indies

  A dense waterboundary over beyond the Azores needed a ship through it. Having failed to secure a footing for the adventure in every capital, ridiculed, driven about from place to place, in rags finally, his mind burning, the martyr's fervor eating now back of his breastbone, his son at his side — the Italian joins the mob about their Catholic Spanish Majesties encamped before Granada. There he watches his opportunity, for the last time to make his proposal.

  par William Carlos Williams
• Darkness Glitters

  He sits on the bridge inspecting his hands. Opposite me is another me it is not hard to find red boats and soon he will come threading his way through the traffic, blow, horns! blow, horns! and the silence dies in the enchanted melody of a flageolet but blow! blow! crack your cheeks and blow! horns! here is birth when I was a child in my cradle a portrait hung over my head and the hard corners ladled its substance into my brain one winked color then and darkness glittered, but blow! and blow again! he is naked, we all see that and leering over him her finger stumbles in his flesh and my senses chatter as we run with him, the horns triumphantly blowing and one with hair streaming running laughing at the head

  par Robert Coates
• The apollo of VEII Stigmatae

  Crunch of foot forward, foot forward;
  Flair of leg-muscles, set to steel,
  Sliding, gliding, bunching to steel;
  Quiver and poise: foot, shin-bone, and knee —
  Crunch of foot forward, foot forward.

  par Carleton Beals