Only lines from Sharon Olds, Frank O’Hara, and Script for Boogie Nights
Andrew Gibson & Zebulon Huset
Past the magazines with nudes
or their first sexual experience which only cost you a quarter
waiting for his cue behind a closed door
I wish I weren't reeling at all
“Say your mother is a pimp.”
A ribbon is floating in the air,
in a convulsion of tourists
“Are you listening to me? Hey— hey—”
“He's got more money than God”
“Pretend you're just a wonderful stud, pretend you're a wonderful stud that's just ready to melt her pussy.”
Sun on pond-ice embedded with twigs—
her sleep like an untamed, good object
breathing and lifting into the clouds
“Get your hand wet.”
He asks me to touch them
“I'm a star. I'm a star, I'm a big bright shining star”
explaining some facts about "the world of illusions.
He lifted it in astonishment, like a gift
“I've got a cock in my pussy, you idiot.”
and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
The pain of the locked past buzzes
You are the foxiest bitch in ten countries
Is she breathing?
the waves which have kept me from reaching you…
SILENCE. HOLD.
a luna moth in a chambered cage.
The Young Stud exits
If you don't have dreams you have nightmares.
Only lines from Lucille Clifton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Script for Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Andrew Gibson & Zebulon Huset
This movie starts the way all movies should... with a cartoon.
With civilization, having caught the plague—
with a loyal gravity.
The sun is a blister overhead
It's not blood, it's paint
He has a loveable, if slightly shell-shocked look.
So... it's blood.
Dangling braids the color of rain,
the Toon Fairy left him under my pillow
in the year of the disconnected gas.
The cemetery is completely still again.
Hair a flutter of
the limpid water turbidly ran,
like a clock dial gone berserk—
someone inside me remembers.
“Meek leaves drop yearly from the forest-trees.”
To prove it fresh from the river
crops refused to grow.
I can barely recall her song.
With a murmur of music, you miss
starshine and clay
Two bits.
The same process is repeated in reverse
with the dragonfly on the river.
Why their tears are falling so?
His eyes pop out of his head at what he sees:
The woman walks into my dreams
picked clean and discarded.
from The Exquisite Cento Project
The Exquisite Cento Project is a collaborative writing project in which two poets work with predetermined source material and the ‘exquisite corpse’ poetic technique of composing a poem with each participant writing alternating lines without being able to see the poem’s previous lines. The combination of the two poetic techniques gives us the project’s name and creates unexpected juxtapositions and serendipitous fluidity, often unearthing a poetic dialogue within the unconscious collaboration of poets.
The poems either use the project’s standard template of selecting lines from a predetermined source of two poets and the script for a movie, or are more freeform and include more varied sources including popular songs, movie reviews, only poets and many others. While some lines were omitted from the final results, aside from capitalization and punctuation, no lines were altered from their sources.
about the writers
Andrew Gibson studied creative writing at North Carolina Central University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming at The Collidescope, The Bookends Review, Random Sample and Always Crashing.
Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer living in San Diego. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Atlanta Review & Texas Review among others. He publishes the writing blog Notebooking Daily, edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked, and recommends literary journals at TheSubmissionWizard.com.