Craig Cotter
Winter 2025 | Poetry
ON O'HARA'S BIRTHDAY
Green algae on my fingers
cleaned the good luck bamboo
back in its Chinese porcelain vase
*
How did you get through people at
MOMA
hated you for being openly gay,
hated you for having the wrong degrees
*
It didn't roll off
your poetry production dropped
as you were promoted the last years.
You didn't have time
to solve the drink
as I'm not solving food.
*
Nancy, where can we go?
Away from blueberry pie I suppose.
*
See, it's all probably.
Except for sitting here
because
even a few days back
it’s probably.
*
Reading interviews of Wright,
he's not sounding as interesting as his poems.
He's sounding angry and disdainful,
pompous and arrogant
even as he talks about those who are
pompous and arrogant.
*
How to be perfect?
A question Mr. Padgett punted on.
*
"Nothing's perfect in nature" my dad
would say
General Motors engineer
You know other things about him
because you’re perfect.
You’re everything in this moment
I haven’t passed on
but for most of you I have.
Where did I go?
When they put me down for surgery
it was being erased
*
We’re safe because we can’t meet.
*
Times I did anything for humanity
often I was being a shit and failing
*
I'm in my cabin too Bill
two stories above the alley,
a/c blaring
this 93 degree LA day.
If you're going to throw your life away
why not throw it big time
give it to art?
Where more fail
than ballplayers in the minors.
*
I’m drinking gin
with pretty pills
to get myself awake.
*
Well old man,
it's late.
You should be 83 tonight.
*
Teens light firecrackers
in the alley.
Did you get erased?
*
something
always
gives
Craig Cotter was born in 1960 in New York and has lived in California since 1986. His poems have appeared in hundreds of journals in the U.S., France, Italy, the Czech Republic, the U.K., Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, India and Ireland. Books include The Aroma of Toast, Chopstix Numbers, and After Lunch with Frank O’Hara. www.craigcotter.com