Hilary Sideris



The Drone

 

            It's got nothing to do with rock. It's to do with roll.

                                    —Keith Richards

 

The moment you tune

your guitar to one chord,

 

you have to learn where not

to put your fingers, what to

 

leave alone. Imagine a piano

turned upside down, the white

 

keys black, an ocean pulsing

in a shell. African tribesmen,

 

Vivaldi, Mozart knew—

you let one note jangle

 

& throb behind the brain.

The same train takes you

 

from the Delta to Detroit,

the human heartbeat.

 

 

Westinghouse

 

After inventors & investors

settled on electrocute,

 

having considered ampermort,

electromort, electricide,

 

they tried the chair

with mixed success on Bill 

 

Kemmler, a former fruit vendor

& drunk axe murderer

 

who'd used the blunt end

on his ex. Edison coined

 

& pushed hard for the verb

form of his rival's name,

 

citing as precedent

Dr. Guillotine.



 

Hilary Sideris' work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Arts & Letters, Cimarron Review, Confrontation, Connecticut Review, The Evansville Review, Green Mountains Review, Grey Sparrow, Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, The Normal School Magazine, PMS, Poet Lore, Quiddity, Tar River Poetry, and Women's Studies Quarterly, among others. Her first and third chapbooks, The Orange Juice is Over and Gold & Other Fish, have been published by Finishing Line Press, and a second chapbook, Baby, was published by Pudding House Press.









                                    

 

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