Surreal-Absurd Sampler Jeff Alessandrelli
“My conception of surrealism-absurdism/ the surreal-absurd changes depending on the day, but today I think it simply involves subverting expectations. All interesting writing does that, of course, but with the surreal-absurd the onus is more on the deeply unseated and disavowed and impossible to conceive of, impossible to forget. The old "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" notion, to quote A. Breton. In my latest poetry collections Fur Not Light (U.S.)/Nothing of the Month Club (U.K. edition of Fur Not Light) I attempted to investigate what doesn’t fit and why that unfitting is often more important than that that fits. The songs on the record that I like best are the ones that momentarily skip before righting themselves. But you remember the skip later.” — Jeff Alessandrelli
The Annunciation
With her bowel movement my three-year old daughter beheads God, clean, precise. I admire the smell as though it were a piece of dirty jewelry spotted amidst flurries of falling snow. Feeble, my lack’s fortitude mottled with crow’s feet, I smile at the other passengers on the bus. Against the bouncing fluorescence some limpid waste of a moon out the shifting windows covers no one fully except my daughter, her hands absently explaining to her mouth the parameters of sensation. Already she is a slave to her life. Waft—it’s an answer to a question no one’s asked, right? A problem of proximity and degree? What does—she wafts in it. Later I stare at the body, head boundless and sinewed. Pacing without moving, my daughter sits in my lap.
Nothing of the Month Club
Look me in the eyes when you stab me in the back the woman thought to herself, slamming back a 32-oz. bottle of Pepto-Bismol, naked, absently staring at herself in the bathroom’s fluorescently lit full-length mirror, her bloated stomach a pot of fool’s gold, barren, pregnant with guel and bile. Belly button the size of a silver dollar. She felt fine she felt fine she felt fine.
*
The woman typed how to fold a burrito so the filling doesn’t fall out into the invisible engine filled with quantifiable numerical codes analytically transformed into linguistically readable searches and
how to fold a burrito so the feeling doesn’t fall out appeared on the screen instead. She scrutinized her finding, decided burritos were none of her business. Outside the library’s computer lab the world was filled with shapes and colors constantly rising and falling in size, stature. The expression on the woman’s face might best be described as glowful. She still needed to go to the market. She needed to make salsa.
Nothing of the Month Club
Owner of the world’s largest air guitar collection, its loudest silence, a tender god is a tender god is a yielding gift to oneself, but don’t quit your day job early, waiting for a fix. Wish. Out of boredom I throw all these dumb clumps of beauty into the river. They sink right quick. Rain, sun, sleet, snow, silence: It’s not even noon and already today five different types of weather. Scampi’s prepared hot and rich and rich. Huh?
The scrap metal that I planted by the reservoir last spring is finally starting to bloom!
A thousand white winter weddings soon upon us!
Nothing of the Month Club
Tonight let the finish line slide beneath me of its own accord and let the sky’s panoply, dumb with stars, cease its brilliant winter. Tonight the Soup of the Day at my favorite restaurant is tequila and, so very hungry, I’m 14 minutes sober—what to do, what to do? Tomorrow will be another morning—let’s call it a life—spent searching the medicine cabinet for aspirin and finding instead cheeseburger wrappers, half-smoked cigars. And the future a dream I had last night, one I’ll never remember. There’s a sickness in me, I’m sure. From a mile away you can hear me smile. A sickness.
Monkey Puzzle Roots
Solitude is earned in a thousand messages in a bottle thrown into the ocean and none answered. Or how with age pleasure becomes a responsibility, not a privilege. Same Make Your Orgasm Deeper— and Longer Lasting! magazine hovering at the checkout stand your entire life. Same regressive dinner parties, validating the flood of companied confusion. Love’s emotional trigonometry. Time. Doubt.
New work by Jeff Alessandrelli appears or is forthcoming in BOMB, Poetry London, Denver Quarterly and Gulf Coast. The Kenyon Review called his most recent poetry collection Fur Not Light (2019) “an example of radical humility,” and, entitled Nothing of the Month Club, the UK Press Broken Sleep released an expanded version of Fur Not Light in June 2021.
In addition to his writing work Alessandrelli also directs the non-profit record label/press Fonograf Ed.
Website: https://jeffalessandrelli.net/
