Laura Mullen, "You Only Live Twice"

  

Leave it to Laura Mullen to invent (or re-invent) a form whose echoic back-and-foreplay mimics an embedded medium, one set of representations nestled in another framework of representation. The shock of such perfect integration is that it makes perfect sense, times two (at least). (JM)

     You Only Live Twice

He is armed. He is harmed.

Licensed to kill and ill, knows

There’s a no in Casino, and now

There’s a drain for the rain

Running down to the old gold

Where the cat buries its scat.

Now here is the nowhere

I lent to the silent secret

Agent who was a real gent:

Him with the scar in the car,

All the cards in his hand and

The ice shaken like dice…

He is mine he is Dramamine.

I am feminine, I am nine.

Laura Mullen is the author of eight books: Complicated Grief (forthcoming from Solid Objects), Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides, The Surface, After I Was Dead, Subject, Dark Archive, The Tales of Horror, and Murmur. Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, two Board of Regents ATLAS grants, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work has been widely anthologized. Mullen is the McElveen Professor in English at LSU and the Director of Creative Writing.