First Tuesdays |||

The Cento for April 2, 2024

To Keep You Over and Over Performing Your Loneliness

i.

Like a blob of snot dangling from god’s left nostril,
everything is becoming artificial quickly.
Give me a voice, give me a new face,
jaws endless, stomach bottomless.

ii.

One hand on her hand, one hand on aluminum bars.
Her eyelids spread over the top of her eyeballs,
pinwheeling like lovers over a precipice.

iii.

Step forward. We hear you are a good man.
Bury you with a good shovel in the good earth.
That was the year the rains came, all in a whisper.

iv.

The curse you gave me keeps me up at night.
In the spotlight of Death,
Life shines in its brightest colors.
In this life and the next, may the Muses take your hand.

v.

The last call: I wish it wasn’t
steel heated to the color of the morning sun.
You tack your promises to the wall with nails made of ice,
the thinnest ice anyone had ever seen.

vi.

My first real home, my first real love:
if one steps on it, they fall into another dimension.


During every First Tuesdays open mic, we communally compose a cento using language taken from each open-mic reader’s offering. On September 3rd, those readers were: This cento is composed of lines from the following open mic readers: Richard Jeffrey Newman, Monija Rahman, Bruce Whitacre, Robert Kaplan, Herb Rubenstein, Martha Hollander, Noah Bumas (who read from Bertholt Brecht), Henry Sussman, Kristi Hart, Adina Dabija, Adrienne Fihenakis, Amina Irving, David Siller, Andrew Dick, Scott Bankert, Kate Cuapio Galvez, and Ronit Malekan.

Many thanks to David Siller, our trusty scribe for writing the cento down as we composed it.

Photo Credit: Transly Translation Agency on Unsplash.

Up next First Tuesdays Presents Sam Peterson First Tuesdays Presents Sokunthary Svay
Latest posts First Tuesdays Presents Martine Bellen First Tuesdays Presents Sokunthary Svay The Cento for April 2, 2024 First Tuesdays Presents Sam Peterson The Cento for September 12, 2023 This Video Was Made From the May 2, 2017 Cento The Cento for May 2, 2023 First Tuesdays Presents Andrea Carter Brown The Cento for April 4, 2023 First Tuesdays Presents Nandana Dev Sen First Tuesdays Presents Elizabeth Wood The Cento for March 7, 2023 The Cento for February 7, 2023 The Cento for January 3, 2023 First Tuesdays Presents Shams Momin First Tuesdays Presents Steven Paul Alvarez First Tuesdays Presents Jason Schneiderman The Cento for October 4, 2022 First Tuesdays Presents Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. The Cento for September 6, 2022 First Tuesdays Presents Jacqueline Jones LaMon - September 6, 2022 Two First Tuesdays Regulars Read An Incarcerated Writer’s Work as Part of PEN’s & The Poetry Project’s BREAK OUT The Cento for December 7, 2021 First Tuesdays Presents David Mills First Tuesdays Presents Alex Segura The Cento for September 9, 2021 The Cento for March 2, 2021 First Tuesdays Presents Lola Koundakjian First Tuesdays Presents Eugene Lim First Tuesdays Presents Christina M. Rau First Tuesdays On Zoom Presents David Rothman