Porte D'entrée
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Adam Henry Carrière
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John LaMar Cole
Christopher Fuller
A. Elizabeth Herting
Ed Higgins
John L. Stanizzi
Patrick Sweeney
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Christian Ward
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Mercedes Webb-Pullman
{below}
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Nick Young
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♥ ♠ ♦ ♣
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Mercedes Webb-Pullman
13 ways to wear a grey velvet suit
(for Erik Satie)
I
amidst Picasso’s party guests
steering clear
of red wine
II
insecure about the waistcoat
in which there are
three pockets
III
the velvet catches shadows
and stows them in creases
IV
a topcoat and trousers
make a suit
a topcoat a waistcoat and trousers
make a suit
V
I don’t know which to wear
the grey velvet suit
or the grey velvet suit behind it
VI
Picasso fills his canvas
with spaces
the grey velvet suit
makes music between them
tunes
with too few notes
VII
sisters of Syria
why wear black?
a grey velvet suit
liberates
imaginations
VIII
I learn savage music
from the black keys
forgetting
how semi-tones stain
grey velvet
IX
when I remove
my grey velvet suit
it tumbles in an arc
X
seeing my suit
crumpled on the floor
she mistakes it for me
and laughs
XI
I fly over Paris
on my piano keys;
fatal ecstasy of
syncopated faces
and hypnotic shades
XII
the party is heating up
the grey velvet suit must have worked
XIII
it was Paris all performance
it was spring
we will always have Paris
just check
my grey velvet suit pocket
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(Do you need to know that Erik Satie was an avant garde musician, a contemporary of Picasso, who bought his grey velvet suits by the dozen?)
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Mercedes Webb-Pullman was Danse Macabre's 2019-2020 Artist-in-Residence. She graduated from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand with her MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of Tasseography (2014) Track Tales (Truth Serum Press, 2017) and The Jean Genie (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2018). Her poems, and the odd short story, have appeared online (Bone Orchard Poetry, Caesura, Connotations, Danse Macabre, The Electronic Bridge, 4th Floor, Main Street Rag, Otoliths, Reconfigurations, Scum, Swamp, Pure Slush, Turbine, among others) and in print (Mana magazine, Poets to the People; Poetry from Lembas Cafe 2009, The 2010 Readstrange Collection, PoetryNZ Yearbook, many anthologies from Kind of a Hurricane Press, and the Danse Macabre anthologies Amour Sombre, Belles-Lettres, Hauptfriedhof, and Weihnachtsmarkt (Hammer & Anvil Books, 2017 & 2018). She has also won the Wellington Cafe Poetry contest in 2010, and wrote a foreword for their collection of 2012 contest entrants, which included another of her poems. Since then she has been awarded 3rd prize in United Poets Laureate International Poetry Contest 2015, and is particularly proud of having a haiku (the only one from New Zealand) in 100 Haiku for Peace, an international publication in five languages. Her lucky number is 8. Blue. She lives in ÅŒtaki Beach, New Zealand.
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