Frances Leviston

Of Tribulation, these are They, Denoted by the White. — Emily Dickinson

frangelico It slops from coppery glass Dominican cassocks thicker than water, thinned syrup crackling and smoking over ice, pale as hearts of  hazelnuts half-caramelized or relics lit in cabinets. Angelic alcoholic for kids, all quickening sweetness without the burnt palate, it’s praline, gilt, milk chocolate. Don’t knock it. Also, don’t drink a lot of it. Handy mnemonic for nuts and Alps, the Piedmont and Languedoc,Our Father, fluent Occitan, Orthodox baroque brass fixtures, all the schmaltzy terror of Christmas    ... Bright liqueur, maple sap, throat’s lacquer, misnomer, namesake— couldn’t quench a thirst, of course, but gives occasion for it. lametta Fuck me, I love that stuff — tinsel stripped like a tarragon stalk of its million radial tines, nervy with static in shredded cascades, angle-confounding and biddable as a fistful of grasshoppers. It implicates itself perpetually in socks, hell-bent as Japanese knotweed on travel, and infiltrates the kitchenette, which seems, beside its disco stooks, too much of a muchness, too matter-of-fact. Could we dress all utilities in spangles of lametta, revel in the vulgar Italian TV indestructible attention-splatter, the cat-bewitching twitch and dangle, the dross? Would things be worse or better? periptero Apparently peripatetic, it pops up wherever I go, glistening on my shoulder, a gold epaulette, a stuffed piñata albatross of bubble-gum, filter tips, and lottery tickets, glossy cascades of laminated sleaze difficult to care about, much harder to reject. Less explicably there are sewing patterns, puzzle books, and tiny plastic helicopters bearing stigmata from the molds where they were cast. The proprietor slams the shutters up and locks himself inside like a djinn in a lamp, a night-busy, helping-hand kobold in a kitchen, utterly invested in the enterprise, inseparable from it. What is the epicenter everyone reports but the staple through the nipple of a centerfold?