NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Michael Paul Hogan values the space between lines and around words, arranging words as a painter slicks paint. No surprise then the images of films and occasional reference to artists slips in, eg, INTERIORS IV / MANHATTAN (complete poem)

	The dress she wore shone like a movie screen
	before the movie. Like parachute silk.
	Or the label on a bottle of vodka.
	A collapsed star
	absorbing color.

	She was alone, that much was obvious
	from the wary looks the other women gave her,
	but her detachment was something deeper,
	the loneliness of the vampire,
	of Dracula's daughter.

	I watched her across the room,
	holding but not drinking a pale blue cocktail
	and staring intently at a (genuine) Mondrian
	as though recognising
	her own abstraction.

	When I'm old 
		she said
	(lighting a pink and gold Sobranie)
	I'll borrow your typewriter
	and write my memoirs

	a catalogue of lovers, past and present
	poets and artists mostly

	my mother's been married for thirty-eight years
	to a guy she still worships
		can you believe that?

	...Her breasts
	are the color of small money.
	She is old photographs
	where everybody
	is the color of iced tea.

	The writer watches
	(it is now, now)
	while his fingers crapshoot
	the typewriter keys
	against the paper...

	The wind is coming.
	Great bombs of it explode against the windows.
	The writer in the corner of the bar
	hears the silk rush of palm trees,
	remembers a girl in a lilac sweater
	and a noise like tearing paper...