Sound Madness, by Gregory Palmerino

The Grand Odalisque, by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (France), 1813.

Sound Madness
            --After Seeing Ingres’ "La Grande Odalisque" Online
 
I love how O starts low in the belly
like Om, arises in the throat with da,
and eases past my grinning teeth with ee.
 
These sounds to me are succulent soma,
physical drugs, so Odalisque can’t trick
in her light manner, staring in the raw
 
all nil. She must lay in sounds we can lick,
sounds we can kiss with open mouth. Her hue
must not convey or feign in pixel talk,
 
but shout at dilettantes who dare subdue
her lines. Her peacock eye, the one that’s blind
at night, must not elude one part of you,
 
art lover; it must roil the blood in kind
and compel the sound madness of your mind.

​Gregory Palmerino

Gregory Palmerino’s essays and poems have appeared in Explicator, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, College English, Amaze: The Cinquain Journal, International Poetry Review, The Literary Hatchet, The Courtland Review, Shot Glass Journal, The Lyric, the fib review, The Road Not Taken, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, The Ekphrastic Review, Lighten Up Online, The NewVerse.News and The Asses of Parnassus. He teaches writing at Manchester Community College and writes poetry in Connecticut’s Quiet Corner, where he lives with his wife and three children.