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Perfect for Mother's Day: the Baby Be of Use series or The Secret Language of Sleep.

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Tina Sestina.

BY DOUG LANG

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 Please, what is this process to which we refer as semolina?
 Hello? Spending all your time in the cantina? 
 Please, I got these words from a page in a book of poems by Mina
 Loy. Now I see that over the whole of Washington there is a strange blue patina. 
 And you know how much we all miss Corinna. 
 Like as much as there are as many ducks in all of Carolina. 

 Carobola. Carobingo. Carolampus. Carolina. Carolingus. Carolina. 
 Semi-Demi. Semolana. Semalapon. Semolina. 
 Corri. Corridora. Corrigendum, Corinna. Corinna. 
 Cannoli. Cannula. Canononical. Canopry. Cantina. 
 P'p'p'p'p'p'p'p'p patina. 
 Mama mia. Mama mama. Mama Mina. 

 Mina Loy. Mi. Na. Mina. Mindbending mindbending mindblowing mindboggling Mina
 Loy. Blue mountains to the north of the walls in Carolina. 
 Munching on a plum a patina
 Of your desolation. This is what you call semolina? 
 Unchanging motion in a straight line? Resulting from the absence of a force in the cantina? 
 This is a portrait of somebody, some other than Corinna. 

 The memory of the memory of Corinna. 
 With the publication of Galileo's Discorsi in 1638, Mina
 Loy started spending all her nights praying in the cantina
 Gravitationally collapsing thermal particles all over Carolina
 Frontal lobe all semolina
 Zero-angular-momentum state of the patina

 You are the mystic boss of Lobachevskian space: and time is a patina
 You use to unlock the grid confining Corinna
 As the photon's wave function impinges on the semolina
 Unlike Smoot's God ? more like Hawking's evaporation time now under the spell of Mina
 Under the spell of Poincaré under the spell of Mozart in the continuum known as Carolina
 And after the Turing machine comes to a halt, you might leave the cantina

 Who is not afraid of the cantina? 
 Who is not in love with the patina? 
 Who is not alone in Carolina? 
 Who is not beguiled by Corinna? 
 Who is not Mina
 Loy? There is no authentic semolina. 

 Dante conceived it: the cantina. Beyond Tuscany there is Corinna. 
 This black snake dualism is all patina. With Mina
 Smoking like a fissure deep in Carolina, I am the semolina 

 

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