Poetry Magazine
Securitization
In someone’s distant algorithm
your mortgage was bundled to another’s
—hedged—
and stamped a new “security.”
While it was swapped
from investor to investor
accruing fees and interest at each turn,
your shadow
partner
defaulted
and she abandoned her home.
Someone uses your mortgage
to leverage
something
far inside the starbursts of a server.
Likewise marriage
has
no image—
What’s a mortgage
and who’s
it engage
on the other side of the firewall?
*
I witnessed a will
which—the language invested with law
godmothers the peacock’s
fanned
screech—
would take care of the baby in the event of a
[blesses herself]
It lives at the Cathedral
and seems to be some kind of
mascot for
Baptisms
*
Securities:
The future art you’ll make and its pleasure
is hedged against the
boys who died
you fancied.
Source: Poetry (December 2008).
Biography
Ange Mlinko is the author of three books, Shoulder Season (Coffee House Press, 2010), Starred Wire (Coffee House Press, 2005), which was a National Poetry Series winner in 2004 and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, and Matinees (Zoland Books, 1999). In 2009, she won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism. Mlinko was born in Philadelphia, and has worked in Brooklyn, Providence, Boston, and Morocco. She has taught poetry at . . .
Poems by Ange Mlinko
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Social Commentaries, Money & Economics, Popular Culture
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