Linda J. Albertano ~ Featured Poet at Second Sunday Poetry Series ~ July 2022

Linda J. Albertano
Linda J. Albertano is a spoken-word and performance artist who’s represented on more than a dozen CD’s including her solo, Skin, for New Alliance. She’s unleashed her vocabulary at language meccas in London and Edinburgh as well as in America including Lollapalooza and South by Southwest. She was among those representing Los Angeles at the One World Poetry Fest in Amsterdam earning an enthused review by Harold Norse for Poetry Flash.

With Anne Waldman, Lewis MacAdams and others, Albertano presented her poetry at Allen Ginsberg’s Memorial at the Wadsworth Theater. And she’s featured on the Venice Poetry Monument with such local notables as Wanda Coleman and Charles Bukowski.

Her work has been published in the LA Institute of Contemporary Arts Journal, Invocation LA, Twelve Shades of Red, Gynomite, Beyond Baroque Press, Tribe LA, and Wide Awake. For eight years, she’s contributed with Andre Codrescu and a host of international artists and poets to Maintenant, a Contemporary Dada Journal annually found at MOMA. Her participation in “Redefining Democracy in America” is currently printed in the January, 2021 issue of the Performance Arts Journal by MIT Press.

BELOVED
Thou art incendiary.
Thou sendest me up in sparks
                                    100 times a day.
Thou makest me hum like 1000
            buzzing phone lines yammering through
                                    dizzy night.

When thou smilest upon me, I'm
            money in the bank.
When thou snarlest, I am as a bad
            check, bounced, and cowering
            in thy heart's darkest dumpster.

Thou art the Lion of La Cienega,
            the Rose of Sherman Way.
            I love to lay eyes on thee.

Thou ringest through me sudden
            and bright as fresh champagne.
My switchboard overloadeth.

Thy breath is as clean laundry
            folded behind thy lips.
Thy teeth art as white Lincolns
            parked in neat rows.

I love to taste the texture
            of thy skin.
Thine eyes art interstellar.

Beloved,
            thou art incendiary.

Thou sendest me up in sparks!