Listen.

Scheherazade

2012-01-23T01:27:00.002-06:00

Scheherazade
by Richard Siken

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another appole
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.

Too lazy to be ambitious

2011-11-26T21:24:00.001-06:00

Too lazy to be ambitious
by Ryokan

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

Patience

2011-11-26T21:19:00.001-06:00

Patience
by Tony Hoagland

'Success is the worst possible thing that could happen
to a man like you,' she said,
'because the shiny shoes, and flattery
and the self-
lubricating slime of affluence would mean
you’d never have to face your failure as a human being.'

There was a rude remark I could have made back to her right then
and I watched it go by like a bright blue sailboat
on a long gray river of silence,
watching it until it disappeared around the bend

while I smiled and listened to her talk,
thinking it was good to let myself be stabbed by her little spears,
because I wanted to see what I was made of

besides fear and the desire to be liked
by every person on the goddamn face of the earth —

To tell the truth, I felt a certain satisfaction in taking it,

letting her believe that I was just a little bird
opening my mouth and swallowing
the medicine she wanted to administer
— a mixture of good advice combined with slow-acting poison.

Is it strange to say that there was something beautiful
in the sight of her running wild, cut loose in an
epileptic fit of telling the truth?

And anyway, she was right about me,
that I am prone to certain misconceptions,

that I should never get so big or fat that I
can’t look down and see my own naked dirty feet,

which is why I kept smiling and smiling as she talked —.

It was a beautiful day. I felt like crying.

I knew that if I could succeed at being demolished,
I could succeed at anything.

How It Ends

2011-11-08T17:27:00.001-06:00

How It Ends
by Andrea Gibson

It has been 3 years
10 months
And 27 days
Since the first time I saw you naked
Since the night you ripped off your shirt
Stuck your boobs in my face and said
Touch them
I touched them like a diabetic third grader opening a Snickers bar
You said
Hard
I thought, Yes I am
But you are so soft
I said, Your lips, they’re like whale blubber
That wasn’t my best line
But it worked

Tonight in the grocery store I found one of your hairs in my underwear
I pulled it out in the frozen foods section and screamed
That is so gorgeous it could kill a man!
Good thing I’m a leprechaun
Lucky…
Lucky…

Baby, I have no idea how this will end
Maybe the equator will fall like a hula hoop from the Earth’s hips
And our mouths will freeze mid-kiss on our 80th anniversary
Or maybe tomorrow my absolute insanity
Combined with the absolute obstacle course of your communication skills
Will leave us like a love letter
In a landfill

But whatever
However
Whenever this ends I want you to know
That right now
I love you forever

I love you for the hardest mile we walked together
For the day I collected every sharp knife in the house
And threw them one-by-one on the roof
And told the sun
Listen, show-off!
From now on, you better only give me blades of grass
Things that are growing and soft
‘Cause there’s this girl who says she wants to float on her back
Through my bloodstream
And when she does
I want my rivers to reach the sea

Do you hear me, lover?
Do you know the night you told me about a crush on my ears?
I swore to never become Van Gogh
And look, baby
They’re both still there
Just like my firefly heart is still right there in your glass jar
I never trusted anybody more to poke enough holes in the lid

So in the nights you sleep like a ballerina
I try to snore like a piccolo
And I press my lips to your holy temples
And I say
I crash into things in the dark
Even when the lights are on
And I am wrong more often than I am writing
And even then I am often wrong

But when my friends are in the bathroom at the bar
Rolling dollar bills into telescopes and claiming they can see God
I will come to you
Holding my grandmother’s Bible
I will press it to your chest
And I will bless it with your breath
And when you ask if I want to role-play altar boys fucking in the church kitchen during Sunday mass
I will say, Hell yes
But only if you leave a hickey on my ass in the shape of Jesus’ palm
So I can be sure I got nailed
Down

Lover, you will never lose me to the wind
You are the lightning that made me fill my chest with candles
You are the thunder clapping for the poem that nobody else wants to hear
You are an icicle’s tear
Water in a tulip on the first day of spring
You melt me alive
You kiss me deep as my roots will reach and I want nothing more
Than to be an eyelash fallen on your cheek
A thing collected by your fingers
And held like a wish
I promise whatever I do
I will always try my best
To come true

The Summer Day

2011-05-04T22:53:00.001-05:00

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The Journey

2011-03-27T00:19:00.002-05:00

The Journey

by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Fruits and Vegetables

2011-03-26T23:32:00.001-05:00

Excerpt from Fruits and Vegetables

by Erica Jong

1

Goodbye, he waved, entering the apple.
That red siren,
whose white flesh turns brown
with prolonged exposure to air,
opened her perfect cheeks to receive him.
She took him in.
The garden revolved
in her glossy patinas of skin.
Goodbye.

2

O note the two round holes in onion.

3

Did I tell you about
my mother’s avocado?
She grew it from a pit.
Secretly, slowly in the dark,
it put out grub-white roots
which filled a jelly jar.
From this unlikely start,
an avocado tree with bark
& dark green leaves
shaded the green silk couch
which shaded me
throughout my shady adolescence
There, beneath that tree
my skirt gave birth to hands!
Oh memorable hands of boys
with blacked-out eyes
like culprits
in the National Enquirer.
My mother nursed that tree like all her children,
turned it around so often
towards the sun
that its trunk grew twisted
as an old riverbed,
& despite its gaudy leaves
it never bore
fruit.

To Lou Andreas-Salome

2011-03-02T22:40:00.000-06:00

To Lou Andreas-Salome
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,
into your sheltered heart.

As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you
turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.

Memory won't suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being's floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.

For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Rose: Love in Violent Times

2011-02-21T21:28:00.001-06:00

You can’t change the world, but you can make it a better place. You can be healthy, loving, compassionate, and sensitive to the needs and feelings of others. You can have daily life practices that bring small happinesses. You can you do your best to consciously live without perpetrating violence. You can bring comfort and love to the people around you. You can listen and hold yourself accountable. You can trace your unconsidered beliefs and value judgments and figure out if they really serve the person you are today. You can learn when and how to fight. And you can protect your izzat and other people’s too.

If you think of yourself as a plant, all of these things make you strong and help you to thrive. When you’re a plant, you can’t do anything about storms, freezes and blights. All you can do is make yourself strong so that in the event that you are suddenly at the mercy of something bigger than you, well, hopefully the strength you have cultivated in yourself and your life is enough to see you through.

All this has a lot to do with love, and the dictionary kind.

There are many important loves in this life. There is the love between friends. Sexual love should never usurp friend love. But there are lots of other loves around us, some we may or may not see. Your neighbors benefit from your love. Nothing’s stopping you from cooking up a double recipe of lasagna and taking it over to one of your neighbors once in a while. The kids running around the neighborhood sure could use a bowl of that watermelon you just cut up, leaving plenty for you and your family. Perfect strangers enjoy your love when you help them load their groceries in the rain, when you let them ahead of you into your lane, when you stop for them so they can cross the street. Lordisa, the birds, squirrels, raccoons, deer and bees love you when you hook them up with sustenance. People bitch about raccoons, but did you know they love cat and dog food a big bag of cheap pet food will keep the raccoons out of your space and away from your pets better than any gun or trap. In love, though, that’s not your motivation for feeding them. In love, you feed the raccoons because you honestly want what’s best for them.

Call this a karmic investment, if you wish. This still traces back to selfish motivations, but if you think of loving the people and the world around you as a way of protecting yourself against things that are bigger than you, it would suffice. I like to think of loving the world as putting into and out of myself exact reflections of the world I want to live in.

And it makes me happy to know that the hummingbirds and crows are fed and that the kids are laughing with watermelon juice running down their sticky faces and arms.

There are so many bigger realities that bring pain and anger that I’ve learned to seek out small joys every day. It is one of the greatest forms of self-defense I know.

Inga Musico

rose: love in violent times (2010)

chapter 7, defending the home front.

p. 219 – 220

Lead

2011-02-14T22:56:00.001-06:00

Lead
by Mary Oliver

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

Reckless Poem

2011-01-28T10:33:00.000-06:00

Reckless Poem
by Mary Oliver

Today again I am hardly myself.

It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.

It flows through me
like the blue wave.
Green leaves – you may believe this or not –
have once or twice
emerged from the tips of my fingers

somewhere
deep in the woods,
in the reckless seizure of spring.

Though, of course, I also know that other song,
the sweet passion of one-ness.

Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
until I came to myself.

And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand,
I have flown from the other window of myself
to become white heron, blue whale,
red fox, hedgehog.
Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower!
Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot, perched
among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.

And Because Love Battles

2010-09-27T21:06:00.001-05:00

And Because Love Battles

by Pablo Neruda

And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.

Flower-sellers, Budapest

2010-05-10T22:27:00.002-05:00

Flower-sellers, Budapest
by Kathleen Jamie

In the gardens
of their mild southern crofts, their
end-of-the-line hillside vineyards,
where figs turn blue, and peppers dry
strung from the eaves,
old women move among flowers,
each with a worn knife, a sliver
crooked in the first finger
of her right hand —
each, like her neighbours,
drawing the blade
onto the callus of her thumb,
so flowers, creamy dahlias,
fall into their arms; the stems'
spittle wiped on their pinafores.

Then, when they have enough,
the old women
foregather at the station
to await the slow, busy little train
that will take them to the city,
where families drift between mass
and lunch; and they hunker
at bus depots, termini
scented with chrysanthemums,
to pull from plastic buckets
yellows, spicy russets,
the petally nub of each flower
tight as a bee;
and from their pockets, pink ribbon
strictly for the flowers.

We must buy some,
— though they will soon wither —
from this thin-faced
widow in a headscarf, this mother
perhaps, of married daughters
down at the border —
or this old woman, sat
among pigeons and lottery kiosks,
who reaches towards us to proffer
the morning's fresh blooms;
or the woman there who calls 'Flowers!'
in several languages —
one for each invasion:

We must buy some,
because only when the flowers are dispersed
will the old women head for home,
each with her neighbours,
back where they came, with their
empty buckets and thick aprons
on a late morning train.

Wild Geese

2010-04-28T23:07:00.001-05:00

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Counting Sheep

2010-04-28T22:19:00.002-05:00

Counting Sheep
by Russell Edson
A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He
wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture
for them.
They are like grains of rice.
He wonders if it is possible to shrink something
out of existence.
He wonders if the sheep are aware of their tininess,
if they have any sense of scale. Perhaps they think
the test tube is a glass barn …
He wonders what he should do with them; they
certainly have less meat and wool than ordinary
sheep. Has he reduced their commercial value?
He wonders if they could be used as a substitute
for rice, a sort of wolly rice …
He wonders if he shouldn’t rub them into a red paste
between his fingers.
He wonders if they are breeding, or if any of them
have died.
He puts them under a microscope, and falls asleep
counting them...

Letter to a Stranger

2010-04-28T22:15:00.002-05:00

Letter to a Stranger
by Tina Chang

Dear Father,

I drifted on the bouquet of your red tongue
for two years. It was a kingdom, the stadium
of your face. I took sweets from a sealed jar
when mother wasn't looking. I grew up on the back steps of St. Mary's
where I learned to scream at kitten boys that didn't do
what I said. We took the body and the blood in time. It is possible
to be divine in one afternoon.

A girl kneels on pebbles to feel the roughness that will change her destiny.

When you died, Vincent started his fascination with glass:
its world of definites. Cut or uncut. Severed or whole. It is the year 2000
and all our failures are tangible. Vincent is 30 and carries a pistol
wrapped in a powder-blue handkerchief. He will use it
on the clocks, the countenance of apples, the delicate house
of some girl's throat still dripping with wine.

Let me sleep now, in the shelter, in the halt. Stop.

At your burial, I dropped carnations into the big earth. Mother pulled
me along by the sleeve. Now there is the sound of great thunder
as the brothers come running through the house, their boots cracking
the surface of things, fuck you's dropping from their fat lips.

One organ persists alone. Three notes repeating and repeating.

I am governed by terror, sleeplessness, nostalgia.
Mother of God helps me out with my daily chores. I capture heat
in a rusted pot, smooth the bed sheets with a hammer, take up the hours
with my veined hands. Father, there are magnificent shadows
engraving themselves onto the dinner table. I keep thinking
that you are telling me to go. Let me sleep
and dream of the falling architecture of this house, transform it
into an imitation of heaven. My eyes are closed, two razors.

Dear Father, What kind of music is coming from me? What kind?

Chopin Bukowski

2010-04-28T22:15:00.001-05:00

Chopin Bukowski
By Charles Bukowski

this is my piano.

the phone rings and people ask,
what are you doing? how about
getting drunk with us?

and I say,
I’m at my piano.

what?

I’m at my piano.

I hang up.

people need me. I fill
them. if they can’t see me
for a while they get desperate, they get
sick.

But if I see them too often
I get sick. it’s hard to feed
without getting fed.

my piano says things back to
me.

sometimes the things are
scrambled and not very good.
other times
I get as good and lucky as
Chopin.

sometimes I get out of practice
out of tune. that’s
all right.

I can sit down and vomit on the
keys
but it’s my
vomit.

it’s better than sitting in a room
with 3 or 4 people and
their pianos.

this is my piano
and it is better than theirs.

and they like it and they do not
like it.

Final Night at the Sunset Drive-In

2010-04-28T22:11:00.000-05:00

Final Night at the Sunset Drive-In
by Kristy Bowen

And what else to do with a girl
with a mouth like a dirty book,
a burnt-out car. Blue limbs

tangling the windshield and every-
thing tilted and still. This isn’t porno,
it’s a love story--tongues everywhere

and desultory lines. A woman on
the screen keens like a broken radio.
This one tastes like Americana,

the burnished chrome of dashboard
instruments. Flip-flopped hat-check girl,
her skirt fussy and florid over her face.

Her breath, all orange crush and flicker.

Theme for English B

2010-04-28T21:59:00.000-05:00

Theme for English B
by Langston Hughes

The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and white---
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

someone should write me a love poem, but i'm stuck doing it myself

2010-01-26T21:27:00.001-06:00

someone should write me a love poem, but i'm stuck doing it myself

by Daphne Gottleib

1. when i was in high school, i had to memorize the
conjugation of the latin verb "to love."

2. i have no idea what happened to my mother's wedding
ring. last night at 12:17 am, i really needed to know.

3. "beautiful" and "amazing" just mean "beautiful" and
"amazing." nothing more.

4. i memorized the latin verb by singing the forms to the
tune of "the mexican hat dance":

amo
amas
amat

amamus
amatis
amant

5. someone called at 1:19 in the morning. the area code is
from somewhere in arizona. i don't think i know anyone
in arizona. there wasn't a message.

6. if someone lets you sleep over and has to go to work while
you're still asleep and they let you sleep in even though though
they don't really know you, it's nice to leave a thank you
note. or make their bed.

7. i haven't been beautiful in days and i need more sleep.
don't think about it too much. it doesn't mean a thing.

8. i have had my shirts altered so i can wear my heart on my
sleeve.

9. told me i'm beautiful and amazing and where are you,
who told me i'm beautiful and amazing, next time please
write it down, i will be beautiful all day after i make the
bed, amazing after i throw the latex away; how is it, the
everywhere of our hands and no trace of handwriting
anywhere

10. i still sing:

amo
amas
amat

amamus
amatis
amant

watch your tense and case

2010-01-26T21:23:00.000-06:00

watch your tense and case
by daphne gottlieb

oh baby
i want to be your direct object.
you know, that is to say
i want to be on the other
side of all the verbs i know
you know how to use.

i've seen you conjugate:
i touch
you touched
you heard
she knows
who cares

i'm interested in
a few decent prepositions:
above, over, inside, atop,
below, around and
i'm sure there are more
right on the tip of
your tongue.

i am ready to spend
the present perfect
splitting your infinitive
there's an art to the way you
dangle your participle and

since we're being informal it's okay to
use a few contractions, like
wasn't (going to)
shouldn't (have)
and a conjunction:
but (did it anyway)

and i'm really really glad
you're not into dependent
clauses since all i'm really
interested in is your
bad, bad grammar
and your exclamation point.

Dithyramb of a Happy Woman

2010-01-20T15:24:00.000-06:00

Dithyramb of a Happy Woman
by Anna Swir

Song of excess,
strength, mighty tenderness,
pliant ecstasy.
Magnificence
lovingly dancing.

I quiver as a body in rapture,
I quiver as a wing,
I am an explosion,
I overstep myself,
I am a fountain,
I have its resilience.
Excess,
a thousand excesses,
strength,
song of gushing strength.

There are gifts in me,
flowerings of abundance,
curls of light are sobbing,
a flame is foaming, its lofty ripeness
is ripening.
Oceans of glare,
rosy as the palate
of a big mouth in ecstasy.

I am astonished
up to my nostrils, I snort,
a snorting universe of astonishment
inundates me.
I am gulping excess, I am choking with fullness,
I am impossible as reality.

The Door is Open

2010-01-20T15:21:00.001-06:00

The Door is Open
by Anna Swir

No, I don't want to tame you,
you'd lose your animal charm.
Your wiliness and nervousness
excite me,
they belong to your exotic breed.

You can't escape me
because the door is always open.
You can't betray me
because I don't demand fidelity.

Give me your hand,
we'll dance
through the laughing darkness.
With sacred bells
on our arms and legs,
the movement of the dance
as supple as ancient Arabic writing,
our hair singing
like a Greek chorus.

Elemental bliss
organised into a mystery play.
Only just domesticated,
like you.

Report on Human Beings

2010-01-17T15:24:00.000-06:00

Report on Human Beings

by Michael Goldman

You know about desks and noses,
proteins, mortgages, orchestras,
nationalities, contraceptives;
you have our ruins and records,
but they won't tell you
what we were like.

We were distinguished
by our interest in scenery;
we could look at things for hours
without using or breaking them--
and there was a touch of desperation, not to be found
in any other animal,
in the looks of love we directed
at our children.

We were treacherous of course.
Like anything here--
winds, dogs, the sun--
we could turn against you unexpectedly,
we could let you down.
But what was remarkable about us
and which you will not believe
is that we alone,
with the exception of a few pets
who probably learned it from us,
when betrayed
were frequently surprised.

We were one of a million species
who continually cried out
or silently wept with pain.
I am proud that we alone resented
taking part in the chorus.

Yes, some of us
like to cause pain.
Yes, most of us
sometimes
liked to cause pain,
but I am proud that most of us
were ashamed
afterward.

Our love of poetry would have amused you;
we were so proud of language
we thought we invented it
(and thus failed to notice
the speech of the animals,
the birds' repeated warnings,
the whispered intelligence
of mutant cells).

We did invent boredom,
a fruitful state.
It hid the size of our desires.
We were spared many murders,
many religions
because we could say, "I am bored."
A kind of clarity
came when we said it
and we could go to Paris or the movies,
give useful parties, master languages,
rather than sink our teeth in our lover's throat
and shake till things felt right again.

Out of the same pulsing world
you know,
out of gases, whorls,
fronds, feelers, jellies,
we devised hard edges,
strings of infinite tension stretched
to guide us.
The mind's pure snowflake
was our map.
Lines, angles, outlines
not to be found in rocks or seas
or living matter
or in the holes of space,
how strange these shapes must look to you,
at odds with everything,
uncanny, broken from the flow,
I think they must be for you
what we called art.

What was most wonderful about us
was our kindness,
but of this it is impossible to speak.
Only someone who knows our cruelty,
who knows the fears we always lived with,
fear of inside and outside, smooth and rough,
soft and hard, wet and dry, touch and no touch,
only someone who understands the great palace we built
on the axis of time
out of our fear and cruelty and called history,
only those who have lived in the anger
of a great modern city,
who saw the traffic in the morning
and the police at night
can know how heartbreaking
our kindness was.

Let me put it this way.
One of us said, "I think
our life is not as good
as the mind warrants,"
another, "It is hard
to be alone and alive at the same time."
To understand these statements
you would have to be human.

Our destruction as a species
was accidental.
Characteristically
we blamed it on ourselves,
which neither the eagle
nor the dinosaur would do.

Look closely around you,
study our instruments,
scan the night sky.
We were alien.
Nothing in the universe
resembles us.

Strings

2010-01-05T18:32:00.001-06:00

Strings

by Ruth Stone

We pop into life the way
Particles pop in and out
Of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
Of probability.
And probably I love you.
The evil of larva
And the evil of stars
Is a formula for the future.
Some bodies can
Thrust their arms into
a flame and be instantly
cured of this world,
while others sicken.
Why think, little brother
Like the moon, spit out like
A broken tooth.
"Oh," groans the world.
The outer planets,
The fizzing sun, here we come
With our luggage.
Look at the clever things
We have made out of
A few building blocks—
O, fabulous continuum.

The Ivy Crown

2010-01-03T12:30:00.002-06:00

The Ivy Crown
by William Carlos Williams

Romance has no part in it.
The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform
to live together.
It has seasons,
for and against,
whatever the heart
fumbles in the dark
to assert
toward the end of May.
Just as the nature of briars
is to tear the flesh,
I have proceeded
through them.
Keep
the briars out,
they say.
You cannot live
and keep free of
briars.

-

At our age the imagination
across the sorry facts
lifts us
to make roses
stand before thorns
Sure
love is cruel
and selfish
and totally obtuse
at least, blinded by light,
young love is.
But we are older,
I to love
and you to be loved,
We have
no matter how,
by our wills survived
to keep
the jeweled prize
always
at our finger tips.
We will it so
and so it is
past all accident.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

2010-01-03T12:22:00.003-06:00

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

by William Carlos Williams

I cannot say
that I have gone to hell
for your love
but often
found myself there
in your pursuit.
I do not like it
and wanted to be
in heaven. Hear me out.
Do not turn away.
I have learned much in my life
from books
and out of them
about love.
Death
is not the end of it.

-

Silence can be complex too,
but you do not get far
with silence.

-

What power has love but forgiveness?
In other words
by its intervention
what has been done
can be undone.

-

Having your love
I was rich.
Thinking to have lost it
I am tortured
and cannot rest.

-

Don't think
that because I say this
in a poem
it can be treated lightly
or that the facts will not uphold it.
Are facts not flowers
and flowers facts
or poems flowers
or all works of the imagination
interchangeable?
Which proves
that love
rules them all, for then
You will be my queen
my queen of love
forever more.

How To Like It

2009-12-31T11:59:00.001-06:00

How To Like It
by Stephen Dobyns

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

Self-Help for Fellow Refugees

2009-12-05T22:08:00.001-06:00

Self-Help for Fellow Refugees

by Li-Young Lee

If your name suggests a country where bells
might have been used for entertainment

or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons
or the birthdays of gods and demons,

it’s probably best to dress in plain clothes
when you arrive in the United States,
and try not to talk too loud.

If you happen to have watched armed men
beat and drag your father
out the front door of your house
and into the back of an idling truck

before your mother jerked you from the threshold
and buried your face in her skirt folds,
try not to judge your mother too harshly.

Don’t ask her what she thought she was doing
turning a child’s eyes
away from history
and toward that place all human aching starts.

And if you meet someone
in your adopted country,
and think you see in the other’s face
an open sky, some promise of a new beginning,
it probably means you’re standing too far.

Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book
whose first and last pages are missing,
the story of your own birthplace,
a country twice erased,
once by fire, once by forgetfulness,
it probably means you’re standing too close.

In any case, try not to let another carry
the burden of your own nostalgia or hope.

And if you’re one of those
whose left side of the face doesn’t match
the right, it might be a clue

looking the other way was a habit
your predecessors found useful for survival.
Don’t lament not being beautiful.

Get used to seeing while not seeing.
Get busy remembering while forgetting.
Dying to live while not wanting to go on.

Very likely, your ancestors decorated
their bells of every shape and size
with elaborate calendars
and diagrams of distance star systems,
but with no maps for scattered descendants.

And I bet you can’t say what language
your father spoke when he shouted to your mother
from the back of the truck, "Let the boy see!"

Maybe it wasn’t the language you used at home.
Maybe it was a forbidden language.
Or maybe there was too much screaming
and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is this:
The kingdom of heaven is good.
But heaven on earth is better.

Thinking is good.
But living is better.

Alone in your favorite chair
with a book you enjoy
is fine. But spooning
is even better.

Bluebird

2009-11-29T00:23:00.001-06:00

Bluebird

Charles Bukowski

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he's in there.

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too tough for him. I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? You want to screw up the works? You want to blow my book sales in Europe?

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, but I'm too clever. I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody's asleep. I say, I know that you're there, so don't be sad. Then I put him back, but he's singing a little in there. I haven't quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact and it's nice enough to make a man weep.

But I don't weep. Do you?

A Working List of Things I Will Never Tell You

2009-11-20T22:11:00.001-06:00

A Working List of Things I Will Never Tell You

by Jon Sands

When I said I wasn’t with another girl
the January after we fell in love for the 3rd time,
it’s because it wasn’t actual sex.

In the February that began our radio silence,
it was actual sex. I hate the tight shirts
that go below your waistline.

Not only do they make you look too young,
but then your torso is a giraffe’s neck attached to tiny legs.
I screamed at myself in the subway

for writing poems about you still.
I made a scene. I think about you almost
each morning, and roughly every five days, I still

believe you’re there.
I still masturbate to you.
When we got really bad,

I would put another coat of mop water on the floor of the bar
to make sure you were asleep when I got to my side of the bed.
You are the only person to whom I’ve lied, knowing

I was telling the truth. I miss the way your neck
wraps around my face like a cave we are both lost in.
I remember when you said being with me

is like being alone with company.
My friend Sarah wrote a poem about pink ponies.
I’m scared you’re my pink pony.

Hers is dead. It is really sad. You’re not dead.
You live in Ohio, or Washington, or Wherever.
You are a shadow my body leaves on other girls.

I have a growing queue of things I know
will make you laugh and I don’t know where to put them.
I mourn like you’re dead. If you had asked me to stay,

I would not have said no.
It would never mean yes.

For Old Snaggle Tooth

2009-11-08T11:46:00.000-06:00

For Old Snaggle Tooth

by Charles Bukowski

I know a woman
who keeps buying puzzles
chinese
puzzles
blocks
wires
pieces that finally fit
into some order.
she works it out
mathematically
she solves all her
puzzles
lives down by the sea
puts sugar out for the ants
and believes
ultimately
in a better world.
her hair is white
she seldom combs it
her teeth are snaggled
and she wears loose shapeless
coveralls over a body most
women would wish they had.
for many years she irritated me
with what I consider her
eccentricities -
like soaking eggshells in water
(to feed the plants so that
they'd get calcium).
but finally when I think of her
life
and compare it to other lives
more dazzling, original
and beautiful
I realize that she has hurt fewer
people than anybody I know
(and by hurt I simply mean hurt).
she has had some terrible times,
times when maybe I should have
helped her more
for she is the mother of my only
child
and we were once great lovers,
but she has come through
like I said
she has hurt fewer people than
anybody I know,
and if you look at it like that,
well,
she has created a better world.
she has won.

Frances, this poem is for
you.

Kink

2009-11-07T20:55:00.001-06:00

Kink

by Brendan Constantine

A recent survey of fetishes has named
feet and shoes the world's greatest objects
of desire. Perhaps surprisingly, lingerie trails
at some distance. Further behind, less than
four percent, are genitals, breasts, buttocks
& legs. They appear, as they often do,
in a pile at the end of a line. The only token
of longing more remote is the electric
pacemaker, for which two people indicated
strong attractions. Much is being made
of the champions, pedicure & shoe sales
have soared, but who can stop thinking
about the losers? The study comes from Italy,
a country formed like a sultan's boot,
but its range is global; no one knows where
the two people live, if they've met, or how
they love. Most of us must see a thing to know
we need it. Even the blind learn shapes
of yearning. A pacemaker is small as a kiss
& works quietly in the dark of the body.
Working at what? The constant arousal
of slow hearts with beats of lightning,
like snapping fingers, like a whip. Maybe
the two lovers are doctor & nurse, or a pair
of electricians. Perhaps they're mad, people
so crazed with loneliness, so at the mercy
of blood, the mere thought of its master is
rapture enough. Anyway, now there are three.

Identity

2009-08-18T17:34:00.000-05:00

Identity

by Julio Noboa Polanco

Let them be as flowers,
always watered, fed, gaurded, admired
but harnessed to a pot of dirt.
I'd rather be a tall, ugly weed,
clinging on cliffs, like an eagle
wind-wavering above high, jagged rocks.
To have broken through the surface of stone
to live, to feel exposed to the madness
of the vast, eternal sky.
To be swayed by the breezes of an ancient sea,
carrying my soul, my seed beyond the mountains of time
or into the abyss of the bizarre.
I'd rather be unseen, and if,
then shunned by everyone
than to be a pleasant-smelling flower,
growing in clusters in the fertile valley
where they're praised, handled, and plucked
by greedy human hands.
I'd rather smell of musty, green stench
than of sweet, fragrant lilac.
If I could stand alone, strong and free
I'd rather be a tall ugly weed.

The Thing Is

2009-07-31T20:47:00.001-05:00

The Thing Is
by Ellen Bass

To love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Unit of Measure

2009-07-30T13:08:00.000-05:00

Unit of Measure
by Sandra Beasley

All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.

Everyone is lesser than or greater than the capybara.

Everything is taller or shorter than the capybara.

Everything is mistaken for a Brazilian dance craze

more or less frequently than the capybara.

Everyone eats greater or fewer watermelons

than the capybara. Everyone eats more or less bark.

Everyone barks more than or less than the capybara,

who also whistles, clicks, grunts, and emits what is known

as his alarm squeal. Everyone is more or less alarmed

than a capybara, who—because his back legs

are longer than his front legs—feels like

he is going downhill at all times.

Everyone is more or less a master of grasses

than the capybara. Or going by the scientific name,

more or less Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris—

or, going by the Greek translation, more or less

water hog. Everyone is more or less

of a fish than the capybara, defined as the outermost realm

of fishdom by the 16th-century Catholic Church.

Everyone is eaten more or less often for Lent than

the capybara. Shredded, spiced, and served over plantains,

everything tastes more or less like pork

than the capybara. Before you decide that you are

greater than or lesser than a capybara, consider

that while the Brazilian capybara breeds only once a year,

the Venezuelan variety mates continuously.

Consider the last time you mated continuously.

Consider the year of your childhood when you had

exactly as many teeth as the capybara—

twenty—and all yours fell out, and all his

kept growing. Consider how his skin stretches

in only one direction. Accept that you are stretchier

than the capybara. Accept that you have foolishly

distributed your eyes, ears, and nostrils

all over your face. Accept that now you will never be able

to sleep underwater. Accept that the fish

will never gather to your capybara body offering

their soft, finned love. One of us, they say, one of us,

but they will not say it to you.

Personal

2009-07-30T13:03:00.001-05:00

Personal
by Tony Hoagland

Don’t take it personal, they said;

but I did, I took it all quite personal—

the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;

the price of grapefruit and stamps,

the wet hair of women in the rain—

And I cursed what hurt me

and I praised what gave me joy,

the most simple-minded of possible responses.

The government reminded me of my father,

with its deafness and its laws,

and the weather reminded me of my mom,

with her tropical squalls.

Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness

Think first, they said of Talk

Get over it, they said

at the School of Broken Hearts

but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t

believe in the clean break;

I believe in the compound fracture

served with a sauce of dirty regret,

I believe in saying it all

and taking it all back

and saying it again for good measure

while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries

like wheeling birds

and the trees look seasick in the wind.

Oh life! Can you blame me

for making a scene?

You were that yellow caboose, the moon

disappearing over a ridge of cloud.

I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;

barking and barking:

trying to convince everything else

to take it personal too.

At the Galleria Shopping Mall by Tony Hoagland

2009-07-30T13:00:00.001-05:00

At the Galleria Shopping Mall
by Tony Hoagland

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,

there are some 49-dollar Chinese-made TVs;

one of them singing news about a far-off war,

one comparing the breast size of an actress from Hollywood

to the breast size of an actress from Bollywood.

And here is my niece Lucinda,

who is nine and a true daughter of Texas,

who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde

and declares that her favorite sport is shopping.

Today is the day she embarks upon her journey,

swinging a credit card like a scythe

through the meadows of golden merchandise.

Today is the day she stops looking at faces,

and starts assessing the labels of purses;

So let it begin. Let her be dipped in the dazzling bounty

and raised and wrung out again and again.

And let us watch.

As the gods in olden stories

turned mortals into laurel trees and crows

to teach them some kind of lesson,

so we were turned into Americans

to learn something about loneliness.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

2009-06-14T18:12:00.001-05:00

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."

"She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me.

"Moderately," Holly confessed. "But Doc knew what I meant. I explained it to him very carefully and it was something he could understand. We shook hands and held on to each other and he wished me luck." She glanced at the clock. "He must be in the Blue Mountains by now."

"What's she talkin' about?" Joe Bell asked me.

Holly lifted her martini. "Let's wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear."

The Diary of Adam and Eve

2009-06-09T08:15:00.001-05:00

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl, and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy. She can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and talk to it and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is colour-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, grey moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud rack, the star jewels glittering in the wastes of space - none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have colour and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them.

The Diary of Adam and Eve - Mark Twain

Song #4

2009-06-09T07:54:00.000-05:00

Song #4
by Howie Good

But on a morning
when my wife
so softly dented
stands naked
in front of the closet
still deciding
between the dark blue
and the black
I feel as the last calamitous
emperor of Rome
might’ve felt writing
with a red
can of shaving cream
love is
and without
quotation marks

there are days when all you have is tao lin, and there are days when no one wants you to have those days

2009-04-19T10:36:00.002-05:00

i am fucked if i really think all human beings are terrible assholes
by tao lin

i want to see a bear running from a hamster
the bear is screaming and goes head-first into a chute

i’m tired of poetry

i'm going to use picasso's head
to cartwheel across two taxicabs

if you want you can move the letters in the word ‘profound’
you can have ‘roof dpfu’

no one ever has wanted that
until now

just kidding!

i’m just being dramatic!

the bear is holding a tennis racket in each paw!

i jumped off a roof once!

i worked on this poem for six hours

‘i’m tired of poetry,’ i said
and turned off the light
and turned on the light
and repeated that, bored, for like ten seconds,
while everyone else at my job was actually doing work for once

‘go home,’ i said

‘he’s tired of poetry,’ someone said noncommittally

in the bar i did a cartwheel over the table

i was standing on the ground and i did a cartwheel onto the table
and over the table

‘fucking awesome,’ someone said

‘we all know that art is not truth,’ said picasso

ska

picasso < ska

surprise! slam poetry.

2009-04-17T15:18:00.000-05:00

The Quiet World
by Jeffrey McDaniel

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it in to my ear
Without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

Revolutionary Dreams

2009-04-13T20:49:00.000-05:00

Revolutionary Dreams
by Nikki Giovanni

I used to dream militant dreams
of taking over america to show
these white folks
how it should be done

I used to dream radical dreams
of blowing everyone away
with my perceptive powers
of correct analysis

I even used to think I'd be the one
to stop the riot and
negotiate the peace

then I awoke and dug
that if I dreamed natural
dreams of being a natural
woman doing what a woman
does when she's natural
I would have a revolution.

Sonnet XVII

2009-04-13T20:47:00.001-05:00

Sonnet XVII
by Pablo Neruda

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

i like my body when it is with your

2009-04-11T11:32:00.001-05:00

i like my body when it is with your
by e. e. cummings

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh ... And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

Fuck You

2009-04-07T19:45:00.000-05:00

Fuck You Poem # 45
by Amy Gerstler

Fuck you in slang and conventional English.
Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes.
Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked and defaced.
Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste.
Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side.
Fuck you humidly and icily.
Fuck you farsightedly and blindly.
Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery.

Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill.
Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill.
Fuck you puce and chartreuse.
Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric.
Fuck you under the influence of opium, codeine, laudanum and paregoric.
Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of.
Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above.
Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running.
Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning.

Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed.
Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead.
Fuck you at low and high tide.
And fuck you astride
anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways,

bathrooms, or kitchens.
Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions.

And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true,
that bind me, till I forgive you, to you.

maggy and milly and molly and may

2009-04-07T19:04:00.000-05:00

'maggie and milly and molly and may'
by e.e. cummings

maggy and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
its always ourselves we find in the sea

what she was wearing

2009-04-03T10:25:00.000-05:00

"what she was wearing"
by denver butson

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I'm afraid
I might kill myself
if I don't wear it

you've been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

and these are my arson gloves

so you don't set fire to something?
he asked

exactly

and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots
I'd like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?

and today she said I'm wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don't get any ideas

and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door

home.

2009-04-02T19:54:00.000-05:00

The Air House

2009-04-02T19:51:00.000-05:00

The Air House

by Zoë Skoulding

wind snags on the gap
between timbers a tongue
against my teeth

disturbs breath
drawn across languages
as air in a room

settles and circulates
around a body full of oxygen
open to a clear morning

the sound of breath
complicates the room
I brush my lips against

your ear to make
a small patch of
air I can live in

2009-03-31T18:16:00.000-05:00

The World Does Not Belong to You,
Though You Belong to the World

by Todd Boss

for this is not a marriage,
living. Only you have
given your hand and
climbed into the carraige
of Morning. Where do you
think you're going? Morning
owes you nothing. She is

fickle, she is strong. Only
to Morning does Morning
belong. As she takes you
into the day, onto the old
wide way of the world, she
sings so intimate a song you
may begin to believe she

loves you. You may even
come to believe you somehow
guide her along sometimes,
but you are wrong.
You think you are a pitcher
taking the mound, but it's
the other way around.

A Grief Observed

2009-03-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
At other times, it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not me.
There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met H. I’ve plenty of what are called “resources”. People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “common-sense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.”

- C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Sacred/Profane

2009-03-21T23:50:00.000-05:00

Four In The Morning

2009-03-21T23:47:00.000-05:00

Four In The Morning
Wislawa Szymborska

The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when the earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
--three cheers for the ants. And left five o clock come
If we're to go on living.

I love that no one looks here

2009-03-07T23:13:00.001-06:00

because I need a corner to be anonymous, right now.

Saying Your Names

2009-03-02T20:30:00.000-06:00

Saying Your Names
Richard Siken

Chemical names, bird names, names of fire
and flight and snow, baby names, paint names,
delicate names like bones in the body,
Rumplestiltskin names that are always changing,
names that no one's ever able to figure out.
Names of spells and names of hexes, names
cursed quietly under the breath, or called out
loudly to fill the yard, calling you inside again,
calling you home. Nicknames and pet names
and Baroque French monikers, written in
shorthand, written in longhand, scrawled
ilegibly in brown ink on the backs of yellowing
photographs, or embossed on envelopes lined
with gold. Names called out across the water,
names I called you behind your back,
sour and delicious, secret and unrepetable,
the names of flowers that open only once,
shouted from balconies, shouted from rooftops,
or muffled by pillows, or whispered in sleep,
or caught in the throat like a lump of meat.
I try, I do. I try and try. A happy ending?
Sure enough - Hello darling, welcome home.
I'll call you darling, hold you tight. We are
not traitors but the lights go out. It's dark.
Sweetheart, is that you? There are no tears,
no pictures of him squarely. A seaside framed
in glass, and boats, those little boats with
sails aflutter, shining lights upon the water,
lights that splinter when they hit the pier.
His voice on tape, his name on the envelope,
the soft sound of a body falling off a bridge
behind you, the body hardly even makes
a sound. The waters of the dead, a clear road,
every lover in the form of stars, the road
blocked. All night I strechted my arms across
him, rivers of blood, the dark woods, singing
with all my skin and bone Please keep him safe.
let him lay his headon my chest and we will be
like sailors, swimming in the sound of it, dashed
to pieces. Makes a cathedral, him pressing against
me, his lips at my neck, and yes, I do believe
his mouth is heaven, his kisses falling over me
like stars. Names of heat and names of light,
names of collision in the dark, on the side of the
bus, in the bark of the tree, in ballpoint pen
on jeans and hands and backs of matchbooks
that then got lost. Names like pain cries, names
like tombstones, names forgotten and reinvented,
names forbidden or overused. Your name like
a song I sing to myself, your name like a box
where I keep my love, your name like a nest
in the tree of love, your name like a boat in the
sea of love - O now we're in the sea of love!
Your name like detergent in the washing machine.
Your name like two X's like punched-in eyes,
like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter,
your name with two X's to mark the spots,
to hold the place, to keep the treasure from
becoming ever lost. I'm saying your name
in the grocery store, I'm saying your name on
the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal
covered with frost, your name like a music that's
been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud,
a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails
in wind and the slap of waves on the hull
of a boat that's sinking to the sounds of mermaids
singingsongsof love, and the tug of a simple
profound sadness when it sounds so far away.
Here is a map with your name for a capital,
here is an arrow to prove a point: we laugh
and it pits the world against us, we laugh,
and we've got nothing left to lose, and our hearts
turn red, and the river rises like a barn on fire.
I came to tell you, we'll swim in the water, we'll
swim like something sparkling underneath
the waves. Our bodies shivering, and the sound
of our breathing, and the shore so far away.
I'll use my body like a ladder, climbing
to the thing behind it, saying farewell to flesh,
farewell to everything caught underfoot
and flattened. Names of poison, names of
handguns, names of places we've been
together, names of people we'd be together.
Names of endurance, names of devotion,
street names and place names and all the names
of our dark heaven crackling in their pan.
It's a bed of straw, darling. It sure as shit is.
If there was one thing I could save from the fire,
he said, the broken arms of the sycamore,
the eucalyptus still trying to climb out of the yard -
your breath on my neck like a music that holds
my hands down, kisses as they burn their way
along my spine -or rain, our bodies wet,
clothes clinging arm to elbow, clothes clinging
nipple to groin - I'll be right here. I'm waiting.
Say hallelujah, say goodnight, say it over
the canned music and your feet won't stumble,
his face getting larger, the rest blurring
on every side. And angels, about twelve angels,
angels knocking on your head right now, hello
hello, a flash in the sky, would you like to
meet him here, in Heaven? Imagine a room,
a sudden glow. Here is my hand, my heart,
my throat, my wrist. Here are the illuminated
cities at the center of me, and here is the center
of me, which is a lake, which is a well that we
can drink from, but I can't go through with it.
I just don't want to die anymore.

People Who Live

2009-03-02T20:11:00.000-06:00

People Who Live
by Erica Jong

People who live by the sea
understand eternity.
They copy the curves of the waves,
their hearts beat with the tides,
& the saltiness of their blood
corresponds with the sea.

They know that the house of flesh
is only a sandcastle
built on the shore,
that skin breaks
under the waves
like sand under the soles
of the first walker on the beach
when the tide recedes.

Each of us walks there once,
watching the bubbles
rise up through the sand
like ascending souls,
tracing the line of the foam,
drawing our index fingers
along the horizon
pointing home.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

2009-02-11T19:06:00.001-06:00

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats	5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …	10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,	15
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,	20
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;	25
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;	30
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go	35
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—	40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare	45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,	50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—	55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?	60
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress	65
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin? . . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets	70
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!	75
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?	80
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,	85
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,	90
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—	95
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,	100
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:	105
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.” . . . . .	110
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,	115
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …	120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.	125

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown	130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Oranges.

2009-01-31T15:31:00.000-06:00

The Top Ten Albums of 2008

2009-01-31T15:24:00.000-06:00

Rilo Kiley, Under The Blacklight
Rock | Last.fm
One. Listening to this whole album makes me afterglow.

Beck, Modern Guilt
Rock | Last.fm
Two. Dreamy album's silence says just as much as the notes in between. Amazing and fresh.

The Blow, Paper Television
Glitch Pop | Last.fm
Three. Seduction has never sounded so appealing as when it's wrapped up in irregular beats and sung by Khaela.

The Kooks, Inside In/Inside Out
Pop | Last.fm
Four. British college musicians form band as a project for class. Whole world wants to kiss the professor.

Ani DiFranco, Red Letter Year
Folk | Last.fm
Five. Angry feminist rocker loses the anger, shows what else she's got.

Metric, Live It Out
Rock | Last.fm
Six. Emily may be a lot of things, but who can tell, under all that metaphor? Catchy and joyful, maybe.

Belle and Sebastian, Tigermilk
Folk Pop | Last.fm
Seven. Beautiful songs for school days.

The Hush Sound, Goodbye Blues
Pop | Last.fm
Eight. Bouyant female lead takes this band places no one was expecting.

The Killers, Day & Age
Dance Rock | Last.fm
Nine. The Killers just got it, you know?

Honeyhoney | First Rodeo
Folk Rock | Last.fm
Ten. Passionate "I love you"'s coupled with equally passionate "Fuck you"'s from a very verbose couple.

Jenny Lewis | Acid Tongue
Folk Rock | Last .fm
Honorable Mention. Probably one of my favorite albums of 09, but I got into it January 2nd, so what are you going to do?

Compiler's Note: Yeah, not compiled by what came out this year, in case you haven't noticed.

Life Story

2009-01-31T15:22:00.000-06:00

Life Story
by Tennessee Williams

After you've been to bed together for the first time,
without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you,
Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what's your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do

sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the two of you
lying together in completely relaxed positions
like a pair of rag dolls a bored child dropped on a bed.

You tell them your story, or as much of your story
as time or a fair degree of prudence allows, and they say,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, until the oh
is just an audible breath, and then of course

there's some interruption. Slow room service comes up
with a bowl of melting ice cubes, or one of you rises to pee
and gaze at himself with the mild astonishment in the bathroom mirror.
And then, the first thing you know, before you've had time
to pick up where you left off with your enthralling life story,
they're telling you their life story, exactly as they'd intended to all along,

and you're saying, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
each time a little more faintly, the vowel at last becoming
no more than an audible sigh,
as the elevator, halfway down the corridor and a turn to the left,
draws one last, long, deep breath of exhaustion
and stops breathing forever. Then?

Well, one of you falls asleep
and the other one does likewise with a lighted cigarette in his mouth,
and that's how people burn to death in hotel rooms.

Love After Love

2009-01-31T15:20:00.001-06:00

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Praise Song For The Day

2009-01-31T15:19:00.000-06:00

Praise Song for the Day
by Elizabeth Alexander, Inaugural Poet

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer consider the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.