I was six.
The fence was high     and as I leapt
the barbs                  wrote perfect lines
straight across           my chest.
My skin ripped easy     as a rag.


                     I dangled there
My blood                   was thick and red.


   That was when
   I first began
   to know the price
   of jumping
   over fences.

~~

In love with women
and men, he says they’re both
the same: “I could close
my eyes and groan and groan
all night. Hands are hands.
And when they knead
my body like bread
I rise to meet the touch.”

~~

Sad and old, she opened her house
to elders knocking at her door.
They promised to visit her
daily. She agreed to join
their church. She was asked
to rid herself of statues
saved on alters in her room.
She told them she was ready
to renounce. Next day, when they
returned, she told them how she’d
thrown her statues out: “I beat
them into nothing.” Each day
when the elders left her home,
she took her statues from a closet
and raised them back to life.

~~

A drink in hand, she talks:
“When I have sex
my mind dissolves.
In the everything of touch,
the nothingness of language
disappears. When thought
returns, I am left with sadness
and with words. I want to live
on the silent side of speech.”

CONTINUE…

by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Books =)

Razors pain you; 
rivers are damp; 
acids stain you; 
and drugs cause cramp. 
Guns aren’t lawful; 
nooses give; 
gas smells awful; 
you might as well live.

by Dorothy Parker 

Probably I hurt your aesthetic feelings.
How I said a thing, how I held a lamp
to the night. These should walk without us—
words, the dark—is perhaps your view
of existence. I can’t know,

you provide no puppet theater,
no tumbling routine for me to engage
in spirited discourse. That a face
comes with every body, and a body
with every name, makes it seem

like we’re the same species,
when a cursory kissing shows how multiform
any one puckerer is. I’m sorry
I’m not the Wednesday or club sandwich
you expected, imagine my surprise

that you’re not the world peace
I really do want, it’s not just a thing
I say to the judges inspecting my cleavage.
If you’ll try again I’ll try again,
however trying we are. “To the puppies” is a phrase

I carry around in search of the context
in which shouting it will change everything. 
If you have no such rip-chord, we really
shouldn’t be seen together in public,
for you are the matter for which I

am the anti-matter, and as “Lost in Space”
showed us if it showed us nothing else,
it’s not good for life when they meet,
and I want to do what is good for life,
because I want life to return the favor.

by Bob Hicok

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

by Adrienne Rich