And let me ask you this: the dead,
where aren’t they?
where aren’t they?
“
| — | By Franz Wright (via faulknerandfieldnotes) |
Vex Me
Vex me, O Night, your stars stuttering like a stuck jukebox,
put a spell on me, my bones atremble at your tabernacle
of rhythm and blues. Call out your archers, chain me
to a wall, let the stone fortress of my body fall
like a rabid fox before an army of dogs. Rebuke me,
rip out my larynx like a lazy snake and feed it to the voiceless
throng. For I am midnight’s girl, scouring unlit streets
like Persephone stalking her swarthy lord. Anoint me
with oil, make me greasy as a fast-food fry. Deliver me
like a pizza to the snapping crack-house hours between
one and four. Build me an ark, fill it with prairie moths,
split-winged fritillaries, blue-bottle flies. Stitch
me a gown of taffeta and quinine, starlight and nightsoil,
and when the clock tocks two, I’ll be the belle of the malaria ball.
by Barbara Hamby
In these minutes
left to myself, before the man and child scuff at the doorstep
and come in, I think of you and wonder what I would say
if I could write. Would I tell you how I avoid his eyes,
this man I’ve learned to live with, afraid
of what he doesn’t know about me. That I’ve finished
a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, to ready myself
for dinner, when my hands will waver over a plate of fish
as my daughter grows up normal in the chair beside me.
left to myself, before the man and child scuff at the doorstep
and come in, I think of you and wonder what I would say
if I could write. Would I tell you how I avoid his eyes,
this man I’ve learned to live with, afraid
of what he doesn’t know about me. That I’ve finished
a pack of cigarettes in one sitting, to ready myself
for dinner, when my hands will waver over a plate of fish
as my daughter grows up normal in the chair beside me.
“
| — |
From Quarter to Six by Dorianne Laux One of the most beautiful poems I’ve read in a long while. Full text HERE |
Dear
Please don’t be angry with
out me. I have so longed
and farewelled too many times
to trust your good intentions. No
offense, love, I would fall
head over ass into this disaster
but I just don’t fit. You’re wanting
something to hold now, an image
no doubt: here’s my breast. You
suck. Why are you still here? Tell me
what I did to deserve this.
I’ll do it again
and again.
Yours
by Naomi Clewett
Fences
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.”
by Benjamin Alire Saenz
You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.
“
| — | From The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy (via coffeeandnights) |
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
“
| — | By W. Somerset Maugham (via amandaonwriting) |
Galactica
We are now accepting apologies
for the universe’s indignities:
spitting stars, solar burnout,
the cosmic purgatory of hanging
from a fence by your underwear,
for gaseous ruptures, vortexes of nothing,
and certainly for the nothingness.
Could it have been more plain?
Frozen pupils, battered moons.
Weren’t we paying attention?
Even here, what is more worrisome
than the silence of an imploded
mountain, the meteor-pocked face
of a desert, the past coming back?
One moment you’re tending sheep
with an old Navajo woman, asking
for the Diné word for shape-shifter;
the next Crazy Harry’s gyrating
in the school yard as we bang
on downspouts in a downpour.
What were the heavens doing
before we lifted Harry and labored
to nail him with lunch-box fruit?
Did they inch a finger, did they
sleep as he wedged? Milky oval,
cry Uncle! Say you’re sorry
for leaving him with a soap dish
of Brillo pads and lemon juice.
Sorry for the ever-wanting
and scrub brush turning to flame,
for the teeth grinding and drip
like coal slag down our throats.
We’ll take them now: your volcanic spew,
salts and celestial bruises,
weary queries, notes, as Celan says,
and the bottles on the seas
swept up with schools of tuna.
What did we say: If you find this,
write back. If you are reading this,
you’re too close. My name is …
We’ll take them like slugs to beer,
everything we ever wished for
wrapped in sleeping bags, pupa, coma,
as the stars in their death march
move across the sky silent
as coyotes passing in the dark.
for the universe’s indignities:
spitting stars, solar burnout,
the cosmic purgatory of hanging
from a fence by your underwear,
for gaseous ruptures, vortexes of nothing,
and certainly for the nothingness.
Could it have been more plain?
Frozen pupils, battered moons.
Weren’t we paying attention?
Even here, what is more worrisome
than the silence of an imploded
mountain, the meteor-pocked face
of a desert, the past coming back?
One moment you’re tending sheep
with an old Navajo woman, asking
for the Diné word for shape-shifter;
the next Crazy Harry’s gyrating
in the school yard as we bang
on downspouts in a downpour.
What were the heavens doing
before we lifted Harry and labored
to nail him with lunch-box fruit?
Did they inch a finger, did they
sleep as he wedged? Milky oval,
cry Uncle! Say you’re sorry
for leaving him with a soap dish
of Brillo pads and lemon juice.
Sorry for the ever-wanting
and scrub brush turning to flame,
for the teeth grinding and drip
like coal slag down our throats.
We’ll take them now: your volcanic spew,
salts and celestial bruises,
weary queries, notes, as Celan says,
and the bottles on the seas
swept up with schools of tuna.
What did we say: If you find this,
write back. If you are reading this,
you’re too close. My name is …
We’ll take them like slugs to beer,
everything we ever wished for
wrapped in sleeping bags, pupa, coma,
as the stars in their death march
move across the sky silent
as coyotes passing in the dark.
by James Hoch
Image #1 from A Ransom Note in Six Images Concerning the Decapitated Heads of the Mexican Revolutionaries by Quintan Ana Wikswo
Strawberry
I am going to fail.
I’m going to fail cartilage and plastic, camera and arrow.
I’m going to fail binoculars and conjugations,
all the accompanying musics: I am failing,
I must fail, I can fail, I have failed
the way some women throw themselves
into lover’s arms or out trains,
fingers crossed and skirts billowing
behind them. I’m going to fail
the way strawberry plants fail,
have dug down hard to fail, shooting
brown runners out into silt, into dry gray beds,
into tissue and rock. I’m going to fail
the way their several hundred hearts below surface
have failed, thick, soft stumps desiccating
to tumors; the way roots wizen in the cold
and cloud black, knotty as spark plugs, cystic
synapses. I’m going to fail light and stars and tears.
I’m going to fail the way cowards only wish they could fail,
the way the brave refuse to fail or the vain fear to,
believing that to stray even once from perfection
is to be permanently cast out, Wandering Jew
of failure, Adam of failure, Sita of failure; that’s the way
I’m going to fail, bud and creosote and cloud.
I’m failing pet and parent. I’m failing the food
in strangers’ stomachs, the slender inchoate rings
of distant planets. I’m going to fail these words
and the next and the next. I’m going to fail them,
I’m going to fail her— trust me, I’ve already failed him—
and the possibility of a we is going to sink me
like a bad boat. I’m going to fail the way
this strawberry plant has failed, alive without bud,
without fruit, without tenderness, hugging itself
to privation and ridiculous want.
I’m going to fail simply by standing in front of you,
waving my arms in your face as if hailing a taxi:
I’m here, I’m here, please don’t forget me,
though you already have, I smell it, even cloaked
with soil, sending out my slender fingers for you,
sending out all my hair and tongue and brain.
I’m going to fail you
just as you’re going to fail me,
urging yourself further down to sediment
and the tiny, trickling filaments of damp;
thirsty, thirsty, desperate to drown
if even for a little while, if even for once:
to succumb, to be destroyed,
to die completely, to fail the way I’ve failed
in every particular sense of myself,
in every new and beautiful light.
by Paisley Rekdal
“I came,” she said, “hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy.”
“Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”
“
| — | From The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon |
