January 2012
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(draft) I am not a poem or a disappearing act
I am not your constant, I am not even moon phases. Everyone thinks I am a poem written for them and stopped in mid sentence but no one wants to lie down beside me and help me sleep. I don’t even check my voicemail on good days so please stop calling. I don’t know how to be anything if I am a body not being touched. I forgot how to stop kissing you. I don’t know how to write to tell you where I...
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love poem #3, James Schiller
1 i will put a bee under your bed 2 every day for a year 3 so you do not perceive the increase 4 of bees under your bed 5 and become unconsciously accustomed to their activity 6 which at its culmination a. (364 bees) 7 will be substantial 8 you will lay down over a large, undulating field 9 of meticulous noise a. their dark purr will comfort you b. you will require their delicate sludge...
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Comet Hyakutake, Arthur Size
Comet Hyakutake’s tail stretches for 360 million miles— in 1996, we saw Hyakutake through binoculars— the ion tail contains the time we saw bats emerge out of a cavern at dusk— in the cavern, we first heard stalactites dripping— first silence, then reverberating sound— our touch reverberates and makes a blossoming track— a comet’s nucleus emits X-rays and leaves tracks— two thousand...
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“I knew from the first or second time we drank that I’d always remember the way...”
– a hum by spencermadsen
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The Bee-Keeper, István Kemény
I have been a bee-keeper for six thousand years And for the past hundred years an electrician. Once I retire I shall keep bees again. Something should hum for me, oh hum for me, Hum and hum and hum Just for me.
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The Secret Of Backs, Dorianne Laux
Heels of the shoes worn down, each in its own way, sending signals to the spine.
The back of the knee as it folds and unfolds. In winter the creases of American-made jeans: blue denim seams worried to white threads.
And in summer, in spring, beneath the hems of skirts, Bermudas, old bathing suit elastic, the pleating and un-pleating of parchment skin.
And the dear, dear rears. Such...
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De Humani Corporis Fabrica, John Burnside
after Vesalius I know the names of almost nothing not the bone between my elbow and my wrist that sometimes aches from breaking years ago and not the plumb line from the pelvis to the knee less ache than hum where in my nineteenth year a knife blade slit through nerves and nicked a vein leaving the wall intact the valves still working so the blood kept flooding out till Eleanor a nurse on evening...
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mawbli:
when not even letting go works
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Phone Me in Care of the Blues, Pam Brown
phone me in care of the blues. all this talk of how it could be. sometimes my cunt is throbbing like a bass guitar. you get the people worried for you. you slip their hearts a song. then you take them in. it is your skin which takes them in. they cling to you like wet cotton clings. you phone me from six hundred miles. oh you mean to say you’re lonely now. sure. i’ll wait at the...
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Creation Myth, Damon McLaughlin
The sidewalk will end in the belly of a girl. A Chevrolet will stamp her abdomen with stars, and we will watch her wilt, motionless. Today rain comes. Fills the streets with yellow fish. Smells from the market swim down boulevards, gather on corners with guitars and saxophones and fire barrels wishing another day of rain. Trees rejoice, limbs free from overcoats, roots shaking their chains. ...
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What They Found In the Diving Bell, Traci Brimhall
The first time I saw my mother, she’d been dead fourteen years and came as a ghost in the mirror, plucking the hair beneath her arms, and humming a bossa nova. She lotioned her chapped heels and padded her bra as if she were alive in the old way. She said I was born with my cord wrapped around my neck like a rosary, and she knew God, the doomed father of her days, wanted us both. Before...
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“Slut” is how we vilify a woman for exercising her right to say “yes”....”
– angels-and-angles
this is an amazing quote
(via livelaughawesome)
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imaginaryimageblog:
A milkman placing an expired milk bottle into a little bottle-sized coffin.
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Translating words I should have grown up learning. Barnaby says this photo of me reminds him of this artwork.
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[the longer i write poems for you], Pam Brown
the longer i write poems for you the shorter they become.
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How the mind works still to be sure, Jennifer...
You were the white field when you handed me a blank sheet of paper and said you’d worked so hard all day and this was the best field you could manage. And when I didn’t understand, you turned it over and showed me how the field had bled through, and then you took out your notebook and said how each time you attempted to make something else, it turned out to be the same field. You...
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Snow and Dirty Rain, Richard Siken
Close your eyes. A lover is standing too close to focus on. Leave me blurry and fall toward me with your entire body. Lie under the covers, pretending to sleep, while I’m in the other room. Imagine my legs crossed, my hair combed, the shine of my boots in the slatted light. I’m thinking My plant, his chair, the ashtray that we bought together. I’m thinking This is where we live. When we...
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"...woman so destitute her only possession was her... →
claytoncubitt:
(thanks Angel!)
mawbli:
that bated moment prior to putting down the watercolor wash destined to spread out of your control
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“What is to give light must endure burning.”
– Viktor Frankl (via thewww)
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Directions for Lines that will Remain Unfinished,...
Line to be sewn into a skirt hem held in my mouth ever since the unraveling Line beneath a bridge for years without hope I stretched my arms into the river searching for you Line to be sent to the cornfield history is a hallway of leaves. Line written for electric wires your voice inside the no history, sitting still Line for future people inside the work, only my empty teeth Line from...
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The Half-Finished Heaven, Tomas Tranströmer
During the heavy months my life caught fire only when I made love with you. The firefly too lights up and goes out, lights up and goes out —by quick glimpses we follow its route among the olive trees in the darkness of night. During the heavy months the soul sat indolent and crushed, but the body took the nearest way to you. The night heavens gave off moos. We stole milk from the...
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September Elegies, Randall Mann
in memory of Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, and Tyler Clementi There are those who suffer in plain sight, there are those who suffer in private. Nothing but secondhand details: a last shower, a request for a pen, a tall red oak. There are those who suffer in private. The one in Tehachapi, aged 13. A last shower, a request for a pen, a tall red oak: he had had enough torment, so he hanged...
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My Brief Careers, Dean Young
As a doorman I didn’t know who wanted in, who out. As an anesthesiologist, I wanted every one awake between the rotten heart cut out and the motorcyclist’s installed to say how it felt. Under the robe, I wore a holster. I became unafraid of ladders. I confused the word career with careen. I was a walk-on bastard with three lines dispensed by the second scene. I mean how one morning you look in the...
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I Go Back to May 1937, Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling out under the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks, the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips aglow in the May air, they are about to graduate, they...
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"The Half-Finished Heaven, Tomas Tranströmer
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight. The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught. And our paintings see daylight, our red beasts of the ice-age studios. Everything begins to look around. We walk in the sun in hundreds. Each man is a half-open door leading to a room for everyone. The endless ground under us. The...
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List of people who fell in love with me briefly because they saw me crying on public transport.
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This Hour and What Is Dead, Li-Young Lee
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house? What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? His love for me feels like spilled water running back to its vessel. At this hour, what is dead is restless and what is living is...
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I need to find the safest word.
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For What Binds Us, Jane Hirshfield
There are names for what binds us: strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them: the skin that forms in a half-empty cup, nails rusting into the places they join, joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they’ve been set down— and gravity, scientists say, is weak. And see how the flesh grows back across a wound, with a great vehemence, more...
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