July 2010
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Room 31, Saeed Jones
Cigarette smoke is the smell of the last couple here, the ghost of their stains still on the sheets, and the bed aches with the weight of my waiting. I’ve left the door ajar, enough for night to push its tongue into the room. (Are you on your way? Where did you tell your wife you were going?) Another hour – A couple argues in the next room; Now, moans. I want to see their faces. I want to be their...
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The World is Too Huge to Grasp, Matthew Dickman
Still, tiger, there’s no reason not to tie your wife up if that’s what she’s been dreaming about in traffic. No reason not to go out and eat twenty doughnuts if that’s what you want instead of granola because, whether you like it or not, it’s a skeleton you’re wearing under those Italian jeans. For my part I’m going to watch hours of television wearing...
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The Fall of 1992, Randall Mann
Gainesville, Florida An empire of moss, dead yellow, and carapace: that was the season of gnats, amyl nitrate, and goddamn rain; of the gator in the fake lake rolling his silverish eyes; of vice; of Erotica, give it up and let me have my way. And the gin-soaked dread that an acronym was festering inside. Love was a doorknob statement, a breakneck...
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“But we’ve been doing it for a while now, the feminism thing, and the theories...”
– Tiger Beatdown › Dirty Girls and Bad Feminists: A Few Thoughts on “I Love Dick”
I wanted to quote this entire blog post. Your time won’t be wasted if you click through and read all of it. The author perfectly expresses a lot of my problems with feminism and “internet...
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Roma, Matthew Dickman
Last night my neighbor was looking a little enlightened, you know, the way bodies do after spending the afternoon having sex on an old couch while responsible people are suffering with their clothes on in cubicles and libraries. He had that look vegetables get in really nice grocery stores where the tomatoes aren’t just red they’re goddamn red! He was like that. Like a glowing,...
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Dedalus, After Icarus, Saeed Jones
Boys behind to gather around the man like seagulls. He ignores them entirely, but they follow him from one end of the beach to the other, and back again. Their footprints seem to burn holes in the sand. It’s quite a sight, a strange parade: A man with a pair of wings strapped to his arms followed by a flock of rowdy boys. Some squawk and flap their boney limbs. Others try to leap now and...
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Out on the Weekend - The Swell Season with Iron...
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Jerome, or The Resurrectionist, Saeed Jones
After the mourners clogged his throat with marigolds and pushed his headstone into its permanent groove, my lover returned to me a cloud of butterflies, blaze of monarchs burning gold in my room, every wall papered with beating wings. The floor shuddered with color: ochre and bronze strokes, flecks of blackness like coal in the lungs. Beating, always beating. Breathing wings curtained the window...
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The Escape Artist, Saeed Jones
He blames me for his stomach pain, the churned rattle of keys I have forced him to swallow; as if he didn’t ask for a walk-in closet full of straightjackets and chains. Anyway, nothing can keep him. Handcuffs etc rings into the wrists of our four post bed, but each morning: a puff of cheap smoke. He stands, hands on his hips. Free again - he says. I’m just a lock he picked.
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Jezebel's FM Radio, Saeed Jones
I am breaking under the weight of torch songs sung so low that dogs have to hold their breath just to hear the flames whistling, the tune of desperation simmering, a quiet heat that crawls into bed at inappropriate hours like a cheating husband just before his sets his marriage on fire. Some rhythms are played to distract us from others, he will say as he scoops his wife’s breasts into his...
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Death in Bed, Saeed Jones
There are no instruction manuals, no pocket book sized pamphlets complete with diagrams and bullet lists, no chapter devoted to proper etiquette for initiating foreplay with bones. I could use some advice on what to wear: a pink negligee or maybe just skin? Or less? Should I worry about making death feel at ease? Do I offer him a drink? Gin and tonic or under the rocks, what do you say, lover?...
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Elegy For Oscar Grant: A Found Poem, Saeed Jones
by Kehinde Wiley
In a painting that no longer exists // One boy kissed into bliss by myth, who can’t remember // to see as beautiful what I thought would destroy me.
In a painting no longer // Maybe he was too calm during the taunts of the police. // “If you were smoke,” he said, “you’d be the smoke that rages from a forest fire, close and wild and dangerous.”
He is the thing that ...
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“Whatever you want to say about hookers, at least they actually provide a service...”
– aaronsw, responding to NYMag’s “puff piece” on political columnist David Brooks. (via dotrob)
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Black or White
You can only walk in the middle for so long. Tea or coffee. Vanilla or chocolate. Barefoot or shodden. Drunk or sober. The beach or the mountains. In love or heartbroken. Short hair or long hair. Dreams or not-remembering. Robot or nervous breakdown. Make a choice.
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A wet kiss
I dream about it tender, then rough: I dream about splitting my head open on the headboard from the force of it.
I dream about carving my name into your belt, another notch.
I dream I wake up naked with you in the dark on the lower bunk of a ship. Coffin dreams.
I dream that your heroics save me from this tower I’ve locked myself in.
I dream about swallowing the key.
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Venezuelan in New York (Englishman in New York) -...
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I even appear in other people’s dreams about the apocalypse. I am apparently the most level headed and convinced of survival at the end of the world. I’ve been practising for a very long time.
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“A lot of people say the same things, “I can’t believe you took that with your...”
– Star Rush in answer to the question “What has been the most surprising or most predictable reaction from people to your iphotos?” on the iPhoneogenic Tumblr. (via mishobaranovic)
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Country
I dreamt about you, you walked naked into the bush like the sky didn’t matter. Your body was a tree struck by lightning. I cast light into your pulse and buried my hands in red dirt. The bush was keening; your bare feet walked the old maps and the tracks of snakes sung under your toes. The sky watched too. I used to know magic but I lost all language. I make a spell called Country and the...
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When Everything Here Is No Longer Alive, Jak...
I see troups of lost boyscouts Snipe hunting in vacant lots And if you weren’t dead, I can tell Youd want to be there Like, right now, you are trying to will some awkward imitation of yourself there to say things like “I’m receiving a transmission from another planet” and “It’s being dictated by an historical figure” But, you seem unsatisfied. It’s not working for some reason. Like a note stuck in...
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Cocktails for menstrual hysteria
Swallow a glass of Laudanum with a bullet in it. and a pair of motorcycle boots to wear.
Italian hot chocolate laced with Laudanum. Viv and I walked home from a cabaret show at Drift on the river after drinking nothing but water and watching a very gay celebration of Barbara Streisand. Drift is like a club docked on the river (and feels a world away from its previous seafood and steak restaurant...
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“The way I really am, it finally caught up with me.”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment) (via awritersruminations) (via linzo)
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The Wolves (Act I and II) by Catherine A.D....
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by Bhanu Kapil Rider
16. HOW WILL YOU / HAVE YOU PREPARE(D) FOR YOUR DEATH? Sometimes a man says something to a woman, and after that she knows she is incapable of giving birth to something. That would live. For days, I wrote about a woman whose lungs were filled with water. I made, instead, the body of the man standing at the edge of the river. Matted lashes. Flush irises. He has my eyes. The last time I saw...
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The Necessity of Appearing In Your Own Face,...
There are days when that is the last place in the world where you want to be but you have to be there, like a movie, because it features you.
(via lprecords)
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Jolene - Ray LaMontagne
(via beenthinking)
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Japan, Billy Collins
Today, I pass the time reading a favorite haiku, saying the words over and over. It feels like eating the same small, perfect grape again and again. I walk through the house reciting it and leave its letters falling through the air of every room. I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it. I say it in front of the painting of the sea. I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf. I listen...
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June 2010
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Use Me by Fiona Apple originally by Bill Withers
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I am exorcising so many old demons this month, if I was a Christian I’d get re-baptised. I’ll go to the ocean instead and swim naked in freezing water.
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I am a Wife
January 2004
I am a wife and he can’t give me back cause he’s had me and everyone knows it. Each day I choke on a fear that tastes like ginger wine I just have to learn to keep My Mouth Shut. He sucks my blood lovingly and then spits it back at me. Even a hot chamomile breeze cannot convince me it is safe enough to sleep so I lay on the floorboards near the window to be nearer to the...
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I Come From There, Mahmoud Darwish
I come from there and I have memories Born as mortals are, I have a mother And a house with many windows, I have brothers, friends, And a prison cell with a cold window. Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls, I have my own view, And an extra blade of grass. Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words, And the bounty of birds, And the immortal olive tree. I walked this land before the swords...
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“Bruised Orange” a John Prine cover by Justin...
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