August 2011
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“There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody...”
– Mary Ruefle, Someone Reading a Book is a Sign of Order in the World (via itgivesitthew)
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Blue Dementia, Yusef Komunyakaa
In the days when a man would hold a swarm of words inside his belly, nestled against his spleen, singing. In the days of night riders when life tongued a reed till blues & sorrow song called out of the deep night: Another man done gone. Another man done gone. In the days when one could lose oneself all up inside love that way, & then moan on the bone till the gods cried out in...
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Langston Blue, Jericho Brown
“O Blood of the River of songs, O songs of the River of Blood,” Let me lie down. Let my words Lie sound in the mouths of men Repeating their invocations pure And perfect as the moans that Mount in the mouth of Bessie Smith. Blues for the angels kicked out Of heaven. Blues for the angels Who miss them still. Blues for My people and whatever water They know. O weary...
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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows →
poetbabble:
infinitegestures:
Go see if you can find yours there.
What is the name of the sorrow that resists their naming?
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“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care...”
– Zadie Smith, On Beauty. (via jillsies)
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How to Write the Great American Indian Novel,...
All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms. Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food. The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, perferably from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory. If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender and in love with a white man. But if she...
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The Hurricane, William Carlos Williams
The tree lay down on the garage roof and stretched, You have your heaven, it said, go to it.
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History of Hurricanes, Teresa Cader
Because we cannot know— we plant crops, make love in the light of our not-knowing A Minuteman prods cows from the Green with his musket, his waxed paper windows snapping in the wind, stiletto stalks in the herb garden upright—Now blown sideways—Now weighted down in genuflection, not toward, And a frail man holding an Imari teacup paces at daybreak in his courtyard in Kyoto a cherry tree...
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Another Elegy, Jericho Brown
This is what your dying looks like. You believe in the sun. You believe I don’t love you. Always be closing, Said our favorite professor before He let the gun go off in his mouth. I turned 29 the way any man turns In his sleep, unaware of the earth Moving beneath him, its plates in Their places, a dated disagreement. Let’s fight it out, baby. You have Only so long left. A man turns...
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Part of Eve's Discussion, Marie Howe
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to...
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The Woman and the Flame, Aimé Césaire
A bit of light that descends the springhead of a gaze twin shadow of the eyelash and the rainbow on a face and round about who goes there angelically ambling Woman the current weather the current weather matters little to me my life is always ahead of a hurricane you are the morning that swoops down on the lamp a night stone between its teeth you are the passage of seabirds as well you who are...
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Tongue licks black skies to find silver lining. Hurricane seen from space and my fingers swirled cloud like cake-batter-someone else’s town.
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Via Dolorosa, Traci Brimhall
We have been telling the story wrong all along, how a king took Philomela’s tongue after he had taken her body, and how the gods turned her into a nightingale
so she could tell the night of her grief. Even now the streets wait for her lamentation—strays minister to bones abandoned on a stoop, a man sleeps on the ghosts of yesterday’s heat,
pigeons rest on top of the church and will not stir...
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“I believe that marriage isn’t between a man and woman, but between love and...”
– Frank Ocean, We All Try (via powerpussysays)
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beekeepers not peacekeepers my skin this disputed territory the sting and welt of occupation witnesses seal their eyes shut with honey
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What They Wanted, Stephen Dunn
They wanted me to tell the truth, so I said I’d lived among them, for years, a spy, but all that I wanted was love. They said they couldn’t love a spy. Couldn’t I tell them other truths? I said I was emotionally bankrupt, would turn any of them in for a kiss. I told them how a kiss feels when it’s especially undeserved; I thought they’d understand. They wanted me to say I was sorry, so...
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Verguenza, Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Woman, I wish I didn’t know your name. What could you be? Silence in my house & the front yard where the dogwood wouldn’t make up its mind about flowers. Aren’t you Nature? A stem cringing, half- shadowed beneath a torque of rain. I too am leaving. I too am half-spun. The other day near the river I bent down & Narcissus turned his immaculate mouth away, refusing to...
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“Although we all want to know love, we talk about the search for true love as...”
– bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (via shana-elmsford)
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A Primer, Bob Hicok
I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go to be in Michigan. The right hand of America waving from maps or the left pressing into clay a mold to take home from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan forty-three years. The state bird is a chained factory gate. The state flower is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical though it is merely cold and deep as truth. A Midwesterner can use the...
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Heart Condition, Jericho Brown
I don’t want to hurt a man, but I like to hear one beg. Two people touch twice a month in ten hotels, and We call it long distance. He holds down one coast. I wander the other like any African American, Africa With its condition and America with its condition And black folk born in this nation content to carry Half of each. I shoulder my share. My man flies To touch me. Sky on our side. Sky...
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The Opposite of Silence →
A must read about Syria. Beautiful, courageous writing. I wept.
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“We have confirmed ourselves as a nation that calls for the light, a people...”
– Gaddafi is gone. Long live unity, democracy and the rule of law | Hisham Matar | Comment is free | The Guardian
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“An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless...”
– John Steinbeck, from “The Log From the Sea of Cortez” (via aubade)
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Clarinet, Terrance Hayes
I am sometimes the clarinet your parents bought your first year in band, my whole body alive in your fingers, my one ear warmed by the music you breathe into it. I hear your shy laugh among the girls at practice. I am not your small wrist rising & falling as you turn the sheet music, but I want to be. Or pinky bone, clavicle. When you walk home from school, birds call to you in a language...
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Some Part of Yourself, Then—Vast, Repeating by...
Sometimes I climb myself. I hear her holding her breath so that her breathing does not obscure the sound of the rain, does not push our bedroom like a paper boat through the window out into the cedar boughs.
And I am waving black flags of sand, blotting out the nights I truly was gone, had hopped the high wall of my body to travel that labyrinth back to you.
(via softcollapse)
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“If you watch television news, you will know less about the world than if you...”
– Garrison Keillor (via theorthodoxheretic)
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Trying to Sleep, Jack Gilbert
The girl shepherd on the farm beyond has been taken from school now she is twelve, and her life is over. I got my genius brother a summer job in the mills and he stayed all his life. I lived with a woman four years who went crazy later, escaped from the hospital, hitchhiked across America terrified and in the snow without a coat, and was raped by most men who gave her a ride. I crank my heart even...
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Also Libya, Suheir Hammad
no one tells you if anyone does you do not listen anyway if you do still you do not understand no one tells you how to be free
there is fire in your neck ocean in your ear there is always your fear the words you cannot even
no one is here when the world opens upside down you reach toward dawn your weight on the earth changes
some of us plant deeper others ache to fly
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Championship, Melissa Broder
God keeps unfurling me with God’s gigantic helium. There are scratchmarks all over my life. That’s from my mitts. Other human, this unfurliness is far too spacious. Would you lend me some muscle? Let’s write a sermon on control. Let’s write a love song for heavyweights and by heavyweights I mean everyone.
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What's Broken, Dorianne Laux
The slate black sky. The middle step of the back porch. And long ago my mother’s necklace, the beads rolling north and south. Broken the rose stem, water into drops, glass knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s pot of parsley and mint, white roots shooting like streamers through the cracks. Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath, the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken little finger on my right...
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Woman Walking on the Road, Terrance Hayes
We were in the car. We were heading home when Christian with his wholly American name & manic chatter told his girlfriend the woman we saw walking on the road with no umbrella was a symbol of torment.We were in the backseat— you with that face making the windows & the black world beyond the windows beautiful, the roadside figure of a woman in the rain beautiful & I knew later...
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The broken record of my life is cracking “The 100 Greatest Love Songs” on vinyl across my knee.
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Appetite, Rynn Williams
The merest suggestion of mouth and I was ravenous—I filled the house with chocolate, chestnuts, strudel, blood sausage; I bathed in butter. A glimpse of tongue and I was undone, simply a hint of heavy cream and the wax came off in a greasy slab, there were no cauldrons large enough. I imagined his body drawn in sections, flank, rib, and tenderloin, I rubbed the blade to sparks, my stove walls...
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“in somali when we see injustice we say ‘dhiiga kuma dhaqaqo?’ which translates...”
– warsan shire.: the water.
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Whenever I happen to see you, Leonard Cohen
Whenever I happen to see you I forget for a while That I am ugly in my own eyes For not winning you I wanted you to choose me Over all the men you know Because I am destroyed In their company I have often prayed for you Like this Let me have her
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left flank: Maliciousness in memes: #boganmovies... →
Much needed post by Elizabeth Humphrys on the classism and maliciousness in memes like #boganmovies and #tightsarenotpants. Even if you’re not on Twitter and unfamiliar with these memes, you would be aware of (or perhaps participated in) some of this behaviour towards “bogans” and the policing of women’s fashion choices.
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“Well, you put Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Fouad Ajami, Azar Nafisi, Ibn Warraq, Irshad...”
– Jadaliyya interviews Hamid Dabashi on Brown Skin, White Masks. (via subashini)
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Birmingham for Tariq Jahan by Carol Ann Duffy
After the evening prayers at the mosque, came the looters in masks, and you three stood, beloved in your neighbourhood, brave, bright, brothers, to be who you were – a hafiz is one who has memorised the entire Koran; a devout man – then the man in the speeding car who purposefully mounted the kerb … I think we all should kneel on that English street, where he widowed...
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God is an American, Terrance Hayes
I still love words. When we make love in the morning, your skin damp from a shower, the day calms. Shadenfreude may be the best way to name the covering of adulthood, the powdered sugar on a black shirt. I am
alone now on the top floor pulled by obsession, the ink on my fingers. And sometimes it is a difficult name. Sometimes it is like the world before America, the kin- ship of fools and...
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[All morning I feel the petals], Simon Perchik
All morning I feed the petals more and more warm water the way a child just born already knows to kiss head down
that all that’s left from the sky is air and in this emptied pail a few mouthfuls, a sun day by day growing taller
glistening with talons, feathers rivers that eat from under their sea’s loving lullabies and drownings and in my hand the tin pail
leans down to watch its...
