February 2012
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The Theater by Traci Brimhal and Brynn Saito
This is where you saw women sing to reenact their suffering, and men who wore wooden swords taught you valor. The costumes are still behind the curtain, so are the masks worn by players to perform the heart’s madness. When the girl on stage wore god’s many faces, you wept in relief. How long have you waited to be shown your own disfigured faith? How many years have you waited to...
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sladegibbs:
woody harrelson high on the golden gate
like leapers to bridges, like lepers to certain islands of which men know nothing of being, the plunge took everything like seagulls like spires like jesus if he had remembered to show. let the whole soil clamor on about the precious nature of redwoods, their weight in gold. doesn’t anyone know how to party anymore? like scansion so...
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Listen, Christopher Howell
Is it an empty house, the body alone with its weary old clothes or its bullet holes and severed arteries, last laugh still shining in its teeth? The road of answers leaps its ditch and descends a dusty hollow where nightbirds coo, Pass by, and the Angel of Nothingness does his nails. Often sky dazzles over the great breathing earth. Often of its own accord the grain begins again to simmer. Deep in...
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The Song of Skeptomai Lou by Heather McHugh
Old wives, I wish I could be one of you. Instead I am the born old maid. Old maid emeritus, let’s say—the squid whose erudition hugs too many clams at once— heart full of ink. With my verdichter’s digits, I could practice having crushes. But appetites for permanence went whirring on. So did the ring of close calls (all collect). Even the elders wrecked their roadsters, just to have one date with...
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Ghosts That Need Reminding by Dana Levin
Through shattered glass and sheeted furniture, chicken wire and piled dishes, sheared-off doors stacked five to a wall, you’re walking like cripples. Toward a dirty window, obstructed by stacks of chairs. And once you move them, one by one, palm circles through the grime and cup your hands round your faces, finally able to see through— Charged night. Sheet-flashes of green, threaded with...
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“AMONG WAZIRISTAN’S RESIDENTS, “I will drone you” has by now...”
– My Drone War - By Pir Zubair Shah | Foreign Policy
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you are a pharmacy, Nate Slawson
you have a hundred secret names & I am the world’s worst shoplifter. you know what I mean? it’s like it’s 1992 & we’re so happy for cigarettes & de la soul & lightning bugs & shit like that. sometimes I wish you knew someone exactly like me who wasn’t so obsessed with your knuckles. they make me hurt like alligator teeth. I want you to be all fists & bruises like ...
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I fear that the man who was supposed to fall in love with me might have died.
(A long time ago
I will write it all down over paper
tracings I made at his grave in
some dream and waking and
forgetting his name)
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The Whistler, Sommer Browning
Here I am so selfish I only remember my reaction. Each fact loosening falling away like icicles along the eaves. I once saw one so large & the earth so soft that it pierced the ground below it. I once walked through a spider web so vast, I felt its tug as I pulled through it. I once drove 30 miles at night through pitch-black counties without headlights using only my cellphone light to guide...
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Bedroom Life with Ceramic Frog, Joshua Diamond
Different from other of my lives but not so different because you are a part of it and them and these and this. We sleep because we love to dream and I talk in my sleep, say I love you with diligence, love like porcupine needles are sharp— that giant space porcupine whose quills the Great Astronaut plucked to weave the needlework of the universe! is how I love you. I’m incomprehensible in the...
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Self-Portrait During a Tornado Sighting by Tory...
Through the window I see a murmuration of starlings bat against the weathervane
like bullets of rain & feel my buzzing thigh—texts & social media
tear across the great plains & rocky mountain states, heralding news
of earthquakes in California. My mother’s messages are worry, worry—
paraphrased, my replies read guilty, guilty. I type furiously: i don’t see the twister
though...
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Celestial, Tina Chang
When everything was accounted for you rummaged through my bag to find something offensive: a revolver, a notebook of misinterpreted text. I’m God’s professor. His eyes two open ovens. He has a physical body and it hiccups and blesses. Tell me a story before the mudslide, tell it fast before the house falls, before it withers in the frost, before it dozes off next to the television. I...
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This Slow Rise, Monica Berlin
What does any of this matter on nights so hot we can’t sleep, somewhere else the rivers spilling banks, pouring in, and somewhere else still, drought spreading out the once rich land into a layer of silt. What does it matter these nights, our backyards of trains, our turning to dust, even as we’re more saturated than we’ve ever been? We’re tracing routes of the maps hung above our beds, not ...
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“Haunting was the language and the experiential modality by which I tried to...”
– “Introduction to the New Edition” - Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting And The Sociological Imagination effusionofbiopower (via thewww)
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Evolution of Danger, Tina Chang
I’m the one in the back of the bar, drinking cachaça, fingering the lip of the glass. Every dream has left me now as I wait for the next song: Drag and drum. They’ll be no humming in this room, only fragrance of sweat and fuel. To make the animal go. To make it Hungry. After that there is Thirst. * I danced in the border town until it wasn’t decent, until I was my grandest...
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Snow Moon, Leah Mooney
Tonight, breaking shells from boiled eggs, my thumbs are red-tender. Beyond this kitchen window the moon fills with blood, grows heavy like a plum as it falls. It is no longer a moon, though that is the closest name left. All we have are names. Moon, snow, egg. I say thumb, but when I hold it in the light, what I am saying to you is see how tender I have become? Even the eggshells undo me.
(via...
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Last Kiss
He used all my favourite lipsticks, so he’s still kissing me even though he’s gone.
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Australian politics
when I overdosed the doctors at the hospital force fed me charcoal the cruellest antidote to a bottle of vodka and fistfuls of smooth white pills my body spewed black dust when I got the bill from the hospital there was an itemised line for the Carbon Tax I wanted to be baptised in Ash Wednesdays but I couldn’t find the right form to renounce my confirmation name so I put my...
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Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy
Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love. Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief. I am trying to be truthful. Not a cute card or a kissogram. I give you an onion. Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as...
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Prayer to Delay the Apocalypse by Traci Brimhall
Angels, give us this day. Set down your plagues, and forgive us this night. I’ve lifted a candle to see who I’ve been making love to and examined his body for the first signs of terror. Whoever you are, wake up. Tell me heaven will be like Venice—dirty, beautiful and sinking. Tell me the walls of every paradise fall, that there are riots in the city of peace. Promise me I will...
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Everything is Waiting For You by David Whyte
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or...
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“Tireless pro-democracy advocate”… What is it like to be a tireless advocate for...”
– @Unhaunting (via hungryghoast)
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The Women are Ordered to Clear the Bodies of...
This is how I betrayed my country— with each almond I fed them, with each grape’s red blister. After the war began, there were years of hunger and fear and our bodies unheld. When the suitors arrived, they wore weapons in order to sleep, and I stroked their backs. I will not defend myself. Bees entered me when we kissed, stingers clotted my throat. O harsh, unforgiving kingdom, everyone...
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I wrote some poems / prose I am really proud of because he was in my life, and it’s over.
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“I think a certain amount of time and experience and pain have helped me —...”
– David Foster Wallace in a letter to Don DeLillo (Thank you, illllllllllllli)
Letters of Note: I don’t enjoy this war one bit
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From her
No ailurophile, yet kisses in your hair render threads of angora. You litter my skin with scratches. I repay your ardor in milk.
(Our list)
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For her
You are an assemblage of flowers in my arms. Sun-slur me, my tongue is coated with pollen and I can’t get the words out.
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Poem by Cynthia Arrieu-King
A pink dozen sunshine trapezoids— It’s good to be breathing says an array of rosemary shrubs. A field of illicit rocks, shrapnel, bees, germs unknown. Hands held. Back seats checked for sleeping. I have made a Tuesday monument of a baby’s toothbrush lying on the sidewalk alone. The far lake no one knows about, bitching its ripples. In this case it doesn’t matter what other...
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“Desire draws me and my Light out of Nothing.”
– GodChannel - Attributes of Spirit (Thank you, manahorse)
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I lay in bed and he bounced light from a makeup mirror onto my bare skin. “Can you feel that?” “I can feel the light dancing.” Maybe I want to really love him like I want it to end.
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