June 2012
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He will come to me with rain in his hair
(like a crown of tears fell on him)
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Rinsing out the sky all soapy. Stars fell in my bath, I ironed them into my hair with a crimper. Hair falling like a curtain sundowned.
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The rituals of dressing for someone who will take off my clothes.
Applying lipstick and then blotting it on his mouth.
(Then he cancels because he is understandably exhausted from working 60 hour weeks, on his feet)
I rip off my own stockings.
I apply perfume for myself.
I go through the sadness of brushing my own hair.
I sleep alone (I prefer it) (I don’t want to)
but it is...
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chemistry.
warsanshire:
i wear my loneliness like a taffeta dress riding up my thigh
and you cannot help but want me.
you think it’s cruel
how i break your heart, to write a poem.
i think it’s alchemy.
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I had nightmares my teeth were crumbling. He read the maps of my skull, trepanned out dissent, making a hole to plant the flag of my citizenship.
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“Glad you enjoyed broadcast. Jefferson certainly was rather disappointing...”
– Alan Turing Letters of Note: Yours in distress, Alan
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Headlights make golden strands from rain falling on a dark street. Once you pulled me into you by the hair, hard, to kiss. Now my body - without the seatbelt of your body - is swerving all over cold, flooded roads.
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Liberation Two by David Kutz-Marks
Vapor is never itself these days, clouded in streetlight and eyeing a gutter and star, dying both ways in a breath. You and I trudging up cobblestones, London like ruin, a formlessness thought, you and I dredging up stones. And once there were oceans violent inside us, since we would not tear or cry ourselves open we got fat and tired and dreamlike. I am high as a kite right now hit a snag in a...
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Red String by Minnie Bruce Pratt
At first she thought the lump in the road was clay thrown up by a trucker’s wheel. Then Beatrice saw the mess of feathers. Six or seven geese stood in the right-of-way, staring at the blood, their black heads rigid above white throats. Unmoved by passing wind or familiar violence, they fixed their gaze on dead flesh and something more, a bird on the wing. It whirled...
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Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh XXI Dynasty by...
My body holds its shape. The genius is intact. Will I return to Thebes? In that lost country The eucalyptus trees have turned to stone. Once, branches nudged me, dropping swollen blossoms, And passionflowers lit my father’s garden. Is it still there, that place of mottled shadow, The scarlet flowers breathing in the darkness? I remember how I died. It was so simple! One morning the garden...
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BAREBACK HEXING
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a draft of hunger and desire — lie next to a man who has scribbled bed hair across my cheek — I was a dull wound polished to holy in soap
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imaginaryimageblog:
a flock of big black birds teaching each other how to whisper
sladegibbs:
follow for poems that aren’t mine but ones you could like just as well
I’m contributing to this (other’s work, not my own), different to what I post here. I’d love you to follow if you’d like to read (even more) poetry, especially as I really like what Slade has been posting so far. to be ready for it
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Woofer (When I Consider the African-American),...
When I consider the much discussed dilemma of the African-American, I think not of of the diasporic middle passing, unchained, juke, jock and jiving sons and daughters of what sleek dashikied poets and tether fisted Nationalists commonly call Mother Africa, but of an ex-girlfriend who was the child of a black-skinned Ghanaian beauty and Jewish- American, globetrotting ethnomusicologist. I forgot...
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Like, Frank Bidart
Woe is blunted not erased by like. Your hands were too full, then empty. At the grave’s lip, secretly you imagine then refuse to imagine a spectre so like what you watched die, the unique soul you loved endures a second death. The dead hate like, bitter when the living with too-small grief replace them. You dread loving again, exhausted by the hungers ineradicable in his...
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To The Dead, Frank Bidart
What I hope (when I hope) is that we’ll see each other again,— … and again reach the VEIN in which we loved each other . . It existed. It existed. There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,— … for, like the detectives (the Ritz Brothers) in The Gorilla, once we’d been battered by the gorilla we searched the walls, the intricately carved impenetrable paneling for a...
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Overheard Through the Walls of the Invisible City,...
…telling those who swarm around him his desire is that an appendage from each of them fill, invade each of his orifices,— repeating, chanting Oh yeahOh yeahOh yeahOh yeahOh yeah until, as if in darkness he craved the sun, at last he reached consummation. Until telling those who swarm around him begins again (we are the wheel to which we are bound).
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Leonard Cohen Explains the Broken Heart
When the level of suffering in any individual reaches a certain point and he can’t deal with his own discomfort, then he is going to look for some kind of solution. I don’t think any religious quest is begun with a sense of luxury. I don’t think any serious study is undertaken unless the being is broken with some kind of suffering, either physical or psychic. I don’t think anybody undertakes a...
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I’m afraid that reading your poetry might be co-opting your heartbreak.
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ululates:
In China, this phenomenon is called Buddha’s light. It was often observed on cloud-shrouded high mountains, such as Huangshan Mountains and Mount Emei. Records of the phenomenon at Mount Emei date back to A.D. 63. The colorful halo always surrounds the observer’s own shadow, and thus was often taken to show the observer’s personal enlightenment
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Near Sonnet For S by Kimberly Ann Southwick
at where i work i know a girl who slurs her words the way you would—but not the way when you were drunk and loud, would sway still tall, balconied, your sentences blurred. no, not watered—slow—sinking, but laughter sure, close-confident, talking nights away in your Christmas-lit room. bedded, we lay close side by side, wrist brushed against finger. i loved you once and there in that soft hush;...
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Comet by J. Michael Wahlgren
I motion fast. If you ask My name I’ll tell you
My life story, how I Harvest, how I bail.
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de-pogrom (your bodies grew a field of wildflowers) selfish, I wanted you back (flowers in my hair, they found my body across the border)
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I Was Never Able to Pray, Edward Hirsch
Wheel me down to the shore where the lighthouse was abandoned and the moon tolls in the rafters. Let me hear the wind paging through the trees and see the stars flaring out, one by one, like the forgotten faces of the dead. I was never able to pray, but let me inscribe my name in the book of waves and then stare into the dome of a sky that never ends and see my voice sail into the night. (via...
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Music Like Dirt by Frank Bidart
for Desmond Dekker
I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary bed it said But he loves me which broke my will.
music like dirt
That you did but willed and continued to will refusal you confirmed seventeen years later saying I was not wrong.
music like dirt
When you said I was not wrong with gravity and weird sweetness I felt not anger not woe but weird calm...
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Half June, Stacie Cassarino
It’s so dark walking East Hill Road we no longer see each other, what does it matter? outline of trees crowding the sky, fog lowering, our bodies urgent, fractious, reinvented. Once, I would have married, you say. Around us no light enters. Surely the pinewood has closed in on itself, a body of water deepens. He was climbing down from the roof when he fell, you say. Three stories. Your hand...
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On Soft Terror, Steven Breyak
How many public sinks left running for ghost hands? Your change given in foreign coins and still coming up short. Imagine all the salt shakers loosened upon the world; names scrawled into sidewalks; people who hate people and work in services you have to tip; patrons making waitresses cry right now. Right now there are sleeper cells waiting to hit you hard on the shoulder as you make your way...
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“What I am saying is that writing is magic and that it is a very potent form of...”
– Dr. David Abram, http://www.childrenofthecode.org/interviews/abram.htm (via dialoghost)
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“I’ve been thinking of how I might engage pendulation—the movement between...”
– Bhanu Kapil Rider, from “What is Experimental Literature?”
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[ 14 ] by Martha Collins
black keys from trees white keys locked on black shoulders locked together above skeleton ribs keys to 45 keyboards from one tusk the word ivory rang through the air one tusk + one slave to carry it bought together if slave survived the long march sold for spice or sugar plantations if not replaced by other slaves five Africans died for each tusk 2 million for 400,000 American pianos including the...
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“she thinks, To each soul its hour.
Like the anorexic Ellen West, Myrrha must...”
– Frank Bidart, from Desire
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Guilty of Dust by Frank Bidart
up or down from the infinite C E N T E R B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time the voice in my head said LOVE IS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE * then I saw the parade of my loves those PERFORMERS comics actors singers forgetful of my very self so often I desired to die to myself to live in them then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained SPECTRES...
