August 2012
3 tags
Vision, Sara Eliza Johnson
Morning drapes over our eyes like little hands— surprise, look—& this where the story
wakes. You are a lit-up house. The light through the window is gauze dressing a wound. I know I am unhinged, like a door fallen down. The seconds splinter. I shake like sea foam, the bees in my sea-cave wish to escape. This is the story that funnels into itself, its beginning crushed by the weight of its...
5 tags
2 tags
5 tags
“Text means Tissue; but whereas hitherto we have always taken this tissue as a...”
– Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (via hookedonsemiotics)
3 tags
“Some say imperfect lines don’t belong in a museum, but I think a sentence’s...”
– Terrance Hayes images a museum of words and sentences in his introduction to our Winter 2010/2011 issue. The rest of the introduction can be found here. (via pshares)
4 tags
aerobe:
Terrance Hayes reading “Snow and Bottles...
4 tags
Shakur by Terrance Hayes
I’m coming at you live from the halfway out Where the winter morning stretches out Like a white sheet over lovers the infinite Has fetched. The still and bone-blue white Couple found parked, frozen on the highway, I’m thinking of them and the drug that made Them think they were warm enough to chill Because I know staying alive requires pills And a wicked streak. I’d need a head...
5 tags
[“Dear Lorca / These letters are to be”] by Jack...
Dear Lorca, These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent. They will establish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left in our poetry and...
2 tags
Psychoanalysis: An Elegy by Jack Spicer
What are you thinking about? I am thinking of an early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water. Shedding it Down empty acres of oak and manzanita Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard. Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana Driving the hills crazy, A fast wind with a bit of dust in it Bruising everything and making the seed...
1 tag
I write beautiful sentences to you in chat windows, then turn them into poems, that other people like.
Are you even listening to me.
2 tags
“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place...”
– Lawrence Durrell, Justine (via proustitute)
2 tags
dailyidioms:
ghost lineage, scriptons, glitch attacks, derangement problems, star phylogeny, nanoforestry.
7 tags
august again
thatonesuheirhammad:
did not expect mercy wall swallows what once was hope language in double talk wa half speak law of hearts dashed against rock did not expect compassion nor retribution for life nor redemption for love of women’s hands reaching shook earth of women wailing into lasting sky expected less than before swallowed a wall built nightly still expected more than history suheir hammad...
3 tags
4 tags
3 tags
The Loudest Living Thing by Shane Lake
On the day you are born, four men across the street hang the bones of a grown blue whale from the ceiling, rib cage a row of upside-down umbrella frames. Years later you tug on your father’s wool coat, pointing to the skeleton the imagined spot of its giant tongue. “It looks big enough to sleep in,” you say, but he is reading about the distance of whale calls and thinking...
2 tags
Stationery, Agha Shahid Ali
The moon did not become the sun. It just fell on the desert in great sheets, reams of silver handmade by you. The night is your cottage industry now, the day is your brisk emporium. The world is full of paper. Write to me.
2 tags
I Will Be Loving, Alex Dimitrov
Someone on the internet tells me, “If we ever meet, I will lovingly degrade you.” Someone I don’t know but want to. I don’t know my own father. Not the way he wanted to be known, not even the way I wanted him. Every time I have sex I am leaving the town I was born in again and for good. Every time I walk into a bedroom I pretend to be someone I’m not interested in talking about in poems. The first...
2 tags
telling our stories, Lucille Clifton
the fox came every evening to my door asking for nothing. my fear trapped me inside, hoping to dismiss her but she sat till morning, waiting. at dawn we would, each of us, rise from our haunches, look through the glass then walk away. did she gather her village around her and sing of the hairless moon face, the trembling snout, the ignorant eyes? child, i tell you now it was not the...
2 tags
the mississippi river empties into the gulf,...
and the gulf enters the sea and so forth, none of them emptying anything, all of them carrying yesterday forever on their white tipped backs, all of them dragging forward tomorrow. it is the great circulation of the earth’s body, like the blood of the gods, this river in which the past is always flowing. every water is the same water coming round. every day someone is standing on the...
3 tags
4 tags
“We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets. At...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy neutralnatura (via thewww)
3 tags
Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America by...
It’s a day when all the dogs of all the borrowed houses are angel footing down the hard hardwood of middle-America’s newly loaned-up renovated kitchen floors, and the world’s nicest pie I know is somewhere waiting for the right time to offer itself to the wayward and the word-weary. How come the road goes coast to coast and never just dumps us in the water, clean and come clean,...
5 tags
“The last question that Rachel’s family was asked before the conference...”
– Cindy Corrie following the verdict: ‘I don’t think that Rachel should have moved. I think we should all have been standing there with her.’
3 tags
Sonnet III by Mahmoud Darwish
translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah Of night, I love the beginning, when you two come together hand in hand, and bit by bit embrace me one section at a time then in flight take me, higher. Stay my friends, don’t hurry and sleep on each of my sides like the wings of a tired swallow Both of your silks are hot. But the flute should be patient and polish a sonnet, when you two descend on...
3 tags
Sonnet I by Mahmoud Darwish
translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah If you are the last of what god told me, be the pronoun revealed to double the “I.” Blessedness is ours now that almond trees have illuminated the footprints of passersby, here on your banks, where above you grouse and doves flutter With a gazelle’s horn you stabbed the sky, then words flowed like dew in nature’s veins. What’s...
3 tags
Cadence Chooses Me by Mahmoud Darwish
translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah Cadence chooses me, it chokes on me I am the violin’s regurgitant flow, and not its player I am in the presence of memory The echo of things pronounces through me then I pronounce… Whenever I listen to the stone I hear the cooing of a white pigeon gasp in me: My brother! I am your little sister, so I cry in her name the tears of speech And whenever I see...
3 tags
Two Stranger Birds in Our Feathers by Mahmoud...
translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah My sky is ashen. Scratch my back. And undo slowly, you stranger, my braids. And tell me what’s on your mind. Tell me what crossed Youssef’s mind. Tell me some simple talk … talk a woman always desires to be told. I don’t want the phrase complete. Gesture is enough to scatter me in the rise of butterflies between springheads and the...
3 tags
Sonnet VI by Mahmoud Darwish
translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah A pine tree in your right hand. A willow in your left. This is summer: one of your hundred gazelles has surrendered to the dew and slept on my shoulder, near one of your regions, and so what if the wolf notices, and a forest burns in the distance. Your sleepiness is stronger than fear. A wilderness of your beauty dozes off, and a moon out of your shadows...
2 tags
Even the Rain by Agha Shahid Ali
What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain? But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain. “our glosses / wanting in this world” “Can you remember?” Anyone! “when we thought / the poets taught” even the rain? After we died—That was it!—God left us in the dark. And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain. Drought was...
2 tags
The Ghazal of What Hurt by Peter Cole
Pain froze you, for years—and fear—leaving scars. But now, as though miraculously, it seems, here you are walking easily across the ground, and into town as though you were floating on air, which in part you are, or riding a wave of what feels like the world’s good will— though helped along by something foreign and older than you are and yet much younger too, inside you, and so palpable...
2 tags
Land by Agha Shahid Ali
For Christopher Merrill Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land— There is no sugar in the promised land. Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love, I’m already drunk in your capitalist land? If home is found on both sides of the globe, home is of course here—and always a missed land. The hour’s come to redeem the pledge (not wholly?) in Fate’s “Long years ago we made a tryst”...
2 tags
The Dawn by Federico García Lorca
Translated By Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili The New York dawn has four columns of mud and a hurricane of black doves that paddle in putrescent waters. The New York dawn grieves along the immense stairways, seeking amidst the groins spikenards of fine-drawn anguish. The dawn comes and no one receives it in his mouth, for there no morn or hope is possible. Occasionally, coins in furious swarms...
2 tags
Hospital parking lot, April by Laura Kasischke
Once there was a woman who laughed for years uncontrollably after a stroke. Once there was a child who woke after surgery to find his parents were impostors. These seagulls above the parking lot today, made of hurricane and ether, they have flown directly out of the brain wearing little blue-gray masks, like strangers’ faces, full of wingéd mania, like television in waiting rooms....
1 tag
ululates:
your eyes poppy fields and mine a stove left on overnight
2 tags
2 tags
3 tags
“What about Neil Armstrong, who wishes he could go back up there and take his...”
– Mary Ruefle, Kangaroo Beach (via invisiblestories)
4 tags
lazenby:
Well right, naturally you should hate spirituality. That word almost always refers to someone using the spiritual as spackle to fill some defect in him or herself. A beached fiftysomething with a face like a worn coin, suddenly terrified of death and enrolled in a community college goddess course. Spirituality doesn’t flow in that direction. It doesn’t give a shit about you. We are in...
2 tags
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
Acts of submission I admit only to God.
1 tag
Beloved,
Dress me in tattered curtains from the ruins of your city. Be the bomb shelter for my body, be the end of everything.
2 tags
Resolutions in a Parked Car by Olena Kalytiak...
After I’m done pleading with the steering wheel, after I’m done screaming at the white doors of the Friendship Inn, no, even while I’m spitting and howling, I know, yes, this is the way we find out about ourselves: crying in rental cars in parking lots in strange cities that are already too familiar. The huge ship in front of you, don’t you hope it will soon disembark? Don’t you hate hotels? Don’t...
2 tags
Like Working at Walmart by Olena Kalytiak Davis
She heard sad things all day long in the usual turning of phrases until it felt everything she was touching was just a neatly packaged beauty supply or a deeply discounted drug; what everyone needed: detergents and cosmetics; she scanned shells for shotguns and rounds for 22s; and while handling cheap bras and polyester socks she began to feel the flimsiness of the lives of others. That grasping...
2 tags
Thallium, Saeed Jones
If I held out the candle, paraffin burning for him, then swallowed all the light, if in the dark, I was a cobra’s tongue, how could it have been his fault? Robber baron, unzipped vagabond, he mistook me for the comfort of a small creek, water crawling along the backs of rocks, emerald house beside it, me at the door in nothing but welcome. Over wine, I warned him soft—you can’t sleep...
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
Trust Me by Jean Valentine
Who did I write last night? leaning over this yellow pad, here, inside, making blue chicken tracks: two sets of blue footprints, tracking out on a yellow ground, child’s colors. Who am I? who want so much to move like a fish through water, through life… Fish like to be underwater. Fish move through fish! Who are you? And Trust Me said, There’s another...
