February 2012
5 posts
1 tag
“Eating food from McDonald’s is mathematically impossible.
Because before you...”
– Chelsea Martin, “McDonalds Is Impossible.” (via colporteur)
1 tag
The Professor's Lover by Victoria Chang
Dogs barking, wind blowing, how I never get used to wind blowing, how I can never make the wind mine, it just goes through me. Trees spackled us with shadow and everything was still okay. Strike that. Reverse it. The trees became more specific. And suddenly, the wind clubbed against me like a clapboard. You heard. People do this. People collide like sex. You told me what you heard. I repeated his...
1 tag
the Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel
in an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred and sixty-seven words, per day. when the phone rings, I put it to my ear without saying hello. in the restaurant I point at the chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way. late at night, I call my long distance lover, and proudly say I only used...
1 tag
I'll Open the Window by Anna Swir
Our embrace lasted too long. We loved right down to the bone. I hear the bones grind, I see our two skeletons.
Now I am waiting till you leave, till the clatter of your shoes is heard no more. Now, silence.
Tonight I am going to sleep alone on the bedclothes of purity. Aloneness is the first hygienic measure. Aloneness will enlarge the walls of the room, I will open the window and...
1 tag
From an Atlas of the Difficult World | Adrienne...
I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains’ enormous spaces around you. I know you are...
January 2012
12 posts
“Now as your teacher
I hope we won’t have to take
ten to twenty years
to see...”
– Miss Sheena (in dedication to The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides)
1 tag
Hate Poem by Julie Sheehan
I hate you truly. Truly I do. Everything about me hates everything about you. The flick of my wrist hates you. The way I hold my pencil hates you. The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped in the jaws of a moray eel hates you. Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you. Look out! Fore! I hate you. The blue-green jewel of sock lint I’m digging from under my third toenail, left...
1 tag
Safe Sex by John Boland
Afterwards, from one or both of you, will come a whispered Are you OK? as if you had just been in an accident and were checking to see who’d survived.
1 tag
Their Sex Life by A.R. Ammons
One failure on Top of another.
1 tag
Too Late for Anything, Too Early for Nothing by...
Unexpectedly we’ll meet again years later, quite on purpose we’ll mix beer and wine with vodka, to ride bicycles in the middle of the night around the estate, unexpectedly bumping into the high kerbstones, trampling flowerbeds, cutting our cheeks on branches that have sprung up unexpectedly, then un- expectedly to fall over, and pushing our warped bicycles, come to my place, to dress our...
1 tag
Dwelling by Li-Young Lee
As though touching her might make him known to himself as though his hand moving over her body might find who he is, as though he lay inside her, a country his hand’s traveling uncovered as though such a country arose continually up out of her to meet his hand’s setting forth and setting forth. And the places on her body have no names. And she is what’s immense about the night....
The Word You Are by xTX
I looked up the word I think you are in the dictionary. It was the Internet dictionary and not the one on my desk an arm’s reach away. That would’ve been too easy.
Things are never easy with you.
I typed the word in wrong. I used a U when it should’ve been an A and an I where it should’ve been a Y. It’s one of those ‘hard words,’ as I call them, something used by fancy pants writers or in books...
1 tag
"We Were Emergencies", Buddy Wakefield
A poet can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost. But tonight let us not become tragedies. We are not funeral homes with propane tanks in our windows lookin’ like cemeteries. Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go. Let go. Tonight, Poets, let’s turn our wrists so far backwards the razor blades in our pencil tips can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside....
1 tag
For the Sake of Strangers by Dorianne Laux
No matter what the grief, its weight, we are obliged to carry it. We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength that pushes us through crowds. And then the young boy give me directions so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open, waits patiently for my empty body to pass through. All day it continues, each kindness reaching toward another - a stranger singing to no one as I pass on the path,...
1 tag
“Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of...”
–
Robert Hass, “Privilege of Being” (Human Wishes, Ecco, 1989)
1 tag
“You will be out with friends
when the news of her existence
will be...”
– Sierra DeMulder, Unrequited Love Poem (via sierrademulder)
December 2011
6 posts
1 tag
You Should Date an Illiterate Girl by Charles...
Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night...
1 tag
In a Tree House by Hafiz
Light Will someday split you open Even if your life is now a cage, For a divine seed, the crown of destiny, Is hidden and sown on an ancient fertile plain You hold the title to. Love will surely bust you wide open Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy Even if your mind is now A spoiled mule. A life giving radiance will come, The Friend’s gratuity will come - O look again within yourself,...
1 tag
“Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along...”
– “Marginalia” by Billy Collins (via clavicola)
This remains to be one of my favorite poems ever.
(via astrophysicists)
1 tag
clavicola:
Havoc by Kristy Bowen
For months, I couldn’t write. It was the loveliest vertigo, sort of like drinking tequila but without the hysterical blindness. My blackbirds were wingless, legless. They sputtered on the ground like firecrackers while you played flare gun, fire engine. I smelled like grass and rabbits, waited in the field for days for lightning, wanted that spark, the mailbox...
1 tag
“I
The Argument:
You Wondered Why You Weren‘t Published
It’s because the...”
– “Poet and Audience” by Erik Campbell (via clavicola)
1 tag
December 21st, 2002 by Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
It’s said it takes seven years to grow completely new skin cells.
To think, this year I will grow into a body you never will
have touched.
November 2011
6 posts
1 tag
Misgivings by William Matthews
“Perhaps you’ll tire of me,” muses my love, although she’s like a great city to me, or a park that finds new ways to wear each flounce of light and investiture of weather. Soil doesn’t tire of rain, I think, but I know what she fears: plans warp, planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away by floods. And worse than what we can’t control is what we could; those drab, scuttled marriages we shed so...
1 tag
lufituaeb by Sierra Demulder
Somewhere across town, you are laying with a lover who is pressing her fingerprints into your back like wet cement. I wonder if she looks like me, if you fell for her features like rearranged furniture. Are we palindrome women? She is beautiful, I am unpronounceable.
She must be your favorite place in Minneapolis. I am a souvenir shop: where you go to remember how much people miss you when...
1 tag
This is not a poem by David Butson
I’m not going to say anything about bridges. or horses. or skyripped apart by birds. there are no fires. in this poem. no lips trailing smoke. no rearview mirror eyes. I’m not going to compare her eyelashes to flags waved from departing ships. or her eyes themselves to rain through dusty winter windowpanes. her lips to wine stains. her fingers to Japanese paper napkins. that’s not my image...
1 tag
The confessions of an apricot by Carl Adamshick
I love incorrectly.
There is a solemnity in hands, the way a palm will curve in accordance to a contour of skin, the way it will release a story.
This should be the pilgrimage. The touching of a source. This is what sanctifies.
This pleading. This mercy. I want to be a pilgrim to everyone, close to the inaccuracies, the astringent dislikes, the wayward peace, the private words. I want to...
1 tag
Practice by Kellam Ayres
You must make this mistake once— pour boiling liquid into a blender, then pulse it. Watch the steam blow the lid straight off. When you see your burned hands, you’ll scream. Other mistakes you repeat, finding yourself in a familiar place, but worn out, like pigeons circling a roof, the flock growing bigger, then smaller. It will be this way with love. Your neighbor plays something on the...
1 tag
The Fisherman by Jon Sands
Sometimes you dance slow with your best friend while a woman you love differently than you love Etta James sings At Last into a karaoke machine like she wrote it in the bathroom. Sometimes every person you know is drunk enough it becomes a new definition for sober.
There is a bar on the west side of Brooklyn the fishermen call home (or they used to when Brooklyn had fishermen), a siren...
October 2011
1 post
1 tag
Family Stories by Dorianne Laux
I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument once ended when his father seized a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurled it out a second-story window. That, I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus, and nobody ever forgave...
September 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Dear City by Conchitina Cruz
Permit us to refresh your memory: what comes from heaven is always a blessing, the enemy is not the rain. Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your irreverence: in you, rain is a visitor with nowhere to go. Where is the ground that knows only the love of water? What are the passageways to your heart? Pity the water that stays and rises on the streets, pity...
1 tag
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace...
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
I
Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
V
I do not know...
1 tag
Done by Viggo Mortensen
For three or four months I have visited the corner where we sometimes used to meet for breakfast—though it is now far out of my usual way——just to see your blood. That stain is no longer a topic of conversation even incidentally among our few remaining friends I occasionally come across. It black- ened over the summer, picking up tire prints and a pigeon feather, asphalt cooking up into it and...
1 tag
Supernatural Love by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
My father at the dictionary stand Touches the page to fully understand The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand His slowly scanning magnifying lens, A blurry, glistening circle he suspends Above the word ‘Carnation’. Then he bends So near his eyes are magnified and blurred, One finger on the miniature word, As if he touched a single key and heard A distant, plucked, infinitesimal...
1 tag
“When any word is called for, say that I am of.
When the tornado forms, that is...”
– Rick Barot: Litany
August 2011
11 posts
4 tags
"Einstein Defining Special Relativity," by A. Van...
ewilcox:
INSERT SHOT: Einstein’s notebook 1905—DAY 1: a theory that is based on two postulates (a) that the speed of light in all inertial frames is constant, independent of the source or observer. As in, the speed of light emitted from the truth is the same as that of a lie coming from the lamp of a face aglow with trust, and (b) the laws of physics are not changed in all inertial systems,...
1 tag
“There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two...”
– Lisel Mueller, Palindrome via grammatolatry (via halus)
6 tags
3 tags
The Crickets Have Arthritis
koyczanpoetry:
It doesn’t matter why I was there, where the air is sterile and the sheets sting. It doesn’t matter that I was hooked up to this thing that buzzed and beeped every time my heart leaped like a man who’s faith tells him God’s hands are big enough to catch an airplane, or a world. It doesn’t matter that I was curled up like a fist protesting death, or that every breath was either...
2 tags
"Gospel," by Philip Levine
ewilcox:
The new grass rising in the hills, the cows loitering in the morning chill, a dozen or more old browns hidden in the shadows of the cottonwoods beside the streambed. I go higher to where the road gives up and there’s only a faint path strewn with lupine between the mountain oaks. I don’t ask myself what I’m looking for. I didn’t come for answers to a place like this, I came to walk on...
1 tag
the poet with his face in his hands by mary oliver
You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need anymore of that sound. So if you’re going to do it and can’t stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t hold it in, at least go by yourself across the forty fields and the forty dark inclines of rocks and water to the place where the falls are flinging out their white sheets like...
1 tag
Lit Up KL's Cross Causeway Exchange Poetry Slam
(clearly this has gone postal to all homes I have on the web)
So I’m one of the five Malaysian poets and I’ll be battling it out against five Singaporean poets! Kind of funny since this will be my second slam after the first one (I know- lack of practice and lack of charm; will that be possible?) But it’s all in all in a good game. It will be in KLPAC, this Saturday 9.30pm. I need my good vibes...
1 tag
Survival poem #17 by Marty McConnell
because this is what you do. get up. blame the liquor for the heaviness. call in late to work. go to the couch because the bed is too empty. watch people scream about love on Jerry Springer. count the ways it could be worse. it could be last week when the missing got so big you wrote him a letter and sent it. it could be yesterday, no work to go to, whole day looming. it could be last...
1 tag
Three of Cups by Marty McConnell
At some point it becomes true that all stories are love stories. all making, love making. I didn’t make this rule. but it binds me all the same. I wish there were a law against condescending against love. against the economy of fear that says your joy means less joy for me as if love were pie, or money, or fossil fuel dug or pumped from the earth, gone when it’s gone. it’s just not true. the heart...
1 tag
Under a Certain Little Star by Wislawa Szymborska
(translated by Joanna Trzeciak)
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity in case I’m mistaken. Don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. May the dead forgive me that their memory’s but a flicker. My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first....
1 tag
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical...
for Yefim Edkind
The poem is speech we utter when struck dumb. I’ll show you. Here’s the picture, gray on gray, Of a man in a coat; a light picks out the white Square he is folding into his inner pocket.
All night it whispers to the machine in his breast That duplicates the leaflets of his veins And placards his electric corridors The language of the angels, such as lays
A finger on the...
July 2011
20 posts
1 tag
Telephone by Marzanna Kielar
awritersruminations:
you were burning dry branches and weeds – I heard fire rustle in the receiver, your whistle when the dogs once again tried to get at the mole-hills where yesterday we picked plums from among the rampant grass; evening drew near – the wind blew breath into its puppy muzzle. The sticky prunes, we ate them for supper. I was leafing through a book on water gardens, photographs...
1 tag
Experiment #23: Fractals by Rebecca Elliott
The world we live in is composed of an infinite number of tiny, identical worlds. When we look through a microscope, we see a copy of the room we are sitting in, the table, our hunched form peering into another microscope. If we were capable of gaining a distant enough perspective, we would see that our room is only one of millions of rooms, each exactly the same, fitting together to form an...
1 tag
A Mathematics of the Body by Rebecca Elliott
If we accept as a given that the number of bones in the body remains constant throughout an individual’s life, then it follows that number can be calculated mathematically. Several factors must be noted: mass, volume, the concentration of hair follicles in the back of the hand, the color of the eyes at noon and again at midnight. Steam rising from all the vents and a bicycle passing...
1 tag
Stillwater by Lightsey Darst
Then we walked down to the river and noticed the bridge carved up into compliant sections, one pushed south: no passage.
Disassembled—or to dissemble, as in an eighteenth century novel, to set aside notions of truth and embroider false leaves below falser flowers. Having lied,
then the near present opens at seams, we can change our lives as we’ve always been asked to, yes so the tower...