February 2012
11 posts
“There were always magpies
in the early morning
swinging from the clothesline...”
– John Kinsella and Dorothy Hewett, The Wild Things
“Is it an empty house, the body alone
with its weary old clothes
or its bullet...”
– Christopher Howell, Listen (via grammatolatry)
“Waking
on the train, I thought
we were attacked
by light: ...”
– Monica Youn, “Venice, Unaccompanied” (via grammatolatry)
Proper technique for removal of the heart from the...
The heart should be grasped by inserting the index finger into the left ventricle, the thumb in the right ventricle, and grasping the ventricular septum. Raise the heart towards the chin, putting a stretch on the blood vessels. Cut vessels one-by-one in a circular direction, beginning with either the inferior vena cava or lower pulmonary vein.
-Henry W. Cattell, Postmortem Pathology, 1906
This Is Not an Elegy | Catherine Pierce
At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant, my fingernails chewed to half-moons. I took off my clothes in a late March field. I had secret car wrecks, secret hysteria. I opened my mouth to swallow stars. In backseats I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust, and distance. I was unformed and total. I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops stopped coming around. The heat lifted its palms. The radio...
Where the Lover Cannot Let Go of an Old Love (&...
“Where the Lover Cannot Let Go of an Old Love (& Chooses to Remain In Those Memories)” based on Richard Siken’s “The Long and Short of It”
“I grew up watching your hands
arrange space,
so I find it very natural
that...”
– Dorothea Grossman (via rosiee)
Lenox Aubade
for Amy Clampitt
I grew my hair out in a depression. Let it knot into a forum for the birds in my thoughts, sparked into actuality in the wee dark. What wills them awake? An early sentry, then the rest beckoning? Coordinates rising when stars in the lifting night are falling. Letting them nest, I felt their joy accumulate, until...
grammatolatry:
“Because I mistrust my head & hands, because I know salt tinctures my songs, I tried hard not to touch you even as I pulled you into my arms. Seasons sprouted & went to seed as we circled the dance with silver cat bells tied to our feet. Now, kissing you, I am the archheir of second chances. Because I know twelve ways to be wrong & two to be good, I was wounded by the...
January 2012
17 posts
“I thought it was odd at first. Take off your clothes you said, unbuttoning yours, putting the Polaroid on a timer we laughed about what would turn up. One caught us moving. But the other, my hand touching you lightly, chilled we didn’t expect any thing so haunting strangely like Masaccio.
Lyn Lifshin, Because of This We Were Late, Everything Got Mixed Up. Later I Broke the Door. Or, The...
Aubade
Scintillas of the anatomical on the vines, buds opening— make me a figure for the woken. On the vines, buds opening— blue, little throats. For the woken, this different tin sky. Blue, little throats speak to me in the right voice. This different tin sky, the playground thawing. Speak to me in the right voice, only clean, sweeter. The playground thawing into its primary colors. Only...
“Think of the firefly,
beating its bright pulse.
Think of the firefly
smashed...”
– “The Light Inside Us.” April Ranger. (via carrierudzinski)
semperaugustus:
“In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle Ts’ui Pen, the character chooses — simultaneously — all of them. He creates, thereby, ‘several futures,’ several times, which themselves proliferate and fork.”
—Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
Words for Love | Ted Berrigan
for Sandy Winter crisp and the brittleness of snow as like make me tired as not. I go my myriad ways blundering, bombastic, dragged by a self that can never be still, pushed by my surging blood, my reasoning mind. I am in love with poetry. Every way I turn this, my weakness, smites me. A glass of chocolate milk, head of lettuce, dark- ness of clouds at one o’clock obsess me. I weep for all of...
Antonio Machado, from "Last Night As I Was...
airwalker:
Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: Along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me, water of a new life that I have never drunk? Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old...
The Half-Finished Heaven, Tomas Tranströmer
kathleenjoy:
During the heavy months my life caught fire only when I made love with you. The firefly too lights up and goes out, lights up and goes out —by quick glimpses we follow its route among the olive trees in the darkness of night. During the heavy months the soul sat indolent and crushed, but the body took the nearest way to you. The night heavens gave off moos. We stole...
Learning Curve, Elizabeth Cantwell
kathleenjoy:
The Atlantic Ocean had been burning
for four days We were told to stay inside
but we’d forgotten which houses
belonged to us Now we lie on the beach
watching the local theater company’s
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In the audience one lumbering
ash man walks up to an ash
woman and leans over He looks
surprised at all the ash Like a man...
4 tags
Joan Didion's Packing List
literarypiano:
To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts 2 jerseys or leotards 1 pullover sweater 2 pair shoes stockings bra nightgown, robe slippers cigarettes bourbon bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil
To Carry:
mohair throw typewriter 2 legal pads and pens files house key
This is a list which...
The Mail Order Bride Attempts a Letter Home |...
babybirch:
Mother he is A gentleman of honor he is A builder of ships My hands have gone Coarse, upholstered in Orchard, mending, churn My corset has Collapsed, spider heap I freckle, I lengthen, I watch Other wives, the sweep Of their skirts, their flocking I am compassless, astir, A map trembling Mother I’ve grown Taller I’ve let down my hems I am fruit-stained Mornings, my...
Eloise Klein Healy, “Asking About You”
airwalker:
Instead of having sex all the time I like to hold you and not get into some involved discussion of what life means. I want you to tell me something I don’t know about you. Something about the day before that photograph in which you’re standing on your head. I want to know about softball and the team picture. Why are you so little next to the others? Were you younger? Were you...
3 tags
Every few seconds I check the Bible to see what Jesus is saying about me. The answer is always nothing. Sometimes
he’s condemning me to eternal damnation, but usually nothing. Tonight I am alone, wearing my sex shorts, adrift amongst
the black suburban pools of eternal damnation. No, I have not been in love. Yes, I have been in love. I am speaking the language
in which no and yes...
December 2011
24 posts
Something Bright, Then Holes | Maggie Nelson
muscovite:
I used to do this, the self I was used to do this the selves I no longer am nor understand. Something bright, then holes is how a girl, newly-sighted, once described a hand. I reread your letters, and remember correctly: you wanted to eat through me. Then fall asleep with your tongue against an organ, quiet enough to hear it kick. Learn everything there is to know about loving someone...
4 tags
Chet Baker, Amsterdam, 1988
A single spot slides the trumpet’s flare then stops at that face, the extraordinary ruins thumb-marked with the hollows of heroin, the rest chiaroscuroed. Amsterdam, the final gig, canals & countless stone bridges arc, glimmered in lamps. Later this week his Badlands face, handsome in a print from thirty years ago, will follow me from the obituary page...
After All This - Richard Jackson
crushedfingers:
After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of...
3 tags
1. Sometimes when a jazz cymbal is played with a brush— a steady soft roll— I hear those rainy streets, the cars I shoved you against, kissing you into place. I can hear them coming for us, rolling across the wet asphalt. Our shirts as skin, soaked tight. We both hate poems that mention jazz, which is okay, because jazz hates us. We kiss like jazz hates us. 2. You’re not scared of living, you’re...
“I relearn how to press my body
against other bodies. My slick flesh
like...”
– Jenny Sadre-Orafai, Other Bodies (via grammatolatry)
Post-Coitus Poem
rabbit-light:
Fifteen minutes after swallowing my heart, I flip on the lamp and search the index of first lines. The empty grocery cart is beginning to roll comes closest to what I mean to say, but seems stuffy. I have described barking for no reason and kissing you elsewhere. My heart is re-swallowed—I don’t think I can say it any better than Mary Ruefle. Your walnut eyes want a romance from...
“Let’s begin by deciding what it is
we’re trying to define. You’re
impossible....”
– Heather Aimee O’Neill, Mars May Have Been a Land of Lakes (via grammatolatry)
I blew up the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast forgive me I like fire — Dora Goss
This is Just to Say, William Carlos Williams
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
semperaugustus:
“Beginnings are brutal, like this accident of stars colliding, mute explosions of colorful gases, the mist and dust that would become our bodies hurling through black holes, rising, muck ridden, from pits of tar and clay. Back then it was easy to have teeth, claw our ways into the trees — it was accepted, the monkeys loved us, sat on their red asses clapping and...
“I wanted to write “stay”
on your sides, surround
your bed with oceans
of...”
– J. Bradley (via grammatolatry)
3 tags
I awaken to the rough sex of boxcars coupling, uncoupling, having fallen asleep to the soughing of mourning doves, putty dollops with pure voices, their rodomontade of loss. On the back road someone’s driving up and down, his amped-up bass line drubbing my peace. Soon we’ll see each other after our longest absence. Our hair will have grown to our napes, and I wonder if you’ll be ...
Hex
rabbit-light:
I’m a silly rabbit, or so my skinny love assumes. Actually, I’m a bent stop sign tilted in the yard Of a house at the bottom of a cul-de-sac. The only house Still standing after the birth defects and the protests. A gabled house, With post-WW II horizontal windows. Rosettes of brown crab grass In the yard. The lasso of an old hose lain out on the cracked dirt Beneath the...
growing-orbits:
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is...
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clavicola:
The thing I miss the most about us is the sound of my name on your tongue.
It’s greedy of me, I know, but in that exhale of me we possessed each other
completely.
“For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo...”
– Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero (via beryl-azure)
“I married a shooting
star, a widower before
“I do.”
– Bob Hicok, Epic tale (via grammatolatry)
"Dulzura" by Sandra Cisneros
seafoamwaltz:
Make love to me in Spanish. Not with that other tongue. I want you juntito a mi, tender like the language crooned to babies. I want to be that lullabied, mi bien querido, that loved.
I want you inside the mouth of my heart, inside the harp of my wrists, the sweet meat of the mango, in the gold that dangles from my ears and neck.
Say my name. Say it. The way it’s...
Medusa in San Francisco | William Winfield Wright
muscovite:
Ok, I was a little nervous in the airport, but I looked at her right in her eyes, and sure she had her hair up sometimes, but why would that make any difference? What I am saying is that a thousand times I smiled into her sweet face, at the restaurant where the owner also took her hands, in the sleepy park, at pizza—she even drank some of my soda—in the bath where I made...
“In the rigmarole of lucky living, you tire
of the daily lessons: Sewing, Yoga,...”
– Sally Wen Mao, Lessons on Lessening (via grammatolatry)
seafoamwaltz:
“What does it matter if I wore my skirt short, my hair stacked high, my eyeliner black and thick, if my long earrings jangled when I ran and I wore a padded bra under my gold lamé blouse or no bra at all under a sheer one? When I danced naked in my apartment or stripped on a mountain and made love amid ferns and conifers, I was like all the other animals. And I say the body is a...