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...
Dog’s Walking Song, José Luis Rey
kathleenjoy:
translated from the Spanish by David Francis I will eat clouds with you, my famous Verónica. It will be the night of sirens, of police searching empty apartments for a starfish, of the bird that wanted to be a girl. It will be the day when the school flew. The bicycles, the rollerblades have worn down the moon and you don’t come for teatime at home when it snows. Don’t you...
Nigel McLoughlin, from 'Seanduine'
airwalker:
Your head and heart are full of all the things you can’t say yet. You contrive. You mean like hell. And so do I. And so do I.
(via kodistes)