April 2012
8 posts
from Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard
atnight:
In your absence I’ve learned to fill myself with starts. Here’s my paters. Here’s my blue. I just wanted to write again and say how much I’ve failed you.
-Paisley Rekdal
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I wonder how many people in this city - Leonard...
I wonder how many people in this city live in furnished rooms. Late at night when i look out at the buildings I swear I see a face in every window looking back at me and when I turn away I wonder how many go back to their desks and write this down.
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Next Entry All Girls Should Have a Poem (For...
All girls should have a poem written for them even if we have to turn this God-damn world upside down to do it
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How Are You Doing? - Rick Snyder
As much as you deserve it, I wouldn’t wish this Sunday night on you— not the Osco at closing, not its two tired women and shaky security guard, not its bin of flip-flops and Tasmanian Devil baseball caps, not its freshly mopped floors and fluorescent lights, not its endless James Taylor song on the intercom, and not its last pint of chocolate mint ice cream, which I carried down Milwaukee Ave....
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Journal, Day Three - Richard Siken
My favorite kind of pie is cake. I have a giant umbrella that protects no one. My father is a sadist and I am my father’s son. These statements are not lies but perhaps they lack a certain clarity. When one lies, one undermines trust in society—which is not my intention—but if there is a Truth out there, to be had clearly and definitively, I’m not sure I’m the kind that can get to it; and if...
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A Love Song - William Carlos Williams
What have I to say to you When we shall meet? Yet— I lie here thinking of you. The stain of love Is upon the world. Yellow, yellow, yellow, It eats into the leaves, Smears with saffron The horned branches that lean Heavily Against a smooth purple sky. There is no light— Only a honey-thick stain That drips from leaf to leaf And limb to limb Spoiling the colours Of the whole world. I am alone. The...
March 2012
30 posts
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Final Notations - Adrienne Rich
it will not be simple, it will not be long it will take little time, it will take all your thought it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath it will be short, it will not be simple it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart it will not be long, it will occupy your thought as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied it will take all your flesh, it will not be...
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The Burning of the Books - Bertolt Brecht
When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge Should be publicly burned on all sides Oxen were forced to drag cart loads of books To the bonfires, a banished Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the Burned, was shocked to find that his Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power. Burn me! he wrote with flying pen,...
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Séverine in Summer School - Rex Wilder
Naked for twenty-four of our last thirty-six
Hours together, and I mean museum-quality, sex-
Shop, God-riddling naked, sapping gold
Light from the windows of her hundred-year-old
Baltimore dorm, we were hungry for selling
Points, like a couple in a showroom. Compelling
Arguments were made to close the deal
And children were discussed. I kissed her from heel
To head in a...
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Tonight No Poetry Will Serve - Adrienne Rich
Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon’s eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the...
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Grief Calls Us to the Things of This World -...
The morning air is all awash with angels —Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” The eyes open to a blue telephone In the bathroom of this five-star hotel. I wonder whom I should call? A plumber, Proctologist, urologist, or priest? Who is blessed among us and most deserves The first call? I choose my father because He’s astounded by bathroom telephones. I dial home. My mother...
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I Am Someone's Dream Husband - Guillaume...
I am someone’s dream husband. I like to fail just to have something to look forward to, which is success. my favorite relationships are ambiguous, unreciprocated or entirely fictional. I love being retweeted by a stranger more than I love myself. the trajectory of my life is a pendulum getting entangled in itself. I regret every part of my body that’s external. my hobbies include dying...
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Angels and Moths - Olena Kalytiak Davis
If a man once loved you, he’s turned you into a moth.
That’s how he’ll remember the flutter: that numinous, that beating, that winged.
Angels and moths: that’s who men love.
But I don’t recollect like that. I don’t think I ever loved that gently. And I’ve never flown toward a burning house, hoping, maybe my faith lay in that single thing left, in that smoldering filigree. I never reminisce...
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Brutal - Andrea Cohen
Brutal to give the prisoner a window— a blue sky glimpse— as if an afterlife existed.Brutal for you to parade in a body in the same room where I dream you.
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Sequestered Writing - Carolyn Forché
Horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow. Black and roan, cantering through snow. The way light fills the hand with light, November with graves, infancy with white. White. Given lilacs, lilacs disappear. Then low voices rising in walls. The way they withdrew from the child’s body and spoke as if it were not there. What ghost comes to the bedside whispering You? — With its...
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Autumn: A Dirge - Percy Bysshe Shelley
I.
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her...
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from 'Forward to New Numbers' - Christopher Logue
If this book doesn’t change you give it no house space; if having read it you are the same person you were before picking it up, then throw it away. Not enough for me that my poems shine in your eye; not enough for me that they look from your walls or lurk on your shelves; I want my poems to be in your mind so you can say them when you are in love so you can say them when the plane takes off and...
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Torch Song For You - Daphne Gottlieb
Since you’ve gone, all I can do is sit at home and sing the great love songs. I don’t want to set the world on fire. I just want to start a small ________________conflagration in your apartment that quickly grows into a five-alarm blaze and you grab the cat and your laptop and run out the door and I, having crawled down the fire escape, come strolling down the street and you’re...
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By Small and Small: Midnight to Four A.M. - Jack...
For eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind would dimly recognize it was me carrying her to where she was going.
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Ten Things I Know - Richard Jackson
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts. It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs. The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true, the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off. Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice...
February 2012
30 posts
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You Write Many Poems About Death - Charles...
yes, and here’s another one and later it might even end up in one of my books. and the book will be sitting on a shelf waiting for you long after I am gone. think of that: in a sense I will be speaking again just for you. and remember this: the page you are looking at now, I once typed the words with care with you in mind under a yellow light with the radio on. If you think about death...
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Love’s not the way to treat a friend - Richard...
Love’s not the way to treat a friend. I wouldn’t wish that on you. I don’t want to see your eyes forgotten on a rainy day, lost in the endless purse of those who can remember nothing. Love’s not the way to treat a friend. I don’t want to see you end up that way with your body being poured like wounded marble into the architecture of those who make bridges out of crippled birds. Love’s not the...
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Jane Austen and John Lennon in Heaven - Ashley...
They call each other ‘J.’ John picks red, red roses in Mansfield Park and brings them to Jane. She explains instant karma to him. In heaven Jane wears her hair short, sports fringed bellbottoms and teashades. John has meat on his bones now; prefers black slacks and button ups, a trucker hat from Abbey Road. They take long drives and often sing songs. He says they’ll remain lovers. Until the end....
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I taste a liquor never brewed - Emily Dickinson
I taste a liquor never brewed From Tankards scooped in Pearl Not all the Vats upon the Rhine Yield such an Alcohol! Inebriate of Air — am I — And Debauchee of Dew Reeling — thro endless summer days — From inns of Molten Blue When “Landlords” turn the drunken Bee Out of the Foxglove’s door When Butterflies — renounce their “drams” —...
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Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando - Benis White
Don’t go, of course, is the definitive feeling. Like a star on a
tree of gasps, we remember what is highest. What is furthest
from our hands. Past the row of windows, a rope draws her up
by her teeth, toward the curved orange ceiling with her head
back. Her gift is to stay attached (if she speaks she will fall),
to cleave in her mouth what is pulling away.