April 2013
2 posts
2 tags
Retrograde
When Saturn first
warned us about the perils of combustion,
I made a list of things I would slough
out my window in the final few seconds
before the holocaust baptized the whole house:
one frayed photograph, a letter from Port-Cartier
but stopped there knowing that I can do
without better than your average monk
and after all, my most prized possessions
come in...
March 2013
2 posts
1 tag
2 tags
Untitled (or If This Has a Title, I Don't Know It)...
I want to purify my body in an inland sea of alkaline, after everything has been made poison from an irrevocable blow from the sky.
After all, just for there to be anyone around to make cave-paintings and calenders the entire world had to go away for a while.
Before there were whales, there were little dogs with hooves, that decided, on bad information, to just keep walking into the ocean. Time...
February 2013
1 post
3 tags
eighteen
each version is vague about which fruit
tempted man, so i picked an orange as
my offering. you peeled back the rind
like primitive man who came upon an
ostrich egg, godlessly marveled its form
then sunk his itching teeth into its shell
to feel the yolk drip down his chin.
the citrus corroded your lips just as
they found their purpose and you
thought these slices were meant to...
January 2013
9 posts
1 tag
“We splurged ten pounds on a sumptuous Chesterfield
Of Prussian blue velvet. ...”
– Ted Hughes, from 55 Eltisley (with regards to B. Nicole)
2 tags
A Poem for April 12 OR Having Six
i.
Engorged with the crimson
of Christ, the Mexican postulants
rest in procession,
common cannibals full-up
before the stakes
of sainthood
ii.
We too are gravid
but with godlessness,
so in the place of salvation we
scavenge satiety and bow our heads
like saints themselves over the skin
of other sinners and prey and
prey and
prey
iii.
Six hands, three...
1 tag
“Forty years ago, when I read his books on the back porch, I swore I’d be a...”
– Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King
1 tag
“I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people. But of...”
– Joan Didion, on keeping a notebook
2 tags
“When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself...”
– Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia
2 tags
Alpha Depressus Majoris OR Finally One For You
If you are Misery
then I am Company,
I think as your ever-
brimming head boils
over my skin, staining
the olive with flecks
of black soot like
magpies moving about
come sundown. You
christen your curse Major
as though it were some
familiar constellation
strung up and circling
your head, dwindling
through bouts of lightness,
never long enough
for you to evade its
dusking...
2 tags
Up in the Air
When the sun feels farther
I grow fatter and keep my bloated
figure thawing at home where the
faces floating there look upon me
with the same disapproving eyes
that have been softened by years
of staring squarely into the whirring
black eye of the kitchen sink
waiting for the foam to dispel
as though it were a shaken...
2 tags
What Lays & Who Lies OR Jack's Poem
I much prefer being sick
to being well. I go for the uncertainty of it
all; the spasmodic retching and sudden chills.
I salute the skin-pervading hushed bug, streaming
through the blue channels of me, trying his best
to cast anchor. How far he has made it –
sad little sailor. My freckles should have
warned him, for they have seen it all;
nothing gets under my skin for very long.
They have...
December 2012
10 posts
1 tag
“Really being able to follow your whims is a talent requiring a long and secret...”
– James Guida from Marbles
Alias: Lenore: a letter in a poem at a funeral. →
five—a—day:
This is an apology letter for all the days
I didn’t love you.
This is for the nights I don’t hold you
tightly enough. This is for the awful things
I called you because they came easier
out my mouth. This is for the time I wore
the white dress into the lake; you seethed
because my…
sarahjeanalex asked: was unaware that you had 2 tumblrs but now i have found you, everything is OK, thank you for liking it, i like you so sososososo much OK
verbatim et literatim: i drank 4 beers tonight and... →
sarahjeanalex:
i drank 4 beers tonight and bent one of the rings on my fingers. i suddenly felt immense control over all aspects of my life. i thought of you, and then i thought nothing. i stretched in bed this morning and felt my ribs pressing against the skin on my chest. i imagined a hammer tapping gently on…
sarah jean, i really like this
2 tags
How to Pray & What to Pray For
You came through me
like the accidental prayer
of a faithless man bargaining
with the sky he calls God for
One More Chance, just one more
bet or one more breath – his plea
escaping his lips as swiftly
as his momentary savior
escapes his mind once the votes
have been counted or the wounds
are all mended. You came through
me in June, wanting to know
the proper way to pray for
forgiveness...
“And knowing it, that this was who we were, that we were no longer who we had...”
– Marcie Hershman’s “The Guillotine”
1 tag
Lily Herman: What's a mile →
lherman:
You tell me I forget everything you’ve told me, but I remember: You said, I used to think anyone who wasn’t hit had no right to complain. You told me too that you didn’t really believe I liked girls, which I thought might be some kind of challenge. It wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of you—the…
lily moon, stay up
2 tags
1 tag
Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) God topples...
1 tag
“All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
2 tags
Deliverance
Freud counted an egg good
so long as she had the ability to love
and to work. By his measure, I am
half mad, not rotten but never meant
to be dished out in the morning over
the darker roast, never meant to be had
with the weather reports in the Sunday
paper. I want a love as constant
as bad news, as craving as famine.
I want the blood of war to...
November 2012
4 posts
2 tags
ramidus: Untitled →
ramidus:
I thought that you could slink in the backdoor
like we did after dark as wayward teenagers,
certain of nothing except our mothers’ sleep
and the ravenous hunger we had for one
another. I thought that you could slip through
the cavities in my siren-lined sternum
and souse into me…
2 tags
Madonna of Humility
I look for you in the same
city that we conquered years ago
as heedless crowned heads filled up
with drink and with folly,
too consumed with our own
good fortune to realize the squalor
ascending with the harbor’s foam
before us. I look for you
on even blocks of pavement
and staircases with railings where
buoyant boys go to learn new tricks.
I remember when...
2 tags
Exposing the Natural
For the first two weeks of excavation
I hunkered down beside a man whose burden
was to teach me the proper way to clean
Iron Age dirt. His muddled accent made words
like trowel seem as fragile as the two
thousand year old structures half
buried beneath our steel-toed feet.
It’s like a narrative, he tells me while
peeling back a couple pages of silt,
he goes on, Each layer in the...
