February 2010
91 posts
(excerpt) Common Magic by Bronwen Wallace
It’s not just women either. Or love
for that matter. The old man
across from you on the bus holds
a young child on his knee; he is singing
to her and his voice is a small boy
turning somersaults in the green
country of his blood.
It’s only when the driver calls his stop
that he emerges into this puzzle
of brick and tiny hedges. Only then
you notice his shaking hands, his need...
January 2010
48 posts
Jean-François Duval: Where is hope? And hope in your work? Charles Bukowski: The hope is a touch of graceful humor, no matter what’s occuring. The ability to laugh, the ability to see the ridiculous, the ability not to tense up too much, when things become impossible, just to face them anyhow. A touch of humor. Let’s say laughter through the flame. Or, guts. Courage…Humor, guts,...
“It was a long time before X could set the note aside, let alone lift...”
– J. D. Salinger
I have Morning by Frank O'Hara memorized and can...
I’ve got to tell you
how I love you always
I think of it on grey
mornings with death
in my mouth the tea
is never hot enough
then and the cigarette
dry the maroon robe
chills me I need you
and look out the window
at the noiseless snow
At night on the dock
the buses glow like
clouds and I am lonely
thinking of flutes
I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is...
There was a time by Claudia Rankine
There was a time when I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years...
“…the landscape translates and reinterprets. It’s a kind of string of...”
– Charles Wright
“The streets were narrow and dark. We opened the windows and the warm air touched...”
– Dave Eggers
The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart by Jack Gilbert...
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for...
October in Vermont by John Lindgren
Endings are always more difficult than beginnings.
Don’t ask me why I remember
lying alone in the grass at dusk, gored
by the tiny horns of snails,
filaments of spider-silk like threads
of starlight across my eyes. I was listening
to the orange and blue
leaves explain my countless lives,
so many that I could not make out a single word.
Their colors wound each of us
in unnameable,...
“Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to...”
– Paul Harding
Seymour--an Introduction by J.D. Salinger
If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as...
excerpt: Nervous System by Michael Dickman
When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?
You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out
and that’s just
today
Tomorrow it could be different
When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on
a windowsill
The voices of my friends
in the sunlight
All of us running around
outside our
deaths
*
Someone is here...
Ode To My Auto-Pilot by Chaz McCallahan
Las Vegas—this unaccredited hell. The aurora of a million slot machines swept over the city. I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t slept since. I’ve never slept. Forgive me. I lie compulsively and I’ll live to a thousand years of age. I like hotel beds where the sheets are tucked up tight, so it feels like I’m falling asleep in a big white envelope. Most days, I’m sorry that I’m sent away. I couldn’t sleep;...
A Momentary Creed by W.S. Merwin
I believe in the ordinary day
that is here at this moment and is me
I do not see it going its own way
but I never saw how it came to me
it extends beyond whatever I may
think I know and all that is real to me
it is the present that it bears away
where has it gone when it has gone from me
there is no place I know outside today
except for the unknown all around me
the only presence...
Strawberry by Paisley Rekdal
I am going to fail. I’m going to fail cartilage and plastic, camera and arrow. I’m going to fail binoculars and conjugations, all the accompanying musics: I am failing, I must fail, I can fail, I have failed the way some women throw themselves into lover’s arms or out trains, fingers crossed and skirts billowing behind them. I’m going to fail the way strawberry plants fail,...
“Alison: HD! we got it to work
i just punched the elevator in the side a lot”
– Back story: our fridge was broken. Alison’s solution was to punch an elevator?
(by elevator, she means fridge)
(via helendear)
Meredith: “hahahaha, you are such a LOSER” (via amoamasamat)
"Hey, can you please smell me?"
amoamasamat:
— Helen, wearing eau de pheromone, just now to Meredith.
In a stroke of pure brilliance, Saja gave me entire Realm set — perfume, eau du toilette, body wash and lotion — for Christmas/Eid/Festivus/whatever. According to the back of the box, the strange woodsy, lumberjacky scent in each of these glorious products is actually human pheromones. According to an obviously reliable ABC...