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Music | I would tell herExcept she wouldn't careI'd write himExcept he'd never write me backThere is a rat they left hangingI'd save itExcept it's deadWhat is the force that swirls meI asked of the windThere was no replyIt was beyond meAnd I was floating in itCircles and circlesI've seen them throughout |
Music | I wrote hard on paper at the bottom of a pool near a canyon where the stars slid onto their bellies like fish I wrote: |
Music | i. I’ve pulled from my throat birdsong like tin- sheeted lullaby [its vicious coldits hoax of wings] the rest of us forest folk dark angels chafing rabbits- foot for |
Music | I'm few deja-vus from repeating my whole life I need to study the shapes of things before death Before declaring myself a better failure: waiting mostly for files to get uploaded or downloaded. My movements are by the book. I will remember history, all of it, before uttering the next sentence And in its |
Music | I've been fighting a War Within Myself all my life, Tired of the hurt, the pain, the strife. Anger consumes me from day to day, Cellies now walking on eggshells, unsure of what to say. I do pray each night for the peace that I need in my heart, I need it before I tear |
Music | I’d have to hear it spoken in mind somehow,my father said, of the Frisian word for hunger,but I’d settle for memory, or grief, underthe category things that undo me. It’s a funnything to think. Who would be the speakerif not him? His mother, maybe,holding hands in the hospital with his |
Music | I’ll keep explaining—because maybe you still don’t get itThose children in California (substitute any state), dead from gunfire—Let me begin again in a little roof garden with my friendA perverse reader, he listens to my stories as if they were TVI mean he mocks me lovingly on the roof and |
Music | I’m the matron-king of hell In yoga pants and a disused bra for a laurel & shatter the scene inside your simmering year Like a ransom scene filmed through shattered transom I smear in my glamour I make as if to justify the ways of God to man That’s my ticket in That’s why God lets me |
Music | I’m thinking of the boiling seaand the dream in whichall the fish were singing.I want to wake up with my heartnot aching like death,but I am always fallingin to terror. I’m a good person.I grieve to appropriate degrees.I mourn this season. This moment.I mourn for the polar beardrifting out of |
Music | In Memory of Paul Violi (1944–2011) I did not realize that you were fading from sight I don’t believe I could have helped with the transitionYou most likely would have made a joke of it Did you hear about the two |
Music | In the autumn I moved to New York,I recognized her face all over the subwaystations—pearls around her throat, she posesfor her immigration papers. In 1924, the onlyAmericans required to carry identity cardswere ethnically Chinese—the first photo IDs,red targets on the head of every man, woman,child, infant, movie star. Like pallbearers,they |
Music | In the late eighties, in the middle of middle school we break from studying our ancestors, pass on the Phoenicians for a while, leave the terraced fields of Canaan and the hanging gardens of Babylon |
Music | In the mercy of the more hollow sisterA serene fog of moons sprinkled with plum the vexed haint of Quasimoto is patient her tongue leaps from her mouth like a tombstone three times Smooth as ashher favorite word is 'apothecary' the bliss in me like the interior of a melting fear as she moves |
Music | In this room, hours pass, a slightcorruption of each previousallotted time block—and probablyconfirm failure and humiliation,which though not ideal, I acceptas historically accurate. I’m sickof lifestyle music, the thing betweenawe and detachment which Hazlittdefines as adrift. I clear my throatremind myself, doors are locked,the ashtray half-full. Unless otherwisenoted, light falls |
Music | it ends my sleep to want my story about my skin melting in the sun that day of summer and a doctor who tells me i am dying, that thing i hide under my nails like dirt scratched from summer skin. so i pick up a pencil and begin to erase myself. erasure is |
Music | It sweeps away depression and todayyou can’t tell the heaped pin-whitecherry blossoms abloom alongRiverside Drive from the clouds aboveit is all kerfluffle, all moisture and light and sointo the wind I gopast Riverside Church and the FairwayMarket, past the water treatment plantand in the dusky triangle belowa hulk of rusted |
Music | It turns out however that I was deeply Mistaken about the end of the world |
Music | it was summer and time circled itself like a swarm of gnats |
Music | It’s not the wind I hear driving south through the Catskills—it’s just bad news from the radio and then a hailstorm morphs into sunlight —look up and there’s— an archipelago of starlings trailing some clouds— But how does the wind come through you primordial hollow—unflattened double reed— so even now when bad |
Music | Kasr Avenue was where the birds lived, In a mud silo millet seeds flourished All winter long and through the dry season Laila was in my soul, also Majnoon’s madness. I was a girl growing up and you, crossing the Nile—yes a flat boat is all you had— Came in, trousers wet and |
Music | Let them come for what’s left: a chorus of bone, river and soot. Worthy enough. Holy enough. Like all the others, singular—or not. Wanting only for your name to bluemy lips and call it miracle. Our love double-knotted, saddle-stitched held the world together. Until it didn’t— all the words you placed in me flushed and |
Music | Let them not say: we did not see it.We saw.Let them not say: we did not hear it.We heard.Let them not say: they did not taste it.We ate, we trembled.Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.We spoke,we witnessed with voices and hands.Let them not say: they did |
Music | Liquid alignment of fabric and outerthigh. Slip. Which mimics the thing it’s |
Music | Locked in the beauty of the pearl, far from frail, these people who claim to love us stillthey don’t give up much, do they, sealed? To eradicate class— the looking glass of it, the complex glare: “Let me introducexxx, impoverished poet.” Winter let up like a terrible religion. In its |
Music | Long ago I met a beautiful boyTogether we sleptin my mother's womb Now the street of our fathersrises to eat him :: Everything black is forbidden in EdenIn my arms my brother sleeps, teeth pearlsI give away the night so he can have this slumber :: I give away the man who made me whiteI give away |
Music | Love me stupid. Love me terrible. And when I am no mountain but rather a monsoon of imperfect thunder love me. When I am blue in my face from swallowing myself yet wearing my best heart even if my best heart is a century of hunger an angry mule breathing hard or perhaps even hopeful. A small sun. Little & bright. |
Music | makes me think plurality. Maybe I can love you with many selves. Or. I love all the Porgys. Even as a colloquialism: a queering of love as singular. English is a strange language because I loves and He loves are not both grammarly. I loves you, Porgy. Better to ask what man is not, Porgy. The beauty of Nina’s |
Music | May I venture to address you, vegetal friend?A lettuce is no less than me, so I respect you,though it’s also true I may make a salad of you,later. That’s how we humans roll. Our speciesis blowing it, bigtime, as you no doubt know,dependent as you are on water and soilwe |
Music | Maybe silence adds to the pain and maybe pain adds to the sea and maybe the sea is only a reflection of a ruin today where the mind is unable to make out how things used to be for us: complete, with deities, a kind oforder. Oh never mind the ATMsscattered throughout the medieval |
Music | My brother, wanting to off himself, Took rope into a summer park. Rope, plus a knife For cutting it: a serrated hawkbill, Cushioned grip, with two-inch Curved, ignoble blade The manufacturers in their cruelty call A lightweight Meadowlark. Cruel because the meadowlark Is calm. They’re calm This morning. Sure, they shaggle the corn a bit, But |
Music | My friend a writer and scientisthas retreated to a monasterywhere he has submitted himselfout of exhaustion to not knowing.He’s been thinking aboutthe incarnation a.k.a. Big Bangafter hearing a monk’s teachingthat crucifixion was not the hard partfor Christ. Incarnation was.How to squeeze all of thatall-of-that into a body. I wokethat Easter |
Music | my friendscreate the moodby describing itturning off all the lightsa place in our mindswakes as in waterwe dance alone and with each otherwe make circles around each otherget close then step backthen get close againmy friendsthe furniture is roundthe furniture is coveredin bluetsthere are drugs my friendswhy be evasivewhen you |
Music | my parents were born from a car. they climbed out & kissed the car on its cheek. my grandmother. to be a first generation person. 23 and Me reports i am descendant of pistons & drive trains. 33% irrigation tools. you are what you do. my first job was in a lunch meat factory. now |
Music | my roommate one year in college would say of my smallnessthat any man who found me attractive had a trace of the pedophilic & i would shrinknewly girled twenty-one with my |
Music | My whole life I have obeyed it—its every hunting. I move beneath it as a jaguar moves, in the dark- |
Music | New moon in midheaven, in Libra. The hermit wields two swords. Temptation overcomes the star. The chariot travails with weakend strength. Death rises to meet every face you meet. Ten wands whittled from prickly ash. Fall in love with a teacher. Build a home on the moon. Grow twinberry and |
Music | No matter how he wrested himself silent in night, six days post-stroke he woke fluent in former languages, backtracking this time here. Mercy nurses, attendants, remedied in their own. Once he registered, all he cawed out was if it’s too far gone, we need |
Music | No tears No tips No meters No nips [wellmayb] No Lyft No Uber No 1-8hundo But he do wanna kno How yubeen? Where’d yu go? & yu kno yu best talkharder 2 pin his desire Even |
Music | Nobody straightens their hair anymore. Space trips & limited air supplies will get you conscious quick. My shea-buttered braids glow planetary as I turn unconcerned, unburned by the pre-take-off bother. “Leave it all behind,” my mother’d told me, sweeping the last specs of copper thread from her front porch steps & just as |
Music | Ojhas are [medicine men, “the ones next to God,” religious ministers or priests who deal with the daily struggles of the village people]; this dynamic allows the village ojha to control the circulation of rumors, and he is the village member who has the power to trap daayans (witches). In |
Music | Onliest man who lay hands on me. Pointer finger pad between my eyes. Pinky knuckle cool on cheekbone. God of precision, blade at my throat,for a half hour, you love me this way. Together we discover what I got from my folks—widows peak, dandruff, hair growing fast in concentric O’s. Claude, so |
Music | Only through a disaster or a renovationdoes the entire brick side of a house come downand in this case the workmen threw stoves and refrigeratorsout the windows, letting them bounceoff the fire escapes into the little Brooklyn yard.And I wouldn’t presume to saythey did it gleefully, but the brute forceresulting |
Music | Poem for Aretha Franklin when she opens her mouth our world swells like dawn on the pond when the sun licks the water & the jay garbles, the whole quiet thing coming into tune, the gnats, frogs, the dandelion pollen, the pebbles & leaves |
Music | ProsperoAssume, just for a moment,I am denied a job in the factory of my dreams under the fluorescent lights of a porcelain white foreman.It’s orderly and neat. I feed my family. No one questions my face. I raised my son in my likeness, so he would never go unseen,bobbing on a wave of expectation, I set in |
Music | Rate your pain the physicaltherapist instructs and I am tryingnot to do what they saywomen do lowballing the numbertrying hard not to try so hardto be the good patient scatteredassurances lining the aisles likedead petals and me leftholding nothing but what’s beenemptied out obviously I am over-thinking it when I |
Music | Right to propertyRight to protect propertyEncrypt everythingMake privateI am so right and if I’m not I’m gonna burn yr FB wall downBe something for saleBe a strategyLast fall was tough on usAsk after meAsk after me againSmall business ownersBig pharmaThere are said to be 7000 bodies buried under that universityIf |
Music | say it with your whole black mouth: i am innocent& if you are not innocent, say this: i am worthy of forgiveness, of breath after breathi tell you this: i let blue eyes dress me in guilt walked around stores |
Music | Say your body’slife-size trip clock starts in schlepon the down slope. Then the long handslaloms you steepas your face tocks the take of nine-to-five. It’s just your timing and mindset that’s semi- rattled, and everyone comes to the skit a littlepusillanimous to begin.What is a kind of smudgy justice:the ancestors’ DNAin full wig |
Music | Science in its tedium revealsthat each spirit we spiritganks a solid half hour fromour life spans.Or so says my doctor, a watery,Jesus-eyed man, and hard to sufferwith his well-intended scrips for yogaand neti pots, notably stingy with the betterdrugs, in situ here amongst the disinfectedtoys dreadful in their plastic baskets.Above |
Music | Shame on you for dating a museum:Everything is dead there and nothing is alive.Not everyone who lives to be old embracesthe publicity of it all. I mean, you get up and folkswant to know, How did you get here? What makes yougo? What is the secret? And there is no |
Music | she ambles toward El Norte she remembers as she stepswasps & spiders webbed in between the corn in Fowlerher mamá Concha’s story the fire she fanned to clearthe path through the thick burned stalks all thisshe almost-touches the blueberries in Skagit Washington& the line of men wrapped as cocoons and |
Music | Shiitake, velvet foot, hen of the woods, woodear, cloud ear, slippery jack, brown wreathsof Polish borowik dried and hangingin the stalls of a Krakow market—all thesewere years away from the room where I layonce, studying the contours of your sexas if it were some subterranean speciesI’d |
Music | Sisyphus punches in, each morning,At a mountain he must face all day,In hell, for eternity, and at night,Having not reached the summitAgain, he walks down slow, whereThe rock rushed by, careful to see,With new eyes, where it all wentWrong, again, and then later,At the bar in town, sits cooling hisBleeding |
Music | Six months ago, the measuring of whiskey left in the jug, urine on the mattress, couch cushions, the crotch of pants in wear. You watch how breath lifts a chest, how a person breathes— sick hobbies of when we must. You watch how you become illiterate at counting. Six or seven broken breathalyzers; a joke formulates in |
Music | Smelling of sweet resin the Aleppo pines' shadows grow taller by the hour. Two identical twin boys chase each other through the shadows, the one who's ten minutes older yelling, I'm gonna kill you while the younger one laughs, Kill me, kill me if you can! Day by day these teatime mortars keep pecking at the blast |
Music | so many this mornings so many movement so many breezesso many cypress so many doorways demolished so many brushso many vines crawl up the front of that house and so manyspaces so many wide open between one structure and anotherso many ditches so many cars parked |
Music | Someone else used to do this before. Someone responsible, someone who loved me enough to protect me from my own filth piling up. But I’m over 40 now & live alone, & if I don’t remember it's Thursday & rise with the cardinals & bluejays calling up the sun, I’m stuck with what’s left rotting for another week. I |
Music | Sometimes it pays to go to Bojangles. To drive out of the parking lot, see the red awning: Fish &Duck Skills. A man walks out and it is broad daylight. Back when I was a new adult in Chattanooga I’d dare myself to go to the Adult Book Shop on Market Street in |
Music | Sometimes starting with a titleInfuses the workWith an insurmountable dreadHow is one to fulfill such a promiseTo make good on the pactThat art in the end allowsFor a kind of connectivityLife otherwise lacksOr lacks in those moreContemplative waysSince mixing the ingredientsTo say a batch of cookiesIs in its own right |
Music | Sometimes you don’t diewhen you’re supposed to& now I have a choicerepair a world or builda new one inside my bodya white door opensinto a place queerly brimminggold light so velvet-goldit is like the worldhasn’t happenedwhen I call outall my friends are thereeveryone we loveis still alive gatheredat the lakesidelike |
Music | Soon my father will lose his wedding ring but before that happens we take the path along the cliff-edge past the sign that says Danger: Keep Back because the waves below have undermined it, and the next big storm will be enough to bring the whole face down.I know this but I can’t help looking |
Music | Start with a base map, unlabeled terrain, in shaded green and ochre, nude relief, cool continental mass bathing in blue, a face whose features now are visible, unannotated, apolitical, as if a mighty snow had settled here and muffled every static line and letter, earth as naked as the moon, but full of lively |
Music | Still turnstiles framed by a window the red alders of Willapa Bay [ |
Music | Suffering I drifted to youSeeing my suffering you sufferedOur conference on calamityOur joints moved against windSustained our growing painUntil protruding bonesFrom our rumpled skin coatsBroke through to exposeTheir staid, stagnant structuresTo a cat we were dual cat castlesA bird perched upon my clavicleTo a friend traveling byWe no longer existedBut |
Music | Sunday afternoon on a city beach. No sand, slabs of manufactured stone. I watch two blondes, maybe sisters, Inflate a raft. They use a bicycle pump. One tries to assemble two paddles, Gives up, puts them in her bag. The one on the pump removes her top. She has exerted herself into better posture. Her breasts are larger |
Music | Take it easy, Sadness. Settle down.You asked for evening. Now, it’s come. It’s here.A choking fog has blanketed the town,infecting some with calm, the rest with fear.While the squalid throng of mortals feels the stingof heartless pleasure swinging its barbed knoutand finds remorse in slavish partying,take my hand, Sorrow. I |
Music | That night the air stank, the stars obscured behind wild horses of clouds. I walked on cobblestones on the edge of somethingI could not name: new land of unalterable decisions like a retinue of assassins coming right for me, who kept comingin a bad dream that dissolved like a black-and-white movie, the |
Music | The Blue Dress—died on August 6, 2015, along with the little blue flowers,all silent. Once the petals looked up. Now small pieces of dust. I wonderwhether they burned the dress or justthe body? I wonder who lifted her upinto the fire? I wonder if her hair |
Music | The bumper sticker says Live In The Moment! on a Jeep that cuts me off. I’m working to forget it, to let go of everything but the wheel in my hands, as a road connects two cities without forcing them to touch. When I drive by something, does it sway toward me or away? Does |
Music | The Chicago Cubs 1908–2015In the hazy birth records of the Arkansas of Europe my Bubbie’s birth scrawled in Yiddish, as eight days past a minor Jewish holiday and not the week before the Cubs most recent World Series victory, fall 1908. Ten years since Bartman cursed his Cubs right out of their first shot at the National |
Music | The children were askinga thousand questions about whythe sky was blue and grass was greenwhen suddenly their tongueswere stilled by an answer theynever saw. Now silence ringsin their place so loud a stonecan hear it in Arkansas.So why not the men insidethe sky who only hear the roarbeneath their wings |
Music | The doctor says it’s an empty room in thereAnd it isA pale sack with no visitorsI have made it and surrounded it with my skin To invite the baby inBut he did not enter And dissolved himself into the sea so many moons agoI wait to seeWill the giant bean |
Music | The eye chews the apple,sends the brainan image of the un-apple. Which is similarto the way I throw my voicelike a Frisbee, like saltover a shoulder, a birthday partywhere someone’s brotheris grilling hot dogs, a little speedin his blood,some red balloons. The eyeis the most deceptiveorgan in the body.Followed closely |
Music | the gone did not go so that we’d endure plucking grapes from the potato salad we did not stretch Frankie Beverly’s voice like a tent across this humble meadow of amber folk sipping gold sun through skin rejoicing over their continued breath just for you to invite anyone in able to pause the bloody legacy and distract your |
Music | The hastily assembled angel saw One thing was like another thing and that Thing like another everything depend- ed on how high it was the place you sawThings from and he had seen the Earth from where A |
Music | The honey bees’ exileis almost complete. You can carrythem from hiveto hive, the child thought & that is whathe tried, walkingwith them thronging between his pressed palms.Let him be right.Let the gods look |
Music | The human brain wants to complete—The poem too easy? Bored. The poem too hard? Angry. What’s this one about? Around the block the easy summer weather, the picture-puff clouds adrift in the blue sky that’s no paint-by-numbers. In the corner garden, the cabbage butterfly bothers the big leafy heads, trying to complete its life cycle |
Music | The hurt returns as it always intended—it is tender as the inside of my thighs, it is as blue, too. O windless,wingless sky, show me your empire of loneliness, let me spring from the jaws of what tried to kill |
Music | The Junior Minister waved a hand toward the courtyard where, he said, |
Music | The larval aura makes summer sense to me who’s alone with my aftermath and the teeth have been torn out of the mask that represents mimicry nobody wants to tell me with summer-breaths where it hurts or who was injured when I broke into a toxic garble with a hissing snake for a heart when I was sweaty and tired I |
Music | The pale sound of jilgueros trilling in the jungle. Abuelo rocks in his chair and maps the birds in his head, practiced in the geometry of sound. My uncle stokes the cabin’s ironblack stove with a short rod. The flames that come are his loves. I cook—chile panameño, coconut milk— a recipe I’d wanted |
Music | The planet pulls our bodies through the year. Delivers us, headlong,into the tears in currents. The ebbs and flows of blood in chambers,bombastic and flooded with unremembered names. Neighbors bourne feet firstthrough their door arches. Down the corridors, lonesomeand lost. Their voices suture the silence behind them andthe little song pulsing its staccatocannot explain |
Music | The shore of the lake is gradual and drawnWith rivers threading into landThen suddenly it’s all landNow the land is darkAnd you can’t distinguish it from the waterAnd the hot orange sunTurns everything dark purpleLike a painting by Joan Mitchell |
Music | The street grew only strangers. All the faces we were wore slings. An ingrown arena peered out from our sigh. We spread ourselves out to feel the glass in a crowd. We prayed to a dog, then some flies. Our solo was a burning zither, not a kite. |
Music | The war ships bobbing off the coast. The outdated oil drills paintedso to blend into the clouds. The gold thin stitched to the water’s edge. Errant dolphin.Balled up |
Music | The war was all over my hands. I held the war and I watched them die in high-definition. I could watch anyone die, but I looked away. Still, I wore the war on my back. I put it on every morning. I walked the dogs and they too wore the war. The sky overhead was |
Music | The way I’m strapped into myself I can’t escape. Wake up and be a better person! Clip your toenails, and by sun-rise make sure you’re sitting at the table |
Music | The wind then, through seams of bluestem, or switchgrass swayed by a coyote’s passing.Where the fabric gapes, Barthes said, lies the sensual. A prairie cutby winding seeps, or winds or shearing wings. Mare’s tails, mackerels, cirrus,distance dispersed as light. Under a buzzard’s bank and spiral the prairie folds and unfolds.Here between the stands of |
Music | The wipers sweep two overlapping hillson the glass, we are quiet against thesqueaky metronome as we often arebefore the concerns of the day well up.Today: Is it dark inside my body?The wet cedar’s dark of green-gone-blackof damp earth mending itself,a pewter bell rung into night’s collectedsigh, choral and sleep-sunk.Dark as |
Music | There is a force that breaks the body, inevitable,the by-product is pain, unexceptional as a raingauge, which has become arcane, rhyme, likewise,unless it’s assonant or internal injury, gloom, joy,which is also a dish soap, but not the one that ridsseabirds of oil from wrecked tankers, that’s Dawn,which should change its |
Music | There is a quick sharp pull that one might feel, with it a weighted turn to finding brightness where there is none. I have Seattle to thank for this, but the home of ours must be built anew. And yet I am not in my method and have no sense |
Music | There is one atop each of the Girls’ heads. Clearly they have been playing this game for a while. There is only one girl whose turkey is still full of air, and that girl is Girl D. The game is called Duck, Duck, Turkey. They go through the motions of |
Music | There were always such beautiful shadows in your work,Though many now dodge their taxes with your art. RarelyAs it seems, life involves death with every decision, which isWhy I miss the non-Euclidean idiom we used to argue overEverything in the dictionary of what not to do. SomewhereIn a mix between |
Music | There’s a father sleeping it off in every master bedroom of the cul-de-sac the morning after, so Saturdaymorning is a snooze. The moon is still out, eyeballing the quiet street like Sun Ra did his Arkestra. Somebodyhas to be a father figure for all of those musical notes. No school |
Music | There’s a way out— walk the dirt road into cerulean dawn,tap the windows of cars and trucksrattling down highway 77with clear fingerprints,and clasp the nine eyes of the desertshut at the intersection of then and now. Ask: will this whirlwindconnect to that one, |
Music | They ask what I believe in— Sour milk: the curdle & butter of it Baby’s breath ragged with phlegmThe green sheen clinging to her skin like algae The bone & teeth of us mossy and alive with DNABut what’s your religion, they’re after— What gods do you pray to? The frilly curtains of her |
Music | They kept showing up, for days,dead on the windowsill,and for days I did nothing about the ladybugsexcept to ask if their entering the houseunnoticed and dying before I saw themwas symbolic.Thinking so was easy.They symbolized birth and death,change and rebirth.It was also possible the tiny beetlesembodied an inborn needto show |
Music | This fireman comes every afternoon to the café on the corner dressed for his shift in clean dark blues This time it’s the second Wednesday of January and he’s meeting his daughter again who must be five or six and who is always waiting for her father like this in her |
Music | This is not how it begins but how you understand it. I walk many kilometers and find myself to be the same— the same moon hovering over the same, bleached sky, and when the officer calls me it is a name I do not recognize, a self I do not recognize. We are asked to |
Music | This massive apartment: a whole room left Empty to air, where we used to sleep. So many steps on the waxed wood, like off turns On the dial of a lock whose combination one’s lost— All decaying about me like empire, The moldings moldering while I sit frozen As a swan on the surface of a |
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