I Favorited You 850 Days Ago

and 850,000,000 times since.

No wonder I couldn't have said it better myself

Morrison Endorses Obama for President
Jan 28, 10:25 AM (ET)
By NEDRA PICKLER
WASHINGTON (AP) - The woman who famously labeled Bill Clinton as the "first black president" is backing Barack Obama to be the second.
Author Toni Morrison said her endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate has little to do with Obama's race - he is the son of a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas - but rather his personal gifts.
Writing with the touch of a poet in a letter to the Illinois senator, Morrison explained why she chose Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton for her first public presidential endorsement.
Morrison, whose acclaimed novels usually concentrate of the lives of black women, said she has admired Clinton for years because of her knowledge and mastery of politics, but then dismissed that experience in favor of Obama's vision.
"In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates," Morrison wrote. "That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.
"Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace - that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom," Morrison wrote.

One more reason to love Toni Morrison. Beloved, indeed.

Tell the girl her world is ever-precarious, my methods are lye, sly, rely on the kindness I can't shake. Tell the girl her world is eraseable that there are acids for burning through everything and salve to ease the burns. Tell the girl I specialize in the un-earned miracle and I am vigilant, catastrophic, beyond.

Where do you wander now?

Undergraduate daze of driving and driving and my friend, Keith Rehm (today's birthday boy--happy, happy and many more) and the way that driving out west feels like an escape into something open. I miss that. Out of all my current friends and watchers of the blog, I think only Ms. Kathrine at Locksmith met him. Keith is responsible for introducing me to The Hobbit & co., for priming me for my favorite bird's science fiction books and shows, for miles and miles and miles of good talks and good times. I nicknamed him the obfuscating peregrinator (b/c when you're showing off your word-of-the-day bad self, you do things like that) and I wonder who he bewilders and where he wanders now. Best wishes to you & yours wherever you might be, Obfuscator. ---La Petit Freaqua (only Chicky could salvage this attempt at the language)

In other news: Sad Heath Ledger. I rented Candy last night and then crashed before I could get it in the dvd player. I did finish Ask the Dust "in the middle of the middle of the night (when all your bones make music"--vintage and beloved Ed Hirsch) and the bare Colin Farrell was what should be seen at three a.m.(more work for Chicky) Salma was having a pretty-day through this one, too. Tomorrow night me and mine Brazilian Grill. This is not a social event, it is an Olympic competition and thanks to Daddy George and my good bird's refusal to waste good food, we're all bibbed-up and ready to go.

Green light us, Babies!

All Full

of gallery-visit, good coffee and spicy food and affection for L-Bo and Chicky and the way such a cold afternoon can seem brighter and warmer for the fact that I know them.

The Bar Code of Love

I brandished the wand & pushed
scanner buttons with both thumbs,
but nothing happened.

I osterized & registered the symbols
of our union, & it wasn't a harbinger,
but, my love, I couldn't erase anything—

not the cast-iron griddle, too heavy to lift;
not the lovesick goblets bent at the waist
as if they performed some important task

other than holding household liquids.
In the next-stop mattress outlet, you pressed
every quilted pillowtop, then suggested we lie

with our shoes still on to check filling
& resilience, skin when we slid each slick
blue surface converging—chrome flush

that spread my chest like a walnut, as if
we hadn't already been living in sin for years,
that bed of pictures (dirty? family?),

a future tucked into your wallet, spilling
folded laminates that accordion out like
shrugged hands. What's in the center

of your palm besides one ring & a lifeline
dug into your skin with a grapefruit spoon?
My heart is a domed cakeplate,

nested glass bubble. Sweet
Something of Mine—before they say
sanctify, let's skip town, hock

the registry gifts for cash, jettison
the material outline of a life which
reduces everything to crime-scene

chalk dust, to streamlined stories
with deceptively simple arcs: a blender,
a stand mixer, service for twelve with matched

open stock vegetable platter. We are a seven-
walled restaurant tangled in an Alphabet City
snapshot, broken plate at our feet. I can't

remember who tossed it, but if you
dig in my coat pocket you'll find
encrypted desire of lint & matchbooks,

free signs in this lush & burgeoning
world of someone's love for us aching
to be tested—that floor-model mattress

before we slipped from the store
empty-handed, your body dashing

& suspended
next to mine.

Copyright © 2006 Erika Meitner All rights reserved
from Crab Orchard Review

If You Should Care For Me

She 'gan him soft to shrive. She asked him, What
black ladder must we climb? How sere my grass?
How ravaged is my valley?
You and I,
we seek perfection, mix a brew of horse
manure, of menstrual blood and soil dug from
a dead love's grave.
The moths flew from their mouths.
We heard them say you too shall one day be
like us.
My most familiar friend, please call me
by my nighest name. We heard the sound
of blankets being woven. No one knows
the mush inside my heart. We pray and hope
in vain to wade unstained across the foul
and muddy river.
We will never be
perfected and our margins never meet.

Copyright © 2007 Lacy Schutz All rights reserved
from Colorado Review

Happy Friday

Because I teach a class that I love. Because my favorite bird offered to share his funeral meats with me--believe me I've been offered worse by worse by the worst but never liver though I do like liver, sorry.

I'm silly today, just because or because I get to NY soon and because it's Friday and I have Sunday Brunch plans and I'm wearing a cool, black vintage sweater dress that was dry-clean only but was washed so the top came out all tiny-shouldered and snug but fits just right and because of aforementioned laundering and despite the designer vintage label, it was mine for a hot ten bucks, and today I look like a poor man's Bond chick, all spy-dressed and black-booted and graphite, lacy stockings. I like such accidents, especially since most accidents come at me like bad frisbees.

And the novel is finding its way, a little bit at a time.

Be well and warm wherever you are. I'm going to score us a good poem for the posting very soon.

Candy Apple

The Writer's Voice Visiting Author Series Presents:
Sophia Kartsonis, Steve Fellner & Aaron Smith
Friday, February 8, 2008
8:00 PMReading
West Side YMCA-- The George Washington Lounge
5 West 63rd Street (between Central Park West & Broadway)
Wines from 67Wine
Books from Mobile Libris
~Admission Free and Open to the Public~
Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Hotel Amerika & Prairie Schooner. She won the Academy of American Poets prize in both 2000 & 2004 and was the 2006 winner of the Fineline Contest sponsored by Mid American Review and judged by Denise Duhamel. Her collection Intaglio won the 2005 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and was published in Autumn 2006 by Kent State University Press. She is currently at work on a novel.
Steve Fellner's first book of poems Blind Date with Cavafy won the Third Annual Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, judged by Denise Duhamel. It has been favorable reviewed in the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, Art Voice, The Mid-American Review, Salt Lake city Weekly, among others. His poetry and essays have appeared in North American Review, Northwest Review, The Sun, Western Humanities Review, among other. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Brockport.
Aaron Smith is the author of Blue on Blue Ground (Pittsburgh, 2005), winner of the 2004 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His chapbook, What's Required (Thorngate Road, 2003), won the Frank O'Hara Award. He is a 2007 Fellow in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his work has appeared in many publications including: 5 AM, Gulf Coast, MIPOesias, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets, and Writing Poems. He is a poetry co-editor for Bloom , and he lives in New York City.

You know you want to hear Aaron Smith read.
You know you want to hear Steve Fellner. I know that's why I'm going and you should too.

I am trying to get Wicked tickets and am planning a drive to a cafe in Union, Connecticut full of used books and great old dinery food. It's been a long time, too long and I'm feeling the need to revisit certain places.

Hear me, You, I got the postcard and the message. I trust not the telegraphs, the small lit screens where bad lightning bugs light and steal wattage. I like my fires to burn pure and where you live, trash ignites and pollutes the pretty sky. But I will gather up your paper airplanes and I will fly them heaven&homeward, for now.
Listen to Patty Griffin's When it Don't Come Easy when time permits and recall I kept your secrets even when it didn't, even as it doesn't.

Bird in a Blizzard

(with apologies to Laura Kasischke and with immense admiration, of course)
This poem so-resonates just today when I'm thinking about care--care given and taken--and I'm weary, it's Monday, I'm covered in snow and my hands are still thawing out.

Intermission

They're feeding each other, two small birds
swiveling on a sea-stone, open beaks
kissing and closing—creatures seeing to each
other's needs without question, drawing
the big world into their brief circle
of wing-quiver, heart-shiver, quick cries
as if the nerves themselves gave tongue,
the path between desire and satisfaction
shorter than thought, the ground dividing
being from being—one flesh-protected
spark of life from another—covered
in no time, so even time, for the moment,
is a matter of no moment, smoke that
vanishes into air, into thin air, to leave
but a flaring thing behind—candescent,
burning its one good instant till all is ash,
redemptive breath recovering itself,
eyes seeking in eyes an answer
to what's happened. The fire at the heart
of things is what these two birds ignite
in their give and take, saying we live
in the one world—where some law of
loving exchange is what tends the blaze
and can startle us into a kind of intermission
of peace between two clamorous cliff-
crumbling waves that rear break roar and
rip to shreds a coast of stone, unsettling
the air we stand in with a surf-storm of
salt-light that bites our eyes, blinding them.

Eamon Grennan
Five Points
Vol. 10, No. 3

January came in lightly

Trying to learn how to fly around with little to hang onto. It's an uncertain year, but really, aren't they all?

In other news I want Maria Bartiromo to be our new president. I don't hate girls at all. I like them to be stellar as they can so often be.

Here is a poet I never think about and so I thought I'd post in honor of forgotten persons this poem.

The Lure of Little Voices
There's a cry from out the loneliness -- oh, listen, Honey, listen!
Do you hear it, do you fear it, you're a-holding of me so?
You're a-sobbing in your sleep, dear, and your lashes, how they glisten --
Do you hear the Little Voices all a-begging me to go?

All a-begging me to leave you. Day and night they're pleading, praying,
On the North-wind, on the West-wind, from the peak and from the plain;
Night and day they never leave me -- do you know what they are saying?
"He was ours before you got him, and we want him once again."

Yes, they're wanting me, they're haunting me, the awful lonely places;
They're whining and they're whimpering as if each had a soul;
They're calling from the wilderness, the vast and God-like spaces,
The stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole.

They miss my little camp-fires, ever brightly, bravely gleaming
In the womb of desolation, where was never man before;
As comradeless I sought them, lion-hearted, loving, dreaming,
And they hailed me as a comrade, and they loved me evermore.

And now they're all a-crying, and it's no use me denying;
The spell of them is on me and I'm helpless as a child;
My heart is aching, aching, but I hear them, sleeping, waking;
It's the Lure of Little Voices, it's the mandate of the Wild.

I'm afraid to tell you, Honey, I can take no bitter leaving;
But softly in the sleep-time from your love I'll steal away.
Oh, it's cruel, dearie, cruel, and it's God knows how I'm grieving;
But His loneliness is calling, and He knows I must obey.

Robert Service

Cento Drawn with a Shiny Glisten

Outside my window the world is falling.
First the leaves followed by stars, then sky,

A boat toward an orgy of waves outranks anchor, so we are far from the field
green detects and takes. Marked card of a field.
We’ll catch nothing this way.

When the sky finds its footing there will be
nothing left standing. Nothing
left to fly-away like things we want to have.

Leaving you
a kind of residue,
half what you’ve collected
half what’s always been.

Across continents
ages, species, we’d find us
birds of a feather

you are the silver
lining in my cloud, emu
we flock together

though tired to my core
i stay to wait, your famous
light a dull note filtered out

and unaware of risks attending warmth:
October and its many ironies.

But closeness is pain. Where did I begin
and where did they end? Somewhere
around the third tune

Skull-kept, three modes of mind wander like radio.
That jade blue of your eyes: a risk in three cities

like walking
forever through trees
and briars—but why break
cobwebs as I watch?

Crescendo, shh and hum, went round until
I lost my breath, lay down.

In a minor key, everything rains

And one by one, or maybe more, we wave goodbye.
What hands will close around us then? Only the sun?

Not long until morning comes
like the squid that flashes electric blue
when aroused

when from out of nowhere,
the parakeet chirps like a lion:
O emerald, forgive me,
the sky.

Amy Small-McKinney*Kristi Maxwell*Evan Commander*Brett Price*Sophia Kartsonis*Caleb Adler*Ann Fine*Joe DeLong*Lesley Jenike*Cynthia Arrieu-King*Joshua Butts*Erica Dawson*Stephanie Rogers*Heather Hamilton*Jillian Weise*Matt Hart (title by Hannah Reck)

The Troubadours etc.

Just for this evening, let’s not mock them.
Not their curtsies or cross-garters
Or ever recurring pepper trees in their gardens
Promising, promising.

At least they had ideas about love.

All day we’ve driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads
Through metal contraptions to eat.
We’ve followed West 84, and what else?
Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields,
Lounging sheep, telephone wires,
Yellowing flowering shrubs.

Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
The violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up:
There is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled up—
Darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound with the thunder of
their wings.
After a while, it must have seemed that they followed
Not instinct or pattern but only
One another.

When they stopped, Audubon observed,
They broke the limbs of stout trees by the sheer weight of their numbers.

And when we stop we’ll follow—what?
Our hearts?

The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love
Only through miracle,
But the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through,
How to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.

Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you.
Think of me in the garden, humming
Quietly to myself in my blue dress,
A blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms,
Though cloudless.

At what point is something gone completely?
The last of the sunlight is disappearing
Even as it swells and waves.

Just for this evening, won’t you put me before you
Until I’m far enough away you can
Believe in me?

Then try, try to come closer—
My wonderful and less than.

Mary Szybist
from Meridien

Chocolate-Covered Plums 'Twas the Night Before DC

Chocolate-covered plums are one of those amazing finds of a treat made in Brooklyn but found in Birmingham, Alabama and one of those things about Alabama that seems like the sweetest apology for other things, say fire ants, say game day in T-town and the way one must grocery shop for hours just to avoid trying to drive home. I have procurred a whole bag of said-plums and while they are so linked to a memory and a promise that a former friend and I would share them at the old folks home while the other lesser seniors ate prunes, they taste sweet tonight with Ms Drusilla curled up beside me and the steady breath of a certain bird as he "hits" snooze once more and the knowledge that morning will bring a flight to D.C. and real Chinese food and Ethiopian for lunch!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (My favorite food of all and while once I thought that Boulder and Denver boasted the best Ethiopian food, I had not visited D.C. and found that Ethiopian outside Ethiopia doesn't get better than D.C.)

Speaking of Little Gods

Between this and Sarah, I'm beginning to think that there simply are not bad Polleys.

April
Now there is only the sound of the rain
which is the shape of the streets and the ropes
of overflow knitting at the mouths of drains
and fraying from the gutters and downpipes.

Whatever the leaves were saying must wait:
rain has filled the trees with its own brisk word.
There’s thunder in the darkened slates.
The pond’s green eye rolls heavenwards.

You can’t charge a page with the hiss, with this
cooling of the city like a new horseshoe.
Rain in the hair, at the neck and the wrists:
for rich and poor, there’s rain to hurry through.

The boil and spit of pavements: mirrored brick.
Every patch of grass is fiercely lit.

Jacob Polley

Thanks to L-Bojengles for leading me (back) to Jeanette Winterson (I have loved her for years) and to Jeanette Winterson for leading me anew to Jacob Polley. Check out Smoke for the kind of poem I only dream I might write.

The Kind of Love I Trust Now

ATLAS

There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it

Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;

Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists

And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds

The permanently rickety elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.

And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.

U.A. Fanthorpe

Thanks Veace

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly a hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.


When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond,
I know she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

Jeff McDaniell

Whatever it was I lost, whatever I wept for
Was a wild, gentle thing, the small dark eyes
Loving me in secret.
It is here.
~James Wright, “Milkweed”


Weirdly Wright's been on the brain all week and when I checked into Jacqueline Wenthe Kolosov's website there he was. I took some silly putty out and lifted him and offer him here to you.

Upon Finding Out that I've Been Diabetic for Twenty-Five Years

Just found out that the diabetes anthology that published a collaborative essay of mine decided that contacting authors--even for things like say: facts or contributor's copies was apparently too much effort and just went ahead and wrote their own "take" on things.

Beware authors. Those anthologies that just vanish sometimes don't. They just decide to take your work and make of it whatever they'd like. The worst about this is that Eliot gets no credit for his pieces if you read it this way. With my writings as the diabetic passages (the best sections, BTW) I'm not sure his contribution: former fat girl despairing over swimsuit season? Professional italicizer? So Ruth Park and Diana Parker, next go-round how about some communication? In the meanwhile, my literary friends, take care.

Upon finding out that Robert Pinsky is married and having great respect for the few that can manage such dealings with any integrity at all, I have quit joking that I will kiss him before I'm dead. Having always known Terrance Hayes to be married, I post this poem for you with no objectifying preamble. (But if one could sleep with a poem, I would likely be seriously flirting with this one.)


God is an American

I still love words. When we make love in the morning,
your skin damp from a shower, the day calms.
Shadenfreude may be the best way to name the covering
of adulthood, the powdered sugar on a black shirt. I am

alone now on the top floor pulled by obsession, the ink
on my fingers. And sometimes it is a difficult name.
Sometimes it is like the world before America, the kin-
ship of fools and hunters, the children, the dazed dream

of mothers with no style. A word can be the boot print
in a square of fresh cement and the glaze of morning.
Your response to my kiss is I have a cavity. I am in
love with incompletion. I am clinging to your moorings.

Yes, I have a pretty good idea what beauty is. It survives
alright. It aches like an open book. It makes it difficult to live.