Rocky Mountain Highs

The Spectacled Bear (Tremarctos ornatus), also known as the Andean Bear and locally as ukuko, jukumari or ucumari, is the last of the lineage of short-faced bears of the Middle Pleistocene to Late Pleistocene age.[1][2]

The Spectacled Bear is a relatively small species of bear native to South America. It has black fur with a distinctive beige-coloured marking across its face and upper chest. Males are 33% larger than females.[3] Males can weigh 130 – 200 kilograms (286 – 440 lb), and females 35 – 60 kilograms (77 – 132 lb). They are found in several areas of northern and western South America, including western Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, western Bolivia, northwestern Argentina, and eastern Panama.[4] Spectacled bears are the only surviving species of bear native to South America, and the only surviving member of the subfamily Tremarctinae. Their survival has depended mostly on their ability to climb even the highest trees of the Andes.
* * *

Ever wonder at the see-through cities, their citizens scurried, sly but nothing-eyed and nowhere-bound? Ever wonder about that Carolinian beach, the forms cameos on the sand, the wind wishing them scattered, the scattered grains that braille words for the blind tyrrants and their teacup poodles--what little yippings! what messages slip out, slip by, slip inside other envelopes and how many must be hired to decipher them? A mountain cradles the valley and no hand-blindfolds, no amount of closed-eye chantings make the mass of it lessen.

And Day Brought Back My Night
It was so simple: you came back to me
And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter
But that. That you had gone away from me
And lived for days with him—it didn’t matter.
That I had been left to care for our old dog
And house alone—couldn’t have mattered less!
On all this, you and I and our happy dog
Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless.I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys
Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work
And started in: Item: it’s years, not days.
Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn’t back,
In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you
Left her, remember? I did? I did. (I do.)
Geoffrey Brock

Half of It's You, Half is Me

Helloing again to my dear lost friend Princess Jellybean and it makes me happy. I am thinking of consistency and how trust is so much that and how my first boyfriend and his wife are attending my sister's wedding and how much good I have in my world and for that good, a standard has been set and sometimes, there's nothing to do but accept.

I am glad you are back, Dear Elizabeth.
I am sorry that You are under house-arrest Dear Homeboy.
Yes, Ander, you are to be birthdayed beyond--one track from George Harrison's own 33 1/3 for his own thirty-third year and because that's the length of an l.p. (But no 33 1/3 track exists--sorry, Spice Boy)

I've no plans to disappear.
--Eliot K. Wilson
(poet, true friend extraordinaire)

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood and I'm on the mend. So there.

Clouds in My Coffee

My peeps buy me the best presents. Even with so high a bar, some gifts transcend themselves--the thing you'd run back into a fire after. I have a silver gypsy pencil like that--one long winter's bear-sleep ago and it still moves me to see it--the gypsy dancing in the swirl of coffee steam, the boy who knew me that well and so early.

Last year it was a pink lunchbox full of Hello Kitty Pez dispensers and an I-Pod. The I-Pod sat all chrome and shiny for nearly a year--I couldn't bear to jeopardize it in any way. Then two weeks ago or so, I finally logged onto I-Tunes and now I am sitting in the dark, scarves over the lamps, tieing off my forearm and logging on...
Such questions arise as which version of Black Coffee to commit to? And which song that mentions coffee is your favorite? Do tell...

(Cafe poems are welcome, as well.)

I want to do mixes of key words like coffee or gypsy. I am all strung out and not at all sorry.

Flu Thru the Weekend

My best bird has three-souped me and taken care of my illin' self. I missed class today and am so tired.

Birds Again by Jim Harrison

A secret came a week ago though I already
knew it just beyond the bruised lips of consciousness.
The very alive souls of thirty-five hundred dead birds
are harbored in my body. It’s not uncomfortable.
I’m only temporary habitat for these not-quite-
weightless creatures. I offered a wordless invitation
and now they’re roosting within me, recalling
how I had watched them at night
in fall and spring passing across earth moons,
little clouds of black confetti, chattering and singing
on their way north or south. Now in my dreams
I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
the watery face of earth as if they’re carrying
me rather than me carrying them. Next winter
I’ll release them near the estuary west of Alvarado
and south of Veracruz. I can see them perching
on undiscovered Olmec heads. We’ll say goodbye
and I’ll return my dreams to earth.

I miss Ethiopian food. I miss Maurice Manning singing Tecumseh Valley into the thickest Alabama night-air. I miss the sky's color earlier when it was all kinds of purpley-blue. I miss fresh figs & fireworks & homemade marshmallows & a big silver cat I loved so much and a big cowboy tomcat I also loved. I miss Riverside Drive and all of its various warmths. I already miss Middleton Avenue and the outdoor grilling that hasn't even happened yet this season but will pass quickly into a new life and one that the New Life Red Rover Kids keep calling me out to but I'm just not yet ready to shake this chain of hands and run forward, let alone fly through. I miss last fall and the one before and that big snowfall three weeks ago. I miss too much.

Virág
Like a name like

flower. Like a

country like the

sound of a state.

Once we drove

in a small car

through a field of

tulips so red so

red the sky had

to leave. The sky

was not itself and

all that was left

was gray so gray

that red could

seem more red

than anything. That

day so many cars

stopped, people

ran into the

field and made

intonations to the

tulips. It was

February. A good

month for tulips.

In a small country

with a view of

the ocean.

**
Amanda Nadelberg's

Just like a progressive ad

I was sitting at the light, on the corner, on the telephone with some tall, dark boy or other when a giant noise came at me and I realized I'd been hit right there in front of the fire station and on the way to a job interview for summer. It was really scary. Also, we all know that I love my silver dovemobile and though its injury was pretty minor and my acheyness will likely subside, the shakey tenuousness of a given moment was not lost on me. Scary. But it makes the world's good things stand out: my good friends, the phonecalls from that Big Colorado Spectacled Bear, my BFF and his get-well Korean food, lunch with dear L-Bo tomorrow, my good black cat-girls, (and even the ever-annoying Shorty and Bronte--my oldest friend in a shrug of fur and some serious mats), my IPOD and its ever-growing library of best songs, the Springsteen concert I just attended and Girls in Their Summer Clothes--a song that destroys me in the best way, homemade oatmeal, golden raisins, good mail (yes, Bear, I know,) and poems like the one below:

Poem for the National Hobo Association Poetry Contest I will not be there with you but think
of all the misery we've yet
to romanticize. Think of the train cars
rattling all night like the bones
of an epileptic. Think of the song
your mother sang to soap
and how her words drained away
with dirt. Think of the door
that screamed its rusted
warning each time you entered
and the last time you left,
your life knotted up in a red bandana on a stick.
Think of St. Louis, frozen
in April. Think of the girl
who does not know she existed,
that she throbs like a nerve exposed,
that she drains away
each night. I will not be there
to learn your names
or hear of the strange happinesses
beneath the sky
or to swear to return
but think of your feet by a mythic fire warmed
and the orchard around you
pelting the night with apples.
Think of those immense barges
singing like baleen whales
and think of your escapes,
which are legend,
of which I will someday hear.
And thinking of you
in winter the river
speckled with snow
will not be the slab where your body last lay.

Paul Guest

O Boy

If you heard this speech and can deny that we have an opportunity to choose a president that is more direct, more honest,brave and real than any we've had any chance at it for a long, long time, then you deserve the tacky, corrupt and self-interested leader you will choose.

I have never heard anyone speak better to the complex and often uncomfortable shades of grey within these issues and do so with more command and an intricate, intimate understanding of the ways race is a tangled and unsimplifiable issue. It requires admitting that some of who we are and some of what we love is complicated by race and indeed, racism. It is difficult to admit, as Obama says, "in polite company" but race, race "priveleges," any advantage or disadvantage that is impacted by race im/ex/plicitly brings things out in each of us that require re-examination and sometimes taming and tailoring. Instead of suggesting that everything or nothing is or should be about race, gender or sexual preference, Obama is candid enough to admit that we do contain all of the things that we contain--genetically, biologically, historically, intellectually, culturally and emotionally--and those things bump into each other in the dark hallways inside us and that is undeniable. It's what we do about them, the rooms we assign them and the ways we direct them that make the difference between truly being and acting in ways that help us to evolve into a "post-race, post-gender" place. But whatever I can say is nothing next to what I've just heard. I love that, like L-Bo, I can be made to cry over a speech by someone alive in my moment of living and the chance to really make something truly inspiring happen.

Glistening

Tiger said why are you
so pretty. I have seen you in pearls
and laces. At night
kissing each part of your nothing.

We break the window
before he can.
His snowball his weekend
turning to weekday.
He laps up the water from our gloves,
too full to lick the temples.
Leaves our house lightly
like a man who has forgotten.

It is not a straight line.
It never has been.

The flowers you made for the goat
are eaten by your roommates
who feel like fruit.

A walk in shallow water?

Further than the spirit trembles
they are eating snow on the moon.

In winter we lie
in the curious river
without matches.

Only the chain is broken,
not the pendant.

Who laughs so fluently?

The mate is a flute played in the wild.

by JEN CURRIN

Down to the Last Few Bites

of so much that I love. I'm banqueting on poetry b/c it feels like I'll be living in skyline of essays and service and such. I'm banqueting on an afternoon in milkish light with Drusilla asleep in the curve of my legs and the way they make a C meant just for such a shape. And there's the rub of it, the C and sea and seachange and all the acres of always I wanted to devour. It's Monday, I'm sleep-deprived.

The Touch
I want to hear the slap
of your shadow
as it hits the floor,
the pins and needles
of water falling
tap to tub. I'm tired,
and what you know
about me will soon be written
on a postcard and passed
in the night.

We're down to the last few bites.
Those who are in the habit
of eating parsley off their plates
will not help us.
Wine has cast its blood-shadow
across our cheeks.

I've come in off the street
to confess these crimes.
We have several mothers in common,
and while they plot our deaths
I want to give them something
to talk about.

I've misspelled my own name so many times
and still I remember every syllable
of every spell.
Still I remember you humming
along as the ghosts
drank water in the kitchen,
as our mothers counted our fingers and toes.

Jen Currin
The Sleep of Four Cities

Falling Asleep to the Sound of Rain
Understanding where you live is first of all
knowing its noises which are memorized
without you knowing that they are, for instance

weather: starting after midnight after stillness
is the clink-clink Irish rain makes on its journey in
a garden in the suburbs, falling on out of season

jasmine then iron railings between
my neighbor's house and mine; which began at sea.

I loved small towns—they seemed to come from
a kinder time: shop blinds lowered on weekday
afternoons, peaceful evenings with beds turned down,

shoes gathering, two by two, under them and in
the cellars of nearby farms, stopped up, ready
to be sold on market day, oily, sharp cheddars,

getting sharper, growing older. But the truth is
there is no truth in this. I never lived there.

What would it mean, I used to wonder, to leave
everything you knew, leave it altogether, never mention
memories; start again inside that reticence?

I once drove into Tarbert at dawn. Everything was gone.
No distances; no trees. Only imagined ones.
I had to begin making my own pageant of

small hawthorn flowers, elderberry. We love fog because
it shifts old anomalies into the elements
surrounding them. It gives relief from a way of seeing.

It is the gift of sleep or the approach to sleep,
to make component parts of place and consciousness
meaningless and, as breathing slows down,

to do what water does, announce a source in cadence,
repetition, sound, allow a gradual dissolving of
boundaries between the actual and evident and still,

when all that is done, I know there never was
a single place for me. I never lost enough to have one.

I want to live where they refused to speak—
those first emigrants who never said
where they came from, what they left behind.

Their country was a finger to the lips, a child's question stopped.
And yet behind their eyes in eerie silence, was an island, if you
looked for it: bronze-green perch in a mute river.

Peat smoke rising from soundless kindling.
Rain falling on leaves and iron, making no noise at all.

Eavan Boland
Domestic Violence

Lightfall

All the light was north, snow on skylights,
the year I lived in the painter's studio.

Scrub forest behind the dunes, a litter
of deer tracks and shotgun shells.
I tied an orange bandanna around
the husky's neck.

//

I knew the dark place was wrong. I walked the letters
of my name, which I did not recognize spoken.

Low corridors.
Me. Her. The I
I could not find.

All the trees had fallen the same way
in the storm. A landscape pointing.

Anyone could happen like that.

//

The husky ate a bee
out of the air, snapped herself shut
on compound eyes, wing-blur, button
of darkness and buzz.

//

A rabbit streaked from under my feet.
Its nest fit my loose fist.
A cup of winter grass, still warm.

Home is the first everywhere,
the place we go out from.

//

The bee flew lower. Pollen graining its legs
drizzled onto linoleum shine. The room

was a different color for each of us. My shadow
bright blue-green in bee sight.

How could it not recognize the window
colored open?

//

I longed to be among trees. They wavered
beyond glass, beyond wire. They could not
be changed into words. They could not be changed
into anything. Even a camera couldn't see
the thick air around them, how it carried
sounds whole like water does,
how it supported slow birds.

//

Bee against pane, translucency
of wings. Centuries flew
against the glass. Then we found
the larger place: earth, that blue ark
afloat in the wilderness of space.

We cannot count ourselves out.

//

How beautiful it was
before we knew. How sweet how

A faint music falls from the stars—

no it does not.

Pamela Alexander

Slow Fire
Ausable Press

And Love for You Too, Frank

For Grace, After a Party
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

Frank O'Hara, of course

L,O,V,E and the Other Twenty-Two
A.
Without you,
an ass would be just
a snake, amore
would be too demanding,
and there’d be no
Aphrodite.
B.
Love is one person
in two bodies.

C.
Not quite a ring—
more like a Cracker Jack prize
or meeting the parents.

D.
Divorce: B loses
its better half.

E.
Almost B, but not quite.
Or perhaps B,
unbuttoned for a while.
F.
Keep watering
and it’ll grow
into something sweet-smelling
that we can call B.


G.
Closer to the gold band
than C— met the parents,
now moving in together.
H.
Eyes locked,
yet a handshake
that’s merely political.


I.
All brain, feet,
and business—
no time to be a poet
or lover.

J.
Add some mascara to I—
wink those lashes.
You’ve caught his eye.

K.
Unrequited love.
L.
J, turn away.
Play hard to get—make Jove
follow you to over to Love.


M.
Mars denies
Venus is imbedded in his self,
even as her slim waist
is in his arms.

N.
I’ll lead the dance
toward Z, falling
and bringing you with me.

O.
The ring that C
aspires to be.
Caution: D only
a straight line away.

P.
Formerly B,
now a poet.

Q.
Love can grow
and grow,
but don’t let it stray
outside the O.
R.
The poet
attempts to repair B
again
and again.


S.
When you dance like that,
wearing close to red or nothing,
you almost look like B.
T.
You make love true.
Then again,
I feel that way
about R, U and E, as well.
But I suppose only you
have that kiss.


U.
Venus
of Willendorf.
V.
Venus of Willendorf
was too lonely
to eat. She became
an inverted Aphrodite,
now solitary only
when Mars is red.


W.
Venus wages fierce kisses
on her husband, temporarily
forgiving his polemic demeanor.
X.
Knees weak,
K finally gives in
to a kiss.

Y.
Playing footsie
over a martini.
Z.
N, with feigned left feet,
half dancing, half falling
towards bed.

Jeanette Marie Sayers
Virginia Arts of the Book Center

Ah, Calgone Take Me Away

Thanks to my favorite bird for pretending to be tolerant, if not amused at my new crazily-strident streak. I will leave today's comments to Mr. Chait and with luck, after a big, deep breath, I will switch back to the poetry program. It's aswarm outside with winter and I am going to eat Vietnamese food and then slide back home in the slush of it all.

The New Republic

Go Already!
by Jonathan Chait
Hillary Clinton, fratricidal maniac.
Post Date Thursday, March 06, 2008

DISCUSS ARTICLE [124] | PRINT | EMAIL ARTICLE



The morning after Tuesday's primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign released a memo titled "The Path to the Presidency." I eagerly dug into the paper, figuring it would explain how Clinton would obtain the Democratic nomination despite an enormous deficit in delegates. Instead, the memo offered a series of arguments as to why Clinton should run against John McCain--i.e., "Hillary is seen as the one who can get the job done"--but nothing about how she actually could. Is she planning a third-party run? Does she think Obama is going to die? The memo does not say.

RELATED CONTENT
Cohn: How Much Should Obama's Delegate Lead Matter?



The reason it doesn't say is that Clinton's path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn't going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton's Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn't going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.


That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing, that she would need to win with superdelegates. But, with most superdelegates already committed, Clinton would need to capture the remaining ones by a margin of better than two to one. And superdelegates are going to be extremely reluctant to overturn an elected delegate lead the size of Obama's. The only way to lessen that reluctance would be to destroy Obama's general election viability, so that superdelegates had no choice but to hand the nomination to her. Hence her flurry of attacks, her oddly qualified response as to whether Obama is a Muslim ("not as far as I know"), her repeated suggestions that John McCain is more qualified.


Clinton's justification for this strategy is that she needs to toughen up Obama for the general election-if he can't handle her attacks, he'll never stand up to the vast right-wing conspiracy. Without her hazing, warns the Clinton memo, "Democrats may have a nominee who will be a lightening rod of controversy." So Clinton's offensive against the likely nominee is really an act of selflessness. And here I was thinking she was maniacally pursuing her slim thread of a chance, not caring--or possibly even hoping, with an eye toward 2012-that she would destroy Obama's chances of defeating McCain in the process. I feel ashamed for having suspected her motives.


Still, there are a few flaws in Clinton's trial-by-smear method. The first is that her attacks on Obama are not a fair proxy for what he'd endure in the general election, because attacks are harder to refute when they come from within one's own party. Indeed, Clinton is saying almost exactly the same things about Obama that McCain is: He's inexperienced, lacking in substance, unequipped to handle foreign policy. As The Washington Monthly's Christina Larson has pointed out, in recent weeks the nightly newscasts have consisted of Clinton attacking Obama, McCain attacking Obama, and then Obama trying to defend himself and still get out his own message. If Obama's the nominee, he won't have a high-profile Democrat validating McCain's message every day.


Second, Obama can't "test" Clinton the way she can test him. While she likes to claim that she beat the Republican attack machine, it's more accurate to say that she survived with heavy damage. Clinton is a wildly polarizing figure, with disapproval ratings at or near 50 percent. But, because she earned the intense loyalty of core Democratic partisans, Obama has to tread gingerly around her vulnerabilities. There is a big bundle of ethical issues from the 1990s that Obama has not raised because he can't associate himself with what partisan Democrats (but not Republicans or swing voters) regard as a pure GOP witch hunt.


What's more, Clinton has benefited from a favorable gender dynamic that won't exist in the fall. (In the Democratic primary, female voters have outnumbered males by nearly three to two.) Clinton's claim to being a tough, tested potential commander-in-chief has gone almost unchallenged. Obama could reply that being First Lady doesn't qualify you to serve as commander-in-chief, but he won't quite say that, because feminists are an important chunk of the Democratic electorate. John McCain wouldn't be so reluctant.


Third, negative campaigning is a negative-sum activity. Both the attacker and the attackee tend to see their popularity drop. Usually, the victim's popularity drops farther than the perpetrator's, which is why negative campaigning works. But it doesn't work so well in primaries, where the winner has to go on to another election.


Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected delegates might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.


Some Clinton supporters, like my friend (and historian) David Greenberg, have been assuring us that lengthy primary fights go on all the time and that the winner doesn't necessarily suffer a mortal wound in the process. But Clinton's kamikaze mission is likely to be unusually damaging. Not only is the opportunity cost--to wrap up the nomination, and spend John McCain into the ground for four months--uniquely high, but the venue could not be less convenient. Pennsylvania is a swing state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn't create a more damaging scenario if you tried.


Imagine in 2000, or 2004, that George W. Bush faced a primary fight that came down to Florida (his November must-win state). Imagine his opponent decided to spend seven weeks pounding home the theme that Bush had a dangerous plan to privatize Social Security. Would this have improved Bush's chances of defeating the Democrats? Would his party have stood for it?

Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic.

I too, wish to quit devoting more space to Hillary

(here, here, Crazy and L-bo) but this Starr stuff, it is more dirty politics, more dishonesty, more broad generalization of the variety that leaves nearly as bad a taste in my mouth as the thought of McCain in office. You can bet that McCain was counting on it, that the way Hillary Clinton runs a campaign, the things she says and does recommend him to the most unexpected of voters. After what the Republican party has done to our country over the last eight years, it's hard to even fathom voting for them. But Hillary, her shadyness, her unattractive boundless greed and self-interest makes her "experience" look like one more deficit. Of course, her "experience" is hers alone when it suits her and first-lady behind-the-scenes "decision-making" when that serves her better. I move that we Ouiji board Eleanor Roosevelt into being and ask that she campaign. Better still, I'll write her in. Come on America, the shady, the tacky, the class-less, the lowdown, and selfish--isn't that the president we already have?
BTW: To those Hillarians that enjoy (with the exact same little smirk in voice or text or expression) asking (passively-aggressively as their sorry leader) what exactly makes me support Obama and then wait (ever-so-long-sufferingly) in expectation for me to say "He pretty. He pretty-speak. He rock-star. He c-o-o-l," allow me now to answer: It is indeed Hillary's experience and my experience of her and her absolute un-winning ways and the way she makes the prettiest boutannier on the lapel of John McCain in a shade so vividly right for him, that she brings out his eyes in the most compelling way. I mean, (for I do not want to be accused of using language too effectively as though it is the stuff of laws, bills, and every preliminary and crucial "move" that any president will ever need to make, it is apparently upsetting to some) I mean that I am interested in a candidate that can win this election and one that I am proud to support and endorse. The issues (yes, including that barely-mentioned HEALTH CARE) are not much different and where they do differ, I prefer a candidate that can admit that there will be challenges and he will fight hard to make change and do as he says he will do and not say anything, anything (including Kenneth Starr and invoke SNL to make a serious political point) just to try (however pitifully) to win at any cost to his party and finally, to his country.

Oh Ohio

sometimes you're so slow. That's okay. We'll catch you on up. L-Bo, every spare hour must be spent hitting the streets, those t-shirts, both poet and emu, and anything and everything that can be done to see to it that the candidate I find most representative of my wish for a president has an honest chance at it.

Obamarama

Tonight. Sitwell's Coffee Shop. Me and mine watch what kind of history we're in the middle of forming.

6:30 a.m.

found me at the polls where yes, GIRLS, oh yes, yes, yes, I did in fact vote and vote for Obama.

I felt as near to that sickeningly-simplistic concept of "patriotism" as I have ever felt. Proud to be there. Proud to be in bright, reasonable, considerate and gracious company. Proud of the young woman--seventeen y.o.--who was voting on a provisional ballot as her birthday was not until May. And maybe she was a Hilary supporter or worse...and maybe she will grow up to tell all of her women friends whether or not they are or are not feminists, but for now her motivation, will and momentum exemplify a good citizen if not a good feminist--not for me to say. As an Obama supporter, I feel it in keeping with the spirit of his campaign that I set out to do what I need to do and what is within my power to change and complete. I do not throw stones and I do not resort to every low trick in the book when I am not getting my way. But it has been a bit exasperating Gyrrrrllllssss, a bit wearisome really, the insults, the assumption that me and mine are all lipsticked and oblivious. I have completed all of my artistic goals, I have done so at great personal expense and instead of talking my "feminism" through a critique of other women and how they look or act or love, I have lived alone a long time and have w ith no traditional outs or ups. Having one's own mind means defending it even in the face of other overbearing and self-righteous WOMEN as well as men. It means knowing you are and what you love no matter who questions it.

Give me a bitch I can back, Tina Fey.

Never Been Anything False About Hope

Happy Bird-day!

"For child I am so glad I've found you Although my arms have always been around you Sweet bird although you did not see me I saw you ..."

Oh Bird, Bird

I lift my glass to
the day you were born, I am
all kinds of grateful.

Practically Soul-mates

(don't worry, Bird, I never saw him at the Mt.)

Me and O, we've got a synchronicity going on.

See who gets your vote:
http://www.votechooser.com/

Torch-lit Octopus

Once in awhile we're lucky enough to know well those people in the world that passing by us would dazzle us and would seem really, a wonder, to know. I am lucky in that my friends are more than a large percentage those people--the ones you are lottery-win-wealthy to score and I have and I never stop marveling at just how.

Among these, L-Bojengles and her Filo-Boy make me prouder than proud to know them.
So, it's likely a little strange for me to direct you to read a review so smart, so generous that between that writing and the way Ms. L. writes about everything from politics (Gobama!) to cinema to music to fashion and all of its ghosts, I feel like the luckiest thing to be called a friend by her. And, if you haven't yet read her poems or if you have and are waiting for a bigger dose, that book that's on its way is well-worth the painful wait.

Besides L, there is my good filo to read as he reviews the lovely and talented Ms. Cate M. and then our sly, silly Chicky's poesy and the fact that Wil Oldham appears here(and wasn't I just listening to you and hot little Matt Sweeney who was supposed to wish me a happy birthday? and wasn't I just craving more Oldham and here then a poem!)

GOHIO*GOBAMA*GOHIO*GOBAMA*GOHIO*GOBAMA

Never have I been so thrilled about a candidate. Direct, classy, cool-headed but without lacking warmth and the desire to bring humanity to every well-considered issue. As for "the words thing," they do matter, but more than the words themselves, the agility of mind and flexibility of options that a humble, intelligent, imaginative thinker brings to a moment. I like Obama's willngness when asked to retract a moment to choose a moment that is not as transparently politically-charged as say "the war on Iraq" which he has addressed with consistency throughout, but to choose instead (and consistent with all of his concern for the American family) the Schiavo case and the cost to individual personal freedom that such a decision risks. How right he is in suggesting that the political arena involves some measure of vanity and ambition and to see, for once in terribly too-long, one who consciously attempts to put those elements to the side in order to address concerns of the people he not only claims to represent but does not forget in his thoughtful treatment of every question and every issue.

Billet Doux--Won't it be Loverly?

I cannot wait for this project to arrive. Kristy Bowen is the greatest. The love letter poems look so pretty and I know that I like the stuff she publishes. Next year, let us all make Valentine's boxes and a new poem all beautiful to send one copy to each person on the postal route. Lots of lace and construction paper and paint and potato stamps and the stuff of second grade. Loverly.

POETS 4 OBAMA!

Lyricists for Obama. Journalists for Obama. Copyeditors for Obama.

Don't tell me words don't matter. Come along, all of you that make words, tailor words, love words, know that words do stuff, big stuff, like matter, which is, really after all, no small matter.

I love feeling so inspired. Me and L-Bo are taking our words to the street. If you're feeling the Poets for Obama t-shirt impulse, let one of us know. I think we're going to have to get a bunch of them for a bunch of us.

When did I last really care about the election so much? This is fun.

Check Out this Hot Bird!

HoT EmU LuV lives on! Our website (with all credit going to Adriana Baros and the crew of writers who DID contribute some hot emu haiku--thank you) was chosen as a finalist for the SXSW Interactive Web Awards. We considered a quick trip to Austin but likely won't be able to swing it. Still, cross your fingers for our shameless bird that knows no bounds.


http://2008.sxsw.com/interactive/web_awards/finalists/

This is the time, the notch of the dam on the moon

Curse the Body that Remembers the Body that Remembers...

One Body
Over the buildings a thinning mist, dawn takes a match to.
All the fuzzy, whirring molecules spin a yarn
of oneness, then flare up, flail, and burn
from such crystal, such sobering, spectacular arsons as this.

Thistle, thistle stop your purpling.
Don't listen to the chorus of fog, its unbearable
sophistry, its prayers. How I hate its implausible reasons.
O, the body...

Copyright © 2007 Yerra Sugarman All rights reserved
from Cimarron Review

Stargazer Lilies & the Blind Heart of mid-February

Stargazer



He arrives at my door with Stargazer lilies,
exotic tall flowers too erotic for us.
Named for nighttime, though we keep
to daylight hours, lest one of us gets ideas.

Three men now have brought me flowers,
each one uncertain in my doorway,
bouquet hanging at his side, embarrassed
by his own thoughtfulness, and I
by how easy I am to please.

I snip the stems and drop them in a vase,
wishing I could gush like a woman being wooed.
But this is a promise he can't deliver.
When he's gone I bury my face in them,
all night l breathe them in.

Flowers like these don't come up naturally,
these were cooed at, coaxed, cut off
at the knees. They tower over me,
block every view, spill their spicy perfume
as their heads dip in heavy half-swoons.

He should have chosen an easier flower,
something less prone to dramatic scenes,
quicker to die. Petals drop to the floor
where I let them lie.

Copyright © 2007 Tara Gorvine All rights reserved
from Tar River Poetry

Tired today. Saw a picture of a mean but lovely man beside an anemic mosquito--that was sad. Saw the picture of sucked-out-blood of friendship--that, too. And the job front. And my motivation. And my sister's hideous, sucky, monstrous husband. Not good.

But there are things like my bird and the spinal-column he wears with such finesse that I remember again a boy can have that, plus character, real character. There's NY and my friends and my other sister's boy and good food, music, color, and the promise of newness in newness and that Billet Doux is due out any minute from Dancing Girl Press! I love this project, love that it had me in Dr. Bird's office on my knees for all of a Sunday afternoon into evening with vellum paper, rubber stamps of bare trees and dandelion spores and fine glitter all starry-spidering across the filmy page. I felt like a little kid, the night before Valentine's Day boxes were due for school. The doilies and candy hearts of it all.

What's Still Right in the World

Autography 4

During this time people protested. I didn't though I never for one moment was for it. And people bought supplies and became political but I didn't though I never for one moment doubted these necessities. A poet acquaintance had a baby. I saw her and the baby—they'd just been at a protest—and felt like I'd never had a baby despite my two boys. I stopped reading newspapers except about science and stopped the TV news though poets were at protests and writing blogs and someone asked me how I could write such abstract lyrics at a time like this and I looked at him and wondered what it felt like to write a poem. Pregnant women looked freakish to me, like costumes or experiments. On my way to the day care I looked at the big bellied women or new mothers with strollers and wondered what was it like to push a baby out of your body. Last night as I gathered my little son out of the bath into a green towel—clean, smooth, slippery, sleepy—I wondered what that was like.


--Rachel Zucker

New York, New York

What a wonderful trip. It was so, so, so good to see these very people: my dear, pretty and talented Veacearina (and her friend, Katherine) though not enough time and now I'm strategizing a quick long weekend and some Brooklyn-time and some Prabhakar and Cynthia time (who were off to Hawaii) and a whole day wandering Chinatown and another for the Village and another and so on...
Also, I finally met Laura--friend of Steve--whom I'd heard about for years.
And Steve, sigh...too, too long it had been and his reading was explosive, riveting, smart and funny. Aaron Smith read the poems I know him for and have always enjoyed and some wild, hilarious, edgy, new stuff. All this after the most poetic of introductions by the inimitable and lovely Glenn Raucher.
Christine Kronis from my Cincinnati workshop was there, having moved to NY and seeing the advertisement for my reading.
Ah, Stevanies-Two, 2/3 of the fiestiest friends I have (Lizzie, you know you have your sash, too,)I miss you guys something atrocious already.

What the Heart's Chambers Should Contain

the work of lush bella, the toystore and yumminess of it.

WeSt SiDe Y ReAdiNg!

Come see us read. Come see us read. I will try to coerce a certain leading emuist to do a guest stint for a poem or two.

You will hear Aaron Blue on Blue Ground Smith!
You will hear Steve Blind Date with Cavafy Fellner!

You will be Intagliod but blue no more!

Bird, Bird, This One's For You

One of my three blog-watchers complains there's too much posey, not enough narcissism, so I dedicate today's post to my fellow half-hearted Patriots fan (or anyone who's offended Philly less than NY).

As for NY--greetings! I hope you're enjoying your perfect little prompt passes. I can't decide whether to register this very second or never again. I am still pouting.

I big-apple soon enough and with the prettiest cargo in tow. Free lodging, upper east side and two of my boys for a slumber party. (Not as fun or twice as fun as it sounds, depending on who you ask.)

Steve Fellner and I finally celebrate that long overdue set of victories. Steve writes funny, brilliant, weird and utterly captivating poems. His images are the bright side of bizarre and make my brain sparkle (much like the dialogue of a certain Dr. Bird--which is, believe it or not, a real species.)

I must be strategic with the limited city-time, and yet, one longs for some Barnes and Noble overlooking the park time. One longs for some Saturday morning farmer's market, some wicked theatre and wickeder food.

This week brings work and more work, fiction sent out and fiction formatted. (A bit more novel.) I just recently heard from one of my favorite fictionistas: Alicia and her work is so gorgeous and true that it shames me. With luck, she'll motivate me to finish this book.

Saturday stretches out lazily and there's too much to do before we Superbowl and Sunday. Go New England or whatever. (You're no NBA.)

We live for the dance, after all, isn't that right, Bird?

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.

No, let me make this clear

EMUseum, a chapbook by Caleb Adler and Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis will be published in Fall 2009 by Dancing Girl Press (a press I adore.)

Flightless, indeed. This bird soars.

I believe we will bringing some emu t-shirts to AWP. I know we'll be wearing some. Let us know if you'd like to help celebrate with your own emu haiku t-shirt. Better still, why not head on over to Hot Emu Luv and write that poem you've been meaning to write--you know you want to. It will be like a champagne toast to our Emuseum.

EMUSEUMEMUSEUMEMUSEUMEMUSEUM

Oh Birds, word has it that Dancing Girl Press is going to publish our chapbook!!!

Not sad

though all these poems seem to be. But they are so pretty, too. A good week full of smart chicks-of-verse. Yesterday was a long, wonderful coffee meeting with a someone so sharp and talented. Today, an interview that made it so I could hear Jillian and Kristi discuss their work. And soon poems co-written with Chicky. From the fishouse I read alongside my favorite of all birds. I love it when language is a blizzard I walk all the way home through.


Soul Train
Ben Doyle

Don Cornelius, we wish there were a channel
with nothing but crying or someplace like
Sesame Street but where they tear the words
to flour & every puppet has his arm up a man.

I wish there were a fog pillar here that could
levitate the remote in a translucent purple.
It would be nice to awaken one morning with
“What are all these white people doing in my house?”

Don Cornelius, the people assert themselves
into a scrupulous derangement, arranged
fisheyed around our lens, which sits in this den,
as I sit, toe to throat, smothered in comforter.

For something viral, Don, has happened its way
into my left lung. Something very sexy is
bound to occur in your coalcar, what with
the buttock bloom & thrusts touching.

I would touch myself but I’m afraid. A bandage
Would have to be broken. Could I keep these
Combos down? They made fine fire goggles after
I sucked them. I could see the fire.

Sometimes the whole hospital blistered,
these weren’t dancing circumstances.
Sometimes ice died, died in plastic
pouches on my painted chest. Oftentimes

A train could be understood as trembling
the readout. Must be nice, my friend, to have only
to unlatch the windows & doors, swipe them open,
blow out each ash from your tubular home.



Runaway
by Kenneth Rexroth

There are sparkles of rain on the bright
Hair over your forehead;
Your eyes are wet and your lips
Wet and cold, your cheek rigid with cold.
Why have you stayed
Away so long, why have you only
Come to me late at night
After walking for hours in wind and rain?
Take off your dress and stockings;
Sit in the deep chair before the fire.
I will warm your feet in my hands;
I will warm your breasts and thighs with kisses.
I wish I could build a fire
In you that would never go out.
I wish I could be sure that deep in you
Was a magnet to draw you always home.

APOLOGIA
The homework swallowed the dog
and I left my burdened wallet
in my other life, in my other car,
which is a Soyuz, Russian
in only the ways that matter.
And what those ways are,
well, I forget. It is a good thing
the constellation of atoms
you recognize as me
has not yet sought to diverge,
to divorce itself
from this idea I keep having
about being alive. That:
it’s lucky my lungs fill up with air
each morning like little
buckets brought to the pebbled rim of the river
by a girl who thinks
about devotion
the slow way back to everyone,
to endless thirst.
And that girl is you,
though you’ll bristle
at the very notion,
and rightly so:
what sense does it make to speak
of heartbreak
for even a moment
in this world cluttered as it is with warehouses
of cheap peanut butter,
skinned with little puddles of oil,
what sense does it make
to ask you
why I am constantly dreaming I’m late
to your life? What sense
is there anywhere?
In what tree sings the bird
to which I spent all spring
teaching it the mimicry
of your sweet laugh,
but not the burr of your anger,
like a stone,
like a blade,
and not the worried ways of your tired voice.
It’s late again
and the moon
teaches me stealth
and borrowed light
and lowered gravity
and before sleep floats me afar on its dreamless river,
let me say
my apologies
like a prayer,
to you,
let me miss you as long as I’m alive.


Paul Guest (of course)

Feasting on Elegies

Sarah Hannah's Inflorescence finally arrived and I have been reading it greedily. Today at the bookstore while waiting for a certain bird of inordinate loveliness to "not finish the whole novel" he began two nights ago at another bookstore, I read all of Mary Jo Bang's Elegy in one sitting. I love her work and while a lot of what I love about her work is there, including word play it is stark and there for the purpose of the kind of confusion and estrangement of living or trying to live in the aftermath of such unimaginable loss.

Chicken Soup for the Soul-Weary

Just what we needed here at IUB Headquarters: a cold. The job app. process itself being such a holiday, the "support system" of late being a bit of an oxymoronic concept and now this. So, it's progresso chicken and wild rice soup which, is actually, after some hot curry madras powder and a squeeze of lime, pretty tasty and not unhealthy. Which is more than can be said for me.
Have a great weekend, my rosy-cheeked friends.

I All But Attacked Ilya Kaminsky

at AWP but read him and understand why. When I read this poem I had been writing a poem about Nadezhda M. and the idea of her keeping Osip through his words all memorized inside her. Reading Ilya K. elucidated that poem for me in certain ways.

The Crush

I can never seem to get over.

And yes, just give me the boring work of cv and cover letter and job applications to do and all I'll want to do is gather poems and dream of the day when I get to write some again.

Carmen de Boheme

SINUOUSLY winding through the room
On smokey tongues of sweetened cigarettes, --
Plaintive yet proud the cello tones resume
The andante of smooth hopes and lost regrets.

Bright peacocks drink from flame-pots by the wall,
Just as absinthe-sipping women shiver through
With shimmering blue from the bowl in Circe's hall.
Their brown eyes blacken, and the blue drop hue.

The andante quivers with crescendo's start,
And dies on fire's birth in each man's heart.
The tapestry betrays a finger through
The slit, soft-pulling; -- -- -- and music follows cue.

There is a sweep, -- a shattering, -- a choir
Disquieting of barbarous fantasy.
The pulse is in the ears, the heart is higher,
And stretches up through mortal eyes to see.

Carmen! Akimbo arms and smouldering eyes; --
Carmen! Bestirring hope and lipping eyes; --
Carmen whirls, and music swirls and dips.
"Carmen!," comes awed from wine-hot lips.

Finale leaves in silence to replume
Bent wings, and Carmen with her flaunts through the gloom
Of whispering tapestry, brown with old fringe: --
The winers leave too, and the small lamps twinge.

Morning: and through the foggy city gate
A gypsy wagon wiggles, striving straight.
And some dream still of Carmen's mystic face, --
Yellow, pallid, like ancient lace.

Hart Crane

Saint George

By this I mean my Daddy. So humble he would hate that he's titled so. But saintly is a vantage point and from where I sit, no finer boy have I known. Late last night my dear father flew back from Crete. It's strange how distance feels more distant even if you're already far away from someone. For example, someone dear to me moved further away than he lived before and I felt the extra miles and they stung. And when the PrettyBird travels from one locale from another, if Locale A was closer and Locale B further away, when he calls from between airports, I feel lonely again as if I just saw him off at the airport and that little umbrella opens in my chest. Sometimes it rains on the drive home or the radio plays nothing but songs about too far away. But today, George is back where he belongs and Mamacat and he have dined together this morning and they are who I want to be when I grow up.

Look for some emu action and other versings at From the Fishouse. Thank you to Eliot K. Wilson for the connection. Even in the worst weathers me and mine cheer each other on and nothing and no one can change that. ...the rest is dross.

All Sparked with Awe

Factory of Souls

It takes just two people to bring the world
to ruin. So goes the history of love.
At the end of the day we tally the casualties
of war, victory for the one who gets wounded

the least. You say it's time for a change
but I don't know to what end, change being
just the skin of some incandescent creature
whose grotesque beauty is what we adore,

whom some people call love, whom we
venerate because it consumes us, morsels
for its huge soul. My people say, don't look
or you'll go blind. You say the end was always

just around the bend. I say all we have
is unconditional surrender to the future.
So unreliable is the past that I feel compelled
to leave unmourned the blind, relentless loves

that may have scorched into our hearts
the way the saints accepted stigmata. My people say,
look back or lose your way. Or, walk backwards
if you can. So I found myself on a bus to New York City

to lose myself completely. Past Hunters Point
we hit the factory of souls - a thousand tombstones
whose subterranean chambers manufactured
the silk-like smoke that we must feed to God.

I don't think the world's ever going to end.
I think it will go on and on, and we will
be as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar, our lives
not worth a footnote, our grand schemes

no more than insidious whispers, all memory
shifting like the continental plates. I should grieve
for time misspent, love returned to sender,
ambitions gone awry. But bards more sage than I

have seen the folly of our loss - and have sung
more dirges than I can bear. In the future,
perhaps all science will finally come around;
genetic engineering, I hear, will be all the rage,

and we will be a super race in a world
infallibly perfected, where trains run on time,
love never dies, and hope can be purchased
by the pound. They call it "immortalization

of the cell lines." We will choose what will survive.
Our destiny made lucid, we will find the world
contemplating itself, like the young god
who held his breath and found Narcissus,

the beautiful rapt face all sparked with awe,
one hand about to touch the pool,
his body lurched towards that marvelous
reflection. I suppose the human race

has always felt compelled to desensitize
its failures. My people say, to go unnoticed,
you play dead. Or something. I myself
(and here is the part where even this poem

stops in its tracks to contemplate that pool)
may have chosen to forget a face, a name,
some cruel word uttered carelessly, but not,
after some reflection, intending any pain.

And many others may have chosen to forget me.
It works both ways. My people say, regret
is the final emotion. It's what you see
when you look back. It's what's no longer there.

Eric Gamalinda

Happy Halloween Veacey-Veace

And let us never tell of the way the phone's programmed ring shook your features into a weary dismay. Or the way we watched you turn back the sheets each of those fall nights and listened, Youngman, as you whispered into the receiver of your isolation. Youngman, solitary, diminished city. Youngman who wears sackcloth to the market to cover the silkworms as they spin histories wholecloth in the secret (but we know it) corner of his soul. Youngman, we cannot provide erotica for your household anymore. Hold on, Youngman, your sinister dealings stay secreted-away on the inside of our heavy spirits. (So many miles from where anyone who knows you now believes you really reside.) We are sorry to see you this way. Sorry to see you go. Buck up, Youngman, the town's pyromaniacs live for fangs of fire. A garden of witchy light so shiny. Even the heat so welcome in the tepid life of Youngmen and their flax-colored days. Reel ahead, Youngman, the tomorrows to which the flash and flame have petered out. Your home cinders. Every hour ash. There is no revolution afoot. Stumble on.

---A.P. The Day the Babies...

Bearily I Say to You

Takeoff

Mistaken, taken for
granted: her hips rose, rose
hips. The top note, that initial overpowering
scent can be mistaken
before it fades into the heart
note, which is the final,
true scent that lingers when the purple
finches have flown away. Granted: a song is a verbal
fence, and so Delilah sings Mon coeur
s'ouvre à to voix, My heart opens
at your voice, but then must cut
Samson's hair because he prefers
God to her, Miss Taken
for Granted. In Fra Angelico's painting, even the flames
of cypress flare up
along the road where the gold-haloed
heads of the martyred Saints Cosme and Damien
roll like rocks with notes
bound over their eyes. It is a splash
of black in a sunny landscape,
van Gogh said of the cypress,
but it is one of the most interesting
black notes, and the most difficult
to hit off that I can
imagine. Mistaken for granite—the skyline
of San Gimignano fallen
on its side, lines grazing out
and back like the lines of
this poem, like cows coming
home, where Italo Svevo swore
to his new wife, Livia: I will love you
forever, as far as the fin de siècle
will allow. He meant to be
diagonal like agony, to outlast
the flat leaves of the hollyhock, which hasten
to lace. Mistaken: the closed burgundy
whorls of the hibiscus fallen
on the path, soft and damp
as the bodies of birds. "Chicken in half-
mourning," poulet demi-deuil, has so many black
truffle slices slid under
its skin that it appears to be
wearing black, just as the pearl-grey
waves of moiré in the Venetian lagoon
could be the waves
of the brain: Touch your hair
if you re going to the Ridotto. Nod
or shake your head
to tell me whether you plan to
go to the piazza, Venetian
lovers once wrote in secret
notes that from the air
could be mistaken
for ruins along the canal where
they met: runes arching their backs
against the sea. Your plane taxis
out to the runway; in a moment it will
lift as you have so many times
beneath me.

Angie Estes

Happy Most-Belated Birthday Wishes to Katherine

10-4 Good Buddy...

Poem Written at Morning


A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.

Wallace Stevens

P & W This is YOUR Last Issue

Wondering if any my blogdom peeps are experiencing the same problem that I am with Poets and Writers and these constant requests to resubscribe? I love P & W like my cat, Schroedenger loves tunafish: something almost sacred to that passion. I have loved P & W before before-color which is in the pre-glossy days of flat paper and no distinct cover-stock paper to make pages and cover differ. But they are seeming shady to me. Anyone else having this problem?

Wishing for Waltzing-Matilda-Rain

It's drably Sunday. But it was gorgeous a bit ago. Dusk on Sundays feels so goodbye.
I have the kind of migraine that made women in front of Frigidaires cry.

Give me Bogart, if you will, or even 1959
and the last hours of a radioactive
Australia when Ava Gardner knows
she won’t see Gregory Peck
again,: It was nice, Dwight Lionel.
It was everything. Then, of course, the kiss
beyond which he sinks into
a submarine tomb and offscreen Ava dies

Ah, I need a rainy day, all my work done, a blanket, a black cat, a tall drink of water of an emu, a fire in the fireplace and this old movie playing all afternoon...
Simone Muench, this was part of a poem I once started for you. Your chapbook is loveliness embodied (big surprise).
Miss you.

Sorry is the dollhead floating in the dirty puddle in the garden where what Goldilocks planted sustains just-rightly. What a lukewarm broth gets spooned to his pretty mouth. Go fester, Youngman, where the neighborhood plants its nightblooming vines. Beware the traffic cop who pulls the sky overcast weekly. Beware of Youngman the weakly news on the doorstop. The Youngmens watch our address like wives watch for evidence. My mailbox is the coinbox to the humming horizon of their cheap vibrating bed. Certain pornographies ensue. Every ashen day, we tip our lusty ashen derby to you. So bored, boring, watching the Greyhound for the broken-down to pass through town. The dearly-gone-dreary and chased from our one lit room.

--Asher Paine from The Day the Babies Came Down

This Whiting Dude Knows a Thing or Two

CONGRATULATIONS Paul Guest, you talented, handsome devil, You!
& Cate Marvin whose poems I read when I had to gather them from various literary magazines, before there was even one amazing book, much less two. And who is reading here tonight, surely you mean to attend.

Note to Veace:
Yes, I do. I really want it. Also, malaria, leprosy, the mob after me, nuclear war, rape, overflooding toilets, the death of all cats everywhere, periwinkle blue, vanilla, silver rings and dark-haired persons all abolished, a lifetime of pot pies, a long kiss goodnight with George Bush (w/tongue, of course), vomit for breakfast, cat litter for lunch, plus that person's phone number... this is my wish list. I think Cate herself said it best: That particular fowl "could be living in a nest on the roof of my apt. and it would have no impact on me." Plus there are always prettier birds to behold in this world. But thanks for thinking of me. Next time, try flowers--even dead ones. ;-)


Later Kitties.

Teaching the Madness of the Jazz Age Tonight

"You told me that night you’d teach me to play. Well, I think love is all
there is or should be."

S. Fitzgerald from Tender is the Night

Just Looking Makes My Mouth Water

No, not Colin Farrell or Bobby Cannavale (sorry Chicky)


Smitten Kitchen, I am your love-slave.

Let's Hear it for the Fish

Intagliod Super-Likes Eliot Wilson and Eliot Wilson Likes Eavan Boland and so...
(Intagliod shows EKW some Medbh McGuckian and he passes along some Eavan. So when Poetry Daily was retiring this poem and when I read it, I had to post it.)
(For Eliot, Michael G. and Drusilla Adler)

House of Shadows. Home of Simile

One afternoon of summer rain
my hand skimmed a shelf and I found
an old florin. Ireland, 1950.

We say like or as and the world is
a fish minted in silver and alloy,

an outing for all the children,
an evening in the Sandford cinema,
a paper cone of lemonade crystals and

say it again so we can see
androgyny of angels, edges to a circle,
the way the body works against the possible—

and no one to tell us, now or ever,
why it ends, why
it always ends.

I am holding
two whole shillings of nothing,
observing its heaviness, its uselessness.

And how in the cool shadow of nowhere
a salmon leaps up to find a weir
it could not even know
was never there.

Eavan Boland
Poetry
October 2006


This next was given to me on a hard, hard Monday some years back. Michael Griffith, writer and human-extraordinaire sent this along on a most necessary day. In addition to its gorgeousness, it reminds me of an image I used in a poem of a round loaf of bread fallen into the harbor in Rhodes and the ecstatic silver chrysanthemum of sardines spinning it for all they were worth.

The Past
by Stephen Dunn

Herrings begin to glow just before they die,

never while alive. When I read this

I wanted to sit for a long time in the dark.

Nothing in nature is a metaphor.

Everything is. I thought both thoughts.

And knew inexactly why I felt sad.

Herrings dead and aglow--

I should have been properly amazed,

the way anyone looking at a star

would be, realizing it was years away,

untouchable. Yet there it is, shining.

On Lingering

Requiem of Autumn

The saddest of all falls is in your hair.
My autumn tumbles in the broken air.
I do not think they will catch me there.

Beyond the brook the bank is crumbling down.
The willow waggles like a crazy clown.
They came for you because you have a town.

I would not let you go, I asked the tree.
I did not let them take your hair from me.
This water flows into some kind of sea.

With all that summer and a spring to spare.

Chad Walsh

"I sat once again on the bench I'd been sitting on before. The sun was going down. And I have to say that the colors in the park were quite extraordinary--almost edible, one would have to say. The air was a kind of rose color, and the light which ran through it was a twinkling yellow.
What were we waiting for? The appearance of the Messiah? Was all this nothing? I was quite fed up with the search for perfection. And rather amazed by all that I had--the lemonade stand with its lemonade, the cafe with its irritable customers and staff, the carousel, the squirrels, the birds, the trees. I'm sorry, Howard, your favorite grove was cut down. But so much remains. This light, so beautiful and warm, was not cut down. The flowers at my feet with their petals that kiss my ankles like little lips, were not cut down. The trembling air and trembling sky were not cut down. My sympathy about the loss of your favorite grove is fading out at the end of the day. It said in the paper that there will be fireworks tonight above the carousel, and right nearby, a parade of young dogs, including some of the newest breeds, some for sale.
I sat on the bench for a very long time, lost--sunk deep--in the experience of unbelievable physical pleasure, maybe the greatest pleasure we can know on this earth--the sweet, ever-changing caress of the early evening breeze."
Wallace Shawn
The Designated Mourner

Doing the Two-Step (on three-toes)--Every Year Gets Sweeter

For child I am so glad I've found you
Although my arms have always been around you
Sweet bird although you did not see me I saw you

---E. Harris

September 30 Sitwells Cafe All-Star Line-Up

If you dig poetry (& really, how could you resist it?) Sitwells. Sunday. September 30. 7:30. (all strung-out on alliteration) is the place to be.

Consider the following:

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

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.

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.


--Kristi Maxwell*Evan Commander*Brett Price*Sophia Kartsonis*Caleb Adler*Lesley Jenike*Cynthia Arrieu-King*Joshua Butts*Erica Dawson*Jillian Weise*Matt Hart

At the Fruit Stand of My Dreams

your dreams are always in season.

Intaglio received a Rain Taxi review. This was on the "life list!" I love taxis of rain. I love reviews.

skinny boy, all bones no lies
your so miserable in the mornings
will you will wait up for me?
its sorted and I cant find my feet
and you’ve got lips I could spend a day with.

skinny boy, some where some prostitution.
some desire some doubt some dance.
they’re coming we see it’s through the back door,
and there you are on the fence
with those lips I could spend a day with.

when its done ill drink champagne to the lonely
lonely in me
monday, tuesday so lonely
wednesday, thursday only me
friday, saturday only me
here comes sunday…

Amy Millan

La Bella Luna

Check out another great review of this great book.

Before Sunset

Today I feel like gathering the fanciful things I love and putting them into one big post.
I won't though. I will say that I had a lovely low-key holiday full of coziness, good movies and a certain vampire bunny-cat. Just now, under good musical advisement, I am listening to M. Ward and loving esp. Poison Cup. Also, that I rode on a snow-white Stella scooter on Saturday and (silly with alliteration,) it was the first time I saw this city I live in the way someone sees someone seeing a city that he has really loved. (I imagine/hope I gave S.L.C. to people from that perspective.) I read an article somewhere about meaningful sex happening b/c someone loves the way you see (as opposed to fun but flimsy sex with those we love for the way they look). And thought it came near what is said in Before Sunset about really looking hard at someone and in that way, taking them in.

Celine: "I mean, I always feel like a freak because I'm never able to move on. You know. People just have an affaire, or even... entire relationships... They break up and they forget! They move on like they would have changed a brand of Cereals! I feel I was never able to forget anyone I've been with. Because each person have… you know, specific qualities. You can never replace anyone. What is lost is lost. That's why I'm very careful with getting involved, because... It hurts too much. Even getting laid. I actually don't do that… I will miss of the person the most mundane things. Like I'm obsessed with little things. Maybe I'm crazy, but... When I was a little girl, my mom told me that I was always late to school. One day she followed me to see why... I was looking at chestnuts falling from the trees, rolling on the sidewalk, or... ants, crossing the road...the way a leaf casts a shadow on a tree trunk... Little things. I think it's the same with people. I see in them little details,so specific to each other, that move me, and that I miss, and... will always miss. You can never replace anyone, because everyone is made of such beautiful specific details. Like I remember the way...your beard has a little bit of red in it. And how the sun was making it glow that...that morning, right before you left. I remember that "