Shark
In the thick dark I nose
toward the salt-smelling blood. It goes
swimming in all directions when I bite.
Above is the too-bright
where steel-fin moves from thin
to thick and back again.
It is the quickest swimmer I've seen.
The slowest blood stays close to sand, in the green-
tinted thin where the bottom stays lit.
Sometimes I get a taste of it.
Heather Hamilton!
from Verse Daily
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
As You Like It
Saturday is Shakespeare in the Park and Friday a night picnic (as Clementine would say "they're different: night picnics" as midnight breakfast tastes different (even if the same food exactly) because it is midnight breakfast.
O My Darling O My Darling
This is the day we met...Wow, how odd, I'm drawn to someone's back...
I don't ever know what to say.
I'm Clementine.
Can I borrow a piece of your chicken?
Then you just took it, without waiting for an answer.
It was so intimate, like we were already lovers...
I think your name is magical.
This is it, Joel,it's gonna be gone soon.
I know.
What do we do?
Enjoy it.
And in real life...
In real life we rarely know to enjoy it, rarely know it will be gone soon, too soon always, no matter how long, if it matters at all, it's too soon.
Tonight is a lonely thing, sniffing around every beach in winter I miss and I've missed. I'm restless, want to slip this town, this skin, this fading summer.
This movie always makes me hungry for places and people and time.
I don't ever know what to say.
I'm Clementine.
Can I borrow a piece of your chicken?
Then you just took it, without waiting for an answer.
It was so intimate, like we were already lovers...
I think your name is magical.
This is it, Joel,it's gonna be gone soon.
I know.
What do we do?
Enjoy it.
And in real life...
In real life we rarely know to enjoy it, rarely know it will be gone soon, too soon always, no matter how long, if it matters at all, it's too soon.
Tonight is a lonely thing, sniffing around every beach in winter I miss and I've missed. I'm restless, want to slip this town, this skin, this fading summer.
This movie always makes me hungry for places and people and time.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Congratulations to Stephanie Rogers!
Our beloved Steph has once again dazzled the masses with her genius.
No news to me that she is (one of) the Best New Poets of 2009 but it needs to recognized, anthologized, known that her poems are well, they're greased lightning.
Look for her here
& here
& soon to be everywhere and I would like credit for saying that Steph Rogers is no new genius in my book. No, I have known because I do know amazing when I see it, and like these Johnnycomelately Best New Poets peeps, I know what to do it when I see it, which is why Ms. Steph is worth all the bullshit she can dish up and believe me when I say to you, this girl can dish, can she ever dish.
But I am lucky to know her and lucky to read her here first. So there.
No news to me that she is (one of) the Best New Poets of 2009 but it needs to recognized, anthologized, known that her poems are well, they're greased lightning.
Look for her here
& here
& soon to be everywhere and I would like credit for saying that Steph Rogers is no new genius in my book. No, I have known because I do know amazing when I see it, and like these Johnnycomelately Best New Poets peeps, I know what to do it when I see it, which is why Ms. Steph is worth all the bullshit she can dish up and believe me when I say to you, this girl can dish, can she ever dish.
But I am lucky to know her and lucky to read her here first. So there.
Friday, August 07, 2009
Found this and had to take the silly putty of my tongue and lift it
Your tongue is shaped how lizards change color and I like to hear you read my words and I don't care who else you've touched and I don't care that the fondness handcuffs me and If you were a pair of pants that were too large I would gain weight in the winter time and wear you out and If you were a caged locker room and I was a young animal in young fur I'd get naked inside of you and I wouldn't be ashamed to hard wire your vestibular bulbs to my brainstorms or drill my lightning in to you to power you and lay my impressions across your forehead and If you were a weather balloon I'd bellow a thunder you could understand from end to end and Maybe I'd let you float through my violence but All this talk makes me want a massage and marijuana and I want to know the way around it and It makes me want to gum the the blood of my fat mind with your corn starch because You love corn and when I claw my way north like winter and hide on the surface of your gloves our Sleep is six of our ten commandments for drinking the slow hours and never getting distracted by what's passing definition down the pue and up The dangerous powers that yield our crosswalk grind me against the pillow in your name and My fat mind is young and knows it and likes to be served too hot for consumption and Your daring coyness enthralls me like why do you stand there and Who put your legs like that and I'd eat without utensils if your cake body was at the wedding I attended and I'd abridge nothing to live the fat fantasy of barking and drooling and reading and Out the door you'd go with the sun shining through your gravy and It moves slow and mechanically like a pinwheel in a tar pit and it's beautiful and I want my face an inch from yours and I want the breath of every morning we've shared to be put in a spoon so that I can freebase it and Feed my fat heart little bubbles of air from your fat lungs But the iron eyelashes of our real lives stop us from really getting close enough to dig our fingertips in to each other but I don't mind ignoring that because it hurts much less than pretending like I don't care about you
©2009 ~lasagnabomb
©2009 ~lasagnabomb
Night at the Fair Once again the fair–but differing from the fair of the afternoon as a girl in the daytime differs from her radiant presentation of herself at night. The substance of the cardboard booths and plaster palaces was gone, the forms remained. Outlined in lights, these forms suggested things more mysterious and entrancing than themselves, and the people strolling along the network of little Broadways shared this quality, as their pale faces singly and in clusters broke the half darkness.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Not new-news but felt like indulging myself this blah-day
ELIOT KHALIL WILSON of Norfolk, Virginia
Winner of the ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
The Tailor of Al Hamdaniyah
Because he wore a suit and seemed
of high-value and would name no terrorists,
knowing none, they stripped and hooded the old man,
the village tailor, and hung him by his wrists
from a mulberry tree that grew by the river
The old man knew only thank you and please
in English which he said through the night
to the sound of the Tigris and the sound of the wind.
He hung from the tree, strange fruit, five days.
Piñata man or Muslim ham, the Americans called him
and burned his feet with their lighters
when he seemed to sleep
Five days it took for his brother to get word
and travel to Mosul and bring his release
but by then the hands of the tailor had ripened.
His hands had changed, like the fruit of the tree,
from white to red to withered black and past saving.
They carried him to the clinic and cut them off.
Nine hundred dollars they issued him,
to which he said neither thank you nor please.
Henri Cole on Eliot Khalil Wilson
There is something close to the vivid cruelty of an Hieronymus Bosch painting in some of the poems of Eliot Khalil Wilson, where we encounter a pilot dropping incendiary bombs, a gunner shooting children and dogs (but not women or birds—"Bad luck.... Even when they are dead, they remember."), a village tailor stripped and hooded, hung from a tree like a "Piñata Man," and a man thrown from a helicopter. Yet even while depicting Bosch-like experiences from the "Descent of Man into Hell," Khalil Wilson, in his unforgettable poems, deploys a voice that has the sympathetic beauty of candlelight and of singing in darkness.
Winner of the ROBERT H. WINNER MEMORIAL AWARD
The Tailor of Al Hamdaniyah
Because he wore a suit and seemed
of high-value and would name no terrorists,
knowing none, they stripped and hooded the old man,
the village tailor, and hung him by his wrists
from a mulberry tree that grew by the river
The old man knew only thank you and please
in English which he said through the night
to the sound of the Tigris and the sound of the wind.
He hung from the tree, strange fruit, five days.
Piñata man or Muslim ham, the Americans called him
and burned his feet with their lighters
when he seemed to sleep
Five days it took for his brother to get word
and travel to Mosul and bring his release
but by then the hands of the tailor had ripened.
His hands had changed, like the fruit of the tree,
from white to red to withered black and past saving.
They carried him to the clinic and cut them off.
Nine hundred dollars they issued him,
to which he said neither thank you nor please.
Henri Cole on Eliot Khalil Wilson
There is something close to the vivid cruelty of an Hieronymus Bosch painting in some of the poems of Eliot Khalil Wilson, where we encounter a pilot dropping incendiary bombs, a gunner shooting children and dogs (but not women or birds—"Bad luck.... Even when they are dead, they remember."), a village tailor stripped and hooded, hung from a tree like a "Piñata Man," and a man thrown from a helicopter. Yet even while depicting Bosch-like experiences from the "Descent of Man into Hell," Khalil Wilson, in his unforgettable poems, deploys a voice that has the sympathetic beauty of candlelight and of singing in darkness.
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Unburdening
by Octavio Quintanilla
I wait for you in a room
where the howls of dogs are mute.
Here, where there's no flight.
Where the clock gathers your eyelashes
with its tongue.
I wait for you without daybreak,
naked because everything is hunger,
thirsty because you have named everything.
I wait for you as your mother fills
my forehead with kisses. She discovers
my poverty and her tongue turns to foam
when she says I am lucky.
There's no such thing as luck.
There's waiting and this life
that never shuts up. It falls in love
with my blood.
Owns the cry that I swallow.
by Octavio Quintanilla
I wait for you in a room
where the howls of dogs are mute.
Here, where there's no flight.
Where the clock gathers your eyelashes
with its tongue.
I wait for you without daybreak,
naked because everything is hunger,
thirsty because you have named everything.
I wait for you as your mother fills
my forehead with kisses. She discovers
my poverty and her tongue turns to foam
when she says I am lucky.
There's no such thing as luck.
There's waiting and this life
that never shuts up. It falls in love
with my blood.
Owns the cry that I swallow.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Spider Lily Love
Talking to my buddy Kate today and thinking about this flower again, the sudden firework on a stem, like if flowers were a carnival treat, these would that: sprouting crazy, sputtering petals like sparklers off a green stick, the leafless stem that seems too thin to hold such a storm of petal.
The Velocity of Love
1. Particle Physics
On the scale we're now talking,
we know nothing is solid,
matter riddled with the fretwork
of subatomic tumult.
Even the smooth, gold bands
we've wrapped around our fingers
are turbulent inside
as the rings of Saturn,
that orbiting debris field
that was once a moon, broken up
by the tug and welter
of gravitational tides.
Even our bodies,
which we vowed in unison
to love for all our days,
are made up
on their deepest level
of a chaotic stew of particles
that don't answer to anything
but a conflicting set of rules:
to attract when apart
but once linked, repel.
2. The Uncertainty Principle
We know now that we can't know
the velocity of love
at the same time
that we pin down its position.
Measuring changes everything.
Being able to say
where love stands
alters its momentum.
No wonder it makes me nervous
to mark our seventh year together,
spreading out a blanket
under the bright dice of stars
where those that burn hottest
are the most prone to going out
in a supernova explosion,
Rigel in Orion
or Polaris in The Bear,
someday vanishing from the story
where we imagined them
linked forever.
No wonder it makes me nervous,
knowing what we know
about Schrödinger's cat
and how the stars,
in whose light
our love shimmers tonight,
may or may not
be already dead.
3. Towards a Unified Field
The universe may be made of music
after all, countless
miniscule strands of energy
vibrating and bombinating
in a subatomic hum
where we thought nothing was.
Unruly music,
lurking under the level
of the Planck scale:
the bosons and gluons,
the messenger particles
love can still set thrumming
in your body, mine,
the superpartners
with their incompatible spins
held moment-
to-moment
in a delicate symmetry.
Isn't that how we hold
each other these days,
the way breath
can be held,
or the strings
they're now saying
might make everything
unified
but aren't necessarily tied
to anything.
Copyright © 2009 Kate Gleason All rights reserved
1. Particle Physics
On the scale we're now talking,
we know nothing is solid,
matter riddled with the fretwork
of subatomic tumult.
Even the smooth, gold bands
we've wrapped around our fingers
are turbulent inside
as the rings of Saturn,
that orbiting debris field
that was once a moon, broken up
by the tug and welter
of gravitational tides.
Even our bodies,
which we vowed in unison
to love for all our days,
are made up
on their deepest level
of a chaotic stew of particles
that don't answer to anything
but a conflicting set of rules:
to attract when apart
but once linked, repel.
2. The Uncertainty Principle
We know now that we can't know
the velocity of love
at the same time
that we pin down its position.
Measuring changes everything.
Being able to say
where love stands
alters its momentum.
No wonder it makes me nervous
to mark our seventh year together,
spreading out a blanket
under the bright dice of stars
where those that burn hottest
are the most prone to going out
in a supernova explosion,
Rigel in Orion
or Polaris in The Bear,
someday vanishing from the story
where we imagined them
linked forever.
No wonder it makes me nervous,
knowing what we know
about Schrödinger's cat
and how the stars,
in whose light
our love shimmers tonight,
may or may not
be already dead.
3. Towards a Unified Field
The universe may be made of music
after all, countless
miniscule strands of energy
vibrating and bombinating
in a subatomic hum
where we thought nothing was.
Unruly music,
lurking under the level
of the Planck scale:
the bosons and gluons,
the messenger particles
love can still set thrumming
in your body, mine,
the superpartners
with their incompatible spins
held moment-
to-moment
in a delicate symmetry.
Isn't that how we hold
each other these days,
the way breath
can be held,
or the strings
they're now saying
might make everything
unified
but aren't necessarily tied
to anything.
Copyright © 2009 Kate Gleason All rights reserved
Delivering Eggs to the Girls' Dorm
For me it was the cherry blossoms flooding
Olive Street and softening the dawn,
the windows flung open in a yawn,
billowing curtains pregnant with the breeze,
the sounds of Procul Harum entering the air,
and fifty girls rising in their underwear.
O lost love. My girl and I had just split up.
The leaves of chestnut trees were rinsed in black,
the wind moaned grief, the moon was on the rack.
Humped over, stacking egg-crates in my Ford,
I was Charles Laughton ringing bells at Notre Dame--
spurned, wounded, but still in love with Sheila Baum.
Arriving at the gates of paradise,
I rang the service bell to wait on
Mrs. Cornish in her saintly apron
fumbling at the door, and the raucous gush
of female voices when she opened it. The flour
in her beard announced the darkness of the hour:
You're late. The hiss of bacon, pancake batter
as it kissed the grill, were a swarm of snakes to warn
the innocent away. Inside were virgins born,
like Sheila Baum, to stay that way. Outside
stood the egg man, despairing in his oval fate:
fifty girls staring, eggless, at an empty plate.
They may still be staring there. For emptiness
became my theme, sweeping eggshells
from my car, driving empty streets, fall's
cherry trees as bare as dormitory walls
washed by September rains. And the bells of Notre Dame
were as still as the broken shell of my dream of Sheila Baum.
B.H. Fairchild (as gracious & authentic as he is talented--reminds me of my favorite, living poet...)
For me it was the cherry blossoms flooding
Olive Street and softening the dawn,
the windows flung open in a yawn,
billowing curtains pregnant with the breeze,
the sounds of Procul Harum entering the air,
and fifty girls rising in their underwear.
O lost love. My girl and I had just split up.
The leaves of chestnut trees were rinsed in black,
the wind moaned grief, the moon was on the rack.
Humped over, stacking egg-crates in my Ford,
I was Charles Laughton ringing bells at Notre Dame--
spurned, wounded, but still in love with Sheila Baum.
Arriving at the gates of paradise,
I rang the service bell to wait on
Mrs. Cornish in her saintly apron
fumbling at the door, and the raucous gush
of female voices when she opened it. The flour
in her beard announced the darkness of the hour:
You're late. The hiss of bacon, pancake batter
as it kissed the grill, were a swarm of snakes to warn
the innocent away. Inside were virgins born,
like Sheila Baum, to stay that way. Outside
stood the egg man, despairing in his oval fate:
fifty girls staring, eggless, at an empty plate.
They may still be staring there. For emptiness
became my theme, sweeping eggshells
from my car, driving empty streets, fall's
cherry trees as bare as dormitory walls
washed by September rains. And the bells of Notre Dame
were as still as the broken shell of my dream of Sheila Baum.
B.H. Fairchild (as gracious & authentic as he is talented--reminds me of my favorite, living poet...)
From Bear 2 Bear
The More Loving One
W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
------------------
W.H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
------------------
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
Feeling all Tagoreish today. Feeling like true-profundity and outside my whiny world-view.
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes. (what a delicious thing to say!)
While God waits for his temple to be built of love, men bring stones.
(this quote made me want to dish up some Tagore and this quote might be my answer as to how I feel about religion.)
It's Thursday. I am lunching. I am click-clicking down the street in high-heeled sandals and a simple cotton black dress. I have written a poem about New York. I am planning a trip somewhere soon. I am living anyway or in spite or like a John Cage song finds a way to route its river both to and from any sea, it's all the same, going with or fighting gravity is doing something. Anything but stasis, says she.
If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars.
My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes. (what a delicious thing to say!)
While God waits for his temple to be built of love, men bring stones.
(this quote made me want to dish up some Tagore and this quote might be my answer as to how I feel about religion.)
It's Thursday. I am lunching. I am click-clicking down the street in high-heeled sandals and a simple cotton black dress. I have written a poem about New York. I am planning a trip somewhere soon. I am living anyway or in spite or like a John Cage song finds a way to route its river both to and from any sea, it's all the same, going with or fighting gravity is doing something. Anything but stasis, says she.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Never about Birdcages
just houses, a place to nest, rest, and so on.
This post will make sense to nearly no one, it's part of an ongoing discussion I am having with myself and with a person or two experiencing the cruelty of doubt, so bear with me or skip this one, it isn't all that, I assure you. For yes, I have been known to see facts with flaws to my seeing, not deliberate, just human frailty at work or play there. I have been known to doubt where I walk or stand if the ground was pulled out from under me. I have been known to be flawed but never to make those that I love feel doubt about that. It might have been good for them or me at times but I could not bear to see their suffering. Which brings me to our talk over shades of coral, red, salmon and an indigo backdrop, a windmill and a spider lily, so much vivid and so much blue.
Friend, I am beginning to think that caring is really at least that which makes it so that it pains someone to know that we are hurting. That seems like a minor requirement, the kind of thing that one cannot let slide. It is the middle of the night again.
This post will make sense to nearly no one, it's part of an ongoing discussion I am having with myself and with a person or two experiencing the cruelty of doubt, so bear with me or skip this one, it isn't all that, I assure you. For yes, I have been known to see facts with flaws to my seeing, not deliberate, just human frailty at work or play there. I have been known to doubt where I walk or stand if the ground was pulled out from under me. I have been known to be flawed but never to make those that I love feel doubt about that. It might have been good for them or me at times but I could not bear to see their suffering. Which brings me to our talk over shades of coral, red, salmon and an indigo backdrop, a windmill and a spider lily, so much vivid and so much blue.
Friend, I am beginning to think that caring is really at least that which makes it so that it pains someone to know that we are hurting. That seems like a minor requirement, the kind of thing that one cannot let slide. It is the middle of the night again.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Copied this info. from L-Bo's blog--thanks for the heads-up. This poem must be read. A jewel.
The Barricade
François Couperin must have loved some girl
and known how to argue, how to twine fingers
in a dance—how one idea will break onto another
like waves that rear and kneel, how the sea's curls must rise
in time to the moon, how a girl can kiss back.
This is what you hear in music that turns
with the steadiness of a merry-go-round,
the ornate horses ready to burst from their glass
bodies and race each other across a hill
in their real shapes—they are that excited,
ready to bolt except for this composition
the composer called a "musical barricade,"
this maze with turnings through a trimmed
suspense: the coy vistas of old boxwood,
this fond and winding argument designed to hold
a loved one fast and keep those horses,
those good horses, from galloping away.
LaWanda Walters
The Georgia Review
The Barricade
François Couperin must have loved some girl
and known how to argue, how to twine fingers
in a dance—how one idea will break onto another
like waves that rear and kneel, how the sea's curls must rise
in time to the moon, how a girl can kiss back.
This is what you hear in music that turns
with the steadiness of a merry-go-round,
the ornate horses ready to burst from their glass
bodies and race each other across a hill
in their real shapes—they are that excited,
ready to bolt except for this composition
the composer called a "musical barricade,"
this maze with turnings through a trimmed
suspense: the coy vistas of old boxwood,
this fond and winding argument designed to hold
a loved one fast and keep those horses,
those good horses, from galloping away.
LaWanda Walters
The Georgia Review
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Brass Knuckle Belt Buckle
for KAR
Because one never knows when
brass knuckles are called-for
and so like a good boy scout
one prepares for brass knuckle
weather and the way pants
must be disciplined into staying
on the body. Not so with love, Friend.
Or so I thought, I said over chocolate
ice cream and coffee that we'd ordered
at a place one goes to eat cucumber
cayenne yogurt, Thai chili peanut ice cream,
berry bergamot or goats milk lingonberry.
A shop about novelty, fleeting sweetnesses
various, while we, two devotees who ordered
for loyalty off the menu and pondered
the fickleness of love, the way someone
walks out the door in figurative brass knuckles
and someone waits to feel the blows and that it
should only be summer frozen on a stick, a plan
to build birdhouses, to find music in the deliberate
songlessness of certain songbooks, a way to fly north
and not worry at which weapons get declared, stored
and which should be worn.
Because one never knows when
brass knuckles are called-for
and so like a good boy scout
one prepares for brass knuckle
weather and the way pants
must be disciplined into staying
on the body. Not so with love, Friend.
Or so I thought, I said over chocolate
ice cream and coffee that we'd ordered
at a place one goes to eat cucumber
cayenne yogurt, Thai chili peanut ice cream,
berry bergamot or goats milk lingonberry.
A shop about novelty, fleeting sweetnesses
various, while we, two devotees who ordered
for loyalty off the menu and pondered
the fickleness of love, the way someone
walks out the door in figurative brass knuckles
and someone waits to feel the blows and that it
should only be summer frozen on a stick, a plan
to build birdhouses, to find music in the deliberate
songlessness of certain songbooks, a way to fly north
and not worry at which weapons get declared, stored
and which should be worn.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
July has always been
heavy with sorrow or the sensuous. Simone Muench's work reminds me of both and their love-children various are what I turn to when I want to think about how luscious any single taste of language can be. From her upcoming collection, Orange Crush, I offer a tease:
Orange Girl Suite
1:
|Young women carrying baskets of oranges used to stand near the stage in London theatres and sell oranges at sixpence apiece and themselves for little more|
between dresses we came.
between naked and nothing
we slipped into the delirious
coils of perfected ears,
pear dust on our skin
sarsparilla sounding our
fizzied song in sailor mouths.
we were translated by churchwomen
who placed umlauts over our words.
when we recovered, we were sold
in beautiful clothes, sent sailing into the gulf
where the moon pitched
its lemon-lateness over the celluloid
slickness of sea. we were movie stars
who never entered the frame.
we were green and gone
lisping "o" words in the air:
ode, odalisque, obituary.
Orange Girl Cast
1: the fever
(starring kristy b)
Sweet Kristy of the culvert, the ankle turn, the verb imperfect, and sailors' notebooks. In this metropolis of binoculars and chicken bones, in this city black with chicken-wire alchemists and bloody gutters, she feigns a fever in her red brassiere, her lavender dress lilting across headlights of chrome sedans: skin livid-exquisite with light bulbs and batteries beneath sinister-shouldered men, zombie drunk from fermented peaches and her silk stocking smell. Sweet Kristy of the corset, born of Anne Boleyn and a bird collector, born of alum and blindfolds, born to unzip men's breath, their clamorous wrists with an alphabet on her breast, a switchblade pinned to her taffeta thigh. Where are you leading with your eyelets and hooks, catching men with clothespins and rain in the perfect sphere of your dance hall mouth.
4: the train track
(starring mary b)
Train track flutter girl; coriander lips and Prohibition ale. That empty mouth like a bottle on a man's neck. Marabou soft, doe's muzzle on a pomegranate split, ultraviolet. You might have to rid yourself of all the boys, mostly rapscallions. How they feel under hands: red fish, big branches caught in your rain-rinsed hair, river tresses. For your ankle, a thread of nine carat bone. While the crossbuck sign bells with danger, citronella girls smoke Parliaments with a felon; your campfire jaw, a kerosene swoon.
Orange Girl Suite
1:
|Young women carrying baskets of oranges used to stand near the stage in London theatres and sell oranges at sixpence apiece and themselves for little more|
between dresses we came.
between naked and nothing
we slipped into the delirious
coils of perfected ears,
pear dust on our skin
sarsparilla sounding our
fizzied song in sailor mouths.
we were translated by churchwomen
who placed umlauts over our words.
when we recovered, we were sold
in beautiful clothes, sent sailing into the gulf
where the moon pitched
its lemon-lateness over the celluloid
slickness of sea. we were movie stars
who never entered the frame.
we were green and gone
lisping "o" words in the air:
ode, odalisque, obituary.
Orange Girl Cast
1: the fever
(starring kristy b)
Sweet Kristy of the culvert, the ankle turn, the verb imperfect, and sailors' notebooks. In this metropolis of binoculars and chicken bones, in this city black with chicken-wire alchemists and bloody gutters, she feigns a fever in her red brassiere, her lavender dress lilting across headlights of chrome sedans: skin livid-exquisite with light bulbs and batteries beneath sinister-shouldered men, zombie drunk from fermented peaches and her silk stocking smell. Sweet Kristy of the corset, born of Anne Boleyn and a bird collector, born of alum and blindfolds, born to unzip men's breath, their clamorous wrists with an alphabet on her breast, a switchblade pinned to her taffeta thigh. Where are you leading with your eyelets and hooks, catching men with clothespins and rain in the perfect sphere of your dance hall mouth.
4: the train track
(starring mary b)
Train track flutter girl; coriander lips and Prohibition ale. That empty mouth like a bottle on a man's neck. Marabou soft, doe's muzzle on a pomegranate split, ultraviolet. You might have to rid yourself of all the boys, mostly rapscallions. How they feel under hands: red fish, big branches caught in your rain-rinsed hair, river tresses. For your ankle, a thread of nine carat bone. While the crossbuck sign bells with danger, citronella girls smoke Parliaments with a felon; your campfire jaw, a kerosene swoon.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Bliss Bliss Bliss
That's all. What else is there to say about that? Except, for now, world, I thank thee.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Fireworks Galore
Have not had a happier fourth ever. Lemon meringue cupcakes and sweet company and King of Hearts (a movie I'd never heard of and adored.)
July, July, a month that owed me a bunch of redemption, I high five thee.
July, July, a month that owed me a bunch of redemption, I high five thee.
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