January 2012
48 posts
2 tags
Penultimate
Death overtakes genital warts, but only by a splash. After that it’s rapists, scorpions, and loss of virtue. Talking about my father’s death, not because I’m hurt but because the more I talk the more likely it is someone will notice I don’t really miss him, I just miss someone else looking out for me.
Not heights so much as vertigo, then crowds with no bathroom, hard...
Smooch and Then Some
(or, as I affectionately refer to this essay in my head, “The Girl Scout’s Guide to Threesomes.” Also written for a memoir workshop in the fall)
Adrian and I got to know each other in a short story seminar our first semester at Pratt. We spent fifteen weeks writing about our fierce parents, the cities from which we had traveled. At the end of term, the class had a reading at a...
Taps
Here it is again—that poets’ old favorite, the onion, returning to limp a last time across the battlefield of one woman’s page. I regret it, but it is necessary
because no other has what the onion does: Unassailable structure, despite a thousand ready methods to its obliteration. The destruction of layers only preempts the existence of more. The knife is not its enemy. Its efforts are too easily...
2 tags
why won't someone pay me to recite poems I've...
Loving you less than life by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Nude Descending A Staircase by X.J. Kennedy
The “holy palmers’ kiss” dialogue sonnet between Romeo and Juliet
The Russian by Robert Bly
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll if I brushed up on it a bit
hire me hire me hire me
She cannot be a real woman
This was a personal essay I wrote originally for my food blog over the summer and was re-worked for a memoir workshop last fall.
I take inventory of my life in the apartment: A second-floor space in an A-frame that was beautiful but beginning to sag from the inside. A rent of almost a thousand dollars per month, supposed to be split between two people, but my roommate left to live in California...
Pitch
I fear for us: the women who talk in the immediate moments following sex, as though the act has silently settled some two-bodied question, who begin making plans for our presumed futures, now cast in a cinematic new mold by the creature below or beside us, the phantom with whom we fled daylight.
Even after several nights or minutes or months of it. Lulled as we are, noble as we are to keep being...
Body of Christ
Three words millions lazily drawl in the course of their otherwise-occupied days. I watch them and count how few actually picture that tender skin aged so briefly before it ripped itself open and invited them, a pack of unsympathetic strangers, to enter paradise by a short walk through all of its wounds.
No matter the master of its mind, a body at thirty-three rejects for a bedmate death, and...
“Did it ever occur to you that what you call insecure, I call not takin’...”
– Garth Ennis, from Preacher
“I remember my hand moving to touch a shoulder but not the moment of contact, and...”
– Brenda Miller
Words I use too much
Depending on the context conspiring or conspiracy, usually in a positive light, like two people pitching a tent in their own bedroom just to have somewhere to put their heads closer together, inhabit where live would do just as well, altar, not like change but in a blood-of-the-lamb edited-for-PBS kind of way,
He says she says like after a decade of poems I still can’t let a...
i love you lily herman
it was so important to me that he used to say it that way—with my full name—because it implicated everything of me. Between those two names exists a legion of good and bad qualities: A lot of affection, kindness, compassion, and conviviality, but also fear, promiscuity, and selfishness, vulgarity and indiscretion. My stomach when it was flat and when it was rounder. My hair long and...
“For you beautiful ones my mind
is unchangeable.”
– Sappho
THE KING MUST DIE
Trying to find information about the songs my family sung when I was growing up. Thus far, I know that “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is actually a William Butler Yeats poem, “Drunken Sailor” is a sea shanty originally sung to accompany tasks on board a ship that “required a bright walking pace,” and “Billy Barlow” was originally called “Cutty...
“Trust in God but tie up your camel.”
– Arab proverb (via remorsecode)
“Call on God, but row away from the rocks.” —Hunter S. Thompson
“For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the...”
– Virginia Woolf, Orlando
The Permanent Collection
for Frank O’Hara Frank was from Baltimore and knew too there’s no gold mine in every city so sometimes you have to find your poems in the street, like any other Catholic picking up God asking him where he’s headed and telling him to throw his gear in the backseat.
The work of it is being watched, your mind a sweatshop overseer conspiring to see that you finish out what you came...
“The third stage of drunkenness is drowning.”
– William Shakespeare
“It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that...”
– G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy
“We will send word when we may, and some of us may yet meet at times, but I fear...”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King. How many times have I been in a room with friends and felt this?
There's the Rub
I can break it apart like this: Thirty-three over the course of eight years is twenty-seven more than my mother and seventeen more than my father. Ten of them were women and twenty-three were men. I drank at least a little before eighteen of them. Nineteen of them were one-night stands. Four of the men didn’t use condoms. Eleven of them were in threesomes. After a fashion, I loved...
In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children
It is simple if you look at it as the village did, brand us haphazardly as fallen: Their hands glued to our garden walls with the first mud since mud’s making, rabid eyes indicting us as stones finally condemn a body to its fate— What were they but a pack of voyeurs, hollowing a garret for themselves in our misery?
No one stepped apart from that mob to...
This one: face split through a peeled curtain the hair in your heart the lion I named for you growing to feeble fullness, the train across your body a body mine, a droning skin, dear in being by me, I was a sorry child the hour I asked if you were home, or home still there
“There is a land that resembles you, where all is beautiful, rich, restful, and...”
– Charles Baudelaire, from Invitation to the Voyage
“Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be...”
– Virginia Woolf, from Orlando
1 tag
SAM PLAY A RECORD
MANIA MONOLOGUE
BOYS CLUB
COMMANDMENTS
DISAGREE
CHARLEMAGNE
IMPERFECTION TO GOD
AXIOMS IN HEAVEN AND ADVICE
COMING TO
MANIA MONOLOGUE
I’m not ready to be ready for you. The dove is making coffee on the eaves and you are talking about the awning. How we lived there and you had cans of fruit for our hearts. The coffee the doves drink is not dark. I have made a lot to...
Desensitization in a few parts
When Ben married Hannah I flung my arms to him, felt the familiar squeeze on my kidneys and said, I’m so proud of you, which was one-part what I meant without wholly knowing or neglecting the rest, a year later splayed warmly on their floor
I think, Anybody who thinks they’re too good for you is not good enough, and that I’d lose a lot of weight if I only ate drunk, chewing becomes so hard it’s...
Letter to Albion
On St. Paul Street between Mt. Royal and Preston “I LOVE YOU” is sprayed across one sidewalk block in orange letters, it soothed me for months till mist turned to rain and someone not yet comfortable carved, “I love me too,” beneath it and I remind myself people have to make everything, even arrogance, their own
like how Alix must get confused making love to me in the shower when your name used...
2 tags
A thousand or a hundred thousand birds
for Bob Dylan and Bob Snyderman, but mostly Aradia
What we talked of first was a marriage: The same year your mattress disappeared each time you couldn’t sleep, and you romanced a bag of wet leaves in the name of your many plays, we heard about Isis
how she snuck to the woods to be a bride, and your cousin snuck to the woods to be a widow, and upstate your niece was born before I even knew you...
“What’s the secret, I wanted to know.
Bodies beat minds, she said.”
– John Fowles
“There are things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark—that...”
– Tennessee Williams
“I wondered if all women did with other women was lie and hug.”
– Sylvia Plath
“It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: You must start...”
– J.R.R. Tolkien (through Meriadoc Brandybuck)
2 tags
Providence
1.
Sweeney says -Well, the first of the recent times when I got blackout drunk, I was speaking to this Iranian woman in German. -Was this at night? I interrupt. -This was like, three o’clock in the afternoon, he says. -Oh, so it’s like how I met you. (And it’s true: Sweeney laid out on the grass in front of the Engineering building at Pratt, had shown up drunk to recreationally...
old journals
when I was nineteen I had the world so figured out that I decided that being in love was just the act of “banging two abysses together”
“Once I said to Dr. Martin that I didn’t care if I were crazy forever if I...”
– Anne Sexton
Having Refused to Accept the Bitter with the Sweet
I don’t want honey or the honey bee.
—Sappho
Primitive Constructs
1. Instead of a job
On a pristinely hot Wednesday, I drink strawberry tea said to cure my heart-breaked liver and wonder if living your life is different than meddling in your own affairs. I am having an affair with my own lethargy and it goes like this: I grind cardamom into my coffee each morning, I masturbate until the second I have to leave the house or late at night on the JFX to see how...
2 tags
IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE COOL SHIT YOU HAVE TO BE A KIND PERSON TOO
December 2011
24 posts
Pleased as man with man to dwell*
I KNOW everyone has to grow up sometime, but part of me wishes Baby Jesus could stay small forever gurgling, unaware that none of the other kids had mangers, but there were plenty of absentee dads
The Prince of Peace never learning not to spit up on his blessed mother’s blessed flannel pajamas for the third night in a row, crying for something to be transformed magically into milk,
...
2 tags
