Confession Confession
I read the chemistry so I think of my windows as thick syrup and I do see a whole world stuck to them so I believe it Somehow twenty pelicans just now escaped with their shadows but the oaks and palmettos are struggling wildly to get loose If they can’t do it with a thousand hands how could we with two Our predicament had been holding two things true at the same time It was worse actually We knew truth between them and did nothing
Apr 21, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Allan Peterson
Rattles Rattles
When I finally woke up, the nurse handed me my baby. “He’s pretty,” she said, plopping him. His eyes looked slanted. The sun shone in. I squinted. I tried to remember the last thing I remembered. A dance in the OR, people scrambling all around me. A nurse with horns. A doctor with a scalpel, another looking toothless. Their faces, all veiny. My husband, where was he, with a cherry. My baby cried, his voice squeaky. I hurt from where they took him. Shh, I said. Shh. I held him. I was cold. He got quiet, closed his eyes and I asked the nurse where was my husband. She wore scrubs with an array of colored rattles. Yellow glasses. Something smelled like apples. She said, Your baby’s probably hungry. I tried to move my arms, to give him, but a sharp pain shot through me. Ahh! I said. Please, I said to the nurse. Can you? She took him, shushing him, bouncing him out to the hallway.
Apr 6, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Kim Chinquee
Looking at Maps Looking at Maps
If they’d had writing in time, Cuba could have been Crete, watery source of the Minoans and thus the Greeks. What’s lost? A possible us growing like new foliage out of stony ground, emerging? Last voice, first, a whole world calling— awful, inaudible—into the unstoppable loud (roaring!) hurricane-force sea wind.
Mar 30, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Elizabeth Arnold
Cats Can Cats Can
You’re feeling silly, but someone said that cats can see ghosts. So you go to the door with a saucer of milk, and just then the ghost wakes up from a deep sleep and bleeds a little into the sink. Or not the sink, but a bed, or rather a head now held up by a bed. Or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Choosing your words carefully makes no difference to a cat or a ghost. Look at your backyard. Does the grass care what the frost heave thinks? Contour is all, even when hidden. The loose overburden covering a buried cavity is delicately balanced. When runoff- storage ponds seep into the folds of the brain, the additional weight can trigger a collapse called a sinkhole, where ghosts bleed into the cracks. Cats can see it.
Mar 23, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Benjamin Friedlander
Spring Spring
Larvae harden into adults, into the complexity of distinct anatomy— windowed wings, legs like stitches—tossing off the sodden blanket of the soft body, their innocence lisping over the pig, oomphs and fizzes forming a transcript of triumphs, but what does it mean to win, out here? Spring’s raffle: who will live, who’ll become distressed and wish for a place to climb in. I’m watching the air fill with the born-again, resting on the corpse of the rotted oak. Tomorrow I’ll drag it, chain-sawed to thick tablets, into the woods. No tragedy to watch it go. The insects have broken from that burrow into warm air. Snow has melted from bark and pooled. With nowhere to turn.
Feb 17, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Paula Bohince
Rough Patch Rough Patch
You can tell, by symptoms of neglect, something of his circumstance: the chipped and buckled eaves, deflated jack-o-lantern beside the stoop, an ember under snow, or red ants swarming the sill, crossing a line of cinnamon in some far-flung military action. You can tell, by frying onions, their thick domestic weather, or the grim satisfaction with which his vacuum overlooks a plain of fur and dust. I can tell from a little just what a whole lot means. You treat me like somebody you ain't never seen. Hackle stacker, mayfly cripple, and Bloom's parachute ant crowd an ashtray—to rarify the quality of failure. Mornings, a frowzy Manx kneads his chest with claws unsheathed, thrumming with desire and contempt in equal measure. Every other weekend, he rolls out a court-appointed cot from the closet for his daughter. You can feel, with your fingertips against his metal door, vibrations from the interstate or seismic evidence of Furry Lewis, circa 1928.
Feb 3, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Devin Johnston
Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste’s ‘Problems in General Linguistics’ (Paris 1966) Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste’s ‘Problems in General Linguistics’ (Paris 1966)
Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics (Paris 1966) This time I forgive you but I shall not forgive you again. I observe that he forgives you but he will not forgive you again. Although I eat this fish I don't know its name. Spirits watch over the soul of course. I suppose and I presume. I pose and I resume. I suppose I have a horse. How in the world can you afford this house I said and she said I had a good divorce. Strangers are warned that here there is a fierce, fast dog. Whores have no business getting lost in the fog. Is it to your ears or your soul that my voice is intolerable? Whether Florinda lays a hand on his knee or his voluble, he pleads a headache and the narrator concludes, The problem is insoluble.
Jan 19, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Anne Carson
Dorothy Wordsworth Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth The daffodils can go fuck themselves. I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings about the spastic sun that shines and shines and shines. How are they any different from me? I, too, have a big messy head on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind. I flower and don't apologize. There's nothing funny about good weather. Oh, spring again, the critics nod. They know the old joy, that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot of future growing things, each one labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang. If I died falling from a helicopter, then this would be an important poem. Then the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren't you meat? But I won't be another bashful shank. The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre, the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop interrupting my poem with boring beauty. All the boys are in the field gnawing raw bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who the hell are they? This is a poem about war.
Jan 19, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Chang