Unidentified Unidentified
Hands touch--set off another round of deals and betrayals! I only hope I don't mistake whose lips and hands! Don't mix up all these break-ups and insomnias. When we let go, I'll try, my friend, to charge my memory! So you won't languish and expire like the others in my poems (the garbage heap of all my Casanovas!). So you won't be washed by rains for millennia, buried in my breast (mass grave for a thousand breasts!)... So you won't --you, my two-starred utter dark!-- end up one more corpse, gravemarker: Unknown. (Translated from the Russian byCatherine Ciepiela)
Dec 16, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Marina Tsvetaeva
Full Harvest Full Harvest
And it seemed it was time for us to die somehow, right now, this afternoon, but the apples were abundant that year and ripened before autumn really showed what it was made of. Even the water shoots arced into branches. And now the sun is happily drinking water from the puddle at the gate and from the burdock -sized leaves of the lilac, but it's not warm enough for that, the day smacks of humidity. Again the magpie chatters in its own way, and old friends, one after another, will deny us, and we would be the last to want to hinder them, but neither to overlook this, because then how would the others cope, left high and dry, without a word from us. (Translated from the Polish by Christian Hawkey and W. Martin)
Nov 24, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Piotr Sommer
Founding Another Colony Founding Another Colony
And the news will have to be tailored to their needs with baffling opinion polls, announcements of the number of steps at the ballerina's dress rehearsal, rarefied shots of Antarctic snow, cascades in the Andes the backwash of shivering butterfly wings no breaks in transmission no voice-overs while regular slots play truant; no controllers in sight and no authorization. You'd think not dying was a la mode. With an almost creepy unconcern they'll form columns and perform exploits beyond every map and outside every schedule. (Translated from the Polish by Rod Mengham)
Nov 24, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Andrzej Sosnowski
Founding a Colony Founding a Colony
Pill boxes, patrols, protocols: this is what made the locals come running, so nothing should be disturbed. Softly, softly, we thought. That graveyard needs moving further south: chop it up among urban allotments, carve out wide boulevards and tunnels, erect viaducts, excavate canals, launch speedboats, ferries, hovercrafts and junk the heritable past; let the map heave with bulldozer silhouettes, he said (lighting a corner of the map) for this shall be our theater of war. And then what? Unlock the fog. At twilight only a boy's quick laugh in a blind back alley shall echo that time shift of desire all lost in space beyond their dreams. (Translated from the Polish by Rod Mengham)
Nov 24, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Andrzej Sosnowski
Early Capitalism Early Capitalism
they are perfecting the pillow with which you are being suffocated now it sings to you and shows you pictures--
Nov 4, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Joe Wenderoth
Identity Theft Identity Theft
If you're a down draft, I'm an escaped photograph. When you're a full moon, children disappear from home. For every nickel you turn in your fingers a bottle fly Files its nails. When you see your face reflected, it Sees you as you once were when you were elsewhere. When flocks fly for you, you let them scatter your neurons. When you were a tin can I shot you many times over. If you're a beggar, I'm turning a corner to face you. Were you a hatband, were I grosgrain ribbon, would I invite you to move into my neighborhood forest. When you're a fox, I'm a fox, we're thinking of stealing something. You are that tired old porch light someone's left burning. I'm a shy green moth short on memory and handcuffs. Silver lines you drew me through have cost me my life.
Oct 28, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Dara Wier
Aubade Aubade
Cell tower beacon a red boutonniere-- Sanankoroba on the hook w/ Senanque-- & flourishing thru this gunite, perishing world: a freesia fitted w/ aerofoils that turn in the wind & turn the wind to kilowatt-hours to power the flower forth--
Oct 14, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Andrew Zawacki
The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue (Excerpt) The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue (Excerpt)
If I sat next to you, spoke only to you, you would feel the warmth of my breath. As our shoulders touched you would shift, and I would know your movement as response. This is a world and we are in it. And still, as if this matters, I worry that you can't see me; I worry that you will go on without me in mind--even as our shoulders continue to touch, even as you carry my voice in your ear. At times I've wished for a structure to lean on, a landmark that's larger than the life around us, something that would govern us all. Maybe I want this because we almost had it. In truth, I was almost our Capital City. Did you know the longest total solar eclipse that will occur in the 21st century was experienced most fully this summer in Shanghai, in a city. China's most populated city. For six minutes and thirty-nine seconds, as the moon passed directly between the earth and the sun, for all those bodies all was darkness. I know how that feels. But daylight is the great extravagance. In the end I know this is true--even if I fall again and again into my private realities--because despite everything I am built out of lives.
Oct 14, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Claudia Rankine
Thin Shangdu Thin Shangdu
The millipede of furious minds who concocts all steel sternumed glass, imagines the heart of what they make, all ruse & rooms of ruby ventricled chandeliers. Along the rear of this vertical frontier: tents & oil spilt ponds, a jungle of bloomers hangs on tiers of stocking string. An opera singer, once in tiger's masque, keens which echoes deep in the well of his welder's mask. A young boy dreams of mums.
Oct 7, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Cathy Park Hong
Narragansett Narragansett
The complete sentence narrates a satisfying process. It closes and opens like a clam. I take a knife to the sentence and start my evening at the raw bar. It is hard work, and the sentences would prefer to be in the ocean. I would rather be a patron of this establishment. Someone over my shoulder Would rather know I am going to continue to put up with his stuff. It is not a wide receiver, his stuff. It is his development, Which is gradual. It involves testing me. Sometimes These tests take the form of imperatives. Drive onto the boat! The boat would rather be en route to Maine. It is an ambitious ferry. My knife wishes to whittle patterns Into the enormous picnic table. Art does not narrate.
Sep 23, 2009 / Books & the Arts / Jordan Davis