August 2012
21 posts
taking off my clothes | carolyn forché
in the night i come to you and it seems a shame to waste my deepest shudders on a wall of a man. you recognize strangers, think you lived through destruction. you can’t explain this night, my face, your memory. you want to know what i know? your own hands are lying.
July 2012
18 posts
for women who are 'difficult' to love | warsan...
you are a horse running alone and he tries to tame you compares you to an impossible highway to a burning house says you are blinding him that he could never leave you forget you want anything but you you dizzy him, you are unbearable every woman before or after you is doused in your name you fill his mouth his teeth ache with memory of taste his body just a long shadow seeking yours but you are...
all i have to say for myself | mindy nettifee
the last time you came to see me there were anchors in your eyes, hardback books in your posture. you were the five star general of sureness, a crisp white tuxedo of a man. i was fiddling with my worn coat pockets, puffing false confidence ghosts in the cold january air. my hands were shitty champagne flutes brimming with cheap merlot. i couldn’t touch you without ruining you, so i didn’t touch...
boston | aaron smith
i’ve been meaning to tell you how the sky is pink here sometimes like the roof of a mouth that’s about to chomp down on the crooked steel teeth of the city, i remember the desperate things we did and that i stumble down sidewalks listening to the buzz of street lamps at dusk and the crush of leaves on the pavement, without you here i’m viciously lonely ...
amazing still it seems i’ll be 23 i...
credo | donna hilbert
i believe in the tuesdays and wednesdays of life, the tuna sandwich lunches and tv after dinner. i believe in coffee with hot milk and peanut butter toast, rose wine in summer and burgundy in winter. i am not in love with holidays, birthdays—nothing special— and weekends are just days numbered six and seven, though my love dozing over tv golf while i work the sunday puzzle might be all i need of...
at twenty-eight | amy fleury
it seems i get by on more luck than sense, not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood, breath on dice, or pennies found in the mud. i shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance. at turns charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude she counts as daylight virtue and muted evenings, the inventory of absence. but this is no sorry spinster story, just the way days...
print flocking | buddy wakefield
sometimes it takes a deeper breath
to hover on holy against the current.
he wasn’t falling out of love with you. he was falling out of ways to tell you.
we were emergencies | buddy wakefield
we can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost but tonight let us not become tragedies. we are not funeral homes with propane tanks in our windows, lookin’ like cemeteries. cemeteries are just the earth’s way of not letting go. let go.
tonight let’s turn our silly wrists so far backwards the razor blades in our pencil tips can’t get a good angle on all that beauty...
all answers to the same question | charles jensen
1. the union negotiator i have a deal for you: tonight when i sleep i’ll think of you. of red rocks, of bull pens and spurs, kansas turnpike, of missouri, how you’ll meet me there, a continental divide, the places where two ends meet. my legs will make a circle around you, your waist; my lips will have secrets to slip over yours like a paper bag.
2. the cartographer i am land-locked. i...
the world is in pencil | todd boss
—not pen. it’s got
that same silken dust about it, doesn’t it,
that same sense of having been roughed
onto paper even as it was planned.
it had to be a labor of love. it must’ve
taken its author some time, some shove.
i’ll bet it felt good in the hand—the o
of the ocean, and the and and the and
of the land.
the book of pilgrimage | ranier maria wilke
you are the future, the red sky before sunrise over the fields of time. you are the cock’s crow when night is done, you are the dew and the bells of matins, maiden, stranger, mother, death. you create yourself in ever-changing shapes that rise from the stuff of our days — unsung, unmourned, undescribed, like a forest we never knew. you are the deep innerness of all things, the last...
eggs | c.g. hanzlicek
i’m scrambling an egg for my daughter. “why are you always whistling?” she asks. “because i’m happy.” and it’s true, though it stuns me to say it aloud, there was a time when i wouldn’t have seen it as my future. it’s partly a matter of who is there to eat the egg. the self fallen out of love with itself through the tedium of familiarity, or...
variations on the word love | margaret atwood
this is a word we use to plug holes with. it’s the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart- shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. add lace and you can sell it. we insert it also in the one empty space on the printed form that comes with no instructions. there are whole magazines with not much in them but the word love , you can ...
you may forget, but | sappho
you may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us
