you shall love your crooked neighbor

spiritual warfare | karla huston

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:22:18 -0500

i’m always thinking about lot’s wife,
wonder what her neighbors thought
when she packed up her tunics and cooking pots
and left town without so much as a fare thee well.
dave, the guy i work with says, “it’s because
she was a sinful woman in a sinful town.
you know where the word sodomy comes from.”
i tell him, “sodomy’s been made legal in texas.
i read it in the paper yesterday.”
dave has been known to get down on his knees
and pray before a computer, but it never seems
to work because it’s always messed up.
“you see, dave, if she’d had a name, maybe someone
could have called to her, maybe she might
not have turned back.” i’m obsessed with this,
it’s true, but i can’t get the no-name-pillar-of-salt thing
out of my head, and this woman
who probably left with wash on the line
and goat stew simmering on the fire.
and, then there are those two daughters,
who later lay with their father, there being no
other men worth their salt in that mountain town
where they ended up. “good thing she wasn’t around
to see that kind of sodomy,” i say. “women
need guidance. remember eve?”
i tell him, “let’s agree to disagree on this.”
he glares at me; his face turns red; pimples
stand out like, like angry mountains, i think.
“beside, dave, lot lingered—he lingered,
and god took mercy on him. i want
mercy for her. and a name, dave,
a name for god’s sake. please call her
something besides ‘lot’s wife’.”
dave takes my hand, says, “kneel with me
and let’s pray for you, my disagreeable friend,
and for all those sick people in texas.”
meanwhile, the computer flashes:
this program has performed an illegal operation.
“how about loretta?” i ask, thinking of my best friend
from high school. i shuck off his hand and add,
“it’s a good name, and mary’s been used.”

when you have forgotten sunday: the love story | gwendolyn brooks

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:57:42 -0500

—and when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a wednesday and a saturday,
and most especially when you have forgotten sunday—
when you have forgotten sunday halves in bed,
or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
looking off down the long street
to nowhere,
hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
and nothing-i-have-to-do and i’m-happy-why?
and if-monday-never-had-to-come—
when you have forgotten that, i say,
and how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
and how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
and how we finally went in to sunday dinner,
that is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
to sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
or chicken and rice
and salad and rye bread and tea
and chocolate chip cookies—
i say, when you have forgotten that,
when you have forgotten my little presentiment
that the war would be over before they got to you;
and how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
and lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
bright bedclothes,
then gently folded into each other—
when you have, i say, forgotten all that,
then you may tell,
then i may believe
you have forgotten me well.

royal heart | andrea gibson

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:49:44 -0500

exceptindreams:

you will never be let down by anyone
more than you will be let down
by the one you love most in the world
it’s how gravity works
it’s why they call it “falling”
it’s why the truth is harder to tell
every year
you have more to lose
but you can choose to bury your past
in the garden
beside the tulips
water it
until it’s so alive
it lets go
and you belong to yourself
again

when you belong to yourself again
remember forgiveness
is not a tidy grave
it is a ready loyal knight kneeling before your royal heart

call in your royal heart
tell it bravery cannot be measured by a lack of fear
it takes guts to tremble
it takes so much tremble to love
every first date is a fucking earth quake

sweetheart, on our first date
i showed off all my therapy
i flaunted the couch
where i finally sweat out my history
pulled out the photo album from the last time i wore a lie to the school dance
i smiled and said “that was never my style
look how fixed i am
look how there’s no more drywall on my fist
look at the stilts i’ve carved for my short temper
look how my wrist is not something i have to hide” i said
well i was hiding it

the telephone pole still down from the storm
by our third date i had fixed the line
i said listen,
i have a hard time
i mean i cry as often as most people pee and i don’t shut the door behind me
i’ll be up in your face screaming “seattle is too rainy seattle is too rainy
i’m never going to be able to live here.”
i sobbed on our fourth date

i can’t live here
in my body, i mean
i can’t live in my body all the time it feels too much
so if i ever feel far away know i am not gone
i am just underneath my grief
adjusting the dial on my radio face so i can take this life with all
of it’s love and all of it’s loss

see i already know that you are the place where i am finally going to
sing without any static meaning
i’m never gonna wait
that extra twenty minutes
to text you back,
and i’m never gonna play
hard to get
when i know your life
has been hard enough already.
when we all know everyone’s life
has been hard enough already

it’s hard to watch
the game we make of love,
like everyone’s playing checkers
with their scars,
saying checkmate
whenever they get out
without a broken heart.

just to be clear
i don’t want to get out
without a broken heart.
i intend to leave this life
so shattered
there’s gonna have to be
a thousand separate heavens
for all of my separate parts
and none of those parts are going to be wearing the romance from the
overpriced vintage rack
that is to say i am not going to get a single speed bike if i can’t
make it up the hill
i know exactly how many gears i’m going to need to love you well
and none of them look hip at the hot coffee shop
they all have god saying “good job you’re finally not full of bullshit”
you finally met someone who’s going to flatten your knee caps into
skipping stones

baby, throw me
throw me as far as i can go
i don’t want to leave this life without ever having come home
and i want to come home to you
i can figure out the rain

ars poetica #100: i believe | elizabeth alexander

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 13:58:15 -0500

grammatolatry:

poetry, i tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though sterling brown said

“every ‘i’ is a dramatic ‘i’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, god
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and i’m sorry the dog died.

poetry (here i hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

a sonnet of invented memories | miles walser

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 20:45:30 -0500

1. i told you that i was a roadway of potholes, not safe to cross. you said nothing, showed up in my driveway wearing roller-skates.

2. the first time i asked you on a date, after you hung up, i held the air between our phones against my ear and whispered, “you will fall in love with me. then, just months later, you will fall out. i will pretend the entire time that i don’t know it’s coming.”

3. once, i got naked and danced around your bedroom, awkward and safe. you did the same. we held each other without hesitation and flailed lovely. this was vulnerability foreplay.

4. the last eight times i told you i loved you, they sounded like apologies.

5. you recorded me a cd of you repeating, “you are beautiful.” i listened to it until i no longer thought in my own voice.

6. into the half-empty phone line, i whispered, “we will wake up believing the worst in each other. we will spit shrapnel at each other’s hearts. the bruises will lodge somewhere we don’t know how to look for and i will still pretend i don’t know its coming.”

7. you photographed my eyebrow shapes and turned them into flashcards: mood on one side, correct response on the other. you studied them until you knew when to stay silent.

8. i bought you an entire bakery so that we could eat nothing but breakfast for a week. breakfast, untainted by the day ahead, was when we still smiled at each other as if we meant it.

9. i whispered, “i will latch on like a deadbolt to a door and tell you it is only because i want to protect you. really, i’m afraid that without you i mean nothing.”

10. i gave you a bouquet of plane tickets so i could practice the feeling of watching you leave.

11. i picked you up from the airport limping. in your absence, i’d forgotten how to walk. when i collapsed at your feet, you refused to look at me until i learned to stand up without your help.

12. too scared to move, i stared while you set fire to your apartment – its walls decaying beyond repair, roaches invading the corpse of your bedroom. you tossed all the faulty appliances through the smoke out your window, screaming that you couldn’t handle choking on one more thing that wouldn’t just fix himself.

13. i whispered, “we will each weed through the last year and try to spot the moment we began breaking. we will repel sprint away from each other. your voice will take months to drain out from my ears. you will throw away your notebook of tally marks from each time you wondered if i was worth the work. the invisible bruises will finally surface and i will still pretend that i didn’t know it was coming.”

14. the entire time, i was only pretending that i knew it was coming.

and they were both right | kapka kassabova

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 21:56:00 -0500

grammatolatry | yesyes

…

what if love is no more than
a tangle of muscles
aching to be untied
by knowing fingers?

what if love is made and nothing else -
asked narcissus, leaning over the green iris of water.
nothing else,
cried echo from the green cochlea of the woods.

and they were both right.
and they were both lonely.

you are the place you cannot move | ralph angel

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 15:40:36 -0500

you wake up healthy
but you don’t feel right. now everything’s
backwards and you’re thinking of someone to blame.

and you do, you’re lucky,
drinking coffee was easy, the traffic’s
moving along, you’re like
everyone else just trying to get through the day
and the place you’re dreaming of seems possible—
somewhere to get to.

all you really know
is that it hurts here, the way feelings
are bigger than we are, and a woman’s face
in a third-story window, her limp hair
and the pots of red geraniums luring you
into her suffering until you’re walking on roads
inscribed in your own body. the maps
you never speak of. intersections, train stations,
roadside benches, the names of places and
people you’ve known all bearing the weight
of cashing a check or your having to eat something,
of glimpsing the newspaper’s ghoulish headlines.

like everyone else, you think,
the struggle is toward a better time, though
no pressure surrounds the house you were born in.
cool, quieter, a vast primitive light
where nothing happens but the sound
of your sole self breathing.
and you’ve decisions to make. isn’t that why
you’ve come? with a bald-headed man at the bar
and your friends all over the place, anxious,
tired, a little less sturdy than you’d hoped for
and needing someone to kick around, someone to love.

tattoo | carl dennis

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:02:41 -0500

if the body is the house of the soul,
what’s wrong with a little home decoration
more permanent than the drapes in the parlor
or the fabric on the dining-room chairs?

a forearm, say, adorned with a tropical flower
or with a palm tree under a deep blue sky,
suggesting the body is glad to recall
its stay in eden, whether or not the soul
regards that episode as relevant now.

or consider the young waitress
who served you lunch just an hour ago,
how her sleeveless blouse revealed
a small heart on her shoulder
inscribed with two names, dave and gretchen,
under a sprig of lilac.

no need to assume she’s failed to imagine a time
when a boyfriend more congenial
wakes up beside her only to be reminded
there was once a dave who was all she wanted.

could be she wants to send a reminder
to the gretchen she may become
not to forget the girl who believed
that holding on was a project worthy
of all the attention that she could muster,
as much a challenge as letting go.

rain | raymond carver

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 23:15:53 -0500

grammatolatry | larmoyante

woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. fought against it for a minute.

then looked out the window at the rain.
and gave over. put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

would i live my life over again?
make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
yes, given half a chance. yes.

summer solstice | stacie cassarino

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 20:53:00 -0500

i wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
then i remembered,
it’s you i miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
you are the green wonder of june,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
when i finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
if i get the story right, desire is continuous,
equatorial. there is still so much
i want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on walnut street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
where is the evidence i will learn
to be good at loving?
the black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
there are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
the moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and i want to tell you
what i couldn’t say the night we rushed
north, how i love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
i stand between taproot and treespire.
here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
we hunger for eloquence.
we measure the isopleths.
i am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
the air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

things that have been lost | yehuda amichai

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 10:49:52 -0500

from newspaper columns and notice boards
i find out about things that have been lost.
this way i know what people had
and what they love.

once my tired head fell
on my hairy chest and there i found my father’s smell
again, after many years.

my memories are like someone
who can’t go back to czechoslovakia
or who is afraid to return to chile.

sometimes i see again
the white vaulted room
with the telegram
on the table.

fiction | lisel mueller

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 23:41:04 -0500

going south, we watched spring
unroll like a proper novel:
forsythia, dogwood, rose;
bare trees, green lace, full shade.
by the time we arrived in georgia
the complications were deep.

when we drove back, we read
from back to front. maroon went wild,
went scarlet, burned once more
and then withdrew into pink,
tentative, still in bud.
i thought if only we could go on
and meet again, shy as strangers.

to the former self in art class | hannah faith notess

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 22:31:11 -0500

you didn’t know the boy sitting next to you
in watercolor 101 was going to shutter himself
in the car, stop breathing, break the heart
of his father and the whole college.

let’s be honest. his cones and cylinders
were as lopsided, as badly shaded
as everyone else’s cones and cylinders.

when you hear the news two years later,
you search your own tatty portfolio
for clues, sigh if only i had known—
but i want to shake you and say, you didn’t,

and anyway that phrase is a stupider knife
even than ockham’s razor. if you went,
with your grey lens of knowledge, back to that
minute, you’d still be painting the same

burnt-out cathedral under burnt-orange blood
dripping from the sky, collaged with quotations
from the waste land. you thought it meant

you were losing your faith; but look, there you are
sitting in church, five years in the future,
wondering (like a good protestant) why
you want so much to pray for the souls of the dead.

in fact, you could go back and forth enough
times to wear a rut in the floor of time,
but your awkward brushstrokes would still paint
the same cathedral that lists to the left. you’d still

stay up all night in agony over the alchemical
substance of the soul. your grand attempts
at pthalo yellow sunrises would still turn murky,

while the same boy sat silent beside you,
washing the globe of an apple with quinacridone
gold, shading it with payne’s grey,
the same dark worm asleep on his heart.

advertisement for the mountain | christina davis

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 21:03:13 -0500

exceptindreams:

There are two versions of every life.

In the first one, you get a mother, a father,
your very own room.

You learn to walk, which is only done by walking.
You learn the past tense of have, which is hunger.

You learn to ask almost anything
is to ask it to be over,
as when the lover asks the other

“Are you sleeping? Are you beginning
to go away?”

(And whether or not you learn it, life does not penetrate
more than five miles above the earth
or reach more than three miles beneath the sea.

Life is eight miles long.

You could walk it, and be there before sundown.
Or swim it, or fall it, or crawl it.)

The second is told from the point
of view of the sky.

spring vow | larissa shmailo

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:55:57 -0500

we will love like dogwood
kiss like cranes
die like moths
i promise

unrequited love poem (on watching someone you love love someone else) | sierra demulder

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:20:00 -0500

you will be out with friends
when the news of her existence
will be accidentally spilled all over
your bar stool. respond calmly
as if it was only a change in weather,
a punch line you saw coming.
after your fourth shot of cheap liquor,
leave the image of him kissing another woman
in the toilet.

in the morning, her name will be
in every headline: car crash, robbery, flood.
when he calls you, ignore the hundreds of ropes
untangling themselves in your stomach.
you are the best friend again. when he invites
you over for dinner, say yes
too easily. remind yourself this isn’t special,
it’s only dinner, everyone has to eat.
when he greets you at the door, do not think
for one second you are the reason
he wore cologne tonight.

someone told you once a soulmate
is not the person who makes you the happiest
but the one who makes you feel the most,
who conducts your heart to bang the loudest,
who can drag you giggling with forgiveness
from the cellar they locked you in.
it has always been him.

in his kitchen, he will hand-feed you
a piece of red pepper. his laugh
will be low and warm and it will make you
feel like candlelight. do not think this is special.
do not count on your fingers the number
of freckles you could kiss too easily.
try to think of pilot lights or olive oil,
not everything you have ever loved about him,
or it will suddenly feel boiling and possible
and so close. you will find her bobby pins
lying innocently on his bathroom sink.
her bobby pins. they look like the wiry legs
of spiders, splinters of her undressing
in his bed. do not say anything.
think of stealing them, wearing them
home in your hair. when he hugs you goodbye,
let him kiss you on the forehead.
settle for target practice.

at home, you will picture her across town
pressing her fingers into his back
like wet cement. you will wonder
if she looks like you, if you are two bedrooms
in the same house. did he fall for her features
like rearranged furniture? when he kisses her,
does she taste like new paint?

you will want to call him.
you will go as far as holding the phone
in your hand, imagine telling him
unimaginable things like you are always
ticking inside of me and i dream of you
more often than i don’t.
my body is a dead language
and you pronounce
each word perfectly.

do not call him.
fall asleep to the hum of the vcr.
she must make him happy.
she must be
she must be his favorite place in minneapolis.
you are a souvenir shop, where he goes
to remember how much people miss him
when he is gone.

o sweet spontaneous | e.e. cummings

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:40:04 -0500

o sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

after love | alan michael parker

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:52:29 -0500

i wrote letters of introduction 
and sent them to every embassy 
of every future
 just in case you need something 
when you get there

including to all the outposts of wind-up afternoons 
and to all the banquets where the gods disagree 
and to all the bees muscling in all the flowers 
and of course to every color.

in the letters i share a couple of our secrets 
the story of our argument on the way to toronto
 how we drove by toronto arguing 
because you were wrong

and later the sweet closing of your body
 on my niagara falls my maid of the mist my sea world 
and how in love 
you breathe in as though you were laughing. 
your right hand rubs my scalp

scratching without thinking 
after love 
as though my head were your own. 
i put that in a few of the letters. 
i hope this is all okay.

now wherever you go they’ll know you
 and you’ll be asked to accompany 
all of the presidents 
every grain of blue
 and all of the ministers 
every knife of every poplar 
and all of the other world’s ambassadors
 every cogitating groundhog. 
i wouldn’t mind being there 
to see.

although my first obligation is right here 
as you rise after love
 to dress back-lighted and so slowly

as each gesture rounds off 
how the light feels about the room.

everyone should know—i will tell everyone. 
i can do this much.
 i will write more letters more letters

are all of the break-ups in your poems real? | aimee nezhukumatathil

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 22:17:13 -0500

if by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck
in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick,
the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse—
then yes, every last page is true, every nuance,
bit, and bite. wait. i have made them up—all of them—
and when i say i am married, it means i married
all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves.
can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many
slices of cake? even now, my husbands plan a great meal
for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot
on the stove. one changes the baby, and one sleeps
in a fat chair. one flips through the newspaper, another
whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single
one of them wonders what time i am coming home.

a blessing for a wedding | jane hirshfield

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 22:46:00 -0500

today when persimmons ripen
today when fox-kits come out of their den into snow
today when the spotted egg releases its wren song today when the
maple sets down its red leaves today when windows keep their promise
to open today when fire keeps its promise to warm today when
someone you love has died
or someone you never met has died
today when someone you love has been born
or someone you will not meet has been born
today when rain leaps to the waiting of roots in their dryness
today when starlight bends to the roofs of the hungry and tired
today when someone sits long inside his last sorrow
today when someone steps into the heat of her first embrace
today, let this light bless you
with these friends let it bless you
with snow-scent and lavender bless you
let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly
spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears
sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes
let its fierceness and tenderness hold you
let its vastness be undisguised in all your days