FOR GRACE, AFTER A PARTY

You do not always know what I am feeling.

Last night in the warm spring air while I was

blazing my tirade against someone who doesn’t

interest

           me, it was love for you that set me

afire,

      and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of

strangers my most tender feelings

                                                     writhe and

bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,

isn’t there

               an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside

the bed? And someone you love enters the room

and says wouldn’t

                           you like the eggs a little

different today?

                        And when they arrive they are

just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather

is holding.

FRANK O’HARA

AFTER THE HOSPITAL

Listen: when I say my heart is broken I don’t mean there’s a girl. I mean I went down to the river. I did not swim. I did not take off my shirt. My chest is a faulty switchboard and I can still feel wires for weeks after the hospital. Listen: the heart in this poem is not a metaphor. I tied a penny to a length of fishing line and swallowed it. The tiny god inside me leaps as fish do when they’re too close to air.

ZACH GOLDBERG

THERE WERE NO EDGES

Today there were no edges. Easy to swallow heat warnings. We are slipping the sky behind our teeth. I’m sorry for how this sounds like a newspaper horoscope. Was it always about folding your fingers into the mouth? Did we bury hunger for something more?

ANA CARRIZO

Lucia Berlin, in “Wait a Minute”, from A Manual for Cleaning Women (via sketchofthepast)

IT IS NOT THE FACT THAT I WILL DIE THAT I MIND

but that no one will love as I did the oak tree out my boyhood window, the mother who set herself so stubbornly against life, the sister with her serious frown and her wish for someone at her side, the father with his dreamy gaze and his left hand idly buried in the fur of his dog. And the dog herself, that mournful look and huge appetite, her need for absolute stillness in the presence of a bird. I know how each of them looks when asleep. And I know how it feels to fall asleep among them. No one knows that but me, No one knows how to love the way I do.

JIM MOORE

INTERVIEW

I’ve been thinking of all the words that have rearranged my life:

words like pine— opening its cathedral doors & emerald quiet; hammock— the whispered conspiracies of sisters overheard in summer’s high fever; shadow— twilight flickering red through a stained glass window—

something left of that fire like a smudge of cloud in lake skies reminds me I work by memory and struggle to perfect a story beneath a calm surface.

This afternoon I took an hour to walk the back fields with a weed stuck in my mouth and a stray cat around my feet.

I wanted to improve what I say I can see— the last days of winter, nearly gone in the precision of rain— a month of mud, of ruts, of minerals.

that smell like rot, like love, that dirty word, telling more than I wanted.

To say dark flowers bloom on wallpaper and a wasp preens on the sill names the invisible.

I’ve told my versions too many times.

M.J. IUPPA

what does it matter that there are other people to love

to possess is darkness 

I’ve lost track of the point in this sedation

pale moonshine of pale moonshine

let go

THE MEMORY

Like a river she was, huge roily mass of water carrying tree trunks and divers drunks. Like a Pricilla, a feminine Benjamin, a whore gone right over the falls, she was. Did you know her. Did you love her, brother. Did wonder pour down on the whole goddamn town.

ROBERT CREELEY

THEY ACCUSE ME OF NOT TALKING

North people known for silence. Long dark of winter. Norrland families go months without talking, Eskimos also, except bursts of sporadic eerie song. South people different. Right and wrong all crystal there and they squabble, no fears, though they praise north silence. “Ho,” they say, “look at them deep thinkers, them strong philosophical types, men of peace.”                                                                 But take notice please of what happens. Winter on the brain. You’re literate, so words are what you feel. Then you’re struck dumb. To which love can you speak the words that mean dying and going insane and the relentless futility of the real?

HAYDEN CARRUTH

HOME TOWN

Peace on my little town, a speck in the safe,            comforting, impersonal immensity of Kansas. Benevolence like a gentle haze on its courthouse            (the model of Greek pillars to me)            on its quiet little bombshell of a library,            on its continuous, hidden, efficient sewer system.

Sharp, amazed, steadfast regard on its more upright citizenry,            my nosy, incredible, delicious neighbors.

Haunting invasion of a train whistle to my friends,            moon-gilding, regular breaths of the old memories to them—            the old whispers, old attempts, old beauties, ever new.

Peace on my little town, haze-blessed, sun-friended,            dreaming sleepy days under the world-champion sky.

WILLIAM STAFFORD

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via proustitute)

K Ei T k-e-i-t

ARROW

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, from “Chess” (via oofpoetry)

Beau Taplin (via oofpoetry)

YOUNG AND WANTING, 2016

SONNET WHICH, UNFORTUNATELY, WILL NOT FIT ON A POST-IT NOTE

Wash every dish and empty out the rack. Fold or hang each garment with the care that it prefers. Tell yourself the air is sweet to your skin. Exercise the knack which you attempted to abandon. Crack an egg and eat what it becomes. Wear a pendant. Clean the bathtub. Wash your hair. Drink water. Leave your bed. Do not go back.

Remember all the soggy, blurred-out days. Remember what you know: this is such stuff as life is made on, which could pass you by again, which has devised so many ways to leave you. Make that memory be enough. It won’t be. It may never be. Try.

ISABEL THE SPY