gravity and light

Indigo Ink Press Launch Party for Paper Covers Rock, Oct. 21

2011-10-23T15:04:00.000-07:00

Here's the video I made for the launch party. I read two poems from Paper Covers Rock: "Poland" & "Forty." My first self-made video that I also uploaded on You Tube today.

My Latest Chapbook of Poetry

2011-09-30T20:55:00.000-07:00

September 30: Official Launching of My Chapbook: Paper Covers Rock

Indigo Ink
http://www.indigoinkpress.org/flip-edition/

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Paper-Covers-Rock-Triplicity-Threes/dp/0982833016/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1317491677&sr=8-2

Dave Bonta's Videocast

http://www.vianegativa.us/2011/09/woodrat-podcast-44-reversible-books/

Reviews of Paper Covers Rock

“A dazzle and a delight, Chella Courington’s poetry will carry you through the brave discoveries of adolescent sex, then turn around and chill you with what she knows of being a grown woman, then turn again and fill you with compassion for human distress. Travel with her on these journeys and you’ll be going with beauty all the way.”
Alicia Ostriker, author of The Book of Seventy

“Crisp narrative lines filled with energy, indignation, and fierce beauty. The images can take your breath away, and the title poem is one I’ll never forget.”
Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire & editor of Brevity

“In Paper Covers Rock, Courington narrates familiar poetic scenarios— adolescent girls exploring their sexuality; a poet/teacher observing her students in a prison—but always with bright, surprising details: one girl doesn’t just kiss the other, she ‘uncloses my eyes with her tongue,’ and a confident, authoritative tone that brings readers back ‘to the point of mooring.’ In this collection, loss is described with ‘words / like sour tree roots’ and trouble becomes so appealing, one can’t help but wonder ‘if Satan’s the hero’ in her story.”
Sara Tracey, author of Flood Year

“Chella Courington’s voice of quiet reflection leads us through sensual memories of youth, struggles for affirmation and the middle-aged acknowledgment of frailty. These poems together form a tight weave of body-knowledge, experienced through time and the pull of first relationships.”

Jen Pearson, reviewer, PoetryLog (www.poetrylog.wordpress.com)

Tom Waits on Being Called a Poet

2011-09-28T12:12:00.000-07:00

Inebreational Travelogue: Tom Waits on Being Called a Poet

BY HARRIET STAFF

Nancy Smith wrote a review at The Rumpus that celebrates Tom Waits and the book Tom Waits on Tom Waits. In said book Waits weighs in on the many things he’s been called over the years, namely “poet.”

See:

It’s almost impossible to write an apt description of Waits, but every journalist in this collection makes a worthy attempt. Some of my favorites: “A mumbling sot on stage.” “A collector and researcher of bawdy stories.” “A half-buzzed derelict with the voice of a bulldozer.” “A gruff-voiced romanticizer of the seamy side of urban life.” “A practitioner of the fine art of conversation” “A Depression-Era hobo ridin’ the rails toward some unforsaken land.” “The teacher we wished we had.” “The greatest entertainer on Planet Earth.”
However he is described, Waits’s magnetic stage presence draws people to him. His live shows take on a theatrical quality, complete with spoken-word ramblings, chain-smoking, dramatic movements, and a lot of jokes. Waits is often referred to as a poet, a term he was quick to toss off in the early days.
“Poetry is a very dangerous word,” says Waits, “It’s very misused. Most people when they hear the word ‘poetry’ think of being chained to a desk, memorizing ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ When somebody says that they’re going to read me a poem, I can think of any number of things that I’d rather be doing. I don’t like the stigma that comes with being called a poet—so I call what I’m doing an improvisational adventure, or an inebriational travelogue, and all of a sudden it takes on a whole new form and meaning. If I’m tied down and have to call myself something, I prefer ‘storyteller.’”

Then, a bit on his process:

For a long time, Waits admits, he was in danger of being overtaken by the low life he wrote about. He drank too much. He made bad friends. “I wanted to experience what it was like to be on the road the way I imagined it would be for the old-timers that I loved, so I would stay in these down joints because I was absorbing all the atmosphere in those places; the ghosts in the room. You want to be where the stories grow, and you think if you live in those places they’ll come up through the sidewalks and out of the cracks in the wall—and they do. But you have to be very clear about who you are and who it is you’re projecting, and there was a time when I was very unclear about who I was and I became a caricature of myself.”
Over time, Waits’s persona becomes both clearer and even more difficult to define. It’s a strange contradiction. Each of his albums are so profoundly different, it’s as if we learn about a new side of Waits with every album. Some of the most interesting interviews include insight into his creative process:
“The creative process is imagination, memories, nightmares, and dismantling certain aspects of this world and putting them back together in the dark. Songs aren’t necessarily verbatim chronicles or necessarily journal entries, they’re like smoke, it’s like it’s made out of smoke.”

from The Poetry Foundation
original interview in The Rumpus 9/26/11

"Poems are a form of texting"

2011-09-19T09:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

About two weeks ago, the Poet Laureate of Great Britain, Carol Ann Duffy, said: ""The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language – it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form."

- Joanna Moorhead
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 September 2011

I thought about Duffy's assertion and then began wondering how we writers & writing teachers can turn texting into poetry exercises and assignments. I would appreciate any ideas you may have. The full article can be accessed at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/sep/05/carol-ann-duffy-poetry-texting-competition>.

Paper Covers Rock

2011-09-17T17:09:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Gravity and Light, my blog of poetry & meanderings, is back. During my hiatus I published a book of prose poetry, Girls & Women, with Burning River; put together another book of poetry, Paper Covers Rock, coming out with Indigo Ink in thirteen days (September 30); and wrote a prose poetry novella, Talking Did Not Come Easily to Diana, being issued as an ebook by Musa Publishing November 11. Indigo Ink has produced a lovely video of the poem concluding Paper Covers Rock, [A GROUP OF JELLYFISH IS CALLED A ‘‘SMACK.’’ A GROUP OF LAPWINGS IS CALLED A ‘‘DECEIT.’’]. You can watch it by clicking on today's title. On that site is also a poem previewed here almost two years ago, "Lynette's War." Because writing is a communal experience once the author releases her/his writing, I am interested in how you respond to my work. Please feel encouraged to leave comments.

Your Author,

Chella Courington

Nursing You by Erica Jong

2011-05-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

in memory of my mom: Tommie Dorris Williams Courington

Nursing You by Erica Jong

On the first night

of the full moon,

the primeval sack of ocean

broke,

& I gave birth to you

little woman,

little carrot top,

little turned-up nose,

pushing you out of myself

as my mother

pushed

me out of herself,

as her mother did,

& her mother's mother before her,

all of us born

of woman.

I am the second daughter

of a second daughter

of a second daughter,

but you shall be the first.

You shall see the phrase

"second sex"

only in puzzlement,

wondering how anyone,

except a madman,

could call you "second"

when you are so splendidly

first,

conferring even on your mother

firstness, vastness, fullness

as the moon at its fullest

lights up the sky.

Now the moon is full again

& you are four weeks old.

Little lion, lioness,

yowling for my breasts,

rowling at the moon,

how I love your lustiness,

your red face demanding,

your hungry mouth howling,

your screams, your cries

which all spell life

in large letters

the color of blood.

You are born a woman

for the sheer glory of it,

little redhead, beautiful screamer.

You are no second sex,

but the first of the first;

& when the moon's phases

fill out the cycle

of your life,

you will crow

for the joy

of being a woman,

telling the pallid moon

to go drown herself

in the blue ocean,

& glorying, glorying, glorying

in the rosy wonder

of your sunshining wondrous

self.

Ghetto: Two Living Children by Anna Swir

2011-03-16T08:34:00.000-07:00

Ghetto: Two Living Children

Anna Swir

Screaming ceased long ago on that street. Only the wind sometimes plays with a torn-out window in which the remnants of a windowpane still glitter, and carries over cobblestones feathers from ripped-open eiderdowns.

At times the same wind brings a sudden shout of many people from far away. Then it happens that from a cross street two living children walk out unexpectedly. Holding each other's hands they escape silently through the middle of a deserted street.

Up to the spot where, hidden behind a street corner wrapped in mist, a German soldier at a machine gun watches day and night on the border of the ghetto.

--tr. Czeslaw Milosz, Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon)

Redder Than Diane's Lipstick

2011-02-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

The paper blot melted on my tongue in a piazza near Lake Cuomo. The man at the next table tapped his glass of Pernod and water at my ear. Did he know? Did he see the guerilla girls catching their blood in glass vials and spraying the canvas pink? Did he taste Pernod in a paint bucket? Diane MacPhear said her father was reincarnated in the old flesh, cracked and blue from blood thinners, skeletal fingers, and bulbous nose. He stood two days in Ethiopian tea, Diane said, with a reduction of rubber bark. On the third day his flesh turned pink and he flew to Our Lady. We flew behind him. Rains washed away baby powder, roughened our skin. My arms chaffed with the currents. But I knew all the Pernod in Italy would not keep us up. It wasn't a matter of drugs. It was a matter of time before my skin would slide from the bone like the skin of the girl with the fat face in fourth grade. Epithalamium tissue moved in waves from the forehead over the eyelids and down the cheeks until it hung like a colostomy bag under the chin. Her Cherokee bones glistening.

First Published: Gargoyle (Summer 2010). Eds. Richard Peabody & Lucinda Ebersole.

Toucans & Reindeer

2011-02-03T15:21:00.000-08:00

The day after Thanksgiving, her mother mounted the singing reindeer with flashing antlers above the toilet, and Diana filled her ears with Angel Soft. She cringed at the trappings—tinsel strand by strand on a tree turning brown, stuffed turkey, musical chairs with cousins she saw once a year. But the holiday changed when the cousin with luscious lips like Danny Zuko handed her dried cannabis wrapped in paper. At fifteen she had no idea what lay ahead—hours waiting for vowels and consonants to catch an upward drift and tumble down before she took another drag, holding it so long she could hear toucans screech from the den below. Their big green beaks tipped in red. Her science teacher said they were tissue thin on the outside. Yet inside, honeycombs of bone. Ridges and hollows of white calcium twirling into a playground of hexagons for no one except Diana and the boy on Christmas Eve.

First published in riverbabble 17 (Summer Bloomsday 2010), Ed. Leila Rae

Pyromantics by Chella Courington

2010-07-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

the father
shouldered
the boy
who twirled a baton
tipped in red
while the father
swallowed
long rods of fire
snuffed out somewhere
past lips
and over tongue
hidden behind teeth
yellowed from nights
tasting sulfur
as giants and dwarfs
with floppy orange shoes
snaked
into dollhouse windows
dangling toes
between me and the boy,

who looked about nine
when I was nine I
walked
over hot coals
dumped
from the grill by dad
who bet ten bucks
i couldn’t do it
and i said i would
if he would
and i did
and he laughed
wiping his hand across his mouth
me standing in burnt feet
crying

and saw myself
branding his back
as skin sizzled

his fingers
tapers in a church
that i lit

First Published: Oregon East Magazine 37 (2006).
Ed. Caitlin Mack.

Blood Moon by Chella Courington

2010-06-18T17:43:00.000-07:00

Sophie tickles my cheek with her tongue, and I give her my right arm. Like the Virgin’s mantle sliding over my shoulder, she rolls her muscles to the drummer’s heartbeat, washing me in light. Mama calls my boa a serpent, and me a dirty coochie dancer. Jesus lives in covered-dish suppers at the Boaz Baptist Church. But I believe Jesus lives in Sophie. At the Bottoms Up Bar she first appeared—eyes milky, scales ghost white. Just slept on a cover under the sink and refused to eat for six days. On the seventh, clouds evaporated. Clear dark eyes and bright brown body. Three days later, she rubbed and pushed her nose against the back screen until the skin broke. All day she pressed against the linoleum floor, never letting up. At night a translucent ribbon lay on the quilt—eye caps on top.

Doorknobs short fiction first-prize winner, Doorknobs and BodyPaint (Issue 55, August 2009).

September by Chella Courington

2010-06-08T17:01:00.000-07:00

Fog on the horizon
hides hard island edges.
Close to the patio
sprinklers swish: streams rise
in sun before falling in the garden.
Six plastic-pink flamingoes
parade by the sago palm.
A pair of dolphins, together
still after twenty years, watch
from the granite fountain.

Stripping an apple, peel swinging
in air, I think of Mother
who sliced what grew around her.
From wood the size of playing cards
she whittled small animals:
our cat on haunches, neck turned.
She carved a woman
on her knees, mostly stomach,
hands buried her bowed face.

Santa Ana winds blow dry
and scatter dust in their wake.
Hummingbirds circle coral bells.
Their wings, shadow puppets
on stucco. Heavy with petals,
dahlias bend to rocky dirt.
Once I caught a Regal Moth—
panes of ruby and jade.
For three days, she flew.

Tonight my namesake calls
like Linda Blair from The Exorcist:
voice gravelly, emerging
from Minnesota. At 25 Satan
and God crowd her head.
No meds can wash them out.
God will kill you for leaving me.
I squeeze the receiver
not forgetting her butterfly nightshirt—
wings pressed against me.

First Published: Touchstone (2007-2008). Ed. David Murphy.

When Berryman Died by Chella Courington

2010-05-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

He left his shoes, scuffed loafers,
on the bridge. A cordovan pair
he could have shed
anywhere: at the university,
beside his desk, under Tate’s coffee table,
at the foot of a lover’s bed.

Every night he thought, tomorrow.
Mornings, he remembered
his suit at the cleaners, his essay
on Marlowe, students waiting
outside his office. January 7
reasons ran dry.

He bathed and trimmed his beard,
put on a new shirt.
In eight degrees he walked
to the bridge.

First Published: Touchstone (2007-2008). Ed. David Murphy.

From the poem, "Under Siege," by Mahmoud Darwish

2010-05-10T10:52:00.001-07:00

If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
(So spoke a woman to her son at his funeral)

Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was a very highly esteemed & prolific Palestinian poet.

Prairie Spring by Willa Cather

2010-05-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

Evening and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.

---O Pioneers! [frontispiece]

Billie Holiday by RL Greenfield

2010-05-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

Billie Holiday

Now what
Now that I have Billie Holiday inside me
Now what do I do
Now that I have become Billie Holiday
I’ve got a bellyful of Billie Holiday
All morning pouring into me
Like a gigantic oil well rolling into my veins
Now I am full to my eyeballs
Brain heart hips groin legs feet
Full
I am full up to the hairline with Billie Holiday
I guess it’s time to take a vacation in the desert
Some place where there is no life at all
So I can push the button & turn Billie loose on death
Just let her roam & croon & ooze rich wine on the dying world
Billie Holiday does not belong in the green world of spring
The green world of spring already has its greenness
Billie belongs in the starkest desert where there is no hope
Let her mourn & groove & chew away at the heart there
Let her bleed from the eyes songs of the keening throat
Let her cry her milk-less milk & silk-less silk
Let her alone, America-----leave that woman to herself
Billie Holiday has to ooze God out of darkest darkest wine

RL Greenfield printed in Santa Barbara Independent

At the Maximum Security Prison for Men by Chella Courington

2010-04-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

Students come to me from solitary confinement
concrete oven set on high—
they come to me
a young woman from the University
who wants to talk about Paradise Lost.

They want to talk too.
Tony says when he broke in, he spotted a dog
and shot a man. Thought the house empty.
Billy Ray says he just needed money from the girl
at the ATM. My hand shook and the trigger went off.

They know why Milton’s God
clips Satan’s wings and kicks him out of heaven.
The man can’t take much lip. Just like my own daddy
knocking me three ways into Sunday when I say no to him.
Knuckles kneading my cheek blue till I cry stop.

The students ask if Satan’s the hero. And I wonder.
Did he endure that heavy hand one too many times?
Punched and mauled like a yard animal
taken behind the barn
left in darkness to find his way back.

First Published: Carquinez Poetry Review (2006). Ed. Ruth Blakeney.

In Honor of Mootie, JT & Miss Rhoda

2010-04-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

Sister Cat
by Frances Mayes

Cat stands at the fridge,
Cries loudly for milk.
But I've filled her bowl.
Wild cat, I say, Sister,
Look, you have milk.
I clink my fingernail
Against the rim. Milk.
With down and liver,
A word I know she hears.
Her sad miaow. She runs
To me. She dips
In her whiskers but
Doesn't drink. As sometimes
I want the light on
When it is on. Or when
I saw the woman walking
toward my house and
I thought there's Frances.
Then looked in the car mirror
To be sure. She stalks
The room. She wants. Milk
Beyond milk. World beyond
This one, she cries.

Diana loved anything orange by Chella Courington

2010-04-10T15:46:00.000-07:00

Diana loved anything orange

—cats, lipstick, hunting vests, nail polish, hard hats, life jackets, water guns. When she slipped through her mother’s legs, almost butting the doctor’s stomach, her skin turned a yellowish red. I did crave pumpkin, her mother said. Before my water broke, I ate a whole pie, crust and all. It took eleven days of being rubbed in olive oil and resin, her mother’s fingers lightly massaging Diana’s new skin that capitulated to air in March before trout season, before her father deserted them for Pennsylvania streams. Her eighth Halloween she painted her nose and toes tangerine and swathed herself in a sheet, RIT-dyed sunshine orange, that her mother soaked in white vinegar until the bleeding stopped. Even then in third grade, she knew what they didn’t. How we climb into our wombs at night, sheets over our heads and wait for the water to float us back.

Runner-up in The Collagist's 2009 Flash Fiction Contest

Memoriam to AI by Jerry Williams

2010-03-22T10:59:00.000-07:00

March 21, 2010

In Memoriam to Ai (1947 - 2010) by Jerry Wiliams

When I was in high school and college I started seeing work in literary magazines by a woman with this exotic name who wrote what every other poet seemed too afraid to write—disturbing poems, violent, sexy, unspeakably moving, grief-stricken, harrowing, cutting, beautiful, and yet the verse seemed skillfully controlled and peaceable. For me, most other poets sat in the back seat and Ai drove (which is ironic because she never in her life, from what I understand, possessed a driver’s license). I sort of mythologized her, and I knew I wanted to be her kind of poet—if the world would let me be one—fearless. I know it might sound extreme, but why waste time on flowers when you have knives? As I learned more about Ai, I read her many books, felt her influence growing in me. Years and years later, I ended up at Oklahoma State University where Ai taught creative writing. She blurbed my first collection of poems, served on my dissertation committee. I have taught her books in many classes, and I included three of her poems in the recent breakup and divorce anthology I edited—a great honor for me. Last July, we spoke on the telephone, and I sent her photos from my wedding. We e-mailed occasionally. I always wanted to stay on her good side. This past Saturday afternoon, when I was sitting on a bench in front of my apartment building in Co-op City, I got a call from a friend on the faculty at Oklahoma State. Sometime on Wednesday, March 17th, the poet Ai checked into the Stillwater Medical Center with pneumonia. As it turned out, she had reached a very advanced stage of breast cancer and passed away comfortably in the company of her family early Saturday morning, March 20th. Upon hearing this news, I completely broke down, and I didn’t understand why. I’m supposed to be tough (knives not flowers), but I could not stop crying. I feel that Ai was something of a poetic mother to me. Later that afternoon, one of her closest friends asked me my age and told me that my kundalini had dropped or opened up or uncoiled and released some new emotion in me. I cried a little watching the movie Step Brothers this morning. What is wrong with me? I assume that the chaos will now ensue. Oklahoma State will get bombarded with telephone calls on Monday. Ditto W.W. Norton & Co. Services will be arranged. All that human stuff. But the poems, Ai’s poems, will remain as immortal as ever. Here’s exquisite proof:

Conversation by Ai

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

It Is A Spring Afternoon by Anne Sexton

2010-03-21T20:25:00.000-07:00

Everything here is yellow and green.
Listen to its throat, its earthskin,
the bone dry voices of the peepers
as they throb like advertisements.
The small animals of the woods
are carrying their deathmasks
into a narrow winter cave.
The scarecrow has plucked out
his two eyes like diamonds
and walked into the village.
The general and the postman
have taken off their packs.
This has all happened before
but nothing here is obsolete.
Everything here is possible.

Because of this
perhaps a young girl has laid down
her winter clothes and has casually
placed herself upon a tree limb
that hangs over a pool in the river.
She has been poured out onto the limb,
low above the houses of the fishes
as they swim in and out of her reflection
and up and down the stairs of her legs.
Her body carries clouds all the way home.
She is overlooking her watery face
in the river where blind men
come to bathe at midday.

Because of this
the ground, that winter nightmare,
has cured its sores and burst
with green birds and vitamins.
Because of this
the trees turn in their trenches
and hold up little rain cups
by their slender fingers.
Because of this
a woman stands by her stove
singing and cooking flowers.
Everything here is yellow and green.

Surely spring will allow
a girl without a stitch on
to turn softly in her sunlight
and not be afraid of her bed.
She has already counted seven
blossoms in her green green mirror.
Two rivers combine beneath her.
The face of the child wrinkles.
in the water and is gone forever.
The woman is all that can be seen
in her animal loveliness.
Her cherished and obstinate skin
lies deeply under the watery tree.
Everything is altogether possible
and the blind men can also see.

Match Dot Com by Ted Chiles

2010-03-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

He stroked her hair as she lay next to him. The sheets pulled from the north and south, gathered about them like a large loincloth. The air smelled of secretions and effort. Unconsciously, they both had the same self-congratulatory smile of the novice distance runner who had finished the race. Neither spoke. Each thought they were catching their breath; but truly, it was the apprehension of being the one to shatter the mood, to ground the flight into the reality of its aftermath. And this reluctance became uncomfortable in these passing moments, much like the delay when asked if the dress flattered the wearer.
He spoke first, with a simple question managing to avoid all expected clichés.
“What can I do for you?”
She smiled because he had not finished with “now” and almost ruined it by saying “again.” Instead, she asked for some water.
He came back to the bed with a single bottle. No glasses. This assumed intimacy pleased her. Passing the bottle back and forth, they drank. She, then he, used the bathroom, both brushing their teeth: he with his toothbrush, she with her finger. The limits of intimacy established and acknowledged by her actions. They held each other, slowly drifting into sleep.
He woke before her. During the night they had separated, creating a space between them. She slept in the middle, face down, with her left arm reaching toward his shoulder. He on his side, facing her, with a pillow trapped between his knees. But these positions were just the randomness of the hour since both had been elsewhere fifteen minutes earlier. Kicking the pillow to the floor, he leaned over and kissed her hair where the part disassembled. Standing nude, he marveled at how right the morning felt and set out to make coffee.
The movement of the mattress started her process of awakening. Her eyes opened to see his receding buttock, gracefully shifting on its way to the kitchen. Momentarily, she considered feigning sleep until she could safely dress. But she didn’t because last night had not brought the anxieties of her failed choices into the morning. He was what she had been hoping for during the last year of reading profiles of boys’ inflated dreams – of who they were and what they hoped to be. She always suspected the computer program possessed an inherently male design. You only need to see the inventor shilling away on TV. Witness her queue of potential partners. She should have known.
He came back into the bedroom, carrying a tray of coffee and all its additions, mismatched pottery and a plate of toast with a small jar of jam. They were both still nude. The fact that he had not dressed, not unbalanced them, and that he was not perfect, sagging and bulging in all the expected places, lent her the courage to drop the sheet. They drank their coffee and ate toast, not caring about the crumbs. If only they could have kept quiet. Not become nervous, not searched for some verbal marker: she for the endearing comment, and he for the clever phrase. The one, years from now, they would recount at anniversary dinners.
“I wish you had been on match.com,” he said.
The pause was evident.
“I was,” she said.
And there, out in the open, it stood: they began to wonder what hidden incompatibility, detected by the algorithm, separated them. And when would this flaw become evident? Slowly, in centimeters, they began to create a space between themselves: he shifted the sheet, as did she.

Ted Chiles's short stories have appeared in Lynx Eye, Nilas, Prism Review, and The Binnacle. In September 2007, The New Short Fiction Series of Los Angeles selected four of his stories for a performance entitled Love During Economic Times. He is an avid doodler.

Published: Pitkin Review, Fall 2007

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold ..." By Maureen Duffy

2010-03-13T09:40:00.000-08:00

Poets don't grow old gracefully:
recall old lusts with Hardy
or clamour like Yeats for new.

"How are you?" people ask them, meaning
"Goodness, you're still alive."
"Are you still writing?" signals
"If so, you're quite forgotten.
I haven't seen any reviews,"
and "Aren't you going gently yet
into your good night?"

Gower, his loins frozen by Venus,
piped of a king and his bounty of wine.
Did he who'd sung of every turn and twist
of love regret the arrow's sting he'd begged
Love's priest to tear from his heart
as he lay apart from his chaste wife?
Merlin the magus, besotted in old age
entombed in the rock by Nimue for his lust
must have been a poet too.
How else could he have cast such spells?

When David was old they brought him a virgin
hoping for a new Song of Solomon.
Help us all then Lady, Sappho's own goddess,
to sing your song until the last bittersweet note.

Born in 1933, Duffy, a poet, playwright and novelist, has published dozens of books, including five volumes of poetry.

In Memory of W. B. Yeats by W. H. Auden

2010-02-20T08:33:00.000-08:00

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

How to Teach Grammar by Chella Courington

2010-01-19T12:18:00.000-08:00

How to Teach Grammar
for denis johnson

i don’t care about their commas
rarely can’t follow an essay
with a run-on sentence
or is it run-away

words colliding in white space
f r a g m e n t s
as if anything comes out whole
like this morning

i race to the committee on ethics
leave in the middle of class
gulp peach smoothie
eight live active cultures

stillborn sentences
turned upside down slapped
on the ass shoved into sound bites
not breathing yet

to hell with grammar
david sleeps in the parking garage
at perdido & salsipuedes
sober most days last thursday

he saw a boy shot
fifteen his son’s age
anna’s clean six months
january her daughter starts second grade

ready to write i yell turning to the board
write naked write from exile write in blood

First Published: Studio (January 2008). Ed. Rishma Dunlop

Museum Pastel by Chella Courington

2010-01-04T11:29:00.000-08:00

Girl, just look at those painted orchids. Green and yellow swimming together, spilling over the edge like rainbow sherbet Mama made in July and spooned into glass cups. They slipped from sticky hands, crashing on black & white linoleum.

Just look at those petals fringed in lavender. Feather boa she tossed over her shoulder, cascading down a satin back Saturday nights. Daddy dipped her to radio blues with us praying for long legs, praying to stay up past nine when Ella & Billie brought it on home.

Never cared for real orchids. Hothouse types fussed over and still didn’t bloom, like those purple flowers Mama loved to wear on her birthday. Afterward, she stored them in the icebox till the petals turned brown.

First Published: Phoebe 19.2 (Fall 2007)

Feliz Navidad

2009-12-18T08:42:00.000-08:00

Feliz Navidad
Feliz Navidad
Feliz Navidad
Prospero Ano y Felicidad.

Feliz Navidad
Feliz Navidad
Feliz Navidad
Prospero Ano y Felicidad.

I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
I wanna wish you a Merry Christmas
From the bottom of my heart.

She Gets What She Came For by Chella Courington

2009-12-14T09:32:00.000-08:00

No matter what you do, I sing “Stairway to Heaven” without end. Amen. Sugar on my tongue, chameleon-long, you raise your cotton shirt, spitting sticky rain. Over the Dutch Elm, Chagall’s wedding couple link hands and catch us in their drift, or is it their draft? Our stretchy limbs angel wings, our eyes spilling—Tibetan monkeys screech of Buddha in drag. Father Hennessey dispenses 50 Hail Marys for fucking mother’s best friend’s husband. Our fingers slip.

But this I know for sure: Mother sees the sun set, calls me high and low. Above Home Depot, I’m mistaken for a clumsy crow. Even when she ropes this body in, I won’t be there, not standing on the porch at 301 Sycamore but floating overhead, watching the girl who plunders and prowls. Last night she snaked into a bed on Main Street, spread arms and legs till the body ripped apart, the right side falling to the floor. The left side waiting for Chagall.

First Published: Tapas short fiction honorable mention, Doorknobs and BodyPaint (Issue 55, August 2009)

Happy Birthday, Emily Dickinson

2009-12-10T10:19:00.000-08:00

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

Blood Moon by Chella Courington

2009-12-09T21:38:00.000-08:00

Sophie tickles my cheek with her tongue, and I give her my right arm. Like the Virgin’s mantle sliding over my shoulder, she rolls her muscles to the drummer’s heartbeat, washing me in light. Mama calls my boa a serpent, and me a dirty coochie dancer. Jesus is in covered-dish suppers at the Boaz Baptist Church. But I believe he’s in Sophie. At the Bottoms Up Bar she first appeared—eyes milky, scales ghost white. Just slept on a cover under the sink and refused to eat for six days. On the seventh, clouds evaporated. Clear dark eyes and bright brown body. Three days later, she rubbed and pushed her nose against the back screen until the skin broke. All day she pressed against the linoleum floor, never letting up. At night a translucent ribbon lay on the quilt—eye caps on top.

First Published: “Blood Moon,” Doorknobs short fiction first-prize winner, Doorknobs and BodyPaint (Issue 55, August 2009).

Tonight, Listening by Chella Courington

2009-11-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

It wasn’t the tumor
but the tumor remembered

being cut from the breast
the breast chiseled from bone

when, startled, she felt it
how it might pull again at her nipple

slip through the ribs
like a cat prowling.

First Published: Survivor’s Review (December 2008). Ed. Sheree Kirby.

September by Chella Courington

2009-11-11T09:35:00.000-08:00

1
Fog on the horizon
hides hard island edges.
Close to the patio
sprinklers swish: streams rise
in sun before falling in the garden.
Six plastic-pink flamingoes
parade by the sago palm.
A pair of dolphins, together
still after twenty years, watch
from the granite fountain.

2
Stripping an apple, peel swinging
in air, I think of Mother
who sliced what grew around her.
From wood the size of playing cards
she whittled small animals:
our cat on haunches, neck turned.
She carved a woman
on her knees, mostly stomach,
hands buried her bowed face.

3
Santa Ana winds blow dry
and scatter dust in their wake.
Hummingbirds circle coral bells.
Their wings, shadow puppets
on stucco. Heavy with petals,
dahlias bend to rocky dirt.
Once I caught a Regal Moth—
panes of ruby and jade.
For three days, she flew.

4
Tonight my namesake calls
like Linda Blair from The Exorcist:
voice gravelly, emerging
from Minnesota. At 19 Satan
and God crowded her head.
No alcohol, no meds, no doctor
could wash them out.
At 30 she screams
God will kill you for leaving me.
I squeeze the receiver
not forgetting her butterfly nightshirt—
wings pressed against me.

First Published: Touchstone (2007-2008), Ed. David Murphy.

Forty by Chella Courington

2009-11-07T11:56:00.000-08:00

Dust devils swirl to Beethoven’s Fifth and sun
burns my eyes between Albuquerque and Grants.
Living in this forsaken land is unimaginable
until I see shadows on desert hills
and think of Georgia O’Keeffe

traveling across New Mexico—water colors
dislodging dark New York her lover old
enough to be her father posing her
day after day in his studio
infatuations in black and white.

Stieglitz dies. She escapes to open plains
cloud vistas where nothing presses
no camera traps no skyscraper blocks
her stretching into whiteness—
bone on red hills.

First Published as "Pilgrimage": Poemeleon 1.2 (Fall 2006). Ed. Cati Porter.
.

DEFINING THE ORGASM by Nin Andrews

2009-11-05T13:52:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you don't want to admit you've never had an orgasm. Maybe you don't even know what orgasms are, much less what style they come in, and how they might become available to you. That is why you are reading this guide to orgasms. You want to enter the realm of intimate revelations, heightened awareness, evocative sounds and silence. Indeed the history of orgasms is nothing other than the history of the world.

The fact is, orgasms are everywhere, though when we ask what an orgasm is, we find ourselves at a loss for words. Some call orgasms faith, others consider them music, still others say they are the best of ourselves in our best possible positions.

However they are defined, orgasms take great pleasure in men and women, good and evil, visible and invisible, real and unreal. Orgasms can happen to anyone, and there are all kinds of orgasms for all kinds of people.

For example, there are the lyric orgasms, which express deep feeling for an imagined person. You never know when your passionate, moaning lover is actually having a lyric orgasm. There is the ballad orgasm, which is kept alive orally, the dramatic orgasm, which speaks for itself, and the epic orgasm, a long-winded orgasm in which one lover plays the hero or conqueror and then relishes his victory. Men are often content with the small and discrete haiku of orgasms, which are said to around emotions and spiritual insight in a mere matter of syllables. Ministers and somber folk talk about the elegiac orgasms, which are mostly enjoyed by the dead, while celebrities and exhibitionists are inclined towards the performance orgasm, a style enacted before audiences. Good old-fashioned men and women never tire of the pastoral orgasms that appear in the midst of rural scenery. And at any time of day or night, lost orgasms aimlessly wander the streets, waiting to be found.

from The Book of Orgasms, Cleveland State University Press, August 2000

Lynette’s War by Chella Courington

2009-10-30T13:03:00.000-07:00

My cousin Lynette says she’s tired from cleaning
East Main houses of rich bitches. They don’t even shit
like us, got toilet seats that float to the bowl,
never make a sound, & she hands me the baby
over the front seat. Days off Merry Maids
we like to drive her ’97 Trans Am to Atlanta—
kd lang over eight speakers.
I’m tired too, tired of being the babysitter.
Leah grabbing my earrings, covers me in crumbs.
She bites off the heads of animal crackers.
Only eats heads.

Don’t know why I hang with her.
She’s like the girl who cut my hair at Cinderella’s
saying I had the ugliest strands she’d ever seen.
I kept going back for more till Lynette blurted
you don’t need to pay for that kind of shit.
But Lynette says outright
she’s sexy & I’m not. We both know it.
Junior high she called me a mutant. Boobs
like raisins on a fifteen-year old’s wrong.
Mama took me to the doctor & he shook his head.

At least Lynette is a good mother.
When the kid has fever, Lynette won’t go
to work. I’d rather lose my job
than leave a sick baby at daycare.
Guess that’s why I hang with her.
She might call me names, but let somebody else do it,
she’d scratch their eyes out. At the Sonic,
some boy from Crossville leaned in the window,
drop the fat chick & let’s go driving.
She clawed his left cheek & screeched away,
tray still on the car, cokes & fries flying.
Son of a bitch thinks he can dump on you and have
a good time with me. Stupid bastard.

I thought Lynette would always be the one to leave.
Good looking. Smart. She never let anybody
walk on her, or me, though she did
what Cochran girls do after getting their
driver’s license. She got knocked up.
Wouldn’t tell a soul who the father was.
We all thought it was Sonny Cruz.
He went to Iraq in August & emailed Lynette every day.
Like they were junk, she’d hit delete.
He started writing letters she stacked on her dresser—
unopened. Keeping in touch with soldiers
is talking to the dead. Sonny could come back,
I say. Lots of boys make it. Lynette turned away
he might, but he won’t be the Sonny I knew.

After homecoming she carries his letters out to the grill.
They catch on the third match.
Every last word.

Voted Goodreads October Poem (2009)

Spiderweb by Kay Ryan

2009-10-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

From other
angles the
fibers look
fragile, but
not from the
spider’s, always
hauling coarse
ropes, hitching
lines to the
best posts
possible. It’s
heavy work
everyplace,
fighting sag,
winching up
give. It
isn’t ever
delicate
to live.

THE SHEEP-CHILD by James Dickey

2009-10-11T23:01:00.000-07:00

Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth mounds
Of pine straw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say I have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol because
Those things can't live his eyes
Are open but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?

Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
Be saying saying

I am here, in my father's house.
I who am half of your world, came deeply
To my mother in the long grass
Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
Listening for foxes. It was something like love
From another world that seized her
From behind, and she gave, not Iifting her head
Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
Of sobbing of something stumbling
Away, began, as she must do,
To carry me. I woke, dying,

In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
The great grassy world from both sides,
Man and beast in the round of their need,
And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
I ate my one meal
Of milk, and died
Staring. From dark grass I came straight

To my father's house, whose dust
Whirls up in the halls for no reason
When no one comes piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
And, through my immortal waters,
I meet the sun's grains eye
To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
Dead, I am most surely living
In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
They go into woods into bean fields they go
Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
They groan they wait they suffer
Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

Copyright © 1966 by James Dickey. All rights reserved. By permission of the Literary Estate of James Dickey.

The Atlantic Monthly; August 1966; The Sheep-Child.

Medley by Chella Courington

2009-10-06T10:43:00.000-07:00

Medley

I

Hi, don’t hang up, my name is Meredith Medley.
What?
Meredith Medley.
What kind of name is that?
Oh, my mom teaches piano at Waverly High.
Waverly? I went there.
Me too, graduated in 85.
I graduated in 88. Are you calling me about the reunion?
No, I’m calling about your favorite TV show.
My what?
Favorite TV show.
I don’t watch TV.
Does anybody in your household?
Who wants to know?
Me.
What if there’s nobody in my household?
Are you saying you’re single?
What if I am?
Are you looking?
For what?
Someone to be with.
Like who?
Anybody. What do you do if you don’t watch TV?
Why should I tell you?
Cause I work for Nielsen.

II

Hi, don’t hang up, my name is Meredith Medley.
But I sent my cell number to dontcalldotgov.
So?
So you shouldn’t be calling me.
Why not?
I was sleeping.
At 4 in the afternoon?
Look Miss, Whoever You Are, it’s none of your goddamn business.
Excuse me, sir, but that language is totally uncalled for.
My language? You’re the one who woke me up.
You took our heavenly father’s name in vain.
He’s not my heavenly father.
What? You don’t believe in God?
It’s none of your goddamn business.
Look sir, I’m not going to talk to you unless you apologize.
What?
Click.

III

Hi, don’t hang up, my name is Meredith Medley.
What do you want?
What’s your favorite TV show?
Why?
I work for Nielsen Ratings.
Nielsen who?
Ratings.
Oh.
So, what’s your favorite?
The Biggest Loser.
You fat?
Not really.
How much do you weigh?
130.
How tall?
5’9.”
You’re almost skinny. I weigh that much & I’m 5’5.”
I don’t eat between meals.
So, what’s your favorite show?
The Biggest Loser.
Why?
I hate fat people & hate myself for hating them.
Really.
So when they lose weight, I can love them again.
Really.
And when I love them again, I can love myself again.
Really.

IV

Hi, don’t hang up, my name is Meredith Medley.
Are you kin to Mel Medley?
Who?
Mel Medley makes the meanest babyback ribs in Austin.
You from there?
No, but my best friend went to UT.
Hmm, what’s your favorite TV show?
South Park.
What?
South Park.
How old are you?
Why?
Cause my nephew watches it.
How old’s he?
12.
So what? Those guys who write it are a lot older than that.
How old are you?
45.
And you like South Park?
Trey Parker & Matt Stone are geniuses.
Who?
What’s your name again?
Meredith Medley.

First Published: Poemeleon's Humor Issue (Winter 2008-09). Ed. Cati Porter.

When Berryman Died by Chella Courington

2009-10-02T17:41:00.000-07:00

WHEN BERRYMAN DIED

He left his shoes, scuffed loafers,
on the bridge. A cordovan pair
he could have shed
anywhere: at the university
beside his desk, under Tate’s coffee table,
at the foot of a lover’s bed.

Every night he thought, tomorrow.
Mornings, he remembered
his suit at the cleaners, his essay
on Marlowe, students waiting
outside his office. January 7
reasons ran dry.

He bathed and trimmed his beard,
putting on a new shirt.
In eight degrees he walked
to the bridge.

First Published: Touchstone (2007-2008), Ed. David Murphy

Queen's Bird by Chella Courington

2009-09-07T17:35:00.000-07:00

Two of each—cup, saucer, bread plate
in lukewarm water, I wash away

thirty years of dust since Mother died.
At 42, ovarian cancer like Queen Mary.

Bloody Mary quite contrary
why leave your subjects crushed?

I thought I’d run into Mother if I traveled:
Chicago, Barbados, Edinburgh.

Against the sun, I raise the porcelain
eyeing it for chips and cracks. Bone china

fired from bone ash like Mother’s gray powder
handed me in a bronze urn.

Or is this cup with songbird glazed in blue
mere clay: my lips where once were hers.

First Published: Mademoiselle’s Fingertips (Summer 2008)

I See He Sees by Chella Courington

2009-09-01T01:26:00.000-07:00

I See He Sees

An upward draft
catches Mama’s hem
at 41st & 12th
raising it in waves
around her knees & over her thighs
a pink-striped dress
dances like the awning
at Lida’s Cantina
when a man at the corner
clutching a boy’s hand
sees Mama naked
under her flying skirt
& I see he sees
wondering why
she doesn’t hold it down
& he sees me see him
winking
before the light turns green.

Rebekah & Christina

2009-08-20T14:33:00.000-07:00

ah, i am breaking pattern, speaking! my dear friend rebekah is now in london on a fulbright teacher exchange. her blog that i've linked: my year in the purple house. sounds like a novel to me. remember julie & julia. so it's a year of living vicariously as i read of her adventures down lavender lane. in honor of her being there, i'll post a christina rossetti poem:

A Birthday

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vier and purple dyes;
Carve it into doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

from RELUCTANT GRAVITIES by Rosmarie Waldrop

2009-08-09T10:36:00.000-07:00

PROLOGUE: TWO VOICES

Two voices on a page. Or is it one? Now turning in on themselves, back into fiber and leaf, now branching into sequence, consequence, public works projects or discord. Now touching, now trapped in frames without dialog box. Both tentative, as if poring over old inscriptions, when perhaps the wall is crumbling, circuits broken, pages blown off by a fall draft.

Even if voices wrestle on the page, their impact on the air is part of their definition. In a play, for instance, the sentences would be explained by their placement on stage. We would not ask an actress what anguish her lines add up to. She would not worry what her voice touches, would let it spill over the audience, aiming beyond the folds of the curtain, at the point in the distance called the meaning of the play.

The difference of our sex, says one voice, saves us from humiliation. It makes me shiver, says the other. Your voice drops stones into feelings to sound their depth. Then warmth is truncated to war. But I'd like to fall back into simplicity as into a featherbed.

Voices, planted on the page, do not ripen or bear fruit. Here placement does not explain, but cultivates the vacancy between them. The voices pause, start over. Gap gardening which, moved inward from the right margin, suspends time. The suspension sets, is set, in type, in columns that precipitate false memories of garden, vineyard, trellis. Trembling leaf, rules of black thumb and white, invisible angle of breath and solid state.

She tries to draw a strength she dimly feels out of the weaknesses she knows, as if predicting an element in the periodic table. He wants to make a flat pebble skim across the water inside her body. He wonders if, for lack of sky, it takes on the color of skin or other cells it touches. If it rusts the bones.

The pact between page and voice is different from the compact of voice and body. The voice opens the body. Air, the cold of the air, passes through and, with a single inflection, builds large castles. The page wants proof, but bonds. The body cannot keep the voice. It spills. Foliage over the palisade.

He has put a pebble under his tongue. While her lips explode in conjectures his lisp is a new scale to practice. He wants his words to lift, against the added odds, to a truth outside him. In exchange, his father walking down the road should diminish into a symbol of age.

The page lures the voice with a promise of wood blossoming. But there is no air. No breath lives in the mouth or clouds the mirror. On stage, the body would carry the surface we call mind. Here, surface marries surface, refusing deep waters. Still, the point of encounter is here, always. Screams rise. Tears fall. Impure white, legible.

I

CONVERSATION 1

ON THE HORIZONTAL

My mother, she says, always spread, irresistibly, across the entire room, flooding me with familiarity to breed content. I feared my spongy nature and, hoping for other forms of absorption, opened the window onto more water, eyes level with its surface. And lower, till the words "I am here" lost their point with the vanishing air. Just as it's only in use that a proposition grinds its lens.

Deciphering, he says, is not a horizontal motion. Though the way a sentence is meant can be expressed by an expansion that becomes part of it. As a smile may wide-open a door. Holding the tools in my mouth I struggle uphill, my body so perfectly suspended between my father's push and gravity's pull that no progress is made. As if consciousness had to stay embedded in carbon. Or copy. Between camp and bomb. But if you try to sound feelings with words, the stone drops into reaches beyond fathoms.

I am here, she says, I've learned that life consists in fitting my body to the earth's slow rotation. So that the way I lean on the parapet betrays dried blood and invisible burns. My shadow lies in the same direction as all the others, and I can't jump over it. My mother's waves ran high. She rode them down on me as on a valley, hoping to flush out the minerals. But I hid my bones under sentences expanding like the flesh in my years.

Language, he says, spells those who love it, sliding sidelong from word to whole cloth. The way fingers extend the body into adventure, print, lakes, and Dead-man's-hand. Wherever the pen pushes, in the teeth of fear and malediction, even to your signature absorbing you into sign. A discomfort with the feel of home before it grows into inflamed tissue and real illness. With symptoms of grammar, punctuation, subtraction of soul. And only death to get you out.

CONVERSATION 2

ON THE VERTICAL

We must decipher our lives, he says, forward and backward, down through cracks in the crystal to excrement, entrails, formation of cells. And up. The way the lark at the end of night trills vertically out of the grass gh and outside myself, though regularly consumed at high noon. So maybe I should grant the shoot-out: light may flood me too, completely. But it won't come walking in boots and spurs, or flowing robes, and take my hand or give me the finger with the assurance of a more rational being. And my body slopes toward yours no matter how level the ground.

If we can't call it God, he says, it still perches on the mind, minting strangeness. How could we recognize what we've never seen? A whale in through the window, frame scattered as far as non-standard candles. The sky faints along the giant outline, thar she blows under your skin, tense, a parable right through the body that remains so painfully flesh.

So pleasurably flesh, she says, and dwells among us, flesh offered to flesh, thick as thieves, beginning to see. Even the lark's soar breaks and is content to drop back into yesterday's gravity. Which wins out over dispersion, even doubt, and our thoughts turn dense like matter. The way the sky turns deep honey at noon. The way my sensations seem to belong to a me that has always already sided with the world.

from RELUCTANT GRAVITIES by Rosmarie Waldrop
New Directions, 1999

The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

2009-08-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

August 8, 2009

It was on this day in 1946 that Harold Ross wrote a memo about John Hersey's Hiroshima story that began "A very fine piece beyond any question; got practically everything. This will be … the classic piece on what follows a bomb dropping for a long time to come."

It was exactly one year and two days after the U.S. had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (the bomb was dropped August 6th, 1945) and The New Yorker was devoting an entire August issue to John Hersey's reporting. Hersey had been one of the first Western reporters to arrive in Hiroshima. To document the aftermath, he decided to write about how individual persons were affected, and he focused his stories on the lives of six people in Hiroshima at the time of the explosion.

The memo that Harold Ross wrote on this day was addressed to Joseph Wigglesworth, The New Yorker staff member whose job it was to compile the query sheets from various editors at the magazine on any given piece. Harold Ross had a reputation for turning in funny, quirky query sheets — and lengthy ones, too. For Hersey's Hiroshima article, Ross had written several hundred questions and observations. In the memo, he admitted, "I probably read it over-zealously."

Ross wrote: "There is, I think, one grave lack in this piece. It may be Hersey's intention that there be. If so, ask consideration for what I say anyhow. All the way through I wondered about what killed these people, the burns, falling debris, the concussion — what? For a year I've been wondering about this and I eagerly hoped this piece would tell me. It doesn't. Nearly a hundred thousand dead people are around but Hersey doesn't tell how they died. Would it be possible — if so, would be wise — to tell on Galley 7 where he gives the one hundred thousand people, how many were killed by being hit by hard objects, how many by burns, how many by concussion, or shock, or whatever it was?"

In the final version that was published, Hersey wrote: "Many people who did not die right away came down with nausea, headache, diarrhea, malaise, and fever, which lasted several days. Doctors could not be certain whether some of these symptoms were the result of radiation or nervous shock. … The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells — caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls."

Harold Ross suggested mentioning the vomiting earlier and describing it more thoroughly. Ross also wrote "I would suggest that Hersey might do well to tuck up on the time — give the hour and minute, exactly or roughly, from time to time. The reader loses all sense of the passing of time in the episodes and never knows what time of day it is, whether ten a.m. or four p.m."

John Hersey's piece appeared a few weeks later, in The New Yorker's last issue of August. Hersey would later say, "What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima."

VII by Wendell Berry

2009-07-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

I would not have been a poet
except that I have been in love
alive in this mortal world,
or an essayist except that I
have been bewildered and afraid,
or a storyteller had I not heard
stories passing to me through the air,
or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
and words have come to me
out of their deep caves
needing to be remembered.
But on the days I am lucky
or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
that two make in making marriage
that for all our trying, all
our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
has no tongue. Or I give myself
to gravity, light, and air
and am carried back
to solitary work in fields
and woods, where my hands
rest upon a world unnamed,
complete, unanswerable, and final
as our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
to life beyond words, silent
and secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

"VII" from the poem "1994" by Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir:
The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997. © Counterpoint, 1998.

Paper Covers Rock by Chella Courington

2009-07-04T14:32:00.000-07:00

I
I can’t stop buying scissors. I walk into Home Depot for geraniums & lilies, leave with gardening shears, green ergonomic handles. Gelson’s for halibut. Shiny poultry shears. At a garage sale I find a pair of hedge clippers. By December paper cutters, pinking shears, hair trimmers—any blades you want are boxed in the kitchen pantry.

II
Saturday he takes his 14 clubs & disappears. In hot water, I clean scissors. Prop them on the counter before drying with muslin. Each blade I shine with baking soda. In high school I hung with cutters. They used whatever worked: broken glass, coat hangers, paper. Arms tracked with violet scars like stretch marks, hidden under long-sleeve shirts.

III
Reflections in a Golden Eye: Mrs. Langdon uses garden shears to clip her nipples when she loses her baby. Snip snip—easy as pinching off deadheads. Sunday in January, I hold my left nipple between the blades of barber shears. Warm steel triggers goose bumps. Is a nipple like a finger? Can they sew it back on?

IV
Recurrent dream: blades-down, scissors drop from the ceiling, rattling & hissing. Impale the cherry nightstand, down comforter, my Land’s End bathrobe. I crouch in the tub, rocking to the sound of hail. Open my thigh—blood a rusty penny melting on my tongue.

V
I get a Nevada divorce. He signs the papers & hauls his Titliest clubs, La-Z-Boy, & mahogany desk back to Illinois. Parting words: The cat stays with you. I get Moot, the crystal, & the condo. Start selling the scissors on E-Bay, box by box.

First Published: Mademoiselle’s Fingertips (Summer 2008)

Dream of New Mexico by Chella Courington

2009-05-25T10:05:00.000-07:00

In La Madera, you find me
late afternoon sun at my back

hips wider than yours, gathering
skulls. We roam red hills:

ocher, orange and purple earth
cracked by hot blowing sand.

A solitary penitent, dark veil
over torso, trudges near us.

Bulky black crosses cover the desert.
You kiss my scars, ghosts of my breasts.

Seven years mortification fall away
evening bells from Ranchos de Taos.

First Published in: _The Wild Goose Poetry Review_ (Summer 2008). Eds. Patricia Kennedy Bostian and Gary Walker.

Skin by Chella Courington

2009-05-18T12:31:00.000-07:00

geckos, iridescent-white
zigzag on the ceiling
lick their way clear
humming fan blades
cut hot air
never sever scales
they’re harmless
there’s nothing we can do
please don’t call the desk

there were snake skins
dry diaphanous coils
grandmother turned inside out
one for each child born before forty
stitched seven across
hung over a black walnut bed
pendulous skins tapped
when a door opened
and someone pulled down a cover

at night
geckos eat the skin
they shed
leave nothing behind
i watch the plump one
in the corner
puffy belly rising
and falling on each cry
my own stomach round
in union undulating

published in _Not A Muse_, Eds. Kate Rogers & Vicki Holmes
Hon Kong: New Haven Books, 2009.

Boredoom by Colette Bryce

2009-05-13T08:59:00.000-07:00

We nursed the wounded gull to death
in the end, attended its small funeral, as the rain
beat down on the shed's tin roof. Tightrope-walked
on the high back walls, took giant steps, ran errands,
Milk, Potatoes, Silk Cut, Special Mince. We swung
in arcs on a length of flex from a lamppost,
racing our own shadows. Shot at aliens
dancing on a screen, pushing coin after coin
in the slot: reached level five, the mother ship.
The world was due to end next week
according to someone whose brother had read
Nostradamus. Magpies, two for joy. Walk round ladders, quick,
touch wood. We mimed the prayer of the Green Cross Code
and waited, good, at the side of the road.
Blessed ourselves when the ambulance sailed
by on a blue (our fingers, toes). Lay awake
in the fret of the night, thinking about the Secret
of Fatima, the four-minute warning, the soft-boiled egg.
Our boomerang did not come back. Frisbees
lodged in the canopies of trees forever, turning black.
I poked out moss from paving slabs, half-dreamingly,
with an ice-pop stick, then leapt at the looped rope
of my name called from a yard, and dawdled home,
trailing a strange tune on the xylophone railings.
The future lived in the crystal ball
of a snake preserved in alcohol in my grandmother's attic.
I looked, on tiptoe, out through the lens
of the highest window; learned the silver river's turn,
the slogans daubed on the ancient walls,
the column of smoke where something always burned.

Colette Bryce was born in 1970 and brought up in Northern Ireland. She won the
National Poetry Competition in 2003 and her second collection, The Full Indian Rope
Trick, was short-listed for the TS Eliot prize in 2004.

Dear Jungle by Sujata Bhatt

2009-05-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

The safest place for you is in the greenhouse now.
The animals have to stay in the zoo.
The birds have their own cage
which is somewhere else, far away;
and the snakes live in the snake house.
I've sprayed the mosquitoes;
there's no point in keeping them.
I'm sorry the butterflies died too.
It was an accident.
Don't be sad. I'll visit you every day.
I'll wear my new tropical outfit, helmet and all.
I'll bring biscuits and Darjeeling tea, just for us.
My dear jungle, please understand
my love for you; how I need your jungly jungliness;
oh, how shall I live without your green,
green rawness all over me.

Sujata Bhatt was born in India in 1956 and was brought up in India and the United
States. She has published six collections of poetry. Her most recent collection, Pure
Lizard, was shortlisted for the 2008 Forward Best Collection prize.

The Raindrop (God Speaks) by Moniza Alvi

2009-05-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

The Guardian published a list of Carol Ann Duffy's favotie women poets Saturday, May 2. I will feature their poetry over the next couple of weeks.

after Jules Supervielle

I'm searching for a drop of rain
so recently fallen into the sea.
In its sheer descent
it out-glistened the others
because alone among all the drops
it had the wisdom to understand
that very softly
it would lose itself forever
in the salty water.
So I'm searching the sea,
scanning the attentive waves
for the sake of a delicate memory
which only I can guard.
Well, I've done my best -
some things even God can't do
despite the best of intentions
and the wordless assistance
of sky, waves, air.

Moniza Alvi was born in Lahore in 1954 and grew up in England. Her most recent collection of poetry, Europa, was shortlisted for the 2008 TS Eliot prize.

Mrs Lazarus by Carol Ann Duffy

2009-05-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day
over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in
from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed
at the burial stones until my hands bled, retched
his name over and over again, dead, dead.

Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot,
widow, one empty glove, white femur
in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits
into black bags, shuffled in a dead man's shoes,
noosed the double knot of a tie around my bare neck,

gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt
the Stations of Bereavement, the icon of my face
in each bleak frame; but all those months
he was going away from me, dwindling
to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going,

going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell
for his face. The last hair on his head
floated out from a book. His scent went from the house.
The will was read. See, he was vanishing
to the small zero held by the gold of my ring.

Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language;
my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher-the shock
of a man's strength under the sleeve of his coat-
along the hedgerows. But I was faithful
for as long as it took. Until he was memory.

So I could stand that evening in the field
in a shawl of fine air, healed, able
to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky
and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice
the village men running towards me, shouting,

behind them the women and children, barking dogs,
and I knew. I knew by the sly light
on the blacksmith's face, the shrill eyes
of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me
into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me.

He lived. I saw the horror on his face.
I heard his mother's crazy song. I breathed
his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud,
moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew,
croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time.

Carol Ann Duffy

Terezin by Taije Silverman

2009-04-28T11:08:00.000-07:00

—a transfer camp in the Czech Republic

We rode the bus out, past fields of sunflowers
that sloped for miles, hill after hill of them blooming.

The bus was filled with old people.
On their laps women held loaves of freshly baked bread.
Men slept in their seats wearing work clothes.

You stared out the window beside me. Your eyes
were so hard that you might have been watching the glass.

Fields and fields of sunflowers.

Arriving we slowed on the cobblestone walkway.
Graves looked like boxes, or houses from high up.

On a bench teenage lovers slouched in toward each other.
Their backs formed a shape like a seashell.
You didn't want to go inside.

But the rooms sang. Song like breath, blown
through spaces in skin.

The beds were wide boards stacked up high on the walls.
The glass on the door to the toilet was broken.
I imagined nothing.

You wore your black sweater and those dark sunglasses.
You didn't look at me.

The rooms were empty, and the courtyard was empty,
and the sunlight on cobblestone could have been water,
and I think even when we are here we are not here.

The courtyard was flooded with absence.
The tunnel was crowded with light.
Like a throat. Like a—

In a book I read how at its mouth they played music,
some last piece by Wagner or Mozart or Strauss.

I don't know why. I don't know
who walked through the tunnel or who played or what finally
they could have wanted. I don't know where the soul goes.

Your hair looked like wheat. It was gleaming.

Nearby on the hillside a gallows leaned slightly.
What has time asked of it? Nights. Windstorms.

Your hair looked like fire, or honey.
You didn't look at me.

Grass twisted up wild, lit gold all around us.
We could have been lost somewhere, in those funny hills.

And the ride back—I don't remember.
Why was I alone? It was night, then. It was still morning.

But the fields were filled with dead sunflowers.
Blooms darkened to brown, the stalks bowed.
And the tips dried to husks that for miles kept reaching.
Those dreamless sloped fields of traveling husks.

miss rosie by Lucille Clifton

2009-04-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

when I watch you
wrapped up like garbage
sitting, surrounded by the smell
of too old potato peels
or
when I watch you
in your old man's shoes
with the little toe cut out
sitting, waiting for your mind
like next week's grocery
I say
when I watch you
you wet brown bag of a woman
who used to be the best looking gal in Georgia
used to be called the Georgia Rose
I stand up
through your destruction
I stand up

Reprinted from Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, BOA Editions, Ltd., 260 East Ave., Rochester, NY 14604.
From poets.org. Click on title above.

"In the desert" from The Black Riders by Stephen Crane

2009-04-17T09:21:00.000-07:00

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend,”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Shaindel Beers: A Brief History of Time

2009-04-15T08:15:00.000-07:00

Recently I interviewed Shaindel Beers about her new book of poetry, A Brief History of Time, published by Salt Publishing in 2009.

1. Several of your poems use long lines. What is their appeal to you and what other contemporary poets and/or poems of the long line do you admire?

I love the rush and the feeling of breathlessness when you get to the end of the line, whether you’re reading aloud or silently. A lot of beginning poets think that the short line makes a poem move more quickly, but each line break stops you for about the same duration as a comma as your eyes make their way over to the left margin. I hadn’t really thought of a lot of contemporary poets who use long lines; I guess, I always think of Whitman automatically when I hear “long line,” or Ginsberg, since he was so influenced by Whitman. I just looked up some poets I really admire who I think might use long lines and realized a lot of them do who I hadn’t thought of—Richard Jackson, Charles Harper Webb, Mary Ruefle, and Bruce Weigl to name a few.

2. I noticed one prose poem in your collection, “Stretching out that fifteen minutes.” What do you like about the form? Dislike?

Prose poems are tricky to even talk about. Is it a prose poem? Is it a short-short story? Is there a difference between these two things? I really think a prose poem is a poem that throws one of the basic elements of poetry out the window—the basic unit of poetry is the line—but keeps all the rest of them. I especially tried to make this one land on the poetic side of the spectrum by phonetically spelling out the way the boy’s name would sound depending on the direction of the wind. But it definitely depends on strong narrative like a short-short story.

The things I don’t like about the form are when people try to definitely label something as a prose poem versus short-short fiction and get huffy in their defense. The other thing is when people write prose poems that could be traditional poems, but they are writing it that way because they are too lazy to decide where line breaks should go. If you can do it with appropriate line breaks, it doesn’t need to be a prose poem.

3. Given your undergraduate major was in English, to what extent are you influenced by classical Western writers?

My good friend and former colleague, Larry Starzec, used to say, “Writers read with larceny in their hearts.” As a writer, you read, and if something is breathtaking, you think, “How can I steal that?” As an English major, you are steeped in the Western tradition, so I think that there’s no way around admitting that that is my main influence. My main focus, even through my first graduate degree, was British literature. I’d never really read American literature until I was teaching it at the community college level, and I’d read almost no contemporary literature until my MFA program (my second graduate program). I would say the Western influence, until relatively recently, was even more focused than most people’s—pretty exclusively 19th Century and British.

Hosting my radio show, Translated By, has gotten me reading at least one non-English language book a week, and I’ve become really intrigued with a particular Japanese writer, Yoko Ogawa, so I’m definitely trying to expand my horizons, but the U.S. really is pretty insular as far as literature goes, and you really have to look for what’s been translated into English.

4. Being a Californian I can’t resist the film question. If you could turn one of your poems into a film, which one would you choose and why? Any idea of whom you’d cast in the key roles?

I think that “HA!” would be one of the best poems to turn into a film. It seems to have a lot of “scenes” without needing different settings—it would all basically take place in a Dollar General store, and it has an interesting cast of characters. I had never thought about casting it before, but I think Susan Sarandon would make a good Ann. Is it fair to put someone as glamorous as Susan Sarandon in a Dollar General? I think Steve would be played by Milo Ventimiglia (Jess from Gilmore Girls). The real Steve (yes, I didn’t change the names for this poem) actually looked just like Ventimiglia. Maybe the addict cashier would be Brittany Murphy, and I don’t know who the nice cashier would be. Probably someone pretty nondescript.

Click on the above title to find more about Salt Publishing & Shaindel Beers

Interviewer: Chella Courington
Santa Barbara, CA
March 2009

Lynette’s War by Chella Courington

2009-04-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

My cousin Lynette says she’s tired from cleaning
East Main houses of rich bitches. They don’t even shit
like us, got toilet seats that float to the bowl,
never make a sound, & she hands me the baby
over the front seat. Days off Merry Maids
we like to drive her ’97 Trans Am to Atlanta—
kd lang over eight speakers.
I’m tired too, tired of being the babysitter.
Leah grabbing my earrings, covers me in crumbs.
She bites off the heads of animal crackers.
Only eats heads. Go figure. Lynette runs
into the outlet mall for Juicy jeans.

Don’t know why I hang with her.
She’s like the girl who cut my hair at Cinderella’s
saying I had the ugliest strands she’d ever seen.
I kept going back for more till Lynette blurted
you don’t need to pay for that kind of shit.
Yeah, well, Lynette’s one to tell me outright
she’s sexy & I’m not. We both know it.
Junior high she called me a mutant. Boobs
like raisins on a fifteen-year old’s wrong.
Mama took me to the doctor & he shook his head,
maybe you’ve done something God didn’t like
so He’s punishing you. Could be
God just didn’t like me cause I sure
didn’t think much of Him & still don’t.

At least Lynette is a good mother.
When the kid has fever, Lynette won’t go
to work. I’d rather lose my job
than leave a sick baby at daycare.
Guess that’s why I hang with her.
She might call me names, but let somebody else do it,
she’d scratch their eyes out. At the Sonic,
some boy from Crossville leaned in the window,
drop the fat chick & let’s go driving.
She clawed his left cheek & screeched away,
tray still on the car, cokes & fries flying.
Son of a bitch thinks he can dump on you and have
a good time with me. Stupid bastard.

I thought Lynette would always be the one to leave.
Good looking. Smart. She never let anybody
walk on her, or me, though she did
what Cochran girls do after getting their
driver’s license. She got knocked up.
Wouldn’t tell a soul who the father was.
We all thought it was Sonny Cruz.
He went to Iraq in August & emailed Lynette every day.
Like they were junk, she’d hit delete.
He started writing letters she stacked on her dresser—
unopened. Keeping in touch with soldiers
is talking to the dead. Sonny could come back,
I say. Lots of boys make it. Lynette turned away
he might, but he won’t be the Sonny I knew.

After homecoming she carries his letters out to the grill.
They catch on the third match.
Every last word.

The Edge of Morning by Chella Courington

2009-03-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

We pass a joint, barely long
enough for a clip. You accuse me
of hiding my sex under tight sheets.
I breathe as deeply as I can. Your words
bounce against the wall, single letters back
and forth: Navratolova slams one ball after a
nother. Chrissie’s flummoxed. Too late to drive
too high to care. And you invoke my mother’s ghost
as you always do this time of night: her hand reaches
from the grave to bless us. I roll more grass, lick the edge
to forget I’ll stumble off to bed with you and blame Mother
for pushing me into your arms.

First published: .” SUB-LIT, 1.4 (Spring 2008). Ed. Michael Ogletree
et al.

Blue by Joni Mitchell

2009-03-07T13:59:00.000-08:00

Blue songs are like tattoos
You know I've been to sea before
Crown and anchor me
Or let me sail away
Hey Blue, here is a song for you
Ink on a pin
Underneath the skin
An empty space to fill in
Well there're so many sinking now
You've got to keep thinking
You can make it thru these waves
Acid, booze, and ass
Needles, guns, and grass
Lots of laughs lots of laughs
Everybody's saying that hell's the hippest way to go
Well I don't think so
But I'm gonna take a look around it though
Blue I love you

Blue here is a shell for you
Inside you'll hear a sigh
A foggy lullaby
There is your song from me

Copyright © 1970; Joni Mitchell

click on the title to find more on joni mitchell

The Grandeur Of The Mountains by Rosmarie Waldrop

2009-02-25T08:55:00.000-08:00

Could the grandeur of the mountains be inhaled by a village girl? How fraught the bond between warm-blooded animals. The governing classes had no intention of loosening their grip. The more snow piled up undenied on the snowbank the more shadows of clouds moved across "household slavery." What does it mean to put a word between quotation marks? Thanks to the discoveries of Darwin the structural plan of every species is laid down in two strands.

How wonderfully the air is laid down on shadows. She had left her widowed mother to discover the grandeur of the mountains. Above a certain solitude no trees grow. Snowballing denoted making few concessions to women. What is passed from generation to generation is a structure of detail like the lacing of boots. Whereas inverted commas take their distance from language.

Such as the accessories of light, heat, electricity, laced boots. Soon she was pregnant. The more rapidly commas were snowballing the harder the resolve to maintain symbols of order. For proper understanding use distance from language. Sometimes slight errors occur above a certain solitude. The sense has been shifted, but not cut into mouthfuls.

This air, then, those we call animals suck in by mouthfuls. In October, there was a severe storm among the symbols of order. This is what is known as genetic mutation. Solitude engulfed the accessories. The vast, shifting grandeur of the mountains. Sexual tolerance was confined within commas, suspended within its history, weighted and therefore thought.

The old woman knew her daughter was near her time. Air is decomposed in the lungs and therefore thought. But genes are grouped into larger units called history. The word enclosed within quotation marks is waiting for its moment of revenge. The governing classes did not confine covert storms, but fidelity to one's wife remained a warm-blooded option. No smoke rising in the public realm.

Part of what they inhale is distributed with the arterial blood (warm). The broken door banged backwards and forwards on its hinges. Only in exceptional cases does a mutation enable an organism to adapt more profitably to solitude. She wrapped her daughter in a quilt. The clergy showed themselves unprepared to overturn the institution of "household slavery." He who puts a word in quotation marks can no longer rid himself of it.

Click on the above title for Waldrop's Home Page

Redemption Song by Bob Marley

2009-02-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

Old pirates, yes, they rob i;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took i
From the bottomless pit.
But my hand was made strong
By the and of the almighty.
We forward in this generation
Triumphantly.
Wont you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our minds.
Have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them can stop the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look? ooh!
Some say its just a part of it:
Weve got to fulfil de book.

Wont you help to sing
These songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever have:
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs;
Redemption songs.
---
/guitar break/
---
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
None but ourselves can free our mind.
Wo! have no fear for atomic energy,
cause none of them-a can-a stop-a the time.
How long shall they kill our prophets,
While we stand aside and look?
Yes, some say its just a part of it:
Weve got to fulfil de book.
Wont you help to sing
Dese songs of freedom? -
cause all I ever had:
Redemption songs -
All I ever had:
Redemption songs:
These songs of freedom,
Songs of freedom.

click on the above title & hear/see marley sing redemption song

Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem: Praise Song for the Day.

2009-01-20T22:56:00.000-08:00

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

From poets.org (click on poem's title)

Paper Covers Rock by Chella Courington

2008-12-28T21:39:00.000-08:00

I
I can’t stop buying scissors. I walk into Home Depot for geraniums & lilies, leave with gardening shears, green ergonomic handles. Gelson’s for halibut. Shiny poultry shears. At a garage sale I find a pair of hedge clippers. By December paper cutters, pinking shears, hair trimmers—any blades you want are boxed in the kitchen pantry.

II
Saturday he takes his 14 clubs & disappears. In hot water, I clean scissors. Prop them on the counter before drying with muslin. Each blade I shine with baking soda. In high school I hung with cutters. They used whatever worked: broken glass, coat hangars,paper. Arms tracked with violet scars like stretch marks. Hidden under long-sleeve shirts.

III
Reflections in a Golden Eye: Mrs. Langdon uses garden shears to clip her nipples when she loses her baby. Snip snip—easy as pinching off deadheads. Sunday in January, I hold my left nipple between the blades of barber shears. Warm steel triggers goose bumps. Is a nipple like a finger? Can they sew it back on?

IV
Recurrent dream: blades-down, scissors drop from the ceiling, rattling & hissing. Impale the cherry nightstand, down comforter, my Land’s End bathrobe. I crouch in the tub, rocking to the sound of hail. Open my thigh—blood a rusty penny melting on my tongue.

V
I get an Alabama divorce. He signs the papers & hauls his Titliest clubs, Lazy Boy, & mahogany desk back to Illinois. Parting words: The cat stays with you. I never liked him. I keep Moot, the crystal, & the condo. Start selling the scissors on E-Bay
—box by box.

First appeared in Mademoiselle’s Fingertips (Summer 2008).

KATHE KOLLWITZ by Muriel Rukeyser

2008-12-15T11:31:00.000-08:00

[Excerpt]

II.

Women as gates, saying:
"The process is after all, like music:
like the development of a piece of music.
The fugues come back and
again and again
interweave.
A theme may seem to have been put aside,
but it keeps returning—
the same thing modulated,
somewhat changed in form.
Usually richer.
And it is very good that this is so."

A woman pouring her opposites,
"After all there are happy things in life too.
Why do you show only the dark side?"
"I could not answer this. But I know—
in the beginning my impulse to know
the working life
had little to do with
pity or sympathy.
I simply felt
that the life of the workers was beautiful."

She said, "I am groping in the dark."

She said, "When the door opens, of sensuality,
then you will understand it too. The struggle begins.
Never again to be free of it,
often you will feel it to be your enemy.
Sometimes
you will almost suffocate,
such joy it brings."

Saying of her husband: "My wish
is to die after Karl.
I know no person who can love as he can,
with his whole soul.
Often this love has oppressed me;
I wanted to be free.
But often too it has made me
so terribly happy."

She said : "We rowed over to Carrara at dawn,
climbed up to the marble quarries
and rowed back at night. The drops of water
fell like glittering stars
from our oars."

She said: "As a matter of fact,
I believe
that bisexuality
is almost a necessary factor
in artistic production; at any rate,
the tinge of masculinity within me
helped me
in my work."

She said : "The only technique I can still manage.
It's hardly a technique at all, lithography.
In it
only the essentials count."

A tight-lipped man in a restaurant last night saying to me:
"Kollwitz? She's too black-and-white."

Ill

Held among wars, watching
all of them
all these people
weavers,
Carmagnole

Looking at
all of them
death, the children
patients in waiting-rooms
famine
the street
the corpse with the baby
floating, on the dark river

A woman seeing
the violent, inexorable
movement of nakedness
and the confession of No
the confession of great weakness, war,
all streaming to one son killed, Peter;
even the son left living; repeated,
the father, the mother; the grandson
another Peter killed in another war; firestorm;
dark, light, as two hands,
this pole and that pole as the gates.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open ....

1968

Click on the poem's title for a brief bio of Kathe Kollwitz & brief view of her work.

At Baia by H.D.

2008-11-23T20:17:00.000-08:00

I should have thought
in a dream you would have brought
some lovely, perilous thing,
orchids piled in a great sheath,
as who would say (in a dream),
"I send you this,
who left the blue veins
of your throat unkissed."

Why was it that your hands
(that never took mine),
your hands that I could see
drift over the orchid-heads
so carefully,
your hands, so fragile, sure to lift
so gently, the fragile flower-stuff--
ah, ah, how was it

You never sent (in a dream)
the very form, the very scent,
not heavy, not sensuous,
but perilous--perilous--
of orchids, piled in a great sheath,
and folded underneath on a bright scroll,
some word:

"Flower sent to flower;
for white hands, the lesser white,
less lovely of flower-leaf,"

or

"Lover to lover, no kiss,
no touch, but forever and ever this."

Waste Management by Maurya Simon

2008-11-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

Every night a bear comes round our house to scare up
some windfall pears or to forage for fragrant garbage,
trudging on soft-padded feet & slightly open-mouthed.
He's an ursine Tony Soprano, I think, seeking refuge

from autumnal hungers as he forages the town's alleys.
Burly as a nightclub bouncer, near-sighted, he browses
through our lives' detritus, appearing as a refugee
from day's ample shadows. Our bear noisily chases

a neighborhood cat, a disemboweler of mouses,
then he eats the worst types of underworld scum—
larval worms in day-glow trousers-food storehoused
in a huge belly that sways to & fro when he travels.

Despite his slovenly slouch, our bear's a marvel
of Mafia etiquette as he curses & wantonly carouses
in the dim byways of the forest, as he sways in raveling air
to snap the bark off trees with his tough teeth & calluses.

We curse the furry rampages of our famished bear
who's surely gotten high on gruff power as he struggles
to grip trashcan rims with iron fingers—ever roused
to action by brisk whiffs of winter or our ribald catcalls.

O made man, living drunk or dour, don't settle
for trudging on soft-padded feet, staying tight-hearted—
know, as I do, how fear & desire drive us all. Look how
nightly a bear circumambulates our lives with such ardor.

"Waste Management" by Maurya Simon from Cartographies: Uncollected Poems: 1980-2005. © Red Hen Press, 2008. (buy now)

Music Swims Back To Me by Anne Sexton

2008-11-09T07:42:00.000-08:00

Today, November 9, is the birthday of Anne Sexton.

Music Swims Back To Me

Wait Mister. Which way is home?
They turned the light out
and the dark is moving in the corner.
There are no sign posts in this room,
four ladies, over eighty,
in diapers every one of them.
La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.

Imagine it. A radio playing
and everyone here was crazy.
I liked it and danced in a circle.
Music pours over the sense
and in a funny way
music sees more than I.
I mean it remembers better;
remembers the first night here.
It was the strangled cold of November;
even the stars were strapped in the sky
and that moon too bright
forking through the bars to stick me
with a singing in the head.
I have forgotten all the rest.

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.
and there are no signs to tell the way,
just the radio beating to itself
and the song that remembers
more than I. Oh, la la la,
this music swims back to me.
The night I came I danced a circle
and was not afraid.
Mister?

--Anne Sexton. Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

sarah palin funny

2008-10-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

click on the above & once you have the pic, click anywhere on it!

Ode to Joy by Chris Abani

2008-10-28T09:24:00.000-07:00

John James,14
Refused to serve his conscience up
to indict an innocent man
handcuffed to chair; they tacked his penis
to the table
with a six inch nail
and left him there

to drip
to death
3 days later

Risking death; an act insignificant
in the face of this child’s courage
we sang:

Oje wai wai,
Moje oje wai, wai.

Incensed
they went
on a
killing rampage

guns
knives
truncheons

even canisters of tear-gas,
fired close up or
directly into mouths, will
take the back
of
your head off
and many men
died singing,
that night.

Notes caught,
surprised,
suspended
as blows bloodied mouths
clotting into silence.

After reading the poem, click on the title above & go to Abani's Website to hear him read "Ode to Joy."

SEA ROSE by H.D.

2008-10-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

Rose, harsh rose
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,

more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem --
you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?

-- Hilda Doolittle (1916)

Stars Wheel in Purple by H.D.

2008-10-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

Stars wheel in purple, yours is not so rare
as Hesperus, nor yet so great a star
as bright Aldeboran or Sirius,
nor yet the stained and brilliant one of War;

stars turn in purple, glorious to the sight;
yours is not gracious as the Pleiads are
nor as Orion's sapphires, luminous;

yet disenchanted, cold, imperious face,
when all the others blighted, reel and fall,
your star, steel-set, keeps lone and frigid tryst
to freighted ships, baffled in wind and blast.

Helen in Egypt, Eidolon, Book III: 4 by H. D.

2008-09-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

Helen herself seems almost ready for this sacrifice--at least, for the immolation of herself before this greatest love of Achilles, his dedication to "his own ship" and the figurehead, "an idol or eidolon . . . a mermaid, Thetis upon the prow."

Did her eyes slant in the old way?
was she Greek or Egyptian?
had some Phoenician sailor wrought her?

was she oak-wood or cedar?
had she been cut from an awkward block
of ship-wood at the ship-builders,

and afterwards riveted there,
or had the prow itself been shaped
to her mermaid body,

curved to her mermaid hair?
was there a dash of paint
in the beginning, in the garment-fold,

did the blue afterwards wear away?
did they re-touch her arms, her shoulders?
did anyone touch her ever?

Had she other zealot and lover,
or did he alone worship her?
did she wear a girdle of sea-weed

or a painted crown? how often
did her high breasts meet the spray,
how often dive down?

Copyright © 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Doolittle. From poets.org
Click on title for poets.org

The Portrait by Stanley Kunitz

2008-09-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time

and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic

with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year

I can feel my cheek
still burning.

We Real Cool BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

2008-09-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.

**********************

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Click on the above title for more on Gwendolyn Brooks from the Poetry Foundation.

poetry readings by Charles Bukowski

2008-09-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can't find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.

I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.

if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:

a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant's fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke

anything
anything
but
these.

"poetry readings," by Charles Bukowski from Bone Palace Ballet © Ecco, 2002.

"Spirits in the Night"

2008-09-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

The boss's "Spirits in the Night" inspired the short story "Greasy Lake" by TC Boyle. He uses this line from the song as an epigraph: "It's a mile down on the dark side of Route 88." Springsteen lyrics are below. Click the title above to see/hear the boss in performance.

Crazy Janey and her mission man
Were back in the alley trading hands
Along came Wild Billy with his friend Gee Man
All duded up for Saturday night

Well, Billy slammed on his coaster brakes, said
Anybody wanna go to Greasy Lake
It's a mile down on the dark side of Route 88
I got a bottle of ros� let's try it

We'll pick up Hazy Davey and Killer Joe and
I'll take you all out to where the gypsy angels go
They're built like light and they dance like

Spirits in the night, all night
Oh you don't know what they can do to you
Spirits in the night, all night
In the night, all night
Stand right up and let them shoot through you

Wild Billy was a crazy cat
And he shook some dust out of his coon skin cap
He said try some of this it'll show you where you're at
Or at least it'll help you to feel it

By the time we made it up to Greasy Lake
My head was out the window
Janey's fingers were in the cake
I think I really dug her, I was too loose to fake
I said I'm hurt she said Honey let's heal it

And we danced all night to a soul fairy band
And she kissed me just right
Like only a lonely angel can
She felt so nice, just as soft as a

Spirit in the night, all night
Janey don't know what she do to you
Spirits in the night, all night
In the night, all night
Stand right up and let her shoot through me

Spirits in the night, in the night
Spirits in the night, all night
Spirits in the night, in the night
Spirits in the night, all night

How the night was bright and the stars threw light
On Billy and Davey dancing in the Moonlight
Down near the water in a stoned mud fight
Killer Joe passed out on the lawn

Hazy Davey got really hurt
He ran into the lake in just his socks and a shirt
Me and Crazy Janey's making love in the dirt
Singing our birthday songs

Janey said it was time to go, so we closed our eyes
And said goodbye to gypsy angel row
Felt so right together we moved like

Spirits in the night, all night
Oh you don't know what they can do to you
Spirits in the night, all night
All night, all night
Stand right up and let them shoot through you
Spirits in the night, all night
Oh you don't know what they can do to you
Spirits in the night, all night
Spirits in the night
Spirits in the night

Power by Audre Lorde

2008-09-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being
ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of the desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.
The policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said "Die you little motherfucker" and
there are tapes to prove that. At his trial
this policeman and in his own defense
"I didn’t notice the size or nothing else
only the color." and
there are tapes to prove that, too.
Today that 37-year-old white man with 13 years of police forcing
has been set free
by 11 white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one black oman who said
"They convinced me" meaning
they had dragged her 4’10" black woman’s frame
over the hot coals of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.
I have not been able to touch the destruction within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85-year-old white woman
who is somebody’s mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in ¾ time
"Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are."

"Power" is a poem written about Clifford Glover, the ten-year-old Black child shot by a cop who was acquitted by a jury on which a Black woman sat. In fact, the day I heard on the radio that O’Shea had been acquitted, I was going across town on Eighty-eight Street and I had to pull over. A kind of fury rose up in me; the sky turned red. I felt so sick. I felt as if I would drive this car into a wall, into the next person I saw. So I pulled over. I took out my journal just to air some of my fury, to get it out of my fingertips. Those expressed feelings are are that poem"
-- Audre Lorde, "My Words Will Be There," in Black Women Writers, 1983

THE MOON IN YOUR HANDS by HD & read by Tandy Cronyn

2008-09-02T15:27:00.000-07:00

If you take the moon in your hands
and turn it round
(heavy, slightly tarnished platter),
you're there;

if you pull dry seaweed from the sand
and turn it round
and wonder at the underside's bright amber,
your eyes

look out as they did here
(you don't remember)
when my soul turned round,
perceiving the other side of everything,
mullein leaf, dogwood leaf, moth wing
and dandelion seed under the ground.

Note: After reading the poem, click on the above title to hear it recited by Tandy Cronyn.

"The Moon in Your Hands" by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), from COLLECTED POEMS: 1912-1944,
copyright ©1982 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle.

When You Are Old by WB Yeats

2008-08-30T09:37:00.000-07:00

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

*Note: After reading this poem, click on the above title to see a video of Matthew Mcfayden reading this poem.

5 & 7 & 5 by Anselm Hollo

2008-08-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

follow that airplane
of course I'm high this is
an emergency

§

giant Scots terrier
I thought I saw was known as
Taxicab Mountain

§

brown photo legend
"serene enjoyment" they suck
pipes bones crumbled back

§

night train whistles stars
over a nation under
mad temporal czars

§

round lumps of cells grow
up to love porridge later
become The Supremes

§

lady I lost my
subway token we must part
it's faster by air

§

"but it's our world"
tiny blue hands and green arms
your thought in my room

§

sweet bouzouki sound
another syntax for heads
up to the aether

§

in you the in moon
its rays entwined in my mind's
hair hangs down right in

§

viewing the dragon
there they ride slim through my dream
Carpaccio's pair

§

slow bloom inside you
the mnemonics of loving
incessant chatter

§

far shore Ferris wheel
turning glowing humming love
in our lit-up heads

§

switch them to sleep now
the flying foxes swarm out
great it's flurry time

§

wind rain you and me
went looking for a new house
o the grass grows loud

From Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence, by Anselm Hollo, published by Coffee House Press. Copyright © 2001 Anselm Hollo. Reprinted by permission of Coffee House Press. All rights reserved.

Persephone the Wanderer by Louise Gluck

2008-08-26T11:02:00.000-07:00

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

Persephone's initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape,
or was she drugged, violated against her will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
"home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother's
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?

"Persephone the Wanderer" from Averno by Louise Glück. Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

2008-08-19T16:14:00.000-07:00

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996
University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.
Permissions information.

Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission.

Star Block by Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate

2008-08-10T19:08:00.000-07:00

There is no such thing
as star block.
We do not think of
locking out the light
of other galaxies.
It is light
so rinsed of impurities
(heat, for instance)
that it excites
no antibodies in us.
Yet people are
curiously soluble
in starlight.
Bathed in its
absence of insistence
their substance
loosens willingly,
their bright
designs dissolve.
Not proximity
but distance
burns us with love.

From _Say Uncle_, 2000.

A Cat/A Future by Kay Ryan, Poet Laureate

2008-08-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude:
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

From _Elephant Rocks_, 1997.

Massage by Chella Courington

2008-07-31T01:56:00.000-07:00

Breathe into your belly. Let your mind follow your breath.
She presses the balls of her hands calmly

into my shoulders, my body flattens into the sheet.
Breathe into your belly. Let your mind follow your breath.

I remember my first love, small hands cupping my heels
in lavender. Like a priestess, she caressed each toe

until it tingled & anchored her fist at the top of my sole
her left palm at the top of my foot, sliding down

I dreamed of a love with slender fingers. Hers were
stubby, raw from pruning rose plants.

Breathe into your belly. Let your mind follow your breath.
Under her touch, fingers tapered toward my thigh.

At the Maximum Security Prison for Men by Chella Courington

2008-07-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

Students come to me from solitary confinement
concrete oven set on high—
they come to me
a young woman from the University
who wants to talk about Paradise Lost.

They want to talk too.
Tony says when he broke in, he spotted a dog
and shot a man. Thought the house empty.
Billy Ray says he just needed money from the girl
at the ATM. My hand shook and the trigger went off.

They know why Milton’s God
clips Satan’s wings and kicks him out of heaven.
The man can’t take much lip. Just like my own daddy
knocking me three ways into Sunday when I say no to him.
Knuckles kneading my cheek blue till I cry stop.

The students ask if Satan’s the hero. And I wonder.
Did he endure that heavy hand one too many times?
Punched and mauled like a yard animal
taken behind the barn
left in darkness to find his way back.

Reprint. Illumen (Fall 2007). Ed Tyree Campbell and Erin Donahoe.

The Edge of Morning by Chella Courington

2008-07-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

We pass a joint, barely long
enough for a clip. You accuse me
of hiding my sex under tight sheets.
I breathe as deep as I can. Your words
bounce against the wall, single letters back
and forth: Navratolova slams one ball after a
nother. Chrissie’s flummoxed. Too late to drive
too high to care. And you invoke my mother’s ghost
like you always do this time of night: her hand reaches
from the grave to bless us. I roll more grass, lick the edge
to forget I’ll stumble off to bed with you and blame Mother
for pushing me into your arms.

SUB-LIT, 1.4 (Spring 2008). Ed. Michael Ogletree et al.

When Berryman Died by Chella Courington

2008-07-11T20:38:00.000-07:00

He left his shoes, scuffed loafers,
on the bridge. A cordovan pair
he could have shed
anywhere: at the university
beside his desk, under Tate’s coffee table,
at the foot of a lover’s bed.

Every night he thought, tomorrow.
Mornings, he remembered
his suit at the cleaners, his essay
on Marlowe, students waiting
outside his office. January 7
reasons ran dry.

He bathed and trimmed his beard,
putting on a new shirt.
In eight degrees he walked
to the bridge.

First published in Touchstone (SP 2008), #40. Ed. David Murphy.

September by Chella Courington

2008-07-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

Fog on the horizon
hides hard island edges.
Close to the patio
sprinklers swish: streams rise
in sun before falling in the garden.
Six plastic-pink flamingoes
parade by the sago palm.
A pair of dolphins, together
still after twenty years, watch
from the granite fountain.

Stripping an apple, peel swinging
in air, I think of Mother
who sliced what grew around her.
From wood the size of playing cards
she whittled small animals:
our cat on haunches, neck turned.
She carved a woman
on her knees, mostly stomach,
hands buried her bowed face.

Santa Ana winds blow dry
scatter dust in their wake.
Hummingbirds circle coral bells.
Their wings, shadow puppets
on stucco. Heavy with petals,
dahlias bend to rocky dirt.
Once I caught a Regal Moth—
panes of ruby and jade.
For three days, she flew.

Tonight my namesake calls
like Linda Blair from The Exorcist:
voice gravelly, emerging
from Minnesota. At 25 Satan
and God crowd her head.
No meds can wash them out.
God will kill you for leaving me.
I squeeze the receiver
not forgetting her butterfly nightshirt—
wings pressed against me.

First published in Touchstone (SP 2008), #40. Ed. David Murphy.

[the cocktail hour finally arrives: whether ending a day at the office],D.A. Powell

2008-06-17T18:57:00.000-07:00

the cocktail hour finally arrives: whether ending a day at the office

or opening the orifice at 6am [legal again to pour in californica]: the time is always right

we need a little glamour and glamour arrives: plenty of chipped ice

a green jurassic palm tree planted. a yellow spastic monkey swinging

a pink classic flamingo impaled upon the exuberant red of cherries

dash of bitters. vermouth sweet. enough rye whiskey to kill

this longing: I take my drinks still and stuffed with plastic. like my lovers

my billfold full of rubbers. OPENs my mouth: its tiny neon lounge

From Cocktails by D. A. Powell. Copyright © 2004 by D. A. Powell. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota. All rights reserved.

Spring and All by William Carlos Williams

2008-06-01T19:03:00.000-07:00

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

Copyright © 1962 by William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved. No part of this poem may be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the publisher @ poets.org.

In an Artist's Studio by Christina Rossetti

2008-05-29T17:13:00.000-07:00

One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel; — every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

DA Powell

2008-05-10T11:48:00.000-07:00

[dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love trash]

dogs and boys can treat you like trash. and dogs do love trash
to nuzzle their muzzles. they slather with tongues that smell like their nuts

but the boys are fickle when they lick you. they stick you with twigs
and roll you over like roaches. then off with another: those sluts

with their asses so tight you couldn't get them to budge for a turd
so unlike the dogs: who will turn in a circle showing & showing their butts

a dog on a leash: a friend in the world. he'll crawl into bed on all fours
and curl up at your toes. he'll give you his nose. he'll slobber on cuts

a dog is not fragile; he's fixed. but a boy: cannot give you his love
he closes his eyes to your kisses. he hisses. a boy is a putz

with a sponge for a brain. and a mop for a heart: he'll soak up your love
if you let him and leave you as dry as a cork. he'll punch out your guts

when a boy goes away: to another boy's arms. what else can you do
but lie down with the dogs. with the hounds with the curs. with the mutts

[Originally published in the October/ November 2001 issue of Boston Review]

Workshop by Billy Collins

2008-04-28T09:10:00.000-07:00

I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.
It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now
so immediately the poem has my attention,
like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.

And I like the first couple of stanzas,
the way they establish this mode of self-pointing
that runs through the whole poem
and tells us that words are food thrown down
on the ground for other words to eat.
I can almost taste the tail of the snake
in its own mouth,
if you know what I mean.

But what I’m not sure about is the voice,
which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans,
but other times seems standoffish,
professorial in the worst sense of the word
like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face.
But maybe that’s just what it wants to do.

What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas,
especially the fourth one.
I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges
which gives me a very clear picture.
And I really like how this drawbridge operator
just appears out of the blue
with his feet up on the iron railing
and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging—
a hook in the slow industrial canal below.
I love slow industrial canal below. All those l’s.

Maybe it’s just me,
but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem.
I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?
And what’s an obbligato of snow?
Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.
At that point I’m lost. I need help.

The other thing that throws me off,
and maybe this is just me,
is the way the scene keeps shifting around.
First, we’re in this big aerodrome
and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles,
which makes me think this could be a dream.
Then he takes us into his garden,
the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose,
though that’s nice, the coiling hose,
but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be.
The rain and the mint green light,
that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper?
Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery?
There’s something about death going on here.

In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none.

But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite.
This is where the poem wins me back,
especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse.
I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before,
but I still love the details he uses
when he’s describing where he lives.
The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard,
the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can,
the spool of thread for a table.
I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work
night after night collecting all these things
while the people in the house were fast asleep,
and that gives me a very strong feeling,
a very powerful sense of something.
But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.
Maybe that was just me.
Maybe that’s just the way I read it.

"Workshop" from The Art of Drowning, by Billy Collins, © 1995. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

I See He Sees by Chella Courington

2008-03-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

An upward draft
catches Mama’s hem
at forty-first & twelfth
raising it in waves
around her knees & over her thighs
a pink-striped dress
dances like the awning
at Lida’s Cantina
when a man at the corner
clutching a boy’s hand
sees Mama naked
under her flying skirt
& I see he sees
wondering why
she doesn’t hold it down
& he sees me see him
winking
before the light turns green

First Published in _Permafrost_ 28 (Summer 2006) under title of "Second Memory."

Ode to Joy by Chris Abani

2008-03-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

John James,14,
refused to serve his conscience up
to indict an innocent man.
Handcuffed to chair, they tacked his penis
to the table
with a six inch nail
and left him there

to drip
to death
3 days later.

Risking death, an act insignificant
in the face of this child’s courage,
we sang:

Oje wai wai,
Moje oje wai, wai.

Incensed
they went
on a
killing rampage.

Guns
knives
truncheons

even canisters of tear-gas,
fired close up or
directly into mouths, will
take the back
of
your head off
and many men
died singing,
that night.

Notes caught,
surprised,
suspended
as blows bloodied mouths,
clotting into silence.

From _Kalakuta Republic_. London:SAQI, 2000.

Toi Derricotte

2008-03-11T09:17:00.000-07:00

The Weakness
by Toi Derricotte

That time my grandmother dragged me

through the perfume aisles at Saks, she held me up

by my arm, hissing, "Stand up,"

through clenched teeth, her eyes

bright as a dog's

cornered in the light.

She said it over and over,

as if she were Jesus,

and I were dead. She had been

solid as a tree,

a fur around her neck, a

light-skinned matron whose car was parked, who walked

on swirling

marble and passed through

brass openings--in 1945.

There was not even a black

elevator operator at Saks.

The saleswoman had brought velvet

leggings to lace me in, and cooed,

as if in service of all grandmothers.

My grandmother had smiled, but not

hungrily, not like my mother

who hated them, but wanted to please,

and they had smiled back, as if

they were wearing wooden collars.

When my legs gave out, my grandmother

dragged me up and held me like God

holds saints by the

roots of the hair. I begged her

to believe I couldn't help it. Stumbling,

her face white

with sweat, she pushed me through the crowd, rushing

away from those eyes

that saw through

her clothes, under

her skin, all the way down

to the transparent

genes confessing.

From Captivity by Toi Derricotte, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Copyright © 1989 Toi Derricotte. From the online Academy of American Poets.

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll

2008-01-27T08:19:00.000-08:00

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Wintering by Alicia Ostriker

2008-01-20T10:15:00.000-08:00

7. WINTERING

I had expected more than this.
I had not expected to be
an ordinary woman.
--Lucille Clifton

It snows and stops, now it is January,
The house plants need feeding,
The guests have gone. Today I'm half a boy,
Flat as something innocent, a clean
Plate, just lacking a story.
A woman should be able to say
I've become an Amazon,
Warrior woman minus a breast,
The better to shoot arrow
After fierce arrow,
Or else I am that dancing Shiva
Carved in the living rock at Elephanta,
Androgynous deity, but I don't feel
Holy enough or mythic enough.
Taking courage, I told a man I've resolved
To be as sexy with one breast
As other people are with two
And he looked away.

Spare me your pity,
Your terror, your condolence.
I'm not your wasting heroine,
Your dying swan. Friend, tragedy
Is a sort of surrender.
Tell me again I'm a model
Of toughness. I eat that up.
I grade papers, I listen to wind,
My husband helps me come, it thaws
A week before semester starts.

Now Schubert plays, and the tenor wheels
Through Heine's lieder. A fifteen-year survivor
Phones: You know what? You're the same person
After a mastectomy as before. An idea
That had never occurred to me.
You have a job you like? You have poems to write?
Your marriage is okay? It will stay that way.
The wrinkles are worse. I hate looking in the mirror.
But a missing breast, well, you get used to it.

From _The Crack in Everything_. Alicia Suskin Ostriker. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

Politics & Poetry

2008-01-10T05:33:00.000-08:00

When Gloria Steinem writes of Senator Clinton in _The New York Times_, January 8, Steinem's prose is rich with anaphora and elements of poetic style.

Click on the above: Politics & poetry