August 2009
This is How Memory Works, Patricia Hampl
poetry365:
You are stepping off a train.
A wet blank night, the smell of cinders.
A gust of steam from the engine swirls
around the hem of your topcoat, around
the hand holding the brown leather valise,
the hand that, a moment ago, slicked back
the hair and then out on the fedora
in front of the mirror when the beveled
edges in the cherrywood compartment.
The girl standing on the...
Yes, Catherine Doty
poetry365:
It’s about the blood
banging in the body,
and the brain
lolling in its bed
like a happy baby.
At your touch, the nerve,
that volatile spook tree,
vibrates. The lungs
take up their work
with a giddy vigor.
Tremors in the joints
and tympani,
dust storms
in the canister of sugar.
The coil of ribs
heats up, begins
to glow. Come
here.
Feasting, Elizabeth W. Garber
poetry365:
I am so amazed to find myself kissing you
with such abandon,
filling myself with our kisses
astounding hunger for edges of lips and tongue.
Returning to feast again and again,
our bellies never overfilling from this banquet.
Returning in surprise,
in remembering,
in rediscovering,
such play of flavors of gliding lips
and forests of pressures and spaces.
The spaces between...
“Fast Car,” Tracy Chapman
And I...
24, Osip Madelstam
poetry365:
Leaves scarcely breathing
in the black breeze;
the flickering swallow
draws circles in the dusk.
In my loving
dying heart
a twilight is coming,
a last ray, gently reproaching.
And over the evening forest
the bronze moon climbs to its place.
Why has the music stopped?
Why is there such silence?
“Again and again, he comes to us broken by his own hands; he uses our mouths to...”
– The Whore’s Guide to Etymology, Rita Mae Reese
“as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave...”
– “Love Poem with Toast,” Miller Williams
1 tag
here is something
Despite how much I hate it there are things I’m going to miss about this home: the cats, of course. Clean beaches. St. Augustine. My mattress and my Wall of Awesome Male Celebrities. Driving to nowhere. Red-winged blackbirds. Thunderstorms. Tree-shaded neighborhoods.
But these things do not outweigh that which I love about my new life and especially where I am living it. The sooner I can...
Sometimes, Nikki Giovanni
poetry365:
sometimes
when i wake up
in the morning
and see all the faces
i just can’t
breathe
Among His Effects We Found a Photograph, Ed...
poetry365:
My mother us beautiful as a flapper.
She is so in love
that she has been gazing
secretly at my father
for forty years.
He’s in uniform,
with puttees and swagger stick,
a tiny cork mustache
bobbing above a shore line of teeth.
They are “poor but happy.”
In his hand is a lost book
he had memorized,
with a thousand clear answers
to everything.
“If we meet again, introduced as friends, please don’t let on that you knew...”
– “Just Like a Woman”
honestly, this song cuts right through me.
“She takes just like a woman. She makes love just like a woman. And she aches...”
– “Just Like a Woman”
Just Like a Woman as sung by Jeff Buckley...
underthesheets:
Crazy man pubes + boxer briefs = a wonderful combination.
Hah! You and I need to be friend. I actually decided this a while ago but I fail at things sometimes.
Hypocrisy
syntheticpubes:
I post things like the quote below, but the nudity herein remains 99% female.
I think that many desensitized internet-goers (e.g. you) are all for male nudity in theory, but the notion remains elusive in practice.
Listen. Wieners are fantastic. I’ve posted dongs before, but the reception has always been lukewarm at best—despite a sizable female audience!
Maybe it’s because...
First Boyfriend, Sharon Olds
poetry365:
(for D.R.)
We would park on any quiet street,
gliding over to the curb as if by accident,
the houses dark, the families sealed into them,
we’d park away from the street-light, just the
fait waves of its amber grit
reached your car, you’d switch off the motor and
turn and reach for me, and I would
slide into your arms as if I had been born for it,
the ochre corduroy of your...
Making Love, Sharon Olds
poetry365:
You wake up, and you do not know
where you are, or who you are
or what you are, the last light of the evening
coming up to the panes, not coming in,
the solid, slanted body of the desk
between the windows, its bird’s-eye slightly
shining, here and there, in the wood. And you
try to think back, you cannot remember it,
it stands behind your mind, like a mountain,
at night,...
Autumn Poems, Nikki Giovanni
poetry365:
the heat
you left with me
last night
still smolders
the wind catches
your scent
and refreshes
my senses
i am a leaf
falling from your tree
upon which i was
impaled
1 tag
here is something
When I get back I’m going to kiss you on the mouth and tell you I missed you.
underthesheets:
I love the kind of driving where it doesn’t even feel like you’re in a car.
“I sit down besides her and she talks—a flood of talk. I hear not a word because...”
– Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (via nightmarebrunette)
On a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing, Ed...
poetry365:
At school you dove off the bridge at night
in a swan, down to the half-dozen girls
treading water to keep up with you.
Then, cock of the walk, you’d strut off
with some chick while the rest of us
were left to drink lukewarm beer and click.
Those were the Dylan Thomas days when
wearing baggy tweeds you picked up west of Whales
you told Under Milk Wood so that all the dead...
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
here is something
This is new. For the entirety of this book I haven’t underlined or marked or quoted a single thing. Even the things that are so entirely true.
For the entirety of this relationship I have not known what to make of things. I still don’t. But I do know that I miss you and in more than the expected way and that surprises us both. But you miss me too, which is fantastic.
But the person...
The War Zone, Joy Harjo
poetry365:
Yesterday in the flare of smoke and temper—
we were brilliant warriors weary
from battling each other—
the illuminations of family ghosts
bright red in the storm.
The century is swept toward an inevitable end—
as summer trees sway beneath thunderclouds,
the wind flattening our faces—
Our teeth make refuge for our tongues,
skins pulled tight in the vertigo of fear
under...
crushed:
J,
Give me sand, stars and the murmuring goodbye of a departing wave, not this wave goodbye.
— S
I think I need to start finding boys with different first initials. This isn’t from me but I’m on my third J. It’s getting problematic.
Sally Mann: Proud Flesh →
syntheticpubes:
“The act of looking appraisingly at a man, making eye contact on the street, asking to photograph him, studying his body, has always been a brazen venture for a woman, though, for a man, these acts are commonplace, even expected.”
I just died. Some of these (or somethings similar) were in a past issue of Aperture and I loveloveLOVED them. I am absolutely going to this opening...
Outside the Hospital, Joe Wenderoth
poetry365:
He says
when they made this place
they sure knew what they were doing.
He carries the dead woman
everyday from her grave
in the shining sky down
into a small garden,
where a light snow
is falling.
He is her lover, and he brings her here,
knowing he is not allowed
to bring her here.
She sees the flowers he’s planted
and thanks him
and tells him what their names are.
He...
1 tag
here is something
So here’s the problem: my knees hurt like hell to bend most of the time. But I also over-extend so I can’t really straighten them all the way without doing damage either. And the most comfortable sitting positions either involve the over extension or having my knees bent, usually more than 90 degrees.
So the most comfortable positions are also the most excruciating. I know...
Unwritten Law, Louise Glück
poetry365:
Interesting how we fall in love:
in my case, absolutely. Absolutely, and, alas, often—
so it was in my youth.
And always with rather boyish men—
unformed, sullen, or shyly kicking the dead leaves:
in the manner of Balanchine.
Nor did I see them as as versions of the same thing.
I, with my inflexible Platonism,
my fierce seeing of only one thing at a time:
I ruled against the...
Apology, Richard Cecil
poetry365:
The war fought by soldiers in machines
manufactured by their wives: steel skin,
for example, impervious to a caress.
But I am single. I line up with conscripts.
I’m issued sleep confiscated from a civilian
in a safe country. I’m handed a photograph
of his lover to tape inside my locker.
I’m marched to a bed too narrow for her
and me and him together, though he lies
inside me,...
1 tag
here is something
Why is it that I still don’t know what to do with you? You’re out of my life for so long, then someone pushes you back in and before I even realize that it’s you, I’m smiling and swooning.
But.
I’m still not in love. I need to emphasize this so much. And it’s weird. Sure, there are people that I love. And people I like. And well. There are definitely...
1 tag
here is something
I did not love you but I loved the things you did, the things you do. So when he does the same things, moves the same way, it makes it harder to tell him he’s doing better than you. But he is and I do tell him so and I don’t even think about you most of the time. I laugh and sigh and we talk about nothing and so far he is making me happy. I have three weeks to decide whether this...
If You Need a Reason, Silvia Curbelo
poetry365:
for Adrian
The way things move sometimes,
light or air,
the distance between
two points, or a map unfolding
on a table, or wind,
never mind sadness.
The difference between sky and room,
between geometry and breath,
the sound we hear
when two opposites finally collide,
smashed bottle, country song,
a bell, any bridge, a connection.
The way some stories end in the middle...
Drooling Madness at St. Liz, Charles Bukowski
poetry365:
Sherri told me they had been
lovers in there
but she had gotten off course
waylaid a few weeks or so
and she showed me the place
in the Cantos where he wrote
about it:
Ez was grabbing the bars
looking at the moon and
asking,
where is she tonight?
one would think a wise man
would see past that but the
fact is that some wise men
become that because
of their feelings.
...
“And when I disappeared under the bed
behind the long black dress of the closet,...”
– Poetry 365: And Where Were You, Len Roberts (for 8/15/09)