January 2012
2 posts
2 tags
P.K. PAGE: STEFAN
Stefan
aged eleven
looked at the baby and said When he thinks it must be pure thought
because he hasn’t any words yet
and we
proud parents
admiring friends
who had looked at the baby
looked at the baby again
2 tags
KENNETH REXROTH: FOR A MASSEUSE AND PROSTITUTE
Nobody knows what love is anymore. Nobody knows what happened to God After midnight, the lesbians and fairies Sweep through the streets of the old tenderloin, Like spirochetes in a softening brain. The hustlers have all been run out of town. I look back on the times spent Talking with you about the idiocies Of a collapsing world and the brutalities Of my race and yours, While the sick,...
December 2011
4 posts
2 tags
P.K. PAGE: A BACKWARD JOURNEY
When I was a child of say, seven, I still had serious attention to give to everyday objects. The Dutch Cleanser- which was the kind my mother bought- in those days came in a round container of yellow cardboard around which ran the very busy Dutch Cleanser woman her face hidden behind her bonnet holding a yellow Dutch Cleanser can on which a smaller Dutch Cleanser woman was holding a smaller Dutch...
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RACTER: UNTITLED
At all events my own essays and dissertations about love
and its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be
known and understood by all of you who read this and
talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends
or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject
of this essay. We will commence with a question: does
steak love lettuce? This question is implacably
hard and...
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PATRICK LANE: THE MACARONI SONG
I remember macaroni, the end of the month, the last week when there was so little. I made up a song for the children. The Macaroni Song! Around the table we would go, laughing and singing. Macaroni, Macaroni! I can’t make the song work now on the page, just remember, we laughed so hard. My wife stood over the grey metal where the macaroni boiled. She never sang the song. It was always six...
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PETE WINSLOW: THE DADA SCARECROW
Two crossed sticks in a field This is the dada scarecrow The crows gather around to wonder at it No straw no old clothes No floppy hat like scarecrows wear Just two crossed sticks in a field And a real man suspended naked From its arms.
November 2011
2 posts
2 tags
LAWRENCE GLADEVIEW: PIGEON HEAD, PIGEON FED
the poets threw me crumbs & i choked on my eagerness
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JOHN GIORNO: THERE WAS A VERY BAD TREE
There was a bad tree a bad tree, that people hated. The leaves gave off a foul smell, and the flowers had a bitter stink. If you got too close, you vomited. The fruit was poison, one bite and you were dead.
Everyone really disliked it. The bad tree stunk. They talked endlessly about it; and decided to cut it down. Get rid of it. They chopped with axes, and barely made a dent; wearing breathing...
October 2011
6 posts
2 tags
bambi—land:
i want a girl so thin with a skin so brittle i can break her bones break them into little fragments to wear around my neck and i want a girl with the saddest glances the clumsiest legs and a breath smelling of raspberry kisses and decomposition and i just really want a girl stuffing me dull with pills and her fingers in my mouth a damp sweet ache
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STEPHEN DUNN: THE ANIMALS OF AMERICA →
The animals have come down from the hills and through the forests and across the prairies. They are American animals, and carry with them a history of their slaughter. There’s not one who doesn’t sleep with an eye open.
Out of necessity the small have banded with the large, the large with the large of different species. When the dark comes they form an enormous circle.
It’s all, after years of...
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LEAH RAE: 1210 JERVIS STREET
After Gillian Jerome
Sing the song of radiators that whistle like kettles The song of kettles that boil ‘til they rust The song of the ancient over burning your martyr fingers
Sing the song of cold mornings The song of radio voices reaching you through layers of wool blankets from the army surplus store as if being shuttled from some dead and distant star
Sing the song of the dirty old...
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GEORGE BOWERING: A PRAYER
Lord God,
if I have but one life to live, I hope this ain’t it.
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LISA SLATER: ENOUGH
After Barbara Adler
There are some kids who are born knowing how to make their parents blush proud at their every footfall. Kids who burble out mama before their first birthday, who can stupefy whole department stores with their precious, pink-cheeked giggles.
Teachers describe them as diligent and well behaved. They buy their parents thoughtful birthday presents from the mall...
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BEN RAWLUCK: PIG'S GORGE
After Elizabeth Bachinksky’s “St. Sarah”
I
We all grew up in northern places. Old packing crates stolen from behind Safeway after closing, to be smashed open and lit up for a bonfire down in a pit. Nothing to do but fuck and fight, who knows what order or whom. Feats of strength, keg stands, I knew a guy who go high and ran through a plate-glass window. We were all tough and...
September 2011
5 posts
2 tags
HAROLD PINTER: DEMOCRACY
There’s no escape. The big pricks are out. They’ll fuck everything in sight. Watch your back.
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JULIAN GOBERT: COMMUTERS OF THE DEAD
The Commuters of the Dead commute. They are victims of forever clauses in their business contracts that force them to work after death. They have risen from their graves, still trying to fulfill their duties and make Christmas bonus. Little do they know that once their expiry date is up their functionality drops quicker than the edibility of day-old California rolls. Still they make the effort,...
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JULIAN GOBERT: WHEN THE DEAD OUTNUMBER THE LIVING
When the dead outnumber the living they will spill forth from purgatory and come back to reclaim their condos. They will take back their steak knives, they will uncork your vinegared wines and ask why you paid good money for this shit. They will make you start over as their slaves, building a new tomorrow from the ground up thinking this time everything will be different. In their honour,...
2 tags
SHANE TURNER: STANDING IN AN ELEVATOR WITH SEVERAL...
Don’t get too close, I have a claustrophobic heart.
2 tags
August 2011
9 posts
2 tags
4 tags
DANIEL HUDON: TEN SIMPLE SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS TO...
Begin by composing a poem. This is harder than it sounds so allow due time. When you’re ready, test your poem on the grand canvas of nature by conducting the following simple science experience—be alert for the unexpected.
1. Weigh you poem. Quote you answers in newtons. Calculate how much your poem would weigh if you wrote it on the moon.
2. Graph your poem. Choose what you like for your...
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SUSAN LABUHN: PARTY GIRLS
She’s a #2 lead pencil dependable and rigid never marking outside the lines she clings to sober conformity and clear-headed restraint where temperance and razor sharp edges keep her sheltered & serene.
I’m a brilliant red crayon, vivacious and wild, as I thrust and penetrate weak margins in the puritanical gray world of her dinner parties. Offended by my brutal sarcasm and...
5 tags
BRUCE TAYLOR: LITTLE ANIMALS
1
That old book has a million moving parts and when you open it to look inside, they all spill out, like the escapement from a sproinged clock, spelling up the life and correspondence of a Dutch cloth merchant call van Leeuwenhoek. A regular little factory, this book, as busy as a Jacquard loom constructing its bustling world of high-piled clouds and shambling courtyards and canals, and copper...
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BROCK MARIE MOORE: BEHIND ME
i went to the beach once, when i didn’t want to and i sat in the care and sulked while my brothers and father fished in the surf returning periodically to place their catches in the empty icebox in the car’s hatch
and i sat and sulked while fish flopped frantically in the chest their panicked throes shaking the car dying perceptibly, unavoidably, behind me conscious of every last...
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SHARRON MCMILLAN: FENCES (I'VE BEEN LOOKING AT...
I used to hate them possessive, enclosing, selfish they hold one cut off from the larger world, block the view, break the landscape into chunks of yours and mine limiting what we can do
but for some reason I’ve been looking at fences lately
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ROBIN BECKER: MORNING POEM →
listen. it’s morning. soon i’ll see your hand reach for my watch, the water will agitate in the kettle, but listen. traffic. i want your dreams first. and to slide my leg beneath yours before the day opens. wait. we slept late. you’ll be moody, the phone will ring, someone wanting something. let me put my hands in your hair. who i was last night i would be again. this is how the future holds me,...
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LOUISE LANE: LIFE IN A NORTHERN TOWN
Your brother held you down as a toddler, singeing your eyebrows with his cigarette. They don’t grow anymore but that’s ok — makeup is for concealing the past.
Later, he locked you alone in a cellar but that’s ok — he was just mad at the world.
Your uncle held you close as drunk and out of control, he wrapped the car around a street pole; glass was everywhere. But that’s...
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BRUCE TAYLOR: IDLENESS
Drawing a treble clef on the wall with my eye, squinting at a chandelier till each bulb in its red fez sprouts vibrating bristles, counting flies in a museum cafeteria next to a table where two lovers are coming apart with long talk and whole minutes of horrified silence: they are doing this terrible thing, unwrapping their sadness and showing it to one another. It is so awful how their voices...
July 2011
1 post
2 tags
unsinkable: The Real Heroes →
unsinkable:
Victims recognize their names in print, grateful they’ve been spell-checked, that reporters were not interested in exploiting their suffering for spectacle or gain. With my world crumbling, journalistic excellence. Pervading sentiment. Discomfort zone. High-ranking officials speak…
June 2011
5 posts
2 tags
DI BRANDT: excerpt from HEART
*
after Jeffrey Eugenides
How jealous I was finding your beautiful morning cock beside me, sister, twin, at fifteen, carrying your gorgeous difference hidden beneath girlie skirts all the time, and I the last to know, no, no, you said, it grew when my blood and breasts came, no one knows my secret shame, except Rose Garden Grandma, who told me in her kitchen at age five, rolling our sour apple...
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SUJI KWOCK KIM: GENERATION
0
Once I was nothing: once we were one.
1
In the unborn world we heard the years hurtling past, whirring like gears in a giant factory—time time time—
2
We heard human breathing, thoughts coming and going like bamboo leaves hissing in wind, doubts swarming like reconnaissance planes over forests of sleep, we heard words murmured in love.
3
We felt naked bodies climb each other, cleaving,...
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RALPH ALFONSO: THE PACIFIC OCEAN
It was a fine white mist that hovered around her as the waves kept crashing down one after the other in a steady rhythmic crescendo almost orchestral in its nature
She was sitting on a mound of black rock planted in sand, facing the Pacific Ocean, conducting her symphony and reveling in the scope of its complexity and grandeur
Wind and fowl and vegetation swirled, swooped and swayed to her grand...
2 tags
KIM FU: THIS IS HOW DEATH COMES
We sat on the roof and watched the tornado come, its morbid beauty growing by the mile. Mother downstairs in a morphine coma, no longer wailing, “comfortable.” Wooden sidewalks of neighboring shackle towns had their boards ripped out, spun wet then dry. I’d arrived with tarp and hammer and nails, ready to batten down. Too late, the doctors said. Already people were standing on their porches,...
3 tags
May 2011
10 posts
2 tags
Anonymous asked: Why, oh why, don't you proofread the poems? I love this blog but it drives me apeshit when I see typos that are obviously errors of transcription. As you are reproducing these poems (I'm guessing not always with permission of their authors), at least take the time to spell things correctly and get all the words right. More of a "tell" than an "ask."
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AUGUST KLEINZAHLER: CHRISTMAS IN CHINATOWN
They’re off doing what they do and it is pleasant to be here without them taking up so much room. They are safely among their own, in front of their piles of meat, arguing about cars and their generals, and, of course, with the TV going all the while.
One reads that the digestive wind passed by cattle is many times more destructive to the atmosphere then all of the aerosal cans combined. How does...
2 tags
SHELAGH ROWAN-LEGG: TRICKS TO AVOIDING DEATH, OR...
The first trick to avoiding Death is to have a sack at the ready. Make sure it is brown and plain so Death will not notice until you slip it over his head.
Also, Death cannot move very fast — his robe is made of heavy velvet and he has to carry his scythe, so be sure you are always wearing running shoes.
When Death catches you off guard with no sack and bad shoes the last resort is of course a...
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JESSICA MOORE: NOVA SCOTIA I
“I miss you and the water is evaporating in the rose bowl.”
All along the sea’s edge, those rosebushes, rosehips red and plump as tomatoes.
The dog raced ahead — he was boundless, surefooted on the rocks — in my mind I sketched our country home:
long grasses shushing along the red path down to the ocean,
our simple garden behind us, three kinds of lettuce, squash, snow peas.
...
3 tags
JULIE CAMERON GRAY: WIDOW FANTASIES
I want my husband to disappear, dissolve like a spoonful of sugar in a cup of coffee.
I want him to fall asleep at the wheel for a distracted driver to make a mistake for snow to conceal a slippery surface.
I want it quick and painless and over in a flash. Twist of metal, bone, the shattered windshield a constellation
across black ice. Traffic backed up for miles.
I’d get a call in the...
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KELLY TWA: ANTI-PETRARCHAN
In my bed love is chocking us, takes me by the throat, crushes your chest. What a mess.
Clearly, we aren’t meant for it. No soft secrets, no sweet lips, no hands and toes under blankets. No blue skies.
No ice cream cone cooling my tongue while you warm my cheeks. No empty swings in a moonlit park. No children playing.
Here we are instead, our skin cold even in this tight embrace. Your...
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JAY PABARUE: SOLUTIONS
I. First smash the chemistry set you were given years ago for Christmas. Forget
water, and try to forget salt.
Not that kind of solution.
II. Sometimes the solution is “Huddle closer together.”
Sometimes the solution is more humane: pick a male child, drive
a nail through only one of his feet.
III. Every minute, no matter the season, a young, disadvantaged girl is in need of a...
1 tag
“I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably...”
– w.c. wiliams (via wafer-thin-mint)
April 2011
16 posts
3 tags
GARY SULLIVAN: MM-HMM
Mm-hmm Yeah, mm-hmm, it’s true big birds make big doo! I got fire inside my “huppa”-chimpTM gonna be agreessive, greasy aw yeah god wanna DOOT! DOOT! Pffffffffffffffffffffffffft! hey! oooh yeah baby gonna shake & bake then take AWWWWWL your monee, honee (tee hee) uggah duggah buggah biggah buggah muggah hey! hey! you stoopid Mick! get off the paddy field and git me some chocolate...
2 tags
plights & gripes: Standing, ready, on a broken toe... →
unsinkable:
Standing, ready, on a broken toe I cannot help but tremor. There is something the whole of my being is focused on, and several people, blurred & softly jostling, in my periphery, do and cannot understand or know it, though I notice them. Shadows disproportionate always on the walk & stopping broken bottle shards from glistening like shark-tooth necklaces on sweaty...
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KAREN SOLIE: PARABOLA
Before words, mathematics nested in the Kananaskis Valley, calculations of upsweep and plain an ache in the bones of crow and Cooper’s hawk. Hard
science lay fossilled in the scree: evolution, cosine, fault. We camp by a river full of fish. It’s fall.
South, at Frank, the old town lies in the cold arms of an equation. Mass, velocity, a mountain broken by its weight. Path
of a...
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KAREN SOLIE: WATCH YOUR HEAD
So what? I tried. So what. Retained the use of my hands, a Scandinavian appreciation for the well-executed blindside, and the rest came back gradually. I haven’t learned a thing. Like the man who thought a drive would do him good; the row had been dreadful. Instead of sticking to the straightaway he turned left and fell in love with a barmaid at the Keno parlour in Morinville. Or the one,...
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KAREN SOLIE: GOPHER
Dirt divers, you pop up, fast and fleshy weeds. We turn our ankles where you’ve been and bust your heads for fun. In the lab of summertime we experiment the finer points of poison, snares, gasoline, twist your tails off at the root, then finally, old enough, use that Christmas .22 gifted lovingly oiled, with a big red bow. You eat and breed. We try to drown you out. You’re...
2 tags
BARRY DEMPSTER: VIVIAN WOODS
They were walking in the Vivian Woods, October flurry, shoulders brushing, naming absolutely everything, from the copper bells of the beech trees to the mould-blue lichen scarring the jagged rocks. Sharing the world, she thought, handing him an oak leaf with its tips torn to lace. But he was memorizing, not giving back, pocketing the arrow-shaped stones, shifting brain cells to make room for...