Sunday, May 17, 2015

"London Exchange" by Eileen Myles (2015)


I have utmost
respect for you
but in that
moment if I
were to 
get out of 
your way
instead of
walking up the stairs
to my home
I would have no respect
for myself,
I didn't know
why you couldn't 
understand this
when I told
you. Instead
you screamed
at me and 
Told me I
was rude. And 
then you said someone 
of my 
age should
know meaning
that you
were adding
to my crime
the fact
that I am 
older than you.
What am I
to do. How
many days
have passed
and I 
have no
reason to think
that
your ancestors
were stolen
from their 
home in A-
frica
and because
of my not
knowing that this
is true
but thinking
that it
is possible
it makes
me certain
that respect
next time
would be 
for me
to step around.
Maybe 
I could say
quietly joining you
for a moment
in your 
vast and
ancient
sorrow
that was 
my home

"Phone Booth" by Brenda Hillman (2008)

There should be more nouns
For objects put to sleep
Against their will
The “booth” for instance
With coiled hidden wires
Lidded chrome drawers
Tipping up like lizards’ eyes
We looked out into rhymed rain
We heard varying vowels
Rimbaud’s vowels with colors
Orange or blue beeps
Types of ancient punctuation
The interpunct between words
A call became twenty-five cents
Times in a marriage we went there
To complain or flirt
A few decades and we wised up
Got used to the shadow
The phone booth as reliquary
An arm could rest
On the triangular shelf
A briefcase between the feet
A pen poked into acoustic holes
While we gathered our actions/wits
For magic and pain
The destiny twins
Some of us scratched pale glyphs
Onto the glass door while talking
One day we started to race past
And others started racing
Holding phones to their ears
Holding a personal string
To their lipsIf there are overages
There might be nouns for
The clotting of numbers in the sky
So thick the stars can’t shine through
A word for backing away
From those who shout to their strings
In the airport while eating
We loved the half-booths
Could cup one hand on the mouthpiece
Lean two-thirds out to talk to a friend
Sitting in the lobby
The universe grows
We are dizzy as mercury
We are solitudes aided by awe
Let us mourn secrets told to
Fake wood and the trapezoidal seat
Perfume in the mouthpiece
Like a little Grecian sash
Why did we live so fast
The booth hid our ankles
We twisted the rigid cord
As we spoke
It made a kind of whorl

"Scene" by Maxine Chernoff (2014)


What the body might guess,
what the hand requests,
what language assumes
becomes amulet,
which is to say
I am carrying your face
in a locket in a box
to a virtual location
guarded by kestrels,
suggesting the scene’s
geography of love and dirt,
trees ripe with darkness
and bones’ white luster.
In the moonlit blue house,
where snow won’t fall
unless called upon,
grace enters as requested,
lands next to you, grasped,
as if love were a reflex
simple as weather.

"Apologies from the Ground Up" by Timothy Donnelly (2013)


The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries
I’d notice it, my own two eyes now breaking down the larger
vertical distance into many smaller distances I’ll conquer
almost absently: the riser, the tread, the measure of it long

 hammered into the body the way it’s always been, even back
in the day when the builders of the tower Nimrod wanted
rising up into the heavens laid the first of the sun-baked bricks
down and rose. Here we are again I say but where exactly

nobody knows, that nowhere in particular humming between
one phoneme and a next, pulse jagged as airless Manhattan-
bound expresses on which I’ve worried years that my cohort
of passengers’ fat inner monologues might manage to lurch

up into audibility at once, a general rupture from the keeping
of thoughts to oneself – statistically improbable I know but
why quarrel with the dread of it. I never counted my own voice
among the chaos, admittedly. I just figured it would happen

not with but against me. A custom punishment for thinking
myself apart from all the others. But not apart from in the sense
above but away from. Although to stand in either way will
imply nobility, power, distinction. As for example if you step

back to consider a sixteenth-century depiction of the tower
under construction, you rapidly identify the isolated figure as
that of the king, his convulsive garment the red of an insect
smitten on a calf, the hint of laughter on his face, or humming

just under the plane of his face, indicative of what you have
come to recognize in others as the kind of pleasure, no more
or less so than in yourself, that can only persist through forcing
the world into its service as it dismantles whatever happens

to oppose it, including its own short-lived impulse to adapt
by absorbing what opposes into its fabric. It will refuse to do that.
It will exhaust its fuel or logic or even combust before it lets
itself evolve into some variation on what it used to be instead

of remaining forever what it is until it dies, even when its death
comes painfully and brings humiliation down upon its house.
In the abstract, on and off – as when hurrying past the wrought-
iron fence some pink flowering branches cantilever through

or if pushed too relentlessly into oneself in public – it’s hard
not to admire the resolve in that. But there are pictures in which
there is no king. The tower staggers into the cloudcover as if
inevitably, or naturally, as if the medium of earth were merely

manifesting its promise. Often the manner in which it does so
reflects the principles of advanced mathematics, but it’s unclear
whether the relationship between the two might be more
appropriately thought of as one of assistance or of guidance.

This distinction is a matter of no small concern to me, actually,
because much as I don’t want anyone’s help, I don’t want anyone
telling me what to do about ten times more, and if what it all
comes down to is that, there’s a far better than average chance

I’ll just end up devising some potentially disastrous third option
on the fly as I wait in line. Elsewhere we find teams of builders
at work among the tower’s open spaces with no one figure leaping
forward as king or even foreman, a phenomenon whose effects

include not only the gratification of our fondness for images
of proto-democracy but also the stimulation of our need to fill
whatever we perceive to be an emptiness, which in this instance
means electing ourselves into the very position of authority

we had been happy to find vacant. I myself would be happy
leaving every position vacant as an antique prairie across which
bison once roamed democratically, each denizen of the herd
voting for what direction it wanted to take off in with a nudge

of its quarter-ton head, but someone around here has to start
taking responsibility, and I don’t see any hands going up. So                                                                                                              here goes.
Sorry. It was me. I built the Tower of Babel. What can I say?
It seemed like a good idea at the time. And a fairly obvious take-

off on what we were already doing, architecture-wise. All I did
was change the scale. I maintained the workers’ enthusiasm
with rustic beer and talk of history. Plus the specter of the great
flood still freaked the people out every heavy rainfall, so it felt

like good civic planning, too – but apparently the whole project
violated the so-called natural order of things. I’m still a little                                                                                                                  shaky
with the language in the aftermath, but my gut says that’s just
some dressed up way of admitting I was really onto something.

"A Story Begins" by Elaine Equi (2012)

The same as other stories, but we follow along in case something different might happen.

Just one different thing. It leads us to a ledge and pushes us over.

Every story has a climax in a way life doesn't.

It puts us back where it found us. It opens our eyes which weren't closed, but felt that way because what we saw was happening inside the story.

We are the excess of the story — that which it cannot contain.

Washed ashore.

What was the story about?

I can't remember. A dwindling, dim-witted tribe.

Every month when the moon was full, they'd sacrifice another virgin, but could never figure out why the crops still wouldn't grow.

"When at a Certain Party in NYC" by Erin Belieu (2011)

Wherever you’re from sucks, and wherever you grew up sucks, and everyone here lives in a converted chocolate factory or deconsecrated church without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup in sight, but only carefully edited objets, like the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen that looks like an industrial age dildo, and when you rifle through the bathroom looking for a spare tampon, you discover that even their toothpaste is somehow more desirable than yours. And later you go with a world famous critic to eat a plate of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like “a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself impossible to eat. And your friend back home– who says the pioneers who first settled the great asphalt parking lot of our middle were not intact heroic, but really the chubby ones, who lacked the imagination to go all the way to California–it could be that she’s on to something. Because, admit it, when you look at the people on these streets, the razor blade women with their strategic bones, and the men wearing Amish pants with interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you will never cut it anywhere that constitutes a where, that even ordering a pint of tuna salad in a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt. So when you see the dogs on the high-rise elevators practically tweaking, panting all the way down from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on with their long planned business of snuffling trash or peeing on something to which all day they’ve been looking forward, what you want is to be on the fastest Conestoga home, where the other losers live and where the tasteless azaleas are, as we speak, half-heartedly exploding. 

"Oh, Don't" by Kelle Groom (2010)

the spirit wroteafter the Civil War,in cloudy scriptlike you might expectfrom someone withouthands, the mediumsbusy with so many dead,collective pushinto the other world,all of us calling.Down by the riverI remembered sawdust,his guitar, two or threesongs, his hand palmup, showing me the placewhere his mother died,like a mirror he thoughtof his own death, and whenthe table turned,he appeared. We walkedaround a fallen tree,the woman in me stilldriving by. His dancewas the best part, I meanno one was dancing, menand women in nightoutfits. Even broken,cement to my thigh,I climbed the stairsand breathed the wayI did at fifteen, takingin the burning. One spiritpassed her arm througha chair, roses, like the oneshe carried to me sayinghe’d never sleep again.There’s red in the sky, redin the table, like winter,the shining garment that materialized.Oh dont keep calling?Oh dont stop?In another photograph,a spirit has written Difficult
to manifest present conditions
not suitable
to manifest present conditionsnot suitable, and another, in tinyscript, la porte fermé—so hardto see it could be fume, thoughthe closed door is what I’ve staredat so long, when evena blind girl can see that’s smoke.