Venus As A Boy

Almost Always like Iris

"I never felt pretty, I don’t feel pretty now; I’m not a pretty person. I don’t like pretty, so I don’t feel badly. And I think it worked out well, because … when you’re somebody like myself, in order to get around and be attractive, you have to develop something, you have to learn something, and have to do something, so you become a bit more interesting. And when you get older, you get by on that. Anyway, I don’t happen to like pretty. Most of the world is not with me, but I don’t care."

"It's the way he looks at you. The way he finds beauty in all your imperfections."

"It's better to be happy than well-dressed"

"Color can raise the dead"

When I was two feet tall

and held the hand above,

how could I know

how far that limping bond would go,

that finger-inch of love.

1

What do we like best

about ourselves?

Our inability

to be content.

We might see this

restlessness

as a chip

not yet cashed in.

                2

You appear 

because you’re lonely

maybe. 

You would not say that.

You come to tell me

you’re saving money

by cooking for yourself.

You’ve figured out

what units you’ll need

to exchange for units

if you intend

I know I mustn’t

interrupt

                3

Hectic and flexible,

flames

are ideal

new bodies for us!

False Flowers by Anne Stevenson

They were to have been a love gift, 

but when she slit the paper funnel, 

they both saw they were fake; false flowers 

he'd picked in haste from the store's display, 

handmade coloured stuff, stiff as crinoline. 

Instantly she thought of women's hands 

cutting in grimy light by a sweatshop window; 

rough plank tables strewn with cut-out 

flower heads: lily, iris, primula, scentless 

chrysanthemums, pistils rigged on wire 

in crowns of sponge-tipped stamens, 

sepals and petals perfect, perfectly 

immune to menaces from the garden. 

Why so wrong, so...flattening? Why not instead 

symbols of unchanging love? 

                                       Yet pretty enough, 

she considered, arranging them in a vase 

with dry grass and last summer's hydrangeas 

whose deadness was still (how to put it?) 

alive, or maybe the other side of life. 

Two sides, really, of the same thing? 

She laughed a little, such ideas were embarrassing 

even when kept to oneself, 

but her train of thought 

carried her in its private tunnel through supper, 

and at bedtime, brushing her teeth, 

she happened to look up at the moon. 

Its sunlit face was turned, as always, in her direction. 

The full moon, she couldn't help thinking, 

though we see only half of it. 

It was an insight she decided she could 

share with him, but when he joined her 

and together they lay in the dark, 

there seemed no reason to say anything. 

The words, in any case, would be wrong, 

would escape or disfigure her meaning. 

Good was the syllable she murmured to him, 

fading into sleep. And just for a split second, 

teetering on the verge of it, she believed 

everything that had to be was understood.

Giving and Getting by Tony Hoagland

I like that, he said in the hospital, where I was rubbing his feet
which were dry and smelled a bit.

Ahh, he said, ahhh, as I worried
what the nurse in the corridor might think,

pushing my thumbs into the pads and calluses,
the skin that had grown leathery and hard

over a lifetime of streets and shoes—

and me trying but unable to forget
some of the things he had done

over the course of our long friendship.
Rubbing his feet was like reaching into some

thick part of my heart that couldn’t feel
and kneading away at it—

Blame caught inside the love
like a fishhook, or a bug in honey.

It is in my character, this
persistent selfishness—

one of my hands offering the gift, the other
trying to take something back.

Giving and getting
like two horses arriving at the same time

from opposite directions
at the stone gate

Not This by Olena Kalytiak Davis

my god all the days we have lived thru 
saying 

not this 
one, not this, 
not now, 
not yet, this week 
doesn't count, was lost, this month 
was shit, what a year, it sucked, 
it flew, that decade was for 
what? i raised my kids, they 
grew i lost two pasts—i am 
not made of them and they 
are through. 

we forget what 
we remember: 

each of the five 
the fevered few 

days we used 
to fall in love. 

Fast Gas by Dorianne Laux

Before the days of self service,

when you never had to pump your own gas,

I was the one who did it for you, the girl

who stepped out at the sound of a bell

with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back

in a straight, unlovely ponytail.

This was before automatic shut-offs

and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank,

I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas

backed up, came arcing out of the hole

in a bright gold wave and soaked me — face, breasts,

belly and legs. And I had to hurry

back to the booth, the small employee bathroom

with the broken lock, to change my uniform,

peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin

and wash myself in the sink.

Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt

pure and amazed — the way the amber gas

glazed my flesh, the searing,

subterranean pain of it, how my skin

shimmered and ached, glowed

like rainbowed oil on the pavement.

I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,

for the first time, in love, that man waiting

patiently in my future like a red leaf

on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty

that asks to be noticed. How was I to know

it would begin this way: every cell of my body

burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me

a nimbus of light that would carry me

through the days, how when he found me,

weeks later, he would find me like that, 

an ordinary woman who could rise 

in flame, all he would have to do 

is come close and touch me.

Talent by Carol Ann Duffy

This is the word tightrope. Now imagine
a man, inching across it in the space
between our thoughts. He holds our breath.

There is no word net.

You want him to fall, don't you?
I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.
The word applause is written all over him.

Seall by Brooklyn Copeland

Our pulses
gulp
in rhyme
upon
release—our

bodies beyond
us
siphon,
harbor.

Francesca Says More by Olena Kalytiak Davis

 

that maiden thump was book on floor, but
does it really matter who kissed who
first or then who decided to go further?
lower? faster? naturally, we took
turns on top. now here, now there, and up
and down…once it started no one even thought to think to stop.
so, we have holes inside our souls,
but mustn’t we begin by filling others’?
god gave us lips and hands and parts
that cannot possibly be saved for prayer. nor by.
i will not name name, claim fame by how well
or who i fucked or why, it happens all the time.
and it’s you, white pilgrim, whom next galehot seeks.

fuck. we didn’t read again for weeks.

On The Metro by C.K. Williams

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me;

she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.

I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers

to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is,

becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself

to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark

her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.)

She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;

she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,

achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.

I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more,

but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite:

a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now,

our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean,

my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg.

The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train,

and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again,

(Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back,

(to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again

as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.

“Let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart. And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Wait by Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don't go too early.
You're tired. But everyone's tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

The bud 

stands for all things, 

even for those things that don’t flower, 

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;   

though sometimes it is necessary 

to reteach a thing its loveliness, 

to put a hand on its brow 

of the flower 

and retell it in words and in touch 

it is lovely 

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found

Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way

Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound

I still make shows how hard it is to say

How harsh and bitter that place felt to me—

Merely to think of it renews the fear. 

"I'm not saying you can change a shape without forever altering the inside. I'm saying the opposite. I'm  saying that in some cases the inside persists long after it doesn't."

Cascando by Samuel Beckett

1

why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed

is it not better abort than be barren

the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2

saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words

terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending

I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3

unless they love you

Diagnosis by Cynthia Cruz

Awkward, and almost always the idiot
Savant, mutant, retard, I

Travel my own effervescent weather,
In my underwater

Vessel, my sweet
Mars, and soundless

Daydream, magical sweep of Rimbaudian
Reverie. Always

Clumsy, and guileless, mind-
Blind, and deathly shy,

Winning every spelling bee,
Every math contest,

Done before the rest, finishing
First in science test.

Hiding the quarterly honor-roll awards
I won beneath the bed.

The shame of being
Seen consumes me.

And I fight it back,
A landowner warding off

Leagues of feral thieves,
With fire, handheld torch, burning back

The onslaught. In grade school,
Listening to the same Blondie song in my bedroom, over

And over for hours, days,
For years. No friends

But the one: silent, and sitting
In my head. Running laps around

The house for five, ten, fifteen
Miles, counting

Calories of everything put
Into my mouth—desperate to ward the onslaught

Off. Until I am nothing
But a body.

Burn the body down
And, with it, out goes the pilot

Blue light of the mind.
Everyone said

I was pretty back then.
Maybe, way back then,

Before I began.

To Read: Ross Gay/Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

 "he put gently into the earth

some plants which, most likely,

some of them, in all likelihood,

continue to grow, continue

to do what such plants do, like house

and feed small and necessary creatures,

like being pleasant to touch and smell,

like converting sunlight

into food, like making it easier

for us to breathe."

Evening, I wander lakeside
Heavy with the tomb of sorrow

Dropped deep inside me.

Ephemera, and trauma.

I thought I could stop
The incessant hum

By moving from city
To city,

By starving clean
The body.

The miraculous leveling out
Of meaning.

Obsessive archiving and collecting
As a means to stop the hum and drone

Of memory, the diamond-white
Rush of doom.

"How do I feel about my botched suicide
Now."

Hannah Sanghee Park #thesame-different

"What's heavier/ than an unused heart, fat with its never-/seen potential? You who stilled a lover./ You who lives all your life with a cover."

"So heart do right by me."

Karen Solie #theroadinisnotthesameroadout

"It seems you can live your whole life with a creature/ and only know it one way."

"Often I don't recognize what I'd rather not do until I've agreed to do it.

"Then I know what I want and what I want makes me weak."

"Sometimes when I've thought I've hurt you,/ you haven't even noticed I'm around. I admire that./ It's something one might work towards one's whole life."

"The fat of its heart has been spent on winter."

“Eventually the text began to explain itself.
Written out, the code was easier to decipher.
They devised a strategy, frequent division,
occasional subtraction. One fragment kissed another.
A sexual innuendo of sorts. Distance was not kind.
They understood the adage that omissions can be cruel
so a system of substitution was concocted. A three was used
to connote a blank space. A blanket was thrown
over the bed but only because it was very, very cold.
It was all in an evening’s amusement.
All a moment’s distraction.”

Mary Jo Bang

Burlesque by Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Watch the fire undress him,
how flame fingers each button,
rolls back his collar, unzips him
without sweet talk or mystery.

See how the skin begins to gather
at his ankles, how it slips into
the embers, how it shimmers
beneath him, unshapen, iridescent

as candlelight on a dark negligee.
Come, look at him, at all his goods,
how his whole body becomes song,
an aria of light, a psalm’s kaleidoscope.

Listen as he lets loose an opus,
night’s national anthem, the tune
you can’t name, but can’t stop humming.
There, he burns brilliant as a blue note.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

The Earthquake In This Case Was by Mary Jo Bang

A seismic storm that knocked down
buildings—the buildings teetering before falling
the way ideological beliefs might sway back and forth

if they were preserved in a glass tower
that was about to be toppled. In any storm,
one hopes he or she is bound in advance

by the story line to escape at the end. In speech,
the mouth becomes a wheelbarrow
that can assert its contents.

The tool-and-die exactitude of pre-packaged thought
is estranging because it suggests
the discrete elements can't be teased apart.

Blind faith relies on an obedience that verges
on boredom. Any disquiet, however slight, might
define a moment like a character's obsessive cough

might define a character by exploding
when it shouldn't. It keeps exploding just when
it shouldn't and when it does it acts in the story

like a glass box cracked by a hammer that breaks
and becomes a broken box. In both situations,
action releases the stale air encased there.

And now the question: what do we do with the longing
for what can destroy us? You're free to think:
logic can change even the most obstinate person; or,

logic cannot change the most obstinate person.

Apt Answer

Every morning,
I wake in a bad dream.

Thoughts of all
that’s gone awry
flood my mind
to overflow
and
all
I
can do
is clutch
the shards
of wreckage
wrought from
billowing despair
with bleeding hands.

I know what I did to us.

I was like a hamster
running in circles
in a plastic ball
losing air
while
you
were
silently
suffocating
in your own misery.


I unwittingly
slashed holes
through our foundation
in my desperation
to find breathing room
without considering
the weapon
I was wielding
for our salvation.

If I’d been more mindful,
I would’ve reached for a saber.
But unknowingly,
I grabbed a cleaver.

Wait by C.K. Williams

Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— 

not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,   

time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, 

one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,   

another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was   

for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly. 

It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,   

relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw. 

Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you, 

you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,   

my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,   

trying to heave itself back to its other way with you. 

But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran 

as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you? 

Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds? 

Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it, 

a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I,   

not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve? 

Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am, 

how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all. 

Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over 

the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn, 

to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"?   

We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."

Present Light by Charles Ghinga

If I could

hold light

in my hand

 

I would 

give it

to you

 

and watch it 

become

your shadow.

"It was an alarming thought that these false selves should still have me in their power, and in my bewilderment I began wondering whether any such thing as my real self could be said to exist at all. Like a sudden revelation, then, it became clear to me that the self was always changing, always developing, only capable of evolving fully through the integration of all past semblances. I wouldn’t be my true self till I accepted and learned to know all those selves I’d disowned and deserted...As if this were something I could do consciously, there and then, the last of my inertia vanished, consumed by an ardent desire for identification with the essential ‘I’ – until this had been achieved I’d always be as I was now, wandering like a stranger, lost, frightened and confused, among the changes and contradictions of my own personality." 

-Anna Kavan

Love Lessons

As for me, I used to be a bird
with a gentle white womb,
someone cut my throat
     just for laughs,
     I don’t know.
As for me, I used to be a great albatross
and whirled over the seas.
Someone put an end to my journey,
without any charity in the tone of it.
But even stretched out on the ground
I sing for you now
my songs of love.

More Merini

"And, up against me, the inanimate things
that I created earlier
come to die again within the breast
of my intelligence
eager for my shelter and my fruits,
begging again for riches from a beggar."
(“When the Anguish”)

"So, within your shaping arms
I pour myself, small and immense,
serene given, restless given,
unending developing motion."
(“The Presence of Orpheus”)

"As for my crying over you, I bleached it away slowly
day by day as full light does
and in silence I sent it back to my eyes,
which, if I look at you, are alive with stars."
(“And it would be even easier”)

On my mind: Aphorisms by Alda Merini

Psychoanalysis 

always looks for the egg 

in a basket 

that has been lost. 

*       *       * 

I sample sin as if it were 

the beginning of well-being. 

*       *       * 

I don't like Paradise 

as they probably don't have obsessions there. 

*       *       * 

If God absolves me 

he always does so 

for insufficient 

evidence. 

*       *       * 

Everyone is a friend of his own pathology. 

*       *       * 

When I raise a toast to madness, 

I toast myself as well. 

*       *       * 

There are nights that don't 

ever happen.

— Translated by Douglas Basford

And soooooo (s)he kicked him in the ding-ding!

"Lost causes are the only ones fighting for."

Spent by Rae Armantrout

Suffer as in allow.

List as in want.

Listless as in transcending

desire, or not rising

to greet it.

To list

is to lean,

dangerously,

to one side.

Have you forgotten?

Spent

as in exhausted.

Second Helpings by John Brehm

I wear my heart on my sleeve,

or rather both sleeves, since 

it's usually broken.

Sometimes when I join my hands

to pray, the jagged edges

briefly touch,

like a plate that fell and cracked

apart from being asked 

to hold too much.

The Language by Robert Creeley

Locate I 

love you some- 

where in 

teeth and   

eyes, bite   

it but 

take care not   

to hurt, you   

want so 

much so   

little. Words   

say everything. 

I 

love you

again, 

then what   

is emptiness   

for. To 

fill, fill. 

I heard words   

and words full 

of holes   

aching. Speech   

is a mouth.

Not Over It by Heather McHugh

By woman so touched, so pressed,

detachment being thought

achievable at all

 

is boggling in itself. Its being

thought achievable by love—but love

for only all (not someone’s single) sentience—

 

appears the precept of too cold

a form of flame. How much

of a hand in things

 

relinquishes the hold

of things-at-hand?

What kiss might such

 

a mind reclaim? A swirl of dust

in Buddhist schools, perhaps.

A view of several solar

 

systems from above.

Not love.

The thought

 

appeals as it appals:

Slow learners, we must spurn

the selving sensualities, to feel

 

for feelers of this kind,

unfasten passion’s burner

to identify what’s under it—

 

in short, must court

dispassion just

to be compassionate.

Where The Wound Lies by Angela de Hoyos

because I go 

          like the professed 

                 sinner repentant 

to the altar 

of your baptismal flame 

         I am saved 

despite your 

                        sculptor-love 

whose whimsy kneads 

                                             and molds 

                                             and fires

then breaks 

the free-form 

of my fasting body

                                             to make 

                                             me whole

yet thankful 

I accept

                these carnal gifts

                of you 

                              Eros 

and wear them 

as I would

flawless jewels 

               (how can you 

                know that I 

                have bled

                the way 

                and back 

                biting the dust 

                to wear 

                your name?) 

. . . the wound lies 

                                                not

in your infliction 

         but in my

                 expectations . . .

 

Brutal to give

the prisoner a window—

a blue sky glimpse—

as if an afterlife

existed. Brutal

for you to parade 

in a body

in the same 

room where I dream you.

Slide by Kate Colby

You and I inhabit thresholds, clinging to neither here nor there, and to

and: this is a threshold of no relief, of interrogative light and obviated

shadows, of questions flattened between clapboard slides,

in laboratories of hanging frames—in a potential frame,

the next moment slumps beneath the shadow of the overhang.

 

They call it earthquake weather, a day like this, of reflected light

and leveling heat of no relief, of corners around which

and angles of incidence jellied in consommé,

molded in amber lunches of tea and

impossible: no incidents or tension, no reflection.

 

No striations: rather, bangle, a broken shoelace

and what are we going to do about that hair?

 

We were in a boat. You were navigating and I was tending

the lines, which flew from my hands, flapping like live wires

on the wind. You watched the shadow of our sail on the water

through the light reflected in your face, conducted a depth sounding:

 

You went under, but not overboard, swam away to plot reliefs

of ocean floors. It is far too shallow here to die.