Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Devotion by Ocean Vuong


      Instead, the year begins
with my knees
      scraping hardwood,
another man leaving
      into my throat. Fresh snow
crackling on the window,
      each flake a letter
from an alphabet
      I’ve shut out for good.
Because the difference
      between prayer & mercy
is how you move
      the tongue. I press mine
to the navel’s familiar
      whorl, molasses threads
descending toward
      devotion. & there’s nothing
more holy than holding
       a man’s heartbeat between
your teeth, sharpened
      with too much
air. This mouth the last
      entry into January, silenced
with fresh snow crackling
      on the window.
& so what—if my feathers
      are burning. I
never asked for flight.
      Only to feel
this fully, this
      entire, the way snow
touches bare skin—& is,
      suddenly, snow
no longer.

Tuesday, August 30, 2016


Natural Law by Babette Deutsch

If you press a stone with your finger, 
Sir Isaac Newton observed, 
The finger is also 
Pressed by the stone. 
But can a woman, pressed by memory’s finger, 
In the deep night, alone, 
Of her softness move 
The airy thing 
That presses upon her 
With the whole weight of love? This 
Sir Isaac said nothing of.

Monday, August 29, 2016

"I used to worry about being like this...but now...now I don't worry any more."

❤️

Sunday, August 28, 2016

Litany by Elise Paschen

To light the dark
of you where no
light has explored,

to trek the deserts,
accept mirages,
swim gulfs, inhabit

the islands, caves,
the rooms and alcoves
of you, the chambers,

to chart the arteries, 
to join the valves, 
the bolts, the nails,

to open windows,
to hazard exits, 
fall through trap floors,

to upend drawers,
slam doors, to shatter
the glass of you,

but most of all, 
awake or sleeping,
to learn to say:

No more to you.

Angling by Elise Paschen

And I let the fish go. 
Elizabeth Bishop

I let him go
as if he were
a fish I'd let
slip into water.

Cupping him in
my hands, his silver
wriggling and spit,
the sun had caught

his wet, flecked skin,
his breath, no breath,
the opening, closing
of gills, that grin.

I had removed
the hook from which
he'd swung with such
momentous grace.

But wasn't I snared?
That look, that flash
as I tossed him back,
alive, in air.

Saturday, August 27, 2016

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

"I do what gnaws at me."

Tuesday, August 16, 2016

___________ and the snow flees like eloping brides
into rain. The imperceptible change begins
out of an old rage and glistens, chaste, with its new
craving, spring. May your desire always overcome
 
your need; your story that you have to tell,
enchanting, mutable, may it fill the world
you believe: a sunny view, flowers lunging
from the sill, the quilt, the chair, all things
 
fill with you and empty and fill. And hurry, because
now as I tire of my studied abandon, counting
the days, I’m sad. Yet I trust your absence, in everything
wholly evident: the rain in the white basin, and I
 
vigilant. 

I Love Your Crazy Bones by Barton Sutter

Even your odds and ends. 
I love your teeth, crazy bones, 
Madcap knees and elbows. 
Forearm and backhand 
Hair makes you animal. 
Rare among things. 
The small of your back could pool rain 
Into water a main might drink. Perfect, 
From the whirlpools your fingers print 
On everything you touch 
To the moons on the nails of all ten toes 
Rising and setting inside your shoes 
Wherever you go.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Lucia by Ravi Shankar

My hair, voluminous from sleeping in
six different positions, redolent with your scent,
helps me recall that last night was indeed real,

that it's possible for a bedspread to spawn
a watershed in the membrane that keeps us
shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure,

that I didn't just dream you into being.
You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,
give my hands their one true purpose,

find in my shoulder a groove for your head.
In a clinch, you're clenched and I'm pinched,
 we're spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched
 
in a chestnut by a mob of our own making,
only to be resurrected to stage several revivals
that arise from slightest touch to thwart

deep sleep with necessities I never knew
I knew until meeting you a few days
or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Monday, August 8, 2016

I have to tell you, 
there are times when 
the sun strikes me 
like a gong, 
and I remember everything, 
even your ears.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look 
into each other’s eyes more, 
and also to appease the mutes, 
the government has decided 
to allot each person exactly one hundred   
and sixty-seven words, per day. 

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear   
without saying hello. In the restaurant   
I point at chicken noodle soup. 
I am adjusting well to the new way. 

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,   
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.   
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond, 
I know she’s used up all her words,   
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times. 
After that, we just sit on the line   
and listen to each other breathe.

Singles Cruise

It was a singles cruise but it wasn’t a singles cruise:
each participant simulated detachment but none
was actually single. Some, like the recently widowed,
were attached to ghosts. Others were legally attached
to a living person they once but no longer loved.
A surprising number loved their partners profoundly
while fearing said partners inhabited the category
of those who loved them no longer. These participants,
whose fears may or may not have been founded,
attempted to self-protect by labeling themselves single.
Soon a pattern emerged: those who feared abandonment
developed around them a planetary-like orbit
of potential new partners to whom they could not attach
because they were already attached. Such orbits lasted,
sometimes, for years. The orbiters went to self-help groups
and/or analysts and/or wrote letters to advice columnists.
Because they could not detach from their objects of unrequited
affection, they became the predominant clientele for future
singles cruises, unilaterally sustaining the singles cruise business.

Monday, August 1, 2016

I like myself when I'm around you...