Darling Coffee

The periodic pleasure
of small happenings
is upon us—
behind the stalls
at the farmer’s market
snow glinting in heaps,
a cardinal its chest
puffed out, bloodshod
above the piles of awnings,
passion’s proclivities;
you picking up a sweet potato
turning to me  ‘This too?’—
query of tenderness
under the blown red wing.
Remember the brazen world?
Let’s find a room
with a window onto elms
strung with sunlight,
a cafe with polished cups,
darling coffee they call it,
may our bed be stoked
with fresh cut rosemary
and glinting thyme,
all herbs in due season
tucked under wild sheets:
fit for the conjugation of joy.

Meena Alexander

Too Hot Can’t Stop By Brenda Shaughnessy

 

1. Won’t Stop

What an unusual winter, to last till fall,
such a bad water this year, so full of elements
and hardly any specials.

I imagine the temperature had a hand in it,
this new kind of hot we’re having, like the clouds
pressed off on all the buttons

and seeped themselves away asocially.
Early retirement in dapplement—all the branches
signed off. Leaves left; they fell well before fall.

The changing of the seasons went viral
and now we have Sunter, Sprummer, Wing, and Wall.

2. Can’t Stop Too Hot

One foot in flip-flop, the other snow boot.
One hatchling learns to conserve energy (someone has to)
detaching its wings, hitching a ride

with a stressed-out vole. Flying’s not fuel-
efficient. A snake sheds its skin and crawls
into the shell with a turtle. They make room.

For my part, I imagine how a coyote re-eats its
plastic waste. This imagining requires no action,
which also, awfully, it’s true, saves energy.

Recycling requires a cycle and we melted
the axle, affixed the spindle. We stay still.
Hoping to grow some chlorophyll.

Soon everywhere will be too far to travel.
Too hot to go outside but in—in skin—
no place to breathe easy, either.

How to Draw a Perfect Circle by Terrance Hayes

I can imitate the spheres of the model’s body, her head,

Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow

But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral

From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle,

The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils

And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle

Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles

Rests in the serpent’s gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.

In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject

Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected

By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake

Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman.

To draw the model’s nipples I have to let myself be carried away.

I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves

As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth

In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding,

The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.

The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing,

In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows,

But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.

When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face

And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling

To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness.

The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried

On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working

Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.

At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped

Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel,

A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field

The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body

Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers,

The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.

When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years

Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy.

I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate

Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat.

An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles

To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.

The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings

The slicer’s eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see

What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:

A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat.

The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness,

All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,

They watch the pastor’s ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open,

They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim

And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant’s funeral

Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun

In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver

Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.

The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed.

I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey

Pink water descends the Cyclops’s cratered face after Odysseus

Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could

Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased,

Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy

I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout

Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder

Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.

Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes

In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs

With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops

Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas

Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything

Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject

A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist’s eye

Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops,

A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion

Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins

Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests,

When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed

It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell,

Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model

Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them

As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself

In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell

Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.

You must look without looking to make the perfect circle.

The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid

Until the drawing is complete.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes

I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison,

Part panic closet, a little room in a house set aflame.

I lock you in a form that is part music box, part meat

Grinder to separate the song of the bird from the bone.

I lock your persona in a dream-inducing sleeper hold

While your better selves watch from the bleachers.

I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow

You undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night

In the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow-

Shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars

Falling from the pep rally posters on your walls.

I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.

Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough

To love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed. 

 

Tea Dance, Provincetown, 1982

At the boy bar, no
one
danced with me.

I danced with
every
one.

The entire
room.
Every song.

That’s what was so
great
about the boy bars
then.

The room vibrated.
Shook.
Convulsed.

In one
collective
zoological
frenzy.

Truthfully,
I was the
only woman
there.

Who cared?
At the Boatslip,
I was welcomed.

The girl bar
down the street?
Pfft!
Dull as Brillo.

But the tea dances shimmied,
miraculous as mercury.
Acrid stink of sweat and
chlorine tang of semen.

Slippery male energy.
Something akin to
watching horses fighting.
Something exciting.

My lover,
the final summer he was bi,
introduced me to the teas.
Often hovered out of sight,
distracted by poolside
beauties, while I danced
content/innocent
with the room of men.

He was a skittish kite, that one.
Kites swerve and swoop and whoop.
Only a matter of time, I knew.
Apropos, I called him
“my little piece of string.”
And that’s what kites
leave you with in the end.

There was an expiration date
to summer. Understood.
That season,
I was experimenting to be
the woman I wanted to be.

Taught myself to sun
topless at the gay beach,
where sunbathers
shouted “ranger,”
a relayed warning
announcing authority,
en route on horseback,
coming to inspect
if we were clothed.
Else fined. Fifty
dollars sans bottom.
One hundred, topless.
Fifty a tit, I joked.

It was easy to be half naked
at a gay beach. Men
didn’t bother to look.
I was in training to be
a woman without shame.

Not a shameless woman,
una sinvergüenza, but
una sin vergüenza
glorious in her skin.
Flesh akin to pride.
I shed that summer
not only bikini top but
guilt-driven Eve and
self-immolating Fatima.

Was practicing for
my Minoan days ahead.
Medusa hair and breasts
spectacular as Nike of Samothrace
welcoming the salty wind.
Yes, I was a lovely thing then.

I can say this with impunity.
At twenty-eight, she was a woman
unrelated to me. I could
tell stories. Have so many to tell
and none to tell them to
except the page.
My faithful confessor.

Lover and I feuded
one night when he
wouldn’t come home with me.
His secret—herpes.
Laughable in retrospect,
considering the Plague
was already decimating dances
across the globe.

But that was before
we knew it as the Plague.

We were all on the run in ’82.
Jumping to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,”
the summer’s theme song.
Beat thumping in our blood.
Drinks sweeter than bodies
convulsing on the floor. 

Sandra Cisneros

 

 

Catastrophe is Next To Godliness

Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe.
Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in.
I want an excuse to change my life.

The day A. died, the sun was brighter than any sun.
I answered the phone, and a channel opened
between my stupid head and heaven, or what was left of it. The blankness
stared back; and I made sound after sound with my blood-wet gullet.
O unsayable—O tender and divine unsayable, I knew you then:
you line straight to the planet’s calamitous core; you moment moment moment;
you intimate abyss I called sister for a good reason.

 

When the Bad Thing happened, I saw every blade.
And every year I find out what they’ve done to us, I shed another skin.
I get closer to open air; true north.

Lord, if I say Bless the cold water you throw on my face,
does that make me a costume party. Am I greedy for comfort
if I ask you not to kill my friends; if I beg you to press
your heel against my throat—not enough to ruin me,
but just so—just so I can almost see your face— 

Franny Choi

A Spell to Banish Grief

 

Only when you wake to a fistful of pulled 

hair


on the floor beside your bed and, from a 

glance,


can guess its weight, when you study dried 

tear


streaks on your cheeks like a farmer 

figuring out


where the season went wrong, when a 

friend calls


out your name three or four times before 

you know


your name is yours, when your name fits 

like clothes


you’ve suddenly outgrown, when there is 

too much


of you, too few of you, too you of you, and 

the mirrors


wish all of you would just look away, when 

the clocks


can’t feel their hands and the calendars 

begin to doubt


themselves, when you begin to agree with 

the glares


from mirrors but your reflection follows 

you around


the house anyway, when you catch yourself 

drunk


on memory, candles lit, eyes closed, your 

head tilted


in the direction of cemetery grass, yellow 

and balding


above what’s left of the body that birthed 

you, and you


try to remember the sound of laughter in 

her throat


and fail, only then, orphan, will I take all 

my selves


and leave.

Saeed Jones

 

❤️

 

 

I Don't Miss It

But sometimes I forget where I am,

Imagine myself inside that life again.

 

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,

Or more likely colorless light

 

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

 

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,

The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

 

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.

Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

 

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.

And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

 

As if the day, the night, wherever it is

I am by then, has been only a whir

 

Of something other than waiting.

 

We hear so much about what love feels like.

Right now, today, with the rain outside,

 

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe

In May, in seasons that come when called,

 

It’s impossible not to want

To walk into the next room and let you

 

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,

Knowing perfectly well what they know.

Tracy K. Smith

The Breather 

Just as in the horror movies 

when someone discovers that the phone calls 

are coming from inside the house 

so too, I realized  

that our tender overlapping 

has been taking place only inside me. 

All that sweetness, the love and desire— 

it’s just been me dialing myself 

then following the ringing to another room 

to find no one on the line, 

well, sometimes a little breathing 

but more often than not, nothing. 

To think that all this time— 

which would include the boat rides, 

the airport embraces, and all the drinks— 

it’s been only me and the two telephones, 

the one on the wall in the kitchen 

and the extension in the darkened guest room upstairs.

Billy Collins

 

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.

I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true

I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.

I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here.

I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.

I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

 

 

1. Is it true?
2. Can I absolutely know that it’s true?
3. How do I react when I think that thought?
4. Who and what would I be without the thought?
5. Turn the thought around, and find three genuine examples of how each turnaround is as true as or truer than the original statement.

(((((((Lukewarm is so fucking lame)))))))

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver

omm: Spiritual Partnership #moregoals

Commitment

• Focus on what I can learn about myself all the time, especially from my reactions—such as anger, fear, jealousy, resentment and impatience instead of judging or blaming others or myself.
• Notice my emotions by feeling the physical sensations in my energy centers.
• Notice my thoughts such as planning my reply, judging, analyzing, comparing and day-dreaming.
• Notice my intention such as blaming, judging, needing to be right, wanting admiration, escaping into thoughts, intellectualizing and trying to convince.

Courage

• Take responsibility for my feelings, experiences and actions. No blaming.
• Practice integrity at all times. This often requires action such as speaking when frightened parts of my personality don’t want to speak and not speaking when they feel compelled to speak.
• Say or do what is most difficult. This includes sharing what I notice, if appropriate, when someone speaks or acts from a frightened part of her personality. Or sharing about myself what I am frightened to say and know that I need to say.

Compassion

• Change my perspective from fearful to loving. Choose to see myself and others in a loving or appreciative way.
• Release any distance I feel from anyone.
• Be present while others are speaking—not preparing replies or judging.

Conscious Communication and Action

• Consult my intuition.
• Choose my intention before I speak or act.
• Act from the healthiest part of my personality that I can find, rather than caretaking, fixing, teaching, judging, blaming or gossiping.
• Speak personally and specifically rather than generally and abstractly. Use "I" statements rather than "we" or "you" statements.
• Release attachment to the outcome. Trust the Universe.
• If I find myself attached, begin again with Commitment, Courage and Compassion.