April 2011
24 posts
“In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you...”
– Siddhārtha Gautama (via kari-shma)
Mardi Gras Premortem
by Ann Townsend
The good times were drunk times, when your body loosened to a soft chair and you closed your eyes. Or when we’d rove bar to bar, clutching cold drinks, out onto the cobbled streets, our plastic neon go-cups shaking with ice. We jostled through a holiday crowd, mummers hurled beads at our feet, the women on the balconies lifted their shirts for a handful of coins or...
Sunday
by Timothy Liu
And when they sat down in the morning
to bowls of cold cereal, each in turn
would notice the blades of a ceiling fan
spinning at the bottom of their spoons,
small enough to swallow, yet no one
ever mentioned it, neither looking up
nor into each other’s eyes for fear
of feeding the hunger that held them there.
Why I Forgive My Younger Self Her Transgressions
by Ruth L. Schwartz
Maybe it’s the time I spend in high school classrooms with the desperate loveliness of all the young, the girls especially, their damp, curled morning hair, lips glossy and dark as rained on plums. I remember, at that age, dressing to be visible, penciling my eyes dark as a mockingbird’s. Everything was black, my nails, the velvet choker looped around my...
Motive
by Reginald Shepherd
I’m a penny from heaven’s corner pocket, anybody’s overcoat, pick me up and I’ll bring you all kinds of luck. I’m a fence burning down, love locked in a box, I’m a map of hand me down tomorrows, the last but one, or anywhere you never wanted to go, but now. I’m a clock without a face I’m blind like time, so lead me on: wear me...
you are sucha fool
by Ntozake Shange
you are sucha fool/ i haveta love you you decide to give me a poem/ intent on it/ actually you pull/ kiss me from 125th to 72nd street/ on the east side/ no less you are sucha fool/ you gonna give me/ the poet/ the poem insistin on proletarian images/ we buy okra/ 3 lbs for $1/ & a pair of 98 cent shoes we kiss we wrestle you make sure at east 110 street/ we have cognac no...
Bay Poem From Berkeley
by Sandra Cisneros
Mornings I still reach for you before opening my eyes. An antique habit from last summer when we pulled each other into the heat of groin and belly, slept with an arm around the other. The Texas sun was like that. Like a body asleep beside you.
But when I open my eyes to the flannel and down, mist at the window and blue light from the bay, I remember where i am. This weight...
“No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously...”
– Mark Twain | The Gilded Age
A Litany For Survival
by Audre Lord
For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who love in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children’s mouths so their dreams will...
won't you celebrate with me
by Lucille Clifton
won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
An Almost Made Up Poem
by Charles Bukowski
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. you used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,...
Love After Love
by Derek Walcott
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows...
