– This story originally appeared in the August 2012 issue of B O D Y NINE MONTHS January ♀
The day I bit an apple, and it bled, I knew we had died.
“I’m not even a boat I’m where a boat crashed. I put my impossible body in your hands is this a pen”
— Eileen Myles, “Computer" (via renegadetongue)
24. I already said Brautigan, and like Brautigan, Sturm creates a thing. You carry around a little slice of the world.
25. Yeah, and I went straight into a fantasy world. Just stepped straight into the abyss. You know, I was gone and kids used to walk past my front room, cause I lived on the green.
“Božičević’s social conscience is always entwined with a knowledge of theoretical concepts that keep her at bay, just a bit. She’s able to write personably and wisely about revolution without necessarily believing in it 100%––her theory-brain just won’t let her off the hook, and it’s a good thing for us as readers.”
“Some people are so beautiful, their beauty seems monstrous, fatal. A horrifying symmetry.”
from “Some Notes on Monstrousness”
http://www.dzancbooks.org/the-collagist/2013/7/9/some-notes-on-monstrousness.html
They shrug their immense shoulders.
The past is buried in the shards
and glyphs of their bellies. Nothing is still,
the shifting tectonic plates
constantly pushing us imperceptibly
toward the sky. Millennium ago,
you and I were two tiny seeds,
the size of these two pills
we just swallowed.
When you wrap your legs
around my waist I taste the black earth
in your skin, that oldest version of us:
our intricately inseparable roots,
our hopelessly entangled limbs.
WET That night you stood outside my door in your wet clothes and I wanted to will your hand to lift. I imagined yo
1. I see other people kiss
see kisses while pedals are still
spinning — how he rushed
and the bike and the red bike fell.
2. Tonight K. spoke hypothetical so well it could have been
German. We had hypothetical gestalt. I blame the bar
there was no electrics, only candles, the owner
so afraid of a shock, so fearless of fire. And K.
so serious about the squish and blast of us
of course I had to
tell you how many hypotheticals I’ve ruined
or how many hotels and motels and inns
I’ve covered in dust.
–Ryan Van Winkle
Former poet laureate Donald Hall talks to Mike Pride, NF ’85, about what journalists can learn from poetry
If you call something poetry to praise it, that’s fine, but it’s not a poem. –Donald Hall
I love too many women is not the best lead-in
for a conversation that will end
with me telling you I love you
for the first time.
I feel like I’ll never live anywhere
that has sunsets ever again.
Up in the sky
all they’ve got is
macaroni packet powder
smeared with coke snot.
I’m scared of buildings now
because I’m smaller &
I’m sadder than I ever thought
I was before.
“I will be an eyelash.
A sponge washing your neck-hairs.
Or a verb, an adjective, I will become. Such a word
slightly lights your cheek.
What happened? Nothing.”
–Polina Barskova, trans. Ilya Kaminsky
All I wanted was to party with you
It is entirely possible to go on living without you.
That’s the scary part.