Anne Carson
Who can sleep when she—
hundreds of miles away I feel that vast breath
fan her restless decks.
Cicatrice by cicatrice
all the links
rattle once.
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.—Decreation (Random House, 2005)
“I wear my heart on my sleeve,
or rather both sleeves, since
it’s usually broken.”Sarah Certa is our Director of Social Media and the author of RED PAPER HEART, a limited hand-bound collection of eight poems from Zoo Cake Press. Usually she’s behind the scenes but this time we want to hear from her. Read on, Dear Ones.
What is poetry? Part 2: Why do you write it?
Poetry is a mystery to me. I don’t understand it…
JAKOB
I am sick of feeling
I never eat or sleep
I just sit here and let the words burn into me
I know you love her
And don’t love me
No, I don’t think you love her
I know there are clouds that are very pretty
I know there are clouds that trundle round the globe
I take anything I can to get to love
Live things are what the world is made of
Live things are black
Black in that they forgot where they came from
I have not forgotten, however I choose not to feel
Those places that have burned into me
There is too much burning here, I’m afraid
Readers, you read flat words
Inside here are many moments
In which I have screamed in pain
As the flames ate meDorothea Lasky
Can I, siren, laugh once more with the people I love?
“I’m always right here/ towing an anchor through the flowers/ without you & I don’t want to admit that/ sustains me as much as it kills me.”
–Nick Sturm
by Matthew Zapruder
photo: Sarah Malonethese days sometimes
she sleeps
in a purple t-shirt
that says Massachusetts
2.
Hold me how the holster holds the hip.
Carrying so close to my hands
something to protect myself.
In some songs
this body of mine still beats like a drum for yours.
3.
Our skin was shed from the same single grass blade
[….]My skin fell from shoulders in a cascade of tears
I stepped out of it, couldn’t describe what I was made out of underneath
But you were made of the same stuff, the world too
Even the weathervanes and the paper cups
Even god and the devil
Every lake, every dark hairy beast in the woods
Every soul who was raised to be a whisper and told to never grow bigger
Such soft hair we all grew
Goddamn we was beautiful
I am so lazy
All I want to do is look good and write poems
And all I get to do is write poems because my time has not yet come to look good.
Sometimes I stand up and sit down thinking about my poems
Truly they are so excellent that I should be famous
And someday too I should look good enough to stand alongside them
Maybe this will happen someday
But not today However even better than this would be
The destruction of the system that causes
Me to fantasize in such an idiotic way.