January 2012
47 posts
pica
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.
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The Honest House | Megan Falley
In an effort not to crawl back to you, I crossed the 2 train off my subway map in blue ink, called it a river, sold my canoe. Swept the soot from the chimney into a vase, scattered it all over Manhattan. Husband, I pretended it was your ash. Spoke your name in past tense and still, when we found ourselves in the same bar, phoned a mystic. Told her I was seeing ghosts. When you confessed your...
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Beyond Even This | Maggie Anderson
Who would have thought the afterlife would look so much like Ohio? A small town place, thickly settled among deciduous trees. I lived for what seemed a very short time. Several things did not work out. Casually almost, I became another one of the departed, but I had never imagined the tunnel of hot wind that pulls the newly dead into the dry Midwest and plants us like corn. I am not alone, but I...
"Emma!"
forgetlings:
It was now about eleven. The streets were fairly dark, and people roamed about in all directions, quiet pairs and noisy groups mixed with one another. The great hour had commenced, the pairing time when the mystic traffic is in full swing — and the hour of merry adventures is at hand. Rustling petticoats, one or two still short, sensual laughter, heaving bosoms, passionate, panting...
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Directions for Lines that will Remain Unfinished |...
Line to be sewn into a skirt hem held in my mouth ever since the unraveling Line beneath a bridge for years without hope I stretched my arms into the river searching for you Line to be sent to the cornfield history is a hallway of leaves. Line written for electric wires your voice inside the no history, sitting still Line for future people inside the work, only my empty teeth Line from...
“Most of the trouble in the world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their...”
– William S. Burroughs (via levantine-chant)
Joan Didion's Packing List
literarypiano:
To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts 2 jerseys or leotards 1 pullover sweater 2 pair shoes stockings bra nightgown, robe slippers cigarettes bourbon bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil
To Carry:
mohair throw typewriter 2 legal pads and pens files house key
This is a list which...
Learning Curve, Elizabeth Cantwell
kathleenjoy:
The Atlantic Ocean had been burning
for four days We were told to stay inside
but we’d forgotten which houses
belonged to us Now we lie on the beach
watching the local theater company’s
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In the audience one lumbering
ash man walks up to an ash
woman and leans over He looks
surprised at all the ash Like a man...
Untitled, Bruce Smith
kathleenjoy:
I closed the book and changed my life and changed my life and changed my life and one more change and I was back here looking up at a blue sky with russets and the World was hypnotic but it wasn’t great. I wanted more range, maybe, more bliss, I didn’t know about bliss. Is bliss just a rant about the size of the bowl? The trance was the true thing, no, the rant, no, the sky, now,...
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“In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and...”
– David Foster Wallace
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“One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am – a...”
– Edward Abbey
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New Dress | Anya Silver
Hello, lovely disguise. Come swing short and loose around my thighs. Cowl my neckline, let my throat
rise out of your yellow folds like a virgin. Cup my shoulders; cling to my breasts so closely
that my skin accepts you, sister, knit and pieced by strangers’ hands, but closer to my body
than my own husband. You absorb in your stitching my wrist’s vanilla and anise, the sweat...
“If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there...”
– William Styron (via theparisreview)
Second letter to Federico García Lorca →
ekstasis:
Dear Lorca,
When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the…
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In Kansas | John Burnside
In Kansas
The moon coming back, your breath returning, love replenishing itself. Allison Funk I Datura It’s warm enough to sit out on the porch till late: the windows all along this street burning out one by one till only the moon and the saw-toothed pumpkins set out in the yards are visible as if the town had finally succumbed to magic...
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Angels and Moths | Olena Kalytiak Davis
If a man once loved you, he’s turned you into a moth.
That’s how he’ll remember the flutter: that numinous, that beating, that winged.
Angels and moths: that’s who men love.
But I don’t recollect like that. I don’t think I ever loved that gently. And I’ve never flown toward a burning house, hoping, maybe my faith lay in that single thing left, in that smoldering filigree. I never reminisce a...
Sadiq by Brian Turner
kathleenjoy:
“It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.” - Sa’di It should make you shake and sweat, nightmare you, strand you in a desert of irrevocable desolation, the consequences seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline feeds the muscle its courage, no matter what god shines down on you, no matter what...
Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 40, Vladimir...
INTERVIEWER: Clarence Brown of Princeton has pointed out striking similarities in your work. He refers to you as “extremely repetitious” and that in wildly different ways you are in essence saying the same thing. He speaks of fate being the “muse of Nabokov.” Are you consciously aware of “repeating yourself,” or to put it another way, that you strive for a conscious unity to your shelf of books?
NABOKOV: I do not think I have seen Clarence Brown's essay, but he may have something there. Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only its own self to copy.
talesfromthecrypt:
foralskelse:
Gypsy by...
Anonymous asked: Whatssup babe? Google Joaquin Sorolla & at the website with 'y bastida' or something like that, & his complete works in the title see what you find, I'm sure you'll find it yummy then when next you're in Spain see the actual paintings in galleries over there he's huge, & also try to get his now expensive monograph on Amazon, which is almost $500. I got it...
“We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a...”
– Stephen Fry (via colporteur)
“you asked over waffles how far the farthest was I ever gone for pussy. well once...”
– “honest answers,” Slade Gibbs (via clavicola)
“Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted...”
– David Foster Wallace (via tthornbirdd)
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Flood | Eliza Griswold
I woke to a voice within the room. perhaps. The room itself: “You’re wasting this life expecting disappointment.” I packed my bag in the night and peered in its leather belly to count the essentials. Nothing is essential. To the east, the flood has begun. Men call to each other on the water for the comfort of voices. Love surprises us. It ends.
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Marriage | Sara Michas-Martin
One side at a time scientists paralyze the brain, then ask the other side questions. You told me last night conflict was contagious. Eating eggs raw I feel poisoned a little, and on the highway that stain is not from a deer. I was half asleep so I missed what you said. Your hands on my buttons. Me twisting your wheels. How often does paint fly out of a truck? Bump the cortex you’ll...
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Work | Matthew Zapruder
This morning I rode my gray metal bike through the city throwing its trucks at me, sometimes along the narrow designated lanes with white painted symbolic bicyclists so close to the cars too close to my shoulders, and sometimes down alleys where people on piles of clothes lie sleeping or smoking or talking in the shade. Cars parked there have signs in their windows that the doors are unlocked and...
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Ode to Forgetting the Year | Barbara Hamby
Forget the year, the parties where you drank too much,
said what you thought without thinking, danced so hard
you dislocated your hip, fainted in the kitchen,
while Gumbo, your hosts’ Jack Russell terrier,
looked you straight in the eye, bloomed into a boddhisattva,
lectured you on the six perfections while...
“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through...”
– Ellen Goodman (via wetbehindthears)
(via starrchild)
I’m not one for resolutions, & pardon me for getting all Fight Club-meets-Office-Space over here (egh), but for real: My sole New Year’s resolution is finding a way to make a living outside of the cubicle, before I lose my sanity...
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City of Lavender | Jason Bredle
I had everything I ever wanted to say to you organized in my head but forgot it all when you took my palm in your hand and with your index finger wrote “disaster.” If you were to ask me how I ended up here, I don’t even know. Every night at 8:25 I can’t believe it’s already 8:25 and I’m so happy it’s only 8:25. Sometimes I find tragedy reassuring. Sometimes the cat licks my neck. I don’t ...
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Valentine | Laurie Lamon
In Manhattan, after wit and spar, after
the dog stops being a joke, for a moment
everyone shuts up and it’s the bridge
that holds us suspended. For a moment,
nothing is funny or aslant. If there is rain
falling on the woman’s hair, the man’s
coat, it isn’t narrative or metaphor.
Everyone is tired and thinking of a last
drink and bed. It is the dog who is certain
of...
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“When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a...”
– Dorothea Lasky, from Poetry Is Not a Project
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December 2011
68 posts
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Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando | Benis White
Don’t go, of course, is the definitive feeling. Like a star on a tree of gasps, we remember what is highest. What is furthest from our hands. Past the row of windows, a rope draws her up by her teeth, toward the curved orange ceiling with her head back. Her gift is to stay attached (if she speaks she will fall), to cleave in her mouth what is pulling away.
“Poetry is my understanding with the world, my intimacy with things, my...”
– Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (via awritersruminations)
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“I got into the Stegner program by submitting a story that was basically true...”
– Stephen Elliott, dropping truth bombs in The Daily Rumpus on the regular.