December 2011
1 post
Fuck, I miss you.
The haunts are vacuous.
Your words are ghostly gray.
Some hackers deleted the emails I vowed
I’d always save. One evening, cold and gray,
the heater hardly churning, I searched for them
under the glow of a college desk lamp.
No results.
Dusting out the Cobwebs...
Glimpsing Nietsche through Rilke
was like glimpsing naked bodies writhing
between the zigzag gray of late night TV.
My eyes have always pondered
a moment longer than is casual.
Tonight Taylor and I are walking, buzzed,
under a bridge in Tucson, Arizona.
He nudges a guy in corduroy, and buys two cigarettes
a dollar apiece. He knows I don’t smoke.
We pass it between us. The bars are...
June 2010
1 post
(BP, Fuck You, and Us)
They lived in other bodies
tainted by flows: simple casings.
We found them ebbing along the shore,
chiseling the rocks. They said nothing
when we touched them.
And they chiseled in their soft way.
Foam popped slowly around them, too slowly,
though it was beautiful and dark.
The shore lithographed as the sun began to set:
the paint hardened over, crackless in its thick.
One by one the...
May 2010
1 post
Draft of that Dream I had about Describing Oranges
They hang like breasts, two oranges,
thick-skinned, trench-skinned, bulbous
at the tips. A rigid cable joins them:
hold it up to the light, copper wires
beneath the green stretched tight.
How they blossom into leaves!
The cable stamps a star onto the orange
and aspirates color into the flesh:
at the opposite pole, the nub,
hard, sure, and full, but disconnected,
protruding; nipples that...
April 2010
1 post
“Woltostu nit sogen me, so tete dir dú milch vil we, wan werlich ich han gesehen...”
– Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit (1250-65), Book 1, XXII
March 2010
3 posts
Some edits, some adds
On the edge of the sticky mohogany
my legs cross underneath, canvas-tipped toes
against the lower rungs of the bar stool.
My pencil skirt is tighter than I wish it,
drawing my attention to the plump filling out
the round of the padded cushion.
Can I get a Tecate?
Tap a silver debit card like dividing up a drug,
Not thinking. The bartender returns,
drink already condensating.
I turn to...
On the edge of the sticky mohogany
my legs cross underneath, canvas-tipped toes
against the lower rungs of the bar stool.
My pencil skirt is tighter than I wish it,
drawing my attention to the plump filling out
the round of the padded cushion.
Can I get a Tecate?
Tapping a silver debit card like dividing up a drug,
Not thinking. The bartender returns,
drink already condensating
I turn to...
“There is a building stands in a ruinous storm,
A dream interrupted out of the...”
– Final stanza, “Sketch of the Ultimate Politician” by Wallace Stevens
January 2010
2 posts
There are days
when a cold wind
blows through the ribs,
on the wind is the past
regrets, failures, missed connections.
The world becomes cold
like a stone at night,
the soul’s feather turns
weakly in the breeze.
For a generation with a short attention span and multiple tabs open on its browser, don’t you think, as far as literature goes, that poetry is the way to go?
December 2009
4 posts
Extracts as Exercise
I feel retro today.
Spend a moment contemplating the irony
of choking on a vitamin.
I picked up my paycheck
and deposited it.
I find myself missing you often.
The answer: 3 times, plus 1, for the query.
Horrible soap opera on the T.V.
Waking up is sobering.
P.S. I’m at the coffee shop in Venice.
I’ve given myself a lot of time to waste.
How does one actually go about writing...
“I’m sick of these motherfuckers. I could be crackin’ these bitches.”
– Overheard coming off the escalator at the mall, Culver City
WANKER
What a great word.
Facebook updates as they appear on the Live Feed
[…] has a space heater!
Burrito!
crim cram
November 2009
2 posts
Lived by hunting, certainly. Senseless eyes
act on senseless desire. Breast
beyond breast, will beyond desire.
Hide them all in the envelope of night,
like stars unknown, and we may be laughed
into forgiveness. Sins like sleep
and slaughterhouse, unacquainted when we met
but certainly foreseeable companions.
Our lives are messy but there’s order
in the trees. Sacred, leafless trees....
October 2009
6 posts
On the Bus
Americans have an invisible social buffer,
a P.E. teacher of mine once called it our “safety circle.”
Americans do not like to have their safety circles
invaded. A purse brushed against our backs, an elbow
pressed to the soft of our upper arms: these things make us twinge,
suck in our breath and count to ten.
On the bus at noon, this circle dissipates
into a hashed circumference, then a...
Portrait of a Windowsill
Insect decay, beer bottle half hidden in the verticals. The rotation of a lanky 7-foot blind lets shimmer on a spider’s web. Beyond, the orange-pink refraction of a streetlamp in a calculated smudge.
Beautiful Words (German, English, Polish)
Blumenmuskel
Blütenstern
köstlich
Unbetretbarkeit
Lider
Blätter
nondescript
gloam
nonsensical
kaczka
szyja
“My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is...”
– Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, N7a, 8
“You cannot cheat Nature! Whoever thinks he can improve bread and pastry made...”
– Alfred Döblin, excerpt Berlin Alexanderplatz (1928)
There is someone in Los Angeles who loves you
in the many states you’re in along the freeways 2 a.m.,
tinseled ribbons glittering white and red under the phosphorescent dark;
even buzzed and hopeless before the flat glow of a TV,
as you assemble defective furniture, grin and nod at the story
under your fingertips flying, as you sink back into the pillows
and grind your teeth to sleep....
August 2009
3 posts
Note from the Band to their Lead Guitarist
It has become clear: your head
was locked plushly in the toothless jaws
of a rabbit twice your size.
The rest of us were looking askance,
only vaguely aware, but distracted still
by the lights, variably hued, and voices
saying, Look here, look there,
at this and that silhouette.
Even the rabbit, with its large,
glazed-over eyes, looked up and away,
enraptured by the crossbeams
and...
Douche
“Douche” is the most satisfying of the insults I know because it mostly closely mimics the sound of a flawless basketball “swoosh.” It is perfect, it reaffirms your sense of victory, it achieves your aim of insult. Douche.
Los Angeles (a draft, like everything on here, I...
Headache: Everyone talked about the pounding of the waves and the pulse of the city, how it was alive, breathing steadily at 2 a.m. and rushing like a sugared-up schoolchild after hours. I lie on my back in bed and stare at the ceiling, wishing for the spin of a dark-wood fan. A breeze floats over my head, about half a foot to high to really feel it. My bangs rustle. Down the street a fire truck...
July 2009
1 post
CHUNK (needs work) ALIBI
It was tragic the way her beauty jumbled
round her teeth as she spoke, how it fled from her eyes
and nestled among the tufts of hair, blond, straightened,
low-lighted. Her white tank, a sheet draped over breasts
and cinched at the waist, enchanted the table
and perplexed this A-cup. But it was her mouth we watched,
clumsily trying to shape slurred thoughts into an answer.
Minutes passed,...
June 2009
2 posts
chump chump chump chump chump
Lines about how I'm going to have to wear shorts...
Sweatpants draped over the radiator remind her
Warmth we wait for comes surprising, comes crisp.
She re-slips the pants over the radiator rung. Still damp and thick.
May 2009
4 posts
2 tags
Dream, broken into lines
We held hands in a Safeway, shopping aimlessly
hungry for nothing in particular save a Cup-o-Noodles
but too much sodium. I thought I might want cookies
and we wandered over to the milk to get a gallon.
A school group walked in, flanked by teachers in ill-fitting
skirt suits. We were in pajamas. You tussled your hair.
It wasn’t the time we thought it was.
The children whisked me to the side...
I’m sitting here eating chips
and according to the calendar it’s still
10 days till my next period so it’s not
that, the reason I’m eating chips,
ate carrot cake, drank that load of wine.
The sun was out today, so I can’t
be lonely. Though
it’s night now. The air’s heavy with sweat
and the teardrops of unsold beer cans.
I walked to the store in flip flops
and my toes tasted fresh air,...
On his way to somewhere
better, God pulled over and took a piss
on Koszalin
Written on the train to Warsaw
It was a pleasure to watch him talk: Occupé, Occupé, the way the pixels darted, how they caved
in around the “O.” His face was kinetic,
a pixel field in spring.
He read cue cards, though poised
too high. We could never meet.
It went on like this for years, the news coming in
in waves that watered my scalp. But it was lonely this way.
The pleasure grew thin, and his face grew flatter,
as...
April 2009
3 posts
Lines scribbled during class on Tuesday
Baby in the bright blue sunglasses
Smacks lips like chapstick
ran thick. Birds overhead
strung happy on telephone wire.
Paper wings, feather fingers.
Sunbath without a towel. Smile, baby,
smile lollipop teeth, coconut-color.
He crossed the ocean, the lands in between.
So warm, the window’s open,
all wrapped together in a twin bed.
It’s just after midnight in Berlin.
Their breath recedes into placid waves,
color of the pre-dawn Baltic.
He stirs and cradles her into his hull,
warm wood, live wood,
cotton boxers round the hips.
Able finally to say good-night
and fall sleep, both.
Ending particularly needs help
The servicemen in their parking
lot blues emerge like snails from vine-covered yards.
They linger on the bricks, running fingers
along electrical boxes. A dirt-clodded gray-hair approves
of a gate handle painted green; he nods his head with infinite tire;
his eyes, two mollusks on a wave, float over to me.
Mine is the first skin they’ve seen in months.
Overhead, unaware of legs, of the...
March 2009
3 posts
Listening to This Will Destroy You
Your DeLorean bloom sleeps with its eyes
open on the lawn, lured into the contented sighs
of post-coital chords, crooning
its quadrangular arms around the eucalyptus tree.
And where are you? Feeling up the girl beside you,
scanty pants with the pockets ripped along the butt cheeks.
You bought the record to be cool, and it worked.
Pulse of guitars, subtle keyboard, promises
and climax....
(oldish)
She bakes chocolate chip cookies
in a communist oven, the dial broken,
the temperature unsure, but they come out
fine, the sugar crystals bending
the kitchen light like prisms
She bakes only in the evening.
So her kitchen light beckons
to the passersby with their Żabka bags
and poorly rolled cigarettes, embered ends
twinkling in brief dialogue with her window.
Cookies on a plate,...
Unhappily hard nipples under
cold wind fingers freeze
and become hail drops.
February 2009
6 posts
a warmup (brrr)
when i arrived on planet health
in this state of being well
i heard the fur coats being dragged
over the hills by God
a low rate of snapping tree limbs and static elec.
you’ll find your friends in the forest of loss
where they have just said no to drugs
draft fragments (clippings?) about nails
The shovelled snow of cuticle
so you can feel the smooth nail
then the dry knuckle.
Every morning, waiting for your toast,
you shovel clear the nail
of your white cuticle, leaving it
piled beneath your crescents at
the edge of the ridges you stroke
with the back of your thumb at breakfast,
half-eaten toast hanging like
a windless flag from your mouth.
You ponder at buttered toast and...
When people look at your hands they see
unconscious you: forced-down
cuticle, white and nervous;
dry knuckle, cracked yet soothing;
freckle, tuft of down; trace
of yesterday’s appointment in black ink.
Long bangs, bare toes
burps from the belly up
calzone ham
The sky bulges gray around the hips of the treetops,
pregnant with snowmen kicking softly.
My knuckles sense their birth, bend white
and scale red. I knit on the porch
in search of raspberry-colored gloves.
The yarn races from my fingers and
into the street, anxious to knit itself
around the dry cobblestones.
I pull the yarn tight; the street is tense,
a trampoline in waiting.
Late...
(5-Hour Layover at JFK)
Outside the rain-stained panels of waning sunlight:
the growth of the stars, the timely erection
of airplanes. The passenger’s secondhand slumps,
laconic and bored in its circuit. She adds up the pieces,
the legs, and finds 30 hours:
Theater chairs in makeshift buildings,
narrow chairs in upright positions, stale air, cold air;
Books, all the wrong books; hours wishing for cucumber...
January 2009
6 posts
Response to Reading the First Chapter of a...
Baby blue-eyed clairvoyant
heart coughing up the mucus of sentimentality
Her savior hands against the glass,
pressed against the grubby hands of a foreign
child crying: Death! Infection! Radiation!
Still other voices cry from the television screen,
a buzz in her apocalyptic ear: Death to tropes,
to the movies we’ve seen before!
She bounces her fist against her breast.
It beats: I...
I preferred our private love
shut behind bathroom doors in
the porcelain of the tub
eyes pressed hard against the water
Now in the ocean, water down
from the cold of Alaska. Goosebumps,
seaweed’s slime around our ankles
The dogs are skipping along the beach,
barking us back to shore
Dream
Do you know how much
I
love you?
Ten-twenty. A crisp ten-
dollar bill and two
dimes.
ADMITTED NYC DEC 23 2008
Welcome home to cheeseburgers, asshole security
UR bag does NOT need a bin JUS
LAY it on the belt. Okay.
I take off my boots, unbelt my coat
unbelt my waist, put my laptop
in a separate bin. NOW. Let’s see, we have
two cheeseburgers, says the mom to the girl
at my back, One cheeseburger for now
and one for later. I’m craving a cucumber-
Edamer cheese sandwich. I have a water bottle,...
you in-
sulted the elevator boy and
here we are again
stuck somewhere between
floors 18 and 30
crawling along the inside of walls
and it’s all
acres of lust
yards of we should have never come
After a Four-Month Absence
A breeze elbows through the crowd of
just-arrivals shuffling into SUVs
and great-aunt kisses.
Rag-doll tired on a bench, my fingers fondle
the strange currency in my wool coat
pocket. They slip against Washington’s worn face, sweaty.
December 23. My top buttons unbuttoned, for breathing.
A shuttle bus picks up the wind and
a few suited men, all determined with their leather laptop cases....