Art. Word. Thought.
Aim behind the ear. Point blank is a mercy.
If this were sacred, we’d let it run freely as it dies.
But we are part-time believers and tie the legs. I fold
your recipe for mint jelly into the crane’s blue paper.
A group of geese is only a gaggle on the ground.
In flight, they become a skein. A lamb is a lamb [Read more…]
by Terrance Hayes
It feels sadder when a black person says Nigga
Because it sounds like Nigger. It feels sadder
When a brother or sister says Nigga because
It sounds like Nigger. I have never heard either
Word in the mouth of my mother or father.
Once I had a lover who said neither word
Out loud. I used neither word for years.
It feels sadder to hear a nigga say Nigga when
It sounds like Nigger. Nothing saddens me more
Than nigger, one whose master has no Lord.
No word leaves me more graced by shame.
You will always be my nigga, I say to the mirror
Because it is a dark water the temperature
Of a blade, the yellow flower stalking a dream. [Read more…]
From Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey: Poems, 1991-1995 (Copper Canyon Press)
“Sex is a political condition.” — Kate Millet
No one disputes that sex
is a condition in the world of the couple:
from there, tenderness and its wild branches.
No one disputes that sex
is a domestic condition:
from there, kids,
nights in common
and days divided
(he, looking for bread in the street,
in offices or factories;
she, in the rear guard of domestic functions,
in the strategy and tactic of the kitchen
that allows survival in a common struggle
at least to the end of the month). [Read more…]
From Charles Bukowski’s just released collection of rare and never-before-seen material — poems from obscure, hard-to-find magazines, as well as from libraries and private collections all over the country — Storm for the Living and the Dead.
♠
if we can’t make literature out of our
agony
what are we going to do with
it?
beg in the streets?
I like my minor comforts
just like any other
son of a
bitch
Everyone’s dark
is coming up
and it isn’t going to be pretty,
as well it shouldn’t be.
Beauty, as a rugged force,
as thorny swaths of dream-thistles,
blooms through night-fasting,
and respiring enclosures of dark.
Beauty
marks the hidden faith
of the smallest hours,
of gongs
and nocturnes tolled. [Read more…]
They should have slept, would have
but had to fight the darkness, had
to build a fire and bathe a man in
flames. No
other soap’s as good when
the dirt is the skin. Black since
birth, burnt by birth. His father
is not in heaven. No parent
from Last Poems
by Anthony Hassett
A new day comes
like something you cannot name.
And perhaps because once again,
you must bend yourself
to the task of living
you begin to hack your way
through the mute glyphs
and weird print of your own thinking.
Searching among the splayed alphabet
of time and space
for the word’s cordite shape. [Read more…]
by Erin Currier How many times have I turned around on as many malecons to find the corners of your eyes? Scattered paper offerings at our feet. Terns circle a midnight in Iquique; and in Beirut: Muslim schoolgirls hand in hand with midday. [Read more...]
A Response To Anthony Hassett’s Last Evenings On Earth
By Rachel Reid Wilkie
Figures of our mind
Bereaved and contorted with guilty awareness,
Witnessed through the keyhole of truth.
Illumined by the soul of a warrior of thought,
Illustrated with the voice of a true sage.
Caught in shameless acts of belligerence and conceit,
An homage to our world of damage and decay. [Read more…]
A heel is not a hammer
But whatever fulfills
The function of a god
Is a God.
I feel, when you sleep beside me,
The touch of your familiar breath
On my mouth.
It is in this place
Where, through some concentration
Of emptiness,
That ghosts are changed into men… [Read more…]
I………..I have seen
the Little Emperor—
mischievous, unabashed, baiting
in borrowed skin
dong tolling through the marketplace
offering his services for a nominal fee.
He leads, without words,
through smile and eyes alone
flesh blood bone advertisement
robed in dust baked brown
in the sun’s unremitting violence
hands nursing thin air
into something mesmeric. [Read more…]
by David Lehman
.....Wandering in the forest I was naked as the dawn that has never before seen herself naked. But no bell tolled and no cock crowed. .....Between the waterfall and the wall stood the incautious girls of my village, which I left when I reached my fifteenth birthday, fed up with the bitches picked up in cafés who would have me own what I preferred to possess by short-term lease. [Read more...]
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Again last night as we slept,
the babies,
were falling from the sky.
So many of them–
eyes wide as darkness,
glowing lifeless palms. [Read more…]
Who are you and what do you want here?
Upon your arrival, birds swooped into the trees,
dogs cowered in the bushes,
and the one cat stepped through her own shadow
on a wall and disappeared.
Because you could only have come from one direction– [Read more…]
Donika Kelly
When he opens her chest, separates the flat skin
of one breast from the other, breaks the hinge of her ribs,
and begins, slowly, to evacuate her organs, she is silent.
He hollows her like a gourd, places her heart
below her lungs, scrapes the ribs clean of fat
and gristle with his thick fingers. He says, Now you are ready, [Read more…]
Anthony Hassett (3 of 3)
And the order among them was very strange, for they worship a cow, and they have idols in the woods. Some be like a monkey, and some like the devil.
Anthony Hassett (2 of 3) Amongst their kind was one thrust through, who fell off from his house and made such a lowing that we Christians thanked Almighty God for his delivery, and fell straight way to our labor with full power upon his body. [Read more...]
Anthony Hassett (1 of 3)
For three months, and in a confusion of names now vanished, our rotting vessels made slow headway through the strange aberrant splendors of the sea. Finally, in a state of madness, we ran our ships on shore, and so embedded them forever in sand.
