After Twelve Days of Rain - Dorianne Laux

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

After Twelve Days of Rain

I couldn't name it, the sweet
sadness welling up in me for weeks.
So I cleaned, found myself standing
in a room with a rag in my hand,
the birds calling time-to-go, time-to-go.
And like an old woman near the end
of her life I could hear it, the voice
of a man I never loved who pressed
my breasts to his lips and whispered
"My little doves, my white, white lilies."
I could almost cry when I remember it.

I don't remember when I began
to call everyone "sweetie,"
as if they were my daughters,
my darlings, my little birds.
I have always loved too much,
or not enough. Last night
I read a poem about God and almost
believed it--God sipping coffee,
smoking cherry tobacco. I've arrived
at a time in my life when I could believe
almost anything.

Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went silent--cars on the wet street
sliding past without sound, the attendant's
mouth opening and closing on air
as he walked from pump to pump, his footsteps
erased in the rain--nothing
but the tiny numbers in their square windows
rolling by my shoulder, the unstoppable seconds
gliding by as I stood at the Chevron,
balanced evenly on my two feet, a gas nozzle
gripped in my hand, my hair gathering rain.

And I saw it didn't matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds--nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. And the sounds
came back, the slish of tires
and footsteps, all the delicate cargo
they carried saying thank you
and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car
as if nothing had happened--
as if everything mattered--What else could I do?

I drove to the grocery store
and bought wheat bread and milk,
a candy bar wrapped in gold foil,
smiled at the teenaged cashier
with the pimpled face and the plastic
name plate pinned above her small breast,
and knew her secret, her sweet fear,
Little bird. Little darling. She handed me
my change, my brown bag, a torn receipt,
pushed the cash drawer in with her hip
and smiled back.

~ Dorianne Laux

(no subject)

[iamkatia.livejournal.com]

Daughter
by Nicole Blackman

One day I'll give birth to a tiny baby girl
and when she's born she'll scream and I'll make sure
she never stops.

I will kiss her before I lay her down
and will tell her a story so she knows
how it is and how it must be for her to survive.

I'll tell her about the power of water
the seduction of paper
the promise of gasoline
and the hope of blood.

I'll teach her to shave her eyebrows and
mark her skin.

I'll teach her that her body is
her greatest work of art.

I'll tell her to light things on fire
and keep them burning.

I'll teach her that the fire will not consume her,
that she must take it and use it.

I'll tell her to be tri-sexual, to try anything
to sleep with, fight with, pray with anyone,
just as long as she feels something.

I'll help her do her best work when it rains.
I'll tell her to reinvent herself every 28 days.
I'll teach her to develop all her selves,
the courageous ones,
the smart ones,
the dreaming ones
the fast ones.

I'll teach her that she has an army inside her
that can save her life.

I'll tell her to say Fuck like other people say The
and when people are shocked
to ask them why they so fear a small quartet
of letters.

I'll make sure she always carries a pen
so she can take down the evidence.
If she has no paper, I'll teach her to
write everything down on her tongue
write it on her thighs.

I'll help her to see that she will not find God
or salvation in a dark brick building
built by dead men.

I'll explain to her that it's better to regret the things
she has done than the things she hasn't.

I'll teach her to write her manifestos
on cocktail napkins.
I'll say she should make men lick her enterprise.

I'll teach her to talk hard.
I'll tell her that her skin is the
most beautiful dress she will ever wear.

I'll tell her that people must earn the right
to use her nickname,
that forced intimacy is san ugly thing.

I'll make her understand that she is worth more
with her clothes on.

I'll tell her that when the words finally flow too fast
and she has no use for a pen
that she must quit her job
run out of the house in her bathrobe,
leaving the door open.
I'll teach her to follow the words.

I'll tell her to stand up
and head for the door
after she makes love.
When he asks her to
stay she'll say
she's got to
go.

I'll tell her that when she first bleeds
when she is a woman,
to go up to the roof at midnight,
reach her hands up to the sky and scream.

I'll teach her to be whole, to be holy,
to be so much that she doesn't even
need me anymore.
I'll tell her to go quickly and never come back.
I will make her stronger than me.

I'll say to her never forget what they did to you
and never let them know you remember.

Never forget what they did to you
and never let them know you remember.

The memory is no friend.

[glass-doll.livejournal.com]

The Shadow Voice
--Margaret Atwood --



My shadow said to me:
what is the matter


Isn't the moon warm
enough for you
why do you need
the blanket of another body


Whose kiss is moss


Around the picnic tables
The bright pink hands held sandwiches
crumbled by distance. Flies crawl
over the sweet instant


You know what is in these blankets


The trees outside are bending with
children shooting guns. Leave
them alone. They are playing
games of their own.


I give water, I give clean crusts


Aren't there enough words
flowing in your veins
to keep you going.

The Return

[i-hunger.livejournal.com]

The Return-

Earth does not understand her child,
Who from the loud gregarious town
Returns, depleted and defiled,
To the still woods, to fling him down.

Earth cannot count the sons she bore:
The wounded lynx, the wounded man
Come trailing blood unto her door;
She shelters both as best she can.

But she is early up and out,
To trim the year or strip its bones;
She has no time to stand about
Talking of him in undertones

Who has no aim but to forget
Be left in peace, be lying thus
For days, for years, for centuries yet,
Unshaven and anonymous;

Who, marked for failure, dulled by grief,
Has traded in his wife and friend
For this warm ledge, this alder leaf:
Comfort that does not comprehend.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

(no subject)

[tom-sizemore.livejournal.com]

Hate Poem



I hate you truly. Truly I do.
Everything about me hates everything about you.
The flick of my wrist hates you.
The way I hold my pencil hates you.
The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped
in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.
Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

The blue-green jewel of sock lint I’m digging
from under by third toenail, left foot, hates you.
The history of this keychain hates you.
My sigh in the background as you explain relational databases
hates you.
The goldfish of my genius hates you.
My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors.

A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious
symbol of how I hate you.

My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate.
My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.
My pleasant “good morning”: hate.
You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head
under your arm? Hate.
The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit
practices it.
My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning
to night hate you.
Layers of hate, a parfait.
Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate,
I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one
individually and at leisure.
My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity
of my hate, which can never have enough of you,
Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.



--Julie Sheehan
(from PLEIADES, vol. 24:2
Central Missouri State Press)

Pretty White Dress - Simone Muench

[orneryhipster.livejournal.com]

Hey ladybird lurking,
what's a fuzzy to you

and a fizzy to him?
Calligraphy or filigree

on the shield of a Viking.
He's aloof as a sawtooth.

He can't yodel or sing.
He's a killer Godzilla,

a teapot signaling steam.
A telltale heart, a deadly dart.

It's a Harlequin romance,
a dizzy and a doozy of a dance.

He's a dense lens, a frigate
on a frozen ocean.

You're a whirl of a girl, pearl
and vertigo, marbled star.

He's a conversation in the dark
ardor or a parked car,

smelling of mint and gin
in a seaside citadel

gliding down your pretty
white dress with a pen.

Regenerative, Ken Babstock

[sailingtoalaska.livejournal.com]

Regenerative
That dog padded home wearing a rip
in his back, clicked onto the kitchen linoleum
with a five-inch smile down his saddling spine.

Where pebbles and dark grit stuck to the wound's
lips, vertebrae like molars grinned through
in an anemic bluish white. The dumb grey

meat of his tongue like a sodden flag waiting
for breeze in the post-storm still of that house--
how he lashed the plucked chicken length of it,

then lapped at the seepage that hung from black
flews. He turned, and turned, and in turning sparks
of shock shot from his eyes as his chances of seeing

pain dimmed, coiled to a brute whine in his chest, I
pictured a bald nest of lab mice pulsing in there
crying its cancer away; pictured a shed door, askew

on its hinges, mowing thick weeds as it swung; even
pictured a field in that dog, where choirs of crickets
sawed through the night with the ache in their legs.

I could smell the top-heavy cattails' thinning brown
felt as it burst, breathing commas on parachutes
into the world; heard the travelling s's of garter snakes

playing wet grass blades with cadmium scales as
they passed through invisible shivers. A lost leather
sneaker shone near a stump, like a child's plug-in

night-light, or a chipped-off sample of moon. Blue
shell casings coughed funnelled web from the throats
where their packed shot had been, and bleached-out

pages of porn doubled as mainsails, fitted to masts
of wild rose. Dew, meltwater cold, slid down my calves
like wet wrists unburdening jewels in my boots. Then no one

I knew approached through the dark, swinging a carved
column of light, prodding the bramble and weeds with
his staff that worked like a blind man's stick in reverse.

The mauve starbursts of thistles passed through it, casting
peaked shadows like crowns. Bugs strafed the beam, reared
from the black, threading it again, and again. He didn't

call out or raise his free hand or even target his lamp
on my head, just kept cresting the weeds with the twin
brows of his knees while scanning the foreground

for snags. Whether it was that he couldn't imagine me
there, and therefore I wasn't, or that my body actually
weighed in at nothing, doused as it was in that field's

feral moulting, bucking, breathing--its bull-stubborn
morphing of intrauterine moments--I couldn't decide.
There wasn't time. He passed on the left, dragged by

this light as if some shadowy leashed mastiff tractored
him on, plunging through weed. Solid black silhouette, receding,
until distance undermined outline, form bled into field.
-Ken Babstock