from Testimonial by Claudia Rankine

[chibibluebird.livejournal.com]

*

In this bed, a man on his back, his eyes graying blue.
It is hurricane season. Sparrows flying in, out the wind.
His lips receiving. He is shore. The Atlantic rushing.
Clouds opening in the late June storm. This,
as before, in the embrace that takes all my heart.
Imagine his unshaven face, his untrimmed nails, as all

the hurt this world could give.

Scheherazade - Richard Siken

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Scheherazade
Richard Siken

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it's more like a song on a policeman's radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it's noon, that means
we're inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we'll never get used to it.

Dorianne Laux

[birdcages.livejournal.com]

Fast Gas
For Richard

Before the days of self service,
when you never had to pump your own gas,
I was the one who did it for you, the girl
who stepped out at the sound of a bell
with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back
in a straight, unlovely ponytail.
This was before automatic shut-offs
and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank,
I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas
backed up, came arcing out of the hole
in a bright gold wave and soaked me—face, breasts,
belly and legs. And I had to hurry
back to the booth, the small employee bathroom
with the broken lock, to change my uniform,
peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin
and wash myself in the sink.
Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt
pure and amazed—the way the amber gas
glazed my flesh, the searing,
subterranean pain of it, how my skin
shimmered and ached, glowed
like rainbowed oil on the pavement.
I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,
for the first time, in love, that man waiting
patiently in my future like a red leaf
on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty
that asks to be noticed. How was I to know
it would begin this way: every cell of my body
burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me
a nimbus of light that would carry me
through the days, how when he found me,
weeks later, he would find me like that,
an ordinary woman who could rise
in flame, all he would have to do
is come close and touch me.

(no subject)

[claymedeiros.livejournal.com]

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things, counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift ,low; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He father’s-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

from The Rebel by Kazi Nazrul Islam

[chibibluebird.livejournal.com]

I am unstoppable, irresponsible, brutal,
I am Nataraja, I destroy the universe
with my metered dance.
Like a cyclone, I blow fear into the hearts of men,
I crush underfoot rules and traditions,
fully laden boats I sink: a dark menace,
a torpedo, a floating mine.
My hair disheveled, I am the untimely storm,
unpredictable. I am the first raindrop.
Tenderly, I kiss the parched soil.
Rebel incarnate I have come
from the womb of Mother Universe.


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