Poetry podcast + Karyna McGlynn

[pyreneeees.livejournal.com]

Here is an new episode of our poetry podcast. In this spooky Halloween episode, we talk about Mark Strand's "The Tunnel" and the poem below, by Karyna McGlynn.

Amanda Hopper's House 
by Karyna McGlynn 

It was a farmhouse for killing, 
the kind I saw in the paper above a row of senior portraits: 

girls found in the basement, 
girls with frosted eye-shadow, 

bangs like birds’ nests, 
girls I saw and said to myself: good. they deserve it. 

The words ‘the stupid sluts’ sit on my tongue. 
I swallow, but the stupid sluts stick there like chicken bones. 

Like Amanda’s older sister, Gloria 
splayed across the hood of her boyfriend’s Chevy Nova. 

From the breakfast table 
we watch him open her dry skinny legs and press 

his belt buckle into her denim crotch. 
It’s 9 am and they chew grape gum. 

We follow the unfurling snail silhouettes of their French kisses 
as Mrs. Hopper lights a menthol out on the porch. 

She watches her oldest daughter, sways gently from side to side. 
The floorboards moan beneath her 

as she tells us out the corner of her mouth 
to stop gaping and eat our fucking Lucky Charms.

E. E. Cummings, 'A Wind Has Blown The Rain Away And Blown'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

A Wind Has Blown The Rain Away And Blown

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long

(and what have you to say,
wind wind wind—did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start

the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!)Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration………a wind has blown the rain

away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
the trees stand. The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.

by e. e. cummings