Jess Rizkallah wrote this after rereading Ocean Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Copy Of 9.9 Notebook Fragments Jess Rizkallah you know, i’m scared of everything but you can’t tell b/c i never!!! joke about it on the internet new rule: if you don’t write a luv poem abt it then it doesn’t exist & it’s probably just gas i am always searching for the moon. maybe instead of blood, i am full of moths. أنت القمر في حياتي TO DO:
summer solstice - when the sun yawns for a long time but its breath smells good summer solstice - when fireflies hatch from the empty wombs of bullet cases everything is softer unfolding from the tree trunk dusk of the throat / i wonder how many times arabic has had to let a lover down easy look at all the rooms i am look at all the windows opening and closing wind and wind and wind last night i had tears in my eyes about my jido afif but for the first time in months they were because of laughter jido wrote ghazals & still lives in the meter of them somewhere on the wind & wind & wind & i don’t agree that non brown folks approaching ghazals is an appropriation. i’m told by other brown folks that this is what i should believe, but i don’t. i want everyone to be so honest about their love. about their longing, to face it where it lives in the space between loss & the sun sometimes this is the only place love can live. i don’t know if this makes me complicit with the colonizers i don’t know if i care this is my privilege one day i will write a ghazal when it stops feeling like a windtunnel my love can’t write itself out of. الزهور تتفتح على لسانك * out of the corner of my eye, my arm keeps tricking me into thinking it’s on fire. i think it’s because of my new eyeliner but lately i always feel like my eyes were just crying even when i haven’t been crying the last few people i cried about will never know it. will never suspect. this makes me feel sneaky this makes me feel clever. this makes me feel sad. this makes me feel better than the alternative would. the alternative: my heart is two paper cranes i go to hand you one of them you smile but do not extend your hand the alternative: you do not water my plants when i am gone the alternative: all the windows closed the alternative: وفاة اسمي في فمك - - - - new rule: there should only be one month of summer & winter the rest should be fall & spring. i could never live on the west coast or any coast that keeps reminding my body that it’s a body & not an oak tree birch tree cedar dear massachusetts dept. of revenue: why is ur office in new york
please do not arrest me over 47 dollars. your money is on its way abdelhalim taught me that “tobah” means never again never again will i love you (that’s not guaranteed) never again will i call your name into the night (i never did that) instead i sing like grackles do under the high notes of bulbuls i ride the coattails of their stories at dusk when the fireflies distract from my ankles & no one watches that closely anyway is there anything scarier than that to finally stop to take a breath to find yourself alone a room with no wind forgive me for navel-gazing i just / want you / to know / that i love you so i keep singing. so i just keep singing.
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I struggled not to make my interaction "Someday, I Will Learn To Love Adam Stone" because I feel that is most of my poems these days. Instead, I took a different concept from Ocean Vuong's Night Sky With Exit Wounds. He has a poem called "Notebook Fragments" which contains a series of stanzas that might be from different poems he was working on an collaged together. This poem contains stanzas from interactions with Ocean's book, as well as other drafts of interactions that I ended up not using. The title is not related to Ocean's book, but from a story about adjective order in English writing and, specifically, JRR Tolkien's work, that keeps popping up in my Facebook feed this week. The Green Great Dragon
Adam Stone No more writing about speaking or silence Nothing that has disappeared was stolen Yes -- skin is an organ Yes -- an organ is also an instrument Yes nerves Yes chords Yes -- tickling is not just for keys Yes -- laughter is music Sure if the events we forget of order in they happened No which absolved we will not be The frequency beneath breath is common in the language where i was raised It's not about what you owe but how often you owe still Yes -- there is accidental consent No -- it does not lead to forgiveness an omission of yes )here is a list of all the dead celebrities you were sure would outlive you( Stop always writing about what you want to forget Burying your loss too close to the surface attracts predators Starting off September with one of my favorite poets from when I was in middle school. Rereading No Thanks by EE Cummings. A lot of the typography-based poems feel really dated and unnecessarily convoluted. But there are also a few of my favorite poems by dead white guys in this collection. (And this book is entirely responsible for my use of parentheses the way Nikki Giovanni's Those Who Ride The Night Winds is responsible for my use of justified text in poems.) I (Do Not) Hate ((The Moon) The Way You Hate
Adam Stone I (do not) hate ((the moon) the way you hate spiders)(though both crawl across) our horizon too often )That's not quite correct (No)( Wait (I do) // When you set your (stupid) eyes on a target )love?( )need?( )wallet?( )shelter( me ) you quantify the precise velocity you can reach before it (or she) (or he) (this time actually me) will decide to flee (or rather watch you flung) \\ I do not hate I study indifferent now thanks to your fingers (spidering spidering) I wait until I can feel (pull of the moon) no more anything for anything like your name I do not call it hate Though it feels the same I met Justin Chin's poetry the first time I went into an adult bookstore by myself. I figured loitering around the poetry section for a bit would make my barely legal ass look less conspicuous before I started flipping through the Bel-Ami DVDs. I bought neither his book, Bite Hard nor An American In Prague because the guy behind the counter looked too much like one of my old bosses. A few years later, I was more confident in buying both poetry and pornography and went back to the store. I didn't find anything there that I was actually looking for, but I did see Justin Chin's new collection, Mostly Harmless and bought it from the same boss-looking beardo that worked in that store until it closed down. I debated doing an exercise based on his Surrealist Bookmark, but after the third reread of "Mistranslations", I knew what I had to do. Mistranslations In The Grindr To English Phrasebook
Adam Stone How's it going? I am so horny right now. Can we meet at your place and fuck? Fine. Fuck off. Good. Fuck off old man. Good. How are you? I am so bored right now. Hi. Summer is a ferry. I am on the dock with a ticket now voided by season. I think I could swim to the ferry. It's not that far. But when I was young I dreamed of an ocean that riptided me from my home. I'm terrified of autumn. How it looms a new education. Strangers scheduled into tribes by ancient academics. I think I can swim my way into eternal summer or at least swim far enough to catch that ferry south. Join me? Sup? I'm married. And my picture is from 1993. Woof. Bounty lumberjack seeks LL Bean model for outdoor encounter while wife is at work. Twenty-seven year old twink here. I keep salting my garden hoping nothing will grow. I don't hunger for what I'm given. I would rather look like a promise than keep one. You look like you're afraid of yourself. I keep my body barren because I know how badly you want to be responsible for a kid that you can guiltlessly abandon. Don't I look guiltless? I'm thirty-nine. Everyone tells me I look so young for my age. LOL Our conversations will be games of Hide-And-Seek where I will find everything funny, and hide my confusion in your mouth. Want to meet at the gym? I am masculine. So masculine. Look at my abs. If you covered the floor with dough and fucked me flat on it, I could make pizza. I mean I'm so hot, it would cook under me. And, also, if you spin me around while you fuck me, my hard nipples will slice it into a geometric masterpiece, which is, coincidentally, how everyone refers to my ass. Can you host? 1.) I live with strangers and you are a stranger and I keep most of my friends and all of my family strangers to me and each other. I didn't give a quote in my yearbook. I don't go drinking with my coworkers. I go drinking a lot. I am alone in a crowd. You could be a crowd. You could crowd me. What's your address? Where do you work? Tell me something about yourself that will make me forget myself. -or- 2.) I squeal like a dolphin repeatedly dipping its tail in a tub of progressively hotter water. My roommates have asked me not to fuck while they're home. Are you masc? Bro, though. For real. I don't want anyone to see me. I don't want anyone to see me as not normal. Are you beer foam goatee? Do you football? When you use the word fantasy you're talking about a sports league and not sex, right? A sex league would be cool, though. I would only draft defensive players. I'm not going to make innuendo, bro. I'm better than that. Are you better than that? Dick pic? I need something to post on Tumblr and think about while I have disappointing sex with a woman who is figuring out how the kindest way to phrase I'm leaving you. What are you into? You look like tap water in a plastic cup. I have more hangups than a telemarketer. Confess something blueberry waffle so I don't feel as peanut butter and bear trap sandwich when I tell you what it takes to get me hard. When I began ordering new books for this project, Jim Daniels's Punching Out was one of the first to arrive. I decided to flip it open and read a poem or two. In about an hour, I had finished it and ordered two more of his books. I love a good work poem, and Punching Out is an entire book of good work poems. In honor of that, I decided to write one of my own work poems, but I've already mined so much of my work in retail, and I've recently written a poem or two about my days delivering newspapers, and working with kids. But I'd completely neglected the first job I took when I moved back to Cape Cod after a single semester of college. So, here's that poem. Sweeping Out
Adam Stone My mother knows all the wrong people to help me find work Before her real estate agent promotes me to manager of touristcentric alcohol distribution she sends me to her coworker's husband's penthouse office above a bagel shop She knows i hate telemarketers Praise the age of caller id and answering machines I just don't enjoy talking to depressed avatars of products nobody believes in So she refers to it as a call center My job is justified thusly Tourists visit a resort sign up for a free weekend giving out their names and phone numbers to a prick The prick gives the numbers to us We call everyone who enters Everybody wins A free weekend of listening to people trying to sell you timeshare four hours a day Jennifer is my trainer Forty-broken but with permanent smile Excited that i am eighteen and speak like an authorative uncle I get five confirmed appointments before our dinner break That's extraordinary she tells me and maybe everybody I don't know We eat dinner in the main office Finally the real boss My mother's coworker's spouse royal wes himself over to his desk to give us an inspirational speech I don't remember his five points of success or his tips on how to be promoted quickly or even what would be considered a promotion I only remember how he swept his arms across his desk knocking over every piece of paper before turning to jennifer and telling her to pick it up I remember how she smiled as she picked up his deliberate mess I remember the other middle aged men and women gasping How their bodies splashed back to the walls or the knees behind them I remember laughing Not at jennifer but at this sad paunch of my mother's coworkers eventually-to-be-exed spouse I said goodbye to jennifer and someone whose name i will never remember and swept my arms across my own cubicle Knocking all of my papers in the trash And I took the trashbag with me as i drove away forever Yusef Komunyakaa's I Apologize For The Eyes In My Head is one of my favorite collections. I selected it for this project and told one of the other writers I would let them borrow it. Unfortunately, I had previously let another writer borrow it and I don't remember whom. As it's $35 or more for it online, and well out of bookstores, I've subbed in the selection of "I Apologize For The Eyes In My Head" from his collection Neon Vernacular, which is also excellent. After reading through the whole thing ad coming up with a few ideas, I decided to go back to the first one that struck me. The opening poem examines being introduced as a man. As I've recently written a couple of poems focused on my gender, I decided to take the idea somewhere slightly different. Speak Easy
Adam Stone Introduce me first as a mouth a taker of air and a geyser of noise My hands enter next though they are really just ambassadors of mouth working also for brain which should be in charge I should be known first as brain but listen to how mouth leads before brain counts the ballots I am known less for my speech bubbles and more for my bubbles of speech an oversudsed washing machine in a trite sitcom laughtracked and unfunny No other part of my body can be seen outside the shadow of my mouth I have a cast iron masseter I have a closed end tongue I could write an entire manuscript's worth of responses to Patricia Lockwood's Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals. Every poem inspired an idea. I decided to write one based on the first line of the final poem in the book: "I was a born as a woman, I talk you to death" and see where it took me. I plan on coming back to this book later. Gutting The Closet Of the Gay Nineties
Adam Stone I was born the promise of impending man poised to open jars and women with equal vigor I was raised with the impending winking compliment of my gender the tall enough to roller coaster by six to mow the crabgrass of adolescence from my face by twelve to tell a grown woman she was wrong by eleven I was wide as reason by thirteen fast tracked to the buffet of yacht club dances in the age of polo shirt villainy You should see how I danced around curfews and teacher-certified potential I was graceless as a man committed as a woman Grew into my cock with the awkward immediacy of a royal orphan I lived as flannel untucked and filthy the way I saw other boys with scratchboard voices flopping their unwashed bangs on TV How fortunate I bloomed too late for Aquanet overgrowth pink mountain lion print leggings How flannel to think fortunate to letharge between the raindrops of Boy George and Marilyn Manson rather than boldface falsetto my mocksculinity I was the appropriate hats for sports and camoflauge backhand at the tennis net coaching varsity women's volleyball in the winters when the swim team was too speedo I summer lifeguarded in the leg-crossing of attraction I ran sportscamp and drama I looked like I should beat myself up and I did constantly Andrew Campana's interaction with Patricia Lockwood's excellent collection, Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals. Patricia Lockwood Interaction
Andrew Campana “He marries her mites and the wires in her wings, he marries her yellow glass eyes and black centers, he marries her near-total head turn, he marries the curve of each of her claws, he marries the information plaque, he marries the extinction of this kind of owl…” —from “He Marries the Stuffed-Owl Exhibit at the Indiana Welcome Center,” by Patricia Lockwood I married the three jars of sauerkraut in the closet, I married the bacteria fermenting them, I married their lids rusting shut, I married the CO2 straining against metal, I married the vacuum-packed lentils, I married the Amazon box they came in, I married the apartment wall torn down to join two hollows together and the rubber flooring tensile across the gap membraned under chairs and table, I married the exhaust fan veiled so night can’t crawl in, I married its silence, I married the paper doors stuck still, I married their unpageness, I married the straw matting and the fear of it moulding, I married their grass scent in damp air, I married their ribs and grooves and the mites that don’t live in them, the felt cookie cat pin, the Totoro puzzle put back in the box, the fitted sheet, the lack of need for a fitted sheet, the tremors, the it’s okay, the flashlight by the balcony, the sink catcher and what’s been caught in it, the key to the Massachusetts storage locker, I married the storage locker, I married the boxes, I married the violin pausing on top of them Leigh Stein has written one of my favorite books of poetry, Dispatch From The Future. I've read a bunch of poems from the first few sections of the books at open mics, and done some interactions with the book as a whole but never really talked about the final section which is where the book's title come from. The final section is a series of time traveling poems, several of which are called "Dispatch From The Future". I decided to write my own message from the future, and thought the image of trapped pronouns in the throat was amusing, and then...well, this happened. Contrition From The Future
Adam Stone Adam can feel adam's neck expanding Adam's throat will soon be wider than adam's head It's all trapped pronouns and archaic adectives society has finally started skimming from dense soup of language Adam's sibling calls adam vilpend A word no adam knew even before every adam's tongue wilted and every adam learned how to click every adam's cheeks and grind every adam's teeth in grotesque charades of being understood What did adam do to adam's sibling? It's not all terrible Adams have a progeny that adams didn't call easter though adams' progeny was born on a tuesday night Easter styles easter's hair obelisk (a term that offends neither last surviving indigenous american nor shiver of sharks that patrol the coastline of nevada) and dances better than peacock spiders Adam doesn't know if adam will remember what happened with plasma flavored birds who nested in chest of warbling ancestor Has it happened to adam yet? Now is birdless and spiderless and adam forgets to grind incisors for joy sometimes but sometimes adam remembers adam's joy leaving adam at altar of adamant Adam regrets shedding of ecstasy Adam's casual dismissal of indulgence and adam wants to tumult down abyss of chronology and tell adam joy never leaves adam It is always adam who leaves joy Stay with joy adam even when joy is not paying attention Stay with joy even when joy insults adam's body Stay with joy as joy neglects adam's lust and does sudoku naked and flaccid Joy will live with adam as long as adam will tolerate joy Adam Now adam's neurons are so beehive humming with hollow of joy Now adam wants former adam to not hum to not wither tongue Former adam leave no proper noun for sake of false honor Please kill now adam for joy Let now's future never so no adam ever shall have to read contritions from now Kelly Cooper's second interaction is with Leigh Stein's Dispatch From The Future examines identity and trauma. Interaction with Leigh Stein's Dispatch From The Future
Kelly Cooper I am a cave a closet, the space underneath a coffee table I am a mirror and a window a panic attack hidden between logorhythmia and logorrhea a theory of dementia involving helmets a knife threatening the ending of the story for the crime of completion I am allorhythmia and pain cushioned by displacement or a layer of blood it’s unclear, opaque even there are too many birds and invasive medical procedures but not enough time. |
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