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Taking a break from Homage Poems for a bit. My initial read-through of Ada Limon's Bright Dead Things didn't inspire anything in me. So I must have been in a terrible mood. Much like Martin Espada's Imagine The Angels Of Bread, the book starts with a poem I imagine hearing on stage at a slam-related open mic. It's written very accessibly and it deals with the sort of stories and issues people at a slam-related open mic will be quick to cheer for. But as the book goes on it becomes increasingly interesting and more complex. And I'm always a sucker for a well-written poem about insomnia. The Tongue Blanket Of Dreaming
Adam Stone I'd like to take a nap. But not a nap that's eternal, a nap where you wake up having dreamt of falling, but you've only fallen into an ease so unkown to you it looks like a new country. -- Ada Limon, "The Noisiness Of Sleep" When i grew too exhausted to tip-toe between the dragons I curled myself into a lozenge Intent on melting away on the foulest dragon's tongue I slept like an accusation against someone you love Dreamed all the precious treasure was time i could scale against my chest Of course i dreamed that i had become my scythe-toothed shelter Don't we all dream of being our own killer or savior
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This poem is an accidental cheat. I was supposed to be rereading Marge Piercy's The Moon Is Always Female but I couldn't find my copy, so I picked up What Are Big Girls Made Of which I've owned but hadn't yet read. After the first seven poems about the death of her brother, she opened the second section with the title poem. While I have since gone back and read the rest of the collection, as soon as I was done reading "What Are Big Girls Made Of", I got the idea for this poem and immediately sat down and wrote it, as is. What Are Faggots Made Of
Adam Stone Abandon and abandonment An ear for vacuuming pop culture and slang from other generations identities not fully compatable with our tongues Uncommon sense Shoulders Our parents' confusion Never knowing what to say Saying it anyway An array of hats Plaid and everything that clashes with plaid Lobster claws for cavity searches Such senses of humor The ability to see common ground in areas clearly marked no trespassing The desire to loose our tongue in areas clearly marked no trespassing Trespass A belief in borders Neighborhoods without fences but cities with painted lines Not stars We are not imagination We language imagination We speak for a we that does not have a singular voice We are made of nothing I am not queer because i was a gift for barren parents Sora would not be straight if his mother had lived Wyatt would not have dressed more accountant if he had less sisters Corey's pronouns would still be corey's pronouns if there was no church in their shadow It is so tempting to believe our bones are fortified tragedy We grew strong Invasive species thriving on the coast of straight Pilgriming inland to the heartland Fish with legs Mammals with feathers Divine mistakes of evolution Faggots are made of blame and fear A lack of science The myth of history Aging Loving the people the world is afraid to love Glowsticks and wrestling tights Painted nails and shaved heads Manifestos Lists of incongruous stereotypes Such musical anger A pot of boiling realizations Disappointment in the people we try to love and try to be The death of casual heartache The chalk outline of puritanism Blood so pure it could kill you if you're not careful A vocabulary of distance Optimistic hyperopia More heart than genitals Faggots are not faggots We are more than reclaiming the hard gs of outdated taxonomy We are not made of looking for conflict Spotlight fuckers Lip synching the gender Karaoking the rebellion We are not we are nots We are waiting for a textbook understanding that was checked out last century and is so past due that religion has decided to pretend they never borrowed it We are not alone in waiting We never want to be alone We grow up believing the ghost story of our wrong the fables of our impending solitude We adolesce into camouflage or sequins We do not sleep for fear of dreaming incorrectly Humans are made of humanity It must be driven from us by our ancestors' ignorance A learned fallacy A typo in the owner's manual of our hearts What I like most about Sara Eliza Johnson's work in Bone Map is its sense of constant travel. I never feel like she is stopping to explain her images or ideas, she's just showing you this beautiful short film she made. And you can watch it as many times as you'd like (the book is in your hands, after all) but she's only going to tell you about it once, and she's not going to answer any of your questions. What I Remember As Panicked
Adam Stone Sitting in the fort your parents built for your younger dying brother You pluck a caterpillar from the tree Squish it between your fingers and rub the smear of its was down my face A moth probably unrelated flies to a tree we can't reach It flies what i remember as panicked But is just the way moths fly Your dog will eat it or its progeny He being a conoisseuir of injured bugs and children He will feast on your brother's arm That he does not kill him is a fit of magic Your father the unwilling volunteer from the audience will make your dog disappear from our neighborhood to the house of an aunt you will never meet From Cassandra: here's the poem i wrote in response to sara eliza johnson's bone map, a book i really loved and NOT just because it had many deer in it. in the dream
Cassandra de Alba the horses run without their hides, tail and mane fused to muscle, eyes rolling and strange in red tapered heads. dust from their hooves glimmers in the ghost of sunlight and doesn’t settle, only multiplies, a cloud of choking gold shimmer out of which Columbia strides, her white dress immaculate, eyes fixed ahead like a declaration of war. under her feet, the skinless horses like an undammed river and under theirs, the country’s splintering bones. Reading Natalie Diaz's When My Brother Is An Aztec is a brutal an astonishing read. When I first asked people to suggest books for me to read, this collection was on the list. I thought I'd hear Natalie's name but hadn't encountered her poetry. Her book was one of the first few to arrive this summer and I devoured it on my way to work. It's the book that inspired me to start this project and try and love poetry as much as I loved this book. What To Turn Into
April Penn A tongue will wrestle its mouth to death and lose-- language is a cemetery ~ Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was An Aztec Learning about the fate of her brother brought me back to the weapon that plants a seed within a person. Does the weapon declare itself a weapon or a plant? Does the weapon weep or does the weapon-- the white employer-- pay her to destroy the land with golden laughter only? I can't lay down my teeth enough for the grief in these narratives. I am wrestling with losses I don't know how to name. An American prayer nicknamed Payroll, as if employment were ever liberation. Survival of an abscess needing survival of the body, tortured by the burnt nerves of its necrotic tissue. From Kelly: I liked this book. Stumbled across it after sitting next to the poetry section to hang out with friend in the Porter Square Bookstore. They went to get snacks and tea as I watched their stuff (after they'd done the same for me). While waiting, I looked at the books beside me. Response to Work & Days by Tess Taylor
Kelly J. Cooper Gardeners have the best metaphors where else will you find seeds, tender sprouts, seasonal changes, life and death, plus the heartbreak of fungal infections? Green, growing, turning sunlight into sugar, changing colors, nestled in mud, life cycles are traps, then guides, then traps again but the structure helps. Facing tragedy is easier when you have something to root for cheer on the good plants rip out the bad plants eat the results This poem actually started as a Sara Eliza Johnson interaction. I was struggling over three interactions for a few days, all of them nature-based, and then there was C A Conrad's splendid little weird book, The Book Of Frank. So many of my interactions this month have been homage-based, and I was finding it difficult to write in the style of C A Conrad without feeling like I was just poorly imitating C A Conrad. So I decided to write a letter to his character of Frank, instead. Letter To Frank From My Uncle's Garden, 1982
Adam Stone I don't know where my parents are But my uncle has this video camera And my cousins haven't surrendered their moods to cocaine and mushrooms yet So they are dancing by the pool I am a scarecrow on the outskirts of their flower garden Staked by dozens of bumblebees as big as my five year old fist All they want is me Dancing with them So that my uncle can capture the abandon of our youth Our dumb rhythms to a song i can't even hear See kids they imagine me saying to my own children in thirty years Once your father was as laughter and jumping jacks as you And you can see it all thanks to this betamax recording A medium which will never die When my parents return from their wherever My uncle pronounces me uncooperative A selfish little nancy My parents do not laugh I am pretty sure my uncle still had the tapes of that party when he died My parents and never saw them We have never needed film to remember ourselves Chika Sagawa was a poet recommended to me by Andrew Campana. So when I was researching the word that I wanted to use as a title for this poem, I was excited to see there was a prompt for this word made by a college student working in Japanese poetry named Andrew. I was then shocked to discover it was a different Andrew. It will never be spoken of again. Kefukaero is the Japanese version of the Cuckoo call, as well as a classical Japanese phrase meaning "to where shall I return" or "will I come home." Kefukaero, Kefukaero
Adam Stone The sky is a balcony nobody sits in The ground is general admission seats for the ocean In the morning when the shore retreats from the orchestra pit and the moon exhausted from seeing himself in every show fades out of the auditorium I throw the rotten scraps of my laughter at the seagulls The waves in their finest crests slap their hands on the stage I go home not even turning to watch the actors grow fat on all my excised joy Andrew Campana is the poet who recommended I read The Collected Works Of Chika Sagawa, and I'm grateful he did. Here's his interaction with her work. Garden
Andrew Campana A night wind Neon flutters at the parking lot edge The road is slick with petals All grit and gentleness and half-eaten colour The husk of a cicada hoards rain under its carapace Smoke gathers, then is gathered Filled with caffeine and sugar A vending machine hums softly to itself I look out through the wire mesh glass At the light hitting the light hitting the trees Five apartment buildings all face a single garden Shivering under the weight of the Wi-Fi From Emily Taylor: The Crown Ain't Worth Much (by Hanif WIllis-Abdurraqib) is a masterpiece and there are so many things to do with it & anything I write doesn't seem to do it justice tbh. this is after his poem after Fall Out Boy. on finding your old converse from 2009
Emily Taylor covered in rusty watercolor from the wet sand of the baseball diamond where you’d run in circles to ward off the undiagnosed hyperactivity, and under that, scrawled lists of bands and favorite lyrics in thin Sharpie; partially to prove that you were a cool girl, even though you are neither a girl, nor cool, at ALL, but also because you didn’t think your own words were good enough to clothe you yet. These cocktails of punk quotes your first found poem, your first toolbox for expression, those were the years of painting someone else’s words all over your town, to write on your wrist so the permanent marker tingle replaced an old sting, you were honestly a parody of yourself. Since then, you’ve found words of your own to protect yourself, but on those days where your words aren’t enough, you pop in your old headphones, lace up your shoes, and remember the songs you pulled apart with your two hands, coaxing this new voice into your throat. |
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