I spent a couple of weeks working on a piece about almost getting into a fight at a Violent Femmes concert. And I think, eventually, that will become more than just a story I tell people about how when physical altercations are aimed in my direction, or the direction of those I care about, I use testosterone-fueled language and the stereotypes people attach to my appearance to defuse them before there is anything more than emotional hurt. But, as much as reading Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib makes you want to write about music (seriously, I just read his article on Bright Eyes and have had the first desire to listen to Fevers & Mirrors in about a decade), reading his collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much got me thinking more about his style and formatting than his subject matter. In particular, I love his poems that begin with "The Author Explains..." There's something about the honesty of the italicized text as he speaks to a specific person about something he feels deeply that makes me keep coming back and rereading them. It doesn't feel like reading poetry, it feels like overhearing someone self-omniscient perfectly explain his beliefs to someone eager to learn them. That's not quite what I ended up with in this poem but it's what I was initially aiming for. Sometimes, for me, the prompts I most enjoy are the ones that get away from me and produce something I wasn't expecting when I set out to write it. The Author Explains To His Ex-Fiancee Why He Finally Cut Her Out Of His Life, And How It Has Nothing To Do With How His Boyfriend At The Time Hated Her
Adam Stone I've never had to choose between love and family And you were almost both And it's hard for me to abandon either But it's easy for me to dismiss neither and almost And you were neither love nor family but almost both And your taste was always so neither And your hatred was so almost Christian but neither Christ-like nor religious Like you could almost swallow jesus when we talked but then he'd get all hairball and there's your savior in a puddle of sick on the couch between us You looking at me like my tongue was a sponge or you could pray my heart into a paper towel And I would stare at you because you are not a cat you're a grown-ass human with a daughter the age we were when we met and you have never had to clean up your own mess and maybe you forgot that i am not on-call for you anymore I love a man who has Old Testament problems Like someone burned his city due to a misunderstanding and his mother is a pillar of dust Like his father wants him to save two of every memory they shared so they have something to talk about in the future but lord it looks like it will never stop raining I know you don't understand what i see in him Your neighborhood has been sunny your whole life Except that time you don't speak about from back before you and jesus were on a first named basis Maybe i love the strange weather in genderless eyes and you are so content to sit in your california and cast shade at our cold fronts I haven't abandoned you because i've forgotten what i saw in you I simply can't stop seeing who you used to be and how afraid she would be of who you have become
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April Penn the psychology of the oppressed where mental health is the ability to repress knowledge of the world’s cruelty ~ Audre Lorde, "Eulogy for Alvin Frost" In North Dakota, "security officers" beat, tear-gassed, and released loose dogs upon indigenous protesters yesterday in America while the adult children of the two main presidential candidates gave interviews that news broadcasters said, "Humanized them," relinquishing viewers from thinking about nonrenewable energy, the destruction of clean drinking water, the increasing temperature of the ocean preceding mass die off of ocean species... the genocide suits that we're born into don't look down you'll see I don't know what to say. People say/I find myself saying The system is corrupt The people who I agree with feel like they are going to die young or live old lives repeating the same reminders like a game of telephone where no one knows what sentence we started with. Do you really think we would defeat planet Earth? Earth will always win! There is a fantasy of the oppressed being secretly more powerful. Like kissing death. The title of this poem is a slight alteration of a line by Audre Lorde: "I see much better and my eyes hurt." I like the straight-forward honesty of her book Black Unicorn. There were a series of ideas I had about what to write for my interaction but when I got to the fourth section of the book, this idea I have been trying to articulate for the last few years took form. I don't think this is the final draft of this poem but it wouldn't be this far without reading her work. I See Much Better Now That My Eyes Hurt
Adam Stone You can not call me crazy now that we have queer vocabulary lessons and a dialect on our own television networks Now that pride has been appropriated into us How we parade the most entertaining stereotype Swishen fetchit the spectacle We are not diagnosable we just are But some of us can step outside our lack of the current buzzword privilege to see that some of us are crazy not in the funny hat sense (that's usually religious) but in an inability to separate our I from our us The separation of sexuality and sanity is not church and state anymore than the separation of masculinity and rape is sports and gambling Trying to talk about a person outside of their generalization is not so much unheard as unlistened to We defend the borders of our identity so vigilantly we should be fascist billionaires by now Enough us Enough we I I am silent now when unsure I am listen when not my experience I am never sure when I am too prideful not proud but supporting my fellow lions I am staring at the center of my own Venn Diagram of sexuality and (everyone has mental illness instead of responsibility) responsibility I don't like how I overlap with people I don't like Eliza Griswold was recommended to me by Mckendy Fils-Aime when I asked poets to suggest other poets whose work I wasn't familiar with. Griswold is primarily a journalist, and her poetry tends to be half-page poems that somehow manage to encompass both huge, international events, and small, personal parallels in about eight lines. They're rarely WOAH poems. Instead they're a series of quiet tremors. Pokemon Key Chain
Adam Stone In the winter before the game's bold comeback you bought a Snorlax figure for the keys to my apartment hoping it woud become our apartment if you charmed it with the Pokemon most like me. Reading Saeed Jones's Prelude To Bruise from the beginning was a mistake of chronology. The first few poems didn't grab me. As I read further, I realized that the manuscript started too universally for me. I prefer a personal beginning that expands rather than a universal beginning that constricts. So I decided to take the experience of how I feel about a manuscript and write it into a poem without being, hopefully, too meta. Universally
Adam Stone The way to his bed is down an elevator not quite antique maybe broken enough to be vintage It is caution enough to take the stairs He is waiting with the lights out You do not fear witness All he has given you is fake but his address His name His picture His experience You are the only thing real about him He does not kiss well But he can apply a condom using only his mouth As you push the neutral gear of his body up a hill The kindest stranger alternative to aaa He tells you about how unlike the town where he was raised this city is You were raised in the same town You were two years apart in the same high school If you'd started at the beginning you'd have known you both started at the same beginning are currently at the same physical now and dark basement but he moles his sexuality you don't know how to metaphor yours but you are not ashamed of it You will leave and never return his e-mails Say the sex was forgettable (it was) But really you are ashamed of his shame And do not care enough to explain it to him If we've all been there what of us says why? How do we not know how to start anything? How to end anything? How to be satisfied with the middle? 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. 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 |
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