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During a routine check through the bookstore for poetry collections that were recommended to me but which I didn't yet own, I found a copy of Mohsen Emadi's Standing On Earth (translated by Lyn Coffin). Nobody had ever mentioned it to me, but the cover art looked interesting so I picked it up, flipped through it, and, as I was on a break from work, had to force myself to stop reading it until got home. There's a lot of death in this book, and yet the tone is...reverently casual? It reminded me that just the previous day, my coworker and I had many conversations with people coming back from the Women's March in Boston, which had jogged this particular memory loose. The Yellow Checkered Scarf And The Flask You Stole From Your Father
Standing outside the funeral home nostalgic for nicotine but comfortable with a scarved mouth I consider the flask of your favorite whiskey pressing its emblem into my left leg Our proximity didn't buy me a ticket in the line of hearses and black sedans so I am once again waiting for you to finish your family commitments The protesters on their way back from a march you would have supported but never attended smile at this scarf that I mistakenly remembered as a gift from you All of them insulated by their politics White as polar bears Chatty as gulls They are meeting for drinks at the steakhouse we escaped to when your relatives came to town And this scarf that I probably got as a Christmas gift from my mother has earned me an invitation to join them but I will go inside with this flask you stole from your father And one more time drink with you while your family says uncomfortable things about your past The two of us staying perfectly still unable to speak
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Kim Hyesoon's Sorrowpaste Mirrorcream (translated by Don Mee Choi) has been sitting on on a chair in my room since December, daring me to read it again, convinced that it had something different to tell me this time. After all, if it didn't have anything to say, wouldn't it have found its way back to the bookshelf? So I'm rereading it, and barely got three poems in when I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to write, and then five words in, it said "Surprise fucker, here's another poem entirely, write until it's finished! So, here it is. Fresh. Unedited. I'm going to back in and see if this book is trying to tell me anything else. What's Right, What's Left
I am sweeping the crumbs of you off my bed I am sweeping the empty like a birthday party magician I am sweeping the piles of skin to the floor Fertilizing the carpet which will grow dozens of versions of you every spring None of them quite as you but all of them the same fragile I am claiming the center of the bed neutral territory sweeping the empty of me into the stitch ridges I am not taking sides in the shadowing of blame I am mining the dresser for the last silt of you See how we are not entirely the bed though that's where it always starts I am opening the window to diffuse the smell of you I am opening the window to remember there is always outside I am opening the window to call in birds to pick your skin out of the carpet but the birds are afraid of my inside I am emptying the refrigerator of all the food you like even if I bought it for myself I don't ever again want to taste a thing that brought you joy I am overreacting I am regretting the lemon meringue in the trash I am thirsty for the apple juice I think you only drank apple juice because I bought it anyway Why am I letting you vinegar my apple juice? I am checking the drawers for what's missing I don't remember precisely what was mine and what was yours I don't remember precisely which us I am trying to forget I don't know if that means I am successful in the forgetting There is a beanstalk in my bedroom There is a beanstalk that can not possibly have grown from your skin cells There is a beanstalk that some errant bird must have planted while I was busy in the kitchen There can not possibly be a beanstalk in my bedroom because this is an apartment in a city in the twenty-first century and I am lactose intolerant and devoid of cows and magic I go to sleep I wake up to bats and am not dreaming I wake up to bats circling a beanstalk and am not dreaming I am covering my head under bankets no bats no bats no bats no beanstalk bats no beanstalk no batstalk no stalking bats There is a cyclone of bats in my doorway The only escape is up the beanstalk Why should I escape? Why should I follow some mystery out of my home? Why shouldn't I just live on this bed until morning until the bats retreat out the window until this bed is mine I say mine again Morning sneaks in through the window while I am searching for the thinning veil of bats Morning sneaks in through the window like he is you Morning sneaks in through the window and I pretend I haven't been waiting for him Morning sneaks in through the window but halts at the beanstalk Morning hates fairy tails Morning likes literal Morning likes just say what you want Morning rolls its clouds at the very idea of beanstalks Morning shoos the last bat to the attic of a neighbor's house Morning sees me eyeing him shrugs boulders next to me on the bed No more reason to sneak Morning knows it is caught Morning doesn't care Morning knows we are both different every time we see each other Morning doesn't care Morning withers the beanstalk to husked leaves that fertilize the carpet Morning doesn't know what to call you either but its being there sometimes is enough 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. 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 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. 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 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 |
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