February 2012
1 post
2 tags
everything I grip cuts lines into my hands, that are small and fine; split like dried branches they reach out towards the moonlight which bathes and bitters my white, chipped skin in marred softness — a callus smoothed by Time instead of the lips that kept Endymion.
December 2011
2 posts
2 tags
holidays & poetry
I haven’t posted in weeks because everything I write is hidden away in notebooks in my car, at my job and beneath my bed. Christmas swallowed my December and won’t give it back. It isn’t even tug of war any more. I’ve been steamrolled, wrapped and lit up like a skirt-less, punch-drunk evergreen. In all the craziness, I never expected my relatives to start demanding me to...
5 tags
sepia advent
wax on the wreath and cranberries, pine on carpet, on rugged stairs, only crumbs on the last of the dishes and lights circled by fly-like memory: she sang at her grandfather’s piano cradling a box and a wobbling note oh how prettily the box’s paper shined — a robe over an organ-robbed body bloodless, empty, alone.
2 tags
“I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me that trouble of liking...”
– Jane Austen
November 2011
6 posts
3 tags
...
I am very sorry to have stayed from Tumblr for so long. I lived as if I were in a daze for the past few months, mainly because of work, and thought poetry had abandoned me. Thankfully I have regained my appetite for reading and writing. It’s funny how my dashboard has changed over the course of my away time. Some people still post, some of disappeared — a few that I loved, to my...
4 tags
for those who sit outside
occupy occupy golden bull park linked number-fences towers hollow of heart occupy occupy drums and wool caps gloves working without shelter signs made without cash occupy occupy speak in dead mics wave at black screens eat little and lean walk tight-rope on curbs, cross streets as streams occupy occupy letter without address stamp pocketed senates seal bills with spit send up good citizens reject...
5 tags
turkey for all
frizzled little kittens bristled with tickled noses and bright-eyes kindled, puzzled by turkey roasted and sizzled meows unmuzzled hurried and scrambled, while ensorcelled humans lose what’s tabled through dazzled fingers giving to paws all jumbled and those frizzled little kittens skedaddled quibbled, hightailed — joy quintupled.
4 tags
to a known knife
I will call you future while you have called me dull, and I will look to the horizon as you have looked inside me to see where your cut has & will have gone.
4 tags
between us sisters
I would like to breathe our time sweetly rather than in a sharp-metered suck scalding like wicked frosts setting the throat against words, the eyes against clarity — I would love sugared moments with you in the morning, with cream, a light steam to bring back years posed in silence: of girls sharing ribbons and oddly matched socks, of flashes and cheek-straining captures. But the taste...
October 2011
1 post
3 tags
at ten past eight
An electric guitar plucked him from my skull and out on the floor he was diminished fifth by fifth, riding slow slaps of whiskey poured straight under low light: no better way to destroy a smell than with a hot throat breathing nothing and numb lips saying what they can’t mean.
August 2011
1 post
4 tags
to the absent
A parking lot river ruined my socks and across a fire lane your likeness watched. Her hazel-bright eyes lit a store window, hued in brown and red, distorted by rain on the glass. The stare she gave was clean and passing while memories of you sank into my heel. She turned her head to chew on words, not yours, her lips opened a question and I turned away, not yours. Blame curled toward you from...
July 2011
6 posts
3 tags
a room on the carpet
In July, I gamble with the Sun an hour here, a spit of minutes there on a flat realm whose transparent panes crack the white, flaking skin of Titan-like shoulders crafted by some sub-Promethean artist circa 1970. Will light sweat the drywall into warming the room and shush songs of vent-dwelling Anemoi, sweet with cold; will it force the sill to shrug its burden upward to entertain the...
4 tags
Crazy Dance
the head bob started as an itch, hips swaying came from leaning on one foot, the wrist shake emerged from fingers shut in a drawer, feet stomping mirrored your angry sister’s gait and maybe one day I’ll explain the choreography more but for now these movements stir a quick, wobbling twirl whose speed is obsession until we forget the song we were shouting or the concert of individual...
4 tags
Quick, Chemistry!
I only met you briefly in the aisle by the soup and dino-shaped cookie cutters. I did not smile, you did not lift your hat but I know you would make me coffee if you could remember if it were one scoop per cup or two, and I would speak to you in French if I could remember more than mon ami and parlez-vous.
5 tags
financial weight
My piggy bank eats lot of pennies and I think his eyes were made white from all the zinc in him, if zinc can steal color more than children’s thumbs or falling books or 409 and coffee. I can see all the digested Abrahams through his slotted back; in two years, piggy might qualify for surgical belly plug removal and perhaps a trip to a real bank who dutifully eats greener monies, who I think...
3 tags
a service
press here! on the hardest part of her skull until her neck sinks below her polo tee press, keep her jaw descending to the rod of bone holding shoulders to a hunched spine, press down until her head disappears into her chest and becomes a lump beneath her skin, press harder, her hands shoot out, timed with an bell whose ringing, wedged somewhere between her ribs, does violence. pressed, her...
3 tags
on the edge of the bed
A pin-shaped pain against the lower rib grows to the shape of a mud-brown eye and ginger ale loses fizz in my stand on the night. The mockingbirds are restless until the moon glides across their wire— a half measure rest, I think, a brief forgetting of why we woke or ever spoke at all.
June 2011
25 posts
2 tags
“All night this poem
knocks at the closed door
of sleep: “Let me...”
– from This Poem by Donald Hall
ukulelesurf-deactivated20110803 asked: Mahler, wow, that is great, what instrument do you play, piano, from the poem you wrote? You write good. I bake too. Totally new here trying to figure it out...
3 tags
june bug
full sun struck the porch and you leaned back in your chair, blew cigarette smoke at twin beetles spinning on their shells brown legs grasping for traction against an obscure sky, spines curling inward in tiny increments and orange juice was warming on the iron table while your story about the drug store presided — quiet thunder over two small deaths.
2 tags
2 tags
1 tag
matryushka asked: What do you think of the T2i? I'm planning on buying a camera this month, and it's at the top of my list! How does it perform with low light, action shots, etc. And what can the kit lens accomodate?
Sorry for the many questions, I'm just excited :)
Sorry for the many questions, I'm just excited :)
3 tags
Barbie, It Was For Boredom
I pushed your favorite yellow shoes off the counter and into the bathroom trash. When your polka dot poodle skirt was found wrapped around the axle of the pink jeep? I was ripping out tufts of your best friend’s angelic hair and braiding it into a rope, so that I could tie up your boyfriend and make him watch cheap, nude versions of you plummet from the window to the garage roof. The polka...
1 tag
3 tags
I Wake Not Knowing The Time
my square place has corners defined by glass heads piled beside husks of flies collected from dusty sills where many red eyes blink as I sleep and blank, fluttering souls watch for the cripple in me crawling belly-down around the room, smearing filth when my mind can not be wet and full, can not be satisfied if not off and dead in the shapeless next-day where ghosts-to-come sit and place unopened...
3 tags
flicked out
strong embers are in the can child, fetch me water the smoke is curling and paper folds inward, consumes its own boundary fetch me water, child, before winds shift and I lose shape of words set drifting, the way one keeps the lips and forgets the eyes of a lover who sleeps two rivers away.
3 tags
lesson
I loved arpeggios, travelers who walked up or down with notes spaced wide enough to cross mountains, close enough to stay rolling steady beneath sunlight reclined on the couch as masking-tape keys A C and E clung to every pass of a hand, hesitant to let a chord resonate, to slow down, to leave endless pacing for pedal notes and blurry edges extending past the end bar — a warden with his big...
3 tags
good morning, reader
the pain of looking downward bolts my neck to its spine and past the expanse of pale legs, crooked toes, there is ground made dark by cigarette ash on the carpet, spilled vodka, magazine ads marked up by mind-to-hand sharpie art — what we wake for in the middle of the night when restless dreams don’t rouse our hot insides, but itch our palms and send us squirming with inspiration high...
3 tags
apart
I breathed in your two-cent-drug-store- mint-chocolate breath, your lips were against my ear and reading quiet Emerson; that passage ran me through sharp blade by sharp green blade, so logical and natural like coffee on a broken deck where we counted fireflies before June (one, two…) before the drug and where it stored your mind: far from me, in pieces hidden within the sun and the moon,...
4 tags
@ notre maison
wire rimmed shadow eyes pupils sparked by god-hot lights— an old poet speaks.
4 tags
to get through the night
I prefer to use the back of a page than tear away to begin anew and feel the specters of another day descend in counterpoint to a bolder ink, a purposed hand and sentences unbending to glaring margins — two dimensional rangers of empty space and parallel rivers guided by presses to reach oblivion without infringement by greedy greens looping or violet lines desiring edges never ridden in a poet’s...
1 tag
For Those Who Might Follow Me
Please don’t be offended if I don’t return the favor right away. It’s nothing against you! I just like reading through everyone’s blogs before I go following back. Sometimes I will go read a blog right away and sometimes I wait because my brain is too full. It has nothing to do with a lack of love or appreciation, I promise. Just slowness on my part.
2 tags
“…at times I believe I see
as in a glass darkly
what I know here
and now...”
– from “To Absence” by W.S. Merwin. The full version can be found in his book Present Company, which I love.
4 tags
Grandpa's Favorite
Popsicles for breakfast, popsicles for dinner! And if it weren’t for Grandma, this would continue into Winter because her hands are never dirty when she brings him the paper, and she always shares the watermelon she sneaks from the refrigerator. She hugs him hard whenever he picks her up from school and watches, fascinated, as he fixes clocks with black and yellow tools. When she leaves him...
3 tags
Bells, for my niece April 4, 2011 (text)
2 tags
For Emma March 25, 2011 (text)
flawsstitchedwithgoodintentions asked: Heritage for myself or the poem? And why do you say so?
4 tags
2 tags
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
– from On Writing by Stephen King
5 tags
powered off
back and forth the air — a hand upon my back — the fan’s motor — a plug for my ears — I am drawn as a sunning snake into quiescence, warm skin dulling from a boil and the bubbles drowning beneath the surface of blood turned languid, lacunae in my heart’s chambers are disguised as Sleep, the deceitful partner, stalls beats and knocks on veins with turbulence,...
2 tags
Poetry Audio Archive
From now on after my poems are up for a month, I’ll be turning them to audio format and placing them in the Poetry Audio Archive on my blog. Some poems may be posted directly in audio format, depending on their purpose. If you would like to have access to the text version of a poem after it’s been taken down, please message me and I will see what I can do. Oh the crazy projects I come...
May 2011
31 posts
2 tags
“So out come the bats, down spiral swifts
into the chimneys, Hey, I’m...”
– an excerpt from Winged Purposes by Dean Young, published in POETRY February 2009
3 tags
Tuesday March 30, 2011
3 tags
You Went Home So, March 27, 2011
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Hot March 26, 2011
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Wearing Marge Piercy’s Red Dress March 24,...
3 tags
5AM Spring March 23, 2011
3 tags
In My Mother’s Kitchen March 23, 2011