the adventures of josie bliss

After a line by G.C.

2008-10-16T12:42:00.001-04:00

Fire and the Morning

Love should be like the days I see all the leaves clearly as separate selves.
Love should be like the bird who travels all night and rests at dawn.
Love should be like the knee that is judged on function not form.
Love should be like the country that stamps your passport and hands it back to you forever changed.
Love should be like the space between molecules of honey.
Love should be like the light in a meditation room.
Love should be like the first feeling of wetness.
Love should be like finding your seat on a plane an hour before sunrise.
Love should be like the glass through which I watch the polar bears swim slowly underwater.
Love should be like my fingers that tell you I love you when my lips won’t.
Love should be like the mask the surgeon wears while he saves your life.
Love should be like the brush-tips of death against your cheek.

VIRTUAL LOCATIONS

2008-10-10T13:11:00.001-04:00

VIRTUAL LOCATIONS

1. Atlantic Flyway

you’ve been flying all night
you’ve nearly exhausted your fat reserves
you are desperate for food and especially water
and you see this rectangle of green

the fly-out changes as time goes on
in the winter it’s maybe 5:35
as you approach the summer solstice it’s more like 8:35
you’ve been flying all night

we start in the morning,
we might end at dusk
yellow metal to yellow feathers
we communicate by word-of-mouth and cell phone

there’s a Birding Log in the Boat House
the North Woods are a little less safe
Strawberry Fields is a good place to find
migrant Passerines in the morning

we’ve been walking all day
we’re ready to sleep
birds wait for us in our dreams
with clean quills and notebooks of air

2. Youtube Bedroom

with the purple curtains
and the wallpaper your mother
put up when you were little

your hair like a chestnut waterfall
your chewed-up fingernails
against the neck of your guitar
and your math homework

in studying you I’ll learn me
you’ll solve my nightmares
and set the variables free

it's been a long time

2008-10-06T00:49:00.002-04:00

but when you go on a writing retreat, even for a couple days, you forget that you can't write.

ZEN MOUNTAIN MONASTERY

I don’t know who made the mountain
but I know I’m looking at it right now.
Or I was when I wrote this.
See, already it’s complicated.
The simplest thing grows worlds inside
if you tilt your head and look.
Secret terraria, little rooms
of moss and glass
in which a soft green past
rubs its back against a hard clear present.
How can so many rooms of time
exist in one human body?
Stomach, liver, spleen:
each is its own drama, its own reality show.

There’s a Zen monastery a mile down the road.
I want to go there so bad.
And a mile in the other direction, a shooting range.
The shots bother me, they pepper
my view of the mountain with noise.
It’s fall, the leaves are green and orange
and silent. I bet monks must use
those tiny explosions as calls to awareness.
I wonder, do they ever drop by the range?
They are hunters of mindfulness, after all,
and the hunters are monks of survival.
And I’m a leaf on the way down,
I’m spinning fast but I don’t have a gun.

Those bittersweet vines climbing the porch
have a thousand green faces
and a thousand orange hearts.
It’s called bittersweet, I’m not saying that to be lyrical.
No one knows quite why. Perhaps the bark’s taste,
acrid then gentle; or the berries’ droplets of color
like a last kiss before the gray winter comes.
Also, they’re poisonous.

Oh Bittersweet.
Things were beginning to align
the year I wove your vines into a roof for my sukkah.
Each morning I went to work
and taught children what I myself believed.
My face hadn’t started to fall apart yet.
It was actually just a couple hours away
from this mountain, and the house is still there,
but I don’t know the people who live there now.
I’m going down the road to talk to the monks
about time. I’m going to say,
if we’re swimming in the ocean,
why are we sucking on bottles of salt water.
He’s going to say, the mountain doesn’t exist,
but I know you’ve been looking at it all day.

DEAR BROOKLYN

2008-07-01T16:46:00.004-04:00

DEAR BROOKLYN

Brooklyn of ample neighborhoods!
I love you!

Your eager bicyclists
Your corner stores
(you outgrew your farms
but people bring you vegetables every day)
I’m ready for you,
Tenuous Brooklyn,
Your hot sidewalks
Kissed brusquely by high heels

Of course I love you for your ideas
but I love you more for your famous friends
Brooklyn you’re a manuscript
about to be accepted by a major publishing house

You’re a full inbox
You’re a record contract
You have millions of rooms
each one with a secret

You take free hours and turn them into coffee
You change your desktop every hour
You are rarely surprised
At sunset you become a wet guitar

You’re hard to get into
You’re hard to get out of
But in between you’re perfect
I’m a perfectly at-home ant
I scurry around doing important things
Brooklyn you make me important

He doesn’t understand you Brooklyn
but I do

IF I WERE A SCIENTIST

2008-04-29T16:16:00.002-04:00

oh, it has been a long while. mostly songwriting which is having an odd effect on my writing writing. but im giving a reading tonight and figured id better sit down and write something. so here it is. dedicated to the girl in my dream last night who vomited while trying to remember the word "erhu".

IF I WERE A SCIENTIST

O Lord, the praise on my tongue
has turned to fear.

In your terrarium
the greens that feed us
transmute to become us,
the waste from us transmutes
to feed the greens,
perfect as a moss doily,
but for us it was struggle
after terrible struggle: we struggled
past it: we reached for greater fires,
soot and coal and carbon flakes.

I remember thinking the meaning lay,
as it always has,
just beneath her clothes.

O terrible terrarium,
O sullen morning
that does not invite us
down to breakfast,
that leaves us
in the cross-trees of the mind,
alone with the last red and turquoise bird,
the last brazen beetle,
each with our songs of alarm
and worry.

Oh, but if I were a scientist
I'd marry a woman with long dark hair
and we'd live on a teak riverboat with solar panels

and devote our lives
to searching for a vaccination
for loneliness.

ALLIGATOR LULLABY

2008-03-15T02:39:00.002-04:00

ALLIGATOR LULLABY (song lyrics)

rest your eyes, alligator.

the day grows old.

I'll wrap you in a blanket

so you dont catch cold.

rest your eyes, alligator,

and when you wake

we'll drink a cup of coffee

and eat a piece of cake.

THE PEGASUS DANCE

2008-03-09T14:37:00.002-04:00

its been for-fucking-ever.

i've been dancing the pegasus dance.

once this essay is done i'll be back, i promise.

jb

THE PEGASUS DANCE

When it comes it will pierce you.

And while it stays it will pierce you.

And when it goes.

Still, lift your wings.

Expose your flank.

The blood that twines

down your leg

is the reason you are here.

ROUGE LUGE

2007-10-30T14:02:00.001-04:00

ROUGE LUGE

I want to make a mistake with you.

Rouge luge is a dead pigeon
on the sidewalk in Richmond.

Life's cash is flesh,
the smell of a warm croissant,
how form blossoms from the inside.

Give the carrion a day, let it decay.
I dare you to cut the umbilical cord
that ties you to what you believe.
I want to go shopping with you.

Rouge luge is a mistake.
When I look back at a day, it's what's stands out.
It's what's left over.
Rouge luge smells like a warm croissant
on the sidewalk.

I smeared rouge luge
all over the perfect city.
Then I cleaned it up.
Then I smeared it again.
Rouge luge has a way
of taking over.

The mistake I made with you.

MY THIRTIETH YEAR

2007-10-30T12:18:00.000-04:00

this one goes out to the demons in the audience.

MY THIRTIETH YEAR

In my thirtieth year I became disoriented.

Snake hands pushed against me from inside.

I found myself in a dark room

pregnant, and alone,

without a midwife or a telephone.

Demons found me.

They crowded round and crowed.

Sweet demons, fuck you all,

I said as I stretched and pushed and kicked.

What else could I have said?

They flooded in through the dark red walls.

Tis moment stretched to encompass all moments.

I decided to ask the demons to help me.

What else could I have done?

And one by one,

they placed their hands on my belly

and began to chant.

And so it was that you were born,

little monster with my face.

I swear the demons cried as they held you to the light.

TO ELIZABETH BISHOP

2007-10-25T16:05:00.000-04:00

yes, ive been reading her for the last few months. she would hate this.

FOR ELIZABETH BISHOP

Heartache and mardons for you, and for Manuel
in the cheap Oaxacan sunset
near the ruins that keep us alive.
Do you really want to abandon
the bullshit you've broken your back protecting?

Lactate, lactate, burn and lactate,
soap and lettuce,
an underfed half-alive bunny
made up of neurons and dreams.

Secrets: last night on the picnic table, in the bear den, in the cave.
You couldn't promote Aristotle for money these days,
therefore, Socrates is mortal.
But to reason that way
is not to acknowledge the bullshit that accumulates
in the corners of your loneliness.
I'd rather go to cocktail hour and revel in it,
wrap your cantaloupe chunk of emptiness
in my literary ham and suck on it, oh yes.

Speaking of despair, here in the metal shop,
I look at your ankles...
untranslatable ankles,
that decay back into sleep the minute I look away.

SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

2007-10-25T15:31:00.001-04:00

SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

MATERIALS

1. Milk
2. A burning sensation
3. Soap
4. Lettuce
5. Soggy leaves from the autumn of your fifteenth year
5. A underfed half-alive bunny made up of
6. neurons and dreams.

OBSERVATION

Water moves through a body of water.
Water moves through the body.
You only want me when you're high.
You won't touch me when you're sober.

WHAT MIGHT IT MEAN

2007-10-25T14:52:00.000-04:00

im still here, just, you know, travelling a lot.

WHAT MIGHT IT MEAN

What might it mean to marry the dark glimmer inside the dark glimmer.

I ask this as one who has traversed great distances to be here with you.

All night I longed to put my lips to your cave's fountain

and drink the rainbowed infusion of your earnestness.

It would have washed away the memory of childhood intersections.

I could have seen the trees that must have lived there before the concrete

and the gas station, I could have drunk tea with my great-great-grandmother.

Someone watching from above would have seen our umbrellas separate

and the angle between them increase, like two boats leaving a port.

What if I left my umbrella on the corner and walked to you through the rain.

THE FLOWER OF DESIRE

2007-10-08T13:43:00.000-04:00

Over and over I have revised this and suddenly I think, perhaps it is actually one of the Manuals, and that's the answer?

THE FLOWER OF DESIRE

God, it makes me tired to think of all these generations of people falling in love. The weddings and the suicides, the children, all the eating and sleep and waking and work and political upheaval in the villages and cities and fields. And when it comes down to it there is the pain of just one person, the equation can always be reduced to that, like a gnat. It leaves me wanting a shaman who will tell me what to do. Looking and looking for a shaman. Carrying my satchel of anger and ambition and the translucent red flower of desire.

WINGS

2007-10-08T13:36:00.000-04:00

WINGS

A nightmare has wings.
You sleep in the death camp
with tiny feathers on your face.
You wake up near the mineral pools.
A singer must paint her nightmare directly
onto the dream of her listeners
so it becomes the listener's dream.
And then rescue the dreamer
who wakes up wet with tears.

POSTCARD FROM VIRGINIA

2007-10-06T17:50:00.000-04:00

GREETINGS FROM VIRGINIA

Everyone here is wearing lederhosen, no shit.
There is definitely an invisible line
down the center of everyone's brains.
Black hemisphere, white hemisphere.
Were you the man with the deer-hoof-handled knife
that nicked my violin on the way down?
Or the drunk girl in the front row
who kept yelling, "Annette, Annette!"
I don't mind being the one who watches
the person with my name fuck things up.
The smell of pot paints the greenroom green.
I wouldn't know how to choose any other life.

TO ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

2007-10-06T17:22:00.000-04:00

TO ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

The River Vistula divided those who burned
from those who watched them burn,
while the bridge, like all bridges,
silently offered its back.
I am speechless in the country you left,
like a towel that's been wrung dry,
nothing to say and nothing not to say,
centuries of unheard screams
and forestsful of saved-up silence.
In Warsaw, all I'm certain I have
is ten fingernails with chipped red paint,
a copy of your book, and a slew of sadness
that trails me everywhere I go.
This cold grey light.
This meeting again with the idea of death.
I want to give birth
to a child who will carry on in God's name.
Adam Zagajewski, I am reading your poems
in Warsaw, and you are saving my life.

MY GARDEN

2007-10-06T17:21:00.000-04:00

greetings from Virginia. everyone is wearing Lederhosen. no shit.

MY GARDEN

Every morning I ask the ivy:
was that a nightmare I could have avoided?
Loving as I do things that make me uncomfortable.
I tie a note on the sparrow's back:

Don't kill yourself.
Don't fail to appreciate your amazing legs while they're yours.
The pumpkin patch by the side of the highway.
The magazine of the seasons.

The sparrow flies out the window.
October contains a hint of March.
The brick wall has gone on for years,
and I still can't read its beautiful graffiti.

My garden wears a vest of mint leaves.
Girls are mysterious from the outside.
How she tosses her head of lettuce.
Her vagina lined with pomegranate seeds.

It's easy to forget I am a part of her.

MORE MANUALS

2007-10-06T15:57:00.000-04:00

THERE ARE TWO HARD PARTS

Seeing the path is the first one, walking it is the second. Sometimes there is a gap, and through this gap a red smoke swirls in, and while you are busy coughing, your feet direct you onto a different path altogether. Big problem. Before you know it you're dead and you've wasted your life, gambling and eating bad cheese.

FINDING A SCROLL

Finding a scroll can be difficult. This is the age of personal-ness, so everyone has to write their own. But the whole point of a scroll is that someone hands it to you, or you hand it to someone. If the scroll disappears in midair, the chasm between us becomes unbridgeable. I cannot solve this problem for you. Are you there? The answer will probably have something to do with hands, but we each have to come up with our own solution to the problem of finding a personal scroll.

DISASTER

God wrote me a letter but I couldn't make out the words. I got overwhelmed by the invisible ink the lemon juice and the light and the candle and I accidentally burned it. The smell of caramel flooded the world.

HOW TO SAIL

God told me to scrape the words off the letter and mix them in a jar of bitter water and make a woman drink it. "Why would God say that," asked my twelve year old friend. We just kind of sat there on the couch of the white spaces between. It was like sailing on the wind of what we didn't understand.

CEDRIC

2007-10-02T13:24:00.001-04:00

two points if you can tell me who cedric is. hint: i'm from baltimore and i love hbo shows.

CEDRIC

Cedric, I like how you sign your name all caps.

I like when something important wings forth.

I like a warm night full of outdoor music.

I like patience and I lack patience.

What of it?

Where did your monstrousness go
when we turned the lights on
and changed the background music?

It's all a movie,
so the drinks are on me,
ignore the monsters
crawling on your mind.

Cedric, I pray for you to get laid.

I pray for a hundred thousand guns to turn into violin bows.

I've stripped down to my shameful interior.
Do you believe me now
when I say I've got nothing to hide?

LADY, YOU ARE LOVED

2007-10-02T12:54:00.000-04:00

LADY, YOU ARE LOVED

Proportion and ratio
inhabit my wilderness.
Do I dare swallow
the treasures that mushroom there?
Praise agitates
in my mouth.
Do I dare fail
its expansive stringency?
Could I free the butterflies
that lie squished together
in the burrito of my intestines?

Lady, you are loved,
despite and for your inner Sir.

PINK THUNDERSTORM

2007-08-29T18:08:00.000-04:00

an amalgam of a recurring nightmare from childhood, and crisis of faith a la Mother Teresa.

PINK THUNDERSTORM

When a strand of pink pearls breaks
they scatter in a shower of pink.
A pink thunderstorm
spreads its wings in the blue around a girl's eyes.
The perfect curve of injury
to match pink and blue butterflies.
Above a green carpet where hills have rolled
where summer is beloved and
a yellow moth flies like a symbol
around the rituals you have already developed
God stands painting pink pearls in a pink thunderstorm
with a gingko tree in the front,
painting the feathered bodies on the hill,
the very picture of certainty.

TAJ MAHAL

2007-08-29T18:05:00.001-04:00

Ive been writing recently (thats the good thing about mfa-land, you're never not writing)
but not posting, i dont know why. here is a little blackberry for you though.

TAJ MAHAL

I wish I could tell you
how it was at the festival
you had your eyes closed and I
had mine open beneath
the clustered blackberries
that hung over us like exploding
stars the vines had climbed
up a tree I don't know
what kind of tree it was
and now I'm so far away
I'll never know. You can visit
the Taj Mahal and get some eye surgery
and it will still be cheaper
than it would have been here,
so don't worry about the great
distances there are airplanes
to take us to each other. If you
had opened your eyes you would
have seen in mine your own head
hovering among the blackberries
tart and frightening and immediate.

A RAINBOW FOR YOU

2007-07-25T15:02:00.000-04:00

(yes, you.)

A RAINBOW FOR YOU

Here is a panful of light and water

Here is a rainbow for you
Here is your hand

which one day will decay
but you can't know that

Here is Filip in his yellow rain slicker
waving goodbye
from the van

Here is an island where everyone stays
eleven years old

Here is a wish
I wish that you hadn't peed on that statue

I wish my sister was happier
I wish I had someone to hold me

Someone like you

ANOTHER GIFTED TAURUS

2007-07-25T15:01:00.001-04:00

ANOTHER GIFTED TAURUS

You know there are dark rooms we are both afraid to enter.
You know that what's found there, we need it to survive.
After a certain age, there is no way to be pristine. Discuss.
What do you know alone? What do we know together?
That butter melts, that trees grow and die,
that our days are filled with childish nicknames
for the things we can't live without,
pee-pee, wee-wee, boobies, titties, that the impossible
assumes different forms but is always just another human idea.
Oh how you soar, Taurus, up the mountain road
toward the monsoon where your stories live,
taking the switchbacks too fast, oh how
clear is the trickle of wisdom down your spine
and how much pain it causes you.
Bodies are not built for that kind of wisdom.
The best we can do is shunt it off again and again.
And so you do. And I watch you. And you watch me.
We are both standing on the catacombs, afraid to enter.

A FEW MORE MANUALS

2007-07-16T14:55:00.000-04:00

from the ongoing series, "from A BOOK OF MANUALS".

this first one is, of course, dedicated to kate. viva desalonistration!

HOW TO DEFENESTRATE

Stand in the window. Place your hands on the windowsill and look out.
Now project your soul out the window to the ground below and look up at yourself.
Which place would you rather be?

HOW TO BE LIGHT

Good morning addiction.
Good morning tin roof.
I want to play the guitar of your passing light.
I want to sing the sun as it goes by.
I want to taste your salt
and the weight of your legs
teaching my legs how to weigh
how to be weight
how to be light.

HOW TO TELL YOUR SPOUSE THAT YOU ALMOST MADE LOVE TO SOMEONE ELSE, BUT STOPPED YOURSELF AT THE LAST MOMENT

Must you?

If you must, know this: details are lethal. Details are the fishing hooks that will remain in the lip of the small fish that lives inside your spouse and swims sometimes towards you, sometimes away from you. If you love the fish, be careful.

WISHES AND BELIEFS

2007-07-16T14:52:00.000-04:00

WISHES AND BELIEFS

You wish I believed in God, don't you.
It's after midnight
when you turn to me and say this.
It's summer, jasmine is dripping from the garden-eaves.

God, who is in the room with us—
in bed with us, actually—
turns to me and smiles.
What are you going to say now, poet?

I dare you to force me on your lover.
The smell of jasmine mixes
with the smell of sex.
I'm on my own now.

OCHRE OKRA

2007-07-16T14:48:00.000-04:00

hello, dear friends, if anyone is reading this.

it has been two months since i last posted on this blog. i needed a break.

now MFA semester 2 is underway, (nautical metaphor!) and i will be returning to you with drafts both fantastical and morose, but almost always relentlessly In-Progress.

to start you off, here is a little thing. thank you for reading. xo, josie.

OCHRE OKRA

Oh, ochre okra.
Temperate tempura.
Ah, angular angels.
Gargoyles wearing argyle
the color of arugula.

Those gargling gargoyles,
with their boiling oil.
In the random kingdom
of undone wonder,
a gnome groans alone.

Dear friend, can I sit with you?
Even though you're too young/too old?
Even though we have never met/were married once?
Even though you
are dead/not born yet?

Oh, falling language body.
Body falling through boredom to boredom.
Where can I find a map
to lead me to the real maps?
The maps of random kingdoms
where the body doesn't lie?

THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS

2007-05-14T18:25:00.001-04:00

THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS

In a lighthouse at the tip of the island, old women with walkie talkies
and matching blue sweatshirts keep visitors from touching
what shouldn't be touched or staying one minute past dusk.
Perhaps one day I'll be like them, but for now I am still young
enough to want all the doors of the night to open at once,
and to want that so badly it makes my own ocean ache.
I want to touch the great bevelled glass, that once magnified
a single bulb into a thick beam to keep sailors from death
against these rocks. And when we have climbed the spiral stairs
to stand at the top of the lighthouse, exactly where that heavy glass
once spun, looking out over an ocean of trees while the wind beats
and beats, I want to touch you.

But I don't, although the lighthouse keeper in my mind urges me
ahead. Yes, I have a lighthouse keeper too—different
from the ones here. When I try to hide in my hood of black cotton,
or shrink from some onslaught of feeling, my lighthouse keeper says
from the back left corner of my mind: do not lock up your soul,
you have years left yet to live wetly; and that thought unleashes
so much possibility that sometimes it is difficult to breathe.
Inside such moments I, lighthouse in a lighthouse,
understand how the various greens of these trees, who love themselves
simply by existing, constantly unify matter and light;
how they risk themselves wholeheartedly to sit in the sun
and photosynthesize. And then I do reach for your hand.

But we can't be like those trees for long, even my lighthouse keeper
would not disagree. And when the old woman behind us says
the tower is closing, though we had hoped to watch the sunset
strew itself across the trees, we begin the climb down without a word.
For we ourselves are halfway between being young—exploding,
and exploding, like a fireworks display that never ends—
and old lighthouse keepers, faces etched with patterns
their own flaming hearts left as they seared through time.

HOW YOU CAME TO BE

2007-05-14T17:53:00.000-04:00

HOW YOU CAME TO BE

Go as deep as you possibly can,
my wife made me swear
before I set out on the submarine voyage.
The pararazzi followed me down,
but one by one they drowned.
Starfish nibbled at their flesh
and little bubbles rose cheerfully,
heralding their demise.
I was too busy to notice,
occupied with a great responsibility:
dials and switches,
and four men's lives in my hands.
We went deeper and deeper
until the pressure was like
trying to stay alive one day past
your destined death-hour
in order to attend your daughter's wedding.
It took tremendous will just to
breathe down there.
But the thought of my
nonexistent daughter in that
imaginary wedding dress
got me through.
Ohhhhh my daughter.
When we had reached our target depth
we began our careful ascent.
Look!, one of my men said,
and pointed to my erection.
But I was not ashamed.
I knew this whole journey
existed to prepare me
for the moment later that night
when I would bury myself
in the deepest depths of your mother.

HOW NOT TO EAT AMERICA

2007-05-14T17:02:00.001-04:00

here's another version of the last poem I posted ("state of the union").
still quite rough.

HOW NOT TO EAT AMERICA

One day you overturn a bottle of red nail polish
and it drips all over the atlas.
The next day you can't stop eating until you've eaten the whole house.
Then comes the neighborhood, the city, the state, and the whole country of America
with its sneakers and TV antennas and mini-malls and gas-station highways
and panty hose and divorces and after-school programs and loneliness.
If this is a free country, it is also a lonely country;
mostly lonely, mostly free, to identical degree.
You can sing yourself this song as you eat;
and only when the whole damn nation is safely tucked
inside the refugee camp of your belly
can you sleep.

So you eat it. First your mother's breast,
that started it all. Then the secret suffering of those closest to you,
you know what I mean, the things they can't tell you but you know.
Then the rest of your family, like Uncle Nancy who comes over on Thanksgiving,
who everybody calls Uncle Nancy behind her back.
She left her husband for a woman once, but came back after a while.
Everyone was glad; Uncle Nancy's great.
She fields phone calls from the richest men in the world
who want her to play bridge with them.
Who knows why her masculine soul was placed in the body of a woman?
Why assume it's an accident? Maybe it's a lesson for the rest of us.

Back to eating. The fashion magazines. The anti-aging serum
that's supposed to keep you from looking like what you are
because everyone knows you're not supposed to look like what you are.
The people you hate because they're different from you
and the people you hate because they're like you.
The wars and the protests against the wars.
The school violence.
The priviliged children spared from violence and destined for suicide.

But in the middle of your feast, the thought of Uncle Nancy stops you.
America, you think. Who's really at home here?
And then, poor America, she contains everything but America.
Maybe Uncle Sam, late at night, sits in the attic in a bra and panties,
painting his nails.
If we just let him, imagine what this country would be.
It would crawl right back up your esophagus and the soldiers would put down their guns
and the torturers would lead their prisoners out of the cells and bring them home
to America, to meet their wives and husbands
and show the children where they came from.

Then you stop eating and just look:
there they are,
the fifteen year old with his bottle of red nail polish
and the twelve year old with her baseball mitt
and the newly freed prisoner,
together in the late afternoon light,
leaning over an atlas on the dining room table.
The free man points: here is my country, the little green one.
What I miss most, after my family, is the food.
The food there was something that I cannot describe,
you would have to put away this book, and come taste it for yourself.

STATE OF THE UNION

2007-05-14T16:20:00.000-04:00

a bizarre political poem

STATE OF THE UNION

Stay tuned for next week when red nail polish drips all over the map.
Stay tuned for next week when you can't stop eating until you've eaten the whole house.
The whole neighborhood, the whole state, the whole country of America
with its sneakers and TV antennas and mini-malls and gas-station highways
and panty hose and divorces and after-school programs and loneliness.
For although, or perhaps because, this is a mostly-free country,
it is also a lonely country;
mostly lonely, mostly free, to identical degree.
And only when the whole god-damn thing is safely
inside the refugee camp of my belly
can I sleep.

O draw the abdominal shutters,
the Doctor Queen is coming down to check on the state of the union!
and she likes her viewing room to be absolutely silent, without a hint of light.
She feels around a bit and pronounces the country "quite healthy."
She has no medical training, but lots of experience
and a very imperious demeanor.
Everyone listens when she speaks.

I don't think the Doctor Queen knows about things like my family.
For example, Uncle Nancy who comes over every Thanksgiving.
Uncle Nancy left her husband for a woman once, but came back after a while.
She fields phone calls from the richest men in the world
who want her to play bridge with them.
Who knows why her masculine soul was placed in the body of a woman?
Why assume it's an accident? Maybe it's a lesson for the rest of us.

America contains all this and more. Who is really at home in America?
America is not at home in America. Uncle Sam, it turns out,
likes to wear a bra and panties and paint his nails late at night.
If we just let him, imagine what this country would be.
It would crawl right up my esophagus and the soldiers would put down their guns
and the torturers would lead their prisoners out of the cells and bring them home
to meet their wives and husbands and show their children where they came from,
leaning together over an atlas. Here is my country. Perhaps there was not
so much freedom like you have, but the food,
the food was something that I cannot describe,
you would have to put away this map, and come taste it for yourself.

CITY LOVE

2007-05-12T23:38:00.000-04:00

this is still a big mess, and probably beyond help, but i'm posting it anyway.

CITY LOVE

Morning has sung my name over rooftops in this city
and on the same block a different morning
has covered me in a bright blanket of sleep
and on the same morning someone else wearing a suit
rushed into a hole in the concrete
like a drop of blood re-entering a wound
in reverse time, to be carried in an artery of steel
back to the dark, muscular chambers of the heart.
When I say heart, I mean the city's heart,
which is the nation's heart, although only
from the city's point of view; a certain organizational tautness
presides here, so one's kidneys contract into little apartments
with lights on inside, and in one of these apartments I write:
I love the sound of rain on the roof
of your mouth
when I cry over you
as you sleep far away.

You may never understand the way I love this city,
how it frames me, consoles my curved loneliness
with its rectangles and squares,
as a movie transforms one's boring private problems
into glamorous, universal ones. And this city in turn will not understand
the way we need the earth—having expressly overwhelmed that
randomness and fertility, and working daily to maintain its dominance
with a host of large yellow dinosaurs and insects
that build and destroy at once—and cannot know
it will be swallowed one day, rooftops and all,
by angry humans or an indifferent sea,
it doesn't really matter which.

But in its arrogance, and mine, I believe
this city understands the way I love
you, neighbor of my soul, how I want to sit with you
together in a single, warm circle of lamplight
night after night, and—not yet but one day perhaps—
would leave even this city that I love, were I to leave with you.

LOVE OR DESTINY OR ACCIDENT

2007-04-19T17:10:00.000-04:00

LOVE OR DESTINY OR ACCIDENT

She showed me a pool,
a rectangular artificial pool
with a brass knob on one corner
and when I put my hand on the knob
colors appeared—I remember
navy blue and black
squares fighting each other
in a strategic battle
of geometry.

You have an angry heart, she said.

But I saw how one day it would become
light-blue and the waters would calm.

Later, on the plane
the moment before take-off when I take
my life in my hand like a wet
frog and offer it up,
gambling the house of my soul:
why, this time, did I keep my fingers
closed around the frog?
And the frog was my heart
and my heart slid down my arm to my chest.
For the first time I knew
the engine would hold
and no microburst would puff us down
against the runway
into dust.

And I remembered what else
the woman at the pool had said:
The only difference between fear
and excitement is how tightly
you clench your kidneys.
My heart moved down my back then
and separated into two
branched sponges, a loose
translation of my hands.

And so it was
that I decided, and decided to tell you:
I will let the twin engines of our love
or destiny or accident or whatever it is
carry me into the light-blue
pool of the unknown,
unknowable sky.

EVERYBODY WANTS TO KNOW GOD

2007-04-19T17:03:00.000-04:00

rrrrough drrrraft. oh that would be a good band name. the rough drafts. i'm sure it already exists.

EVERYBODY WANTS TO KNOW GOD THESE DAYS

Everybody wants to know God these days.
His PR people must be doing a great job. His PR people in their funny robes.
These days everybody's selling things that are already inside a person, like water.
Or Oil. Or, yes I will say it, like Love.
Mine your bone marrow, there must be some in there.
But you won't find it if you spend your evenings arranging yourself
just so on the bed
so that you'll look effortlessly stunning
if someone happens to wander in by mistake.

Say it: say Love.
Where do your eyes focus when two examples of beautiful nature stand in front of you:
trees, and breasts.
Make it trees after rain and breasts after a shower.
With drops of water clinging, almost dropping but...
Both exist between a force that rises up, and a force that pulls down,
suspended
between life and death—isn't that it—
exuberance and gravity—living
their one sad, brave life
in the space between elemental forces
like a canyon carved by a river.

Everyone wants to buy love these days.
Correction: those who are not running for their lives.
In an Anne Frank state of mind, love is the one
who shares the attic hideaway. Outside the Nazis lurk
but here, inside, hormones run in rivulets along
the broad floorboards,
lurk in the folds of clothing,
and gather in the cuticles of the boy you see every day.

AN OFFERING SMELLS GOOD TO GOD

2007-04-18T15:12:00.001-04:00

AN OFFERING SMELLS GOOD TO GOD

I half wish I wouldn't wake up
and that my face would remain forever
a sister to Sylvia's
kin to the ones who run
before the morning
to keep from standing still
like an offering
as a fire burns on the highway although
really the fire is not burning
in the streets it is the combustion
of engines in cars
driving always driving
interchangeable cars and their
interchangeable drivers.
And my loneliness, in which I sleep
every night, which I briefly relinquished
at my wedding and which my husband
returned to me with his
infidelity, I've carried
with me through move after move,
husband after husband. Now
I'd trade it for a few marbles.
I half want to be the one in the corner
naked, wrapped in sheets
like the Statue of Liberty,
sheets stained with the blood
of babies we didn't have.

FAILURE IS THE SUCCESS

2007-04-18T14:21:00.000-04:00

haven't you heard?

FAILURE IS THE NEW SUCCESS

I'm one of the giant lies.
I'd be happy helping in the kitchen,
except that I lost my ability to collapse.
It just ran away, like a little pet.
A pile of wet potato peels gleams on the counter.
I'm waiting til the light turns green
to call my ex-husband and say,
you were so soft around the edges
the last time I saw you,
after all those years of alligator skin
and jealousy—guarding the Goldberg variations
inside the wallet of your heart;
trying to keep me happy
by saying nothing, and not wondering
about the inner life of the third-grade
teacher who drives home alone
in the late afternoon light
that melts all over everything,
embodied spirit driving a
Honda, so uncertain of herself
outside the classroom,
thinking of you maybe as she walks
upstairs to her dappled wood-
floored room for the kind of joy
that only comes from masturbation.

FEELS LIKE HOME

2007-04-14T19:34:00.000-04:00

it's weird, I kind of forgot about this blog for a little while.

but I'm back.... I dont think I'll post what I wrote in between (too bad, cause one of the most graphic poems I've ever written was unexpectedly born in the hartford airport) but anyway, here's today's offering:

FEELS LIKE HOME

What feels like home is simply habit and half the time bad for you.
You get used to the dirty screen of your eyes looking out at the world,
or always walking a certain way so as to feel certain or brave,
though it leads to health problems over time
and you feel neither certain nor brave while being driven to the hospital
for hip replacement surgery.
Can you hear the drumbeat in your own mind, or are you too far away?
P. believes life is an extended moment in the game of telephone.
He's uncertain about what his last lifetime is whispering in his ear
but whispers it uncertainly into his next lifetime's ear:
"I think she said..."

I think she said,
Some of the greatest minds have walked out of this orchard mindless.
When is it time to go? When you are a whole basket of love
and readiness who will bite, perhaps.
Lifetimes come and go: dried up, then gathering, then waiting to pop.
My eyes themselves are the things that would love the music to continue:
continue, continue, they plead, before we are melted down again.
I think she said,
One day you will sing with complete confidence and be certain what it means to be a
true morning-style failure
Pure

And me
I keep getting stuck in these eddies of self, then time spins me out
And I'm somewhere else without knowing how I got there
happy for a bit, then desperate for the next spin-out.
If I knew how the spins happened, I could make them happen.
If I could make them happen, I would.
I would make them happen right now, I would spin for you,
And you would keep right on reading,
because it would feel like home.

MY COWBOY

2007-03-26T15:00:00.001-04:00

sushi cowboy travelling love.

MY COWBOY

I went all over looking for my cowboy and when I found him he was gone.
Lying by the side of the road with all the wrong clothes on.
I ground my red bandanna into the dust.
It was erroneous, the whole quest had been erroneous, and by that I mean
everything, the love letters, the smell of meat, the flares of frustration
I used to send up towards the sky, and what I thought I knew.

I bought a certain sunset and thought that sunset was "mine"
believe me, I knew a lot of things about that sunset!
It was the color of salmon sashimi,
and the cactus was the color of wasabi,
and pickled ginger was the taste in my mouth when I touched myself
looking at a picture of it. That was what I called "love."

I loved a lot of other things I had read about too, like Spanish Colonial Architecture
and The Garden of Hanging Vines on the wall at the pizzeria
and An Island of Mysterious Women Who Might Have Been You
Had Things Been Different. Before I went to sleep at night
I read about them in my guidebook, and I knew all the rules.
Act confident: birds don't eat you when you're feeling confident.

To prepare for a visit to pretty much anywhere,
give away most of your possessions; when travelling
one depends on miracles and that's how a fraction of a fraction
becomes all you ever need. I've tested that, it's true,
unlike "mine" and "love." Still, Spanish colonial cities lance my heart
and so does the idea of my cowboy. And sushi,

which is, after all, a good example of "not-mine." You can't save it up.
You take money, and you turn it into sushi, and eat it. As for "love,"
I don't know. But I have a feeling that if I ever do find it,
it won't look like the picture on the cover of the guidebook.

INVOCATION: ON THE TARMAC

2007-03-26T14:39:00.000-04:00

INVOCATION: ON THE TARMAC

A roar happens when you're around,
God,
or Goddessss,
a sibilance of genuis that unlocks
all the granaries.
In you,
Charlotte sings
love songs
to Charlotte,
and everybody wants to sleep with her
because she points to you.
It's her deep voice
and the chaos she holds together with ribbons.
She's nourished by propriety
and fed by the forbidden.
Sometimes she punches me in the stomach;
sometimes says to me,
sweetie, drink seltzer, it'll settle your stomach—but
there's no seltzer left
because we're stuck in an airplane on the runway
and we haven't been allowed to leave for days
and I can see the edges of kindness unravelling
in myself and everyone else;
allegiances form
and prejudices are confirmed
all our kidneys are taut with the smell of oncoming conflict.
Which is why I am invoking
you at this moment,
God,
in the form of Charlotte,
Goddess of the Tarmac,
to whom I pray,
please
open the small door
with its rounded edges
and let us out
before we murder each other.

REVISION

2007-03-22T17:16:00.000-04:00

poetry=digestion.
I am in an MFA program, learning to pee better.

REVISION

Sometimes it takes many drafts
to establish
what's actually important
or rather
unimportant or actually
neither important
nor unimportant
but simply extant
and how to let it run
like tea through the body
warm in the mouth
at first, then
a flurry of awareness as it
passes through the center
and finally
the sweet tinkle
of water against water
when it's time to end
the poem

HANDSOME HUSBANDS HIDE IN HOLES

2007-03-21T13:33:00.000-04:00

i have no fucking idea where this came from.
somewhere between joanna newsom and my own twisted imagination.

HANDSOME HUSBANDS HIDE IN HOLES

Handsome husbands hide in holes,
dug by ugly wives.
Subtle foxes play their roles
and then break out in hives
While priests delineate the goals
and drinkers drink in dives.
Girls wind garlands round the poles
that boys have carved with knives,
Old men warm themselves at coals
that used to be their brides.
And so it is, the road goes on,
and on the body drives,
Till undertakers take our souls,
and throw away our lives.

AUSTIN

2007-03-19T18:54:00.000-04:00

AUSTIN

I have just returned from Austin.
In Austin, I kept Austin at a distance.
Now, Austin is at a distance.
Still, I don't know which is farther away:
me, or Austin.

MARRIAGE IS SOMETHING

2007-03-19T18:49:00.000-04:00

this is a bizarre melange of a poem. that's what happens from too many hours listening to 2000 bands play simultaneously for 3 days. also i'm clearly a little obsessed with what marriage is and isn't these days.

MARRIAGE IS SOMETHING

Paramour or palindrome, you can't have both,
I read that somewhere,
And as for affairs, about which my sister warns me daily,
I think the key is, not to think ill of those who relieve the unbearable
needs that we cannot relieve.
Just being here is winning a certain kind of lottery.
A conversation gets carried-out soon enough,
and if that conversation is a marriage--?

Am I in error or is there a flaw in the conformity of the conformity of the rose in my mouth that keeps words in and keeps the sphincter tight and the rings on fingers and the wine in glasses?

All those crystal glasses full of wine
held by brides wearing smiles.
I can see wine leaking out of their breasts
and staining their white satin dresses.

Oh marriage you are spilling out of the cracks in everyone's bodies.
Oh marriage you wake me up from sweet sleep by ringing me against the wall of myself.
Oh marriage you are a chart for the argonauts who sail across the brain of sorrow.
Underdogs of the underdawn scavenging the corners of the body's round rooms.

Am I missing something in you?
Or is it me?
I miss the thing I thought I could think of.
And the sense of a ceiling constantly moving beyond my reach as I grew.
I am thinging about you tonight.
Thinging about how
If you were a thing I would buy you.
Silly as that is.
I love something.
I guess one name for that something is you.

CALIFORNIA

2007-03-12T18:18:00.000-04:00

hey, i wrote a poem called "Florida" last month. Am i going to start a Sufjan Stevens style project of one poem about every state? hm, sounds fun......

CALIFORNIA

We left the rooftop pool at 2 a.m. so the men
who had come upstairs with a joint
could have their romance,
We left and went to kiss on the stairwell
Where we surprised another man coming upstairs
who also surprised us
And who said "have fun guys"
without any mischief or joy in his voice.
Your hand was under my shirt.
I wonder what it would feel like to be you
with your hand under my shirt.
Don't you know, when we stop for Oaxacan food
on Santa Monica Boulevard,
That red mole is the color of
my love for you.
But I have to wait for it to
take me over undeniably.
When we get to the beach
the marrow of my femur gives off
a smell that says, my love for you
is somewhere in the sand
Buried beneath the memory of your
father's death.
You'll tell me when it's time.
And so I understand when
you say, "Tell me about your first"
and look at me like a librarian
Who has just been given a rare manuscript.
A Dead Sea Scroll that has to be taken
out of its clay jar carefully, with tweezers,
Because it's been rolled up in there
for thousands of years.
And I understand
why the scrolls would begin
to disintegrate
the instant those ancient letters
were touched
by air and sunlight.

HELP ME, THE DAYS ARE SO SHORT

2007-03-12T18:11:00.000-04:00

a revision of that december wedding one below. i think i've been possessed by walt whitman and channeled it into my other life as a participant in the wedding industry. whoa.

HELP ME, THE DAYS ARE SO SHORT

Let us all sigh at our unnecessariness, as if the sighing makes it less true.
Let us give thanks for snow, for new underwear, for worn out underwear,
for gleaming morningness, and burnished afternoonness,
for the days between Thanksgiving and New Years,
for the pale December bride with her white thighs like honeydew,
for the nutrients in the ground that flowers nursed on all summer and fall until the ground froze,
for her older sister, who will wait till after the wedding to tell her family she is getting divorced, and who right now squints into the bathroom mirror, painting silver eye shadow onto her lids with raised eyebrows,
for the bride handing the bouquet to of white flowers to her mother to hold while she adjusts her bra,
everyone rejoicing, and only the sister thinking of the flowers, thinking It's a shame to cut them but they would have died soon in any case.
For the bride's first cousin practicing his reading from Corinthians under a tree,
thinking of the summer when they were fourteen and used to slip into the woods
behind the family's rented vacation cabin late at night to touch each other,
promising "last time," meeting again the next night to reason their way out of damnation in whispers, and then touching each other again.
For the cousin's girlfriend in red satin in the corner,
who has never liked the bride but is thinking that she does look really great in her white strapless dress, she's obviously been working out, but she'll probably just gain the weight back after the wedding,
and wondering what kind of dress she would wear as a bride except that she doesn't really believe in marriage, but probably something off-white, creamy, with a vintage veil.
For this entire scene which exists in my imagination and probably also somewhere in America right now in some hotel ballroom or backyard.
For my mother's refusal to plant a tree in memory of someone in case the tree dies, this I did not create in my imagination.
Also for continually moving forward when the soul's traction drags you back to bed, like this morning,
or is it the soul that gets the body out of bed:
help me, the days are so short,
and there's so much I need to do before I leave.

WRITING ABOUT WRITING ABOUT WRITING

2007-03-06T14:01:00.000-05:00

here is a revised draft. i must give ginormous thanks to kate for helping me turn myspace into a fish. oh and the poem is obviously dedicated to T.H.

WRITING ABOUT WRITING ABOUT WRITING

A mermaid crawls out of my mouth to meet you in this poem,
my teacher who calls me teacher and therefore is my teacher,
who shows me how to knot a net to make the moon rise
during night watch on calm seas while the other sailors sleep.
We are the ocean and our speaking is the waves, each phrase
a little breaker spreading its foam, then a pause, and then another.
"A poem is a scrimshaw knife," you tell me. "The carved pictures
mean something and the blade cleans a fish for dinner."
"But why can't the poem be the fish?"
"Because the fish will die."
"And why shouldn't a poem expire like us?"
"And why shouldn't a poem aspire not to?"
By now we've knotted a net that covers the deck, and the moon is up.
"Oh teacher, I feel so far from New York." "Well, teacher, we are.
Out here we must eat of the sea and navigate by star." You teach me
to throw the mind into the water and haul it in full of frantic poems,
choosing which to keep and which to fling back quickly, while they slap themselves
in panic against the cold wood. We pick the best two for a meal
and eat them raw. And now that we are satisfied, you say,
let us lie back and read the poems of the constellations. The Pleiades
are freckles on a girl's cheek. In this case the girl is astral body
with night sky for face, her other cheekbone fractured
by Queen Cassiopeia's brutal zig-zag. Is the Queen jealous of the girl
or is she merely the scar of the past on the fresh present? Orion too
contains the future: there is a stellar nursery in his sword.
Unlike you, I am patient, Orion says, stretched out as if on a rack
though he was there far before medieval torturers and, in fact,
is not there at all. Who is more imaginary, me or Orion? Is it
wrong to toss the word "torture" around like a shiny fish while
people are locked in cells? Should we try to imagine them?
My teacher and I look at each other for a few hours. It's a problem,
this incarnational merry-go-round, some humans on a poem-boat
in the middle of the ocean and some children begging for food
from tourists and some in jail for having murdered a girl.
I could say it's the astral body girl murdered at last, but it's wrong
to redeem imagined cruelty for beauty, isn't it, teacher? Teacher?
Why are you silent, teacher? Teacher, why are you silent?

BLUE UTERUS

2007-03-06T12:58:00.000-05:00

also from last week in Berkeley. feeling much better now.

BLUE UTERUS

What can keep me
from drenching myself
in my own rain...I feel the clouds
gathering in my uterus,
barometers plummet
in every room of my body,
no raincoat nor umbrella
can guard the skin from a rain
that rains from inside,
there is only to breathe
the flood to become the flood and
flood the body boat with drench.
Blue uterus I will not breathe
until the first drop falls.

AFTER THANKSGIVING

2007-03-06T12:53:00.000-05:00

don't know why I'm writing about December in the beginning of March.
This also was written with Brian T. at that cafe in Berkeley. Right after he told me there had been a series of small earthquakes and "some people think the big one's coming."

AFTER THANKSGIVING

Let us all sigh at our unnecessariness, as if the sighing makes it less true.
Let us give thanks for snow, for new underwear, for worn out underwear,
for gleaming morningness,
for the days between Thanksgiving and New Years,
for the pale December bride with her white thighs like honeydew,
for the nutrients in the ground that flowers will nurse on when the snow melts,
for the bride handing the bouquet to her mother to hold while she adjusts her bra,
for no one is thinking of the white flowers.
For my mother's refusal to plant a tree in memory of someone in case the tree dies,
for continually moving forward when the soul's traction drags you back to bed,
or is it the soul that gets the body out of bed:
help me, my time here is so short,
and there's so much I need to do before I leave.

SIGNS SEEN FROM ABOVE

2007-03-06T12:49:00.000-05:00

this isnt very good, but it's what I was writing while sitting at a cafe in Berkeley with Brian T.

SIGNS SEEN FROM ABOVE

1.

pile of bananas
on a red tray
atop the marble counter,
I'm waiting for
you to tell me
how long my life will be

2.

open mouths
of tea mugs
black tea with milk
green tea with honey
and the floating tea leaves spelling
"water water" into the hand
of Helen Keller

3.

bras cup
so gently
the breasts of the ladies
waiting in v-necks
to pick up their
paninis on the lower level
of the student cafe

4.

one breast means "exactly"
and the other "now"

CUNEIFORM

2007-03-06T12:47:00.000-05:00

CUNEIFORM

My lover takes me to see
the cuneiform in the locked,
climate-controlled basement
of the body. He shows his
card and the guard guides us
down two flights of stairs
to a small room where we
stand before the delicate stone.
"What does it say?" I ask.
He translates for me: "A great flood
destroyed the world. The world
grew back. A great flood
destroyed the world again.
The world grew back again.
When will the flood come back?
Soon, soon." Together
we ride the elevator to the
ground floor and step out
into the gathering clouds.

FLORIDA, REVISED

2007-02-12T23:15:00.000-05:00

aghasdgjsdghaskjdf;alksjdfnvpwaoieurnv;ldv agggh!

FLORIDA

There are some really beautiful ones out there on the beach
like baubles on the world's wrist
I'm surprised when they let me kiss them (it doesn't happen much)
(but I don't try much either) (I'm too afraid they'll say no).
Sometimes I feel sorry for myself for feeling ashamed of myself for wanting them.
Oh boy, I'm lucky, I tell myself all the time. You're lucky, I.
Dear I, it's very important to me that you understand how lucky you are:
don't help me write this letter, just step back and think about it for a minute.
What you call lonely, someone else would call "not-hungry,"
"not-afraid-for-my-life."
So why are you crying, dear I?
There's a sea shell I want to pick up. Why? To stick my tongue
in its salty whorls.
Yes, it hurts to want, doesn't it. It never stops hurting. Why not?
I'm afraid she would say "Florida is my name."
I'll never be comfortable in Florida.
In a long thin land of bathing suits and alligators.
The whole state is a charm bracelet
on the wrist of a girl I'll never be allowed to touch.
Oh Florida, why charm those who are already pained with desiring you?

HERE ARE THE CLUES, REVISED

2007-02-12T22:55:00.000-05:00

wow, it's so fucking weird to be doing this thing. writing, yes, but also mailing it to someone who mails it back with comments. thank god he is the right one for me. the one who points out the "speaker's" selfishness.

HERE ARE THE CLUES, WHERE IS THE MYSTERY?

Why do I love my mother so much.
Why do I think about her dying all the time.
Why does she visit dying people every day—it is her job,
but why did she choose this for her job—and read
the obituaries first.
Why does my mother love football.
Why did the Colts score a touchdown just as the band ended their first song.
What is a coincidence.
A million clocks are running simultaneously and if two of them read the same hour
look, people say, it's a coincidence!
In this vision everything has its own internal clock.
And for one who has not learned to wait
the time between second-hand notches is excruciating.
You could swing a whole planet off of that energy between seconds.
You could sigh yourself into a different universe
where a daughter is a mother's mother
like my mother was to hers.

The refrigerator sighs at night while the house is sleeping.
The provolone cheese just sits there, sits, sits, sits, sits, sits, sits, sits,
until someone picks it up.
But actually tiny invisible changes are happening
and if it sits long enough it grows
a little garden on its yellow plain.
And me, oh, I too sit sit sit sit sit sit sit sit.
And my changes are also imperceptible.
I put on my scarf, then take it off.
There is a distance to some words and others are intimate.
There is a distance to some intimacies and others are proximate.
Some words shine a cold light and some illuminate with a glow.

Late at night I have to stay brave so my mother will not fear for me.
I have to be a mother to the mother in my mind.
This I call love when I wake up crying from the dream in which she dies.
Meanwhile my real mother is sitting by the side of someone who is really dying
and who knows what thoughts populate her untouchable mind.
If this is love then a chasm so great lies between people
a dry moat of dead stars a forsaken vacuum
we might as well be dreaming of having lunch with each other
as we sit at the kitchen table eating cheese sandwiches.
So what if I hear when my mother says, "Do you want some juice?"
And she hears me say, "No thanks."
This is a coincidence. The clocks are poised to change
soon it will be the next second
in which we'll be strangers. The ones we really are.

DEAR ELIZABETH

2007-02-12T13:02:00.000-05:00

this is a response to Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art"
(which you already knew if you have read that poem before!)
(if you haven't, go google that instead of reading this, hers is
infinitely better)

DEAR ELIZABETH

I haven't mastered it. It hurts like a bitch
every time. No matter if the limb
was a discounted sweatshirt I regretted buying
at first, or four hundred dollars. I could kick a wall in.
Just the thought of losing my mother—which,
as someone recently pointed out, is merely selfish—
sends me crawling up the walls
of my rage.

And you? If your ghost were to visit me
at teatime, wearing (I imagine) sensible shoes
and cable-knit stockings, I would thank you
for your poems and then say, You were
being sarcastic, right? Because your rage
also burns like a cold fire just behind your
carnations and island harbors full of
tiny white sails.

If we held a contest of losses between us, you'd win.
Though your trophy would surely dissolve almost
immediately. What does it mean, anyway, for a dead person
to tell you what is and isn't difficult? Though of course you were living
when you wrote about lost keys, and hours, and homes.
Well, dear invisible Elizabeth, I guess
you've mastered it now, and one day
I will too.

(an older version just so i have it in case my computer dies)

DEAR ELIZABETH

I haven't mastered it. It hurts like a bitch
every time. Like tearing a limb off my side,
fascia clinging to each other with rubbery
stubbornness. No matter if the limb
was a discounted sweatshirt I regretted buying
at first but had grown to love after travelling in it,
or four hundred dollars tossed after internet
plane tickets when I made the return for March
instead of February and had to buy new tickets
to correct my mistake. I could kick a wall in, that's
how unpleasant and how terrible I become.
Just the thought of losing the ones I love—which,
as someone recently pointed out, is merely selfish,
I couldn't care less about my mother's life,
it's my own love for her life I care about—
the mere thought of her death sends me crawling
up the walls of my rage.

And you? If your ghost were to visit me
at teatime, wearing (I imagine) sensible shoes
and cable-knit stockings, I would thank you
for your poems and then ask, You were
being sarcastic, right? Because your rage
also burns like a cold fire just behind your
carnations and island harbors full of tiny
white sails. But perhaps you meant it,
had indeed some trick; after all, if we held
a contest of losses between us, you'd emerge
triumphant, clutching a trophy which would surely
dissolve in your hands before your hands themselves
dissolved again into air. What does it mean
for a dead person to tell you what is and isn't
difficult? Though of course you were living
when you wrote about lost keys, hours, and homes. Well,
dear invisible Elizabeth, I suppose at any rate
you've mastered it now.

A SECRET NAME FOR BEAUTY

2007-02-08T14:59:00.001-05:00

A SECRET NAME FOR BEAUTY

Oh Marguerite.
It was difficult
to wake up this
afternoon.
I felt so
taut,
ological.
It seems that
love is all about
being all about
being in love
as the doe does
what does do
what do those
does do?
Now Marguerite
she was like a doe.
I remember Marguerite.
She was a stunner
that stunning Marguerite.
She stole my
something bright
and hid it
at the bottom of a lake
deeper down than
the deepest diver
could dive down.
Since then
every beauty
has had in my mind
the secret name
Marguerite.

loneliness

2007-02-06T14:44:00.000-05:00

loneliness

a silver dagger probing the heart's cavities

a candy wrapper blowing down an empty alley

inside the femur

or without a body

a flicker in the atmosphere

an itch in the air's ear

POEM

2007-02-06T14:39:00.001-05:00

this may or may not be part of the manuals

POEM

a word ranch
with word cows
lassoed by words
holding word lassos

MY SON THE CHOREOGRAPHER

2007-02-06T13:38:00.000-05:00

MY SON THE CHOREOGRAPHER

A dancer hurls himself through space.
Maybe he's my son.
Maybe I once yelled at him,
Ribbons? There are too many of them in this house.
Cups against saucers?
Stop it, the noise makes me sad.
Maybe I had another son in my mind
who I loved more,
or (another way of saying it) I was my own son
and had no time to be a mother.

My son the choreographer.
Now you keep pushing your memories
off the stage, desperately,
until you fall onto their chest, crying.
I gave you those memories to choreograph.
And your second father, the bastard
who stole your immune system
and also transformed time into a creature
with six wings,
two covering the eyes two covering the feet two covering
the genitals
and a mouth of blue fire
burning between the feathers.
I watched it change:
the field of time stood up,
grew a face—half Love, half Death—
arms sprouted from its sides,
and wings from the arms.
And he changed the air around him,
as a sunken pothole changes the road around it,
as a flaming tree in autumn
changes the backyard,
like a father in a kitchen.

See that?

I love to be pulled under, always have,
and the suction it creates on the surface.
I wasn't necessarily thinking
about you up there in your little boat.
And now look at you, with your own
six wings, your own
fierce blue mouth.
My son, we are the same double-helix paint
on the same canvas of cells,
but look: how different
the pictures we paint are,
and how alike.

LETTER TO A YOUNG PROPHET

2007-02-04T01:17:00.001-05:00

this is kind of part of the Manuals series...

LETTER TO A YOUNG PROPHET

There is a waterfall
at a man's center
but it's frozen
by the world.
Your job is to kneel
beneath it and warm
his body, to draw
that fountain downward
making a home for it
in your mouth,
like a prophet
preparing for God's word.

ENEMIES

2007-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

ok, revised from the version that was up here before:

ENEMIES

And yet the strings of me and the strings of you are played on by the same air.

How is that.

In my dream, you are holding a small globe made of rubber bands.

It is your secret history.

I want to put it in my mouth.

As if it could pass from your body to mine.

As if I were a vampire toothing your neck for the sweet pooled vermilion

of your pain.

How can I not be you?

And you, what can you accept from me?

ANNE CARSON

2007-01-25T14:38:00.000-05:00

*sigh* ... a penny tossed in the fountain of regret.

ON NOT BEING ABLE TO GO SEE ANNE CARSON READ TONIGHT

If I were in the room with you I might beam
through my pores so brightly I'd break them
and certainly this is why the fates contrived
for my father to be in town tonight and meet
me and my sister for dinner in Williamsburg.
We will be eating pizza on Bedford and North
Eighth Street while you are illuminating
at the crossroads of Ancient Greece and My Own
Loneliness. Me and my sister and my father
who gave us both life but knew nothing of us,
no one in the world did, in that moment
of creation, when we were two sparks
containing the fires we are now. No wonder
the mystics talk about sparks all the time.
Even the sun is a spark if you look at it
from far enough away.

TEN RULES OF THE FANTASY BOX

2007-01-25T01:32:00.000-05:00

ok, it's really time for bed.......

TEN RULES OF THE FANTASY BOX

1. There is a fantasy box and the fantasy box is a place where everything is in
its place.

2. In the fantasy box, outside the fantasy box does not exist.

3. Everything lines up perfectly with the curves of the fantasy box.

4. A fantasy box is never subject to decay,

5. When the lights go out.

6. When the lights go out inside it is so poignant to watch people walk around painlessly. Like tasting a mouthful of rehydrating mushrooms, bursting richly in the rich red of your mouth.

7. You are like a gut string stretched over a gourd, being plucked by the people walking by.

8. When people look painless you are not seeing the milky ways inside them, the light streaks and the dark streaks, the streak of eternity and the streak of mortality, and

9. the loneliness of thinking of their bodies after death, burned and scattered (like stars in the daytime) or sealed in boxes (like when the lights go out inside).

10. When the lights go out inside you begin to wish for a fantasy box.

MUSIC (another version)

2007-01-25T01:25:00.001-05:00

MUSIC

I really believed
I would not grow up
and now that the one
who believed is gone,
everything
is subject to question,
an orchestra of questions
playing a symphony
of questions.

NO PHANTOMS

2007-01-24T13:49:00.000-05:00

this one seems to contain multiple phantoms, i mean poems, but for now I kind of like it that way.

NO PHANTOMS

"I am haunted by no phantoms. It is rather that the ashes I stir up contain the crystallization that hold the image, reduced or synthetic, of the living and impure beings that they constituted before the fire intervened. If life has a meaning, this image (from the beyond?) has perhaps some significance. That is what I should like to know. And it is why I write."
—Blaise Cendrars

What was that hive of bees burrowed in the ground
in front of the front door of my parents' house that summer?
They swarmed around me but I escaped inside somewhat miraculously
And what was that alarm my parents had installed why
did they need to install an alarm
As if since I had last visited everything had grown more dangerous
and safer at the same time.

There is a lot of multiplication in the world.
Most of what humans do is just to keep doing the math
trying to figure out what is going on around them.
Or should I say we, us. Do the math, young one. That's your job for now.
Keep it going, young one. Make a chicken soup.
Sleep in your quilt of numbers, young one.
Solve a theorem.
Fly to Germany to present it.
Order a Coke on the plane.
Do you understand the complicated algorithm
of its fizz?

Young one, you remind me of a man I knew who lived in airports
for two months
doing research for his novel
about a man who lived in airports.
I was certain this friend was going to become famous.
Perhaps that was a symptom of love.
He wrote in notebooks bought at airport bookstores
with pens found beneath airport benches.
Every few days he would fly somewhere new
but he would never leave the airport.
And the people who came to work each day
at the coffee stand
spent their days on the edge of air travel—
so close they could smell
the air of Spain or Tokyo on the clothes
of the travellers who ordered cappucinos
to keep them awake during layovers.
But at night they returned home
and each night, my friend
was the one watching them leave.

Do you understand what I am telling you,
young one, pinned beneath your tray
upon which rests your jubilant soda
whose many bubbles commit themselves skyward
although technically already in the sky?
It doesn't matter. We fly back and forth
if we happen to be born into the class of humans
who fly back and forth during the time
when humans fly back and forth.
Parents and hives of bees and alarms are countries
of the mind,
which is the only kind of country there is.
And we are like spiders secreting an invisible
thread of theorems and nostalgia,
weaving a blanket for the raw and tortured globe.

HERE ARE THE CLUES

2007-01-22T13:27:00.000-05:00

like everything else, this is a waaay first draft.
i stole the title from Steve Orlen's class at residency - but Steve didn't
say it, it was someone else during the Q & A, a fiction teacher I think.
I absolutely love the phrase:

HERE ARE THE CLUES, WHERE IS THE MYSTERY?

Why do I love my mother so much.
Why do I think about her dying all the time.
Why does she visit dying people every day—it is her job, but why did she choose this for
her job—and read the obituaries first.
Why does my mother love football.
Why did the Colts score a touchdown just as the band ended their first song.
What is a coincidence.
Like a million clocks are running simultaneously and if two of them read the same hour
oh! it's a coincidence!
Like everything has its own internal clock and the
time
between
second-
hand
notches
is
excruciating.
You could swing a whole planet off of that energy between seconds.
You could sigh yourself into a different universe
where a daughter is a mother's mother
like my mother was to hers.

The refrigerator sighs at night while the house is sleeping.
The provolone cheese just sits there, sits, sits, sits, sits, sits, sits, sits,
until someone picks it up.
But actually tiny invisible changes are happening
and if it sits long enough it grows
a little garden on its yellow plain.
And me, oh, I too sit sit sit sit sit sit sit sit.
And my changes are also imperceptible.
I put on my scarf, then take it off.
There is a distance to some words and others are intimate.
There is a distance to some intimacies and others are proximate.
Some words shine a cold light and some illuminate with a glow.
Watch out because sometimes I wield a word dashingly
and sometimes I impale myself on a word
and sometimes I keep a word sheathed by my hip
like a subsitute you-know-what
a refrigerator maybe
a second hand
or a third hand
or a mother who will never die before I do.

WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT

2007-01-22T12:38:00.000-05:00

WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT

When the lights go out inside it is poignant to watch people walk around painlessly.
Like tasting a mouthful of rehydrating mushrooms, bursting richly in the rich red
of your mouth. It is a kind of need. If need means thinking I need, there is room
for disparagement. A lot of fat could get sheared off that idea. But need can also be
like a tooth-nerve, a shudder like you are a gut string stretched across a gourd
and being plucked, being plucked by the stars strewn like salt across the night
sky—that is no way to describe the shock of seeing stars after many months in a
city—they are not the metaphor, you are—they pluck you like a harp. As do the
people walking around. You call them "painless" because you are outside them;
actually they have milky ways inside them, we all do, the streak of eternity against
a dark sky of mortality. Like your own loneliness when you think of their bodies
after death, burned and scattered (like stars in the daytime) or sealed in boxes (like
when the lights go out inside, that's it, a kind of coffin). Which of course is thinking of
your body after death. Then will you be like them, painless-seeming, will you see
yourself from the outside? Or will another quivering being think of you, so that
after your death the thought of you will be music playing on the harp of someone else.

YOU

2007-01-17T14:28:00.000-05:00

YOU

When you think about a word,
it unravels in your hands.
Like Wind. You think
it pushes you down while
you are walking uphill
in January. But it's nothing
of the sort. It's just air (and what
is air) being led along by a
turning planet and convection
currents and you happen to be
on a hill where it is. And what
is a Hill. A place where the land
is higher so it's harder to walk
up and you see more from the top.
It's nothing of the sort. A hill
is a fold of earth gathered on
itself and if you weren't there
to mark it what name would it
have then? And Then. Then
is a When not Now, even Now
upon which we cannot agree,
Now, a series of disjointed or
maybe overlapping Now's become
Then's as soon as named. And
___S. More than one we group
as one and give a new name
of NameS. Itself becomes a
themselves when a camera zooms
out and Self dissolves in favor
of Selves but then what is being
made plural exactly. And
Exactly. Is there an Exactly
in the house? Is your Exactly
Exactly like my Exactly?
And if so, am I really You,
You Me, and Me just Us
waiting to be made You?

A FOUNTAIN WE ARE STANDING IN BUT CANNOT SEE

2007-01-17T14:12:00.000-05:00

A FOUNTAIN WE ARE STANDING IN BUT CANNOT SEE

I've moved into a cave to perfect my visions against the cold wall.
Press your palms flat against that wall and you can feel death beginning
to seep in through the matrix of your skin cells which are not, after all,
solid: no there is space between them space for infection and space for
infiltration and eventually for death. Then skin is not skin in the way
it is skin when you are alive, skin is an object of pre-decay to be touched
shudderingly by those who loved you best or just happened to be there
when it happened. Unhappy hapless happening, how will you happen?
Prophet! Tell me of my death! No, wait, don't...

Ladies clap quietly without making a sound in the church of the invader
which has become their church. Rock side to side. Oh fame I used to want
you so badly until I saw America's absolute grace and now all I want is Self,
radiating gem of true Self more difficult than fame and more precious.
A fountain we are standing in but cannot see. I didn't want to bow down
until the idol got up grabbed my shoulders and shook me: "If I'm not real, why
does everyone leave me dishes of food while they starve?" And he's right. People
mail letters to themselves so they can be seen removing them from the mailbox
a few days later, delightedly. With a knowing smile—I am one of them. But
I don't want to be anymore.

SAPPHIC FRAGMENT

2007-01-17T13:20:00.001-05:00

On the stage of my dreams
I hovered like a silver dagger
outside with the smokers.
A girl asked me a question
I could not answer and so I kissed
my own forearm
impertinently, like a man
on the stage of my dreams.

(borrowed/stolen from the dream life of JH)

MUSIC

2007-01-16T14:33:00.000-05:00

hi.
my lines are getting so long i had to change the template of my blog slightly.
well, thanks to tim for "la mer" which planted the seeds for this poem.
xo josie

MUSIC

There is a settle and hush. The high priest waves a stick and the others, facing us,
begin their psalms. They swell inside us and plant a longing for answers
in our bodies though it is, I think, the body that asks. For example, I really believed
I would not grow up and now that the one who believed is gone, everything
is subject to question, an orchestra of questions playing a symphony of questions.
And who can tell me what holds it all together—the piccolos & the oppressors & the
oppressed, the worrying & the contrabass & the timpani, the pizzicato the legato
the throat-clearing the overture the interlude the finale the fine mist spray of silence after,
a rainbow of silence held in the light, then the victorious hitting of palms against palms,
forcing the air between them into the room's pooled air. That vast pool with its eddies in
open mouths, and deeper, in the violin-shaped air still throbbing inside the violins. You
are breathing this air if you are alive to consider these words—that much is still
guaranteed—though we may soon have to buy it by the bottle and wear masks while
walking back to the parking lot, right now we emerge smiling, naked-faced, clutching
our programs, with psalms growing in the center of our bodies, like palm trees whose
leaves will eventually splay past our bodies' edges when we blossom into the full
symphony of death. Will we see each other then. Will there be a conductor to guide us.
Will we hear the note that rings out from us and the ripples still vibrating in air after
we've left our seats, left the need for seats, and temples, and air, and answers, and music.

JANUARY DIARIES OF X

2007-01-14T15:10:00.001-05:00

figured i'd finish this since it's really january now...

JANUARY DIARIES OF X

January 1.

No.

January 2.

Still no.

January 3.

Maybe.

January 4.

I thought I hated peas my whole life but I liked them today.

January 5.

Allergies. How can you have allergies in January. I'm cold.

January 6.

I have a cold.

January 7.

pm, am, pm, am, pm, am.

January 8.

January 8.

January 9.

Today the slant of light shot me through the heart. How many times do you have to tell me things like this. I will get off your back when I am ready.

January 10.

I will get off your back when I am ready.

January 11.

I'm ready.

January 12.

I bought a ticket for tomorrow. I hate planes.

January 13.

Well, I went on the plane but in my mind I was in my room the whole time. Except when I thought I was going to die and then I was in the plane.

January 14.

I didn't die, and now I'm somewhere else and so is my room.

January 15.

I think I'll go back to my room. But which one.

January 16.

Today I was looking at some cobblestones and I realized that the current of progress is everywhere but you can duck beneath it and then it just passes over your head.

January 17.

My stomach hurts.

January 18.

Sick.

January 19.

Sick but eating crackers.

January 20.

Sick but eating brown rice and bananas.

January 21.

Maybe it's time to go back home.

January 22.

I went on a plane and dreamed about someone I had forgotten existed. When I got home he had called.

January 23.

A movie is a much better vacation because you can go back to your room afterwards.

January 24.

He is coming to visit.

January 25.

He is sleeping on the couch.

January 26.

The left side of his head is resting on my right leg.

January 27.

Goodbye: sorry, we can't accept foreign currency.

January 28.

Maybe I have been living under a raincoat like he says.

January 29.

Today it rained and I got wet.

January 30.

I'm dry now.

January 31.

Still January.

WRITERS ON A COUCH WATCHING FOOTBALL

2007-01-14T14:33:00.000-05:00

THREE WRITERS ON A COUCH WATCHING FOOTBALL

Don't you think those lines on the field are kind of like poetry? Ah, a touchdown. A brilliant yellow streak down the player's helmet, like an image. It reorders the game around itself. The lines paint themselves on the players. The players are the words. Words that pile on each other, then spread out, then coalesce, chasing each other down the field of the poem. One word that slips through the holes between other words to the end zone where it dives onto the orange-painted astroturf, cuddling the ball like the meaning of a poem. Words with biceps and strong jaws. O handsome words.

One day after school a boy came to the front door. I'd never seen him before. He was wearing a football uniform and holding a steaming platter of potato casserole. "Mary?" he said. (My name is Louise.) I had no idea what was going to happen next. ...What's going to happen next?

Where is the guitar that keeps me going when the fall leaves leave. Where's the mellow grease that keeps your mushroom growing. Go forth girls and underwrite my loss and don't stare stubbornly till the nose falls off to where my grandmother from above cries out "touchdown!"

"Would you like fries with that?" the lunch lady said.
Yes, yes please. Fat? Ha. Nobody knows fat like I do. It's 1972, I'm in the seventh grade, and I weigh 230 pounds.

The one-eyed faces of the tubas turning like sunflowers towards the crowd. I'm so restless and lean. I do exercises all the time, invisible exercises. I want to keep my Do you believe in shame? good and tight.

A football field with an ambient light.
A glowing field.
I like how the cheerleaders are watching my furnace.
Florida State's not playing.

TODAY

2007-01-14T14:11:00.000-05:00

with thanks to HK, who gave me a ride to asheville and sat next to me writing while i wrote the beginning of this.
i'm not sure if this should be just one long stanza.

TODAY

Tomorrow puts on lipstick in the bathroom, while in the bedroom
yesterday licks its wounds. But where is today? Is it the soup
in your mouth? Is it the squeak of your hair emerging from follicles?
Is it these words in your mind, synapses crossing and crossing the woods
in your head like a horizontal Sisyphus? Is it your breath like a ball thrown
straight up to the sun till it becomes a tiny sun, and then falling back to earth
where it's a tiny earth? Once I found today on the beach and put it in my pocket,
but when I got home it was gone. And once today was a woman to whom I whispered,
"relax" as I kissed her neck, but she just laughed at me, shook her head, tied me
to the bedposts, and left.

But once I walked into a clear blue today and each of my vertebrae burst
into song, it was the many-leaved, inaudible song of driving around a bend
and suddenly the ocean is there, and has been for millenia, and you are there
to see it right now, the song of coffee which is the song of blood hymning through
miraculous veins, the song of dreaming someone you love has died and waking up and
they are still alive, or of dreaming you see someone who has died, and they tell you
"Stop worrying about me, I'm fine here" and you know it's true, you don't have to
worry anymore, even after you have awoken into the tomorrow that has put on today's
clothes and taken you like a baby from yesterday's arms.

CHARCOAL

2007-01-14T14:09:00.001-05:00

this is kinda gross. sorry.

CHARCOAL

You're living in a very well-maintained building. Just imagine
if you weren't, the fire would explode in your face
and the blood duende do his little dance on dreams of ash.
My body has finally turned into a book after all these years.
I forgot to take him out of the fire and look, he burned to ash,
his head is a stick of charcoal to be ground into the floor.
While you're flirting on the subway, imagine you are a stranger,
imagine a beloved wing-nut entering your anus. These are the things
that keep you young – not botox and whole grain toast.

DINNER MEETING

2007-01-05T22:01:00.000-05:00

hello from the dark and spooky room which is my mind during MFA residency.
this little tidbit is the first thing i've written here and it was such a relief to just finally write something instead of talking about writing and hearing people talk about writing. anyway, i made it through dinner without crying, that's the good news.

DINNER MEETING

We all live together, feeling alone, in the dormitory
between time and not time, where chocolate chunks of shame
nugget the walls and a cold flourescent desire dribbles down
between them. Tonight we strapped flashlights to our foreheads
and drove to a family restaurant, where we confessed our personal shame
to each other over salmon and pasta wet with olive oil, lemon and thyme.
But what we most wanted to share, we guarded, each of us, around our necks
in a tiny flask. The liquid inside warmed slowly at the hearths of our
chests until we had lay down our tens and ones and drove back to the cave.
I mean the monastery. Now we are getting ready for bed, brushing
our teeth at the adjacent sinks in pajamas and slippers, and still the little flasks lie
like hot sleeping robins against our respective breasts, our separate breasts
which will be touched, but never by each other.

Oh, and here is another version. Which do you prefer?

DINNER MEETING

We all live together, feeling alone, in dinner meeting.
Tonight we drove to a family restaurant, our personal shame
wet with olive oil, lemon and thyme.
What we most wanted to share, we guarded
in tiny flasks at the hearths of our breasts
until we lay down our tens and ones and drove back to the cave.
I mean, the monastery. Now, brushing our teeth at adjacent sinks
in pajamas and slippers, we are
like hot sleeping robins which will be touched, but never by each other.

THANK YOU FOR CREATING ME

2006-12-11T12:04:00.000-05:00

hello dear readers,

here is today's offering, brought to you by ozzie's fair trade organic french roast.

love, josie

THANK YOU FOR CREATING ME

He came over with an accordion
dripping with heartbreak
it filled up the room with a dripping sound,
kind of French. That's what it sounded like to her.
Heartbreak is pretty easy when it walks
hairlessly and doesn't stop to ring the bell
it's pretty easy the way a woman loves the daintiness
she never had.
So when they started to stalk her,
she thought, perhaps it is my razor sharp perfume.
And when she got tired and old and her bangs fell,
it was a relief, when it wore off.
Now she is a lecturer, she lives in the west,
she sends out an email saying the son of a bitch is dead,
I apologize for my profanity,
but he killed people I imagine I might have loved.
She has an imaginary friend who insults her all the time.
She realizes that we are God's
masturbatory masterpiece
and vice versa.
Is it men, women, or God who makes a body cast
for the un-dainty lady
and writes on her tombstone, as she wished:
thank you for creating me,
I have loved believing in you while it lasted.

DONATION

2006-11-30T13:38:00.000-05:00

este pequeno poema
es por el maestro,
quien no se sienta
hasta que su maestro se siente.
(shit, how do you say that right??? ayudeme, maestro!)

DONATION

If you have a lot of privilege
it comes with free guilt.
And if you don't there is something or nothing wrong
either way
sometimes you just want to eat more pretzels
but the rawhide heart muscle pushes you out of yourself
again and again.

You arrive empty-handed on a tide of blood
asking for books.
We need books, you say.
we need pencils and
we need cookies and juice
so our fingers will work.
We need sleep to replenish
sometimes we need to go to the bathroom and cry
we need the kind of money you could give me
to learn to swim to shore.

At our meeting you ask me what I need.
Something to work on slowly
and complete concomitant with its end.
This is not the right year for the books I will need later,
the things I want to do but cannot do,
the business contained in my own eggs.
You advise me to follow my emotional stability.
I suppose that too is a kind of money
which falls from the sky
labeled "books."

There's a special way to undermine yourself
imagining you don't deserve something you haven't yet understood.
This is what you know and why you glow.
Build a raft of books
to paddle your children out of the blood river,
teacher,
I will watch from the shore with open arms.

I THINK ABOUT HOW EVERYONE LOOKS AT THE STARS

2006-11-02T14:10:00.000-05:00

I think about how everyone looks at the stars. What would draw you in?
What would make you come back to someone you lived with for a summer,
ten years ago? I don't know, but I know everyone looks at the stars,
everyone I know looks at the stars, and I am afraid of heights.
Looking down from a star would be difficult to say the least:

A mountaineer with a boutaineer
I am a famous poet
you are a famous poet
my intestine is a famous poet
Palestine is a favorite poet
My most famous poet is an icelandic ogre
who waits behind trees for my friend to come over
My favorite poet is
a bloody zit
perched on a twig
overlooking the skylight
enough to keep me strangled

are you the woman in the hat
or the one looking at the woman in the hat
what i'm trying to say is, if you look at or out, you get a different.

for a run
for a shower.

you can be happy and cheerful for a run for a shower.

But if you are to fail,
fail fully, filly!—

faithfully, filthily

filigree.

in closing, here are some things of fall. squash. vines. darkness in the chambers of the torso.

a darkness like dust into which

i take my leave.

WAR LULLABY

2006-10-19T17:55:00.000-04:00

it's been a while, i know. in service of the big picture, i'm going to be writing less until december, when I will be writing more. but when i can sneak away for a moment, i will whisper what i write--which will probably be very rough--into your ears.

WAR LULLABY

drink up, little beetle.
when you drop your watch, time doesn't stop.
sometimes you are five years old and I watch your face break
as you start to cry.
did you believe my nonsense, when I told you you were a fiery stallion,
chronically under-estimated?
milk and honey was a misunderstood enema,
exploding into a doorfull of cosmopolitan
assumptions.
beside me, a father drinks beer with his daughter in silence.
maybe they hate each other.
or maybe they just love each other in other ways than before.
the thing is, reality can change like a number.
like a gorilla in the wilderness.
believe me. or don't:
no, don't believe me:
i'm just you in a different dress.

PIER 43

2006-09-21T13:45:00.000-04:00

PIER 43

noble
       craggy
              escapees
       of the ship
that pees birds
       "I believe it's chemical"
love,
       travel,
              a prison bookstore.
while on pier 43
       we're aiming for an understanding of
              what is & isn't &
desire to be with the one who makes
       you most lonely
whose cord
       you sever repeatedly
and whose milk you spill

now the sun is setting my clock
       against the backdrop
              of Alcatraz

WASHINGTON, D.C.

2006-09-21T13:42:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON, D.C.

So near the national archives my
shoulder was the national conscience
and the capitol a reminder of the life
I could have chosen/did not choose, saying
      I'd rather a delicate sway.
Still, a marriage mimics a country with its
free gifts, our twin exports of Democracy & Obesity.
And all the teenage daughters are hot for a revolutionary
with problems, o problems, such problems in love.
An essay seems better-written than it is
when you have just woken up from a dream
      of making love to the writer.
That's why we pledge allegiance first thing.
Are you afraid to be an under cover lover
whose Buddhist heart palpitates redly
among the green-tea-bellied businessmen?
You who would eat the veins out of my calves,
your violent streak an inefficient medley of
juxtapositions cleaning, dirtying, cleaning, dirtying.
Stripes say something and my stripes
      are meat-cleaver kind.
So I'll jog over to your place
eat a spaghetti dinner.
My husband and I have the logos of
our time together branded on our backs
and if I could just let go,
a million coasts of difference would
      open between us
and all that is unspoken.
The divorce may not be so bad.

FISHING IN NEW JERSEY

2006-09-21T13:39:00.000-04:00

FISHING IN NEW JERSEY

We probably should be evolved higher than
      this.—
The algae clings to the lure and
the angle of an ankle is indispensable—

right when I started to say that
      the lakewater became
      psychedelic as if revealing
what was underneath anyway

I'll cling but I'll recognize the feeling
as if you don't want me to be younger
the sky slightly sullied
rosé lamé

is there a wisdom past insight
      beloved dignity
goes so fast in the hospital
lock the baby in the dock and someone dies a floor up

she turns her bow
      an open lap a gurgle
o world
      cleave my heart!

A GODDESS IS PATIENT SOMETIMES

2006-09-21T13:32:00.000-04:00

A GODDESS IS PATIENT SOMETIMES

it's
your seeming unattractiveness
that makes you
      so dangerous,
         Abraham

a ruler is frightened sometimes,
but a mother?—

there's so much I don't know, said
the small & lovely tree
as cocaine
numbed the back of my throat
in suburban august—retrospectively
      generous

at the time merely syrup.

and so some of us
      laughed as we thought
about bombs & marble & which was stronger—

a mosquito or a rabbi—

and believing the leaf
         change
      believing
      a hundred dollars or a hundred idolaters
or the cost of coffee
or the balcony of my arms around the stage
of my face.

That's everything I'm not—
[a box of perfect]

your money is so money, Abraham,
your dirt is so dirt,
your God is so God.
When a mountain overflows it
      calls you rose,
and when an angel overflows
it's time for death.

time for the death of this
      particular pain—
and because I am of the
      ones who would know I would know.

maybe I'm angry at demon
maybe moon warrior or
      maybe
a back-turned mortal, my husband
who now recedes into
the living.

graduate school for ms bliss

2006-09-21T13:29:00.000-04:00

hello dear readers.

i just found out i got into grad school for poetry. it's a low-residency MFA program (so i can continue being a wandering troubador and avoiding workshops at all cost, while improving my writing and meeting other poets, i hope). supposedly it's a good one, and one that lets you write as yourself rather than engaging in what anselm berrigan called "factional aesthetics" or something like that the other night. by the way, he gave a really wonderful talk and reading at CUNY graduate center. anyway, i'm very gratified to be accepted.

and now that i'm back from tour, I have new postings.... which will go up momentarily, as long as the internet connection here in the brooklyn writers studio doesnt stop working.

besos,
josie

I DON'T NEED TO CRY THE OCEAN DOES IT FOR ME

2006-08-10T13:27:00.000-04:00

dear reader. should I choose one of these titles?
if so, which one?

I DON'T NEED TO CRY THE OCEAN DOES IT FOR ME
(or, BELIEVING IS AN ACT)

Not so much the
having as the
having had,
not so much the making love
as the having
donned the
ritual garment.
I believe in all kinds
of false gods
I believe believing
is an act
resulting from a state
of mind
and if you get your
talons in that
project don't let go.
When a chopper
has chopped my love off
I go to the beach
and when it happens
that a dress of a different stripe
wanders acrimoniously
by and snags the object
I was holding
which I was calling mine,
mine, and leaves me
holding a reason
to cry, I come here because
I don't need to cry
the ocean does it for me.
I don't need to bleach
my heart the sun will.
And whatever's left behind
maggots will enjoy
this too I see
when I come here to
unfold the blue blanket
and shake my life
out onto the sand.

THE DEVIL'S FIZZ-BOMBS

2006-08-10T12:30:00.000-04:00

THE DEVIL'S FIZZ-BOMBS

Lizard-child, Hieronymous Bosch predicted you. The Book of Medical Oddities illustrated you. And now in a field of raining sour fizz-bombs you finally open your mouth to the chartreuse sky. It is odious to be a prophet. Rest well if you can. Do not think about what they have stuffed your pillow with. Money, the juice of oppression, nectar of suffering, morphine harvested from the spinal fluid of those under your boot. What you were meant to do is not what you are doing. Rest now. The fizz-bombs will still shower you in dreams.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM

2006-08-03T20:28:00.000-04:00

dear readers, I have been away. and i will be again. but here i am now. and i will come back again.

AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

One who grows up in peacetime walks around the Metropolitan Museum of Art
trying to get over you by looking at Mayan wall paintings
of a god with his hand on his erect penis which shoots blood.
"The god offers his sacrificial blood" is how the plaque describes it
and then fifteen feet to the right "the second incarnation of the god
offers his sacrificial blood" and once more "the third incarnation
of the god offers his sacrificial blood" fifteen more feet down.
Each time blood arcs towards the soil where it sprouts into a
holy tree in whose branches sit a flamboyant bird.
And in this way the world is created the world which if you walked
from the moment of that Mayan god-blood forward and avoided
death would eventually lead you to now, and perhaps even to
New York City, where you would find me in the Met looking up
at the blood god because it is July and so hot (did you
learn about global warming during your slow ascent
through the millenia?) that the mayor gives a performance
of turning off his air conditioner (another not unrelated development
of the past hundred years). I don't have an air conditioner or a penis
but I do have blood here at the Met with honey between my breasts.
I could make love with you on a mountain of cheesecake
while the bombs rained but the truth is we both know you never meant to sing
the songs you sang me. If the power does go out, those Mayan drawings
will be like they were in their cave and at least a few people
will fall in love in the darkened Metropolitan Museum of Art
and maybe come back if it doesn't work out although by then
the Mayan wall paintings will not be there anymore
and it probably won't be so hot and maybe not peacetime either.

UNBELIEVABLE TIMELINE

2006-07-10T21:06:00.000-04:00

ah, yet another rejection letter awaited me when i got back from my trip last night.
but still. what can you do.

UNBELIEVABLE TIMELINE

This is how an infection begins
it moves towards capturing per minute frames
within frames one angle off to form a multimultihedronstar
which explodes your heart
it just explodes!
what are you thankful for thankfinch,
I just did what I do with my nose and get ready
to fail every morning
like a perfect sweater for smokers
a cowprod for neurons.
An infection is a firebrand
which always wears something
sexy when she dances dirty with your soul
who was a monkey
pretending to be a human pretending to be a monkey;
a certain if you were, you weren't.
Here in Napoleon's testicle, it is dark
and stimulating. The ideas of war are beginning.
Two hundred years in the future,
a famous basketball player
is about to be born.
His mother walks enthralled into the other side of the city's
unbelievable timeline,
through a backdrop darkly.

NATURE SHOW/A GIRL'S MANUAL

2006-07-10T20:50:00.000-04:00

NATURE SHOW/A GIRL'S MANUAL

If you wet the sheets – if you
wet the sheets without meaning to – if you
intend through
the sheets
with too much integrity,
if you
carry the water
upstairs inside you
and pour it on the sheets with your tongue,
if you
spill it around your drawn-in ankles,
you and the sun
will wake up alone.
You will shave
wax
bleed
you will cry under a monsoon moon
Or you will let the ocean cry for you and just
sit with your calves hanging
and your toe-rings making small
O's where a mouth was.
Don't
mark a half-birthday
Don't go under
when the undertow tows.
Walk out of the water
with your delicate toe-rings.
Cause you are no cartoon
no cartoon.
And if the male of the species
hunts for a cartoon
the female becomes invisible
due to her blurry edges.

SISTER

2006-07-03T21:47:00.000-04:00

with apologies to my real sisters.

SISTER

Knowing is a mockery
if we cannot know each other
and a mockery if we do.
She woke me up screaming
every night while she slept,
and I held myself apart from her dreams
like a lover or a surgeon,
she was a fisherman's wife
ripping nets in the evening
and mending them in the morning.
When she grew older she carried
a dildo in a black plastic bag,
always piercing the lyric
with some kind of symptom
while her hair hung low over
the orange blossoms she painted,
her eyes angled up
towards the sanitarium jars
she arranged on shelves.
There is a temptation to eulogize
that which we do not understand
and to think of a sister as a thing
that should be beautiful.
A thing that does not bleed
at night. Whose horrors
are lesser than or equal to your
own. As if you could ever know
your own.

WHEN I LIVED AND DIED

2006-07-03T21:11:00.000-04:00

MORE ABOUT THE SUN WHILE DEATH HAS TURNED ITS FACE AWAY

the sun burns a hole in my back
the sun burns a hole wherever my
eyes look
the sun does not illuminate
or ruminate it simply takes its time to
make children through me
and children they are
all the concessions —and
what do you want sun
do you want a hymn do you
want fresh produce
do you want 1,000 near misses
should I arrange or withdraw the
primordial family in? or into? its
interdenominational
agony?

MY OLD HEART IS RIDDLED WITH NEW ROOMS

I used to be something and am now this
whose image-laden tutu you would
tug off a little boy wearing
your T shirt
yes it's been a whole hour
since I left you
at the diner, Antonio,
and I don't know how but it's not all right
trees pass
and I keep wondering
are you the boy I shot?
or infected with you-know-what?
you threw yourself from the train
looking for something real
looking for something real
for a more than temporary
insanity and
"teeming life" wishing for some
blank to be filled up
(with a vagina-sized
cigarette) anyway
you would have been a revolutionary
if you were born back then, Antonio,
I could tell the minute I met you,
I could tell by your hair.

THE VIRGIN WHO WOULD TAKE AWAY

any hurt.
we know the gaslamp and the
discomfort it can cause.
for we have sat in the park
watching the lights come out
from behind their hoods
at dusk.
we want someone to
carry us past Thanksgiving past
moonlit disability past dinner
on the porch
while the tugboats' interminable
crawl toward the harbor of death
is ringed with magenta lights
like Brooklyn has teeth,
like a dropcloth,
while we lie in the virgin's green womb
hiding from the shadows that
the lampposts
rhyme with our own.

WHEN I DIED

when I died,
it didn't matter one iota,
a puff of light perhaps

no mastery
no sorrow guitars
those all important
paisleys of shame
dissolved from my skin

I didn't even think
too bad I thought
so much about them

it was like one wave
coming in crosses another
coming out and their waters
tug through each other

like holding hands with someone
while you are pulled apart
and your knuckles start to
tug out of their sockets

and then you let go
and nothing changes

SISTERS IN ROOMS

2006-06-29T15:48:00.000-04:00

SISTERS IN ROOMS

sisters in rooms in dreams
park illegally and get my backpack
stolen when I don't know the language
swim through wax
I showed her an art book but
she didn't like bits of wood
sticking out from a page. and I
saw her danger of fundamentalism.
and so it was that my sister
always the anti-religious one
hung a copper trapeze from
the warehouse ceiling
and swung.

ON MY PLANET

2006-06-26T15:02:00.000-04:00

the other half of the revision of A Wet Handful of Seeds or whatever that was called.

i'm all about seeds and cutting things up and dreams this afternoon.

ON MY PLANET

The water falls and falls
but will not touch the thirsty pool
and yet I like to feel you push me
down, hard, as if God were
the pavement I was waiting
to meet during those ten years of praying
in a Thai restaurant
two blocks from the river,
vomiting invisibly into the awful-seeming truth
only to wake up facing south
into the rain, your hair turned gray.
One wet handful of seeds
can be a sign of who wrote them
and about whom, the way your mother
was revealed as mirage
while you were on the line
with the phone company
trying to convince them to cancel a fee,
and found only the
fill-in-the-blank
rotten cantaloupe
of longing, mouth
open, the fee you were trying
to cancel
which holds the world in place

WHERE I COME FROM IS NEVER ENOUGH

2006-06-26T15:00:00.000-04:00

this is a revision of A Handful of Wet Seeds or whatever that was called.

this is half of it and the other half is "On My Planet" which i will post shortly.

WHERE I COME FROM IS NEVER ENOUGH

Where I come from is never enough,
and you leaned over and said "I have
two questions for you, Alicia." I answered, "Yes, and yes." Then
, and I was

When a dream erases me like that, my own waterfall. Itself just a computer simulation.
Because
I found the poems your other lover wrote about her other lover—

well, "found" is not really accurate, they were tacked to the wall and
I realized. They met for dinner,

inside out from non- into existence,

while a terrible feeling
sprouted like a lotus in your diaphragm, the embryo turning itself

pustules erect,
those neon rules before:
gravity, felony, and empathy. Now so much like a, had told you things would be—
picnic table at the end of the trail suddenly
and you alone with a hammock of thready slime
connecting to another.

A WET HANDFUL OF SEEDS

2006-06-26T14:42:00.000-04:00

A WET HANDFUL OF SEEDS

Your hair turned gray and you leaned over and said "I have
two questions for you, Alicia." I answered, "Yes, and yes." Then
you were on the line with the phone company trying to convince them
to cancel a fee, and I was the fee you were trying to cancel.

When a dream erases me like that, only to wake up facing south
towards the rain, it can be a sign. And yet I like to feel you push me
down, hard, as if God had been the pavement I was waiting
to meet during those ten years of praying, when I found only

my own waterfall of longing. Itself just a computer simulation.
Because where I come from there is never simply enough,
the water falls and falls but will not touch the thirsty pool.
I found the poems your other lover wrote about her other lover—

well, "found" is not really accurate, they were tacked to the wall and
I realized who wrote them and about whom. They met for dinner in a
Thai restaurant two blocks from the river, while a terrible feeling
sprouted like a lotus in your diaphragm, the embryo turning itself

inside out from non- into existence, pustules erect, mouth
open, vomiting invisibly into the awful-seeming truth which erased
those neon rules which had held the world in place before:
gravity, felony, and empathy. Now so much like a rotten

cantaloupe, the way your mother had told you things would be—
that fill-in-the-blank picnic table at the end of the trail suddenly
revealed as mirage, and you alone with a hammock of thready slime
connecting one wet handful of seeds to another.

DO YOU REMEMBER HOW I TOLD YOU...

2006-06-19T12:51:00.000-04:00

DO YOU REMEMBER HOW I TOLD YOU THAT SOMETIMES I HAVE A BODY, AND SOMETIMES I DON'T? WELL, THIS IS IT.

.
It's good to have you here with your risk
a risk of more pregnancy & indelible beauty.
The suggested donation that follows me home.
It is your very not-knowing that keeps mine
awake. (Dear diary, keep me awake). Its
honeysuckle gives me what I want: sobbing.
I put on a skirt and mount my bicycle so
reminiscent of her hand. Waking up to read
the new tattoo on her wrist. "Gracious
cornflower bag full of blood
throbbing." How you doing? Like
the weather, like a light gray silent
Brooklyn evening, like the inside of a feather
pillow seen from the windows
of the Manhattan-bound F train. (Dear
diary, who will read you when I die?)
One day you'll be ashamed you were ever
this simple. But I will still
wear the dirt of your innocence on my
jacket sleeves like a corsage.

HELEN OF NOWHERE

2006-06-19T11:41:00.000-04:00

the title is taken from Philip Roth's book The Human Stain.

HELEN OF NOWHERE. HELEN OF NOTHING.

when your etymologies have all dried up
and more than one friend has absconded
the lonely water-fall at night
dried up with its etymologies & hagiographies
endless gay men holding hands in the subway
with french fries
trying to have a baby
a magical poster-eyed girl
and pain au chocolat
& the elation of travelling.
in a sailboat-shaped plane God took my husband away from me
the sun, the sun
drunken street full of beauty
next to the laundromat that dries & cries.

DIRTY THOUGHTS AT 11TH AND OCEAN

2006-06-15T12:14:00.000-04:00

summer approaches.

DIRTY THOUGHTS AT 11TH AND OCEAN

Excuse me, are you Italian?
Will you dance naked at my funeral?
Would I have to pay you beforehand?
It's too cloudless not to say Fuck Me! You're also
gonna die one day!
We're at the Beach! Have a beer!

FLOTSAM

2006-06-15T11:47:00.000-04:00

I'M SORRY THERE'S TOO MUCH FLOTSAM HERE TO RADIO BACK

Hm, for an excuse
This must be the oddest one I have received
What size jeans haunt you in dreams/forgotten breakfasts
on Amsterdam Avenue/hours looking for lost keys/
first rubbery penis glimpse
It's true that you are still in love
with you & your diaries
Years of congestion spit into a railway station corner
in Russia
you are trying to escape that corner where you slept?
It will continue even in the layered tropics – Rivera fetish handbags – allowance to follow and to fester
I am sad now that my oak tree has gone home
I manage the weight of hurricane force winds behind my eyes
if you find me strange this is probably why
I fell asleep on the train and it took a long, long time to even think
about who I was
where and why
it's like watching you settle into a business and announce:
prize! prize! as if you were a toddler learning your name
what do you think about how your rhinestones flower?
would you marry your previous incarnation?
flotsam
and in the floating flotsam you are afraid to say anything about what you really mean
I mean
I know what you mean, you mean mean man
whose yolk is a shy girl

ADULT POEMS

2006-06-14T22:58:00.000-04:00

just a little tapas for your evening perusal, fair readers...

ADULT POEMS

I.
You're everything to me
said the spork to the brunch.
Do you remember when I told you
that I go in and out of having a body?
If you can tell whether I have one
now, I'll marry you.

II.
Pull your pants up, I'm likely to be
more or less aware of your accident.
at which I shout
"ZABOOGIE!" you
go around shooting sparks of poetry out of your pimply ass
which shoot back at me...orange origami...
monstrous monstrosity.

III.
my breasts are succulent
and will one day
wither
why then dost thou compare the penis to a cactus

IV.
I will punish myself with you
til sweet death do save us from each other
come here, bride, kiss me with your
skeleton teeth.

UNDER UNDER.....

2006-06-08T15:14:00.000-04:00

UNDER UNDER UNDER UNDER UNDER YOU SIR

I look up to your look up look.
Remind me to unstitch seams stitched around
stitched lips, and risk
my orifice is your office
baby don't get up set upset
get your last home town rime grime
under under the steeple and roof truth
under under the wonderful sooth
blunder and on
sunder and fawn
love
behind you under you wonder you sir.