THE WORLD IS BEAUTIFUL BUT YOU ARE
NOT IN IT
Let me refer
to myself in glorious ways:
colors seem
brighter, the sky is a shocking blue.
I carry my
stomach in this bowl
and earth is
planted in my blood.
From your
last letter, I gather hills.
I’m trying to
keep my tenderness in check.
Trying to see
what kind of grill the neighbors have
is everything
I couldn’t do before.
Now brown
eggs shift heavy in my palms, this bowl.
Words make
their way up my thigh.
I swear very
nice boy and I refer to myself.
No. The hills
are holding you and I refer to myself.
Let’s be
honest: I need a real man, I say out loud.
Every weakness
I have settles into a tree trunk,
stays all
winter. I don’t know if I mean it.
Winter has
lasted five years already.
This morning I
press into the edges of my stomach.
My mother makes
coffee in California.
Ladies will
say we are expert with machines
but they will
be two bottles under sangria.
I said you could
make music out of this.
Ingesting artificial
palm trees, exploding.
Your letters
are getting shorter. I am getting close
enough to the
sun to touch the tip of its cigar.
We carry what
is shocking and heavy in blood.
Music seems
brighter: the sky the sky. (Morgan Parker)
After a short
wait, I finally received my contributor copy of the fifth annual HANDSOME journal, produced by Black
Ocean. Launched recently at AWP in Boston, this issue contains one hundred and twenty
pages of strong writing, most by writers I haven’t previously heard of. I’m
slowly and still working my way through learning the names and writing of
contemporary American poets, but there are still only two that haunt the pages
of this new issue, being Deborah Poe [author of a recent chapbook through above/ground press] and Brian Henry. A graceful journal of
new poetry, HANDSOME is edited by
Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Allison Titus, and published by Janaka Stucky. Another
of a series of journals who publish work sans author biography, I’m left with
the work itself, immediately struck by the work of Morgan Parker, Kristina Marie Darling and Sarah Goldstein. There is something of Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay (Slope Editions,
2002) to Kristina Marie Darling’s poem, in that the footnote quickly overtakes
the body of the poem. Sarah Goldstein’s pieces in this issue are a small
handful of “untitled” prose-poems, wrapping a rather straightforward lyric
story with just a hint of something more, something surreal, akin to Miranda July or Lydia Davis. She says just enough in each piece, but there is so much
more beneath the surface; suggested, but still hidden.
UNTITLED (PROPERTY)
The woman in
the house down the road, whose phone bill you accidentally received and ripped
open, fills her doorway, out of which wafts the dark smell of potpourri. You’ve
seen her in the branches of the furious thickets between your houses calling
her dog, thrashing like a shark in a net. You talk about the neighborhood
squirrels: the big one with deep cuts on its shoulder, and the other one that
made it through the winter without any fur. Large white cat in the window,
large yellow dog pushing and whining behind her. “Oh, you’re so bad, you’re so
bad,” she says to him. The dog always runs to you when he sees you, snapping
the leash out of her hand, shoving his desperate head into your belly.
Some other
pieces that struck include Jenny Drai’s poem “DER ABFLUG,” as well as Audrey Walls’
striking poem “Aquaphobia,” which ends with the lines: “You could drown in two
inches // of water, my mother once warned. All you need / is someone to hold
you under.” Kerri Webster has four poems in the new issue, each with the title “DIADEM,”
and I wonder if these are a stand-alone quartet, or, like Noah Eli Gordon’s The Source (New York NY:
Futurepoem Books, 2011), part of something much larger? I would like to see
more.
DIADEM
Jupiter is
fucking with me. What I know
of cruelty: a
world is made
we did not
ask for. In the dark, boys
set the dog
on fire, let it loose
in the field.
What
do you
believe? Chanting what
as you go to
sleep? I
see: same
trees. Same locust
blossoms. I walk
and walk. Smoke
from the
burning scrapwood
shuts my
eyes.
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