Poetry |
“Ololyga” and “ordure”
“Soon it was ash falling on everything falling / on the invisible frequencies of an Internet of pain // the women had strung across and through themselves.”
Essay |
“’Then was the fear a little quieted’: at the reading last night”
“Ralph read some poems about bears because he saw Hayden Carruth read, & Hayden said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to write nothing at all except poems about bears?’ & so Ralph wrote ‘a garland of bears.’ & some of those poems were about Hayden …”
Poetry |
“Ghazal w/Tequila,” “Ghazal w/Road,” “Ghazal w/Salt,” “Ghazal w/Bowl,” “Ghazal w/Sleep” & “Ghazal w/Open”
“I want to be the flesh around the stone, the thing consumed / at the kitchen sink, the juice down your arm, the peel, a ribbon of road. // To be the bus come to rest in its bay; to be the bay: that oily harbor.”
Poetry |
Three Poems by Sappho
“And if now she runs away, soon she will chase; / if she refuses gifts, soon she’ll bring her own; / if she won’t love you, soon she will be longing …”
Poetry |
“Reading One of Wright’s Notebooks” and “Heat Waiver”
“The clouds, a marriage / of mirages. // There’s an argument / to be had. / Close at hand.”
Poetry |
“A Yellow Cab Driver”
“Then I think of my mother and the nights / she crab-walked home after peeing herself behind the wheel. / She couldn’t find a toilet on the clock.”
Essay |
“The Acid of the Bath”: on Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead and Hervé Guibert’s The Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991
“When Guibert is diagnosed with AIDS, Zambreno describes his response as ‘the calm of the hypochondriac who has been preparing for calamity his whole life,’ but one could also read it as the punishment a queer artist raised in heteronormative Catholicism had come to expect in return for venal sin.”
Poetry |
“Music Box,” “Maya Miller” & “Clever Dress”
“On the part that opens, there’s a mirror. / I am not a music box, even though / I am a box shaped like music. / The music you have to imagine.”
Fiction |
from Life Sciences, a novel by Joy Sorman
“… she knows perfectly well that this malady didn’t land on her randomly, that it didn’t come out of nowhere, but from a slowly formed bed of history and time, from layers of pathological strata …”
Poetry |
“Gaza And Jerusalem: A Triptych”
“Worlds / reassemble / in our minds, these / sides of the line. / Tell us where / and we’ll put / them there.”
Essay |
on “Poems Not Written” — a recurring feature On The Seawall
“We have to be okay with letting our writing rest. My friend reminds me that if poetry makes nothing happen, as Auden said, not-writing poetry has quite the opposite effect.”
Poetry |
“Watching”
“When a wave hit — / it shook its head, / biting the air. // When two swans passed by, / they looked whiter / than usual.”
Poetry |
“The Young Herdsman,” “Pastoral (Eclogue)” & “My Manifest”
“… and in more time / each summer once the heat is broken by the pine / spare parts become common, and to include them / commonplace …”
Poetry |
“Dispatch,” “Reflexive,” “Monumental Life Building” & “saw, circular”
“The teacher told me / my heart was roughly / the size of my fist // and I saw my hand / clench around / the new knowledge …”
Poetry |
“Meditation on Comprehension,” “Meditation on Direction,” “Octet” & “Looking at Cy Twombly’s Cold Stream and Feeling The Heat”
“The line, / like the river, / does not know to stop. / Nothing on this earth is straight —/ not the sky, the sea, the self, the stream — “