Also - for my class's final assignment I'm doing a poetry reading at a bar with a mic and everything. So if you could help me choose poems to read aloud based on either these or past posts I've written, that would be awesome! And of course, you're all invited. Although I don't know when it'll be now - the time, date and location has been changed and my teacher's going to email us. Facebook me if you want to know when/where :) I'd be happy to see you]
Webster Library, With Eye-Circles Like Coffee Rings
[Prose poem]
Between bookshelves, she sits on her sandals, studying and sipping slow sips of similes showing her how she’s not actually unique but is in fact comparable to every other thing in this world. She turns the pages and learns that every breath and sneeze and choke is a metaphor, that her nine-to-five existence is actually an allegory for the greater microcosm of society. She feels sad about this. Emotion cranks like a jack-in-the-box, pushing out tears instead of jesters just at the moment when she least expects. She has to wipe her eyes and nose on her coffee-stained sweater that she borrowed from her grandmother eight years ago and never ended up giving back before she died from hating the public transit system too much (sometimes she felt guilty about not having driven her the places she wanted to go, but then again, she tells herself, she would have died from the stench of the spring worms anyway, or from listening to the FM radio all night, or from sprinkling those peanuts they have in metal containers at Thai Express that are suspiciously exposed to fingers and air and other things incompatible with human beings). She looks around to see if anyone noticed her snotted sleeve, ready to blame the air conditioner that’s on full-blast, installed to cool the frying minds of students and lessen the number of volcanic brain eruptions. A fast glance shows that there’s nobody there except an Asian med-student who’s bleeding his eyes over an advanced bioorganic chemistry book. She looks down again, satisfied that she’s studying English, and that her life won’t be dedicated to helping people. She takes out a thermos to give herself some instant broth nutrition and chugs the cold liquid distilled from what was once the life of a turkey. It’s not as satisfying as she would have hoped; she’s left craving with the sensation of a greasy sheen. I’m like that puddle that’s drying out but leaving behind its gas-leak scum, she thinks without realizing that she just thought of yet another thing in the world that she is indistinct from.
Seven Glasses Of Water Slide Down The Esophagus Pretty Easy, But It's The Eighth You Have To Watch Out For
Microcyte feelings distend through
layers of skin but don’t break:
instead swellingbloatingclusteringagainst
cellagainstcellagainstcell,
pressingthemuplikesardinesupernovas
readyto BANG! and s h r a p n e l everything they’ve had
pooling and swimming and spawning inside –
but for now they prefer to
stay and stick until the only option left
is to prick them with a wire like a cake,
to see if they’re done yet with their overanalyzations
that even Freud would be bored with –
but they’re afraid to bleed
because they don’t like the taste of pennies.
Tectonic
Even though
we can make
the earth s h a k e
we can never quite
align.
An Exercise In Knowing
[Prose poem]
The World swells in your eyes like a socket suddenly plugged with a lightbulb. It glows, bathed in cold sunlight and the sound of your reverent breathing. It seems to feed on it, the planet, a church, commanding and chewing on your awe. I watch your shins begin to shake under the weight of your head. You start to weep the oceans away as it becomes too much, the magma core too molten for a brain to contain, especially impossible for yours. Pacific surges with Indian, Atlantic is tangled by Arctic, and all steam as they drain onto your face, past your chin and down your neck. The emptied World becomes instead a mix of green and gray, like the cement sludge sidewalks we wiped our footprints in, outlined by dying dandelions and ambitions maple tree shoots. But, like the maple babies, the green soon withers and the World turns into a postcard autumn. There’s everything poetic about death, so who am I to complain? I keep watching you as your freckles fade against the rising flush that burns like infection. Your lips are open for an articulation that never quite made it out; they’re chap-cracking and remind me of the slim tentacle sticks of deep fried squid we used to get during our breaks between classes back when we were getting our BAs. I want to press my face against your mouth to recall the taste, but it looks like that would hurt because your face is distorting now, distended red with peeling edges, and our kisses aren’t what they used to be. You’re probably wondering why I’m not helping you, but it would have been fine if only you hadn’t cried the oceans away. Now the cratered, caving planet in your eyes will only ever grow and die. I want to shake you and tell you this, scream it in your melted ears. But instead I whisper, “Blink.”
Smother
Moths flop, on off,
eating holes through my eyes –
batting their brown scaled wings
so that they appear as my own lashes
and not the things that are
blinding me.
My moon-crater eyes stare at
their close up faces
and all I can think is how fiercely
their endless gazes pierce
and how covered in fur
they really are.
Like Spinning Plates
We rest on counteractive points of reality turning in place as dimensional
cohesions on this tabletop twisting that which we are into something
that is a refracted lie while we are side by side but absolutely blind
as we spin as we don’t notice anything around us as we spin
as we whirl and look like spheres but are only flat in that
our truths are masked by speed because we go so
fast that no one will notice that we move so
completely that we don’t understand
what we are anymore except we
are complete in this bent
image and we only
hope that no
one will
stop
us
.
Yelling Grandly
She looks at him through
her glass eyes,
like carrion smeared against
black-red atmospheres sunsetting
into a wasted skyline,
after the moment when she realizes
that the horizon is only the horizon
and his fingers in her hair are only
fingers.
Yoko Imagined This
Pushing up
out of darkened soil:
the wish trees,
from crumbling earth of forgotten moments
dusting the world with dying skins,
reaching fingers to encrusted skies;
barely exposed,
their leaves of longings expand to sunlight.
They stretch,
they stride,
dancing in the dried dirt,
roots anchored deeply
in bottomless reservoirs
of half-thought dreams.
They stay,
they sway,
wish trees like dandelion pollen,
blown by mouths of dreamers,
to grow into
weeds.
3 comments:
Oh Marta! You know how to use words, that's for sure. You've allowed me to rediscover the word "smother". It's such a glorious word, and accompanied with the image of a moth (also a good word, that, "moth"), brilliant!
I haven't read all of them yet (you've been busy this semester!) but I was blown away by "Tectonic". The spaces between the letters of the word "shake" was particularly clever. Love.
OhmyfuckingGod "the cold liquid distilled from what was once the life of a turkey" that's so hilarious you almost made me laugh in the middle of a 200 people class!
I really like Yoko imagined this. The imagery is very intense. It made me smile.
Post a Comment