Snow and Dirty Rain

[Cat Malojan]

Everyday I rewrite her name across my ribcage
so that those who wish to break my heart
will know who to answer to later

She has no idea that I’ve taught my tongue to make pennies,
and every time our mouths are to meet
I will slip coins to the back of her throat and make wishes.

Mike McGee

 

[Cat Malojan]

Your name is safe in my mouth—
your heart too, tendons twined around my tongue,
body cradled in the cage of my teeth.

I will lock you up tight, in the space above my throat
where even I
cannot get you

Kate Horowitz

 

[Cat Malojan]

I’m saying your name on
the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal
covered with frost, your name like a music that’s
been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud,
a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails
in wind and the slap of waves on the hull
of a boat that’s sinking to the sound of mermaids
singing songs of love, and the tug of a simple
profound sadness when it sounds so far away.

Richard Siken

 

[Cat Malojan]

Your old anthem burns a hole in stomach
I am the daughter of immigrants
my home is a home of longing
I am swollen with language I cannot afford to forget
I am homesick for a home I have never lived in
last night I dreamt of you
your warm mouth on the soles of my feet
you were humid
your palms flat on my bare shoulders
you carried me home
my mothers village
my fathers first kiss
dear god,
was this what belonging felt like
my god,
I’d never wanted anything so bad.

Warsan Shire

 

[Cat Malojan]

I want to quiet you
like quick
like cunt
like hollow
like whole
–I want to hold you
holy
like prayer
like benediction
like intercession
like hallelujah, like hallelujah
like hallelujah
like amen.

Stacey Ann Chin

 

[SelfTawt]

The body pushed into lifes mouth
velvet crunch of white under feet my heart
snowy lizards' tails sleeping on branches
Arms rhyme with bending earth
a shadow slants like a calligrapher's quill.

Mong-Lan

 

[Cat Malojan]

Anyway it will be autumn tomorrow or the next day: I can smell it in the air–summer smoldering.

J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

 

[FataMorgana]

Sometimes I wonder if Mary breastfed Jesus. if she cried out when he bit her or if she sobbed when he would not latch. and sometimes I wonder if this is all too vulgar to ask in a church full of men without milk stains on their shirts or coconut oil on their breasts preaching from pulpits off limits to the Mother of God. but then i think of feeding Jesus, birthing Jesus, the expulsion of blood and smell of sweat, the salt of a mother’s tears onto the soft head of the Salt of the Earth, feeling lonely and tired hungry annoyed overwhelmed loving and i think, if the vulgarity of birth is not honestly preached by men who carry power but not burden, who carry privilege but not labor, who carry authority but not submission, then it should not be preached at all. because the real scandal of the Birth of God lies in the cracked nipples of a 14 year old and not in the sermons of ministers who say women are too delicate to lead.

Kaitlin Hardy Shetler

 

[FataMorgana]

Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew that things that moved
all night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a cardgame where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.


Death of an Irishwoman, Michael Hartnett

 

[FataMorgana]

Names of Horses

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in meadow and hayfield, the mowing machine
clacketing beside you, while the sun walked high in the morning;

and after noon’s heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.

When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,

and lay the shotgun’s muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground made your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the Pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground—old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.



Donald Hall

 

[FataMorgana]

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.


Dan Albergotti, Things To Do In The Belly of the Whale

 

[butters]

thankyou

 

[Emerson40]

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

~The Road, Cormac McCarthy​

 

[FataMorgana]

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

~The Road, Cormac McCarthy​

 

[FataMorgana]

Some people, no matter what you give them, still want the moon. The bread, the salt, white meat and dark meat, still hungry. The marriage bed and the cradle, still empty arms. You give them land, their own earth under their feet, still they take to the roads. And water: dig them the deepest, still it’s not deep enough to drink the moon from.

Denise Levertov

 

[FataMorgana]

…the salt drifts down behind her eyes, falling like snow, down through the ocean, past the dead coral, gathering on the branches of the salt tree that rises from the white crystal dunes below it. Scattered on the underwater sand are the bones of many small fish. It is so beautiful. Nothing can kill it. After everything is over, she thinks, there will still be salt.

Margaret Atwood

 

[FataMorgana]

I want you plain.
I want you bragging.
I want you naked as a tongue without a word.
I want you laughing.
I want you joy.
I want you wonder & wonderful.
The hips on every guitar.
Copper tambourines scoring your laughter.
Don’t ever learn how to stop laughing.
Laugh when you shouldn’t.
I like that laughing best.
I want you miracle.
I want you possible & foolish.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths

 

[FataMorgana]

I put my hand on her forehead,
stroke her wispy hair.
How tall she used to be,

how we’ve all dwindled.
It’s time for her to go deeper,
into the blizzard ahead of her,

both dark and light, like snow.
Why can’t I let go of her?
Why can’t I let her go?

Margaret Atwood

 

[FataMorgana]

I dreamed of embracing the dead Jesus in that Tomb, no more than a cave, actually. His small, wounded body seemed extraordinarily beautiful to me, for it registered every trace of his journey toward crucifixion: the hard calluses on the foot soles, the legacy of anger written across the forehead, the harsh, knifelike furrows at the corners of the eyes, the grime embedded into the folds of the knuckles. And, of course, the wounds.

I touched every inch, every micromillimeter of his body, and under my hands, his body spoke. The language in which it spoke was Braille. His body was a sacred text. By slow explorations of my fingertips, tongue, eyelids, lips, by awed, sensitive tissue of my cheeks and my nipples, also the aureolae and undersides of my breasts, also by the delicate kiss of my labia, I read of an abominable grandeur.

His body was sturdy, banded with muscle like the body of a mule, a peasant’s body, its Mediterranean complexion tinged with the green of a Levantine olive. His coloring, lightest on the palms of his hands, darkest about the knees, elbows and scrotal sac, was that of a meal prepared over a desert campfire, and the smell of his flesh suggested sand, blazing sun, smoky cookfires built on the sides of salty lakes.

That was the most erotic dream I’ve ever had, even though it was all about knowledge.

Poppy Z. Brite