Morning smells of everything we thought to ask for. We turn over and breathe it each away from the other in the smallest tactful winds. The sun has beaten us up again, but it’s Sunday and we know nothing demands us except the newspaper hefted up to the stoop. I empty what night left me [...]
I write a lot into the Twitter text box. The I edit, select, cut, cut again, print out, cut up, lay about, arrange, rearrange, randomize, assemble, and reassemble the thought shards in to longer pieces, for reading out and collecting into a pocket book I’m working on, tentatively called Notes to Nothing. These are edited [...]
CrossTalk
CLICK HERE FOR AUDIO An abrupt abutment of wide earth and broad air is a line that draws him without end to the boundary of wide earth and broad air. He plows a square on the plain without end to the boundary, the bent hedgepost by the sun. He plows a square on the plain [...]
Several pieces on pith… are published in a book of poems by joesmith. Really. Click the button and buy it if you like. Thank you.
These poems are from Vasko Popa’s “Games” cycle of 13 poems, translated by Charles Simic, published in Homage to the Lame Wolf: Selected Poems. If you buy only 1 book of poetry your whole life, you couldn’t choose a better one. Popa is an all-too-little known maestro of the powerful poetic parable and Simic is [...]
There are no camels in this combo crèche, formed in Singapore, assembled in Malaysia. The pieces, each in its place, dominate the living room, diverting our path to where we cleanse and empty and keep my store-bought teeth, neither sneer nor smile in their snap-tight cup. The lone cow’s head is broken, decapitated last season, [...]
anyone famous or important enough to land him a job or sufficiently elegant to bequeath him some grace, the names of his favorite quivering trees, the distance from earth to moon or sun to earth, where he last put his keys or where he would go if he could, how many ounces in a pound [...]
The soap opera organ announces what we can hardly bear to hear. A metal-aproned matron summons the skin ribbon she left on the seat of a Galaxy 500, circa 1969. Her tremolo is a casual torture. We mistake her voice for a choir of a thousand muffled mothers and wobble dutifully in to an Easter [...]
I save the spaces. No, I’m no bent surveyor with a three-legged stare bent on destiny, unsettled by innominate expanses, undone by an absence of fences, parsing the plenty. We know how that was manifest. I’ve never been enamoured of wrought geometries and plaid is a bad parody of place. I save only the spaces: [...]
Tagged poetryWhen the planets turned ready in slow-time abeyance for a rendition of lives to clash, maybe Cherokee man or colonial long hunter, maybe English renegade, or would-be farmer plunging his hands in black dirt to tease out a weed’s root system, or maybe highland warrior who puts his tired head to his suffering wife’s breast [...]
Tagged Jenny Benjamin-Smith, poetryStrip malls give way to strip clubs One hundred fifty miles grind Alongside mammoth motor homes The land is changing She is more voluptuous Her sins secreted While in dusty towns Proud old resentments Bolted to bricks shout “Get us out of the United Nations!” Greasy truck-stop trading posts Stand between bands of green Separating [...]
Tagged Kathleen Eull, poetryHere in the town of the common and the good, only the flashes reach us. There’s no thunder rumble, no sound to savor, no low music to score the out-of-favor soul. No, first it’s the din, carried air away east, then the bright, the flight of sand as light, breaking in waves on main street [...]
Tagged joesmith, poetryAlert as the light that changes color with the weather atop the building some mistake as electric, we’re mingling our blood and juices without the dolor that ought accompany a great big age of disease. We are lovely here and welcome the change we bring to each brown room. In the phone booth, we tear [...]
Tagged poetryBURIEDFED This is my last song about myself, about my friends Found something else to sing Try and patch it up with tape and twine Maybe I’ll just break everything that’s mine They wheeled out my casket, They said, “Boy, lay down your head” I said, “Aw shit, man, I ain’t even dead” I won’t [...]
BEFORE THE GAME Shut one eye then the other Peek into every corner of yourself See that there are no nails no thieves See that there are cuckoo’s eggs Shut then the other eye Squat and jump Jump jump high high On top of yourself Fall then with all your weight Fall for days on [...]
Tagged poetry, prose poetry, Vasko PopaSoft stockings coddle them by day and nail-bossed leather shoes buttress them, but my toes refuse to pay attention. Nothing interests them but emitting toenails, horny plates, semi-transparent and elastic, to defend themselves–from whom? Stupid and mistrustful as they alone can be, they never for a moment stop readying that tenuous armament. They reject the [...]
Tagged featured writers, prose poetryWhen I’m done, love, when the impalpable me has made his sullen exit, scrape clean the meat from my bones. String it in ribbons in the back yard trees. Wait for morning rain and hear the glorified pigeons attempt to sing. Summon then the odiferous ones, the shunned ones, the old utilarians who speak to [...]
Left hanging will be a saying in the destined nation a millennia or two after my feet and palms are ripped from this rare piece of pre-owned tree. I thirst for better revelations than bumper stickers promising to free machines from their manifest sins. Sorry friends. No rapture will come to your four-horsemen town. I [...]
Tagged joesmith, poem