Sunday Service: Dorothea Lasky Poem
The Hermit
I was quiet
As I went
Down the road
By the ocean
I was quiet
Or I wasn’t
You didn’t know me
You didn’t care
I was a unicorn
On a lonely road
And the sky
Was green, pink
And purple
Lonely yellow stars
Hung by the balustrades
And the moon was gel-like
Petty, and forgotten
Did we kiss, or fuck
I don’t know
I don’t know
I don’t know anymore
I know the blue
Of the evening
Was lush-dark
And that the moon lit its face
On my road
What I’ve come to look for
I don’t see
What I’ve come to find
I don’t see anymore
Still you walk
Ten steps ahead of me
In the foreground
I can almost see
Your cloak
Will you turn around
Will you turn around
No you do not care
How I wander
All the things
I wanted
The other time
When the sky was mist
I don’t want
I don’t want
I don’t want anymore
Dorothea Lasky is the author of Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all out from Wave Books. She can be found online here: www.birdinsnow.com.
This poem was inspired by The Hermit card of the tarot deck
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Sunday Service: Angela Veronica Wong Poems
Elsa, IT’S OKAY. CRYING On The Bathroom Floor Is
Elsa, IT’S OKAY. CRYING on the bath-
room floor is a RIGHT of passage. You will
PRESS YOUR CHEEK against the bathroom tile and
find comfort in that irony. You will REPLAY THE
THINGS he said to you in those first 2 weeks
of dating. You will REMEMBER YOUR PLANS
to go to ———— together. IT WILL
FEEL like a condom on your heart. You
will DO THIS at least 17 times be-
fore you turn 35. EVERY TIME hurt-
ing will be different. You will EAT ONLY
WAFFLES and hope you lose twelve pounds. This is
a ritual YOU WILL CALL HEARTBREAK.
IT WILL DESTROY YOU LIKE NOTHING ELSE COULD.
Elsa When You Are Single This World Is
Elsa when you are single this world
is so amazing. It’s like an enor-
mous penis. It PAYS ATTENTION. Your
nipples harden just thinking about it.
Everyone wants your vagina. Your nail
polish changes color according to
your emotions. Elsa when you are
single it never rains. You can get away
with the things girls do in public bathrooms.
Do you miss me, Elsa? My best ideas
with you come when I’m brushing my teeth. I
wouldn’t worry about it. Instead spend
your time building syllabi, buying
wedding clothes. Wiping bug guts from walls.
Angela Veronica Wong is the author of how to survive a hotel fire (Coconut Books 2012). She is on the internet at angelaveronicawong.com.
These Elsa poems were inspired by The Star card of the tarot deck
New York’s 100 Most Important Rats Living In the Subway System
fluffy
darlene
beyonce
macduff
copyrat infringement
spike
fenton
skeletor
francois
meatball
Sunday Service: Alex Dimitrov Poem
I Wanted To Write It For You
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
Did you come here to be with yourself?
Did you finish that day you couldn’t begin?
That’s not what was written but what I came to ask.
I wanted to live with you.
I wanted to know where you leave yourself
and who you live inside.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
I wanted to call you, I wanted to hear
just you. Talking. To me.
I wanted to see your mouth move.
I wanted to write you.
A novel, no letter.
Do you understand?
I wanted to write
without a beginning or end.
I wanted to write just the love part for you.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint.
Above a window. Near a fire escape.
Because we have no escape
I wanted to write it.
Someone has written it lightly in dark paint
like I wanted to write it for you.
Just the love part.
That’s the only thing I wanted to write.
That’s what it says. Above a window.
Framed by a fire escape.
That’s what someone has written.
Just the love part.
There’s no plot. Nothing happens.
Nothing will happen in this poem.
Nothing much happens in life.
Nothing worth knowing about really.
Just the love part.
No beginning or end.
I wanted to write it for you.
Alex Dimitrov’s first book of poems, Begging for It, will be published by Four Way Books in March 2013. He is the founder of Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. Dimitrov’s poems have been published in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate, Poetry Daily, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize in 2011. He is also the author of American Boys, an e-chapbook published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2012. Dimitrov works at the Academy of American Poets, teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, and frequently writes for Poets & Writers.
I Wanted To Write It For You was inspired by The Lovers card of the tarot deck.
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HIDER ROSER
HIDER ROSER
by Ben Mirov
Octopus Books, 2012
95 pages / $12.00 buy from SPD
A shamanic healer in San Francisco, who charges way more money than $12 USD, says we are always every age we have ever been. She promises to heal us of the behaviors that once protected us, at 3 and 8 and 13, but now no longer serve us. She will heal us with repeated sessions in which she asks ‘who is talking?’ and ‘what age is that person?’
For $12 USD, Ben Mirov’s HIDER ROSER provides direct textual access to this sort of temporal and spatial inquiry. You can keep it in your bag. You can have it all the time. What’s more, the poet reveals his own story (or the story of a mirror character) (or many mirror characters) (who is talking who is talking?) reducing the feelings of aloneness we may experience on our own trips. He gives us his eyeball, still wet. He gives us his ID. I read this book during a week of bad panic attacks, or “death lite” as I like to call them. I felt understood by Mirov’s book. “If your wolf gets too heavy / don’t pop the flares,” he advises. “No one will rescue you. You are the rescue team.”
Simultaneous threads of fear and acceptance run through these poems. The speaker watches himself disintegrate. The Self and its idea of who and what it is are not solid. Yet in knowing that he lacks the power to stop the fracture, Mirov’s speaker possesses the wisdom to embrace the dissolution.
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November 16th, 2012 / 1:21 pm
November 16th, 2012 / 1:21 pm
What I Say When You Ask What I’m Up To
A paper cutout-style animated video by Dan Lichtenberg adapted from Diana Salier’s poem WHAT I SAY WHEN YOU ASK WHAT I’M UP TO, from her new book LETTERS FROM ROBOTS.
blurbing every story in the new New York Tyrant
I wrote a blurb for every story in the new issue of New York Tyrant.
Luke Goebel guest-edited this issue and dedicated it to his brother, who passed away last year. The quality of the writing in here is killer. Sometimes when a journal has so many big names it’s all b-sides. But everybody brought it. Also, most of these pieces contend in some way with the dual burdens of the physical body and family, so the issue as a whole feels like a unified fantasy of escape from a packed boiler room.
Also there is a release party this Friday at KGB Bar in NYC. There will be an open bar from 8-10 PM and no readings.
OK…the blurbs:
“Amber, Freckled” by Cooper Renner
Renner’s terse prose dissolve the notion of the fixed self in a surreal, genderless kitchen. Kill your family.
“Clyde Roy” by Brandon Hobson
Whose body is this? That is the question Clyde Roy and so many of us face. Readers who want out of themselves will identify with this story. Kill your family.
untitled drawing by Atticus Lish
On looseleaf paper, Lish portrays a baby who gives his mother more sexual pleasure than her husband. Kill your husband.
I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET by Sophia Le Fraga
I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET
by Sophia Le Fraga
Keep This Bag Away From Children, August 2012
45 pages / $5 Buy from publisher
If you accidentally drop Sophia Le Fraga’s I DON’T WANT ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE INTERNET, the book is fucked. This text is unbound, typewritten, looseleaf and there are no page numbers, so one misshap and the whole thing is irrevocably scrambled.
Or maybe it is not fucked. The sequencing of these poems is malleable and they do not have to be read chronologically. This “randomness” lends itself to all kinds of questions about the way that we perceive the order of a book of poems. Bound books appear official, permanent, as though there is an art god or a poetry god who said “do it like this” and it was so, and it is so forever. But sequencing is really subjective. If given the chance to rip out the binding and re-shuffle, many poets would likely re-sequence their books shortly after publication.
And what about the god of the internet, the @Lord? Is there one? “do me a favor, / professional / consoler: / get outta my sky. / save yourself on a computer / and zoom in on a stranger,” writes Le Fraga. This text is tense, at once resisting and embracing the fleetingness of pop culture and the meme. The speaker is “sick with / sincerity” yet “mass texts” are rendered “a / worse feeling / than hearing / about suicide.” Likewise, “time is a waste of #Poetry” but “RunningOutOfXanax” and “#y’all” and “#Instagram” are immortalized on the printed page. If an electronic god exists, it exists everywhere—irl too. Any attempts to separate the lexicon of the internet from poetry, are futile. The internet is omniscient, a time traveler and in you.
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September 12th, 2012 / 1:30 pm
September 12th, 2012 / 1:30 pm
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF TWEETS – vol 2
Another “journal” dedicated to the criticism (not really) and recognition of excellence in tweeting.
TWEETUS ILLUMINATIO MEA, TWEETAMS EST LITTERAE
*
@georgelazenby by name
Genre: ol’ man meta
The collection of tweets published by ‘name’ stands more as a philosophy of existence in an absurd world than as literature. According to name, “self-confidence is at best choosing not to look at the fact that people are idiots for believing in you” – a theory that may or may not be reflected by his 120/10,0000+ ratio. What’s more, name appears to possess a certain admiration of those mired in the pedestrian. “finally envy people who care about drapes” he tweets. “watch paris texas in an industrial freezer,” he advises, as though urging oneself to make meaning via pop cultural moors can spontaneously ground a man in the here and now. Considering the plight of Sisyphus, it would be easy for a tweeter with name’s wisdom to write off existence as wholly absurd and without hope. Alternately, name puts up a brave front in the face of the existential. “Who the fuck are you to know what you are?” he asks. “get a laser pointer—we gonna go back to fuck with emily dickinson” he encourages. Still, given the fact that death is inevitable (and that unless you are DJ AM or tree_bro, one’s followers will inevitably unfollow) we sense a deep anxiety.
@nytyrant by New York Tyrant
Genre: magical fatism
Hitching your whole star to an entity as fleeting as a tweet is a bad idea. The Tyrant embodies this knowledge, appearing confident enough in his own voice to experiment with a range of tonal modes. He explores the romantic (“I’d understand if I saw someone at the races, jacking it to death almost, since the energy and horsemuscles and speed are essentially porn.”), the literary (“Because I could not stop for Hardee’s The drive thru was for me The Mustang held but just ourselves and a quarter bag of weed.”), ardent fatmiration, and even an occasional promotional (“@lesmistons @nytimes @newyorker @nypost @Nymag OUR FONT IS EMOJI SYRINGES AND GUNS”). When one visualizes The Tyrant on deck, one sees the sillhouette of a man flicking tweets off his fingers like Nerds candy into a night sky. Suddenly, with a start, our man grows bored and goes on to do something else entirely, like snort Pop Rocks, without worrying about retweets, faves, unfollows. Perhaps it is naïve of the editors to believe a human so impervious to judgment exists (we do know The Tyrant weighs twitter with a certain degree of gravitas, as he has been known to tell writers [paraphrase] “love the tweets but your work is shit”). Still, let’s choose to believe in something. Everybody needs a hero.