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HANIF ABDURRAQIB

#poem

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reel by Barbara Crooker

#poem #despite

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Wendell Berry, “I. [After the bitter nights]”

#poem #being

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-- Devin Kelly

#poem

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Franny Choi, Soft Science

#poem #death #grief

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tracy brimhall, riddle at 29,000 feet.

#poem #love

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richard siken crush: “litany in which certain things are crossed out” \ josé saramago cain \ richard snow and dirty rain \ namwali serpell the furrows \ ??

kofi

#story

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Mild Dry Lines: An Exchange, Christian Wiman

            —You prick too liberal into alien pains, and read too readily a grief  you need to see in order for the world to be the world that ratifies the choices you’ve made. You talk of callings, but a calling should enlarge the life that it refines, not grind its spice into some same mustard.           —If  we could see the grief of any one life it would be slag enough to crust a world and any feeling being buried within. But grief’s a craft like any other, it seems, if only indirectly ours: our skin’s inscripted with what nature knows. The dead child chiseled in that woman’s cheek, the battle smoldering off that old man’s brow, our very mirrors, friend, these aging faces with their lines of  loneliness like pressured ice: you would have them silenced?                                             —I would have them whole.           —As would I. As would anyone whose life is lit, however dimly, by the light of survival.           —I fear that by survival what you mean is resignation, or, worse, a fictioned oblivion, like the bull elephant that has outgrown the stake that it was tied to as a calf: it can’t break the rope that it could break with ease.           —And I fear by wholeness what you mean is merely the will to leaven fate with will, that constipated sorrow called good cheer. I won’t relapse from these mild dry lines whose only consolation is their dryness, that one might utter calmly utter blood.

#poem #grief #pickles

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He is at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.

The Dog Stars, Peter Heller

#character

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Gregory Orr, from Poetry as Survival

(transcription below cut)

ONE OF STORY'S primary purposes is to lay claim to experience. Autobiographical storytelling can take personal experience back from silence, shame, fear, or oblivion. It says, "I cherish this," or, "This haunts me." It asserts the significance of events in one s life: "This happened to me." "I did this." "This is part of who I am." "This should not or will not disappear, and I act to preserve it by turning it to words and shaping them as story."

#storytelling

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bardo, peter gizzi

I've spent my life in a lone mechanical whine,

this combustion far off.

How fathomless to be embedded in glacial ice,

what piece of self hiding there.

I am not sure about meaning but understand the wave.

No more Novalis out loud.

No Juan de la Cruz singing "I do not die to die."

No solstice, midhaven, midi, nor twilight.

No isn't it amazing, no none of that.

To crow, to crown, to cry, to crumble.

The trees the air warms into a bright something

a bluish nothing into

clicks and pops bursts and percussive runs.

I come with my asymmetries, my untutored imagination.

Heathenish,

my homespun vision sponsored by the winter sky.

Then someone said nether, someone whirr.

And if I say the words will you know them?

Is there world? Are they still calling it that?

#poem #hauntology #con

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... a story resolves nothing. The resolution of a story must occur in us, with what we make of the questions with which the story leaves us.

the devil finds work, james baldwin

#storytelling

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Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well.

Henry Scott Holland, from "Death is Nothing at All"

#death #love #saudade

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Lord Is Not a Word

Lord is not a word.

Song is not a salve.

Suffer the child, who lived

on sunlight and solitude.

Savor the man, craving

earth like an aftertaste.

To discover in one’s hand

two local stones the size

of a dead man’s eyes

saves no one, but to fling them

with a grace you did not know

you knew, to bring them

skimming homing

over blue, is to discover

the river from which they came.

Mild merciful amnesia

through which I’ve moved

as through a blue atmosphere

of almost and was,

how is it now,

like ruins unearthed by ruin,

my childhood should rise?

Lord, suffer me to sing

these wounds by which I am made

and marred, savor this creature

whose aloneness you ease and are.

- Christian Wiman

#tbd #hob selkirk

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Root Systems

Kay Ulanday Barrett

for Yolanda P. Salvo

I have this assignment to write on origins. All I can think about is your rellenong talong at sunrise, garlic thick air, wisp of your floral dress sways on linoleum as you commit to careful chemistry of fried egg.

                     To say I have roots means all us kids,                      knee deep in dirt. Means I only know how                      to eat because you brought backyard, earth                      soaked, each bite caressed by sweat of                      forehead. The land gives us what we need                      not like this country—

We didn’t get it then, you training us for end of times, or maybe, bringing us back to our beginning. Bold brown knuckles turned into baon, lunch time snacks folded of banana leaf. To unwrap gift every noon, map illustrated of rice, speckled in sea spinach, while others ate bland

                     mashed potatoes. A spark of sili, proclamation                      of patis, we held up sliced mangoes sculpted into bouquet.                      Every summer, you took small seed, harsh stone,                      harsh light, profuse cackle, grew it into momentum                      to fuel every star speckled report card on the fridge,                      every trophy shimmer slung over shoulder.

Our last photo together, San Fabian, July 2007—   96°F heat, palm tree silhouette on cheeks. You said you liked my haircut, So Pogi! Big smirks. Fingertips pressed on lychee skin, our version of prayer. Not to mention, the way you taught me to pick apart until we found tender.

                     How we knew somehow together,                      there could be sweetness. You asked me to open                      every fruit, juice like sprinkler from our old house.                      This breaking apart. This delicate pouring.                      This bulbous bounty. This bellyful harvest                      was always ours, no matter the soil we stood on.

#poem #love #home #saudade

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“In My Next Life Let Me Be A Tomato” - Natasha Rao

lusting and unafraid. In this bipedal incarnation I have always been scared of my own ripening, mother standing outside the fitting room door. I only become bright after Bloody Mary’s, only whole in New Jersey summers where beefsteaks, like baubles, sag in the yard, where we pass down heirlooms in thin paper envelopes and I tend barefoot to a garden that snakes with desire, unashamed to coil and spread. Cherry Falls, Brandywine, Sweet Aperitif, I kneel with a spool, staking and tying, checking each morning after last night’s thunderstorm only to find more sprawl, the tomatoes have no fear of wind and water, they gain power from the lightning, while I, in this version of life, retreat in bed to wither. In this life, rabbits are afraid of my clumsy gait. In the next, let them come willingly to nibble my lowest limbs, my outstretched arm always offering something sweet. I want to return from reincarnation’s spin covered in dirt and buds. I want to be unabashed, audacious, to gobble space, to blush deeper each day in the sun, knowing I’ll end up in an eager mouth. An overly ripe tomato will begin sprouting, so excited it is for more life, so intent to be part of this world, trellising wildly. For every time in this life I have thought of dying, let me yield that much fruit in my next, skeleton drooping under the weight of my own vivacity as I spread to take more of this air, this fencepost, this forgiving light.

#poem #being

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At the New York City AIDS Memorial

Stefania Gomez

Your absence is a bisected city block where a hospital once stood. The footprint of a yellow house on Providence’s east side we once shared. Demolished. A white pickup you drove decorated with black dice. The ground beneath it crumbled—poof—then paved over, engraved like verses into stone. When I was told what happened to you, I sank to the wet floor of a bar’s bathroom, furious that you left us to reassemble ourselves from rubble. To build, between subway stops, some saccharine monument pigeons shit on, empty except for a circle of queens chattering, furnishing the air like ghosts. Your death means I’m always equidistant from you, no matter where I travel, where I linger, misguided, hopeful. Last night, by candle light, a woman unearthed me. Together, she and I grieved the impossibility of disappearing into one another. Poof. Since you died, erasure obsesses me. Among the photos at the memorial, one of a banner that reads WHERE IS YOUR RAGE? ACT UP FIGHT BACK FIGHT AIDS, carried by five young men. Your face in each. Your beautiful face.

#poem #love #death #grief