sublimate-blog

[sublimate-blog]

Night Walk

The all-night convenience store's empty and no one is behind the counter. You open and shut the glass door a few times causing a bell to go off, but no one appears. You only came to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe a copy of yesterday's newspaper -- finally you take one and leave thirty-five cents in its place. It is freezing, but it is a good thing to step outside again: you can feel less alone in the night, with lights on here and there between the dark buildings and trees. Your own among them, somewhere. There must be thousands of people in this city who are dying to welcome you into their small bolted rooms, to sit you down and tell you what has happened to their lives. And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable.

Franz Wright

[sublimate-blog]

[sublimate-blog]

-Richard Siken

[sublimate-blog]

In the dream with the stillborn ghost, 

the chicken never crosses the road.  I’m trying to get out of my mother’s car  but it’s parked too close to my father’s truck;  I’m left with one foot pinned by the door.  In the dream you’ve heard this all before.  I lick your teeth; each one turns over  out of order, spells oh, spells oh I,  spells other side. 

Stephanie Goehring, "No. 15"

[sublimate-blog]

[sublimate-blog]

for the Motel Astra The desolation without season, summer somehow heightens it, Route 1’s course from Maine to Florida Interstate-strangled, this narrow stretch in Virginia wasted as a riverbed drought-hushed. Remains of gas stations, diners, and motels litter it, and here, July, long month that had meant their greatest thriving, offers itself again to the decades’ abandonment. The motel signs, once neon sculptures of lyric light and promise, still advertise darkly what was: Corona, Radiant, Starlight, Aurora, places named for skybound destinations someone dreamed up to lure those on their way to or from the ocean, to or from the mundane everyday, the heat, at least, for a time — a night — escapable. A place or two still rent by the season to migrant workers following a harvest, tobacco, peanuts, soybeans — or the paving of other roads. But most have fallen beyond use, windows paneless, still-numbered doors ajar, anything worth salvage hauled out piecemeal, the only inhabitants small birds, black snakes, wasps, and vines, cavity-seekers, their shadows. From here, when the Interstate stalls, the horizon glows past sunset — the convergence of brakelights and lowbeams rising with the smell of sour crude oil and tar: jaundiced-rose fuming exhaust cast off as though from lava flow, slow- certain rage. And when it is in motion, the sound of shifting gears and engine braking becomes that of a storm, never quite formed, its forming ceaseless, thunder dry, impotent. The Astra lingers on as a flea market and fruit stand, as though in a demented dream of itself, some rooms filled with the detritus of what didn’t sell at auction, some with fresher produce: watermelons, tomatoes, cantaloupes, peaches warm to the touch.   The sign at the open gate of the swimming pool warns no lifeguard, the risk yours. The owner might have drained it, or let it drain itself, evaporate from precious clarity to airless pond before this measured void, the diving board a dull, more deadly blade. On the concrete floor of the pool, the years’ collection of leaf rot, dust, rainfall and frost, the crickets and toads that fell into and then could not escape it — have recomposed to form the barest layer of soil. Strict plot, unruly, vagrant narrative. The poorest, most ordinary volunteer, take shallow root, fireflies seeding sunken air.  The road took with it the unreachable looming, mirage, vivid shimmering above fresh blacktop never water at all, unattainable refraction, the vision disappearing quick as the light, sweet crude we used to chase it — irresistible, that fleet mirror of what was sky. Claudia Emerson

Elegy in July

[sublimate-blog]

[sublimate-blog]

Heat exists as energy in transit, something spontaneous, volatile, elementary, “something which may be transferred from one body to another” (James Clerk Maxwell, “Theory of Heat”). Notice how it moves from an object with a high temperature to an object with a lower one, a process of thermal contact, the sun burning through the coldest morning sky. Heat increases and flows across boundaries. It is ancient, fluctuating, vibrational, like these summer days that are so combustible and these nights when stars enlighten the skies. I remember the time you touched me near the stove and the flames sparked in my body, love.

Edward Hirsch

Come Live With Me

[sublimate-blog]

The question was authenticity: silver Indian bracelet, turquoise beads. You said, “Sterling, 925.” I said, “Nickel, cannot find the stamp,” and we left the pawnshop’s dim arcade, your face transparent before watches in the window’s glass.

On Queen’s West: leather jackets in a store called “Skin and Bone,” jeweled phoenixes that rose straight from my high school feathered roach-clip days. Parallel wall mirrors sent soap-stone beavers and raw-hide drums off in rows.

You wanted one small drop of blue for your right ear. The cost: splitting a pair. An infant squawked and sucked a fist in the back room, his mother stitching moose-skin, surrounded by fur. You said: “My old lover would like this,

she collected pelts.” I looked at the tied feet and noses—bear, bobcat, minx, deer, cow. Twenty skunk-tails in a barrel. I thought of zooaphilia: woman who married a bear, a frog, a swan, who fed a cobra milk and then fell in love. Or the man who married a horse, a goat, a bird he held to his chest and carried everywhere. I thought of each pelt as you, your skin. Remembered the man who stoned two dogs to death and hung them in a tree. His only cure: to marry the dog’s sister in an elaborate ceremony, a feast for a thousand guests. I thought about the difference, a dog in a white dress.

That night you worried about my carrying on— crying, raccoon eyes, my leaps between our hotel beds then catatonia, unable to sleep in that tower of 500 rooms, all with the same portrait above the bed—a naked beauty cavorting against a furred beast; he a psychedelic square of hair, she, S-shaped, pale, sleek. I prayed our marriage would ward off bad omens, dreamt of cages, stroked your hair. I couldn’t tell whose skin was whose. I dreamed I was your animal. Let me be your animal. But then I woke and found our bodies hairless in the mollusk-colored room.

Sarah Messer

Vacationing in the Fur Trade District

[sublimate-blog]

“For the moment my desire to be loved is enough to spur me to action. I want to be loved despite my faults. It isn’t exactly true that I’m a provocateur. A real provocateur is someone who says things he doesn’t think, just to shock. I try to say what I think. And when I sense that what I think is going to cause displeasure, I rush to say it with real enthusiasm. And deep down, I want to be loved despite that.

“Of course, there’s no guarantee this will last.”

—Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction No. 206

[sublimate-blog]

Sharks in the River

We'll say unbelievable things to each other in the early morning—   our blue coming up from our roots, our water rising in our extraordinary limbs.   All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles and ghosts of men, and spirits behind those birds of flame.   I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through.   It is a short walkway— into another bedroom.   Consider the handle. Consider the key.   I say to a friend, how scared I am of sharks.   How I thought I saw them in the creek across from my street.   I once watched for them, holding a bundle of rattlesnake grass in my hand, shaking like a weak-leaf girl.   She sends me an article from a recent National Geographic that says,   Sharks bite fewer people each year than New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records.   Then she sends me on my way. Into the City of Sharks.   Through another doorway, I walk to the East River saying,   Sharks are people too. Sharks are people too. Sharks are people too.   I write all the things I need on the bottom of my tennis shoes. I say, Let's walk together.   The sun behind me is like a fire. Tiny flames in the river's ripples.   I say something to God, but he's not a living thing, so I say it to the river, I say,   I want to walk through this doorway But without all those ghosts on the edge, I want them to stay here. I want them to go on without me. I want them to burn in the water. Ada Limón from Sharks in the River

#poetry #ada limon #sharks

[sublimate-blog]

#poetry #criticism #matthew zapruder

[sublimate-blog]

April Snow

Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway. The world is in a delay. All the political consultants drinking whiskey keep their heads down, lifting them only to look at the beautiful scarred waitress who wears typewriter keys as a necklace. They jingle when she brings them drinks. Outside the giant plate glass windows the planes are completely covered in snow, it piles up on the wings. I feel like a mountain of cell phone chargers. Each of the various faiths of our various fathers keeps us only partly protected. I don’t want to talk on the phone to an angel. At night before I go to sleep I am already dreaming. Of coffee, of ancient generals, of the faces of statues each of which has the eternal expression of one of my feelings. I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

Matthew Zapruder from Come On All You Ghosts

#poetry #matthew zapruder

[sublimate-blog]

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.

Alan Watts  (via laplumeabelle)

[sublimate-blog]

Lover spot and spit, churning oil in the stomach, seeding a blood-story.  It’s not enough, happiness. I want to be paper-thin, high like the soldiers in Vietnam smoking hashish.        Somewhere I had that.        4500 miles above sea. I’m shaking out the ocean-fuzz, the sound a child might utter when she spots a strange animal:        I’m gonna see.  The anticipation’s so easy going.  A lover’s what I need—not only hands, but a brain I could die for. I found one, maybe two. They both love downers, love a lot of talk over the fine details of social machinery: it squeaks here. It doesn’t rust; it won’t swallow up the maker, maiming him, degloving the skin from his arthritic hand, snapping his finger bones in a beautiful cacophony down on the factory floor. The anticipation of blood flattens me. I’m helpless now to any horror I can find.       Your brain mouths nightmare triggers               to my sleepless eyes.  Baby,        that’s how I know the devil.  I’ve been        looking for him, gonna confront him        about all those years ago. You were there.  The way you talk about women,        it’s apparent you’ve watched them break. Yeah, but one, maybe two.  It never matters how dark. Spot and The Lorax.  Little almond mouths soak up the hunger—I’m telling you.  Didn’t matter how many ways I said, “I’m leaving you.”  I never did. In shower steam I write B-r-i-a-n on the glass.        You gave me a variation on coke.  I knew        I could talk circles around the world,        I understood devotion as I never had. It felt like that, I felt everything playing my heart-strings, I felt euphoric— lessons from the male brain.  Spells and sacrifices; I lay down my emotion starting now, I know I can always pick it up again.

Male Brain on ADHD

[sublimate-blog]

Ivanovo detstvo/Ivan’s Childhood, 1962, Andrei Tarkovsky

The complex choreographed sequence involving Masha’s encounter with Kholin in the birch forest is one of the most iconic shots in cinema, symbolizing the need for help in hard times, a moment of connection above the void, a desperate act of human contact. The camera tracks their movements at a distance before joining them, finally, in a strange, low-angle embrace over a small trench. The shot begins from a low point of view, and then, when Masha tries to jump over the ditch and is intercepted by Kholin, who holds her in the air and kisses her, the camera goes down below ground level and records the scene from within the ditch, to soon thereafter rise sharply up and continue rolling at eye level with the characters.  (1, 2)

[sublimate-blog]

This House

Call me a wild thing.  I run sometimes.  Sometimes I sleep beneath the ancient tree.  My belly is softer than my back. There are things inside of me that are overgrown with blackberries. They are plump with the sun, ready to stain fingers. There is a room where a woman a woman with a loom weaves. She is making a fabric, like skin, white as a ghost.  The light passes through it.  Her body is like lace. The light passes through it. Its corners curl into shapes and beautiful patterns. She lays herself before me on top of the table and places my teacup onto her chest. They are both trembling things. She covers her body with teacups, balancing, braces herself for any movement in the earth. The earth is a trembling thing.  I lay at her feet and kiss her ankle. We are all trembling things.

Anis Mojgani