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7r0773r · 4 years

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Vice: New and Selected Poems by Ai

ABORTION

Coming home, I find you still in bed, but when I pull back the blanket, I see your stomach is flat as an iron. You’ve done it, as you warned me you would and left the fetus wrapped in wax paper for me to look at. My son. Woman, loving you no matter what you do, what can I say, except that I’ve heard the poor have no children, just small people and there is room only for one man in this house. (from Cruelty, p. 4)

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THE COCKFIGHTER’S DAUGHTER

I found my father, face down, in his homemade chili and had to hit the bowl with a hammer to get it off, then scrape the pinto beans and chunks of ground beef off his face with a knife. Once he was clean I called the police, described the dirt road that snaked from the highway to his trailer beside the river. The rooster was in the bedroom, tied to a table leg. Nearby stood a tin of cloudy water and a few seeds scattered on a piece of wax paper, the cheap green carpet stained by gobs of darker green shit. I was careful not to get too close, because, though his beak was tied shut, he could still jump for me and claw me as he had my father. The scars ran down his arms to a hole where the rooster had torn the flesh and run with it, finally spitting it out. When the old man stopped the bleeding, the rooster was waiting on top of the pickup, his red eyes like Pentecostal flames. That’s when Father named him Preacher. He lured him down with a hen he kept penned in a coop, fortified with the kind of grille you find in those New York taxicabs. It had slots for food and water and a trap door on top, so he could reach in and pull her out by the neck. One morning he found her stiff and glassy-eyed and stood watching as the rooster attacked her carcass until she was ripped to bits of bloody flesh and feather. I cursed and screamed, but he told me to shut up, stay inside, what did a girl know about it? Then he looked at me with desire and disdain. Later he loaded the truck and left. I was sixteen and I had a mean streak, carried a knife and wore such tight jeans I could hardly walk. They all talked about me in town, but I didn’t care. My hair was stringy and greasy and I was easy for the truckers and the bar clowns that hung around night after night, fighting sometimes just for the sheer pleasure of it. I’d quit high school, but I could write my name and add two plus two without a calculator. And this time, I got to thinking, I got to planning, and one morning I hitched a ride on a semi that was headed for California in the blaze of a west Texas sunrise. I remember how he’d sit reading his schedules of bouts and planning his routes to the heart of a country he thought he could conquer with only one soldier, the $1000 cockfight always further down the pike, or balanced on the knife edge, but he wanted to deny me even that, wanted me silent and finally wife to some other unfinished businessman, but tonight, it’s just me and this old rooster, and when I’m ready, I untie him and he runs through the trailer, flapping his wings and crowing like it’s daybreak and maybe it is. Maybe we’ve both come our separate ways to reconciliation, or to placating the patron saint of roosters and lost children, and when I go outside, he strolls after me until I kneel down and we stare at each other from the cages we were born to, both knowing what it’s like to fly at an enemy’s face and take him down for the final count. Preacher, I say, I got my GED, a AA degree in computer science, a husband, and a son named Gerald, who’s three. I’ve been to L.A., Chicago, and New York City on a dare, and know what?– it’s shitty everywhere, but at least it’s not home.

After the coroner’s gone, I clean up the trailer, and later, smoke one of Father’s hand-rolled cigarettes as I walk by the river, a quivering way down in my guts, while Preacher huddles in his cage. A fat frog catches the lit cigarette and swallows it. I go back and look at the picture of my husband and son, reread the only letter I ever sent and which he did not answer, then tear it all to shreds. I hitch the pickup to the trailer and put Preacher’s cage on the seat, then I aim my car for the river, start it, and jump out just before it hits. I start the pickup and sit bent over the steering wheel, shaking and crying, until I hear Preacher clawing at the wire, my path clear, my fear drained from me like blood from a cut that’s still not deep enough to kill you off, Father, to spill you out of me for good. What was it that made us kin, that sends daughters crawling after fathers who abandon them at the womb’s door? What a great and liberating crowing comes from your rooster as another sunrise breaks the night apart with bare hands and the engine roars as I press the pedal to the floor and we shoot forward onto the road. Your schedule of fights, clipped above the dashboard, flutters in the breeze. Barstow, El Centro, then swing back to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and a twenty-minute soak in the hot springs where Geronimo once bathed, before we wind back again into Arizona, then all the way to Idaho by way of Colorado, the climb, then the slow, inevitable descent toward the unknown mine now. Mine.

(from Fate, pp. 129-33)

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PENIS ENVY

My wife deserved to be shot. I served time in the Gulf, and I am telling you when I came home and found her packed up and gone, it wasn't long until I hatched a plan. I located the man behind it all, staked out his apartment and his job. Then one afternoon, I dressed up in camouflage, loaded up my AK-47 and went to Hot Dog Heaven. I found them in the parking lot, sharing kisses over lunch. I came up from behind, but changed my mind and walked right in front, and aimed through the windshield, before they had a chance to see who it was. I shouted my name, hoping she would hear it as she died, then I went to the passenger side and fired at his head. A red mass exploded like a sunburst. At first, I couldn't believe I'd done it, then I put the gun down and looked at my hands, which were steady. I pulled open the door, before I knew what I was doing. I just had to see what he was hiding in his pants. It was pathetic, a sad, shriveled thing there between his legs and not the foot-long she had said made her scream with pleasure. I did hear screams, but they were coming from my mouth, not hers. Noise, I thought, as I fired at her body again. Of course, I'd turned the gun on myself. What else could I do to erase it all? - the 911 calls, the sirens in the distance, but the ordinariness of murder overwhelmed me, possessed me like a spirit and I thought how easy it would be to take two or three more people with me. Instead, I decided to give myself up, plus I was out of ammunition. I guess it is my destiny, to be a living example for other men, who are only bluffing when they threaten violence. Now once a week, I write a column on relationships for the prison publication. I base my advice on actual situations. For example, Clarence Thomas. He had a dick fixation, just as I did. For me, it was a torment and my downfall and nearly his. Ultimately, the question is always how far are you willing to go? I think within his parameters, Clarence went the distance. As far as I'm concerned, he's earned his place on the Supreme Court and stands tall beside all the other men, who haven't given in to a woman's scorn, who are born again from the fire of their ridicule. If you ask me, Anita Hill got off too easily. I would have caught the bitch some afternoon, while the cherry blossoms were in bloom and boom, solved all my problems. Oops! I think I wobbled over the line that separates fantasy from crime. The counselors tell me all the time I've got to get it straight how the imagination sometimes races on without us. But I know Debby and Ed are off somewhere eating wedding cake and letting me take the fall for their betrayal. Is it fair that on the other side of this wall Clarence has it all and I have nothing but a ball and chain? That reminds me, I checked this Othello play out of the library. It's about a guy who loses his reputation and his wife, well, he kills her, but she made him. I found some parallels to my own life and Clarence's. Othello's black. But the other subtler thing is how a man must stand up to humiliation, must retaliate, or lose himself, who when he finds some pubic hair in his can of Coke must ask, regardless of the consequences, who put it there? (from Greed, pp. 176-79)

#ai #book quotes

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catherine-white · 7 years

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#3 summer series 2016

If it wasn't for each daybreak I'd stay here, staked like a star in the back of the brain. -- Yusef Komunyakaa, from "Fever," Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1993)

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tpthvn · 7 years

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Don Domanski With The Cape Breton Book of the Dead, Don Domanski emerged as a remarkable new voice in Canadian poetry, combining formal conciseness with broad cosmic allusions, constant surprise with brooding atmospherics, and innovative syntax with delicate phrasings. In subsequent collections, Domanski’s poetry has deepened and expanded, with longer lines and more complex structures that journey into the far reaches of metaphor. Now, with Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski, the long-awaited first selection from his books, readers have a chance to experience the full range of his work in one volume. Editor Brian Bartlett, in his introduction, “The Trees are Full of Rings,”, discusses Domanski’s engagement with nature and the transformative power of his metaphors; his poetic bestiary amd mythical underpinnings; and his kinship to poets like Stevens, Whitman, and Rumi. Like these poets, Domanski is drawn to borderlands between the physical and the spiritual, the unconscious and the conscious. His poetry finds a home for demons and angels, spiders and wolves—and for kitchens and back alleys, forests and stars. In language both fluent and hypnotic, Domanski maintains an awareness of both the magnitudes and the minutiae that live beyond language. In “Flying Over Language,” an essay written specifically for this volume, the poet explains that for him metaphor is one way to suggest the wealth of being that poetry can only point toward. Beldam 1 Angels 2 Hospital Morgue 3 SummerPiece 4 The Sacrifice 5 Sunrise at Sea Level 6 One for an Apparition 7 A Netherpoem 8 The Ape of God 26 The God of Folding 28 Excathedra 30 Fata Morgana 31 Epiphany Under Thunderclouds 33 Before the Plague and the Breaking of Fingers 35 Lethean Lock Mnemonic Key 37 He Leans Homeward 39 Sub Rosa 9 Snowbound Letter 11 Visiting the Grandmother 13 At Daybreak a Hairsbreadth Turns to Blue 14 Hammerstroke 16 Hammerstroke II 17 Dangerous Words 18 Looking for a Destination 20 The Sleepers 21 Love Poem on the Sabbath 23 A Perfect Forehead 25 House 41 Taking the Train to Fredericton 43 The Passageway 44 Walking Away 46 What the Bestiary Said 48 Sentient Beings 49 Sleeps Ova 50 Banns 52 Flying Over Language 53 Acknowledgements

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decker62frederick-blog · 6 years

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8 Sun block Mistakes You are actually Probably Creating.

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