PETER SCHWARTZTWO THOUSAND CITY AND TWO - mimi vaquer
TWO THOUSAND CITY AND TWO
mimi vaquer
I.
Background music. Background. A thousand page textbook, Art Through the Ages, squared off on a drink-rimmed coffee table. The light has melted the candles sitting too close to the window, and they are prime for restless fingers. What happens when the sleep covers the eyes and crusts them still awake? What happens still awake?
II.
The backseat is still breathing. I can make out the vinyl among suitcases of days left to spill on its surface. The weekly planner, a dear diary, a novel to leech water from a stone. What need is there for words when history lives on floorboards of Volkswagens?
III.
I told of a dream and I stopped because I told of a dream and I stopped because I remembered you were there.
IV.
We bifurcated the days according to the calendar of light and dark. We bought a dog. The city never stopped.
Mimi Vaquer
http://mimivaquer.typepad.com/blog/
Finding Peace
Sheila Schwartz
mimi vaquer
I.
Background music. Background. A thousand page textbook, Art Through the Ages, squared off on a drink-rimmed coffee table. The light has melted the candles sitting too close to the window, and they are prime for restless fingers. What happens when the sleep covers the eyes and crusts them still awake? What happens still awake?
II.
The backseat is still breathing. I can make out the vinyl among suitcases of days left to spill on its surface. The weekly planner, a dear diary, a novel to leech water from a stone. What need is there for words when history lives on floorboards of Volkswagens?
III.
I told of a dream and I stopped because I told of a dream and I stopped because I remembered you were there.
IV.
We bifurcated the days according to the calendar of light and dark. We bought a dog. The city never stopped.
Mimi Vaquer
http://mimivaquer.typepad.com/blog/
Finding Peace
Sheila Schwartz
THE MORNING COMMUTE: THE INTERNALIZATION CANNOT CONTINUE - louisa casanave
THE MORNING COMMUTE: THE INTERNALIZATION CANNOT CONTINUE
louisa casanave
Half an hour subway delays, a woman listening to techno-core, a Lenny Kravits look-a-like, one hour before you usually wake up because your therapist wants to squeeze in a session before group therapy; the train is inching along like a millipede and uptown service has stopped. You use the emergency exit to walk to the front car to leave the train. The subway station looks like a cesarean birth. You walk one mile north and a half mile east to get to therapy, just to leave after 20 minutes to trek back to Brooklyn, past the Hilton Hotel that’s opposite Radio City Music Hall, the very junction where he told you it wasn’t like that, the day before your sister told you she was going to marry her cheating boyfriend and in your mind the two events are still inseparable. You depart the crowded rush hour train and you can’t hold in your fart any longer.
Louisa Casanave
www.louisapoetry.blogspot.com
Invitation to a Beheading
Nabokov
louisa casanave
Half an hour subway delays, a woman listening to techno-core, a Lenny Kravits look-a-like, one hour before you usually wake up because your therapist wants to squeeze in a session before group therapy; the train is inching along like a millipede and uptown service has stopped. You use the emergency exit to walk to the front car to leave the train. The subway station looks like a cesarean birth. You walk one mile north and a half mile east to get to therapy, just to leave after 20 minutes to trek back to Brooklyn, past the Hilton Hotel that’s opposite Radio City Music Hall, the very junction where he told you it wasn’t like that, the day before your sister told you she was going to marry her cheating boyfriend and in your mind the two events are still inseparable. You depart the crowded rush hour train and you can’t hold in your fart any longer.
Louisa Casanave
www.louisapoetry.blogspot.com
Invitation to a Beheading
Nabokov
TALKING TO A GIRL ON MISSION STREET - nate east
TALKING TO A GIRL ON MISSION STREET
nate east
Well anyway you can only write one story about the flood. Smoke spilled out of her mouth as she spoke and her hair spiked down over her face in shiny triangles. Because after you write one it seems like everything turns out to be about Noah, everything you write on after that. And then you try super hard to avoid writing about not just the story itself but also variations and retellings and similar themes, and pretty soon every poem ends with the opposite of G/d destroying the world, or if He ends up going for it then in your poem no one is chosen to survive so the boat’s empty except for the two-by-two animals and beasts, the captain’s wheel thing just spins by itself with no one to steer so the barge slashes around in the gale and skyscraper waves, wildly bucking and tipping and the maelstrom rips wooden boards and rigging off the side of the ship.
She flicks away her cigarette pulls a fresh one out of her bag. Ha ha, do you have a light? Takes a long deep breath of smoke and lets it drift slowly out of her mouth again in little waves and then she’s silent for a while and when she starts to talk she’s not looking at me anymore. Everything ends up as some stupid bible imitation or childish parody, anyway. Her eyes are clear grey staring off in the darkness and then suddenly they snap back onto me like a wolf’s. Seriously, she says. Everything I or you will ever write. She doesn’t smile.
Nate East
www.nateeast.com
The Girl on the Fridge
Etgar Keret
nate east
Well anyway you can only write one story about the flood. Smoke spilled out of her mouth as she spoke and her hair spiked down over her face in shiny triangles. Because after you write one it seems like everything turns out to be about Noah, everything you write on after that. And then you try super hard to avoid writing about not just the story itself but also variations and retellings and similar themes, and pretty soon every poem ends with the opposite of G/d destroying the world, or if He ends up going for it then in your poem no one is chosen to survive so the boat’s empty except for the two-by-two animals and beasts, the captain’s wheel thing just spins by itself with no one to steer so the barge slashes around in the gale and skyscraper waves, wildly bucking and tipping and the maelstrom rips wooden boards and rigging off the side of the ship.
She flicks away her cigarette pulls a fresh one out of her bag. Ha ha, do you have a light? Takes a long deep breath of smoke and lets it drift slowly out of her mouth again in little waves and then she’s silent for a while and when she starts to talk she’s not looking at me anymore. Everything ends up as some stupid bible imitation or childish parody, anyway. Her eyes are clear grey staring off in the darkness and then suddenly they snap back onto me like a wolf’s. Seriously, she says. Everything I or you will ever write. She doesn’t smile.
Nate East
www.nateeast.com
The Girl on the Fridge
Etgar Keret
NO, TURN ON RED - michelle orabona
NO, TURN ON RED
michelle orabona
She showed up as the sun was setting with an eyebrow raised and her incisors biting down on the skin under her lower lip while she bounced her bicycle seat against her hip. She knew I was going to do anything she asked. We sat on my porch till the street lights came on, then rode through town with a wide tip black magic marker and added inappropriate punctuation to billboards and traffic signs.
That was the night she sucked on a blackened finger at the corner of her mouth and said, “Hey, did you know Niagra Falls is moving backwards?” and then stared down at her chewed up fingernails without looking back at me because whenever she said hey, did you know… we both knew that she was going to be telling me something I never could have found out on my own.
That was also the night I looked down at my hand and saw her stained fingers alternating with mine. When I looked up again her face was right there.
The next time I saw her, her hands were clean and her face was far away.
Michelle Orabona
http://www.mayaswellbeme.blogspot.com/
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
michelle orabona
She showed up as the sun was setting with an eyebrow raised and her incisors biting down on the skin under her lower lip while she bounced her bicycle seat against her hip. She knew I was going to do anything she asked. We sat on my porch till the street lights came on, then rode through town with a wide tip black magic marker and added inappropriate punctuation to billboards and traffic signs.
That was the night she sucked on a blackened finger at the corner of her mouth and said, “Hey, did you know Niagra Falls is moving backwards?” and then stared down at her chewed up fingernails without looking back at me because whenever she said hey, did you know… we both knew that she was going to be telling me something I never could have found out on my own.
That was also the night I looked down at my hand and saw her stained fingers alternating with mine. When I looked up again her face was right there.
The next time I saw her, her hands were clean and her face was far away.
Michelle Orabona
http://www.mayaswellbeme.blogspot.com/
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
STELLA'S SONG - xtx
STELLA’S SONG
XTX
I remember you used to call me, “Stella” for reasons you could never adequately explain. Every attempt made you sound stoned out of your mind or like you were hiding something. I chalked it up to a name you assigned to all of your girlfriends and I didn’t care because you looked how you looked and smelled how you smelled and fucked how you fucked.
The week after we broke up and you moved out, I opened a hand-written letter addressed to you from a Stella Chadwick. It was your mom. I never gave you the letter and involuntarily reevaluated what the past seven months had really been about. I thought maybe I shouldn’t have cut every grilled cheese sandwich I made for you on the diagonal or shampooed your hair whenever we bathed together. You never asked for these things. I gave them willingly. How would I have known?
Or, somehow, did I?
Fixing your tie, handing you a towel fresh from the dryer, wiping the wet rings from underneath your beer and finding it a coaster; you’d follow each action with loving praise in a signature song crooned quietly: Sweet, sweet Stella, Stella so sweet. A song I always worked hard to hear; even when on my knees: Pavlovian.
I find myself humming it sometimes when I need a dark place to go to. It always gets me there.
XTX
I remember you used to call me, “Stella” for reasons you could never adequately explain. Every attempt made you sound stoned out of your mind or like you were hiding something. I chalked it up to a name you assigned to all of your girlfriends and I didn’t care because you looked how you looked and smelled how you smelled and fucked how you fucked.
The week after we broke up and you moved out, I opened a hand-written letter addressed to you from a Stella Chadwick. It was your mom. I never gave you the letter and involuntarily reevaluated what the past seven months had really been about. I thought maybe I shouldn’t have cut every grilled cheese sandwich I made for you on the diagonal or shampooed your hair whenever we bathed together. You never asked for these things. I gave them willingly. How would I have known?
Or, somehow, did I?
Fixing your tie, handing you a towel fresh from the dryer, wiping the wet rings from underneath your beer and finding it a coaster; you’d follow each action with loving praise in a signature song crooned quietly: Sweet, sweet Stella, Stella so sweet. A song I always worked hard to hear; even when on my knees: Pavlovian.
I find myself humming it sometimes when I need a dark place to go to. It always gets me there.
HOW TO BE THE OTHER WOMAN - maxine lopez-keough
HOW TO BE THE OTHER WOMAN
maxine lopez-keough
1. Become the kind of girl that asks important questions.
2. Remove the spine. Coil tightly. Store for winter.
3. Require a well-devised plan to secure your evening presence.
4. Pick up your anchor.
5. Develop the hips, the curve of the back, the piano-player’s fingers.
6. Provide a sense of urgency.
7. Evolve past him.
8. Regret the need to stop for air, water. (Do so audibly.)
9. Make space into a home.
10. Keep coffee shops, enemies closer.
11. Embody every port in every storm.
12. Replace the heart with a ticking clock
12b. Hold his head to the space above the left breast; give unmeasured time.
13. Learn to sleep while being watched.
14. Separate limb from limb, slowly, with vengeance.
15. Say the name until it loses all its meaning.
16. Make waiting a triumphant act.
17. Forget you have a mother.
18. Invest in bulbs; misremember their species.
19. Have the kinds of hands that heal, reform.
20. Be willing to light yourself on fire.
21. Listen for the voice that says: It was for you that I planted this garden.
22. Leave before you are asked to.
Maxine Lopez-Keough
http://thatsnice.tumblr.com
The Cradle Place
Thomas Lux
maxine lopez-keough
1. Become the kind of girl that asks important questions.
2. Remove the spine. Coil tightly. Store for winter.
3. Require a well-devised plan to secure your evening presence.
4. Pick up your anchor.
5. Develop the hips, the curve of the back, the piano-player’s fingers.
6. Provide a sense of urgency.
7. Evolve past him.
8. Regret the need to stop for air, water. (Do so audibly.)
9. Make space into a home.
10. Keep coffee shops, enemies closer.
11. Embody every port in every storm.
12. Replace the heart with a ticking clock
12b. Hold his head to the space above the left breast; give unmeasured time.
13. Learn to sleep while being watched.
14. Separate limb from limb, slowly, with vengeance.
15. Say the name until it loses all its meaning.
16. Make waiting a triumphant act.
17. Forget you have a mother.
18. Invest in bulbs; misremember their species.
19. Have the kinds of hands that heal, reform.
20. Be willing to light yourself on fire.
21. Listen for the voice that says: It was for you that I planted this garden.
22. Leave before you are asked to.
Maxine Lopez-Keough
http://thatsnice.tumblr.com
The Cradle Place
Thomas Lux
HENRY'S VOICE - neila mezynski
HENRY’S VOICE
neila mezynski
A raspy cough, Banana Cream Pie, endless cartoons, excuses. Sunk deep, quoting unalive philosophers, blaming. No one looking. Listening. Henry heard a clear voice above the deadwood. It was his. This slow house filled with the dead. He listened.
Neila Mezynski
http://www.wordriot.org/archives/576
Tobacco Road
Erskine Caldwell
neila mezynski
A raspy cough, Banana Cream Pie, endless cartoons, excuses. Sunk deep, quoting unalive philosophers, blaming. No one looking. Listening. Henry heard a clear voice above the deadwood. It was his. This slow house filled with the dead. He listened.
Neila Mezynski
http://www.wordriot.org/archives/576
Tobacco Road
Erskine Caldwell
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