May 2012
3 posts
2 tags
نشست مهدی
Outside ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field
I’ll meet you there.
That old same place, mid-state, with sunshine 300 or so days a year.
Where we can break bread again,
take our tomatoes and our cheese,
our chicken wet with curry and make a meal.
Let us saw through those bones to the mealy marrow,
and you tell me how Khomeni kicked you out,
how Carter’s men spit on you for...
April 2012
5 posts
3 tags
Baucis, Philemon, Jupiter and Mercury
“The gods recline. Old Baucis, with her skirts
tucked up—and hands that shook a bit—sets out
the table; one of it three legs was short—
but then the piece of broken pottery
she jams beneath the shorter leg adjusts
the slant—at last it’s level. And with green
mint leaves, old Baucis wipes the table clean.
She offers dappled...
3 tags
Snakes' Nest
His eyes seized upon the sudden beatitude of her face illuminated by exaltation. It was as if in the dilated wrinkles, in the quivering nose, in the agitated eyelids (and even in the streaks of penciled brows, in the narrow forehead and the tiny ears) all the emblems of life were reunited, emblems of a splendid and definitive existence which afterward was dispersed in the tiny blue veins, in the...
1 tag
Build a Village--Marry, Cut, Sign
I am different because I raised me. I smell the smoke on my lapels because I built the fire we all sat around.
The documents all have my name, ‘X’.
I pretended not to read.
I married the town beggar girl with the town boy. It is a small town, and they both have the same marks.
I have taken everyone in until it is my town, a small circle of childheads, bowing over meal,...
2 tags
Missouri
Recreate the look and the feel of the set of Deliverance, pull a core sample of depressed soil, shimmy the tiny rocks from the dirt, cast them aside like i-ching; realize there is no way out of this state unless you can learn to evolve out of body, float like an apolitical turd on the muscle of Missouri’s sky.
Befriend an eager, toothless boy. Play a game of kick-and-carry the tumbleweed. Don’t...
3 tags
Ode to a Notebook
You smell like glue, and you’re red too. Vibrant like blood on snow. I like you, I like my eyes on you—they have a future here, so do my fingers, my scrawling collection of graphite—each ‘mm’ happy to climb inside you, each mote on each tip happy that you’re obliging our ritual.
Eventually things will flicker here in tandem with corollaries and...
March 2012
18 posts
3 tags
1 tag
“The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip...
4 tags
Side Effects May Include
Cooper: How did you become interested in the DSM? Lane: I’m a teacher, and I learned that many of my students were on some kind of psychiatric medication, generally prescribed but sometimes not. I wanted to know why they and their doctors felt that drugs were necessary to treat relatively mild problems that earlier generations had dealt with quite differently. I had just finished writing a...
3 tags
“I’d sit in the garden among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was a wonderland for under-age drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaise and Katzenjammer Kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinees in French, until the pictures swam in front of my eyes, smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane. And I still associate the taste of oysters...
2 tags
3 tags
14th street smells of bergamot. 12th of magnolia. 9th of strawberry jello.
The green-haired girl in front of me, on the bus, with her neck pierced, her barbell guarding a pustule, smells like the final night before an eviction.
When I get to go to your house, it smells moldy. All those silver-lined towels formerly wrapped around tattooed, swimming girls, are discarded in a pile by the door. I...
4 tags
I knew when I started making caricatures of genitals with our bedsheets that I was bored with things. See, it’s an asshole. My hand turned into a fist, the other hand plucking the sheet slack through the hole. I balled up my fists underneath the sheet, tenting my thumbs a little higher up then the rest. Breasts. And then my hands prayed in a slightly open manner, the two pointer fingers bent low...
3 tags
Prescription for Leaving
Go far away, where they don’t know you. This should be easy. Memorize a route to the nearest bar that satisfies you, most accommodations will do. Learn the bartenders’ names, tell them what you want in their language. Stumble as you pull out their currency and put it on their bar. Get dangerous, get blind, blink back the spit thrown into your eye from a friend who is frothing at the mouth....
2 tags
From Crotone
I have been made by your country to return to the place where I met you. It has been easy to ignore the fact that we no longer see each other until now. Being in this spot is arguably easier when aloneness is something contemplated, drawn upon. Now it is something I compare with. The time now features a lingering you, a time of un-aloneness, but I must remember that I sat with you so many times...
5 tags
One of the first things he told me, the day we met, was that, for him, the great surprise of foraging in Nordic Europe was to see cabbages sprouting from rotting seaweed on a beach, and to realize how much food value the sea, the sand, and the nutrients released in the rotting process could produce.
4 tags
Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby
Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes.
3 tags
Da Una Collina
You don’t have very long until it’s over. All the people that sought you properly have since backed off. Their eyes shifting to the corner where the only light is. This has been a bold voyage to another land where the people are roughly the same. Paranoid agents of power, misogynists, dictators, sly librarians, Nazis, egoists, mystics.
Here you have gone to the top of their hills and looked...
5 tags
Metal Goose
A moveable peace. This is what the air is like outside the airplane, cold and fast and involved in destinations. Its frictions casts a white noise that never goes away. Years after leaving, one still hears the throttle of lift, the whiny-tin plucks of wing flaps. It is a technological seashell, drudged up from the mis-landings of kitty hawk. It is a great diamond of a fowl, a belly so full and...
3 tags
"Mere Words!"
“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear and vivid and cruel. One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of a viol or lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?” —The Picture of Dorian Gray
February 2012
5 posts
Natasha VC: Fuck Your Juice!!!!!! →
natashavc:
Quit smoking. Quit drinking. Devote all manner of vice to soda drinking. Say you will only do it on the weekends as a “treat” then just give up and have it with every meal. Fuck meals, drive to 7/11 twice a week to just get six packs (the baby kind!) of root beer. How long is this waitress going…
4 tags
1. The Most Holy: Immune
To touch—a most unwitting thing,
to pour over the other like a viscous fluid
letting their heat
be its heat, without tension
is to touch well
To at first hold
like what you are holding is a hot egg
with a hard interior, scalded
discolorated, with wet skin
is to hold nervously
To love like the nose is dug,
rubbed in pollen
intentionless, except for want of scent
then rest,...
3 tags
An Intimate Cosmology
I often act out from a perceived scarcity of love. The acting out is like that of an animal. I act like an animal in hunger—to my self and to others.
What I want then is my love of another to supersede my animal self, to poison the weed of narcissism and let it die off.
A love that will laugh, and jump into a lake naked, or wheelbarrow me into a weedy ditch, to plow and crow and come out...
December 2011
3 posts
6 tags
A Little Christmas, Jackie Returns to the States...
FRIEND: Hey Jackie, well I am assuming it’s about time for you to return. Are you ready for it?
ME: I’m almost ready for it. First I have to jump through a gate of fire…I believe most Americans refer to it as ‘New Jersey’. There I shall fast until my eyes cross. Permanently. Then I will take my trusty walking stick and cross the Appalachian mountains into the...
2 tags
Fun with Times, New York Times, August 26, 2011
“The thefts are believed to be the work on an organized gang of itinerant people known as Irish travelers, who are also involved in drug smuggling, money laundering and the less flamboyant crime of distributing fake power tools”
“We didn’t need the capital, but it doesn’t hurt in a volatile time.” Charles O. Holiday, bank chairman
“Another friend,...
November 2011
5 posts
this room and everything in it: "An Insistent and... →
rabbit-light:
—David Abram Like an enormous leech the pancreas lies with its head tucked into the duodenum, upside down, the tail outstretched over it, an animal curled in on itself. In the preserve jar of the belly, it wriggles like a strange, medieval cure. When we sleep, Anicka, the pancreas secretes…
3 tags
3 tags
Watched ‘Modern Times’, came out of the theater to a thick fog. When at home decided to flip through the portable Oscar Wilde book I got at the library and found this:
“If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself—a rare type in our time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met with—you rise from the table richer, and conscious that...
2 tags
“Empathy, he had once decided, must be limited to herbivores, or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between successful and defeated…As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being...
September 2011
2 posts
1 tag
When it Comes
When it comes it is like the
neighbor boy pacing, I can see
him through the blended, corrugated glass
When it comes it quickly spreads like
a car’s light over porticos
the darkness then turns its pages
its body, from violet
to a lit within gray
When it comes we are talking
about the whole-some descriptions of a girl—
“she wore cinnamon lipstick, paisley,...
August 2011
1 post
3 tags
Bookslut Interview with Anthony Bourdain Excerpt:...
There’s a passage in the Salman Rushdie book The Ground Beneath Her Feet that talks about people who don’t belong to any one place and have to keep moving, and reading it was like feeling, oh, I’m not the only one.
AB: It was a sad moment. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life, but it was also a sad one. It was a selfish moment. I’ve talked elsewhere about there are times in your...