people

all quotes by giorgio agamben from homo sacer

". . . the technico-scientific problem of resuscitation: at stake was nothing less than a redefinition of death. until then, the task of determining death was given over to the physician, who made use of the traditional criteria that had remained substantially the same throughout the centuries: the stopping of the heartbeat and the cessation of breathing. overcoma rendered obsolete precisely these two ancient categories for the assessment of death and, opening a no-man's-land between coma and death, made it necessary to identity new criteria and establish new definitions as [mollaret and goulon] wrote, the problem expands 'to the point of putting the final borders of life in question, and even further, to the determination of a right to establish the hour of legal death.'"

"the hospital room in which the neomort, the overcomatose person, and the faux vivant waver between life and death delimits a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man and his technology, appears for the first time. and since it is precisely a question not of a natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo sacer (the comatose person has been defined as an intermediary being between man and an animal), what is at stake is, once again, the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide."

"the camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. in the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order."

"if this is true, if the essence of the camp consists in the materialization of the state of exception and in the subsequent creation of a space in which bare life and the juridical rule enter into a threshold of indistinction, then we must admit that we find ourselves virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created, independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography. . . an apparently innocuous space (for example, the hotel arcades in roissy) actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign (for example, in the four days during which foreigners can be held in the zone d'attente before the intervention of the judicial authority).

in this light, the birth of the camp in our time appears as an event that decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. it is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state, which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the state) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation), enters into a lasting crisis, and the state decides to assume directly the care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks. if the structure of the nation-state is, in other words, defined by the three elements land, order, birth, the rupture of the old nomos is produced not in the two aspects that constituted it according to schmitt. . . but rather at the point marking the inscription of bare life (the birth that thus become nation) within the two of them. something can no longer function within the traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and the camp is the new hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order - or, rather, the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine. it is significant that the camps appear together with new laws on citizenship and the denationalization of citizens - not only the nuremberg laws on citizenship in the reich but also the laws on denationalization promulgated by almost all european states, including france, between 1915 and 1933. the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the juridico-political order, now becomes a new and stable spatial arrangement inhabited by the bare life that more and more can no longer be inscribed in that order. the growing dissociation of birth (bare life) and the nation-state is the new fact of politics in our day, and what we call camp is this disjunction. . . the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living, and it is this structure of the camp that we must learn to recognize in all its metamorphoses into the zones d'attentes of our airports and certain outskirts of our cities."

"every interpretation of the political meaning of the term 'people' must begin with the singular fact that in modern european languages, 'people' also always indicates the poor, the disinherited, and the excluded. one term thus names both the constitutive political subject and the class that is, de facto if not de jure, excluded from politics.

in common speech as in political parlance, the italian popolo, the french peuple, the spanish pueblo (like the corresponding adjectives popolare, populaire, popolar and late populus and popularis, from which they derive) designate both the complex of citizens as a unitary political body (as in 'the italian people' or 'the people's judge') and the members of the lower classes (as in homme du peuple, rione popolare, front populaire). even the english word 'people,' which has a less differentiated meaning, still conserves the sense of 'ordinary people' in contrast to the rich and the nobility. . .

such a diffuse and constant semantic ambiguity cannot be accidental: it must reflect an amphiboly inherent in the nature and function of the concept 'people' in western politics. it is as if what we call 'people' were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, and exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve - court of miracles or camp - of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated. in this sense, a single and compact referent for the term 'people' simply does not exist anywhere: like many fundamental political concepts. . . 'people' is a polar concept that indicates a double movement and a complex relation between two extremes."

the story, around the corner

by naomi shihab nye from you & yours

is not turning the way you thought

it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,

the way a child draws the tail of a pig.

what came out of your mouth,

a riff of common talk.

as a sudden weather shift on a beach,

sky looming mountains of cloud

in a way you cannot predict

or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,

takes its own side. and it is strange.

far more complicated than a few phrases

pierced together around a kitchen table

on a july morning in dallas, say,

a city you don’t live in, where people

might shop forever or throw a thousand stories

away. you who carried or told a tiny bit of it

aren’t sure. is this what we wanted?

stories wandering out,

having their own free lives?

maybe they are planning something bad.

a scrap or cell of talk you barely remember

is growing into a weird body with many demands.

one day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,

knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

“remote objects of intense devotion”

by jean valentine from little boat

a guy smoking, in his chair

a guy in his car    intensely

in unrequited love    for eternity

remote

objects

of intense devotion

as long as one remote glistening soul

    so long will i cry it

still forces

hotly or coldly        a child

    so long will i cry it

from slavery to prisons

quotes from are prisons obsolete? by angela davis

“the u.s. population in general is less than five percent of the world's total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world's combined prison population can be claimed by the united states. In elliott currie's words, ‘the prison has become a looming presence in our society to an extent unparalleled in our history or that of any other industrial democracy. Short of major wars, mass incarceration has been the most thoroughly implemented government social program of our time.’"

“Geographer Ruth Gilmore describes the expansion of prisons in California as 'a geographical solution to socio-economic problems.' Her analysis of the prison industrial complex in California describes these developments as a response to surpluses of capital, land labor, and state capacity.

'California's new prisons are sited on devalued rural land, most, in fact on formerly irrigated agricultural acres. . . The State bought land sold by big landowners. And the State assured the small, depressed towns now shadowed by prisons that the new, recession-proof, non-polluting industry would jump-start local redevelopment.'”

“the ideologies governing slavery and those governing punishment were profoundly linked during the earliest period of u.s. history. While free people could be legally sentenced to punishment by hard labor, such a sentence would in no way change the conditions of existence already experienced by slaves. Thus, as hirsch further reveals, thomas jefferson, who supported the sentencing of convicted people to hard labor on road and water projects, also pointed out that he would exclude slaves from this sort of punishment. Since slaves already performed hard labor, sentencing them to penal labor would not mark a difference in their condition. Jefferson suggested banishment to other countries instead.

Particularly in the united states, race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality. After the abolition of slavery, former slave states passed new legislation revising the Slave Codes in order to regulate the behavior of free blacks in ways similar to those that had existed during slavery. The new Black Codes proscribed a range of actions – such as vagrancy, absence from work, breach of job contracts, the possession of firearms, and insulting gestures or acts – that were criminalized only when the person charged was black. With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, slavery and involuntary servitude were putatively abolished. However, there was a significant exception. In the wording of the amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude were abolished 'except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.' According to the Black Codes, there were crimes defined by state law for which only black people could be 'duly convicted.' Thus, former slaves, who had recently been extricated from a condition of hard labor for life, could be legally sentenced to penal servitude.

In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the southern states hastened to develop a criminal justice system that could legally restrict the possibilities of freedom for newly released slaves. Black people became the prime targets of a developing convict lease system, referred to by many as a reincarnation of slavery. The Mississippi Black Codes, for example, declared vagrant 'anyone/who was guilty of theft, had run away [from a job, apparently], was drunk, was wanton in conduct or speech, had neglected job or family, handled money carelessly, and . . . all other idle and disorderly persons.' Thus, vagrancy was coded as a black crime, one punishable by incarceration and forced labor, sometimes on the very plantations that previously had thrived on slave labor.”

“the expansion of the convict lease system and the county chain gang meant that the antebellum criminal justice system, which focused far more intensely on black people than on whites, defined southern criminal justice largely as a means of controlling black labor. According to mancini: 'among the multifarious debilitating legacies of slavery was the conviction that blacks could only labor in a certain way – the way experience had shown them to have labored in the past: in gangs, subjected to constant supervision, and under the discipline of the lash. Since these were the requisites of slavery, and since slaves were blacks, southern whites almost universally concluded that blacks could not work unless subjected to such intense surveillance and discipline.'”

“Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew.”

"thus far i have largely used gender-neutral language to describe the historical development of the prison and its reformers. but convicts punished by imprisonment in emergent penitentiary systems were primarily male. this reflected the deeply gender-biased structure of legal, political, and economic rights. since women were largely denied public status as rights-bearing individuals, they could not be easily punished by the deprivation of such rights through imprisonment. this was especially true of married women, who had no standing before the law. according to english common law, marriage resulted in a state of 'civil death,' as symbolized by the wife's assumption of the husband's name. consequently, she tended to be punished for revolting against her domestic duties rather than for failure in her meager public responsibilities. the relegation of white women to domestic economies prevented them from playing a significant role in the emergent commodity realm. this was especially true since wage labor was typically gendered as male and racialized as white. it is not fortuituous that domestic corporal punishment for women survived long after these modes of punishment had become obsolete for (white) men. the persistence of domestic violence painfully attests to these historical modes of gendered punishment."

“alderson's regimes were based on the assumption that 'criminal' women could be rehabilitated by assimilating correct womanly behaviors – that is, by becoming experts in domesticity – especially cooking, cleaning, and sewing. Of course, training designed to produce better wives and mothers among middle-class white women effectively produced domestic servants among black and poor women.”

“for most of the period after world war II, the female incarceration rate hovered at around 8 per 100,000; it did not reach double digits until 1977. today it is 51 per 100,000. . . at the current rates of increase, there will be more women in american prisons in the year 2010 than there were inmates of both sexes in 1970. when we combine the effects of race and gender, the nature of these shifts in the prison population is even clearer. The prison incarceration rate for black women today exceeds that for white men as recently as 1980.” - elliot currie

“for private business prison labor is like a pot of gold. No strikes. No union organizing. No health benefits, unemployment insurance, or workers' compensation to pay. No language barriers, as in foreign countries. New leviathan prisons are being built on thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure, and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds, and lingerie for victoria's secret, all at a fraction of the cost of 'free labor'.” -linda evans and eve goldberg

“the notion of a prison industrial complex insists on understandings of the punishment process that take into account economic and political structures and ideologies, rather than focusing myopically on individual criminal conduct and efforts to 'curb crime'. The fact, for example, that many corporations with global markets now rely on prisons as an important source of profit helps us to understand the rapidity with which prisons began to proliferate precisely at a time when official studies indicated that the crime rate was falling. The notion of a prison industrial complex also insists that the racialization of prison populations – and this is not only true of the united states, but of europe, south america, and australia as well – is not an incidental feature. Thus, critiques of the prison industrial complex undertaken by abolitionist activists and scholars are very much linked to critiques of the global persistence of racism. Antiracist and other social justice movements are incomplete without attention to the politics of imprisonment.”

“i hesitate to make unmediated use of such statistical evidence because it can discourage the very critical thinking that ought to be elicited by an understanding of the prison industrial complex. It is precisely the abstraction of numbers that plays such a central role in criminalizing those who experience the misfortune of imprisonment. There are many different kinds of men and women in the prisons, jails, and INS and military detention centers, whose lives are erased by the bureau of justice statistics figures. The numbers recognize no distinction between the woman who is imprisoned on drug conspiracy and the man who is in prison for killing his wife, a man who might actually end up spending less time behind bars than the woman.

With this observation in mind, the statistical breakdown is as follows: there were 1,324,465 people in 'federal and state prisons', 15,852 in 'territorial prisons', 631,240 in 'local jails', 8,761 in 'immigration and naturalization detention facilities', 2,436 in 'military facilities', 1,912 in 'jails in indian country', and 108,965 in 'juvenile facilities'. [2001] In the ten years between 1990 and 2000, 351 new places of confinement were opened by states and more than 528,000 beds were added, amounting to  1,320 state facilities, representing an eight-one percent increase.”

“companies that service the criminal justice system need sufficient quantities of raw materials to guarantee long-term growth. . . in the criminal justice field, the raw material is prisoners, and industry will do what is necessary to guarantee a steady supple. For the supple of prisoners to grow, criminal justice policies must ensure a sufficient number of incarcerated americans regardless of whether crime is rising or the incarceration is necessary.” - nils christie

“extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analysis and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison. Prison reform rhetoric, which has always undergirded dominant critiques of the prison system, will not work in this new situation. If reform approaches have tended to bolster the permanence of the prison in the past, they certainly will not suffice to challenge the economic and political relationships that sustain the prison today. This means that in the era of the prison industrial complex, activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of u.s.-style prisons throughout the world.”

“radical opposition to the global prison industrial complex sees the antiprison movement as a vital means of expanding the terrain on which the quest for democracy will unfold. This movement is thus antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and antihomophobic. It calls for the abolition of the prison as the dominant mode of punishment but at the same time recognizes the need for genuine solidarity with the millions of men, women, and children who are behind bars. A major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more humane, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners- calling for less violent conditions, an end to state sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing – and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, nor more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?”

“it is within this context that it makes sense to consider the decriminalization of drug use as a significant component of a larger strategy to simultaneously oppose structures of racism within the criminal justice system and further the abolitionist agenda of decarceration.”

“it is true that if we focus myopically on the existing system – and perhaps this is the problem that leads to the assumption that imprisonment is the only alternative to death – it is very hard to imagine a structurally similar system capable of handling such a vast population of lawbreakers. If, however, we shift our attention from the prison, perceived as an isolated institution, to the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex, it may be easier to think about alternatives. In other words, a more complicated framework may yield more options than if we simply attempt to discover a single substitute for the prison system. The first step, then, would be to let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment that would occupy the same footprint as the prison system.

Since the 1980s, the prison system has become increasingly ensconced in the economic, political, and ideological life of the united states and the transnational trafficking in US commodities, culture, and ideas. Thus, the prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards' unions, and legislative and court agendas. If it is true that the contemporary meaning of punishment is fashioned through these relationships, then the most effective abolitionist strategies will contest these relationships and propose alternatives that pull them apart. What, then, would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?

An abolitionist approach that seeks to answer questions such as these would require us to imagine a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions, with the ultimate aim of removing the prison from the social and ideological landscapes of our society. In other words, we would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, positing decarceration as our overarching strategyy, we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment – demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance.

The creation of new institutions that lay claim to the space now occupied by the prison can eventually start to crowd out the prison so that it would inhabit increasingly smaller areas of our social and psychic landscape. Schools can therefore be seen as the most powerful alternative to jails and prisons. Unless the current structures of violence are eliminated from schools in impoverished communities of color – including the presence of armed security guards and police – and unless schools become places that encourage the joy of learning, these schools will remain the major conduits to prison. The alternative would be to transform schools into vehicles for decarceration. Within the health care system, it is important to emphasize the current scarcity of institutions available to poor people who suffer severe mental and emotional illnesses. There are currently more people with mental and emotional disorders in jails and prisons than in mental institutions. This call for new facilities designed to assist poor people should not be taken as an appeal to reinstitute the old system of mental institutions, which were – and in many cases still are – as repressive as the prisons. It is simply to suggest that the racial and class disparities in care available to the affluent and the deprived need to be eradicated, thus creating another vehicle for decarceration.”

boundaries. desire.

all quotes by jeanette winterson from the powerbook

"i looked down. there it was, making a bridge from my body to hers.
i was still wearing my tunic and the princess could not see the leather belt that carried everything with it. all she could see, all she could feel, was the eagerness of my bulbs and stem.
i kneeled down, the tulip waving at me as it had done on the hillside that afternoon i cut it down.
very gently the princess lowered herself across my knees and i felt the firm red head and pale shaft plant itself in her body. a delicate green-tinted sap dribbled down her brown thighs.
all afternoon i fucked her."

"(she suddenly took my hand.) 'this is where i feel things.'
(she guided my hand over the low waistband of her jeans.) 'excitement, danger. . .'
(she flattened my hand on her abdomen and held it there.)
'sex. and to go on feeling i have to keep some empty space.'
(suddenly she let my hand drop. i looked at it sadly.)
she said, 'what about you? what brings you to paris?'
'a story i'm writing.'
'is it about paris?'
'no, but paris is in it.'
'what is it about?'
'boundaries. desire.'
'what are your other books about?'
'boundaries. desire.'
'can't you write about something else?'
'no.'
 'so why come to paris?'
'another city. another disguise.'"

"then she made a speech. i suppose you can guess the lines.
inside her marriage there were too many clocks and not enough time. too much furniture and too little space. outside her marriage, there would be nothing to hold her, nothing to shape her. the space she found would be outer space. space without gravity or weight, where bit by bit the self disintegrates."

"'i like you.'
'why?'
'you want to fight.'
'the world is my boxing ring.'
'do you have to fight everyone?'
'only the enemy.'
'is it that simple?'
'you can be so subtle you just tie yourself up in knots.'
'you can be so simple you just go nine rounds with yourself.'
'well yes, i do, often.'
'what for?'
'to stay on my toes.'
'you should relax.'
'i look silly in an armchair.'
'what do you look like in bed?'"

 "what to say? that the end of love is a haunting. a haunting of dream. a haunting of silence. haunted by ghosts it is easy to become a ghost. life ebbs. the pulse is too faint. nothing stirs you. some people approve of this and call it healing. it is not healing. a dead body feels no pain. . .
she thinks i'm holding on to pain. she thinks the pain is a souvenir. perhaps she thinks that pain is the only way i can feel. as it is, the pain reminds me that my feelings are damaged. the pain doesn't stop me from loving - only a false healing could do that - the pain tells me that neither my receptors nor my transmitters are in perfect working order. the pain is not feeling, but it has become an instrument of feeling."

"the danger of writing yourself towards an ending that need never be told. at a certain point the story gathers momentum. it convinces itself, and does its best to convince you, that the end in sight is the only possible outcome. there is a fatefulness and a loss of control that are somehow comforting. this was your script, but now it writes itself.
stop.
break the narrative. refuse all the stories that have been told so far (because that is what the momentum really is), and try to tell the story differently - in a different style, with different weights - and allow some air to those elements choked with centuries of use, and give some substance to the floating world.
in quantum reality there are millions of possible worlds, unactualised, potential, perhaps, bearing in on us, but only reachable by wormholes we can never find. if we do find one, we don't come back.
in those other worlds event may track our own, but the ending will be different. sometimes we need a different ending."

"'oh, i know what you think of me.'
'what i think of you and what i feel for you are different things.'
'do you usually sleep with people you despise?'
'that's not what i meant.'
'i want you to be my lover not my judge.'
she's right. i'm the one who's muddling things up. how she lives is her decision. if i don't like it i should stay out of the way. if i don't like it i should say so and close the door.
her arms were warms and tight.
'what is it you want?' she said.
i want to be able to call you. i want to be able to knock on your door. i want to be able to keep your key and to give you mine. i want to be seen with you in public. i want there to be no gossip. i want to make supper with you. i want to go shopping with you. i want to know that nothing can come between us except each other.
. . . how do you seem to write me to myself?
i am a message. you change the meaning.
i am a map that you redraw.
. . . reach in to lift it out and your hand misses. the water is deeper than you had gauged. you reach further, your whole body straining, and then there is nothing for it but to slide in - deeper, much deeper than you had gauged - and still the thing eludes you."

"if i want to say no, i will, but for the right reasons. if i want to say yes, i will, but for the right reasons. leave the consequences. leave the finale. leave the grand statements. the simplicity of feeling should not be taxed. i can't work out what this will cost or what either of us owe. . . she was silent. we were both exposed. the truth is that you can divide your heart in all sorts of interesting ways - a little here, a little there, most banked at home, some of it coined out for a flutter. but love cleaves through the mind's mathematics. love's lengthways splits the heart in two - the heart where you are, the heart where you want to be."

"i've been here before and it's not a room with a view. the only power i have is the negative power of withdrawal. if i don't withdraw i have no power at all. a relationship where one person has no power or negative power isn't a relationship, it's the bond between master and slave."

against annihilation

-for jacob a. hill

by roberta hill whiteman

(from philadelphia flowers)

when i found eraser dust

from “you must do your math”

left on my desk this morning, i thought of how

i love to see your face,

at once so familiar, so foreign.

soon, you will be a man

in a country born from war,

in a country that renews its pride

by making cluster-bombs. but this morning

we are safe on our street and i can watch

your spirit shimmer around you

when you laugh.

at this moment, the joy of antelope twins

who bounded before you on the day

of your birth overtakes you.

you grow bold, curious

to the point of danger,

tramping through jack pines,

setting up camps. your nomadic soul

follows the wind’s way---

whatever arrives, arrives.

yet you never stay out too long

before the coolness of the turtle clan

glides over your shoulders.

then your turtle heart hedges

and you hoard string,

bits of tin, railroad ties,

like gatherers who abided under ancient maples.

you grow so hard on yourself, hibernating,

building robots in your room,

your blood blooming under dreaming seas,

inaccessible to me,

though at times like these

you stand before an open window

like my father.

at such moments, do you ponder

just what phenolphthalein means?

this poem asks the earth

to offer you her care,

to remind you that your grandfathers

lived here for five thousand years.

they followed the loon,

so it may also guide

your running through the humming night.

at distances greater than your twelve years,

through the silhouettes

of starker fears, may these blessings

find you still

wonderously alive

in this world that prizes

annihilation.

the wheel

by Tomaž Šalamun from justice

o, like a little puppy i slept on the floor,
washed myself in the window.
i didn't trust your honeyed heart.
we ate breakfast when you
smelled like the urmother of hours,
mortally dangerous to me.
i tied you up.
you forbade me to steal horses.
they'll come by themselves!
they'll come by themselves!
and i smacked my lips.

only you are here
to burn you and forget you,
my property.
collapsing wet brown houses,
how should i get up.
how should i drink your gulps
in this thick, poisoned
sea air.
you by yourself broke your eyes and
pulled out your
scent with your rattle, your
banal black moan.
you give a damn what happens to me.

come, break me, reduce me. i'm becoming
the family milk bowl. the siren will
kill me. tear her dress off like virgil to make her

a fat, abashed, gelatine. i'm mashed by rocks.
she devours me like a tempest, she devours
the tattered flag. i'm an ice cream cone

melting in the child's belly. smashed
grapeskins. the yawning of sybaritic gazelles.
as an elephant i squirted. as a leopard i

squatted on the cow's heart, the big one, at the edge
bordered with pearls. bamboo was stuck in
the heart's small nooks which on the other side

kept opening like mouths that had just passed
through the gelatine. the arrow, the wing,
the fish fins, the diamond nib of my liquified

brain. this makes the empire. lust.
appoint the sirens in the valleys, but i
swallow you out of myself. i enjoy

you out of myself. and i want more.
more, more, more, still more, 'til the pain
with its heel squeezes my soul like toothpaste

from my throat. to have a good cry again and to
tremble, to shake like an overhead machine
and to sob. to need you. to need you.

a forge, and a scythe

by raymond carver, from where water comes together with other water

one minute i had the windows open
and the sun was out. warm breezes
blew through the room.
(i remarked on this in a letter.)
then, while i watched, it grew dark.
the water began whitecapping.
all the sport-fishing boats turned
and headed in, a little fleet.
those wind-chimes on the porch
blew down. the tops of our trees shook.
the stove pipe squeaked and rattled
around in its moorings.
i said, "a forge, and a scythe."
i talk to myself like this.
saying the names of things -
capstan, hawser, loam, leaf, furnace.
your face, your mouth, your shoulder
inconceivable to to me now!
where did they go? it's like
i dreamed them. the stones we brought
home from the beach lie face up
on the windowsill, cooling.
come home. do you hear?
my lungs are thick with the smoke
of your absence.