living it up

 by max ritvo, from four reincarnations

the bed is on fire, and are you laughing?

you leave the bed

and leave me without thought.

the springs want to embrace each other

but they're afraid if they break

their spiral, they will never

be able to hold anyone.

i wish you would let me know

how difficult it is to love me.

then i would know you love me

beneath all that difficulty.

you are tending not only to me, you tell me, 

but to your other child -- the air,

and air puts his feet in my slippers,

and air scrubs his teeth on my brush,

and we must learn to share a bed,

we must learn to share a body.

the money is running out.

we will have to split one needle

this winter -- one end for me,

one end for air.

irresistible

 from the needle's eye by fanny howe

"degenerating matter is as alive as young matter, even feistier sometimes, for life fights for life. the stony planets are vibrating as are the chips and bones and ashes on this flying rock. but is that really living? only if empathy is pulling them around like gravity: an irresistible attachment to each other's fate." (56)

ha ha! you thought you got to choose

 from know my name by chanel miller

"you belong here, she said. and anger is allowed to be embodied. rage for the perpetrator, bystanders, society, was a healthy and normal response. some direct anger inward toward themselves, feeling that this is the only safe way to be angry. this could result in negative self-talk, blaming ourselves for the trauma, struggling to reconcile prior beliefs about justice, systems of meaning." (306)

"no matter how formidable or self-assured i might become, i will always be a tadpole. i believe that's what being a victim is, living with that little finicky, darting thing inside you. most people say development is linear, but for survivors it is cyclic. people grow up, victims grow around; we strengthen that place of hurt, become older and fuller, but the vulnerable core is never gone. more than becoming a frog, i believe surviving means learning to live forever with this trembling tadpole." (307)

"writing is the way i process the world. when i was given the opportunity to write this book, whatever god is up there said, you got your dream. i said, actually i was hoping for a lighter topic, and god was like ha ha! you thought you got to choose. this was the topic i was given. if something else had happened to me, i would have written about that too. when i get worked up over what happened, i tell myself, you are a pair of eyes. i'm a civilian who's been randomly selected to receive an all-access pass to the court system. feelings will include invasion, shame, isolation, cruelty. my job is to observe, feel, document, report. what am i learning and seeing that other people can't see? what doorways does my suffering lead to? people sometimes say, i can't imagine. how do i make them imagine? i write to show how victims are treated at this moment in time, to record the temperature of our culture. this is a marker, and i hope that in twenty years this grueling aftermath of victimhood will feel foreign." (315)

dot dot dot

 by ari banias, from anybody

touch me lightly as we walk around the polluted lake.

touch your arm to mine.

see the sunset behind the courthouse, and how they are one

 institution touching another. to my elbow touch your own

as the pelicans dip their otherworldly faces

in union into the night water. starched dress shirts

without bodies in them, without heads. 

walk with me up the residential hill and down the other side.

as we sit across from each other at the unexceptional thai restaurant

touch your leg to my leg. the table wobbles and because i am with you

i forget it. at the streetcorner,

smell the eucalyptus reminiscent of cat piss.

glance with me into the cardboard box at the discarded khakis

and rollerboard suitcase, and touch my shoulder. this is the key

broken off inside my car door in desperation by a stranger.

climb in through the trunk with me and touch your head to my head

at the cheek, at the temple, at the eye, at the lips.

let's go to the mucky shore and watch

the gondolier in the striped shirt, a cliche and real,

stroking the water seriously.

take my body away from me

lightly by touching me, take away

my head. steer me with gentleness

from the sizeable heap of oranges molding at the curb

which i would otherwise describe further.

song of the anti-sisyphus

  by chen chen from when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities

i want to start a snowball fight with you, late at night

in the supermarket parking lot. i want you

to do your worst. i want to put the groceries in the car first

because it's going to get nasty. because i was reading today

in the science section of the paper that passionate love

lasts only a year, maybe two, if you're lucky.

because i want to be extra, extra lucky. because the article 

apologized specifically to poets -- sorry, you hopeless

saps -- as though we automatically believe in love more

than anyone else (more than kindergarten teachers, long-haired

carpenters) & have been pushing this non-truth

on everyone. because who knows what will happen,

but i want to, baby, want to believe it's always possible

to love bigger & madder, even after two, three, four years,

four decades. i want a love as dirty as a snowball fight

in the sludge, under grimy yellow lights. i want this winter

inside my lungs. inside my brain & dream. i want to eat

the unplowed street & the fog that's been erasing 

evergreens. i want to eat the fog only to discover 

it's some giant's lost silver blanket. i want to 

find the giant & return to him his treasure.

i want the journey to be long. & strange, like a map 

drawn in snow by our shadows shivering. i want to shiver

against you, into you. i want the sound

of your teeth. i want the sound of the wind. i want to be

like the kids with their plastic sleds, gliding down, 

all the way down the hill, then trudging

their sleds & snowsuited bodies all the way

back to the top. i want to be how they do this, for hours,

till sunset, till some sensible someone has

to come drag them away from the snow, the slope,

the 3. . .            2. . .            1!

of joy. i want to be the anti-sisyphus, in love

with repetition, in love, in love. foolish repetition,

wise repetition. i want more hours, i want insomnia, i want

to replace the clock tick with tambourines. i want to growl,

moan, whisper, grunt, hum, & howl your name.

i want again & again your little dance, little booty shake

in big snow boots, as i sing your name.

for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me

 by chen chen from when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities

i pledge allegiance to the already fallen snow

& to the snow now falling. to the old snow & the new.

to foot & paw & tire prints in the snow both young & aging,

the deep & shallow marks left on cold streets, our long

misbegotten manuscripts. i pledge allegiance to the weather

report that promises more snow, plus freezing rain.

though i would minus the pluvial & plus the multitude

of messages pressed muddy into the perfectly

mutable snow, i have faith in the report that goes on to read:

by the end of the week, there will be an increased storm-related

illegibility of the asphalt & concrete & brick. for i pledge

betrayal to the fantasy of ever reading anything

completely. for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me:

to be brought into a patterned world of weathers

& reports. & thus i pledge allegiance to the always 

partial, the always translated, the always never

of knowing who's walking around, what's being left behind,

the signs, the cries, the breadcrumbs & the blood. the toe-

nails & armpit hair of our trying & failing to speak

our specks of here to the everywhere. dirty snow of my weary 

city, i ask you to tell me a story about your life

& you tell me you've left for another country,

but forgot your suitcase. at the airport they told you

not to worry, all your things have already been sent 

to your new place by your ninth-grade french teacher,

the only nice one. & the weather where your true love is

is governed by principles or persons you can't name,

imagine. it is that good, or bad.

kafka's axe & michael's vest

 by chen chen, from when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities

still winter. snowing, still. can it even be called action, this patience

in the form of gravity overdressed in gray?

days like this, the right silence can be an action, an axe,

right through the frozen sea, as kafka calls for. a necessary smashing,

opening. though silence can also be a shattering, closing.

 

think of peace & how the buddhists say it is found through silence.

think of silence & how audre lorde says it will not protect you.

 

think of silence as a violence, when silence means being made

a frozen sea. think of speaking as a violence, when speaking is a house

that dresses your life in the tidiest wallpaper. it makes your grief

 

sit down, this house. it makes you chairs when you need

justice. it keeps your rage room temperature. i've been thinking

 

about how the world is actually unbearable.

about all those moments of silence we're supposed to take.

each year, more moments, less life, & perhaps

 

the most monastic of monks are right to take vows 

of silence that last a decade.

 

though someone else (probably french) says our speaking

was never ours; our thoughts & selves housed 

by history, rooms we did not choose, but must live in.

 

think of paul celan, living

in the bone-rooms of german. living, singing.

 

what does it mean, to sing in the language of those

who have killed your mother,

would kill her again? does meaning shatter, leaving

 

behind the barest moan? this english, i bear it, a master's

axe, yet so is every tongue -- red with singing & killing. 

 

are we even built for peace? i think of breath & my teacher,

michael, one of the least masterly, most peaceful people i know,

& kafka's number one fan. i think of the puffy blue vest michael wears

 

when his breaths turn white. even when i'm doing my best

to think axes & walls, brave monks & unbearable houses,

 

the thought of michael in his bit-too-big deep blue vest

leaks in. & i don't think i will ever stop trying to sneak

into casual conversations the word "ululation." if only all language

 

could be ululation in blue vests. if silence could always be

as quiet as michael, sitting with his coffee & his book, rereading.

sorry

 excerpts from on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

the most common english word spoken in the nail salon was sorry. it was the one refrain for what it meant to work in the service of beauty. again and again, i watched as manicurists, bowed over a hand or foot of a client, some young as seven, say, "i'm sorry. i'm sorry. i'm so, so sorry," when they had done nothing wrong. i have seen workers, you included, apologize dozens of times throughout a forty-five-minute manicure, hoping to gain warm traction that would lead to the ultimate goal, a tip-- only to say sorry anyway when none was given.

in the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. it no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: i'm here, right here, beneath you. it is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. in the nail salon, one's definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that's charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. because the mouth must eat.

and yet it's not only so in the nail salon, ma. in those tobacco fields, too, we said it. "lo siento," manny would utter as he walked across mr. buford's field of vision. "lo siento," rigo whispered as he reached to place a machete back on the wall where buford sat ticking off numbers on a clipboard. "lo siento," i said to the boss after missing a day when lan had another schizophrenic attack and had shoved all her clothes into the oven, saying she had to get rid of the "evidence." "lo siento," we said when, one day, night arrived only to find the field half harvested, the tractor, its blown-out engine, sitting in the stilled dark. "lo siento, senor," each of us said as we walked past the truck with buford inside blasting hank williams and staring at his withered crop, a palm-sized photo of ronald reagan taped to the dash. how the day after, we began work not with "good morning" but with "lo siento." the phrase with its sound of a bootstep sinking, then lifted, from mud. the slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. again and again, i write to you regretting my tongue. 

******************************************************************************

what do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? a martyr? a weakling? no, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. yes, the period in the sentence -- it's what makes us human, ma, i swear. it lets us stop in order to keep going. 

because submission, i soon learned, was also a kind of power. 

*******************************************************************************

let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, i said to myself.

*******************************************************************************

i'm not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck -- the pieces floating, finally legible.

*******************************************************************************

later, i would learn that this was a common scene on a saigon night. city coroners, underfunded, don't always work around the clock. when someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. as a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called "delaying sadness." 

in saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death -- or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal.

it's through the drag performers' explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass of gender, that this relief, through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. as much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is till a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. because grief, at its worst, is unreal. and it calls for a surreal response. the queens - in this way - are unicorns.

unicorns stamping in a graveyard

moonbeam

 by louise gluck, from the seven ages

 

the mist rose with a little sound. like a thud. 

which was the heart beating. and the sun rose, briefly diluted.

and after what seemed years, it sank again

and twilight washed over the shore and deepened there. 

and from out of nowhere lovers came, 

people who still had bodies and hearts. who still had 

arms, legs, mouths, although by day they might be

housewives and businessmen.

the same night also produced people like ourselves.

you are like me, whether or not you admit it.

unsatisfied, meticulous. and your hunger is not for experience

but for understanding, as though it could be had in the abstract.

then it's daylight again and the world goes back to normal.

the lovers smooth their hair; the moon resumes its hollow existence.

and the beach belongs again to mysterious birds

soon to appear on postage stamps.

but what of our memories, the memories of those who depend on images?

do they count for nothing?

the mist rose, taking back proof of love.

without which we have only the mirror, you and i.

~nobel prize winner~

💙 

the seven ages by louise gluck

 

in my first dream the world appeared

the salt, the bitter, the forbidden, the sweet

in my second i descended

 

i was human, i couldn't just see a thing

beast that i am

 

i had to touch, to contain it

 

i hid in the groves,

i worked in the fields until the fields were bare --

 

time

that will never come again --

the dry wheat bound, caskets

of figs and olives

 

i even loved a few times in my disgusting human way

 

and like everyone i called that accomplishment

erotic freedom,

absurd as it seems

 

the wheat gathered and stored, the last

fruit dried: time

 

that is hoarded, that is never used,

does it also end?

 

in my first dream the world appeared

the sweet, the forbidden

but there was no garden, only

raw elements

 

i was human: 

i had to beg to descend

 

the salt, the bitter, the demanding, the preemptive

 

and like everyone, i took, i was taken

i dreamed

 

i was betrayed:

 

earth was given to me in a dream

in a dream i possessed it

ace of hearts

 excerpt from slab by selah saterstrom (coffeehouse press, p. 191)

 

when she was brave enough, the girl harriet turned over the remaining card on madam surget's makeshift table.

 

something comes to an end, madam surget said. this is a gate card, the heart's path, but broken open, diaspora.

 

it is the story of people leaving their homes and never coming back. and the moon goes through all its phases at once.

 

it is what it is. the best you can do is accept it.

 

make an offering for what is lost without judging how that offering is received. always set a place at your table for the dead. know too that their number includes you. cast yourself as a figure, leaving. while you go, tell yourself stories you learned and made. it all enters memory, the watery grave of what you will, in other words, forget.

 

when you can, give the precious version, yourself as you are, the story of your survival after the death created through having loved.

 

there isn't time to pack a bag, you must be on your way.

red velvet classic

 excerpt from slab by selah saterstrom (coffeehouse press, p. 76)

 

 get a thorn from a white rose bush. and a box of betty crocker red velvet cake mix. acquire a jar of gold, magnetic sand. goat milk, fresh if you can arrange it, you will need a whole cup. and bowls: two small, one large, glass, and clear. we shall need a towel too. petition that the dram correspond to the nine conditions, and a bench, chapel length, and a man's bed. warm the wax. form one portion of the halved wax into the shape of him. form one portion of the halved wax into the shape of you. bake the red velvet cake using black hen eggs. after it springs from the pan, knife the red, steaming bread and slip in a dead relative's lock of hair. bury the cake in your backyard, under a tree, whole, with birthday candles on top, burning. balm, enough to coat the entire sarcophagus, and wash your slips in blue water that has within it one pinch of saltpeter. and after you have done these things, all these goddamned things, you will be done with it. you will be done.

weekend in the underworld

  by franz wright, from walking to martha's vineyard

 

once i held your face

in my hands, i saw through

space

poor spirit

drifting off now

like smoke in pouring rain

wait---

are you there?

everywhere. i'm 

everywhere

old story

  by franz wright, from walking to martha's vineyard

first the telephone went,

then

the electricity.

 

it was cold,

and they both went to sleep

as though dressed for a journey.

 

like addictions condoned

from above evening 

fell, lost

 

leaves waiting 

to come back as leaves---

the long snowy divorce. . . 

 

that narrow bed, a cross

between an altar

and an operating table. voice

 

saying, while i was alive

i loved you.

and i love you now.

on earth

 by franz wright, from walking to martha's vineyard

 

 resurrection of the little apple tree outside

my window, leaf-

light of late

in the april

called her eyes, forget

forget---

but how 

how does one go

about dying?

who on earth

is going to teach me---

the world 

is filled with people

who have never died

leisure-loving man suffers untimely death

 by max ritvo, from the final voicemails

 

you ask why the dinner table has been so quiet.

i've felt, for a month, like the table:

 

holding strange things in my head

when there are voices present.

 

and when the voices die,

a cool cloth and some sparkling spray.

 

i'm on painkillers around the clock,

and i fear it's always been

 

just the pain talking to you.

 

the last vision was of the pain leaving ---

it looked just like me as it came out

 

of my mouth, but it was holding a spatula.

it was me if i had learned to cook.

 

the pain drifted to the kitchen.

he hitched himself to the oven, was a centaur

 

completed by bread, great black loaves

bursting from the oven,

 

and then the vision vanished.

i followed, and stood where he had stood.

 

the knives rustled in the block,

the pans clacked overhead.

 

i'm sterile from chemo,

and thought of that.

 

sure, i wish my imagination well,

wherever it is. but now

 

i have sleep to fill. every night

i dream i have a bucket

 

and move clear water from a hole

to a clear ocean. a robot's voice barks,

 

this is sleep. this is sleep.

i'd drink the water, but i'm worried the next 

 

night i'd regret it.

i might need every last drop. nobody will tell me.

 

 

too much and not the mood

 from too much and not the mood by durga chew-bose [published by farrar, straus and giroux]

"being wowed by fruit or cake batter, i should add, yet fairly sure i'm okay with never seeing the grand canyon in person, ought to disqualify me from ever writing about wonder. then again, maybe that's why i'm drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities." (12)

"i've come around to the conciliatory quality of untruths. memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. memory isn't a well but an offshoot. it goes secretly. comes apart. deceives. it's guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you've emotionalized.

and besides, it feels more covert to have no evidence. to believe that something you've experienced will build on your extent -- your extent as a person who sees things, and is moved by things -- without ever having to prove those things happened exactly as they happened. substantiating is grueling, monotonous. it's what life expects of you. memory is trust open to doubt." (31-32)

"i've been so young for so long and so old for longer -- so heart-wrinkled and naive all at once. so brow-furrowed but heart-open too; a detective. snooping yet easily sidetracked. i'll believe anything because i want to understand, yet understanding can sometimes organize itself like a series of false starts." (35)

"it's been months since i'd been to a museum, but watching this woman mechanically tie her hair was softly enormous." (57)

"going to the movies is the most public way to experience a secret. or, the most secretive way to experience the public." (191)

"i still confuse being misunderstood with feeling shame." (215)

"while my mother said, 'people don't change,' what she meant is, i'd estimate: i shouldn't try to change a person. that the effort exerted is often ineffectual and upsetting. nobody adjusts himself or herself, unless prompted first, by some interior gurgling. some deep mobilizing. urgency forms in the belly. and change, i've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. the body's clever ways for communicating shifts can make a person crazy, but also move a person toward life. 

in suggesting i shouldn't attempt to alter how this person from my past thinks or finds his focus, my mother also meant: be wary of overvaluing what he gives. be cautious of how proportioned my ability to love is with how impressionable i become. what moves him to create belongs discretely to him. what lights him up from inside and incites growth is what will ultimately specify his dimension. not me." (218-219)

common to whom

 from the introduction section (by anna della subin) in the hospital by ahmed bouanani  [published by new directions]

"in his manifesto the editor and poet adbdellatif laabi railed against the stagnation of moroccan thought and called for the total decolonization of culture and art. yet what foundation was left upon which to build a national culture? what bound moroccans together as a nation? after all, it was the colonizers, laabi wrote, who had come up with the boundaries of nations, artificial divisions that retraced the history of conquest and dismembered tribal zones. what made morocco a unity beyond a shared history of defeat? its conquerors had imposed an invented binary between 'berbers' and 'arabs,' for the french had seized upon linguistic differences to pit two imagined 'races' against one another. often, colonial administrators extended special protections to the berbers to alienate them from their arab neighbors, in a classic tactic of divide and rule." (16)

"the number fourteen conjures a conflicting way of measuring time, as the islamic fourteenth century a.h. corresponds to the twentieth century c.e. - the designation ever prompting the question, common to whom? the dueling systems of timekeeping destabilize any authority time itself might have, that 'invention of adults' which twists into absurd shapes in the eternity of a hospital ward." (24)

sadness and wild freedom

 from the rules of inheritance by claire bidwell smith

"grief is like another country, i realize. it's a place." (94)

"my grief fills rooms. it takes up space and it sucks out the air. it leaves no room for anyone else. 

grief and i are left alone a lot. we smoke cigarettes and we cry. . .

grief holds my hand as i walk down the sidewalk, and grief doesn't mind when i cry because it's raining and i cannot find a taxi. grief wraps itself around me in the morning when i wake from a dream of my mother, and grief holds me back when i lean too far over the edge of the roof at night, a drink in my hand.

grief acts like a jealous friend, reminding me that no one else will ever love me as much as it does.

grief whispers in my ear that no one understands me.

grief is possessive and doesn't let me go anywhere without it."

"her death leaves me both depleted and emboldened. that's what tragedy does to you, i am learning. the sadness and the wild freedom of it all impart a strange durability. i feel weathered and detached, tucking my head against the winds and trudging forward into my life."

"when it comes to boys, i've always been the same. i;ve always been the girl who gives too much too easily and expects the same in return. i don't remember which boy was first. in the beginning they were all the same: smooth and hairless and vulnerable, emulating or disobeying their fathers -- there was nothing original about them yet.

maybe there never is."

"when people ask me what i do and i say that i work in hospice, they often recoil in a horror that ushers forth a series of well-meaning exclamations.

oh, isn't that hard?

that seems so sad!

i couldn't do that.

the truth is that i don't find it sad at all. when i talk to grieving people, it's like looking at a negative image -- the deeper the grief, the more evidence of love i see.

after my father died i let the follow-up calls from the hospice bereavement counselor go unanswered, and sought out my own coping methods. sometimes these involved drinking and losing myself in the people around me, but i was also driven to learn as much about grief as i could.

i read everything from scientific texts to memoirs about loss. i found myself drawn to movies about death and to information specific to my particular parental loss. i read about trauma and its effects on development. i studied anxiety and how to overcome it. i read about attachment theory and tried to link it to my current relationships. 

i couldn't help wondering if what i felt was normal. and each time i came across someone else's story, each time i found reassurance that i wasn't alone in my grief process, i relaxed a little more. . .

the bottom line is that there is simply no one way to define grief, but the irony is that almost every grieving person i've met seems concerned about whether they're doing it right."

the pure lover

 from the pure lover by david plante [beacon press, 2009]

"grief makes the griever believe the death of his lover is unique. grief demands a grand, timeless expression, and the bereaved tries, tries for that expression, and wonders if the expression is false." (25)

"grief cannot help but idealize." (43)

"grief reveals the griever's vanity, the vanity of his grief, the vanity of all his life." (47)

"at a dinner party to celebrate the success of one of these books, you, when complimented, raised a napkin to cover your face, as if to absent yourself. at the time, i thought you were trying to impress more with your absence than your presence, but i was wrong, for you always thought of yourself as more absent than present." (53-54)

"how confused i become thinking of you and me as one, wondering how much of you i have made mine, how much of me i have made yours - combining in us both mind and soul, as if these two were one, and aristotle and plato, too." (76)

"nietzsche's books, you argued, all together 'cohered,' not 'logically' as philosophy, but 'formally' as in a work of art, the 'form' containing 'an infinite number of inconsistencies.' nietzsche's 'form' was cyclical, was repetition revolving on repetition, each repetition an elaboration." (79)

"did i want you to die, as though your death were a strange fulfillment of my love for you? i'd stop, stand still in the street, overwhelmed by this: the sense, a sensation throughout my body and, too, my soul, that you must live.

i sometimes asked myself in the pages of my diary (wanting in those pages to account for every thought, every feeling) if your death would liberate me from our lives together to live an altogether other life with radiating possibilities. my answer to myself, as near as i could get to a central truth, was no - i wanted, at that center, no other life, but my life radiating in you." (89)

"every night, in bed with you, i thought: i am falling asleep with someone who is dying. all during the night, often woken by you because your back pained you, i'd think: i'm in bed with someone who is dying." (91)

"the griever prays that grief will come and purify him, prays that after the overwhelming devastation of grief, whatever remains of him will be simple and clear. and suddenly, grief overwhelms the griever at the sight of an old woman in a crowd carrying a small valise.

my love for you was not enough - you died." (103)

"grief centers the griever's grief everywhere, making connections." (111)