Left-Facing Bird is a stark, strange and memorable collaborative poetry project I stumbled upon quite some time ago. Very little is revealed about it–according to this single-page website, the project was executed by three writers (Lucas Farrell, Greg Hill Jr., and Brandon Shimoda) in Montana over a period of two days in April 2008.
LEFT-FACING BIRD
PROPER AESTHETICS OF HIGH TERROR
ONE HUNDRED WRITERS, SIX HOURS
So take that as you will. I can’t say I like every one of the poems, or understand all of them, but they are at least distinct and worth checking out. Here are a few of my favorites (I apologize for them all being somewhat melancholy–it seemed to be a pattern):
________
LONELINESS THEORY
In space they are mirroring us; my ugly faces in mom’s full-length
did stick, but not the way she thought. Somewhere in the next galaxy
someone sits down at a computer and gathers printed emails
to her chest, the ones that never say: Love you, Babe, walks home
from work alone down a street in mimicry. The same sun burns her white,
white skin. Our alien other-halves lather themselves in SPF 15 and make,
with us in unison, solo entrances to office patio parties, cleave
their shared bodies past more shared bodies. We eclipse each other
sometimes, me and my-Self. Our bowls of ice cream melt sadly, but together.
–Lesley Jenike
________
THE ETYMOLOGY OF SHARK
is unknown, she says this, touching her hair, because
airport vodka is contentious. We sit at the bar, the kiss
and clink of highball glasses. Her flight from Lisbon was
delayed, and mine a streak over the Atlantic. A near miss
she says, our fingers fumbling. When I compare marriage
to finding water in a desert, she looks to her hands.
She is a midwife starting over, waiting on baggage
in unseen cargo holds to arrive on another land.
If there were time we might leave together, get a room
outside, among the rows of neon cheap hotels.
We might apologize fantastically, projecting past lovers
onto each other’s faces. She may describe the tomb
inside her, the men she loved too early. She is the shell
of her own suffering. We speak lightly of news, weather.
–Matthew Kaler
________
THE NOTHING ON THE FLOOR OF MY ROOM
I sat and spoke to the nothing
on the floor of my room.
It did not tell me much I did
not already know.
I did find its knowledge of maps
acute and surprising.
–John Findura
________
BLESS YOUR CROOKED LITTLE HEART
Things would be better if I
were drunk and you were
high and we were in Ohio
but the only way to fix
this one may be with some
sort of heavy machinery
and I’m tired of friction
–John Findura
________
PRACTICING
Yesterday, when I could not find you,
I’d naturally assumed you died:
slit, blood, bathroom tile,
your birds hungry, squawking.
Yesterday, waiting
for a ride, I watched,
through the window, a girl
walk to the door, meet a foreign boy
who’d come up from behind;
he asked her why she’d worn so many layers.
She said she would be cold without.
I was cold.
I have been cold.
I don’t know the exact color
of the room you’re in now; I suspect
I wouldn’t be let in but would be made to sit,
wait, politely thumbing women’s magazines
as if I was just to find I really wanted
this red trench, this red bag.
I want to say, in that room, Mozart is inappropriate.
I want to say, to you, I know it is too loud–
Too loud to hear a sparrow fall–
But you aren’t dead.
I found you, alive.
One day, you will die.
I am prepared; we have been practicing.
You’ll fill in the right details.
You will cut well.
No one will believe you ever failed.
I do not believe
birds mean to fly into the glass.
I believe the birds believe
reflection is a lie, the sky has no interior,
the cold is merely cold,
a thought of cold that, after death, is not
a memory of anything endured.
–Lindsey Anne Baker
________
TO LACK
She wants to know. She wants to know what I am reading and
she wants to know who told me to read it. She wants to know
what I am writing. Who I am writing it to. She wants and the
verb to want also means to lack, I tell my students. So I ask them,
What do you want. They say they want everything. I ask them,
So what do you lack, and they say they lack nothing. They do not
understand any less than I understand. To want is also obviously
to desire, I say, and they stare the way I stare at my desire, which
has become open, spacious.
–Michael Flatt
________
FROM SANCTA
The wind scrolls through its clichés: cracked whip, exhalation, the dead’s turnstile,
aftermath of a moth’s flight, wake of something too big to see…A blade of ducks skins the
blankness. All ants wear elegies on their backs. Hatchlings find their pond to drown in.
The world is so casual: it presumes its attrition. I envy a self-cleaning apparatus. And the
wind pushes another load of used light over the horizon.
File under: I don’t know if this ever happened but I feel I need to distract you from
oncoming low-level panic attack. Once, as a light crept across the gnash of narrow ice,
gripping small trees, bat harmonics shrill in the spruce-scent, eyes closed, I groped for
miles along the low purr of powerlines. The blindness grew familiar. Slowly, inside my
mouth, a mouth of silver teeth began to open.
Let’s play storm metaphor. The lake gone grand mal with lightning, florid scrape, sick
hands, sulfuric hair of wrecked sisters. Now your turn. Light akin to breaking skin. A
shower of Xs. A sword down the mouth of the sky. You win again. This is the Chapter
in which I can’t stop shivering. Your face is lit by pure exhaustion. The light rends. God
help the whites of our eyes.
–Andy Grace
________
IN THE SUICIDE’S TOP DRAWER
• thumbtacks
• shirtbuttons
• cigarette papers
• drycleaner’s ticket
• daysleeper’s mask
• sketch of a house on the back of a menu
• straight razor
• arrowheads
• Canadian dime
• handkerchiefs
• collar stays
• bone-handled penknife
• bar of soap from an airport motel
• hip flask
• brochure for a hunting lodge in Alaska
• whetstone
• splintered reed from a clarinet
• list of names under the heading Customers’ Children
• list of addresses crossed through with red ink
• box of tie-pins
• box of electrical fuses
• book of trout flies
• deck of backbroken cards
• page filled with his signature in various styles
• page with columns of numbers (importance unknown)
• matchbooks
• shoehorn
• birthday card from a dentist
• photograph of a woman with snow in her hair
–Young Smith
________
SUGGESTIONS FOR NEW COLLECTIVE NOUNS
— a fever of larkspur
— a siege of guitars
— a lather of birdsong
— a custard of stars
— a stupor of crickets
— a parlor of sighs
— a menace of windows
— a vapor of lies
— an equation of rifles
— a scabbard of pain
— a slumber of clergymen
— an opera of rain
— a quarrel of ashes
— a rumor of crows
— a pastry of kisses
— a carcass of prose
–Young Smith
________
To view additional poems (in PDF format) by these authors and others, visit Left-Facing Bird and click on the authors’ names. Happy reading, and enjoy the weekend!
