Claudia Schiffer by Helmut Newton, 1992

WHAT DO WOMEN WANT?
by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

One of my favorite fashion poems. Spending the night with the boyfriend tonight, making dinner, playing games and such, so this is what I’ll leave you with. Have a great weekend!

One of my favorite poets; most of these are from Smoke.  Read on.

_________

APHASIA

for Honeya

After the stroke all she could say
was Venezuela, pointing to the pitcher
with its bright blue rim, her one word
command. And when she drank the clear
water in and gave the glass back,
it was Venezuela again, gratitude,
maybe, or the word now simply
a sigh, like the sky in the window,
the pillows a cloudy definition
propped beneath her head. Pink roses
dying on the bedside table, each fallen
petal a scrap in the shape of a country
she’d never been to, had never once
expressed interest in, and now
it was everywhere, in the peach
she lifted, dripping, to her lips,
the white tissue in the box, her brooding
children when they came to visit,
baptized with their new name
after each kiss. And at night
she whispered it, dark narcotic
in her husband’s ear as he bent
to listen, her hands fumbling
at her buttons, her breasts,
holding them up to the light
like a gift. Venezuela, she said.

♥

THE WORD

You called it screwing, what we did nights
on the rug in front of the mirror, draped
over the edge of a hotel bed, on balconies
overlooking the dark hearts of fir trees

or a city of flickering lights. You’d
whisper that word into my ear
as if it were a thing you could taste –
a sliver of fish, a swirl of chocolate

on the tongue. I knew only
the rough exuberant consonants
of fucking, and this soft s and hard c
was a new sound — querulous, slow,

like the long moments of leaving
between thrusts. I don’t know what
to make of it, now that you’re gone. I think
of metal eating wood. Delicate filaments

quivering inside a bulb of thin glass.
Harsh light. Corks easing up through
the wet necks of wine bottles. A silver lid
sealed tight on a jar of skinned plums.

I see two blue dragonflies hovering, end
to end, above the pond, as if twisting
the iridescence deep into each other’s
body, abdomens writhing, spiraling

into the wing-beaten air. And your voice
comes back to me through the trees, this word
for what we couldn’t help but do
to each other — a thin cry, unwinding.

♥

THE STUDENT

She never spoke, which made her obvious,
the way death makes the air obvious
in an empty chair, the way sky compressed

between bare branches is more gray or blue,
the way a window is more apparent than a wall.
She held her silence to her breast like a worn coat,
smoke, an armful of roses. Her silence
colored the smaller silences that came and went,
that other students stood up and filled in.

I leaned near the window in my office. She sat
on the edge of a chair. Hips rigid, fidgeting
while I made my little speech. February

light pressed its cold back against the glass,
sealing us in. She focused on my lips
as I spoke, as if to study how it’s done,
the sheer mechanics of it: orchestration
of jaw and tongue, teeth shifting in tandem,
shaping the air. So I stopped, let her silence

drift over us, let it sift in like smoke or snow,
let its petals settle on my shoulders.
I looked outside to the branches

of a stripped tree, winter starlings
folded in their speckled wings, chilled flames
shuddering at the tips. Students wandered
across campus as if under water, hands and hair
unfurling, their soundless mouths churning –
irate or ecstatic, I couldn’t tell — ready to burn
it all down or break into song. When I looked back
her eyes had found the window: tree, students,
birds swimming by, mute in their element.

It was painful to hear the papery rasp
of her folding and unfolding hands, to watch
color smudging her neck and temple, branching
to mist the delicate rim of one ear. I listened
to the air sunder between us, the feverish hush
collapse. I could hear her breath — smoke

rising from ice. I could see what it cost her
to make that leap. What heat it takes
for the body to blossom into speech.

♥

HEART

The heart shifts shape of its own accord –
from bird to ax, from pinwheel
to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest,
a brown bear groggy with winter, skips
like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade
of the fireworks booth, the fat lady’s tent,
the corn dog stand. Or the heart
is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead
wait, paging through magazines, licking
their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks
through a door into a maze of hallways.
Behind one door a roomful of orchids,
behind another, the smell of burned toast.
The rooms go on and on: sewing room
with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles,
room full of file cabinets and torn curtains,
room buzzing with a thousand black flies.
Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke,
a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets
its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt.
Heart makes a wrong turn.
Heart locked in its gate of thorns.
Heart with its hands folded in its lap.
Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake.
It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats
when it’s hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down.
Bored, it watches movies deep into the night,
stands by the window counting the streetlamps
squinting out one by one.
Heart with a hundred mouths open.
Heart with its hundred eyes closed.
Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel,
heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence.
Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked
in devoted rows, their dusty spines
unreadable. Heart
with its hands full.
Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history’s lists,
things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart.
Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal.
Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues.
Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe.
Heart with its feet up reading the scores.
Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster.
Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club,
banging on the lid.

♥

DEATH COMES TO ME AGAIN, A GIRL

Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip.
Barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible, she tells me,
not like you think: all darkness and silence.

There are wind chimes and the scent of lemons.
Some days it rains. But more often the air
is dry and sweet. We sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living.

I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair.
Especially when they fight, and when they sing.

♥

I just completed my last semester of college for the foreseeable future, and I’m feeling a little nonplussed.  The past six years of my life were spent forging a career in creative writing (specifically, creative nonfiction), and it’s difficult to imagine moving on from that (as ready as I am).  I plan to continue writing, and I still love reading great pieces and working in literary publishing.  But in many ways, life will be switching gears from here on out.  If I ever go back to school, it will probably be for something unrelated (psychology, mathematics, genetics).  My life is so much more than creative writing.

That said, here’s a little going away present: an excerpt from an in-progress piece (and a sappy one at that), which I began writing three years ago – some old, some new.  Damn, I need to grit this up!

_________

“I bet it’s by the falls,” Matt said, as I passed him the last of the coke.  The two of us sat beneath a canopy of pine trees on a hill, eating ham sandwiches.  It was Spring Break, March, early afternoon, and our first real outing as friends.  The breeze kept lifting my skirt, and I pushed it down while Matt tried to avert his eyes, both of us laughing.

We were in Riverfront Park in Spokane, Washington, searching for a Sherman Alexie poem in a granite spiral.  We’d already walked by a giant red wagon and a clock tower sounding its four o’clock chimes.  We’d passed an Australian sundial covered in light and pine needles, an abandoned ferris wheel, and a pavilion frame from Expo ’74 whose steel mesh cut the blue sky to geometry.

We stood and brushed the crumbs from our laps, then walked until we reached the wooden bridge over Spokane Falls.  The water rushed under our feet as we surveyed the area, shielding our eyes from the sun.  Still nothing.  On the other side we took turns photographing one another beneath a totem pole.  Matt crouched down, pulled his leather jacket over his head and posed under the wooden god and red paint, sand spreading out to the shadows.

We looped around to where the river slowed and pooled, and the children scattered bread to the ducks and the gulls that swarmed overhead.

“Damn, where is it?” I asked.  Matt wandered over to the concrete steps where I was sitting, after tossing the birds some thawed French fries he’d brought from home.  Off to the right was a small building with glass walls housing an old-fashioned carousel.  The lights were off, the doors closed.

We wandered along, this way and that, going too far in what seemed to be every direction.  We ended up near the carousel again, the street close by, the sun going down.

I sighed.  “We’ve looked everywhere.”

“Wait. Let’s try one more place. Up here,” Matt said, pointing to the intersection at the highway bridge, where a round-walled area began to take shape.  I ran, and he followed me, until we started seeing words twisting over open ground.

“We found it!” I shrieked, examining its shiny granite surface.  I was already familiar with the poem—“That Place Where Ghosts of Salmon Jump”—but I followed the spiral nonetheless, reading the entire poem to its center as the sun set over the city lights.  My focus lay with the lines that spiraled, “Look at the Falls now, if you can see beyond all of the concrete . . . Look at all of this and tell me that concrete ever equals love.”  Its words meant more overlooking the river, as many things did that night.

On the highway home the two of us shared what soon became one of my favorite confections.  Matt had one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding out a finger for me to coat with one of Wonka’s latest creations: a squeezable candy paste in Green Apple.  We took turns sampling it from its little tube, a light green ooze thick with saccharine tang.  Indie rock music filled the car, twisting around us and sliding down the windshield.  Matt talked about something called vertical farming and rubbed the early spring chill from my hands.

I didn’t know what to think about any of it.  But I smiled, leaned back in my seat, and craned my neck to find the stars through the passenger window.  They were there, all tiny lights we rode into, scattered over the upper atmosphere like celestial sugar.

Lynch’s poems are like sparks that ignite some part of nature—its memories, colors, abstractions.  There is something very odd and rare about these poems, something I can’t always grasp before it floats away and lingers somewhere just out of reach, leaving behind it a parade of images.  At times it’s a bit of a tease, but I like that sometimes.

Here’s a taste—a few of my favorites.

_________

Birthday

Some of the wishes were scared of the dark and pink
and blue and the planet at large.

Some had tender feet, slightly barbed
by paper clips and wire,
picked guitars and a violin’s absent string,
lost parades of forks and knives.

So they winged it,
away from ribbons and balloons, spinning
into the sky
like maple-leaf copters,
like bright little wing-bones of ants,
while the candles they’d abandoned sputtered and sank,
and the ghostly flames staggered, flagged
and paused in the wake:

Upon a bucket of rose-skulls
Upon the moon’s lonely talon
Upon the dying man tugged back to life
Upon the dead man strolling into the room
Upon a silver-horned bicycle and a whirring hat
Upon a bell for a dove
Upon the end of fog         the sage fields rising
Upon the hook-winged crow wheeling its blackness
Upon city-smoke confounded by the clarity of twig and feather
Upon yellow ribbon         against yellow stars

The wishes were not all sublime—some cantankerous—
dirty and grim, sad, and many sweeping by
lost from the original mouth and mind
that hoisted them into the air.

For years I stood watching them while behind me
my house burned and my land and the forests beyond.

_________

A Letter.  Like Blazing.

When I rose from the ditch
I left a swift petal
in lieu of presence

& found you in a slink of otter-
damp river, wearing the secret
hinge of a smile

& when you unbuttoned
the stars from navy

midnight & wind fell
cold out of velvet & my
stilled door blew open

& when your hard gold
hook swerved & pressed, the twilight

thistles by my river stiffened
& thrust into the sky that had been hurting

all morning for your purple voice, flecked, glittering

& when we swung through, pirating our private eye-
patched afternoon, the local bees shimmered in their grove with what blazed

between your hips & mine:
maple & pine-tar
& the terrible knowing of going not gone.

_________

Icicles

Those brothers banged them till they fissured,
fell to snow.  They used sticks or bats
or stones.  Sometimes missed.  Sometimes split
the glimmering to a shatter, a cough
of electric dust—the burning stickled
their skins.  Those brothers said nothing
was good about them—they damaged the eaves
and dragged the house down—said they were
a poor excuse for rain or any form
of weeping, streaking through their freeze.
But I longed for them to stay, longed
for their elegance to last,
the tiny silver cities and gold
sea illuminating their edges,
the slender bodies hanging
impeccably from the eaves, barely
hanging from anything.  They were miracles,
their points dissolving in the smoldering
grip of a hand that could
end it all.  Any hand.

_________

Piece by Piece He Went
for Bill

First, his blue toe.
Then, his calf up to the hipbone.
He thinned to a frame.

Fireflies faltered, lit into
his bony lattice, the fretted ribs, mating
between collarbone and pelvis

till the whole leg fell off and inside
he was all air and brightness and treefrogs—

(bluethroated crickets struggled through his beard,
a meadow rose from the cave of his stomach)

—we tried to catch their tender bodies,
their thrumming hearts
that longed to be let back

into the wild yellow grass—no matter how
rotten with dew, no matter how
darkened by rain, no matter.

_________

In the Yard,

I am raking through stars—
Their faces, damp and yellow,
won’t pick up.

I smell their tail-smoke
in the red oak, singed.
Its soft, tarnished arms
bothered by wind.

It was how many
pinned?  How many stiffly
shot to harrowed dirt, blackly
pitting the earth?

In the pale aftermath,
the rain could not
tap music
into them.  The moon could not
calculate, but dimly faced

the fading scarlet outcasts
in skinflint hats,
those wetted and gassed.

Low on the branch, low
on the rack, a few
freezing notices,

colorless maps—
not stars, not leaves—we rake
through—we hang back.

_________

On Balloons That Have Hissed Out

We were having a picnic when we found them.

Like abandoned petals
(pale magnolia choked and flushed, bursting in flustered bloom)
(dogwood petal unpacked from the dark trunk, freed from its floating
act to a yellow blister)
—one a silky blue ear
wilting on the hot-top tar
—one a cut-up cloud
that gave its last white gasp
—one a purple scab softened and bloated
by rain, peeled from its original skin.

These pieces were want-to-be sails
with their tiny muster—now
grounded after such short drifts of purposelessness
wherein they’d pressed up
the air, swell-headed and empirical—nodding
to the elms and helicopters and awnings and swings.

Remember all the air that put them there?
Remember the helium years
that filled their heads to a colorful bouquet
tossed up like giant roses and oversized carnations
at the matador-sky’s cloaked face
at the ballerina-cloud’s waxy poise
at the president of wind that must deadhead
anything thrown, any ecstatically flung thing
bloom or balloon or bomb—

dull shreds
in disarray on the dirt—
how modest their hiss
when all the air fled.

_________

Hope you all are having a magical weekend.

I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a literary journal I’ve recently discovered.  PANK is a magazine out of Michigan which publishes work that, from what I’ve read so far, is edgy and at times nothing short of bizarre.  From the website:

PANK comes from the end of the road, the edge of things, a north shore, up country, a place of amalgamation, and unplumbed depths, where things are made and unmade, and unimagined futures are born. An ultima Thule, PANK – no soft pink hands here.  We bear old scar and fresh scab, callous, blood and dirt.  PANK is serene melancholy, spiritual longing, quirk and anomaly.  PANK is progressive, experimental and improvisational.  PANK inhabits its contradictions.

Here are a few sample pieces that stand out to me in the current online release (Issue 4, September 2009).  There are several, but they’re relatively quick reads, if you can handle the awesomeness.

_________

HARD-TO-REACH PLACES

by Beth Thomas

Jody wakes some days with pieces missing. Small pieces, mostly: an eyebrow, a toenail. Sometimes the things come back, sometimes not. Last month, she woke with a hole through her right hand, a neat hole about the size of a half-dollar coin, big enough to look through. She plays peek-a-boo with kids on the bus when their parents aren’t looking, wondering if this memory will surface later in therapy.

Sometimes, though rarely, there are extra things. An extra finger, which disappeared weeks later. Once, an extra tooth jammed in the back of her jaw, aching. She says to whomever, you can get used to anything. Her mother used to say that.

Every morning, she investigates, fingers nimble in her mouth counting teeth, then down over her breasts and ribs, poking around, feeling for holes. Roger finds this sexy. Roger is missing an entire leg, from the hip down — car accident a dozen years ago. He understands how things that once were there can just be gone. He helps her search her hard-to-reach places, then makes pancakes for breakfast…

(read the rest here)

_________

RED

by Lindsay Oncken

She said my color is red,
like bursting cherries and summertime,
like her mother poised on a lawn chair
at noon, hair newly dyed and curled,
and the color of the Mustang
shaking off dust and tree branches
while a man traces his hand up
the porch railway. It’s the color
of lipstick smears on wrists and teeth,
the way the man’s eyes catch
and her mother jumps and she spends
another hour cleaning cherry pie
off the floor. The color of love, even,
smeared with paint all over
the living room walls because the man
said that red calms him.
Her mother smiles but her eyes dart,
and every night the house goes silent
at exactly nine o’clock…

(read the rest here)

_________

NOTES ON A CANDY CANE TREE

by Gregory Sherl

What did I think about before you touched my thigh? Let me say this: I’m going to touch you until my fingers fall off. If my fingers don’t fall off, I will hold your hand even if it’s sweaty. And let me say this: You are lovelier than clouds that look like lovely things. I have only loved a few times and the last time was when you rubbed my neck under the monkey bars. We weren’t much younger than we are now. I still have the same haircut. You still have only one dimple. It’s on your left cheek and it looks like you fell on a pebble. I love that it looks like you fell on a pebble. Let me say this: You taste like candy canes. There was a candy cane tree in my old neighborhood. My neighbor hung candy canes on the branches of the willow and I snatched them in the middle of the night. It was December when I rode my bike the quickest, like I was going somewhere to meet you. I like you more than the candy cane tree. Let me say this: I am uncomfortable in my own skin, so I hold your face. I hold your face and your hips but mostly your face. You have a lovely face. Let me say this: I love you like monsters like scaring little kids. I make a list of words I can use to diagram your body: petite, mellifluous, comely, milk, necessary. Please, forgive the humming; you see I rarely taste candy canes in March. When I don’t taste you I taste sweat. Not good sweat, mind you, sweaty sweat from the men’s locker room. Sometimes I taste pizza, but that’s only because I loved pizza first. Let me say this: My love for pizza was fleeting. I was young and naïve and thought that extra toppings meant something. These are fine days because they end with you. Let me just say this: I’m going to kiss you until my lips fall off. If my lips don’t fall off, I will kiss up your spine until I run out of spine. Then I’ll start over.

(see the original here)

_________

TEN INAPPROPRIATE DOPPELGANGBANGER HAIKUS

by Wess Mongo Jolley

I.

He told me he jerked
off in a mirror.  Yeah, I
smiled, I’d do me.

II.

Cloning, I thought, was
a waste of time and money.
Then I saw twin porn.

III.

My test clone said he
loved me our first night.  No, I
said, I love you more…

(read the rest here)

_________

BRIDGES

by Jennifer Andrews

She stands on a steel girder, her feet hooked around its ice edge, her hand wrapped tight around a cabled wire, her body, pulsing in the wind.

Rewind.

She leans into the side of the bridge, her nightgown snaps, like lightening, in hard cracks behind her.  She places her hands flat along the wall, then looks down.

Rewind.

Nights before Christmas, surrounded by bolts of calico and yards of crimped ribbon, my mother, running flannel and pins under a needle and following chalked lines into small wrists and necklines, made nightgowns for my sister and I.  After church on Christmas Eve, we’d come home, brush our teeth, shimmy into our pajamas and sit under the blink, blinking lights of our tree.  Then we’d open one gift.  It was always a flannel nightgown.  Donna got dark blues and yellows.  I got pinks and lazy greens.  I envied her dark colors, the chance to be wrapped in bold dyes.  Sometimes Donna liked my dewy pastels.  Sometimes we traded.  Our new nightgowns brushed the tops of our feet, the middle of our hands.  We smoothed ourselves down, ran our hands along arms, stomachs, our legs.  Then we sprinted along our stretch of hallway to feel the gown snap at our feet, to feel it stop us.  It was fur against skin.  Safe…

(read the rest here)

_________

I HATE ZOMBIES LIKE YOU HATE ME

by Scott Woods

Here is what I wish would happen:

a windy November day,
before the snow has spilled its milk
and the leaves still grip the ground in their stiff handshakes,
that while visiting your grandmother’s gravesite,
having cleared away the autumn debris and dew dust,
I wish your grandmother would break the crust
and reach for you,
swirl her knobby, apple-pie baking bones around your ankle
and drag herself out of the trench she has been digging,
staring at you with unblinking, puss-laden eyes
yellow from a lack of sun and birthdays,
moaning from her diaphragm and her throat at once,
baring her teeth after having popped mortician stitches,
aimed at your snot-nosed five-year-old who only
wants to know if you’re going to stop at
McDonald’s on the way home.

I wish that in that mortifying moment you
remember how, while we sat in a theater
and the trailer for yet another zombie movie splayed across
the cinema canvas, you turned to me and said,
“Zombies are awesome.”
And when I said “I am so sick of zombies”,
you tightened your lips and lost
my phone number…

(read the rest here)

_________

WHUPPINS

also by Scott Woods

A whuppin is a ritual.

I agree: a smack on the back of the head
is degrading,
borders on abuse.
But a whuppin?
A whuppin is an understanding.

Praying to leather belt gods,
extension cord deities,
flying shoes made missiles,
switches ripped from the arms of
understanding trees.

Some of you
will not understand
what I am talking about.
Some of you
will nod your heads and
feel the breath of a ghost belt
whispering in your ears…

(click here & scroll down to read the rest)

_________

Bam.

You can visit PANK’s website for more online samples, subscription information, or submission guidelines.  From what I can tell, they publish all genres (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, et cetera), although I can’t find this explicitly stated.  They have both print and online issues, the former published once a year and the latter released in monthly installments.

If this last release is any indication, I consider it a journal worth keeping in mind.

I got this book for my birthday, and just had to share it with you.  It feels all too appropriate given my mental state these last couple days.

This book (incorrectly titled in stock photos–it really does say “Disorders,” not “Illnesses”) is surprisingly thorough and informative.  DiClaudio has divided the book into nine classes of mental disorders (Anxiety, Dissociative, Factitious, Impulse-Control, Personality, Psychotic, Sexual, Sleep, and Somatoform), and each has a minimum 2-page listing, complete with symptoms (“Quiz Yourself”), Inner Monologue, Diagnosis, Causality, and Treatment.  Also, the material is constantly hilarious.  Some favorites:

Hyperexplexia
“Because everything, everywhere, is always shocking.”

Susto
“Because you’d lose your soul if it wasn’t attached to your body.”

Capgras Syndrome
“Because for all you know, your mother could secretly be a robot.”

Cotard’s Syndrome
“Because if you were dead, would anybody even tell you?”

Dissociative Fugue
“Because you never know when you might be lying to yourself about everything in your entire life.”

Synesthesia
“Because sometimes an apple sounds like a primary color.”

Foreign Accent Syndrome
“Because it’s not pretentious if you can’t stop doing it.”

Intermittent Explosive Disorder
“Because you have to stay calm, you have to stay calm, you have to…SMASH THAT TABLE!”

Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Disorder
“Because you’ll do what you’re told, and you’ll do it now.”

Windigo Psychosis
“Because there’s no better cure for a boring winter evening than transforming yourself into a demonic ice spirit and hitting the town in a cannibalistic feeding frenzy.”

Frotteurism
“Because a day without grinding your crotch against a random stranger on the subway is like a day without sunshine.”

Penis Panic
“Because if there’s one thing that will ruin your day, it’s having your penis stolen.”

Body Integrity Identity Disorder
“Because sometimes two legs is 0.7563 legs too many.”

______

Of course, it is much more thorough than that; I’m simply passing out titles.  So if this intrigues you at all, get a copy–you won’t be disappointed.

Oh, and for the record, Dennis DiClaudio has also written:

The Hypochondriac’s Pocket Guide to Horrible Diseases You Probably Already Have
The Deviant’s Pocket Guide to the Outlandish Sexual Desires Barely Contained in Your Subconscious

Now back to my synesthesia and irrational fears.

ALL high school students, teachers, and administrators should be aware of this program!  Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins–one of America’s most beloved, successful and accessible poets–has spearheaded Poetry 180: a poem for every day of the school year.

The basic idea is that high school students be exposed to one poem (of the 180 poems pre-selected on the website) each day, to make poetry a part of their daily lives.  The poems are specifically selected for a younger audience and are meant to be read in a public way (for example, at a school’s end-of-day announcements), to emphasize that poetry is for everyone, not just poets and writers–and teachers are encouraged to select student readers.  I also think this might also work in a smaller format–the poems can be read and discussed in classrooms, assigned as course reading, et cetera.  Also, it could not be more easy to participate: it’s completely free, all the poems are printable from the website, participation can begin at any time, and the poems can be used in any order. There’s even a page with tips on successful poem-reading!

Personally, I think this is a great idea.  While not everyone will be open to the poems at first, it’s a great way to show kids that poems can be cool.  I wish I had a program like this in high school–even just in English class.  It’s so easy to implement, and the poems are well-written, fun, and easy to “get.”  Also, they’re contemporary–which is much more appealing to today’s kids, and much more helpful for those who are actually interested in becoming writers.  I can say without question that I would have learned more about being a good writer (not to mention had a much easier time in college, and a more fun time in high school English class) had I been exposed to such great contemporary writing in high school.  When I was in high school, almost all we got was Shakespeare–whose plays are great but whose poems are, in today’s literary world, outdated–and much different from the kind of poetry writers are expected to be capable of producing today.

Here are a few sample poems from the website (including one from Collins himself, which would be a good introductory poem for this project).

________

“Introduction to Poetry”

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

–Billy Collins

________

“Grammar”

Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she’s a conjugated verb.
She’s been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:

some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We’re all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,

we’ve all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.

–Tony Hoagland

________

“Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?”

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It’s all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author’s name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, “Shhhh.”

Then start again.

–Ron Koertge

________

“Selecting a Reader”

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

–Ted Kooser

________

I sincerely hope more schools will consider implementing this–and to all you high school students who are being deprived of great contemporary poetry, notify your teachers and administrators, and if that doesn’t work, read these poems for yourself!  You will learn so much.

To learn more about the program, read the rest of the poems, or get started on this grand idea, check out the website at Library of Congress.

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!