the wonder that holds the stars apart

seamless_Meagan Brothers
Like a broken compass,
I don't know whether you're pushing me away
or pulling me towards.
You seemed so alive then,
so soft and dark
and quiet inside your skeleton.
I never knew how to be still like that.
I wrote your words on my arms,
but I was too clean to get dirty.
 I got skinny,
 but I was too hungry to starve.
The words are pungent and broken on my belly,
but they are alive,
because sometimes you speak to me this way,
with touches and tattoos,
in whispers and shouts
while my hair grows out,
and I remember that you were
broken once, too.
I'm okay, though,
I'm fixed,
you've glued me back
and there are no cracks in sight,
just this
seamless whisper
of your hands
on my shoulders
pushing me or pulling me
in every direction
of you.

When streams are ripe and swelled with rain

Collecting again, a few this time:

DOMESTIC SITUATION | ERNEST HILBERT

Maybe you’ve heard about this. Maybe not.
A man came home and chucked his girlfriend’s cat
In the wood chipper. This really happened.
Dinner wasn’t ready on time. A lot
Of other little things went wrong. He spat
On her father, who came out when he learned
About it. He also broke her pinky,
Stole her checks, and got her sister pregnant.
But she stood by him, stood strong, through it all,
Because she loved him. She loved him, you see.
She actually said that, and then she went
And married him. She felt some unique call.
Don’t try to understand what another
Person means by love. Don’t even bother.


A Working List of Things I Will Never Tell You
by Jon Sands

When I said I wasn’t with another girl
the January after we fell in love for the 3rd time,
it’s because it wasn’t actual sex.

In the February that began our radio silence,
it was actual sex. I hate the tight shirts
that go below your waistline.

Not only do they make you look too young,
but then your torso is a giraffe’s neck attached to tiny legs.
I screamed at myself in the subway

for writing poems about you still.
I made a scene. I think about you almost
each morning, and roughly every five days, I still

believe you’re there.
I still masturbate to you.
When we got really bad,

I would put another coat of mop water on the floor of the bar
to make sure you were asleep when I got to my side of the bed.
You are the only person to whom I’ve lied, knowing

I was telling the truth. I miss the way your neck
wraps around my face like a cave we are both lost in.
I remember when you said being with me

is like being alone with company.
My friend Sarah wrote a poem about pink ponies.
I’m scared you’re my pink pony.

Hers is dead. It is really sad. You’re not dead.
You live in Ohio, or Washington, or Wherever.
You are a shadow my body leaves on other girls.

I have a growing queue of things I know
will make you laugh and I don’t know where to put them.
I mourn like you’re dead. If you had asked me to stay,

I would not have said no.
It would never mean yes.

I just want a moment of truth so vast...

Ground Zero // David Lerner

whenever I say things like
"poetry is a lethal weapon"

my friends get nervous

I can't really blame them

they've visted me in
enough loony bins and dryouts
to know that

the line I walk between
image and fact

is sometimes thin indeed

I've fought my share of battles where
the only blood spilled
was inside my head...

Brecht said
he didn't write his plays
to warm the cockles of the bourgeois heart

now he was bragging, but

what with freebase, croissants, all-talk radio and
credit card blow jobs

we're already entertained to death...

and when I say things like
"poetry's a war"

my friends look at me careful
and measure the whites of my eyes
against the blue of my nerves
and sigh

hopefully poised for ironic topspin

but ready to call my doctor
in the middle of the
night

I stare back at them blank-eyed

just because I'm crazy
doesn't mean I
don't make sense

if I sometimes tilt at windmills
head first

it's probably because
I need a new head...

and when they ask why
I say how

when they ask how
I say when

and when I say when
they say

"But I have to go to the doctor
that week"

or, "I'm busy with my dogs"

or, "I'd rather eat Chinese"

or

it sounds good on paper
but what's in it for me

Nothing, I reply

nothing at all

except a chance to drink fire from a glass
and spit it back in some asshole's face

nothing but a license to
chase the Devil around the block
with a big blue sword
that is sharper than his horns

nothing I can run down in a heartbeat
or prove with math

but I cross my soul and
swear to kill

if I'm lying...

the world can eat itself alive
for another 1000 years
for all I care

I was never much good at
abstract compassion

I just want a moment of truth
so vast

that all the lights on the planet
dim for a second...

we're right at ground zero
the times are suffused with murder
perfect with disbelief

and I say

take an emotion
and file it to a point
with everything you have and haven't

shoot it through the laser
that beats in our bones

turn the sound up
way past 10
and don't sweat the distortion...

and who knows

perhaps one day we'll come to
a fine and deadly pleasure

one free breath

I believe in saying it all and taking it all back

I have made a plan, which is interesting, and oddly settling, even though it is painfully vague. I will stay here for the summer, because I would have to pay for here anyway. And I will find a paid internship, or work, or something else that makes me happy and gives me some money and something to learn.

And then, then I will move on. Leave here at least, maybe DC, if I get the perfect job offer. But maybe abroad, because I don't have experience there and I need more field experience, really. Ideally good field experience, great field experience, with an organization that is awesome and helpful and wonderful and that teaches me an endless amount of things. And then maybe I will come back here, apply for jobs back here, find work and a home and a place that I can live alone and buy a dog. And that will be good too. And it's okay if that all happens soon, now, if one of the jobs I really like wants to interview me, wants to hire me, likes me. I'll be okay with that, I'll find a home and a puppy and settle in and that could be good too, but it's nice, for now, that further decisions don't need to be made, enough have been made for now, and what needs to happen will happen.

"I run on whiskey and risk, and ennui and impatience"

Method Suicide | Jacob Scheier
Method Suicide

When Konstantin kills himself,
the actor is off-stage not even pretending to kill himself.
This is why Chekhov is so brilliant and died
only three years after falling in love for the first time. Of course,
Chekhov was saying something about plot
having little to do with events. If The Seagull were fiction,
Constantine’s brain splatter
would fall neatly between a set of brackets.

The phone rang like a gunshot
in the other room. I nearly believed you that time,
though you were playing too many characters
for a realistic comedy. You cannot be Konstantin
and at the same time tell Trigorin/the audience,
“You have just killed yourself!”
The whole thing felt a little Brechtian:
your near death stimulating
only on an intellectual level -
suicide as social gest.

This is why you will never be a great actress.
You can’t just want to die.
You have to live it.
This is what separates the great performances from the mediocre
(I think my mother trained in Stanislavsky).

Chekhov frequented brothels.
He was incapable of trusting or loving a woman,
which might not be different things.

I didn’t leave you after the first attempt,
only because I was reading Lady with Lapdog at the time
and I thought Chekhov was saying that suffering was a requisite
for authentic love.
I didn’t know he was just telling a story,
that suffering is just a description of the landscape,
that love is the only requisite for love.

In my dreams there's a horse, he stands eighteen hands high

I can see his face, when he talks to me over the phone, across all those miles and all those mistakes. I can see his expressions, the way he pulls his cigarettes towards his mouth, rails against everything he knows, rants for twenty minutes before thinking to ask how I'm doing. I can see how he thinks, but I don't know if he realizes what he's arguing for, when he says I should come home. Move back, that the people there are better for me than the people anywhere else, that there's something more to home that nowhere else can contain.

And I want to lash out, ask him if he realizes how trapped home makes me feel, tell him to read my writing from before I left, the pages and pages I scrawled out about how much I wanted to leave, wanted new, wanted passion and discovery in a manner that there can't supply me with anymore. And part of me wants to give in, move home, curl up next to him and forget about the millions of other possibilities, the million other paths.

But if it didn't make me happy three years ago, two years ago, what about it would make me happy now, what has changed that would make it enough. He offers words, ideas of home, but it is not the home I left two years ago, there is little left of that version, and there is nothing to signify that what remains is better, just different, just less connected.

And I won't say no, I won't swear no, but nothing drives me to return there for anything beyond short visits and vacations. It is not that there is nothing there for me anymore, it is just that there is so much more somewhere else.

every boy's in love with his girl's best friend

[When Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope] Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
o Interview by David Brancaccio, NOW (PBS) (7 October 2005)