Edward
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Edward

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singularity

I read somewhere about black holes,
black holes on trains in stained tartan shirts,
that cock pierced eyebrows at City Center
on their way to class, black holes in knit
dresses, black holes yawning.

I met one once, by the steps at Saint Patrick’s
cathedral. It touched my wrist,
I went home and threw away every watch I owned,
every bracelet, cuff, bangle.

Staring into a black hole that evening
I poured all of myself out and it drank
deeply, cavernously.

Have you ever poured milk into a gutter?
I met a black hole with an easy smile
and did just that, until I was
a carton emptied by clumsy
kisses, gravity,
and it was still unfilled,
because it is hard to fill a gutter.

We put our hands in each others’
back pockets,
suns set on an event horizon,
and there is the tug of the black hole
on my arm, the empty weight of nothing,
nothing at all.

#poetry  #writing 

5 notes

the keeping of secrets

like terriers, underfed
so that their ribs jut
like volcanoes, nose
dry in coaldust
nostrils slit like throats
that have stopped bleeding.

like goalposts, outstretched
arms to block, grass stains
bloom like sunsets
of yellowgreen on white cotton,
a whistle blows, shining
the steel light of
locomotives. 

like fruit, in a basket,
wicker, that is rough
and reminds of scarecraws
as the skin of apples
brown, strawberries grow
lawns of snowy mold,
indetermite and fuzzy,
the television screen
in a lightning storm. 

#poetry  #look at me being all prolific and obtuse  #goodnight!  #writing 

4 notes

noir

I carry a soft spot, one that bruises
easily, for girls dressed all in black,
who smirk between sips of their espresso
to lament: oh, life is a funeral,
for we are all dying.

It is a tender spot, like the
brown patches of apples we eat around
in the garden in september, the
space of skin between the halves of
your niece’s skull, newly born,
that have not yet come together. I nurse it
like a wound, feeding it a steady diet
of girls in suede ankle boots,
their lips painted red and pursed
around thin cigarettes,
girls who are all dying.

They stand in front of an impressively
large canvas and yawn, preferring
the inch square piece in the corner,
rendered with india ink and an eyedropper,
dark and obscure. They read to me
on stairsteps, the gentle lull of
Ashberry, and I am quite sure it
means nothing at all. 
We smoke, or don’t, and their voices
speaking quiet verse, raise
ugly purple bruises. They laugh
and flicker like shadows. 

#poetry  #writing 

2 notes

NaPoWriMo 2012: fin.

I completed exactly 2/3rds of the challenge, which I am totally okay with, because before this month I hadn’t been writing poetry regularly for almost 2 years. If you so choose, you can browse my effort, loosely entitled A Hall of Mirrors, here.

Thanks to everyone who offered kind words and support throughout the past 30 days. You people are awesome <3

#napowrimo  #poetry  #a hall of mirrors 

3 notes

#20. my neighbor, our city

My neighbor speaks in tongues
to his cat, Siamese, lapping
the sweet milk of religion. 
On Thursdays he rolls out the
garbage with his back bent
like cigarettes, one can large
and brimming with empty spools
of yarn, the torn pages of magazines
that did not make it into a collage,
wood shavings from an ornamental coffin.
His smoke breaks are indulgant and often,
his hands always cold, his voice sure
when, gesturing towards the scrapyard
of buildings downtown, he tells me
‘Look, weeds in the garden.’

Our city is sweet to us, a polyamorous
lover that shares cold kisses of fog,
pressed against our lips until breath
becomes something visible, substantial,
and it rises in the morning
like ghosts. 

#less than 5 hours to write 10 more poems?  #I don't think I'm going to be finishing NaPo  #NaPoWriMo  #A Hall of Mirrors  #poetry  #writing 

2 notes

#18. The distinctness of persons

I am a body disassembled
for spare parts.
my kidney regulating blood pressure
in the abdominal cavity
of a sheikh in Muskat, Oman;
my lungs in Illinois, twin billows
venting air for a girl of eight,
her pigtails bouncing in time
to steady breathing as 
she skips rope.
My eyes, from a glass bowl
observe themselves in the 
polished surface of the table
they rest on.
You wipe the blood from your chin,
fit the gears built from the bones
of my feet, my ankles, 
my able joints, into the rough
machinations 
of weapons.
My trembling fingers pull
a trigger
in South Sudan,
in a suburb of Milan
my teeth pierce a jugular,
my tongue tastes copper,
somewhere my lips
smile.
I am made into somethings new,
sharp and cold,
my skin in Puerto Rico shivers,
my eyes in Hartford, Connecticut
sleepily, with all the 
weight of iron,
start to close.

#poetry  #napowrimo  #A Hall of Mirrors  #writing 

1 notes

I Need to be More French. Or Japanese.

Then I wouldn’t prefer the California wine,
its big sugar, big fruit rolling down my tongue,
a cornucopia spilled across a tacky tablecloth.
I’d prefer the French, its smoke and rot.
Said Cézanne: Le mond-c’est terrible!
Which means, The world-it bites the big weenie.
People sound smarter in French.
The Japanese prefer the crescent moon to the full,
prefer the rose before it blooms.
Oh, I have been to the temples of Kyoto,
I have stood on the Pont Neuf, and my eyes,
they drank it in, but my taste buds
shuffled along in the beer line at Wrigley Field.
It was the day they gave out foam fingers.
I hereby pledge to wear more gray, less yellow
of the beaks of baby mockingbirds,
that huge yellow yawping open on wobbly necks,
trusting something yummy will be dropped inside,
soon. I hereby pledge to be reserved.
When the French designer learned
I didn’t like her mockups for my book cover,
she sniffed, They’re not for everyone. They’re
subtle. What area code is 662 anyway? I said,
Mississippi, sweetheart. Bet you couldn’t find it
with a map. Okay: I didn’t really. But so what
if I’m subtle as May in Mississippi, my nose
in the wine-bowl of this magnolia bloom, so what
if I’m mellow as the punch-drunk bee.
If I were Japanese I’d write about magnolias
in March, how tonal, each bud long as a pencil,
sheathed in celadon suede, jutting from a cluster
of glossy leaves. I’d end the poem before anything
bloomed, end with the rain swelling the buds
and the sheaths bursting, then falling to the grass
like a fairy’s castoff slippers, like candy wrappers,
like spent firecrackers. Yes, my poem
would end there, spend firecrackers.
If I were French, I’d capture post-peak, in July,
the petals floppy, creased brown with age,
the stamens naked, stripped of yellow filaments.
The bees lazy now, bungling the ballet, thinking
for the first time about October. If I were French,
I’d prefer this, end with the red-tipped filaments
scattered on the scorched brown grass,
and my poem would incite the sophisticated,
the French and the Japanese readers—
because the filaments look like matchsticks,
and it’s matchsticks, we all know, that start the fire.

—Beth Ann Fennelly 


#poetry 

3 notes

#14. One weird spice to cure Diabetes

the shades are drawn like moths to light,
my mother, wrapped in darkness,
snores.

we are become gladiators,
slaying tigers with the blunt
edges of swords, racing chariots
that creak like old bones,
awaiting the thumbs up or down,
their meanings inverted,
from a sleeping Caesar. 

we strike fantastic poses,
limbs stretched as the faces
of sunflowers, the perfect lines
of ballerinas, elbows with
the parabolic curve of Renoir’s 
bather, cheeks with the vibrant blush
of Basquiat, all the unnoticed
commotion of Icarus drowning
in a Breughel on the mantle.

I build castles with the unswept
shards of glass from a plate
broken in the kitchen.
It fell, a flawless swan dive,
a perfect ten,
and stuck the landing.

she sleeps, still,
laid in rose petals,
a cast sarcophagus of 
rusting iron, to the lullabies
of creation and lives
lived, all the childish
business of tugging sleeves
sad and ignored.

#if the title seems random it's actually what inspired this  #it was a pop up add  #...it's actually kind of personal idk man  #mommy issues  #etc  #poetry  #NaPoWriMo  #A Hall of Mirrors  #writing 

1 notes

#13. an interview

We will begin with a series of
questions. I want you to 
answer as quickly as 
you can:

You enter a room, I am
asking you questions, 
Will you answer?

A man enters, approaches you
and shakes his head furiously.
He screams, and instead of words
he speaks blood. What
does he say?

A woman enters, she has your
face. She carefully knots
the scarf around her neck, 
looks you directly in the eye,
and says “I have no idea
what you mean, dear, 
I have never owned a scarf
in my life”

A cat enters, and does not.

A child enters, spends
76 years in the room, and does
not exit. 

A room enters, and you 
step inside it, and are 
immediately asked questions.

You enter, and there is a man,
and he is growing impatient,
and will you answer?

#NaPoWriMo  #poetry  #A Hall of Mirrors  #when I try to catch up the quality usually goes downhill  #but I'm also just trying to experiment more?  #writing 

2 notes

#12. A sea urchin releases a message into the surrounding water

How strange it is, to exist
in the universe
of your hair.
gravitation is a natural phenomenon
by which physical bodies
(us, leaning, breath held like newborns)
attract with a force,
(your hair between my fingers,
standing like the stalks of bamboo, as I
pull you closer)
olfaction is a biological process
by which vertebrates inhale
either volatile chemicals
(the 
dead cells of skin I breathe in
and keep, your old photographs 
inhaled)
or fluid-based ones
(pheromones, secretions
that trigger a social response;
your musk so like smoke,
my dilating pupils,
the beads of sweat on your
upper lip, my fingers,
trembling)
in order to
sense smells.

We are breathing deeply,
consuming one another
in unseeable pieces,
we are bodies of mass,
binary stars in twin orbit,
we are.

#ugh I'm still 4 days behind  #poetry is hard u guyz!!!11  #NaPoWriMo  #a hall of mirrors  #poetry  #writing 

10 notes

#11. Laissez-affair

gluing dollars into paper chains
I wear and become a ghoul.
dragging across halls emptied
as vas deferens;
clanging with the gentle climax
of capitalism, the soft grunt
of phasers set to kill.

I am a banshee, I howl
with tinny corporate jingles,
a ghost (4 out of 5 coroners
agree!) pearly, extra whitening
in the moonlight.

my magnetic strips have grown
ineffective with use.
cashiers must take me in hand,
look at my face,
recite my numbers.
once they were memorized,
and a 19 year old girl
in west Connecticut 
became me.

#NaPoWriMo  #a hall of mirrors  #poetry  #writing 

0 notes

#10. clay

I mold a figure, you, out of the red earth.
it is svelte, hips like tiny birds
and with you in my palm
we dance, slowly
my thumb cradling your limbs,
knuckles like crutches
of skin and bones,
so you will not crumble.

It rains, and we are in it,
you rolling in the mud,
me, laughing, aching, made whole.
And you pick up the wet earth
as you go, stealing mass
like sweet sips of wine
and growing.
when we go home, I carry you
in both arms, 
and my knees shake.

now we do not dance.
you have chrysalized 
in layers of red earth
and emerged 
weighty, substantial.
When I hold you, it is
with broad shoulders
and a bent spine, 
I am become Atlas,
holder of worlds.

#NaPoWriMo  #poetry  #a hall of mirrors  #writing 

1 notes

#8. because I am young, and feeling, and possessed of the relative privilege of melancholy

I shed tears like corn husks,
like feathers at a molting,
a saltwater bloodletting
draining the liquid of a past self
to become new and dry and hollow,
like skin flaking against the
scratch of nails badly chewed
and too much sun, like
mink in spring,
when I will emerge
pale and raw
and empty,
like some other simile
in some other poem
by some other writer
of tear-smudged letters
that speaks with my voice,
we two (or many) beings
mirrored in tears
shed like corn husks. 

#NaPoWriMo  #A Hall of Mirrors  #basically caught up!!!!!  #sorry for spamming this shit  #done for the night  #poetry  #writing 

1 notes

#7. not being you

“there is a crack in everything”
someone said once
in a song,
and it is true of this plaster
and my knuckles,
I make it true
as I paint walls red.

The plaster gives,
the tithe of physical objects
to those who apply force,
and behind it is a tunnel.
Darkness asserts itself
against my eyelids,
leading somewhere. I stoop,
warm wind licks my face,
the soft promise of answers,
purpose, resolution.
The logical progression here
would find me crawling,
because I am desperate
and stories need things that
happen, and tunnels suggest
light at the end, death
or transcendence or the 
vaginal imagery of rebirth.

I have re-papered the room
in lavender, crown molding,
all the trappings of bourgeois excess.
If you listen, there is a wind somewhere,
but I do not investigate.

All is well.

#NaPoWriMo  #poetry  #A Hall of Mirrors  #still 2 days behind but starting to catch up  #writing 

2 notes

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