don’t let me leave you

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Don’t Let Me Leave You
Kseniya Marennikova

Photo by Akhil Verma on Unsplash

love poem 8

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Love Poem 8

Darío Jaramillo Agudelo

Your tongue, your wise tongue that invents my skin,
your fire tongue that burns me,
your tongue that creates the instant of insanity, delirium
of the body in love
your tongue, sacred whip, sweet ember,
invocation of fire that takes me out of myself,
that transforms me,
your tongue of unmodest flesh,
your tongue of surrender that demands everything from me,
your very mine tongue,
your beautiful tongue electrifying my lips, making yours the body you have purified,
your tongue exploring and discovering me,
your gorgeous tongue also knowing how to say it loves me.

Translation

Poema de amor 8

Tu lengua, tu sabia lengua que inventa mi piel,
tu lengua de fuego que me incendia,
tu lengua que crea el instante de demencia, el delirio del cuerpo enamorado,
tu lengua, látigo sagrado, brasa dulce,
invocación de los incendios que me saca de mí, que me transforma,
tu lengua de carne sin pudores,
tu lengua de entrega que me demanda todo, tu muy mía lengua,
tu bella lengua que electriza mis labios, que vuelve tuyo mi cuerpo por ti purificado,
tu lengua que me explora y me descubre,
tu hermosa lengua que también sabe decir que me ama.

 

Photo by Nsey Benajah on Unsplash

Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry

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Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry

Jericho Brown

I don’t know whose side you’re on,

But I am here for the people

Who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning

And close down for deep cleaning at night

Right up the street and in cities I mispronounce,

In towns too tiny for my big black

Car to quit, and in every wide corner

Of Kansas where going to school means

At least one field trip

To a slaughterhouse. I want so little: another leather bound

Book, a gimlet with a lavender gin, bread

So good when I taste it I can tell you

How it’s made. I’d like us to rethink

What it is to be a nation. I’m in a mood about America

Today. I have PTSD

About the Lord. God save the people who work

In grocery stores. They know a bit of glamour

Is a lot of glamour. They know how much

It costs for the eldest of us to eat. Save

My loves and not my sentences. Before I see them,

I draw a mole near my left dimple,

Behind my mask. I grin or lie or maybe

I wear the mouth of a beast. I eat wild animals

While some of us grow up knowing

What gnocchi is. The people who work at the grocery don’t care.

They say, Thank you. They say, Sorry,

We don’t sell motor oil anymore with a grief so thick

You could touch it. Go on. Touch it.

It is early. It is late. They have washed their hands.

They have washed their hands for you.

And they take the bus home.

Photo by Gábor Molnár on Unsplash

newborn garys

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And a very happy birthday to one of my near-lifelong friends, a truly incomparable and exceptional Gary.

The Hunt for a Newborn Gary
Patricia Lockwood
Screen Shot 2020-02-16 at 23.41.18

reunion

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Reunion
Carolyn Forché

Just as he changes himself, in the end eternity changes him.
—Mallarmé

On the phonograph, the voice
of a woman already dead for three
decades, singing of a man
who could make her do anything.   
On the table, two fragile   
glasses of black wine,
a bottle wrapped in its towel.   
It is that room, the one
we took in every city, it is
as I remember: the bed, a block   
of moonlight and pillows.   
My fingernails, pecks of light   
on your thighs.
The stink of the fire escape.   
The wet butts of cigarettes   
you crushed one after another.   
How I watched the morning come   
as you slept, more my son   
than a man ten years older.   
How my breasts feel, years   
later, the tongues swishing   
in my dress, some yours, some   
left by other men.
Since then, I have always   
wakened first, I have learned   
to leave a bed without being   
seen and have stood
at the washbasins, wiping oil   
and salt from my skin,
staring at the cupped water   
in my two hands.
I have kept everything
you whispered to me then.
I can remember it now as I see you   
again, how much tenderness we could   
wedge between a stairwell   
and a police lock, or as it was,   
as it still is, in the voice
of a woman singing of a man
who could make her do anything.

.

god of suicides

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God of Suicides
Nava EtShalom

I have been wrong before, god of syntax
and understatement, god of slips in silk
and polyester, god of the laboratory, god of newsprint
and sunscreen, god of gulls, god of the unlocked bakery,
god of twins, god of all the cities of my youngest years,
god of the nurses who walk those wards, god
of sensible shoes and of Wall Street, god of whales
and their depths, god of the kitchen, god
of the blood clot, god of the authoritative sentence,
god of weight and liquor, god of scarves
and of the required fast, god of the green room
and the downbeat, god of lemons,
god of the disappeared and god of their mothers,
god of the highway’s meridian, god
of all 206 bones and the compulsive catalogue,
god of freckles, god of rhinoplasty, god of narcotics, god
of the Five-Year Plan, god of the solemn
and the sudden, god of the stage,
god of runways, god of release on one’s own
recognizance, god of the unrecognized face, god
of divorce and of lip gloss, god of crosswalks
and alphabets, god of M16s
and god of hands without instructions,
god of attention, god of the tucked
chin, god of the article,
god of the attitude, god of direction, god
of the brownstone and its master bedroom,
god of the pinstriped suit, the knuckles,
but in all of these furious declamatory years the question
has never been, god of what, god of the city’s brick,
god of my palm, god of my open mouth.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

intestate

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Intestate
Fleur Adcock

What was she supposed to use for ink —
blood? Breast milk? Amniotic fluid?
Too late for those. Too late altogether.
Some things are impossible to write.

Photo by MJ S on Unsplash

our eunuch dreams

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Our Eunuch Dreams
Dylan Thomas

I

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,
Of light and love the tempers of the heart,
Whack their boys' limbs,
And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,
Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night
Fold in their arms.

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,
When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,
The bones of men, the broken in their beds,
By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.

II

In this our age the gunman and his moll
Two one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,
Strange to our solid eye,
And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;
When cameras shut they hurry to their hole
down in the yard of day.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull,
Impose their shots, showing the nights away;
We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill
Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

III

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, which
Shall fall awake when cures and their itch
Raise up this red-eyed earth?
Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,
The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,
Or drive the night-geared forth.

The photograph is married to the eye,
Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;
The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith
That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

IV

This is the world; the lying likeness of
Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move
Loving and being loth;
The dream that kicks the buried from their sack
And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.
This is the world. Have faith.

For we shall be a shouter like the cock,
Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack
The image from the plates;
And we shall be fit fellows for a life,
And who remains shall flower as they love,
Praise to our faring hearts.


Photo by Kent Pilcher on Unsplash

i woke up, and the day caught me

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I woke up, and the day caught me

Kara Jackson

i woke up and the day caught me

in its mouth like a strand of yarn
i am useful
the motivation for a scarf, maybe

some stitch started to be finished
i will make up someone’s
heat i will be a fire
so intricate it can be worn

i woke up and the day called on me
specifically, threw my name through the sky
the way children are thought up
trials pulled through the stars

i woke up and like anyone who wakes
and asks why i checked my feet,
rubbed the bones for their reality
i keep waking though i’ve asked for rest

cornered the moon in the alley,
pawned the dark to assume its place
and still i return to that burning chin
honour that persistent candle

because who will wake up if not me?
who will the day catch then
if i am not the centre of its tongue?

what of the women who keep waking?
what of my mother, who has asked for rest, too?
and her mother, tucked into an endless slumber

i woke up and the day thanked me
for coming so far. i know rest is a long
walk from the sun, i know we’ve been up
for so long, that sleep doesn’t settle
for my blood. me, daughter of the rooster’s song

but when the day calls i will answer to my name
claim it like a fire rushing toward living things
i will rise because there is someone praying
for me to remain still

Photo by Karen Penroz on Unsplash