February 2012
5 posts
1 tag
Fledgling Pledge
I know you saw my bird heart and refused to nest. On a numbered avenue we met up last summer. There were trees with branches reaching away from them, like children who’ve realized they know enough and can reach themselves. Their shade felt so deserved. My heart didn’t as it usually did try to invent collisions named thrill and hope and this is all to say I realize now things change back as...
ima twat now →
(please notice the clever word ambiguation)
This Is Not A Poem
Zoom zoom vroom fliberty jibbieribit rabbit boom.
Stop being lazy, you words.
January 2012
6 posts
The First Poem of My Creative Thesis, Pt II
Summers in Durham
There were too many well-marked and paved roads For it to be Small Town America it was wanting The antique store with the ribboned-off rocking chair In which the very Martha Washington once perched, Or just something easily identified as quaint By the camera-ed slung and tube sock-ed visitors. For redemption, there were mom-and-pop diners, Bottomless cups of coffee, boys...
212121212121
Birthday tomorrow. Party tonight. So much love.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-pico-iyer-20120108,0,2137466.story
“Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it...
Cartoon Physics, part 1
Nick Flynn
Children under, say, ten, shouldn’t know that the universe is ever-expanding, inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies
swallowed by galaxies, whole
solar systems collapsing, all of it acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning
the rules of cartoon animation,
that if a man draws a door on a rock only he can pass through it. Anyone else who...
December 2011
4 posts
Obligatory End Of Year Post
I don’t think we change as much as we all think we do: we just re-prioritize and highlight different parts of our surroundings and our selves. This next year is going to be wild. I’m ready.
Or, do I buy heels for my future 9-5?
Maybe shit will hit every single fan across all seven continents on January 1st. Maybe the Mayans weren’t just lacking extreme foresight and actually did chose to end their calendars at 2012 for some reason the universe only divulged to them, you know, because of all their hot cocoa inventing and human sacrificing. And those dank ass pyramids they built mostly by themselves (thank you very...
Ahem, my prose thesis is done
The final first & last sentences:
There was a goat, scrawny, all haunches, that wandered about the back hills behind Rigoon proper, and, when the other places has roosters, all comb and wattle, we had a featherless thing.
But all the kids felt was the hot sun baring down on the backs of their necks and the dirt grit on the soft parts of their skin that seems to attach itself to all of us...
You made a visitor of your hands.
Also, I’ve had dinner with the woman who’s on the front page of the poetry foundation’s website. Movin’ on upppp.
November 2011
3 posts
Thesis Excerpt
(In which my thesis finally inches toward the close)
…After that first sluggish moment, we all made for the church; it’s roof and sides, minutes before white, were streaking slowly with deep red, falling faster, the blood hardening on our skin, on the church’s side, clotting onto our clothing, the thick drops mixing into the dirt at our feet, splattering like some kind of...
Keepin' my tabula reaalll rasa
First night free of bronchitis antibiotics. It’s a Saturday. Bates has conveniently planned a “senior gift launch party,” a transparent two-step system: (1) give seniors unlimited, free drinks (2) ask them to donate money when their judgement is sufficiently impaired. Said event begins at 6:00. We are all drunk by 6:14. Luckily, it’s Maine, so it’s dark out. Cut to...
When I first got my job, I was stoked.
SCENE ONE
Me: No way? You’re hiring me? I was the first to respond? My resume was impressive? You must not have checked my references for the “job” I had at Barnes and Noble because the contact number I listed was my cell. Yes, why, yes I am desperate and need money to buy myself cheap bottles of alcoholic libation for my Wednesday through...
October 2011
2 posts
The Black Keys - Meet Me In The City
octobe r bre...
Terrior We cannot live on this land – tired, overwrought, the lines blurred in their rooted crissing and crossing. No longer a way to tell between the tomatoes and the plums – now beyond rot, now scattered pebbles in the field’s tangled rows. Here, are the lasts of the animals: spiders in the dead trees’ elbows, rattlers in the weeds. This land cannot – the stagnated river, wind etched into...
September 2011
2 posts
first paragraph in my first draft of my first...
I was born alone. My Mama was, too, there, but she was screaming, not herself, soon to be dead. I’ve been told that Pops was over with Tim, telling the field what a strong son I would become, so strong I could cull hay more than any other Rigoon boy, throwing beers into the silent grass. Wind wasn’t blowing, wasn’t combing the husks. But I came out all wrong; a smeared girl and a gone Mama.
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
6 posts
“Oh yes, didn’t you know that lawyer, accountant, and personal tax adviser are...”
– From an email my co-worker sent me.
1 tag
Adam
He accidentally came upon it his teen years like a dead sparrow on the sidewalk and it’s heaven was interrupted by prods and pokes. He is still not sorry and believes in no god but people taller than him shake their heads. It was the summer. He licked the sweat riding down her neck in sloppy intimacy, stared at the undoing tide, thought about the future as a thing unlike fate that has no road...
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"My name is Alana and I write poetry. Here it...
Just got back from a poetry reading. Where I read a poem. To a basement full of strangers. My hands shook. It was liberating.
June 2011
12 posts
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Celebration for June 24th →
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Typical
I hate computer clutter. I have one document and one folder on my desktop. They are entitled, respectively, “England Journal” and “Weekly Budgets.” And I know it’s better (read: more responsible and aaahh-dult) that I’ fastidiously maintained my budgets the entire time I was in England thankyouverymuch, but goddamned my own self for writing “more...
Operation Cupcake →
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What To Expect When The San Andreas Fault Shifts...
First is the rumble, like a distant stomach, hungry. Then the ground goes, then the shelved things. For some reason, you’ll always look up. The ceilings’ corners swaying in diagonals. The world’s gone clumsy. The librarian’s under her desk; the walls seem flimsy as if the plaster will, the minute you turn, crumble and fling itself onto the now unmoving ground, lying in surrender. It’ll stop...
May 2011
10 posts
The City
New York tomorrow. Nothing feels quite real. Too much traveling & not enough equilibrium.
LA
I’m going home tomorrow. I’m packed. I need more time to process all of this. Mostly, right now, I want to get myself back to The Land Of The Free and/or Home Of The Brave so I have get my hands on some gatorade. And a burrito. And some hugs from people I’ve known longer than four months.
“Everybody has to find his or her own way of witnessing, and the only way I can...”
– Geoffrey Hill (via theparisreview)
I heard him speak at Oxford three days ago!
Sunny Side Up
I’m not one for New Age bull shit. I don’t use the word “cosmos” and I want to have my palm read because its something new to do, not because I want to hear about how the future holds great things for me. Oh, yeah, and 11:11 is just a time on the clock. You get the idea.
But I am a firm believer in two complimentary theories:
If you try your hardest to do something...
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