grammatolatry

"When you show yourself to the woman you love, you don’t know your fear is not fear, itself. You have..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:50:58 -0400

“When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’t know your fear

is not fear, itself. You have never been good,
but now you are so good,

who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,

or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?

This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind

that doesn’t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,

the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.”

- Brenda Shaughnessy, excerpt from “Card 19: The Sun”
(via pleasebebrave)

"There is no pleasure like leaving before dawn in last night’s clothes. Light snow or thick dew in..."

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:30:37 -0400

“There is no pleasure like leaving
before dawn in last night’s clothes.
Light snow or thick dew in the grass—
no one’s passed this way before.
The note you left needed only a few words,
no explanation where lies could creep in.
Your eyes, blinked clear, won’t squint or glance off,
it’s the stars that turn their faces away.
He or she is or is not the one you love
and you cannot stay. The dark
turns to mist and the mist cannot stay
but for once there’s no need for alarm.
You’re getting a good head start.
Maybe the world isn’t made of dust.
Maybe you won’t make another mistake.
You’re as young as you’ll ever be.”

- Dean Young, excerpt from “Alarm Clock” (via pleasebebrave)

"I. That’s how we can distinguish a man from a woman, or from ourselves: only in a moment of..."

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:30:26 -0400

“

That’s how we can distinguish a man from a woman, or from ourselves: only in a moment
of embrace. Judgment on bodies has already passed, they say that we are like any
other, cock is a breast, balls another pair that swings like hands
of a clock. Our stories have no listener; our stories are like any other.
We misunderstand each other, our bodies the only proof of intimacy, a repetition
of bodies coming together as we move on top or under each other,
we fill each other with ourselves in the moment of embrace,
an imago stretching its wings out, two bodies connected by an embrace.

II.

“Hush,” you say, “I love your body,” “I get hard only for you,” “I am yours only.”
You say that sex is another word for how we leave the body, or how, like the Whirling
Dervishes, we seek the eternal in the embrace, in the moment of unveiling
the white so much like a butterfly, or ourselves. You hold your cock, you release
come like a magician releasing the doves. They land on my stomach, they stay there
until they dry like scabs over wound.

“Love is another way to say how unoriginal we are,” or “You and I are separated
by a word, a mere word.” Love is a division, it is a barrier that makes us who we are,
another word for how repetition becomes the way we part from each other, over
and over again, love is another way of saying, Your face in this light is how I want to remember
you, a face only a few steps away from death, this is when I like you the best.

III.

You call it Shoah, the unrepeatable. Here’s a picture: soldiers burning books,
another picture: soldiers dragging an old man who held the Torah as if it were
his child, or God. Let us move thirty years ahead: here’s a picture of students burning
books, another of students pushing an old man clutching the Classics.
The faces of these boys are so many years before any partings they can understand,
their bodies taut with how little years they have. Pictures are repeatable, so are events.
God loves innocence and children, but two are not the same.

I say that the Holocaust is an image of bodies ahead of all partings.
The souls have already forgotten the rib cages, the backbones that protrude like a broken
violin. A picture: bodies after bodies thrown into a ditch. The only thing
separating a man from a woman is by how their sacks are carelessly placed:
here is a man, his balls have shriveled down to the size of a large pea; there, a woman,
where her breasts once were, two broken pendulums that no longer tell time hang.
I want to say, the shaved heads tell all: holocaust is the debasement of bodies,
where bodies turn into grotesque universality. In this picture, a woman lies on top
of two men, their mouths open as if almost a kiss.

IV.

The proof is the body, not in words: you lie on your stomach, slowly rocking yourself
to sleep as if the bed is another body you can ease yourself into. I lie
next to you, my thighs slightly open like a window, or a door, anyone can look
in, even you. But we have stopped our movements already. In the early morning, words are bodies
heaped up high, each body imprinted with past, they are remembrance. But we have already turned
our eyes inward, we do not hear. Each come-cry hides in the cave of the mouth,
stays inside of us like doves in a magician’s pockets, waiting for the signal they’ve been
trained to recognize.

”

- Mariko Nagai, Histories of Bodies (via yesyes)

"I don’t know why I love you. I don’t know why you leave me whenever I am faced with my..."

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:30:43 -0400

“

I don’t know why I love you.
I don’t know why you leave me

whenever I am faced with my own body.
In my loose clothes and walk, you say
“secret” and “muscle.” Outside the dumpsters
are lifted and emptied. I slide the white shirt

over my head. Last night I had
the coward dream again, the airport,
Santa Fe, gun shots echo off
the women’s bodies. I stand
in the line of men who have to watch.

We all love you to begin with.
Then something happens. We become
a mother who races down concrete steps
to cover our daughter, riding her bike

topless, with a plaid blanket. All these years
you have been my skin though I am afraid
to say sometimes I don’t love you at all.
Sometimes, it is a man I love.

In the beginning was the word and the word
knows us. We don’t always return the gesture.

”

- Stacey Waite, Love Poem to Androgyny

"This is not morning. There is a nastiness slowing your shoes, something you shouldn’t step..."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:30:42 -0400

“

This is not morning. There is a nastiness
slowing your shoes, something you shouldn’t step in.
It’s shattered beads, stomped flowers, vomit-
such stupid beauty,

beauty you can stick a manicured finger
into and through, beauty that doesn’t rely
on any sentence the sun chants, it’s whiskey
swelter blown scarlet.

Call this something else. Last night it had a name,
a name wedged between an organ’s teeth, a name
pumping a virgin unawares, a curse word.
Wail it, regardless.

Weak light, bleakly triumphant, will unveil scabs,
snippets of filth music, cars on collapsed veins.
The whole of gray doubt slithers on solemn skin.
Call her New Orleans.

Each day she wavers, not knowing how long she
can stomach the introduction of needles,
the brash, boozed warbling of bums with neon crowns,
necklaces raining.

She tries on her voice, which sounds like cigarettes,
pubic sweat, brown spittle lining a sax bell
the broken heel on a drag queen’s scarlet slings.
Your kind of singing.

Weirdly in love, you rhumba her edges, drink
fuming concoctions, lick your lukewarm breakfast
directly from her crust. Go on, admit it.
You are addicted

to her brick hips, the thick swerve she elicits,
the way she kisses you, her lies wide open.
She prefers alleys, crevices, basement floors.
Hell, let her woo you.

This kind of romance dims the worth of soldiers,
bends and breaks the back, sips manna from muscle,
tells you Leave your life. Pack your little suitcase,
flee what is rigid

and duly prescribed. Let her touch that raw space
between cock and calm, the place that scripts such jazz.
Let her pen letters addressed to your asking.
You s-s-stutter.

New Orleans, p-please. Don’t. Blue is the color
stunning your tongue. At least the city pretends
to remember to be listening.
She grins with glint tooth,

wiping your mind blind of the wife, the children.
the numb ritual of job and garden plot.
Gently, she leads you out into the darkness
and makes you drink rain.

”

- Patricia Smith, And Then She Owns You

"Jeanne, I have spent days arranging this bowl of fruit, all for you, knowing how much you love..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:30:41 -0400

“Jeanne, I have spent days arranging
this bowl of fruit, all for you,
knowing how much you love fruit
(not to eat, of course, but to examine),
and I’ve been careful to make sure
the bananas are the shape of bananas,
that the oranges rhyme with oranges,
and for your pleasure I’ve included
a lone pear, which may signify
something to you I haven’t intended,
which is my intention.
No doubt you’ve begun to question
why the quince and the apple
are so close together, and (knowing you)
if there might be a worm
in the apple, whether this gift
is a gift at all. And perhaps it’s true
that I’ve covered up the worm hole
with putty, painted over it perfectly,
though this would be a mystery
that only can be solved
by cutting open or biting into,
letting the juices run down the sides
of your mouth, or onto your hands.
It would be the kind of bold probing
I would love for you to love, the final
messiness of theory, still life breaking open
into live, the discovery that the secret worm,
if real, will not permit you any distance.
But surely by now you’ve come to realize
there is no worm, only this bowl of fruit
made of words, only these seductions.”

- Stephen Dunn, A Bowl of Fruit (via yesyes)

"I took the Metro to Cité. I walked past Notre-Dame and thought of the hunchback Quasimodo swinging..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:58:03 -0400

“I took the Metro to Cité. I walked past Notre-Dame and thought of the hunchback Quasimodo swinging his misshapen body across the bell-ropes of love for Esmerelda. Quasimodo was a deaf mute. Cupid is blind. Freud called love an ‘overestimation of the object.’ But I would swing through the ringing world for you.”

- Jeannette Winterson, “All I Know About Gertrude Stein”

"After our fierce loving in the brief time we found to be together, you lay in the half..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:30:19 -0400

“

After our fierce loving
in the brief time we found to be together,
you lay in the half light
exhausted, rich,
with your face turned sideways on the pillow
and I traced the exquisite
line of your profile, dark against the white,

delicate and lovely as a child’s.
Perhaps
you will cease to love me.
or we may be consumed in the holocaust,

but I keep, against the ice and the fire,
the memory of your profile on the pillow.

”

- dudley randall, the profile on the pillow. (via black-poetry)

"What if love is no more than a tangle of muscles aching to be untied by knowing fingers? What if..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:30:40 -0400

“

What if love is no more than
a tangle of muscles
aching to be untied
by knowing fingers?

What if love is made and nothing else -
asked Narcissus, leaning over the green iris of water.

Nothing else,
cried Echo from the green cochlea of the woods.

And they were both right.
And they were both lonely.

”

- Kapka Kassabova, from “And they were both right” (via yesyes)

"Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a..."

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 19:30:23 -0400

“

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

”

- Raymond Carver, “Rain” (via larmoyante)
Raymond Carter, “Rain”

"so there you have it, Jack… my desire and my withholding. what I can and cannot give."

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 19:30:23 -0400

“

so there you have it, Jack…

my desire and my withholding.

what I can and cannot give.

”

- “from dear jack,” Jill Stengel

"I don’t know how to love, she whispers to me from across the table. It was the beginning of Spring..."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:30:43 -0400

“

I don’t know how to love, she whispers to me from across the table. It was
the beginning of Spring and little flowers were starting to pop up in the strangest
places. Lifting the sheet this morning, I found a cluster of rosebuds growing on
my right thigh.

She continues, When I was only three weeks old, my mother gave me away to
another family. She looks like a crushed bee. They were almost hippies, this
family, only they dressed better. I can’t remember my mother’s face …

I begin to feel bored. Why did she give you away? Looking at her pale face,
she reminds me of a calla lily. The couple at the next table bicker over the
remaining crème brûlée.

The waiter brings our ginger teas. I bite into my blueberry scone. They wanted a
boy I suppose. I think about myself. Is that what my mother wanted?

We abruptly change the subject and go back to talking about our screenplays
and our lousy boyfriends.

”

- “Los Angeles,” Maw Shein Win

"Right away there’s thinking. Right away. No matter how much I want my face to moon with no..."

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:30:39 -0400

“Right away there’s thinking. Right away.
No matter how much I want my face to moon
with no contortion, leave all talk to voiceovers.
Hands take after purrs. Nicknames remind us
mostly of the fun inventing them. Every beach
fire is a kind of desperate flag. Cops pull over a
riding lawnmower, and the man won’t turn it off.
We walk the dike that crosses I-91. Headlights
pan like reasons. We’re keeping warm. Cars aren’t
fireflies, which is not even how I feel. “Funny isn’t
the same as being happy,” I tell you. Duh. Neither is
that. A family of tiny arsonists live in burned out
delivery trucks behind your neck. They are your
bad pillow. Hands wobble. It’s never been infinity
with me. Infinity is something I can fist bump.
It’s more like when I chew the top off a lightbulb,
and there’s no blob of light to hold. Carry. Get
close. Let me eat your eyelash like a mission.
If we plant it in a divot on my cheek, maybe I’ll
grow your love of coats. The lay of your wrist
when you’re tired. What plays in your head after
you gnaw my finger, look at me, teething the skin like
wrapping paper you want to save for next Christmas.
Sometimes I know that I don’t know what’s going to happen
next, but I know exactly who I’m going to be with when it
does. This feeling is called kiss me. This feeling is called hi.
But maybe you’re not thinking of anything. I’ve thought
about that. We’re on a hillside. Night grass. Grass face.
And the sky is clear enough to see exactly how you feel.”

- “You Can Know That Wait Means Stay,” Mike Young

"My friend, I went to your stupid mine, carried in obligation’s very hot mitten. Everything..."

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:30:29 -0400

“

My friend, I went to your stupid mine,
carried in obligation’s very hot mitten.

Everything was ticked as Gift, Scar, or Luck.
The new parasail made you look post-history,

as we do feel, or feel-ish, long enough to
fuck up. I did that eyebrows thing like good job.

Then we stood on the roof, years of stilt training
between us. We chewed Sudafeds and ham, chuckled at

by all: all that passes for beloved these days.
Why is cake in the shape of a rocket not

you? Someone wants to draw your face and I say
ransom. When my friend makes a good joke,

my other friends are in the shower distantly,
as the minutes of the sun left wait to be

picked for the dodgeball of sentiment.
Half the time I feel like U.S.S. Bitchface,

and all the people line up to pet me. Other-
wise, I cut burritos with a pizza slicer and you

laugh and I think “if that is your real laugh,
go to sleep. I want to steal it. Don’t go.”

”

- “All of These Parties Outside Your Microwave,” Mike Young

"Most of my time is spent displacing want. In some of it, the water heater’s bugged. When I..."

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:30:37 -0400

“

Most of my time is spent displacing want.
In some of it, the water heater’s bugged.

When I turn my face under the cold kind,
what I’m trying to do is divorce my head.

I am most proud of my existential friends
and secretly embarrassed by sweet weather.

We follow the road back to the missed exit.
That is the worst mood I can think of.

My moments of inward congratulation are
offset by meals alone in pants I really like.

There is a harmonica under the river.
There is the time we kiss our own wrist.

Now I have talked my way through dawn
and then some, hot up with promises.

No longer do I pack my own face towel.
Trust lives by its own impossibility.

One girl sat in the shopping cart, almost
asleep. Her friend didn’t know what to say.

There are things you keep dust off.
There is no way to explain this.

What they don’t tell you about God
is that it waits for one kind of laughter

to appear in two people at once.
This has never happened. Wait.

Downstream stood another set of bathers.
We felt like someone was writing a song.

Give me something to give into.
It will be weird. It will be so weird.

”

- “Tell Me And I Will Know,” Mike Young

"That’s us in the satellite photographs, in flagrante delicto through the atmosphere. ..."

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:30:24 -0400

“

That’s us in the satellite photographs,
in flagrante delicto through the atmosphere.

You can tell by the tattoos: starfish ashore on your ankle,
daggered Ace of Spades bloodless on my shoulder blade.

You’re pressing your knuckles to my vestigial tailbone.
I’m saying something urgent to your jugular vein.

See: that pile’s what we wore that day: your mismatched lingerie,
my NASA boxer shorts and T-shirt with wine stains.

It seems, at least, we’ve bathed, but the soles of my feet
shine with calluses. Your toenail polish has flaked.

Thank gravy we’re not wearing outfits, or, heavens,
playing Prison Escape. By the sunlight on our bodies,

it’s neither early nor late. Something shadows my face.
Your eyes are closed. You’ve made a cradle of your legs.

”

- “Satellites,” Aaron Anstett

"Excuse me. You’ve parked in the towaway zone of my confidence. Until I’m archaic..."

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 19:30:26 -0400

“Excuse me. You’ve parked in the towaway zone of
my confidence. Until I’m archaic I’m attachable.
To covert wars with your black underwear.
To a rain that makes duct tape out of May.
The Me as Lincoln logs with feelings: solder
resin. Think of my picture open in Photoshop.
When feelings are easy—but then I’m in a
bus on the Hudson Expressway with a peeled
roof. Choke on my granola bar. Shaving kit
spills down the aisle. Mexican priest with a
gash and moans. A man holds a bushel of his wet
hair, bloody, rolls it up in a Snickers wrapper
and leans out the wreck’s window to smoke it.
“This is an induction of a crash!” I tell my
court reporters, my career in tastes, my how-
itzers of pantyhose and yellow dresses in the
night. Some of you I’ve given perfect games.
Or seared a wink in cinnamon, honey, cinnamon,
for a great supper on TV trays with sex too.
I don’t want a song vendor beside my turnoff.
I don’t want a ride to the hospital, thanks.
The guests I love have done my dishes for me.
If you want to know whether I’m in love with you,
put an olive in a bowl of Dr. Pepper, put a blue
berry in an even larger bowl of coffee. Sodium
floats, bonds ceaselessly, shudders up against
pilgrims on the beach and mixes with the salt
they’ve brought. This started with you inside
me, which is something I’d like in a tinkle box.
I called you up because I almost died almost
significantly, and isn’t there anyone to vouch
for the pennies I’ve spilled under the pillow?
When I die, haul a mattress to the quarry, wet
sheets, then please make it up like I just rose.
If anyone can do this, it’s you. Congratulations.”

- “If I Crash My Love Goes With Me,” Mike Young

"Warm slipperiness of us in the car’s backseat hot July afternoon coming home and we cannot..."

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 19:30:42 -0400

“

Warm slipperiness of us in the car’s backseat
hot July afternoon coming home and we cannot wait
for bed’s winding sheet and mirror’s last glance before we fall.
Instead we have each other smelling of coconut lotion,
spangled with sand and salt crystals, wild wind-styled hair,
bathing suits still damp, still cooling our bodies.

White cotton shirt ties arms entangled in a hurry,
the light and dark of us tanned and not,
worn like smooth and seamless suits, marks that never leave
our skin, necks salty and offered, the back of this field
haven enough for this whirl of us in a moment of surrender
we practice like children with a white flag.

”

- “Doors Thrown Open to Daisies,” Rick Agran

"Woke up this morning with a terrific urge to lie in bed all day and read. Fought against it for a..."

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:19:10 -0400

“

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

”

- Raymond Carver, “Rain” (via larmoyante)
- Raymond Carver, “Rain” (via larmoyante

"Spend every cent on my final expenses: fireworks and rock bands, one fur-lined coffin for each card..."

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:30:29 -0400

“

Spend every cent on my final expenses:
fireworks and rock bands, one fur-lined coffin

for each card in my wallet, truckloads of snacks:
nacho chips and Chuckles, your Ring Dings and Corn Nuts.

Tattoo labels on my eyelids, one per:
Never Better or Miss You. Outline the skeleton

along my skin with black-light ink, Latin names
in cursive script. Finance a student film

of my libretto, contralto, from beyond the grave,
beyond the range of human hearing, twenty-four hours

of “Race car, race car, race car” backwards fast.
Fly a TV-special magician and whatever assistants

right here. Hire them at any cost to cut me in half
for real and make those pieces disappear.

”

- “$500,000 Policy,” Aaron Anstett