favorite words
I was born drunk & paisley, vestige
from the womb. My face laughed into itself—
eyes sank into earlobe & nostrils warped into seahorse.
I was vanilla bean & Mexican vanilla & amniotic
dessert, & my mother did everything she could not to devour me.
I became comino & ajo & hibiscus—
all good for grinding. Mocajete, fist, & knuckle decomposing mass
& matter, baby & mother. When she tried to stillbear me it hurt
until she cried diamonds while my father was swapping spit
with the agave.
― Iliana Rocha, 1981, Creation Myth
in rome I got down among the weeds and tiny perfumed
flowers like eyeballs dabbed in blood and the big ruins
said do it my way pal while starlings
kept offering show biz solutions and well the vatican
pursued its interests the palm trees like singular affidavits
the wind succinct and the mountains painted blue
just before dawn accelerated at the last point
of departure before the big illuminated structures
dug up from the basement got going and I ate crostatas
for breakfast and on the terrace chatted
with the clay-faced old man next door and said I was
after a woman who’d left me years ago and he said lord aren’t we all.
― Charlie Smith, 1947, Crostatas
A man called Dad walks by
then another one does. Dad, you say
and he turns, forever turning, forever
being called. Dad, he turns, and looks
at you, bewildered, his face a moving
wreck of skin, a gravity-bound question
mark, a fruit ripped in two, an animal
that can’t escape the field.
― Eleni Sikelianos, 2010, At The Airport
We each wanted our own story, my father and I;
we were talkers, him first then me,
each wanted the other to listen until his heart broke.
It didn’t matter where the story began,
or what it was about, each had a better one,
each had gone farther, seen more,
each needed – this time – to be listened to;
each was ready to kill the other to get him to shut up.
Or so it seemed to me
until I hated him. He had the advantage,
years when I didn’t exist; he knew war, marriage,
the birth of sons, decline; I knew dreams, agility,
desire, a boy’s will. It was no wonder I got out of there,
no wonder I ran for my life
like a boy running at a sunset.
Everywhere I went, sons out on bail
yapped like maniacs. And every time a man stopped me
to pour out his heart, I understood why he did this.
And the whispers in theaters,
and the soft patter after lovemaking,
and the derelict explaining himself to a building,
I understood. A boy can’t make his father listen to him,
and he can’t make his father stop talking.
Even years later, when I returned,
my father wouldn’t let me get a word in,
he had so much to say about how he missed me.
― Charlie Smith, 1994, The Essential Story
My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.
I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.
― Dylan Thomas, Clown In The Moon
Live
To the point of
Tears
― Albert Camus
there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
a space
and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest times
we will know it
we will know it
more than
ever
there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
and
we will wait
and
wait
in that space.
― Charles Bukowski, No Help For That
who knows if the moon’s
a balloon, coming out of a keen city
in the sky—filled with pretty people?
and if you and i should
get into it, if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we’d go up higher with all the pretty people
than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody’s ever visited, where
always
it’s
Spring and everyone’s
in love and flowers pick themselves
― E.E. Cummings, 1925, Who Knows If The Moon’s
Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil. I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
The sky blurs—there’s a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner. How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon. A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.
― William Matthews, 1998, Morningside Heights, July
sometimes
i smell my parents
on my words.
and i weep.
― Nayyirah Waheed, 2017