Poem Friday #11

Weather-related migraine today. I swear, I'm a human barometer. A walking weather radar. I'm loading up on Sudafed Sinus Headache, which I've heard gives off a similar rx to meth. For someone who rarely goes to bed before 2AM, this will be quite an interesting day.

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Will I see you at AWP? I'm coming in on Thursday evening & will be reading w/Switchback Books on Friday night. I'm also going to the sure-to-be-fabulous No Tell Books/Pilot Books/Octopus Books reading on Sat. night.

PLR won't have a table this year (but we have BIG BIG plans in store for 08), but look for me & our spankin' new assistant editor, Matt Siegel & we'll give you fancy PLR magnets & postcards.

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Everyone should read this book. I haven't felt as strongly about a debut collection since Crush.

MRI by Alex Lemon

An old man is playing fiddle in my head.
At least that’s what the doctor says,
pointing, as he holds my MRI to the light.

He must be eating the same hot dogs
my nephew microwaves. My nephew sees
Bob the Builder everywhere—smiling

in sauerkraut, sawing in the drifting sky.
Afternoons he names me Bob, knocks
my knee with a plastic hammer. I’m half-

naked, shivery with chicken skin,
napkin-gowned. But I don’t laugh
because I think the veined cobweb

looks like Abe Lincoln’s profile on the penny.
So let’s pretend I’m not sick at all.
I’m filled with golden tumors—

love for the nurse who feeds me
to the machine. The machine worse
than any death—the powerlessness

of a shaved & strapped-down body.
Even in purgatory you can wear earrings
& though the music might crack a spine,

at least in that torture, the tears from your arm’s
needle marks are mouth wateringly sweet.

(from Mosquito)

Poem Friday #10

Broken Helix by Dina Ben-Lev

The sexy talk show host nods and nods. Beside her
a bald man begs to meet the mother he’s never known.
Slowly, in front of fourteen million, the curtain
rises with applause—surprise! Before a camera closes in,

I shut my eyes. Down in deepest Florida, in a hospital
winged with a sanatorium, you named me Cheryl.
Then signed me away. At 22, were you tired
of trailer parks, truck stops, drive-thru

windows of worry? Did an old, world-weary nurse
warn, Only one skill you’ll be properly paid for. . .
Impressive, said a man with his hand on my resume. . .
But hell, you’ll ruin marriages

with such heavenly hair. Walking out of that white room
and out of that black building, I thought of your leaving—
thirty years ago, those minutes it took
to exit, empty-handed but for one slim bag.

In the cool, antiseptic lobby, you might’ve stopped
at a fountain. Bending, maybe you moved your whole
face into the water. Were you glamorous in sunglasses,
pushing open the door to the heat? You’d never see

your daughter settled in Seattle, where sun’s uncommon
and painful. Never know her new name. Did you
ride a bus alone through battering light, past the hundred
hotels of Miami? At 20, after phoning and phoning and failing

to find you, I fell off a chair in the Fontainebleu.
Pink drinks paid for by a lawyer who liked me best
on my knees. Did my father rub your feet
when you returned? Or did you dream

all night, alone, one light left on?
Blurry on gas, I spread for suction
and scalpel. A nurse held my head. . .
At 24, with a Master’s in Fantasy, I ached for escape

from the dirtiest, snowiest section of Syracuse.
A taxi took me home, where sleep came on a green
Goodwill couch—bought with the man of my dreams
who later burned poems in the bathtub,

shot fist-wide holes through my Nova.
And the next day, did you turn to the TV
for comfort? And now, half a lifetime later,
in the kitchen / livingroom / bedroom / only room,

watch the same talk show host? How she moved
a microphone to the mouth of the bald man’s mother?
How she asked, OK tell me, would you do it again?

(from Broken Helix)

Birthday AWP Hitch

My 30th birthday party was this past Saturday: chocolate martinis, coffee liquer, big fancy cake, pink tiara, what more could I have asked for? Thank you to my near & dears (someone was missed terribly) who were able to come for showing me a great time. Thanks for the goodies: chocolate truffles and Starbucks liquer, basket o' novelties (including Etch-a-Sketch pen, tennis shoe eraser, candles, tea, and aforementioned tiara), Cold Pluto by Mary Ruefle, candle holders, snazzy photo frame, strawberry stoli and vanilla vodka, gift cards, tulips, and from the hubby, Tiffany earrings and Dior Miss Cherie perfume.

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I'm gearing up for AWP. Jeff & I are driving to Atlanta (10 hours). When you live in Texas, 10 hours is nothing. Seriously. It takes almost 14 to get from east to west. We're a planet.

Come hear me read at the Switchback Books reading on Friday, March 2 @ 8PM @ Django Lounge and Restaurant, 495 Peachtree St. I'm very excited to attend the No Tell Books/Pilot Books/Octopus Books/Black Ocean Books reading on Saturday, March 3rd @ 7:00 p.m. @ the Apache Cafe, 64 3rd Street. What AWP events are you going to?

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I'm going to see the play Hitchcock Blonde at the Alley Theatre next Sunday. I'm quite the Hitchcock freak, so I'm very much looking forward to it. See the synopsis here.

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Trying to locate the entrance to my next poem. Yes, this poem is a building.

Lily & Poem Friday #9

Exciting tidbit: The Writing Seminars at Bennington College has nominated me for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation!

I'm applying to Breadloaf for the very first time this year. Any advice? Tales from the field?

Are you entering Tupelo Press' Tupelo Press Poetry Project? I've selected the poem "Exposition of the Contents of a Cab" to submit.

I went to see Pimone Triplett and Andrew Feld read last night at the University of Houston Honors College. It was a great reading, with both poets reading from their books and from selections of newer poems. After, Matt, Brett & I went for sushi followed by drinks at LZ's Pub.

In honor of the reading,

Poem Friday #9

Past Light by Pimone Triplett

Within reach of sex but not yet, I remember, a few stars
freckling the vacancies
past the yard’s blown flood beams and father’s single
sycamore. Expert amateur,
I thought myself, aged thirteen, rabid for facts and trying
to have a mind for
what each light was. This I knew: arrivals of gaseous crackups
wholly unlike us, and not
pinpricks, nor quaint connect-the-dots, nor tiny stabs of will.
Sky’s Zenith, Lyra, The Great, The Small Bear.
Hopes rose. It was before the boys and window escapes,
before breakup seeped
into the house like bad water. I loved stories
of staying in place.
In the one about the ancient astronomer
on the day of eclipse,
after he’d gazed his naked sight away,
he thought he saw the sun giving birth
to itself and scrawled, half blind, in a notebook,
as if wood fought back
to eat the fire. Meanwhile, our lawn sparked
with mother’s rake tines upraised,
sound of door slam and squabble inside, squeal
of brakes rounding
out the drive. And if I wanted one clean,
one lesser loyalty, wishing
so hard on that old onlooker?
I could see him at full kneel
in dirt unflinching, begging the above to smote what’s bulk,
the words arcing slowly up,
saying, burn me all to star, o fathers.
I understood nothing of their pain.
Already, close to home, the sycamore leaves in full
heat looked edgeless,
each dark on dark blurring the shapes
as if we were all dropped through:
Zenith, Lyra, The Greater, The Lesser, The True.

(from The Price of Light)

Poem (late) Friday #8

In Praise of the Mouth by Rigoberto González

Your throat, moan-cluttered, opens
like the desert’s flower. The tongue quivering with thirst
is not the stamen, but the wet union of exposed
corolla and nocturnal bat—the sharp sting
of pink, the accidental fang of red. With me inside,
your mouth transforms into a pair of leeches
fattening sucker to sucker, an
uroboros swallowing its glutinous reflection
to retrieve a slick coat as it spits itself back.
Neck against neck, two voices dance
through the madness of the Venus’s-fly-trap, the rattle
in the hinges of its blade is not
death, but the cry of love—what the narcissistic
moon hums to the sea that mirrors it.
Even the alligator’s dangerous parade of teeth
looks beautiful because it celebrates the mouth.
With or without the ringing uvula of welcomes
your cave still softens into silk
when something finds its refuge there. And there
stone shatters, undressed of blue crystals,
bone melts to marrow, and hearts implode,
shriveling down to the plum pit origins of lust.

(from Other Fugitives and Other Strangers)

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