December 22, 2012

DAY 22: KATE GREENSTREET, You Say Our Love is a Forest Fire


























collage by Lilly Pereira
(click image for audio)


KATE GREENSTREET


You say our love is a f
orest fire


half open
our burning open
page
your broken open sleeping
longer each day
hours just dreaming of the luggage
woods are burning down the words
you turned to speak
say ours
in a language I can't read
you
shoulder it
for hours
say woulds are
burning up our metaphor
in black and white
half closed
you turn
say
why is it so hot in here
you sit and sit and sit you say
our love you see it
burning far away





“You say our love is a forest fire” was made for the opening of Lilly Pereira’s art exhibit at Flying Object in June 2012, a response to her collage “Circular Ruins.”

December 21, 2012

Upcoming Feature! Women Publishers' Roundtable


Dorothy Parker, who knew about women,
publishing & round tables


I'm thrilled to announce that I'll be organizing a women publishers' roundtable for Delirious Hem.  The feature will include my new publishing venture, Noctuary Press, as well as several more established presses run by amazing women.  I hope you'll check it out in the new year!

Kristina Marie Darling

DAY 21: DANIELLE VOGEL, from SMALL ICELANDIC NOVELS



















DANIELLE VOGEL
from Small Icelandic Novels
for angela rawlings


1.

when we are at sea we are suspended
just feet below the air we watch through the wet rim
of the ocean through the green-shouldered waves
we let ourselves be turned we watch the
ways in which the light writes
upon our selves and sisters




a pod of women spines
liquidic with sleep it is our season
of crossing it is always our season
days are passing before the first of us surfaces
we swim to surface us dreaming-women
in nightgowns buoy bellies to the sky
a slow arching into under again


the first night is all nights and we are buoyant
within the bay we are swimming and
we are not swimming within the bay we are writing a pod
of oceanic women sleeping as we swim
we write we are writing


we are writing as we pass our eyes
always closed our lids twitch
with writing our faces relaxed in sleep
our mouths open tongues searching
like the soft foot of a clam


and we turn to deepen whorling
over our nightgowned backs creak where the
pages and covers of books are shingled
along growling like a fibrous exoskeleton
these books bi-valved creatures
 an elongated cone wound on its axis
withdraw all its soft parts into the mouth
 sound-calcites thinly plated upon the teeth leaf-like
crystals shingling the finger bones opalescent
light refracted the memory-tissue of the word
kelp trailed and growing



our density increases until we
are lifting out the sea our density
increases until we are washed up
shore pulling our sleeping forms across
the earth by our hands bellies to
dirt legs drug behind


our density increases until we are
invisible in the darkest parts
of the ocean we are metamorphic icicled
sedimentary blooms
we glacial the tongue
until it is always moving our surface slopes
the air weightless but woolen
our density builds through a stratum
of re-smothering we are subcellular
a slip in perspectives a deformation
of gravity we freeze over and
separate debris as we thaw
-->

December 20, 2012

DAY 20: ARIELLE GUY, EXILE





















(click image for audio)

ARIELLE GUY

Exile

But I am (but I am)
washed in forest:

in the sin of Atom;
Adam’s

post-apocalypse
we all swam in acid
toasted marshmallows by the sea
side-stepped, goose-

stepped the Majesty
of hope.

by my brilliant deductions,
our worlds should have ended
long ago
we’re still here

hold on
knuckles whitening
against stone
reddening as the rocks
rip our skin

our skin
our kin
levitators of Beauty;

all masks
All Saints
the Fallen congregate
around the Burned:;

syntax is lost
language is lost
prayer is lost
we are all dead

we are all dead
we are all dead
we are all dead

but wait! an earth-covered,
worm-tasseled hand
breaks through the boundary
of earth between life and death
and lives again;

the whole body, dirt-covered,
emerges from a rain-soaked grave
in early winter.
the snows haven’t come yet,
deep winter cold
hasn’t frozen the ground,
forbidding the dead to be buried there.

The sky doesn’t touch
pussy, justice,
Lord, God,
grave, my sodden,
my heart’s armor
of ribs; they protect like
a Claddagh ring,
like the sky,
opening to the moor,
to the outback,
to the tundra.

No one flourishes in infertile ground.
We’re same as green--salt the land and nothing grows.


 

December 17, 2012

DAY 17: SARAH ANNE COX & ELENI MAKKA, RE: Hope (for Pussy Riot)



























(click image for audio)



Re: Hope
(for Pussy Riot)

My mother used to say
no, I will not calm down
rinsing the roots of a coconut palm
here, frost divides the pine needles
and snowflakes aren’t special
just unrelenting
a case of conviction
sewing camp
red vestigial machines
line in sewn
in mouths
Not even
the smudged glass
centuries of appeal
to the painted lady
hot breath whispered
etched in silver
the court room box
can escape iconography