(click image for audio)
December 25, 2012
DAY 25: Deborah Poe, Am Vladimir
DEBORAH POE
Am Vladimir
Am hard
am the heavy gut,
stomach verged at urge of television
am binary barrage of image.
Hand. Am the first song’s
fist, uninterrupted, the mainstream
love song. Am straight. Am the child
Am storming the familiar
sun seeks bodies to save
my kind thus struggling
& deserving.
Am broken.
Was light-crept exception just
next door, was same
like spirit-same, born of & heard.
Spoke English
as if unfortunate squirrel.
Am greedy.
Was holding wife, was angry,
misunderstood,
was ignorant and roof over head
was led to ninety ghosts telling me:
keep words forever for their aftertaste
in Vladivostok —
of misfortune and smoke
To groin-calling need,
was living creature.
Crave. Am struck.
Was skin & mowed lawn. Am a part.
Was bored as machine.
Was—why—for supper
and was not rented room.
Was moral & archaic,
Napolean & bush.
Am organic wanting,
was the craving man.
This poem is (heavily) after Lucie Brock-Broido’s “Am Moor.” Words italicized in the poem are from Osip Mandelstam’s poem to Anna Akhmatova, #235. “Poems from the Thirties” from The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (The New York Review of Books 1973).
December 24, 2012
DAY 24: LEE ANN RORIPAUGH, LET FREEDOM RIOT SING
(click for audio)
LEE ANN RORIPAUGH
let
freedom sing riot
profane as wildflowers
shoving oxygen back
into the brutal
and dictatorial air
in blue-gloved airports
in locked closets
in bombed clinics
in blood-soaked schools
in the sanctuary
beneath the jaded gaze
of scopophilic saints:
wound as spectacle
wound as bloody gash
wound as commodity
bound foot’s rotten gauze
and silk unwound
crushed bones unmachined
whalebone unharpooned
ribs unlaced
jawbone unshattered
chastity belt unchaste(ned):
a box of fear
duct-taped in day-glo
slit open
oranges alert
behind the purdah
of pesticide’s sugary veil
queen bees unsealed
from collapsing tombs of wax
guitar laws unblued
into unchained melody
Andromeda unjailed
as bait to monstrous appetite
a pistol-whipped Prometheus
left as eagle carrion
unbound from barbed wire
ungash
unslit
unmuffled
chastity belt unchaste(ned):
cunt uncensored
clitoris unhooded
pussy unbarred
fist’s tight bud
diaspora’s salvo
confetti of sparks
igniting a viral riot
a chorused blaze of heat
and fire rising fierce
against the silence
December 23, 2012
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 forest 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
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