someshadeofgrey (2:54:29 PM): dudde you better not drink again, because if you get really fucked up and pass out i'm goin gto sharpie a goose to your neck

LadyRepublica: i less than 3 you too

Remember when you were little and your parents were giving you a bath, or teaching you how to swim? And you would somehow get water in your eyes and you would attempt to wipe the water from your eyes and be coughing and crying the whole time? And your parents would go "It's just water!"

Well, bite me, okay? Because when people drown you don't say "it's just water."

someshadeofgrey: you are a girl.
Seasickmnky: that I am. at least i was last time I checked...hmmmm
someshadeofgrey: check, its not that hard, just look downwards
Seasickmnky: okay hold on...
someshadeofgrey: dude wouldn't u flip out if a penis popped out/
someshadeofgrey: you'd be like FUCK WHA THTEOIHWSG:OHO:WGHIS:OGH
someshadeofgrey: and you'd cry
Seasickmnky: haha. yeah I would.
someshadeofgrey: because penises are weird looking
Seasickmnky: good thing its still a vagina

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Girl with a Bowl on her Head


When I was a girl, my mother
always made me

wear a wooden bowl on my head.
She wanted to

keep people from looking at me
and it worked. No

one ever really saw me, but
only the bowl,

or what they thought they might have glimpsed
from underneath,

and soon I became secretive
as an acorn.

I cultivated a new way
of seeing and

became a connoisseur of strange,
vegetal things

kept hidden inside—the second
miniature

bell pepper nested inside the first
like a Russian

doll, green, with the intricate curl
and fold of an

ear. Or how the inscrutable
placid carrot

ripening into anarchy
splits wide open

and bares its ropey length of barbed,
thorny spine. Or

the tearing apart of spicy
cool globes of or-

anges to sometimes find an extra
section, the size

of a lima bean, tucked between
two large sections

like a flower pressed in the pages
of a thick book.

Hungrily picking and plucking
at the thistled

leaves of an artichoke, down to
the translucent

purple-tipped petals that flutter
thin as gills, down

past the nest of buttery fur
cropped close like a

scrub brush that comes off in sticky
clumps, all the way

down to the green, sweet creamy heart.


Lee Ann Roripaugh

Exhaustion


I lie down in the Dark Ages, another night deficient in ecstasy.
I'm tired of the old laws and the new laws and the laws they've been thinking
up between breakfast and delirium.
I might as well be driving a dog sled in the white waste of Alaska, mukluks
still feral on my feet,
Or sliding a two-ton truck through Alabama mud, a seizure of fiddles on the
radio and a bumper sticker that says: Living in a vacuum sucks.
The world's run short of taffeta and courtesy and grass widows with a gamy
scent.
And where are you, bare spark at the flash point, when I need the moony
spasms of release?
I'm tired of all the stagestruck mothers with little Hamlets in the womb, and
those snakehandlers whipping Jesus in the lead with their rattlers and
cottonmouths.
And I'm worn out from the terror, the gruesome excuses for a heart packed
in dry ice and a flag strung up by the neck.
The heart frightens me, too, the way it motors off on its own, with no backup,
no redundant systems for the pump.
So what's the weather like in the otherworld? Same today as the last eternity
— nothing changes where everything's changed.
Even the Bible's been divided into tongues, from the Aramaic all the way to
gangster slang: So they brung him down the cross, and the guy's already
colder than a Jersey whore.
And what about you? Idle hands, when I could use another volunteer to stir
the fleshpots.
I've survived the drumrolls and the German sense of humor and the bloody
flux — why isn't it someone else's turn to pull the temple down?
I'm not feeling world-historical tonight, though I can still smell the stench of
a rotten hypothesis, like eggheads left out too long in the sun.
My mind's one wrinkle away from ravenous black — spiders in the brainpan,
and all circuits down on the motherboard.
And I'm so tired of death shouldering his scythe across the fields,
grasshoppers leaping from his bony toes.
Give me freshets from the belly; quicken my desire by some strange order
of magnitude; fix me a poultice to bring the swelling down.
The hour already feels tainted and ancient. And then, at the low stroke of
the soul, you come.


Elton Glaser

The History of The
first, we weren't anyone

or a cloud taught us. Then rain,
then the slow moving toward.
Which is to say, it was the sun
we saw, the sky
blue because certain vast machinery
in the eye tells us what is
color. Second, we found two whose
bodies might invite us here. Past
the dark room of that
though it was pleasant enough. Third,
the long slide. Then the longer
learning simple massive things: food
goes into the mouth. And on its way out?
Well, there are other things
of mystery: how one number equals those
two birds on a branch, why sleep comes
and forces you to lie down straight.
Remember, we weren't anyone.
And then, that changed
and changed again.

• • •

I had a book once

and opened it. Maybe it was important.
I watched my grandfather read like that, his lips
moved, silent, and I saw his eyes go
word by word, left to right. Forty years ago.

And to see that now? How could it matter?
Under the knife, the body is quiet.
And the surgeon gathers himself like water
to the sponge. The room is cool
as the past is cool in its
immaculate way. Dark hallways. Even in the summer,
the rooms there.... Meanwhile, my grandfather
read by the window. And I gathered myself

though there was no self yet
to gather. How to say this? I watched
light fall on him and all his years:
beautiful, courtly.

• • •

the bone house

and we build it, one of childhood's
great triumphs. Rib, spine, femur, skull
to take the weight of days, release

of nights: knuckle, vertebrae, joints
for every moveable minute — up, down,
in, out. Is the soul a tent

draped under it? Tiny fractures that
curve the spine, that change the walking
forward or backward, the cadence,

the way we imagine here to there.
Over so much time. And now this
stiffening, this clicking, each step,

each step down. Ghost of the old ones
passing into my tent where we
sit down wordless, no tea to pass.

• • •

the history of

the, says the linguist, began grandly
as that. As opposed to the plainest a
meaning a man, a woman, a day like any other
day between them. Oh ancient
the! — as in that second cousin I loved, say,
or that afternoon once, when you
looked down into the empty lot,
the old woman saying: sometimes, it's
just filled with cars! The
with a hat on, a wild feather
in such a hat, spotted, streaked,
even tipped in red. Until, until
the great graying into
the, oh lord of balance, oh
polite nod to center the blooming
whatever-it-is
on the tablecloth.

• • •

guesswork

is work: one eye open, the other —
always building back to that
earliest half-lit place
where days were an inch, the night
miles of inching through space,
one dim star
to star. I only mean
I liked those times
sitting in the woods alone,
nothing quite locked
in my binoculars, my confusion kept to
which bird and what flower
as if, for a moment, that
right on the verge of knowing were
a kind of knowing. So clouds
have no idea they're
clouds. The almost in us,
billowing.

• • •

snow melting on roof

isn't a halo. Isn't memory really
though in certain places, the shingles
next door — made to look old, that

cobble-looking old — show through
the way forgetfulness clears
for a second, and you're back

on the hospital stairs where
a nurse breaks down in tears,
looks up, startled — who were you

to be there? So much is unexplained.
It's all melting anyway — snow,
the thought of snow, its intrepid

invention: winter, that private
knock-knock no one answers, though
in bad poems, there's always

a voice for it, maybe a low moan.
In truth, it's merely cold
and cloudy — no glitter

off the roof's half snow.
No wind just now: sometimes
the mind stays here.

• • •

drawing, of course

I would draw my cat,
but she'd look back. I would
draw her but she's
way past sleep and sheds her
quiet like tickertape
down the long hallway, talking
cranky and offkey.

Of course, it's winter. I would draw
that, but a pencil isn't
fierce enough for branches stripped
to nothing. To one leaf, which
is as good as nothing. And nothing —
that gift needs invisible ink.

I'd draw the way words feel
in the mouth after too long without
words, or the way the body rises after
hours of dream, gravity
on every bone again, that anchoring
and ache.

Or I wouldn't. Or I couldn't.
Or I'd bury the treasure
in the most obvious place.

• • •

old photographs

take a moment and pretend
it's a life. The happy picnic. The happy
look-at-us amid flowers and soiled napkins.

My friend Joan took a picture once,
three nuns, all strangers in the solid flowing white,
peering into the Grand Canyon, that

astonishing void. I see them
from the back, a hand just so, pointing.
A head tilted. There. And my eye, poor eye,

moves from one to the other to the other,
restless. And pleasure? The canyon's vast
and empty, and endlessly still. And so small,

my looking at their looking.

• • •

no one in the library this early

so it's all sleep, talkative
books silenced by their covers.
And Xerox machines dreaming that
one rare uncopiable thing. And computers
still pinned to their home sites. Gladness is
human: none of that. Neither
is there sorrow, or sweetness, or —
no — no jubilation. And just to invite
tears into this place, one needs a full life
or at least one afternoon,
the traffic blinding someone
driving straight into the sun: Officer,
I just didn't see it. But is it solace?
Here? A quiet, clean corner. A book of poems
no one has touched for ten years. I open it
to the middle, a poem not
particularly good, maybe an afterthought
added the last few hours
before mailing off the manuscript.
Because one line, maybe
that one....

• • •

crossing the street at dawn

or not dawn, not yet. A few cars in the dark.
A young man with a backpack
in front of me. Stars? Too cloudy.
I left my car somewhere.
And walk. Too stiff to walk
this early. And the great university's halls —
looming sturdy as lament.
Across the quad, a door opens and closes.
The street lamps — one must
pass under them: the reverse
of shade. A kind of weird mist,
that light. So I let a pencil
bring it back, writing this by hand,
plain as it was: glowing, uneventful.

• • •

something flashes

in this hollow between buildings. Closer,
a notebook, smallest ambition
of the binding machine, big enough
to reduce the world to faded ink — one bird
and its color, say, someone carefully
writing the date: late winter, early spring.
Or it's just a phone number there,
no name. Mysterious
least of things, stained, open. One page
turning, turned back, this day
in a new century — one hour
or one life. It was mine, I'll say, or
it was yours. What do we call that?
Wind? Was that it?

• • •

really, I remember a window, nothing

special. A young tree flowered
once a year. The flowers pink, or they
were white, the stamens yellow
in the folds. Maybe the green finches

had turned their brilliant gold
by then, hanging funny on the feeder
to earn their thistle, seeds so tiny,
flying out of my hand through the wind —

hardly anything. A slow buzzing
of frogs those springs. At first we thought
insects, the pitch higher
on warm evenings. I know exactly

when it stopped. By June or so, only birds
slowed the twilight, not
many. We sometimes walked then. It was
cooler, the sun out of the world, everyone

tired of the day and what it brought. What did
it bring? I remember only the same things
over and over, the way a song remembers,
coming back like that.


--Marianne Boruch

The Ha-Ha, Part II: I Cry My Heart, Antonio
—at Dal Pescatore, Cannetto sull'Oglio, just outside Mantova



It's just as the waiter has brought us
a single buttery dumpling
stuffed with pecorino, parmigiano, and ricotta

that arrives after the porcini mushrooms
and the seafood risotto
and before the snapper with tomato and black olives

and the duck in balsamic vinegar reduction
that I touch my napkin
to my lips and say, "There are no words to describe this"

and then feel the sting of tears as I remember
where I'd read these words,
in that book about the trial of the English pedophile

and child murderer who delighted in recording
the final moments
of her victims' lives, the screaming, the promises not to tell,

her own tapes used in evidence against her yet thought so horrific
by the judge that
he ordered them played in a sealed courtroom

and then, in the public interest,
to a single journalist
who would only say, "There are no words to describe this."

•

And even though the waiter arrives at that moment
to clear away plates and pour more wine
and ask if everything is good, if it's all to our satisfaction,

still, Barbara bends close to me and asks if everything's okay,
says I seem a little upset,
and I cover by telling her the story that Mark's cousin Antonio

had told me about this prosciutto he'd bought
and had put in his basement
for curing so it would turn salty and sweet and delicate all at once,

but something went wrong, and one day
he went down to check
on his prosciutto, and it was maggot-ridden and moldy,

and here Antonio shakes his head and looks at me
with a sad smile and says,
"I cry my heart, David," and only later do I realize

I've used this story as a ha-ha, which is not a joke but a landscape trick
from 18th-century England,
a sunken fence used to keep cows at a picturesque distance

from the manor house so they can be seen grazing on the greensward,
kept by the ha-ha
from trampling the lawn and mooing at the guests.

•

Your ha-ha, then, is a structure against your chaos.
And your story about Antonio's prosciutto
is thus a structure against your psychological chaos, as the poem

about the meal at Dal Pescatore and the hideously inappropriate memory
and Antonio's prosciutto and the ha-ha
is a further structure against further chaos still.

Or not structure, maybe, but process, like a walk.
There's almost no problem a walk can't solve,
say the walkers, and surely the same is true about poetry and possibly

doubly true when the poem is about walking, as is Campbell McGrath's
"Spring Comes to Chicago," in which
the poet talks about walking around that city with his pregnant wife,

eating pizza in one restaurant and waffles in another and somehow surviving
the Chicago traffic that many do not survive,
for the same walk that can be our best friend can be our worst enemy as well—

while it is indisputably good to go out walking, it is equally indisputable
that we may, in the course of our exercise,
be struck down or otherwise injured, be we in 20th-century Chicago

or 18th-century Durham, where the ha-ha boom waxed and then waned
after Lord Lambton tumbled into his,
climbed out cursing, and had it filled with coal-spoil.

•

When the meal is over, we take a taxi to Piadena and the train
from there to Mantova,
past these little towns, each with its own duomo, great or small,

that bursts from the pavement like Dante's Mount of Paradise,
and while none is so beautiful as the dome
of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence or so Gothic and spire-studded

as the Milan duomo that seems to be armed against the devil's legions
or as vast as that of St. Peter's in Rome,
the cathedral big enough to brag of its bigness by outlining

on its floor — plenty of opportunities to stumble there! — the plans
of the other, lesser cathedrals,
still, were we to get off the train and walk into one of these little churches,

we'd see it's been built like all the others, its interior looming larger
than its exterior suggests and its vault
painted in the manner of the night sky, because night

is the best time to talk to God, for if Satan and his boys are everywhere,
the rates are cheaper then,
and so we make our way down the aisle, the dark cut only

by candlelight, and figures shuffle in the shadows, though who they are,
we'll never know, and our steps are uncertain,
but over our heads, the sky blazes with promise, and the stars are spinning.

--David Kirby

I was feeling pretty religious
standing on the bridge in my winter coat
looking down at the gray water:
the sharp little waves dusted with snow,
fish in their tin armor.

That's what I like about disappointment:
the way it slows you down,
when the querulous insistent chatter of desire
goes dead calm

and the minor roadside flowers
pronounce their quiet colors,
and the red dirt of the hillside glows.

She played the flute, he played the fiddle
and the moon came up over the barn.
Then he didn't get the job,—
or her father died before she told him
that one, most important thing—

and everything got still.

It was February or October
It was July
I remember it so clear
You don't have to pursue anything ever again
It's over
You're free
You're unemployed

You just have to stand there
looking out on the water
in your trench coat of solitude
with your scarf of resignation
lifting in the wind.

--Tony Hoagland// Disappointment