Sibyl James' "October Lambs" "in suburban Carthage" {a prose poem}

October Lambs The tenth of October, the sky overcast, sultry with the storms that leave the palm-lined street strewn with huge fronds, the pale green Mediterranean roaring almost like a proper ocean, its usual gentle swell lost in the winds that stir these nights with thunderless heat lightning. Everywhere, the fall's the time for raking. Only here it's unripe dates and fat fig leaves, brown and curled like fists--not the red and golden blaze of maples, sycamore. The rake looks strange beside my swim suit, flesh I cover when I haul stuffed bags outside the gates, careful not to shock the families headed for the beach, girls with their hair wrapped in Muslim scarves, the maids from the richer houses with their white safsaris draped on heads, knotted across a work dress. Some herder's descending Byrsa Hill with his sheep and goats cropping whatever grows outside the walls surrounding villas, in suburban Carthage, where the ruins of Dido's city and the Romans who sowed her streets with salt still sprout between the Arab homes. I see lambs with the ewes, new-born size, still suckling. Lamps in October, the seasons confusing as Arabic books printed back to front, in this country I have never learned to read. Sibyl James from The Prose Poem, on Web Del Sol. Bio: Sibyl James has published nine books, including The Adventures of Stout Mama (fiction),China Beats (poetry) and, most recently, The Last Woro Woro to Treichville: A West African Memoir. She has taught in the US, China, Mexico, and–as Fulbright professor–Tunisia and Cote d’Ivoire.

Camille Martin's LOOMS: strolling down a parallel road

At first I was confused. Shaken. Oh yes, I was adrift.

Overly dramatic? Not when it's about poetry, in this case, Camille Martin's Looms, which like Penelope's famous twenty-year woven prevarication while Odysseus is out and about, begins each day anew with each poem, each poem begun without fanfare and needing none.

What it is: there are no titles and without titles, I initially was unmoored and a little ashamed I needed the perfunctory "To a Skylark" or "Homage to My Hips" to orient me. But then I got with the agenda gloriously so - allowed myself to float, to be shuttled (but not shuttlecocked) from perspective to image and on, each sonnet a frame and yet an embrace, a scene and invitation.

Martin launches the collection with a quotation from Barbara Guest:  Its remoteness from the center of things is what is endearing about a Tale and it doesn't tell the truth about itself. It tells us what it dreams about. Ah!

I recommend you get hold of Looms (published by Shearsman Books, publisher of Mervyn Taylor, Janet Holmes, Tom Clark, and a long, long list of other terrific poets).  Here's why (from page 36):

Between grass and vacuum, standing on faded
tapestry in a low cloud, the odd pine cone skittering down
a roof. Some burgeoning belief poses-index finger raised-
and then that becomes life strolling down a parallel road
beneath a gentle sky, a cruel sky, Consoling
to think of burning ballast for light, brewing letters from ashes
moistened with a little fog. If all weather reports of one life
redeemed emptiness, maybe the ordinary could re-emerge,
inert, forgettable, except for the part where it juts and struts
and sobs. Worth a try to con it with words of practiced
lust settling like dead metaphors on scrap. Easy to love
indelible ink, gliding down opaque roads. But to ponder it
is to falter and to falter is to reawaken standing on faded tapestry
now different somehow. If I could sugar-coat one tiny historical
diva of a moment as the last rose on earth withers  Then that
becomes the reigning prophecy. No way to grasp unique
blades, so they vanish with or without exegesis
into static. With no motive but moving limbs, pedestrians
absorb bland gravity and step on soft signals.
____
Camille Martin, Looms, Shearsman, 2012.

Flame, Flower, Kahlo, Tagore

Flower of Flame (1943) by Frieda Kahlo (b. 1910)

Poem from Rabindranath Tagore (b. 1861)
               who wrote the Bengali version (not here) and the English version below.

Accept me, my lord, accept me for this while.
Let those orphaned days that passed without thee be forgotten.
Only spread this little moment wide across thy lap, holding it under thy light.
I have wandered in pursuit of voices that drew me yet led me nowhere.
Now let me sit in peace and listen to thy words in the soul of my silence.
Do not turn away thy face from my heart's dark secrets, but burn them till they are alight with thy fire.

Why call water my sister if water isn't my sister? PESSOA v ST. FRANCIS

Don't get carried away, St. Francis. Pessoa has some words for you.

Today someone read me St. Francis of Assisi.
I listened and couldn’t believe my ears.
How could a man who was so fond of things
Never have looked at them or understood what they were?

Why call water my sister if water isn’t my sister?
To feel it better?
I feel it better by drinking it than by calling it something –
Sister, or mother, or daughter.
Water is beautiful because it’s water.
If I call it my sister,
I can see, even as I call it that, that it’s not my sister
And that it’s best to call it water, since that’s what it is,
Or, better yet, not to call it anything
But to drink it, to feel it on my wrists, and to look at it,
Without any names.
 

Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith
From: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected PoemsPublisher: Penguin, New York, 2006, 0-14-303955-5

Photo from: Rivanna Writer Blogspot

an incendiary sweetness . . . scheduler of passions . . . 2 poems

I had a great time on Saturday at the Rainbow Book Fair, in its eighth year.

In its seventh year was Come Hear ! -- the marathon reading organized by Nathaniel Siegal and Regie Cabico, and this year hosted by Nathaniel. As did most of the others in the line-up, I read three poems; am posting two of them below. (The third's a soon-to-be-published.)
 

Confused Words 

Woman, you show your lover your worst 

girlish passivity, an incendiary sweetness

teasing her libido each time you approach.  

And your petulance at boyish bumbling -

where the  evenness and patience offered 

those of us who ramble of our importance?

You have such good insights - friends 

admire your well-spoken depths - they do.

For her you show no depth and would she

spot it as she flexes a loud brash rendition 

of the woman she becomes seated across

a table where you pause for caffeine before

a rayon jacket-sheltered run to the place

you two tumble.  You are a couple –

you lapping at cream - her filling the
          chipped saucer as it overflows.

by Sarah Sarai / from Emily Dickinson’s Coconut Face (my Dusie Kollektiv chapbook, distributed at AWP)

Pillow Book

A train steaming out from between your thighs,
the locomotive intensity of its
exit and expressively oriental loss of your forested regions.

We pray for a layover, schedulers of passions:
hear us.

Oh, grant me a boarding pass for where
I want to visit so I can be a passenger,
a tourist in your underground,
eager for an infinity of pinks.

by Sarah Sarai / published in Gobshite Quarterly, Issue 12, 2012

Image from http://www.etsy.com/listing/104765868/leather-sketchbook-journal-pride-rainbow

From Ms. Rukeyser: "Song for Dead Children" {a poem}

It turns out I could learn to love the word poignant. Enough said.  This unrelated image, by the way, is from an article in The Daily Mail about the "new face of grief" in England and how politicians are trying to eliminate it.  So, two offerings.  The article's url follows the poem. I hope I'm not confusing with independent yet related things.

SONG FOR DEAD CHILDREN

We set great wreaths of brightness on the graves of the passionate

who required tribute of hot July flowers—

for you, O brittle-hearted, we bring offering

remembering how your wrists were thin and your delicate bones

not yet braced for conquering.

The sharp cries of ghost-boys are keen above the meadows,

and little girls continue graceful and wondering.

Flickering evening on the lakes recalls those young

heirs whose developing years have sunk to earth,

their strength not tested, their praise unsung.

Weave grasses for their childhood—who will never see

love or disaster or take sides against decay

balancing the choices of maturity.

Silent and coffined in silence while we pass

loud in defiance of death, the helpless lie.

 October 1935

BY Muriel Rukeyser, from The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukesyer. 

The Daily Mail article is here: "Modern face of mourning: The colourful 'poundland' shrines across Britain that councils are trying to wipe out"

Sopheap Pich at the Met...Don't Miss this Exhibit

 

Quite an exhibit, in several of the Asian galleries, including up a staircase to an elevated gallery. An exploration, a winding revelation.  Sopheap Pich at the Met until July 7. When the Khmer Rouge was in power, morning glories (above) were sometimes all that were available for food, or at least for filling of the stomach.

 

I haven't found a photo showing the blush of red at the tips of the rattan, the faint riveting reminder of the Khmer Rouge's stranglehold on Cambodia. No matter.  "Budda 2." A sculpture of rattan, wire, and dye.

An excerpt from the artist's statement:

Buddha 2 was born out of a short journey my family took on foot from a Khmer Rouge village to the center of Battambang, the province of my birth. The Buddha was to symbolize a temple called Wat Ta Mim. My family built a hut across the street. I used to go past the temple ground everyday with a buffalo to the rice field several hundred meters away. I would occasionally walk inside the temple hall to see bloodstains on the floor, ceiling, and walls—bloodstains that looked like they had been sprayed with a toy gun. Where there used to be the normal Buddha sculptures, there were just piles of broken things I couldn’t see. . . . I was afraid to look in the dark. [Sophea Pich]
 

Sopheap Pich at the Metropolitan Mueum of Art.

My AWP Takeaway

Family Dog Presents Buffalo Springfield

My AWP Takeaway

1.  Google runs buses from "the Valley" into San Francisco.
2.  There is, was, and will be gorgeous poetry in Turkey.
3.  Google runs buses from San Francisco into "the Valley."
4.  Nazim Hikmet, 1902 to 1963, is a joy to read.
5.  Those Google people are sure tight with their money when it comes to charitable giving.
6.  Lewis Hyde's exploration of The Gift presents us writers with models of being.
7.  San Francisco has a decent poetry scene, but who wants to live there.
8.  Boston breeds poets and venues.
9.  No good music has come out of San Francisco since Buffalo Springfield.
10.  There are, in fact, countless wonderful poets in Boston and everywhere.
11.  Jefferson Starship?  You kidding me?
13.  Writers of fiction, nonfiction, creative abstracts & co. abound, are enthusiastic, convivial, and of course all too human.
14.  Did Hot Tuna come out of S.F.? 
15.  Approaches to and manifestations of persona poems are varied.
16.  Now, L.A., is a great place to live.
17.  Uses of letters (epistles) in writing range from highly creative to usefully functional and (most) always interesting.
18.  Google is in search of something or other. God help us all when Google finds it.
19.  Hearing poetry in a bar with warm colors and brass fixtures is a necessary antidote to convention center readings.
20.  Soft hands are, for some, genetic.

Basically, heard and saw and met many n-a-m-e-s and wondrous people. The Dusie Kollektiv chapbook swap was a highpoint, partly because it facilitated putting faces to names, mainly because the poets were fun and generous. 

Suggestion for another AWP:  Read all material in advance. Make lists of people I want to catach up with. Plan.  Get phone numbers in advance.  Stay closer to the convention center so offsite readings in the eventuality of snow or other weather are easier to negotiate than they were this time around. 

And on the Third Day . . . of AWP

Kinda beat. Long day. Lots of walking around, in spite of hitting some panels.  Went to a great one on Turkish poet Nazim Hakmet. Another great one on Lewis Hyde's The Gift as it applies to the writing game as known at AWP.

Some startlingly fabulous discussions with people whose names I don't remember. A few disappointments with people I thought I had more of a bond with than is really there. Much warmth from New York friends.  A few names and email addresses written down and saved.

Went to evening receptions.  Wine and enough snacks, some from a chafing dish, to make a meal.

Here's Nazim Hakmet, one of Turkey's greatest poets.

I love my country:
I’ve swung on its plane trees,
I’ve slept in its prisons.
Nothing lifts my spirits like its songs and tobacco…
My county:
goats on the Ankara plain,
the sheen of their long blond silky hair.
The succulent plump hazelnuts of Giresun.
Amasya apples with fragrant red cheeks,
olives,
figs,
melons,
and bunches and bunches of grapes
all colors,
then plows,
and black oxen,
and then my people,
ready to embrace
with the wide-eyed joy of children
anything modern, beautiful and good –
my honest, hard-working, brave people,
half full, half hungry,
half slaves…

Nazim Hikmet, 1902, Salonica to 1963, Moscow (courtesy of "Turkish Poetry--click on his name).

Day Second of AWP--Odes & Laughs

It was a sloppy kiss of a snowfall today, wet and easy. I was in Cambridge, a veritable hamlet to my New York eye, to enjoy at least a little. Mostly, however, I was at Hynes Convention Center, Boston, for day two of AWP.

Started off with an exultation. "Odes, Psalms and Praise Songs: A Living Tradition" was about poetry "claiming a space for the human voice" (not sure who I'm quoting). I got to hear David Ferry, Kristen Bulger, Jennifer Barber, and George Kalogregris.

Next I went to Epistolophilia--use of letters (not poetry, but who knows)--and as with odes & co. was presented with a ton of ways to use and imagine, transgressively or retrospectively.

And then the bookfair, a mighty surfeit of journals and schools, beyond my comprehension, so I joked and had fun. Got swag--enough magnets to hide my refrigrator, even from drones.

Met some people I'd planned to meet, ran into some friends, met folk I knew through Facebook, went to an offsite reading where I heard Bill Hicok, C. Dean Young and others and more.

And then I went online and saw I had a short story accepted. Which is kind of ironic. I spent a day at a conference meeting editors yet my fate is over-the-transom.

illustration from:  Shi Jing – The Book of Odes

The oldest collection of Chinese poetry, more than three hundred songs, odes and hymns. Tr. Legge (en) and Granet (fr, incomplete)

AWP: I Arrive, *Emily Dickinson's Coconut Face* in Hand

Cover illustraton for Emily Dickinson's Coconut Face.

 

My AWP experience hit two high points, maybe the only two, but that's enough.  One was today when I picked up my badge at Hynes Conference Center in Boston: I didn't feel hostility. I didn't feel jealousy (over what, you might ask, all you did was stand in line and register). Believe me. When I'm comparing myself to anyone, an easy breezy task at a conference of writers, I am more than capable of insecurity masked as hostility. But my internal work this year has been freeing. Plus I'm taking a great class in New York, studying Hopkins with very smart people, which reinforces the beatifying effect literature can have. Which makes me feel good.. So today I just felt happy, relaxed, part of something but not attached. The feeling's going to last for the duration.

Second high point came yesterday in New York when I picked up my chapbook from Staples.  I'd volunteeredfor an AWP chapbook swap organized by Susana Gardner of the Dusie Kollektiv, agreed to show up with 30 copies. At some point 30 poets are going to meet and share. I was ridiculously proud of the results of my two days of work: a selection of five poems, a cool illustration on the cover, the Dusie Kollektiv seal, a bio. 

The poems--there are five--are orphans. With the exception of "Longing for a Blue Sky" which was published in Lavender, I've never been able to place them. I assumed they were early shots, good starts and nothing more, but together they work. At least I think so, and confidence adds a glow to the book. Books of poems need a glow.

I procrastinated pulling the chapbook together because I couldn't find the instructions and was generally panicked. Then I emailed a fellow swappee, publisher, poet, editor T.A. Noonan who graciously and immediately sent what I needed, bless her. Even though I have too many blank pages and committed an infinitude of infractions (I'm sure), these poems are happy to be with each other and proud of their presentation. So for me, without having started, AWP is a success.

Above cover illustration of my chap, Emily Dickinson's Coconut Face, is from S. Sekiya and Y. Kikuchi: The Eruption of Bandai-san, in Transactions of the Seismological Society of Japan. 13(2), 1890, pp. 139-222.} 

The Next Big Thing: I Go Viral

"The Next Big Thing" has been going around for a few weeks now like a flu you hope to get. Part chain letter, part credo, authors are asked to respond to ten questions AND to tag five more writers to do the same.  I was tagged by poet and fiction writer Rachel Dacus (click Here for her Q/A).

Here I go:

What is the title of your book?
It's not a book, it's a chapbook:  I Feel Good.

Where did the idea for the book come from?
Grammar, as in the direct-address comma.

What genre is your book?
 E-chapbook of poems, swashingbuckling epic, romance novel with a frisson of manifesto, a hint of saffron.

If your book were made into a movie, what actors would you choose to play the part of your characters?
Penélope Cruz as Jezebel.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
You can't win, so try.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
It came in winds, not drafts.

Who or what inspired the writing of your book?

The philosophy of Sun Ra; the musical stylings of Swedenborg; the grandeur and compassion of Emma Goldman.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Poem #1 is "You, Jezebel" (note direct-address comma). In its own way, this poem questions the habitual and age-old vilification of Jezebel, Ahab's wife who was greatly misrepresented by history, which, it turns out, is written by historians who are hired by the victors. Such as the victory was. Get a clue, history. No one wins for long, or in the long run. Jezebel, for instance, was not unspiritual nor a-religious. She continued to worship goddesses and gods of her parents, and that served as insult and vexing provocation to Mr. Deuteronomy.

Who published or will publish your book?
It will be published in the next few months by Beard of Bees, Eric Elshtain, editor.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday:

I'll link when links are given to me (unless they post on Facebook, which is also good), but the writers are Melissa Studdard, Mary Meriam (more, forthcoming).
 

James Wright's "Northern Pike" {an exalting poem}

Easy enough to find this poem online, other sites, elsewhere.  Every and each placement brings it to us anew and so I post.

Northern Pike

All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
                       under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.

James Wright (click for bio, courtesy of the Poetry Society of America)

Image from West Virginia University, Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Design, List of Fish Species 

Anne Shaw's "Drag King Manifesto" {a pirate of a poem}

Drag King Manifesto

That woman is an engine, I refuse. To generate. To be chambered. To combust.


Let her who would acquire don the masculine article. The necktie and the wingtip and the the.
The leather chair, its kingdom. As swishy shadow tidies in the wake.


I too unhitch my notice. I touch what I will touch. I wear roulette-wheel cufflinks
and filch the jack of diamonds from the deck.


I'll show you how to razor: Take off your gown of ghosts. Untie your solaces, unzip your name.



Let her who would be pirate begin in piracy. The double-breasted suit. The clip.
And Adam's apple pendant in the throat.


Let her who would go veiled take up her wrench, her drill. Up her sleeve the jackal
of hearts, the jack of jills.


Let her in frilled distress begin. To study the mallet, the screw.


And therefore tinker. Therefore crux. How treason wears the pants.


Let her who would go naked smith her tool.
ww

by Anne Shaw, author of Undertow and Shatter and Thrust (Persea)

image from the wonderful Liana's Paper Doll Blog

"Who's for Jesus" on 14th Street {story by Sarah Sarai} at Unlikely Stories

Thanks to Jonathan Penton, editor of Unlikely Stories, for publishing my short story, "Who's for Jesus." Click here to read it!

Ching-In Chen's "Gruel, Tea: a riddle" {a fierce poem}

 

 

Agnes Martin's hand

Very happy to post Ching-In Chen's "Gruel, Tea: a riddle." I met her a few months ago. Was so impressed. Yet I'm messing up her poem. The 2 stanzas should be parallel or do I mean opposite each other.  I tried.  This is part of a larger piece.

Gruel, Tea: a riddle

A room full of fathers birth
maggots which boil
into a sticky bag of
soup. Some sons
learned to suckle
too tightly, their
incandescent greed
dropping into the pot.
Others memorized
the recipe of how to
survive without

Will follow you for 1000
miles without breaking sweat,
desires neither to be fed or
clothed, fears neither guns nor
soldiers, can kiss the bruising
sun or coax a lullaby from the
dying mother.

Wars have been lit in its name.

by Chin-In Chen, from The Heart's Traffic. Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press.

Info on image of Agnes Martin's hand here.

Susan Firer's "On the Island of the Elder Poets" {a witty poem}

by Agnes Martin

On the Island of the Elder Poets

In Memory of Kenneth Koch

"Why live in the provinces
when you could be in the capital?"

"Don't tell people you like Sexton—
it makes you look bad!"

"No atmosphere, please."

"If you don't sleep with me,
I will kill myself."

"Kiss me after my reading."

"Will you do my wash?"

by Susan Firer, author of the collections, My Life With the Czar and Other Poems, The Laugh We Make When We Fall, The Lives Of The Saints And Everything, Underground Communion Rail.

art by Agnes Martin. 1965 drawing. 

Judith Harway's "Middle Ages" {a beautiful poem}

Agnes Martin

Middle Ages

Eventually, we have to face the truth:
time passes, and flesh passes,
and the things we passed for
fall away like rags.
Someone brags or someone sings
and suddenly the artist is a hack,
the soul a sham, the word
(which, in the end, is all we have)
reveals its lie. We learn
the avalanche that buries us
is ours, the cells of sloughed off skins,
the dust we're destined for
because (or so we're told)
it's our beginning. Eventually,
our words begin to crumble
underneath the weight
of worlds we build, believing
in no other. I am writing this
because I love you still,
because the girl you loved lies
like a baby fallen in the well,
and when they bring her up—
or if, perhaps—we have to face
the truth of what survives.

poem: Judith Harway, author of All That is Left (2009) and The Memory Box (2002).

art:  Agnes Martin, Starlight, 1963. Watercolor and ink on paper, 8 x 8 in. Private Collection

Czeslaw Milosz Takes the Long View in "Forget"

Parnassius mnemosyne ilster.jpg

He had me at the first two lines.  "Forget the suffering / You caused others."  

Forget

Forget the suffering
You caused others.
Forget the suffering
Others caused you.
The waters run and run,
Springs sparkle and are done,
You walk the earth you are forgetting.

Sometimes you hear a distant refrain.
What does it mean, you ask, who is singing?
A childlike sun grows warm.
A grandson and a great-grandson are born.
You are led by the hand once again.

The names of the rivers remain with you.
How endless those rivers seem!
Your fields lie fallow,
The city towers are not as they were.
You stand at the threshold mute.

________

by Czeslaw Milosz


translation by Robert Hass

Names of the Lying Idiots Against the Disabilities Treaty

 The List: The 38 Senators Who Voted Against The Disabled, Including Vets

by David Badash on December 5, 2012

in Bigotry Watch,News,Politics

                                                                                                                                                               For the full article click here:thenewcivilrightsmovement

"Claudia" (for Claudia Rankine)

by artist Carrie Mae Weems*

I wrote this in 2011 in response to Claudia Rankine's calling out of Tony Hoagland.  The debate can be Googled. Easily.

Writing poetry is not easy and creating characters or presenting a persona is not easy. I appreciate that. We make mistakes and sometimes create crappy art. If we were to offend, say, the KKK, we would be proud. They are bad people.

But if we reveal our own racism (everyone's got it), well, we say we're sorry. It's embarrassing, I can see that, but all God's creatures are idiots at one point or another. Hoagland, to my understanding, couldn't admit participation in the great idiocy of mankind and wouldn't apologize or recognize the issue.

I can't imagine it's easy being a man, and I know it's not easy being white, but we stumble through this one lifetime and hope for some grace now and then.

Rankine offered to post relevant poems on her blog. I wrote the following back then but never shipped it over and now I can't find her blog. I feel a little shaky about the poem's value. It's not even easy being me, but I stumble along.

Claudia

      legislate paper

draft a bill

      name it

The Inscrutable East

Mother

Dialogs of Plato

          

          cast

      Socrates as Chinook

The Symposium a potlatch

the eidos of flesh the

perfect form of each of us

      a woman

The perfect form is

a woman but hush on that

Tough enough a trek

      out of Africa made

more beautiful

for ultimate

inaccessibility of return by

      likes of me

Do we rescue

(a ship is burning)

the captain or smirk as an arrow

feathers his bone

      Glad's another word for

the elephant felt up by

blind men and thus

      elephants grieve

an impossible perfecting

of the heart

the impossible accepting

of the self

      nine hundred hatreds

Each orchid in a bell jar

each girl in an orchid

each boy in an orchid each

      movement of only gratitude

If Jesus dies for sins

of the west, his suffering

is just begun.

____

Sarah Sarai, 2011

*Carrie Mae Weems online:http://carriemaeweems.net/

In Which the Poet Pushes to Remain Conscious

Vengeful Sprites.  "Cain" by Sophie Blackall*

I finally input the draft of the poem I scribbled early this month at the Met.  Like "St. Sarah Sarai Carrying the Infant Christ Child"--first published in the Mississippi Review (R.I.P.), the poem overtook me.

It's too soon to know if the new poem, written in full draft while I sat on a bench facing a great from the catalog of Euro art.

My point is, however--and I'm using this space as a Memo to Sarah, Hello! Already. Probably the most consistent story in my life that isn't the story of MY LIFE can inspire a poem. It won't necessarily do so.  No sure thing. 

But my intuition says, and pretty loudly given I'm bidden to make it public and relatively, in the way of blog postings, public, keep at it.  Go back to the source. I also note "Remorse"--which was published in Terrain (a thriving online journal) (scroll down--it's the 2nd poem there). It was inspired (I'm using "inspired" as a placeholder--there is a more accurate description unavailable to me) by a story in Genesis.

What I'm saying to myself is Why not push harder to write poems on this theme, aligned to this mythology, belief, religion, wildly active participant in the collective mind?

Huh, Sarah? Don't let yourself bury the impulse in mystery novels and searches for the perfect purse.

*For more on Sophie Blackall, wonderful artist, visit her Facebook page, Sophie Blackall.

The U.S. Has Reached a Tipping Point Toward the Good (Obama) (Huzzah)

You know that feeling before the news is in, that suspended state of false knowledge and ugly anticipation when the suspension fluid is fear, and it sinks into your pores, doesn't permeate, maybe, probably doesn't permeate but still, it reaches organs and blood cells, tumbles through your body until every inch of your personal geography has some reminder the worst could be on the way, and every shred of your variable consciousness negotiating good and bad alike, hope and fear, the known, unknown, and the imagined, informs your life that this--all this--could soon end? THAT feeling?

And the tension builds, internalizes and externalizes, sneaks in and out, up and down, sideways, elliptically, in a parabolic curve, and straight-ahead like a dive-bombing bee headed for that Looney Tunes buzzard or Bugs Bunny. And you who prides yourself on flexibility and imagination, on coping mechanism and device, cannot imagine yourself coping if the worst that could be materializes?

And so after months and weeks and days you go to bed not knowing, because if this is your last night of hope, you are going to let yourself have it.

So you wake, like it is the Day the Bomb is dropped in your lifetime. 

And you are safe.  Your loved ones are safe.  Yes, safe is relative, but the great ignorance and hating both belonging to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have been vanquished.  The world has changed, not like it did in 2008 when we elected a black president and the country showed it was trying to do the right thing. This time around, there the victory is more telling. This time around, the disaffection for poor people, basically for any but the wealthy, was exposed. And voted down by the majority of voters.

And every so often I feel the relief. I'll be walking down the street and my body will remember it can be happy.  I realize yet again just how scared I was.  A little more tension evaporates. And my joy is monumental. The U.S. has reached a tipping point toward the good.

A Few Reviews (by me) Lately Published, Plus I'm Unicornless No More

This unicorn has no relationship to anything
but my blog was hitherto without a unicorn,
an omission now rectified.

Howdy, all.

Recently-ish I reviewed two poetry collections and a novel for Lambda.

‘Buddha in My Belly’ by Brittany K. Fonte

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Sarah Sarai

If Roseanne Barr wrote prose poems, they wouldn’t be so very different from those in Buddha in My Belly, Brittany K. Fonte’s debut collection (Hopewell Publications, 2012).  Like Barr’s routines, these pieces are sardonic, honest—and about women. Sometimes it’s hard to be one. Okay, that was Tammy. Anyway.   (more…)

Lady Business: A Celebration of Lesbian Poetry’ edited by Bryan Borland

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Sarah Sarai

A dozen long-stemmed red roses? Ho hum. How 50s heterosexual can you get?  It’s not that I’m disenchanted with roses, their heady fragrance and dizzying blend of fragility and toughness. It’s just, well, I love me some variety. (more…)

AND . . . a novel by an Australian writer . . .

‘My Sister Chaos’ by Lara Fergus

Posted on June 17, 2012 by Sarah Sarai in Fiction, Reviews

The world of My Sister Chaos (Triangle Publishing’s  Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction winner and a finalist for this year’s Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Debut Fiction) is disconcerting.  Always near the surface of this quiet and speculative methodical tale is the fact that we are in a time of crisis. (more…)

Enjoy!

Oh Shoot! (Poem written n / o / w)

Stephanie Holttum*

Oh Shoot!

It's so long 
since I posted here
I'm just going to
chance it
and write a few thoughts
which means
translate.
I am translating 
as I type 
strike that
typing my translation
of the sensory volume
in my stomach.

Two days I edited
pharmaceutical
advertising for AIDS
meds and that was
good as long 
I thought about Good
and not Death
or Profits. 
Late afternoon
the office was 
hot enough
to bake gingerbread.
Why gingerbread
people?  
They're fragile but
cheery and sweet.

Today I put in
more time with a
new story
the third about
Berthe whose parents
were killed in jail.
She's large
and a dyke who
teaches lit.
This one began
in L.A. then flew to
("one" = story)
 San Francisco.

"Lillia" is a 24/7
Seattle story
published in
Devil's Lake.  
The devil does have
lakes as I recall.
We've all taken
the tour. 
Berthe's deal ia
she figures out
(never stated)
she is always 
working out her
parents' insanity.
Like I'm always
working out my mom's.
The Christian Scientist
who fostered cancer
for twenty years and
then things got worse.
Your body doesn't forget
but it is busy with
circulation of the blood
through the heart and
lungs and elimination
of toxins.  
The body has a to-do
list the length of
its intestines and is
busy night and day.

It was nice to have
a feeling
and know the lurch
was something old
and no longer
impossibly painful
but kept alive just like
I am by the flow.

Is this a poem?
I don't know.
Sometimes I want 
to tell poets
they can't just lineate
thoughts and 
events and call it
a poem.  
I'm not calling this
a poem I'm calling it
a blog posting
written in a free 
moment between
jobs and as a
marker to the fact
that today 
I felt something old
and it was okay.
_____________
Sarah Sarai, November 14, 2012


*For more information on artist Stephanie Holttum, please visit http://www.thurstontalk.com/2012/01/21/a-visit-with-artist-stephanie-holttum/.