January 2012
counting down
kerrycoxpoetry:
This is what I’m waiting for,
what I’m ready to do without: lists
like this and old paper creased
in all the wrong places, for one,
too small shoes, excellent posture,
maps that won’t hang straight or
tell me where I need to go, for another.
I have a phobia I haven’t mentioned, two
left thumbs, a weird habit of mentioning
other peoples’ pets like real people
and sometimes an...
December 2011
“Vinegar is amazing. You can use it to clean windows and toilets, to melt away...”
– Sayings of Te Toh
“One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you...”
– Margaret Mead
Dancing Toward Bethlehem
If there is only enough time in the final minutes of the twentieth century for one last dance I would like to be dancing it slowly with you, say, in the ballroom of a seaside hotel, my palm would press into the small of your back as the past hundred years collapsed into a pile of mirrors or buttons or frivolous shoes just as the floor of the nineteenth century gave way and disappeared in a cloud...
7 tags
Holding onto Flowers
On a warm and sunny day, she sat in her wheel chair on the patio. She held a yellow flower in both hands. Seventy-seven years old. The first flower she had ever truly seen, she was certain. It was beautiful, she thought. She treasured that flower as if she were treasuring her own life. By the time she died the following day, she had forgotten the flower. Pain will do that.
—Tito Titus
“She stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray, then settles herself against him,...”
– Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin
6 tags
“When I blow words out my ass I want them to sparkle.”
– Sayings of Te Toh
8 tags
Open mic gold
The best part of the December open mic at Seattle’s famous C&P Coffee:
Georgie Bright Kunkel extemporaneously riffed on her conversation with a Chinese woman (from China) she met at a crosswalk at the West Seattle Junction. Georgie told her—God knows why—that she was dating. The woman, who had already expressed amazement that Georgie was 91 years old, asked her if they had sex. Georgie...
14 tags
“We’re all just walking each other home.”
– Ram Das
5 tags
Got A Little Hitch In My Gitalong
Attempting to be clever, I said to the woman beside me, “I used to be a contender.”
Another woman, overhearing our conversation, patted me on the shoulder in a maternal sort of way and said, “We all think you still are!”
As I was leaving, a man told me that he admired my swagger. He said that he hopes I will get it back soon. His eyes looked as if he was absorbing more of my pain than I had to...
“Dawn is a gun shot,
but less humane.
Tell yourself
again each morning—
the...”
– Sarah Barlett, On Survival/Off Death
Hanging Harvest
Tobacco is sticky on the fingers as soon as it’s ready to hang, gums up your rings and nails, leaves warm stains on wooden chairs, weighs heavy and dank in the barn.
Dried, it cracks hands, makes work-sore feet ache from standing, blows up dust to clog the nostrils, keeps the stripping room warm, and the family fed, once it sells.
~~jamiesueaustin:
bellydeep:
It’s morning time darkness is still holding on to the sky I can hear the cars passing by, holding on to your skin, stretching mine like an oyster revealing a secret my one little pearl, I give away
“It’s dark.
You exhale a fist of memory.
I love you like weathering wood
in a...”
– James L. White, from “Lying in Sadness” in The Salt Ecstasies
“The night is dark, the waters deep,
Yet soft the billows roll;
Alas!...”
– Helen Maria Williams, from “A Song”
10 tags
“These things that I am not telling you, they really happened. I can’t tell...”
– —Poet on Fire
raindrops on the passenger side window.
thedustdancestoo:
tears.
veins, bleeding.
tiny drops of stars
catching bits of lost light
as they meet, swallow
each other,
and then separate,
streaking
across the glass
before disappearing
into the night.
8 tags
“I know they were young. Their tattoos were fresh. As vibrant as their bodies....”
– —Poet on fire
kerrycoxpoetry:
quiet, i feel bones of it laying on sidewalk in winter whiter than cloud breaking in splinter shatter i shiver twelve times an hour faster now cowering branches leaveless and lithe query the wind for a chance or an answer serious sentence by judges unseen walled up in a mirror moored to the feet capsizing banter from lip to bare shoulder, silent this boulder caught in the throat...
