"The Replacement" by Tania Rochelle

THE REPLACEMENT

For months I've imagined brass
and polish, sharp edges--
a food critic, maybe,
or a stripper-someone
agnostic enough to tolerate
an indifferent lover, reluctant
father, petulant payer of bills;
and all that time, she's just
got to get to class.
Ten years younger, she shakes
her long brown hair
from her clueless face,
asks if I want my husband back.
She tells me she wouldn't compete,
as if it were a gift,
more lead crystal
to leach slow poison
into my daily cocktail.
So fresh I could bite her,
this girl, twenty-one, still
smelling of grass and Kool-Aid,
is asking permission.
But I'm not her mother--
to care if she runs
with a pencil in one hand,
a fork in the other.
Let her keep her prize:
his glass-green eyes,
a gold-plated tongue
that ferrets out soft spots
where promises grow
wild as ivy, as fire
through parchment.
Searching her flat baby-blues
for ripples, the slight wave
that might suggest she stands a chance,
I see only a plain beauty,
hands in her pockets.


Tania Rochelle, Karaoke Funeral

"The Invisible Intruder" by Katie Chaple

THE INVISIBLE INTRUDER

I always did want to be Nancy Drew—
think, to be that perfect girl with perfect titian hair,
the perfect powder-blue convertible,
to have two trust-worthy (yet not-quite-as-pretty) friends.
But then, to have the cute boyfriend, the daddy lawyer
and still to continually, with no true hesitation,
seek out the mysterious, the dangerous?
She did have everything, didn’t she? Smart, pretty.
She belonged in the best college, the best sorority,
not skulking in a moss-covered mansion or an old attic.
I think there is something dark in Drew.
I mean, a girl who, if tied, knows how to clasp her hands together
so she can free them, is a girl who has more
than a nodding acquaintance with bondage,
who knows more than she lets on.
But maybe Nancy needed a reckless man,
one with a motorcycle—not that androgynous, blonde Ned,
all chaste pecks and letterman’s jacket.
Maybe, though, Nancy really wanted to fill up the abandoned
and decaying, where she would wind up, alone,
again and again—in the caves, the towers,
or maybe, really it was all about her dead mother,
and she was trying to pull the emptiness in—
the swirl of air, dankness—by learning it,
by throwing herself into what, in actuality, terrified her.
But whatever it is, tell me
that a girl who’s always using her beautiful, slender fingers
to creak open doors, carry heavy flashlights
all to illuminate cob-webbed corners, abandoned passageways,
tell me she is happy with her life.

~ Katie Chaple

Originally published in The Antioch Review, Vol. 62, Issue 2.
Also published in the Java Monkey Speaks anthology.

"This Poem Wants To Be Censored"

Tonight, I used my iPhone to record "I Should Write Soap Operas" for qarrtsiluni. Now, I'm sort of addicted to recording stuff and transferring it to my computer. I recorded another poem just for my blog because it makes me feel more professional over giving into an addiction. So yeah! For a limited time, here is "This Poem Wants To Be Censored."

"Kept Image" by Andrew Demcak

from ZERO SUMMER


Kept Image

a childhood returned
this morning
mother dragging us
needy and feral-
haired

it's my older cousin on top
draining inside of me
yesterday's
first man
desire like pumping water

nights he sailed into me

enlisted
I was 10
pain along the shoals

but how
could I fend off
familiar skin

with what:
my almost fists
my obedient holes?

"Fourteen" by C. Dale Young

I'm in love with C. Dale Young's "Fourteen."

You can find it in OCHO #22: Dear America, Don't Be My Valentine!


FOURTEEN

Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been
six days since my last confession. I let a guy
cheat off of my science test because it made me
feel smarter. And I ignored my Mother telling me

to be home by 9:00 pm. I don’t really even know
why she asks such things. And I continue to have
impure thoughts, sometimes every hour. I let a
girl kiss me, a boy, too, but we all had our clothes on.

And this may not be a sin, but I knocked Mike down
on the basketball court just as he was making a jump,
just to be able to help him up, help him back
to the locker room. His knee got twisted. It swelled

until it looked like a softball. It was so swollen.
He let me hold ice to it until his folks came.
I liked holding the ice to it. But I found myself
having impure thoughts, Father, strange thoughts.

I sat there holding the ice and staring at his knee
and up the legs of his shorts. I could see
the white edge of his jockey shorts and more.
I had to look, Father. I had to look.

Forgive me, I couldn’t help it, the staring.
It was like the time last week, after the game,
when I couldn’t help but watch the soap suds
under your chin just before you washed off.

I sat on a bench in my towel and watched you, the
shape of your back, your arms, your chest. I know
this is wrong, Father, watching you in the shower.
But I only watched the soap. I only watched the water.

OCHO #22 is OUT & I have a Poem in it

OCHO #22: Dear America Don't Be My Valentine , guest edited by Miguel Murphy, is out. I am thrilled to have my poem "Meeting Judy Bloom" in the issue. I am also very thrilled to be among such talented writers as Brent Goodman, C. Dale Young, Matthew Hittinger, Charles Jensen, RJ Gibson, Jeremy Halinen, and Blas Falconer.


OCHO #22: DEAR AMERICA DON'T BE MY VALENTINE

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Poetry Creative Writing poetry gay

Duhamel in Ducts

Fathers

My father walks through the scrub, a shortcut, to get to Walmart
where he meets up with his friends for coffee on Friday afternoons.
He says teenagers are always hanging around back there, barbequing
something. I’m assuming my father has never smelled pot
and that’s what he’s smelling now, so I say, Dad, stick to the streets,
because I am afraid for him, even though these kids
are probably mellow from weed. My father, 80, says
there are too many zooming cars on the road, and besides,
he likes the pond, the wildflowers that will probably be gone
when the plaza expands to a Super Walmart next year.
I want to make sure the teenagers don’t rob my father for his two dollars,
the way they robbed my father-in-law right in the Albertson’s bathroom,
pushing him into the white tiled wall while he was at the urinal,
then fleeing with his wallet. It took my father-in-law a long time to get up
and regain his balance. It took him a long time to replace
his credit cards and ID. He was 90 by then. My husband said,
Can’t you catch these kids on the surveillance camera?
The manager was lazy and said the supermarket wasn’t responsible.
My husband said, No one is saying the supermarket is responsible—
we just want an arrest so these kids can’t mug anyone else.
My father-in-law filled out a police report,
his provisions idle in the silver cart.
When the supermarket wanted my father to retire,
they sent him to get the carts in the rain. Though there was a union
to protect wages, employees had no fixed assignments.
Having meat men suddenly clean bathrooms or produce men
suddenly wash floors was one way management
could humiliate older workers enough to make them leave.
A grown man doing the work a teenager could.
A grown man working 40 hours a week, eating up
the supermarket’s profits with his benefits. A teenager was warm inside,
part-time, bagging, flirting with the cashier, maybe laughing
at my father because my father wasn’t the teenager’s father.
That would have been a different story all together.

~ Denise Duhamel, taken from Ducts

Don't forget you can win an autographed copy of Denise's new book, KA-CHING!, which is due out spring '09. Click here for the details.

Marie Howe in Honor of World AIDS Day

In honor of World AIDS Day:


The Last Time

The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

and took my hands in his hands and said,
I'm going to die soon. I want you to know that.

And I said, I think I do know.
And he said, What surprises me is that you don't.

And I said, I do. And he said, What?
And I said, Know that you're going to die.

And he said, No, I mean know that you are.


Marie Howe

Mark Doty ~ National Book Award Winner ~ Congratulations!

In honor of Mark Doty winning a National Book Award for poetry, I would like to share the podcast of Doty at the Key West Literary Seminar giving the John Hersey Memorial Address. I was at the festival, and I have to say, the clapping at the end of the speech was edited. The audience applauded for at least three to five minutes. I applauded until my hands were stinging.



Click here for an interview with Doty published on the National Book Foundation's website.


Congratulations Mark!

***Update***
Click here to read what Doty has to say about his win.

"A Myth of Devotion" ~ Louise Glück

A Myth of Devotion

When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.

A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn't everyone want love?

He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.

Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—

That's what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there'd be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn't imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone's Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end.
you're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.

from Louise Glück's Averno

"Commencement Address" by Dean Young

Commencement Address

I love you for shattering.
Someone has to. Just as someone
has to announce inadvertently
the end of grief or spring's
splurge even as the bureaucracy's
spittoon overflows. Someone has to come out
the other end of the labyrinth
saying, What's the big deal?
Someone has to spend all day staring
at the data from outer space
or separating the receipts
or changing sheets in sour room after room.
I like it when the end of the toilet paper
is folded into a point.
I like napkins folded into swans
because I like wiping my mouth on swans.
Matriculates, come back from the dance floor
to sip at the lacrimal glands of chaos,
a god could be forgiven
for eating you, you've been such angels
just not very good ones.
You've put your tongue
into the peanut canister
of your best friend's girlfriend's mom.
You've taken a brown bag lunch
on which was writ another's name.
All night it snows a blue snow
like the crystallized confessions
you've wrung from phantoms
even though it is you wearing the filched necklace,
your rages splitting the concrete like dandelions.
All that destruction from a ball of fluff!
There's nothing left but hope.

~ Dean Young
from the May/June issue of APR

"The Instruction Aubade"

"The Instruction Aubade" by Charles Jensen.

"Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam"

On Thursday, Dan Vera read a poem titled "Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam," and I have yet to be able to stop thinking about this phenomenal poem. Even Mark Doty gave it a mention in his blog. When I read lines that I wish I had written I called them 'jealousy lines.' Well, every single line of "Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam" made me jealous. Damn good job, Dan!

Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Slam

I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house.
It happened like this:

One day she took the train to Boston,
made her way to the darkened room,
put her name down in cursive script
and waited her turn.

Poets before her stood and rhymed,
followed a meter tight and expected,
outdoing one another in a monotonous clip.

When they read her name aloud
she made her way to the stage
straightened the papers in her hands --
pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills,
she closed her eyes for a minute,
took a breath,
and began.

From her mouth perfect words exploded,
intact formulas of light and darkness.
She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal
and described the skies like diadem.
Obscurely worded incantations filled the room
with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake.

The solitary words she handled
in her upstairs room with keen precision
came rumbling out to make the electric lights flicker.

40 members of the audience
were treated for hypertension.
20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads
had turned a Moses White.

Her second poem earased the memory of every cell phone
in the nightclub,
and by the fourth line of the sixth verse
the grandmother in the upstairs apartment
had been cured of her rheumatism.

The papers reported the power outages.
The area hospitals taxed their emergency generators
and sirens were heard to wail through the night.

Quietly she made her way to the exit,
walked to the terminal and rode back to Amherst.

She never left her room again
and never read such syllables aloud.

~ Dan Vera, The Space Between Our Danger and Delight

BUY Dan's book-- you won't regret it!

"John McCain's Dementia"

"John McCain's Dementia" by Kate Evans

"Our Other Sister" ~ Jeffrey Harrison

I've been in love with this poem from the very first time I read it.


OUR OTHER SISTER

for Ellen

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn’t shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second

before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who’d gone away.
What my motives were I can’t recall: a whim,

or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel

and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

Before I knew it, she’d moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she’d stopped calling.

I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember

how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I’d just made up
had that kind of power, and I can still feel

the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister

had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.


From Feeding the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001).

Rick/Steve to Poetry to Cancer to Damon/Palin

Congrats to Rick & Steve!

"Autopsy" by Christopher Hennessy

"Is My Cancer Upsetting You?"

"Dinner Party Horror" ~ Denise Duhamel

Dinner Party Horror


After dessert, my friends and I try to figure out the order in which we would die in a horror movie.

Stan, the aggressive male, would be murdered first. His macho-ness would lead him out into the woods or up into the attic, unprepared for what he'd find there. Chatty Peg would go next—too innocently boisterous. She'd walk right up to the killer and try to make friends. Then David would go, through no fault of his own, but because he's black—sorry to say, minorities never make it to the end of horror films. Susan would also meet a grisly fate because (she admits this herself) she's a bit of a slut and sluts are always punished in movies.

It's down to Mary and me—I think she'd be the lone survivor since she's the most likeable. She thinks I'd be the lone survivor since I'm the most likeable. And surely, if one of us were to die, it would be as she tried to save the other.

Then Stan says, Before you start congratulating yourselves, remember, one of your two bitches has to be the killer.

We are horrified. Did he really say bitches?

It's a joke, he assures us.

David chimes in, It's definitely an outside killer. Not Mary or Denise. Besides, Susan says her autopsy shows she was molested before she was butchered, so that means her killer was male, right?

Peg says Wait!—maybe Stan stabbed his twin right off to fool us, and he's not really dead, but has been lurking as the killer in the movie all along. Stan likes the idea of his character coming back in the final scene. David still thinks it's an outside job. Mary says the whole conversation is giving her the creeps. Anyway, she has to get up early in the morning. She gets up from the couch and reaches for her car keys.

Wait! Don't go out there alone!

I tried to warn her, but she wouldn't listen.

"Cher" by Dorianne Laux

Cher

I wanted to be Cher, tall
as a glass of iced tea,
her bony shoulders draped
with a curtain of dark hair
that plunged straight down,
the cut tips brushing
her non-existent butt.
I wanted to wear a lantern
for a hat, a cabbage, a pinata
and walk in six-inch heels that buttoned
up the back. I wanted her
rouged cheekbones and her
throaty panache, her voice
of gravel and clover, the hokum
of her clothes: black fishnet
and pink pom-poms, frilled
halter tops, fringed bells
and that thin strip of waist
with the bullet hole navel.
Cher standing with her skinny arm
slung around Sonny's thick neck,
posing in front of the Eiffel Tower,
The Leaning Tower of Pisa,
The Great Wall of China,
The Crumbling Pyramids, smiling
for the camera with her crooked
teeth, hit-and-miss beauty, the sun
bouncing off the bump on her nose.
Give me back the old Cher
the gangly, imperfect girl
before the shaving knife
took her, before they put
pillows in her tits, injected
the lumpy gel into her lips.
Take me back to the woman
I wanted to be, stalwart
and silly, smart as her lion
tamer's whip, my body a torch
stretched along the length
of the polished piano, legs
bent at the knee, hair cascading
down over Sonny's blunt fingers
as he pummeled the keys,
singing in a sloppy alto
the oldest, saddest songs.

~ Dorianne Laux
found in Superman: The Chapbook
as well as in
Third Rail: An Anthology of Poetry of Rock 'n Roll

The Writer's Almanac for August 8, 2008

Beautiful Poem!

Migration

This year Marie drives back and forth
from the hospital room of her dying friend
to the office of the adoption agency.

I bet sometimes she doesn't know
What threshold she is waiting at—

the hand of her sick friend, hot with fever;
the theoretical baby just a lot of paperwork so far.

But next year she might be standing by a grave,
wearing black with a splash of
banana vomit on it,

the little girl just starting to say Sesame Street
and Cappuccino latte grand Mommy.
The future ours for a while to hold, with its heaviness—

and hope moving from one location to another
like the holy ghost that it is.

"Migration" by Tony Hoagland
from What Narcissism Means To Me © Graywolf Press, 2003.

"Dead Girls" by Kim Addonizio

DEAD GIRLS

show up often in the movies, facedown
in the weeds beside the highway.
Kids find them by the river, or in the woods,

under leaves, one pink-nailed hand thrust up.
Detectives stand over them in studio apartments
or lift their photos off pianos

in the houses they almost grew up in.
A dead girl can kick a movie into gear
better than a saloon brawl, better

than a factory explosion, just
by lying there. Anyone can play her,
any child off the street

can be hog-tied and dumped from a van
or strangled blue in a kitchen, a bathroom,
an alley, a school. That's the beauty

of a dead girl. Even a plain one
who feels worthless
as a clod of dirt, broken

by the sorrow of gazing all day
at a fashion magazine,
can be made whole, redeemed

by what she finally can't help being,
the center of attention, the special,
desirable, dead, dead girl.

~ Kim Addonizio
from what is this thing called love