With two types of beer mingling in the plastic cups. Dirty.
Like king, like two at a time. We were made to be polite.
At the beer garden, under the ospreys, with good teeth.

…The hips gone at it down in the gravel.
A handful. Also wanted the roadster. Wanted to be off-road
with racing stripes, anywhere other than Brooklyn or Queens.
Wanted to chase you down on the sand with a pint of something
sweet brown between us.

To tug you around by the collar of your white T Shirt. Pin you against
the wall in the bathroom, familiar, littoral. To hold red lipstick very,
very close to your cheek and say I’m sorry. Wanted both of us
to have bigger tits and an easier time of it. To be drunk enough to believe
a beach and come out in swimsuits, with hula hoops, flashing our hands.

…Increased police presence was only making it worse. Still unused
to the megaphoned voices reordering the street, still unused
to the monomania of blue disco. Rather, pull the blinds.
Exacerbated a portion of liquor with a portion of raw onion. A mistake
in the sequence of alt, slick, luck.

And the boatman was not friendly.

Danielle Pafunda

Hymenopus coronatu, The orchid mantis.

Don’t mind me, guys. I got myself a Google Reader this week and my mind is being BLOWN. I’ll return to my text-driven self soonish.

More here.

On Saturday morning the University of Alabama plays one of the most important football games of its season. All day today RVs have been lumbering into town and setting up camp in grassy undeveloped lots. There are hot air balloon rides on the quad. The tailgating tents are already springing up and the buildings downtown are already cordoning off their yards, to keep revelers out. There are hundreds of porta potties tucked into every nook and cranny on campus. Strange middle-aged people draped in head to toe with team gear are staggering around town on foot and of course the traffic is unbelievable. In the darkness the stadium looms, lights blazing, like the fucking death star. Football is weird, y’all.

You must accept that’s who he really is.
You must accept you cannot be his
unless he is yours. No compromise.
He is a canvas on which paint never dries;
a clay that never sets, steel that bends
in a breeze, a melody that when it ends
no one can whistle. He is not who
you thought. He’s not. He is a shoe
that walks away: “I will not go where you
want to go.” “Why, then, are you a shoe?”
“I’m not. I have the sole of a lover
but don’t know what love is.” “Discover
it, then.” “Will I have to go where you go?”
“Sometimes.” “Be patient with you?” “Yes.” “Then, no.”
You have to hear what he is telling you
and see what he is; how it is killing you.

Kate Light

You guys, I might be kind of judgy about “funny” poems. YIPES

Wrote the name of a pill on my hand. Wrote one
because that was all I took. I spent a long time making the bed.
It wasn’t because you weren’t home, so much as it wasn’t home
without you there. I didn’t want to make any mistakes.
Took the trash out early, and washed the bottles in the sink.
I wasn’t sad. I was occupied.

The cat was in heat and every advisement involved a Bic pen.
The television broke, the toaster inflamed. Around three there was nothing
in the air but the air, and I wasn’t asleep. Wrote the name of the pill,
wrote my name, wrote yours. Wrote a couple of things I’d been meaning to do.
Wrote married and wondered.

Even in good dreams, I take a piss in the wrong place. I wake up
with sweat between my legs, my hands numb, and thinking
you’re down there at the end of the bed setting up nets
and all kinds of measures.

Danielle Pafunda

What is the difference between this poetry and the insufferable Arda? The syntax and tone are the same, almost rote. It’s the same torpid anxious self-aggrandizing self-hating self-obsessed narrator. What is the difference? Is it that Pafunda’s not afraid to like, talk about piss and cats in heat and catching a man and Collins is so much more…sterile? Conventional? Pretty? Pianos and soups?

Huh.

Yesterday I had a meeting with Professor R, famed in the department for having an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry and being exceptionally useful when you don’t know exactly what you’re writing and need a prescribed reading list.

I came into her office and got settled while she finished typing something on her computer. Then she powered down, turned looked at me for a long moment. Collected her thoughts, switched her glasses. “Let’s pretend you are writing for three readers in the entire world, Farren,” she dove right in, “and all three of them know every word you’ve ever written, backwards and forwards. They are acquainted with all your obsessions, you’ve told them all your dreams and stories. What is the next thing you’re going to write? Now that they know the lay of the land, where are you going to take them?”

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT IS THE SOUND OF MY MIND GETTING BLOWN.

Poets I remind her of: CD Wright, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Frank Bidart, TS Eliot (esp the Wasteland), Lucie Brock-Broido, Karen Volkmann, John Berryman and GC Waldrep. Poets I need to read next: Karen Volkmann, Lucie Brock-Broido, Bruce Smith, Lynn Emanuel, David St. John and TS Eliot (esp The Wasteland). YES.