….as Gary Snyder once said.
New work appearing in Wild Roof Journal next month.
his tawny listening at the water’s edge, shy antlers in pooling green light
| More than anything, I need this boy so close to my ears, his questions electric as honeybees in an acreage of goldenrod and aster. And time where we are, slow sugar in the veins of white pine, rubbery mushrooms cloistered at their feet. His tawny listening at the water’s edge, shy antlers in pooling green light, while we consider fox prints etched in clay. I need little black boys to be able to be little black boys, whole salt water galaxies in cotton and loudness—not fixed in stunned suspension, episodes on hot asphalt, waiting in the dazzling absence of apology. I need this kid to stay mighty and coltish, thundering alongside other black kids, their wrestle and whoop, the brightness of it—I need for the world to bear it. And until it will, may the trees kneel closer, while we sit in mineral hush, together. May the boy whose dark eyes are an echo of my father’s dark eyes, and his father’s dark eyes, reach with cupped hands into the braided current. The boy, restless and lanky, the boy for whom each moment endlessly opens, for the attention he invests in the beetle’s lacquered armor, each furrowed seed or heartbeat, the boy who once told me the world gives you second chances, the boy tugging my arm, saying look, saying now. |
with the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud
I found this article originally printed in the now defunct Numero Cinq to be a satisfying read, its relevance to the issues of the day a reminder of a long stretch of history holding little originality with regards to conflict resolution.
Continue reading “with the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud”Artist Residency 2020
If your own private house up in the woods and down the road from Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens sounds like a good place to spend your Spring, today is the last day to apply to their Visual Artist Residency.
The time I spent there as the writer in residence was invaluable, and I know will continue to inform my work for years to come.
les enfants terribles
Work forthcoming in the next issue of Carte Blanche.
Montreal is a great place for writers to be in 2020. From their Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival in May to the Festival International de la Litterature in September, this beautiful spot will be full of authors from all over the world.
Vision Press
If you’re an author and looking for a designer for your book cover, please consider Vision Press for insightful, professional work at a reasonable rate.
i will wade out till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
Crepuscule
ee cummings
I will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burn-
ing flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my
body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will I complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
did you hold forest-fire in one hand
There Is a Devil Inside Me
—After Ana Mendieta
Did you carry around the matin star? Did you hold
forest-fire in one hand? Would you wake to radiate,
shimmer, gleam lucero-light? Through the morning
would you measure the wingspan of an idea taking off—
& by night would you read by the light of your own torso?
Did you hear through the curtains a voice, through folds &
folds of fabric a lowdown voice—How are you fallen
from—How are you cut down to the ground?
*
Would gunpowder flash up in the other hand?
Were you the most beautiful of them—the most beauty,
full bew, teful, bu wtie, full be out, i full, btfl?
Did the sky flutter & flower like bridal
shrouds? Did a dog rise in the East in it?
Did a wolf set in the West? Were they a thirsty pair?
And was there a meadow? How many flowers to pick?
And when no flowers, were you gathering bone chips
& feathers & mud? Was music a circle that spun?
*
Did you spin it in reverse? Was your singing a rushlight,
pyre light, a conflagration of dragonflies rushing out
from your fire-throat? Did you lie down in the snow?
Did it soften & thaw into a pool of your shape?
Did you whisper to the graven thing, whisper a many
lowdown phrase: How are you fallen my btfl?
Would they trek closer, the animals? A grand iridium
thirst, each arriving with their soft velour
mouths to drink your silhouette?
Credit:
Copyright © 2018 by Carolina Ebeid. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 12, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
About this Poem:
“I am writing a series of poems centered around the video works of Ana Mendieta. In one of them, Mendieta faces a blank wall with her back to us. She bends down to dip her hands and forearms in a pan that is filled with animal blood and begins to draw on the wall a narrow arc the width of her body. With more blood, she writes at the center of this tombstone-like shape, ‘There is a Devil Inside Me.’ My poem imagines the artist as a kind of Lucifer, the messenger bearing light, before falling from grace into the underworld.”
—Carolina Ebeid
ojo de mano
The seeing
have eyes
in their hands.
– dicho nevadaño
out of what immense good-bye
Nativity by Li-Young Lee
In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.
How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?
Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,
this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,
just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.
l noelle mclaughlin 