“It turns out that soil is teeming with life.” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’
Sure I’m spoiling this Friday and next Friday’s books, but it’s okay! We read for prose, not plot. Speaking of prose, here’s a bunch written by other people!
“I wanted to be a man / until I met enough men // to know better. The pain / of understanding that arrives too late // is the teeth of handsaw / against skin, a mistake” – Amorak Huey, “For So Long, I Was Foolishly Proud of The Scar on My Thumb”
“He hadn’t yet learned that nature could hold the edge of its blade to your throat.” – Chloe N. Clark, “Boy and Cave and Man and Night”
“she longed to be proletarian / But that’s impossible / Who will think of her? / I think of her” – Victoria Guerrero-Peirano, ‘Diary Of A Proletarian Seamstress’
“That the young would rather be entertained by tales of the extreme rather than the mundane is not arguable. Pirates defeat accountants.” – Percival Everett, ‘Erasure’
“We sort the cards at the kitchen table. / Instead of flowers our people help / the family pay for the funeral. / My mother and aunt document / the names and amounts of money in each envelope.” – Michelle Peñaloza, “WE ARE SO SORRY FOR YOUR LOST”
“Day rises in vain / I belong to shadow and shrouded in shadow I lie on a bed of fire” – César Moro, “OH FUROR THE DAWN EMERGES FROM YOUR LIPS”
“there’s a story about a woman who became a goddess, and all she had / to do was drown herself in a river” – Bridget Gordon, “fawning responses”
“Is he sickly in the bog? / Hungry at the mall? / Content in the water?” – Lesle Lewis, “Phone”
“and I was no poet. there was a sisterhood / wrapped around this world like a sunrise” – Bridget Gordon, “ode to Brighid”
“No. In a fine body there is magic. I do not know what makes it in one and not in another. But thou hast it.” – Ernest Hemingway, ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’
“and suddenly I’m ferried / not to the first time I did my shot / or the first time I dissolved / the small blue pills // or the first time I said my name / or the first time she said it with me / but to the first time / I gave myself to the moon” – Bridget Gordon, “given to the moon”
“when did you become the moon / this not how we planned any of this / we are supposed to be touching / are we supposed to be touching” – Amorak Huey, “You Told Me Always to Add “In Bed” to the End of My Fortune Cookie Fortunes. I Told You the Same Thing Works on Poems but I Was Just Trying to Impress You. In Bed.”
“slut era but it’s just passing the same $20 and the same nudes back and forth until we both die / slut era but it’s just letting someone help you with your shot / slut era but it’s just putting together a gay transsexual dinner party for the gay transsexuals with a menu inspired by what foods have fallen into your bra” – Bridget Gordon, “slut era”
“it’s going to rain I’m/ going to go see Spider / Man by the time the / theater lets out it’ll be / raining I won’t have seen // it start I’ll have been / watching a boy turn into / a spider I saw something” – Jon Woodward, “Spring (comprising further music)”
“Mother told me about telling all her bridge buddies about my books, asking as she always did if there wasn’t a better word for fuck than fuck.” – Percival Everett, ‘Erasure’
“The tablecloth stays tucked away in the kitchen cabinet / I got myself knee-deep in diplomas / And I don’t know how to embroider” – Victoria Guerrero-Peirano, “Tablecloth”
“these three eggs were scrambled / they probably had three parents // is that an unusual heritage / for a breakfast to have / also for breakfast I’m having / a headache somebody was serving / the poorest ever stab at // sangria I stood babbling in / the rain with girls and / sang Beatles tunes banged on” – Jon Woodward, “Rain, Ocean”
“If the weather would just shut up for awhile, we could rest and catch up.” – Lesle Lewis, “Around”
“wanna go to Gloucester and / look at how the tombstones / and fishing boat masts are / raised irregularly against the sky / he said nope I don’t” – Jon Woodward, “Rain, Ocean”
“No. There was nothing to be gained by leaving them alone. Except that all people should be left alone and you should interfere with no one.” – Ernest Hemingway, ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’
“But, he thought to himself then, maybe it was a normal day, maybe this is how things always would be. He felt himself hardening from the inside out.” – Joshua Trent Brown, ‘The Walls Are Closing In On Us’
“The global crisis of soil fertility and the growth of superweeds impervious to herbicides are but two examples of nature’s autonomy…” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’
“I breathe the / uninterruptible law // of no money / that we really love” – Mathias Svalina, “THE WINE-DARK SEA”
“Return to ants / swarming legs, / urine on the kitchen floor, // to vent pine, / a trachea-nowhere: // the thing I / body contains” – Mathias Svalina, “THE WINE-DARK SEA”
“where a wish / is anything rotting, / the shore.” – Mathias Svalina, “THE WINE-DARK SEA”
“Some geese batter the fog / with their wings. / A hearse rolls through / a red light because / who even cares.” – Matthew Rohrer, “SWEET DREAMS”
“They are the wine-dark sea. And I / am the wine-dark sea.” – Mathias Svalina, “THE WINE-DARK SEA”
“A cold day is a prison / a little music breaks it open” – Matthew Rohrer, “WINTER SUN”
“Perhaps I’ve missed the point. // Perhaps I was thinking of the moon.” – Amorak Huey, “I Have Been Trying To Make Sense of Love Again”
“The first boy I ever let / touch me / marveled / at the difference in / our skin, / my hairlessness, my / taut brown.” – Michelle Peñaloza, “Pioneer”
“I’m just elbowing a stack of / folders off my desk earlier during / a careless chair swivel after simultaneously/ answering twelve of tomorrow’s sentient emails” – Jon Woodward, “MOUTH SPEAKING”
“You slide your fingers // into my mouth & pull out / another word for this lake // we’ve made of our lives” – Amorak Huey, “Love Poem”
“I thought why not manipulate these / people it seems to bring them // comfort why not just stand on / the “devastate” button feeding them wormwood” – Jon Woodward, “MOUTH SPEAKING”
“my social self I’m a delight / go ask anyone I’m friends with / the extinction event of the summer / makes people glad that Jon’s here” – Jon Woodward, “HEAR ANYTHING”
“If you are ever unsure what kind of light you are dealing with, he said, check to see if a cat will sit in it. If so, it is simply the light of the sun.” – Mar Romasco Moore, “Different Kinds Of Light”
“Isn’t kindness just like the touch of the moon on snow or a fever?” – Lesle Lewis, “Points”
“a wind-up whale surfaced alongside me / it had stairs for a tongue / a recorded voice said “you’re trespassing / I can swim you back to / the visitor’s area here climb inside” – Jon Woodward, “REWRITE ANYTHING”
“Yet cities are obviously not separate from the natural world.” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’
“the car ferry don’t mistake process // for meaning some billboards belying Eden” – Jon Woodward, “REMEMBER ANYTHING”
“Men. It is a shame to us women that we make them.” – Ernest Hemingway, ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’
“He hugged me, an event in itself, and I appreciated the gesture, but it was stiff as if he hadn’t touched me at all.” – Percival Everett, ‘Erasure’
“How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister?…You only heard the statement of loss. You did not see the father fall…” – Ernest Hemingway, ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’
“The industrialized nations…have effectively colonized the atmospheric commons.” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’
“The laws must be rewritten, as they were in Ecuador and then in Bolivia, so that the rights of nature become part of every country’s constitution.” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’
“A pogo stick in the nightclub of physics, molecules crashing / in the mind of a fish and its quartz eyes. What do they see? / The estuary of a river. I imagine a cracked head: / this image unfurling like an atomic mass” – Juan José Rodinás, “KOAN HANDEL: AQUATIC MUSIC”
“Yet rather than imposing emissions cuts using the power of the EPA, Obama decided to negotiate with congressional Republicans.” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’
“Isn’t a little bit of reality necessary, something that touches us inside, / like the bones of words invoked from within their dead language?” – Juan José Rodinás, “ARTEKOVSKY PREPARES THE MYSTIC ZEN FOR HIS ANHEDONIA”
“With the independence of so many so-called Third World nations in the post-1945 era, many Indigenous people found themselves locked into nations that did not recognize their rights. They effectively constituted a Fourth World, extending from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego in the Americas, and including the Ainu of Japan, the Aborigines of Australia, the Māori of New Zealand, the Sámi of Scandinavia, and the tribal peoples of of the former Soviet Union, China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Under the pretext of conserving nature, postcolonial states continued colonial policies of expelling Indigenous people from their land.” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’
“The trees do not have a parliament / the birds do not lobby the wind / the moss grows on whatever” – Matthew Rohrer, “SONGS OF WEST RIVER”
“…a recent call to return national parks to Native American tribes in the US that was perceived as quite radical seems less so when compared to developments such as the Forest Rights Act in India or the sweeping restitution that courts have approved in Indonesia.” – Ashley Dawson, ‘Environmentalism From Below’
“There was so much water. How did you find someone under all of it?” – Chloe N. Clark, “The Rushing Waves”
“It was always coming for her without ever catching her, and so there could be no escape. There was no way to survive something that hadn’t happened yet.” – Chloe N. Clark, “Leopard Seals”
“None of us could figure it out. It went against the natural order. There were theories, of course. She was confused. She was insane. She was in love.” – Mar Romasco Moore, “The Thaw”
“When had she begun to sound so meek? Was there a point in her childhood when she had firmly decided that strength and rebellion were just not something she could ever aspire to?” – Chloe N. Clark, “Leopard Seals”
“To think that you can believe that I am enjoying myself, that I am happy or even calm far away from you, saddens me as if I had committed a crime.” – César Moro, letter to Antonio, 1938
“Over and over, it’s just endless talk about how amazing Chicago is going to be.” – James R. Gapinski, ‘Edge Of The Known Bus Line’
“But he claims this place was once exactly like Chicago, with rainbows and sunflowers and all-you-can-eat buffets and orgies.” – James R. Gapinski, ‘Edge Of The Known Bus Line’
“It’ll fuck you up. You’ll have a vision of Cleveland. Then we’ll know you’re not a threat.” – James R. Galpinski, ‘Edge Of The Known Bus Line’
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“ANYWAY what I’m saying is that Eve was right, when someone offers a taste you take it no matter the cost.” – Amorak Huey, “Ode to Temptation”
“Finally, the house lights came up and they rolled the man over onto his back, his body moving in the joint less way peculiar to corpses.” – Eric Williams, “Wanton Poets”
“It was something, to be in that tight little restaurant, everybody happy and talking, while I looked down the barrel of a long night with a dead body. I’d never noticed how cheerful the sound of silverware on dishes could be, or how peaceful a steamy window can feel when you’re on the warm side of it. And poor Mr. Hatch there, in his bedroom, cold, and just getting colder.” – Eric Williams, “Waking Dr. Hatch”
“And when a person only has one or two ties, or anchors, to a place that they called their home and those ties that bind vanish suddenly like a leaf taken downstream by a fast-moving river, that sense of home was gone.” – Joshua Trent Brown, ‘The Walls Are Closing In On Us’
“No parent should have to bury her child, she thought, and then she thought back to long ago. There was another mother in Chicago who had buried her child, and Carolyn Bryant knew all too well that she herself was to blame for that loss.” – Percival Everett, ‘The Trees’
“That boy ain’t got sense enough to piss out of a boot with the directions wrote on the heel.” – Percival Everett, ‘The Trees’
“This is Mississippi…Somebody Black had better watch these White folks down here. Because for a lot of these crazy folks, it’s still nineteen fifty.” – Percival Everett, ‘The Trees’
“Less than 1 percent of lynchers were ever convicted of a crime. Only a fraction of those ever served a sentence. Teddy Roosevelt claimed the main cause of lynching was Black men raping White women. You know what? That didn’t happen.” – Percival Everett, ‘The Trees’
“in the telefonic water with wires from orange and crotch / in the unvoiced and choked up alveolus with baskets of fruit and pregnant pyramids as thick as pins with black heads / in the swift shadow of an ancient balcony lost in the freezing folds under a pallid sun of salamanders of some funereal tapestry / in the most hermetic nook of a surface marred like the face of the moon / in the foam and rage of the sun falling into night in the black kiss of hysteria” – César Moro, “VARIOUS LIONS LICK THE RUGOSE SURFACE OF THE EQUESTRIAN TURTLE AT TWILIGHT”
“This lake was a mikveh.” – Adam Mansbach, ‘The Golem of Brooklyn’
“Out here, a million tiny sounds added up to stillness. Why, then, in New York, did a million tiny sounds added up to cacophony?” – Adam Mansbach, ‘The Golem of Brooklyn’
“standing by the dream harbor / the sea and the ships on her / and the stone streets are alive” – Matthew Rohrer, “49”
“I always wanted to be a Beat poet. Wrong generation. Now I stick dead people in drawer. I suppose it’s the same thing once you get down to it.” – Percival Everett, ‘The Trees’
“‘Everything metaphor, shmendrick,’ The Golem said, and withdrew back into the darkness.” – Adam Mansbach, ‘The Golem Of Brooklyn’
You’re right, The Golem. Everything is a metaphor.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris