MERIAN

Sometimes the streets' gridding gauze seems just the thing to encase this throb. Lines running out otherwards starch the punctum of me. This tiny slipping site of me. My bicycle is a mystery I've learned to collaborate with. Cars gnash & noxify on all intimate quarters, architecture tips up to blue & sun, pitted avenues in grimy ice-rim gripe against too tattery tyres; and I arrive, hot in the blasty chill, bright-eyed, breathing, leave my machine in the street & enter at the appointed door.

BENJ GERDES

The whole gang was there. When the piper showed up it was almost too much. I held Mitzi close and studied everyone's eyes, my knuckles

bloodless. Around two in the morning I cracked: "Benj," I whispered, "isn't it time?" He shook his head once, almost imperceptibly, and gave a blazing glare.

Владиимир Владиимирович Набоков

The gingko leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.

word, orts
for chick, spill
night pot
pourri, nourri
soil, spell
blank in devanāgarī. Semantra sounding from within monastiraki wall-bounds, aground, germinate in Sanskrit seed-syllable:

Milkthistle. Noosphere. Time-element.

happy birthday sarah yanni

He was happy because bicycling season and butterflying season were synchronous. Ballad-singers built intricate masses of sexual energy around themselves while they worked their looms. In wooden rooms, such a vibration of formerly living tissues! “The tissues that comprise my body” (he was thinking out loud into the empty space) “share ancestry with those of these broad wolf-pine planks.” It was like the erotic sympathy that overtook him in old cemeteries: Selastina, Barberry, Patience—graved in slate, their unlikely names were the mouths and hands with which the unwedded dead worried his flesh. Dust, lust: he’d intended exploiting the rhyme in some sort of testament until he found he’d been beaten to it, with preclusive success, by Charles Cotton, a minor poet of the seventeenth century. Women create flesh, eye, limb; further, we weave the magic field of sex-pleasure which sets the first stitches of such creation. Men practice power, pretend it’s pleasure; but it’s not. They consume, discard; are disposable thereby; don’t have the patience that pleasure takes. He entered the room and the hushy thump of looming ceased. Penelope looked up from her work, two yards of bright textile filling her lap.

a) There we left you, on the suspiciously lush pasto of your parents' lawn, in the warm dark of a very late night. The funniest bits of texting I ever messed with.

b) There we left you, in that hard world of winter with all the water stoppt up solid & framing the clean live air in angles & planes, slip & fall, miss the train!

Pink rock faces ocean's thunder in craggy early-20th-century planes, lines interrupted and truncated and textured according to superannuated spatial notions out of the cities of Europe. We used to come here with our wooden things, our oily pigments and stiff sailcloth panels; we'd make pictures. I'd make pictures of you, you swimming, you sitting. I'd swim; you'd make a picture of that. Where did all those pictures get to, I've been meaning to ask you. I float off, into the islands. There are three knives on me: one for oysters, one for scallops, one for cutting beads out of green lilac or apple.

MISS RUTH LYMAN

Who was possessed of many
amiable qualities, the joy of
her Parents, the delight of
her connexions, and
beloved of all, if youth,
if virtue deserve a tear,
reader, drop it here,
when the engraving of this stone
informs you that she left
her weeping friends in the
23d year of her Age, June 22 1783

Old 91-Corridor stock; her great-nephew became friendly with Emily Dickinson, he would take her on his knee in converse while courting her sister. Her stone was cut from Connecticut's coarse silicate tissue and imaged by a carver there before being brought out to salty Maine. Within a few years the inscribed text will fall away; a light tap would do it now.

My brother and I swam the Dniester, he beat me to its nether shore but I beat him back. Little lateen-rigged boatlets skittered buoyantly past us, manned by boys. I felt as good as I've felt in weeks. The sunlight crutched my flawy vision such that I could almost read the "Karadeniz Çayı" sign in Bender from where we lay on the east bank. My brother got a passing tsigane to back him on the tanbur as he sang (for my benefit, bless him!) that Canceaux song. Then there was rose spoon-sweet for all from a tidy treat-vendor who cleaned his little silver koutali in a cup of saltwater after each of our mouthings.

Paschal joy is imminent. After great pain a formal feeling comes. The beloved fellow-creature is near, the one with whom alone I've followed creation further in and farther on. My song. Three darts into the heart of Absalom, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak. Joseph Sykes's stones stand hard, soft schist from salt-swamps, waiting for sun to come athwart them and thicken their lines with shadow to animate the faces figured there. Like a slide quiet in its slot before the bulb's switched on. I love the ocean, I love the linguage, I love the melodies and the countermelodies. Where did you go. Under a rosebush that dies back every winter. I miss the place of rest, you, Sofferetti, your lap. Where is your lap? You are continually dismantling it, forming it up again every time you sit down.

I sustain a focused expiration; in it nascent flames chuckle. Having thrown mouth and nose over my left shoulder into a deft, smokeless breath, I come back to blowing before the little dance sags wholly. Old lover, soft and bleary in our flannel sheets upstairs, I will warm these rooms for thee. Breath circulates among elements: cold air off the massed saltwater and the rocks; wooden rooms packaging it elegantly; the hot, wet mystery of my lungs; yours, upstairs; the suckling glow of a young fire. Free circuit of breath voids me, I delaminate from the thickness of my morning. Dragon. We are given breathing, a readymade spiritual practice. Stacked stinking popple steams beside the black box, hot now. You descend.

Monster baby

I was in the hospital. It was time to give birth and I was thinking My stomach isn't really very big. The baby just sort of squelched out, no pain, no drama. Immediately nurses took it away. I was lying in bed for a while, I knew my mother was trying to find me but I did not want to talk. I told a nurse I think it's time I saw my baby. She took me down the corridor and out of the hospital onto the street. We walked into the food court of a strip mall and I stood in line behind her at the Pretzel Shack. She held the ticket for my baby. A feeling of deep dread and regret came over me and I thought My life is over. She gave the ticket to a man in an apron behind the counter. He came back with a plastic catering dish with a clear snap-on top. The dish was filled with dinner rolls. The baby squirmed underneath and tried to push the rolls out of the way. I took the top off and long fingers with long nails started snapping together. The baby's face had a tiny hinged jaw lined with sharp teeth. It had a well-developed nose and dark eyes. I was thinking Those Italian features must have come from Christian, my sperm donor. My mother finally ran up. Her hair was dyed black. She stood looking at the baby. We walked and tried to cross the road. I dropped the dish and the baby's face fell off except for the mouth. I picked the dish up and carried it across the road trying to avoid being bitten by the mouth while my mother was pushing the baby parts across the road with her foot, trying to get them out of the way of the oncoming cars. I was thinking I hate my life, this baby is a problem. My dad rolled up in a pimped-out red Ford Festiva with black flower detailing on the sides.

Today I interviewed a housing developer for my documentary. He said that he thinks the primary reason "this town is so dangerous is that many of the criminals displaced by Katrina moved here."

I was leaving ceramics class early. All my pots were glazed. I walked to a tall building, entered and found the elevators. I got in the elevator and was trying to find the eleventh floor, but my vision was blurry. A young man in a suit and a lady in a dress ran giggling into the elevator as the doors were closing, like a commercial (life insurance? cologne?). The elevator started to ascend rapidly. I still couldn't find the button for eleven and the floors were going by faster than I could read, so I randomly pressed one. The elevator stopped at the fortieth floor and I got out. I saw then that the small footprint of the building had continued up the entire height, that I was in a spire. I walked out of the spire into a bigger space. A couple was floating in a pool, embracing and laughing. Tourists were eating at a restaurant. My father walked up to me and handed me a bundle of white envelopes, all labeled with black writing. The envelopes were filled with different types of pine pollen or pitch. I said "Now I understand why I'm so sneezy. My allergies followed the pitch up the elevator. I can barely function." My father said don't worry just put the envelopes into the trunk.