I love this representation of the Future as Foretold in the Past. I also love that it included the work of the wonderful Octavia Butler.
SONG OF SUBURBIA by Michael Lynch
O sock drawers of paunchy, square-fingered mowers, monochromatic sedan drivers!
May you be spiked forever with rogue golf tees, the ubiquitous Playboy
secreted always in your depths.
O cut-glass decanters of the wet bar! O filament light sculpture!
O deep blue, wall-to-wall misery smooth as the skin of the inner thigh—
let no decorator revise you.
O fainting couch, green glow of banker's lamp, O Reader's
Digest Condensed Books tawdry in your gilt spines! O intendance of oak
paneling, of chenille swag and fleur-de-lis!
O furbished stereo console! O high fidelity! O Whipped
Cream and Other Delights! O Jump Up Calypso! O On The Street
Where You Live! O My
Fair Lady still jacketed and unmolested! Endure beneath the sunburst
clock and the swirled plaster of the ceiling spangled
with flecks of light!
O aquamarine coin of wading pool! O corrugated carport overhang!
May you share eternally those trellises of summer afternoons
drowsy with pink blooms.
And O split-level entryway, wrought-iron balustrade—glazed bonecage of the landing!
O soft, skylit corridors and childhoods murdered in each room
remain, remain!
Remain unchanged as the dioramas forgotten in library storerooms, pristine,
delicate as embryos, dazzling as miniature scenes jewelled
into enamel eggs.
appeared in White Whale Review
Photo by Bill Owens
Audrey Lorde
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
Thirty Six Shades of Prussian Blue
“Turnbull’s Blue—Antwerp Blue—Berlin Blue—Prussiate of Iron—Chinese Blue—Saxon Blue—Blau de Berlin”: Reading the world’s first artificial color.”
Natalie Diaz
I had the pleasure of meeting Natalie Diaz at Bread Loaf this summer. Such a beautiful one, she is.
Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table
While she sleeps, I paint
Valencia oranges across her skin,
seven times the color orange,
a bright tree glittering the limestone grotto of her clavicle—
heaving bonfires pulsing each pale limb
like Nero’s condemned heretics sparking along Via Appia.
A small stream of Prussian blue I’ve trickled
down her bicep. A fat red nasturtium
eddies her inner elbow.
Against her swollen palms,
I’ve brushed glowing halves of avocados
lamping like bell-hipped women in ecstasy.
A wounded Saint Teresa sketched to each breast.
Her navel is a charcoal bowl of figs,
all stem thick with sour milk and gowned
in taffeta the color of bruises.
This is to offer up with our flophouse prayers—
God created us with absence
in our hands, but we will not return that way.
Not now, when we are both so capable of growing full
on banquets embroidered by Lorca’s gypsy nun.
She sleeps, gone to the needle’s gentle rocking,
and I lean out the window, a Horus
drunk on my own scent
and midnight’s slow drip of stars.
She has always been more orchard than loved,
I, more bite than mouth.
So much is empty in this hour—
the spoon, still warm, lost in the sheets,
the candle’s yellow-white thorn of flame,
and night, open as autumn’s unfilled basket
as the locusts feast the field.
-Natalie Diaz
“I Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table” by Natalie Diaz, appears in When My Brother Was An Aztec (2012) and is used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. It also appeared in Narrative Magazine, Spring 2012.
Violence is painful, but it is also a beautiful and functioning part of our lives. It has to be. We don’t stop at violence—at least not in the world I live in—we begin over and over again out of it. This is one reason why the rituals and beliefs of the Aztecs lure me—they made light from violence, or found light despite violence, which doesn’t happen if you close your eyes.
Kujichagulia
Adrienne Rich
the skins @ wreckroom
most entertaining literary tumblrs
http://www.themillions.com/2012/08/the-great-taxonomy-of-literary-tumblrs-round-two.html
anotherblackgenius | poet
This is a beautiful, insightful interview with poet, Vievee Francis. Such a pleasure to come across such a lovely record of her conversation with Romayne Rubinas Dorsey on The Poets Weave on Indiana Public Media.
Vievee Francis