WHEN AT A CERTAIN PARTY IN NYC Wherever you’re from sucks, and wherever you grew up sucks, and everyone here lives in a converted chocolate factory or deconsecrated church without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup in sight, but only carefully edited objets like the Lacanian soap dispenser in the kitchen that looks like an industrial age dildo, and when you rifle through the bathroom looking for a spare tampon, you discover that even their toothpaste is somehow more desirable than yours. And later you go with a world famous critic to eat a plate of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like “a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself impossible to eat. And your friend back home—- who says the pioneers who first settled the great asphalt parking [...]
Christine Gelineau
The Delta If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet. You are not you anymore. You are a girl standing in a pool of clouds as they catch fire in the distance. There are laws of heaven and those of place and those who see the sky in the water, angels in ashes that are the delta’s now. They say if you sweep the trash from your house after dark, you sweep away your luck. If you are going by foot, bring a stick, a third leg, and honor the great disorder, the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds. Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can, knowing there is a little water in things you take for granted, a little charity and squalor for the smallest forms of life. Voodoo was always mostly charity. People forget. If you shake a tablecloth outside at night, someone in [...]
Psalm for Kingston _____If I forget thee, O Jerusalem __________~Psalm 137 City of Jack Mandora—mi nuh choose none—of Anancy _____prevailing over Mongoose, Breda Rat, Puss, and Dog, Anancy __________saved by his wits in the midst of chaos and against all odds; _____of bawdy Big Boy stories told by peacock-strutting boys, hush-hush but loud enough to be heard by anyone passing by the yard. City of market women at Half-Way-Tree with baskets _____atop their heads or planted in front of their laps, squatting or standing __________with arms akimbo, susuing with one another, clucking _____their tongues, calling in voices of pure sugar, come dou-dou: see the pretty bag I have for you, then kissing their teeth when you saunter off. City of school children in uniforms playing dandy shandy _____and brown girl in the ring—tra-la-la-la-la— __________eating bun and cheese and bulla and mangoes, _____juice sticky and running down their chins, bodies arced [...]
TOWN GREEN: SOUTH ROYALTON How long has it been since I lazed on a town green? (Wistfulness, beware.) A couple of square acres set with maple and crabapple. (Sprayed, mulched, blooming impossibly early.) Two gazebos, for bandstand and romance. (Amo, amas. Gazebo, gazebae?) Starched white church with a black clock-face. (The time is what unearthly hour?) Across the green, a train station where business begins. (End of the line) Before me, a cottage row; behind, a row of eateries. (Who cooks in a chichi town?) On its grass surface, not a weed or divot. (No sliding tackles, scraped knees?) From the highway, South Royalton seems tucked in timelessness (a steeple crucifix, a gambrel barn’s weathervane) like a storybook town one sees from a passing car, wishing (fairytales were true) fairytales were true, wondering how one gets there (from here) from here. Forty years ago, I’d have lain (“loafed and invited [...]
Crooked I wanted a crooked man. I panned for a crooked man. I tea spooned out trenches until I dug up my crooked man. Now I have a corner on a crooked man, a crooked house. I got crookider And crookider, out of whack. Nakeder than cheese, clothed with nakedness. Tilt and spin, I let in every draft. No matter. Nothing straightens any of us out. Nothing goes according to plan. Unless the plan is a crooked plan. ___________________________________________ Lee Upton’s most recent book is Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy (Tupelo). In 2014 a collection of her short stories, The Tao of Humiliation, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. She is a professor of English and writer-in-residence at Lafayette College. Photo credit: Cece Ziolkowski. Copyright © 2013 by Lee Upton. Used with permission of the author. Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: Lisa [...]