LAMENT After Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii There was a time when giants ruled the earth and women were gods, too. But here in this moment of mortality who, woman, will hold back your heart from the imminent cliffs of grief? You cry out instead of speaking, and if you were allowed you’d take the oath and follow your husband, guard him against the wretched spell of death like a shadow of black silk unraveling, like a permanent shadow forged onto the ground after an atomic blast, your arms outstretched; in the background a curtain surrenders in the wind. Beloved woman, twisted with torment your spinning head cries like a god out of control: Be brief! Let the weight of your serrated edges cut this sorrow out of me. _____________________________________________________________________ Ruben Quesada is the author of Next Extinct Mammal (2011) and Luis Cernuda: Exiled from the Throne of Night [...]
Lisa Marie Basile
Body, Out (From Voicemail Poems) There is a freshly-made bed next to mine, that I don’t touch. There is a hum in the room, a hymn in the sky. That evening two animal gods stood mountaintop, and I sat below in the sunset, my body rooted, theirs extended, all precision and color; hoof on mountaintop, bone and rock, fur and mane; curve and wish, the desert is nothing but curve and wish, the shhhh of air, the hush of morning, of waking, of speaking to a silent room, to an unbearable angel, to a movement not unlike birth, legs open, body out A Sad, Private Place (From The Way Home) This is how I imagine it would go if I did not prick my finger, if I did not stop growing while asleep; if it did not matter that, in these years, you lived and grew beautifully, independently. This is [...]
Am Ha’aretz* In the gardens of givat ram We never saw Solomon’s turtledoves For seven years the winter And the rain she and I Strangers in the midrahov she and I Cracked cobblestone Once a market road Deserted on a sabbath evening All the jackals are gone And every day in july Tempting that last stretch of sky she and I The end so close we lied Beyond reach somewhere the mountains in the mountains Among lotus shrubs in the Galilee she and I never saw Wild goats rising up In contest the grackles Picking off their parasites And what of those nights In the snow in the snow Sweeping the midrahov Those nights when I was repossessed By am ha’aretz After I lost her In ammei ha’aretz These roads I do not know I do not know her arms anymore her arms those child’s songs in arabic when I [...]
AND SO IT IS BECAUSE OF THE LICHEN Gathering the facts like so many bones. They make a good tool for telling you I am in love. With the flint, I tear one open, climb in, and speak: hold me close like a crucifix above the river. I cannot cross it the way I would my heart. […]
LMB:You talk about the body as a representation of the world around us – it is. Everything we are is everything there is. But the body may not be the only way we exist. If our hair is the war, , and the war is our body, does writing keep us from falling apart? Does our writing become extraphysical? CA: Thank you so much for this opportunity to be interviewed. I’m punchy. Last night I woke to smoke and fire engines. The building next to mine was on fire, the building I SHARE A WALL WITH, and I had to crawl down three flights of steps because the smoke was thick. It’s SO NICE to be alive and writing to you!! But I want to say to your question that while I was standing on the street watching firemen chop a hole into my neighbor’s roof and pour hundreds of [...]
LMB: You recently defended – for lack of a better word – the use of melodrama in poetics. Why do you think people are so uncomfortable with it? CF: It’s funny, because I don’t think melodrama itself is the problem; think, for example, of the melodramatics in Keats, in Eliot, in Donne – the first stanza of The Good Morrow is as dramatic as any Lana Del Rey song or Minnis poem. I think the real issue is that people have a problem with feminine melodramatics; it’s why Plath became the poster child for some crass concept of Confessionalism (even though another melodramatic man, Robert Lowell, is really responsible for that whole mess) in spite of the fact that she was a master craftsman and genius of the literary costume. So, I think it’s a gendered issue more than a simple one of dramatic/not-dramatic. The “problem” with girly melodrama in [...]