Myth of Cosmos It stands outside of myself, something round, flecked with spit, like a moon« growing out of my nails, moon« of phenomenal lactescence. I push my head into the roundess & a cloud« is my face & I see particles of mist« floating away. There’s nothing I can do or limb or crook of elbow, inutile & something is growing under my tongue, a word, a love« A deer falls from my eyes, rolls down my cheek, & I name the cloud« with the overgrown tongue & a brush of flowers falls on my face to toe I’m blessed, blessing painted on my nails my palms I d«ance, palm flashing thigh buckling silvered belly stars. ___________________________________________________________ Monica Mody is the author of two chapbooks, and her work can also be found in journals such as the Boston Review, Wasafiri, Upstairs at Duroc, pyrta, Lantern Review, and Nether, among [...]
Sridala Swami
Exile: an invitation to a struggle (from My Rice tastes like the lake. Berkeley, CA: Apogee Press, 2011) Mother tells me to eat well. Mother who knows best, asks, how are you? She has asked this all of my life. There are only two answers to this question. Two answers keep us mother and son, mother and daughter. The distance is a question. The question is also a statement of a struggle. If the word is a struggle, you understand. We cannot continue as we are. We cannot forget we are guests who have overstayed. I invite you to living against (as we do.) It is not enough to have one tongue. It cannot point to everything and in every direction. We do not use our mother tongue for our lovers. Beloved, we speak your words. What do we want? Freedom. When do we want it? Now. Protest in the [...]
HOW A THING TURNS WRETCHED It is errant. It errs around the town to which it belongs and errs like a word constantly misspoken. It is taken out of its regular place and placed in exile. Exile is an outside of the kind strange animals inhabit. A sharing of skins occurs. On a branch above all this a species of bird watches: a sparrow. The thing driven out like a screw from its wall lies open to rust until it errs again in the strange place outside animals inhabit. It wanders around and returns, a cur. It hungers and spits. It takes off one skin and puts on another. Its new skin is inside out and like a net cast to the sea it collects more and more of itself, wreaking. A wretched thing is alone until it is not. Among others of its kind a wretched thing is still [...]
(This post was to begin with a quote that I remember as having been said by the filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard: “You don’t read a film; you watch it”. While trying to chase down the quote, though, I found it had disappeared so effectively that I began to doubt both the words and the person to whom I was attributing it. Regardless of who said it and whether they said it that way, here it is, the quote as epigraph:) You don’t read a film; you watch it. A poem, like a film, is a different beast. It is both an event and an object; which it to say, it occurs in time and it occupies space. It is music and it is drawing. It may not be both things at once, but it has the potential to be either. And both (though not necessarily, of course, at once. See previous [...]